2.2M BMW's vulnerable to being hacked [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.fiaregion1.com/download/news/bmw-security-loopholes.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> The TLDR;

The cars use a closed network, but still can get hacked. The leak would allow thieves to unlock the doors, read emails, track locations and access collected data without leaving any trace.</comment>


Your DNS Provider Should Not Be Your Registrar - <AUTHOR> http://www.petekeen.net/your-dns-provider-should-not-be-your-registrar <comment><USER2> Unless of course, your domain name is in the .uk namespace, which allows you to change your registrar at any point without their involvement. I don't know of any other TLD's that operate this way, but I don't doubt that there is one.</comment>


Machine vs. Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32978565

<comment><AUTHOR> 24 robotics teams are about to compete for $3.5m in a Pentagon-backed competition.

A team from Google was a favorite to win, but has quit the contest because they had concerns of the competition being linked to a military-backed event, even though it is has a "humanitarian" theme.</comment>


Catching It Early: New Ways of Detecting Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://chembites.org/2020/05/26/catching-it-early-new-ways-of-detecting-coronavirus/ <comment><USER3> What is really nice about this is that they show response to actual human samples, not just purified spike protein vs. control proteins/blanco buffer controls. This gives me hope that a finalized test could have good specificity...

 _Finally, clinical samples were tested to analyze the performance of the biosensor._ _Human swab samples from a normal person and a COVID-19 patient were collected separately. The normal sample was loaded onto the device before the addition of the patient sample. Figure 3a clearly shows that patient samples produce a different signal from the normal sample within a couple of minutes. Even after diluting the patient sample 100000 times, clear responses were observed._

</comment><comment><USER4> If I get this right this sensor could be reused until it is saturated with positive detection? (one or more positive patients depending on intensity of the signal) That would be a complete game-changer compared to PCR where tests that turn out negative are exactly as expensive as positives which incentivizes against testing without suspicion.

<comment><USER5> This has a good impact on the economics of testing. If each test device paid for can find one positive case, there's motivation to expand testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 'Biosensors' are a really cool blend of fields, and manufactured for more ordinary things like pH measurement too, but they (not SARS-CoV-2 ones specifically obviously) seem to me to be completely unavailable to the hobbyist/anyone that doesn't want to have a meeting to discuss a small sample of 100k units to get started.

Is there just insufficient market for them to make them more available, or is fabrication really expensive, or something else?

I asked about it recently, but no traction or comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22996014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22996014)

<comment><USER4> Lazy layman's guess, posted to provoke more knowledgeable answers: expensive combined with very low durability. I just can't imagine semiconductor surface doped with complex proteins to last very long when exposed to arbitrary samples.

If I'd wanted to have this sensor in a near-future hard sci-fi I'd world-build it the sensor to last a day at most to keep it convincing. Comes in a cartridge of 16, each day the machine unseals a new sensor then you need to pop in a new disk.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's the case - when I was looking into it prior to posting the above Ask HN, I saw a video (a bit marketing-y, but interesting) for a company that was deploying pH sensing ones in their packaged product dotted around in the sea (harbour or fishery or something) in buoys for some reason or other. It didn't seem like it was a consumable that would need continually replacing, more like a 'deploy and forget' humidity or temperature sensor (as in thermistor, I don't know if you can also get temp FETs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Impressive that it catches the virus even in a highly diluted sample. I'm trying to figure out if this also works faster than other tests? Can't tell from the excerpt.

<comment><USER8> If you look at figure 2a, it looks like they are dropping successively more concentrated samples of SARS-CoV-2 onto the sensor and getting immediate spikes in the response.

But it's not clear whether or not this technology could be developed into something that can be used at home or in the field. That is the real challenge you need to overcome in order to make a test with a quick response. Packaging a sample, sending it to a lab, getting a technician to put the sample through the test, recording the result and communicating it back to the patient - <USER2> is what takes time not the actual performance of the test itself.

<comment><USER4> > successively more concentrated samples

Good observation, I saw that but completely failed to consider the ascending nature in my assessment in my first post. So reusability would have an upper bound at the first positive. Could still be an incredibly valuable addition to the using Arsenal of they manage to shape a deployable product around the technology (ed if it turns out to be a car-sized behemoth, if the throughput is right)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Covered by ScienceDaily in April:

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200420145029.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200420145029.htm)

What I didn't find covered is how hard is to maintain the "sensing" state of the sensor for more than a single measurement. If I understood correctly, actual antibodies have to be put on the graphene. The described process for that is far from trivial, in the paper:

"The fabricated graphene-based device was soaked in 2 mM PBASE (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, MA) in methanol for 1 h at room temperature and then rinsed several times with PBS and DI water. Finally, the functionalized device was exposed to 250 μg/mL SARS-CoV-2 spike antibody for 4 h."

</comment><comment><USER10> It is important to be scientific about the context. There are already cheap, fast, accurate tests for COVID-19 related antibodies. This test is comparable to other antibody tests and not to the PCR tests which are fundamentally more complex and slow while also being better at detective active infection.

Probably the current biggest competitor would be the Abbot Labs antibody test, so this is really going to come down to cost, availability, and just how much the speed matters. Little differences can really add up when doing population scale testing, but waiting a few minutes might not necessarily be different enough from nearly instant to be worth additional cost. It will be really interesting to see if production of transistor based sensors can keep up with chemical antibody test production.

<comment> mark-r I didn't think they were detecting antibodies, they were using antibodies built into the transistor to affect the transistor response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> South-korea, Taiwan and a few other Asian democracies have shown great organisational skills in this crisis.

The title "catching it early" suggested to me that the article would be about macro solutions for societies to "catch it early".

For instance sewage detection: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/coronavir...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/coronavirus- in-sewage-portended-covid-19-outbreak-in-dutch-city)

<comment><USER12> This appears to be a non seqitur. Why did the success of Asian countries make you think that this would be about something else? Especially since a lot of South Korea's success was tied to the their extensive testing efforts.

Taiwan's success attributed almost entirely to their taking a far more aggressive approach to isolation than WHO was recommending (also notable, Taiwan is not part of WHO due to China's efforts to keep them out).

<comment><USER13> > Taiwan is not part of WHO due to China's efforts to keep them out.

Taiwan isn't part of the WHO because the WHO is part of the UN and broadly speaking, member states of the UN -- the United States included -- don't officially recognize Taiwan.

As an aside, the US relationship with Taiwan is entirely unofficial. The US political stance follows the One China policy and recognizes Beijing as the capital of a China inclusive of both what is colloquially the PRC and the ROC.

For what it's worth, it's likely due to the close (if challenging) relationship the PRC and ROC enjoy that Taiwan was able to get a head start on containment.

<comment><USER11> PRC's influence is shocking. I remember that some Taiwanese officials attended a conference in Amsterdam called "we make the city" and even local neighbourhood politicians were not allowed to officially meet them, let alone take pictures with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tests are useful. Why no one is bothering about humane side of tests outcome? E.g. who compensates effectively lost airline ticket for someone positive right before boarding? For we stop him/her for public safety but also punish like criminal, what for?

<comment><USER15> Travel insurance.

"punish like criminal" \- what are you talking about?

Also, you're talking about the humane side but focusing on losing money because of void airplane tickets. I think hindering a pandemic is more humane than worrying about losing a few hundred dollars.

<comment><USER14> You were never flying, right? No travel insurance covers this. I am glad you are talking about trillions of dollars in savings but against compensating tickets lost which is often a big personal issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do if you see your coworker job searching? - <AUTHOR>

At work today I was remotely pair programming with a fellow dev on my team. During his screen share, he accidentally pulled up a browser window that had various tabs showing open developer positions. It happened quite quickly so I didn't say anything at the time, but now I'm wondering what to do.
He's a very likable guy and I consider him to be one of the top devs on our team and in our company, so I definitely don't want to see him leave. Unfortunately though, we aren't very close personally, so I'm not sure if I should bring it up to him. For all I know he wasn't even looking at jobs for himself...
I appreciate any advice you all have on whether or not I should bring it up to him, project manager, etc. And if so, how to go about doing it. Thanks! <comment><USER2> You do nothing. It is frankly none of your business.

> For all I know he wasn't even looking at jobs for himself...

Or he could just be looking at what is out there. Keeping updated in case he wants to move on in the future. Smart move, if so.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mind your own business.

<comment><USER4> That's the best way to deal with this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do nothing.

Some companies are stupid enough to fire people the second they get sniff of them considering leaving.

You could get your colleague into serious trouble by reporting something that is neither your, nor your employer's business.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hook that guy up with some job leads. There's nothing wrong with looking for a better opportunity. Why on earth would you bring it up with anyone. What exactly do you expect to happen by getting involved?

</comment><comment><USER7> I had a few tabs open today, a colleague saw them, turns out they were positions a friend sent me and was asking my opinion on.

It happens, you don't know the back story.

</comment><comment><USER8> Make sure you are connected on LinkedIn, click to endorse his relevant skills, and write him a glowing recommendation!

Seriously though, it's none of your business, and everyone deserves the right to look at other positions, learn what they're worth/what's out there, and move to a new position if it will make them happy. If your coworker wants to leave, doing anything to keep them around is likely to end badly for all involved. If they do leave, look at it this way, you have expanded your network and now have a friend elsewhere in the industry who might someday look out for you!

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think you know enough to take action. You might draw incorrect conclusions from what you saw and it may have unwanted results if you raise this with a project manager (or him).

Usually there are other signs as well when an employee is looking to leave (search online). When those confirm your suspicion you could consider talking about it. But from just a few open browser tabs I don't think you can draw conclusions (it may well have been recruiter spam that looked curious).

</comment><comment><USER10> Why would you do anything at all? What makes you think it is any business of yours? Rather than tell you to mind your own business, I would love to understand why you think it is something you should act upon?

Also, I hope I never work with you.

<comment><USER11> I agree - It's none of your business what was on his screen. ...and good for him if he finds something better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do nothing unless he asks or talks to you.

I regularly take a look at what developer roles are on offer. It doesnt mean I want to leave my job.

I use it as a way to see what companies are using what technology.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. I do this all the time. One of the most under-appreciated ways to gain competitive intelligence about other companies is to look at their job ads. Of course they won't reveal everything but you can read between the lines, and see the direction they're headed.

<comment><USER14> He could also be gathering data to make the case for a raise.

If he can show the industry rate is higher than he's being paid, that's better than saying he feels subjectively he's worth more.</comment></comment></comment>


Team Behind Finnish Success Story Supercell Launches Nordic Startup Fund - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/04/22/finnish-success-story-supercell-and-investors-launch-nordic-startup-fund/

<comment><AUTHOR> "... Applifier, which was acquired by a bigger American software tool developer Unity Technologies for an undisclosed sum in March."

Unity was founded in Denmark and to my understanding it still has the biggest development team in Denmark. Surely they have offices and likely a corporation entity in US, but saying that Unity is American software tool developer is like saying Sony is American device manufacturer.

<comment><USER2> Yes, to my understanding the SF office is mainly a sales/business office, while engineering/technical work remains based in Copenhagen, with some bits outsourced elsewhere (Ukraine, China, etc.). I believe the main rationale for the SF office is that it's closer to a number of potential clients and investors (and events like GDC), but operations weren't moved there. If anything they seem to be doubling down on Copenhagen as the engineering site, recently moving to a bigger new space in the city center.</comment></comment>


Sun Microsystems: A Look Back at a Tech Company Ahead of Its Time - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/sun-microsystems-a-look-back-at-a-tech-company-ahead-of-its-time/ <comment><USER2> Knee deep learning Solaris 7 back right around the time 8 was approaching release.

I was convinced by a peer in my helpdesk job that I should drop out of community college and pursue Solaris training. Back then he said Sun had ~48% of the internet backbone market. Took a few thousand my parents loaned me and paid for an all you could eat training package. From those seven courses I took it helped develop my future career in sys admin work. I was all about Sun.

I think the true nerd moment of my life was learning the history of Bill Joy and figuring out his Sun email address. Sent him an email praising and thanking him for his contributions. I also complimented him on the article he wrote for Wired called, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." The article stood out as something I felt would be coming for humanity in the next several decades. He responded to my email thanking me for reaching out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was thinking back to when I worked in a data center. We used solaris zones(container) and crossbow(networking). Writing a custom PXE deployer, that bootstrapped our nodes. Then added them to a cross data center cluster. It felt like where we are now with containers. It always seemed a bit ahead, and now those features are more readily available.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sun was constantly blowing my mind when I first got into computing. I remember going to my first Java 1 when Sun was showing off the Java Card. There were terminals everywhere and you would just slide your card into the terminal and your X windows sessions would pop up exactly how you left it at the last terminal. I know, its just skipping the login step but it seemed so cool at the time.

Years later at a pre-maker-fair style event Sun was showing off their Java based robotic controllers. They had embedded WIFI and a compiler with a button that would upload the code directly to the device. This was before raspberry pie, IoT and "connected devices". Back then we had to physically update our controllers by attaching them to the PC. It was amazing but sadly WAY too expensive.

Was very sad when their assets got swallowed up by Oracle. I doubt we will ever see their like again.

</comment><comment><USER5> My first workstation was a Sun SPARC, the first UNIX I worked with was SunOS (later Solaris) and I still have a lot of memorabilia. Great respect for what Sun has done/offered to the computing field.

</comment><comment><USER6> In our company at the end of the 1980s we built embedded systems based on Z80 and 8051 chips; our compilers were CP/M. We maintained the builds from a 386i/SunOS environment using make and SCCM. The builds were done using DOS with a CP/M emulator. Builds were run from a SunOS makefile.

Cool stuff for the time.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what today's equivalent of Sun would be.

<comment><USER8> Or SGI or Apollo or DEC or any of those old workstation makers. It really was a golden age, companies making their own CPUs, their own OS, everything from desktop workstations to massive servers. Today's world where everything is just a PC (even in a rackmount case) is dull and grey in comparison.

<comment><AUTHOR> At least some of the best parts of Solaris and IRIX now live on in other places.</comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg: The temptation of Facebook's CEO - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/06/technology/facebook_excerpt.fortune/index.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Part 2 of extract from an upcoming book, _"The Facebook Effect"_ by David Kirkpatrick ~ [http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company- Connect...](http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company- Connecting/dp/1439102112/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0) The first part is here ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325071></comment>


Squanderville vs. Thriftville - Warren Buffett (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/wsw/news/fortunearticle_20031026_03.html <comment><USER2> Good article and the principle is sound, but the postscript is that Buffett wound up losing Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders $1 billion by betting against the dollar. He forgot that the reason the dollar is holding its value is that China is backstopping it because, absent any other source of political legitimacy, it can't afford to allow its economic growth to stall.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/business/01leonhardt.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/business/01leonhardt.html?_r=1)

Furthermore, he's now a net buyer of US assets:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17buffett.html> (about him buying equities for his personal portfolio) <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/business/04deal.html> (about Berkshire Hathaway buying a railroad for $26 billion)

<comment><USER3> > _"Good article and the principle is sound, but the postscript is that > Buffett wound up losing Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders $1 billion by > betting against the dollar."_

That's incredibly unfair. Buffet has absolutely crushed the market. The S&P500 is down 22% over the past decade, the Nasdaq is down 50% and Buffet is up 150%. Check over the past two decades and the S&P has approximately doubled, the Nasdaq has slightly less than quadrupled what it was and Berkshire Hathaway is worth _fifteen_ times its 1990 value.

People who bought Berkshire right after this piece was published beat 99.9% of the market and every single widely followed pundit I know of.

[http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chdet=1266236606437&chddm=998614&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=INDEXSP:.INX;INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC&cmptdms=0;0&q=NYSE:BRK.A&ntsp=0)

<comment><USER2> It's unfair to point out that Buffett made a bad trade that lost a billion dollars? Regardless of his status as the foremost investor of probably _all time_, he was empirically wrong on this one, and the article was about him talking down the dollar, so it's not unfair to point out that he lost a billion dollars putting his money where his mouth was.

<comment><USER3> It's unfair to leap on a single mistake and say it was _the_ postscript of his essay. He also bought Petro China as part of his strategy to deal with a weakening dollar around the same time and by when he was selling it 2007, it had earned several billion. It is also worth pointing out that the essay dealt with China specifically, and that the RMB has appreciated against the dollar in the time since (and will more as the government relaxes its peg).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't agree with the IC idea.

In practice, importers would set up fake shell companies to invoice the imported goods at a lesser price than the actual cost - the incentives to do so would be enormous.

Not unlike the behavior of the "re-insurance" business - which Buffett has been involved in since 1998 or so with his purchase of General Re-insurance and with another re-insurance company called National Indemnity.

<comment><USER2> Similarly, the market in carbon emission credits is rife with fraud.

<comment><USER5> If you look at the numbers it appears that the market in fraud is rife with carbon emissions credits. Not even joking -- one particular fraud (VAT carousel) was generating over 90% of the exchange volume, according to Europol.</comment></comment></comment>


Anonymous withdraws support for WikiLeaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/17e6d936-1486-11e2-aa93-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> It's a shame that there are still websites out there that requires you to register before you can read their articles.</comment>


Today's Slylock Fox puzzle: did you get it right? - <AUTHOR> http://content.comicskingdom.net/Slylock/Slylock.20110130_large.gif

<comment><USER2> What, nobody else knows a woman named Jeffany?</comment>


Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow in eBook Format - <AUTHOR>

I just finished a project to convert SE data-dumps into draft PDF eBooks, which I'm calling SE2go. SE2go eBooks are interactive, they contain all the original links within the question and answer body, original formatting (as much as possible), and are sorted by tag and question title. Also included are links back to the original question, and the meta data important to each question and answer.
Any comments or unaccepted answers are not included in the eBooks. The page size of all eBooks are formatted to be easy to read on a 7" reader or tablet, include any embedded graphics and highlighted syntax. Using SE2go on larger displays is also supported without any degradation in quality.
The Stack Overflow has the largest number of questions and accepted answers, the Posts.xml file is >20G. To convert the entire Stack Overflow site into a single eBook was just off the hook; it made an eBook that was not user friendly, so the best working idea was to create separate tag based eBooks.
The first set of draft eBooks are built from the Stack Exchange data dumps of 3Q/2013. Current plans are to release another set of drafts after community input. Right now the only format available is PDF but depending on community input other eBook formats (epub, Nook, Kindle, etc) can be done. There's a short survey to see what the community would like.
I've posted draft PDFs here: http://se2go.ka6wke.net. <comment><USER2> I love this idea! The only thing bothering me is the font on the code snippets. I don't know if its a google doc thing, but the font used in the snippets makes code a bit of a chore to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd prefer ePub format over PDF.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's next after I get source code detection improved.</comment></comment>


SQLite.swift: Swift framework wrapping SQLite3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stephencelis/SQLite.swift

<comment><USER2> Tough crowd, arguing whether or not this is a good open source swift (implementation) vs good open source swift (software). Or is this just how we get more... what do we call it here, karma?

</comment><comment><USER3> This appears to be a Swift wrapper for SQLite 3, not some sort of open source version of the Swift language, as the title implies.

<comment><USER4> When I read the title, I did not think this sounded like it was an open source version of the Swift language.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Magicdocs – Turn your docs into websites - <AUTHOR> https://magicdocs.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I built this NoCode platform so other developers like me could easily create and share documents as websites. We are currently focusing on proposals, but it can be used for anything really.

I also made a demo: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ragLfdvxETQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ragLfdvxETQ)]

What do you guys think?</comment>


Grub Hub CEO – If you support Trump, I want your resignation - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/boss-tells-pro-trump-employees-to-resign.html <comment><USER2> I think that political purges in the workplace are a bad idea. The U.S. should have learned that lesson in the 1950s, when people lost their jobs for being communists.[0]

This kind of discrimination would be illegal in California, where "political activities or affiliations" are a protected class.[1]

However, Grubhub seems to be based in Chicago[2], and political affiliations don't seem to be protected under Illinois law.[3]

Political affiliation is also not a protected class under Federal law.[1] Perhaps it should be.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Ten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Ten), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california- employment...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employment- discrimination-31690.html)

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

[3] [https://www.illinois.gov/ihrc/Pages/default.aspx](https://www.illinois.gov/ihrc/Pages/default.aspx)

<comment><USER3> > Political affiliation is also not a protected class under Federal law.[1] > Perhaps it should be.

Probably, but I would guess they would have to exempt the government itself (or a massive subset) since each election has the potential to change what affiliation is going to hold the positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I, on the whole, don't agree with this sort of thing; sounds like the CEO is a complete asshole. I certainly wouldn't work there and will certainly not use their service just based on this alone.

Having said that, the shareholders should be able to hire/fire anyone they please. Period. If they delegate that right to a board, and then to managers, so be it. The proper response to the use of commercial power to intimidate or harass or discriminate against employees (or customers) is to respond in kind: call them out on it, don't do business with them, don't do business with other businesses that choose to closely partner with them. So long as that's done with honesty and not making shit up, then more power to you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow that is so insanely extreme. At least other tech leaders have been more calm. Did he think at all about those comments? There are investors as well as Grub Hub is a public company.

<comment><USER6> This is disappointing... Isn't discrimination and firing someone for their personal beliefs against the law?

Kind of funny, too.

While Maloney seemingly calls out Trump supporters at his company on the one hand, the young CEO boasted about the company's supportive and inclusive culture on the other, saying he "firmly believes that we must bring together different perspectives."

As for stock price today: Px/Chg 1D (USD) 37.10/-4.08%

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I worked there I would wear a Trump hat at my desk every day just to spite him. What an enormous fucking asshole.

I can't believe I am right down the street from such an intolerant and bigoted tech company.

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be interesting to see a brave employee reply-all along the lines of: "I voted for Trump, and if you fire me, I'll sue you."

<comment><USER9> I would have loved to see this especially with someone who don't vote. It would be funny to see the company get sued, to have to pay up, and to find out half way though the court procedures that the person didn't vote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fascism has come to America, and ironically, it's not Trump.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It took 30 upvotes and 12 comments for this post to finally be flagged. Oh the hypocrisy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is this flagged?

</comment><comment><USER12> No, it's more "If you act like Trump (in his more distasteful moments) at the office or with colleagues, then fuck off".

<comment><USER7> Oh come on. If you voted Trump and you got this email at work, and you had kids at home to feed, you would be scared out of your wits. This is the very definition of hostile work environment.

<comment><USER13> Also, things like this will probably make you lie in a telephonic survey, and that will skew the results of the survey ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminder: if you believe this is wrong, you're not a libertarian.

<comment><USER9> I believe this is wrong. I'm just not going to ask government to fix it. I'll just never use grub-hub or eat with friends who want to use grub-hub.

Just because I am a libertarian doesn't mean I support witch hunts.

<comment><USER14> You don't support the absolute freedom of contract?

<comment><USER9> Moral obligations cannot be constituted they can only be felt as a function of interaction between others.

<comment><USER14> It is incredibly likely that GrubHub's employees knowingly, freely, and without coercion or duress, entered into contracts specifying their employment was "at-will" and that they could be dismissed at any time and for any reason.

Is it your contention that those contracts should not be enforced?

<comment><USER15> Libertarians have no qualms with peer pressure to encourage you to act a certain way. Their problem is with the state using their monopoly on violence for that purpose. Boycotting Grubhub, or offering to poach their employees with quick hiring turnaround, are both fair game.

<comment><USER14> So where were you when HN users had to reach for their fainting couches because people encouraged disassociating from/boycotting Thiel and his business ventures?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup 'moodagent' has fun - 700k dl /~3weeks - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10428779-27.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The program was first born has "Playlist DJ" for Nokia, but didn't get to be a success until it was reborn as an Iphone app called "moodagent" in December. 300k iPhone users downloaded in 3 weeks and about 400k Nokia users. The daily rate is about 20k dl. The founders think they'll reach 10mio before 2010 ends. Their business model is this : about 3$/user/year in ad income shown in a small window in the application. Besides founders Peter Berg Steffensen and Mikael Henderson the investors include the it-investor Morten Lund.

(if you can read the gibberish called Danish , the source is here : <http://epn.dk/teknologi2/tele/article1945005.ece> )

<comment><USER2> Please don't editorialize titles (especially since the linked article has absolutely nothing to do with Zed Shaw).

<comment><AUTHOR> I edited Zed Shaw out of the title.

<comment><USER3> It's still not covered by the article, the 700k downloads is not in there.

What's wrong with the original article title ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your title has completely no bearing on the article.</comment>


jQuery plugins: Who needs 'em? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/06/jquery-plugins-who-needs-em/

<comment><USER2> A long way of saying "I can't read other people's code (since I never try), so I just redo their work." or perhaps "Any code that isn't written exactly the way I would write it is intolerable."

If there's one good thing about Perl's TMTOWTDI motto, it's that you get used to different styles of code very very quickly.</comment>


Show HN: My Father-In-law Wrote This Table Data Format in GO - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/urban-wombat/gotable <comment><USER2> While reading the README where it mentioned JSON, YAML and XML I kept thinking CSV! I like the added support for types and convenience functions for sorting and printing. Tell your FIL good work!</comment>


My new conjecture in P vs. NP - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@calhoun137/my-new-conjecture-in-p-vs-np-398ff240d745 <comment><USER2> If you set up the rules so that a self-reproducing machine can create an exponentially large number of copies, then indeed you can solve NP problems in polynomial time.

But you should realize that an exponentially large number of machines also requires an exponentially large amount of space to fit them, so at the very least it takes an exponentially long time at the speed of light for the winning machine to report its result back to you.</comment>


Will Amazon Kill FedEx? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-amazon-delivery/ <comment><USER3> FedEx is both an established airline AND _one_ of the most trusted logistics companies on the planet. So Amazon can beat them when they can do this on demand:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-qPtWc4heA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-qPtWc4heA)

For brevity: the above purports to show a time lapse of FedEx's fleet of DC-10s, Airbus A310s etc - packed with fuel, valuables and people - <USER2> for the Memphis, TN hub and hooking in handily around a massive angry thunderstorm.

It looks like a perfectly organized, well timed dance - with incredibly high stakes.

edit: clarity.

<comment><USER4> The Fedex courier in my area has been consistently bad for years and doesn't get fired. Two weeks ago: doesn't come, doesn't leave a notice, two days in a row, claiming he came, I had a to exchange some salty emails with customer service to get my package. Each time I had to use Fedex these last 3 years I've had to do this cycle.

On the other hand I have developped a "good relationship" with the UPS courier.

<comment><USER5> I live in quite a remote area, with UPS and FedEx drivers that are driving hundreds of miles per day on their route, often starting over 100 miles away, and yet they're both consistently excellent. They virtually never miss delivery estimates, and often exceed them. I'm honestly quite impressed with them, especially considering a moderate amount of their route is also on fairly poor quality dirt roads.

<comment><USER4> I still "trust" FedEx as a company, but the delivery man in charge of my area is sh*t.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised this journalist, who apparently has some in-depth knowledge about the shipping industry, seems to be completely unaware of FedEx's contract with the US Postal Service. FedEx moves ALL mail that goes by air. That includes Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express. I don't see Amazon killing a company with a huge customer like that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Amazon's edge isn't in shipping. It's in fulfillment.

Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) is a boon for many businesses, as it combines warehousing, packing/labelling, and shipping into a single interface at an attractive price. Let's not forget that they also bring customers and handle the entire billing operation, too.

If Amazon does harm FedEx/UPS, it won't be by starving them of packages directly, but rather by sidestepping their business, attracting companies to FBA, so that they never enter the "shipping" business sector.

I don't expect to see Amazon enter the point-to-point shipping business anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why does Amazon need to kill any service. Even with their cloud platform, rack space, digital ocean and plenty of other providers are thriving and coming up.

<comment><USER9> AWS is infrastructure as a service. Digital Ocean sells virtual private servers. They aren't even remotely the same product. I host a blog on DO for a few buck a month. My company hosts their entire infrastructure on AWS for 4 different applications.

Apples and oranges.

<comment><USER10> You can do the same on DO, it's just slightly more involved, almost certainly less resiliant and they supply less PaaS options.

In fact as an IaaS if you throw kubernetes at it, run ceph and put a little effort into getting autoscaling, then you have a knock-off cloud.

Amazons value is that it's cheaper for a small company than hiring the people who can do this well and you can hire a generalist to glue it all together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gee, for a while I was Director of Operations Research at FedEx. My office was next to that of FedEx founder, COB, CEO F. Smith.

Poor Smith: One night at about midnight, I was in my office getting in a little violin practice before heading back to my rented room for some sleep (my wife was still in her Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins in MD). As I left to get some sleep, I saw Smith in his office. He had had to listen to my violin practice of scales, intervals, etc.!

The first good thing I did for Smith was write some software for scheduling the fleet. The BoD was seriously asking if such scheduling could be done at all. One evening R. Frock (he has a book on FedEx) and I used my software and produced a schedule for the full, planned operation. Smith's remark was "Solves the most important problem". Our two BoD representatives of BoD Member General Dynamics said "It's a little tight in a few places, but it's flyable". The BoD was happy, and crucial funding was enabled.

But by the night of the violin practice, I was working on better scheduling. Right, I was encountering the question of P = NP. So, I had chatted with G. Nemhauser about integer linear programming set covering.

Later I went for my Ph.D. in applied math and, in the studies, kept in mind the problems I'd seen at FedEx. So, e.g., model various cases of arrivals as a Poisson process -- from an axiomatic derivation of that process or just from the renewal theorem. Use some stochastic optimal control for some of the operational issues. Have some much more accurate cost estimating of the airplane operations and include those in the integer linear programming, etc.

Gee, for the last 10 years, I didn't know that Amazon was doing so much in such logistics. No way can they be avoiding some optimization problems for their logistics without wasting significant bucks. For a lot they were doing, I'd been there, done that, went to grad school for it, written software for it, etc. Could have helped them!

Scattering warehouses, sort centers, fulfillment centers, ships, airplanes, trucks, bicycles, drones, etc. all around and changing all that ASAP over time has to encounter some severe challenges in applied math and corresponding software, especially having those two keep up with the operational changes.

I know; I know; if assume that the operations will be big enough, then there are some approaches to those discrete optimization problems that use just some continuous techniques that are much easier. In that case, maybe for a while, during the rapid growth period, go ahead and don't try very hard on the optimization, scatter around, and anticipate that, when reach the target size, nearly all those warehouses, sort centers, etc. will be close enough to something optimal.

Then I wonder: What is Wal-Mart doing in response? They have a lot of warehouses, trucks, and stores and a Web site for on-line ordering? Right, they bought Jet.com. But anything else?

Fundamentally I begin to wonder about Amazon and airplanes: For FedEx, sure airplanes are crucial. But for Amazon? I wonder.

Why? What's the difference?

For FedEx, hour by hour, a huge fraction of what FedEx receives and ships is different, literally never done before, that is, could not have been stocked in a warehouse. E.g., FedEx may receive a legal brief, some medical samples, a custom 3D printout, etc. That was the first and last time those particular items were ever shipped. The variety of what FedEx ships is beyond belief -- stand in the sort center in Memphis and watch the stuff go by and have to give up on any simple overview.

For Amazon, all they ship is what's for sale on their Web site. So far, next to none of that stuff is perishable. And, for nearly all of it, the time, hours, days, weeks, from when it is created by the original manufacturer to when it is needed in an Amazon warehouse doesn't much matter.

So, in comparison with FedEx, the variety is much less. So Amazon has an easier time just stocking nearly all their reasonably popular items at each of their local warehouses and delivering to those warehouses by the cheapest way possible, typically 18 wheel trucks.

Okay, maybe Amazon is selling some item, expects to sell only 15 of them in the next month, but has 60 local warehouses. So, can't stock the item at each warehouse. So, for _slow moving items_ , have to stock in some central warehouse and ship from there via airplane. So, have 60 planes, and each day ship from the central warehouse for slow moving items to each of the 60 local warehouses all the slow moving items that warehouse needs.

Right, maybe have fewer than 60 planes, often have one plane serve more than one warehouse, on a given day maybe have some planes make more than one trip from the central warehouse, and each day, given the loads to be moved from the central warehouse to each of the 60 local ones, decide which planes go to which warehouses in what order -- back to integer linear programming set covering again. Okay.

How does that set covering work? Okay, just enumerate all reasonably efficient trips a single airplane might do. If have several airplane types, have to do that separately for each type. Assume that if an airplane stops at a warehouse, then it brings everything that warehouse needs (one warehouse that needs more than one airplane can carry would be a special case, easier in some ways). Then take those candidate airplane trips and pick the ones that move all the loads, within the performance limitations of the airplanes, in the times required and that give the least total operating cost. That last part is the _optimization_ and 0-1 integer linear programming.

But, still, the variety for Amazon is much less than that for FedEx.

Actually, FedEx has long had a warehouse in Memphis. So, shipping customers would use trucks to put their stock in that warehouse, and FedEx would pick from that stock and ship via FedEx planes the orders that had arrived and accumulated from end-user customers. So, in that case, a truck was used for the trip to Memphis and an airplane, for the trip from Memphis.

Airplanes are strange beasts: Generally, if can keep an airplane flying nearly full lots of hours each day, then can have a license to print money. But if have an airplane sit on the ground or, worse, flying with not much load, then have a path to going broke. How much usage FedEx can get from an airplane is well understood, at least by Smith. But I question if Amazon can get enough usage out of airplanes.

Of course, maybe by now, beyond what was in the OP, Amazon has plenty of data to know that they can put a big warehouse there in southern Ohio for their _slow moving items_ and ship those items to local warehouses and distribution centers as orders arrive from the Amazon Web site. Maybe. But, again, for their fast moving items, just stock the local warehouses and distribution centers by 18 wheel trucks -- no expensive airplanes involved.

Gee, in my Ph.D. program, I took courses in optimization, stochastic processes, facility location, multi-objective optimization, etc. from world- class people. I never got a call from an Amazon recruiter! I wasn't that difficult to find: The guy who taught the course in multi-objective optimization and was one of my Ph.D. dissertation advisers was, during a lot of those years of Amazon's growth, President at CMU. The guy who was Chair of the committee that approved my dissertation research was a world-class guy in transportation.

Lesson 1: Go get a Ph.D. for some ways to get approximately optimal solutions to some really complicated NP-complete problems, maybe also with some random elements, and even if a big business has a lot of need for such applied math maybe still won't get an opportunity to apply what studied.

Lesson 2: If want to make money with some applied math and, then, some corresponding computing, then pick own practical problem to solve, do the math to solve the problem (yes, pick the problem so that can use some math to get an advantage in getting a good solution to the problem -- that is, pick the problem and the math together, as a good pair), write the software, and do own startup where are already the CEO. That is, for own future applying math and computing, don't depend on some other CEO. And that's what I'm doing -- my own startup.

<comment><USER12> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER11> What I wrote is about 8859 bytes and, thus, already "elaborate". What do you want _elaborated_?

<comment><USER12> I'd be curious to read more about your startup you mentioned at the end. What problem are you solving?

<comment><USER11> Assumption: There is a lot of _content_ on the Internet, and generally people have _interests_ and want appropriate _content_. The most effective current means are based on keywords/phrases; these means can work really well in some cases but are at best poor for about 2/3rds of content on the Internet, queries people want to do, and content they want to find.

For more: Generally, _finding stuff_ has long been part of the field of _information retrieval_. That field long ago divided the whole problem into pieces. One big division was between (A) content a person knew existed and had some information about, e.g., keywords/phrases and (B) content that person did not know existed. The old library card catalog subject index is close to case (A) and so are the Internet search engines based on keywords/phrases. For case (B), that is closer to what might be called _discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, subscription_.

My startup is for being the best for case (B). For case (A), that will remain. What I am doing for case (B) is very different from what has worked well for case (A). Very different: E.g., there is no use of keywords/phrases.

So, my work brings together in a coordinated way (i) the unmet part of the user need to find stuff on the Internet, (ii) a new and very different UI/UX, (iii) some important new data, and (iv), for processing the data to get the results for the users, some new applied math (complete with theorems and proofs, based on some advanced pure math prerequisites) that is the crucial core of the work, that is, the means of getting especially good results for the users.

Some of the efforts seem to have taken some simple techniques and simple, old data sources for _recommendation engines_ and bent the real problem to what these techniques could do; my view is that this is not very promising.

E.g., I believe that my work will do much better for letting people look for, say, movies than what Netflix got from their Netflix Challenge contests. Why? I believe that Netflix formulated the problem poorly, in too narrow a way. What I have done does not fit what Netflix assumed in their problem formulation.

Yes, my work is quite new but, still, supposed to be really easy and intuitive for users. E.g., I hope that a child in a third world country who knows no English will be able to get good with my work in a few minutes alone or sooner watching one example of usage. Right, I might put such an example on YouTube and have my Web site Help page link to that.

There is part of the math that is surprising: One would guess that no such good thing could be true, but it is. Of course, users will not be aware of anything mathematical.

To be a little more clear, my math is original and has nothing to do with anything I've seen in artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML). To be a little more clear, the AI and ML I have seen do contain some applied math but which is apparently quite narrow. In contrast, on the shelves of the QA sections of the research libraries, there is enormously greater variety, and my work is not on those shelves. So, instead of AI or ML, I just derived some applied (applicable) math.

Then I wrote the corresponding software. Currently there is about 100,000 lines of typing, for both the programming language statements and the documentation in comments in the code. There is much more documentation outside the code. And there is the math, typed into D. Knuth's TeX.

All the code appears to run as intended. The code appears to be essentially all that is needed for at least early production. Currently the code is in _alpha test_. I'm a solo founder, 100% owner.

The next steps are to complete the alpha test to let me be rock solidly sure the code is correct and ready for production, load some more initial data, do a beta test and get back comments, maybe tweak some parts of the code, say, for the UI/UX, maybe load some more initial data, and, then, just go live in a routine way, get publicity, users, ads, and revenue. Simple.

Right, my math has nothing to do with the social graph, the interest graph, image processing, semantic processing, the semantic graph, speech recognition, natural language processing, singular value decomposition, AI, ML, principal components analysis, support vector machines, collaborative filtering, cluster analysis, intuitive heuristics, neural nets, classification and regression trees (L. Breiman's CART), random forests, gradient descent, etc. Instead, I just derived some new math; I'm supposed to be able to do that; I've done it before on other practical problems of wide variety. It's just some new math -- it has no name like ML. Some aspects of the math, some provable good properties, give me confidence the results for the users will be good.

At first, I will concentrate on users and advertisers just in the US. Then later I may "go international".

If people like my work, then I should have a nice business. Why? From my understanding and assumptions, I have by far the best solution for the problem I am solving; due if only to the math there is essentially no chance that anyone else will do anything at all comparable or competitive; the problem I am solving is so far at best poorly solved; the problem is important to essentially every user of the Internet in the world.

But, right, mostly people don't see the importance of the problem or a solution and are not screaming out for a solution. This is to be expected.

Supposedly Henry Ford said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.". That is, even if people have a big problem, usually they don't envision a solution until they can see the possibility. In Ford's case, that solution involved some cast iron and some gasoline, both quite foreign to people with horses and the problem.

People don't envision my solution now because they don't see the means or the possibility. They will easily envision, and I hope embrace, my solution once they see it. That's what happened when horse owners saw Ford's Model T. It's also what happened with FedEx. And now, Amazon. And for that matter, essentially all of the commercial Internet, e-mail, PCs, laptops, smartphones, etc. For something new, for people to like it, first they have to see it.

Venture capital? Apparently, and I have a lot of evidence, there is nothing in common between my startup and venture capital. That is, across the table, we won't be able to shake hands, ever.

The venture capital people would look at the work I have done to date and say that it and a dime won't cover a 10 cent cup of coffee. They also won't like that I am a solo founder -- formulate your own reasons why. They will hate that there is a role for some original applied math with some advanced prerequisites; they seem to prefer _technology_ that is just routine software. In the _patterns_ they want to use, they have not seen a successful startup like mine. Right, they need to find startups that are exceptional, and to do that they want to use patterns based on successful startups of the past.

They might get interested once my startup has _traction_ (users and/or revenue) significant and growing rapidly, but by then, with me as a solo founder with meager _burn rate_ , I will be nicely profitable, already have a _lifestyle business_ , and have plenty of cash for more servers, etc. So, we can't shake hands across the table because now they believe I am too early and, by the time they are ready to shake hands, I will believe that they are too late.

Is that the _elaboration_ you had in mind?

<comment><USER12> Thanks for sharing more details. Sounds interesting. I'd love to get a look and provide feedback when you're ready to open it up to more users. My contact info is in my profile.

<comment><USER11> You are now on the beta test list! Thanks for your interest!

<comment><USER13> Id like to be on the beta list too if possible. :)

pr @ asimuv . com

<comment><USER11> Same for all who so post here. I have the URLs and when ready for beta testers will return and contact everyone here.

Many thanks to all for your interest.

<comment><USER14> Please add me to the beta test list too! This sounds awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15>
      "I fully expect Amazon to build out a logistics supply
       chain that others can use. Over the next five years? I
       doubt it. Over 10 or 15 years? Oh yeah."

From this speculation arguing that Amazon will "kill FedEx" is just nuts, IMHO. But printing nutty things is part of journalism, so enjoy the ride.

</comment><comment><USER16> I expect it. A family member has worked for FedEx ground since it was RPS, and has been telling me for years how Amazon kept hiring away their execs. And the company is your typical sclerotic old-style megacorporation mired in bureaucracy so it moves very slowly on everything.

</comment><comment><USER17> Years ago, Amazon used DHL. I complained once about the service with them, and they said they had to continue using them in my area until they'd had enough complaints. (Which I felt was kind of reasonable, I guess.)

Less than a year later, they were no longer using them in my area, and then a while later I hear DHL basically doesn't exist in the USA.

So yeah, Amazon can apparently kill a mail carrier. Whether they _will_ or not will depend on how bad that carrier does its business.

<comment><USER18> That is an extraordinarily loose usage of the principle of cause and effect.

<comment><USER17> Obviously Amazon alone didn't kill them. But being dropped by Amazon as a carrier certainly didn't do them any favors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just yesterday I had someone from the other coast leave a laptop charger. Rather messing with the UPS or FEDEX, I just ordered a new one and had it delivered to their address.

<comment><USER20> That's like $70 you didn't need to spend. Hell of a convenience fee.

I've only recently hit power cord saturation, though.

<comment><USER21> Maybe he didn't have a Mac, and the difference between the charger and shipping wasn't that big.

<comment><USER22> Where's the notion that non-mac chargers are any cheaper from? Have you seen prices of genuine HP, Dell or Lenovo chargers? They are just as, if not more expensive than Apple chargers. Sure, you can buy a replacement charger from amazon for $20 but then you can't compare it to a genuine apple charger.

<comment><USER23> A 90W brand-new, genuine Dell charger goes for about $25 on Amazon [1]. That's the same price as shipping that charger accross the US with FedEx 2Day delivery (without pickup).

Generic brands start at $7.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/s/keywords=dell+90w+ac+adapter&ie=UTF...](https://www.amazon.com/s/keywords=dell+90w+ac+adapter&ie=UTF8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It has definitely been replacing the need for FedEx with it's super fast delivery, although some Amazon items still come via FedEx...

<comment><USER25> Amazon has almost 100% been using the local Prime Now drivers to deliver boxes - which is great because they come next day. Down side is drivers are always new and have no experience delivering mail. It's gotten a little better but I had to call amazon and request that their drivers not call me to tell me to meet them at the corner of the block for my package.

I've figured out that if I want something tomorrow, I check the prime now site and see if it's available there. If so there's a very good chance it'll come overnight.

What I wonder if how are the drivers compensated for delivering a box vs same day? Same day you tip them. So does that mean they're getting screwed for normal deliveries? Knowing amazon, probably.

<comment><USER26> Were they calling because they were having trouble finding your address, or because they were lazy?

<comment><USER25> I don't know how you miss a massive apartment building? It seems their drivers followed the gps dot exactly (which shows the intersection). Even pizza guys get it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why wouldn't AMZN just acquire FedEx?</comment>