What mistakes of yours do you really regret. Why? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Wow! The last comment really resonated with me. I actually went the route of getting the PhD when I ended up in cubicle hxll. Only then, and with a good bit of consulting and time working for someone else, did it dawn on me to start my own gig.

To back up, I'm now almost 40; I finished my PhD when I was 30 after working on-and-off for several years. (I didn't get married until a few weeks ago, actually -- so I didn't have family issues holding me back.) When I did get into the ivory tower and started teaching, I became disgusted with the academic mentality and was fortunate enough to find my way out into my own startup with a "good" problem, and contacts to customers.

The CS/CmpE degrees taught me irreplaceable critical thinking skills. I regret not having even thought about the possibility of starting my own gig. I also regret not having developed or appreciated developing a network of contacts until I was in my 30s; I have found access to investors, entrepreneurs, etc. as not only wonderful from a pragmatic perspective, but also (and more importantly) for vetting out ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes I really regret the computer science major. The things I learned were right, but the credential was wrong -- it basically certified me as sufficiently trained to work in IT cubicle hell. (It was really a math degree at its core, and it made me a problem-solving generalist, which is not what Industry wants.) I considered dropping it, but it was so easy to do what I needed for the additional credential -- it was a matter of two classes I wouldn't otherwise have taken.

I regret not recognizing the intensely political nature of my masters' degree program before it was too late to do anything about it. I've thought about going back to a different school, getting the PhD, and trying to scale the ivory tower, but I don't think the payoff I can realistically expect is worth the investment. It's not like a PhD in Renaissance music theory makes you any more employable in the "real world," and academic positions are few and far between, and there is so much of a surplus of good professors that some of the best are eking out a living teaching as adjuncts at community college.

</comment><comment><USER4> I regret having waited until I m 26 before I took concrete/tangible steps towards my own start-up. A large part of the blame goes towards thinking that there will be a "right-time" for all this and a "right-idea". :)

But, now that I have taken the steps, I feel __liberated__. And I m not worried so much about failing. And that owes a great deal to the people behind this site, and the content posted here, and the interactions that happen here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not communicating and collaborating with other "geeks" in Uni, especially being one myself. I had always been interested in doing my own projects at Uni, but never had it struck me that it would be very beneficial to form a group and start something (like a startup?).

</comment><comment><USER6> Not learning to code the moment I thought about starting an internet company.</comment>


Euthanasia Coaster (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.julijonasurbonas.lt/p/euthanasia-coaster/

<comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://kottke.org/12/02/the-rollercoaster-of- compassionate-d...](http://kottke.org/12/02/the-rollercoaster-of- compassionate-death), which points to this.</comment>


Ask HN: Show us your personal site - <AUTHOR> I'm about to embark on a redesign of my own site, and in search of a little inspiration I thought I would see what the community is up to. I'll go first, http://fajitanachos.com/ <comment><USER2> [https://mkii.org/](https://mkii.org/) \- Pretty minimal style based on [1]. It's a static site that I generate with my woefully incomplete static site generator written in rust [2].

[1] [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/azdle/virgil](https://github.com/azdle/virgil)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://ninadmhatre.com](https://ninadmhatre.com)

I have created my site in python + flask + bootstrap, its minimal look. this was my first attempt at creating putting something on internet

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.bookmark.com](https://www.bookmark.com) I feel we have done a good job with a clean video looping 5 clips.

</comment><comment><USER5> Really basic stuff but here it is: [http://bellagamba.net.ar](http://bellagamba.net.ar)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.delightfuldev.com](http://www.delightfuldev.com) Jekyll+Appolo theme.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://ChrisLTD.com](http://ChrisLTD.com) – built on Jekyll

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://gee.io](http://gee.io)</comment>


Forth enthusiast Jeff Fox passed away - <AUTHOR> http://www.colorforth.com/blog.htm

<comment><USER2> <http://www.ultratechnology.com/> some very good posts on forth by him</comment>


Newsflash: people still buy software - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lightbody.net/post/11661631743/newsflash-people-still-buy-software

<comment><USER2> Good read.

"Knowing that there are 50M people supporting DropBox or 11M+ people supporting Evernote"

Lots of people use more than one service for similar functionality: dropbox, google docs, and evernote.

Not sure why, but I can verify they do.</comment>


The (JavaScript) Question I Bombed in an Interview with a Y Combinator Startup - <AUTHOR> http://nathanleclaire.com/blog/2013/11/16/the-javascript-question-i-bombed-in-an-interview-with-a-y-combinator-startup/ <comment><USER2> We have all been there, so don't let it get you down. Interviews where you are expected to code solutions to problems and you're put on the spot are unrealistic as to what you will face in the real world. The pressure of an interview can make us do silly things like forget basic things like closures or methods like setTimeout and setInterval. In an ideal world and situation, you might even question the use of jQuery and instead opt for a vanilla JS solution which shows that you know more about Javascript than jQuery.</comment>


The Data Engineering Ecosystem: An Interactive Map - <AUTHOR> http://insightdataengineering.com/blog/The-Data-Engineering-Ecosystem-An-Interactive-Map.html

<comment><USER2> Very nice effort. A couple things missing though to make it truly up to date:

1\. In "Ingest", where's Flume? 2\. Where's "Interactive SQL" (eg Impala, and for Presto)? 3\. Where's "Search" (Solr, ElasticSearch)?

<comment><USER3> Thanks, if you mouse-over the Batch and Database, you'll see more categories. Presto is under Batch SQL and Elasticsearch is under Document Oriented.

We see Flume, Solr, and Impala a lot but decided to omit them to strike a balance between including more technologies and overwhelming people who are new to the field. Inevitably, we had to leave off many of our favorite technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While all maps like this tend to make little practical sense since they inevitably over-generalize and over-simplify things, I'd still like to point out that they got "columnar" category quite wrong: neither HBase nor Cassandra are columnar stores in a way this term is commonly understood.

HBase and Cassandra still store data in rows, however rows can be partitioned into column families which may be stored separately. Columnar databases are usually also relational (Vertica and Redshift) and support SQL or SQL-like query language.

Anyway, I think regardless of how you define columnar, HBase and Redshift shouldn't end up in the same category as they are quite different in a way they work, throughput/latency and read/write balance and use cases.

<comment><USER3> You're correct that it's very difficult to balance between giving an overview and over-simplifying. We intended this to be a starting point, knowing that we'd have to make a trade-off between including more details and giving a concise overview.

For NoSQL specifically, it's difficult to put every database in only a few categories. We discussed that Cassandra and HBase are "maps of maps" in the details, and we definitely didn't want to imply that they have the same model or use-cases as Redshift. Perhaps our next iteration will explain the "column family" more and include a separate category for the databases that were inspired by the Big Table data model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No real time MPP databases like Redshift, Netezza, Aster...otherwise good graph.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, if you mouse-over the databases box, you'll see Redshift under Columnar - we do see a lot of Netezza and Aster as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love the text overlay. It would be nice to also have project links in the text.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, we'll definitely include links in our next iteration.</comment></comment>


A researcher's tale of defeating traps, tricks, and complex virtual machines - <AUTHOR> https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/03/01/finfisher-exposed-a-researchers-tale-of-defeating-traps-tricks-and-complex-virtual-machines/ <comment><USER2> I feel like this gets at something that you don't really hear talked about much, namely: we, as an industry, have for a very long time assumed when thinking about how to secure our products that the attackers those products would face would be either low-skill amateurs ("script kiddies") or, at worst, small gangs of professional criminals. But more and more we're seeing a new class of attacker, actual _nation-states_ (and their associated intelligence services), who can bring resources and expertise to bear that those other attackers could only dream of. Which means they can open up defenses that were more than sufficient against the attackers of the past like soft fruit.

That's a big change, and I don't know that most developers have even started to grapple with what it means for the products we build and the way we build them.

<comment><USER3> Take nation-states creating tools that can then be repurposed by anyone and hardware that is insecure all the way down and you have a cyberworld where it looks like offense is going to be superior to defense for a while.

This is the way real world warfare has gone historically. Guns made medieval armor obsolete, defenses against missiles are more fig leaves than serious factors and simple mobile units have become standard.

<comment><USER4> Where does it end? Or at least go next? The death of the general purpose computer [1], that's where. Signed bootloaders show up as opt-in, luring you with safety. Soon enough, they'll be mandated by legislation. Next ISPs will be required to execute authentication protocols against all devices -- no more anonymity.

[1] [https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html](https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

<comment><USER5> Cellular providers are already feature-gating users based on whether their crapware is installed on user devices or not. Certain providers are also basing it off of whether or not you bought the phone from them, via the IMEI number. Updates to devices are often different based on the phone's "affiliation." They can easily corral people into using specific firmwares.

<comment><USER6> And they can load their code into the baseband processor without any interaction from the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The amount of obfuscation going on here is very impressive. It always makes me wonder how these things are even written and designed in the first place.

I seem to recall a C++ protection library that would allow you to define custom versions of types like int and long. It would use operator overloading to allow you to use the types in a fairly normal fashion, but underneath these operators would actually be implemented as a very complicated virtual machine. This way, your algorithm code could look fairly normal but it would compile to an absolute beast of a protection layer.

<comment><USER8> For a game I once did something very similar in Lua for protecting values in memory that cheaters might like to change.

<comment><USER9> MOV/SUBLEQ/CRYPTOLEQ virtual machines which decrypt self-modifying code are the bane of my existence!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Microsoft gave a Jan 2018 presentation on Windows 10 "Hardening with Hardware" features that are going to be rolled out in upcoming releases, e.g. Hyper-V dynamic root of trust, remote attestation, per-app VM with copy-on-write memory, GPU isolation via IOMMU, secure enclaves.

Slides: [https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security- Research/blob/mas...](https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security- Research/blob/master/presentations/2018_01_BlueHatIL/BlueHatIL18_Weston_Hardening_With_Hardware.pdf)

Video: [https://youtube.com/watch?&v=8V0wcqS22vc](https://youtube.com/watch?&v=8V0wcqS22vc)

</comment><comment><USER11> Great read. Most of my knowledge in this area is for macOS and Linux, so it's interesting to see how obfuscation is done on Windows. The core ideas are the same: add weird instructions to fool disassemblers, indirect through a VM, disable debugging and tracing, etc. but the techniques are different on each platform. Plus you have creative solutions like the one mentioned in the article: taking a screenshot of the screen and displaying it over everything to give the impression that nothing malicious is going on, all while you're running code that displays security messages that you couldn't figure out how to subvert.</comment>


"eye chart" to test for conficker - loads images from AV sites that conficker blocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html

<comment><USER2> This is a genius idea. I wonder if this concept can be extended to other situations.

<comment><USER3> One application of this I can see is to create a page like this to understand what sites your company's (or country's) firewall / proxy might be blocking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And if your system is infected here is the removal tool.

[http://data2.kaspersky- labs.com:8080/special/KKiller_v3.4.1....](http://data2.kaspersky- labs.com:8080/special/KKiller_v3.4.1.zip)

</comment><comment><USER5> I suppose the next patch for conficker might block those URLs, except for the images.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another test is to try to show hidden/system folders on a Windows machine.

If you can't, the PC's infected.

<comment><USER7> If it's a work machine, it could be "infected" by your IT group.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that just as bad then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Might be even a little easier for an end user if you wrote some javascript that just showed the appropriate message. If the pictures won't load, just have a big "You Are Safe." message. Making people look at the pictures isn't actually needed.

<comment><USER10> I disagree. This requires absolutely no technical skill to interpret, and yet they haven't abstracted away the evidence.

I am much more reassured by this, then I would be with some website that said "You Are Safe". Presenting the user with the evidence that they are safe is much more reassuring than just saying "You Are Safe, trust us on this one, we know what we're talking about."

<comment><USER11> Why not do both? Show the images, and display a message based on the results.</comment></comment></comment>


BarListo: online boards of lists (AKA a simpler, more information-dense Trello) - <AUTHOR> http://www.barlisto.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Some background:

I'm at a very early-stage start-up of 2, and we wanted a centralized tool to keep track of bugs, todos, ideas, potential testers and (oh my) leads/customers. And we don't need or want the overhead, and often cost (however small, we're not even close to ramen-profitable) of 'specialized' tools.

We first worked with a Google spreadsheet, but 'marking' and on-the-fly organizing items was too cumbersome. We then looked at trello.com but their 'cards' are a bit too big for our taste and you cannot position everything where you want so you can only have left-to-right 'flow'.

So I threw this last week and started using it right away, and frankly we both love it. So here it is online, who knows if somebody else likes it.

Hope nobody gets offended by the silly light-hearted tone of the web site, writing it like that has been a nice break between more 'serious' matters (our startup is in e-commerce).

Thanks for any feedback!</comment>


Observability Pipelines at Kubecon - <AUTHOR> https://monitoring2.substack.com/p/observability-pipelines-at-kubecon <comment><USER2> Do you guys think the whole kubernetes ecosystem is a huge bubble or u think its here to last? Recently I started to apply jobs and the pay a kubernetes centered startup offered me was just insane.

<comment><USER3> It seems to have become the defacto even though it's complex

<comment><USER4> The problem is more that it is actually simple. And that simplicity allowed the creation of more and more things, all building on the simple frameworks, that work somewhat the same way. In a world where rarely do we enjoy fitting in one or two machines, and where there's a lot of moving bits to handle, that commonality, that Operating System for Data Center, is a godsend.

And "simple" is not the same as "easy". K8s is a classic example of complexity arising from simple system, as there are pretty much two major algorithm ideas in the whole thing (blackboard multi agent system and OODA loop controllers).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If the US was at war, would it pay the coupon on its bonds to the enemy? - <AUTHOR> Assuming the answer is no, would the financial markets consider that a default? <comment><USER2> I assume if we went to war, the US government would immediately seize all assets of the enemy government that were within its jurisdiction, presumably including any Treasury bond holdings. So it would keep paying the coupons, but it would be paying them to itself.</comment>


Don't we get karma for submissions anymore? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Nothing has changed in karma calculations.</comment>


How I hacked hundreds of companies through their helpdesk - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@intideceukelaire/how-i-hacked-hundreds-of-companies-through-their-helpdesk-b7680ddc2d4c <comment><USER2> I'm kind of blown away that some of these larger companies aren't using SAML to do their Slack authentication. I guess when you're provided with a super simple turn-key solution to getting employees on the system (corporate email verification) then you're probably inclined to use it. I wonder how diligent these companies are about cleaning up old employee Slack accounts, as it's not like Slack re-verifies periodically that I'm aware of.

<comment><USER3> I was at a company that used ADFS with Slack. The other day I was trying to get to another slack group and selected the wrong link in my history. It logged me into my old company account and rooms. Apparently the AD team doesn't push disabled accounts to service providers. (I left four months ago).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this affect Hipchat?

</comment><comment><USER5> That's a good one!</comment>


Medieval medical books could hold the recipe for new antibiotics - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/medieval-medical-books-could-hold-the-recipe-for-new-antibiotics-74490 <comment><USER2> It is interesting that they started with Staph infection and apparently the tincture actually used well known antimicrobial agents. (Including copper and zinc ions leeched from brass using alcohol.) I'd suspect it resulted as a stepwise "common sense" combination of reagents improved over time. The interesting part is how they figured out a way to digest and emulsify garlic using oxgall specifically, as this part was not known in antiquity unlike both garlic and infused wine properties.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just because it was "medieval" doesn't mean that it didn't involve some method on it, or that it wasn't tested and the best results were reproduced for different patients.

I even think that "method" developed not because someone was sitting still with nothing to do, but exactly because some people succeeded and others didn't, and so something in the actions (or in the thinking) of the successful ones was a key to success.</comment>


California's historic overhaul of cash bail is now on hold, pending referendum - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-bail-overhaul-referendum-20190116-story.html <comment><USER2> It was odd to use the Referendum mechanism for this; it merely undoes the effects of SB10. A full-on Initiative Statute has the same signature burden but allows the authors to rewrite the law as they like.

Maybe they feared the Secretary of State would fight any new statute language in the courts indefinitely. A Referendum can't be fought that way.</comment>


Mitochondrial DNA can come from both parents - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/plot-twist-mitochondrial-dna-can-come-from-both-parents/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how much of a "plot twist" this is - when I took my biology course _decades_ ago, it was explained to me that both maternal and paternal mitochondria were passed on, but the Egg is so much larger than the sperm, that the impact of of paternal mitochondria, and amount passed on, was relatively minor. I guess the interesting detail here is that the amount present raises to the level of catching a DNA scan.

<comment><USER3> > I'm not sure how much of a "plot twist" this is

I was taught differently in 1998.

There was the press coverage of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_\(Australopithecus\)) which was referenced in a scene of [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2872732/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2872732/)

It can be said that it's a plot twist that was stoked for decades.

<comment><USER4> I remember being taught that there was a paternal component of mtDNA, but that the contribution was really small (<10%, maybe <1%). However, I don't remember if this was undergrad (~ 1998) or grad (~2000)... probably grad school.

<comment><USER3> > probably grad school.

I was an undergrad, which still puts us both above the vast majority in education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "It's not clear why mtDNA prefers being exclusively maternal"

Wait... I thought that the reason mtDNA came from your mother is that the egg from your mother forms your first cell and the sperm only delivers DNA into the nucleus. They cytoplasm all comes from your mother. In that cytoplasm swims your mother's mitochondria.

I assumed when I started reading this article that maybe somehow mitochondria from the sperm sneaks out into the cytoplasm of your initial cell.

Is that understanding not correct?

</comment><comment><USER6> Aside: this question came to mind today, is there any discernible genetic component from a surrogate mother (a womb donor, as it were)? It seems highly likely to me _a priori_?

<comment><USER7> Certainly an epigenetic contribution. It turns out that the mother's body during pregnancy can have a huge _and heritable_ impact on the baby. E.g., studies have shown that nutritional problems (like famine) during pregnancy can cause the baby to have obesity problems later in life. These have been shown to be the result not of direct genetics (the fetus's DNA has already been selected), but by causing a different mix of genes to be _expressed_.

That shouldn't be too surprising. It seems logical that evolution would find a way to prepare a baby to be born into an highly-food-constrained environment so their metabolism will be more conserving of resources.

What really is surprising (at least to me) is that the child's propensity has been observed to be passed down even to the grandchild.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/11/21/1810946115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/11/21/1810946115)

</comment><comment><USER9> In the age of low-cost DNA sequencing, shouldn't this be simple to figure out?

<comment><USER10> I work as a software developer at a DNA analysis company with an in-house lab. You might be surprised to know how much knowledge is regurgitated and how little actual research occurs.

<comment><USER11> I'm very interested in working in the genetics/biotech industry as a software engineer - how much specialist knowledge do you feel is required to approach that career path? My background is computer science, so I have been looking around at biochemistry courses which might be helpful.

Would love to pick your brain if you have the time :)

<comment><USER10> Specialist knowledge? I've never been to high school or college. I don't have a degree. I've been writing software for 20 years but couldn't even spell the words in DNA before I was hired.

It helps to have bio knowledge but biotech really just needs a lot more software tools. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit for automation and analysis. There's a hell of a lot of room for people smarter than me to innovate.

There's a ton of room for improvement in the privacy area. You can read what I'd said about that in previous [0] comments [1]. I very strongly disagree with some types of industry standard software [11] [12]. They're highly sensitive to input and timing and contribute to reproducibility problems in the industry.

I think that's a problem which plagues the industry right now: reproducibility. I can't speak for the UK (where your profile says you're from) but in the USA the FDA (in charge of medicine) recently had a "truth challenge" [3]. In it, participants were asked to analyse the same set DNA data. Nobody got the same answer and very few even got _consistent_ answers [4]. That's Very F@#$ing Scary if you ask me since the DNA data starts with just text files [5] [6]. So irreproducibility of results is solely due to poorly designed software (and I can discuss at length about that if you want).

If you want to stay in computer science, then tackle that. A lot of the industry is based off of BWA [7] and GATK [8]. They're nowhere near as bad as IMPUTE2 or Admixture, but they're highly sensitive to parameter changes (and every analysis company uses different parameters). There are other open-source analysis tools as well but they're nowhere near as popular. There's of course not-so-open-source tools too which I don't feel like mentioning (I work on one such software as an internal tool for the company).

On a different note, one of the problems that underpins this whole technology is the way "Next Generation Sequencing" works: shear your DNA into small fragments so that sequencing machines can analyse each fragment in parallel (in contrast to linearly through the strand before it was cut up) [9]. Then the software analysis tools try to re-assemble all those pieces back into a single fragment.

If you were to take this comment and cut it up into words and sentence fragments, would you be able to reassemble the words back into the correct post? Of course not. So that's very much a limiting factor to analysis [10].

Realistically this forum is not ideal for communication. I looked at your profile but did not see a way to contact you. But feel free to contact me at the email in mine. I don't check it often though :)

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196717](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196717) [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754393) [3] [https://precision.fda.gov/challenges/truth](https://precision.fda.gov/challenges/truth) [4] [https://precision.fda.gov/challenges/truth/results- explore](https://precision.fda.gov/challenges/truth/results-explore) [5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTA_format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTA_format) [6] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format) [7] [http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/](http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/) [8] [https://software.broadinstitute.org/gatk/](https://software.broadinstitute.org/gatk/) [9] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High- throughput...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High- throughput_sequencing_\(HTS\)_methods) [10] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4531809/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4531809/) [11] [https://mathgen.stats.ox.ac.uk/impute/impute_v2.html](https://mathgen.stats.ox.ac.uk/impute/impute_v2.html) [12] [http://software.genetics.ucla.edu/admixture/](http://software.genetics.ucla.edu/admixture/)

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Excellent pointers, I had no idea the sequence fragments being aligned were so short in some cases.

I can't see your email either, so I assume the profiles don't publish them. You can reach me at mike at <username>.net however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> is there some website along the lines of "things you learned in <= freshman university science class that has been updated"?

</comment><comment><USER13> This has been known for a long time. It's a myth that mtDNA only comes from the mother and was based on a misreading of an old paper decades ago. I don't know why the myth has so much traction among geneticists who should know better. Many claims have been made deriving from these assumptions. Nearly all research purporting to date past branches of populations based on mtDNA mutations by assuming a maternal clone is passed, and any differences are mutations, is completely off. All that research is and always has been invalid.

1996 paper on paternal mtDNA inheritance: [http://www.pnas.org/content/93/24/13859.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/93/24/13859.full)

2002 paper on paternal mtDNA inheritance: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2716-mitochondria- can...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2716-mitochondria-can-be- inherited-from-both-parents/)

Wikipedia's been updating this article since 2006: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_mtDNA_transmission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_mtDNA_transmission)

<comment><USER14> > Nearly all research purporting to date past branches of populations based on > mtDNA mutations by assuming a maternal clone is passed, and any differences > are mutations, is completely off. All that research is and always has been > invalid.

This is a drastic and totally implausible statement that is not supported by any serious geneticist, nor by the Wikipedia article you've linked to.

mtDNA does not have to come exclusively, 100%, no-exceptions-ever from the mother, in order for population research which uses to be valid! 99% is quite sufficient. It is at least 99.9% accurate: as the Wikipedia article helpfully points out, there are 1000x as many mitochondria in an egg as in a sperm.

<comment><USER13> You're attacking a strawman.

mtDNA can be used to track lineages. It's the dating of when branches occurred that is off because it assumes all differences are due to mutations and not paternal contributions.

<comment><USER15> I'd have to take a look at the details, but I'm 99% sure that the important part is that the mitochondrial DNA has no crossover, so all the differences are due to mutations and it is a real tree.

With normal DNA the crossover add some changes and in particular it mix the changes in one branch of the tree with the changes in the other branch of the tree, so it's not longer a tree.

So my guess is that it will not change the dates too much, specially since he dates are calibrated by historical events. With made up numbers, something like "we know that this population reach here 10000 years ago and has 37 changes and that population reach there 20000 years ago and has 69 changes. This other population has 53 changes so after some complicated math, we estimate that they split 15000-1600 years ago.

I guess that the size of the population at the bottlenecks will be slightly reduced, because IIUC they are not calibrated using historical data but using some mathematical models about how the size of the population affect the diversity. I don't expect a big change nevertheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Then this [1] article from 3 weeks ago now means that we can also get our stresses from our mothers.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18405636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18405636)

</comment><comment><USER17> More info here: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa020350](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa020350)</comment>


Clicking on a Facebook Scam to See What Would Happen - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/_theycallmetoni/i-clicked-on-a-facebook-scam-to-see-what-would-happen <comment><USER2> Seems like the article is incomplete. Another hour or two of investigation, actually proving a malware connection would have been really interesting.

TLDR: It's not a legitimate site, they're probably doing something silly, though not able to reproduce, and was able to find contact info on whois (assuming scammers don't know how to mask identities).

</comment><comment><USER3> > Since there was no way I was going to Share the link, this was my stopping > point.

Note that you could share it with the visibility set to 'only me' and after confirmation delete it again.

</comment><comment><USER4> Aside from malware, this might just be trying to get a lot of likes on a facebook page. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but there's definitely a demand for pages with a large quantity of likes. I have a page that has 100,000+ likes and I get multiple messages every day inquiring to "buy" (read: steal) the page. So, a scam like this might just be trying to fill a page with likes for whatever market exists for well-liked pages.

</comment><comment><USER5> The memes on this story tie the investigation together.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this a regular thing, to see phishing or malware scams in Facebook ads?

<comment><USER7> Yep, but you'll probably never see them. I never see them but I always see them on my mum's Facebook whenever I'm home. My guess is there's two main factors:

1) Abusing Facebook targeting to proxy for 'non-technical' in some way.

2) Presumably if you click Facebook ads you get more similar ones, for some criteria. So if you got them you wouldn't click, and they'd disappear.

Facebook are terrible at policing this - I'd guess >50% of the stuff they're paid to show my mum is a blatant scam - if somebody spent 10 seconds looking at each ad I've seen there before accepting it they'd spot all of them. I've basically tried to show my mum how to identify something that will take her outside of the app (not that easy on the Android app) and told her never to click any of them.

I'm surprised this isn't talked about very often, but they're clearly only being shown to the people who won't recognise them for what they are.

<comment><USER8> I'm not on FB, but can you click in the corner of the advert and find out why you (or rather, your mum) was targeted? Is it demographic or interest based targeting?

<comment><USER7> That's a really good point, I'll have to ask if we can try that next time! I just had a look at one of mine and the top line was "One reason you're seeing this ad is that Habito wants to reach people who may be similar to their customers." which is pretty vague. The next bit mentioned 18+ and in the UK, and a few others mentioned age too so maybe it'd at least give that much.

<comment><USER8> Twitter is even worse with this. I block all advertisers, but they've recently added the ability to see why you were targeted - each of them states I was targeted because i'm in the UK, even for stuff that's only relevant to another country, Kenya was the last example.

There is a targeting problem that helps TW/FB, or there is a reporting problem that helps nobody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know how to execute a mail bomb?

[https://www.whois.com/whois/deltaa- com.us](https://www.whois.com/whois/deltaa-com.us)

</comment><comment><USER10> if one knew how much money these people make doing this stuff, one would be tempted to do it too. Folks made millions doing this because Facebook is slow to ban the domains</comment>


Show HN: AnsibleWorks AWX is now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.ansibleworks.com/ansibleworks-awx/

<comment><USER2> I have been waiting for this one. Not so much for myself but for the folks I work with who ain't so command line savvy.

Looking at the system reqs, whoa! System reqs so big! 2GB of RAM and 20GB of HD. It appears my 512 Digital Ocean droplet isn't man enough. That's the next item for me to investigate.

Edit: Actually, I'm assuming the big sys reqs are to ensure that their big clients get smooth usage out of it. Us little guys can probably get by with our meager machines.</comment>


The Secret Life of the Aluminum Can, a Feat of Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/secret-life-aluminum-can-true-modern-marvel/

<comment><USER2> Neat! I thought the secret would be about the can design, which I've read about before. It's actually about the coating, which is something I've not read about - I'm surprised and pleased.</comment>


Ad agency leaks data on US military veterans' combat injuries - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/ad-agency-leaks-data-on-us-military-veterans-combat-injuries/ <comment><USER2> shouldn't the advertising agency having the data in the first place already be considered a leak?</comment>


Caponia - an in memory, full text search system in clojure - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/mattdw/caponia

<comment><USER2> Why not just wrap Lucene? It's in Java, provenly awesome over the course of a decade and supports in-memory, file-backed, whatever. Probably a lot easier than writing your own tokenizers and indexing algorithms.

<comment><USER3> Fair question. I'm running couchdb for a new project, and Lucene is the 'blessed' search backend for that.

However, (at least via couchdb) Lucene needs a whole JVM of its own, and I'm planning to run this on a VPS with pretty tight resources. A couple of MB in the same JVM as my site is a whole lot more appealing, and has the additional advantage of using native data-structures directly.

<comment><USER2> Lucene's just a toolkit, it'll run in the same JVM that you're running clojure in, and while it can be memory-intensive if you're running a lot of searches over a big index, it's probably not any more memory intensive than what you're doing -- they've done a bunch of iterations already.

Maybe you were thinking of Solr? That's the REST service that wraps Lucene but you can use the Lucene API from within your app just as easily if that fits your use case.

<comment><USER3> couchdb-lucene, which is what I was looking at, does require its own JVM. I didn't think to look at using Lucene directly.

On the other hand, I'm quite happy with how this turned out, it's one less dependency, and it's been fun to write.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, kudos for writing it, it's always good to write something like that and learn. If you find further needs, I'd really recommend looking at the "thin wrapper around lucene" approach, they've been banging on this problem for a decade and have a lot of lessons learned in their codebase.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Efficient Editing With vim - <AUTHOR> http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html <comment><USER2> Warning: learning Vim makes you look for Vim like commands in any program you interact with using the keyboard. Everything else will be frustrating.

<comment><USER3> I would kill for GMail to add vim-like text editing.

<comment><USER4> Have you heard of the "It's All Text" Firefox extension? It copies the content of any textarea to a tempfile and opens it up in an external editor of your choice. Writes to the tempfile are copied back to the textarea. It's not quite in-browser vim, but it's pretty close. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/4125>

<comment><USER5> There is also ViewSourceWith which allows the use of different editors.

<comment><USER6> . . . but Vimperator also Vimperates the entire browser, instead of just the text areas. Unless you're an Emacs zealot, I don't see the downside.

<comment><USER5> I think we got it by now. Unfortunately, vimperator has quite a few quirks and makes too many changes that cannot easily be undone, which is the reason why I uninstalled it and moved to VSW.

<comment><USER6> I moved in the opposite direction, from VSW (which I used heavily for a while) to Vimperator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nooooo all of the secrets of our vim cult revealed in one easy-to-read document! Vim is hard, people! Trust me. You're not smart enough to use it.

:-P

<comment><USER8> Actually, I find that Emacs has a steeper learning curve than Vi/Vim. I had an easier time learning to switch between command/insert modes than to try and get comfortable with all of the Meta-/Control- sequences in Emacs.

{edit} not to start a flame war.. to each their own {/edit}

<comment><USER6> I find that Vim's learning "curve" is almost vertical at first, but Emacs' gets worse as it goes while Vim's gets better. There's an image here that illustrates the phenomenon pretty well:

<http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=981>

It's sort of a "ha ha only serious" moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel silly for only recently discovering tabs in vim.

      :tabnew file

Opens up a new tab,

      :tabn

Goes to the next tab, and

      :tabp

Goes to the previous tab. Works great in both gui and non-gui mode.

<comment><USER10> gt and gT in command mode also do next tab and previous tab

<comment><USER11> also #gt will go that tab number. I've changed my tab text to show the number in parenthesis before the name.

<comment><USER12> That's a neat idea. How do you change it to show tab number in the tab header?

<comment><USER11> This is for GVIM.

      set guitablabel=(%N%M)\ %f

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A decent intro; I'd add to the movement section these:

g$ - move cursor to last displayed character of line

Tx - move cursor backward and to the right of the first occurrence of x (reverse of tx)

And get started with split views:

^ws - horizontal split view

^wv - vertical split view

^w{h,j,k,l} - move to window in respective direction

Some decent scripts to get started with:

minibufexpl.vim: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=159>

surround.vim: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1697>

More of a full-fledge suite, a frontend to a head{ed,less} Eclipse server: <http://eclim.sourceforge.net>

<comment><USER14> Another nice script I discovered recently is Nerd Tree : <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1658>

<comment><USER13> Nerd Tree is indeed a good one, and I'll add to this vimfs, which isn't a Vim plugin but rather a CLI file system browser with Vim bindings. I hardly ever actually browse my file system (zfs, grep, and locate do all of the work for me), so I'm not sure how much mileage one can get out of this (especially compared to something like Midnight Commander).

<comment><USER6> My preference is to use things like cd and ls to browse the filesystem. When I'm feeling really fancy, I might use tree.

<comment><USER13> Do you sometimes let loose and use tree -C?

<comment><USER6> I have done so, but not in a long time. Then again, I haven't even used tree in a long time. Maybe I don't really use it any longer.

Hmm. . . .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is one of the best articles to speed up vim proficiency. When I read it a long while ago it really made a difference in my speed and typing joy.

If you guys love these kind of vim related posts, a while ago I had collected some good articles with brilliant tips:

[http://durdn.com/blog/2008/11/26/vim-mind-share-soaring- roun...](http://durdn.com/blog/2008/11/26/vim-mind-share-soaring-roundup- of-10-vim-articles-recent-and-older-gems/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool feature I discovered today, for multi-file project navigation:

      :tag yourMethodNameHere

Tab-completion works, so typing ":tag yourM", and pressing tab repeatedly cycles through all the tags with that prefix (you need to have created the tags file with ctags first).

<comment><USER17> Tag jumping is also cool: Ctrl-] will jump to the tag under the cursor and pushes the current location on the tag. Ctrl-T pops the tag stack and moves you back to your previous location. Good for checking the definition of a function and jumping back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> See, this is one of the things I love about Vim: there's always something new to learn! Somehow I had overlooked "K" to go to man pages. The other thing I love about Vim is the excellent documentation! I wanted to know more about "K" so I typed ":help K" and learned that, for example, if you're editing Ruby and would rather use 'ri' in place of 'man', all you have to do is add ":set keywordprg=ri" to your .vimrc (and if you have the ruby.vim files, it's already done for you).

<comment><USER8> Just a note, but ':help' doesn't always go to what you want. For example the option 'smartindent' (set with ':set smartindent') can be abbreviated as ':set si', but ':help si' takes you to the help for the ':sim[alt]' command.

It's useful to note that when searching through help you type something like:

      :help 'si'

To get help on a variable and:

      :help :si

To get help on a command. The first form would take you to the help entry for 'smartindent' and the second would take you to the entry for :simalt. If you just use:

      :help si

It will just find the first match for 'si', which in this case is the tag :si and not the tag 'si'.

Other possible confusions with :help are:

      :help tab

Will take to the help for <Tab> (the tab key/tab character), whereas the help page for all the things related to Vim tabs is:

      :help tabpage

(though :help tabs will take you to the :tabs command which is part of the tabpage help doc)

<comment><USER19> :help si<CTL-D> (type :help space s i and control-d after the i) will give you all available variations in help on si, including 'si' and si among many others.

CTL-D is a sort of intelli-suggest in context (except it's move 1/2 page down in command mode)

:help<CTL-D> gives variations of help in your installation.

:help <CTL-D> (help then space then control-D) gives more variations.

:help help<CTL-D> (ask for help on help, with a control-D immediately after the last p) gives more variations on help.

:help c_CTRL-D (literally typed just like that) is the help entry for using CTL-D on the command line.

:help CTRL-D<CTL-D> (everything up to the first D literally, then control-D) lists all the different help subjects for CTRL-D in various contexts.

:<CTL-D> (control-D immediately after typing colon) lists all the things you can do on the command line, including help.

Help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think it's the first time that I want to install vim to try it. As a Windows user, I always found NotePad++ and other text editor an easier choice but I can now see some powerfull utilities to vim now. Very clear article.

<comment><USER21> (I'm just throwing tips in comments where I see opportunities to help people who find any of the same niggles I've had over the years.)

Users who want to run Windows vim with no titlebar, create a file _vimrc in your base vim directory (on my windows desktop it's C:\Program Files\Vim). In this, put this line:

        set guioptions-=T

<comment><USER8> You can control _a lot_ of things with guioptions. I would recommend doing a:

      :help guioptions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find it amusing that he asserts "blockwise selection mode. Extremely powerful and available in very few other editors".

Blockwise selection mode is available in almost every Windows editor I use - from the Delphi IDE, Visual Studio, even to Notepad2, Shift+Alt does block selection, or alternatively Alt + mouse selection.

<comment><USER23> plus I still have to see a use for it. Usually I just go linewise or, inside a line, with movements like f) or $.

<comment><USER22> It's mostly useful for ASCII diagrams, in conjunction with overwrite mode.

<comment><USER6> . . . or source code formatting, or adding comment characters to multiple lines, or in any other way making an identical change to several adjacent lines at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pretty cool, I was learning Vim through "A Byte of Vim" at <http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim>

</comment><comment><USER25> :Ex is a very useful command. And at first I thought that doing 'vim foo' where foo was a folder was just a quirk of UNIX, but eventually I figured that it's a folder browse view.

No more feeling around folder structures with ':e'!

</comment><comment><USER26> if you are viming on an osx macbook of some sort and are sick of the damn small-ass control key they left us with, i've found it helpful to remap the caps lock key to control. you can do this easily in System Prefs > Keyboard > Modifier Keys. so now you can <esc> insert mode with the ^[, hardly moving your hands at all.

This works for me personally because I very rarely find myself even thinking about or noticing the true CAPS key, but if you are stuck on your CAPS bein CAPS, then this wouldn't be for you :!)

</comment><comment><USER27> TIP for the Vim lovers out there:

Firefox: you can do a quick search hitting '/' Skype [Mac]: you can replace text in your last sent message with the 's/<old>/<new>/' syntax

I would love to hear about other apps with Vim-ish behavior :)

VIM IS FULL OF WIN!

</comment><comment><USER28> Amazingly, this is the first I've heard of fx/tx/Fx. How ridiculously awesome.

<comment><USER3> I have this printed out and taped up right next to my monitor: [http://wint1.kaist.ac.kr/files/attach/images/59/450/vi- vim-c...](http://wint1.kaist.ac.kr/files/attach/images/59/450/vi-vim-cheat- sheet.gif)

It's helped me polish off those last few vim commands that I never got used to. I recommend looking at it daily.

<comment><USER29> I've got that cheat sheet saved on my computer and I've looked at it several times before, but today was the first time I realized that you can hit '&' to repeat the last :s command on the current line. Very slick!!

<comment><USER3> Yep, and 'g&' is really helpful. It runs the last substitute across the entire file, preserving flags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It is also very useful to learn the code-folding commands ("z*"). Rather than repeat them here, just say ":help fold".

</comment><comment><USER31> remapping capslock -> esc will make editing so much easier and faster. being able to easily enter command mode has increased my speed more than anything else, it's also really useful in other interfaces, to be able to quickly hit escape instead of reaching over to the top of the keyboard.

add xmodmap -e 'clear Lock' -e 'keycode 0x42 = Escape' to your ~/.xinitrc on linux

<comment><USER32> Remapping capslock to another control will make editing even easier and faster. Especially when you realize escape can be entered with ctrl-[ and sometimes ctrl-3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Love me some vim, but isn't this kind of old? It is awesome though - think I used it back when I was getting started with vim.

</comment><comment><USER34> vi is my favorite Rogue-like, with NetHack in close second, and my own <http://DeadByZombie.com> in third.

vi is the only Rogue-like where you can get real work done with it. And every time you learn a new trick it's like your XP level or attribs go up, or you've descended down to a new more evil level of the dungeon, with more powerful monsters to fight with your enhanced vi-fu.

<comment><USER6> . . . and I thought vi(m) was awesome before!

I will never look at the king of all editors quite the same way. You have my thanks, mkramlich. May your life be long and prosperous.

(I totally didn't mean that to sound like a Vulcan blessing, I swear.)</comment></comment>


Ads are taking over Samsung's Galaxy smartphones - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/30/ads-are-taking-over-samsungs-galaxy-smartphones-and-im-fed-up/ <comment><USER2> They were doing this with their TVs. For me it was one of the most weird feelings I got, having no control over it and having a freaking ad in the menu of the TV in my living room (and I did follow all the possible steps to disable any marketing and other messages). Imagine having kids and seeing an ad for a chocolate with 50% sugar on your TV or other products that you want away from your kids, and no way of knowing what else they would push there.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's pathetic is the resignation at the end: "we know ads aren't going away...", and then the suggestion of making them less obnoxious, "maybe, please, Samsung, could you...?". Yeesh, we're already negotiating? Do we collectively like Samsung phones so much that we'll do anything but simply not buy an ad-ridden $1400 phone?

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a Samsung Smart TV and they keep adding Facebook Video and CBS All Access apps to the "Recently Used" apps menu. I've never even launched these apps. Ever. And as an "added benefit" to customers, these apps cannot be deleted nor can you prevent them from being pushed in your face. Totally infuriating. As such my future TVs will not be Samsung.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a terrible disrespect to their paying customers. I'm glad I didn't go with Samsung last time. And clearly I never will.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recently purchased a Xiaomi phone and even though it's a flagship of sorts, it still has ads in the stock browser and music apps, asking other places.

I curse the US for removing Huawei as a competitor. My last Huawei phone had no such ads.

</comment><comment><USER7> You kinda get what you deserve when you spend what an iPhone costs on something that is not an iPhone.

<comment><USER3> That's some twisted logic right there. "You get what you deserve when you spend what a Mercedes costs on something that isn't a Mercedes.", I said to the BMW owner.</comment></comment>


Bookitbee- alpha launch - would welcome feedback - <AUTHOR> http://www.bookitbee.com

<comment><USER2> Like the video on the home page; really explains what this service is about and its value in just 2 minutes.

I was looking for pricing info on the home page but couldn't find any. Found the info post account creation and I'm cool with this being free during alpha but the lack of info up-front always has me worried or makes me assume this is a free service.

I found the design options lacking. People tend to be really creative with their event fliers and other marketing material, so I can imagine that people would want greater control over the fonts, colors, layout, etc. But it's alpha so I guess you got to focus.

Overall this is a well-designed web app with a minimalist feel to it.

NOTE: there is a major bug on /organizer/event-dashboard/81/edit/tickets/ that ultimately made it impossible for me to go live with my event.

Feedback @ /organizer/register/ :

* The Cancel button comes off as redundant (especially since it just takes the customer to the home page) and steals attention from your call to action.

* The button 'I accept' makes sense since it refers to the TOS but it doesn't correspond to the title of the page. Maybe you could use something more straightforward like "Create This Event" and reformulate the paragraph above the button to say, "By clicking on Create This Event you agree to the bookitbee Terms & Conditions".

* I like the date/time widget! The margins/borders of the elements need to be aligned, however. Right now the icons are slightly taller than the input fields. This occurs on several other admin pages.

/organizer/event-welcome/81/ :

* Hey, that checklist is really handy because it guides me through the event creation process.

* I would like to see a more distinct message on top of the page that says something like, "Welcome, arkitaip! Your new event - NAME OF EVENT - has been created!"

/organizer/event-dashboard/81/edit/ :

* If I click on the time element of the Event ends widget, there are no default time values. The rightmost arrow set changes AM to PM but the preview doesn't work.

Feedback @ /organizer/event-dashboard/81/edit/tickets/ :

* I tried to create two tickets by filling out the two default rows and the site crashed on submit (Error: 500). Also, why is GBP the default currency?

/organizer/event-dashboard/81/design/ :

* Some of the textures - e.g. the grass, the party - get a very jagged/pixelated look when previewed. Some of the thumbnails disappear on reload.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this feedback it is really helpful

Pleased you like the general feel - have spent a lot of time trying to cut out anything we don't need.

The UX points are all great. We are doing a daily update at the moment take it looks like we have missed some bugs now causing the 500 errors.

GBP is in while we get full financial approval from the UK processing bank - this will change when we have it

I'll post when updated with these points on board

Thanks again

<comment><USER2> You're welcome. Good luck.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News, automagically organized - <AUTHOR> http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/

<comment><USER2> Awesome stuff! I tried a couple of searches, and the search ranking looks decently good (at first glance, atleast).

I also like the fading of text as the results become less relevant.

What kind of relevance algorithms are you using? Since this site is targeted at hackers, who tend to like more control, you could expose some of the parameters and allow users to tweak their relevance.

For instance, sliders that let you determine the importance of article age, # of comments in the article, karma points of article, avg karma points of readers, and of course the pattern match counts...

<comment><AUTHOR> _I tried a couple of searches, and the search ranking looks decently good (at first glance, atleast)._

Its based solely upon the text in the comment thread. I was actually pretty surprised this worked as well as it did. I am currently crawling outlinks, which should hopefully improve relevancy even more, as well as discover more topics.

 _Since this site is targeted at hackers, who tend to like more control, you could expose some of the parameters and allow users to tweak their relevance._

Rather than drilling specifically into Hacker News, I'm more interested in exposing functionality to other hackers by building an API that will allow them to auto-organize their sites too. The one issue is that indexing is a batch, off-line process, and most APIs are built in a real-time, on-demand setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The other day I though how cool it would be to have a Web service that could crawl your site and auto categorize all of your pages (or at least help you to do it). As ever, turns out someone is on the case ;-) Nice work! I think there's definitely a wider audience for this technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I think there's definitely a wider audience for this technology._

What audiences do you see for this technology?

Also, how would you expand the audience for this technology?

Possible options:

* Auto-crawl content and automagically organize it, without involving the content owner. (The Google approach).

* Build a turn-key solution that people can upload their content and get the index returned to them. (An API approach.)

* Talking to businesses directly, and make one on one deals. (An enterprise/B2B approach.)

<comment><USER4> There are lots of uses for this, but my main advice is to not loose these three things:

1\. advantage of relevancy within specific domains. The page-rank was a huge value-add to relevancy over other search. But internet wide is now too ambitious. HN is a great corpus because the content is already vetted by a community. The work of integrating other specialized communities content can give density and relevancy.

2\. ease-of-use in integration. The less configuration to use this API, the better. Autotagging, done well, is very useful. I have a lot of ideas around this if you'd like to chat some time.

3\. ease-of-use interface . Combining browsable, faceted search with NLP is, I think, the sweet spot between getting lots of relevant results, but allowing for discovery.

<comment><USER5> Mostly #1, but agreed with all. Especially so as to leverage a managed topic domain into a transferable form of domain knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using Python's NLTK and Lucene can produce results like this. I wrote something similar using Wordnet, PHP/Zend Lucene, and and Freeling (C++ NLP) for NewsCup.

I think what makes this project interesting to me is the interface and quality of search results. They show a really good understanding how to use NLP and search in conjunction.

Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is not a complaint, but simply a bug report.

With javascript disabled, if you type something in the provided text box and hit enter, you end up with an error message:

      Not Found
      The requested URL /projects/autotag/php/search.php was not found on this server.

I just figured you'd want to know.

<comment><USER7> I have JS enabled and am getting the same error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool - can you add dates to the lists of articles, be nice to see how old an article is (or maybe color code the list to provide two axes of relevance)?

<comment><USER9> Agreed on this point - it was the first thing I looked for.

I was hoping to use this site as an alternate view into HN to find semi-recent submissions covering specific topics.

In addition, it might be nice to expose the popularity of the article somehow. Something that got 24+ votes is probably going to be more relevant to me than something with only 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this. I am working on a related project (the result, not HN) inspired by Paul Graham's Naive Bayes Spam Filter.

If you have a moment, I would like to hear more about your architecture and interface. It is responsive, clean, accurate, and multi-device ready, and clearly an implementation to be replicated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, you seriously have a lot of side-projects (<http://techbio.org/>). Drop me an email, and we'll talk.

<comment><USER5> Your contact page quickly led me to here: <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/topia.termextract/>

and: <http://www.metaoptimize.com/qa>

Great stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I appreciate your work on this (in the past I've just used google with the site option). As a nitpick, one thing I'd do is remove the fluff from the bottom of the page and give an indicator that the large box is for a search term (as opposed to several lines of text which is what it looks like). In fact, a normal sized box would work just fine.

I realize that there is a line that instructs you to enter text in the box, but to me in got lost in the noise of the page (another reason for getting rid of the extra details at the bottom). On the results page, it'd be nice if you showed the results foremost and the related topics as a sidebar. I want my results, and only if I don't find what I'm looking for do I want to know the code's opinion of where I should try to go next.

Anyways, like I said those are just nitpicks. Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very very cool.

A couple problems though. For terms with spaces in them it creates a tag for each word. For example "stack overflow" has tags for "stack" and "overflow", which aren't all that useful (although yes the tag stackoverflow is created): [http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/5a/...](http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/5a/stack- overflow.html)?

What would be a solution to this? Parse the text so each token includes the first space it encounters and see if that multi word token occurs frequently?

The other problem is stripping out punctuation. The tag c++ doesn't exist, neither does c#. Not sure how you'd include relevant punctuation and strip out the rest.

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome! Gabriel, could you please get these search results into Duck Duck Go?

<comment><USER13> Nice, some folks will demote you here for any reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice work. This gets a place on my bookmark bar.

When can you get it current?

Minor note: found that F# does not index.

</comment><comment><USER15> Pretty cool. The only goof I found was that it thinks that Emacs is plural for 'Emac'.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very nicely done. Would love to see some stats about how long this took, in terms of crawling, indexing, etc. time.

Also, would love to hear more about the tools behind it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Feature request: Ability to browse list of existing tags would be great apart from the auto-complete feature.

</comment><comment><USER18> Cool. How do you find the related topics to a given topic? What api do you use for that? Google suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER19> Could be really interesting for creating silios within sites for automagically creating navigation bars whereby all the related nav links were relevant to the page currently being viewed, removing unrelated clutter and offering navigation for a site much more relevant.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow! Excellent stuff!

Just added it to my Utilities bookmark folder.

Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER21> great! i've been working on the same exact thing for a month already! good job! :) glad to know that my idea existed in someone else's mind.

</comment><comment><USER22> No minecraft tag?

<comment><USER23> The index is out of date. Minecraft wasn't around in October 2009.

<comment><USER24> It would be interesting to see what new tags pop over the years. And maybe trends in tag usage etc.

For example, to see a google trend style chart for Ruby vs Python tags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice work. Why does it stop at Oct. 13, 2009?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mike Cheng (<http://searchyc.com>) gave me this data dump a year ago. I am currently crawling the rest of hacker news, as well as outlinks, to fill out this index.

Consider the site right now a proof-of-concept. I'm trying to gauge people's interest level, and get feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Awesome work mate :)</comment>


Is Type Tracing for Python Useful? Some Experiments - happy-go-lucky http://renesd.blogspot.com/2017/02/is-type-tracing-for-python-useful-some.html <comment><AUTHOR> It seems like this would do well on Python code where type errors are relatively rare, and the developers' attitude towards types has been basically sane for the history of the project. Furthermore, this looks like it's going to work best if you have a lot of pure functions. If these things are true you're already doing pretty well! I'd say this is a tool to make already- exemplary Python code even better.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I think you're right mostly.

However, my main use for this so far has been for old python 1.5-2 programs (some 15 years old) with not much typing at all. Adding limited type information for methods seems useful for helping the static checkers as well in these cases. The division errors in the blog post were based on real bugs it found inside class methods for example. I bet there are lots of corner cases I haven't tripped over yet however. I wouldn't be surprised with dynamic python that it could cause quite a lot of problems. Python can get pretty fancy. I told it to ignore all 'self' variables for example.

I think basing it on the coverage tool helped avoid a lot of problems. Because they have already done the hard parts of getting the tracing to only happen on user code. If you don't trace into libraries, and only do user code the task becomes 7 million times easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of our projects, Meta, built out (and beyond) many of the ideas mentioned in this post: [http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2016/ethan/meta.pdf](http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2016/ethan/meta.pdf)

We found that auto-documentation via these kinds of run-time traces is really powerful. If you add in a bit of centralization (connecting traces across many users), this can also be a useful way to capture bugs or unforeseen behavior.

<comment><USER2> Very interesting! I don't think the paper mentions type tracing combined with static analysis, property testing, or AOT compilers however. Do you have another link with more info? I can't seem to find it anywhere, and am keen to have play with it :)

It does seem like there's a lot more very useful tools which could be made from the data we already have. Bug databases combined with commits are also filled with useful information. It does seem you can train a classifier for certain bugs from just those features.

I think the "Auto Complete from stack overflow" and related stuff from early 2016 was also pretty neat, in that it didn't use trace info, but more normal text search methods. But was surprisingly useful none the less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pycharm also supports this: [https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/2016.3/using- docstrin...](https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/2016.3/using-docstrings- to-specify-types.html#d462428e149)

</comment><comment> chris-laffra One use of type tracing is to automatically generate unit tests, as done by Auger: [https://github.com/laffra/auger](https://github.com/laffra/auger).</comment>


Americans Are Self-Censoring at Record Rates - <AUTHOR> https://www.persuasion.community/p/americans-are-self-censoring-at-record <comment><USER2> Fear of deplatforming. Mention that hydroxychloroquine is frequently used outside the US and get kicked off Twitter, FB. Lots and lots of third rails.

<comment><USER3> Hydroxychloroquine is frequently used for malaria. It has shown no effectiveness with regard to coronavirus. "Oh no, I can't spread dangerous misinformation without consequence!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is another front page story about the rise of new data companies that aim to "score" people in ways that affect their employability or housing etc. Self censorship is the only viable option now unless you are independently wealthy</comment>


Event-reduce: An algorithm to optimize database queries that run multiple times - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pubkey/event-reduce <comment><USER2> Previous discussion [1], 84 comments.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888239)

</comment><comment> seph-reed Are there any installation/usage docs?

</comment><comment><USER3> isnt this just eventsourcing with projections?</comment>


Ask HN: Save your job or help your company? - <AUTHOR> I'm implementing/integrating software at the company I work at.
There is a company for sale that does consulting for the specific thing I was brought on to do and maintain.
The company for sale has several experienced employees. The cashflow of the company is a little more than I make. The company is selling for about 2-3X what I make. It's in a different state but has clients all over.
If my company bought the company for sale it could pay my salary. So, in five years they've saved double their investment.
If they bought the company and fired me they could probably get their investment back in 18 months.
Do I tell them about it? <comment><USER2> Unless identifying potential acquisitions is part of your job responsibilities, stick to what you're being paid to do and let others worry about the rest.

Future employers, and even your current one, are likely to value ability to operate as a team player more than tendency to go outside the boundaries of your job responsibilities, even if it's ostensibly to save money.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you easily employable? If yes then sure I'd tell them, but they aren't going to buy a company if it's outside of their core competency.</comment>


Generative art: New and recreated vintage art, made with code and imagination - <AUTHOR> https://beta.observablehq.com/collection/@observablehq/generative-art <comment><USER2> Related:

I make paintings from generative art, which I use to inspire physical paintings.

[https://medium.com/@rememberlenny/digital-processes- inspirin...](https://medium.com/@rememberlenny/digital-processes-inspiring- analog-paintings-a358eb7801a0?source=linkShare-72744a57b325-1537677401)

</comment><comment><USER3> I made a tutorial on recreating the generative art of John Whitney in the Processing programming language: [https://youtu.be/LaarVR1AOvs](https://youtu.be/LaarVR1AOvs)

It's intended for beginner programmers, but it's surprising what you can do with not much code.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reference to John Whitney, new to me, and most interesting. Some of his films are on archive.org and his book _Digital Harmony_ is downloadable as a pdf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got started with this back in May 2015[1] and would highly recommend YOU (yes, you!) try it! It's super easy - you just have to download and install Processing[2], then write some Java code to manipulate an canvas and viola!

[1] [https://zk.gd/art.html](https://zk.gd/art.html)

[2] [https://processing.org](https://processing.org)

<comment><USER6> Nice images!

You can half the filesizes by better compressing the PNGs, for example with optipng or pngcrush, losslessly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just noticed on my one of my notebooks is featured in this collection!

Also, the other collections are defiantly worth checking out: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@observablehq?tab=collections](https://beta.observablehq.com/@observablehq?tab=collections)

<comment><USER8> The link does not work for me while the top one is. I am on iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And you can actually see most of the art pieces being generated.. mesmerising..

Don't think quotes ' are warranted here

</comment><comment><USER10> if you wanna create some awesome generative art youself check you the awesome Chromata[1] by "I was a teenage punk-rockstar" turned web-dev michael bromley

[1][https://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/experiments/chromata/](https://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/experiments/chromata/)

</comment><comment><USER11> There's a (no longer updated) gallery using Processing at [http://www.complexification.net/gallery/](http://www.complexification.net/gallery/). It's quite old as well - ~10y at least

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there an auditory equivalent?

<comment><USER13> Yes: [http://wry.me/bytebeat/examples.html](http://wry.me/bytebeat/examples.html)

(explanation: [http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic- symph...](http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies- from-one-line-of.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Problem is style transfer as a paradigm adds very little to art as an original augmentation of our experience: it is seen as a mere pick & mix without an original act behind, therefore it is very difficult to sell... or is this the latest instalment of the old elites with money vs the angry and penniless young? I don't know, really. That's why as an art dealer I just took the plunge at [http://www.artyde.com](http://www.artyde.com) in order to make the physical act on very basic media fashionable again, that is hand-made A3 A4 A5 drawing or paintings with pastels and water colours. Pauperism forces thought and imagination and we literally need rehabilitation to create new styles imho.

<comment><USER15> All valid points, but not everything needs to be about money and business. A lot of people here are interested in subjects like generative art, simply for the joy of creating something nice and for fun :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> how to see these? Firefox, Chrome, and IE won't render anything... just a blank page.

</comment><comment><USER16> how to see these? Firefox, Chrome, and IE only show a blank page.</comment>


A simple, intuitive, low-cost alternative to NFC and QR Codes - <AUTHOR> http://snow.sh

<comment><USER2> It's cool! It's fresh!

Neat things I like about it:

1) _Is the app branded for my store?_

 _Yes, you send us your logo and color choices and we design the app!_

2) _How can I track customer usage of the app?_

 _SnowShoe has a merchant login, where you can sign in and see all your customer usage statistics on an hourly basis._

3) Like the title says, it will work on smartphones without NFC.

A couple things I can see holding this back, though.

1) It looks pretty bulky. Might not be a huge issue for the intended use of having it at a business checkout, but carrying it around for non-traditional storefronts or businesses, the thickness could be a holdup.

2) _Do I have to post to a social network?_

 _No, but if you want to get your free item faster you should. Each time you share a post you will get an extra punch!_

3) It only works on smartphones. Even worse, it only works on iOS devices and Android 4.0+. Even worse, it only works when the app is running and the phone is connected to an Internet connection (wifi recommended).

NFC works, at least on my phone, all the time. You tap the phone and it launches the NFC-enabled app. The guys and gals at SnowShoe seem bright, talented, and fun. I wish them all the best with their products, and this definitely is a cool and trendy device with some interesting hardware and software working together to make the magic happen. I do have to say I prefer solutions that are a little more cross-platform. As a Windows Phone user I'm used to being left out in the cold, but NFC wallets have this beat and with a simple app you can replicate the rest still using NFC. Time will tell if NFC actually grabs any hold in the marketplace, though.

\--edit: not that this post isn't long already, but I thought I'd add one more thing. I love the concept of capacitive stamps. Even not knowing where this specific product will end up in the marketplace, I think capacitive stamps could have a future for myriad purposes. It's now on my list of "why didn't I think of that!" ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Two quick questions for you:

Re: holdup #2) Are you saying you would prefer that it automatically post to social networks all the time, or that you would prefer to not have preferential treatment of users that are willing to make a post? Or that the default should be to post with an opt-out option?

Re: holdup #3) Our native apps currently only run on Android 4.0+ because those are the only devices where we can guarantee five-point multitouch capability. There are a large number of 2.3.3 and 3.0 devices that are capable, but there is no way for us to limit downloads to only those devices while simultaneously disallowing downloads to devices with those operating systems that can only do 2 or 4 point multitouch (and we definitely don't want to allow customers that don't have 5 multitouch capability to download our apps).

Our HTML5/JS SDK doesn't have such problems, though, and works on 80%+ of the current installed smartphone user base.

Also, re: holdup #1) We can make the stamps slimmer, but don't really have a reason to. We like having an analog to the inked stamps everyone has used at some point in their life, and this form factor does just that. IF someone wants to build an app that requires a more portable version of the stamp, we'd be happy to build stamps for them with a slimmed-down form factor.

Thanks again for the feedback!

<comment><USER2> Hey cool, talking to an employee! I do really like your concept.

2) I guess I don't like the concept that posting to a social network gives one more punch than not doing so. I don't have an aversion to twitter or facebook etc, I use them all the time. What I don't like seeing is auto-generated posts from my friends flooding my news feed. I'll admit I have no better solution than you've devised, and I completely understand the decision. Some others might have more of a backlash against it though. You may have seen some vitrol on here whenever someone sees a "login with Facebook" link on a startup's page.

3) That makes sense. It's kind of disappointing from a technical limitation standpoint, though. The reason I called it out as possibly being a barrier to entry is because 4.0+ still isn't terribly common. While iOS is very common, I was sad to see Windows Phone, Blackberry, and other touchscreen smartphone platforms not included. Like I mentioned in my footnotes, we're used to it, but I still like to call it out.

1) Not a problem. My criticisms were posted just because I like to give positive and negatives to interesting startups I see and like. There are some things people might not see from the inside out. This is a very non- traditional checkout method, and I could see non-traditional businesses loving it. Good to know you're willing to work with them to meet their needs. When I wrote that I was thinking more along the lines of alternative use-cases other than POS terminals. The ideas you have are just the beginning of where this technology can go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again - feedback at this stage is golden!

1) This is useful feedback. If a client doesn't want to grant additional credits for social posts, we can certainly disable that feature. Unfortunately, most clients we have talked to see this as one of the main selling points. I agree - autopost spam on my news feeds sucks. This is one reason why our current MO is to have this be an opt-in feature after every stamp interaction.

3) Our HTML5/JS SDK will work on any phone running a webkit based browser. We're working on a code package for the new IE, though until we see more demand, it will be a relatively low priority. I'm not sure Blackberry is worth any expenditure of our resources right now, though if we had a developer who really wanted, we could probably make it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a good idea. I see some avenues for improvement though.

1\. It would be better if the application could work without an internet connection. What's stopping you from caching the stamp data and then syncing when the user has an internet connection? This would make the product more attractive to both merchants and users. Merchants wont have to provide free wifi to ensure the stamping process is fast and smooth, and users will not have to bother with connecting to a wifi network. The technologies you are competing with (QR codes and NFC) can both work without internet connections.

2\. Security. I did not see this mentioned on the FAQ and this is probably something that merchants will want to know. For example, is your system immune to "replay" attacks? If a user managed to record the capacitive stamp, what's stopping them from re-sending it to the servers to get more stamps?

3\. Customers may not always want to share their email address directly with a merchant. Why not provide merchants a way to send deals to customers through an API i.e allow them to send deals to customers without exposing the customer's email address?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Responses: 1) We're working on a local stamp authentication code package for our native SDKs. We're at a pretty early stage right now, which means we're constantly refining our algorithms and tweaking our stamp observation interface. Thus, for the time being, it is easiest (and more secure) for us to keep the authentication services on our server. We should have a local version ready in the spring, though.

2) I'm working on a major blog post about security that I'll post next week. In summary, we have several measures implemented to prevent replay attacks, including o.auth and time-gated ticketing.

3) Agreed. This is a client-specified feature. Most SMBs want it (even if their customers don't). Ces't la Vie.

We have a couponing API for our native apps in private beta right now. We also have a Twilio-based SMS couponing feature that will launch soon.

Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK, I don't get it. How is this easier or better?

NFC is a no-touch proximity read. QR Code is a no-touch read from a medium distance. This requires physically touching something to my screen? Seems like it's much more cumbersome to 'read' (IMHO), and it doesn't really solve some of the main problems of NFC and QR Codes: you don't know what is really lurking behind that tag...

<comment><USER2> Well, if the site's documentation gives any indication of performance, this is only used with the app and only as authentication. The store clerk would have the stamp, and all it would do is authenticate the store within the app. Nothing can really be lurking.

<comment><USER5> And if an app has to be started in advance, still don't see how the proposed solution is easier than QR codes, where an app has to be started in advance too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a cute idea, but a static pattern is trivially defeated by presenting a smartphone that records the touch pattern. Make a smart box that can stamp a dynamic pattern and you'll be on to something.

EDIT: context on why this is important, a comment from the original poster lower on the page:

 _We already have apps that do retail loyalty, coupons, and micro-payments launched on the platform. We also have developers working on apps to authenticate EMRs (electronic medical records) and industrial systems maintenance. Finally, we won the TechCrunch DisruptSF Hackathon back in September by using the stamp as the authentication step for a webservice actuated door lock_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4811221>

<comment><USER7> I was about to say the same thing but there is no point in faking it because it appears that the stamp only tells your phone to pay that specific store, the app then would probably ask you for a confirmation on screen (it could also ask you to enter a pin possibly).

<comment><USER6> If there's "no point in faking it", why does the page make a big deal about uniqueness and ? In your scenario, a GPS fix serves equally well.

The claim _"Like snowflakes, no two SnowShoe Stamps are exactly alike."_ is wrong. If you stamp my phone, your SnowShow Stamp will have the same exact signature as a carefully carved potato.

<comment><USER7> in my view: 1-because it is key for each store to have a unique stamp 2- I don' think so,what about stores in the same building or stores very near each other? 3-no two officially produced "snowshoes" though, anyway yes no one would keep you from 3d printing the stamp of another store so that you can have your customers pay that store instead of yours, but I don't see any clear advantage in it, and, as i said before, the app would probably show you the store name before proceeding

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting idea. I think it's biggest downfall is that it's yet another item that you are carrying around. Doesn't seem like it's as convenient or as cheap as printing QR Codes. And NFC could be used for just about any data, where this seems like it's targeted at purchases.

Still gotta give props to the creative thinking.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to not actually have people carrying the stamp - you are already carrying your smartphone. The stamp should be placed at a static, centralized location (e.g. the point of sale at a retailer) and used to authenticate transactions (loyalty punches, coupon redemptions, even payments in some niche applications) with customers' smartphones. Does that make sense?

<comment><USER8> Completely. I got that from the description. I just sort of thought we were slowly moving away from that. Maybe I've seen too many commercials with the retailer swiping your credit card with a phone. Or those phone bump commercials. :) I'm sure the static point of sale method will not go away any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would I want to carry the stamp in my pocket along with my cellphone and keys?

If it was similar to a credit card that I could carry in my wallet then maybe.

Right now for my money the Protean guys have a better solution with Echo. <http://getprotean.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> You are not going to carry the stamp - you are already carrying your mobile device. The stamp is placed with the centralized person or system with whom you want to interact (e.g. at the coffee shop's point of sale or on the outside of the door you want to unlock). You stamp your mobile device to authenticate that you are interacting with that person or system in a specific way (e.g. the coffee shop cashier only stamps the loyalty app on your phone if you have made a purchase - thus purchase-gating that transaction). Does that make sense?

<comment><USER9> So I still have to type in a pin to prove its me? If I've already got my smartphone it would seem either NFC or Protean would be simpler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's just get this straight: Being able to ID a phone is _not_ the whole of NFC capability. Right now, there are tons of handheld scientific and engineering instruments that can upload readings over NFC. At the same time, there are tons of people who own smartphones, but who are reading digits off a readout on these instruments, jotting down these numbers, then going back to a computer to key them in by hand.

So, there's tons of potential out there for this, QR codes, and NFC. The make or break is going to be responsiveness. If entering readings is faster and more reliable than jotting them down on paper, then someone will be able to make a profit on this capability. If not, then it's too early for the tech.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a great idea, but I have a few concerns. First, you would want to make the stamp out of a material that is anti-bacterial, otherwise you're spreading grease and germs from people's faces to other people's faces via the stamp. I'm also curious as to what resolution a phone touch screen can detect the pattern. Might there be cases where someone has an older phone or a phone with a crappy touch screen where this stamp just wouldn't work? Also, do you have to be connected to the internet for this to work? What happens if the user has no signal?

Lastly (and not serious), your promo video of the girl buying the beer shows her using the stamp to activate a coupon, but she doesn't pay for her beers.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is way more expensive than QR codes (which is more or less free). Each tech has pros and cons. When talking about QR codes, I guarantee price will be at the forefront. I'm not sure this is anything more than trying to invent a problem to solve with a novel product.

</comment><comment><USER13> Unless I'm mistaken, this is a blatant copy of a project that I saw at UBC last year that has had retail partners for a long time. Maybe a coincidence. But they are strikingly identical.

</comment><comment><USER14> I saw you guys at tech crunch disrupt and it looks like you're making a lot of progress! Good luck to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very clever, and a nice website too! I hope this works out well for you :)

</comment><comment><USER16> The second image is a tiff. O_O

</comment><comment><USER17> Sigh we killed the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yikes - working on getting it back up now. I guess load balancing for our www site needs to move up in priority.

In the meantime, you can see much of the same info on our AngelList page: <https://angel.co/snowshoe-stamp>

<comment><USER17> Nice concept, is the dot pattern secret? Which is to say is this something you 'train' between the app and the stamp or is it programmed? And does it do a 'multi-touch' type stamp or are you doing sequences? And if the latter I'm guessing you can do a sequence that fingers can't and thus avoid 'faking' the stamp manually.

All in all very clever. Not sure what the use case is though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great questions. Our basic stamps have dot patterns that are not obscured and are static on each stamp. They are precision milled out of the aluminum stamp body, and, thus, they are still VERY hard to spoof because the location of the observed dots needs to be precise down to the pixel resolution of the phone. You can't spoof them with you fingers. The nice thing about these stamps is that they are nothing more than a solid block of aluminum - no circuitry whatsoever. You can run them through a dishwasher or an autoclave - great for food service and medical applications.

We also have more secure "dynamic" stamps wherein the capacitive touch points are modulated in sequence amongst an array of potential contact points. These are still in the prototype stage, but we get a lot of requests for them, so may be looking to launch this new product line in the spring.

Finally, as for use cases - we can do many of the things people are currently trying to use NFC, QR Codes and/or GPS gating to authenticate. We already have apps that do retail loyalty, coupons, and micro-payments launched on the platform. We also have developers working on apps to authenticate EMRs (electronic medical records) and industrial systems maintenance. Finally, we won the TechCrunch DisruptSF Hackathon back in September by using the stamp as the authentication step for a webservice actuated door lock (article: <http://snow.sh/ack>)

<comment><USER18> Very much like the idea, and am definitely interested. My pre-question qualifier: most of the use cases that immediately spring to mind for have the user holding an authenticating block, and not the touchscreen device.

Security question for the use cases where that would matter. What is to prevent someone from making an impression mold and then using a technique like lost wax casting to quickly generate a copy?

As a materials scientist, this is the first thing I thought of.

Cheers and Kudos,

-p

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! Responses:

"My pre-question qualifier: most of the use cases that immediately spring to mind for have the user holding an authenticating block, and not the touchscreen device." -Could you say a little more about the use cases you are thinking of? Who do you consider to be the "user"? Most of our targeted use cases involve transactions where many smartphone users need to interact with a single, centralized system, person or installation. For example, our loyalty apps are downloaded by a retailer's customers, and then credits for purchases are added to their apps via a stamp placed at the retailer's point of sale. We consider both the customers and the retailer to be "users", though.

As for the security question, the capacitive touch points are embedded in a low capacitance elastomer, so physical duplication (e.g. casting) without destroying the stamp isn't an option. We also have other optional authentication layers (GPS-gating transactions to a stamp's known lat & lon, time-gating transactions to a stores hours of service, etc.) that would make even a duplicated stamp much harder to use.

Remember, its not hard to make a functional copy of the mag stripe on your credit card. I would argue it is much easier to do that than it is to spoof one of our stamps. Further, we don't print the "secure key" (the stamp point coordinates) on the front of our stamps, but your credit card number is plastered across the front of your plastic . . .

<comment><USER18> Silly, but actionable use case example: I run a llama shearing business, and I attach an aluminum ID block to each llama's collar as means to track each llama's shearing schedule. That's the type of example, where there are many blocks and few readers. Replace llama with "something else in inventory" for more practical examples. Clearly all is golden for the POS retail coupon verification case, with few blocks and many readers.

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Embedded in elastomer makes sense. I had several ways to skin that cat pop into mind, but I figured there was just one piece of the extant ID block I was missing. Thanks for clarifying.

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All other security points well taken. Wasn't trying to get down on the idea at all. Indeed have numerous use cases in mind that would work well in a reversed use-case of the consumer facing implementation. Not all situations need high grade security.

-phil</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


America's Next Spaceship: Designed to go where no man has gone before - <AUTHOR> http://www.airspacemag.com/space/americas-next-spaceship-180952126/?all

<comment><USER2> Is there enough information available to make a mockup for the oculus rift?

I'd love to get a sense of how much space there is inside.</comment>


Google and Facebook race to solve the game of Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/12/google-and-facebook-race-to-solve-the-ancient-game-of-go/ <comment><USER2> Boring! The singularity point has already occurred. [https://medium.com/@yanazendo/proof-of-work- steganography-63...](https://medium.com/@yanazendo/proof-of-work- steganography-633a70986423)

<comment><USER2> Here's how anyone can solve Go. Just use cash money to rig professional Go games, just like a gangster. P~NP because there always exists a way to make any intractable problem tractable.</comment></comment>