Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.abhijittomar.com/2018/10/19/google-business-claim-scam/ <comment><USER2> I do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there's a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I'm amazed Google doesn't bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a "prison".

What Google needs to do is lock information for verified businesses or businesses they're directly scraping from the Corp location pages.

<comment> black-tea Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.

<comment><USER3> It's not quite "pay", but Google have a notion of "points" to reward contributors, who they call local guides: [https://support.google.com/local- guides/answer/6225851?hl=en](https://support.google.com/local- guides/answer/6225851?hl=en)

Anecdotally it's mostly credits towards Google's own products, free storage, etc, but also freebies like subscriptions to the NYTimes Crossword, etc -- at least at the lower levels.

<comment><USER4> Am I the only one who thinks that "Local Guides" is a needlessly misleading name? Before I looked up what it meant, I assumed that reviews tagged with "Local Guide" were actually written by locals, when in fact the author may just as well live on the other side of the world.

<comment><USER5> It prompts you to review/update info on locations that you've been to recently. Although you can do so for other locations as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work at a major community development charity in Canada with 100+ branches across the country. Almost every day, I have to log into Google My Business to reject the "user-suggested edits" made to a particular location's phone number or street address. Half the time, it seems Google auto-approves these user edits, so we get complaints from clients who used the Google info and showed up when the office was closed.

Almost all the time, people will see the address/number listed on Google's search engine snippet, which is larger, has an image and is much more conspicuous than anything else on the screen. They'll make their plans around that, instead of clicking on the #1 search result, which is our website showing the official hours.

It's incredibly irresponsible for Google to let any Tom Dick and Harry make changes to this type of information, and then display it to the world without posting so much as a disclaimer to users to verify with the actual site.

<comment><USER7> Maybe you can sue Google for negligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A local taxi company near me was relisted on Google maps using a pay-per- minute redirect service. The scammers get paid, and the customer is non the wiser until they get their bill.

I was charged about £5 for a 30 second call.

<comment><USER9> Hi,

I work on maps spam. I was wondering if you could dig up a link to the maps business, and include a rough idea of when this occurred.

Thanks!

<comment><USER10> I've tried to report this map spam before - details at [https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/04/hundreds-of-thousands-of- sp...](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/04/hundreds-of-thousands-of-spam- listings-on-google-my-maps/)

Happy to be contacted if you'd like more information.

<comment><USER11> Your blog post appears to be conflating Google Maps with MyMaps. MyMaps lets people create & publish their _own_ maps with random POIs: for example, here's a map of nice wineries around Melbourne.

[https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mtgpe7JU9OtHUUdvG_A6Uq0eTp...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mtgpe7JU9OtHUUdvG_A6Uq0eTpQ&usp=sharing)

However, these do _not_ show up in the "main" Google Maps, and adding spam to them isn't any more effective than adding spam to a random website.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Google Maps.

<comment><USER10> I mean, the url for these spam entries starts "Google.com/maps" so I think it is pretty reasonable to call this Google Maps spam.

I don't remember how I found those specific ones, but using Google Maps for Android finds some pretty similar entries. Perhaps you could pass that on to your old team?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I got burned by a similar scam with information changes in google. I was looking for a specific restaurant in google and used the given address to get there. When I got there I found out it was a different restaurant. I asked about the other restaurant and they told me the other restaurant had gone out of business. A complete lie.

I'm sure they hired a company to promote them and they used this trick to increase their customer base.

Never trust the company info google gives you without double checking. It's very easy for anyone to change the business info without proof of ownership.

<comment><USER13> I don't initially trust anything on he internet without second source verification. The internet is just one big scam pot today and at the same time, since using it before wide spread public use, I'm fascinated with watching it evolve, devolve since then.

<comment><USER12> Not the internet per se, scams are all over society. It's sad but true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Google is going to have customers remain on their site for search information they have the duty to ensure it is accurate. More and more searches are now given a placard that is either community generated or scraped whether it be maps or the main search. A search that used to feature a link to the bank's "Contact Us" page is now being taken by Google with the link being buried further down between more ads. I get this is to help Google provide voice searches (with the great side effect that Google gets people spending more time on their site), but with that revenue comes a responsibility to do more to ensure it is accurate.

<comment><USER15> Most people want to remain anonymous on the internet or have disposable IDs and profiles. And yet they expect Google to somehow ensure that people are who they say they are. This is a hard problem and it won't be solved as long as people want it both ways.

<comment><USER16> It's not that people don't want to _ever_ be identified, it's that they don't want to _constantly_ be identified and tracked with no way to opt out.

This is also a false dichotomy: Google not tracking us online would not prevent it from verifying our true identities with regard to e.g. editing maps information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The same thing happened to a cousin of mine. I wrote a (somewhat more detailed than this article) blog post about it a month ago. Didn't gain any traction on HN then but here it is: [http://blog.abhijittomar.com/2018/10/19/google- business-clai...](http://blog.abhijittomar.com/2018/10/19/google-business- claim-scam/)

<comment><USER18> Yes, that's a good article and has more detail than either the submitted url ([https://www.businessinsider.com/scammers-edit-google-maps- ba...](https://www.businessinsider.com/scammers-edit-google-maps-bank- listings-fraud-2018-11)) or the one it points to [https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/a-new-bank- scam...](https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/a-new-bank-scam-using- google-maps-loophole/article25541414.ece), so we've switched to it above. Hopefully it will gain some traction on HN now.

(You won't get the HN karma, but we plan to implement karma sharing for cases where multiple submitters contributed.)

<comment><USER17> Thank you.

I've added the news links to my article for reference as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is some scam going on in Lake Powell, AZ. We visited there in September and yelped a well reviewed place: CNG Burgers. We arrive there and can't find it. It simply isn't there. And not just isn't there - there is NO trace of it on the building that matched the address (like where there would a lighter shade of paint behind where the restaurant sign was - at least according to the photos on Google Maps).

Oh well, onto the restaurant across the street. Asked the waitress there about CNG Burgers - she's never heard of it and said that she's worked there for a year. I looked on Google Maps and CNG received a ton of recent reviews.

Reading this thread compelled me to look at it again. Finally, Yelp is listing it as closed (I reported it as such), however, there are reviews as recent as 2 weeks ago.

On Google Maps, it's still active - all recent reviews by Local Guides.

Still not sure what it all means.

<comment><USER20> This one? [http://pageburgers.com/directions.html](http://pageburgers.com/directions.html)

Google maps has an image capture from May 2018 with their sign up.

<comment><USER19> I know. [https://i.imgur.com/s5qesHC.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/s5qesHC.jpg)

Except, the restaurant is not there. None of the signs are on the building except for Lake Powell Realty. Not the "Restaurant" sign on the left, not the CNG Burgers sign in the middle. And the reviews kept on coming even after we left.

<comment><USER21> So its closed and google hasn't removed it. The restaurant bought some fake reviews that are still coming in.

This isn't a scam like the article is talking about, just google failing to update a listing and letting in bad reviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A couple of years ago, I needed to find a limo service for an old family friend, for a memorial service. It'd been some years, but I knew of and used to use one of the top two limo services in my metropolitan area. (In my area, in a perverse historical twist, a shared limo ride to the airport was substantially cheaper than a cab ride, as well as pretty much guaranteed timely as well as more comfortable.)

I'd heard that this was one business area where fly by night companies, and outright scammers, had been stuffing and, where possible, gaming search engine results -- meaning, given their market dominance, Google results.

I searched for the company -- mind you, a relatively large livery service with a diverse and well-heeled customer base, sure to still be in existence -- and sure enough, the search results were full of hits purporting to be them or part of them, or just playing on minor variations of their name. If nothing else, the phone numbers didn't look right to me as compared to my vague memory, formed back when people still dialed numbers.

Anyway, eventually I pulled out an old, physical yellow pages I'd been hoarding, looked them up in that, and called. They had changed that particular number, although not to something looking like one of the scam results. They had numbers from back when people faced in-state toll charges on phone calls, and since they covered an entire large metropolitan area, they had at that time registered numbers in several local exchanges, to make customer calls to them a local call (just pick the number having a local or non-toll exchange).

They still had the number from the yellow pages, though, assigned to an internal extension, and the person who answered took time out of their day to provide first rate customer service for the family friend.

The first rate service was still there. However, finding it through a Google search was a risky venture.

I'm not at all surprised that Maps contents is being exploited and gamed. I guess I'll hold on to that old yellow pages book a bit longer.

<comment><USER23> > They had numbers from back when people faced in-state toll charges on phone > calls, and since they covered an entire large metropolitan area, they had at > that time registered numbers in several local exchanges, to make customer > calls to them a local call (just pick the number having a local or non-toll > exchange).

Totally unrelated to people scamming others on Google, but I love little bits of telephone trivia like this. A large plumber and an unrelated large handyman company in my hometown metro both have the same style of phone number: "just dial your area code then [seven digits]."

One other thing we had growing up in that area were the concept of "metro numbers." Back in the day, the area was divided up into three different incumbents and it wasn't always the case that a person physically near you would have a number you could call for free. So metro numbers were ones in specific exchanges that anyone in the six-county area could call with no toll charges. Since all metro numbers were in a handful of exchanges and, because the three old incumbents crossed area codes as well, didn't always follow area code rules (e.g. you could be physically in area code 123 but get a metro number in area code 198), you'll see old businesses with old numbers in area codes where they "shouldn't be."

My mobile number is like this. It is a metro number and has an area code and prefix of one side of the metro area but if you look it up in any of the telco databases, those listings say it is "homed" to two counties away in a different area code.

<comment><USER24> You might enjoy this. I was growing up in the countryside in the late 80s when BBSs and services like AOL started to take off. We were too far away from anything like a city for them to be a local call, so my use of them was extremely limited. I had a friend who lived a few miles closer to the nearest city and they were a local call for him, so we'd always spend a lot of time on the BBSs at his place.

Eventually we came up with a brilliant scheme. My friend's father had a home office with a dedicated phone line. He had signed up for call forwarding so he could be reached when he was away. But outside of business hours, the line sat idle. The process of changing the forwarding number was totally automated and free. Calling his number was a local call for me, and calling the interesting services was a local call for him, so I could bounce through his line (with his permission, of course) to call these things for free.

<comment><USER23> I do enjoy this, thanks. It reminded me of another memory: Growing up, my house sat on the border between two of the incumbents. It was odd enough that dialing the Operator got the pre-connection announcement for the incumbent that mailed us the phone bill but calling Information (411) got the pre- connection announcement for the adjacent city's incumbent.

This also happened to make my hometown one of a handful that could call local numbers served by either incumbent in the same area code. I was doing work for a tiny ISP and my boss asked my parents if he could put a Livingston PortMaster 16 in our house and hook up 16 phone lines in exchange for paying my parents a small sum and giving us free Internet access by sharing the connection with the PortMaster.

We agreed and, thus, I became one of the few teenagers at the time to have high-speed wired Internet at my house. (None of my peers gave a crap but I loved it.) The phone company was less overjoyed because we consumed every available pair in the cross-connect box at the end of the street and nobody on our block or the next one over could get an additional phone line for months until a new box was added.

(As a capper to the story: A second cross-connect was added...but the tiny ISP went bankrupt a month later and all 16 of those lines were disconnected, rendering the shiny new cross-connect pointless.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In 2014 Bryan Seely wiretapped FBI and Secret Service exploiting the Google maps (lack of) verification process.

According to his tedtalk, Google was not to eager to fix the problem and it seems things didn't change much since then.

[https://youtu.be/5c6AADI7Pb4](https://youtu.be/5c6AADI7Pb4)

</comment><comment><USER26> A very well known CA company uses these details as a method of verification for EV certs.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wait, Google is seriously just taking people's word for this stuff? What happened to the Semantic Web and getting information from official websites? They've essentially created OpenStreetMap, but with less transparency.

</comment><comment><USER28> So how will this work with the new Google Duplex ai assistant auto calling a scammer for you? Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER29> In college I was somehow made the owner or something of my department building's google maps entry. I worked for the department, so my .edu google account was in some admin/staff group I guess. I kept getting emails asking me to update the listing and definitely considered some harmless pranks/light vandalism.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've considered myself fairly resistive to various devious scamming efforts but recently they have upped the game at completely new level. Other day I received text message that my XYZ card had suspicious charge and my card was disabled. To re-enable the card I must call 1-800- number. I absolutely believed that! That number is in fact fake number to get all your bank details!

These are clear attempt for theft. For physical attempts I would call police and that's one of the big restraint on rampant theft attempts. But there is no law enforcement infrastructure set up to report and act on electronic thefts easily. These thieves can easily be traced otherwise as their 1-800- numbers are public.

<comment><USER31> When I've had these I've always called the number on my card instead.

<comment><USER32> Which is exactly what you should do. Or look up the number from the bank's own secure web site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I check phone numbers with yellowpages.com if I'm unsure, we've come full circle...

<comment><USER34> How do you know this is legit? Does the yellow pages verify every listing? If a company neglects to register a yellow pages slot, how hard is it for someone else to register it? Genuine questions (and I'd guess it changes by country); Google does a fair bit of effort to get business owner to claim their property on Google (again, probably changes by country); if they don't do so, then how different is it to someone neglecting to put their yellow pages entry in?

<comment><USER35> You have to pay to be in the yellow pages, so that both discourages scammers and provides identity confirmation (bank account or credit card number)

<comment><USER34> Probably a small price to pay for scammers, and I wonder/doubt if anyone actually confirms the details - yes, it might be possible after the fact, but by that point the damage is done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I basically don't trust the search engine "summary" info that is presented in search results. I always go to the actual website of the business to get contact info, addresses, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> I am lol as I changed the profile picture for one country's central bank a long time ago because I was dumbstruck by the offer to "Claim this business" and just had to try it out.

It has been fun watching the edit wars over the hours of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. There are times it has been OPEN and times it has been CLOSED and times when it is OPEN for 2 hours on the weekend, presumably for a pickup of household radioactive waste.

</comment><comment><USER37> @dang

I know "Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps to defraud people" is 4 characters too long but maybe "Scammers changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps to defraud people" is better than what it currently is? "changing the contact" alone doesn't make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER38> Or drop people: "Scammers are changing the contact info for banks on Google Maps to defraud"

<comment><USER39> The the is supefluous too: "Scammers changing contact details of banks on Google Maps [to defraud]". But the "defraud" coming at the end and not being just "fraud" is poor in English. However, "scammers" are pretty much synonymous with "fraudsters", so the "to defraud" is probably superfluous too.

<comment><USER40> I hope you apply the same reductionism to problem solving as well.

Got any tips on using it in practice (you seem to be at a higher skill level than most)?

<comment><USER39> I try, I'm not an engineer, my critical faculties are better than my constructive ones -- I do think I'm pretty good at succinct and accurate writing though. Unfortunately I'm not able to make best use of these skills at present.

What field do you work in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In fact, if you live in China, you will know that the information provided by search engines is not always right. Some frauds are even carried out with the help of search engines, for example, putian

</comment><comment><USER42> Reminds me of the time I claimed the Google SF office on Google maps.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've seen more than a couple instances of terrible addresses being marked on Google Maps. Painful while ordering food or taking an Uber.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why he didn't call the phone number on his debit card or bank's web site?!

</comment><comment><USER45> Not to blame the victim, but this is an apt example of social engineering at work. The so-called 'educated' person in question is not too aware I guess. All the banking institutions send you a gazillion emails about not sharing your card information ever with any employee. In fact it has come to a point that the government of India runs TV ad campaigns regarding this on all the channels under the sun. So the ignorance of the victim is to blame for this as well.</comment>


Question for PG/HN:  Where do you think we stand on your list of "ideas"? - <AUTHOR> About three years ago, Paul penned his essay "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund".  Three years along, how do you think this list stands up today?  Are any solved (in part or in whole)?  Anything new you would add to the list?<p>I ask, because I remember reading this years ago and getting inspired to work on a few things (that didn't pan out).  Given the popularity of (and success of YC), it would be interesting to see what Paul and HN see as the state of the world for this list. <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the essay -- <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

<comment><USER3> When I go down the list I can only think of a few YC startups that have done well by following these ideas (dropbox, heroku). The leaders in the categories listed are not YC companies, and the big hits that YC did have were in categories not listed (eg. Airbnb).

<comment><USER4> Airbnb = Craigslist competitor (#25)

<comment><USER3> I'd put Airbnb as a competitor to hostels, they're not really competing with Craigslist directly.

<comment><USER5> Funny, because they seem to get quite a few referrals from craigslist.

<comment><USER6> Wikipedia gets quite a few referrals from Google. Are they direct competitors?

<comment><USER7> That depends on your view of Knol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We built something alot like: 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.

The question is though, what problem does it solve? It was very hard to explain to people why they would need it or care about it.

Spent a year developing it and spent alot of money on it. For nothing in the end. A very cool technology and I still like it alot.

Lesson: build something people want, or that solves a real problem. Don't build a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER9> That's funny because I'm also building a web-based Excel/database hybrid, and I'm also a bit concerned about demand. But your story doesn't deter me at all, for two reasons: one, because I'm crazy; two because of La Femme Nikita. Let me explain.

People talk about ideas as being worthless, etc. No, they're not. You can't get an oak tree with a mustard seed. But there's a big difference between even oak trees. Idea and execution are the same thing, just two ends of a continuous line.

The films _La Femme Nikita_ and _Point of No Return_ have nearly the exact same plot. The former is one of the greatest action films ever made; the latter is one of the worst.

That whole "build something people want" is only for people who want to make money. And honestly, if what you want is to make money, be a dentist.

People waant Facebook and Twitter and Farmville. But they need core technological innovation. They need better ways to work with data. You did the right thing, Andrew. It wasn't a waste of time. And I won't stop either, because the world has far too much of what it wants and far too little of what it needs.

<comment><USER10> Actually, Facebook, Twitter and Farmville are great examples of products nobody said they wanted and didn't solve any perceived problems, but are succesful any way.

I've compulsively weaned myself off the "solve a problem" mentality because it gets in the way of building truly innovative products, IMO.

<comment><USER11> Couldn't the problem be that people just have way to much time on their hands and need help with that? Haha, seriously!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not just _Enterprise software 2.0._ but Localized Enterprise software. The idea to adapt, say, SAP for Russian or Indian or Chinese laws, regulations and actual document flow is totally broken. Hosted services also limited to US market.

The problem is - it is almost impossible to get funding for such projects in domestic markets.

So, it is a very simple and obvious idea to build Enterprise software using the same technology that powers modern global-scale online services, targeting emerging markets, but it is quite long and very expensive journey.

There are huge demand for hosted niched services for small and medium business, such as tour operators (schedules, synchronizations), goods carriers (simplified logistics), B2B systems (customer - supplier) and so on.

<comment><USER13> Something I've been pondering lately is whether there's a viable niche in internationalization as a middleware library & service: it takes a lot of effort to get right, it's tedious stuff (as I discovered when trying to document postal address formats for most of Africa and Europe), and it involves a lot of domain knowledge that's completely irrelevant to the actual core business of most SaaS vendors.

<comment><USER12> Yes, that is why it should be done by domestic startups and teams 'right on the site'. So, YC's model doesn't work here - they fund only US-based startups (because it is quite difficult to fetch a profit from aboard =) but this one must be an international one. (same as that network of Google offices around the globe).

<comment><USER13> What I mean is whether there's a niche for a single entity whose job it is to be knowledgeable about all the sorts of issues you can run into in trying to internationalize software and services, whether they be local tax issues, best practices for translation layers in a software stack, cost estimations for freighting products.

Like, i.e. an all-in-one service: build your SaaS platform against our framework, and we'll handle all i18n issues on this given list, for this given set of countries and languages, including payment handling and shipping, and take a cut. A successful startup often doesn't have time to deal with its own internationalization before local competitor clones get the jump on it (e.g, Ebay, Groupon). So what I'm envisioning is a company that acts at a higher level than the usual outsource-to-the-translator-agency routine, yet has product-ized its offerings enough that it's not locked into the consultancy business model.

<comment><USER14> There is definitely a market for this. International payment gateways like CyberSource (www.cybersource.com) are extending their services to include address validation (and correction), fraud detection, etc.

It would be very hard for a startup to compete in this space though - <USER2> a better opportunity for a partnership between a payment gateway and a major distributer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My opinion:

\- Simplified browsing has happened ala tablets, mobiles etc, especially purpose-specific apps.

\- Photo/Video sharing services .... they went mobile, big time

\- CRM ... I think twitter, facebook and internet outrage are changing that pretty rapidly

\- Web office apps ... I (still) don't get the sense there's any major urge to move to web office apps, but obviously the 800 pound gorilla in that space is (went?) web

\- Online learning ... Kahn Academy

\- New payment methods ... Square, NFC et al

\- The web os ... kind of became redundant with the explosion of mobile and tablet, but Chrome OS might end up mattering

\- Application and data hosting happened in a huge way lol

<comment><AUTHOR> re: - Simplified browsing has happened ala tablets, mobiles etc, especially purpose-specific apps.

Mobile and apps certainly have helped. But, there is still a problem of knowing what urls (in the case of a browser) or sites to search or which apps to get to help out.

It seems like there should be a better way of just "getting information" based on location/interests/curiousities...

<comment><USER16> Semantic web. Hunch is trying, other startups as well. You need so much "opt in, we will find cool stuff (after 200 questions)."

The big boys of online data preferences who Could do these things would be Google, perhaps FaceBook (which still brings up ridiculous unrelated ads to my interests, however, I don't "click" any apps or "like" many pages out of privacy). More on FaceBook, even my "prolific" friends (checkins, 200-400 friends, likes and friends with 100 or so movies, bands, apps, etc.) still don't click ads.

NetFlix seems, after 4 years, of finally getting a semblance of "interests" down.

That is quite a bit of data, time length, and me, the user actually rating the movies I watch in a semi-diligent manner.

I would, in fact love to log onto Google, or wherever, see my "bored" category of movies I may like to watch online, at the theater, local events going on that evening, something coming up tomorrow and all somewhat related to what I would enjoy, not just "pushing" or scraping a bunch of different calenders / pooling app info together.

Very difficult problem.

<comment><USER17> How about Apple? They have access or the potential to access a whole bunch of info through that little touch screen life portal everyone clings to on a daily basis. Add in iCloud and their Nuance partnership and you have something pretty interesting.

"Hey iPhone, is there anything fun to do after work?"

It grabs your location, sees you have a late meeting blocked off from 6-7, sees you were watching Transformers 3 trailers a few days ago, sees your buddy Mike tweeted "Transformers 3 looks pretty rad, I definitely want to see that".

It now has an approximate time and location, a pretty good idea of what you're interested in (both long term and short term) based on app data, and can see if any of this aligns with your social graph...

Would you be interested in seeing Transformers 3 at 7:30 with Mike?

"Yes, send him an invitation." iMessage sent with all the details, when you get a yes from him, Fandango launches and you buy your ticket, it gets added to your calendar so you get a reminder after your meeting, maps out directions, etc.

It's a stretch but if anyone can make harvesting that much of your personal info look appealing, it's definitely Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'll take the opportunity to post about my recently started (2 weeks now) project on "design dependent search" (idea 16).

The idea I'm trying to leverage is that typing long search queries on mobile devices is super awkward, but the touch screens make clicking much easier and more fun. My site displays similar search results geographically near each other on the screen, allowing you to make your searches more focused just by clicking on certain areas. Right now, it only works on blogs with RSS feeds due to my limited internet crawling resources. I hope to add media (picture,movie, and maybe music) search by the end of the summer. I don't see this necessarily working as a Google replacement though.

You can check out the prototype at <http://blogumbus.com> and visit the developer blog at <http://dev.blogumbus.com>.

<comment><USER19> Interesting. I had a play with it and I think there is some potential there. Its somewhat similar to <http://www.chunews.com/> which I wrote some time ago in that you can follow the links between similar articles and paged. I like your implementation though.

How are you working out whats related? Links or some deeper textual analysis?

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the heads up on chunews. I was having some trouble finding similar projects to judge where I should focus development. How many users did you get?

As for linkedness, I'm going to do a detailed blog post about it sometime, but here it is in short:

Use the HITS algorithm to get hub and authority scores for each domain. Pages are related only if websites with higher scores link to both of them. This makes spam much less of a problem (I think!), and will make for some interesting search algorithms that I haven't quite implemented yet.

<comment><USER19> I was more my attempt at recreating TailRank when it closed down (since I assumed that it couldn't be that difficult to write). It just seems to overlap what you have there quite a bit.

Not many users. It tends to get a lot of SEO traffic though (usually breaking news stories funnel through it pretty quickly and you see a large spike) with anywhere from 50 to 500 uniques a day.

Ah interesting. Chunews does statistical word ranking on each article it pulls down to group similar stories together. From memory it uses links as well but in reality since it checks exact links that never affects this.

One of these days I may iterate on it but for the moment it shows me whats happening in the world at any point which is fine for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Dating? Anyone think the chicken & egg problem has been solved or is being solved? Any ideas how to solve this?

<comment><USER21> When I look at the history there is a clear pattern:

\- Match.com solved it by starting in 1995 and working really hard.

\- eHarmony solved it by attracting the christian crowd with endorsements by pat roberson and great offline marketing.

\- plentyoffish solved it with a great brand name, and using the "free forever" look, feel, and marketing.

\- OKcupid solved it by creating tons of questionnaires that were fun and interesting.

\- AshleyMadison solved it by targeting the infidelity niche.

\- AdultFriendfinder solved it by marketing to suckers on gaming and porn sites.

The pattern is clear. There is no pattern.

<comment><USER22> Don't forget apps like Grindr. It's hyper-local, which is a whole new niche in this space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting to read this knowing that it was return years ago:

 _A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn't have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design._

<comment><USER24> I'd say this is the idea Hipmunk is going after...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Dare I say we'd like to work on 10 & 25? We've started testing a selling format (<http://pricetack.com>) we think might be applicable in a variety of situations and have some ideas on how to address the immense chicken & egg issue. But have no illusions on the difficulty ahead.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone have any news of developments in 15. "Off-the-shelf security" products?</comment>


Walking through a basic Racket web service - <AUTHOR> http://notes.eatonphil.com/2016/29/walking-through-basic-racket-web-service.html <comment><USER2> Hi Phil,

A very nice article! I like that you show how to "remove the magic".

I noticed you "aside" at the bottom and wanted to give you a tip. If you open a source file in DrRacket and then click the "Check Syntax" icon (the green check mark with a looking glass), then DrRacket will annotate each binding with its origin. Right clicking on say `serialize-stuffer` will give you an option to jump to the file were it is defined. It's also possible to right click on module names such as `web-server` in an require statement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip! I just heard about this on Twitter as well. But although this what I'm looking for, I still think it would be most reasonable to link to the source on the documentation website.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a tendency in the Racket community to rely much more on a thorough reading of manuals and docs than a peek at the source code. I personally can count on one hand the number of times I've had to look up implementation code for debugging or to figure out how to implement something. The Racket manuals, Scribble, DrRacket's integration with both, and the strong culture of documentation in user packages make for a wonderful development experience.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you market yourself as a developer? - <AUTHOR> For those of you who aren't scraping freelance job sites, but have clients knocking on your doors for work... how do you do it? How do you market yourself? <comment><USER2> There's many ways to do this, both offline and online. Attend local meetups and network and meet new people. The experiences you gain from meeting new people will eventually pay off either with a new job or transfer of knowledge which is invaluable.

You can also try contributing more to open source projects. Pick a project of your interest and just see where you can contribute. Employers love to see those who gives back to the community. For more on this, I recently wrote a quick piece that can hopefully inspire you and others who are interested in contributing to open source ([https://medium.com/@tranvu/path-to-open-source- bec824af077d](https://medium.com/@tranvu/path-to-open-source-bec824af077d))

If you're specifically seeking for more freelance clients, one of the best way is to ask your people who you have worked with in the past. The majority of the consulting work I do stems from referrals. If you lack a network of connections, you can try some freelance gig sites such as Upwork.</comment>


The Joy of Bit-Banging - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2012/09/the-joy-of-bit-banging.html

<comment><USER2> The Saleae Logic is a beautiful device. I can't believe I tried to analyze digital traffic with my old scope before this.

<comment><USER3> I am really tempted to get it. I have a $390 LogicPort [0] which is a 34 channel, 500 MHz probe (quite a bit beefier than the Logic's 8 channel, 24 MHz). The hardware is great but the software is rather terrible. There is no way to add your own protocol decoders. Export features are limited. I wanted to write my own GUI so I contacted the company and asked if they had any documentation on the USB protocol. Their response was snarky and rude. Sad, because I really wanted a Linux version. Maybe reversing the protocol wouldn't be too difficult...

[0]: <http://www.pctestinstruments.com/>

<comment><USER4> Sigrok [1] plans to support your LogicPort but doesn't yet. Help them out instead of buying a Saleae.

[1]:<http://sigrok.org/wiki/Supported_hardware#Logic_analyzers>

<comment><USER3> Thank you for showing me this! I didn't know about the project before. It would be a big motivation if others are working on reversing the protocol as well!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typo in the first sentence: the link text "big-bang" should, I presume, be "bit-bang".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Linux kernel has built-in support for bit-banging I2C and SPI interfaces, which I used way back when I was writing a driver for the MyHD HDTV tuner card. The thoughtful developers of earlier TV drivers had written a plethora of tools for probing and debugging I2C buses.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love bit-banging, sometimes you want to go that route even if the uC does have specialized hardware. I remember having to bit-bang I2C on multiple occasions because the standards are so loose.. good times.

<comment><USER8> Recently I had to bitbang I2C through a voltage level translating buffer that had a direction setting pin that needed to be manipulated when sampling SDA on input. The uC's hardware I2C block obviously couldn't handle that extra signaling oddity. Not the fastest approach but then this I2C application wasn't that high speed to begin with. Good times indeed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bitbanged an eMMC interface on a MSP430 - enjoyed it greatly but then we switched to a micro with a built in MMC/SDIO interface so it's just a memory now.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've seen some bit-banged USB interfaces (ie using gpio and discrete level shifting) on avr's and pic's. It was a very neat hack, if very very wrong.</comment>


Looking for new LuaJIT maintainers - <AUTHOR> http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Looking-for-new-LuaJIT-maintainers <comment><USER2> I have mixed feelings about this.

On the negative side, Mike Pall is an impressive individual who has contributed a lot to the field of JIT-compiled languages, so losing him is obviously bad for the project. LuaJIT is also a hard codebase to get into, I myself tried to get into it and gave up (I blogged about it last month [1]). There are probably still parts of it that only Mike understands, I guess we will see how much in the next months.

On the positive side, this will forcefully increase the bus factor of the project and take it out of this situation. And maybe we will see it catch up with Lua 5.3 :)

[1] [http://blog.separateconcerns.com/2015-06-18-love-hate- luajit...](http://blog.separateconcerns.com/2015-06-18-love-hate-luajit.html)

<comment><USER3> > And maybe we will see it catch up with Lua 5.3

For those that think that LuaJIT's 5.1 compatibility isn't too far behind 5.3, be aware that Lua changes a lot in its minor versions.

To give you an idea, 5.2 introduced changed how scope works (both some stuff with lexical/global scope, and by redoing environments), introduced the `goto` statement, finalisers, and changed how `break` works.

5.3 introduced integers (Lua was previously like Javascript with only one Number type which was backed by a `double`), and utf8 support.

This means that upgrading a Lua version can be a big deal and break all of the programs written in it. For instance, redis and WoW both still embed 5.1.

<comment><USER4> Yes, 5.3 is not a "minor version" increment, it's a major version increment on 5.2. That's how Lua version numbering works.

Adding support for 5.3's integer subtype is probably going to be a very large project, I would guess that annoyed Mike.

People say that LuaJIT's source is difficult to understand, but I've seen source for several VMs with JIT compilers and this one certainly isn't the gnarliest; it's decently well commented. It only took me 30 min to add a new builtin function, with almost no understanding of the codebase beyond skimming a couple header files. As long as you don't want the JIT compiler to output asm for your language extensions, it's almost friendly.

<comment><USER5> Parrotting Mike Pall: having 64 bits integers require 128 bits for representing Lua values. This would be bad performance-wise because it would clutter the CPU cache (as it is the case for Lua 5.3 vs 5.2).

Currently, LuaJIT relies on NAN tagging which allows it to represent values in 64 bits.

<comment><USER4> I noticed that LuaJIT has the LJ_DUALNUM define, which actually internally adds an int32 subtype which causes numbers which can fit in an int32 to be stored as such. It does not change the semantics, it's to avoid floating point ops on (mainly ARM) processors with slow or emulated FPUs. However, I think it should be possible to extend it without a huge amount of work to implement Lua 5.3 semantics with a 32 bit (rather than the default 64 bit) integer subtype. I think it would still be useful to a lot of people, personally I would love to have it.

Increasing TValues to 128 bits would be very undesirable, but since luajit already supports 64 bit ints through the ffi library I don't see why they couldn't be stored as boxed udatas/cdatas in the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a good initiative because LuaJIT development has been mostly halted since May 2014, when the following note was added to the LuaJIT Open Sponsorships page:

 _" The main LuaJIT author (Mike Pall) is working on unrelated projects and cannot accept new sponsorships at this time..."_ [1]

Since then, Mike has only made bugfix commits to the project.

I really hope that the features mentioned on that Open Sponsorships page start happening after these news, and CloudFlare seems like a good candidate to me: even without knowing how much resources they're ready to offer, I'm willing to bet it will be an improvement over the current situation.

Everyone was surprised when LuaJIT seized the position of "fastest scripting language in the west", and it would be awesome if they could manage to keep that status - or has it been taken over by Javascript already? JS implementations have been improving dramatically thanks to the competition between browsers, and V8/SpiderMonkey are implementing features from LuaJIT's TODO list right now (I'm thinking about vectorized SIMD instructions). A lot of people use benchmarks as a major factor for choosing a scripting language, and I'd rather see more projects using Lua/LuaJIT rather than JS as a scripting language. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Go LuaJIT!

[1]: [http://wiki.luajit.org/Open-Sponsorships](http://wiki.luajit.org/Open- Sponsorships)

<comment><USER7>
        "fastest scripting language in the west"

Ironic - Since Lua's speed is most heavily used in Yahoo! China, Taobao, Alibaba and programmers hired by Cloudflare to work with Lua worked in those companies. ([http://agentzh.org/#AboutMe](http://agentzh.org/#AboutMe)) The use of Lua - openresty with nginx - Nginx is from Russia, too.

        "fastest scripting language in the east"

Might be slightly more appropriate.

But then again - Lua originated from Brazil and heavily used in game companies in the U.S. Not sure how much they use LuaJIT though.

<comment><USER8> This is a reference to the trope of quickdraw duels and "Fastest gun in the west" referring to the western United States in the "Wild West". Not an east/west of the world like you're thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm...wonder what this means about the status of the Quad-color bitmapped arena mark-n-sweep collector Mike was planning for LuaJIT 3.0 ([http://wiki.luajit.org/New-Garbage-Collector](http://wiki.luajit.org/New- Garbage-Collector))?

I remember reading what he had researched so far a couple years back and being really excited, but it seems like the work was never really continued. I'd be interested to know if there was some fatal flaw that would've kept the collector from living up to its potential? or was it just a matter of the sizable effort required to write a new collector, more-or-less from scratch?

<comment><USER4> AFAIK, he never moved beyond planning it, unless the GC64 work is also a prereq for it. E.g. almost no significant updates to the new GC wiki page or mention of GC in git commits since 2012.

BTW, previous HN discussion of the new GC: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053969)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is this recent thread[1] where people are looking for resources to help them understand the project. There are interesting pointers[2] as well as a part of a PhD thesis[3] that covers it.

[1] [http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/how-to-read-the- source-...](http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/how-to-read-the-source-codes- of-luajit) [2] [http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/how-to-read-the- source-...](http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/how-to-read-the-source-codes- of-luajit,1) [3] [http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/how-to-read-the- source-...](http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/how-to-read-the-source-codes- of-luajit,3)

</comment><comment><USER11> Mike Pall is an international treasure whose work on LuaJIT has been without parallel in the embedded/gaming world. I hope this move is born of desire and moving on to great new things rather than any type of necessity.

<comment><USER12> I've never heard any actual stories of LuaJIT being used in games as opposed to stock Lua, but I know it was ported to power processors. Have any big games claimed to use LuaJIT? It would certainly make sense if the memory and gc pauses were no worse than Lua.

<comment><USER13> No _big_ games that I know of, but it's certainly used in games; the LOVE engine embeds LuaJIT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone actually fill Mike Pall's shoes? I always got the impression that what he was doing came from a very rare combination of JIT and low level optimization knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm a big fan of Luajit, I think it's ease of use of FFI makes it fantastic to integrate into bigger projects; all that 'glue' that I haven't had to write !! Hope someone pick it up; I can understand he wants to move to other things, and sometime a projects becomes a bit too 'big' and you can feel a bit shackled to it after a while...

</comment><comment><USER15> Wonder what Mike Pall will be up to next...

<comment><USER16> Maybe he'll find some other language to make an order of magnitude faster.

<comment><USER17> Hoping he picks python :)

<comment><USER12> I think he has written about why Lua was so good for JIT compilation and in doing so talked about python. I don't remember specifically what he said, but he had analyzed other languages and there were hurdles that kept them from being able to achieve the same speed as LuaJIT.

<comment><USER18> I'd like to see cPython without a GIL first. It would be really nice to take advantage of multi core CPUs without having to use subprocesses.

<comment><USER19> What's the disadvantage of subprocesses?

<comment><USER3> There are plenty, but here's an easy example: sockets. File descriptors are shared across process forks. So let's take a typical web application that does:

1\. Boot, setting up system wide resources like DB/memcached connections

2\. Start doing work

Then any process forked after step #1 is sharing those sockets and can accidentally corrupt the work that the parent process is doing. With threads, you can share the connections through a pool that can be simply mediated within the process.

Yeah, you can design around it. But with threads, you don't have to.

Here's another: serialisation. If you want to parallelise any processing that builds up any complex data structures, you have to serialise them between your parent/child processes which can make it hard to keep the "richness" of the objects like interdependencies between processing runs. In addition, now your processing bottleneck becomes how fast your single-threaded parent process can deserialise the responses (which in Python in particular can really be quite slow).

And not everything can be serialised. It's not trivial to share sockets with other processes that have already been started. You can't easily accept a connection in one process and pass it to another to do the work and send the response (it's possible, just not as easy as passing an integer around like you can do between threads).

<comment><USER20> Are you talking about Python limitations? Because for 1) if you can put your sockets 'close on exec' no? For 2) how about using shared memory?

<comment><USER3> > Are you talking about Python limitations?

Yes, but:

> for 1) if you can put your sockets 'close on exec' no?

Yes, if you're the one that opened the socket. If you're using a library that opens that socket for you (e.g. a memcached or postgres library in my example), you don't necessarily have access to the socket itself. And now instead of children corrupting the parent's socket, you just have children with closed sockets. So you still have to solve the inherited-resource-sharing problem, FD_CLOEXEC isn't magic fairy dust.

> 2) how about using shared memory?

Possible but has its own downsides (you can't lock with regular posix mutexes, you have to make sure that the memory you're sharing is all in the shared block so you can't just use malloc, which means that you can't share objects that you don't control the allocation of, like, say, libraries' objects).

Yes, these are solveable problems. There are lots of other ones, these are just easy examples. Like I said:

> Yeah, you can design around it. But with threads, you don't have to.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Free/Pro/Enterprise build management - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I've inherited 3 separate git repos for an Enterprise, Professional and free version of a WordPress plugin. The free version has a subset of pro functionality which has a subset of the enterprise version.  Generally, changes in one version need to be reflected in the other 2 so I'm looking for a DRYer solution.
I imagine it's not wise to deliver all the enterprise code with feature turned off to the free users, so I'm investigating a solution for building the versions with only the relevant code for that specific project.
The different scenarios I've come across that I need to manage are
1. A file exists only in the enterprise version, but does not need to be in pro or free version 2. A file exists in the enterprise and pro version, but does not need to be in free version 3. A file exists in all 3 versions, but is not the same (eg the readme file must have different information)
Right now I'm just hacking the build process together with Rake and a list of files.  It seems like this problem has probably been solved before though.  So HN, have you encounter this, are you aware of any tooling for this, or do you have advice about how to solve this.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I think your best bet is to have one git repo for the Enterprise edition and then have some script that produces the subset versions.</comment>


Casio FX-880P Personal Computer Teardown - <AUTHOR> https://neil.computer/notes/casio-fx-880p-personal-computer-teardown/ <comment><USER2> I started looking around for other cool models. First I found this beauty, the fx-890p, programmable not just in BASIC but also in C (interpreted) and assembler:

[https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Casio- fx-89...](https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Casio- fx-890P/Casio-fx-890P-M.JPG)

And then there is this pocket Lisp machine:

[https://casio.ledudu.com/images/pockets/casio/machines/zoom/...](https://casio.ledudu.com/images/pockets/casio/machines/zoom/AI1000.jpg)

There are a couple of emulators out there, this one supports the AI-1000 Lisp version too:

[http://www.pisi.com.pl/piotr433/pb2000ee.htm](http://www.pisi.com.pl/piotr433/pb2000ee.htm)

<comment><USER3> I have a pair of Atari Portfolios' in my retro collection, one of which is my original from the release, and the other was a contribution - and they're simply delightful little machines.

My original still has Turbo C on it, and all the programs I wrote during flights all over the place back in the 90's, keeping myself awake in obscure airports.

Very fun to dig it out, put in fresh batteries, and go back to where I was editing, ~30 years ago .. ;)

My GPD Pocket is still a better dev machine in that regard, though..

(I also have an Olivetti M10, which is like a Tandy Model 100 .. another delightful machine with saved state that goes back decades, instantly available with the insertion of a couple of ol' trusty AA's ..)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think I first saw one of these devices in our house when I was a kid in the mid 80s.

My dad was (still is) an electronics engineer, and started a company making data logging devices for weather and environmental data, and was using these for data download and display.

His own computer was a self-built machine with a Motorola 6809 processor, with all the boards/parts mounted into an old Hoover Keymatic washing machine chassis [1].

It was funny for ~8yo me to learn that this tiny pocket-sized Casio thing and the Hoover monstrosity in the garage were both "computers".

Fond memories.

[1] [https://www.ssplprints.com/image/83554/hoover-keymatic- washi...](https://www.ssplprints.com/image/83554/hoover-keymatic-washing- machine-1963)

</comment><comment><USER5> > If somone designed a calculator today, they would most likely be made from > ABS plastic, in a clamshell case.

Not so-- calculators are now such a niche market that it again makes sense to build for quality. You're not going to get any of the price shopper to begin with.

[https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php](https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php)

<comment><USER6> Absolutely so. There were at least a dozen plastic calculators available to buy at the office supply store when I was last there earlier this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > If somone designed a calculator today, they would most likely be made from > ABS plastic, in a clamshell case. An ARM microcontroller that replaces > essentially 70% of the chips, and it would be impossible to repair.

Interestingly, my Casio fx-115ES PLUS (which I love, BTW) uses a obscure but cute little architecture called nX-U8/100\. Although I am a bit sad that it's hidden by epoxy like most cheaper calculators :(

<comment><USER8> I don't agree with the author here. The ARM replacing the chips is not bad, just the nature of what technical possibilities we have now. And having some funky chips in an old design does not help with repairing it.

I think OP has some sort of nostalgia that is not always well placed for old electronics.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here, I didn't phrase that right. It was meant along the lines of "Look at all these mechanical linkages, its all replaced by relay logic now-a-days". Indeed, a SoC + PMIC and a few stray bypass caps will replace the whole motherboard - that's a great thing.

It's sort of like appreciating old timers for doing what they had to do with the tools they had at the time - how NES game developers had 40KB of space to fit their game in which lead to some incredible resourceful hacks [1]. Obviously, today's game engines are "better" in every metric possible if by "better" we measure those metrics as higher/faster/easier == better. There is also a fascinating reason why a game engine like Pico8 [2] exists when we have almost unlimited compute/storage resources and if everything was "better" in the modern age :)

OP does have nostalgia, otherwise why would he purchase old useless gadgets? ;)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213840) [2] [https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php](https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Loved my Casio.

Back in the late 80', throughout the 90's, the Casio FX models were the high school and university beloved models.

With 850 and 880 being the wished for models of engineering university students.

Our education system did not had any kind of monopoly agreement like TI seems to have in US.

So I hardly can relate to the usual TI stories, it was all about Casio and some lucky ones got HP-48 variants.

</comment><comment><USER10> I believe that Radio Shack marketed and sold these as the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. I was probably in my 20's then.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Pocket_Computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Pocket_Computer)

<comment><USER12> "Although named after the TRS-80 line of computers, they were not compatible with it and didn't use the Z-80 CPU. Computers in the line were actually rebadged Sharp and Casio devices with different model names."

<comment><USER13> The Casio FX-880P uses a Hitachi HD62002A01 CPU, which is a Z80 with a built in MMU. I suspect the _" didn't use the Z-80 CPU"_ part may not be right for the Casio OEM'ed ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have one of these, but the LCD is bad (terribly faint).

How would I go about fixing it?

<comment><USER15> The most likely culprit for display issues on these old calculators in my experience is the ribbon cables. You can take a multimeter and check the resistance of each connection, if any of them read too high you can solder a thin wire in parallel with it.

Or it could be the contrast potentiometer giving too high of a resistance, you can try cleaning the internal contacts or replacing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It only uses those two cell batteries? Wonder what it can do.</comment>


Amid Thaw, Ice Trucker's Cry: 'We Need Greenpeace' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/world/europe/siberia-ice-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> Time to start using hovercrafts</comment>


1950's tax preparation: plugboard programming with an IBM 403 Accounting Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2017/04/1950s-tax-preparation-plugboard.html <comment><USER2> Back in the 1980s I worked for a guy who wrote accounting systems, mainly in COBOL for Wang VS systems, which were still a thing at the time. One of our clients had an old plugboard system--we were helping them replace it. There was one person left at the company who knew how to run it, and no one who knew how to program the plugboards. If anything happened to the boards, they were SOL.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sparkler Filters [1] in Conroe, TX is still using an IBM 402 for daily operations and bookkeeping.

[1] [http://ibm-1401.info/402.html#SparkleFilters](http://ibm-1401.info/402.html#SparkleFilters) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCZ35y3O04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCZ35y3O04)

</comment><comment><USER4> Although not designed for it, old-school punched card machines were capable of pretty sophisticated computations. Here's a tidbit from Richard Feynman [1] on the crucial part played by IBM machines in the Manhattan Project circa 1945. They had even implemented a form of pipeline parallelism:

> Anyway we decided that the big problem--which was to figure out exactly what > happened during the bomb's implosion, so you can figure out exactly how much > energy was released and so on--required much more calculating than we were > capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley Frankel realized that it > could possibly he done on IBM machines. The IBM company had machines for > business purposes, adding machines called tabulators for listing sums, and a > multiplier that you put cards in and it would take two numbers from a card > and multiply them. There were also collators and sorters and so on.

> So Frankel figured out a nice program. If we got enough of these machines in > a room, we could take the cards and put them through a cycle. Everybody who > does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I'm talking about, but > this was kind of a new thing then--mass production with machines. We had > done things like this on adding machines. Usually you go one step across, > doing everything yourself. But this was different--where you go first to the > adder, then to the multiplier, then to the adder, and so on. So Frankel > designed this system and ordered the machines from the IBM company because > we realized it was a good way of solving our problems. [...]

> But one of the secret ways we did our problems was this. The problems > consisted of a bunch of cards that had to go through a cycle. First add, > then multiply--and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room, > slowly, as it went around and around. So we figured a way to put a different > colored set of cards through a cycle too, but out of phase. We'd do two or > three problems at a time. [...]

> As the cards went through, sometimes the machine made a mistake, or they put > a wrong number in. What we used to have to do when that happened was to go > back and do it over again. But they noticed that a mistake made at some > point in one cycle only affects the nearby numbers, the next cycle affects > the nearby numbers, and so on. It works its way through the pack of cards. > If you have fifty cards and you make a mistake at card number thirty-nine, > it affects thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. The next, card > thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. The next > time it spreads like a disease. So they found an error back a way, and they > got an idea. They would only compute a small deck of ten cards around the > error. And because ten cards could he put through the machine faster than > the deck of fifty cards, they would go rapidly through with this other deck > while they continued with the fifty cards with the disease spreading. But > the other thing was computing faster, and they would seal it all up and > correct it. Very clever.

[1] "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Los Alamos chapter

</comment><comment><USER5> > Long before computers existed, businesses used electromechanical accounting > machines for data processing.

The term "computer" \-- referring to either an organism carrying out computations or a machine doing the same -- predates our modern concept of "computer" \-- what we think of instantaneously when reading the word -- by many (or some, depending on _your_ concept of "computer") decades.

</comment><comment><USER6> The title should be "1950s tax preparation", of course.

<comment><USER7> Sorry! Fixed.

p.s. This is a great article.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Fuet, simple and fast template compiler for Vue.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wearespindle/fuet <comment><USER2> Your README don't explain how I can/should integrate it in an existing Vue project. Let's say I use the webpack-simple template to scaffold my project... I really would like to give it a try</comment>


Big Nerd Ranch needs a loan - <AUTHOR> http://www.possibleprobable.com/?p=357 <comment><USER3> Posting because I had zero context and had to research:

\- BNR builds software for mobile / desktop via <http://www.bignerdranch.com/software/>

\- BNR has become "known around the globe for the quality of the experience we produce", except to me [edit - read RunJake's comment]

\- Since 2001 BNR has been running trainings for other programmers and writing well accepted texts on software dev.

\- They want to build an actual location, a la 37signals, to host their trainings and develop a "monastery for learning".

\- They already secured a loan with which they purchased 13 acres near Fairburn, GA in two transactions.

\- They need ~$4,900,000 to build the facility and cover debt, and SBA will lend them 35% of the project at just over 4% interest.

<comment><USER4> And I didn't mean to sound like I was lambasting you. Not everyone is familiar with the Cocoa world.

I just wanted to point out that (most likely) the vast majority of objc/Cocoa programmers in the world got started by reading his book (along with Kochan's objc book).

<comment><USER3> Not at all - much appreciated and good to know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I'm not nearly rich enough to make the loan anyway, if I were I'd be disinclined to give a better deal than the bank. It seems like a fairly risky loan; your money is guaranteed by a property which probably can't be sold for its construction cost and some shares in a business which may or may not go broke.

<comment><USER6> OTOH if the building is made to last, it will retain its value over time in a way that a prefab construction with a 20 year lifespan will not.

</comment></comment><comment> DanI-S _Whenever I go to a really old, really cool building, I think, "This building was built by men with chisels and hammers. How come the modern world, with all its power tools and advanced materials, can't build such cool stuff?" The answer is "Banks won't let you."_

That's a fantastic opening sentence if ever there was one.

<comment><USER5> If you wanna build a really cool building out of stone, save up your money until you have enough to build it with cash. That's what the men who built those cool old buildings did.

<comment><USER7> It also helps if you can wait until a period of enormous wealth inequality so that skilled labor is basically free.

<comment><USER8> Wait?

<comment><USER9> Thats what Dubai and Abu Dhabi did.

Waited for the slave labour to arrive

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One reason the banks are going to be wary is that construction projects are even more prone to cost and time overruns than software development projects are. Thus they expect that the requested loan won't be the last, and if the company doesn't have resources for it then things could go badly south.

Plus there is the fact that if things collapse half-way through you've got a company which could be hard to get value out of, and a piece of land which probably has the start to a foundation that will only be a PITA for whatever anyone else wants to do with said land.

<comment><USER11> For some reason, I don't think that's the issue is here. They don't have much credit history - seems to me that they have bootstrapped up until now - <USER2> everything from profits and retained earnings.

`Harsh penalties for prepayment in the first five years` that shows that the banks are concerned that they have been debt-free or low debt (i.e. there is no money in providing the loan, because they will likely pay it back quickly).

The bottom line is that the banks don't think they will make much, if any, money on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the comments made me laugh:

"Dear Aaron, If I had it, I'd give it to you! Mom"

</comment><comment><USER13> > Some folks have asked about smaller loans. _This is would be great._

When you're asking for large sums of money and very non-trivial support of others, it's probably a good idea to be extra careful with your typing. No offense.

edit: I don't mean to nit-pick, it's just good to put your very best foot forth on these kind of requests!

<comment><USER14> That's obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a recovering banker I can tell you that banks a weary of lending on these Taj Mahal type projects because in the case of a foreclosure all that extra work to make the building look nice doesn't easily translate into rents high enough to justify the cost. Also, keep in mind most bankers have no clue how technology companies operate. Another reason why this might be hard for you is because virtually every commercial bank is getting hosed on commercial real estate and many have exceeded the regulatory limit on real estate lending, so the underwriting is much tighter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Poor societies can't afford the luxury of throwaway architecture. With the cheap prefab construction today, you're lucky if your commercial building lasts until the mortgage is paid off. By then you'll want to rip it down and reconfigure it to the new retail hotness anyway - witness the number of '80s-era strip-malls currently getting rebuilt into big-box plazas.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is a new site up by the guys/girls who created kiva.org: <https://www.profounder.com/>

I think you would be a good fit for it.

<comment><USER17> Kickstarter is another similar way to get funding- although $5 million is asking a lot.</comment></comment>


Insecure by design: protocols for encrypted phone calls - <AUTHOR> https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2016/01/19/insecure-by-design-protocols-for-encrypted-phone-calls/ <comment><USER2> What's frustrating for me is this obsession governments have with the encryption aspect of cryptography, and the carelessness they have with the authentication (signing) aspect of cryptography. If they break the former, they break the latter. The authentication aspect should assure sender and receiver both their mutual identities and the veracity of message content. If any portion of that authenticity goes away, massive trust is lost. Signed digital documents, legal or even everyday emails, is then broken. Both current and historical documents are affected. Voice conversations and voicemail can be recorded, modified, and rebroadcast - my conversation with a bank, a broker, reciting my SSN, all of that can be used with a copy of my own voice in ways that hurt me or other people and implicate me.

I'm convinced elements in governments are playing with matches. I don't know that it's malicious, but at the least it's obliviousness.

It may be inevitable that this gets severely broken, and that's the thing to plan for - the aftermath - not dissimilar to compsec practice of preparing for infiltration by better protecting data itself rather than relying solely on the idea of an impenetrable network.

</comment><comment><USER3> great article would be nice if it concluded with a mention of "there are no secure smartphones": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905643)</comment>


If You're Not On Facebook, It's Time To Get Over Yourself - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/#!top/5792570

<comment><USER2> The author seems a bit too proud of Facebook. (Actually, it creeps me out whenever someone blogs passionately in defense of a product.) Maybe abstainers just don't want to deal with it? I know several people like that. They don't think they're better than anyone, they're just content to let it pass them by.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Everyone knows one of those self righteous Facebook abstainers."

Yep, I see him every morning when I shave.

"Except really, these people aren't defending anything except antisocial, extremely annoying behavior. And if you're one of them, you need to stop."

Who am I annoying? I have about one friend who posts stuff on Facebook, and whose information I might care to see. Sorry, PK.

"Facebook is the most important way we touch our friends online, period."

For some value of "we".

"Birthdays, parties, Passover seders, graduations--they're all organized on Facebook."

They all can be organized on Facebook. (Though "birthdays"--are we organizing a birth?) Also on 3x5 index cards, with telephone calls, or by runner.

No doubt, in many respects I should get over myself. But this fellow isn't the one to tell me.

</comment><comment><USER4> How did Zuckerberg build such a cult following? You're crazy if you don't use this service. Even Apple hasn't achieved that.

</comment><comment><USER5> ><http://gizmodo.com/#..>.

Broken link.

</comment><comment><USER6> Facebook == The new AOL</comment>


Climate change skeptics/deniers pay better - <AUTHOR> http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/climate-change-skeptics-deniers-pay.html

<comment><USER2> > I wonder if this implies something about gullibility.

I wonder if this implies that skeptics/deniers are more productive (and have more money to spend.)

I wonder if this implies that skeptics/deniers are more curious (and will follow a link to learn more.)

I wonder if this implies that skeptics/deniers are less anti-business (and don't ignore advertisements.)

Maybe not but I don't particularly think that clicking a blog ad is a clear implication of "gullibility" either.

<comment><USER2> Also, you only say what percentage of revenue comes from likely "deniers" (based on origin.) If you think you're measuring "gullibility," wouldn't it be more informative to know the two percentages of likely vs. unknown/random who visit your site and generate ad revenue, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Strange the number of posts I see with this logic:

1) I fund my site via ads 2) User group X clicks on those ads more often than others 3) They're suckers!

In other words, "I have contempt for the people who pay my bills."

If you think so poorly of advertising (which is understandable), maybe you shouldn't fund your site with it?

<comment><USER4> "maybe you shouldn't fund your site with it"

Maybe you should read the part that says $0.50 is a typical month. What exactly can one "fund" with 50 cents?

<comment><USER5> My once-a-month small candy bar habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have things gotten so bad, that simply reading about other opinions (on the "denier" blog), gets you branded as a heretic?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but I was assuming that the vast number of people who do read those blogs agree with their contents (because of homophily) and that only rarely are people reading things concerning opposing ideas.</comment></comment>


The 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-built-the-coolest-computer-ever-it-bombed/ <comment><USER2> The Cube with matching LCD monitor and USB keyboard was way ahead of its time. A premium product at a premium price.

The problem was software. Apple did not have the operating system to justify such a premium product. MacOS 9 was laughably dated, slow, and unstable, especially compared to Win2000 and WinXP, and OS X was years away from being ready.

The hardware writes a check that the software can't cash. Anyone would have been better with a PowerMac or a Win2k machine.

I own a Cube, and with OS X 10.4 installed it is a completely different machine. It boots faster than a modern Mac, and is light years ahead of aged Mac OS 9 and the early versions of OS X. It feels utterly modern, and takes full advantage of the tight integration between the hardware, LCD monitor, and USB peripherals.

Unfortunately for Apple, OS X 10.4 was released 4 years after the Cube was cancelled. I think that if Apple had OS X 10.4 ready in 2000, we would look back at the Cube in a different way.

<comment><USER3> 10.4 was such a beautiful operating system. I really believe that Apple had the best operating system out there for the short window that 10.4 was around.

<comment><USER4> I still use 10.4 on a 2005 PowerMac several times a week for various creative projects.

The ease of use is so much higher than recent MacOS versions it's not even funny.

<comment><USER3> What software are you using? Is the machine connected to the internet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember when this came out watching the big unveiling and absolutely LOVING it. And then. My god, that price. It was so stupidly expensive it really deserved to fail. I don't understand how they could think that would sell many units. It was a super cool looking, super small, super quiet machine that could've really worked well for many people. From the Wired article:

"That didn't happen. For one thing, the price was prohibitive—by the time you bought the display, it was almost three times the price of an iMac and even more than some PowerMacs. By and large, people don't spend their art budget on computers."

<comment><USER6> How much was it?

<comment><USER7> I found the old press release. The base price was $1,799 for the 400Mhz G4 and $2,299 for the 500Mhz. Adjusted for inflation it's equivalent to $2,783 and $3,557 in today's money.

[https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/07/19Apple-Introduces- Re...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/07/19Apple-Introduces- Revolutionary/)

<comment><USER8> That's...not as expensive as I had expected.

In my country, after taxes, a 16-inch Macbook Pro starts at nearly $3k

<comment><USER7> The big issue was how underpowered it was for the price. It was the same price as a good desktop Mac at the time but with all the limitations of the iMac.

<comment><USER9> Mind that the iMacs of the time were considerably underpowered G3s with not the best graphics. The Cube was in another league.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I miss Apple using color. I know they abandoned it because they want their machines to melt away and just have the screen left, but they abandoned fun in the process. Computers don't just have to be windows into a virtual space.

<comment><USER11> Personally, what I miss is translucency! I'd really like to see translucent electronics make a comeback, it was always neat to see the inner workings.

<comment><USER12> You might enjoy this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY)

It's about electronic devices designed to be used in prison, so they're intentionally made transparent.

<comment><USER13> It's hard to enjoy tech made for USA's cruelly overlong prison sentences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For me, the cool thing about the Cube was that I could bring it home from college in a carry-on suitcase. At the time, the laptops had G3 processors, and the G4 towers obviously didn't fit in a suitcase. But I could travel with my G4 Cube (500 MHz with DVD) in my rolling luggage and my Apple Studio Display (15", with tilt arm detached) in my shoulder bag. It was the only way to get G4 performance in a semi-portable form factor.

This was great because when I went home for Christmas, I had my computer (and DVD player) in my room. And when I went to summer internships, it was easy to bring my digital life with me. I loved it!

<comment><USER15> I did this just a couple years ago when I found a Cube while traveling! [https://i.imgur.com/H8UxYCj.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/H8UxYCj.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When the Cube came out I was thinking it would be what the Mac mini became. Instead it was a shitty PowerMac that cost almost as much as a PowerMac.

If you wanted to use it for anything but trivial stuff you really just wanted a PowerMac. If your needs were trivial you were much better off with an iMac. Apple's 2x2 product matrix worked pretty well and the Cube didn't fit in it at all.

It was a weird expensive mutant.

<comment><USER17> Kind of like the Twentieth Anniversary Mac before it in terms of having more style than substance.

<comment><USER16> The TAM was _way_ more style over substance than the Cube. The Cube did have some utility in that it was virtually silent. I know a lot of audio people that liked them for this reason. The TAM was a $10,000 pure luxury item.

That being said I would love to add a TAM to my vintage Mac collection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Curious - people have long drawn parallels between Apple and Nintendo's aesthetics for hardware and strategy, but I never realized how close the G4 Cube (July 2000) was to the Nintendo GameCube (September 2001). I still think the GameCube is the most aesthetically pleasing console.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, for all the love the G4 Cube gets, the Gamecube was much, much, smaller, had more efficient cooling, similar specs (minus the disk drive), and was 1/10th the price.

The 1T-SRAM and EDRAM framebuffer caches in the Gamecube were also much more interesting on a technical level. Considering how poorly Aqua ran on the Mac's of that era, the Gamecube's 3D hardware probably would have been better suited to OS X than Apple's own.

It's a far superior design imo.

<comment><USER20> _the Gamecube was much, much, smaller, had more efficient cooling, similar specs (minus the disk drive), and was 1 /10th the price_

How many people ran Photoshop or did desktop publishing on a GameCube?

<comment><USER19> Honestly, Resident Evil 4 was far more computationally intensive than anything Photoshop does. It's applying thousands of texture filters and transformations in real time and then mapping them to polygon surfaces with lighting transforms.

It's all software, some of it just costs more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I actually still have my Cube. I haven't powered it on in years, I can't bring myself to throw it out, but I can't figure anything useful for it to do. I have other PPC macs that are in regular use, but its mostly to support hardware that never made it to intel. Since I cant stick a PCI card in the Cube, it just sits there.

<comment><USER22> It makes a pretty tissue box. [https://www.applegazette.com/wp- content/uploads/g4cube_tissu...](https://www.applegazette.com/wp- content/uploads/g4cube_tissuebox-550x733.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For a minute I thought it was the Next. But that was a bomb that went off 32 years ago.

<comment><USER24> Same here. NeXT was way cooler than any old Power Mac in a pretty box.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I am guessing you never actually tried to get any work done on one. Nothing like listening to it swap on the floptical while doing a big compile. CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA...CHUNKA-CHUNKA.

<comment><USER24> I actually had a lab full of them. I said they were cool, not fast. :-)

Most everyone I knew who had one added a SCSI hard drive real quick to their NeXT cube and moved stuff like swap there, and eventually folks figured out how to replace the optical as the boot drive. If you were desperate, you could swap to NFS which while not much faster was usually smoother (and quieter) than swapping to the optical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Cube was great, particularly once OS X came out in the following year. But even before that, iTunes was released, and with the Harman Kardon Soundsticks [1,2] (two little speakers and a subwoofer) it was a brilliant machine for the living room. Looked great, you could work on it, surf, listen to music and watch DVDs.

You could set iTunes to automatically rip CDs it hadn't ripped before, IIRC, and with the nifty mechanism it was really pleasant to pop in your entire music collection one at a time and turn it into mp3s. Rip, mix, burn [3]. And then the iPod came out in 2001 as well, and your entire collection was on the damn thing in minutes (over FireWire).

Nowadays, this is all a matter of course, but back then it was way ahead of the rest. (Should have bought Apple shares...)

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

[2] [https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon- sound...](https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-soundsticks- ii-teardown-f5ef983185cb)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4)

</comment><comment><USER27> Back when this came out, I was 15, and still stuck in my zealous fanboyism _against_ anything Apple-- but even I had to admit it looked cool.

</comment><comment><USER28> They learned the lesson of the Cube so well, they created the 2013 Mac Pro.

</comment><comment><USER29> These were not compatible with users who set the computer on it's side, or people who would lay papers on top of it. Either way it would overheat (speaking as a former tech support person)

<comment><USER30> My Cube cracked the PCBs of two graphics cards before I gave up on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was gifted one of these long after they hit their EOL. I plan to turn it into a normal x86-64 box since the form factor.. with just a minor bit of dremel work, should fit an ITX board.

As a size comparison, upside down with an ITX on the bottom.

[https://i.imgur.com/W1BTU4u.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/W1BTU4u.jpg)

<comment><USER15> Please don't gut a working rare classic computer :(

<comment><USER31> The fact that it still runs and can even connect to the net (however unsafe that may be with its current state) has delayed the project.

The power supply is flaking out. When the magic goes, it goes.

One of the more amazing things was the monitor. It manages to power itself via the DVI cable.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, the internal DC/DC board is known to die if you load the machine up with a CPU/GPU upgrade, even worse if you use the ADC monitor too. It's not cheap, but Artmix makes an upgraded replacement. I promise if you get into modding the Cube it will be a million times more fun than turning such a rare machine into Yet Another Intel Box ;) [https://artmix.com/products/product/stratos- technology-power...](https://artmix.com/products/product/stratos-technology- powermac-g4-cube-high-power-vrm-unit/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I bought one of these after they were discontinued as a refurb. It was a great semi-portable computer—I'd take it with a cheap flat panel display, keyboard and mouse to band rehearsals and gigs to do recordings. Absolutely silent. At the refurb price it was a pretty good deal. I sold it for not much less than I paid for it to help fund my first PowerBook.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't remember the exact quote I read, but someone back then noted that it was a supercomputer the size of a box of tissues, and that it was (and I'm going by memory now):

 _One of the few things that makes the Year 2000 what it was cracked up to be._

</comment><comment><USER34> Now I wonder if the Cobalt Qube[1] was inspired by this...

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

<comment><USER35> Maybe the other way around. Your link says Qube came out in 1998. The G4 Cube came out in 2000.

<comment><USER15> The G4 Cube was not Jobs' first cube computer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> That kind of move is always Apple's big failing---super-expensive, years ahead of its time but not _enough_ years ahead (and quickly self-cannibalized by better yet cheaper products), marquee products. They did that with the Lisa, and arguably with the Newton too. Though I guess the Newton wasn't Jobs's fault, like the others were.

I really wanted a cube when it came out though.

</comment><comment><USER37> I had one of these, once upon a time. The model with the capacitive power button. Great machine, but it sure was annoying when people would come by my desk to talk to me, and accidentally put my computer to sleep by absentmindedly resting a hand on a convenient surface.

</comment><comment><USER38> A hint of the coming future:

> "Do you really want to put a hole in this thing and put a button there?" > Jobs asked me, justifying the lack of a power switch. "Look at the energy we > put into this slot drive so you wouldn't have a tray, and you want to ruin > that and put a button in?"

</comment><comment><USER39> I still hope they bring this back with the new Apple silicon macs. I loved the cube!

</comment><comment><USER40> The Cube also had bad market timing. The dotcom bubble was bursting so the market for luxury office equipment was quickly drying up. Aside from that everyone said it looked like a overpriced tissue box.

</comment><comment><USER41> Loved by G4 Cube. Was my first OSX machine. Liked the hardware extension scene with CPU extensions and new graphics cards that could work in that small space and without active cooling.

</comment><comment><USER42> I did fall in love with one of these as soon as I saw it in the University shop. But the sticker price was simply unaffordable, our worplace ran MS Windows and I had a house to pay off.

</comment><comment><USER43> In fairness it was an astonishingly pretty machine, and I've always really wanted one - even today when it would be totally useless.

Who cares if it would power cycle on sufficiently hot days :D

</comment><comment><USER44> This is a testament to the greatness of Steve Jobs. It's not just your successes that define you when you constantly are pushing the envelope.

</comment><comment><USER45> I know more than one person who bought these just because Apple had released new hardware. Totally bought in to the image.

</comment><comment><USER46> heh, one of my classmates had this.

His cat loves sitting on top of it, causing it to shutdown unexpectedly.

</comment><comment><USER47> > Jobs: Yeah, we did one before. Cubes are very efficient spaces.

Does anybody know what he means there?

<comment><USER32> The NeXT Cube

<comment><USER48> Also highly hyped, also bombed, but severely influential. IMO has a better claim to "coolest" than the Mac cube does.

<comment><USER49> NeXT was conceptually interesting. It had a magneto-optical drive and, as I recall, one of the pitches was that in a world of expensive computers and slow networks, especially in higher education it was an interesting concept that you could carry around a removable disk and essentially make any workstation "your" personal workstation by inserting your disk.

And, yes, Jobs was quite the salesman. I wasn't at the original announcement but he reprised the announcement for the Boston Computer Society in Symphony Hall. (Which also says something about the size of the BCS at the time.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The cube was a rehash of the NeXT Cube. Why do that again?

<comment><USER51> Because the NeXT Cube was an undeniable work of art...

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I knew someone who had one of these, it was awesome

</comment><comment><USER53> I loved my cube. <3

</comment><comment><USER54> > These are all specially formulated, and it's all proprietary, just us. It > took us six months just to formulate these plastics. They make bulletproof > vests out of it! And it's incredibly sturdy, and it's just beautiful! > There's never been anything like that. How do you make something like that? > Nobody ever made anything like that! Isn't that beautiful? I think it's > stunning!

Weird. This reads like something straight out of a Trump speech.

<comment><USER55> Why is that weird? Both Trump and Jobs have/had huge sway with crowds. It's not surprising to me their speech patterns are similar.

<comment><USER56> Because Trump usually speaks in huge unpunctuated sentences? When did Steve jobs randomly say "Good genes, good genes" while explaining how good he is at nuclear

<comment><USER13> Jobs died before he got old enough to ge to that linguistic stage, thanks in part to his peculiar views on health science (another similarity to Trump)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Do I have too many blockers running, because there's no article here?

Answer: Yes

<comment><USER58> This was my experience. I've got headline, lead image, one line of text and then an author bio!

This is with Firefox 78.0.2 running uBlock Origin.

<comment><USER57> Same here, but apparently this info is worth several downvotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I love it but I'm pretty sure it was built by workers in a factory, but our world only remember names of so-called « leaders »</comment>