Ask HN: What do you miss about the life before Internet? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Nothing. I'm 34 years old and grew up in the rural Southeastern U.S. We had a meager public library that was a 20-minute drive from my home. I spent as much time as I could get away with in my schools' libraries.

My entire childhood, I had the sense of a world much bigger than the one I lived in that was just beyond my reach. My mother could give me glimpses when we went on vacation, but I was living years out of touch.

When we got Internet access, I got connected in a life-changing way to that world. It transformed how I learn, how I discover, what I remember, how I connect with people, everything, and all of it for the better. I think I'd rather die than go back.

<comment><USER4> My hometown didn't have sidewalks. My house was a long and extremely unsafe walk away from anything of value, and my mother worked insane hours. When she finally caved and got dial up, I remember everything changed very aggressively. There was no longer a physical barrier between me and new information or new people. I could be stuck in my isolated home and still have hours of things to do. Sometimes I think the people that say things like "I wish we could go back to before everyone had the internet" never lived in an area where, without the internet, you never really had anything to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How you could enjoy video games without having the entire game spoiled for you before the release date. Pre internet, you played at your leisure, didn't know what to expect and saw new things/character/levels/gameplay mechanics as they came. So you'd play say, Ocarina of Time or Final Fantasy VII and every area, boss, new attack, etc would be a surprise.

Nowadays on the other hand, the internet means that a video of the final boss and ending will probably be up on Youtube in less than a week. Probably a matter of hours after the release date to be honest, there's a sort of obsession with recording the entirety of every new game as quickly as possible.

I also miss the existence of rumours and hearsay about stuff in video games. Like, of getting the Triforce in Ocarina of Time, Luigi in Mario 64 or finding Mew in Pokemon Red and Blue. Pre internet and early internet, this sort of stuff spread via the school playground and other places like a weird game of Chinese Whispers or Telephone. It was nuts the kind of stuff that you'd hear, like the the story about the flying pink cow that would apparently take you to the Temple of Light or something.

But thanks to the modern internet, these games now get disassembled about a week after their release, so people know exactly what's included and can confirm or rule out any interesting rumour before it can get started.

<comment><USER6> I enjoy not getting into arguments with people who buy into each and every rumor, no matter how absurd it is. Though I'll chalk this up to a difference in gossip culture.

I absolutely abhor rumors and gossip. Give me some facts or some data - otherwise don't waste my time. Other people enjoy gossiping and get excited about rumors and the "mystery" that comes with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Writing (and reading) letters. Email brings speed - and brevity. But letters forced writers to be more...deliberate with their words.

I'm currently reading a collection of letters from Richard Feynman - <USER2> by his daughter, who weeded through file cabinets full of them, forwarded from Caltech's archives. One can chart the course of a life by the letters that person wrote. It makes me wonder - when all of us are gone, will someone publish collections of emails from our noteworthy contemporaries? I doubt it.

Digital communications are fleeting. While they can more easily be archived than a drawer full of paper letters, they can also easily be deleted with a keystroke. Email and text communications offer many advantages, but they lack the weight of the written word - and the longevity.

</comment><comment><USER8> People's ability to accept and even enjoy being bored.

Related: People's ability to accept they cannot - and should not and do not deserve to - get everything right now.

<comment><USER9> and i miss the time: where they were no selfies all over the place. when people weren't such egocentrics. when no one would loose a career for a single tweet. and, last but not least, when no one else than my newsagent would know which porn i'm into...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Newspapers-- it was once considered a professional requirement to read them daily. Beyond local news-- you were really on your information game if you read the NY Times or Wall Street Journal.

The printed paper format seems to lend itself more easily to tripping over interesting articles that you might not normally seek out. Versus mindless, repetitive web surfing.

And of course, if you wanted to share a news item with someone-- it meant cutting it out and mailing via the postal service. Usually, accompanied with a brief handwritten note. Always nice to receive. Now a lost art form.

<comment><USER11> I disagree. In college (1995-99) I had to subscribe to WSJ for my business courses, and I hated it. I would have much rather had a digital subscription; I'd read it when I could, I could easily share it. Instead, I got a disdain for paper subscriptions.

<comment><USER12> They had digital subscriptions. In fact, I'd guess that WSJ.com was the first successful paid-online-subscription newspaper that still endures as paid subscription. (The San Jose Mercury was earlier, but they went free later for a number of years.)

Back in the 90s, WSJ Op-Ed content was free, but the rest was paywalled.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but the class requirement was the paper subscription. Pretty sure the professor was just an WSJ paperboy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> People being completely cool with just going for a walk. It could be a freak nice 70 degree day in December and people are still inside watching tv,on computers, playing video games, texting, etc. It's a sad world when you can't separate yourself enough to enjoy the moment.

<comment><USER14> I'll second this one. I love walking. I've walked all over Chicago, SF, Manhattan, and other cities and there's just something about being _there_, in the moment. It'll never happen the same way again.

Another thing I'll add is people just standing around waiting for something - anything. For the light to turn green at a crosswalk. Waiting for a friend to get done using the restroom after a movie lets out. Waiting for coffee or food. Having a drink. Phones are everywhere, all the time. Nonstop.

The internet has provided a way for me to sustain my livelihood and I love it for that. The same way I love electricity and plumbing. But, I feel like this is just the beginning and there might be some day where no one will pay attention to anything around them. Only their devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> People not constantly staring at their phones. Everywhere. Outside. Inside. In restaurants. At work.

<comment><USER5> How about when supposably serving customers? That's got to be the worse one. You'd go get a coffee or something, and the person behind the counter would be more interested in seeing what's happening on Twitter or Instagram than actually taking the order or serving people.

<comment><USER11> There was a story[1] last year about a restaurant that did some research and found that wait times (and subsequently Yelp ratings) suffered because of phone usage by patrons.

tl;dr - people spending time on their phones, slows down service/table turnover at restaurants.

[1] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2690490/Service- time...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2690490/Service-time- restaurants-doubled-past-ten-years-customers-cell-phones-blame-claims-busy- NYC-restaurant.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not a lot.

I sometimes miss the more quiet world, getting lost in my own thoughts, interacting directly with people, idle pleasures of various kinds. Of course, I visit that world with an off-grid camping trip each year. A good week being in a beautiful place with no possibility of connecting to anything is awesome!

Then I get bored, play, hike, explore, talk, relax, and sort of reset. I come back charged and ready to go!

Really, my only regret is not having Internet sooner. I would have done so much more as a kid.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was an only child, isolated, rural, so alone. So alone so alone so alone. Fuck life before the internet.

Wow, that looks like a terrible little poem.

Also, being a smart kid but not having any role models or anyone who knew about the stuff I was interested in to help me in the right direction.

Connection to the outside world could've made a huge difference when an abusive home life was my entire world.

</comment><comment><USER17> The ability to start a face-to-face conversation with someone without feeling like I was intruding on their electronic world.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reading more books.

</comment><comment><USER19> Movies were more enjoyable.

Now everyone has either spoiled the movie ahead of you, bitched online about how awful it was, analyzed the trailer and figured out all the surprises (or the trailer itself gave it away), or we're all tracking the weekend box office returns to confirm our choice of movie as the Winning Choice or as The Bomb That You Shouldn't See (But Will Be A Cult Classic in Twenty Years When It's Given a Chance)

Movies also stayed in the theaters longer. Remember when the original run of _Star Wars_ lasted almost an entire year?

<comment><USER12> _Plus_ the absence of internet-enabled devices (phones, etc.) in theaters.

I recall when "The Godfather" and "Rocky" were in first-run theaters for at _least_ a year. The Syufy theaters had a quarter-page print ad for one or more films every single day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In 1986, I "text chatted" via my Commodore 64 to another kid in a neighboring town, across our 600 baud modems, using our parent's home phone land lines. I'll never forget typing the white letters on the blue screen: "Hey Brian can you see this?"

...then seeing the screen cursor start to produce characters that I didn't type:

"Yep sure did"

It would be 8 more years before I accessed the Internet in 1994.

I think what I miss is the thrilling self-discovery of communicating in a new medium.

</comment><comment> josh-wrale Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), discovering new things at public libraries, traveling around to different libraries, having a tan.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was born in 1990, started using the Internet at around age 5 with Windows 95. I don't remember life without it. I remember using Encarta, and playing Oregon Trail, and AOL's program. Those are my first memories of the Internet and Computing in general.

</comment><comment><USER22> I miss not being so hooked and dependent on social networks.

</comment><comment><USER23> Less apparently BS businesses and BS books based on the emergent qualities of the Internet. Less inboxes to check.

</comment><comment><USER24> This was a post on reddit that was highlighted on businessinsider.

I miss less distractions

</comment><comment><USER25> Physical photographs

</comment><comment><USER26> sports.</comment>


The EFF SSL Observatory - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/observatory

<comment><USER2> SSL is a fine protocol, but it's been badly misconfigured on the Internet. Among other things:

* The overwhelming majority of SSL-speaking sites don't have valid certificates.

* An untenably large number of organizations have been allowed to act as CAs.

* Some of those CA's have in turn been allowed to set up sub-CA's.

* Several CA's use cryptographically weak keys

* Some CA's were spotted _sharing keys_

* CA's have signed certs for RFC1918 private IP space, sometimes more than once.

* CA's have signed certs for "localhost"

The bad news is that all these things are devastating to the global security of SSL/TLS. The good news is that fixing them doesn't involve a change to SSL/TLS, or even any of the software that implements it. The bad news is that's unlikely to happen in our lifetimes.

<comment><USER3> How you would have configured SSL (or the PKI, as seems to be the problem) for the Internet?

Do you think a global, managed and secure PKI is feasible?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I do think it's feasible to solve the authentication problem SSL is aiming to solve. I think the overwhelming majority of the challenge with SSL is UI-driven, and that _any_ security solution attempted at Internet scale will need to address that same problem.

Specifically:

* Nobody has come up with a user-comprehensible abstraction to represent the machinery needed to represent the chain of actors needed to assert that "this is really Bank of America". Instead, we wound up with a buried configuration box that says "Verisign is God."

* An obvious corrollary: there shouldn't be a single global set of browser-accepted root certificates. End-users should subscribe to CA's as needed (again: the UI abstractions aren't there yet to make this doable). The IETF should come up with a process to run a CA to certify and name other CA's.

* It shouldn't be possible to easily click through warnings about invalid certificates, since that warning amounts to "there is no security provided by SSL on this connection." Implementing this would require service operators to have better ways of making sure their certs were valid.

All this stuff sounds highly dramatic, but I want to remind you that none of these changes would alter the SSL protocol or any of its implementations (OpenSSL, NSS, SCHANNEL, etc).

<comment><USER4> My biggest complaint with the SSL CA chain of trust is the way that self- signed certificates are (mis)handled. The connection is still an encrypted, "secure" connection to the server; it's the server's _identity_ that is in question, and there's rarely any distinction made to the user about that.

I don't want to have to pay or verify my identity to run my own SSL-secured mail server, IRC bouncer, or similar service. Why should I need to? But if I don't, then just about every SSL client in the world falls down and sucks its thumbs or screams bloody murder at me because my certificate isn't signed by the holy gatekeepers...

<comment><USER2> No, this is pretty much dead wrong. An SSL connection set up under a self- signed cert is not "secure". Authentication isn't a feature of a secure channel, it's a requirement. Without it, marginal effort by an attacker allows them to silently, quickly, and transparently decrypt your traffic by inserting themselves in the middle.

People on HN can and do argue about this until they are blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that authenticated connections aren't just a special "bonus" that SSL provides beyond encryption. _Every_ secure encrypted protocol makes arrangements to authenticate keys; this is the same thing that makes your first SSH connection to a new server insecure (demonstrating that problem used to be a sport at security conventions).

<comment><USER4> If I'm verifying the fingerprint of the server's certificate, is that not doing the same thing that the chain of trust would be doing?

<comment><USER2> Nobody is really verifying the fingerprint of the server's certificate, but if you are, fine; you and I are talking about two different issues. You're talking about your own homebrew setup that uses the SSL protocol and manual certificate verification (incidentally, just set up your own CA and forget about the fingerprints; it's not hard). I'm talking about Internet-scale secure web connections to banks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Measuring the Django Community: The Django community in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://jacobian.org/writing/django-community/django-community-2012/ <comment><USER2> This seems too conservative to me. Judging from all the recruiter emails I started getting about 6 months ago, it would seem to me Django usage has increased ten fold.

Does anyone have any alternative explanations? A year or two ago I think Django jobs were rare, and now it seems like they're everywhere.</comment>


I Co-Founded Waze and I'm No Longer Going to Own a Car - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/startupnationcentral/2018/03/28/i-co-founded-waze-and-im-no-longer-going-to-own-a-car <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this old post from 2013: [http://jamespmcgrath.com/why-i-am-not- buying-an-autonomous-c...](http://jamespmcgrath.com/why-i-am-not-buying-an- autonomous-car/)</comment>


Pure Python Operation System - <AUTHOR> http://python-os.info/en/ Python OS Project (POP) created with idea to make a pure python OS. POP based on linux kernel (currently 2.6.32) and GNU userland utilities. <comment><AUTHOR> We think, that OS, written in simple interpreted language, like python, allows us to dominate desktop operating systems market.

Python is simple and nice. Our user will be able to easy modify any part of OS without compiling souce code. This is the real Open Source Freedom!

<comment><USER2> It sounds like what you really want is a lisp machine.

Everything old is new again...

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly... But python machine =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice idea, though the way I see it, you are either:

(A) A user who doesn't care what language(s) their OS/toolchain/stack is built with; or

(B) A developer who sees the value in the right tool for the job. I love Python, but it isn't the right tool for all jobs

</comment><comment><USER2> > POP based on linux kernel (currently 2.6.32) and GNU userland utilities.

So, not actually a "pure python OS," but rather a desktop environment containing a large amount of python?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now - yes.

But we thinking about rewriting Linux Kernel in pure python.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to force myself to learn emacs? - <AUTHOR> Any suggestions welcomed, but what I was thinking was...
Is there some module or extension that prevents me or notifies me whenever i do something that could be done easier with a shortcut? E.g. if i use the arrow keys, it stops me until i use c-b/c-f/c-p/c-n? If I go to a new line and press tab, it undoes it newline and tells me to use c-j, etc.
It would be fantastic if there was one. <comment><USER2> Learning Emacs versus another editor is like learning to compose versus learning the names of the notes of the keys on a piano. When I jumped in in the early 90's I--having already been convinced of Emacs' superb capabilities --just made the decision to not use anything else than Emacs and stick to that.

I guess that with a program so endless as Emacs, there's no other way.

First I never looked back and then I never wanted to look back.

The first days were painful because there was so much I hadn't bumped into yet but soon the later days were much easier. The same analogy held for the coming weeks, months, and years. I _still_ learn new stuff that Emacs has but in 95% of what I do with it I don't even think about anymore. That's the payload I've accumulated in nearly 20 years of Emacs.

It's all in my spine somewhere and I'm always amazed when I occasionally use another editor that it doesn't do things that Emacs does, or rather that it doesn't work _with me_ as Emacs does.

I also customized Emacs heavily in the beginning years but now I've been trying to not touch anything unless absolutely necessary. In other words, first I made Emacs grow closer to me and now I've grown closer to Emacs. I can work up another .emacs from scratch in a couple of days, fixing all remaining settings that I've accustomed to, on the fly as I bump into them. There aren't that many left.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just use it a lot. During university I reached a point where I wrote everything in Emacs and appreciated the fact that whatever I was working on (Code, terminal, articles) I could switch over to something else without having to switch context in my mind. (Keyboard shortcuts, macros and formatting options stayed the same.)

Don't worry at the start about default options or the Right Way(tm), these things are likely to distract you to begin with. You probably will find yourself gradually adopting them. Make emacs a comfortable editor for your own way of working - It is intended to be extendible and configurable for this reason.

As to a module for teaching... When you run extended commands using M-x (Alt-x) it should tell you if there is a shortcut bound to that command. If it doesn't or you miss it then maybe the following functions will be helpful:

 _M-x where-is_ [C-h w] Type a command and it will tell you the key shortcut (if any)

 _M-x describe-key_ [C-h k] Type a key shortcut and it will tell you the command it is bound to

 _M-x describe-function_ [C-h f] Provides details about the function you specify

</comment><comment><USER4> ...People do that? Make emacs work for you; don't work for it!

There's nothing wrong with using the arrow keys. There's nothing wrong with remapping return to do newline and indent. Heck, if you want to use the standard C-c, C-v, C-x for copy, paste, cut, there's a mode for that too. (<http://www.emacswiki.org/CuaMode>)

Put your .emacs and .emacs.d somewhere easily accessible and updateable, like GitHub or Dropbox, and you don't have to worry about not knowing the default settings.

<comment><USER5> There's something to be said for complying with default settings. I know there are people out there who only ever work on their own machines, but I find that when I'm hopping around on 100+ different boxes I don't own it's worth the trouble to live by the default mappings and behaviors.

<comment><USER3> This is why you can do: (load-file "/<user>@<host>:~/.emacs")

(Assuming your 100+ machines are capable of reaching your home directory in some way (ssh, ftp, ...). If not, you could also put your desired emacs init in a publicly accessible location.)

 _Edit_ : Or put a copy on a USB drive, or diskette, or floppy.

<comment><USER5> (Half the time a given box didn't even have network access)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1] Set up a reminder saying "Read EmacsWiki" in gCal for a specific time every day. Have it send you an SMS.

2] When you get the reminder, spend 10 minutes reading <http://www.emacswiki.org/> Find _just one thing_ that interests you.

3] Make a point of using that one thing at least a couple of times over the course of the day.

If you want to learn all the keyboard commands, spend your first few days (re-(re-(re-)))reading the basic keylists.

It will start to stick in less time than you think, and you'll have fun doing it.

<comment><USER7> I used to do something similar to this (less intense), however I seem to have hit my limit for number of remembered features.

ie I'll find something new now, use it for a few hours or a day, then suddenly it will be 3 months later and I'll suddenly remember that I could be using that feature right now, if I could still remember how to use it.

Any tips?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Use ~/.emacs.d/init.el instead of ~/.emacs (emacs will recognize either): that way you can put the whole directory under version control more easily.

The best way is to just start using it. And periodically read tutorials or the built-in info (C-h i) - don't worry about memorizing everything at once. Just learn a couple of shortcuts, and come back again later.

Ask people you know who use emacs for tips. Just follow your interests: if reading IRC inside emacs sounds cool, learn to do it. If org-mode sounds like something you could use, read a tutorial, start using it, and read more later.

If you like lots of window panes (C-x 2, C-x 3, repeat), window-number.el is nice. Or bind M-o to other-window.

Learn to use the kill-ring. Learn to love C-y M-y and miss it in other apps.

Learn to record and play back macros -- C-x m ( -- if you use your movement commands carefully (forward-word, end-of-line, etc. instead of single- character movements), you can get a LOT of mileage out of it.

Use customization rather than programmatic configuration wherever possible - it'll keep your init.el much more manageable later when you come back and completely forgot why you added things.

Again, just start using it, and follow your sense of interest in learning new things. Focus on features that actually help you accomplish tasks more easily or quickly.

Oh, and for the love of everything holy, rebind your Caps-lock to another Ctrl, so you don't damage your pinky finger! :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> That is easy, I always include this lines in the .emacs f new users

\---

      (defun  disabled-key ()
        "Assign this to disable a key"
        (interactive)
        (print "All your arrow keys are belong to me. Have a nice day!"))

      ;; All your arrow keys are disabled Hahahah
      (global-set-key (kbd "<up>")      'disabled-key)
      (global-set-key (kbd "<down>")    'disabled-key)
      (global-set-key (kbd "<left>")    'disabled-key)
      (global-set-key (kbd "<right>")   'disabled-key)
      (global-set-key (kbd "<C-up>")      'disabled-key)
      (global-set-key (kbd "<C-down>")    'disabled-key)
      (global-set-key (kbd "<C-left>")    'disabled-key)
      (global-set-key (kbd "<C-right>")   'disabled-key)

Learning emacs can means many different things.

The first thing you will need to learn is, indeedn to use it as a text editor. But you should also learn many other things, like learning eshell, learn and use elisp to adapt emacs to your work flow, use org emacs, rectangular editing, ...

Yesterday I send this "Mastering EShell" link [1] that didn't make the front page.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2002037>

<comment><USER7> Is using the arrow keys really that bad? I understand that it moves you off the home row, but is _that_ really so bad? Should I be doing this?

If you're being serious, it kinda seems like just punishing new users for no good reason. If you want that kind of self-flagellation, use vim (kidding! kidding!!)

(FWIW I use arrow keys, but also other smart navigation combinations, a lot. I consider myself a reasonable user of emacs but no pro - I have bells and whistles turned off, fairly hefty .emacs/.emacs.d file, much of which I wrote (or tweaked, to be honest) myself for specific cases, etc. but I know I only use <1% of what is out there. I try and make myself learn a new feature reasonably regularly, though.)

<comment><USER9> Dont understand me wrong, I use Arrow Keys, plus S-j S-k S-l S-i as custom "smart navigation".

I think the extra pain, that you cause when you remove the arrow keys is worth because force a new user to be conscious all the time that he is not anymore in his old editor.

E.g For me the arrow keys were a good enough option to align things by hand, but after removing the them, I learned to use align-regex and rectangular editing.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. I've never used either align-regex or rectangular editing, so you've inspired me to give them a go!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I put off learning Emacs until I found Steve Yegge's Effective Emacs article: <http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs>

Here's a list of basic emacs keyboard commands I wrote during college: <http://tamale.net/essays/effcoding.shtml#emacs>

</comment><comment><USER11> get the emacs starter kit by technomancy (on github). It comes with some nice default settings that made it pretty easy for me to jump right in.

I still do a few non-emacsy things like use the arrow keys, but I've installed a few new libraries and customized it a bit more to my liking... _to the point where I now find Textmate a big drag on productivity_.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm learning Emacs too (after 10 years of vi/Vim), and one of the first things that most people suggest are: hiding the menu and toolbars.

See more here: [http://charsequence.blogspot.com/2010/07/setup-emacs-for- dev...](http://charsequence.blogspot.com/2010/07/setup-emacs-for-development- with.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> dude, don't be fanatic about it. it's a tool, not a mistic knowledge that once you gain, you'll master the universe

<comment><USER14> I cannot agree with you more. Sure things could be done easier in it (or in vi/vim) but programming is done in the head not in the editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The best way to stay motivated to learn emacs is to get benefits from it very quickly.

In my case, I was in undergrad school and my annoyance with MS word formatting led to latex. I did not want to learn all the keywords, so the latex mode helped me quickly to get over the hump.

Check this out for creating html in emacs : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQAd41VAXWo>

Pick your favorite language (something popular), load up the mode and get to work :)

</comment><comment><USER16> C-h m brings up all the shortcuts for the current mode.

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't try doing any real work with it at first. I made that mistake a couple times, only to learn that trying to get anything done using a tool I don't know (no matter how great and useful it is) can only lead to frustration. Give yourself a day or two to just play with it and get comfortable, go through the built-in tutorial, write a few small Hello World-like programs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> 1) Hide your mouse

2) Hide the other editors

3) Hide the toolbar (if you aren't using the ncurses interface)

4) Always look at the minibuffer every time you "M-x command". Emacs tells you if there is a shortcut that does the same thing

5) "C-h a command" is your friend

6) If you are on Mac OS X use the emacs-style shortcuts in other editors too (C-a, C-b, C-d, C-e, C-f, C-h, C-k, C-n, C-p, C-u, C-v)

</comment><comment><USER19> Buy either _Practical Common Lisp_ or _Land of Lisp_ and work through the entire book. They both teach Lisp via Emacs.

<http://gigamonkeys.com/book/>

<http://landoflisp.com/>

<comment> saw-lau I bought Land of Lisp recently (haven't got round to starting it yet), but a quick search of the PDF only shows a couple of mentions of emacs...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Blu-tack a cheat-sheet to the wall. Worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER21> alias vi emacs

<comment><USER22> I actually did this recently! I kept vim as vim though, so if I REALLY needed to edit something quickly, I still could.

It's very natural to type "vi <filename>", so it certainly helped.

<comment><USER21> _it certainly helped_

That was my experience as well, having learned vi before emacs. Unfortunately back then computers were scarce and I frequently shared my account with friends less pleased with this strategy. One even thought it was a joke On him and after he eventually got his own account he got "even" with me by putting 'nice 5' in my .login, which I didn't find for weeks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Set your desktop wall paper to some cheat sheet of Emacs. I employed a similar technique for VIM thought :)</comment>


Lean Advertising and the Age of Disruption - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrewcoyle.com/blog/2013/02/25/lean-advertising-the-new-consumer/

<comment><USER2> "Full-service agencies' value proposition has been that they can execute a client's message through every conceivable medium."

This is not very accurate. "Full-service" usually means that an agency both makes the ads and buys media to place them. There are many agencies that do only one or the other, and then there are subsets of each: digital-only shops, ideation-only shops, search-only shops and so on. "Full-service" is not a bad thing, at least in theory, because the fewer agencies you have working on different pieces of the same project, the smaller the chances that the result will be a watered-down compromise between competing organizations. The real reason why big agencies are big -- which is what I think OP is really arguing against -- and will stay big is scale. A national retail chain will produce thousands of banners a year, dozens of TV commercials with dozens of regional variations, hundreds of radio spots, thousands of catalog images and pieces of copy. A single unit of ad output may require input from dozens of people. The OP has an idealized model of the business that ad agencies are in, but creative ideation is only one line item in an advertising budget.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Advertising is immoral, not because it is inherently insincere, manipulative, and intrusive, but because it is inefficient." -James Oyle, Advertising Director_

so efficient advertising is moral ...

<comment><USER4> I suppose by definition efficient advertising only informs me about products I need and/or want when I want them. The result being the highest possible conversion rates and best customer experiences also ensuring that customers will rave about it.

Inefficient advertising takes advantage of law of large numbers low-cost spammy channels, inundating a large majority with crap they don't care about, wasting their time and even successfully selling people who don't want or like your product.

So in that sense it would seem to be more "moral".

<comment><USER3> >I suppose by definition efficient advertising only informs me about products I need and/or want when I want them.

efficient advertising vs privacy - big dilemma ...

efficient advertising => less privacy => immoral ?

[http://www.pannone.com/media-centre/articles/ecommerce- artic...](http://www.pannone.com/media-centre/articles/ecommerce- articles/online-behavioural-advertising-%E2%80%93-privacy-vs-efficient)

<comment><USER4> You argument assumes inefficient advertising invades privacy less, which I'm not certain is true, or that an invasion of privacy is necessary to be efficient. Again since it wasn't really defined either way I suppose it's debatable what is meant by efficient or inefficient.

I would suggest that ideal advertising/marketing should have a viral or organically promoted component to it. I'm always going to be more likely to be interested in a product that someone I trust recommends or that I'm directly seeking rather than is being pushed to me. Efficient advertising would ideally be more passive rather than pushy and active and rely on and encourage organic promotion by having the right fit for the audience.

Still I'm just speculating what is meant here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> maybe it s better to evoke ideas rather than just emotions, through ideas.</comment>


Ask HN: Automated machine learning products live up to the promise? - <AUTHOR> My company is looking at some "AI" products like datarobot and h2o driverless. The sales pitch for these is that they automate away a lot of the hard stuff of data science and will enable a less technical "business analyst" to effectively create and deploy machine learning models.
Curious if anyone can share experiences with this. Has it really worked out that way?
The team members that would use such a tool, should we buy one, are fairly data savvy, can do the data prep work/etl; and have good domain knowledge for the problems we would try to model.  wondering if they could be successful at the model building work with a tool like this despite lacking real undestanding / know how to do such work "manually". <comment><USER2> IDK about those products but Google's AutoML stuff is probably the best of breed here. A few research groups have published AutoML-like stuff on github too.

Like anything it depends on your use case. Sometimes even a tiny bit of feature engineering can have a huge impact on model fidelity.

<comment><AUTHOR> The google one looked like it was focused only on a few use cases (language / vision).

I've played around with some of the open source stuff (tpot, autosklearn, h20's automl).

The commercial products seem to do more automated feature engineering.

H2o's automl is pretty easy to use with their graphical "flow" notebook interface. Was able to build a reasonable model with no coding aside from prepping the data going in.</comment></comment>


BP's Photo Blockade of the Gulf Oil Spill - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2010/05/26/the-missing-oil-spill-photos.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a great opportunity for real reporters to dress up as fishermen to sneak out there and take some unique pictures. This kind of thing only stops the half-ass-reporters out there who will go home after running into the coast guard to complain and feel sorry about themselves.

 _boo hoo BP is trying to control the press coverage_

Uh, yes, that's what a public company has to do: maximize shareholder value. Now do what _real journalists are supposed to do do_ : break a couple of stupid rules, find a way to get out there, and take some damned pictures. What are they going to do? Shoot down your plane? Seriously.

I mean, what kind of journalist decides because the coastguard stopped you, you're going to sit back and write self-pitying articles like this? Grow some balls, just hide in a fishing boat for all I care, and _take some damned pictures_.

Then write another story of how badass you were nearly getting shot down by the BP Air Force. Reporters nowadays, sheesh.

<comment><USER3> The flight ban is also being enforced by the FAA. Probably difficult to find a pilot willing to put their career at risk. I'm not clear why my tax dollars via the FAA should be used to fund the PR response of a public company.

<comment><USER4> I can see them putting some restrictions on the area due the the massive amount of press that will want access to the airspace (i.e. to prevent aerial traffic jams over the hardest hit areas or the areas with the most damning photos). But the idea that BP is pulling the strings and that only BP-charter flights can get clearance is getting too close to the realm of Big Brother (well, closer to the Neal Stephenson vision of the future in Snow Crash where corporations rule everything) for me.

<comment><USER5> Funny, there's dozens of aircraft aloft over my city of Los Angeles at any given moment, and it's far smaller than this spill.

Crowded airspace is _not_ the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the actual TFR:

<http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_0_2957.html>

"Pilots requesting flights under this exception must contact the houma deepwater horizon incident air operations center at 985-493-7804 between the hours of 0600-1800 cst, a minimum of 24 hours prior to desired flight time. Operators should be prepared to provide precise details of their requested flight including: pilots name and contact information, company/organization, purpose of flight, type aircraft, callsign, ingress/egress points and times, Requested altitude and route of flight. Pilots will then be provided with additional instructions for obtaining final approval and beacon code assignment."

</comment><comment><USER7> The comments here scare me. Why is everyone afraid of the government or breaking some rules? The worst that could happen to you is a few days in prison. Suck it up, serve the sentence, and know that you've changed the world in a positive way. I'm glad that everyone is not so spineless, otherwise we wouldn't even know there _was_ an oil spill...

<comment><USER8> _The worst that could happen to you is a few days in prison_

I don't know about journalists, but having a criminal file would make many jobs I am interested in inaccessible.

<comment><USER7> Not as many as being afraid would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> BP's also denying the existence of large underwater oil plumes that have been spotted by many science vessels:

[http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/bp-denies- existence-...](http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/bp-denies-existence- underwater-oil-plumes-gulf-mexico.php)

</comment><comment><USER10> Finding a pilot willing to loose his $6k+ pilots license to the FAA, no matter how farked the FAA is would be tough.

Easier to get a $300 RC plane setup, lightweight camera and a boat. The Slowstick by GWS makes an easy to fly, inexpensive camera platform.

If I was anywhere near the gulf, I'd be doing this myself.

<comment><USER7> Best idea I've heard yet. I, for one, welcome our new sticking-it-to-the-man robot overlords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kickstarter - Grassroots mapping the Gulf oil spill with balloons and kites: <http://kck.st/cj3Anh>

<comment><USER12> If you're going to do it, DO IT! Stop raising money for everything: it's a waste of time.

<comment><USER6> They are doing it: <http://grassrootsmapping.org/gulf-oil-spill/>

<comment><USER12> So they are... clearly I didn't get past the fold on Kickstarter. Maybe this is why?

      $750 PLEDGED OF $5,000 GOAL
      19 DAYS TO GO
      THIS PROJECT WILL ONLY BE FUNDED IF AT LEAST $5,000
        IS PLEDGED BY MONDAY JUN 21, 6:18PM EDT

Why use kickstarter instead of PayPal/traditional payment gateway? The theme of the site suggests that a project will not begin until it has achieved a funding goal. Will grassrootsmapping see any of the $750 they have raised so far before the 21st? And do they get anything if they don't reach $5k?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course, the blockade is actually being run by government and military entities. BP can't arrest journalists, but the Coast Guard can.

<comment><USER14> In case there was any doubt about the feasibility of coordinating a large- scale conspiracy involving large numbers of personel, here it is. In plain view yet we may never see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's the most graphic images I've seen, but they're over a week old and pretty tame compared to Valdez.

[http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisia...](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisiana_shores.html)

<comment><USER16> I hope you mean the images are pretty tame in comparison, and not the spill itself. Not only has the BP leak massively surpassed Valdez in volume (2-10x), it took place a mile underwater, which multiplies it's danger.

Exxon Valdez was a surface spill, so most of the oil that was spilled stayed on the surface of the water and began to have dramatic effects on the coastal environment. This disaster is leaking millions of gallons per day (Valdez was 10 million gallons) from the sea floor, much of which is rising slowly to the top through a mile of water, dispersing on its way up, and some percentage of the oil is clumping at the bottom, or simply not rising [1]. The polluted area should thus be measured in cubic feet, and not simply in visibly affected surface area.

The implications of this event are quite staggering, and BP will get away with paying a slim fraction of the true cost to society.

[1] unless I am misinformed and 100% of crude oil rises to the surface

<comment><USER17> Ah, but the more dilute the spill the better things are.

Bacteria do a wonderful job to biodegrading oil - but only if they have enough oxygen, which is in limited supply. By spreading things out they have enough oxygen to work with.

And yes, 100% of the oil should rise to the surface, but some will rise slowly.

I think the reason we are not seeing a lot of oil is simply that the bacteria ate it.

<comment><USER11> what do bacteria turn oil into? CO2? In that case will there be big algae blooms in the next phase of this spill?

<comment><USER17> CO2, yes (and water), but algae blooms are not caused by CO2, they are caused by nitrogen or phosphorous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On a related note, I was just remarking to a friend today about how hard this oil spill is to think about without seeing any sort of visual diagrams of the well, what the seafloor looks like, where the relief wells would be drilled, etc. These sort of visual aids have been conspicuously absent in mostly everything I've seen about this catastrophe.

<comment><USER19> Believe it or not, the BBC has some of the best graphical representations of what has been happening over the past 40 days.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8651333.stm>

As a past resident of Louisiana (attended LSU and lived in New Orleans for 3 years) I can tell you that this catastrophe will economically be on-par with Hurricane Katrina. Many of us have no idea how important (and awesome!) our seafood industry is. Our best shrimp, crabs, and oysters all _directly_ come from the area that this spill is impacting. All I can say is, this sucks.

With _that_ said, reading the article leads me to believe that a good majority of reporters and people being turned away have been done so in good faith or simple mistakes. Let's not be mistaken - reporters can crowd an area and cause serious safety concerns for people who are working to contain the spill. And they can also irritate the crap out of workers who are more concerned with getting stuff done than answering lots of questions. Reporters will climb over themselves to get the latest scoop on a hop topic. And this is one.

On on the subject of TFR's (Temporary Flight Restrictions) as mentioned in the article - Only the FAA issues TFR's, and those are issued to protect operating aircraft in a specially designated zone from outside interference (read: mostly the media). There was a complete TFR issued for most of south east Louisiana just after Katrina so that air traffic was carefully controlled for rescue operations. This is no different, there is an enormous amount of aircraft that are working in this area and TFR's are common to protect the working aircraft from non-essential related aircraft.

I'm sure that BP has their corporate spin-doctors running at full steam, but I'm quite positive that there is no conspiracy to shut down access to the public regarding this tragedy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I found this very useful for portraying the actual size of the spill: <http://www.beowulfe.com/oil/>

</comment><comment><USER21> Good post - check this out for aerials of the disaster on the coast: [http://healthygulf.org/201005281321/blog/bp-s-oil- drilling-d...](http://healthygulf.org/201005281321/blog/bp-s-oil-drilling- disaster-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/new-photos-of-oil-in-la-marsh)

</comment><comment><USER22> Cops are being complicit because they know long after the press is gone, BP will still be there handing out the cash to those that helped them cover this up.

Remember BP has other rigs running in the area which made them $3 Billion this year alone. They probably won't even bother renaming themselves and just spend the money on lawyers and their PR machine instead.

As a corporation they've also been handed unlimited votes via unlimited advertising, hence politicians working with them.

</comment><comment><USER23> How can BP block anything? They are a private corporation with no particular rights to the public beaches they are making a fuss over. This is so wrong...

<comment><USER7> They donate to politicians, who have passed laws allowing them to do whatever they feel like doing. Balance of power? Hahahaha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's pretty sad how strongly the desire to share information inversely correlates with naked financial interest.

</comment><comment><USER25> First off BP has an overriding obligation to its stockholders. Second, BP has a PR playbook for this scenario that is based upon decades of experience. For the moment BP's money is making the rules.

<comment><USER4> How many of those stockholders are going to affected by the local impact to Louisiana and the possible National/Global economic impact as it radiates outward? It's short-sighted to talk about BP's obligations to their stockholders just in terms of raw stock prices.

[ You also fail to mention that many BP employees as well as executives and board members probably have stock options, meaning that they are also looking after their own interests in this matter too. It's not like they _want_ to be altruistic, but these pesky investors are holding them back. And it's not like these 'stockholders' are some external entity to the company with a hard line between investors and employees with no grey area in between. ]

{edit} AIG also had an obligation to their investors to keep the stock price up and up and up... until it came crashing down. Saying, 'they have an obligation to their investors,' is really just a cop out. It's a way of pushing responsibility away (i.e. "Don't blame me! I have a responsibility to the investors, my hands are tied! I'm compelled to this course of action.").

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster (cbsnews.com) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1393992>

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe someone should build a site to anonymously post photos on.

<comment><USER27> pretty sure wikileaks will help you there - <http://www.wikileaks.com>

<comment><USER4> Or 4chan (or any of the other anonymous image boards)...

Or a throw-away Flickr account...

The hardest part is the _getting_ of the photos, not the distribution.</comment></comment></comment>


Cloudflare's IPFS Gateway - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2018/09/cloudflares-ipfs-gateway/ <comment><USER2> Your original announcement of this already is on HN, please stick to the rules and don't submit additional thin posts about it.</comment>


PARC 'office of the future' - 40 years later - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=xerox-parc-biegelsen-40

<comment><USER2> One thing about PARC that has always struck me is that it was essentially the product of photocopying patents. Without that mountain of cash generated by a photocopying monopoly, no PARC. The irony is that the PC, more than anything else, is the biggest foe of the photocopier. I haven't used one in years. It's a fascinating story.

<comment><USER3> I thought that the one thing that came out of PARC (after it was started using the mountain of cash you mention) that paid for the entire thing was the laser printer patent? So they got you either way :-)</comment></comment>


No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. - <AUTHOR> http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257 <comment><USER2> Why post this now?</comment>


Gmail + Plus + Dot = Countless Aliases of Your Gmail Address - <AUTHOR> http://saynt2day.blogspot.ru/2013/07/countless-aliases-of-your-gmail-address.html

<comment><USER2> Since a lot of services filter + in email addresses I changed my mail server to accept . instead. Its pretty handy being about to do email@example.com and not have to worry about it being blocked by a poorly created email regex.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use this technique frequently, it helps people understand my email address better. My non-personal address has firstname.lastname@example.com, so I use email@example.com whenever possible.

And yes, I could have camelCased, but non-technical people don't encounter camelcase on a frequent basis.

</comment><comment><USER4> Found this out via HN the other day. I put a dot between every character in my address and gave it out as a contact method to someone. Their response was basically "Wtf....?"

</comment><comment><USER5> I prefer to append a tag to the end of the name with a + "email@example.com". helps with tracking who is selling your email address as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> Co-worker showed me this. It's great for testing web apps - you can have all the types of authentication go back to 1 address.

</comment><comment><USER7> pretty sure this is as old as gmail itself.

</comment><comment><USER8> Until Google decides otherwise. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> a feature 'discovered' every month by email users for a over a decade at least.</comment>


Project Idea: Trade or buy code reviews (for independent developers) - <AUTHOR> http://baberuth.posterous.com/idea-trade-or-buy-code-reviews

<comment><USER2> Interesting that the author suggests "maybe a feature off of stack overflow" Something like <http://codereview.stackexchange.com> perhaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> something like that. This morning I had this thought for 2 things:

1\. a python filtering function I wrote 2\. how to restructure an entire django project.

Both (esp #2) are a little big for posting a code snippet. Bigger architecture problems probably only make sense within the context of the larger scope, so I'd pretty much want someone to check out the whole repository.

The SO thing would be great because SO has built in reputations so it'd help people feel more comfortable with giving away the entire project. I personally don't care, but I can imagine that being a barrier to code reviews by strangers.

Obviously, that sort of code review is a much more time-expensive request, so finding reviewers might also be hard without some sort of compensation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd get into that. I am a C/C++ guy, writing Python (etc.,etc.), with R/Perl programming coworkers. There is obvious value for me in external reviews.

The trick is, could there be some sort of bilateral confidentially agreement? That's one I'd need to ponder a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not super concerned about confidentiality for my code, but then again I'm not doing anything groundbreaking.

Mostly, if I cared about confidentiality, it'd be so I don't get publicly embarassed for crappy code.

Rating systems for reviewers would also let people build reputations so that reviewee's could feel more comfortable about code confidentiality.

Stack overflow already has reputations built in, so as I mentioned, it might just be awesome as a feature for SO. And another revenue stream, if they weren't already swimming in cash.

<comment><USER2> The main confidentiality issue is not about whether you, the coder, cares about people stealing your groundbreaking idea. When you are doing work for hire, the code is not necessarily yours to publish.

Whilst sharing it with someone you could refer to as a colleague, employee, or contractor might be OK. Sharing it with the world, or someone who might share it with the world, is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A big issue I can foresee with this (other than confidentiality, etc) is simply the time required to give a quality review of a decent sized block of code, and making sure you get back a fair review in exchange.

You can review and give decent feedback on a small snippet of code fairly easily and quickly, but that's of limited value in a real project.

To be able to give a decent review (eg beyond a cursory "You should name that variable better, or your indentation sucks), requires that either the amount of code you are reviewing is so small that you can grok it quickly (limiting the value of the review), or that you spend at least some time familiarizing yourself with the rest of the code base so be able to gauge the impact of the code changes.

This is all good if the person you're trading reviews is prepared to spend the same amount of time on your code, but for example, I find it very frustrating when I spend 30-45 minutes giving a detailed review of a website on <http://feedbackroulette.com> (a similar concept, but for websites reviews), only to get back a 3 sentence review in exchange that was clearly bashed off in about 30 seconds. Awarding points for reviews goes someway to alleviate this, but still it's a real pita...

</comment><comment><USER5> Trading and buying unknown goods is considered bad practice. Build a system that matches people building similar things and I will be your first user. (SO is not modular enough)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was thinking along similar lines last week with regards to APIs. Obviously you want people to use them, and they only will if they're understandable and useful. It would be good to have something like <http://fivesecondtest.com/>, where people can comment on your ideas for "karma".

(aside: I can't actually work out if people who complete reviews at 5 sec tests get paid? Or if they do just get karma)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great idea, posted an order on Bitcoin-OverTheCounter: [http://bitcoin- otc.com/vieworderbook.php?sortby=id&sorto...](http://bitcoin- otc.com/vieworderbook.php?sortby=id&sortorder=ASC&type=&nick=&thing=CODE+REVIEW&otherthing=&eitherthing=&notes=)

If anyone has some bitcoins and wants a code review, send me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER8> Another project in a similar vein is project metrics. Various times as I'm reviewing a library to include in my code, I'd like to compare various ones and see where the momentum is, how easy the code is to understand, how much work is being done on it. I think github is starting down this path but would like to see more of this type of thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rather than using a web site, join (or start) a local software craftsmanship group. I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to donate some time to look at your code, and you get the benefit of meeting other people in a community specifically dedicated to improving code quality and acquiring technical mastery.</comment>


Get 25GB FREE online storage from Microsoft SkyDrive - <AUTHOR> http://techfond.com/get-25gb-free-online-storage-from-microsoft-skydrive/

<comment><USER2> Useless for those of us w/o SkyDrive accounts: "...for all users who signed up to SkyDrive prior to April 22,2012."

:(</comment>


How Surveillance Changes Behavior: A Restaurant Workers Case Study - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/how-surveillance-changes-behavior-a-restaurant-workers-case-study/?src=me&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Some anecdotal evidence: I took over a restaurant a few months ago. Half the surveillance cameras don't work. I don't have video for every incident I know occurs there. But just having the cameras look like they're kind of working is enough.

I had an employee that stole a bunch of cheese and pastrami (I know, right, what's the point of stealing $50 worth of cheese and a block of pastrami?) inside empty pickle buckets he was "taking to the garbage bin" but really took to his car's trunk until said cameras were installed. A couple weeks after camera installation and a couple weeks of my eyeing him suspiciously, he quit saying that all the changes were annoying him and that the cameras were the last straw.

Currently the employees don't even dare to shift the blame for things that go wrong - not to mention I try to cultivate a culture of just being honest with me and giving people a pass for most offenses. They really seem to believe that I'm watching them when I'm really just occasionally checking the cameras for activity at night when the restaurant is closed. I think it also helps that I'll occasionally use the camera and the footage being recorded when a customer is being an asshole - to support my employees.

While I hate the idea of surveillance especially en masse, it seems like certain groups of people are willing to be a lot more honest and hard working when they think someone is watching and when it helps them too.

<comment><USER3> What about the people who like their job less because you don't trust them?

<comment><USER4> Trust, but verify.

Same reason contracts are written down.

<comment><USER5> Ah yes, the old "I want it both ways" statement.

Trust is the belief that you don't need to verify.

<comment><USER6> Actually, there's a fairly sensible way to view the statement "trust, but verify" \-- think of it as a policy of entering agreements without doing the necessary vetting / clearing / what have you in advance. You still do that, but afterwards. As long as the people you're working with are trustworthy, things will run much more smoothly, but if they're not, you'll still find out. That "verify" step is important to maintaining trustworthiness all around.

<comment><USER5> That's a reasonable interpretation. "Trust now, verify later" would be a bit clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the article in question spins a very positive light on surveillance - in the given context, theft has been occurring and is curtailed by the change in behaviour of staff, regardless of whether or not action is taken based on the surveillance being present.

The larger problem with surveillance is that there is no global notion of what is 'right' and 'wrong' \- theft is assumed wrong to almost everyone, but few readers here will have been at the poverty line, where it might appear a little more ambiguous whether taking a small cut from a very successful business which pays minimum wage is so clearly immoral.

These changes in behaviour push us to comply and work 'in-line' with whatever the watching power signals as being appropriate; and at least in the U.S., that largely appears to be increased revenue margins and employee efficiency - which has a very dull and power-imbalanced end game. There is more to life than work and producing value for someone else.

<comment><USER8> I don't agree with the notion that someone is entitled to steal just because they make minimum wage.

<comment><USER9> "When someone pays you minimum wage he is trying to say he would pay you less if it wasn't against the law." \-- Chris Rock

I agree, but it is hard for me to find sympathy for businessmen who hold wages so low. This behavior is widespread in the restaurant business, and it isn't limited to the staff stealing from the restaurant.

<comment><USER8> Sympathy has nothing to do with it.

If you feel your wages are too low, negotiate for higher ones. If that doesn't work, accept it or quit. If you've been wronged, you have access to redress from the courts, and the courts are very sympathetic towards workers in disputes with employers.

<comment><USER9> I said I agree with you.

>If you feel your wages are too low, negotiate for higher ones. If that doesn't work, accept it or quit.

I wish more people would do just that. It's what I did, after about a month of working as a barback.

>If you've been wronged, you have access to redress from the courts, and the courts are very sympathetic towards workers in disputes with employers.

No, you really don't, and the courts aren't. Where did you get that idea?

<comment><USER8> > Where did you get that idea?

Details of cases I am familiar with, and talking with lawyer friends who tell me that, although it is not supposed to be that way, jurors and judges often give the benefit of any doubt to the perceived underdog.

There's a reason why lawyers carefully dress their clients in certain ways, select jurors based on socioeconomic status, etc.

<comment><USER9> You think a person who makes minimum wage-ish + tips can hire one of your friends to sue their manager / boss / restaurant owner over wage / tip discrepancies? Do you think your coworkers who depend upon their waitstaff job to support their family / college education will agree to testify or be deposed in proceedings against their employer? Have you really thought about this?

<comment><USER8> [http://dwd.wisconsin.gov/er/labor_standards_bureau/publicati...](http://dwd.wisconsin.gov/er/labor_standards_bureau/publication_erd_10721_p.htm)

States all have their mechanisms where a worker can file a complaint without needing a lawyer.

<comment><USER9> _The person assigned to investigate a labor standards complaint will mail the employer a letter informing the employer of the complaint, who filed the complaint and what will happen next._

 _Since unpaid wage complaints involving minimum wage or overtime issues may affect other current /former employees who are not listed in the complaint, the department may request the employer conduct a self-audit of its place of employment if the complaint before the department proves to be valid. _

Yes that sounds like a fantastically powerful tool for workers to wield against their employers. I bet it keeps everything above board. /sarcasm

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > In the new study, the tracking software was NCR's Restaurant Guard product, > and NCR provided the data.

> Not surprisingly, NCR is delighted by the results.

I _really_ hope they had a neutral third party going over the data.

</comment><comment><USER11> there is a difference when a private entity, whom you patronize (or are employed by) at your own choice, engages in surveillance and when a public entity does so. If you find the private entity abusing its surveillance, you can leave, or in egregious cases, take legal action. When the state does so, you cannot easily leave, and more fundamentally you have a problem: Quis ipsos custodiet custodies?

</comment><comment><USER12> If they went back and looked at business theory from the 20s and 30s they might have come across a famous phenomenon called the Hawthorne/Observer effect [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

Basically, when employees are being observed (which you could read as under surveillance) their productivity improves.

Rather than suggest we turn into a panopticon loving society, it speaks to me that restaurant owners should in fact be paying more attention to their staff, and creating a workplace where they feel valued. This should improve productivity, and reduce turnover - but maybe my perspective is skewed because of the differences in being a restaurant waiter/ress vs a software dev.

In any case, if you want better profitability then why not incentivise staff? If they have a share of profits, then you can be sure they will be trying to maximise profits - including reducing wastage, up-selling and reporting other members of staff not pulling their weight/stealing.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a person who generally prefers to be private wherever possible, I am still divided on a related topic: security cameras. I don't want them to be recorded everywhere I go, but then on the other hand, I do realize that the world does have a few bad people and in many cases, they are caught with the help of cameras/CCTV footage.

I had always wondered if someone can shed some light on this debate from the other side perhaps and this article comes close.

I have still not figured out where I stand on the CCTV cameras in public places though.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't dispute these findings, but the entire spin on this article made me feel like I was reading a PR piece. Who were these researchers funded by? It sounds like it was funded by a company selling a product that benefits from these findings.. Besides referring to specific software products by brand name, there was a conspicuous absent of any downsides from surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER15> Our current society really tends to mix up dangerously the notions of "trust" and "surveillance"... at all the possible levels.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes, you can beat man to submission, true that.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how surveillance changes creativity?</comment>


Jack Ma: This is what to study if you want a high-paying job in the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/jack-ma-this-is-what-to-study-if-you-want-a-good-job-in-the-future.html <comment><USER2> I wonder what you would need to study to have a high satisfaction job in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, this is tough one, I guess if will be up to every individual to decide...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ditching iTunes, What's The Alternative? - <AUTHOR>

I just got a Samsung Galaxy S4 and am ditching iTunes. What is the alternative these days to iTunes? I want something that can play a wide ranged of formats including Flac files. I did some Googling, but couldn't really find anything other than poorly skinned iTunes rip-offs. <comment><USER2> I don't know a complete answer, but part of that is you not providing the needed details of "how" and "what" you're after.

ffmpeg is the underlying code powering programs like VLC (VideoLAN Client) and MPlayer on desktop and laptop systems. It supports a lot of different formats, both video and audio. There are a few porting attempts for VLC and MPlayer to Android available, but I haven't tested any of them. There is also a porting effort for ffmpeg itself:

<https://github.com/appunite/AndroidFFmpeg>

It should be a step in the right direction, but providing details on how you expect to use it and what you want it to do should help others respond with better answers than mine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Take a look at DoubleTwist, the UI is very similar to iTunes. It works on Android and has a Desktop version which it syncs with pretty well.

<http://www.doubletwist.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Rocketplayer</comment>


Is ketamine the best hope for curing major depression? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-ketamine-depression-treatment/ <comment> steve-howard I found this article pretty hard to read from the distracting animations, but I do like where the research is going on ketamine. Specifically, it's been found to be a good treatment for anhedonia[1], the loss of pleasure or interest in things you used to enjoy. Anhedonia makes life feel pretty empty, and it tends to improve very slowly even with treatment.

Frustratingly for the animators of this article, the view that ketamine is a club drug that can also fix depression is probably not going to do wonders for its legitimacy as a serious treatment.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v4/n10/full/tp2014105a.html](http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v4/n10/full/tp2014105a.html) . Tested patients with bipolar depression also on a mood stabilizer, so there's lots more research to do.

<comment><USER2> You can always save it to Pocket and view it that way of use the reading option (where the extraneous graphics are removed) of your browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know several people who have tried ketamine, but in powder form. Have any of you on HN tried? I saw people doing it only once, and they seemed quite functional, though a bit inebriated. They said it was a very pleasurable high. I guess they were on low doses.

My main problem with street bought drugs is that you never really know what you're getting (I'm a chemist, seen my fair share of "white powders" during my training). I have argued with people countless times against their using substances of unknown origin. I'm really glad to see this available in a safe clinical setting. It's very mature.

<comment><USER4> I've tried ket, but at this point it's way too expensive. You normally pay 70 to 90 dollars for 10 to 5 uses depending on your tolerance and other factors.

It does help with depression but only temporarily.

I've also experimented with other drugs in the dissos category. Namely:

MXE - Twice as potent, twice as long ketamine but a bit weirder. Currently one of the most popular dissosatives for the people who do research chemicals. I've used this heavily in the past for depression but it's lost it's effectiveness for me.

DXM - This drug always feels dirty to me, mainly because you have to take a bunch of cough syrup to get it's effects. You can get the raw powder but isn't really worth the hassle. Longer duration and unique feeling. Does help with depression but not worth it to me

MXP- Feels like cleaner DXM. Didn't really enjoy it, didn't really help depression.

MXM- Brand new, haven't tried it much, but really promising for depression in my eyes. Shorter then MXE, longer then ket, has a very unique feeling to it.

3-MEO-PCP - In my opinion this is the best for depression. you can't hole on it, and it ends up very stimulating. Basically mania in powder form. Generally people see the PCP in there and run scared. I will note PCPs in general are extremely hard to dose. Cheap scales can't normally do bellow twenty mg, and anything over 5mg can't fit on blotter. 3-meo-PCP doses between those two.

N2O - does work for depression, sort of. Way too addictive to be worth it, and honestly leaves you feeling sort of blah.

As for how you know what you're getting, you really don't. You rely on reputation and the crazy people who test these things.

This whole process started for me when a dose of ketamine basically transformed me from suicidally depressed to fairly normal and functional in one use. It's like a light switch flips and given that current depression drugs take weeks to start working I hope that they figure this out.

<comment><USER5> Not sure about now, but a few years back the problem with Ketamine in the UK was it was so cheap. About £5 /$7 for a gram. It was all getting shipped over from Indian supplies by the litre (err 4 quarts(ish)).

I hear now, after India cracked down, it got scheduled in the UK that prices are up and quality is down and mostly coming from China. Very little to none redirected from veterinary supplies for the UK market

<comment><USER4> There's been a lot of crack downs in China. Prices are about 70 bucks a gram on the darknet, and much higher locally. Local stuff is cut to shit to, and you'll likely never find liquid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> tbh the long term affects of ketamine make it the drug of the stupid , i spent a year on the shit partying and after stopping it have had to witness many of my friends continue to use and develop server health problems. Most of them carry around there fluids and have to sleep on plastic sheets. Ketamine seems a fun drug and unlike lsd lasts much less time but I've never heard of LSD destroying a persons bladder.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, the dosages most of these doctors are administering are well under a usual recreational dose, as the article mentions. IIRC you also build tolerance to ketamine pretty quickly, so I'd imagine the amount of K those people are doing that's causing bladder damage is a couple orders of magnitude larger than any of these patients.

<comment><USER5> You don't get bladder problems using / abusing ketamine just at weekends.

People sniffing it every day / all day and getting through the 5grams+

But hammering that much every day of any drug is not a good idea.

At the above+1 commenter, take LSD at high doses everyday and see what damage you do to yourself

<comment><USER8> LSD is as close to as harmless a drug, physiologically, as you can get--no one has ever died of an overdose on it, and there isn't permanent physiological damage that happens even with regular heavy use.

Of course, your psyche might be another matter...

<comment><USER5> Agreed, not physically damaging. But it can destroy you mentally if used often and in heavy doses.

>but I've never heard of LSD destroying a persons bladder. That was the quote I was referring to. Bladder in tact, but a shell of a person left with severe paranoia and mental problems.

Not to hate on LSD, but no drug is safe is abused daily.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure it's even possible to do decent quantities of LSD daily, at least in the context of trying to achieve a potent effect.

Plenty of times in my life I've done LSD and I learned pretty early on that it was pointless to try a dose the day after a previous dose.

It would just have very little to no effect on my mind and I would typically have to wait a few days at least before doing it again before it worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Patients receive a low dose of the drug: about one-tenth of what > recreational abusers of ketamine take or about one-fifth of what might be > used as a general anesthetic.

This strikes me as odd - shouldn't the recreational dose be well below the anesthetic dose? Even in the K-hole you'd like to retain some conciseness.

The effects the patients describe are pretty much the recreational effects.

<comment><USER11> Dosages don't always have a linear response, effects at standard doses aren't simply intensified by larger doses: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction)

And with ketamine as with other 'fun' sedatives such as ambien or quaaludes back in the day, one has to resist the urge to nod off for long enough for the fun to start.

<comment><USER10> I never had the urge to nod off with small doses of ketamine where I already felt some effects - it'd be a pretty bad anesthetic anyway if you could resist it by willpower alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "We believe we can double the income of the average family physician or internist"

This sounds like a setup for badness the first time someone has bronchospasm or goes apneic when they push the full dose or aspirates their vomit. Probably not a good idea to go to your local FP or internist-- or anyone else not prepared to take over your airway for you-- for a ketamine treatment.

<comment><USER13> The full dose isn't pushed. It's on a drip IV over half an hour or more. But I fully agree that you should have a competent, experienced doctor doing it, preferably an anesthesiologist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey, that's my ketamine doctor (Brooks)! Fantastic guy.

<comment><USER13> Oh, and for the record, the crazy-ass geometric animations on the article are not that far off what I get when receiving IV ketamine and I close my eyes-- although the real ones are far more complex and change constantly. However, the fear-and-loathing melty and color changing stuff is not something ketamine induces. What the page does not capture at all is horrible effects it has on sound. The visual stuff is pretty tolerable, but a simple fan ends up sounding like a helicopter, and most other sounds get very harsh. For me, having music is absolutely critical to getting through the whole process. I listen to a mix of various Bach performances, which gives the whole crazy trip some structure and narrative and keeps it familiar enough that I feel like I still have a handle on and am still grounded in reality, despite the strong dissociative side effects.

<comment><USER14> Are you taking it for depression? If so, how's that working out for you? How are the side-effects?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ok we get it, Bloomberg, you are writing about drugs. Jeez..

<comment><USER16> Someone in the creative department got a little too creative on this one. It's actually quite distracting for a reader.

<comment><USER17> All the javascript crap going on makes it virtually impossible to scroll.

<comment><USER18> Actually the color inversion is probably a 'filter: invert(100%)' turned on by js; I tried peeking through the DOM and didn't see it, so I may be wrong.

If filter performance is an issue, they could force gpu rendering by applying a 3d transform that does nothing.

<comment><USER19> You're right, lines 104 & 140 in [http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-ketamine- depression-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-ketamine-depression- treatment/js/script.js). Considered the gpu thing but was reading mixed advice ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10814178/css- performance-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10814178/css-performance- relative-to-translatez0)) and ran out of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I recommend this article for the trippy banner image.

<comment><USER19> that's no image

<comment><USER19> critique me! #showhn [http://bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-ketamine-depression- treat...](http://bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-ketamine-depression- treatment/js/script.js)</comment></comment></comment>