Doctors' plan for war on sugar - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/advertising-banned-drinks-taxed-vending-machines-removed-doctors-plan-for-war-on-sugar-20180105-h0duw0.html <comment><USER2> Seeing a few comments about "personal responsibility" here. I used to feel this way, but only toward behavior that came naturally to me. For things I have to work toward, it's always a work in progress.

There are a good amount of productivity hacks and emphasis on time management skills on HN; should I dismiss those articles with a complaint about personal responsibility? No. 'Just try harder' rarely works. If it was that easy, you wouldn't have to try harder in the first place.

Personal responsibility exists, but the human brain is lazy and impulsive, and it takes a ton of outside intervention to get it aligned with modern society (parents, schooling, socialization, etc.). It's no wonder we have appetite control problems since we're dealing with human hardware that's hundreds of thousands of years old.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree. Personal responsibility is what you teach your kids, not how you design effective systems.

<comment><USER2> Heh, I could interpret your comment in 2 opposing ways, not sure which one you meant.

To be clear, I have mixed feelings on the "war on sugar". It's just that the "Whatever happened to personal responsibility" cliche others have brought up is shortsighted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Seattle Sugar Tax [0]. Forgive me I don't know much about it and I don't live in Seattle, but I saw this on the /r/seattle subreddit and was surprised. (I am entertaining the idea of relocating to Seattle from Austin. Thus, that's why I was browsing that subreddit.)

[0] [https://i.redd.it/0sfewnke5h801.jpg](https://i.redd.it/0sfewnke5h801.jpg)

<comment><USER5> It looks like such a tax has been introduced in quite a few places now, with results ranging from okay to good.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> To avoid a nanny state, I'd prefer to see taxation and education be the sole solutions. People should be allowed to eat whatever they want, but they need to pay their own healthcare costs somehow.

<comment><USER7> > I'd prefer to see taxation and education be the sole solutions

The market is incapable of self-regulation, that much has shown itself to be true. Removal of marketing towards children and easy access to vending machines will go a long way in improving public health in Australia. The days of avoiding a nanny state in Australia are pretty much gone, the government regulates _everything_ , and for the most part it hasn't actually been bad at all.

> but they need to pay their own healthcare costs somehow.

Terrible idea, Medicare is one of Australia's shining institutions (even with all it's bureaucratic flaws). The American healthcare model has literally 0 chance of ever being adopted in Australia. The simple fact is we live in a socialised society, and so when burdens are placed on the public infrastructure from profit hungry corporations, the natural response is to regulate and deal with it. We saw it with cigarettes, hopefully we see it with sugar, and one day with alcohol too.

<comment><USER8> > but they need to pay their own healthcare costs somehow.

I think you should read this as arguing for Tax on Negative Externality, also called a Pigovian tax. Such taxation aims to solve the problem that the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good. Sugar is a horribly addictive substance, and the outcomes of it's consumption and abuse are a massive drain on Australia's public health infrastructure. Hopefully however the sugar tax is coupled with some form of subsidy or relief from high prices of healthier alternatives (the groundwork exists with a GST exemption for fruit & veg) because obesity has a disproportionate affect on people in lower income brackets due to how cheap and easy it is to buy some processed garbage.

<comment><USER9> The outcomes of going outside without a hat and sunscreen are a drain too; in Australia, skin cancer kills thousands of people per year and requires hundreds of thousands of people per year to be treated.

Should going outside without a hat on be ticketable?

And what about people over 70, falls cause many bone and brain injuries, and many deaths in the elderly, and it's expensive and dangerous. Should we require a helmet and kneepads for anyone over 70 to be work at all times when walking?

And what about salt? Heart problems come from more places than obesity, and it's heart problems that are a huge drain on the healthcare system; will we also ban salt?

How about a sedentary office lifestyle, this is also bad for your health, will we tax sitting? Will the gym, like voting, become compulsory in Australia?

<comment><USER7> You can make up all these outrageous examples which don't correlate to what I said in any way shape or form at all as much as you like, but just know you aren't convincing anyone or making a compelling argument.

Skin cancer and heart disease are major issues as is the elderly falling over, and if there were predatory organisations which were peddling products that abused human weakness to capitalize on addiction, or running around pushing old people over, I think we should look into handling those organizations. However salt and sunshine are absolutely vital to the proper functioning of the human body, whereas eating a bag of skittles and downing six bottles of coke is not. And corporations are out there peddling sugar because it sells, and that is predatory behaviour and the bill is footed by the Australian public for the profit seeking of a tiny minority. That is what this recommendation seeks to stop.

<comment><USER9> A good argument, and a reasonable one, but we do have game, TV, and social media companies doing whatever they can to ensure a sedentary life of staring at screens, since the more you sit and stare (and develop mental and physical health problems) the more ads or iaps they can feed you and profit from. No one suggest we tax sitting or screen time.

I'll concede sun and salt are in a different category, but it seems morally wrong to tax my sugar because someone else can't moderate their own intake. Why is it our position anyway, to tell someone what they can't do if it doesn't affect us? If we tax sugar, alcohol, salt, etc, then the man who has these each in moderation, once a month or whatever, is now paying higher taxes not on one product, but across the board, where none of it harms him because he partakes rarely of any one category.

<comment><USER10> If you eat less than the average amount of sugar then a sugar tax is equivalent to giving you money by reducing your tax burden at the expense of others.

<comment><USER9> That's true, but limiting someone else's freedom to save yourself some money seems to me to be pretty evil. -- I guess what you said doesn't conflict with that idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about making nutrition facts label to tell me how much added sugar per serving. Yesterday, I had to search the internet to find added sugar in Chobani yogurt.

Then we make law to print warning labels about the danger of sugar on every product that has added sugar.

These would be more effective than tax.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would prefer a war on processed foods if you absolutely need the the war metaphor. The sugar issue would resolve itself if people ate mainly real foods. For example: don't drink fruit juice but eat fruit.

<comment><USER13> This is an incoherent standard, though. Fruits are better than fruit juice because they retain the fruit's fiber, not because they were "processed". What does "processed" even mean? Nothing coherent. We can and should and honestly must be processing foods in ways that are conducive to health and environmental friendliness (think Soylent, Beyond Meat, the Impossible Burger as the earliest attempts at this) - and not making some ridiculously arbitrary decision.

<comment><USER12> Fruit juice you buy in the store goes through a lot of processing. Do you know how many oranges you need to make a glass of juice? You would never eat that many in one sitting. So a glass of store bought fruit juice gives you much more sugar than you would get eating real fruit.

Things like veggie burgers are probably a little better but when I look at the ingredient list it's still scary long. I can make burgers myself from around 5 ingredients or less.

<comment><USER14> > Things like veggie burgers are probably a little better but when I look at > the ingredient list it's still scary long. I can make burgers myself from > around 5 ingredients or less.

Sure, but why is 5 ingredients better? That's the question you haven't offered any defense of.

I just ate a sandwich. I put _three_ kinds of peppers on it. Would it have been better for me if I'd only put two? It had soy-based meant on it. Would it have been better for me if it'd had regular ham instead?

"Less processed" _might_ be a useful heuristic for health, and "fewer ingredients" is likely a useful heuristic for "less processed", but you've presented no _evidence_ for that claim, and it's _definitely_ very far from universally true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> About time.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't get why as humans we like to have "wars on things", can't we just educate people about things and use some self control to tackle these kind of issues.

I mean look what happened to "the war on fat", the sugar war will be no different. I feel that excess consumption of artificial sweeteners, salts or fats will be the next problem.

<comment><USER17> Does education work, in terms of improving health? Does it work better than regulation?

I guess there should be data on this (in relation to tobacco/ alcohol).

My personal biases tell me that people don't have great self control. Shifting social norms, such that over-consumption is less socially acceptable might help. But that's hard to do (and something different than education).

<comment><USER18> > Does education work, in terms of improving health?

No. This has been beaten to death in dozens of studies going back to the 50s. Education does not trump brain chemistry.

> Shifting social norms, such that over-consumption is less socially > acceptable might help.

It would help a lot, but food purity laws would help more. It would be nice if I could find a loaf of bread in a supermarket that didn't have HFCS in it.

<comment><USER17> If you have a link to a good study, I would be interested in reading.

Regarding beard, curiously enough I've just started using a bread maker. Takes 5mins to setup in the evening and can be timed to have the bread ready when you wake up, recommend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Watch: "That Sugar Film", "Sugar Coated", "Fed Up".

</comment><comment><USER20> Sugar is not the primary problem. I eat copious amounts of sugar (probably too much). This ranges from refined sugar in sweets, lots of fruits, juices and even soda. I've been vegetarian for over a decade now, and my BMI Is 23.5, my body fat percentage is 14.5% and my blood sugar level is still considered in the good range for preventing diabetes. I don't think the problem is sugar, the problem is living a sedentary life style, and perhaps even eating lots of processed red meats.

My point being, a war on sugar is the wrong way to battle the obesity crisis. Get people to eat more fruits and veggies and to spend more active time outdoors.

<comment><USER21> Do you know the difference between anecdotes and science?

<comment><USER20> Here's some science then. Based on analyzing food groups controlled with total calorie consumption, it was found that meat availability is most highly correlated with obesity: [https://bmcnutr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40795-01...](https://bmcnutr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40795-016-0063-9)

<comment><AUTHOR> So you are saying that when you eat the same amount of calories, meat is better at getting you fat? How does this debunk the problems with sugar in your view?

<comment><USER22> Note that it studies meat _availability_ , not meat _consumption_.

<comment><AUTHOR> You get more likely fat by looking at meat?

Besides that, I agree that meat is a superior food compared to sugar and it will get you more easily fat, if compared on calorie by calorie base.

But this does not say anything about the addictiveness of sugar or the health problems that come from overconsumption (diabetes, etc).

Will say, most people can control their meat intake (some not), but most can not control how much sugar they consume. Especially if it is omnipresent and hidden in many foods you might not suspect.

<comment><USER22>
      meat... will get you more easily fat if compared on calorie (for) calorie (basis)

I think that's exactly wrong. I can think of no mechanism by which, say, 1000 calories of excess fat+protein would cause more net fat gain than 1000 calories of excess carbohydrate.

<comment><USER14> How about if one results in you later consuming fewer calories than the other by affecting the production (and reception) of leptin, insulin, and maybe a dozen other hormones?

<comment><USER22> Yes, that's exactly the point -- meat/fat have much higher satiety than carbohydrate and less effect on insulin.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An In-App Purchase Brain Dump - <AUTHOR> http://www.subfurther.com/blog/?p=856 <comment><USER2> As an alternative, Portland-based Urban Airship now sells and hosts an In-App Purchase infrastructure, in addition to Push Notification services.

<http://urbanairship.com>

[http://siliconflorist.com/2009/06/17/tap-tap-revenge- urban-a...](http://siliconflorist.com/2009/06/17/tap-tap-revenge-urban- airship-celebrates-launch-iphone-os-30-tapulous-deal/)

</comment><comment><USER3> _A thought for you: how do you persist the "unlocked" state from one launch to another? You could write a .plist, a database record, or other local file, but that struck me as rather hackable by the pirate/jailbreak crowd._

The problem with this line of thinking is that _everything_ is rather hackable by the pirate/jailbreak crowd, and that they do not pay money for your software anyhow. Drop it in a file and spend the extra engineering resources you just saved on something which will help you market the app.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised it took him so long to get it together (he recommends a month.)

I created an entire app in less than two days that has consumable in app purchases. It has a RoR server component as well as the iPhone component and supports the asynchronous callbacks and such. Maybe it was easier for me because my background is in server side programming?

<comment><USER5> It sounds like he hit a fair amount of trouble with subscriptions.</comment></comment>


Death's Best Friend - the-enemy http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/02/deaths-best-friend/ <comment><AUTHOR> > The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, > known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of > the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an > understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a > deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

\-- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross</comment>


No Bitcoin-based protocol can handle more than 20M users per month - <AUTHOR> https://runeksvendsen.github.io/blog/posts/2017-10-08-no-bitcoin-based-protocol-can-handle-more-than-20m-users-per-month.html <comment><USER2> OP makes the implicit assumption that all lightning network payment channels are p2p in which case the 20M users per month upper limit is true. From what I understand, the plan is to have a network of supernodes which settle on the blockchain. Users will interact with these nodes instead of true p2p. Lightning network opponents argue that these supernodes will become mini banks in some ways and will need to follow KYC norms. While it's possible to do p2p payment channels without interacting with any third party, the high transaction fees make it impractical. From the Lightning Network paper [0] :

> If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of > micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels per > year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require 133 MB > blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 locks per year).

Notice the 2 channels per year. These 2 channels will be opened with a supernode (operated by eg- Coinbase, Gemini, Blockstream etc). I glanced through the document but they don't seem to acknowledge the requirement for these supernodes.

It's hard to cut through all the FUD, trolling, memes and propaganda to get to the meat of the debate, so I'm not too sure my understanding is accurate, feel free to correct me.

[0] [https://lightning.network/lightning-network- paper.pdf](https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > Lightning network opponents argue that these supernodes will become mini > banks in some ways and will need to follow KYC norms.

This is an interesting theory. Why don't money transmitter laws apply to standard bitcoin nodes which authenticate more than $10,000 of transactions a year?

<comment><USER4> Laws would probably have to be re-written to categorize them as a money transmitter, because there is no fiduciary duty for the Lightning Network Node (they cannot wrongfully claim funds).

These changes shouldn't happen, there are lots of companies who provide services where it doesn't make sense for them to act like money transmitters. For instance, BitGo is a 2-of-3 multisig wallet where they hold one key. They aren't a money transmitter because they can't send funds without your approval nor can they prevent you from sending funds.

<comment><USER5> > _Laws would probably have to be re-written to categorize them as a money > transmitter, because there is no fiduciary duty for the Lightning Network > Node_

American law draws two circles. One is for entities with know your customer (KYC) requirements. The other is for entities with a fiduciary duty to their clients. The second circle is inside the first. Lots of entities with no client fiduciary requirements are required to know their customers.

TL; DR If you're handling others' money, or helping others transmit money, directly or indirectly, you have a KYC liability under current law.

 _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The max block size for segwit transactions is about 3.7mb. The idea that bitcoin blocks are limited to 1mb is false, and its being propagandized as such by people who really want to fire core and take over the bitcoin brand. It has nothing to do with technology (because as I pointed out the max block size quadrupled in August.)

It's also worth noting that segwit transactions are more efficient and segwit paves the way for even more efficient transaction formats in the future, so that 225byte average transaction size will go down over time.

SegWit was just activated in August. The core client that utilizes it is still in testing (or was recently released) so segwit is still very early in its adoption stages.

Along with Lightening Network and side chains (a whole other form of scalability) and other layer 2 solutions, SegWit contains multiple layer one scalability solutions, not just SegWit itself and the block size increase, but efficiencies across the board-- and over the past 2 years core has been making bitcoin more efficient, and scalable, with many releases and many optimizations... none of which are talked about in the "scaling debate" because its really a "I want to be king fo bitcoin" debate.

</comment><comment><USER7> No Bitcoin-based protocol that handles _money_ , at least.

[https://www.civic.com/](https://www.civic.com/) is based on the Bitcoin protocol. It's a service for putting signed information about a user in a block chain, so that you don't need to implement your own verification of adresses, phone numbers, e-mails, etc being real, as long as you trust the signer of that information in the Civic block chain. This is a read heavy, not write heavy, block chain - reads of signed information is more common that writes of the signatures.

It's definitely my favorite block chain based technology that isn't a currency.

<comment><USER8> What double spend problem is that solving though? Why not a broadcast network? Why blockchain...

<comment><USER9> It's just because "blockchain" is the new magic word that gets you funded. You can do the same with public-key cryptography, but that's boring 70s technology. Who'd want that!?

<comment><USER10> Isn't "the same with public-key cryptography" exactly what Keybase is?

<comment><USER11> I'm not the guy you were talking to, but I still don't know what keybase actually is. Let me know if you understand it.

<comment><USER12> You put your public (and private if you want) pgp key on there. Then you make public posts on your social media signed with that key. This way, you show everyone that you own these accounts or websites or whatever.

If any of the proofs changes, it puts it on a timeline. If your account has a hard reset it notifies all your followers.

Basically its safeish key sharing in the modern world.

<comment><USER11> > You put your public (and private if you want) pgp key on there. Then you > make public posts on your social media signed with that key. This way, you > show everyone that you own these accounts or websites or whatever.

If I don't want to give keybase my private key, which I obviously don't, how can it sign my tweets?

What is even the use case of signing my tweets? Presumably if I can access my account, t's me. There's only two alternative scenarios: someone hacks my account, or twitter is trying to screw me. Is there really a use case for this? Other than a few very high risk individuals, I don't think there's a point in signing tweets.

One of us (or both) is missing something here :D

<comment><USER13> You've got it backwards. The point of Keybase is to replace PGP web of trust with a more human-friendly system based on proof of control of social media accounts (and/or domain names, and/or various other things).

The idea is that you tweet a message that's signed with your PGP key, then publicly register the URL of your tweet on the Keybase server. Later, when somebody requests your public key on Keybase, the Keybase client also requests that URL from the Keybase server, then scrapes it, verifies the signature, and tells that user what your Twitter handle is. That way the user knows that the owner of that private key is the same person who owns your Twitter handle.

Obviously this isn't secure by itself against a compromise of your Twitter account, but if you do this with multiple social media profiles (and/or domain names, and/or various other things), then the proof of identity becomes stronger. And there are some additional security measures based on timestamping and cross-signing.

Documentation: [https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/following](https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/following)

<comment><USER11> In other words, "a website that has people accounts and they can like other website's accounts".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author is just assuming an expiry time of the payment channels of one month, which is not realistic in an hypothetical scenario in which layer2 protocols started to become prevalent in the cryptocurrency space: the more people trust this new software stacks, the longer the expiry times people will give to their deposits, because they will not mind locking money which will be just useful in the Layer2 area, if most of the merchants move to this layer as well, and because the longer your expiry dates are, the less fees (blockchain fees) one will have to pay.

<comment><USER15> So basically, we are back to a federated system :)

<comment><USER16> With a finite currency that is immune to inflation fractional reserve credit cycles.

<comment><USER17> ... But instead has guaranteed deflation and correspondingly greater speculation.

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin is inflationary. It is currently inflating at a low rate and that will decrease every four years.

That's not "deflation".

Further, money holding its value is a good thing. The only people who profit from inflation are governments with fiat and miners with bitcoin.

The people always suffer. The only reason bitcoin is going up in value despite inflation is its use case and technological ability is going up faster, and of course it started at zero.

<comment><USER17> No, you are confusing "inflation" versus "minting more money". While related, they are not the same thing.

Whatever school of economics you subscribe to, 99% of the time somebody says "inflation" or "deflation", they are _not_ referring to the "money supply" of currency in existence. Instead, they are referring to _a change in proportion_ between that money supply versus how much "economic stuff" people want it for.

Bitcoin will continue to follow its past deflationary pattern as long as the supply of Bitcoins does not keep up with the underlying growth of everything else... And it's hard to see a future where "Number of coins mined this year" grows while "Size of human economy" shrinks.

<comment><USER6> Inflation is literally minting more money. Full stop. The definition you are giving is a propaganda line to try and rationalize robbing the populace via inflation. Even Keyenes agrees with me on this. (But thank you for not saying it's the consumer price index!)

What you're actually describing is the purchasing power effects of minting more money.

Second paragraph I agree with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > When a user receives money – which humans usually receive monthly as > wages/salaries – they need to deposit it into the layer 2 system, in order > for it to be available within it.

If my employer pays me in bitcoins from their coinbase account to my coinbase account, that transaction doesn't touch the chain. I can then send bitcoins from my coinbase account to another coinbase account, again without touching the chain.

Why wouldn't the employer pay wages in the layer 2 system to begin with?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Why wouldn't the employer pay wages in the layer 2 system to begin with?

(Author here)

Very few employers pay wages denominated in bitcoins. If you're lucky enough that an employer is willing to pay a part of your wage within a layer 2-system, you're right. For all the people who receive their wages in national currency (of whichever country they live in), they have to go via the blockchain, and thus run into this limit.

Also, it seems to me that, if layer 2 protocols want to solve Bitcoin scalability in order to increase adoption, it doesn't make sense for it to depend on everyone having adopted Bitcoin already (which, I would argue, would be the case if most people received their wages as bitcoins).

<comment><USER19> > Very few employers pay wages denominated in bitcoins.

Very few merchants accept payment denominated in bitcoins, either. And these two statements are clearly tied together. If, upon bitcoin scaling up in the economny, more merchants accepted bitcoins, then it follows that more employers would pay wages denominated in bitcoins.

If the state of affairs remains the same as it is today, then there is no need for me to buy into layer 2 protocols monthly. My monthly spend in bitcoins will remain a fraction of my monthly wage. I could afford to buy into layer 2 annually easily enough.

If more of the economy moves into bitcoins, then employers will pay wages in bitcoins by definition. And at that stage, it will be feasible for them to pay in layer 2.

Either way, I think this exposes a vital flow in your chain of reasoning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> An idea would be to not use one blockchain but a tree of blockchains. Say one blockchain is attributed to London so that if you make a transaction in that blockchain it should be quite fast. Now you want to send money to bangkok, the transaction bubbles up and you get the idea.

edit: obviously someone got that idea before; my point was meant to be that it would be a shame to use a centralised solution like the services of private companies.

<comment><USER7> Wow, that's super interesting, I've never heard about something like that proposed before. Same protocol, but layered and sharded, basically.

<comment><USER21> The Ethereum guys proposed something like this in a super long rambling document with lots of made up terminology [1]

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding- FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> tl;dr: the old "bitcoin can only do 7 tps" argument, except with an extra bit that says even with layer 2 scaling, if each user has to transact once a month on-chain (because... salaries?) then max users is 20M (which is 7tps multiplied by 1month). All in all, not very interesting because there's no reason why salaries can't be paid on l2 as well (securely as well, if LN is used).

<comment><USER23> So thought experiment: the incentive to stay on L2 is anonymity & lower transaction fees. Therefore as usage goes up transaction fees will raise but more will be pushed to L2 in order to avoid those fees, & in effect reducing them

So let's say things have exploded: transaction fees are twice my salary. If I get stiffed on L2 I'll have to pay more in fees than my salary. So my recourse will be to sue my employer into paying the transaction fee

Obvious answer to this: L3

<comment><USER24> Then L4 :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Blockchain protocols typically aren't designed to be scalable because, based on what they are actually used for, they don't need to be.

Bitcoin was a cryptography research project that became popular outside of the usual circle of people interested in such things mostly due to these three somewhat overlapping groups: get-rich-quick types, criminals, and people who have deluded themselves into believing that Bitcoin will usurp the world's major currencies.

One those three, only the last group have any interest in massively scaling up blockchain technologies. Those looking to speculate on Bitcoin markets have no such concern, and the criminals are just feeding off Bitcoin's popularity for this rather than having an interest in making it scale; besides, they'd prefer a more anonymized cryptocoin to be popular rather than something that makes public the entire transaction history.

The 'true believers' of Bitcoin are outnumbered not only by these other two groups, but also by the general population who have no use case for Bitcoin at all.

This is why scalability is such a fringe issue for Bitcoin and other blockchain protocols - they're all just solutions looking for mass-scale problems.

<comment><USER24> So there are four groups? The usual circle, the get-rick-quick types, criminals, and people who have deluded themselves into believing that Bitcoin will usurp the world's major currencies?

Do only the 1st and 4th group hold? The 2nd manipulates the market best they can, and only the 3rd and maybe some in the 1st are actually using it?

May I ask - What do you think are hallmarks of the usual people or the true believers of Bitcoin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This hopefully throws some context on the scaling debate. The giant fight, a fight from 1MB to 2MB, would allow Bitcoin to scale from 20 million monthly users, to 40 million monthly users.

It's not a big upgrade. Any exec at Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, etc. would laugh you out of the room if you suggested that we should have a company-splitting and devastating debate that sidetracks development for 2 years over scaling the platform from 20 million to 40 million users. It just doesn't make sense.

Which is one of the big reasons the small blockers resist the 2mb hardfork. For all the pain that this debate has brought about, there's very little upside in the grand scheme of things. We scale Bitcoin from an insignificant number of users to still an insignificant number of users.

If we find a scaling solution, it's going to come from somewhere else.

<comment><USER27> FWIW, the block size of Bitcoin Cash is 8MB not 2MB: [https://www.bitcoincash.org/](https://www.bitcoincash.org/) "As a first step, the blocksize limit has been made adjustable, with an increased default of 8MB. Research is underway to allow massive future increases."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The only good scaling/high throughput consensus algorithm is Byteball.

The block-chain does not scale, DAG coins suffer form various issues, the only DAG-coin with semi-trustless distributed "consensus" is Byteball.

The implementation sucks, the algorithm is nice and innovative.

<comment><USER29> > The only good scaling/high throughput consensus algorithm is Byteball.

SPECTRE [0] is pretty good, not implemented in any cryptocurrency yet.

[0]: [https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre- protocol-7dbbebb70...](https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre- protocol-7dbbebb707b5)

<comment><USER30> Interesting paper. You could almost rename SPECTRE as "GitCoin" (trademark me) as the various tips of the branches are effectively merged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why can't people be paid directly on one of the layer 2 systems?

<comment><USER32> At that point, aren't you just reinventing fiat money?

<comment><USER33> Layer 2 is not money and so can't be fiat. Lightning network is just a clever way to construct bitcoin transactions such that it is possible to send sub- transactions via different communication channel(not congesting bitcoin network) but preserving crypto currency guarantees.

<comment><USER14> > Layer 2 is not money

Ehrm, what? So Layer1 is not money for you either? Explain...

PS: I'm not agreeing with that "this is reinventing fiat money" comment.

<comment><USER33> layer 2 is the payment processing network, money being transferred remains bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> When explaining bitcoin to non technical people I compare bitcoin for the to gold. Almost all non-tech people I know think bitcoin is the new next currency, I doubt it. Blockchain is currently hyped as currency, but it could solve many things related to trust, which is not only currency.

An other new technology to watch is IOTA ( [https://iota.org](https://iota.org) ) not blockchain based, no fees and scalable.

<comment><USER21> IOTA is amateur hour. The author implemented their own hashing algo, "curl", which is used all over the place in IOTA, until recently including signing transactions. Researchers were able to produce distinct transactions with colliding signatures [1].

Depending on whether you believe the author, either they did it intentionally for the implied purpose of attacking competing forks (as they claim), or unintentionally because they're incompetent. Neither situation sounds good to me.

IOTA also relies on a closed-source "coordinator" for consensus. They call it "training wheels". Who knows if their "tangle" will actually work in production. Crazy to me that people are pumping so much money into it w/o any due diligence.

[1] [https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln- iot...](https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iota.md)

<comment><USER35> Wow. I'm not a crypto expert, but the one thing I'm sure of is that no individual should ever create their own crypto algorithms. Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.

<comment><USER36> >Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.

Stop judging things by what they were, unless of course you think the aerospace industry is a space where 2 brothers can build a plane out of wood and push it off a cliff...

<comment><USER35> Oh, I'm definitely judging it by the titanic failure it turned into: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox)

<comment><USER36> I know very well what you are referring to, however Mt. Gox was one of the first exchanges, and it in no way is indicative of the industry now.

Bitcoin is very new, created in 2009, didn't see any real usage until 2010/2011, Mt. Gox blew up in early 2014, and now in 2017 most exchanges follow KYC laws, are built on real trading systems, and can't be compared to Mt. Gox any more than you can compare a Boeing 777 to the wood gliders that mankind first flew on.

<comment><USER35> My point was that the cryptocurrency world is enormously tolerant of clown- shoes levels of operation, ones where it's hard to tell whether the people are incompetent or just scammers.

Key differences between Mt Gox and the Wright Brothers are that a) the financial industry was well established in 2010, and b) the Wright Brothers were not offering commercial flights to a general audience on their wooden gliders.

The first means that Mt Gox was run by idiots who ignored all of the established best practices around running a financial company. (And was given money by same.) The second means that even if you were right, that Bitcoin was just too new to do well, then they were grossly negligent in offering services to the general public and managing hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Of course, the incompetence at scale continued long after Mt Gox. E.g., [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_\(organization\))

You may be right that there are now some adults running well-regulated businesses. But that doesn't mean the space isn't full of scam artists, Dunning Kruger goofs, and wide-eyed technoutopian marks. We only have to look at the latest ICO announcements to see that, at best, enthusiasm has run ahead of competence.

<comment><USER36> Mt. Gox was a massive fuck up, i'm not denying that. They had no business being in the space.

But at the same time nobody else was taking it seriously. Look back over the history of banks. Do you really think no "bank" ever lost significant amounts of money? Do you really think there aren't still scam artists and assholes trying to steal people's money? Just the other day my mother got called again by people asking for her social to "fix her credit", does that mean that the incompetence of the financial industry is still at an all time high?

Cryptocurrencies have a lot in common with traditional finance industries, but they are different enough that the previous systems don't work. It's very much the "wild west" right now (which i'll point out there were established "governments" at the time of the "wild west"). The space is still new, and if you are risk averse you should stay away from it, but painting the entire industry as idiots and children makes you look like the idiot.

<comment><USER35> We still have bank failures pretty regularly. But they're a small fraction of total volume, and the damage is contained thanks to regulation. Since 1933, every bank depositor in the US has had insured accounts. And the bank failures that happen are not of the "oops I losted your dollars" variety. E.g., the most recent one, the First National Bank of Edinburg, Texas, was just a pretty normal business failure. Nothing was stolen, the regulator arranged a merger, and no depositor money was lost.

It's true that Mt Gox might have lost some money even if they had been following known best practices. You're right that Bitcoin is new, and presents new risks. But they wouldn't have been driven out of business with hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. Money given to them by people who were just as credulous, just as believing that the old rules didn't apply.

Yes, there will always be fools and financial scammers. But the proportion and the scope in the cryptocurrency world is much, much larger. In the short reign of the *coins, there have already been enough disasters that somebody has managed to fill a book with them: [https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot- Blockchain-Contracts-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-Blockchain- Contracts-ebook/dp/B073CPP581)

And I'll note that I'm not saying the entire space is "idiots and children". Just that the tolerance for incompetence and scam artistry is much, much higher. Which, given that you defend it as being the "wild west", you apparently agree with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> You are wrong. But interesting!

Take a look a the following scenario where Bob works for Company A and has a monthly salary of 1.5btc:

\- CompanyA opens a 100btc channel with Amazon

\- Bob has an 2btc channel opened with Amazon

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

Now lets say, that at a start, channels look like this:

\- Company A 100btc -> Amazon 0btc

\- Bob 2btc -> Amazon 0btc

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

As the month goes through, Bob starts spending his money on Amazon and other stores that have channels opened with them. Company A also spends their money paying suppliers and other expenses. After 2 weeks, channels look like this:

\- Company A 40btc -> Amazon 60btc

\- Bob 0.75btc -> Amazon 1.25btc

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

Its the end of the month, many Clients have payed their bills, and Bob has almost consumed all his salary.

\- Company A 95btc -> Amazon 5btc

\- Bob 0.5btc -> Amazon 1.5btc

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

Now its time for company A to pay salaries. And we go back to step 1. Rinse and repeat.

But I think you are right on one thing. Eventually the 1mb block limit has to be raised.

<comment><USER38> I think you have changed Bob's scenario halfway through--he has a monthly salary of 1.5btc, yet somehow has 2btc to spend?

<comment><USER37> He has a side project. He sells pancakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> All true except that a transaction can have around 400 inputs per standard size transaction. You were assuming a single input. This means Bitcoin-based protocols can handle 8B users per month, which is more payments than the ACH handles per month.

<comment><AUTHOR> > All true except that a transaction can have around 400 inputs per standard > size transaction.

(Author here)

I'm not sure what you mean by this. A transaction can have lots of inputs, yes, but they take up space -- in fact they are the largest part of the transaction, since they contain signature (~72 bytes), public key (~33 bytes), as well as redeemed txid+input index (32+4 bytes).

The 224-byte transaction used as an example has a single input and two outputs (one destination address; one change address). A standard (pay-to-pubkey-hash) transaction with two inputs and two outputs is ~373 bytes. A 400-input (2-output) transaction would be roughly 60KB.

<comment><USER39> Standard size transaction is up to 100KB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why not have several thousand block chains? Just having 2^13 blockchains would be enough for 100 billion users. New blockchains could be rolled out as needed. Perhaps a blockchain could mitotically divide as needed?

<comment><USER41> There are some projects working on solutions like this, but the problem becomes how you move funds between these blockchains.

<comment><USER42> I'm interesting in someone exploring atomic swaps.

<comment><USER42> interested _

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The community is well-aware of this problem already, right? Title seems a bit click-baity, but it's definitely an active area of research. Bitcoin is still less than a decade old :)

</comment><comment><USER44> The world now has a compelling reason to make the internet operate again as peer-to-peer in addition to client-server?

(I am presuming there is a reason bitcoin was originally designed as peer-to- peer and not client-server i.e. it was not an arbitrary decision.)

The silver lining of the bitcoin movement, if there is one, could be that it provides internet users with reasons to want the network to reliably operate peer-to-peer. Not to mention reasons to want to understand and use asymmetric cryptography.

<comment><USER45> It's nothing to do with peer-to-peer vs client-server. The main issue is keeping the blockchain up to date. Client-server can actually be more efficient than peer-to-peer in disseminating blockchain updates, but it's still not enough.

Bear in mind that, in order for all users to keep a full copy of the blockchain, every time a transaction is carried out every single copy of the blockchain needs to be updated. Beyond a certain level that simply isn't scalable, as it has a big impact on performance. The only pragmatic way to scale the network beyond that point is to only have some nodes having a full copy of the blockchain, at which point you've got more of a client-server model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting to see this get so many upvotes & discussion. Blockchain is an agreed protocol not a god-given thing, any time we need more we can just increase the block-size.

This blog post would make sense if it talked about why incrementing block-size is not feasible, which is feasible. Storage gets cheaper every year and block- size has no effect on compute power.

</comment><comment><USER42> We'd be down for someone to come out and chat about this at our next crypto builders meet-up at Noisebridge in SF on the 11th.[0]

Scaling is a huge point of interest when considering building on top of BTC or ETH.

[0] [https://www.meetup.com/sfhackdays/events/243614539/](https://www.meetup.com/sfhackdays/events/243614539/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Why do all of everybody's step 1 transactions have to be within a single block? Do the proposed 'layer 2' ideas only work inside one block? It's not obvious why you can't pay into 'layer 2' from arbitrarily many Blockchain blocks, but I'm not really familiar with any of the proposals.

</comment><comment><USER48> What about Ripple and Stellar? How many users these can handle?

<comment><USER49> Bitcoin can do about 7 transactions per second and Ripple tests have shown it can handle about 70,000. In the real world Ripple has never hit anything near that so we don't know for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> If networks and/or computers were faster, would that increase the max throughput? Or is the max throughput fundamental to the blockchain algorithm?

</comment><comment><USER51> I've never heard of such metric, being useful measure of utilization without indicating duration or with another metric.

<comment><USER24> Seriously. What about off chain transactions and their already extant impact on the velocity? From the oft-cited coinbase customer email to coinbase customer email "bitcoin" transaction to handing the private key over to somebody, behind a hologram or not, these types of transactions don't appear on the blockchain but they certainly do effect the economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Even dash/litecoin?

Maybe dpos will win e.g steemit kevin ross just joined

</comment><comment><USER53> This article gets it completely wrong. Bitcoin can handle much more than 20M users without layer 2 services. Layer 2 services are a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER54> Time to buy.

</comment><comment><USER23> ITT: pumpers</comment>


Python 101 cheat sheet: a quick reference document for newcomers to the language - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-cheatsheet3.html

<comment><USER2> Just FYI, this is from February 2000.</comment>


What makes a great teacher? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

<comment><USER2> I wonder what limitations there are to using standardized testing for evaluating "progress"? From personal experience, many of my friends who score very well on standardized tests aren't necessarily "smart" in the sense Feynman was "smart" - that is, capable of creating and sharpening their models of the world.

What's ironic is that while Teach for America acknowledges that it's extremely difficult to measure what makes a "good teacher", in that same sense of a person who continuously creates and sharpens their models of the world, they seem to assume it's trivial to measure a "good student", even though the two are fundamentally the same.

<comment><USER3> _I wonder what limitations there are to using standardized testing for evaluating "progress"?_

Any heuristic you care to use is significantly better than the traditional metric for school quality, which is spending per pupil. (This metric was selected because optimizing for it optimizes for the outcomes teachers unions desire. American public school exist to employ union teachers and sometimes cause education as an industrial biproduct.)

This puts me in mind of the metric my day job used to track productivity for several decades: hours worked by the engineering staff. That one had perverse consequences, too. (Having a bad quarter? Need a good statistic to report to the head office? Start a deathmarch!)

<comment><USER4> Goodheart's Law (not to be confused with Godwin or Murphy's Laws): "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes".

Randall Munroe (xkcd) has make a similar observation.

<comment><USER5> As soon as you start measuring something and attaching organizational outcomes to the results, you encourage gaming.

<comment><USER6> As above, better that what people are pursuing is student learning than spending per school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the most promising things in that article is how the government is using federal money to get legislative changes through that enable the performance of teachers to be measured, and, potentially fire low performers.

Obviously the unions aren't happy about it, but really, the teachers unions seem to think that school is run for the benefit of their members rather than students. If we could break them it'd be a great day for kids and a great day for America.

<comment><USER8> I'm no great fan of unions in general but teaching unions do provide important advice, support and representation to teachers. There have been enough cases of teachers being wrongly sacked over false claims by children of abuse etc. that I can understand teachers wanting to belong to an organisation which will help defend them if they're ever in that situation. You could argue that that could happen in any profession - I could be wrongly accused of stealing from the office I work in - but child abuse is a more sensitive issue than most and schools can feel pressured to appear to be 'protecting children' and perhaps more cynically to not want to take the risk of a repeat incident bringing more bad publicity.

<comment><USER7> It's a fair point but unfortunately the unions have greatly overstepped defending teachers against wrongful allegations and moved into advancing teachers rights at the expense of students.

The following article:

[http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me- teachers3-2009may03,...](http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me- teachers3-2009may03,0,5765040,full.story)

contains a few examples of just how hard it can be to fire a bad teacher, including one who mocked a student's suicide attempt to the rest of the class yet was reinstated in his job.

Additionally, a bad teacher will potentially damage the futures of hundreds of students throughout their career; because of the high cost I'd say that erring on the side of dismissal is worth the risk.

<comment><USER9> As with most every human organizational construct: They were created for good reason and have done good things, but are inevitably perverted over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Teach for America recruits smart, young graduates and aggressively researches and optimizes what works so that they can teach kids better. They're covered extensively in the article and they're one of my favorite organizations.

If you follow American education, this should be absolutely no surprise for you: the unions _hate_ Teach for America.

P.S. _Next, Mr. Taylor announces it's time for Multiplication Bingo._

</comment><comment><USER10> This jives with some of the studies mentioned in the excellent book "How We Decide". Basically, if you want to get good at something, relentlessly question your methods, benchmark yourself, and try to get better.

I become a teacher of sorts about a year ago. I teach my boss's kid how to code on the weekends, he's learning Javascript at the moment. I've had to majorly re-adjust my teaching strategy about 4 times over the last year. When I started I was doing a terrible job, and now I know I'm doing a much better job (though I still have a long way to go). Whenever I teach it takes quite a bit of brainpower on my end as I try and get inside of my student's head, so I can see what's working and what isn't. I can only imagine how hard teaching is when you don't have the luxury of focusing on just one student, but rather 5 classes of 30.

In my memories of high school and college (high school in particular) so many of my teachers seemed detached, uninterested, and even bored with a lesson plan that they'd probably taught year in year out. I wonder how these people can be fixed? Can they just copy off teachers who actually try, or are they doomed to mediocrity? Can one be genuinely self-critical if one isn't motivated? My intuition tells me the answer, sadly is no.

<comment><USER4> How often do good coders read other people's code (in code reviews, or in their free time)? How often do teachers "sit in" on other teachers lessons?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> OK, having read the whole article, it seems like energetic people who buy in to what they're doing are more likely to be successful than people who despair at their ability to control their outcome. People highly energetic about where they're going are more likely to work harder at it, so that's not all that surprising.

And there have been enough links on here about 'grit' to make that consequence not surprising at all.

The interesting question to me would be to see longitudinal results from random teachers in general. I remember in high school having a PHENOMENAL teacher who was in his 3rd year of teaching. I went back to visit him recently (he'd have been teaching 10 more years now), and he was very, very despondent. I wonder how his 'class performance' during those first 3 years compares to his class performance during his last 3.

"Great teachers...were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he'd get a similar response from all of them: 'They'd say, "You're welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it's not working as well as it could." When you hear that over and over, and you don't hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.' Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing."

Sounds like software development, too.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. > [...] But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. "They'd > say, 'Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a > lesson plan?'"

Way to miss the point. :/

</comment><comment><USER12> _Next, Mr. Taylor announces it's time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand._

Patrick (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11>), this one paragraph helped me understand why your business is so important more than all the discussion about it here on hn over the years. You may want to pursue using it in your marketing efforts.

Your business is a perfect example of what Guy Kawasaki calls, "Make Meaning". One more way for you to inspire the rest of us. Respect.

<comment><USER11> He's also a pretty cool cat. Not like I'm making a fan club or anything, but yeah.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help, I'm new to HN ... - <AUTHOR>

There's a (1) next to my username at the top right implying I have a message waiting for me. When I click on it, I'm taken to a page where I can update information but the (1) never goes away. What gives? <comment><USER2> The (1) next to your name is your "karma", which is designed to make the primitive hoarding and status-seeking parts of your monkey-brain feel inadequate when no one upvotes your comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! OK thanks for helping out. I guess we all have to start somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's your karma. You start at 1.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> Some other information. Your username will be green for some amount of time and then turn black. If it turns black, you have either passed the trial period and are legit or you have been ghosted, which is likely only to happen if you either appear to be a spammer, a troll, or you don't fit in. You can also be ghosted after your username turn black. If you try to post too much, you will be unable to post anymore for some period of time. If you try to create too many new users in a day by axing your account, it tracks that also. There is cookie-based and IP based security/tracking. Don't try to say anything funny or you will >50% of the time get downvoted- it isn't slashdot. Don't be mean or controversial, but throw foul language in and be emotional when you want, as long as it goes with the silicon valley flow. PG is Paul Graham- know him and love him like the rest. He runs this place, and maybe the world for that matter as far as HN is concerned and the world of startups as they exist on this site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the info. Happy to be a part of it all. I've spent the last couple of weeks reading just about everything I can get my hands on by Paul Graham and it's all great and inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> HN is an exception to the law of software envelopment. It does not have private messages.</comment>


Attempting to modify e-coli with CRISPR in my bathroom - <AUTHOR> https://benjamin.computer/posts/2018-04-20-e-coli.html <comment><USER2> The post mentions CRISPR in the title and at several points but I can't actually discern at what step the CRISPR gene editing would have been performed. As described, this mostly resembles a classical transgenic experiment where a plasmid with an antibiotic resistance gene is introduced (transfected) into the bacteria. This has nothing to do with CRISPR, which allows more targeted modifications of a host genome than simple plasmid transfection.

At any rate it's a fun experiment that is performed, in similar form, in biology in French high schools. Contrary to the tone in some of the comments it's not particularly dangerous (the bacteria can't survive outside their agar plates), though local regulations in some countries still might forbid it from being performed at home.

Unfortunately the description is too imprecise to be sure what exactly the author did.

<comment><USER3> Near as I can tell the only real reference to CRISPR is that he purchased a plasmid that had been modified with CRISPR. Note: This is not what-so-ever like using the CRISPR method to modify DNA. Modifying bacteria with a plasmid as he is demonstrating here is no where near its equivalent. Every introduction to biology course that I've ever seen performs the identical procedure (and generally with much higher rates of success).

<comment><USER2> I think I got it: the plasmids (plural) contain the Cas9 and the gRNA targeting _rpsL_ in the host organisms [1] (plus the DNA template for the homology directed repair).

[1] [http://www.the-odin.com/crispr-bacterial-guide/](http://www.the- odin.com/crispr-bacterial-guide/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some issues and general observations:

* Making plates is hard. You really need an autoclave, and a laminar flow hood is also very helpful. For a DIY approach, you need a pressure cooker and a bunsen burner (in a relatively still room, the bunsen burner creates a radius of sterile space around it. Yes, this is legitimate lab technique, if a bit old-school). Those plates were clearly contaminated, and without proper sterile technique, nothing whatsoever is going to work. The kit's instructions, in my view, are unlikely to produce sterile plates. They provide sterilized agar, but need to be poured in a sterile area, but make no provision for this.

* The instructions for the kit are just barely sufficient. There are a million different ways you can do things incorrectly, so very clear and thorough steps are needed for a novice to have a chance at success. A lot of troubleshooting material should be included as well. This is a setup for failure in my view. For instance, an un-inoculated control plate is a bare minimum control. For a HN-friendly analogy, it would be like debugging software without any error reporting, print statements, etc.

* Lab equipment is mostly fridges, water baths, plastic disposables, and moderately specialized stuff like tabletop centrifuges and thermocyclers. It seems relatively accessible, which gets people excited about DIY microbiology, but it's deceptive. Temperatures, and the stability of temperatures, can matter a lot. Reliable equipment is very important. Someone seriously looking to do this (it's certainly possible!) needs to be able to devote a fair amount of space and resources to their home lab.

* The #1 difference between a 'real' lab and a home lab is access to troubleshooting resources. Shit goes wrong all the time, and experienced post-docs, lab techs, colleagues, etc. are what make research possible. You also very often need access to quality materials for positive and negative controls. It's not uncommon for entire labs to grind to a halt for weeks or months until some tricky bit of troubleshooting is resolved.

Some people are commenting that this isn't 'CRISPR'. It is. The transformation provides a plasmid that will not convey resistance on it's own (unless they're being dishonest about what's in the kit). Only when a stable transformation of the genome occurs will resistance be seen.

<comment><USER5> I spent a year in a lab learning how to clone genes into E.Coli. it's amazing how easy it is to screw up. Once, we got a bottle of broth back from the autoclave (it should be completely sterile) and within a week or so of sitting on the shelf, unopened, there was already a cloudy membrane growing inside.

What I learned from the process is that it's all about control experiments and troubleshooting. To make a real discovery today, or even just convince yourself you succeeded in a process, you need to be outright paranoid about every component in your system. I wasted a lot of time because I started with only negative controls, and learned the hard way that you need positive controls.

That doesn't even begin to describe all the problems I had extracting reliable data from gels. I'm convinced that all the dark secrets in biology are in the gels.

Even when I worked for a major biotech company, when i talked to the guys who ran the continuous fermentors said they always saw strange fluctuations in things like bulk metabolic rate, drug production, etc, that they couldn't explain, and they were _the_ experts in reliably growing liters of e.coli.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What worried me most about those pictures is that there is a can in that fridge that says 'breakfast pizza'. Is that a real thing or is this very subtle trolling?

<comment><USER7> No, that probably isn't a can of breakfast pizza, just looks like a recipe that's usually printed on cans of vegetables. Further, if you were worried that breakfast pizza was something unusual, it's just normal pizza, not specifically for breakfast, but using breakfast ingredients (eggs, bacon, potatoes.) Often times cans of vegetables include a recipe to... fill space? Provide value?

The can itself looks like a can of olives (warning at the bottom says to watch out for pits, the ingredient line for olives is very specific as to what type of olives to use, olives are fruits in a botanical sense.)

<comment><USER8> Is there a large part of the world I'm ignorant of which considers olives and mushrooms to be breakfast ingredients?

<comment><USER5> they are not uncommon in omlettes. Spanish Omlette- olives & red pepper. Also, I would imagine that the Japanese eat miso soup with mushrooms for breakfast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Intro contains two of the greatest lines ever blogged:

>Grow some bacteria

>Take some bacteria and make it competent

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if anyone has genetically modified microorganisms to synthesize illegal drugs. Seem like if this happens, the DEA is going to have a really rough time.

<comment><USER5> You mean like this? [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6252/1095](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6252/1095) or this? [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25994576](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25994576)

<comment><USER10> Wow! Very interesting, thanks for those links

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> is he risking his family, and possibly neighbors, with this setup in his bathroom?

asking with genuine concern - i have no idea how contagious e-coli would be and what its medium of spreading is.

<comment><USER12> Your intestines are filled with e-coli. It spreads via contaminated water (or food, usually water).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The e-coli experiment you can buy is an attempt to create bacteria that can survive on an anti-bacterial plate of agar."

That's exactly what we need!

<comment><USER14> This is standard procedure in microbiology. Resistance is to one known antibiotic rather than an attempt to create a MSR monster. This allows one to quickly verify if a trait intended to be conveyed with the antibiotic resistance was transferred, since cells without the package will just die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is so hacky compared to working in a well-equipped lab. Not having analysis instruments also limits how much can be accomplished.

<comment><USER15> You say this like it's a bad thing? I'm more amazed that anything like this is even possible outside of a lab environment.

<comment><USER16> I've engineered a 20kbp yac in my kitchen, but also I have a PhD in chemistry and real molecular biology experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Attempting to modify e-coli with CRISPR in my bathroom

This either sounds like the third sentence uttered in a 911 call, The FBI justification for a lifetime supermax incarceration, or the cause of death and mortality summary on a medical report.

<comment><USER18> It made me think, "I wonder if you could modify whatever bacteria is growing in my bathroom to emit a fresh lemon scent, so it would always _smell_ freshly cleaned."

<comment><USER5> We can do minty: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acssynbio.5b00092](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acssynbio.5b00092)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm, am I the only one concerned here? This technology should be strongly regulated. I don't want some "biohacker" accidentally creating AB resistent bacteria in their back garden...

<comment><USER20> > I don't want some "biohacker" accidentally creating AB resistent bacteria in > their back garden...

There are much easier ways of creating AB resistant bacteria than CRISPR. In some countries, they even give out the necessary chemical reagents for free to anyone with a bit of patience!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Would somebody explain if that actually makes (sort of) sense or it's pure trolling?

<comment><USER22> The accusations of trolling can do a lot of damage.

Some people find hacking ecoli is cool - I am one of them, even if this experiment failed it is great to see what is possible right now.

<comment><USER21> Where is the accusation? Mine was a question. And, according to other comments, the title is actually a click-bait (no CRISPR involved). Probably I used the word "trolling" with a bit of a lateral meaning (something like "make fun of other people"), improperly.

<comment><USER2> > no CRISPR involved

Please see my follow-up comment: I was able to find the protocol of the kit that the author likely used and it looks like a CRISPR experiment after all. Its description just didn't sound like it (the actual steps are somewhat similar between the two experiments).

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the clarification. Mine was still an honest question.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is Startup Weekend like? - <AUTHOR>

There is a Startup Weekend event being hosted at my university in January and I'm interested in participating. How do you find a team? Do people take their creations seriously afterward and expect to pursue them as a company? Any tips to help me get a better picture of how it works and whether or not I should sign up would be great. <comment><USER3> It depends. The one I went to, teams formed around the ideas - <USER2> pitched an idea, then you had to go mingle with people to get votes, then the top ten were the ideas that most people worked on.

Usually a couple of teams actually stay together for over a month, most usually fizzle after the weekend.

The one I went to tended to be a little more business-oriented than I liked (the winning team didn't write a line of code), so maybe be careful at first if that's not what you're looking for.

I think it's worth going to for at least one day. You aren't (or shouldn't be) bound to sticking with it the entire weekend.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for something to improve my programming skills, like a hackathon. The only problem with just showing up for a day is that it costs $79 to register either way.</comment></comment>


TrapTap – A Wireless Speed Trap Indicator - <AUTHOR> http://Izh7FiYw.kckb.st <comment><USER2> Good luck! You will need it, because this is one of those ideas that starts with:

Step 1: Everyone owns and uses our product.

<comment><USER3> No matter what the percentage of all drivers own one, whenever one owner gets nailed at a trap all the rest that pass by don't get nailed by the same trap. So it only takes a small percentage (one of a thousand?) in your area for it to start working.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to legally secure a Web Service? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
My company is working on releasing an iPhone app. The app uses a Web Service hosted at our own servers. Since anybody can access the Web Service, we want to legally prevent people from making apps using our WS. Do you have any leads on this subject ?
Thanks in advance <comment><USER2> The simplest example I can think of is to create an app on twitter <https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new>

They hand you a consumer key and a consumer secret which are used to access the API. Then, individual users must use an Access token and Secret, to get back an Auth Token.

While you don't need to be that sophisticated, requiring some authentication for queries against your webservice will allow you to disable shared or abusive keys.</comment>


Your 2048 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anilshanbhag/Your2048

<comment><USER2> My Google Account doesn't seem to want to connect, but we just did a potentially similar thing here: [http://games.usvsth3m.com/2048](http://games.usvsth3m.com/2048)

Great minds, etc!</comment>


Mozilla Mr. Robot promo backfires after installing extension without permission - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/mozillas-mr-robot-promo-backfires-after-it-installs-firefox-extension-without-permission/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mozilla was doing so well with Firefox 57, I almost thought there would be a come back.

This is bad. Very bad.

How can they claim they care about privacy, now? Privacy and control was how they sold the product, now they've proven user have absolutely no control, and Mozilla doesn't respect its users.

This could be the final nail in the coffin.

</comment><comment><USER4> They had the fucking permission, that's actually part of the problem. They ship Firefox with the "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" permission already enabled (bad bad bad).

And they did this shit for some promotion for a TV show. What a clusterfuck Mozilla, hope you learned your lesson.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Here is Mozilla's response, courtesy of Chief Marketing Officer Jascha > Kaykas-Wolff [...]

A tone-deaf response that doesn't acknowledge the issue with their approach, after two days of official silence.

Mozilla, it's time for some serious introspection.

<comment><USER6> Those responsible need to be fired or resign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The amount of chuzpah, ignorance and insensitivity in that CMO's response is staggering and completely out of touch with their core audience.

Looks like they didn't have a look at what happened to Patreon lately.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is how it starts. One show, opt-in.

I happen to like Mr. Robot but what happens when a show I dislike is pushed on me. Later on, it's 5 shows with a forced opt-out. After that, it's a bunch of other stuff with a convoluted way of opting out (similar to "installing" a 3rd-party search engine).

Mozilla says it's a show it's users like... This is the scariest statement from Mozilla so far. It's the kind of thing the Facebooks, the Googles and all the others are doing via their surveillance mechanisms.

After a while, the browser will be littered with Kardashian stuff because the majority will dictate the lowest common denominator.

</comment><comment><USER9> Technically it was with permission, because people had shild program enabled in Firefox, it's a different story who enabled it, and why it re-enables after upgrade.

<comment><USER10> Does participating in a program to study potential improvements in Firefox equal permission to roll out advertising? I guess one could construe it as "experiment how people react to ads", but I doubt that's what those responsible had in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really don't understand the negative sentiment. You're trusting Mozilla to run code on your machine, and automatically push updates. Is there a substantive difference between updating FF binaries directly vs calling it an add on? Just not grokking it

<comment><USER12> Because it was arbitrary and opaque? It was not apparent that there was a promotion being implemented by a feature of the browser not explicitly used for marketing. It introduces an trust problem.

<comment><USER13> So, who can we trust with our web browsing, if not Mozilla? In your opinion, of course. Just curious.

<comment><USER12> I think that's the point, isn't it? This is one of those groups we felt somewhat confident with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It sounds like the marketing department has been left to run amok with little or no oversight</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know some companies doing niche business in custom programming? - <AUTHOR>

For web or desktop it doesn't matter. <comment><USER2> I interned at one:

<http://www.foliage.com/></comment>


Safeguarding against social engineering attacks on live chat - <AUTHOR> https://blog.olark.com/guarding-against-social-engineering-attacks <comment><USER2> Matt here, Sendwithus founder -- Live Chat is great, but it's really important to consider that most of the "big hacks" in the news are the result of social engineering.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any service which concludes stuff based on SEC filing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What kind of 'stuff' are you looking for conclusions on?</comment>


Being a Better Programmer #2: Don't Be a Missionary - <AUTHOR> http://www.humanerr.com/2008/07/14/being-a-better-programmer-2/

<comment><USER2> There's nothing wrong with using politics and marketing to get good changes pushed forward. The real point here is to make sure those changes are good for more than just your own personal satisfaction.

There are good causes and not-so-good causes. Being a missionary isn't the problem.</comment>


Google, practice what you preach - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/binary-passion/practice-what-you-preach-215bfd6f1fe7#.hssxxtqys <comment><USER2> Actually I like it quite often, although I would prefer it to just turn on location setting when I select ,,current location'' in directions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks more like an innocent bug to me.</comment>


Engineers in San Francisco Have Mediocre Take Home Pay - <AUTHOR> https://www.mytrove.com/ca/san-francisco/cheddar/software-application-developers <comment><USER3> Six figures in San Francisco is a joke. I was working out of Raleigh, NC until recently, with a take home pay w/benefits around $85k. I calculated to have an equivalent standard of living and spending money in SF, I would need to take home around 150-160k. Equivalent! That includes no raise over my previous position!

Housing was a large part of it, but equally problematic was taxes. The more you make, each extra marginal dollar is taxed at the highest bracket. So each marginal dollar earned goes a little bit less far. Combined, the high cost-of- living and marginal tax rates make SF extremely expensive. I laugh at 120k offers in SF, that's like making 65k in a reasonable city.

<comment><USER4> I live in North Carolina (not in the tech-heavy part) and "work in" SF Bay Area ... it's a good situation.

<comment><USER5> I wish I enjoyed remote work more, since I've managed to get contracts like that but really missed the feeling of working with a team in an office.

<comment><USER4> That is the real downside to remote work. I used to enjoy frequent outings and lunch time with co-workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is wayyy off in housing. I don't know anyone who is paying 10k a year for rent in santa clara county. This is the rent if you are sharing a house with 5 other people in bad parts of san jose. Peninsula rents are almost the same as SF.

<comment><USER7> Likewise for SF, their estimate is $1250/month, which will rent you a garage or a converted living room with a curtain separating it from the kitchen in the far reaches of the city.

As a grad student, this is about my budget for housing, and I promise you I'm not exaggerating.

<comment><USER8> >Likewise for SF, their estimate is $1250/month, which will rent you a garage or a converted living room with a curtain separating it from the kitchen in the far reaches of the city.

You found a garage for $1250? Link? Is there an open house soon?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When you realize your take home in Germany is higher than in San Francisco in absolute numbers despite 50% income tax... Mindblowing.

<comment><USER10> > 50% income tax

Thats insane

<comment><USER11> When you put it like that. But a big chunk of that is (I presume) mandatory pensions payments? So just a little insane?

<comment><USER12> 45% is the ceiling bracket for income insurance, then there's pension insurance (~9.x%) capped at ~70k income, unemployement (1.5%) also capped at 70k, solidarity surcharge (up to 5.5%, basically redistribution between parts of Germany). Health insurance is separate again (up to %7 capped at 50k).

But with that you have free education including college, health insurance without deductibles & co-payments, continued payment in case of loss of work, kinda somewhat decent-ish retirment money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish tools like this would account for equity.

Base salary in the Bay area has never been particularly high compared to comparable cities, but in my admittedly anecdotal experience, The Bay Area has the highest equity compensation of anywhere in the US.

<comment><USER14> But is the equity actually worth anything?

<comment><USER15> established companies (FAANG) come as RSUs that vest monthly or quarterly. so yeah, real money.

<comment><USER16> You can only sell once a quarter though!

<comment><USER17> That's only a Google thing. At Microsoft, for example, you can sell all the time.

<comment><USER16> There's no trading windows for insiders?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find this pretty off for silicon valley. <$1000/month for housing? Even with utilities, this is still nothing. If you added in all of misc, it'd be more realistic. Wasn't aware that salaries in Seattle had risen to $130k+ so quickly either. I remember starting at $80k being a good salary there just 3-4 years ago.

<comment><USER19> I don't know what the average is, but I was making around 130k in Seattle 10 years ago and I don't think I was a huge outlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Am I crazy in thinking the listed comp is crazy low?

Not disputing that the COL is too damn high, but the only people I know making that little are very early in their careers and/or working for a startup, and that's be valuing their equity at 0 (which is probably an appropriate valuation).

Or maybe I'm just in a weird bubble.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is based on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data: [https://www.mytrove.com/t/cheddar- counter/methodology](https://www.mytrove.com/t/cheddar-counter/methodology)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sure, living and working in the city sucks. But the Bay Area as a whole? Very Good.

[https://www.mytrove.com/ca/the-bay-area/cheddar/software- app...](https://www.mytrove.com/ca/the-bay-area/cheddar/software-application- developers)

<comment><USER8> East Bay (El Cerrito/Albany/Berkeley) is where it's at. Great weather, no suburban sprawl hell, easy commute to anywhere, great food and culture, top notch schools, decent rents. Every time I try to leave this place I just can't justify it.

<comment><USER22> Do you rent or own? I've been looking to buy in the East Bay, but it's becoming extremely difficult to find something that an engineer's salary can afford that's in a good school district and is of a reasonable size.

<comment><USER8> I rent in El Cerrito but we've been looking at buying. It's really the best option around here IMO. Decent 3 bedrooms in a wonderful neighborhood can still be had for < $700k. Case in point: [https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/El-Cerrito- CA/fsba,fsb...](https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/El-Cerrito- CA/fsba,fsbo,new_lt/house_type/18525815_zpid/51858_rid/1-_beds/1-_baths/37.947141,-122.256289,37.88891,-122.348557_rect/13_zm/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Manhattan one is quite amusing: [https://www.mytrove.com/ny/manhattan/cheddar/software- applic...](https://www.mytrove.com/ny/manhattan/cheddar/software-application- developers)

<comment><USER24> I've never seen such bullshit! I live in Chinatown with a 100k salary. According to this website the median is 111k salary, with 11k discretionary income.

I have a decent place in Manhattan (Chinatown), which I'm paying $800/mo for (split with 2 friends), absolutely not paying 5.3k/y for transportation (3 subway cards a month??), and I have NO idea what these mystical $1500/mo miscellaneous expenses are, unless they could be attributed to savings, $600/mo on groceries is just feckless profligacy--and $500/mo on utilities??? WTF!???

I have so much discretionary income I literally have nothing to do with it except save/reinvest. My two roommates constantly make fun of me for being a spendthrift, but according to this website I must be in the top 25 penny- pinchers in Manhattan...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I find their methodology to be seriously flawed.

It doesn't matter what dataset you are using to base it off of, if you think that the average person pays $1,263 per year in total healthcare costs you're crazy. I'm paying something like 3 times that as a very healthy 20-something.

<comment><USER26> There's probably some bimodality here. Nobody pays 104/mo in insurance but I bet 50% pay more and 50% pay $0/mo (due to their employer paying it).

<comment><USER25> Is it common that employers pay 100% of healthcare costs? I've never heard of a company doing that outside of big tech companies. I work at a startup and for us its about 50/50 employer/employee contribution, which is similar to the deal I've gotten everywhere I've ever worked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Big FYI for all you devs - this is how content marketing is done correctly. This page is quality content (similar strategies provide useful tools) that is tangentially related to a companies product/service. BUT there is no call to action, no pitch, and no mention of the actual company being a company - <USER2> comes off as a publisher.

The benefits to this are: links for SEO, links/blogs/news articles about it, discussion around the topic, and some percent of users who are interested in the subject will poke around the site for more info... and they'll find out this company will store and move your belongings for you.

The best example I can think of is (was) crew.co

[https://crew.co/blog/how-side-projects-saved-our- startup/](https://crew.co/blog/how-side-projects-saved-our-startup/)

</comment><comment><USER28> So, fun observation. The site estimates the housing cost for year to be ~$18k. LOL. It's kinda difficult to get a room (in a shared apartment) in an accessible part of SF at that rate today. I guess it's worse than mediocre.

</comment><comment><USER29> Living in San Francisco is a luxury people trade discretionary income for.

</comment><comment><USER30> According to the "Methodology" section, the data is based on:

> May 2016 Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Area Occupational Employment and > Wage Estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. Department of > Labor. Unless otherwise specified, the salary is the "Mean Annual Wage" > column of the data set.

This data also has a 75th percentile and 90th percentile column. It would be cool if the visualization worked with those parts of the data too, because the salary gap between the 50th percentile and the 90th percentile can sometimes be huge.

</comment><comment><USER31> Questions about the data aside, I really like the Data visualization UI and UX, its very nice-to-use and you play around with it without thinking.

However, whenever it shows "Physics Teachers and Business Teachers" and says they are for postsecondary, I think they mean professors for college or other postsecondary education because teachers tend to mislead and bring up images of highschool teachers instead.

</comment><comment><USER32> That's strange. When you click on the next dot over, for The Bay Area, it jumps to "excellent" with discretionary income of $42,329.

</comment><comment><USER33> I make $140k in Detroit. With decent 401k benefits, insurance, flex time, remote twice a week. I'm a programmer working for just a regular company. Building your typical enterprise CRUD app. I know people making $190k 45 minutes away in Ann Arbor. I've often been tempted by the valley but it's just not worth it. I'll need to make $250k cash at the very least.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wound up deciding to live in the midwest while working remotely for California companies. Now it's as if my salary has gone up by 200-300%. The midwest gets an incredible amount of hate from west coasters, but meanwhile I'm living a life which feels like an easy paradise compared to the rat race back on the west coast.

</comment><comment><USER35> Bay Area average apparently has a "Very Good Cheddar" rating

[https://www.mytrove.com/ca/the-bay-area/cheddar/software- app...](https://www.mytrove.com/ca/the-bay-area/cheddar/software-application- developers)

</comment><comment><USER36> The trove data for housing is way off. Especially for cities like NY or SF. Where in San Francisco can you find a place to rent for $18k/year or $1500/month?

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, that is how it is. Meaning a developer, if comparing to the local standard is a normal job that nothing to envoy about.

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks like Seattle it the best for software engineers? Don't care how much I'd make in Seattle.. I'll pass on flannels and death cab for cutie.

<comment><USER39> The cost of living is about to skyrocket in Seattle, if I had to guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> God bless Texas.

(please don't come here and screw it up for us.)

<comment><USER41> You will be ok. I have no intention of moving there</comment></comment>


Good read: cPython's dictionary implementation - <AUTHOR> http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/dictobject.c?view=markup

<comment><USER2> Tim Peters is very good at practical algorithm design. He one of the primary designers of the Python dictionary algorithms. His sort algorithm (timsort) is also pretty cool. Also check out the Knights Tour and N-Queens algorithms in the unit tests: <[http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/test/test_genera...](http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/test/test_generators.py?revision=73489&view=markup) .

<comment><USER3> Also worth noting that timsort is used for array sorting in Java 7.

[http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view%5Fbug.do?bug%5Fid=68041...](http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view%5Fbug.do?bug%5Fid=6804124)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The introductory comments are an excellent read about the pragmatics of good hash table design. It would have been really helpful a couple of decades back when I was routinely implementing custom hash tables. OTOH tuning the probe parameters for a table was always an entertaining way to spend an afternoon. Generating a perfect hash for an evolving keyword table was too cumbersome, but trying to reach nearly every symbol in a dense table with a single probe was good sport.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/dictnotes.tx...](http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/dictnotes.txt?view=markup) is a great summary of the issues.

</comment><comment><USER6> iirc isn't there a chapter in Beautiful Code about this? <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046>

<comment><USER7> Looks like a good book, would you recommend it?

(Also, looks like this is a chapter: Chapter 18 Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People)

<comment><USER8> I have mixed feelings.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184118/what- programming-b...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184118/what-programming- book-would-you-not-recommend-to-developers)

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R1W0YZZWT53Y9M/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R1W0YZZWT53Y9M/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm)</comment></comment></comment>


Please don't organize 'fun' activities at hackathons - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sathishvj/please-dont-organize-fun-activities-at-hackathons-a3333f0bbc2c#.d19pnnape <comment> yc-kraln Please don't organize corporate 'hackathons', as they are spec work of the worst caliber and are exploitative. More info @ [http://www.nospec.com](http://www.nospec.com)

<comment><USER2> Depends on the terms of the hackathon. If the terms clearly state that the participants fully own all the IP they develop during the contest, then it's not exploitative spec work.

Why would a company run such a hackathon? To find talent. To make a PR splash about something. To deliver an audience for a partner. To generate ideas. There are lots of reasons.

<comment><USER3> To encourage use of some API that they provide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remember conversation at {mobile games company} - they were keen to have people come in and write games on their own time, but only if they owned them.

\- Whats the point I asked, I already know a bunch of artists and programmers (indeed work with some) - if we can't own the IP ourselves ? - Would be just doing extra work for someone else.</comment>


Ask HN: CSS/JS/SVG game IDE? - <AUTHOR>

Does there exist an IDE for making games using open web standards (read: not flash)?
Do you think there is a market for a website to allow users to create, host, and share these (presumably free) games?
Of course, the adoption of the newer standards is what really stands in the way, but I've seem some great things made in Javascript, and I'd just like to see them expanded upon. <comment><USER2> Effect Games has something like this: <http://www.effectgames.com/effect/>

It was posted to HN a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986196>

</comment><comment><USER3> If such an IDE was built, it would pretty much mean the end of Flash on the long term. So my guess is that there is a market for an open standards IDE.

</comment><comment><USER4> How about in the form of a browser plugin. Think Firebug. That would be completely amazing and it's definitely possible.

</comment><comment><USER5> It both saddens and annoys me that programming for the web requires: A styling syntax, a markup syntax, an ugly programming language, and a xml based graphic format.</comment>


'Can you hear me?' scam has police urging people to hang up immediately - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/01/27/can-hear-me-scam-has-police-urging-people-to-hang-up-immediately.html <comment><USER2> It looks like nobody has ever actually been 'scammed' by this,[http://www.snopes.com/can-you-hear-me-scam/](http://www.snopes.com/can- you-hear-me-scam/)

<comment><USER3> Surely we're not still using Snopes as a source of truth?

<comment><USER4> You say that as though there were some well-known reason we should have stopped. So far as I am aware Snopes continues to be a reliable source of information about urban legends.

<comment><USER3> They've been wrong on a number facts, and have been shown to largely ignore any corrections or feedback + they've also shown a fairly clear political agenda in the last 12 months and have been creating 'facts' that simply aren't true to support that agenda.

<comment><USER4> That's a shame, but this is the first I've heard of it - can you point me toward any specifics I could read up about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TD Bank recently tried to sell me on how using my voice is a great way to authenticate me when I use their customer service over the phone. Seems banks are still are not getting security right.

<comment><USER6> One of my bank authenticates me whenever I call them by asking my date of birth, my id number and a simple question about how I use my account that is easily guessable and that's why I don't put a lot of money in that bank account.

<comment><USER7> Same here. In response to a question about the most recent transaction, I guessed saying "Umm I took out about 500 dollars, I think." This was good enough to authenticate.

My guess was about $400 off, so now I have $20 in that account

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We stopped answering the phone entirely. All calls go to voicemail, unless the caller is in our mobile phones' address books. 99% of calls are hang ups. The remaining 1% are my mother-in-law complaining that we never answer the phone (we call her back immediately ;-) )

</comment><comment><USER9> Simple way to prevent this... utilities should not allow voice authorizations for new services. Require a signed contract. They can still allow phone based signups for convenience with a contract to follow later, but let consumers cancel any service without a contract for a full retroactive refund.

<comment><USER10> No 'utility' uses just a 'yes' to sign anyone up for anything - this is just a silly article

<comment><USER9> You've never heard of cramming?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cramming_(fraud)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cramming_\(fraud\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One more reason why I will not answer calls from people who are not in my address book. If it's important they can leave a voicemail.

</comment><comment><USER12> "My voice is my passport. Verify Me."

</comment><comment><USER13> Sort of off topic, but relevant.. my fear about iOS call blocking apps might be coming true. Now that there's TrueCaller, Mr Number, Hiya, etc, there are islands of data and I doubt that they're sharing with each other. This is just letting more and more stuff slip by.

i'm almost at the point where I wish that Apple had their own huge gargantuan database of reported spam numbers. Or that they would have licensed Oomas or nomorobo (even though they're a paid service) or something.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've gotten a couple of these and have always hung up. I always assumed it was just a delay tactic while you get routed to a human to talk to about whatever the spam topic of the day is.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apple put this headline in my iPhone News App... it reads like clickbait in the hardest way.</comment>