How do you Design a cryptocurrency like ethereum/BTC to have stable value? - <AUTHOR> how would you Design a cryptocurrency to have stable value, not speculative-asset value?<p>are crypto currency doomed to have crazy swings up and down in value like ethereum and bitcoin ? <comment><USER2> The value swings represent changing ideas in the minds of human beings about the value of the underlying currency.

If you want the value of a currency to be stable, you need to be in a position to economically support the stable price - if lots of people want to sell, the stabilizer must be prepared to buy a lot of the currency at the stable price. If a lot of people want to buy, the stabilizer must be prepared to sell a lot of the currency at the stable price. This is potentially a very, very expensive - and perhaps impossible - undertaking.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy) for more.

Ultimately, value isn't something that's designed, it's the overall effect of a lot of individuals' preferences and guesses about the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first step is to not make it deflationary, which causes people to hoard it instead of spend it. Unfortunately BTC gained such popularity in part because of this property.

One cool way to do this that I've been thinking about is to tie the mining reward rate to the exchange rate somehow. This has the effect of more coins being created when prices are low, and less created when prices are high. In theory this should stabilize the price. The problem with this method is you need a way to measure the "price" in a decentralized way separate from any other currency.

One way to do THAT is to aim for a certain velocity of money ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money)). Theoretically it should correlate to inflation: if people are hoarding, the *coin will gradually start to decrease in value until more people are spending. If people are spending like crazy, the value will gradually increase. Not sure if that is a good solution, just one that I thought up.

<comment><USER4> isn't a dollar or euro merely a deflationary currency that follows the velocity of money principle albeit controlled by the government and when the velocity is slow they print more?

<comment><USER3> Not exactly. First of all the currencies aren't deflationary, they're slightly inflationary, meaning they lose value over time. Deflationary currencies are considered very bad if a government holds much debt at all. Inflationary currencies incentivize spending over holding.

Second of all they don't just look at velocity of money, they also look at the economy's strength, demand for money and lending, consumer prices indicies, and other things that are tied to external metrics and thus need a centralized authority to use. For a cryptocurrency, we can't do this, we have to rely on some algorithm. Tying creation rate to velocity of money seems like a decent approximation to me, but I could be dead wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not possible to have a 100% stable currency. At their core currencies are human opinions of how much to exchange for a product or service. But human opinion changes on a whim.

I think a currency could be stabilized by automatically adding coins to the total when people feel they want to hoard them, such as economic panics and reducing them when they feel they want to use it without care such as when the economy is booming.

It has to be automatic but finding a way to do that is the big question. But what and how? Use an index, maybe but it has to be impartial and give a true view of how people feel about the economy at the time.

For the US dollar the Federal Reserve is responsible for increasing and decreasing the money supply but they have truckloads of people telling them how the economy is doing.

A cryptocurrency has potential since in theory you can figure out exactly how people are using them.

Additionally, the supply has to increase as more people use it to create economic goods and services. If you don't, there won't be enough currency to go around and it will limit the potential products/services that people can create and consume.

</comment><comment><USER6> As others have said, basically it's a problem of control. Normal currencies, in relatively normal times, are semi-managed by central banks. They use tools like reserve requirements and interest rates to influence the rate at which new currency flows into the general economy. It's possible for one bank to trade in the market in a way to peg one currency against another, as China did for some years. And it was costly, because they were doing it while trying to maintain a large trade surplus, so large numbers of dollars were coming in that needed to be neutralized somewhere. It's why they hold so much US debt. Real currencies get in trouble--severe deflation or inflation--when circumstances (the gold standard, external debts financed in another country's currency) make it hard to respond to economic conditions.

This becomes the question: can the system be designed to respond dynamically to demand in a way that mimics the actions of a central bank, without there actually being a central bank? If the goal was to make it so that it was reasonably constant in terms of purchasing power, there's probably a number of metrics one could choose to measure that, but how to achieve it, that's above my pay grade.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable- cryptocur...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable- cryptocurrency/)

[https://bitshares.org/technology/price-stable- cryptocurrenci...](https://bitshares.org/technology/price-stable- cryptocurrencies/)

[http://docs.hero.global/en/master/](http://docs.hero.global/en/master/)

[https://thecontrol.co/stablecoins-a-holy-grail-in-digital- cu...](https://thecontrol.co/stablecoins-a-holy-grail-in-digital- currency-b64f3371e111)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd say it all comes down to volume. If there's enough money in a currency or in fact any kind of asset it's much less volatile because it's much harder for single players with big pockets to move the needle in either direction.

This isn't really a design issue though (or one specific to cryptocurrencies) but one of making the asset attractive enough in the long term.

Even then larger up and down movements are still possible, for example as seen when George Soros decided to 'break' the Bank of England in 1992.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can design a token implemente on an Smart Contract to do rebasement like a Central Bank but in an automated fashion, no humans involved...

</comment><comment><USER10> option (i) have a _credible_ centralised monetary authority that promises to redeem it for its reserves of dollars or gold or whatever you want it to be stable against. Though arguably for the crypto-currency to actually be credible it needs that monetary authority to hold (or have the facility to borrow at short notice) the asset it's backing it with

option (ii) replicate the fiat system: i.e. the spendable currency is mostly credit with a future repayment obligation and thus actual future demand to hold the currency, and imbalances between rates of borrowing and repayment which drive the currency value up and down are kept in check by algorithmic adjustments to "interest rates" creditors face when borrowing to meet margin calls and "taxes" which make debtors have to buy even more coin to meet payment obligations. (This still isn't going to work unless credit creators are regulated though...)

whether it's still a cryptocurrency after all that is another question....

</comment><comment><USER11> maybe it does have a stable value, we just need to wait out initial short-term phase of euphoric speculation:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tulip_price_index1.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tulip_price_index1.svg)

</comment><comment><USER12> Everything is about speculation, so you cannot prevent it, unless you have a large quantity of reserve tokens and act as a central bank...

</comment><comment><USER13> You can't design a cryptocurrency with stable value. At least not without a central monetary authority anyway. A key selling point of cryptocurrency is that it (theoretically) exists outside of the influence of a central authority. But this very feature is the thing that will prevent it from ever having a stable value.

Because there's a limited amount of it, it's deflationary in nature. If a currency becomes deflationary, then it's not going to be a currency for very long. People will hoard it instead of using it in their everyday transactions.

Cryptocurrency gets most of its value from speculation. In the case of Bitcoin, at least, that speculation is spurred by some people's belief that it has importance as a potential future currency. It doesn't matter that they're wrong. Their beliefs are still enough to boost the price of the speculative asset. Then you have this cycle where its price will crash every so often. If Bitcoin's price ever stabilizes, it will be because most people have given up on it as a currency.

Once the hype dies down, the question is whether it can do what gold did and become a valuable asset with a relatively steady price. Will there be fringe Bitcoin bugs like there are gold bugs who create enough demand for it to keep the price from going to zero? I guess we'll see.

At its core, Bitcoin is gold. And if you want an answer to why we'll never be using Bitcoin as our currency, ask yourself why gold is never again going to be our currency. It's the same answer. Without a central authority, you can't keep the price stable.

Now we could certainly construct a credit structure on top of Bitcoin. So instead of trading Bitcoin directly, we trade IOUs for Bitcoin. That's what we did with the gold standard. If they're "just as good" as Bitcoin, then it effectively increases the circulation of Bitcoin-denominated assets and can help keep prices stable.

You'd of course need some kind of trusted authority to tweak various macroeconomic variables to ensure that the value of Bitcoin (or Bitcoin IOUs) remains stable. But it's _possible_ at least for a while. You just have to give up one of the core principles of cryptocurrency.

Eventually you're going to have so much money circulating and so little actual Bitcoin to back it up that the system is going to become too brittle and you'll have to leave the Bitcoin standard.

Hey look. You just bootstrapped another fiat currency.

Bitcoin is gold. It can be manipulated by governments just as much as gold can. And it has just as much potential to be a real currency as gold does. For a long time there, we were lucky and we were mining new gold at roughly the rate required to keep prices stable. No such luck with the cryptocurrencies. And even if you manage to hit on the right rate of currency minting today, the future looks different.

<comment><USER7> Deflation/Austrian economics isn't a core principle of cryptocurrency; it's just a historical accident that Bitcoin works that way and it's also helpful for scams.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Unhappy with current position. – Need Advice - <AUTHOR> Hello HN! I am currently working as a C#/.NET dev and have been at my current company almost 2 years.
This is my first position out college, and while I have learned a lot I am beginning to feel un-challenged, bored, and annoyed.
I have relayed this all to my manager (who has only been here for 1.5 months), and I have gotten no feedback. I have also been waiting 5 months for a review (I first asked for it five months ago). The lack of focus/goals at any level in the company is what is most annoying (Aside from my almost 1 hour 45 minute round trip commute each day).
All I really want is to work on software that helps others, keep learning, and work with other intelligent people (I previously worked with 2 other devs, but I am the only dev at the company again).
I just feel like this position is stagnating, and I don't want to feel that way any longer. I'm not sure if I should begin looking for new jobs, or just stick it out and see how it plays out. Any advice is appreciated. <comment><USER2> Is there a position within your company that you'd like to be in (some other team doing more exciting work, etc)? If so, try to figure out what it'd take to move there. If not, get a new job.

But before doing that, do the following (which you should be doing anyway):

* learn about new things in your / neighbouring fields that interest you - this is a career where you want to be learning all the time, and much of the learning will be on your own time/dime (the upshot is that you don't need to slog thhrough new things - breadth is more important than depth)

* keep an eye on the potential new jobs (interesting new jobs or companies), maybe apply to a few places to see how far you go

* increase your visibility; blog, relevant activity on hn/reddit/stackoverflow/quora/..., source code examples or open source contributions, community involvement (organising / speaking on events), screencasting your coding sessions - whatever sounds more fun to you

Doing these three will help make you more valuable (and more _clearly_ valuable) to the company so that you might have an easier time of convincing your manager(s) to give you more challenges/responsibility, and if that fails, you'll be in much better position when looking for a new job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not particularly - since I work for a non-tech company doing dev work it's pretty stale and the open positions are unrelated to dev work.

</comment></comment><comment> user-on1 Well there is very little information here, but i will just throw my suggestion in the bucket.

You already have 2 years of experience it should be perfect for you to start applying to other companies.

There are tons of jobs out there, you can be sure that if you are proficient you will clear 6 out of 10 interviews.

Also if you are bored n have lot of time and energy left after work you can learn a few new technologies like Cloud, AI etc,. in this time and accumulate tons of skills and then make a big switch with big package and company of your dreams and stuff. In this case you may decide to spend 3 to 6 months more in same company irrespective of how it goes.

But while you switch you also have to pay attention to make sure same issues doesn't crop up in the new place.

You can ask enough question during interview to filter the right job.

You can make a list of priority items and if the current job doesn't match more than 50% of them simply switch.

Don't be too confused, Try to get a better opportunity and if you can just go for it. You cannot switch companies every few months but making a first switch at 2 years is definitely not bad.</comment>


A few things I've learned about computer networking - <AUTHOR> https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/05/things-ive-learned-networking/ <comment><USER2> Good list indeed.

Networking is a weird animal in computer science. It is very historically charged as it is all based on series of protocol that are designed to ensure retrocompatibility.

The amount of knowledge and theory to know before being proficient on networking layers is huge compared with the traditional API//Frontend//Backend programming stunts.

Being really good at networking requires a ton of knowledge and a mind around distributed systems and the ability to juggle around all layers.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good list, but consider many items on that list that requires unencrypted traffic, those stillare usefull at the momemt but with https/http2 and DNScrypt lots of debugging tools that got me interested in the intersection of networking and applications are useless.

It's hard to keep up with the current way to decrypt applications specific traffic, unless that is your job, and I do not think this is going to get much easier for amatuers anytime soon.

<comment><USER4> > many items on that list that requires unencrypted traffic, those stillare > usefull at the momemt but with https/http2

TLS is an encryption layer around the protocol (whether HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, etc). It's still very useful (necessary IMO) to understand the protocol to build an application on top of it. Whether or not traffic is tunneled through TLS in production (and it should :)).

<comment><USER3> Yes, but the tools become TLS inspection tools instead of general protocol inspection tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to be a fly on the wall when the author starts to look at BGP.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also would add mtr to the "tools" list.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think a nice addition would be familiarity with the OSI model. It can be really useful having an understanding of it, at least a rough one, when trouble shooting network issues.

<comment><USER8> This post seems to have been downvoted. Why?

Having a knowledge of the OSI model has been beneficial in all sorts of ways since I was first exposed to it decades ago.

I have even used one implementation of it actively and in a commercial environment. What we were able to do with at the time, made all other networking protocols seem very primitive (including the tcp/ip set of protocols and IBM's SNA).

It may have not survived in the long run, but there is no guarantees about any system or product doing so. It is still worth understanding the basics of it though.

[Edit for readability]

<comment> Const-me > downvoted. Why?

Networks have changed a lot since 1983. The only good idea from that model is "you can build a higher-level protocol on top of a lower level protocol". Nowadays software ate every level of the OSI model including physical layer, and the idea of composing these layers is kinda obvious because that's how people design complex software.

> has been beneficial in all sorts of ways

Having a knowledge of the OSI model has been beneficial to me in only one way, when someone asked me about it on a job interview.

> It is still worth understanding the basics of it though.

I know the basics, but I think that for younger people the OSI model is mostly useless. There's modern stuff to demonstrate that principle of composability of protocols, e.g. websocket/http/tls (all of them are based on each other and yet all are on the same OSI level 7).</comment></comment></comment>


Magic Leap Secures $542M Led by Google - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/21/magic-leap-tech/ <comment><USER3> Looking through their most recently filed patents, it looks like their main innovation is a HMD device that uses a combination of a high speed digital zone plate, a masking device, and a traditional imaging device.

For each eye, there is an imaging device (720p/1080p resolution for example) that displays an image. In front of the imaging devices there are high speed mask device (LCD?) that blocks off portions of the image that are not at the current focal depth. The focal depth cycles quickly between 12 different values and easily driven by the z-buffer values from the renders. The light not blocked by the mask is partially collimated and guided towards the eye via optics and then a high resolution high speed digital zone plate is used to refocus the light at different depth levels using diffraction. The mask and zone plate update together at 12X (360Hz-720Hz) the rate of the image device (30-60Hz). The result is that pixels that should be at different depths are actually focused near that depth and the eye blends the 12 partial frames together to form one image that has a range of depth in it.

I expect they are using off the shelf parts for the imaging device (and maybe mask LCD) but manufacturing their own digital zone plates since they need super high resolution and high speed for those (at least 360hz) but only on- off values not color or grayscale. This is probably where a bit of their money is going.

If it works, you could get high resolution images per eye, and also see 12 buckets of depth so your eye would refocus to see things close up versus far away. This could potentially create a pretty good impression of something existing close to you, compared to existing AR where all objects are focused at a single fixed depth and there is a conflict between accommodation and stereopis cues.

Of course this is one of the patents filed, it could be just an idea they decided to file on, not what they are actually building.

<comment><USER4> > In front of the imaging devices there are high speed mask device (LCD?) that > blocks off portions of the image that are not at the current focal depth.

It would be interesting to see how this works in practice. The eye can't focus on something that close. For an example, imagine a speck of dirt on your glasses - it shows up as a blob in your vision, not as a dot.

<comment><USER5> The eye is not focusing on that depth. The light coming out of the lens or LCD would be collimated / diffracted to form an image on the retina that appears to originate from a specific distance (or in this case, many different distances, multiplexed together).

Just like with Google Glass, where the image appears to be at a distance and your eyes do not focus on the actual screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, the biggest headline out of this not being mentioned is that half a billion in VC was just raised in Hollywood, FL.

I'm building a startup community in Myrtle Beach, SC and Paul Reynolds is one of the founders of Startup.SC with me. Paul is involved in Magic Leap as a director, and after working remotely, just moved there last month. It's very exciting to see unfold!

It drives home the fact that a startup can make such headlines not only outside Silicon Valley, but even outside other well known northeast tech metros. It's the sort of news I feed on to explain scalable startup growth potential: Magic Leap has done a spectacular job attracting talent from all over the country. There are worse places to be than the Fort Lauderdale, FL area.

I watched the revival of the Boston startup scene while involved with TechStars, DogPatch labs, etc. from 2009-2012 and although we certainly don't have the same resources, I'm doing my best to apply those principles to the Myrtle Beach market. I hope to one day have a startup come through Startup.SC which can also demonstrate the ability to attract talent and investment dollars to a coastal city not known for tech, and demonstrate that a company can thrive!

Edit: And not going unnoticed in Miami: [http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article2942814.html](http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article2942814.html)

<comment><USER7> That single $542mm investment in Florida almost exactly doubles all VC investments made in the state year-to-date. [1]

Here's how I would read this if you're not located in a major tech hub where VCs readily fund companies and have offices:

1\. Attracting a $500mm investment from Google or any other institutional investor is an outlier case regardless of where you're located.

2\. You need to have groundbreaking, path forging technology and an amazing team to get on the radar when you're far outside of a major tech hub.

[1] [http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/10/17/interactive-m...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/10/17/interactive- map-where-the-venture-capital-dollars-are-going/)

<comment><USER8> I think #2 is the salient point there and displaces #1.

Creating a "groudbreaking, path forging technology and an amazing team" is the outlier, not raising a half a billion in funding. If you can achieve the former, then your odds of the latter go up by many orders of magnitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > It's rare that a company can stay relatively secretive while raising a huge > amount of funding, but Florida's Magic Leap has managed that.

Only rare because journalists are extremely lazy by default, and need their stories pre-drafted and handed to them on a silver platter, which companies tend to do. Avoiding press is very easy, just don't do the journalists' job for them. :)

<comment><USER10> _" journalists are extremely lazy by default, and need their stories pre- drafted and handed to them"_

This seems to be a consensus opinion on HN. I have no idea if it's a majority opinion, but it's fairly typical. The "journalists are lazy/stupid/inept" argument generally misunderstands what journalists do, how they work, and how they pick (or, as is more often the case, how they're assigned) their coverage. If anything, it gives some journalists _too much_ credit, and for the wrong things.

I'm not a professional journalist, though I've written frequently for some major and minor publications. My typical process looks like this:

1\. Pitch a bunch of story ideas to my editor.

2\. Have 99% of those ideas rejected for various reasons: too narrow; too wonky; not enough meat on the bone [1]; not timely enough [2].

3\. Settle on a topic that is somehow deemed acceptably timely, broad, approachable to general audiences, and well substantiated by some degree of data or prior coverage.

The astute reader will start to see how objections [1] and [2] come into direct conflict. By definition, breaking something _new_ means covering ground that hasn't been covered before (or at least not often, or not in depth). But having prior substantiation often means being able to point to pre-existing coverage, as proof that your topic is of some interest to the public. [3] Also, you have to sort this all out on a deadline: anything from the end of the day to the end of the week, per story. (As an exercise: try investigating, substantiating, and beautifully composing an in-depth story in a single working day).

[3] The public, as typically defined, is a _very_ broad swath of readers. Even major tech sites, like TechCrunch, now have a very broad readership -- with highly varying degrees of technical sophistication, subject-matter expertise, and topical interests.

On the flip side, look at any of the blogs or publications that HN readers respect. Chances are, they write in greater depth. They are not afraid to get into the wonky, technical details of their coverage. They don't just give you charts and infographics; they give you their statistical reasoning. Niche publications can do this.

Broad publications theoretically can, but often choose not to, out of the belief that the effort/payoff ratio just isn't there. It's a lot of effort that will appeal to only a sliver of their readerships. Deep coverage, or investigative coverage, or breaking new ground, requires a shitload of hard work. It is _extremely_ tough on a standard deadline. It often requires a dedicated budget, and a broadly extended deadline, just to ensure that the writer(s) can afford to develop it.

Bottom line: I don't disagree with you. Most tech journalism sucks. That said, I don't blame the writers _per se_. They are the proximate end of a very long chain. Maybe some of them are capable of writing the stories we'd want to read. Maybe not. But they don't get the chance in the first place.

Before we impugn the entire field of journalism, let's be clear which publications, and which branches of journalism, we're impugning. It's silly to paint the whole field with one brush. I'm not saying the ratio of wheat to chaff is a good one, in the aggregate. But there is definitely wheat to be found. For every two dozen tossed-out, deadline-harried stories you find, I can point you to one or two amazing pieces of long-form writing. Sometimes the former and the latter are produced by the same writer. It all depends on the publication, its business objectives, and its beliefs about the demands of its average audience. The stuff you read in TechCrunch, for example, is meant to be consumed and immediately understood by almost everyone: you, your non- technical friend, and even your Baby Boomer parents. There's a certain type of material that fits that broad audience's tastes. Chances are, it's not the type of material that moves readers like us.

<comment><USER11> Journalist here. This man speaks truth. Pitching is 99% of the job, and I've lost count of the number of major stories my editors turned down, even when I had those stories as much as 3 years before major outlets. This is exactly how it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Definitely got my attention.

:) Funny thing I noticed, going through the job descriptions - <USER2> Requirements for HR Generalist[1]:

> While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required > to sit;use hands to finger, handle, or feel and talk or hear. The employee > is frequently required to reach with hands and arms. The employee is > occasionally required to stand;walk;climb or balance;stoop, kneel, crouch, > or crawl and taste or smell.

> The employee must regularly lift and/or move up to 10 pounds, frequently > lift and/or move up to 25 pounds and occasionally lift and/or move up to 50 > pounds.

> Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, > distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception and > ability to adjust focus.

[1] [http://www.magicleap.com/#/jobDescription/administration/l7&...](http://www.magicleap.com/#/jobDescription/administration/l7&post_id=1)

<comment><USER13> I did a web search on those sentences and they appear thousands of times in job descriptions, e.g. 133,000 results for the "Specific vision...focus" sentence. The "taste and smell" seems to appear mostly in food service jobs, where it makes sense.

These seem to be some sort of standard conditions that many jobs cut-and-paste from somewhere. I wonder what the original source is. But they seem very out of place for an HR position.

<comment><USER14> Those sentences probably have to do with the Americans with Disabilities(ADA) act. They are defining so called "essential job functions".

[http://www.natlawreview.com/article/importance-job- descripti...](http://www.natlawreview.com/article/importance-job-descriptions)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a bit strange how the CEO claims it's not AR while it looks completely like it.

> since it goes well beyond that and provides truly integrated, 3D digital > objects that looks as though they were physical objects, alongside the real > world

That's exactly the goal of augmented reality IMO.

<comment><USER16> I'm sure this is easier to explain than "we _actually_ do AR, everyone else is using the word wrong". (See also: "hacker".)

<comment><USER17> Who is using the AR word wrong?

<comment><USER16> The Ingress game is perhaps the most famous example of a company using "Augmented Reality" to mean something substantially more limited than Magic Leap intends.

Also, most of [http://mashable.com/category/augmented- reality/](http://mashable.com/category/augmented-reality/).

<comment><USER18> I'd say AR with limited functionality is still AR. This pool tables is also rightly called AR even though it doesn't even feature a screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As I said when there was speculation into an investment this size by Google, etc into Magic Leap:

An investment this size isn't designed to get "VC-size" (10x) returns. It is designed to block competitors getting access to the technology before Google.

<comment><USER20> The 10x factor generally only applies to early stage investments, VCs making later stage investments tend to need smaller returns because there's less risk involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://www.magicleap.com/#/wizards- wanted](http://www.magicleap.com/#/wizards-wanted)

Looks like they're heavily recruiting across the board.

        - FPGA / ASIC engineers;
        - Android developers;
        - Unity developers;
        - Raft of machine vision PhDs (eye tracking, iris recognition, 3D object tracking);
        - Deep learning experts;
        - Rapid prototyping experts;

I guess they have a super compelling prototype that needs a bunch of polishing before commercial release?

Exciting stuff.

<comment><USER22> I hope they're OK with remote work, and that they're open to paying more than the typical IT wage in Florida, because I can't imagine their talent pool will be substantial otherwise, being in Hollywood, and all.

<comment><USER23> This struck me too. The secrecy probably excludes remote work, so . . . they're going to have to pay massively to get the experience they apparently need down there. This is a rare case where relocating to SV may actually be a cost reduction measure.

<comment><USER24> I don't know. I can see it going both ways. Honestly, how many places sound this interesting to work at? Feels like Steve Jobs famous line about you can keep on making sugar water or you can change the world with us. It's hard for SV people to leave the Kool Aid but it wouldn't be too hard to pull anyone from a cold part of the US and/or already on the East Coast.

<comment><USER22> This company isn't targeting the SV "Kool Aid" crowd for engineering on the main product. Perhaps their web/mobile apps or other secondary products might target that crowd, but their core product is one that requires hardware and software teams working together, with the software teams implementing systems (applications or even lower level) programming, not fad driven JS-client-on- Ruby-backend web/mobile "apps".

There just isn't enough such talent especially in Hollywood for them to attract it locally. By the same token, the tech industry there in general isn't strong enough to be attractive to someone coming from a tech-rich area like the Bay (or even Chicago or New York). I would not move to Florida for work without some significant salary and stability guarantees, because in the event the company goes belly up, relocates to a place I couldn't/wouldn't follow, or terminates my employment the quality of the "fallback" jobs is atrocious (especially in comparison to the work apparently being done at this place).

<comment><USER24> "SV Kool Aid" crowd are people who will never leave the Bay Area because they believe it's the only place to be. They wouldn't move anywhere else - even a major secondary hub on the West or East Coast.

I also understand that you personally wouldn't take the risk and move. I just think that's a small sample size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Their technology trademark is 'Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal'. A lightfield camera has multiple lenses to record multiple focal points simultaneously. Have they found a way to reverse this concept, 'project' to a wearable an eye refocusable image? Their list of job openings leads to a lot of possibilities.

<comment><USER26> There's no theoretical reason this wouldn't be possible - there's been a lot of very cool work on lightfield technology. The best I remember was a display where by adding multiple LCD layers (3 I think) and calculating a high frequency distortion signal, you could achieve wide-field of view 3D TV, glasses-free, with pre-rendered images.

There's other work to do the same thing to the retina - throw a lightfield at it which simulates the proper wavefronts to focus a 3D image at a short distance.

Of course this is all kind of begging the question of what this company is actually doing: for example, the big problem not answered is where they get the portable processing power to make this work, and what the actual resolution is? The Oculus Rift already tells us 1080p is not enough and even 1440p will be imperfect.

Of course you could try to end run around the problem: I've been curious what you could do with 3-color lasers shone through an interferometer setup mounted on piezoelectrics, so you could add or subtract interference peaks by advancing the mirrors a few nanometers and then scanning the output over the eye (or, as one company is doing - using a DLP mirror chip). Focus that laser beam small enough, and you'd be addressing individual rod and cone receptors in the retina, granting infinite focus to any projected image.

EDIT: Looking at that jobs page, a laser and fiber optic engineer being top position seems very intriguing.

<comment><USER27> But the Rift has a very high FOV compared to what many AR applications require. If you only need to draw a relatively small AR object instead of drawing the whole FOV, 1080p goes a long way.

Kinda like the 1080p laptop screen in front of me is cleary enough, but stretching that to the whole FOV decreases the pixel density too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very interesting, I looked up the CEO to see if he had a Disney/Imagineering background, and was surprised to see I was familiar with his previous work, which was founding former public company MAKO Surgical (which ended up being acquired by Stryker). MAKO's product used a robot/surgeon hybrid + software for visualizing/planning surgeries for implanting joint replacements. Interesting career twist (edit: but one that makes a lot of sense)

edit: @glxc, completely agree, I just didn't know a lot about his background prior to seeing this news. Interesting guy.

<comment><USER29> He's not a roboticist or a film producer, he's a technologist

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'll go ahead and be that guy...

It's absurd that a company is raising a half-billion dollars in _venture capital_.

So much opportunistic capital tied up in one place makes zero sense, regardless of how good this venture may be.

<comment><USER31> As others have pointed out, it's unlikely that the company needs the money and this is more about denying competitors the technology before Google gets their hands on it.

<comment><USER30> Right, I get that. That's why the company _wants_ the capital. It's impossible for any young company to _need_ this sum of money at once. But it doesn't justify the market giving it to them.

The ultimate effect is the entire market got denied a substantial amount of capital (not just ML's competitors) in order for a single entity to gamble it.

That's irresponsible of everyone, founders and investors included. Either acquire, go public, or JV to secure an opportunity. Why sap such a huge swathe of capital from the opportunistic ecosystem?

<comment><USER31> These are very intelligent folks we're talking about, I'm sure there is a rational explanation.

<comment><USER30> I hope there is. Intelligent folks also run Wall Street and Washington but both of those systems are undeniably terrible. Perhaps this is different.

<comment><USER31> I don't think that's a good example. For all the angst around them online, they both have their redeeming qualities if you actually interact with either.

<comment><USER30> I know people who work on Wall Street and I know people who work in the White House. They are some of the most brilliant people I know.

That doesn't make the systems they collectively run any less corrupt or terrible than they are.

You originally said:

> These are very intelligent folks we're talking about, I'm sure there is a > rational explanation.

If the examples I mentioned aren't good, then logically, _there may not be_ a rational explanation.

But in any case, I think all 3 situations are quite similar. VCs are probably just as smart as the top people in finance and politics, yet they often appear stupid from the outside. It's actually quite intriguing. If I were a researcher, I'd definitely want to investigate this further...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There's a neat discussion on Oculus Rift forums about this company and speculation that it may be based on light field displays.

[https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1...](https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10449)

</comment><comment><USER33> " _artificial, but extremely realistic images .. projected directly onto a user's retina_ " launching without predecessors as a commercial product "fairly soon" would be quite a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER34> See my previous comment about what their technology might be: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452013)

</comment><comment><USER35> Why didn't they give $500 million to Meta? Seems cooler to me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJNnX3OaCTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJNnX3OaCTY)

This is the one I found from a few years ago for Magic Leap: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOW3b7YmeKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOW3b7YmeKk) Maybe they have googles now or improved it somehow.

<comment><USER36> Seems cooler? Magic Leap didnt even properly presented their technology, so how can you know?

If they gave $500 million to this company it must mean it is either better or have better perspective. As simple as that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> They have an app on the App Store called Hour Blue, which they had run as a demo at Comic Con a few years back, in conjunction with string labs. It doesn't seem to work for me in the iPhone 6 though. You watch a video of the demo if you search on YouTube however. The demo was a basic augmented reality example. I'm assuming, with an investment of this size, they have achieved something far more substantial.

</comment><comment><USER38> AR is okay, but it will probably be gimmicky for a long time before it's useful. VR is the closest thing we have to the Holodeck, and it's almost here. I thought Google loved Star Trek. It shouldn't be ignoring VR.

<comment><USER15> It's already useful. See [http://augmentedev.com/](http://augmentedev.com/) (Well, it's not a really funny application of AR, but I wouldn't call it gimmicky)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Really love that they actually try to sell a vision and pull through with it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Did anybody notice the typo on the company page? "It is biomimetic, meaning it respects how we are function naturally as humans (we are humans after all, not machines)."

<comment><USER23> I was more struck that it misrepresented what biomimetics is.

There are interesting biomimetic things in display tech derived from butterly wings, which the wikipedia page conveniently mentions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetics#Display_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetics#Display_technology)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Was anyone else's antivirus software triggered by their website? Avast thinks http//www.magicleap.com/js/app.js is malware.

<comment><USER42> It's just an angular app. False positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Interesting that disney didn't invest, seems like they are right in their backyard and the potential to use this in a theme park....

</comment><comment><USER44> read the article, visited their website, watched their video.

still haven't a clue of what they are doing. maybe i'm a moron. can someone shed some light on what _exactly_ they are getting $542M for?

<comment><USER45> I'll take a guess and say that the hidden killer app is porn.

<comment><USER46> haha!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why didn't Google just buy Meta?

</comment><comment><USER48> i only half read the article but i'm still gonna call color</comment>


Hewlett Packard buys ArcSight security software firm - <AUTHOR>

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11287478 <comment><USER2> Hardware companies buying security software companies. Looks like it's the new trend. Now is a good time to own a security software company, but probably too late to start one.</comment>


BSD – The Dark Horse of Open Source (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070114093427179

<comment><USER2> "Note/Disclaimer: This discussion is limited to likely effects under Australian law. Some of the arguments made are of a generic nature and might be profitably applied in other common law jurisdictions, such as the UK and the US – but, then again, they might not."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a result of a discussion I had earlier today, the linked article, and a somewhat related piece published by the SFLC in 2007[1], I now feel more confused than I ever have been about the obligations imposed by the 3-Clause and 2-Clause BSD licenses[2].

Let me pose a hypothetical situation – I would very much appreciate informed feedback from the HN community:

 _Suppose Project A is licensed under 2 or 3-Clause BSD, and includes that license text at the head of each of its source code files. Now suppose Project B's source code is derived from Project A's source code, but the maintainer of Project B wishes to use a different license. In an effort to avoid confusion, Project B has that different license text at the head of each of its source code files, while Project A 's original license text has been moved off to a file bundled in Project B's source distributions, e.g. "licenses/ORIGINAL- PROJECTA-LICENSE.txt". Assume that Project B is properly a derivative work, i.e. exclude the case where B only includes trivial changes to A's sources.

Would Project B be in compliance with the "retain" language in clause #1 of the 2 or 3-Clause BSD license? Is there any case law to that effect or to the contrary?_

Additionally, it seems some projects have started including extra notices in proximity to their BSD licenses. One example off the top of my head is Google Polymer:

[https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/blob/master/banner.txt](https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/blob/master/banner.txt)

"This code may only be used under the BSD style license found at [http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt"](http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt")

The actual text of Polymer's license is boilerplate 3-Clause BSD:

[http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt](http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt)

But what are the legal effects of such a notice with respect to derivative and combined works? Is the appearance of a BSD license deceiving in this case, and what's really being imposed is a subtle form of copyleft? That's a genuine question, not intended to be inflammatory.

[1] [https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non- gpl-c...](https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl- collaboration.html)

[2] [http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause](http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause)

[&] [http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause](http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause)</comment>


Ask HN: What does HN think about ads on the iOS App Store? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't like them. In a lot of cases you search for a well-known & nice app and the ad is about an unknown knockoff.

Sometimes they also advertise outright scams (like apps that promise something impossible under a "free" trial subscription which becomes very expensive past the trial, the idea being that people would uninstall the app when they realise it doesn't work but forget to cancel the subscription) or snake oil like antivirus (which is impossible to implement given how iOS app sandboxing works) or VPNs with dubious privacy policies (if they even have a policy at all).

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to think Apple makes money from selling expensive hardware. Them trying to make money from me without giving an option to download another App Store seems an desperate move, very disturbing indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I hate them. It seems so beneath Apple.</comment>


Ask HN: Which 2FA app do you use for your iPhone? - <AUTHOR> A while ago I switched to Authy for iPhone for handling my 2FA since it has a slick UI and offered a few additional features, but for a while I've been frustrated with the slow speed that the app has: I only have about 10 different accounts but it takes about 1 second to switch to a different account than the one currently displayed. The slow speed of the app has increasingly made me consider switching to a different app. I know that Google Authenticator exists, but I from what I remember it didn't have backups or Touch ID (or pin) integration, which I really like about Authy. Should I go back and check out Google Authenticator, or are there other 2FA apps that HN recommends? <comment><USER2> I also use Google Authenticator but find the UI breaks down after a dozen accounts (I have 30+). 1 Password also supports adding TOTP but that sort of violates separating password from the second factor…so I use it only for accounts whose loss would be annoying but not devastating.

I keep manual backups of the TOTP codes for all accounts, using a QR reader to decode the QR code they give out and saving the result in an encrypted file.

A variant of the Google Authenticator source code is available at [https://github.com/google/google- authenticator](https://github.com/google/google-authenticator) but is not what's on the iOS/Android app stores.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Google Authenticator. It's actually more pertinent now after some recent hacks. People are calling cellphone providers and getting access to other people's simcards. Then they try to hack any accounts that use SMS our Authy 2FA. (Authy because it's tied to your phone, but google authenticator isn't).

</comment><comment><USER4> LastPass Authenticator. It has Touch ID and pin support, plus the push notifications feature it has is really convenient. You can argue about the security concerns of using LastPass in the first place, but that's a different discussion IMO.

</comment><comment><USER5> Authenticator by Matt Rubin [https://appsto.re/us/ChQQT.i](https://appsto.re/us/ChQQT.i)

Open source, lightweight, extremely small app size

</comment><comment><USER6> Just tried my Authy and switching between accounts is instantaneous on a 2 year old smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER7> OTP Auth [1]

It adds intelligent features over Google auth, including encryption of the database, and lets you break down into folders - which makes it infinitely more usable than Authenticator once you've accumulated enough sites.

I irritate very fast from apps that use 4 clicks when 2 would have done, or add other needless steps or hurdles. After around a year of flawless use I can't think of a single aspect that irritates. That's exceptionally rare for me!

It doesn't have ads, even in the free version. I gladly paid, even though I didn't need the few extra features the paid version adds. I just wanted to support very good software. There's a macOS version too, which I haven't tried.

Authy, on the other hand, was uninstalled before adding even one 2FA as it wanted phone and email before allowing you to do anything at all.

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth-two-factor- authenti...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth-two-factor- authentication-for-pros/id659877384?mt=8)</comment>


Fake Bus Stops For Alzheimer's patients in Germany (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theiacp.org/About/Governance/Divisions/StateAssociationsofChiefsofPoliceSACOP/CurrentSACOPProjects/MissingAlzheimersDiseasePatientInitiative/AlzheimersSuccessStory/tabid/1007/Default.aspx?id=1665

<comment><USER2> In a way I find this kind of manipulation tragically sad, but in reality the true tragedy is the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's. I'm glad nursing homes have figured out a way to mitigate some of the problems until scientists can cure or prevent Alzheimer's for good.

<comment><USER3> The only "tragically sad" part is the fact that most people in developed nations end up in institutions, rather than being cared for by their families.

If you want to see "tragically sad," volunteer at any nursing home in the US with a dementia/Alzheimer's ward. It's a prison where everyone's on death row, the only difference is the food sucks.

What they're doing by going along with their delusions is offering these elderly people more peace in their confusion. Interrupting a delusion abruptly is like slapping a baby for crying - they can't help their situation and limitations and they won't understand the punishment.

<comment><USER4> Looking after someone with dementia is a full time job which is very emotionally draining and people can live many years with dementia. A lot of people could not afford to look after their loved ones, economically or mentally.

I imagine you'll quit your job when the time comes to look after your parents?

If I ever get dementia I'd like to be euthanasied, rather than have my children suffer through it.

<comment><USER5> > I imagine you'll quit your job when the time comes to look after your > parents?

One of my dad's coworkers did exactly that. He gave up his high paying six- figure job to go back to India to take care of his dad.

<comment><USER4> I know that some people can do this and good on them for doing it, but not everyone will be in the position to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This made me pause and think about what might be needed when I get old. Will the nursing home need to have a vintage Macbook seeded with data from The Internet Archive so I can obsessively check Hacker News and Twitter to see if anything is "new"?

<comment><USER7> Make it in advance, and make it in C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT, but that is one _hell_ of a hierarchical URL

<comment><USER9> They use DotNetNuke, a god awful CMS running on ASP.NET WebForms. Together with Umbraco, it's the most popular open source CMS in the Microsoft world. It's really sad.

You can access the page (internally called a "tab") by its "TabId", for instance: <http://www.theiacp.org/tabid/1007/Default.aspx?id=1665>

or, just by using query string parameters: [http://www.theiacp.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1007&id=1665](http://www.theiacp.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1007&id=1665)

DotNetNuke uses a system similar to Joomla (at least I think so) where a page is composed of instances of modules that are placed inside "panes", these panes in turn are defined by the theme a given page uses.

Alas, I guess they have a custom news module where an article can be accessed by supplying an id parameter in its query string.

<http://www.theiacp.org/tabid/1007/Default.aspx?id=1660> will point to a different news article. It's technically still the same page however.

<comment><USER10> Oh god, I hate DNN. I had to use it for my fraternity's site when I was redoing it because one of the alumni is the director of training for it. The sad part is he would never respond or help. That thing was such a pain to use. Trying to actually get into the nuts and bolts (css, html, js, ect.) of any of the pages was horrible.

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry you had a difficult time reaching me and working with DotNetNuke. Anyone else having trouble trying to learn/use DNN, feel free to email me at email@example.com or call me at 650-288-3153

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A discussion from 2008:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209955>

A lot of the current post seems to be taken straight from there. Compare, for example:

> in Alzheimer's patients their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the > long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign > and remember that waiting there means they will go home.

with Goebel's quote:

> 'Their short-term memory hardly works, but the long-term memory is still > active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting > there means they will go home.'

</comment><comment><USER13> In Switzerland, a virtual train is used for the same purpose:

[http://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/bern/Pflegeheim- realisier...](http://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/bern/Pflegeheim-realisiert- ZugfahrSimulator-fuer-Demente/story/20599776)

(Link leads to a German article.)

</comment><comment><USER14> They also have these in the US. My grandfather was in a home that had a whole 1940s small town-type setting in the backyard area complete with bus stop, sidewalk, and a little bit of fake street.

<comment><USER15> That sounds beautiful. Can you give us a link with more info?

<comment><USER14> I can't seem to find a link. It wasn't very large. Maybe 8 feet by 20. But it was just enough to make it feel like the way things used to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was a good radiolab podcast about this:

[http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab- blog/2010/mar/23/the-...](http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab- blog/2010/mar/23/the-bus-stop/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't tell whether I find this crushingly sad or not. On the one hand, I cried like a baby at the end of the Notebook. On the other hand, this basically reminds me of what it's like dealing with my 2 year old daughter.

Is it necessarily a tragedy that someone's mind dies before their body does? It's undoubtedly painful for those waching - but for what reason?

I guess "potential" isn't tragic (ie. my daughter will eventually become a completely coherent adult) where as this kind of mental decline is like some sort of extreme nostalgia that basically picks out every sense of loss we've ever felt and makes it resonate like a tuning fork.

<comment><USER18> A story that turns that crushing sadness to 11 is Part Four (The Scholar's Tale) in Dan Simmons' "Hyperion", where a young woman catches a strange sickness that has her age backward - each morning when she wakes up she's physically two days younger and has lost one more day of her life memories. I think it's the saddest thing I've ever read.

<comment><USER19> The med industry would love the technology to make that possible.

Just think 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' with some extra rejuvenation added for fun!

I would gladly write some stuff in a diary and go back to 12 years old.

<comment><USER18> Completely different scenario. In Hyperion, it's a _constantly repeating_ process.

SPOLERS AHEAD

The girl tries to keep herself updated via a diary for years, but eventually the information about this life she lived but can't remember becomes overwhelming (requiring hours to digest and come to terms with, repeated every day) and too disconnected from what she does remember. She asks her parents to simply lie to her and act as if nothing had happened and it really were the day after the one she last remembers (i.e. one day earlier for every day that passes) and there's just some unexpected problem that prevents her from going to school, meeting her friends, have a birthday party, etc. (since it's SF, it's possible for the parents not to age).

The parents agree, since watching their daughter struggle with that mind- boggling revelation every day anew had been painful, but the resulting charade is in some ways worse, especially after the mother dies in an accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Such stop was used as a trap for "patients" escaping from elderly home in a short movie Harvie Krumpet. I highly recommend to watch it, it's only 22mins long and can be found on Youtube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouyVS6HOFeo>

</comment><comment><USER21> Given the number of people on here who appreciate a good life hack, has anyone got any ideas for other solutions? My family's currently going through the to home or not to home question. Arguments for standard solutions are essentially:

\- A care home offers full time protection, but displaces the person from their familiar environment. Some care homes also don't attend their patients but focus on making a profit; though we hope that by visiting often and looking at existing patients we can get an idea of which ones are suitable. It costs money, but the money in this case comes from my Nan's savings, and she's not going to be spending it on anything more than basic living costs anyway. My family don't need the money, so though in some cases inheritance is a concert (i.e. people save up through their lives to provide for their family even in death), that's not a concern for our situation.

\- Leaving the person in their own home seems the nicest but least practical option. Having family members or carers visit frequently to keep an eye on the person adds in some security, but family can't be there all the time (we're talking a 90 minute drive there in good traffic; so 3 hours round trip) and carers aren't immediately recognised so can seem an intrusion to the sufferer, often leading to stressful confrontations.

\- Having the person move in with their children gives full time protection by people who know and love them, but strips their children of freedom (their lives essentially becoming that of full time carers with the added depression of watching someone they love fade away).

On top of the above there are also internal family conflicts; for example my aunt is pushing for the state to fund any care solution (by not doing anything to help ourselves so the state acts as a catch statement) whilst my mum feels we should do all we can as well as taking what the state offers - but both working together (i.e. my mum & aunt have been given responsibility over my nan's care and assets on the condition they use those assets to my nan's best interest - trying to squeeze more out of the state isn't in her best interests, but may mean that my mum & aunt would lose their rights because by not using my nan's assets they're being irresponsible; the state could then take control of those assets and make all decisions without my mum or aunt's input).

Given all of these factors (and I'm sure you can all think of more), what other ideas can you come up with to improve the system to provide a solution which gives people security and dignity, whilst ensuring that families still maintain some freedom to experience their own lives?

</comment><comment><USER22> Meanwhile, the visiting tourist is wondering why no bus has come in hours... lol

<comment><USER23> Good point - this wouldn't such be a great solution if it caused problems for other people. That has been accounted for, though: the sign actually says "Sonderfahrten" (special trips) in the area where the bus number(s) would be, to indicate that there is no regular scheduled service.

<comment><USER24> Well, a tourist would probably not know German(as was my case when I visited Austria a couple of weeks ago)

<comment><USER25> Sure, but one would hope that they -would- know how to look to see whether the number for the bus they wanted was present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As terrible, sad and somewhat terrifying as it is, I find Alzheimer's disease quite fascinating. For those who want to find out more, Louis Theroux's documentary on the subject is very insightful.

</comment><comment><USER27> People knowing about fake stuff NOW, who will have Alzheimer in 40 Years, will NOT forget that there are fake bus-stops and stuff in the backyard. So they will know that nursing homes have fake stuff and they will complain about it.

My opinion about "it's sad": Alzheimer is not very sad for the pacients, but for their families. The patients, like my grandfather and grandmother, don't really know they _have_ it, and they don't really care. They still have 100% functional feelings and experiences. Just their short time memory will let them forget anything very soon. But old memories persists.

<comment><USER28> Sorry, but this a very limited description of the disease. Alzheimer's, like all dementias, is a disease of the _brain_ , not "just memory". It comes with a whole suite of symptoms and difficulties that are experienced directly by the patient, including depression, irritability, aphasias, and often physical limitations in advanced cases.

Long-term memory loss dominates public perception of the disease, but as anyone who works with dementia can tell you, most of the time it is as distressing for the patient as it is for the family.

<comment><USER29> Dementia is a part of my condition (which seems to be idiopathic, presenting symptoms of both Parkinson's and Huntington's). The motor difficulties and aphasic episodes are the things that I can't explain away, even though the explanations for other things are often quite convoluted. There was a period of some weeks a couple of years ago now when I amassed what must have been the largest privately-held collection of tomato ketchup in Canada, apparently by going shopping for food I needed and, having no idea why I was in a grocery store (or, for that matter, which store I was in) deciding that I was probably nearly out of ketchup anyway, and that I could get out of the store without embarrassment if I bought a bottle. I lost nearly thirty pounds that month, and wound up in the hospital twice due to extreme dehydration. Apparently I was not particularly nice to the people who were trying to help me, since I didn't need their damned help anyway, and they were trying to poison me. Things are considerably better now with medication, but there are still times when I find myself completely lost in what should be familiar territory. And I'm no longer really attached to anybody; it's like that part of me is missing now, and I can't sustain anything like caring. I don't know how much of the depression and irritation is part of the pathology and how much is just frustration and fear (terror, really) that never really goes away. Sometimes I think that if there is ever a root cause found and a cure effected, it would take me many years before I would trust normal life again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I assumed it was to be parsed as "(fake bus) stops" but it turns out they've merely gone to the lengths of "fake (bus stops)"!

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm a med student. I remember this topic came up in our exam on ethics and philosophy.

<comment><USER32> Please elaborate on a few of these aspects (again!). Thanks if you do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I guess this is what goes as a "psychological hack".

Definitely interesting to see how you can play the same tricks on people as you can on machines as long as you know enough about how they work internally.

Interesting _and_ scary I guess. We all know how big corp is going to be spending billions on this to manipulate us all.

<comment><USER34>
        We all know how big corp is going to be spending billions on this to manipulate us all

That's more than a little hyperbolic. No matter how much money someone spends, while I'm sane I will not (cannot?) be manipulated to stand next to a fake bus stop.

Back on topic, my girlfriend works at a nursing home and she has often spoke to me about the residents being eager to go home, and just as in the article the residents often express their intent to find a bus stop. The approach my girlfriend takes is to tell them that the bus will arrive shortly, and they simply sit and wait in the home itself, waiting to be notified of the bus's arrival. Interestingly, some of the residents even think that the nursing home _itself_ is a bus, and in that case they tell them that their stop is just around the corner, and they happily sit and wait to alight from the "bus".

To me, the scariest thing is that occurence of Alzheimers will likely increase as medicine further increases the lifespan of our bodies, but medicine is rarely successful in increasing the lifespan of our brains. And with that I sincerely hope that by the time any of us are that old, euthanasia is no longer a taboo and is a socially-accepted norm.

<comment><USER35>
      "No matter how much money someone spends, while I'm sane I will not (cannot?) be manipulated to stand next to a fake bus stop."

I'm sure this doesn't apply to you specifically (nor anyone in the HN crowd), but your statement really made me think of this article. [http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-man-pranks- times-s...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-man-pranks-times-square- crowds-posing-a-fake-celebrity-article-1.1142640)

But to add some substance to this comment, let me add something. Be it marketing drivel or just the flurry of advertisements we see every day, we are being conditioned and manipulated. To a society where we need to buy to be happy, where you need Tide for clean clothes and McDonalds for happy children. Where brand names matter, and showing wealth is more important than fulfilling interests. Not to sound all hippy dippy, but I think it's naive to say that we aren't being manipulated.

I do want to also agree with your last point though. I'm amazed that in our current society that we have no "right to death". I too hope this changes by the time I start to turn.

<comment><USER34> You raise a good point about advertising, we are constantly bombarded with attempts to manipulate and coerce into specific ways of thinking. Even those who acknowledge this are likely still being manipulated, though more subtly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting. The nursing home where my grandma was, had a car in the courtyard for patients with dementia to sit in.

</comment><comment><USER37> I immediately thought of the end of the movie 'Ghost World' for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER38> I am actually living next to one (in Berlin)... It's interesting, because I never saw a single person there, I have no idea how successful it is here, but always wanted to ask.

</comment><comment><USER39> It is a compassionate approach.

</comment><comment><USER40> I can't wait for the google van to take me home.

</comment><comment><USER41> The broader question is: when is it ethical to deceive people for their own good? Only when they are suffering from severe dementia?

I deceived a psychotic person into taking an antipsychotic drug once, and I think it was probably the best thing I could have done, and at the same time, one of the worst things I've ever done.

</comment><comment><USER42> My grandfather was a railroad worker, replicating that would have been a bit more of a hassle.

<comment><USER43> If your in the area and he can make the trip, <http://www.oerm.org/> is cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if it will work in a decade or two, when people prior to Alzheimer's learn about the trick and would perhaps be subconsciously more suspicious.

Or more directly, do they keep doing this with the same patient?

</comment><comment><USER45> Some photos : [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schein- Bushaltestelle...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schein- Bushaltestelle_0009.JPG)

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe it's a German thing; it reminded me of "Goodbye Lenin!" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/>

</comment><comment><USER47> Love that kind of real life/mind hacks !

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish we had fake red lights in Germany, to keep all the crazy obedient bureaucrats occupied. The longer they wait at red lights, the fewer Wikipedia pages they can delete or create new tax forms.

</comment><comment><USER49> I read the title as fake-bus stops...

</comment><comment><USER50> _Germany and Europe_

Hmm...

</comment><comment><USER50> This reminds me of the old guy in Ghost World who waits for the bus that doesn't run anymore, until it picks him up at the end of the film.

</comment><comment><USER51> A mildly interesting old article that has nothing to do with anything. Am I on Reddit?

Edit: Yep, posted earlier today: [http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/yp94q/til_tha...](http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/yp94q/til_that_in_germany_there_are_fake_bus_stops/)

<comment><USER52> <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

_If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit._

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Reminds me of that joke: last week my doctor told me I had AIDS & Alzheimer's. I said, "Sh*t, at least I don't have AIDS!". :)</comment>


CodinGame – Games for Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://www.codingame.com/start <comment><USER2> I'm playing the puzzles for some time now (when I can afford the time), and I consider myself a relatively experienced dev (college + two years in the industry) and learning a new language (Scala) and just using plain Java. It's magnificent how I tend to overcomplicate everything with using lambdas, pattern matching, options, stream operations on collections now, banging my head on one liners, while some younger me would just make a couple of ugly loops (maybe even more efficient than the elegant solution) and just continue on. Not sure have I evolved or devolved.

</comment><comment><USER3> I signed up for this a while back and sent a message to their support. It took 5 days for them to get back to me. So I hope now they have raised money, they can get someone to respond quicker if they want to compete as they are in France and not San Francisco as it states on the website.

</comment><comment><USER4> So I've seen an increase in programming puzzle games released lately (but that may be just due to more indie games coming out in total). They are entertaining but the latter levels tend to suck up so much time to complete, and optimise!

Just to name a few: SpaceChem InfiniFactory Human Resource Machine TIS-100

Now I have to wonder how much time that could be devoted to actual programming - building and solving real world problems - this is soaking up? How much of it is useful training of logic and puzzle solving?

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone else seeing a bunch of artwork that they might not have the rights too(I'm pretty sure I saw Bastion on the homepage at one part)?

</comment><comment><USER6> Went through a few of the puzzles on Friday last week, it's pretty great for shaking out the cobwebs in languages you haven't used in a while.

I did have some issues with their IDE in the latest Chrome build when I first started it though. Not sure if that was because I was using it as a guest but, strangely enough, everything worked perfectly in Edge.</comment>


President Trump Is Ensuring That Americans Are Not Displaced by Foreign Workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-ensuring-americans-not-displaced-foreign-workers-using-federal-dollars/ <comment><USER2> I thought it was about improving education so professionals formed in the US could be more competitive.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is huge. Federal corporations going out of their way to hire H1Bs</comment>


Ask HN: How long does GoDaddy sit on a domain after it expires? - <AUTHOR>

I have a domain name in sight that has expired on Dec 16th but godaddy (previous owner registered on godaddy) continues to keep it as "This domain name expired on 12/16/2013 and is pending renewal or deletion". Is this normal ? I tried to click on "buy it" and it wants me to pay $70 for it. Is there a timeline by which the domain should be released or is this a godaddy trick ? <comment><USER2> This is a well-known process that most, if not all, registrars adhere. Use the googles.

When a domain expires, the registrant has a "grace period" in which they may renew it (at regular price) without penalty. IIRC, this is ~30-45 days.

After this, it goes into a "redemption period" (I don't remember how long this is) where it is basically in limbo. I believe that some/most registrars will still allow you to regain control of the domain during this stage, although at a _MUCH_ higher cost.

Eventually, the redemption period is over and there is a short period (5-7 days?) before the domain is finally released and available for registration by anyone.

FWIW, I just looked up a .net domain (these timelines sometimes vary by TLD) I had that expired 27-Oct-2013. It is currently still in the "redemption period". Same thing for a .org domain that expired on 28-Oct-2013.

I wouldn't expect for the domain to be released and available for you to purchase any earlier than 1-Feb-2014.</comment>


US Navy to ditch touch screen ship controls - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49319450 <comment><USER2> 400 comments in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668578)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Keep it simple stupid.</comment>


Out of Bethlehem: The Radicalization of Joan Didion - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/out-of-bethlehem

<comment><USER2> If anyone would like to be "radicalized" in a slightly different political direction, I would suggest visiting the real Bethlehem. Then try to reconcile the experience of the people living there with the politics of writers for the New Yorker (on both US and Israeli politics).

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh my god, I can't take this rambling book review style. Please save me from this pretentious focusless essay disguised as a book review.</comment>


Would You Pay $7,500 to Educate Your Kid Like Elon Musk's? - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/would-you-pay-dollar7500-to-educate-your-kid-like-elon-musks <comment><USER2> > _"I don't bemoan Elon Musk doing this kind of work," added Vasquez Heilig. > "I just wish he would have chosen instead to partner with Oakland or Alum > Rock, a school district that serves low income students in Silicon Valley. > There are a lot of equity concerns in the STEM field and he [had] a real > opportunity to make what he was doing a public good, rather than a private > good only certain people can access."_

Well it's in line with everything he does. If his fans think they're going to Mars they're going to be disappointed. Schools for the super-wealthy with a questionable curriculum, a bullet proof truck for civilians, fleeing from earth because of the evil AIs and collapse, I'm not exactly sure why people think Musk is inspiring some utopian vision given how dystopian this stuff is.I always got the same vibes from Andrew Yang and I don't think it's accidental that there's apparently so many young men on the internet who are obsessed with both. (the robots are going to replace all of us, just take your UBI and we'll move the cities up the mountains instead of fighting climate change etc)

I haven't seen it talked about much but there is a strange combination of extreme nihilism with superficial techno-optimism on top that's kind of scary in many ways, and very popular among the 'tech elites'.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Drawing on Musk's interests, the innovative curriculum had no language, > music, or sports lessons, but students would work on complex projects, such > as building battling robots, discussing nuclear politics, and planning how > to defeat evil AIs.

</comment><comment><USER4> So the school's application is to watch the video on their website titled "The Lake Conundrum" and give a response to the question asked.

[https://astranova.org/aaol](https://astranova.org/aaol)

I was wondering if anyone here would be up for watching the two minute video and giving their thoughts to the question asked at the end?

A tiny summary of the video is that it is about a hypothetical company that is polluting a lake and then tries to whitewash it to the town that lives near the lake. Seems like a "tragedy of the commons" type discussion.

</comment><comment><USER5> $7,500 is dirt cheap in comparison with state run public schools in the united states which sometimes boast per student costs rivaling harvard tuition.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yuck. The world needs more people like Elon Musk. It does not need "all the people" like Elon Musk.</comment>


PlatformIO IDE with Unified Debugger is out 100+ boards, zero-configuration - <AUTHOR> https://community.platformio.org/t/platformio-ide-2-0-beta-3-with-pio-unified-debugger/1867 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey friends,

We've just released next public beta of upcoming PlatformIO IDE 2.0. This version received a full support of [PIO Unified Debugger]([http://docs.platformio.org/page/plus/debugging.html](http://docs.platformio.org/page/plus/debugging.html)).

A support for other IDEs (Eclipse, VSCode, Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs) will be added soon.

Would be thankful for any feedback!

Regards, The PlatformIO Team</comment>


LaunchNotes raise 1.8M and makes public release notes platform free for all - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/26/launchnotes-raises-a-1-8m-seed-round-to-help-companies-communicate-their-software-updates/ <comment><USER2> Phenomenal product that solves some serious pain with the communications process around releases. Great team building another great product. Congrats LaunchNotes team!

<comment><USER3> Thanks a ton for your praise and support, @ewittman!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome product! Great way to ensure seamless internal and external communications around anything product release / launch related. Congrats!

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much, @tmoyal!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been looking for an easy and affordable way to share "what's new" with our customers. Finally a pricing that doesn't make this prohibitive for smaller startups.

<comment><USER3> Awesome this fits the bill, @jschumacher. We'd love for you to give it a try!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats to the LaunchNotes team. Been following the product for a few months now, looks like a solid product. Nice that they made embeds work on the free accounts!

<comment><USER3> Yes! We're super pumped about the embeds, @mfkp. We're also seeing a ton of user traction on them. Excited to make them free today!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats, LaunchNotes! I'm really loving this for release information sharing so far! It's changed how I keep my teams informed. Keep up the great work!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, @chuparkoff! We couldn't have gotten this far without your support along the way. Really appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a solid product. Tired of always having to duct tape this together everyplace I've worked.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice to finally have something that helps a problem I see in every team

<comment><USER3> Hopefully our new free tier is just what all of those teams need, @tnachen. Please let us know what they think!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rocketship company right here

<comment><USER3> To infinity... and beyond!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> great team and problem hits really close to home. congrats to them!

<comment><USER3> Thanks a ton for the support, @scootklein!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> incredible team solving a real pain point

<comment><USER3> Thanks, @cowboyvc. Onward and upward!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congrats, guys!

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much, @jsilvers!</comment></comment>


Can "Internet-of-Body" Thwart Cyber Attacks on Implanted Medical Devices? - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/thwart-cyber-attacks-on-implanted-medical-devices <comment><USER2> Ability to read data emitted from device is a different sort of "hacking" than ability to write data to the device in a malicious way to gain access or force an error. I don't like that the article conflated "cyberattacks on devices and hospitals" with "reading unencrypted data".

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, "reading unencrypted data" repeatedly enough can turn into "burning the battery out" which is a denial-of-service attack.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's how most of these devices operate. I think these unencrypted simple RF signals don't require any bidirectional comms or client negotiation steps -- but simply broadcast the data. I could be very wrong, but that's just what I thought.

<comment><USER3> It depends on the device. St. Judes device was vulnerable:

[https://static2.businessinsider.com/r-st-jude-warns-of- heart...](https://static2.businessinsider.com/r-st-jude-warns-of-heart-device- battery-issue-linked-to-two-deaths-2016-10?op=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps I am missing something but they claim that the solution is encrypting the RF signal but wouldn't this have an impact on device battery life?

Assuming that patients need surgery everytime a battery is replaced this seems like they are hand-waving a major lifetime design implication.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry for the useless comment but this is really fucking cool

</comment><comment><USER6> Can we all just agree there are places in which computers do not belong? Or if they do, they ought to be minimized. Implanted devices, nuclear plants, etc.</comment>


Analytic continuations: how to compute non-converging infinite sums (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/the-euler-maclaurin-formula-bernoulli-numbers-the-zeta-function-and-real-variable-analytic-continuation/?foo

<comment><AUTHOR> This submission is a dup of this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7078744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7078744)

I submitted it under this alternate title at the suggestion of an HN mod with whom I have been corresponding, but I encourage you to upvote the original submission (which is now un-killed) instead of this one.</comment>


Some Thoughts on Digital Manufacturing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nickpinkston.com/2013/01/some-thoughts-on-digital-manufacturing.html <comment><USER2> "So yes, you may democratize prototype-grade 3D printers, but then others will be make huge, fast printers that are able to beat your per-unit cost by an order of magnitude - but at high capital cost."

Fantastic point, and something that Wired, etc. don't account for when they write about the 3dp revolution.

Great article!</comment>


Ask HN: Jira, Trello, Sprintly, Asana or Something Else? - <AUTHOR> I've worked professionally as a software developer for close to ten years - and I still haven't heard a developer say that they're excited or outright like the project management/scrum/kanban tool they're using.
People seem to outright hate JIRA. They seem to like Trello a bit more but often say that it's lacking something - I used Sprintly years ago, but that also didn't seem to be perfect.
What is the perfect tool out there that you really like (if there is one?) - what are the shortcomings and things you would like to see the perfect tool have.. or doesn't such a thing exist because it simply comes down to each company's individual use case..
Curious to hear your thoughts! :) <comment><USER2> Most of these tools seem to exist more for the benefit of managers than hackers.

For small groups, I think I honest-to-goodness prefer TODO.txt in the top level of the relevant repository to _any_ tool. Otherwise, GitHub issues is a pretty nice lightweight-ish tool.

Lack of an explicit model of a "sprint" (which often seems to be where formal process starts to get reified in these tools) is a big plus in my book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting.. yeah a todo in its simplest form is not a bad idea :)

When you say "explicit model of a sprint" do you think about the whole start- date, end-date kind of thing per Kanban board? Or is it the kanban board itself that sort of leads to this formal process?

<comment><USER2> Good question. Kanban isn't something I've particularly experienced, but I'd be willing to believe that a simple Kanban board might be a useful level of coordination for some people. Although my inclination is to say that if you need a mechanism to track which stuff is being worked on, you might have either too many people, or excessively fine-grained tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I work as a lead developer at an enterprise that uses JIRA. This is a question very close to my heart.

JIRA is feature dense, but everyone hates it. The interface is complex and the learning curve is silly. We waste valuable hours fighting the tool. It was not made for software developers. It was a trouble ticket tool that treats software projects as if they were high priority catastrophes.

Trello is too malleable. Long story short, the question became, "Why don't we use sticky notes?" Sticky notes didn't work because we have 1 remote employee and a fistful of executives that demand involvement in tracking sprint progress (lolololo) but they are unwilling to sacrifice 10 minutes for standups or a trip downstairs to see the board.

At the end of the day, we spend time arguing about how to reduce friction for the development team and ignoring their needs because we already purchased JIRA licenses. If I started my own company, we would request features and track progress in the issue tracker of the source control product our devs chose. If project managers, scrum masters, execs, and other parties have a need for another project management tool they're welcome to use whatever integrates with the issue tracker.

The entire point of practicing agile development is to produce better software faster. Move decision making closer to the problem. Therefore, I don't understand why we can't manage our developers closer to the codebase. Every time they come up for air to the project management tool for someone else's benefit is a context switch that costs us. You wouldn't hire a mechanic to fix your car and tell him that he had to bring all of his tools to your garage to work.

If your clients or internal customers are using your issue tracker, they are actively showing you which features or bugs are impacting them the most. My experience is that JIRA, Trello or anything similar encourages you to create an interpretation layer for your customer's emotional responses. If you teach them to interact with your internal projects as if they were contributing to an open source project, you get a first person account of their priorities, and you may yourself with less empty stares around the room during product reviews.

</comment><comment><USER4> On a six-month contract I did in Cupertino, we started off with Pivotal. And we were very happy with what it provided.

However, Pivotal had decided to get out of the business of providing software that other people could install behind their firewall, and instead went to a pure SaaS model. So, the lost the business of a Fortune20 company that insists on running everything behind their firewall.

During the time I was there, I heard lots of discussions about alternatives, but nothing was considered satisfactory. One guy kept saying that we should just go ahead and choose Jira, because we all knew that is what management would force us to do regardless.

I never did hear what they finally chose. When my contract was up, I hightailed it back to Austin ASAP because CA was just way too bloody expensive.

</comment><comment><USER5> At work, we went from Asana to JIRA to Trello.

We stick to Trello because everyone in the company outside of Engineering team can also use it (nice & simple interface).

But I prefer to cut down the amount of human action any process. So I miss the JIRA-GitHub integration when using Trello. I could just mention the JIRA ticket ID in a PR and the ticket gets closed when the PR is merged. Such sweet integration.

I was looking forward to GitHub Projects when I heard about it since everyone in the company has a GitHub account. When I tried GitHub Projects, it felt so inverse to what I expected. I expected a GitHub Project to have many repositories instead of the current way (each project has many repositories). I'm hoping they change it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do PMs keep documentation around the features (high level, what's the purpose/function etc) in a separate tool than Trello? Or is that not a thing they do at all?

For Github Projects you mean each repository has many projects, but you wanted it to be each project could have many repositories, right? :) That does make it a lot harder, especially as what you work on grow bigger and span multiple repositories..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Check out clubhouse.io

It's slick and lightweight, yet very powerful. One of the very few tools I feel like just gets project management right.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've got a totally biases preference for Pivotal Tracker these days. It just kinda tells you what you're likely to get done each iteration. Really happy to not have the upfront commitment and ceremony of sprints in my life anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh. I meant to mention Pivotal as well in my original post - but I guess it slipped my mind :( That's what I used back in the day as well - and it seemed good, I can only imagine it has gotten better since

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Never underestimate the power of stickies and a wall. I'd do a very simple do/doing/done online board along with it when remote co-workers were involved.

IMO, Comparing between scrum and kanban is pointless. As long as you have good periodic retrospectives, you'll find the team correcting itself to what works the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you follow a certain process in retrospective, or do you more just sit and have an open-hearted conversation with the members of the team?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Localizer – Free open-source self-hosted crowd-translation platform - <AUTHOR> I've built https://localizer.dev last week when I couldn't find a solution that fit my needs. You can play with it live here: https://localize.todorant.com. <comment><USER2> What was you use case? Which formats does it generate?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just needed a simple place where I can store all of my translation strings and upload/download them over a simple API, as well as be able to send a link to whoever wants to help with translations.

It generates a simple JSON with all the translations — the article on how to set up Localizer contains example scripts (taken from my projects) on how this JSON can be parsed and converted into multiple formats :)</comment></comment>


Princeton's nanomesh nearly triples solar cell efficiency - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/142962-princetons-nanomesh-nearly-triples-solar-cell-efficiency

<comment><USER2> As usual, the numbers in the pop media news article are nonsense.

From the paper's abstract:

      In harvesting scattered light, the Omni acceptance can
      increase PCE by additional 81% over ITO-SC, leading to a
      total 175% increase (i.e. 8% PCE).

PCE is power conversion efficiency-- 100 watts of sunlight in, 8 watts of electricity out.

Very good for an organic solar cell. Pretty bad for a silicon solar cell. (which will do 27%) Absolutely terrible for a multijunction cell. (44%)

<comment><USER3> I looked for the actual paper but couldn't find it, can you post the link?

<comment><USER4> [http://www.princeton.edu/~chouweb/publications/223%20Chou_Ul...](http://www.princeton.edu/~chouweb/publications/223%20Chou_Ultrathin%20high- efficiency%20broad-band_OpticsExpress_2012.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If we combine all of these efficiency improvements to solar cells that have been posted to HN over the past five years, we can produce solar cells that are, oh, about 800% efficient.

Honest question: Have any of these reached production? I am genuinely curious to hear positive answers to that question.

<comment><USER6> A lot of improvements have reached production. Solar cells are much cheaper per watt than they were just a few years ago. However, as the first comment on that page explains, this article has some pretty confused numbers.

<comment><USER7> Thats because of economics of scale (read: cheap chinese stimulus money), not because of dramatic advancements in the technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Misleading title.

They have tripled the efficiency of a specific type of solar cell (organic photovoltaics), that is extremely inefficient to begin with. They are still almost an order of magnitude away from the efficiency of the best solar cells that have been built.

<comment><USER6> However, they are pretty cheap. Tripling the efficiency of a cheap solar cell without adding too much cost would be pretty noteworthy. Of course it remains to be seen if the decade-old manufacturing technique can really live up to the hype.

<comment><USER4> It'll be noteworthy when they get close to current cheap silicon PV cells (which they still need to get 3-4 times more efficient to reach). Keep in mind the efficiency they managed to achieve is only 4.4%. Not saying it isn't an important achievement, just that they have a very long way to go still to change anything in the current solar market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've found this graph handy as a primer for the trends of and relationships between the different major types of photovoltaic cells and their efficiencies: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff(rev121211).jpg>

It will put a lot of these news articles in perspective when you know that, for instance, a 100% increase in efficiency in a thin-film tech only means that it's approaching the efficiency of existing multijunction tech _(ignoring price-per-watt)_.

</comment><comment><USER9> Please please please please ban "extremetech.com" its this exact same annoying pattern over and over.</comment>


Ask HN: ListAndPlay.com - What should I change?  - <AUTHOR>

This app allows you to create & share Youtube playlists in an easy way, tries to simplify the whole process and give you a new Youtube experience.<p>What would you change about the concept/layout/functions? <comment><USER2> Initial thoughts:

\- Can't we make playlists in Youtube already?

\- Youtube's search auto-suggests, yours started playing a silly cartoon when I typed "a".

\- Controls are not where I would expect them (they are at bottom left in just about all other video sites in the world).

\- There's a weird dotted outline when you click on the video.

\- On the top right, there's a link to your profile, which I don't care about, but no link to register/login, which I do.

\- "Add" icon is rip-off of Netvibes. Does not add to Netvibes and is confusing.

\- How about supporting other video sites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback, here a quick reply:

\- Yes it is possible on YT, but you need to login and it is not fast enough for me. I want to find videos while I type and build a list.

\- Auto-suggest is already active, you can force exact search by hitting enter.

\- 90% Controls have influence on your search results, that's why I put them top left. They need to get attention but shouldn't distract the user, so that's why I chose top left (also the fullscreen looks nice with it)

\- The dotted outline is a DIV hack needed to catch mouse clicks for pause/play (since I can't capture clicks from the flash video itself)

\- Not having a login/register is one of the main advantages of this site, you build a list, share it and save it that way.

\- Add icon was not meant as rip-off from Netvibes (didn't knew they even used it), what do you suggest as a positive 'add this video' icon?

\- Supporting other video sites is in the pipeline!

<comment><USER2> Re: icon: I always liked explicit text on my buttons. I remember reading something about icons not being very user-friendly.

[http://uxmyths.com/post/715009009/myth-icons-enhance- usabili...](http://uxmyths.com/post/715009009/myth-icons-enhance-usability)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting, thanks! Right now I've got title tags set for the icons. I will try to convert the icons into short text buttons. Keep the feedback coming :)!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Quick link: <http://ListAndPlay.com></comment>