My Paleo Media Diet - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/03/paleo-media-diet.html <comment><USER2> Nice metaphor.

To paraphrase Pollan: "Listen to people. Not too many. Mostly local."

<comment><USER3> Listen to the people around you? That goes against the anti-echo-chamber advice.

<comment><USER4> Just surround yourself with people who aren't like you? Easier said than done I guess...

<comment><USER5> Surround yourself with people who actually think and who aren't prone to just believe the echoes in the chamber.

<comment><USER6> As I was thinking - 'local' in values and principles, it doesn't have to mean 'local' in geography. :)

<comment><USER7> Local in values and principles is precisely what leads to an echo chamber. Of course, an echo chamber is very much the state of the paleolithic human...

<comment><USER2> My god, constructive responses.

Some further observations:

I didn't think about this koan for more than three minutes.

I don't follow this very well myself. I also don't do paleo for that matter. I'm a baker. I think pies and pancakes are awesome, French bread is the height of human civilization, and while I try to moderate these things I wouldn't give them up unless they were killing me painfully. (I live in fear of gluten intolerance and eat a muffin every time I think about it.)

When I wrote "local" I tried to find the better word. In the end, "local" is pretty good because it captures the paleo theme; our pre-literate ancestors were always local. But this is 2012 and we shouldn't read that word literally. Think of "local" as "among your friends, family, and neighbors".

This "echo chamber" concept deserves its own essay. Here I will say that the word "mostly" is there for a reason, as it was in the quote I stole it from: Michael Pollan is no more opposed to French bread than I.

And I _wish_ I could give the same loving attention to the words of seven hundred diverse people, or seven thousand people, or seventy thousand people, which would bring me up to almost 0.001% of the people _currently alive_ \- but of course I should save some time for the great works of people now dead - but this is impossible, just as my living until 2170 is impossible, and the era has come where we need to face that squarely, because the technology is there but the human capability is not. You can meaningfully hear the words of a few hundred people per day, tops, and if those people are all different each day it isn't good for your personality.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, obviously giving every voice equal weight isn't practical, and whatever filter you apply is likely to introduce some kind of bias. I'm not saying that the fact that you get echo chamber effects devastates the whole notion, just that it is a failure mode you should be aware of if pursuing something like this, and that "local in values and principles" is worse than "local geographically" as pertains to this specific effect.

Edited to add:

In fact, "mostly local" helps address a failure mode we see presently - if you only hear news from your tribe and a little from neighboring tribes, things you hear about are far more likely to be significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wrote that piece a few months ago when I was taking time off. Now that I'm back at work (I work for O'Reilly Media's Radar group) it's like being an alcoholic working behind a bar. I'm having a much harder time with it. I try to do intermittent fasting and I still won't touch my phone/email before about 10am - I even got a separate alarm clock so I wouldn't be relying on my phone for that.

<comment><USER9> You have a similar problem to food addicts (I was/am one). You can't completely abstain, so you have to find strategies. Things that have helped:

Planning: Determine in advance what you will consume and when.

Support: Find others like you that you can use for support (just not on Twitter ;).

Self-empowerment: 12-steps call this your "higher power", but I think that brings too many religious overtones (even though they explicitly say it's not meant to). Regardless, there is a power we have (or are given, if you are religious), but you have to dig for it. The journey is what provides the power.

Good luck!

<comment><USER10> One of the benefits of intermittent fasting is that you can in fact completely abstain from food; not forever, but for a day, certainly.

<comment><USER9> While that is certainly true, I, personally, would never do that because it would put me in a situation that the combination of biology (real hunger) and emotion (haven't eaten in a day!) would put me in an _extremely_ dangerous place. Instead, I go for routine: regular, small meals; don't ever get really hungry; etc. Couple that with eating high quality food that you actually want to eat, and it has served me well.

You are in a different boat. You physically can abstain forever, but your career doesn't allow you to. I could see how abstaining would be a very helpful option there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel this is going to be an inevitable practice for us. Just as the switch to white collar jobs have forced us to confront our sedentary lifestyles and allocate time specifically for exercise, the constant stream of information brought to us by the internet is going to force us to get away from our computers for an hour (and hopefully more) a day and get some bloody contemplation.

<comment><USER12> Our distraction is a full-blown epidemic — a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. It can be compared to smoking: People aren't aware what's happening to their mental processes, in the same way that people years ago couldn't look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.

<comment><USER11> There's potential for a huge industry built around "regrowing attention spans" and "info diets" and so forth. It will be partly a continuation of the efficiency/simplicity lifehacking practices of the last decade, except to a whole new level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of Paul Miller's ongoing "Offline" series. <http://www.theverge.com/label/offline> (older articles at the bottom) He's a writer for tech blog The Verge, but he's taking a one-year break from the internet. He's also really good at writing about it.

<comment><USER8> Yep. Great experiment. My thinking was also influenced by a book I read a few years ago. Better Off by Eric Brende published without irony, if I remember correctly, by MIT Press.

<comment><USER14> Better Off inspired me to move to a small cabin on Vancouver Island; for the past year and a half (and the past order of magnitude of revenue and team size growth!) I've lived and worked in this cabin.

That book helped me stay sane during an extremely hectic time of life, I highly recommend it. Nice to see it getting a plug here :)

<comment><USER8> Wow. Cool story. I assume you've seen the PBS special "Alone in the Wilderness"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I try to do the same thing, but it is not easy with a Samsung Galaxy S III in my pocket :-)

Instead of starting right in on work this morning I had coffee with three friends and then went fishing on Oak Creek near my house. I was going to say that I was offline for 90 minutes but I just remembered that I emailed a picture of the creek to my Dad while I was fishing. Oh well...

</comment><comment><USER16> I know this is slightly off topic and I apologize but I'm rather obsessed with the topic at the moment.

First, vegan isn't a necessarily a moral choice. I'm vegan and my primary reason for being so is for one animal: me.

Second, the China Study shows overwhelming evidence that animal-based foods are terrible for you. I'm no expert in the field of nutrition but it seems to me the paleo diet falls straight into the animal food based diet category and therefore into the greatly increases your risk of multiple kinds of diseases category.

(If anyone knows of any real criticism of the China Study, I'd like to read it. All I can find boils down to "I like me therefore it's good for me")

<comment><USER17> In my personal, anecdotal experience, every vegan I know has serious health problems. Literally every single one. Never anything that can be traced directly to their diet (e.g. one of those I'm thinking of mostly has severe eczema), but it's such a sharp correlation that I can't help thinking there's something to it.

While I haven't looked at that particular study, the result you're claiming seems implausible; one would expect humans to be optimized by evolution for living on the ancestral diet. While there are specific reasons why certain parts of our traditional diet are unhealthy (e.g. the ancestral lifestyle burned far more calories than current), in the absence of a specific mechanism like that, "I like me therefore it's good for me" is a perfectly reasonable inference.

And if you're really only interested in health, it seems implausible that that would be 100% correlated with animal vs. non-animal. There are so many different possible food molecules and no reliable common factor that differentiates where they came from - even more so when it comes to the animal byproducts that make vegans different from vegetarians, such as honey.

<comment><USER18> _> every vegan I know has serious health problems_

That does not necessarily mean that veganism caused their health problems.

<comment><USER19> That many vegans with health problems watched those problems evaporate upon return to omnivorous habits does.

Such anecdotes (data more so) are hard to come by due to the verbal abuse ex- vegans tend to suffer.

<comment><USER16> Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I've felt much better since going vegan. I'm willing to grant that may be a placebo effect, but my acne seems to also have improved a bit as well.

<comment><USER19> Hence room for the correct answer: we are built to consume both plants and animals, but different people respond differently to particular combinations thereof and thus have individual reasons to tailor their diets differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My own personal situation is that I've completely given up on Twitter. It was just too much noise.

G+ is a once a day thing, maybe 30seconds.

Facebook is a twice a day thing, mostly to respond to friends messages. 5 minutes, probably on average. 10 on busy days.

I don't RSS anymore either. 0seconds

Email is open most of the day.

I'm more or less sick of it all and I feel better not having it clutter up my life. I've tried hard not to substitute anything for it either, which means I just have more free time. Kind of like when you stop watching one TV show, don't replace it with another, just have one less you watch (or stop all together). Over time, you'll end up with much more free time to do useful and productive things.

</comment><comment><USER21> "The circuit" gets me all the time. Sometimes I don't even know why I'm checking email/twitter/reddit that I checked only a few minutes ago. I just blocked reddit and youtube as an experiment to see if I can be more productive without them.

</comment><comment><USER22> Another benefit that your friends filter out what they consider noise, they will only communicate what is worth communicating (putting in the effort) by their standards.

Taleb also uses this method.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well done Jim, you've made Hacker News. Now go eat a Twitterburger. ;)

Knowing that you've reduced you media restrictions somewhat, I'm curious if you're now of the believe that, with all things, a balance is appropriate and too much of anything is bad.

I still struggle with managing the overflow of data that is Twitter, at least to a point where it's not a huge distraction. I wish I could, but I can't.

<comment><USER8> I think the question of balance is difficult if you really believe in addiction. For people that aren't addicted, moderation / balance is a great strategy. If behavior crosses into addiction the moderation strategy is much less realistic. That's the crux question for me.

<comment><USER23> That's an interesting point. I wonder how many people of are regular "socialites" are truly addicted, versus just think that's what you're supposed to do these days. Much like HSN, gambling, etc...I bet the percentage of the former is pretty high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I aspire to "be in the moment" as well, but being an INTJ I live in my head almost all of the time.

If Stogdill is spending his time daydreaming or thinking about other things (I do this as well) then ignoring his phone is not helping him live in the present anyways.

<comment><USER8> You aren't the first to mention that, and it's a good point. But I am not just day dreaming when I'm not looking at my phone or whatever. I spend a lot more time with people these days, and I'm loathe to pick the damned thing up when I'm with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> By paleo standards writing = agriculture. Internet's more like HFCS.

<comment><USER25> I would reserve the idea of "attentional High Fructose Corn Sugar' for just some specific user-experiences, rather than the internet as a whole.

There are some interface patterns that tend to heighten the sense of importance/urgency/novelty... without any real substance. Those help create the overstimulation-crash-craving cycle like dietary sugar binges.

The interleaved Twitter/Facebook streams are one form of attentional sugar. But the HN format is, too: mixed topics, jittery time-influenced rankings, random arrival of comments/karma-deltas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> <http://jnocook.net/linda/index.htm>

Jno Cook also did the Robert Frank Coloring Book, which is ace. Not sure if he has stuck with this diet for the last 8 years or not.

</comment><comment><USER27> You want real Paleo? Try radio, or rather, this amazing podcast on media effects from Gutenberg to McLuhan:

<http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/episode206-lq.mp3></comment>


Inside Tesla's factory, a medical clinic designed to ignore injured workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-medical-clinic-designed-to-ignore-injured-workers/ <comment><USER2> Other post here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18384883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18384883) .</comment>


Uber Paid Hackers $100,000 to Conceal Large 2016 Breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-reveals-data-breach-and-cover-up-leading-to-two-firings-1511305453 <comment><USER2> I did a recent survey on twitter, and in a private facebook group I have full of cyberpunk people who do whitehat hacking.

I asked the simple question of "What % of Fortune 500 companies are paying hacker ransoms?"

The overwhelming majority thought that it was above 50%, which to me, was mind blowing.</comment>


Patio11 AMA about Japan, Technology, Business and Startups - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hntokyo.io/patio11-ama-hn-tokyo/ <comment><USER2> "Far better to do it at a startup (or at AppAmaGooBookSoft) than at a traditionally-managed Japanese company"

From what I've seen at least Google and Amazon don't have much engineering effort beyond localization in Japan. I'm curious to know if any of these guys are hiring for Software Engineering or SRE type roles (in Japan).

<comment><USER3> Yes, AppAmaGooBookSoft are hiring for software engineering and SREs in Tokyo. No, your perception that they do not have much engineering effort is not materially reflective of reality.

Google's open job reqs: [https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=e...](https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=en- US&jl=35.6894875%3A139.69170639999993%3ATokyo%2C+Japan%3AJP%3A%3A15.113740824064168%3AADMIN_1&jld=10&jcoid=7c8c6665-81cf-4e11-8fc9-ec1d6a69120c&jcoid=e43afd0d-d215-45db-a154-5386c9036525&jed=BACHELORS&j=engineer&)

That's the public version. If you want the non-public version, take any one of several thousand people in Tokyo out for a beer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "My agreement with my employers mostly forecloses personal side projects"

Understandable that he doesn't have time, but the agreement sounds a little unfair.

<comment><USER3> I'm satisfied with the agreement, which was the result of two relatively sophisticated parties negotiating spiritedly towards a mutually acceptable outcome.

Without talking about _that_ negotiation, note generally that if a prospective employer says "BTW we want all of your attention on the day job so our policy is $FOO" that you have many, many options for your next sentence, of which "OK then, if that is your policy." is only one.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's understandable, particularly if side projects are not important to you at the moment. But it still reflects poorly on the company (from my standpoint).

As an aside (while it's the de facto standard) my understanding was that it's illegal in Japan to restrict your work outside of company time. If anyone has a good reference for this, it would be welcome.

<comment><USER5> It's more or less illegal in California for employers to restrict off-hours work as well, but it's not illegal for them to claim copyright for off-hours work that is related to their business.

<comment><USER6> To quote Joel Spolsky (being more succinct than I would be):

"Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer's line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise."

(For California only)

So as usual, it's a bit more complex, but the key is whether it's related to your employer's line of work. Of course the employer may try to claim _anything_ to belong to them, but they may not prevail in court. That outcome is less than ideal for the employee - best not talk about side projects at work or do anything related to them at work.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side- pr...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also from same author, on the emergence of AWS EC2 and S3:

[https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971343](https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971343)

"... not going to set the world on fire."

But see (also on front page currently):

[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-com-announces- fourth-q...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-com-announces-fourth- quarter-210100782.html)

It seems like AWS is doing quite well.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, the slashdot description of it was a grid computing service, but VMs running on EC2 are _not_ running on a grid in the traditional sense.

<comment><USER7> I understand the differences, however, the term was being used to describe EC2. In another example, I saw Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in an interview refer to "grid computing" as a synonym for EC2 when describing it to a naive audience. Indeed the AMA authors comment about "setting the world on fire" was responding to the first announcement of _EC2_ , not a general discussion of grid computing. He chose to use that term, rightly or wrongly, because like Bezos he saw it as synonymous with EC2.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple developing Flash alternative - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20004509-37.html

<comment><USER2> They use the 'conceirge' app as an example [https://concierge.apple.com/WebObjects/Concierge.woa/68/wo/o...](https://concierge.apple.com/WebObjects/Concierge.woa/68/wo/obVt6nToltCeIpYyuU99tg/0).

I wonder if Gianduia is a developer tool or a media plugin? I suspect the first.

If it is a media plug-in, we'd likely call it Giardia.</comment>


Cryptocurrency trading bot in ~40 lines of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thomasdavis/blockbid-ccxt-tutorials <comment><USER2> In in experience the vast majority of the code of a trading application is dedicated to safety: pre/post trade checks, price checks, open notional, pnl delta limits, order rate, fill rate etc. And of course error handling and getting out of unexpected states safely and quickly.

40 lines of JS definitely scare me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It definitely should scare you =D

The script is a tutorial to help complete beginners have an understanding of how to write a bot.

Though you're right, I should have really made it more clear because it is real money.

<comment><USER3> Well, "real" money since we're talking about cryptocurrencies here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might want to replace the `openOrders.forEach ...` call with a call to `await Promise.all(openOrders.map ...)` if you want to catch errors and stop the program when cancelling previous orders, and more importantly make sure you cancel orders before doing anything else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, I didn't actually know that technique.

<comment><USER4> You're welcome. Alternatively, you could simply use "for of" but the requests won't be sent in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It used ccxt, which is a very big library with most of the infrastructure already implemented:

[https://github.com/ccxt/ccxt](https://github.com/ccxt/ccxt)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is dangerous haha!

It seems the price coming back from cryptonator doesn't update, TUSD is a stable coin but surely the bitcoin rate against it should be updating every 30s ? [https://api.cryptonator.com/api/ticker/btc- tusd](https://api.cryptonator.com/api/ticker/btc-tusd)

[https://www.cryptonator.com/api/](https://www.cryptonator.com/api/) > Prices are updated every 30 seconds

<comment><USER7> It also seems exceptionally risky to grab a price off some random website and then trade blindly on another. Shouldn't you be getting the prices from the market you are actually trading in?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct, the code is more of a tutorial, it should have error prevention.

I made it pull from a third party global average because an individual market can shift a lot depending on how volatile it is.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't you want your trading bot to have access to that volatility?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One redeeming quality of cryptocurrencies existing is that all the exchanges have REST compliant APIs and real time data available for free

The finance sector's biggest meme for the last decade and a half was that PhD quants were required to program trading algorithms when really a single exchange cost $12,000 a month for real time data, it came with horrible documentation, support, antiquated protocols, FIX, and then you had to figure out how to co-locate your own server to connect to the exchange fast enough to prevent front running

The gatekeeping is what kept this specialized for the most part

<comment><USER10> > The gatekeeping is what kept this specialized for the most part.

It certainly kept the vast majority of retail out, but I disagree that this was the main cause of specialization. I think that the number of lone geniuses who could've beat the market using algo trading is a number approaching zero.

It's true that you don't need a PhD, or even higher education, as the math you need can be entirely self taught. However, you need plenty of specialized knowledge to avoid the accidental discharge of the vast number of very expensive footguns that litter the landscape. This knowledge can be gained from literature, but without having someone streetwise as a guide, it's going to be very difficult to discern genuine insight from wishful thinking.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, it's pretty easy to create a rough approximation of many popular hedge fund strategies. Like on Quantopian, it's pretty easy to whip up a simple factor strategy in a couple hours. The returns aren't bad, either.

The part that is hard are trading costs and slippage. But assuming that retail investor's capital is relatively small and no trading costs (Alpaca provides this), an individual can do pretty well.

The parts that are hard for hedge funds is slippage, illiquidity of assets, trading costs, and client demands. As an individual you really don't have to worry about those things and consequentially things become _much_ easier.

The only downside is that it's harder to get as much cheap leverage as the big guys. Also some (HFT) strategies are off limits to individuals, but that's fine, because HFT really isn't a good way to make money in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After a cursory glance, is it me or is floating point being used? I thought this was something you wanted to avoid because of precision errors.

ie 0.2 * 0.1

<comment><USER13> This will work!!

parseFloat((0.2 * 0.1).toFixed(10))

<comment><USER14> The issue is more obvious when rounding something like 0.5, which, due to lack of precision can become either 0 or 1.

Shameless plug: use [https://www.npmjs.com/package/bigint- money](https://www.npmjs.com/package/bigint-money)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > no KYC required

Just believing really hard that the law doesn't apply to you doesn't make it true.

<comment><USER16> I'm scratching my head wondering what the hell that actually that's supposed to mean. Their terms when you sign up do mention a KYC process:

> Blockbid is registered with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis > Centre (AUSTRAC) which is the regulatory body that deals with the Anti-Money > Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (AML/CTF Act).

> [... truncated ...]

> Blockbid operates a Know Your Customer (KYC) and AML/CTF Program that meets > the requirements of the AML/CTF Act (and associated laws).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for finding this guys. Recently we moved to be a crypto to crypto exchange. Without fiat, we no longer are obliged to enable the KYC process for our users.

We will most likely bring it back in as our fiat support matures.

<comment><USER16> Are you still regulated by and report to AUSTRAC? If so, I do not see how you would avoid KYC.

Hell, I don't even know why you'd want to explicitly avoid KYC unless your going out of your way to create a money laundering service.

Also, there's some typos in those terms, ex: no space before email in "contact us email@example.com".

<comment><USER17> How exactly is exchanging cryptos with other cryptos conducive to money laundering?

I can tell you why you want to avoid KYC: It's really annoying for the users and it's labor-intensive for the company.

<comment><USER16> > How exactly is exchanging cryptos with other cryptos conducive to money > laundering?

One of the fundamental rules of money laundering is that anything that can be used for money laundering will be used for money laundering. Allowing anonymous users to shift from one crypto to another could be part of a money laundering routine. It does not have to include any fiat currency in the flow.

> I can tell you why you want to avoid KYC: It's really annoying for the users > and it's labor-intensive for the company.

Ha! It's annoying, labor intensive, and a cost center for non-crypto companies as well. I can assure you that the entire non-crypto financial services industry would avoid it if they could as well.

<comment><USER17> > Allowing anonymous users to shift from one crypto to another could be part > of a money laundering routine. It does not have to include any fiat currency > in the flow.

What's the point? That's like exchanging cash for cash. I guess you could use it to "launder" crypto in the sense that you can make transfers off-chain. The exchange still has those records though, they don't need KYC to provide them, if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If any wants to try their hand at quant trading, Quantopian is a great place to get started. Great data sources and you can get allocated capital and make a little bit of money. Also the competitions are fun and you get paid $50/day for having (essentially) the best Sharpe ratio.

If you want to trade your own money, Alpaca is really awesome. Pretty easy to import an algorithm from Quantopian and use it on Alpaca.

I've been managing about 15% of my portfolio through Alpaca and it's been great. On my account, I can get 4x intraday leverage, which has been absolutely awesome. Also there's no trading costs, so I don't have any problem with daily rebalancing (I actually rebalance to 4x leverage in the morning and deleverage at the end of the day).

Highly recommended! There's a lot of alpha in the market for retail investors (with leverage, no transaction costs, and the ability to short).

<comment><USER18> Quantopian looks amazing, I hadn't seen that. How much historical data and fundamentals do they have for equities?

<comment><USER11> They have minute data and a bunch of free fundamentals for US markets going back to 2002. If you want to trade equities, they should have everything you need. And if they don't, you can buy proprietary datasets for a reasonable price, or you can upload your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Advertisement for their API? Trading is gambling unless you have some insider info to increase your odds. Only rich or stupid people gamble.

<comment><USER20> Actually, it's not irrational for non-rich smart people to gamble ie poker is a game where skill almost always wins the day, and betting baseball parlays can, with a good deal of study, land in a positive expectation.

Furthermore, the sheer number of quite profitable high speed trading platforms seems to totally rebuke your assertion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool, until the tax declaration comes up.

Luckily, there are now tools such as Accointing or CryptoTax that take care of the 30,000 transactions.

<comment><USER22> won't tax declaration only apply to executed orders? those will be much lower.

<comment><USER21> Yes, with 20% you probably have good chances not do get anything taxable at all

<comment><USER22> should there be successful executed orders in the magnitude of 30k. I'd be more than happy to handle the tax declation some way or the other :-)))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I understand that back-testing is a foolish way to work out whether a bot works, but it'd be interesting to see how this performs on arbitrary lengths of past history. Like, is this enough to beat a lazy index fund calculated over the same time, with interest reinvested?

<comment><USER24> Why is backtesting foolish? As long as you haven't used the data you're using to backtest in any way, it seems like a reasonable way to test your strategy.

<comment><USER23> I think I was mainly trying to avoid risking that anyone reads this and thinks past performance is an indication of future performance.

Your point is perfectly valid and is a useful addition to my prior post.

<comment><USER25> I think it really depends on your experiment, the size of the trades you're making, and the restrictions you place on your backtest.

Otherwise, they could be an indication of future performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great to see people are interested in the tutorial.

I'd be happy to answer any questions to the best of my ability.

<comment><USER22> Cool stuff. 20% Deviation from the market price is quite high though. I suppose orders will never get a chance to execute. What would be a more realistic percentage? Could it be based on the current volatility for example? Or am I missing something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you are 100% correct.

This is a very naive bot, it will rarely ever execute at that margin but you will never lose either. You are just betting on the fact that hopefully someone buys out the orderbook by accident or because they really want that asset.

A more realistic margin is 0.0000001% but when you start doing that, you will start losing money so you will want a much better algorithmic trading strategy.

I will probably write a hedging tutorial next.

<comment><USER22> the current implementation will do great on flash crashes :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >trading programmatically

>trading _money_

>in javascript

Am I alone in thinking this is insane?

<comment><USER27> No, it is indeed fairly insane. It's a good proof-of-concept of API-based trading, but I am far too timid to trust this sort of thing to a bot, especially considering that other people are running better bots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 40 lines, yeah...I can do it in 2 lines even, if I use external libraries. body onload="mybot();" and boom, I'm done.

</comment><comment><USER29> When did Blockbid exchange launch? Looks like just yesterday. The btc/usd order book is just 5 levels deep.

</comment><comment><USER30> It seems to be for a specific exchange that has $240 24 hour volume...

</comment><comment><USER31> This looks great. Only 40 lines, that's some amazing golf right there.

<comment><USER32> an included general purpose library with 40 lines of custom business logic? that software can't be very smart lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is it profitable?

<comment><USER34> No. Don't day trade. Never.</comment></comment>


The great inflation cover-up - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/31/magazines/fortune/spiers_cpi.fortune/

<comment><USER2> Well, at least in the long run food and energy prices are going to start to leak into other prices.

As a side note, this is really bad for lower income individuals and families. A larger percentage of their income goes towards food and energy than a higher income individual/family. Not only are a lot of them dealing with mortgage issues and tighter credit availability - now they need to deal with this.

<comment><USER3> _lower income individuals and families_

Not really. Not immediately, anyway. Low income people often have more debt than wealth, making inflation beneficial. The people who are genuinely hurt are those on non-inflation-indexed pensions, and those of us with savings or inappropriate investments (long term bonds, for example).

<comment><USER4> I'm certainly looking forward to what my fixed mortgage and student loan payments are going to look like 10 years from now :). Run, inflation, run!</comment></comment></comment>


Net Neutrality to Get U.S. Senate Vote as Democrats Force Issue - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-08/net-neutrality-to-get-u-s-senate-vote-as-democrats-force-issue <comment><USER2> This vote seems like the best chance of maintaining NN at the national level. Congress ultimately directly serve at the pleasure of their constituents, unlike the FCC commissioners.

Point being, the time leading up to this vote is probably be the best time to let your congress members know your opinion on NN. Do not let the "failure"[1] of previous efforts to get congress to act in defense of NN dissuade you from future action, particularly now: It is far easier for a politician to take no action (as they could when the FCC was ones doing the voting) than to actively vote against the wishes of their constituents.

\---

[1] Failure in scare quotes since it seems likely part of the reason NN is still a topic being actively fought for in congress, in the courts, and at a state level is because there is a large amount of vocal support for it.

<comment><USER3> Why don't Democrats pass NN through congress and get it enshrined into law? Instead of trying to block that from happening, since it's Republicans who are trying to do that.

Why was NN so easy to repeal in the first place? Why didn't Obama do a proper job if it's such an important issue? I still don't agree with the accepted wisdom about what NN is in the first place. Seems to me to suggest companies that are using up a lot of bandwidth are going to start paying more, competitors are going to start paying less. Which is why every single large company is opposed to the change.

<comment><USER4> > Why didn't Obama do a proper job if it's such an important issue?

Obama was president while the Republicans held the legislature hostage. It was a miracle his administration was able to ask for and get any legislation passed at all; it was easily the most obstructionist congress ever. He couldn't even appoint a Supreme Court Justice because Mitch McConnell wouldn't allow congress to hold hearings - that's how impossible a situation he was in.

Obama did exactly as much as he was able to do with the powers he had. He wasn't about to try the kinds of stunts our current president thinks he can.

And speaking frankly, as a black person, I don't think he even could have _tried_ to pull these kinds of stunts - he would have been impeached and booted, as any President pulling these kinds of fascist, dictatorial moves should be.

<comment><USER5> The Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2009-2010. Anything Obama and other Democrats thought was really important could have been forced through then.

(Indeed, they did force a major health care reform bill through with zero Republican support, mirroring how a major tax reform bill was forced through with zero Democrat support a few weeks ago.)

<comment><USER6> The Democrats observed the regular order of the Senate, hosted 5 bipartisan meetings and finished the bill so it could actually be analyzed and read before being passed [1]. The republicans didn't bother with any bipartisan meetings and passed it within the same week of finishing writing it. And they broke the regular order of the senate to do it.

In any case, the two year period between 2009 and 2010 was spent almost entirely on the economy. Which given how strong the Obama-era recovery was, seems to be have been time well spent.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/10/us/republican...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/10/us/republican- health-care-process.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 This vote is an important device that serves to decouple net neutrality as a distinct political issue, rather than a footnote in a particular politician's larger platform which -- to many voters -- isn't as important as some other hot-button stances to merit single-issue voting. By triggering a senate vote, this gives an opportunity for each senator to make their stance on this a matter of official record, theoretically independent from any other affiliation they might hold. With the FCC's latest ruling opposed by a majority of liberal and conservatives alike, this is an opportunity to stand with their constituents.

The other objective of those who brought the vote is to illustrate just how few, if any, of those on the other side will vote to oppose the FCC's new rules. This can be weaponized on the ground in later elections, especially competitive districts -- or in this case, states.

<comment><USER7> Where the idea that FCC latest ruling is opposed by majority of conservatives comes from?

Moreover, if you think issue as obscure and technical as NN would be important enough for a senator to break with their own party, you are deluding yourself. The only way to make it so is to wage blatantly false campaign like "without NN you'd be paying 100x for Internet tomorrow and all your favorite sites would be blocked" \- which is also kinda too late anyway, because we already know it's not true. Hoping that the average voter can appreciate the fine points of the tug of war between backbone providers and content generators is, as I said, delusional.

<comment> temp-dude-87844 My assertion as stated in the parent post is based on the University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation's December 2017 poll, which asked respondents to weigh how convincing they found a pro-repeal and a con-repeal argument, and then asked their final stance. The results show [1] that 75% of Republican voters, over 88% of Democrat voters, and almost 86% of independents oppose changes are consistent with the result the FCC's undoing of the Obama- era NN rules. This survey at the time was widely covered in media, e.g. [2][3].

[1] [http://www.publicconsultation.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/12...](http://www.publicconsultation.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/12/Net_Neutrality_Quaire_121217.pdf) [2] [http://thehill.com/policy/technology/364528-poll-83-percent-...](http://thehill.com/policy/technology/364528-poll-83-percent- of-voters-support-keeping-fccs-net-neutrality-rules) [3] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2017/12/12...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2017/12/12/this-poll-gave-americans-a-detailed-case-for-and-against- the-fccs-net-neutrality-plan-the-reaction-among-republicans-was-striking/)

<comment><USER7> They didn't ask however whether people oppose specific changes to FCC regulations, but whether people oppose the consequences that those regulations' supporters claim that will result from removing those regulations. This is somewhat different. In any case, thanks for the links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The U.S. Senate voted on an older version of net neutrality in 2011 with a resolution introduced by former republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (a resolution of disapproval of the FCC's Open Internet Order of 2010). It was a party line vote, 48-52, with republicans (the minority caucus in the Senate at that time) voting against the order and democrats voting in support of the order.

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-joint- re...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-joint- resolution/6/all-actions)

Also in 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives had a disapproval vote which passed 240-179, since republicans were in the majority at that time. All but 2 republicans voted to disapprove the FCC order, while all but 6 democrats voted in support of the order.

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-joint- res...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-joint- resolution/37/all-actions)

<comment><USER9> The problem isn't net neutrality, it's lack of competition among ISPs. Normally, I would agree with them - regulating the internet is _not_ the way to spur innovation. But with an ISP monopoly or duopoly in most markets, either more competition (my preferred solution) or regulation is needed. As we've seen with phone service (if you're old enough to remember), regulation will give us reliable but expensive service, and competition will give us cheap, reliable, and feature-filled service.

<comment><USER10> "competition will give us cheap, reliable, and feature-filled service". Really, I would love to see the evidence that this would be the case.

<comment><USER11> Competition lowers costs in most industries, especially in markets with a low barrier to entry. In 1956, fridge would have cost the equivalent of $3000[1]. Now, it's down to a few hundred of dollars, completely because competition spurred the creation of technological and manufacturing advances, driving the price down.

The issue here is that some industries, particularly industries with a high barrier to entry and low returns due to existing competition, are incredibly difficult to enter. The internet service provider industry happens to be one of those industries that form monopolies.

[1] [http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html](http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As usual, Democrats are the only party that gives a damn. Really baffling why anyone younger than me votes for anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER13> What I don't understand is: why did it take so much effort to get to 30 supporters, when Democrats have 48 in the Senate? What are the other 18 Democratic Senators doing? Why are they not fully behind NN?

<comment><USER14> Follow the money. I suspect you will find the answers to your questions here:

[https://www.opensecrets.org/influence/](https://www.opensecrets.org/influence/)

[https://www.opensecrets.org/elections/](https://www.opensecrets.org/elections/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would a CRA force a House vote as well?

(The House has another procedure called a discharge petition to force votes on things that are supported by a majority of representatives but opposed by a majority of the majority party -- it seems unlikely that there are enough votes in the House to force a net neutrality vote, though. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_petition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_petition))

<comment><USER16> It only goes to the House if the CRA resolution passes the Senate. CRA resolutions function just like other resolutions or bills, being introduced and voted on in one house and approved via vote in the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If your senator(s) are on this list [1] write them to THANK them for stepping up to do so. (And if they're not, write them to request that they do so!)

[1] [https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/status/950498741366247424](https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/status/950498741366247424)

</comment><comment><USER18> IIRC, the FCC commissioner's (stated) argument against net neutrality was that it was Congress's job to legislate things like that, not the FCC's job to just write regulations to make it so. Arguably, it's a defensible point.

Note well: I take no position on whether this was his _actual_ reason, or just a smoke screen.

<comment><USER19> This is what overturned net neutrality in 2014, and possibly would have overturned it again without the current administration. The FCC states their right to regulate the issue comes from one incredibly vague line in a 96 act, that they are to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is risky. If lack of net neutrality regulation _doesn 't_ result in clearly-out-of-bounds behavior by ISPs in the near term, Democrats will be the ones looking bad for trying to add useless regulation. I hope they've thought this scenario through.

<comment><USER21> The ISP bad behavior has already been going on for years and is now hitting a high-pitched fervor now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality. I don't see how it's risky; the bad behavior is already there and regulation is sorely needed.

<comment><USER22> This would benefit strongly from examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's a good resource for understanding broadband markets as a whole?

At least in SF in the past 5 years, Comcast seems to have upgraded 100Mbps connections to 1Gbps connections. Not sure whether that translates to a bigger shared pipe for the city as a whole, but it certainly looks like a good amount of improvement in $:bits, at least in comparison with $:sqFt.

<comment><USER24> Its an improvement but Comcast has been delaying real improvements for years but collect insane profits (afaik). I would love to see the numbers as well. The X1 DVR as far as I am concerned was horrible compared to the ReplayTV or Tivo circa 2001 (except for obviously HD improvement). It only took 15 years and lots of legislation mandating cablecards and whatnot to get them to get there. I don't have hope that they will act in our best interests given past actions but I have to use them because there are no other real options.

Honestly I would like to see the effective monopoly on physical layer internet broken up. Allow municipalities own the cables under the street and and not allow Comcast and others to block companies like Google from expanding by blocking access to the last mile. There is a lot of unused dark fiber in lots of places that could have supported 1Gbps a long time ago but doesn't

<comment><USER7> Comcast profit margin is 12%: [https://ycharts.com/companies/CMCSA/profit_margin](https://ycharts.com/companies/CMCSA/profit_margin) That's on the high side, usually it's around 10%. For comparison, profit margins for Internet/IT companies are around 25%, Google's 24%. Facebook's a whopping 45%. Microsoft's a remarkable 26%.

Is 12% "insane"? Which one would be the "sane" one?

<comment><USER25> For a company not having any R&D cost, granted monopoly/duopoly via lobbying, yes 12% may be insane.

<comment><USER7> Why do you think they don't have any R&D cost? They just launched a mobile network, you don't think that involved at least some R&D investment? How much would be sane in your opinion? 1%? No profit at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why net neutrality has turned into a partisan issue is beyond me, but in this era seemingly everything must be politicized as part of a divide and conquer strategy.

I suspect the best hope for net neutrality is for states to adopt it themselves at the state level.

<comment><USER26> It became a partisan issue immediately, as we have one party that is really against regulation. why wouldn't a conservative/libertarian party feel this way?

Dems should run on it, win and sign it into law for good!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Title II was never meant to be a good solution to net neutrality. It was used because it was the only level that the FCC had.

Congress can actually craft internet specific legislation and should. It seems like Title II has become the end game for many because of pure politics, not because it is a good solution. Remember, parts of Title II had to be ignored to get this square peg to fit.

No, don't vote for this. Develop an actual, specific policy if that is what you want. I fear that after Title II is enacted it would be very difficult to move to better policy in the future.

<comment><USER21> I don't care if it's optimal, I care that it works, which it does. That makes it good. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

I'm gonna say this flat out: Do you believe in net neutrality? Because this argument that you're concern trolling with leads me to believe that you don't actually believe in it. Trying to give supposed "advice" to advance a goal—that doesn't actually do so—is deceptive.

<comment><USER28> Works for what, exactly? You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

<comment><USER29> We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Good, force people to put their name behind an issue.

<comment><USER28> what is your NN position, Mr. Lurr?

<comment><USER30> I am pro net neutrality and unwilling to reveal my real name.

I'm also not an elected representative of the people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Bernie did it right. There is no reason for the government to force net neutrality if instead the government focused on maintaining a competitive ISP landscape.</comment>


Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see better - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable-glasses-josh-silver

<comment><AUTHOR> Josh Silver was one of my tutors at university (a very smart, friendly, approachable professor).

He has indeed been pursuing this idea for a good while, quite passionately. This is one case where entrepreneurship in the western world can really help poorer countries, imho.

It's also a good example that it can take a lot of perseverance and more than just cool technology to make things happen on a large scale like this. The science to make these glasses was already pretty much done 10 years ago when I did my degree, but unfortunately it's still not widely distributed to the people who need it most.

I know there are many people on this site who are looking for interesting, socially constructive projects to back - this is certainly one of them.

<comment><USER2> I agree, great example of overcoming throwing sheep.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10045321-36.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In many countries it is already common practice that poor people buy glasses on the market without any prescription. They try on several different lenses and buy the one that seems most suitable. In essence that's what the doctor does as well.

</comment><comment> puzzle-out I'm so glad the article didn't end up taking a 'social enterprise' angle. Silver was doing his stuff a long time before the concept was given a title, and hence got diluted with PR nonsense and consultancy management speak.</comment>


Ask HN: Buy new Apple hardware given none was announced at WWDC? - <AUTHOR> I was planning on buying a Mac Pro and hoping for a new model to be announced today at WWDC. It has been about 18 months since it was refreshed.
No hardware at all was announced.
Now, I don't know if buying a new machine is a good idea or if they are going to do a refresh in the near future. <comment><USER2> Bought a MBP in May of 2015. AMD GPU means no CUDA. Two months ago, the screen went black. Lost a few days. Same thing happened to a friend with same model. Still have a MBP Retina from 2012. That model has a Nvidia chip, so probably as fast or faster for ML. Also, there is a recall on the 2015 display that flickers. Have put off requesting a fix on mine. Am hoping that after the new MBP comes out with a (rumored) Nvidia chip, that Apple will replaced my flawed AMD version. If Apple comes out with another AMD GPU, then will abandon Apple for something better.

</comment><comment><USER3> A major new high-end MacBook product announcement should have happened at WWDC 2016. It seems that Tim Cook has decided that only software announcements are appropriate at WWDC.

Steve Jobs had a better sense of timing when he introduced the first iPad at WWDC in 2010. Apple missed an opportunity to bring down the house at WWDC 2016. Apple execs need to recognize that Apple developers, the audience at WWDC, badly need and want improvements to the high-end MacBook products.

The old saying at Apple was that "software sells systems". Apple Hardware Engineering is still a world-class organization and is directly responsible for most of Apple's revenue. Why not play up this strength at WWDC?

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro](http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro)

<comment><AUTHOR> The only one that is "buy now" is the MacBook and it seems only because it was the most recent updated. This isn't totally useful for decision making.

<comment><USER5> Is based on the average refresh cycle for those product lines. Given how Apple is usually pretty scheduled in their updates, it works pretty well usually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you NEED it, buy it now. If you can wait, wait.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a retina 15 inch MacBook Pro with 16gb of RAM and also an iMac that is dedicated for work.

I was hoping to get more into AI and OpenCV with c++.

<comment><USER7> If you're looking to do primarily CUDA/OpenCV work you'd be crazy to not build your own PC/drop in a new Pascal card. $450 will get you a GTX 1070 that should easily do 7 TFLOPs of SP (w a slight overclock), and for $600-700 a GTX 1080 that could push 9+ TFLOPs.

As far as price/performance, a high end Mac is only worthwhile if you have very specific software requirements (mostly, if you use Mac-only media production software).

<comment><AUTHOR> Any help on a board that supports multiple cards and lots of RAM?

<comment><USER8> How much RAM do you need?

I can recommend SuperMicro boards but it's just a guess because it's better to know what exactly do you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >No hardware at all was announced.

No hardware was announced _yet_. There have been occasions in the past that speed bumps and minor changes (i.e., not worthy of announcements) just appear in the web store without fanfare.</comment>


Don't Read Tech Blogs: 10 Pieces of Startup Advice from Backupify's Rob May - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/03/07/don%E2%80%99t-read-tech-blogs-10-ideas-from-backupifys-rob-may/?single_page=true

<comment><USER3> > _3\. Incubators aren't thinking big enough. ... If you want to build > something really big, May says, "three programmers and $50K isn't going to > get you very far." He appreciates lean startups as much as anyone, but when > it comes to disrupting big industries and building big companies, you need > time and capital._

Well...

HARD: finding a product that has very good product-market fit and has the possibility to be a huge company.

EASY (at least relatively): raising money when you've got a product with great product-market fit.

Three programmers and $50k isn't meant to make you become a big company. It's meant to allow you to experiment with ideas to see if it gets traction, to determine whether it's a big company or not. If it is, then the big bills can come out to make it a big company.

Maybe incubators aren't thinking big in the sense that they're sinking $10 million into an idea that might have dubious traction, but they are thinking pragmatically.

</comment><comment><USER4> >> Don't read too many tech blogs... Part of the reason, he says, is that many of the bloggers are 23-year-olds who haven't built a real company yet

Ha - I'm sure will ruffle many, many feathers around here. If we could downvote articles, I'm certain that many here would do so for this reason. And, although I'm sure I'll get downvoted for saying this, I'm pretty sure that those of us who are 35 or older who have built successful companies nodded in agreement as we read that line. I thought I knew a lot at 23 but, at 40 when I look back, I really appreciate just how much "naive exuberance" I had.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quite the conundrum; had I followed his advice, I may not have discovered it.

<comment><USER6> I interpreted _tech_ as referring to _engineering_. I know that 99 times out of 100, Googling around, reading blog posts, and otherwise banging my head on the latest and greatest is less productive and produces lower quality software than just reading some damn man pages and spitting out some code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just to clarify the "don't read blogs" comment... what I meant was that tech blogs are disproportionately written by engineers. You don't see, for instance, many middle managers at Apple or Amazon blogging about their work. So if that's all you read, you have this skewed view of how a company should work based on what a bunch of young, small startup engineers tell you.

There is a disconnect between how the world works and how you think it works if you spend too much time reading these blogs, and that disconnect hurts you more than it helps you.

</comment><comment><USER8> I knew Rob back when he was running BusinessPundit. He's a great guy, classic entrepreneur. He was about ready to give up on starting businesses - penning a sad blog entry about failing and not being sure where he was going next - <USER2> he came together with some other founders to do Backupify. I've never liked the cliche about success being closest when you're just about to give up, but it seems to ring true an awful lot.</comment>


Video tags reveal surprising details of blue whale feeding behavior - <AUTHOR> https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/11/blue-whales.html <comment><USER2> Totally thought this was going to be about an algorithm that tags videos of whales with text, and and how they noticed a pattern by looking at the tags.

Title would be better served by mentioning "handedness" in whales, but there was already a flurry of those last week, presumably on the same study.

<comment><USER3> >Totally thought this was going to be about an algorithm that tags videos of whales with text, and and how they noticed a pattern by looking at the tags.

same!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, they attached cameras to the back of the whales. Nifty!

Edit: Blue Planet 2 apparently did something similar; this article has more details: [http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/how-blue-planet-ii- team-1...](http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/how-blue-planet-ii- team-11528095)

</comment><comment><USER5> When I read "video tags," I immediately thought of <video> and was very confused.

I now get that they're cameras, but I'm sure I'll make this mistake next time I read "video tags," too.</comment>


Pixel 'phone by Google' announced - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13161028/google-phone-announced-pixel-xl-price-release-date-specs <comment><USER2> Starts at $649. Ugh. The era of a phone as a status symbol is fading, and even if Google succeeds in winning Android's high-end market, that's not what a majority of consumers are after. We want cheap phones. Given the end of subsidises (in the US market) and consumer fatigue for laying out crazy money for a disposable device, $200 is the sweet spot which Google should have been aiming for. Don't compete with iPhone, define a new standard and make them compete with you.

<comment><USER3> Cmon Jeff. Android users want a premium experience too. Who wants more crap android phones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It honestly looks like a cheap iPhone clone. Why did they choose to go for the same aesthetic?

</comment><comment><USER5> The most important thing a company like Google or Apple could do is liberate consumers from the tyranny of phone companies in the US. My device ought not be limited to a single provider. Imagine if this was the case with your computer.

By making devices vendor-locked competition is limited and service costs remain high. Smart phones have been a windfall for phone companies. We are all paying way too much for their services. If competition was open due to device independence, service would be better and costs would come down.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Google's Pixel phones built to challenge Apple iPhone

> Google Pixel phone launched to take on iPhone

> ...Pixel: Google's First Real Threat to Apple's iPhone

Why not "a phone to delight customers" or "phone to make people healthier and more connected with their family" or "a phone to democratize Android (and make it somewhat accessible to non-geeks)"?

</comment><comment><USER7> iPhone, by Google.</comment>


The Rise and Fall of Scala - <AUTHOR> https://dzone.com/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-scala?oid=hn <comment><USER2> "Java has surpassed Scala as the preeminent functional programming language"

Yeah, nope.</comment>


Amazon Aurora - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/

<comment><USER2> Relevant: we're evaluating Aurora as a storage mechanism for our software. Currently we're MariaDB.

Quick thoughts: speedy, nice throughput, good read/write speeds generally, but the query optimiser still needs some work.

More detail...

So, it's a pretty nice engine. Scales well, seems fairly bullet proof. You can alter instances and they go up and down in size nicely, reboots are handled gracefully (although it doesn't seem to give estimated timings, which is a mild irritation).

The optimiser seems to get a bit stuck on understanding what indexes to use for queries that involve multiple joins or more complex data structures. My guess is that this is because under it (from what I understand), it's basically DynamoDB with clever bells and whistles (if someone knows more or that that's incorrect, please feel free to jump in). Mostly though, it's quicker for the majority of queries.

Backup management is lovely, caching system seems pretty performant from current benchmarking.

The metrics panel is also pretty sweet for monitoring the things that you're going to care about in DB-land.

I'd say if you're running something sensible sized, and your data is relational but not massively complex, it's a pretty solid solution which I'm sure will only improve over time. That said, there are a few edge cases where you're going to have to do some work on your queries to make sure they still behave in a timely manner. Mostly, if you're using an ORM, this is where I suspect you're going to get some pain.

Any questions on specifics, feel free to fire away and I'll elaborate where I can.

<comment><USER3> I haven't used it but I did attend the talk on it at the AWS conference when it was announced.

It is not using DynamoDB under the covers. It basically uses a fork of MySQL for the front end and their own storage layer built from scratch on the backend. It does use concepts from the Dynamo white paper for redundantly storing the data to disk which removes the need for MySQL style replication. But it's not using the DynamoDB service currently offered from Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Released two days ago, and discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959579)

</comment><comment><USER5> Now all Amazon needs to do is make Aurora HIPAA compliant/offer to sign a BAA and the dump trucks full of money will be backing up in no time. Can I dream?

<comment><USER6> > Now all Amazon needs to do is make Aurora HIPAA compliant/offer to sign a > BAA and the dump trucks full of money will be backing up in no time. Can I > dream?

Amazon already signs BAAs that cover EC2 dedicated instances and S3. Or do you mean BAAs that cover Aurora specifically?

FWIW, unless you're already a rather large company with excess capacity in _both_ the engineering and legal teams, I'd recommend skipping AWS entirely and using a company like Aptible (YC S'14) to handle hosting and compliance[0]. It's more or less like using Heroku, except you have all of the compliance requirements (including legal documentation) managed for you. Having tried both approaches myself, I can testify that the latter is by far the preferable alternative (and honestly cheaper in the long run).

[0] Like Heroku, Aptible uses AWS under the hood, so it's not really "skipping" AWS, but you never have to deal with it directly (and that's a good thing).

<comment><USER5> I was referring to Aurora (or any RDS product for that matter) specifically.

<comment><USER7> RDS just cleared HIPAA and BAA. See here: [http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa- compliance/](http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/)

Working on Aurora...

<comment><USER5> Awesome! I must have missed that announcement. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> too desperate for imaginary points you couldn't wait more than 2 days?

</comment><comment><USER9> dang: can this get merged into the old thread ceejayoz mentions?

Not sure if HN has the logic to be able to detect identical posts and reject or merge automagically.</comment>


Perforce Adds "p4 shelve" Command for Checkpointing - <AUTHOR> http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/cmdref/shelve.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I know it's high time I learn how to use git, but perforce is what we use at work and their 2-user/5-client evaluation version has served me well at home. Just letting those perforce users among us know that it might be worth upgrading. I know shelving has been on my wishlist for a while!</comment>


Juvenile social dynamics reflect adult reproductive strategies in dolphins - <AUTHOR> https://today.duke.edu/2020/07/young-dolphins-pick-their-friends-wisely <comment><USER2> The article doesn't explain well why the male mating strategy is so successful or preferred.

Is male sociability a critical feature to be selected by females?

<comment><USER3> It does mention it — groups of males will corner a female and force themselves on her.

<comment><USER4> I can't fathom how the need for young dolphins to lay the groundwork for what is essentially a rape-posse, came to be the path to evolutionary success. It would seem that consensual reproduction would be the norm in any successful strategy, given the critical need for offspring.

<comment><USER5> There are many species that don't care about consent. The ones that do have consent tend to spend a lot of energy growing plumage and doing elaborate dances to woo the females. It shouldn't be that hard to understand that some species evolution would land on rape as a way to save the time and energy spent during courtship. Just because humans shun rape it doesn't mean it can't work for other species, moral issues aside.

<comment><USER6> The very concept of consent or rape (as moral and ethical concepts - which is why the article uses the word "coerce" instead of "rape", I bet) are difficult to apply to nonhuman species because they're not human.

[EDIT: interestingly I think this all boils down to considering if dolphins have ethics or "dolphin rights" within their own societies. A violation of a right is logically impossible if the very concept of, or indeed, the right itself, does not exist.]

I think it would be really interesting to talk about animal ethics and with very smart mammals like dolphins moral imperatives like consent might be appropriate in some way but I just don't know.

But it's inaccurate, imho, to talk about rape as a reproductive strategy for animals if we are using that word in the way we use it when we are talking about ourselves (humans).

Again not to say the concept is irrelevant to animal life but I think we do both ourselves and animals a disservice if we aren't careful.

If you are speaking with some knowledge of animal ethics but didn't share it my apologies :)

<comment><USER7> Your comment seems to imply that there's something fundamentally different from humans and other animals.

<comment><USER6> Good point. I don't know, I'd like to learn more! I mean we aren't that different from other animals, especially our fellow mammals. And we're all part of nature and life. And it definitely seems like many animals have varying degrees of what we call consciousness or intelligence (octopus!).

At the same time there is an obvious difference, though perhaps one of degree and not of kind. The sophistication of our language, social structures, capacity for abstract thought, and toolmaking abilities. Stuff like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TIL I would be a very unsuccessful dolphin.</comment>


Any news.YCers going to SXSW? - <AUTHOR>

Let's organize a meetup.  Is that cool pg?  (wanna join us? :)
I'm thinking lunch on Sunday or Monday perhaps.
(If you're not familiar with SXSW Interactive (http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/), it's a yearly conference covering subjects like web standards, APIs, new business models, web 2.0, design and entrepreneurship.  You can get a sense of the topics at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/)
Hope to meet some of you there. <comment><USER2> I'm going to this but I was planning on not buying a ticket and just going to various shows / parties with a big group of indie music type friends.

Are there any panel discussions that are free? At any rate I'm pretty pumped up about this. I'd be down for meeting up some startup types at a bar. Anyway this seems really fun, I'm pretty pumped!

</comment><comment><USER3> I went last year and was underwhelmed. Most of the talks necessarily had to speak to the lower common denominator in the room.

My advice would be to avoid going to talks/sessions about topics where you're knowledgeable and stick to stuff that's new/interesting to you.

Oh, and have fun. The parties are a blast!

<comment><AUTHOR> The real value in most conferences is in the hallways, talking to the other attendees.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How about:

Sunday, 12:45 (previous session ends 12:30, next session starts at 2PM)

Where: Rio Grande (good Mexican food, close to the convention centre) <http://tinyurl.com/2cfd7a>

<comment><USER2> This thread seems like it kinda died off. Wanna make a facebook event for this and see if a bunch of people want to come?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to meet up. I live in Austin so I know the area really well. I bought the full badge, so I'll be going to see a lot of bands as well. Feel free to send me an email.

</comment><comment><USER5> For anyone going to the music, I strongly recommend the best band from Pittsburgh touring nationally, Black Moth Super Rainbow.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like fun. I'll be there. Sunday night is the bowling, so I'm good any other night.

</comment><comment><USER7> Three of us are going to be there. Agreed. We should definitely meet up.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll be there for Interactive and Film. A meetup sounds like fun.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds cool, I'll be there!</comment>


NASA code formally proven as deadlock free; later crashes due to a deadlock - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZK0tW8EhQ

<comment><USER2> Here is a paraphrase of what went wrong:

"The answer turned out to be 2 fold

1) We just got unlucky. In the Post-mortem analysis we figured out exactly what happened. And it was event that was very crucially timing related. The clock on the flight computer was slightly different than the clock the bench (ground) computer that all the tests had been run on. The probability that the sequence of events which led to the deadlock turned out to happen with a higher probability with the skewed clock.

2) How is it possible that the situation exists after the proof of correctness? One possibility is the proof system had a flaw. That turned out not to be the case. It turned out to be much more prosaic. Instead some assumption was wrong. Only the kernel of the system was proven to be deadlock free. However, the applications were not. And one application in particular had to work around some limitations with the kernel imposed programming model. That work around was the source of the deadlock since it was not analysed by the proof system.

"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Salient discussion between 37–47 minutes</comment>


China's Mobike plans move into services and international expansion - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/mobike-cto-joe-xia-techcrunch-china-shenzhen <comment><USER3> I'm in China and use Mobike a lot. I've said it before and I'll say it again. MoBike totally nails it. In terms of bike sharing they blow everything out of the water. The bikes work, the unlocking via app is quick, the prices are reasonable, and you can park anywhere. To anyone who says China can't innovate, this will take the wind out of your sails. I think they will be the first Chinese startup to become a consumer juggernaut on par with Airbnb or Uber.

<comment><USER4> I would bet against it.

Germany had the best tank in WW2. The "royal tiger". But the Russian T34 was much cheaper. They outproduced Germany.

MoBikes are expensive and heavy. They look over-engineered for the problem they are trying to solve. Compare this with the yellow bkes ofo. They seem to be much cheaper to produce and are much lighter (no GPS positioning system, location is saved by last cyclist during checkout).

<comment><USER5> Ofos get stolen. There are almost none left in Singapore. All you need to do is remember the PIN, and scratch out the serial.

The "overengineered" Mobikes and oBikes (a competitor with very similar bikes - solar panels for the electronics, GPS lock, etc.) are all that is left in our streets.

<comment> dis-sys Not sure which mobike model you guys have in Singapore, the ones in Shanghai/Beijing have pretty poor user experience, it just feel so heavy thanks to its chain-less design.

<comment><USER6> Try its 4th gen bicycles with chains.

<comment> dis-sys solid tyres? then still the same heavy feeling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dis-sys the entire bicycle manufacturing industry is being wiped out thanks to Mobike and its competitor ofo (each has about 50% of market share). one of them ordered 5 million bikes a couple months back, according to the files submitted to the Chinese regulator, the manufacturer building those bikes are making less than 1.5 USD per bike - you don't need to be smart to imagine the conditions faced by those workers actually building the bikes.

bike shops around the country are being shutdown as people no longer buy/upgrade/repair their own bikes, they rent one for 6 USD cent each ride. you see less fun/cool/stupid/crappy bikes on street, they all look the same now.

do they reduce emission? well, rather than walking to the metro stations to catch metro people now ride a mobike/ofo to catch the metro, I don't see any reduced cars on street. There is no stats to back the reduced emission story at all - otherwise you'd be seeing them pointing to those figures jumping up and down on daily basis.

do they make cities better? well, see photos below, remember - they don't clean up their mess, they just deploy their tens of millions cheap bikes onto your streets.

[http://img.mp.itc.cn/upload/20170327/3e5e188412ef46ca892d20f...](http://img.mp.itc.cn/upload/20170327/3e5e188412ef46ca892d20f57d6a7ab3_th.jpeg)

[http://s2.imbiker.cn/201705/22/b25b38ba8cda6df9c686657044f48...](http://s2.imbiker.cn/201705/22/b25b38ba8cda6df9c686657044f4813d.jpeg)

<comment><USER7> "the entire bicycle manufacturing industry is being wiped out thanks to Mobike and its competitor ofo"

If fewer bicycles are being produced due to higher usage per bike, that's good for the environment, right? Even if reduces the size of the bicycle manufacturing market.

"manufacturer building those bikes are making less than 1.5 USD per bike - <USER2> don't need to be smart to imagine the conditions faced by those workers actually building the bikes."

I don't see how the profit made my bicycle manufacturers affects worker conditions. These are determined by the overall labour market, as these workers aren't bicycle specialists.

"I don't see any reduced cars on street."

The effect would have to be huge in order for you to be able to notice it. (I'm assuming you didn't actually collect data.)

"do they make cities better?"

Yes. The subway journey from my place to work is unacceptably long, due to the long walk at one end. Mobike has solved that problem. Three-wheeler electric tuktuks riding the wrong way down the service lane are less prevalent now, too, which is a bonus.

<comment> dis-sys "If fewer bicycles are being produced due to higher usage per bike, that's good for the environment, right?"

The manufacturers are being hit hard because their profit margin is squeezed to the absolute limit. 8 RMB or less than 1.5 USD is the profit you get for building and shipping a bike. With this in mind, do you seriously believe that they are going to maintain the same level of control to limit pollution when making those bikes? Well, your room for environmental protection is now at less than 1.5 USD each bike, that is assuming the manufacturer is willing to give up _ALL_ profit to battle pollution caused during production.

"Yes. The subway journey from my place to work is unacceptably long, due to the long walk at one end. Mobike has solved that problem. Three-wheeler electric tuktuks riding the wrong way down the service lane are less prevalent now, too, which is a bonus."

Great, would you like to share a few photos on how the metro station look like during peak hours? let's focus on those mobike/ofo pollution outside the station. I have a few for you:

[http://www.52qixiang.com/uploads/allimg/170421/1-1F4211AU9.j...](http://www.52qixiang.com/uploads/allimg/170421/1-1F4211AU9.jpg) [http://p3.pstatp.com/origin/1b7a00067dfae9a90762](http://p3.pstatp.com/origin/1b7a00067dfae9a90762)

<comment><USER7> "do you seriously believe that they are going to maintain the same level of control to limit pollution when making those bikes?"

I believe that the level of profit they make has no impact on the level of control to limit pollution. Their actions in regard to pollution will be driven by whatever (dis)incentives are put in place by government regulations.

"that is assuming the manufacturer is willing to give up _ALL_ profit to battle pollution caused during production"

That is assuming that the profit figure doesn't already reflect any costs for 'battling pollution'.

"let's focus on those mobike/ofo pollution outside the station"

You're using the word 'pollution' in a different sense than I was, and in a wider sense than the common usage. I was talking about air quality, and I guess you knew that. You're talking about space taken up on the pavement, a very different problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People are talking about Mobike being innovators, and their business sounds like it's doing really well, but bike sharing is a concept that's been around for a while. Melbourne Bike Share[1] was founded in 2010, though apparently the bike sharing concept was around in Europe since the 60s[2].

People suggest Melbourne Bike Share was largely unsuccessful due to mandatory helmet laws in Australia making them a bit inconvenient. I'm sure there will be idiosyncrasies in certain places which make the concept less appealing.

In saying that though, I really wish there was a service like this when I lived in Guangzhou. I think it's a great fit for very dense cities.

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

[2]: "Runde Sache". Readers Digest Deutschland (in German). 06/11: 74–75. June 2011.

<comment><USER9> The sharing schemes in Europe and MoBike are completely different. The dockless nature of MoBike, Ofo, Obike etc is an order of magnitude game changer. I pick up a bike from below my block, ride it anywhere and just leave it there. I use it many times a day. When I lived in Europe I never once used the docked bike sharing services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would love to introduce this to my country, Germany. I think in large cities it might work well, especially for the last meters after public transport, but also in university towns. We already have rentable bikes, but Ofo and Mobike proved that you don't have to have overengineered docking stations and complicated locks. If you let people just leave the bikes where they want, it works surprisingly well.

Problems are:

\- I have no capital, and you'd need a high investment upfront. Even the simplest bike is not going to cost less than 200-300 €, and those are not the most durable. Also, in Germany you require light. However, I think Ofo has proven that you do not need GPS or electronic locks (initially), and you don't need docking stations.

\- Germans sometimes hate new things. It is my gut feeling that I'd get a lot of resistance. Especially after the first accident, or the first bike gets thrown into a river. One problem is that in Beijing, apparently there is an Ofo graveyard. I haven't seen it myself, but broken Ofo bikes are piling meters high. You just need one bad competitor who creates a mess, and the whole idea is in danger.

But:

\- As a renter, you are not obliged to get insurance for the riders AFAIK.

\- Bike infrastructure is good already.

\- It should be possible to make a sustainable business, but you'd have to reach a certain scale.

<comment><USER11> Don't you have Callabike in your city? It's exactly the same concept, the lock isn't complicated and it all works like a charm. Use the app to find one, ride to wherever you want to, leave it there and log out. Then there's Nextbike, which I haven't used yet but works similarly and stuff from local public transportation companies like MVG Rad in Munich which has stations but allows you to leave the bike also in a certain area. How does Mobike provide more than these offerings?

<comment><USER10> Yes, but in my town you can only pick them up at the train station and have to bring them back there. In larger cities there are more stations, or in some places you can leave them anywhere, but I've never been to a place where they were abundant. From what I've heard, Munich is a particularly good place.

The difference to the chinese bikes is:

\- The chinese bikes are dirt simple. They sometimes have reliability-oriented features like special tires, otherwise they are just commodity bikes with a lock, painted colorful. Call a bike in contrast is really overengineered, with custom frame and everything. (OK, this is more of an advantage for the company than for the user.)

\- There are no stations. This is the big difference. Where ever I can walk, I can ride faster. I never look for a bike, I just grab one when I find it.

\- The bicyles are absolutely abundant. Even at a small subway station in beijing, there are at least 50 of each brand. Contrast it with Hamburg, where in the city center, 2 stops away from the central station, you find a sad docking station with eight empty places. Maybe this is only possible due to "chinese scale", I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mobike and other sharing bicycle competitors has been in a fierce fight for three months.

From sometime this April to two to three weeks ago, it is not only free riding a Mobike, but there is also a chance of random amount of cash gift, known as Hong Bao. I have personally earned about $40 of cash by riding Mobike, the amount of which almost reaches the deposit for renting the bike.

<comment> dis-sys because they are both backed by major investors with access to unlimited cash. they don't invest in those bikes, your deposit covers that, they don't manage those bikes, what else to spend their cash on?

well, they picked the easiest way - they pay their users to use their services.

<comment><USER6> Even if my deposit had covered the gift cash, what I have got would be too much in the sense of annualized returns. They just burned incredible amount of investor's money in this campaign. It would be crucial which of them drains its revenue first/last. I guess the investors would be in favor of a merger, then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Governments should be forcing these operators to place the bike deposits in a trust account, rather than using the money for capital to fund expansion. I paid $50 USD as a "deposit" for oBike, however in the future when one of these companies fails, they will take millions in deposits with them. Especially if the bikes are getting stolen or wrecked.

</comment><comment><USER13> Mobike is innovative, however, the competition is becoming so fierce with at least 10 major copy cats here in Shanghai. The unit economics of this model is being destroyed by the follower mindset in China's tech scene.</comment>


Show HN: Linguaquote – Professional Translation Management - <AUTHOR> https://www.linguaquote.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm on hand over the weekend to discuss any of the details, stack, market fit or strategy. Basically an against-all-the-odds single founder, bootstrapped startup needing not very many paid accounts to be profitable (discounting sunk costs).

Sales is the next major challenge. Think I'll crack it given enough time. I have all the runway I need, at least. Hopefully be able to join the profitable side project threads next year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a little bump - anyone here use translation for their sites/businesses at all?

It's a solid, reliable lever for business development, a relatively underused 'growth-hack'.</comment></comment>


Justice Department Sues Telco For Daring To Challenge the NSL - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120719/11304719763/justice-department-sues-telco-daring-to-challenge-its-secret-demands-private-information.shtml

<comment><USER2> Someone had an interesting comment on the Techdirt page: have people stream online when opening up the mail.

Google Glass FTW. When the person reads the letter, video footage is automatically streamed and seeded around the internet. How can they compell you with a gag order if you didn't know what was in the letter to begin with and you happen to read it live over the network? :-)

<comment><USER3> Ignorance of a law that you haven't read yet because you're not allowed to is no excuse!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When this happens in China, we cry foul. When it happens here, we're quick to brush it under the rug.

<comment><USER5> The media is complicit. No one who watches any of the major news channels will ever hear of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are these the same folks who gave assault rifles to drug cartels?

<comment><USER7> Yes. Operation Fast and Furious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there any chance that the telco will win the suit?

<comment><USER9> IANAL but I would guess the first thing that will happen is their lawyers will ask to postpone the case pending the challenge to the NSL. I would be surprised if a court does not agree to this. Then the challenge will happen, if they lose on the challenge, the Telco will be back in court with the record of the previous battle saying they were within their rights.

If the telco loses, it is a bad day for due process indeed. I can't imagine a telco losing because they delayed compliance in order to challenge an order, and if that is all that is required to be liable then due process is dead. It's unimaginable to me, and the consequences of that cannot be overstated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In case any one else was confused, The DOJ is part of the Executive, and completely different from the Judiciary. As far as I know (and hope), the Judiciary can't actually sue people in its own courts.</comment>


Tech firms to give secret evidence at child sexual abuse inquiry - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/13/tech-giants-to-give-secret-evidence-at-child-sexual-abuse-inquiry <comment><USER2> Not up on UK law, perhaps there's some other hearing where they could give public evidence?

Nice recounting of the horrors "this example case" suffered too. Remember: its all about abused children, think about that instead of the reporter's agenda; because after all no agenda is too extreme in the face of such horribly abused children.

Does anyone advocating "for the children" in these cases ever suggest telling kids they are people, with dignity and rights to defend themselves? That they have a right to violently, if need be, reject advances and insult to their integrity even from adults they should be able to trust? Seems to me most of the proposed fixes for "child porn" involve keeping it quiet, instead.</comment>


Nuxt's $2M Seed Round - <AUTHOR> https://nuxtjs.org/blog/seed-round <comment><AUTHOR> Further proof that even the large VC firms won't put somebody on a plane to Paris or Detroit. Even for something as huge as Nuxt.

If you're not willing to travel to the Valley it's really like you don't exist. I've been using Nuxt for some time and I am really impressed with it.</comment>


Going Fullscreen with Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://jlongster.com/2011/11/21/canvas.html

<comment><USER2> It also works in Safari 5, surprisingly enough, with ESC to exit fullscreen mode.

</comment><comment><USER3> <evil>

I wonder how difficult it'd be to build a fullscreen browser replacement and have it load automatically. The fake browser could mimic real browser actions and easily mask the url (and all of the browser chrome, for that matter) and inject their own content when a user navigates to an interesting site. All the normal "safe" markers (e.g. green URL bar, security lock on the bottom right, the correct URL) could be shown to the user.

Hmm....

</evil>

<comment><AUTHOR> The only way that would be feasible is to use iframes, and you can't inject anything into an iframe.

<comment><USER4> It would be a technical challenge, but they could MITM your entire browsing experience. Fullscreen to canvas, then show what looks like a browser. When someone types something in the URL bar the attacker's backend proxies a request to the real site, loads the content, then renders a canvas page of it.

It would probably be too much work for too little payoff to actually make a browser that rendered to canvas, but they could do it for a couple of major target sites like gmail and banks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surprised that escape doesn't work to exit fullscreen.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant to mention that -- Firefox uses ESC to exit fullscreen but Chrome uses Cmd+Shift+F. They need to standardize that.

<comment><USER6> esc works for me on 17.0.942.0 dev on OS X

<comment><USER7> Crap, I want to use this in my web game, but my users are already used to using esc for other stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Firefox should be coming out with another API call that lets you have full access to keys in fullscreen mode (<http://jlongster.com/2011/11/21/canvas.html#keys>).

Although you would be breaking the standard convention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't work on my Kubuntu (Chromium 13.0.782.215 (Build 97094 Linux) Ubuntu 11.04 ).

Nothing happens when I click the button.

EDIT: on Firefox too.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great news for HTML5 game developers!

<comment><USER10> if you're on Chrome 15+, you can use fullscreen in my HTML5 game. <http://chrome.private-joe.com>

fullscreen button is bottom right, when the level loads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To undo fullscreen in Chrome:

* Command/Shift/F

or

* Command/, (going into Preferences disables it)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hey that Gamepad API reads promising.

When is there ever going to be a download API?</comment>


Ask HN: Questions you were asked during tech interviews?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm preparing for an upcoming interview for a Software Engineer position. Can anyone share challenging and/or interesting questions they've been asked in the past? <comment><AUTHOR> The interview went pretty well. Some questions were...

1\. Describe how you've used object-oriented JavaScript. 2\. Tell me about some of the decisions you make when designing a database. 3\. Are you familiar with dependency injection? 4\. Do you prefer working individually, in teams or in pairs? Why?</comment>


Let's Stop and Remember What Devops Is - <AUTHOR> http://joerussbowman.tumblr.com/post/117077946811/lets-stop-and-remember-what-devops-is

<comment><USER2> When I read the initial article I thought to myself... oh crap, I've compiled hadoop and I thought I was supposed to be a data scientist. Compiling Hadoop vs installing and maintaining an entire HDFS based cluster are a whole different shebang. Personally I'll be happy when we have a chain of trust built into docker and something like pachyderm or mesos can take advantage of it. Smart folks are already doing that sort of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of this stuff is chicken/egg too. A lot of times things are built, someone else points out the security risk and then the tasks to make it more secure are grafted on to it.</comment></comment>