Rate our startup: Tribesports - a social network for sportspeople - <AUTHOR>

http://tribesports.com
The social network for sports lovers. Create your sports profile, celebrate your achievements, join Tribes, take Challenges, get motivated to do more in sports.
<comment>
Hi all,
I presented on dogfooding at Tribesports at last week's London Hacker News meetup (http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/dogfooding). We received some really valuable feedback at the event, so we thought a rate-my-startup post might be of interest here; we'd certainly love to hear your thoughts.
About a year ago, we began building a new tool for sports lovers, a place where people can build up their complete sports profile (like Steve's here: http://tribesports.com/users/steve), join Tribes based on their sports interests and take on Challenges to get motivated to do more in sports.
We launched into open beta earlier this month, after about 3 months in private beta. You can sign up using email, Twitter or Facebook - a process we've tried to make as easy as possible.
A few tech details if anyone's interested: we're running Rails 3 on Ruby 1.9.2, with the following core gems: devise/omniauth for authentication, resque for background jobs, sunspot/solr for search, and capistrano for deployment. For development, we use cucumber for acceptance/integration tests, and rspec for unit tests.
Thanks very much for taking a look - and we're happy to answer any questions you might have, be they tech-related or otherwise... </comment><comment><USER2> Is there a reason you call them "sports people" instead of "athletes?" At first I thought it was for sports fans, but after poking around the site, only then did I realize it was more for people who were actually interested in doing sports together. Sort of like Meetup focused on sports.

Along with that, would it make sense to have also groups tied to specific locales, rather than just topics?

<comment><USER3> Hi athst,

Thanks for your comment and questions. We went with "sportspeople" because our research showed it was regarded as meaning "people who do sport" in the most places - in the UK, for instance, "athletes" is often (but not always) interpreted as referring specifically to people who do track-and-field athletics.

You're quite right, we're not aiming to be a sports fan site - we're very much focused on the sportsperson/athlete. We're not really a Meetup-for-sports, though (although obviously it's great if our members find new sporting partners on the site, and many have already). In fact a huge amount of interaction is between people who are never likely to meet; a Scot who cycles 100 miles before breakfast encouraging a mother-of-two who's working towards their her 5k, for example. It's been great to see how our users will give motivation freely, no matter what someone's level.

On the question of locale-specific Tribes, we certainly have a few of these, and users are welcome to create whatever Tribes they would find useful. We also have event-specific challenges for specific marathons, which are naturally localised. What we've found, though, is that our users seem to respond best to Tribes and Challenges that are globally relevant; things like the get fit without joining a gym Tribe (<http://tribesports.com/tribes/get- fit-without-joining-a-gym>), or the 5 minute plank Challenge ([http://tribesports.com/challenges/hold-the-plank-pose- for-5-...](http://tribesports.com/challenges/hold-the-plank-pose- for-5-minutes)).

You're absolutely right, though, more location-specific resources for users will be a key feature in future, and it's certainly something we'd like to develop further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey Andrew. I enjoyed the talk (I was the big Irish guy who asked about people potentially gaming the leaderboard).

The site looks great and the timing is perfect as I am about to start a pretty significant fitness program in order to loose weight so I'll be relying on you guys for motivation!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comments. It was a good question at the meetup, and one we get asked regularly. We will definitely help motivate you. If you sign up, let me know your username and I will make sure we give you support. I'm <http://tribesports.com/users/andrew>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was skeptical at first, but this looks really cool. I just signed up and I'm excited to use it. I had used DailyBurn for a while, but the challenges and social aspects were disappointing. I think you've really nailed those things already. Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER6> That's a pretty nice site, and I would certainly use it if were not for me having my passion somewhere else.

If you don't mind, may I ask how you got your initial users?

<comment><USER3> Hi dadads, thanks for your comment.

Our userbase has expanded from an early base of friends and family, then through active seeding within carefully picked sports communities, and moved forwards with a great response from users themselves; our invitations system worked very well for us in the early stages, allowing users to send out exclusive invitations to their friends.

We've been really lucky to have such great early adopters - getting a power user or two early on is a huge motivation, gets you excellent feedback on what is and isn't working, and really makes the community feel alive, which is what keeps people coming back...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is definitely an "otherwise" - why didn't you put in a clickable link?

Like this: <http://tribesports.com>

<comment><USER3> They're auto-generated, and aren't enabled in "ask HN" OPs (as I understand it, at least). I guess this is to prevent people link-spamming...

(Edit - thanks for providing one. I'm another dev at Tribesports, by the way.)

<comment><USER7> Well, exactly. That's why people often put in a "reply" that includes a clickable link, and I was wondering why you didn't.

Alternatively, why not submit a link to the site as the URL, and your question as the title? Submissions that don't include links have a ranking penalty, so you're doing yourself down by submitting it the way you did.

<comment><USER3> Ah right - we weren't aware of the ranking penalty. Previous "rate my startup" submissions were pretty universally non-linked ones, so we went with that, assuming direct links were specifically frowned upon for these posts for some reason. Live and learn...

<comment><USER7> Indeed.

My suggestion would be to create a landing page for HN readers, and then link to that. Put something attractive (but accurate!) as your title, and submit a link to the landing page. There you can solicit opinions and suggestions, ask for comments, explain your reasoning, _etc._

That would also be much more readable than a large slab of darkish grey on lighter grey.

Just my thoughts - I don't speak for the management, and have a tendency to strong opinions, unsupported by facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. You should also post this on reddit.com/r/fitness.

<comment><USER3> Good suggestion, thanks. :-)</comment></comment>


Counter-Example to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Found - <AUTHOR> http://ejde.math.txstate.edu/Volumes/2010/93/abstr.html

<comment><USER2> I spent half an hour composing meaningful description of insignificance of the work (without judging if it is indeed a result, attacked "uniqueness" is more of a technicality than anything much of a big deal) only to find out author also published stabs at some other Clay problems: <http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4935> (PNP), <http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.2361> (RH)… at which point I have nothing more to say.

Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER3> So first, the equations seems to be mostly used to approximate and model a lot of stuff. Very precise, I know.

Second, here's wikipedia take on the Millenium problem: Somewhat surprisingly, given their wide range of practical uses, mathematicians have not yet proven that in three dimensions solutions always exist (existence), or that if they do exist, then they do not contain any singularity (smoothness). These are called the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problems. The Clay Mathematics Institute has called this one of the seven most important open problems in mathematics and has offered a US$1,000,000 prize for a solution or a counter-example.

Does the article directly relate to the Millenium Prize problems? I can't conclude anything but it seems like just a small part of the whole. It think people are excited because there was a lot of talk about the possible solution to the P equals or not NP problem.

Maths at those levels are esoteric to most people and as such, presenting papers like that is pretty useless in mainstream media. If one could find a good analysis of the conclusions and possibilities, it might be a lot more useful.

<comment><USER4> It looks like the author is attacking statement C from the official problem description ([http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier- Stokes_Equations/n...](http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier- Stokes_Equations/navierstokes.pdf)). That statement asks for "a smooth, divergence-free vector field u0 (x) on R3 and a smooth f(x, t) on R3 x [0, ∞), satisfying [some physical-reasonableness conditions] for which there exist no solutions (p, u) of the [the Navier-Stokes equation, a physical reasonableness condition, and a sort of sanity condition]." In essence, you're finding a counterexample for uniqueness.

The author claims to have found exactly such a combination of initial-value field u0(x) and force function f(x), solving the millenium problem. I can't really judge his claim yet, as I haven't read the whole paper (and I'm probably not qualified to say even once I have), but slackenemy presents some good reasons to be rather dubious elsewhere in the thread. Also, applying Scott Aaronson's "Eight Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong" (<http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458>) isn't pretty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> what

<comment><USER5> oh, this might help

"Waves follow our boat as we meander across the lake, and turbulent air currents follow our flight in a modern jet. Mathematicians and physicists believe that an explanation for and the prediction of both the breeze and the turbulence can be found through an understanding of solutions to the Navier- Stokes equations. Although these equations were written down in the 19th Century, our understanding of them remains minimal. The challenge is to make substantial progress toward a mathematical theory which will unlock the secrets hidden in the Navier-Stokes equations."

<http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier-Stokes_Equations/>

<comment><USER6> that doesn't seem to setup an assertion for which a counter-example could be shown.

<comment><USER7> My understanding is that the Navier-Stokes problem has to do with showing that smooth solutions always exist for the three dimensional system of equations, so a counter-example would be a set of initial conditions for which no smooth solution exists. On Wikipedia, the problem is described as:

"Prove or give a counter-example of the following statement:

In three space dimensions and time, given an initial velocity field, there exists a vector velocity and a scalar pressure field, which are both smooth and globally defined, that solve the Navier–Stokes equations."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier–Stokes_existence_and_smo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier–Stokes_existence_and_smoothness)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part V: Happy 100th Birthday Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2009/04/20/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-part-v-happy-100th-birthday-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> Here is a link to the Google Tech Talk by Steve Blank: [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=video_r...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=video_result&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DhFSPHfZQpIQ&ei=Yr7sScrqNIrCM9zmoNkF&usg=AFQjCNF3xS5pQ0n2x_j4a_FVgyfupHDE0g)

<comment><USER3> In the slides from that talk he actually anchored the start of Silicon Valley with Hewlett Packard. I blogged last year that Federal Radio was a much better starting point, See [http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on- secre...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-secret- history-of-silicon-valley-at-chm-nov-20/) based on Timothy J. Sturgeon's "How Silicon Valley Came to Be" where he notes:

The fact that the San Francisco Bay Area's electronics industry began close to the turn of the Twentieth Century should lay to rest the notion that industrialization and urbanization on the scale of Silicon Valley can be quickly induced in other areas. Silicon Valley is nearly 100 years old. It grew out of a historically and geographically specific context that cannot be recreated. The lesson for planners and economic developers is to focus on long-term, not short-term developmental trajectories. Silicon Valley was the fastest growing region in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s; but that growth came out of a place, not a technology. Silicon Valley's development is intimately entwined with the long history of industrialization and innovation in the larger San Francisco Bay Area.

See <http://web.mit.edu/ipc/publications/pdf/00-014.pdf>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the link to the MIT paper. Wish I had seen it _before_ I wrote the blog post! I would have been much more coherent.

steve</comment></comment></comment>


"I Wear Goggles When You Are Not Here" – GitHub for Windows Release Notes - <AUTHOR> https://windows.github.com/release-notes.html

<comment><USER2> "I wear goggles when you are not here" is a mis-heard song lyric from the Macy Gray song "I Try".

Actual lyrics: My world crumbles when you are not here.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6kY_I7rUiE#t=53s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6kY_I7rUiE#t=53s)

</comment><comment><USER3> Whatever they are they're oddly poetic:

       * The Endless Forms More Beautiful
       * Pray for Toaster
       * The Fall of Disorder

<comment><USER4> Like ship names in the Culture!

<comment><USER5> They immediately put me in mind of Marathon level titles, but it turns out the first is also the name of an operatic metal album.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I assume these are release codenames? I see "Thumb Tacks and Bailing Wire" before this...

Clever names, but without context it's sort of confusing.

</comment><comment><USER7> What's updog?

<comment><USER8> Oh, nothing much. You?

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this the most awesome version naming scheme ever? Or just something odd...

</comment><comment><USER10> Are these jokes?

<comment><USER11> Reference to "Macy Gray - I Try" perhaps?

<comment><USER4> The google seems to think so.

Though it instantly gives an idea for a sci-fi short story.</comment></comment></comment>


Searching YouTube for "lets play" return an error - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lets+play <comment><AUTHOR> Searching youtube for "lets play" or similar (letss play/lets playy) return an error. Any other terms return fine. Reproduced from two computers and three browsers (chrome/firefox/edge).

Is anyone else seeing this?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I see the same. Interesting. Adding any third word to the query (e.g. lets play minecraft) works fine as well.</comment></comment>


Tell HN:  A method for finding links to submit to Hacker News. - <AUTHOR>

Instead of just submitting what you find on reddit or other social news sites, why not also try this approach:<p>* come up with an idea that you have not seen before<p>* google it to find links on that idea or something related<p>* submit what you find to Hacker News<p>The advantage of this technique is that you would be able to find links that are not presently hot on other social news sites. <comment><USER2> I think a more productive approach is to "not" look for links to post to hacker news.

I think stories are beginning to "churn" where good stories arent sticking around very long because there are so many mediocre stories being submitted.

I post stuff that I or my friends have written, or from new stuff from communities I participate in.

while I understand submitting is a form of contribution, its only a positive contribution with high enough quality, if people sit around looking for stuff to post I cant see the quality rising.

<comment><USER2> a shorter version of ^ would be

there just isnt enough interesting news in the tech world to have 200 interesting links posted a day, better trying to make the news than to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You mean _besides_ Ask HN and Polls... :-p :-)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=amichail>

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the guy just refuses to understand. This is from 422 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182193>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I don't care whether or not I see, here, things that are already hot on other networks as I only use this one.

The way you said, would require much more effort compared to posting links to the interesting news you received on your feeds.

Most of the links I see here are completely new to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another technique is to write something original and meaty for your own blog that's relevant to the audience here. Then submit that link. Instead of looking for the work of others, create your own.

<comment><USER7> I thought people would resent that as shameless self-promotion. Is it really acceptable to post my own blog articles, if they're relevant? Or should I let other people post them (rudimentary peer-review?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Read what you normally read. If you spend an okay amount of time here you know what's appropriate, probably interesting,etc. Submit it. It's really that simple. I never go link hunting for HN.

</comment><comment><USER9> If had to condense what HN likes to a phrase it'd be: actionable ideas.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the reward in finding links that aren't popular elsewhere? Surely posting something that has clearly garnered interest on other sites is a faster route to karma?

Also, I'd say: subscribe to interesting RSS feeds and twitter accounts and post stuff from those. (That was mostly my strategy as a pro-blogger, though without the twitter part :P)

<comment><USER11> If you're posting the link for the karma, please don't bother.

<comment><USER10> Oh, personally, I don't. (check my posting history and you'll see I rarely post links.)

I'm just thinking from the point of view of a value-reward system. The only quantitative reward on HN is karma, hence an optimisation strategy to post new links is surely best based around said reward.

<comment><USER11> I feel there are three other value-reward systems in effect:

1) If I post links that I think people will find interesting, they will feel more inclined to share links they feel interesting: most of us have an innate sense of quid pro quo.

2) If I post links and they are voted up, others will recognize that as an interesting subject and post other links on the same subject, providing me with information I wouldn't see otherwise

3) If I post a link, people will comment on the story and provide valuable insights/feedback, helping me to determine the value of the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One word: software</comment>


Thomas Jefferson Letter on Censorship (1814) - <AUTHOR> http://classicliberal.tripod.com/jefferson/dufeif.html <comment><AUTHOR> > It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings > or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test > of truth and reason. If M. de Becourt's book be false in its facts, disprove > them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us > freely hear both sides, if we choose.

Interesting thoughts for such an early time. We seem to have wandered quite far from this mindset. Today, if we disapprove of an idea, we must stamp it out.

It is not good enough to simply refute or disprove a position or idea, and engage in spirited debate. Today, no person is allowed to think out loud thoughts that might conflict with another's. We cannot trust the population to form informed opinions all on their own, based on spirited public debates.

Jefferson is specifically referencing a religious book in this letter - however the overall notion survives religion, and applies to all thoughts in general.</comment>


We have broken SHA-1 in practice - <AUTHOR> http://shattered.it <comment><USER2> Active discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713480)

</comment><comment><USER3> StackOverflow post explaining how Git would handle a SHA-1 collision

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9392365/how-would-git- han...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9392365/how-would-git-handle-a- sha-1-collision-on-a-blob)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it seems like a non issue for Git.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Here are some numbers that give a sense of how large scale this computation > was:

        Nine quintillion (9,223,372,036,854,775,808) SHA1 computations in total
        6,500 years of CPU computation to complete the attack first phase
        110 years of GPU computation to complete the second phase

So no need to panic or urgently switch, but time to slowly transition

<comment><USER6> Ars technica's article is not as optimistic:

> Had the researchers performed their attack on Amazon's Web Services > platform, it would have cost $560,000 at normal pricing. Had the researchers > been patient and waited to run their attack during off-peak hours, the same > collision would have cost $110,000. That's within the $75,000 to $120,000 > range CWI's Stevens projected in late 2015.

Not cheap but definitely achievable by a wealthy individual or corporation.

<comment><USER7> How long would the processing have taken?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I removed this comment from here, and posted it here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713557)

<comment><USER9> > SHA-1 is still used in some important software like torrents and git.

Which can be appropriate. Not every use of SHA-1 is security focused, it might also be combined with a file size and used to check for file consistency.

The same thing happened with MD5 (which is much more broken). People freaked out because some software was using the "insecure" algorithm while entirely missing that it was used a file consistency check (in combination with file size) rather than for security within its own right.

If you're doing security work, you should already know that SHA-1 is unacceptable. If you aren't doing security work then you MIGHT want to look into something else but only if there would be a benefit to someone abusing a SHA-1 collision.

<comment><USER6> >Which can be appropriate

I disagree. Obviously if you have a big distributed infrastructure (like git) then you won't be able to switch within a day, but that's a pretty extreme example. They _should_ be working on moving away from it though, pandora's box is open now, it's only going to get easier and cheaper.

There's no benefit until there's a benefit. If you're using a hash it's probably because you want a compact way to reference a resource, or maybe simply check it's integrity. If this property no longer holds then it's basically useless. You can ignore it until somebody decides to forge collisions in your system in order to corrupt files or DoS it somehow.

Or you use SHA-1 to deduplicate your files, somebody stores two colliding PDFs and you delete one of them because you think they're dupes.

So I don't think there's any nuance needed here. The word should be "stop using SHA-1". Otherwise people will keep making excuses not to do it until something important breaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, looks like this guy was wrong: [https://lwn.net/Articles/307281/](https://lwn.net/Articles/307281/)

Copy-pasting for posterity:

      I've been informed by the git Gods that the chances of a
      SHA1 collision is the same as the Earth being sucked up into
      the black hole created by the CERN accelerator. If this is
      indeed true, then there's no need for that extra memcmp.

<comment> not-tsuraru Well he seems to be talking about a random collision, not an attack. So not really the same subject.

See the end of his post: "He did show some concern that there might be a way to crack the algorithm"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >...That means Git and unknown number of other widely used services that rely on SHA1 have THREE MONTHS to wean themselves and their users off the insecure function

[https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/02/at-deaths-door- for-...](https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/02/at-deaths-door-for-years- widely-used-sha1-function-is-now-dead/)

<comment><USER12> That is a bit of hyperbole. Just as MD5 is a good hash function, as is SHA1 - they just are not good cryptographical hash functions. We've known this for more than a decade, so this is just confimation of what we already knew.

That said, it's relatively straight forward to upgrade Git for instance, but it will break all external linking to a repository unless they store both new and old hashes for existing commits. If the hashing function in Git should have been secure, it should not have been created with SHA1 in the first place, as it was known to be broke before development even began.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Computing a collision today costs about $100K from my reading of the paper. So most uses of SHA1 are protecting documents of far lower value, and would not be likely attack targets (today).

<comment><USER14> if there are any important ssl certs signed with SHA-1, the race has just started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't tell from the various sites that have covered this, but it seems this is faster brute force attack (much faster), but not a preimage attack. Am I reading this correctly?

</comment><comment><USER16> Can someone explain how they made the two PDFs cause the same hash, I feel that's the bit that's missing from the explanation

<comment><USER17> Almost certainly padding the file to match.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I knew Google "knew something" about SHA-1 being vulnerable to collisions when it announced the aggressive timeline for deprecating SHA-1 support.

They got a lot of flak for trying to deprecate it "so early". It's nice to see them proving everyone wrong on this.

</comment><comment><USER19> > If you use Chrome, you will be automatically protected from insecure TLS/SSL > certificates, and Firefox has this feature planned for early 2017.

No need to wait. The option to reject SHA-1 certificates on Firefox is `security.pki.sha1_enforcement_level` with value `1`.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/01/06/man-in-the- midd...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/01/06/man-in-the-middle- interfering-with-increased-security/)

Other configs worth doing:

`security.ssl.treat_unsafe_negotiation_as_broken` to `true` and `security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation` to `true` also. Refusing insecure algorithms (`security.ssl3.<alg>`) might also be smart.</comment>


How fast are those packets moving? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/ping-lightspeed <comment><USER2> There is an interesting urban legend / story about the 500 mile email that covers this as well: [https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

excerpt:

' "We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. "Come again?"'

</comment><comment><USER3> _I would expect SF to Hong Kong to be much faster than Denver to Chicago, since a larger percentage of the time would be spent travelling over fiber._

Regular electrical signals can propagate just as fast in copper wires as light does in fiber:

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

Also, if there are any wireless (microwave) links in the path, those will actually be (almost, due to the atmosphere) at the speed of light.

</comment><comment><USER4> A few issues:

\- They don't factor the time the opto-electrical converstion takes at each hop.

\- They don't factor queueing and buffering in any devices

\- They assume the router was able to instantly generate the TTL exceeded message at each traceroute hop.

\- They don't seem to consider that the return path might be going via Japan with a hop through France, which won't show on the traceroute at all.

\- They assume each non-passive device on the path will show in the traceroute (this isn't true, L1/2 devices won't show, technologies like MPLS can obfuscate entire network cores).

In terms of how fast light moves in single-mode fibre it's fairly constant, the variance here ins't to do with the fibre.

<comment><USER5> > the variance here ins't to do with the fibre.

Which is basically what the article is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I may be completely wrong here but I would like to hear some one else opinion.

The speed of packets in fiber is exactly the one calculate doing the math combining together the speed of light and the refraction coefficient of fiber.

What slowndown everything is reaching an hub, detect the light and trasmute those impulses into bits, decide where to redirect the packet, and re-trasmute the bits into light impulse.

It is not the light domain the one that dominate the speed of packets but is the electronic domain.

Am I wrong?

<comment><USER7> Here is a suspicion I have, can someone who has experience in the field shed some light on this?:

In addition to the refraction index, you'd expect fibre optics to have another limiting factor: scatter. As light bounces off the side of the fibre, it gets scattered back and forth. I.o.w.: you'd expect a single, "perfect" pulse to eventually reach the other end as a slightly drawn out pulse (with its intensity spread out over a bell curve?). Is that true? If so, does that mean that in fibre optics , the longer the cable, the lower the frequency at which you can send pulses, to avoid "bleeding" from one into the next? And is it true radio doesn't have that?

Or does fibre not work that way?

<comment><USER8> This is the case in Multimode fiber, which is used for short distances (meters). For anything longer, single mode fiber is used and the core of the fiber guides the light. See [https://garyherlache.wikispaces.com/Digital+Communications+F...](https://garyherlache.wikispaces.com/Digital+Communications+Fall+2009+Fiber+basics)

<comment><USER9> That looks like single mode fiber never refracts… Surely it can't go round any bend, then, though? (And I'm probably missing something obvious. It's been a while since I've done optics of any sort.)

<comment><USER10> > That looks like single mode fiber never refracts…

No, it does.

> Surely it can't go round any bend, then, though?

No, if you bend the fiber too much the light leaks out into the cladding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >This is approximately the same speed as SF to Hong Kong, which is quite surprising - I would expect SF to Hong Kong to be much faster than Denver to Chicago, since a larger percentage of the time would be spent travelling over fiber.

Undersea fiber cables have repeaters embedded in them. So even though it's only one hop from an L2 perspective, the light is being decoded, error corrected, and re-transmitted many times along the way to hong kong from SF.

<comment><USER12> Back 20 years ago when I was doing my undergrad, optical amplifiers [0] were a thing. In theory it's possible to boost signal without repeating. Is it the case that they're still too expensive or are we talking old legacy long haul infrastructure that hasn't been updated yet?

I'd say it's more likely to be some sort of routing or even filtering overhead between the two national jurisdictions. Plausibly there be some kind of layer 3 filtering going on ...

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

<comment><USER13> Does the light signal in an fibre optic cable get noisy over distance? If so, then wouldn't an analog signal amp such as this simply amplify the noise along with the signal? Decoding and re-encoding would have the effect of 'cleaning' the signal in this case. If it does get noisy, where does the noise come from? The medium? Leakage from outside the cable?

<comment><USER12> I thought the point of fibre was that it was low noise ...

EDIT There's a good discussion of what you're talking about here [0]

Upon further reading, there's a such thing as an _all optical_ regenerator which would appear to provide the best of both worlds, though there's nothing here about how widely these are used [1]

[0] [http://www.rfwireless-world.com/Terminology/Optical- Repeater...](http://www.rfwireless-world.com/Terminology/Optical-Repeater-vs- Optical-Amplifier.html)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamyshev_2R_regenerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamyshev_2R_regenerator)

<comment><USER13> That's pretty fascinating, but I don't understand how this works from a purely thermodynamic POV. If the signal is being amplified, where is the extra energy coming from? Does it deplete the material? Is it like boosting voltage at the expense of current?

<comment><USER10> Longhaul subsea fiber optic cables have a conductor in them that carries a high voltage DC current that powers the amplifiers on the cable route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of this apocryphal story: [https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> The author's calculations are based on flight distance which will be significantly shorter than the actual fiber distance. Also, the actual network path is much harder -if not impossible- to derive with conventional tools. Put another way: the calculations are extremely rough approximations and should be taken with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER16> The [https://www.submarinecablemap.com/](https://www.submarinecablemap.com/) is also a great resource - one can expect to hit almost the speed the light, barring the repeaters / amplifiers, while going through the cables.

</comment><comment><USER17> We've got a larger dataset of ping times here: [http://wondernetwork.com/pings](http://wondernetwork.com/pings)

</comment><comment><USER18> I found it enLIGHTening indeed. :D</comment>


Install Jekyll on MacOS Mojave - <AUTHOR> https://desiredpersona.com/install-jekyll-on-macos/ <comment><USER2> That's a lot of work. If you only need to build and serve a website on a local machine, Docker makes all of this work unnecessary. You can simply install Docker Desktop and spin up a Jekyll container to test your code. I'll write this up soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya, I had noticed on Github a few people were having install issues with Mojave, so I took the time to write up the steps in as much detail as possible. Ok cool, looking forward to your article.</comment></comment>


This is the new Gmail design - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/12/17227974/google-gmail-design-features-update-2018-redesign <comment><USER2> > _The Verge has obtained screenshots of the new Gmail design, currently being > tested inside Google and with trusted partners._

Those "trusted partners" better include trying things out with the elderly, and people who need ARIA. And since by default these people are _always_ forgotten, the fact that the design team isn't boasting about thinking about them has me very, very worried already.

Pak1G summarised this perfectly five years ago in a HN comment on the Gmail redesign back then.

> _I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My [mom] saw me come > online on Skype, so she called me. There 's an ocean between us currently. > She said she called me because she was writing an email to me, but couldn't > find the Send button, so didn't know how to send it. Either it made her feel > stupid or frustrated, or she felt so sad that she couldn't send an email to > me that she had spent some time writing, or whatever, but she started > crying. She was crying because she couldn't find the Send button in gmail. > She's approaching 60 and isn't as technically adept as some of us, so that > is admittedly a factor._

> _Seeing her cry about this made me change the way I think about what some > users go through when they experience unexpected UI changes. I remember > hearing people say they got confused by Windows 8 tiles, and didn 't think > it was such a big deal. After seeing my mom cry over a UI change, I think > there are better ways to implement UI changes than simply shoving them down > people's throat. Sure, if it must be done, it must be done (UI change), but > don't shove it down people's throats unexpectedly and with no hand-holding > at all._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429848)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ewww! Painfully bright! I hope there's a dark there like with YouTube.

<comment><USER4> You can still use an offline client such as Claws Mail and choose your favorite appearance. It also is a lot faster than any browser out there.

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/pap...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus- claws-mail-theme/master/preview.png)

[http://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php?section=downloads](http://www.claws- mail.org/downloads.php?section=downloads)

<comment><USER4> Lol, being downvoted for suggesting an OSS software I have zero affiliation with to solve an user problem. May I ask an explanation of the reason, if any?

I'm 100% aware that writing about being downvoted brings more downvotes, and I don't give a monkey's multicolored ass about it. If I can't even suggest a software to solve an user's problem then Houston we have a much much worse problem than downvoted users being downvoted for writing about downvotes.

BTW, the image I linked is the _only one_ that comes out by searching "claws mail dark theme", just in case someone thinks I'm affiliated with that other site and is too lazy to check.

HN: what about forcing users to give a short reason for downvoting? This time I know I'm 100% right but newbies (including myself when I landed here) have a hard time figuring what's wrong in their fading posts without any explanation. Post ratings should strive to be accurate because everyone benefits from it; I can't think of an useful information being hidden because some trigger happy users or their bosses don't like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >A new snooze feature also lets you temporarily remove emails from your inbox until a certain time, so you can avoid certain email threads until you're ready to reply.

How is this a feature worth developing? Is leaving the email unread until you want to read it too difficult? I can't think of a single use case for this.

<comment><USER6> That's because for many people, email is a to-do list.

Once you see the inbox as a task list, you will understand the feature.

A to-do list sorted by the time the task was put on the list is not optimal. Some people would like to see the tasks that they have to do this week (send pictures to Emily), and not in three months (check-in for the upcoming flight).

I was not aware of this feature myself until just now, but I'm going to be a user of it.</comment></comment>


Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? - <AUTHOR>

32-bit systems can handle up to 4GB and any modern Linux system with a CPU that supports Physical Address Extension can use up to 64GB.<p>How are you coming up with your 2GB limitation? <comment><USER2> There's 4GB of physical memory on the server, but for various reasons we only end up with about 2GB of usable heap space.

Rtm just placed an order for a new server, so we should have more memory and a somewhat faster CPU soon.

<comment><USER3> Well, Don't you think that if you make pagination for comments of a story, that could help?

For example, if a story has 50 comments, then it should be devided into 2 pages, each page shows 25 comments... and as a result it will use less memory?

<comment><USER2> That would not use less memory. It's not the html pages that are stored in memory, but the individual comments.

<comment><USER3> Yes I know that the individual comments are the ones stored in the memory. But it takes a while to load anyway. like the feature request story... it takes around 11 seconds to load.

Thanks for making it clear to me, I really appreciate it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was discussed in pg's original submission on why things had been slow lately. Do we need this separate submission?

</comment><comment><USER5> I assume he means the machine YC is hosted on has 2gb of memory.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I forgot to mention the link to his original comment, but now I can't find the thread.

<comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512244>

Did you mean that one?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do geniuses think? How do you think? - <AUTHOR> I've recently been engrossed by the question of how geniuses and highly intelligent people think. There's bits and pieces of information online. What I'd really like to see, though, is (a) geniuses describe their thought process and (b) a smart person voicing is interior monologue while attacking a problem.
1) Do you know of any information like this? Link?
2) Otherwise: do you think in a way that's different (better) than the average person? <comment><USER2> Obsession is more valuable than genius. If you accept IQ testing at all they call people over 130 on the WAIS very superior because genius implies a social or intellectual impact many very superior individuals never achieve. Very superior scores correlate highly with success in a career. But other variables matter much more. I have met few accomplished people who work less than 60 hours a week.

Example: [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/the_truth_about_grit/?page=3)

"Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, came to a similar conclusion. He spent decades following a large sample of "gifted" students, searching for evidence that his measurement of intelligence was linked to real world success. While the most accomplished men did have slightly higher scores, Terman also found that other traits, such as "perseverance," were much more pertinent. Terman concluded that one of the most fundamental tasks of modern psychology was to figure out why intelligence is not a more important part of achievement: "Why this is so, and what circumstances affect the fruition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent importance that they should be investigated by every method that promises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance."

Kurt Vonnegut Quote:

"Novelists . . . have, on the average, about the same IQ as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time."

<comment><USER3> Love the Vonnegut quote, thanks for introducing me to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) There are some awesome Feynman interviews on the web.

2) My brain will refuse to learn anything unless I can understand it from first principles. I spend a long time trying to get an intuitive understanding of a problem before starting to try to solve it. When solving a problem, I talk out loud as if I'm trying to persuade another person of my argument, including responding to imagined objections or questions. Often I find myself thinking "wait, what exactly am I saying here? what do I mean by this?" I meta-think, estimating the probability of me misunderstanding something without being aware based on context (e.g. if I think something is easy when really smart people think it's hard, then I probably missed something).

Math is helpful for picking up good thinking habits.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's different kinds of genius I think. You have "skill" genius where someone can play the piano, chess etc extremely well. You also have "creative" genius which is people like Einstein who makes creative new leaps. The first kind of genius seems to be genetical while the second can be learnt.

I can't claim to be any kind of genius myself but creative "breakthroughs" in my experience has mostly followed the same pattern: Immersion -> Gestation -> Creative Leap.

You start by immersing yourself into a problem, reading everything there's to read about the subject, getting all aspects of the problem down on paper, pondering it wherever you go etc. As you start this you will also start a subconcious gestation process where you're brain will start arranging itself to the problem space. This is why I think you see "obvious" solutions to problems after a certain period of time.

The "creative leap" or "aha!" moment can take different forms. I find they often pop into my head while doing something else like taking a walk or a bath and letting my mind drift. Exercise is also great to stimulate the brain. It can also come in the form on coming in contact with something in a different area and seeing how it relates to your problem.

I've found the more I know about a wide array of topics the easier it is to find creative solutions to stuff. Learning stuff like languages and playing instruments also creates new cross-connections in the brain. What you eat will also to some degree have an impact on your thought process so eat some nuts and fish :)

Some other good habit is to constantly re-examine and question "basic facts" and "certainties". Keep a text dump of your thoughts so you easier can arrange and go back to them. Play "pretend it's magic", "if it/you could anything, what would it do?". Assume there's a solution and speculate around it's properties instead of questioning whether one exists.

So immerse yourself, eat well, learn about lots of stuff, take long walks, exercise and don't be afraid to daydream :)

<comment><USER6> Have you actually read anything on genius, or are you just stating what "feels" right to you? Because there are many studies on this exact thing -- the "skill" genius you're describing -- that show you are exactly wrong.

It really helps to actually study something before writing a sure-sounding opinion to the internet at large.

<comment><USER5> This is mainly my personal view and experience although I've done some research on the subject. Regarding "skill" genius: of course you can get extremely good at anything by practice, but getting into that very last percentile seems to demand some kind of innate talent.

Chess is a good example. The Polgar sisters was groomed from from childhood by their father to become grandmasters. Studies shows that chessplayers rewire their brains to use the part normally used to recognize faces to remember positions... so you can train your chess memory.

But even though the Polgar sisters are Grandmasters they're nowhere near the raw talent of Kasparov and lately Magnus Carlsen who've defeated Karpov and become Grand Master at the age of 13 and I think now is ranked #2 in the world.

I would argue that you stand a much better chance of training your brain for creative genius (in for instance science or IT) than beating Magnus :) The same probably applies for piano etc

Bonus url: Magnus Carlsen speaks of his talent... he doesn't seem to agree with me :) <http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6187>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everybody thinks they're highly skilled and above average. A study on hubris in academia recently showed that 95% of all university professors think they are leading their field. (They are not.) Some of my coworkers constantly babble on how super-intelligent and gifted their children are. (I've seen their offspring, they are retarded and borderline autistic.)

Listening to self-declared or celebrated "geniuses" on how a decent thought process is supposed to work, that's a really bad idea unless you're a psychologist conducting studies on pseudocompetence and illusory superiority. Many of our contemporary heroes are really just only good at one thing: self marketing.

Along those lines, I'll be the first to admit: I'm below average, in almost every single aspect of physical and mental prowess. But even with my limited capabilities I can understand how individually different people's problem solving strategies are. Just watching them may be inspiring, but it's not gonna help you be any smarter.

<comment><USER8> While you are correct that almost everyone believes themselves to be "above average", the HN demographic likely is mostly above average individuals.

Also, not everyone claiming high intelligence is just arrogant or deluded. I'd estimate myself at high intelligence for fairly simple reasons - scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized tests, graduating summa cum laude, etc. I suspect a good number of HN posters have the same (or better) educational achievements I have to base our self-assessments on.

<comment><USER9> The problem is what is the correlation between intelligence and results in standardized tests?

I mean, why do you think having good results means that you are intelligent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The smartest people I know have the following in common:

\- They are the most knowledgeable person in the room in their topic of interest. That takes obsession.

\- They surround themselves by other smart people constantly

\- In large groups of smart people they are perfectly happy to ask questions even if they are wrong. E.g in a maths seminar will debate, and often get beaten by the subject expert.

I often wonder if the latter - asking "stupid" questions to experts in a field - is something that was there before they were at the top. Anyone else noticed this?

</comment><comment><USER11> 1) Read Genius, by James Gleick. It's a biography of Feynman which mostly concentrates on his life story (with just enough of his work thrown in to keep my inner physics geek happy) which happens to contain a couple of intriguing hints as to how he thought. Reading between the lines, I suspect he was (or had become) synaesthetic - he describes formulae as having colour, and combining them as entities rather than as series of symbols. He also mentions not understanding how his students comprehended equations if they could not see them this way, so he clearly understood that there was something different going on in his own head.

If that's true, it's a hint as to how he was such a formidable force, because somehow his sensory and proprioceptive apparatus had arranged to map directly to mathematical concepts such that intuitive manipulations which the brain is very, very good at doing anyway (because they are what's needed to drive the body and survive day-to-day) generated useful, valid, mathematical results. Or possibly, given descriptions of how he worked from other people, they generated many more options, whether valid or not, in a shorter time than anyone else, which meant he had a larger sample of possible ideas to pull the best one from.

Whether that translates to other geniuses or not, I don't know, but when people refer to "genius," they are referring to a qualitative difference in thought patterns. Where conventional thought might be verbal, symbolic manipulation, they are somehow using a higher level of abstraction. Finding a mapping between subject-specific concepts (like formulae, or chess positions) and something else your brain does "in the background" would seem to fit that.

2) No. I am not a genius. But I can do some things _faster_ than other people.

</comment><comment><USER12> This essay by CW Hamming may be of interest. [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.htm...](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.html) Also, the work of James Austin, professor at Harvard Medical School on successful research. Marvin Minsky, legendary MIT professor, is also interested in the same subject but I don't have a reference. The "Random Walks of George Polya" is also related to the subject. Stanford math professor who specialized in techniques to solve advanced math problems.

This subject would perhaps make a great forum or separate website.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would highly recommend you read the Strategies of Genius series by Robert Dilts-

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%22Strategies+Of+Genius%22+&x=0&y=0)

Also I would add a few incites (that was deliberate) of my own that get me labeled as that by some people, for example I-

1\. do not buy into 'social reality' I look for a model of reality that works well enough to be useful even if the facts are contrary to what I am told by 'authorities'. This elicits responses from "You're crazy" to "Wow, you're a genius" to "But XYZ pundit/politician/personality doesn't agree'. The disadvantage to this is that most people do appear to be unquestioning sheep and you disturb them from their slumber at your peril.

2\. think more in terms of processes than things, you'd be surprised how wedded most people are to particular concepts of objects (real world, not the programming paradigm)

3\. am very self directed and when I want or need to understand a subject I immerse myself in it completely.

4\. don't let my ego get in the way of a solution to a problem, and never let myself slip into the 'not invented here' mentality, I stand on the shoulders of generations of giants, and am thankful for it.

5\. do not consider myself a genius, I'm just rather different from the norm.

EDIT:

Also 'genius' does not mean never wrong, a few examples-

1\. Isaac Newton may have formulated the theory of gravity, but he also believed in alchemy.

2\. Albert Einstein formulated the theories of Special and General Relativity but would not accept quantum mechanics, famously saying "God does not play dice with the universe".

</comment><comment><USER14> People, genius or not, generally don't have any idea whatsoever _how_ they think. This is one of the fundamental difficulties that has plagued the field of psychology since its inception. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean that you really know anything at all about how it is that you do it. I beat my heart. I grow my hair. I stand upright on two feet without falling over. But, I don't have any first-hand experiential knowledge of _how_ I do any of these things. I might have a little bit of insight into how I approach some limited forms of volitional thought, but I'm well aware that the overwhelming majority of thought isn't volitional. It just happens and I don't have any idea how it happens (and neither does anyone else for the most part).

</comment><comment><USER3> What I want to know is: how many people on HN would publicly describe themselves as a "genius"?

<comment><USER15> Never seriously…

It would be to close to hubris? An early indication of loosing touch with reality? Perhaps indicating the onset of psychosis?

Maybe ironically, especially after a less-then-perfect performance ;)

Better to let others do the praising?

Q: How many people where (by others, not family/friends) publicly described as a "genius"?

<comment><USER3> I was being pretty rhetorical ;)

<comment><USER15> I was being aspergery about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> First, I think one needs to define genius.

Do you equate people who have achieved great success/heights as geniuses? Do you think Tiger Woods is a genius golfer or that Warren Buffet is a genius investor?

Or do you equate the kind of people who for example, listen to a piece of music they have never heard before, once, and can play it flawlessly the next moment. I think these kind of people are more savant than genius.

If former is the case, then according to this article, genius is nothing but deliberate practice for periods of around 10 years. ([http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391794/))

</comment><comment><USER17> (Warning: I have hardly slept. A family member is dying. I will likely regret this post. It seemed like a good idea at the time -- or at least a better idea than wallowing in self pity.)

Do I think I am a genius? No. But I have been repeatedly told that I "stand out" from the crowd even when the crowd is pretty bright (which usually feels to me like I stick out like a sore thumb :-/ ). Do I think in a way that is different from the average person? Absolutely -- I think this is clear by the rampant degree to which I am routinely misunderstood and the fact that I and my son are getting well when doctors and most of the world say it cannot be done.

Is this 'miracle cure' due to genius? I don't happen to think so. It is mostly due to a unique set of circumstances and my ability to recognize the opportunity it represented, combined with a fairly high degree of social insight which allowed me to side step group-think and other social traps. I have a relatively mild form of a condition that is quite deadly, and so does my oldest son. I was diagnosed late in life, not long before the age at which most people die from the more traditionally recognized form of the condition. The late diagnosis meant that I had been thinking about my health issues and coping with them for a very long time before being given a label for it. So when that label came, I was reluctant to accept the definitions, assumptions, preconceived notions, psychological baggage and raft of general mental and emotional crapola that such labels typically come with.

I am also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The journey of recovery for that issue prepared me for asking the hard, socially unacceptable questions that were needed for me to get well, first psychologically and later physically. (After spending years telling a couple of different therapists, who also happened to be ministers, every dirty thing ever done to me and every nasty thing I ever felt, the negative reactions that swirl around my shocking views of health issues are hardly worth raising an eyebrow over.) At the age of 45, I am at a place where I feel that this earlier psychological journey of healing was a gift to me -- a unique and highly valuable opportunity for thinking through problems which are "unthinkable" and "unspeakable" but which I had no choice but to think on and speak on in order to survive (I attempted suicide at age 17 and would likely have self-destructed in some manner if I had not dealt with these issues).

I was also a homemaker for a long time in an era and culture where that is very strange and I homeschooled my twice exceptional (gifted and learning disabled) sons. I think every single thing I have done has reinforced my ability to walk my own path and resist following the crowd in spite of often enormous pressure from one crowd or another. Not getting sucked into group- think is the most valuable skill I have and probably the most offensive thing I do, socially. Einstein said something like "You cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it." It is clear to me that the definitions and view of the health problem I have are part of the problem. In some ways, I find it baffling that my attempts to share a different view are so shocking and offensive to other people -- people who clearly know that the status quo is not working yet cling to the thinking of the status quo like a security blanket. I don't know how to help such people and attempting to do so puts me in a position of being a target of ugliness. I don't believe martyring myself is any way to put more good into the world. I believe it only teaches people that "good" people must martyr themselves and anyone who doesn't is "bad", or something along those lines. The general tendency for people to force individuals into roles of "good" or "bad" is the root of many problems. I would rather walk away entirely than contribute to reinforcement of this paradigm. I often wonder if I should, in a sense, go into "hiding" -- stop posting under any names I am known by online and start some new website that no one would expect and go live the "normal life" I desperately wanted for so long and am now getting well enough to try to pursue.

I don't have an answer to that last conundrum, perhaps more proof positive that I am not a genius. Sometimes, knowing the right questions to ask is more important than having an answer. That approach has taken me pretty far, so I see no reason to abandon it at this late stage in the game.

"Be careful what you wish for". Had you asked this question on some other day, I likely would not have replied. :-P But there is a tiny piece of my own inner monologue, FWIW.

<comment><USER18> While all of your thoughts are insightful -- thank you for that -- this one particularly stuck out to me:

"Not getting sucked into group-think is the most valuable skill I have and probably the most offensive thing I do, socially."

I think a lot of the people on this site can relate to that. Thank you.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps that's why HN has yet to issue me a one way ticket to Cyberia. <wink>

(Cyberia: A cold, frozen wasteland of Cyberspace.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't yhink I'm a genius but I actually recently realized that I have a different thought process than most people. Interestingly enough I recently wrote my first blog post about it. You can check it out here: <http://Kulpreet.com>

</comment><comment><USER20> You might be interested in _What Kind of Genius Are You?_ <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html>

I found it pretty interesting, and superficially it seems correct. (It was on HN a while ago)

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General- Masterpiece...](http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Masterpiece- Science/dp/9569569069/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287587996&sr=1-2)

</comment><comment><USER22> My Kung Fu Grandmaster said: although some people can be gifted, we apply our diligence to overcome the differences.

</comment><comment><USER23> 10 000 hours of work(!) is a necessary(not sufficient though) condition, rather than "thinking".

</comment><comment><USER24> How do average people think compared to dumb people? Extrapolate to geniuses.

<comment><USER25> Elegant!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You should take a look at Charlie munger.

video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6Cy7UwsRPQ>

a more detailed overview of what you are looking for:

<http://www.focusinvestor.com/FocusSeriesPart3.pdf> (from charlie munger wiki)

<comment><USER12> This article is superb in response to the question and also to helping non- business people understand how their disciplines apply to business/business decisionmaking

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 1)I don't know if this is true but I have found that people who are very intelligent talk fast (not faster than people who are nervous).

2) I cannot comment on better, but ya I do think different (I take special pride in it). One of the few things I cannot understand about myself is my obsession with "the problem space". People have this tendency to solve the problem immediately after they have encountered it (at least the people I study with, can't say for HN guys). But I cannot start working on the problem till I have fully understood all the parts of the problems (from the first principles) itself. This has helped me a lot, because I can formulate solutions which solve specific parts of the problem and as these are usually byte sized I reuse them a lot.</comment>


Lab tests: Why Consumer Reports can't recommend the iPhone 4 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/2010/07/apple-iphone-4-antenna-issue-iphone4-problems-dropped-calls-lab-test-confirmed-problem-issues-signal-strength-att-network-gsm.html

<comment><USER2> The iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue will be remembered as one of the biggest avoidable but unforeseen design errors of all time, I think.

<comment><USER3> Maybe by HNers. I think a solid percentage of the general public at least vaguely knows about it, but most of my non-techie friends probably don't, or if they do they heard once and then forgot about it. It's certainly a screw up on Apple's part, but when you keep in mind that the rest of the world is seeing much less targeted news streams, I hardly think it's historical.

<comment><USER4> Almost everyone that has noticed my iPhone 4 and wanted to talk about it (strange how much attention it gets, compared to what the 3G and 3GS did) has asked about the antenna. The issue has been talked up enough in non-tech news that it's hard _not_ to know about it.

<comment><USER5> Same here.

"Ooh is that the new iPhone? Do you have antenna problems?"

I say that while I do notice the affect, i've dropped no calls in my apartment with the new model, vs 70% dropped rate on my 3G.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is probably another advantage to the Android "lots of phones" strategy vs. putting all your eggs in one basket strategy. Even if you really like Apple's products, it's not like there's a good alternative phone you can turn to that's still an Apple product. While with Android, if a severe problem with a particular phone comes out, you can always just pick another phone.

In the future, it might make more sense for Apple to release several flavors of phones, diversify what they are selling, rather than lumping their entire strategy with one product that might have unforeseen problems.

<comment><USER7> _In the future, it might make more sense for Apple to release several flavors of phones, diversify what they are selling, rather than lumping their entire strategy with one product that might have unforeseen problems._

Technically they are: the iPhone 3GS runs the iOS 4 very well and doesn't have the lovely antenna bridging issue.

That said, I'm having trouble imagining Apple going the iPod/iPod Nano/iPod Shuffle route with the iPhone. Whereas an iPod is used to play music 99% of the time, an iPhone makes calls, sends e-mail, surfs the web, and runs hundreds of thousands of apps, all of which expect a certain screen size and hardware components. An MP3 file doesn't require much.

So, as neat as it would be to see Apple make many flavors of iPhones, I doubt it'll happen. This is the company that doesn't make a sub-$2,500 workstation with a replaceable graphics card, and whose netbook competitor costs $500.

(Still, I would love to see an iPhone Shuffle. No screen. Press the button and it calls someone at random.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I actually really like this bug in the phone. I'm an app developer and it's great for testing going in and out of coverage. I only get one bar in my house, not enough to make calls, but enough to affect the connected flags. I can consistently drop that bar.

<comment><USER9> We used a foil-lined box to do this at my last job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Knew perfectly well about the issue, still got iPhone 4 last week.

Crappy antenna is something I can live with. Crappy display, battery, software and user experience are not.

<comment><USER11> I feel exactly the opposite about my phone. It just needs to make calls.

<comment><USER12> If it just needs to make calls, don't get a smart phone.

<comment><USER10> Bingo! I seldom _talk_ on my iPhone. However I constanly do countless other stuff with it.

If you are different, there is a vast number of alternative, seriously cheaper phones doing the phone part so much better.

But if you want to do... anything else, well, there's an app for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's interesting that a piece of tape does indeed fix the problem. On last week's TWiT, one of the antenna engineers they had on kept saying how tape doesn't solve it.

<comment><USER14> I'm skeptical of Consumer Reports methodology when it is in conflict with experts' predictions and tests. That it also is in conflict with AnandTech's review suggests to me that CR didn't have the expertise to adequaty test this.

Which is not to say the problem doesn't exist. I just don't think they understand it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> i don't think apple has to worry, apparently people can't be swayed by facts (see: "How telling people the facts may not cause them to change what they believe" ([http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full) )).

also, every iphone has had serious signal issues, it's a known problem, yet people still continue to buy them–why would this change anything... most people buy the iphone because of marketing not functionality.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm sorry but this is just over reaction. The big deal about the antenna issue is that Apple tried to cover it up NOT the issue itself. The issue itself can be fixed easily and cheaply by either using masking tape (as they suggest) or by simply buying the $29 "bumper" accessory from Apple.

To suggest someone buy a 3GS over an iPhone 4 because of this issue (as they do at the end of the article) is just a little silly.

<comment><USER17> Sure, because Consumer Reports is so prone to over-reaction.

Do you think they have some kind of anti-Apple agenda? I can understand why people were skeptical when Gizmodo started posting reports they culled from the Macrumors forums, but this is Consumer Reports. Just because your phone works fine doesn't mean that the issue does not exist.

<comment><USER18> So you're saying that Consumer Reports is incapable of over-reacting and accusing them of such is to imply that they have an anti-Apple agenda?

<comment><USER17> What I'm saying is that Consumer Reports seem to have put their money where their mouth is. Countless bloggers, Youtubers, and Twitter users have made their anecdotal claims about having signal issues, and nearly every time they get published, a legion of Apple fanatics yells them down with "Doesn't happen on my phone/This is so overblown." There's already someone in the HN comments on this story who says it can't possibly be true because he's never had the problem with his iPhone. Seriously. Dinosaurs can't be millions of years old, because I read a book that said the earth is 4000 years old!

Consumer Reports took the time and money to test three different iPhones in an RF isolation chamber, and presumably through scientific process, determined that indeed, the iPhone4 has signal attenuation issues that cause calls to be dropped.

I think that if one believes they are fudging the numbers, either duplicate their effort, or contact Consumer Reports and ask for more details on how the experiment is run.

I think it's good to question authority - and in fact that's what Consumer Reports often does, and is what they're doing here. The authority, Apple, is saying there's nothing wrong with one face, and with another face, they're hiring RF and antenna engineers. There are real people who paid at least $200 for this phone who are having real signal issues, but I shouldn't believe them because AT&T's coverage in Philadelphia is so widespread that I can use my iPhone underground in the subway?

That's zealous, and I'm glad to see an organization with the means to test these things put some weight behind the bloggers and everyday users who are having real trouble with these phones.

<comment><USER19> _presumably through scientific process_

Thats what bothers me - where is the data? And furthermore, is CR testing signal attenuation, or an actual loss of functionality? Not having a phone myself (but knowing someone who is quite happy with hers) I remain unconvinced that there is a fundamental issue until I see data correlating hand position to actual dropped calls or reduced data throughput. Anything else has the feel of weather prediction.

<comment><USER17> "Is CR testing signal attenuation, or an actual loss of functionality?"

From the article: "When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone's lower left side - an easy thing, especially for lefties - the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you're in an area with a weak signal"

They are testing both signal attenuation and an actual loss of functionality.

I agree, actual data would be nice. What gives me confidence in the report is that, to quote Wikipedia, "Consumer Reports does not print outside advertising, accept free product samples, or permit the commercial use of its reviews for selling products" and that they've been doing this since 1936.

Bose and Sharper Image have in the past attempted to sue Consumer Reports for showing some kind of bias or for presumably using inaccurate methods in their reviews - both lost their lawsuits. There are good reasons why CR has the reputation it has, and that's why I'm willing to take what they have to say at close to face value, even without raw data being published in the same blog entry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's a shame they don't mention the app store jail. I guess it's not high- priority because things like VoIP and tethering aren't really on the consumer radar yet, but hopefully that changes in the future.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't call it a "shame" by any means. Owning both an iPhone and an Android phone, I can say that the app store "jail" also makes it 100x more usable, with better quality apps overall and more consistency among the apps.

I hear a lot of developers bitch about the app store, but from an end-users perspective it has been one of Apple's best moves to-date.

<comment><USER22> Yes, Apple restricting tethering apps make the other apps better.

I don't doubt that some Apple special sauce makes it easier to ignore the crappy apps, or that they are removed, but to imply that Apple's fart machine apps are better because you can't freely tether your device with 3rd party apps is just silly.

<comment><USER21> While I have no first-hand knowledge (and I doubt you do either, please clarify if I'm wrong), I'd be willing to bet that overall Apple could care less about tethering apps.

I believe that tethering is native to the OS, I remember doing some simple hack on my first 3G iPhone that enabled it for a while until a software update wiped it out. Other carriers (non-US) support it (a quick link I found re: Rogers: [http://scilib.typepad.com/techreviews/2009/06/rogers- iphone-...](http://scilib.typepad.com/techreviews/2009/06/rogers-iphone- tethering-policy.html) )

So, your tethering restriction argument seems kind of straw-man to me. Additionally, it's not surprising that there are some bottom-feeder (fart) apps. Of course, the "fart-machine" apps are hardly the majority of the eco- system, but even so I could pretty much guarantee you that the fart apps would work 100% of the time on iOS, and probably 50% of the time at best on Android. As the app gets more complex, the probability of it working properly on all supported iOS devices, and NOT working properly on some subset of Android OS and hardware increases.

<comment><USER22> Except for the fact that Apple blocks tons of apps that have large user bases. Google Voice, Netshare, emulators, etc. Surely you aren't implying that Cydia is only full of apps that were rejected because they are crummy? Not to mention the fact that, for example, Google allows "Wifi Tether for Root users" on the Android Market. Show me something comparable on the AppStore. It doesn't exist.

Also, the fragmentation argument is weak and old, I won't bother refuting it or answering it here. APIs are backward compatible. If you target 1.6 you work on 95+% of devices out there, etc, etc.

Heh, I would say Apple's refusal to accept Netshare, PDANet, oh any other tethering app, etc pretty well shows that they won't accept tethering apps. I'm kinda shocked that this is news to ... anyone really.

<comment><USER21> Apple has routinely rejected apps that attempt to mimic core functions of the OS. So, if you go back and re-read my comment where it says tethering is built-in to the OS, then it would make sense that 3rd party apps that attempt to enable tethering would be banned. This may be "right" or "wrong" depending on your viewpoint, but it would serve to ensure that users are not seeing/downloading apps that don't work or function as they are expected to.

My personal experience with Android apps (Moto Droid and now HTC incredible) is that a decent percentage of apps (mostly (but not exclusively) games and odd things like "LED Flashlight Strobe" type stuff) do not work universally across all devices. Reading the comments on some of these apps supports my personal experience, so I think there is still a general problem with any random app on the Android store not offering a 100% consistent or "functions as expected" experience across all Android devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How is this hacker news?

<comment><USER17> From the HN Guidelines (linked from the bottom of every page on HN): "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. "

<comment><USER23> Drat... foiled at my own game!</comment></comment></comment>


Japan: Powerful earthquake hits north-east - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13032122

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I get it : is this last thursday's one ([http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us...](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0002ksa.php) ) or did they have yeat another?

According to USGS there was nothing above 7 since thrusday. Only a 6.6 today :

[http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us...](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0002n9v.php)

[http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/1...](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/140_40.php)

Damn I never thought we coud get confused about which 7+ eartquake we are talking about...

<comment><USER3> Yep, another one a few minutes ago.</comment></comment>


Apple's top spec Mac Pro will likely cost at least $35,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/3/18651208/apple-mac-pro-how-much-top-spec-price-estimate-ballpark <comment><USER2> Here we go!

It's time to move past the general purpose PC. A quick look at this machine reminds me very strongly of SGI and it's approach back in the 90's. I was computing back then, and frankly, would take the SGI computer every time. Some of the workstations I ran cost 50K easy.

Best computing experience I've ever had too.

This big machine from Apple does a few things:

One, it makes for a known, supported, big memory, big compute, big GPU, big throughput configuration standard. Software people can go big, take a next step in app functionality and know there is at least one workstation class machine out there to perform as intended, and necessary.

Two, this moves Apple very clearly back into the higher end, "money is no concern, value is" position they've held in the past. Those people, and by that I mean people who recognize and can make effective use of value, do not care so much about cost. They make it back using that value. For me, this is great to see!

Three, many of us are writing comments here and there all about a shift, or change coming. Custom hardware, etc... This is a clear signal. We are moving into a new computing era. Love it. Long overdue.</comment>


IBM and Cisco lose billions after NSA scandal exposed by Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/it-firms-lose-billions-after-nsa-scandal-exposed-by-whistleblower-edward-snowden-9028599.html

<comment><USER2> Hey, corrupt Congress: How does this affect my tech job ?</comment>


Fear of Authoritarian Regimes Is Pushing the Film Industry to Self-Censor - <AUTHOR> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-08-04/hollywood-running-out-villains? <comment><AUTHOR> [https://outline.com/3pzRsm](https://outline.com/3pzRsm)</comment>


Show HN: Build a DIY license plate reader with machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex/tree/master/examples/tensorflow/license-plate-reader <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I'm Caleb, and I'm a maintainer of Cortex, an open source model deployment platform. Not long ago, we published this DIY license plate reader project, and I wanted to share it here for anyone who is interested in computer vision or production machine learning in general.

The project is a web service that accepts images and, using three trained models, returns extracted license plate text, assuming there is a license plate in the image. Of the models used, two are pre-trained models from keras- ocr, while one is a fine tuned YOLOv3. All models are freely available.

You can see a video of the project in action here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsYEZtecXlA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsYEZtecXlA)

And read a write up by Robert Lucian, the maintainer who spearheaded this entire project, about how he built a camera system to interface with the web service using a Raspberry Pi and 5G: [https://towardsdatascience.com/i-built- a-diy-license-plate-r...](https://towardsdatascience.com/i-built-a-diy- license-plate-reader-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-machine-learning-7e428d3c7401)

<comment><USER2> I wonder if it would be more efficient with OpenCV?

<comment><USER3> This one uses some OpenCV:

[https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/remember- that-86-million-l...](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/remember- that-86-million-license-plate-scanner-i-replicated-heres-what-happened- next-9f3c64e8f22b/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take care to understand your local law regarding automatic license plate recognition. Use of such software and/or data collected with it may be under regulation. IANAL, but see your state statutes here if you live in the US: [https://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and- informa...](https://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information- technology/state-statutes-regulating-the-use-of-automated-license-plate- readers-alpr-or-alpr-data.aspx)

<comment><USER5> I find it interesting that some states are trying to regulate something like this.

What if you had a child read off every license plate they see and use voice recognition to record the license plates?

Is it illegal in real time, but allowed if you replay your dashcam footage later?

<comment><USER6> What if you let the child buy drugs? Same thing. Don't let your child do illegal things and better - don't help it. If you hear your child is reciting the number plates, make sure all recording hardware in your car is off before you lecture the kid that what it does is absolutely forbidden.

<comment><USER7> This made me laugh

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I missing something or in this image, is the confidence score 99.23% and has the incorrect license plate? The plates clearly have a 5 but it's predicting an S.

[https://camo.githubusercontent.com/5138d6bce5c840d15e533db6f...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/5138d6bce5c840d15e533db6f300660c80eb2619/68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f746731504531452e6a7067)

<comment><USER9> Is that confidence for the value or the category. It comes after LP in the image which makes me think it's the confidence that it is a license plate, not necessarily the confidence of the reading of said license plate.

<comment><USER8> You might be right. The gif on github, at times, shows no plate prediction but still includes a confidence score. I would suspect that if it can't even show a prediction, it's confidence score wouldn't show either (being that it would be 0%).

<comment><USER9> > I would suspect that if it can't even show a prediction, it's confidence > score wouldn't show either (being that it would be 0%).

Recognizing that something is a license place, and being able to read the plate are mutually exclusive things. People can identify license plates even if they can't read them, and people who don't know what a license plate is my still be able to read the numbers on them.

The ML has to do two things; the first is reject anything that isn't a License Plate, the second is OCR License Plates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Do-it-yourself" seems like a not quite appropriate title for an interface that calls a webservice with pre-built vision ML.

<comment><USER6> This is CIY - cobble it yourself.

<comment><USER11> That's a fantastic description. Never seen it before. I'm a data scientist. Some of my projects are DIY and some of them just consist of writing code to link data with existing models and I might start using "CIY" to describe them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been watching dashcam footage lately and thinking about this. It would be very helpful for hit and runs if the dashcam had some on-board recognition that saved the last x license plates just like it saves the last x seconds of videos.

Often the video footage is not good enough to get a plate because the capture settings are set lower so that more footage can be stored.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how much more revenue police departments are making with ANPR[1].

They can, for example, have a camera in all the cruisers, and automatically alert when a nearby car has an expired registration, inspection, etc. Or, if they have the tie-ins, registered to an owner with an open warrant or unpaid traffic citations.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number- plate_recogni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number- plate_recognition)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've pondered the implications of running an 'installation art' project where a bunch of these are deployed around a city, with aggregated data visible over a web UI (assuming that this doesn't violate any laws.) The aim would be to raise public awareness of pervasive surveillance, and perhaps catalyze changes to the law.

<comment><USER15> Regardless of the content, I think the idea of an installation art project whose goal is to make the art project itself illegal is pretty cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does this implementation perform compared to classic approaches such as OpenALPR [1] ?

At the very least running local inference becomes much more expensive, and possibly provides worse results.

[1] - [https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr](https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr)

<comment><USER17> This reminds me of an article [1] I read a few years back which utilised OpenALPR.

[1]: [https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-i-replicated- an-86-mil...](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-i-replicated- an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The actual computation here shouldn't be that great, right? (especially given the RPi has a GPU on) Seems like an inconsiderate design to stream images to a cloud service, rather than process locally and stream the plates themselves.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is great! I've been meaning to build something like this for a long time. I'm always excited when I notice I've passed the same car on commutes on different days, or see a car I recognize from home in a different part of town. Automating that process and having my phone tell me e.g. "You just passed a car that you once drove past 1,000 miles away from here" is such a tempting side project. Bit big-brothery, though.

<comment><USER20> I want this tied to a crude speed estimation algorithm, from a stationary camera.

Even with ALPR retention restrictions, I could trigger a video save and send the police a video of the idiots doing 50mph through the residential neighborhood.

<comment><USER21> For speed estimation, I wonder if the simplest thing would be two plate readers a fixed distance apart. Say they're attached to light poles N meters distant.

When the reader triggers and takes a picture, it pings your server for a timestamp. It does the processing and records car X at time T provided by the timestamp. You then calculate the speed by the distance between the two meters divided by the time between the two timestamps for X.

Provided that speeding cars are a problem in your neighborhood, I bet you could find the people responsible for the light poles (which likely have power associated to them) to let you install the devices, especially if you're providing the devices and servers.

I don't think you'd necessarily be able to ticket the drivers though, as you're not law enforcement. Maybe you'd be able to work with local law enforcement though.

<comment><USER20> I was thinking of using the bounding boxes across frames.

Maybe I could work with a neighbor, but then things need to be tightly time- synced.

Zero chance I could get light pole access. A city endorsed surveillance system? No way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great. One of my side project ideas is to build an ANPR based app and 'social network' starting with basic tracking, I.e. you've passed this car 4 times before. I'm new to the ML world so still learning vut Do you think this is feasible to run in real time using CoreML on iOS?

</comment><comment><USER23> I was thinking the other day about a DIY solar panel for apartments that could be part of the decoration like within plant vases or something in that fashion that would be cool and would look good and not have "space being occupied", that would be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER24> [https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=w1mUAVPaX98&feature=share](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=w1mUAVPaX98&feature=share)

</comment><comment><USER25> "You, too, can now actively participate in the surveillance state"

Yes, I get the technical appeal. I wish we all wondered less if we could, and more if we should.

<comment><USER15> I'm much less concerned about this being used by a private citizen to keep license logs along with dash cams, integrate ALPR output into dash cam footage, etc, than I am about the surveillance _State_ as a whole.</comment></comment>


On technical debt, complexity and opportunity cost - <AUTHOR> http://easyart.github.io/2013/10/12/on-technical-debt/ <comment><USER2> Philip Glass is for me the best writer on software development from a almost- academic-research point of view (#). In _facts and fallacies_ He bangs on a lot about complexity (25% increase in code, 100% increase in complexity) and opportunity cost. Brooks touches on this in the mythical man month.

What I am saying is that this is a good blog post, but this is stuff we should all know, all push to the PM and CEO with the morning mail, not have to be reminded of.

Just if we have to relearn this every year, let alone every generation, what are we missing ?

(#) really we have terrible software engineering research in the real world.

<comment><USER3> No wonder I had a hard time finding that Glass book in Google, it's Robert Glass, not Phillip. [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Facts-Fallacies-Software- Engineering...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering- Robert/dp/0321117425)

<comment><USER2> aargh - I keep doing that. Probably a dozen times over the past few years - it's the strangest thing. I now know more about a minimalist composers works than I ever expected to for a tone deaf Mozart fan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We don't understand the carrying cost of code yet in the industry. That's the problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> The hidden cost of early optimization can be hidden complexity and bugs. Take something slow and simple, replace with a cute trick that complicates and has corner cases and boom maintenance nightmare. In many cases while the optimization is obvious, it is unnecessary since no cold hard data on the cost of execution in production of the slow code actually exists

</comment><comment><USER6> This has been a popular point lately. I wonder if it is a reflection of our current tool set around architecture and design. It seems realistic that implementing a "simple" new feature should not be inordinately costly, I don't dare to claim it should be a one to one relationship, but the current ratio seems out of control.

I believe as the software industry increases it's understanding of architectural design that we will learn to add most types of features, in a systematically less costly way. Making them easier to maintain,update, and detangle from the rest of the software.

In fact, I am finding that we are just now arriving at that point with functional languages. Not that functional is our savior, but it does provide a good set of tools for this particular problem.

To wrap this up, I don't think software needs less code and less features. I think it needs better tools and methodologies with which to deal with creating, updating, and maintaining features and complexity.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here, thanks for the comment.

This topic is on my mind at the moment because I'm having to decide which features live and die as we migrate from a legacy platform to a new one. We're very keen to avoid unnecessary technical debt in that process, and to put better decision-making in place around new features as they are introduced.

<comment><USER2> A gratuitous comment if you don't mind - I would try dropping the term legacy. It tends to set an existing system in concrete and creates a mindset of leaving it to pasture instead of actively refactoring and rewriting all the code existing and new, as architecture and sanity demand

in short: rip a little functionality out of the existing code and refactor everything like mad to make it a sensible cut. I have found about As much effort goes into fixing up the existing code that just got damaged as writing the new.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair comment, but in this case the situation you describe is fairly accurate as it's a system that for various reasons my team don't have full control of.</comment></comment></comment></comment>