Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers - <AUTHOR> http://fseek.me/2010/05/duck-duck-go-my-new-search-engine/ <comment><USER2> I like Duck Duck Go. Mostly because, there is someone out there who is courageous enough to give it a go, single-handedly, into the search engine market. So props to him, I can support someone like him.

Having said that. There can be too much of a good thing. I feel that HN is being used as an advertising platform to promote DDG, which in itself is not such a bad thing when there are major developments and exiting features and news about it once in a while. So can we try to go easy on this promotional bandwagon?

<comment><USER3> I'd rather see 10 more articles about DDG than one more about the ipad or fakestevejobs.

<comment><USER4> _"I'd rather see 10 more articles about DDG than one more about the ipad or fakestevejobs."_

...because clearly, those are the only choices.

As long as we're throwing around false dichotomies, I'd rather see 10 more articles about the internals of a search engine than one more rah-rah post about DDG.

<comment><USER5> What would you like to know? For starters: [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go- arc...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go- architecture.html)

<comment><USER6> Do you maintain full text indices for parts of the web and which parts, or does it all fall back to external services like Wikipedia search, Yahoo BOSS, etc?

If you have some indices on your servers, how do you build and search them? Is it your own technology, or open source (Xapian, Lucene-based, etc)? In what percent of searches do you display results from your own indices?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not perfect yet, but I'd really like to get there: [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack- go.htm...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.html)

Here's what's coming:

\--Stack Overflow, man pages & programming documentation in 0-click.

\--More programming !bangs; I've already added a bunch but would love more suggestions: <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

\--More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced math to wolfram alpha, today unicode); again, suggestions welcome: <http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html>

<comment><USER7> I use !bangs a lot, but I wish they worked at the end of your search terms instead of just at the beginning.

I often don't think about the specifics of what I want until I've started typing, then I realize, "Oh, I actually want the wikipedia page of this." So I have to Ctrl-A to the beginning and type !w [space].

It's not a big hassle, but it'd be great if I could skip that step.

<comment><USER5> Easy fix--will do tomorrow as it's getting late :)

<comment><USER5> This is now fixed. I also made them case insensitive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ddg is quite nice when you're searching in languages with a relatively simple morphology. For English, I'm not using google any more unless ddg tells me to do so :)

It is very easy to perform shallow parsing operations on English, because of its relatively simple morphology. However, for agglutinative languages like Turkish, (Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese are also in the same family) where stems can appear under too many forms to enumerate, basic shallow parsing algorithms would not produce as interesting search results.

My anecdotal experience with DDG in Turkish seems to go in line with that assumption. So, I think DDG has a lot room for improvement in processing languages with complex morphology.

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

A famous illustrative Turkish word is: uygarlaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına

...which decomposes to suffixes as follows: uygar+laş+tır+ama+dık+lar+ımız+dan+mış+sınız+casına

...and translates to english as follows: behaving as if you(plural) are among those whom we could not cause to become civilized

</comment><comment><USER9> I am current taking the search engine for a spin and it has made a great first impression. I particularly like that instead of paging the search results it displays the results on demand using ajax. I prefer this interface because with less effort I see more results. I've found that with Google I tend to not to move past the first page and by doing that I probably miss out on information that may have been useful to me.

I wonder if Google has ever considered a similar interface for their search results.

<comment><USER3> Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad impressions and clicks.

The big question is how Gabriel will scale DDG with the design decisions already made.

It's quite possible that DDG can get to profitability with the layout the way it is today, maybe not as profitable as google but I don't think that would matter much.

Making a step back in income is a lot harder than foregoing a certain amount of income from the start.

<comment><USER10> _Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad impressions and clicks._

This seems unnecessarily constraining. They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic?

Certainly Google is very concerned with click-through on ads, but I'm not sure they'd be losing much if they allowed continuous scrolling. What percentage of their revenue do you think they derive from ads placed on 'next' pages?

And certainly there would be some way that they could integrate more ads with the Ajax loads: adding them to the sidebar as you scroll, or otherwise integrating them with the incrementally added results.

<comment><USER3> > They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search > instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic?

That nobody except for a few geeks do it. Just like the 'I feel lucky' button.

> Certainly Google is very concerned with click-through on ads, but I'm not > sure they'd be losing much if they allowed continuous scrolling. What > percentage of their revenue do you think they derive from ads placed on > 'next' pages?

About 32% according to their own statistics. 68% of the clicks (ads or results) are on page 1, the rest on subsequent pages.

Google is working hard to get to the point where 100% of the clicks are done on the first page, then it is a moot point, but a 32% impact to their bottom line is not something they'll do if they don't have to.

Also, yes, they could load that ad again, but I suspect that may not be as effective and would lead to a lot of complaints. A 'quiet' (as in non- animated) page creates a lot of goodwill, switching ads would likely lead to a distraction and therefore diminished user experience.

<comment><USER10> Great statistics, thanks! That's much higher than I would have guessed. While I agree that very few people change the default number of results, I would have also guessed that few click through to a second page.

Personally, I don't like the AJAX update approach. I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays. If I could set Google to return 1000 results, it would feel about right.

<comment><USER3> > I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow > me to scroll through them without loading delays.

I think that is a balance between server load and user convenience.

On ddg it is already pretty fast, if you aren't in a real hurry it is hardly noticeable and faster than clicking through to a second page.

<comment><USER11> Well, that, and the fact that users _really_ hate pages that are slow to load. (Although most of the loading would happen off-screen, this can still slow down users/other requests/...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this, I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try for about a month and a half.

<comment><USER5> A lot has changed in a year. I'd love if you'd try it again and email me your detailed feedback, so in another year maybe you'll switch :)

<comment><USER13> (To grandparent comment[er]) I also had a similar experience a while ago; but I gave DDG a second change recently, and indeed, the results have improved enough for me to keep DDG as my primary search engine, resorting to Google only once every 50 searches or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Perfect for programmers? I was skeptical. Then I searched for A* (which doesn't work on Google). Perfect indeed!

<comment><USER15> Nice. I will switch when it handles mathematical expressions well.

<comment><USER5> What kind? It might already or might be an easy fix.

<comment><USER16> personally I often use google to do stuff like

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=120mph+in+km%2Fh>

or

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=1%24+in+€>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I first heard about DDG it was because of it's privacy. I couldn't care less for that.

Now, saying that it is good for _programming_ questions made me set it as the default search engine without even testing.

Zero-click info is amazing for quick doc checks, the auto-extending page is sweet and actually displaying the page link and favicon is a lot more informative.

Two things though:

\- It's slow. Maybe because I'm in South America, or the server is not that good, but speed is essential for a search engine.

\- Special characters are not always handled correctly. A* work perfectly, but the situation is inverted when it comes to "@". Google's results for @override (<http://www.google.com/search?q=@override>) are better than DDG's (<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=@override>).

<comment><USER5> Thx. Servers are currently in the US; hence, the slowness for some people outside of the US. Eventually I hope to improve the infrastructure there.

Special character handling will be much better as I index programming documentation and Stack Overflow with the special characters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like DDG, but the last time I used it I had to fall back to Google to find an answer to my question. I was trying to find the date at which the central bank of Canada was going to make its next rate announcement. I knew it was June, used the most obvious keywords, but didn't find a good answer with DDG. With Google it was in the top 10.

Not a huge problem. It works most times when I use it. But it's not quite Google yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is DDG completely independent or does it pull in results from other search engines, like a meta search engine? Does it do its own spidering?

<comment><USER20> Both. Gabriel has disussed this before (I'm on my iPhone so no links sorry). But basically he does his own spodering and also uses yahoo boss and the bing api.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a win32 programmer, I always try things like createwindowex and I expect to get msdn as it is the most informative page. I can get it on DDG (doesn't even, show up ). It's the first result on google, even if I mistype it like createwindowe or createwindoaexaze. But may be I'm a dinosaur.

<comment><USER5> The first result at <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=createwindowex> is not what you want? It goes to <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms632680(VS.85).aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> And FYI in Chrome you can set it to use DDG for search instead of Google (they actually have quite a number of choices).

</comment><comment><USER23> "Privacy -Your searches are private! I don't need to say more"

Well ... they are now</comment>


TwinLisp - <AUTHOR> http://twinlisp.nongnu.org/

<comment><USER2> I wonder what the Lisp world would be like if people wrote libraries for CL or Scheme instead of inventing their own weird-ass "lisp" dialect.

The point of Lisp is that you don't need to invent your own language. Just "defmacro" and get back to solving your real problem.

<comment><USER3> CL is pretty ugly. Scheme isn't so hot either. it's the reason i stayed away from lisp in general for a good half year until Arc came out. it's like these languages had a chance to be pretty due to lisp's streamlined syntax... but they ruined it by using excessively verbose names and abusing the parentheses

<comment><USER2> For every excessively verbose identifier in CL, I can give you another that's excessively short. I won't defend any of CL's design, it's horrible. But it's not a major problem for actually using the language, you can rename whatever function you want, or have your editor type it for you.

As for the parentheses, I don't see any excess.

        (let (foo bar) ...)

and

       (let ((foo 0)(bar 1)) ...)

are both useful. I would hate to have to write:

       (let (foo nil bar nil) ...)

just because you're afraid of a few parentheses. It is easy to type and easy to read. (foo nil bar nil) is, IMHO, nearly unreadable.

Edited to add: Another reason I like the ((var binding)...) syntax is because it keeps the core language as unambiguious as possible. If I want to have an Arc-like binding operator, I can just write one and use that:

       (my-let (foo 1 bar 2 baz 3) (+ foo bar baz)) ; ==> 6

<comment><USER3> Arc's is:

      (let foo 0 ...)

(and what rkts wrote, due to Arc autodestructuring things.) the multi-bind is _with_

certainly things can be renamed, but personally i feel that if you don't go the extra mile for your users, someone else will, and you probably don't deserve success

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent: a combination of C's syntax and extensibility with Common Lisp's speed. That's what I've been waiting for!

<comment><USER2> When I saw the operator precedence table, I stopped reading and said to myself, "congratulations, you just missed the whole point of lisp."

And actually, SBCL is nearly as fast as C in many cases. So there's really no reason to not use CL, unless of course you don't like CL.

<comment><USER5> You don't have to program directly in an AST to do metaprogramming. It's a trade-off: some people feel it's important to make metaprogramming as easy as possible, while others feel it's more important to have readable syntax.

Every Lisp dialect has some high-level syntax, e.g. quote, CL reader macros, and Arc ssyntax. These obscure the relationship between code and the underlying AST, but the designers felt that the gain in readability was worth it.

How much syntax should there be? A hard question, but I think it would be good for Lisp to move in the "more" direction. Readability is one of the big problems I have with Lisp, and macros, while certainly useful, make up only a small fraction of my code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "TwinLisp is a language with C/Java - like syntax, but with internals and abilities of a Common Lisp"

Um...C/Java syntax <i>and</i> the abilities of Common Lisp....and the webpage says s-expressions aren't needed to build macros....ummm...ok, could the author show us a few TwinLisp macros?

<comment><USER7> Here's one:

mac &infinite-loop ( __body) {

`do () { $@body }}

S-expressions are permissible, so maybe it would be best to stick to those until you wrap your head around this crazy infix notation.

<comment><USER6> I grew up on simpleminded infix notation, and am overjoyed to have moved on.

Perhaps we could see a macro example just slightly more complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to like to freeze you in a Lisp newbie state, please go for it!</comment>


What Bitcoin Is Teaching Us - <AUTHOR> http://lfb.org/today/what-bitcoin-is-teaching-us/

<comment><USER2> Yes, let's go back to the glory days of the deflationary late-19th century.

The reason the Keynesians like currency that slowly decreases in value is because it brought about the longest sustained period of economic growth in human history, without which we would not even have Bitcoin to celebrate right now (the widely adopted technology that makes it possible to implement being a result of aforementioned growth.)

If everyone hoards, and never spends, then the economy stalls and then recedes. What's good for us as individuals is terrible for us as a whole.

That said, I think BitCoin is very interesting, and if some sort of shorting is introduced to cause a downward pressure on prices then the price could very well stabilize. A stable, slightly deflationary currency is just about as good as a stable, slightly inflationary currency.

<comment><USER3> > it brought about the longest sustained period of economic growth in human > history, without which we would not even have Bitcoin to celebrate right now

The industrial revolution happened while on the gold standard (with just a few short periods where it didn't apply, as I understand). Steam power, railroads, electrification, refrigeration, anaesthesia, early automobiles and so on.

I'm very fond of the computers that we have now (yay 20th century !), but it's a bit hard to brush aside the 19th century just like that. There's insane economic growth that happened in that period.

<comment><USER4> It's almost as if technological advancement isn't tied to a certain type of currency.

<comment><USER5> It's almost as if currency is just a medium of exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find the Ron Paul/Austrian school camp's complaints that central banking causes bubbles hilarious because their most notable achievements so far have been the creation of two asset bubbles.

Since 2008 they have been claiming that monetary policy will usher in hyper inflation and they created a gold/silver asset price bubble. Now the same ideology is being used to create a bitcoin bubble.

Even more hilarious is their assertion that a crypto-currency like bitcoin is scarce and limited in supply.

Clone the bitcoin github repo, find and replace bitcoin with HollowayCoin, edit a couple lines of code to create a new genesis block and boom I just made my own crypto currency with all the benefits of bitcoin.

New crypto coins will become important because the block chain won't scale, and new block chains will need to be created. These alt coins are already being traded for btc on a couple exchanges.

These crypto-currencies serve a purpose, but there is no need for them to trade at $230 per coin.

<comment><USER7> Even funnier is claiming that the gold/silver standards resulted in more stable financial systems. Inflation, deflation, and starvation of capital were huge problems before we switched to debt-based currencies.

They also equate "no central banking" with commodity-based currency. The United State's 19th century experiments with disbanding central banking wasn't exactly an economic revolution.

<comment><USER8> The point is not that gold and silve were stable, but that they have been _more_ stable and have kept more value than fiat/debt-based currencies.

<comment><USER7> They absolutely were not.

Look at a graph of UK inflation in the 19th century. [http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/inflation/tim...](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/inflation/timeline/chart.aspx)

The market value of a hunk of gold has done ok over the centuries, but it's value at any point in time as a currency goes all over that place. This makes it difficult to get capital -- who wants to lend money when you have no idea what money will be worth?

<comment><USER8> Your evidence is faulty for these reasons:

1\. You are choosing a specific currency.

2\. You are choosing a specific time period.

3\. The time period you choose from already had world wide debt based currencies.

4\. The UK already had a central bank.

5\. The UK already had a reserve rate that was < 100%, and a practical reserve rate that was less than the prescribed one due to fraud by the banks.

I do afford you that gold is volatile, that is true, but it is especially volatile these days _because_ of its role in the economy. People view gold as the "oh shit, the government is going to default" or the "oh shit, I need to smuggle my wealth out of this country before they confiscate it" currency. Both of those properties make it very volatile to political and economic news.

The point is that for every USD or CAD you bring forward, I can bring forward one of these: <http://instagram.com/p/X7pWUKIHK5/>

History is riddled with the collapse of currencies (and, hence, economies as there is a sudden shift of wealth away from those that saved it).

The point of currencies is not to have them be good for the economy. The point of currencies is to be a store of value and a divisible good for exchange. I agree that gold has flaws, I also agree that bitcoin has flaws, but they do have some advantages as well, and I would argue that in gold or silver's case stability is one of them.

<comment><USER7> I deliberately chose the largest economy in the world at the time. Comparing US currency today vs. US currency in 1800 isn't a meaningful comparison.

How far back do you want me to go? The Romans? Oh wait, they played around with coinage as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bitcoin has already taught us that even smart people are not immune to drinking the Kool-Aid. The tech community is quickly separating into two camps that are becoming unintelligible to each other. For some, this article is an amazing piece full of profound insights that justify their decision to buy Bitcoins. For others, it piles weak arguments on top of an assumption that the recent rise in Bitcoin value will continue forever.

<comment><USER10> Two issues:

1)Having insights and owning bitcoins can be mutually independent variables.

In other words, it's entirely possibly you have it completely backward, and that upon arriving at a lengthy deliberation, some rational actors, _are therefore choosing to take a position._

2) _> "that the recent rise in Bitcoin value will continue forever."_

That's a pretty decent sized strawman you've rustled up. Most people in that camp are not arguing that bitcoin will rise forever.

The discussion is about the shape of the graph. I believe both an s-curve (slow adoption, exponential growth, maturity) and [perhaps multiple] sawtooth (crash scenario) are plausible.

<comment><USER11> It seems to me, with a finite supply and limited usage, it has to either keep increasing forever or crash, right?

Finite supply and an uptake in usage as an actual currency (aka something different than what 90% of the players seem to be doing) would mean an increase in demand causing prices to continue to rise with adoption (which could spell some problems with adoption, but not necessarily insurmountable ones).

Meanwhile, if adoption as an actual currency never takes off, then eventually the whole thing's gotta fall over, right? So it's either continual price rises or a big crash? What are the other scenarios?

All of this talk about the nature of currencies when it's clear that 90% of the activity is treating it as a speculative asset seems silly to me. Either it transitions to a currency (which is more about usage than price), or it doesn't and eventually crashes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author mistakenly attributes the deflating aspects of a controlled limited supply of Bitcoins (by design) as the cause of the recent surge in valuation while it's really just speculation at this point. Even worse, he's urging everyone to hoard their bitcoins and not spend them because he believes t1 will always be higher than t0. When you undermine the only true value of a currency (which is trading) you might as well place your bets in a Las Vegas casino and get some free drinks while you're at it because the thin line between speculating and gambling has been crossed at this point.

</comment><comment><USER13> Bitcoin seems to be teaching people exactly what they wanted to believe in the first place, what a coincidence!

<comment><USER14> This is the only comment that matters here. FWIW, at my SW company which is filled with brilliant people I spend most of my day patiently explaining that monetary systems are always about power, not technological innovation, and Bitcoin will demonstrate that brutally, sooner or later.

I think debates like this mostly illustrate how shockingly poorly engineers are educated in subjects like history and basic economics.

<comment><USER13> Engineers have a tendency to view everything as an engineering problem, when most of the "really hard" problems are about people, interactions and relationships. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - and we have an entire culture of hammer designers churning out the most effective hammers in history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "it does what currency should do, which is increase in value over time."

What utter rubbish. Bitcoin may or may not survive (as a volatile commodity, like gold), but you buy it now at your peril. It is backed by nothing, and generates no earnings. It started at $.10, and to $.10 it might well return.

<comment><USER16> What is gold, silver or fiat currency backed by?

Commodity demand for gold is only about 12%.

[http://www.gold.org/investment/why_how_and_where/why_invest/...](http://www.gold.org/investment/why_how_and_where/why_invest/demand_and_supply/)

<comment><USER17> What is Google public stock backed by? It buys no influence and yields no dividend, and Larry and Sergei have said it will stay that way, yet investors are happy to pay $800 for a symbolic piece (costing 25 times the share of earnings it represents, useless as that is without dividends).

<comment><USER18> Which is one reason that I'm not buying stock. Of course even Groupon stock might when the company fails still yield some Aeron chairs and cubicle dividers. There is a something behind any (non-scam) stock. The same cannot be said about Bitcoin. If I had a bitcoin I would sell it as quickly as I could.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bitcoin is, at most, a payment service similar to Paypal. It is not a true currency nor will it ever be one. All anyone cares about is how it relates to the USD.

All government backed currencies at least start on the gold standard. After sufficient time and economic development, some countries (like the US) can move off the gold standard and lend and borrow on reputation alone.

Bitcoin was started by people who do not appear to exist, the "money" was printed by a select group of early adopters who still control vast portions of its economy, and with nobody to regulate or monitor the exchanges, the recent inflation can all be some part of manipulative collusion.

WoW Gold and Team Fortress 2 Apple Earbuds seem to have a more stable and trustworthy currency than Bitcoin.

Yes, I wish I could predict the spike and have cashed out, but I'm not losing sleep over avoiding an investment that doesn't feel right in the least.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what Tucker will say Bitcoin is teaching us if it falls to $40.

Bitcoin is very interesting and agree with Ezra Klein's piece on it. However, the importance of Bitcoin is not in its exchange rate to other currencies, but in all its other unique properties.

Tucker puts far too much weight on what is quite likely a speculative bubble, which will be to the ultimate detriment of Bitcoin's long-term future.

</comment><comment><USER21> Inflation is a tax on held currency. You may think a tax on wealth is good or bad, but from a policy position I don't see a compelling reason to argue about it in any other terms.

This means that inflation encourages people to hold their wealth in assets other than currency.

Considering that wealth aggregates at the top, the effect of inflation is greatest on the wealthiest.

This also means that if you have $100 worth of assets held in a currency that is expected to depreciate and $100 worth of assets in a currency that is expected to appreciate, then you will spend the former rather than the latter.

Hence the argument that deflationary currencies are worse than inflationary currencies as a unit of exchange.

</comment><comment><USER22> This article is quite opinionated, but one thing I liked:

 _This brings us to another lesson that Bitcoin has taught us. Money is like any other good in society in that it can be produced and managed entirely by the free market. This is the reverse of what scholarly opinion has said for more than 100 years._

<comment> T-hawk That's always been true. Scrip has existed forever. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip> Any private party can issue a form of currency. Its value is limited by trust in that private party to keep the supply stable and uncounterfeitable (not double spendable), and the expectation that merchants will accept it for goods and services.

What Bitcoin introduces is a money supply with that question of trust removed, with enforcement by mathematical means. This only became possible recently of course, with the advent of enormous computational processing power and interconnectivity. The latter part of adoption by merchants seems to have very recently reached critical mass by way of networking effects. So Bitcoin could indeed be on the rise to become the world's monetary system.

At this point, Bitcoin's biggest danger is not obscurity and oblivion or a free market crash, it's regulation or illegalization from governments that may be hostile to the existence and usage of a currency system they don't and can't control. The US and EU governments are the entities with possible power to kill Bitcoin, because they possess legalized force outside of the Bitcoin protocol and ecosystem.

<comment><USER23> "What Bitcoin introduces is a money supply with that question of trust removed, with enforcement by mathematical means"

Except that there is no formal definition of the security for Bitcoin, so there is no meaningful "enforcement." Formal definitions of security for digital cash systems cannot be applied to Bitcoin _because_ of the lack of a central authority. The security of Bitcoin is extremely vague, based on hand- waving arguments about computational power that are extremely difficult to analyze.

Even if somehow we overlook that lack of rigor, "enforcement" is not accurate. There is a known, polynomial time, practical attack that allows Bitcoin money to be double-spent. That does not sound like "enforcement by mathematical means" to me, at least not if the "mathematics" you are referring to are cryptography, game theory, or related fields (and I am not sure what other mathematics would even be used to enforce rules).

<comment><USER24> Double-spending bitcoins is hard, counterfeiting and general fraud are easy enough crooks can do them.

Also, this is a ridiculous argument because all fist currencies are being manipulated now to avoid a default-inspired crash. Your cash _is_ rotting in your pocket, and your investments aren't making back inflation let alone a profit.

<comment><USER23> "Double-spending bitcoins is hard"

1\. That is not well-defined. What does double-spending even mean for Bitcoin? Previous security definitions for digital cash define double spending in terms of a central bank that issues the money.

2\. Even with the vague idea of what double-spending means for Bitcoin, your statement is false under the definition of "hard" that cryptographers typically use. There is a known polynomial-time algorithm for double spending Bitcoin that was described in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. That attack is _practical_ and there are already concerns about one "mining pool" that has almost enough computational power to pull it off (and if they are willing to accept a small probability of failure, they _already_ have that much power).

<comment><USER24> Yawn. Fraud is easy, no matter how you define it, stealing a few bitcoins on the other hand merely takes a finite amount of resources.

You're essentially a troll. What you say is true but double spending a few coins (your maximum return is 2x) would take hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of luck. Duplicating paper money requires an inkjet printer with good registration and the common sense to separate the eruion constellations into separate layers. It's not rocket surgery, and once the source file is made it can be replicated at any copy shop. Its vanishingly unlikely you haven't accepted a counterfeit bill, and its vanishingly unlikely a bitcoin could be double-spent beyond seven blocks.

Give it up. Bitcoins may not be a sound investment but they're _far_ more secure than cash for both parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is anyone else as annoyed at the moralizing tone of this article?

"With paper money, governments and central banks are in a position to punish holding money. Because it can be created without limit, discipline vanishes. Individuals, families, businesses, and government can ramp up spending without limit and avoid the consequences of their behavior."

Punishing the "sinners" for not keeping their currency and spending it in order to support the economy as a whole seems to be a primary goal of those that want commodity currency.

"You can try this experiment at home. Let's say you have a problem teenager who lives like everyone else, throwing around cash and seeing no point whatsoever in saving money. Send that kid a Bitcoin and see what happens, even without hectoring instructions."

Yes, give them a Bitcoin and they'll be saved, praise our lord and savior Bitcoin! Unless that teenager wants a skateboard today, not two skateboards in 2 months. Maybe they want to buy a meal b/c they are hungry?

Finally don't reference the Gilded Age as a model of good monetary policy, two major depressions and a thin veneer of success for a wealthy minority shouldn't be the zenith of monetary policy.

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems that the author thinks Bitcoin is going to steadily appreciate indefinitely, which is obviously not the case. Give a kid a BC at $140 and you'll have a furious kid when it crashes to $15.

Somewhat off-topic: isn't BC just digital gold? Is there any reason to think of it any differently?

<comment><USER7> The difference is that gold is a tangible, immutable substance that doesn't decay much. It doesn't go anywhere.

I bought a bunch of bitcoin early, and sold it for a handy profit at $10. The ones I kept aside (about 20) were lost on a PC whose hard disk crashed. My understanding is that these coins are forever lost.

<comment><USER27> You may have lost bitcoins, but you did so before you knew they'd be worth hundreds of dollars. I'd expect that in the future, people will be much more careful to backup (or print out) their private keys.

In any case, the ones you lost just increased the value of all the other bitcoins still in use. Since each unit is theoretically divisible into infinitely smaller units at some point in the future, people will just trade smaller amounts for larger values. That's a feature, not a bug!

A lot of people are claiming that deflation is a death sentence for a currency like this. Something they overlook is that new coins will continue to be created for many years still, and that all it takes is a new version of the protocol to 'fix' any fatal flaws in the current system. If the majority of users have a financial interest in defending the value of their coins, it seems logical to me that they are likely to act rationally to achieve that if a threat were to emerge.

But then, who knows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ridiculous. Bitcoin - as cool as it is and as much as I admire the cleverness of the system - is a FAILED currency. What it MIGHT turn out to be is a store of value once the speculation cools - but that is still a few years away.

If a currency encourages saving and discourages spending, it brings the economy to a screeching halt. This is why Bitcoin fails as a currency. It is also the reason why it will never be accepted commonly as a currency.

However, because the supply will be (artificially) limited in time as all Bitcoins are mined, there is a case to be made that it might emerge like gold as a decentralized store of value. It's anonymous and infinitely portable.

So time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yes please Ignore the deflationary spiral that its currently undergoing. It amazes me that people are buying into a system which actively discourages people from using it as a way to exchange good and services.

<comment><USER30> A deflationary spiral is not a price increase, large or small. It is _supposed_ to be when price increases, large or small, shrinks actual economic activity, causing more price increases, more shrinkage, etc.

Has this actually happened? This shouldn't be a hard question to answer if the Bitcoin economy is indeed "currently undergoing" a deflationary spiral.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't seem that it's happening or even can happen, because there really isn't much of a bitcoin economy. The speculation on the currency absolutely dwarfs any usage of it as a currency. Nobody on earth uses it for more than 1% of their purchases.

So anyone who wants to use it as a justification for some reactionary ron paul economics is really not observing what's going on. Is claiming you made money on gold as an investment really an argument for gold-backed currency?

<comment><USER29> Because of the nature of bit coin its impossible to determine how much of the current activity is actual commerce and how much of it is speculative trading.

The truth is the system is set up to encourage deflation and there is nothing to prevent it from happening on a large scale. The huge price increase seen over the last few weeks is not because there is an explosion in commerce using BitCoin. Its because people are viewing BitCoin as a investment vehicle and they are hording it.

As to your point about there not being an economy, thats exactly the point their currency is worthless not because people won't give you stuff for it, but because in terms of its ability to foster an exchang3e of goods and services it is actively discouraging you from using it ( why buy something today for 1 BTC when next week it will be 0.5 BTC ) The fixed nature of introducing new currency into the market only exasperates this problem as the hard limit on all bit coins that can ever be mined makes it so eventually even that small control over deflation will be non existent and increase the deflation.

<comment><USER11> I'm not really disagreeing with you on the facts as regard asset price, I'm saying that calling it 'deflation' is a misnomer because it's being treated much more like an asset than as a currency.

I do think it's basically a ponzi scheme.

I guess we need a separate term for 'rapidly appreciating value relative to other currencies which makes it prohibitive to create an economy based on this currency in the first place', where deflation occurs to an existing economy based on a currency.

<comment><USER29> Maybe we can call it a Tusser Economy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What happens when we don't need to exchange BTC for another currency anymore? Or will BTC be forever inherently dependant on the existence of a government controlled currency? How would we price things in BTC like groceries or salaries? Would that be always changing because the value of BTC would be forever going up? I'm probably talking beyond our lifetime here..

</comment><comment><USER32> i just wished i'd hit the buy button when they were $20. I didn't believe in them then, I don't believe in them now, but I sure as hell believe I would have cashed in some nice short term earnings from the bubble :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Mr Tucker is truly a treasure. If anyone is not familiar with him or the ideas, check out mises.org

</comment><comment><USER34> Well said!</comment>


Why the Controversial Airbnb Ads Might Be a Work of Marketing Genius - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jhreha/why-the-tone-deaf-airbnb-ads-might-be-a-work-of-marketing-genius-84d6693dfbee?source=tw-444597d4f7be-1445817852403 <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed the post and the idea of proposing alternate theories, but it doesn't discuss the mentality of those without a strong opinion of Airbnb. I assume that people who are fairly neutral will see their social networks express a negative opinion and internalize the negative opinion. The biggest impact isn't the people who read this 50 times rather the people who vaguely associate Airbnb with being out of touch and negative.</comment>


ASK HN: Are Time Tracking Applications Worth It - <AUTHOR> In my previous role we used toggl to track how long it takes to complete a task and it just seemed like a distraction as it popped up on the screen every 10 minutes.
I'm thinking about using something similar again to get a better idea of how long it takes me to complete a task
What are people's experience with this type of software? Is it worth it or just an annoying distraction? <comment><USER2> \- you can set up toggle in a way that isn't distracting - definitely disable the popups, have a keyboard shortcut for start/stop tracking, or use the auto tracking feature if you like it

\- I've found time tracking with toggle to be extremely helpful at times when my discipline was lacking. For example, while working on university projects, the goal of spending at least 4 hours every day doing actual work, helped so much with getting things done on time.

\- even then, my time tracking was focused on work - I would never recommend tracking every minute of your day. I've tried it for a very short period of time and completely hated it.

\- at the moment I have enough discipline and structure in my work and personal life, so time tracking isn't necessary. At work, I log time against projects a few times a week, but that process isn't micromanaged and we don't use real-time time tracking. I wouldn't time track my personal projects because I enjoy the feeling of flexibility and don't need the additional discipline.

edit:

It just occurred to me that this is very similar to managing a budget. If you've never had a budget before and don't know where your money goes, it's _really_ useful to track your finances closely at least for a while. But if you're doing fine financially and you're still obsessively counting every penny, you've probably gone too far and you're taking away from your quality of life. At that point just a general idea of how much is spent and on what will be enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would say the overhead of time tracking, as a deliberate productivity tool, is barely worth the trouble. For instance, I use Emacs org-mode, where you can schedule and clock tasks in sophisticated ways. It took a long time to setup and get used to the stuff. I thought it might scale in the future. Turns out that pen and paper is much more efficient and effective for me to get anything done on a daily basis. Now I use it more or less to get reminded for some important dates, and to satisfy the sunk cost fallacy. I would only use it as time tracker again, if forced by my employer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool I use a pen and paper todo at the moment so I'll just stick with that.

Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use Toggl to track time that I spend working for clients. It's ok but I find their reporting / filtering to be seriously lacking. I'm in the process of building my own tool because it's such a pain in the ass. But I do absolutely need this kind of software.

</comment><comment><USER5> If something was popping up on my screen every 10 min I would go insane.</comment>


Stealth Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://vvvnt.com/media/stealth-infrastructure <comment><USER2> It is very common in the US for government entities to build towers (for water storage or to fill a gap in emergency services 2-way radio coverage) and then lease space to carriers to offset the cost and reduce the number of towers in a area. I'd assume economics before spies if I saw a cell sector on a police tower.

<comment><USER3> Local law enforcement organizations do buy cell interception technology, regularly: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/meet-the- machines...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/meet-the-machines- that-steal-your-phones-data/2/)

Seeing as companies like Harris build equipment for both running _and_ spying on cell networks, it may make sense for them to offer a tower-mounted system...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Strangely enough, despite all the /stuff/ of cellular infrastructure, on roofs and poles in and around cities, the prevailing idea was that mobile phones communicated via satellite and that all these towers were something to do with TV._

I was conscious back then, and I don't recall this particular misunderstanding. Soon after we wondered "what are those things that are mounted like microwave repeaters but obviously are not microwave repeaters?" someone had figured out they were cell antennas. This was before anyone I knew (except my Uncle Glen) had cell phones.

Hmmm, maybe this misunderstanding was a Kiwi thing.

<comment><USER5> Louis C.K. thinks phones communicate with satellites in space.

[http://gizmodo.com/5658560/louis-ck-the-shittiest-cell- phone...](http://gizmodo.com/5658560/louis-ck-the-shittiest-cell-phone-in-the- world-is-a-miracle)

"Give it a second, could ya? It's going to space! Could you give it a second to get back from space?"

<comment><USER6> Even more common are people who think GPS involves satellites tracking the location of their phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to work in one of the taller buildings in a city. At the top of the building, there was a bunch of cell infrastructure. We were installing some radio equipment in the radio room (the same place AT&T and the others had their stuff), and I noticed two identical locked server boxes. They were very heavy-duty compared to the server cabinets I'm used to. One was marked "FBI" and the other was marked "USMS/DEA" (or something like that).

I couldn't really tell without going through a bunch of ceiling-mounted wires, but I'm pretty sure these were connected to some of the civilian cell infrastructure. There wasn't much else to connect to up there.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've always been fascinated by this. Apologies if if it is linked somewhere in the article that I missed, but where are the forums where radio enthusiasts share hidden towers they've found?

<comment><USER9> Not quite what you're looking for, but there is a "Stealth Infrastructure Catalogue" linked after the article, which might serve you as a place to start.

<comment><USER8> I took a look there(after winding my way through Bumping Borders), it appears to be a PDF containing a nicely formatted list of sightings from various countries. I was hoping for the "busy forums" mentioned in the article, but this is still very interesting. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> this was his favorite [http://www.waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=5df351c0...](http://www.waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=5df351c0-98ea-4b8c-9a84-844f67beb552&wst=9&kw=cell%20towers&st=2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of your images is 10 MB, it probably doesn't need to be that large while in the middle of an article, maybe a link to the full-size version instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> scaled it down, apologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cellular coverage for rural NZ is quite a competitive scene. Did you check your facts on those "Family farms"?

</comment><comment><USER12> I have in fact noticed an impossibly strong AT&T signal at the rainbow bridge. It extends even on the Canadian side. Makes it near impossible to connect easily back to a Canadian carrier like Rogers or Telus. It always seemed a bit strange to me, why US carriers blanketed a tourist area and Canadian ones hadn't.

<comment><USER13> Often the US sites are actually right on the border - I know where several carriers are sited at the Blaine crossing, and both are within a couple block thereof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That was a great read!

So, was it a MITM BTS?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can also find an interview with Julian Oliver here: [http://vvvnt.com/media/julian-oliver](http://vvvnt.com/media/julian-oliver)

</comment><comment><USER15> Blocked from Russia :/.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll look into this. In the meantime, we did co-publish this essay with Rhizome.org. You can find their version here (same text).

[http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/may/20/stealth- infrastruct...](http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/may/20/stealth- infrastructure/)</comment></comment>


New Graphcore IPU Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> https://www.graphcore.ai/posts/new-graphcore-ipu-benchmarks <comment><USER2> What does IPU stand for in this context? The only use I know of is Image Processing Unit — silicon that is custom developed for cameras. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor)

This is clearly not that.

Edit: Intelligence Processing Unit. [https://www.graphcore.ai/products/](https://www.graphcore.ai/products/)

I assume that the Bionic neural engine in Apple's A11 and later is an example of this?

<comment><USER3> "IPU" was made up by graphcore to describe their processor, so you call choose to use the term for as many or as few processors as you want. IMO, any processor can be an "intelligence" processor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Given the impressive inference results shown on this page, I find it interesting that graphcore did not participate in mlperf inference v0.5.

<comment><USER4> It's probably because these are the best hand picked results they could come up with (and also, crucially, _worst_ for the competition), and mlperf has a fixed set of tasks and you don't get to do that. I've done this shit professionally: if you're given full freedom wrt the choice of the task and configuration, you can easily make it seem like your competition sucks beyond belief. You can "prove" that a CPU is faster than a GPU without much trouble. :-) And yet NVIDIA still dominates most rankings, mostly, even though in absolute terms it's nowhere near the fastest or the most efficient option (that'd be the TPU, on some tasks, at the moment). With so many performance cliffs in the hardware tooling is super important, and NVIDIA is the only viable acceleration option that has any meaningful tooling at all.

Caveat emptor: the published numbers (_any_ numbers, not just Graphcore's) are mostly bullshit unless code is also published and hardware is available for independent measurement. There's no way you're getting the claimed 13TFLOPs out of your shiny new NVIDIA GPU. Take an off the shelf resnet50 (4GFLOPS) and witness it run at about 700 samples per second, which pencils out to 2.8TFLOPs not 13. Still amazing (and still easily 10x the high end CPU throughput), but perf claims are often exaggerated by as much as 10x even by big names, let alone startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They have been describing this as shipping (in the Dell systems mentioned) for a while, I would guess 2 years. It isn't clear to me where the hardware is going or why the company hasn't made more of a splash if performance is so good.

<comment><USER6> The obvious answer is that it wasn't working until very recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating.</comment>


Switching roles told me how hard it is for women to get the respect they deserve - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SchneidRemarks/status/839910253680553988?s=09 <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: This story is _not_ by me but really worth reading. Posting it here for better discussion.</comment>


Ask HN: Is having two brand names a dumb idea? - <AUTHOR>

I'm guilty, I've fallen in love with two names and can obtain both domains. They have a very different feel to each other, and halfway in between is the feel I want to achieve.
I am the cofounder of a cloud computing start up and we are developing an application to assist in managing cloud deployments.
The two domains are in the format: XXXXXXXcloud.com YYYYYapp.com
I'm not dumb enough to use both just because I love both, but the first one sounds perfect for a company name and the second for the app name.
Is it foolish to use both as we only have one product? Should the company name and the app name be the same? <comment><USER2>
      Company:  Microsoft

      Brands:

             Office
             Windows
             Sharepoint
             Dynamics
             etc.

      Company: IBM

        Brands:

            Lotus
            Rational
            Tivoli
            Cognos
            WebSphere
            DB2

The point being, that it's pretty routine to have a "company name" and then one or more "brand names" that hang off of the company name. All of that said, it's a judgment call on when/what/how many brands to have... The one thing of interest that I'll throw out is this... marketing guru Jack Trout (of _Positioning_ fame) is a big fan of launching new products under a new brand name, instead of doing a "line extension." Now that's in the context of an established company, not a startup... but I think you can generalize the point to "yes, it's OK - perhaps even preferred - to have multiple brands."

In my own case, my company name is "Fogbeam Labs" and I fully intend to name the _product(s)_ something very specific when we have something to ship. <http://www.fogbeam.com> will always just be a link to the main company website... any hosted / SaaS apps will have their own domain. I should probably point out, though, that our primary focus is on the B2B / Enterprise Software market, and my biases are towards thinking in those terms. Any or all of this may have absolutely zero relevance to your situation. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We are primarily B2B/Enterprise too, so that is very relevant. So your plan is to have lots of products, uniquely named, all under the Fogbeam Labs umbrella?

How would your strategy change if you only planned to have one product in the next few years?

A couple of companies from our industry are good examples here:

<http://newrelic.com/> \- Company name and single product name are both the same.

<http://www.3tera.com/AppLogic/> \- Company name and product name different (ignore their acquisition by CA for this example).

To me, 3tera's AppLogic sounds more suitable for B2B than New Relic. It also leaves us open to producing other products in the future, should we wish to.

<comment><USER2> _We are primarily B2B/Enterprise too, so that is very relevant. So your plan is to have lots of products, uniquely named, all under the Fogbeam Labs umbrella?_

I'm not sure that the initial plan is to have _lots_ of products, but the current plan is for a suite of products that work in concert with each other, but also deliver some value independently. There would be a specific brand to cover those products, for sure. Any future products _might_ come out under a different brand name, but that's looking ahead an awful lot for us right now.

I will say that, in general, I think IBM have struck a good balance, for a company that has a broad product line... they have lots of products, but the fall nicely into the various divisions: Lotus, DB2, Tivoli, WebSphere, etc.

 _How would your strategy change if you only planned to have one product in the next few years?_

Good question. This is an area that I've only recently started doing a lot of thinking, and it's all still a bit "up in the air."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Two brands makes sense if they map to different market segments which require substantially different branding strategies, e.g. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (and yes I know these also have different feature sets) or Chevy and GMC (which do not have meaningfully different feature sets).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I meant to write a different company name and product name for a company with one product, rather than brands.

Better phrased, my question should have been "Should a startup with one product, and no near future plans to add another, use the same name for the company and product?"

<comment><USER3> Having two names may create less friction as your company evolves, e.g. you can change the name of the company while keeping the name of the product, or change the name of the product, sell the irghts to distribute the product line to another company, or buy rights to another product .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While it's done all the time (see Obvious Corp and Twitter), one potential downside for a bootstrapped startup is that you'll need to make an extra effort to protect two names (trademarks, licenses, etc.).

<comment><AUTHOR> So, aside from the (relatively low) addition admin and expense, you don't think it's confusing for a start-up with one product to promote two brands?</comment></comment>


Year Old Guy Generates Millions of Dollars a Year, Gives Away Everything - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/how-this-21-year-old-guy-generates-millions-of-dollars-a-year-and-gives-away-almost-all-of-them-bed1fbc52aee <comment><USER2> Best de-clickbaiting fail yet</comment>


Management today review of 37signal's "Rework" - tomh- http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/rss/article/985294

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently reading the book, and he amusingly left out the stats supporting their conclusions or the rest of the sentence which tempers the strong advice. This is obviously intentional.

They say "Don't make plans" and end the sentence with "Before you start, you don't know anything then".

They say "learn from successes, not failures" and back it up with stats about how people who failed at a prior business endeavor are no more likely than first time starters (23% of succeeding), but people who've succeeded at prior business have a much greater chance (forgot that number).

Uneven smear job a stuckup business writer.

<comment><USER2> I think approaching your work from the standpoint of "Learn from success, not failure" is a sure path to succumbing to confirmation bias and becoming a one- trick pony.

The 37s guys have done some wonderful work. But to me they are pretty much the embodiment of what I think of when I remember Paul Buchheit's great quote:

"Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice"

<comment><USER3>
      I think approaching your work from the standpoint of "Learn
      from success, not failure" is a sure path to succumbing to
      confirmation bias and becoming a one-trick pony.

And the stats mentioned show, that approaching work from standpoint "learn from failure" is a sure path to being zero-trick pony. The stats in question show, that those who failed previously have the same success rate as those who never even tried, and those who succeeded previously have success rate higher by third.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't tell anything, as you don't know why people failed in the first place and if they learned from their mistakes.

Maybe, people able to learn from mistakes are able to recover them before their business fails...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tomh- It's important to realize that this "Rework" book is about the stuff that worked for 37signals and might work for you if you have a similar business. The review points out that this is not always the case from a management perspective and it's not always applicable to other business'.

<comment><USER5> From the inside flap - "REWORK shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition."

Note that the claim is not 'Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in a business that is similar to 37 signals. Maybe'.

<comment><USER6> It depends. Maybe. Sometimes. Your milage may vary. Reasonable people understand these apply in most (but not all!) situations.

<comment><USER5> No doubt. But what the what the OP is trying to do is weasel away from a critique of the book by saying 'Well, it's really mostly about 37 signals. If you don't like it/doesn't work for you, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man'. I imagine you wrote the book with the notion that it is broadly (not universally) applicable, just like most books in the genre. And it's perfectly sensible to review it in those terms, just like this and all other reviews I've seen so far have.

<comment><USER6> I do think a lot of our ideas can apply to a very broad spectrum of businesses.

I've personally heard from thousands of business owners in just about every industry who've told me many of the ideas we espouse work beautifully for them in their businesses.

But, no of course I don't believe any idea applies to everyone.

<comment><USER7> Thousands? That's one for every working day ten years in a row.

No need to exaggerate to make your point.

<comment><USER8> _Thousands? That's one for every working day ten years in a row._

Or three days worth of email

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Management is an interesting concept. My personal view on it is that I don't want to work with people who need to be managed.

So don't call it management, call it leadership instead. If you're on a team of peers and you're the natural leader who helps motivate everyone and makes the idea a reality, you are essentially the manager... the PHB, but you are doing it artfully.

In lots of businesses, one is not fortunate enough to be able to hire self- motivated employees, and so management is akin to being the old lady on the school yard with a whistle.

But more broadly, management is the science of motivating people... and anyone who is a "founder" and can't do the project alone must fill those shoes to some extent.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that there is no such thing as management, only mismanagement.

</comment><comment><USER10> "I am not sure these guys are real businesspeople."

What exactly are "real businesspeople"?

<comment><USER11> Parsed charitably, he means that they aren't _serial_ businesspeople — they ["don't want to", "won't", "can't"] start new independent businesses.

It's a variant of the _lifestyle business_ epithet.

<comment><USER12> That sounds like a " _serial_ entrepreneur", not a serial businessperson: a "business person" doesn't necessarily ever start a new business, let alone a string of them.

<comment><USER11> His point is more that they're really Web Developers, not businesspeople. That their expertise is from direct experiential practice with an extremely narrow type of software business.

He's a business school type, so this rankles. His whole world view is based on broadly applicable business practices, grounded in theory and hypothesis, backed up with data.

His kind of "business person" doesn't even necessarily start one business, even if they might see opportunities everywhere — they get brought in as management. But if they start one, they're probably going to start more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a feeling this writer has no idea who 37signals is. He's probably realizing right about now that he's stepped on a land mine with exploding 37signals fanboys.

Edit: No offense to fans of 37signals (I read svn). This guy is about to get a lesson in how many fans of 37signals there are.

<comment><USER14> The book's target audience is obviously "business people," so I'd say he really doesn't need to know details about 37signals specifically.

The review was wonderfully British -- "What is it about Americans that they think 10 years is a long time?" -- which probably is the main reason behind the criticism. Real business people according to the author are probably those with a degree from LSE.

<comment><USER15> "What is it about Americans that they think 10 years is a long time?"

What is it about the British that make them assume short term thinking is coming from an American? One of the two authors are Danish, not American. Does working in America for four years make you an American these days?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> from article "I have the pleasure of working with real businesspeople who care about doing a good job, not talking about doing a good job."

Well, I don't know if he did research about the software that 37Signals has made, but I consider Ruby on Rails a "good job". I haven't used any of their other products (Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire), but I would bet that the 3 million people using them would consider those products to be a "good job" too.

<comment><USER17> Yes, by the review author's logic, no one should ever write a business book, because they are too busy doing a good job.

<comment><USER18> Of course, the reviewer neglects to note that writing a book and then selling it successfully and profitably is a case of a businessperson doing a good job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "The book is written by people who, I think, would rather be celebrities than businesspeople."

To a large extent celebrities are businesspeople nowadays. 37s has done nothing if not figure out a brilliant way to turn being web-famous into making money. While I think I'd take their business advice with a mound of salt (mostly because it's all expressed in such absolute terms as to be inherently meaningless) you have to admire the way they've used blogging and internet celebrity to turn a nice profit out of a product you could build in 2 weeks.

</comment><comment><USER20> The author suggests that 37signals shouldn't "try and make a name for [their] software company by issuing such over-heated generalisations".

Is this book is about making a name for 37signals? Is the Rework Readers -> Basecamp Buyers conversion rate expected to be high?

</comment><comment><USER21> "Maybe in a low-risk software company you can 'just do it', but if, like a restaurant chain, you have capital expenditure, or you are moving a factory, you had better make sure you plan the move, the stock-build, the overtime, the working capital and service implications."

The author of the review is the "co-founder of Leon Restaurants". Maybe he sees everything from this perspective, and that's why doesn't agree with anything in the book. I think the book is about advice meant for (tech) startups, not restaurants.

"And perhaps if the authors had followed the advice about 'build half a product, not a half-assed product' and 'underdo your competition', the book would have been a deal better."

Is he really trying to say that 37signal's apps are bad ?

All in one I found the review biased and hypocritical, but I'm yet to read the book, so until I do I'll refrain from further comments on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER22> I imagine the book is really only relevant industries where the real resource is the people and the profit margins can be massive. It seems that Jason's main point would be that in a tech. business you shouldn't squander that main resource (i.e. the people).

The closest analogy I can think to the tech. industry would be the music industry, since it's possible to make a record on virtually no money and have it sell millions. Now, you wouldn't expect Lady Gaga or Jay-Z to sit in endless meetings that they weren't needed in, when they could be making more records, would you?

Lots of other businesses are not really about the people in them like restaurants, bars, manufacturing etc. and that is what the reviewer is getting at. Though the reviewer doesn't seem to know the difference.

</comment><comment><USER23> old guy doesn't approve of 37 signals, shocking.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seriously, this is a rather typical old-economy response to a well understood concept at this point: Simple works.

Coming from the inside of the enterprise web publishing world I'd suggest it's not 37signals that is missing something.

Of course the author (of the review) did found a chain of restaurants...

<comment><USER25> "Simple works". Which is why they created everything with Forth on Rails. Oh wait... it's Tcl on Rails. No... Ruby? Ruby is not _simple_. It's actually a nice mix of elegance, simplicity and, where called for, fancy ways of handling complexity.

And they host everything on DOS. Because it's simple! No?

I think this stuff goes both ways... you can't just wave "simple!" around.

If you really wanted _simple_ , you'd use a pencil and paper.

<comment><USER3> Uhm… How about trying to see the difference the product and implementation details? Cars are simple you know: turn a key, step on the gas and you ar going. Does anyone claim that those dozens of CPU hidden under bonnet and AT gearbox is simple?

<comment><USER25> Some stuff is simple, some isn't. Trying to make it simpler is a good goal in many cases, except for when it isn't.

What I disagree with is "business by platitude".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I couldn't see his point through the smog of ad hominem.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think that in their last podcast, where they talk about Rework, the guys at 37s say that this book is written with entrepreneurs in mind.

Maybe that's why old "real" enterprisey business persons can't understand it.

<http://37signals.com/podcast/#episode9> (wow! that's a lousy permalink)

</comment><comment><USER28> Well you can't blame the reviewer. The whole MT's business philosophy is the antithesis of 37signal's. As somebody said (it's a famous quote, forgotten its origin though):

"Don't expect somebody to learn something when his stomach depends on him not learning it"

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow: this review, and now these comments, what a microcosm of the generation gap...

</comment><comment><USER30> "In reality, good meetings are good and bad meetings are not good". Yeah, because we'd rather read a book of tautologies than some actual points.

<comment><USER31> I think you're missing his point. He's saying it would be more helpful if the authors explained what it is about bad meetings that makes them bad, rather than issuing a blanket condemnation on all meetings.

<comment><USER3> Authors do explain. They even provide some guidelines how to make productive meeting. It's just the reviewer who chooses to ignore that.

<comment><USER31> He doesn't ignore it, he just points out that the slogans contradict the actual advice, which is pretty run-of-the-mill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'll read the book and formulate my own opinion on it. Thank you.

<comment><USER20> One of the points of a review is to suggest whether you should or should not spend your valuable time reading a book in the first place.

<comment><USER18> In that light, it's useful to compare reviews of books you have already read with your own assessments of those books. That way you can get a sense of which reviewers are more likely to write future reviews that will dovetail with your own values and expectations.</comment></comment></comment>


What is App Store Optimization(ASO) and how to explain it to someone? - <AUTHOR> http://captaindanko.blogspot.com/2017/04/what-is-app-store-optimization.html <comment><USER2> What is App Store Optimization (ASO)?

App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in an app store's search results. It also improves an app's overall and category rankings by boosting app downloads and conversion rates. Because of its similarity with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), ASO is also referred as App Store SEO, App Search Optimization, or Mobile App SEO.

For more details of how to do ASO, check out this post: [https://www.meatti.com/blog/app-store-optimization- tips/](https://www.meatti.com/blog/app-store-optimization-tips/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing your 4-step process for explaining ASO. You are right, the best way to understand it is to just jump in and do it.

Here are some other ideas for how to explain it to someone: [https://www.mobileaction.co/blog/what-is-app-store- optimizat...](https://www.mobileaction.co/blog/what-is-app-store- optimization/)</comment>


Slide Caught Posting Fake Positive Reviews For Their Own App - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/slide-caught-posting-fake-positive-reviews-for-their-own-app/ <comment><USER2> Headline is misleading. There's no problem posting reviews of your own products, as long as you identify yourself as being affiliated with the company. Posting ratings, on the other hand, is always unethical since they forcibly affect the average rating.

<comment><USER3> Well, the reviews were "Fake" because they were not genuinely written by anyone.

Although most of the Slide people I've met are religiously fanatical about their products, so maybe they were genuine, but posted with fake names.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I've asked several ad people why I would want to work with them and they all say, "well, we're number 1." This answer is ALWAYS offered and never goes deeper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shocking!

btw, you should really check out submissions and comments by raghus here on news.yc - he's really insightful.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raghus>

</comment><comment><USER6> Reviews for startups have always been extremely artificial. In an ideal world, users would be very vocal about what they like and don't like. Surprise, they're usually NOT!

Techcrunch in particular is a traditional publicity channel that gets most of its information through heavily biased sources such as press releases, friends, etc. instead of directly from the users. This is why I find it hilarious that techcrunch should be the ones to call them out on producing biased information.

Then again, Arrington has been working to discover sites as a user through hn for example, so he may be doing a small part to correct this wrong.

</comment><comment><USER7> I see nothing wrong with this. You'd be surprised at some of the stuff startups have to do to get out there and get initial traction, not limited to spam and "faking it till you make it".

The only thing that surprises me is that they were putting up fake reviews so late into the game. The benefits weren't that great at that point, and the risks at least mediocre. It just looks like laziness, if anything. Maybe they wanted to artificially stimulate some growth prior to that new funding round and possibly trying to get acquired, and fake reviews are just one of many methods used at once.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> here is another related link:

Web 2.0 And Why You Shouldn't Fake Reviews [http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You- Should...](http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You-Shouldn-t- Fake-Reviews/97539)

</comment><comment><USER8> Great guerilla marketing - unless you get caught of course.

<comment><USER9> 1\. You usually DO get caught.

2\. There are ALWAYS more effective things for you to to do than forging positive customer feedback...

<comment><USER8> I actually think that more often than not you don't get caught.

<comment><USER10> I think it's "undecidable" because we'll never know how many do it but don't get caught.

The only thing I can say is I _hope_ most get caught. But they're just wasting their time _trying_ to fake value while they could be creating more value for themselves and others.

<comment><USER11> go try it, a statistically significant number of times, and tell us if you ever got caught.

<comment><USER10> That would only indicate my own skill or lack thereof at it (btw I think I'd be hopelessly clueless at doing it). You couldn't meaningfully generalize to the whole population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> !Not a good sign at all, this undermines the product regardless of anyones actual opinion. I personally don't think slide is anything special, a simple flash widget. The likes of which I have seen better examples made by single independent coders in there bedrooms with no fanfare whatsoever, is this really the best idea Paypal X could come up with?

>>>>>It just goes to show that great ideas ARE worth a lot more than great execution!</comment>


Has anyone else noticed their karma going haywire recently? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I haven't noticed anything. If it went down and you weren't moderated, maybe the vote cheating algorithm was changed and you were getting more or less karma from people that already modded you up or done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In the past week or so my karma has gone from 267 to 270 to 262, with the only moderation I've received in that time being one comment that got an upvote. Has anyone else noticed similar weirdness?

<comment><USER3> Someone went through my posts and modded down about twenty in a row. Took at all the karma I gained and then some from the six hours I spent on my last blog post.

<comment><USER4> Do you mean someone downmodded your comments? It's not possible to downmod submissions. I looked at your last couple comments and no one had downmodded them.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I meant comments, specifically those from 3-5 days ago. I looked through them, and many of the comments previously downmodded have been mysteriously modded back up to what they were previously. Not a big deal in the first place though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GoblinCore-64: Scalable, open architecture for data intensive HPC - <AUTHOR> https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/ttu-ir/bitstream/handle/2346/72633/LEIDEL-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y <comment><USER2> Another win for RISC-V, exactly what it was for, an open platform for anyone to innovate on processor design.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone tell what's the likelihood of anyone implementing a HPC system based on this work? It looks very good on paper but anything can be made to look good on paper.</comment>


The future of games and reality and weirdness and points and things like that - <AUTHOR> http://www.zefrank.com/zesblog/archives/2010/02/the_future_of_g_1.html

<comment><USER2> Jesse Schell's Monstrous Bonus-Point Police State [http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/jesse-schells- monst...](http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/jesse-schells-monstrous- bonus-point-police-state/)</comment>


Get Rid of Your Lawn, It's a waste of land and terrible for the environment - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/lawns-are-bad-get-rid-of-them.html <comment><USER2> > Lawnmowers suck up gas and pollute the air: Every year, U.S. homeowners > spill about 17 million gallons of gas while filling up mowers.

I have a Fiskars "reel mower" that doesn't use any gas or oil, though it's not getting much use now after recently converting most of the property to xeriscape. I like it and there's _no way_ I would get a gas powered mower, especially not a "riding mower."

> American lawns have so, so much potential—and right now, it's going to > waste. It's time to culturally stigmatize the classic overwatered, > overfertilized, overmowed American lawn—a symbol of excess that's persisted > for far too long.

I agree but instead of criticizing lawns, I'd rather promote the beauty and functionality of a xeriscape yard. With a backyard food forest you can be harvesting hundreds of kilograms of food per year with minimal upkeep (beyond initial mulching and perennial planting). You can have stunning flower blooms from peaches, plums, apples, and other fruit trees. You can have fruit of all colors everywhere you look, just a rainbow of form and function. You can investigate and plant cold hardy things like Chicago Hardy Figs and other things you wouldn't dream were possible. Chances are, most figs available to you are dried, in the store. Imagine having a fresh one right off the tree, from your own yard picked less than 5 seconds ago.

Apart from the initial creation, based on personal experience, I think maintaining a xeriscaped backyard food forest takes less work, less time, and less money than maintaining a yard. For me the only demanding part was putting down down all the (free!) wood chips, but we're supposed to exercise anyway -- and this kind has inherent value.

</comment><comment><USER3> What an awful article. Not a single mention of required setback laws at play in virtually every major city? We're required to keep 25 feet of setback. That means 25 feet of dead grass, water-guzzling lawn, or some mixture of other things.

Imagine how much more square footage could be added around the bay area if that 25 feet was changed to just 5 feet? It's amazing to me that such "progressive" cities such as in the bay area maintain such _awful_ laws regarding required setbacks. Haven't these cities learned the more they try and control things the worse it gets?

</comment><comment><USER4> What an awful article. It completely ignores the ground truth of most suburban and urban environments -- in many places you can be heavily fined for not upkeeping a lawn. Even if we ignore that, the "numbers" don't prove themselves out for having anything but a lawn. I would never make back the time invested in growing anything agriculture related.

Not only that, I would limit my kid's (already limited) space in which they could "run free" by having high grasses growing. I too have two small kids, I don't water, feed, or otherwise treat my lawn other then cutting it and still spend more then an hour per week with less than half and acre. Now the author wants me to invest time or money in agriculture that will never pay back and take more time out of my life?

This is coming from someone who studied the advent of lawns both in an academic and professional setting.

</comment><comment> village-idiot Golf courses too.</comment>


Redefining Hick's Law - <AUTHOR> http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/23/redefining-hicks-law/

<comment><USER2> If one writes an article about a supposed relation, formulate it in the beginning. This article just assume you know what Hicks law state: The time spent to chose an option is increases with the amount of choices you have. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hicks_law>

<comment><USER3> Your link has lost it's '.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick's_law</comment></comment>


Microsoft is quietly recycling Outlook email accounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2052586/microsoft-is-quietly-recycling-outlook-email-accounts.html <comment><USER2> Looks like the journalist was too young to remember the day when Microsoft announced this policy via email to everyone. I remember the days where I get reminder emails on my secondary account to login. It was always in their terms and conditions ever since. Certainly they didn't do this quietly. But yes, they do this, unfortunately.</comment>


No Exits. Liquidity Dries Up Even More For VC-Backed Startups In Third Quarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/02/no-exits-liquidity-dries-up-even-more-for-vc-backed-startups-in-third-quarter/ <comment><USER2> Whine whine. I have an idea. Why not make a product to sell to consumers, instead of making shares to sell to the public?

<comment><USER3> Well said.

How about downscaling the size. Sites like Twitter could be done by one person and a bit for subcontracting. Sites like Facebook by a team of 10 to 15.

Too much money and too much megabuck sponsored hype. Simple micro startups are still left out even though they are more than viable.

<comment><USER4> There seems to be an almost pathological bias against profitability with a lot of startups.

<comment><USER5> So I heard that some think that is because for a long while the R/D effort was outsourced to other companies, away from larger ones. I dunno if that is the case but in the company I worked for got acquired and did some pretty serious R/D. It could have been profitable but acquisition was obviously the easier way out so the investors took it.

I'm sure something like Twitter is useful but only to a large company, perhaps? I dunno.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good! now startups will be forced to restructure their business and actually find a way to make real revenue.</comment>


Effective Technical Leadership - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-talk/b193a544e771

<comment><USER2> I'd like to differ slightly: the job of a good tech lead is to be an effective first among equals.

If you're working on a talented team, there should be no presupposition that the tech lead is necessarily the best developer on it. But you should be good enough to break ties and set direction. I've worked on a lot of teams with talented developers who aren't especially interested in leadership, or former leads who've decided they want to go back and hack some more. You cannot, and should not, boss these people around. But you can block management up, and unblock team down, by keeping management out of everyone's hair, and keep the developers from tearing each other apart over complicated technical questions or obscure business ones.

If you're working on a team that embraces pairing, that can ease a lot of the pressure on the lead to do reviews as long as the pairs are well-chosen. Trust but verify.

<comment><USER3> My own take on it is different again - as far as I see it the job of technical lead on a project is take ensure that the right technical decisions get made and to ultimately take responsibility for those decisions. Yes, I could directly override people and tell them to do things - but if I ever did that then IMHO I would have failed.

A lot of my job is asking questions, making suggestions and proving (when necessary) that something can actually be done. [I love it when someone utters a phrase starting "There is no way to...."]

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The point about prioritizing clearing road-blocks for your team cannot be underestimated, but, in my experience, with a serious caveat:

\- Unless your SURE you have the time, do not put the technical task onto yourself, try to redirect.

I've made that blunder over and over again: saying "heh, I'll hack this little bit up tomorrow", and in the middle of planning, helping other people and so forth you postpone, losing the blocked developers attention and focus.

Other than that, great write-up on my job description :)

<comment><USER5> I can't upvote you more than once, so I'll add an "amen" and a personal experience.

A while back a company where I'd been doing contract web dev work had a dual account/project management role come open and offered it to me. I'd done some client-facing work for them before and freelancing on my own, so I thought "How hard could it be?"

Two things I didn't know when I said yes:

* how much work there was for the small team in place -- and because I wasn't replaced as a technical resource, the team had just gotten smaller

* how different development and management work are in terms of headspace. It's _very_ hard to do both simultaneously, because one job requires a lot of immersive concentration, and the other requires near continuous back-and-forth to discuss, track, and push a lot little pieces of information where they need to go.

So... I'd end up having to find non-office hours to do development work, but still had to be "on" and available during normal office hours.

I managed to keep it up for about six months. Kindof. Wouldn't recommend it, though.

<comment><USER6> Pg referred to this as Maker schedule and manager schedule

[http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

It's true all over

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This list covers a lot of good ground, one of the smaller but i think important points is this: "simplify". It's part of your job as a tech lead to show your team a simpler route. Simple code reduces complexity, which makes maintenance easier, and can get you to your goal faster. A lot of new to intermediate guys will over engineer a small piece (and i mean that literally, for some reason i've never had the experience of women over engineering code).

<comment><USER8> I think I've seen more aimlessness than overengineering, but otherwise, yes. Simple sometimes takes a second look, and a willingness to edit during that look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great article with many excellent points, especially those about unblocking/blocking - essentially the two main activities you'll participate in to keep a project moving forward. Everything else exists just to serve these two goals, in my opinion.

I'd also add that a great tool that a tech lead can direct is post-mortems (corrections of errors, whatever your company calls them). Effectively leading these discussions improves a company culture, educates individuals both involved and those not involved in sometimes obscure errors, and elevates the team's overall experience level.

Thanks for the write up.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good differentiation between leadership and management. Reminds me of some very good HBR articles on that difference, and the need for putting leadership before management in any organization.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic article. Reading it felt like I was reading a guide on how to become a better coder.

Sidenote: I'm sure to want to reread this in the future. What terrifies me about Medium is that if I'm flipping through my notes, say 5 or 10 years from now, will this link still work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I haven't read all the article, but it looks very close to the daily-work I have had for 3 years. I agree with almost every aspect, and also I will take good tips from here.

</comment><comment><USER13> s/code/{work activity}/g and s/technical/{business area}/g

The methods here apply to many aspects of leadership. Thinking about going from technical to general management you can use the same methods, think of them as a template class. My one recommendation is to not underestimate the complexity of other areas of business, use experts just as you do in technology.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very helpful for anyone looking to hire such a person too - almost a checklist of things to ask them about from their experience.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article started well, but degenerated into a laundry list.

A list that contains _everything_ is barely helpful.

<comment><USER16> Lets not criticize the list for being too good. Choose the subset you like and enjoy. :)</comment></comment>


Android Malware May Have Infected 5 Million Users  - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/28/0431251/android-malware-may-have-infected-5-million-users <comment><USER2> Look, downloading any app starting with "Sexy girls" is stupid to begin with.

You can sit on the sidewalk and watch them and not get a virus, if you keep your hands to yourself.</comment>


Facebook Leaks Access Tokens, Exposes Private User Data to Advertisers - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Facebook-Leaks-Access-Tokens-Exposes-Private-Data-to-Advertisers-416736/

<comment><USER2> >Most access tokens expire in two hours, but some tokens work offline and remain valid until the user changes the password, Doshi said.

FB users can just go into their authenticated applications list and revoke access tokens on a per-application basis. Changing passwords shouldn't be necessary - that's the whole point of access tokens.

<comment><USER3> Not only is it unnecessary, it won't do anything. One of the big _points_ of access tokens is that they survive password changes, so a user can change their credentials and not have to reauthorize a few dozen apps.

<comment><USER4> "If the user changes their password, the access token expires" [<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/>]

<comment><USER3> That's not the case if `offline_access` has been requested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR: An old Facebook auth system included access tokens in app iframe URLs, which were subsequently leaked through the referrer to app advertisers, analytics, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> >Certain Facebook applications are leaking "access tokens" to third parties, such as advertisers, giving them access to personal-profile data ...

we all are sure that Facebook did it unintentionally, just by [technical] mistake.

<comment><USER3> The leak looks wholly unintentional. No conspracy theories necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I haven't visited facebook.com in months, am I safe?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a good portfolio app/site for tracking my crypto investments? - <AUTHOR> like every second person, i invested some money in crypto.  I have a few different coins in kraken and coinbase.
I want an app/website to show me a simple view of my portfolio to tell me how much i am up/down on each coin, cost, value, etc...
I use blockfolio on the iphone but it is pretty crappy.
Ideally, the app would integrate automatically to the exchanges and pull down my data so I don't have to type in every transaction. <comment><USER2> Hey, my friend and I just released Coinbook -- super fast and simple to watch and track coins in your portfolio. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coinbook-bitcoin-altcoin- app...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coinbook-bitcoin-altcoin- app/id1332107825?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use blockfolio, and gave up trying to pop in all my trades. So I just it to track overall price movements of the coins - blockfolio doesn't seem to understand the swapping of one coin for another even show it displays prices in pairs and lets you insert trades that way. For example, if I bought one, swapped it into another, and bought another (esp. USDT, which doesn't show up even as an option, only USD) then the system doesn't chain those together as one transaction.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use [https://cryptocompare.com](https://cryptocompare.com)</comment>


Google: Gmail users "have no reasonable expectation of privacy" - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2423074,00.asp

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article: "Google argued that "just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use Web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient's ECS [electronic communications service] provider in the course of delivery."

The search giant goes on to quote a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland, which found that "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.""

If this argument stands, any surveillance becomes much easier to justify.</comment>