Surfing the Internet from My TRS-80 Model 100 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/surfing-the-internet-from-my-trs-80-model-100/ <comment><USER2> More accurately, it's "Using a TRS-80 Model 100 as a dumb terminal for a Raspberry Pi".

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I would have liked to have seen something more like ethernet on the T100 (also very doable).

<comment><USER4> You could just solder an ESPY wifi chip to the T100 and have it communicate just fine over wifi, no rPi required ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My first computer was a Sol-20 (My dad still has this machine) and than I became a Commodore guy so I miss the days of talking Trash ;) between Pet-20 vs the TRS-80 days.

P.S. Yes colors are pretty and I prefer color.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hacked the crap out of this machine years ago; I still have mine and it still works great. I know there are some people still using them IRL, too.

I loved that thing.

<comment><USER6> I ran into a journalist in the middle east a couple of years ago in a hotel bar typing away on an M100. He said that he still used it because it was the only "laptop" he couldn't break, the battery life was better than most anything else and his local bureau still had an analog modem and he could upload his story as long as he could find a phone line (internet not required). Apparently he's not the only journo working this way.

<comment><USER3> Indeed; all day no problem.

I've somewhat-considered doing a "clone" with essentially the same functionality, but with modern components, and a real battery. I'd guess you could get 2-3 days out of it.

<comment><USER6> By "real battery", I assume you mean a li-ion or some such. The fact that it _doesn 't_ use an exotic battery and needs only 4 x AA batteries that can be found just about anywhere was another bonus he touted. No charger to be lost. No strange power plug to be adapted to. No power source needed.

Other than that, I'm with you. Something just as rugged, with a somewhat denser display (80x24), very low power (msp430 comes in a couple of crazy low power variants and has plenty of oomf), bit more storage. Add maybe a PDF->text converter to the built in software and you're good to go.

<comment><USER3> That's true about the batteries. Maybe a pluggable battery case that could handle either. +1 for a denser display (and I might even argue for an OLED, but creeping featurisms also mean poorer battery life).

Hrm, might have to start working on something. There are some crazy low-power ARMs around too, I'd have to do a bit of research.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Integrating KDBus in Android [pdf] - vezzy-fnord https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw//system/presentations/3417/original/integrating-kdbus-in-android.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Can't see where this answers "Can android gain from KDBus?" or any hint at why we'd even try when "things we havn't looked at: security and performance" would probably be the biggest motivators. Is there something I'm missing or is this just another case of hopping on the bandwagon?</comment>


Cruise settles legal case involving cofounder - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/car-startup-cruise-settles-legal-case-involving-cofounder-2016-5?op=1 <comment><USER2> To all new founders, get a legal agreement in place from day 1 with your collaborators. Here are some amazing free resources (vetted for Canada, a million times better than nothing in the US, pass it by a lawyer if you have the money):

[http://wiki.velocity.uwaterloo.ca/Legal](http://wiki.velocity.uwaterloo.ca/Legal)

@sama - could YC spearhead creating US versions of the founder IP agreements?

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that Vogt is not a new founder. He was a cofounder of JustinTV, SocialCam, and Twitch before Cruise. It might have been an error due to lack of relevant experience, but the previously problematic situation isn't attributable to a rookie mistake.

Though I am not a lawyer, my understanding is that the claims and counter claims did not really revolve around IP. Take it out of the equation and the documents [as described on the internet] might still form the basis of a claim.

<comment><USER4> Those there companies are all the same company. Also while Kyle was a cofounder of Justin.tv he wasn't actually part of it until a little bit in when they needed someone to figure out the camera.

<comment><USER3> My intuition from a distance is a two dollar dollop of conceptual imprecision regarding meaty persons versus fictitious persons lies closer -- not further -- from the center of the recently settled issue.

Autodesk and Amazon did not buy the same company.

<comment><USER5> "two dollar dollop of conceptual imprecision regarding meaty persons versus fictitious persons" ... what?

Maybe I'm just slow today, but even as a native English speaker I cannot understand that sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, that private settlement certainly clears it up for them. As for the rest of us, who sat on the sidelines and watched the slap-fighting, it doesn't offer a whole lot. Here's the crux I guess of the article:

> _Cruise and its founder Kyle Vogt now acknowledge that Guillory was a > cofounder of the company._

This is very much a sticking point that was extensively discussed in the prior hullabaloo regarding the YC-affiliated post on the matter. How this was agreed upon - the reasoning - being private isn't the most clarifying outcome for the public. I've no doubt this is on purpose for all the parties involved, and hope they are satisfied in private.

As a longtime observer of human behavior, my belief is this announcement will do nothing to quell outside speculation. If the parties involved don't want a bunch of randos-on-the-internet making up their own scenarios, there is an easy fix. Just share with the class what happened so we all may learn.

<comment><USER7> What is there to fix? They've settled it. Why should they care to satisfy your curiosity?

<comment><USER6> To answer your questions in order:

1\. Public perception of a contentious disagreement where both sides levied serious accusations and reputations may be relevant in future business dealings.

2\. Because if they don't want people making up their own theories they'll at least say something in unison other than "we aren't saying anything" as it pertains to Answer #1.

I'm not saying they _owe_ any explanation - I'm just saying if they don't _give_ one then they don't have room to _bemoan_ idle speculation.

<comment><USER8> > 1\. Public perception of a contentious disagreement where both sides levied > serious accusations and reputations may be relevant in future business > dealings.

That sounds exactly like why they said "we've reached a mutually-agreeable compromise." Now neither party will be negatively affected in future business dealings.

> If they don't want people making up their own theories they'll at least say > something

Who cares? They have a billion dollars from General Motors. GM itself is a big enough company that opinions on HN don't matter and won't affect the sales of their final product.

They defused a difficult set of complaints in a mutually-agreeable fashion without involving the courts. That's good business. As outsiders, we are not in any involved with them, and probably shouldn't spend any time caring, except to take away one lesson: talk your differences over and reach an amicable agreement. Don't invent drama when none is required!

<comment><USER6> Well regarding your perspective I think you've got a contradiction in the reasoning used: Unlike you state, they did involve the courts, at least initially. Settling out of court enabled a level of privacy which, as I was getting at, leaves the mechanics of agreement undisclosed (agreeing to not say anything). As outsiders sure that doesn't mean squat, but, in a larger view, some high profile disputes employ "trial in the court of public opinion" tactics. That seemed relevant in this particular instance, and when it goes unaddressed, it simply - again, as an outsider - leaves an odd impression to me.

<comment><USER9> What people are saying is nobody really cares about "leaving an odd impression on an outsider". You're acting too serious about something that's really not your business.

<comment><USER6> I'm a writer so when a story has an inconclusive ending it gives me pause. Maybe you don't feel the same way and that's fine. I was simply commenting in the way I would about any other storyline I watch being played out. Caring is not particularly an accurate term, I'd say more like interest. I'm interested, and thus I've paid attention. I postulate, comment, and move on with life and store the data for later use.

<comment><USER10> All of your replies read like a bad attempt at prying into how much they paid to get this to go away. I have to agree with the others: it's none of your business, and no spinning of some reputation damage unless they do (?) will change that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sam Altman posted on his views on his blog:

[http://blog.samaltman.com/cruise](http://blog.samaltman.com/cruise)

And the related HN comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11490188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11490188)

<comment><USER12> So, I have a stupid, flamebait question: What precisely is wrong with Jeremy Guillory's case? I read those links but I also read this related BI piece [1] and it looks like Guillory has a solid claim: there is a document of them representing the company as half belonging to him, and no one's presenting any later agreement that says when his half was bought out or invalidated.

All that Vogt is going on, it seems, is "but you were just congratulating us when we raised more money!". What does that matter?

Altman's response, in turn, is that Guillory isn't being cool about this and taking (what he deems) a reasonable offer from Vogt. Well, why would he? If he was led to believe early on that he had a full 50% stake, why is it some moral transgression not to accept less [2]?

If you don't want a now-silent partner keeping equity, then buy them out. Don't wait until the company is worth something and then try to retroactively void the equity because you don't feel like they're part of the gang anymore.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-cofounder-fires- back-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-cofounder-fires-back-2016-4)

[2] than the corresponding amount modulo later dilution

<comment><USER13> I think Alman's emotional arguments were a bit misplaced and while I disagreed with, at the time, how they were made, he seems to be fairly correct. Here is my interpretation of why:

> What precisely is wrong with Jeremy Guillory's case?

It isn't that there was anything wrong with it, but if you see Alman's post, they were in the preliminary stages of the company and I think jointly applied to YC. if IIRC they didn't even both do through YC together.

Let's say you and I talk about doing a lemonade stand. We apply to Techstars as _Junicorn_ bespoke lemonade purveyors. Unfortunately, I want to use tensor flow & the latest stanford NLP techniques for our lemonade startup and build it on blockchain technology using go. You wanted to do some anachronistic throwback where the Lemonade POS system is built on nodeJS with gulp & browserfy having it be mobile-first, cloud based omnichannel.

So we have the break up.

Then I, and my new founders build an entire company based on Lemonade stands & blockchain technology. Going throug techstars with an entirely different group of people and taking the idea all the way from an idea into a product. Again for a timeline recap:

1\. We both had the same idea independently.

2\. Then we tried to combine our ideas.

3\. Then we went our seperate ways to work on our own seperate implementation.

4\. Then my team and I built _Junicorn: Summer Lemonade_ and sold to MinuteMaid for our Concentration technology. (this is like thousands of steps you weren't part of)

5\. Then you ask for some large number payoff because we both discussed starting a company but ultimately didn't.

However, depending on the legal structure and some of the other factors (e.g. massive leverage before a sale) he was probably able to make some money. He may have even contributed to the company in a way that entitled him to something. It was just pretty shitty to bring that up during a massive sale like this.

<comment><USER14> If you read the legal documents, instead of Sam's attempt to try the case in the media, you'll see it's quite clear. There are signed documents stating Guillory owned half the equity. These documents were in YC's possession. Nothing ever voided them.

Instead of separating Guillory early and cleanly, they dropped the ball, and attempted to shame him, attempted to threaten him (Sam called Guillory dozens of times in a single weekend and told him to take a small buyout or he'd never work again), and then only as a final result did the thing they should've done out of the gate: negotiate a settlement.

<comment><USER13> If true, is this professional? No. However, OJ Simpson wasn't found guilty, using a technicality to escape justice. So while the legal system is helpful and i wouldn't consider it a total piece of shit, I think if I built a 1 billion dollar company and someone asked for $500M, because I forgot to file some paperwork due to the quickie shotgun starter-marriage we rushed into I would probably flip the fuck out.

Also, it's like in the social network where "Mark" says:

You know, you really don't need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.

edit: I responded to SA from my account* and articulated why I thought he made a mistake. You created a novelty/new account called 's[am]alt[man]wrong'. Your point isn't that bad, Jeremy may deserve something (i'm not an insider on the story) but this is cowardly behavior, and downright harmful to your case due to how chldish this is. I respect Sam for taking a personal stance on this which ultimately could/might have slightly damaged him personally. So, in essence this was the point I was making here.

It isn't about the issue, but how it was handled. Coming out of the woodwork in the final hours of a massive deal to demand payment is shady and doesn't seem to be handled in a way that was particularly reasonable. Just as anonymously asserting insider info on here which is unverifiable because you are choosing to hide your identity...is also less than forthcoming. You and Jeremy may be correct, but I would allege that regardless how Sam and Kyle handled themselves, the burden of being reasonable rests on detractors, I mean Kyle doesn't need to prove he added a ton of value to Cruise because he fucking started Cruise and built the team that ended up building the product that was Cruise and turned into the company that was Cruise which then put together the sale of the company(Cruise) to GM.

* which is like >800 days old and pretty fucking tied to my real identity. I mean, there is a goddamn keybase public key attached to it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So all of that drama, name calling, sam altman posts, etc. ended with them agreeing that he was indeed a co-founder? Honestly the only people who really know what happens between two people, are those two people.

<comment><USER16> Settling != agreeing the other party was right. Lots of times it makes financial sense to settle even if the other person was completely wrong.

e.g. When you have a legal issue holding up the close of your $1bn deal and you have to choose between paying up so you can get your deal closed, or dragging it out over 1-3 years in a protracted legal battle that risks never getting the deal done.

<comment><USER15> So you are saying, without in-depth knowledge about the situation, that even though they settled and publicly agreed that he was indeed a cofounder, that he is lying and Cruise is wrong? I choose to believe the court record.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If Guillory has undiluted 50% ownership of Cruise - he surely must have made a bank. Anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Surprised I found this on Techmeme and not here. No matter what the outcome actually became, this was a shtfest, rollercoaster, HBO drama, discussion, and learning experience all in one.

Cheers.

<comment><USER18> Judging from the absence of a @sama blog post about the settlement it looks like things didn't work out too well for him and YC....

<comment><USER19> Anyone want to speculate about how much YC & Vogt just lost? They acknowledged him as cofounder based on a document in which he's listed as 50% owner; such a concession sounds like a complete victory for Guillory, implying he still owns 50% of the initial equity, and Cruise was bought for $1b. But presumably as cofounder he would have been diluted equally by the YC and any other subsequent investments. YC only takes 1.5%, IIRC, which is fairly negligible, but Cruise did 4 rounds according to [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cruise#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cruise#/entity) . So how much of that $1b did Vogt wind up getting? And does it come out of Guillory's share entirely? (That wouldn't make sense, since Guillory might not even have 50% left.)

<comment><USER20> It's almost certain the settlement wasn't for the equity he would have been entitled based on the document that implies he had 50% equity at the time. That is the disaster, worst-possible outcome from a trial so there would be absolutely _no reason_ to settle for that amount. If you're willing to accept that outcome you would be willing to go to trial and hope for the chance that you're willing to win.

It would've been an amount that Guillory was happy to accept, and that Cruise was willing to part with in order to reduce the risk that the legal uncertainty would spoil their acquisition offer. I have _no guess_ as to what this value was, other than to say it would need to be an amount far-below what you would get if you assumed Guillory received 50% equity.

Additionally, Guillory probably traded some amount of financial compensation for the public admission that he was a co-founder.

<comment><USER21> > That is the disaster, worst-possible outcome from a trial so there would be > absolutely no reason to settle for that amount.

Not entirely true: the disaster, worst-possible outcome from the trial is that _plus_ an order to pay the other sides costs, _plus_ having racked up a bunch of your own costs.

Which is why one _might_ , _conceivably_ settle for that without the expense and delay of trial.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coming Soon: Android 7.1 Developer Preview - <AUTHOR> https://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/10/android-71-developer-preview.html <comment><USER2> This : "Use app shortcuts to surface key actions and take users deep into your app instantly." -good look.

I can't wait for update ;D

<comment><USER3> And so everybody will get them only half a year :( Life is brutal!

<comment><USER2> Maybe yes, maybe no. Time will tell...</comment></comment></comment>


Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies. – Daryl Davis – TEDxNaperville - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw <comment><USER2> Stopped listening to JRE almost a year ago but Daryl Davis has always been one of the best episodes!</comment>


Intel Lake Crest Chip for DNN Learning Detailed – 32 GB HBM2 at 1 TB/s - <AUTHOR> http://wccftech.com/intel-lake-crest-chip-detailed-32-gb-hbm2-1-tb/ <comment><USER2> "With the rise of AI learning in the tech industry, GPU makers such as NVIDIA and AMD have made chips that are specifically designed for DNN (Deep Neural Network) workloads."

Er, have they really done that? Maybe they've added a few instructions, but not a chip specifically designed for DNN?</comment>


AI sound/ cough classifier as Covid19 early warning system? - <AUTHOR> Business owners considering re-opening their business are confronted with two very serious dilemmas:
1. How to ensure a safe working environment for their team & clients without compromising convenience or privacy?  AND 2. How to set up an early warning system to manage the risk should an infection happen in the team?
PCR tests are obviously not an option. Immunity registries are potentially interesting, but unrealistic. Besides, there is no evidence that antibodies will avoid a new infection or transmission.
I have been thinking a lot about acoustic surveillance. Basically, using an app on employees/ residents phones, or installing dedicated devices around the premises, that run an AI acoustic classifier that can identify coughs & sneezes.
At any given point in time, there is a spectrum of "normal" frequency of coughing/ sneezing in any given location. Sound monitoring happens in real time, which means that any deviation from the benchmark will be immediately obvious and owners can react quickly by isolating risk areas, quarantines, tests and so on as needed.
This can be done at the level of a campus/ facility, but also at municipal/ community levels.
What does everyone think? Feasable? <comment><USER2> I have allergies, will you include everyone who does as a Covid possibility?

Think about false positives and what that would mean inside and outside of the application</comment>


Shown HN: Online Markdown Code Editor - <AUTHOR> http://markdown.vidcat.org/

<comment><USER2> I type some text - nothing happens. I hit "Submit", nothing happens.

<fx: shrug />

I leave ... Did anyone else make it work?

<comment><USER3> I had your same experience, then I opened the syntax guide in another window and indented something four spaces, tried again. It rendered the very simple markdown as HTML.

Pretty good. I might show this to my friend who is trying to learn Javascript, doesn't know any HTML or Markdown now, probably will need to learn both, slightly interested in parsing and parse trees, but I don't know how useful it is.

I wouldn't put this on the front page though.</comment></comment>


Web scraping with Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://www.chrismytton.uk/2015/01/19/web-scraping-with-ruby/ <comment><USER2> I had to write scrapers in Ruby for a very large application that scraped all kinds of government information from various states. We found (after a lot of pain working with very procedural scrapers) that a modified producer/consumer pattern worked well. We found that making classes for the producers (they were classes that described each page to be scraped, with methods that matched the modeled data) allowed for easy maintenance. We then created consumers that could be passed any of the page specific producer classes, and knew how to persist the scraped data.

Once I had a good pattern in place I could easily create subclasses of the data type I was trying to scrape, basically pointing each of the modeled data methods to an xpath that was specific to that page.

<comment><USER3> I lead a team that works on several hundred bots scraping at high frequency. We also separate the problem of site structure and payload parsing, though slightly differently.

We have a low frequency discovery process that delves the site to create a representative meta-data structure. This is then read by a high frequency process to create a list of URLs to fetch and parse each time.

The behaviour can then be modified and/or work divided between processes by using command line arguments that cause filtering of the meta-data.

<comment><USER4> I too run a crawler that visits a lot of pages, although not at a particular high frequency. We visit hundreds of sites and each site then has a custom bot that essentially has two methods: find_links and extract. The first finds more links to visit on the site (e.g. navigates and follows pagination) whereas the latter finds and stores records. Is this similar to your approach?

Incidentally, at scale I find that the more tricky part is the whole orchestration (Schedule crawls, make sure resources are used most efficiently without overloading the target sites, properly detecting errors) is the hardest part.

<comment><USER3> The discovery process is crawling I suppose, but only within the same site. It is always assured that the higher speed process accesses data that we want to parse. It does no navigation.

Aside from having the physical capacity for the suite to run 24/7, our main challenge is speed. All data must be parsed, matched to other data in our database and published with the lowest possible latency.

We have pretty strict validation. Addressing errors in retrospect is preferable to publishing incorrect data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd suggest going with mechanize from the off - not just, as the article says, "[when] the site you're scraping requires you to login first, for those instances I recommend looking into mechanize".

Mechanize allows you to write clean, efficient scraper code without all the boilerplate. It's the nicest scraping solution I've yet encountered.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that mechanize is an excellent scraping solution, but for something really basic like this where we're not clicking links or submitting forms it seemed like a bit of an overkill :)

<comment><USER5> Each to their own, but I find the Mechanize syntax much easier even for simple scraping work. You can use CSS selectors as per the example, or XPath should you want to get more complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recommend having a look at capybara [0]. It is build on top of nokogiri, and is actually a tool to write acceptence tests. But it can also be used for web scraping: you can open websites, click on links, fill in forms, find elements on a page (via xpath or css), get their values, etc... I prefer it over nokogiri because of its nice DSL and good documentation [1]. It also can execute javascript, which sometimes is handy for scraping.

I've spend a lot of time working on web scrapers for two of my projects, [http://themescroller.com](http://themescroller.com) (dead) and [http://www.remoteworknewsletter.com](http://www.remoteworknewsletter.com), and I think the holy grail is to build a rails app around your scraper. You can write your scrapers as libs, and then make them executable as rake tasks, or even cronjobs. And because its a rails app you can save all scraped data as actual models and have them persisted in a database. With rails its also super easy to build an api around your data, or build a quick backend for it via rails scaffolds.

[0] [https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara](https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara) [1] [http://www.rubydoc.info/github/jnicklas/capybara/](http://www.rubydoc.info/github/jnicklas/capybara/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I always see people using something like HTTParty or open-uri for pulling down the page. My preferred (by far) is typhoeus, as it supports parallel requests and wraps around libcurl.

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

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd suggest taking a look at Scrapy ([http://scrapy.org](http://scrapy.org)). It is built on top of Twisted (asynchronous) and uses xPath which makes your "scraping" code a lot more readable.

<comment><USER9> Scrapy is written in Python. This looks like a Ruby focused article. It's even written in the title, no need to actually go and read it. I'd say your suggestion is simply off-topic here.

As for Scrapy itself, it's a big framework, written on top of even bigger framework which is probably better described as a platform at this point. I've used Scrapy in a couple of projects and I also worked with Twisted before, which made things significantly easier for me, and it still was quite a bit of a hassle to set things up. IIRC configuring a pipeline for saving images to disk with their original names was kind of a nightmare. It does perform extremely well and scales to insane workloads, but I would never use it for simple scrapper for a single site. For those requests+lxml work extremely well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scraping is generally easy but challenges come when you are scraping large amount of unstructured data and how well you respond to page changes pro- actively. Scrapy is very good. I couldn't find similar tool in Ruby though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone list some good resources about scraping, with gotchas etc.?

<comment><USER12> My recipe is to use Typhoeus ([https://github.com/typhoeus/typhoeus](https://github.com/typhoeus/typhoeus)) + Nokogiri. I have tried lots of different options including EventMachine with em-http-request and reactor loop and concurrent-ruby (both a re very poorly documented)

Typhoeus has a built-in concurrency mechanism with callbacks with specified number of concurrent http requests. You just create a hydra object, create the first request object with URL and a callback (you have to check errors like 404 yourself) where you extract another URLs from the page and push them to hydra again with the same on another callback.

<comment><USER7> Just said this myself. I love Typhoeus, though I can't spell it 9/10 times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not just use like watir or selenium?

<comment><USER14> Because then you're running an entire browser when all you really need is an HTTP library and a parser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How do you get the script to save the json file?

<comment><USER16> Or, you can write it from within Ruby:

        open("out.json", "w") {|f| f.puts JSON.dump(showings) }

<comment> tom-lord

        f << JSON.dump(showings)

avoids adding any new lines (not that it really matters in the case of JSON)

<comment><USER16> Doh, yes. `print` rather than `puts` is also acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> thanks for sharing this - great scraping intro for us newbies (I'm new to ruby and ROR).</comment>


Function Visualizer: D3 based mathematical function explorer - <AUTHOR> http://haggy.github.io/function-visualizer.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my favorite visualization so far is sin(x^2).

<comment><AUTHOR> (on a fast delay)</comment></comment>


Microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/27/revealed-microplastic-pollution-is-raining-down-on-city-dwellers <comment><USER2> " London has highest level yet recorded but health impacts of breathing particles are unknown"

That's the attitude. We're essentially running big experiments on the environment and figuring out the effects later.</comment>


19 year/o kid made an actually useful Android lib out of emojis and inspired art - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rakshakhegde/LastPagerAdapter <comment><AUTHOR> If you didn't guess already, I'm the developer.

<comment><USER2> Ahhh ... Was just about to ask why you are referring to yourself in third person...

<comment><AUTHOR> You can still ask me that XD</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HTML5 guitar lessons with pitch detection - <AUTHOR> https://getinstinct.com <comment><AUTHOR> We first launched here on HN 1.5 years ago, and we're pretty excited to share v2.

Our goal with Instinct is to add deep interactivity to any music lesson. We think that one day, every lesson on YouTube might have pitch detection, scrolling notation, a scoring system and personalized feedback.

This v2 is a big first step in that direction. We've teamed up with a bunch of online teachers to create fully interactive video courses, as a way of showing what's possible with the tech.

There's much more to do though! At this stage, we're looking for as much input as possible from users and teachers.

<comment><USER2> I bought a guitar 3 years ago and I've tried to learn it on and off but never really went past the c chord because I always lose interest.

I just finished my first lesson and this is superb for me. I love the scoring system which motivates me to try and do better each time and just the ease and simplicity with which I can immerse myself into learning it at my own pace.

Just a minor thing that confused me was that the music tab layout(maybe that's the standard) is different from the layout of the strings in the animation (which is the same as my guitar). I think both should be the same as the guitar.

<comment><USER3> I haven't tried Instinct, but having learned guitar off and on many years ago, the biggest 'leap' I made between knowing a few chords, and a few riffs, and actually learning enough to pick up a guitar at a party without embarrassing myself occurred when I started learning full-length songs.

There are a plethora of very simple songs that are super easy to play, and if you learn some that people might like singing along to (even guiltily, like "Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive"), you'll likely bound ahead in skill by a lot.

To that effect, I'd recommend hitting up YouTube for an instructor like Marty Schwartz (user 'martyzsongs') and finding some of his easy tutorials, then learning a few songs to string together. Get 15-20 of those easy songs under your belt, and everything starts getting a lot easier from there.

[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=martyzsings+easy](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=martyzsings+easy)

<comment><USER4> _the biggest 'leap' I made between knowing a few chords, and a few riffs, and actually learning enough to pick up a guitar at a party without embarrassing myself occurred when I started learning full-length songs._

I am in the middle of that journey myself. I bought a guitar a little over ten years ago, got some starter pointers from a passing acquaintance, then spent ten years picking up the guitar every few months, pounding out some open chords reading tabs, and not progressing at all. Bought various software to help (guitar pro, rocksmith) which is good software, but doesn't correct bad habits.

Finally I got tired of just being shit and went to a teacher. Almost every lesson he's correcting a bad habit or providing insight into what I personally am doing incorrectly, and the practice I'm am given each fortnight relates to improving those specific weaknesses. Rocksmith is a hell of a lot of fun, but it's also quite sloppy in what it expects and you can get away with horrible habits (despite this, it's a very impressive bit of software). Guitar Pro is good for isolating the track you want to play in a popular song and repeating things to get the timing right. But for me, personally, it's a meatspace teacher that is making the difference. A teacher isn't cheap - one lesson is roughly the same as the software above - but I can see which of my skills are progressing and by how much.

The journey is interesting. I'm smart, but have no penchant for applying elbow grease. I'm used to picking things up quickly... and the skills in playing a musical instrument well can't be gained in a short time - you have to put in the hours. It's also interesting that the more I learn about the instrument, the further away the target of 'doesn't suck' seems to get :)

<comment><USER5> I've been using Rocksmith. I think it only lets you get away with bad habits as long as you are comfortable with whatever rating it gives you. I know I was stuck in terms of progress until I learned proper technique elsewhere, then I could do the fast and difficult passages and getting 100%s on more songs. I learned those proper techniques off YouTube, but am also thinking of getting a proper teacher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got a acoustic guitar for birthday and from since I've sat hours before Youtube videos and tried to learn it. It has been a bumpy ride and I've merely learned anything. Mainly because it's hard to learn from the people who are already good players. They play fast and keeping track with them using YouTube video player is really annoying.

Today I found GetInstinct and tried it out for like 30 minutes. I feel I've accomplished something and what is more important for me, I feel I've learned something.

It's easy, understandable and really enjoyable.

You'll make dozens (if not millions) of people enjoy playing guitar and hopefully other instruments. Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER7> Is testimonial writing your profession? But, seriously, this is a pretty nifty app.

<comment><USER6> Heh, no. I'm a professional programmer (go figure...)

<comment><USER8> You should go to a music school, thats what I did and in 5 months I'm playing pretty decent (I'm a professional programmer too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Sorry, Flash isn't playing nice with your browser. Try refreshing or use > another browser.

HTML5 indeed. Though I suppose taken literally the title doesn't claim html5 for the pitch detection part.

<comment><USER10> To be pedantic Flash is included in the HTML 5 spec via the object tag.

<comment><USER11> Flash is embedded into HTML via <object>, but that has nothing to do with the HTML5 spec. Flash is not part of the Web Platfrom or HTML5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Firefox 30, Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 enabled, Ubuntu 14.10 - I see the flash dialog, but am unable to allow access to my microphone.

Why not use getUserMedia({audio:true}) instead?

<comment><USER13> I second that. Flash does not work well for me, a fully functional HTML5 version would totally get my money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah we like HTML5 / WebRTC a lot better too. In Chrome, Instinct actually uses WebRTC instead of flash to access the mic.

We had a few issues with Firefox WebRTC though, still trying to work through those.

<comment><USER14> Would you mind telling me your issues? I'm a Firefox dev, working on getUserMedia/Web audio api. I'm sure we can fix them so that Firefox users can enjoy your app without flash as well. I'm padenot at mozilla dot com, or padenot on Twitter.

Great app anyhow!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thx for writing! So the Firefox issue is that the browser asks for microphone approval on every lesson, which can get a little annoying as a user. Is there a way to get Firefox to ask only once and remember what the user chooses?

To see what happens, try a few lessons in real guitar mode on our staging box. This box allows getUserMedia() even for FF:

[https://stage.getinstinct.net](https://stage.getinstinct.net)

(also just a heads up that our staging box is small, so if a lot of people hit it, it might get slow)

<comment><USER14> So, this is known, and tracked in our bug tracker [1]. In the meantime, you can ask your users to use the drop-down in the doorhanger (the little panel that come down), they can whitelist your site this way (it says: "always share with this website" or something).

As you see in the bug (and in a duplicate [2]), this behaviour may change in the future. As you can understand, this need to be changed with care, it's rather easy to screw up, and could have serious privacy implication for our users (of course, your use case it absolutly legit, but websites get hacked, and some website are clearly malicious).

In general, if you want to talk to the team because you suspect a bug in Firefox, or anything, really, come in #media on irc.mozilla.org, or come and talk to us on the dev-media mailing list [3]. We don't bite, and love to hear about the crazy stuff people make with our APIs :-).

Keep up the good work !

[1]: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=819413](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=819413)

[2]: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=893945](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=893945)

[3]: [https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev- media](https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-media)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not sure how closely you pay attention to what fingerings are shown, but on this lesson: [https://getinstinct.com/courses/intro-to-guitar/low- strings/...](https://getinstinct.com/courses/intro-to-guitar/low-strings/game- over-riff-on-the-a-string)

I noticed the last 4 notes are fingered 2-1-1-open, which has a slide on the first finger. Probably better to not encourage sliding on first finger unless needed. I wonder if other lessons might have less than optimal fingerings shown?

edit: but, very cool! :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Any plans for other instruments? Would be really interested in a piano version

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'd love for us to make a piano version too. We haven't started it yet, but maybe it's percolating - I've been spending a ton of time on the piano lately. :)

<comment><USER17> I would be really, really happy if you can get a piano version out soon. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really great - played first lesson. Second lesson crashed on [https://getinstinct.com/courses/intro-to-guitar/amazing- grac...](https://getinstinct.com/courses/intro-to-guitar/amazing-grace/part-2) before I could play along with the review of part-1.

Would like regular music notation as I already know that. Also it's a bit quiet, would love to have a voice guide rather than just reading the prompts.

One slight problem is that on parts where the section to play starts on the same note as the end, and uses an open string, the sustained note of the string automatically skips the first note of the repeat playthrough. Perhaps the algo needs to look for an amplitude peak at the start of the students playthrough to avoid this?

Incidentally the tuner is better than any of the simple tuners I've used on Android, haven't tried it on my phone however. It coped with my children talking over it and still helped me tune very quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points, and thanks so much for the kind words about the tuner.

Agree that sheet music would be great, and also that the lessons do feel a little quiet / less lively than they could. Your voiceover idea is really cool. We've also thought about adding backing tracks as another way to increase the energy level.

We've also run into that wraparound issue you describe, where a section that starts and ends with the same note can cause an issue when you get to the end and sustain the note. I think you're right about the solution, i.e. better attack detection by looking at the amplitude of the signal.

<comment><USER18> I'm sure it's on your list of possible future enhancements but I'd be interested in a Ukulele version.

Now I've done 4 full lessons and some riffs - I'm finding the scrolling on the tab a bit hard to follow, TBH I think it would be fine if it were a bit more compressed (so less scrolling were needed) and also possibly you could but a visual break [like a coloured vertical bar or similar] so that the eye can more easily pick out the move? Happy to give further feedback, I'm pbhj on your system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, please do keep the feedback coming. You can message us thru the site when logged in (we use Intercom for this) or email us at firstname.lastname@example.com .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How do you even play the demo? I move my mouse and the hand moves with it, and it tells me to play the string, but I click, hold, press buttons, the hand just moves and nothing happens... A help screen would be very beneficial...

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah in demo mode, just move the mouse over the highlighted strings at the bottom and they will play. No need to click or anything.

<comment><USER19> Did that, nothing happened. Just air guitar like a gangsta.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, sorry about that, probably a bug.

If you don't mind sending us OS / browser / version + the lesson you played, we can try to debug. Our email is firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pretty neat! I plugged in my rocksmith cable and it just works. One thing though, it needs some kind of calibration. The tiniest bit of string noise and the lessons shoot off without me, even when I have my strings muted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it does work with the Rocksmith cable and we've seen a bunch of users discovering that. As you point out, pitch detection can be a little sensitive with that cable (depending on the guitar), and you're right that we could / should do some calibrating to improve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, really impressive. I tried the first Jazz lesson, completed it, was prompted to register, happily signed up and I'm very excited about the other lessons!

</comment><comment><USER22> Ha, time to dust up my guitar. I've always wanted to learn but know nothing of musical notation. This should give me another excuse get back to learning

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, I love this. Played around with it this morning and works surprisingly well. Great idea and great execution, wish you all the best.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks great. Can't wait to try it after work!

</comment><comment><USER25> This is pretty awesome. Nice work! I've been playing for 30 years but I am eager to try it out and learn some new stuff :).

</comment><comment><USER26> Any ukulele lessons coming up? :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha - Actually, we've thought about it multiple times. With the right teacher, it wouldn't be that hard!

<comment><USER27> +1 for the Uke.

Nice stuff, Blake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wish you a resounding success, thank you for making more art and artists in the world.

</comment><comment><USER29> easydrum[1] is a similar student project dedicated to drums. As far as I know it uses MIDI and the flash plugin to connect to electronic drums.

[1] [http://easydrum.binsofrei.at/](http://easydrum.binsofrei.at/)

</comment><comment><USER30> any chance you have ukulele coming up next? :)</comment>


Microsoft releases RC1 of IE 8 for XP and 32-bit and 64-bit Vista (but not Windows 7) - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/01/26/microsoft-nudges-internet-explorer-8-closer-to-release-with-rc1/

<comment><USER2> FYI IE 8 is already in Windows 7.

<comment><USER3> But not the RC1, is an earlier build</comment></comment>


The Simplicity Test: A Simple Policy Guide for Job Growth - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2010/01/31/the-simplicity-test-a-simple-policy-guide-for-job-growth/

<comment><USER2> Amen. (Although this will never happen).

I have a simple S Corporation setup in Washington. I have to deal with:

\- City government (license & tax)

\- County government (property tax)

\- State government (license, 3 different taxes)

\- Federal government (payroll, etc)

This is for a one-man corporation in a state without state taxes. The amount of paperwork and agencies is a total time-sink. Outsourcing it cheap for a small business either (need more volume to amortize the cost).

Sadly, I don't see simplification happening in politics anytime soon. Not only does it require cooperation between different levels of government, it would create fewer loopholes for businesses.

It's the same reason we'll never see a simple flat tax for personal taxes. Makes it too difficult to hide all the political favors.

<comment><USER3> why do you need licenses? Are you a brick and mortar business?

<comment><USER2> Doesn't matter if you're brick and mortar, you still need licenses having a basic business.

In general, the laws aren't really made with small/virtual businesses in mind. You need physical locations, in-person meetings, non-electronic paperwork, etc, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another brilliant idea that makes you cry with the impossibility of anyone ever doing it.

<comment><USER5> Except, it's not brilliant, and we've been doing it for years. This post is a hollow re-tread of the _"lower my taxes and I'll trickle it down"_ argument, which has been the primary platform of the Republican party (and wealthy people) since I've been alive. Our tax rates are dramatically lower than they were even 20 years ago, and I have to say...it doesn't seem to be working that well.

Two observations that came immediately to mind while reading this post:

1) Accountants and lawyers are people with jobs. Fire them and replace them with non-accountant, non-lawyer jobs, and all you've done is shuffle the jobs around.

Yes, you can argue that every dollar spent on non-administrative expenses can be invested into productivity, but that leads me to my second observation:

2) Small businesses just don't spend that much on administrative overhead.

I've worked at far more small businesses (<20 employees) than large ones, and all of them -- every single one -- has out-sourced the accounting expenses to such a degree that I doubt there's a single full-time equivalent lost in the shuffle. Legal expenses can be more variable, but typically not because of government overhead.

When I hear this argument coming from extremely rich people, my natural instinct is to assume that they're using the populist vision of the "struggling small business owner" to promote policies that would benefit their personal bottom line. Quite honestly, this looks like more of the same. Mark Cuban has a lot more to gain from cuts in the corporate tax rate than does your average small business owner -- yet he'll never employ enough people to make up the difference.

<comment><USER6> It's not just administrative overhead, it's friction in getting things done. There is such a thing as objective value creation.

The complexity of the tax code in the US has been increasing with ever larger loopholes to satisfy lobbyists and curry favor with various special interests. This isn't even about taxes - it's about simplifying something that shouldn't even be complex. Further, the irony is the people who lobby for the complexity are often the "extremely rich people".

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at your argument that moving jobs from tax accounting/legal which attempt to manage friction in transactions to professions that create goods and services people actually want to pay for is just "shuffling the jobs around". As an extension of your argument, shouldn't the government employ everyone by fiat and simply abolish unemployment? This is especially made particularly absurd that the US Treasury Secretary couldn't even figure out how to pay his own taxes but now runs the IRS. There is something very very wrong with this picture.

<comment><USER5> _"It's not just administrative overhead, it's friction in getting things done. There is such a thing as objective value creation."_

Yeah, which is why I said you could make that argument, and why I mentioned my second point -- small businesses just don't spend that much on this kind of thing. It's a red herring.

 _"I don't know whether to laugh or cry at your argument that moving jobs from tax accounting/legal which attempt to manage friction in transactions to professions that create goods and services people actually want to pay for is just 'shuffling the jobs around'."_

You shouldn't laugh _or_ cry, because it's just a statement of fact. I said that people who have jobs as accountants and lawyers are, by definition, _people with jobs_. So if you eliminate one accountant's job, and replace it with some other kind of job, you _haven't increased the number of jobs_. At best, you've made some small move toward "increasing productivity", which will then perhaps have a non-linear increase in other jobs, but that's an extremely tenuous argument for most small businesses.

 _"As an extension of your argument, shouldn't the government employ everyone by fiat and simply abolish unemployment?"_

No. That would be stupid. It has nothing to do with my argument.

 _" This is especially made particularly absurd that the US Treasury Secretary couldn't even figure out how to pay his own taxes but now runs the IRS. There is something very very wrong with this picture."_

Straw Man. I'm not arguing that the complexity of the tax code is a good thing; I'm arguing that reducing the complexity of the tax code is very different than "lowering the corporate tax rate". I'm also arguing that rich people like Mark Cuban have a disproportionate interest in doing the latter, in the guise of doing the former.

<comment><USER6> Small businesses do spend increasing amounts on tax accounting and legal. There's a very real and tangible cost to complexity in both regulations and taxation.

"No. That would be stupid. It has nothing to do with my argument." You're right it would be a stupid argument except according to you, a job is a job. Not sure how it's even a tenuous argument to point out that reducing friction increases jobs as it not only frees up people who have to navigate the complexity - ie the tax accountants and lawyers to doing something more productive but it also reduces the costs of compliance for companies themselves. The US tax code is now over 16500 pages with non-compliance a criminal offense.

I find it remarkable that you don't think there's an increasing cost to this compliance. Ask just about any internal accountant or anyone in a position of leadership and they'd tell you differently especially over the last 15 years.

<comment><USER5> _"reducing friction increases jobs as it not only frees up people who have to navigate the complexity - ie the tax accountants and lawyers to doing something more productive"_

Har. Yes...because if we reduce the complexity of the tax code, somehow, droves lawyers and accountants (who _chose_ to do what they do, and spent _years_ training to do it) are going to switch to "productive" jobs.

I get it. You don't like lawyers and accountants. But I think you need to separate your judgments of these jobs from the reality that these people do productive work that is clearly valuable -- even outside of the need for tax code compliance. Lawyers and accountants are not going away.

 _"I find it remarkable that you don't think there's an increasing cost to this compliance."_

I didn't say that. I said that small businesses don't spend that much on compliance relative to all other factors, and that I'm therefore skeptical of the claim that reducing tax code complexity will increase jobs in any substantive way.

<comment><USER7> _Har. Yes...because if we reduce the complexity of the tax code, somehow, droves lawyers and accountants (who chose to do what they do, and spent years training to do it) are going to switch to "productive" jobs._

There are legal and accounting tasks to be performed in any company that are not related to tax and regulatory compliance. Lawyers will still be lawyers, and accountants will still be accountants, but instead of working (indirectly) for the government doing nothing that provides value to consumers or the business, they would be working on things that _are_ of value to consumers or the business. Contracts need to be written and negotiated, books need to be kept, projections need to be made, copyrights and trademarks need to be defended, etc. These things make our world run smoother, and our economy grow, and helps small businesses defend themselves against larger incumbents, and helps them plan and finance growth.

We're talking about a baroque tax code and regulatory environment for business. This cost is relatively higher for small business than large business (because large business has full-time legal and accounting staff, while small businesses must outsource or do it themselves, poorly, and at the expense of productive expenditures of money or time).

I'm, frankly, stunned that you believe that small business "don't spend that much on compliance". I spend about two days a month on it for our three-man company; that's more than 13% of my productivity gone to keeping us out of trouble with the government. Given that the other two people are part-time employees, it's about 6% of our entire available work. You consider that _small_ , when it does _nothing_ for our business' growth or for our customers? When added to the actual taxes we pay out, it's a wonder any small business can get off the ground while staying legal.

Note that while I'd also enjoy seeing small business tax obligations reduced, I'd be extremely happy to see reduction in the complexity of paying those taxes at both the state and federal level. If I can put off employing lawyers and accountants (who make more money than I, as CEO, currently make, lawyers, in particular, who make more than I've ever made even when I was a well-paid contractor) for another year, that'd allow me to grow faster, and hire another employee this year.

And, of course, if it means lawyers don't work quite as much, and have to put off buying that new BMW for another three months, I think I can live with that.

<comment><USER5> _"I'm, frankly, stunned that you believe that small business "don't spend that much on compliance". I spend about two days a month on it for our three-man company; that's more than 13% of my productivity gone to keeping us out of trouble with the government. Given that the other two people are part-time employees, it's about 6% of our entire available work. You consider that small, when it does nothing for our business' growth or for our customers?"_

I consider it far less than a single full-time job, or even a part-time job. Even if you could eliminate all of this overhead (which you can't), you wouldn't be able to hire a new employee with the savings.

Look, if you think my argument is that the tax code _shouldn't_ be simple, you're not reading me correctly. Low compliance costs should _always_ be the goal. But when Mark Cuban says _"reduce small business taxes to fix the economy"_ , I think he's wrong. It won't move the needle on hiring, because in 99% of the businesses that matter for employment, hiring is limited by consumer demand, not corporate taxes.

<comment><USER8> 'But when Mark Cuban says "reduce small business taxes to fix the economy", I think he's wrong.'

He did not say that. He called for a simplification of the tax code and easing the regulatory environment, not for lower taxes.

<comment><USER5> You have to be able to read between the lines. "Dramatically streamline the tax code" is classic political double-speak for "flat tax", which means the elimination of most forms of taxation on US corporations. Much of the "complexity" of US tax code is part of the long legislative history of closing tax loopholes that large businesses have successfully exploited to escape taxation in the past.

But even if you don't take my word on this, he actually does call for tax cuts in the post:

 _"Make capital gains on investments up to $1mm in small companies tax free"_

This has nothing to do with "streamlining" the tax code. Cuban wants the ability to invest in hedge funds and other "small businesses" without paying capital gains tax on the profits, and he's framing it as a way of "encouraging investment" in the mom and pop store down the street (who will never, ever be assisted by this kind of a policy change). In reality, Cuban is proposing yet another loophole that would be used primarily by rich people and large corporations to escape taxation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm all for simplifying the overhead on companies, but to translate that into creating jobs is a bit of a stretch. If you cut all of the taxes on an existing company they would not simply add jobs to their company. The only way jobs are added is if they're necessary. This usually means an increase in sales/revenue and the need for more resources.

To take a modern example, the recent recession caused companies to go on a spree of job cutting. This wasn't because of any change in tax or overhead. It was the result of lost revenue. Increased revenue causes job increases. Not the efficiencies of overhead.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. The easiest way for the government to get people to hire is to start buying stuff from them. It's a buyers market right now and there are many ways for the government to use that for the public good and incidentally to create jobs.

<comment><USER11> The government cannot afford to buy anything it is worse than broke, it is in serious debt. The amount of unfunded liabilities that are coming down the pipeline are ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is so true.

When I was a teen I started an LLC in MA. It was simple and cost $100.

3 years ago I started another and the price had gone up to $500. For adding a row to a database, $500.

>Like the administration before it, the current administration seems to have no concept of what it takes to start, run and grow a small business. None.

Mitt Romney was governor during this increase in MA. I couldn't believe he would allow such a thing. But then I realized he had no experience starting a small business without millions of dollars in capital from the get go.

<comment><USER10> The Romney administration increased fees across the board. They wanted to claim "no tax increase" and hid the tax increase in these fee increases. It's politically easier to increase a fee because not everyone pays it immediately or thinks that they necessarily will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The concept is sound; however, the execution is far from trivial.

GAAP (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAAP>) and IFRS ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Financial_Reporti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Financial_Reporting_Standards)) are two great examples of accounting standards which approach regulation from two very different perspectives. I'd be interested if someone has info comparing administrative costs for businesses operating under each regime.

Regarding the tax code, my opinion is that all corporate income tax should be eliminated in favor of steeper progressive tax rates for individual income taxes. Effectively eliminating this burden from corporations and shifting it to the wealthiest who can afford the administrative costs, while also having a neutral effect on government revenues.

By its nature, capitalism demands regulations to inspire confidence in investors. So don't fool yourself into believing "all regulation is bad." The question remains, "what is the most effective & efficient means of regulation?"

Finally, here's some advice, an LLC is generally the most effective form for a small business to take. When you get to the point where _additional_ equity must be issued or raised, you might then consider the advantages of C or S corporation.

<comment><USER14> In California an LLC pays a franchise tax on gross revenue that SubS is not subject to (in addition to all of the fees that both owe) Unless you have foreign nationals as founders SubS is probably preferable in California.

<comment><USER13> So form your business elsewhere. It's true that some states are more friendly to small businesses than others, but generally the reasoning holds true. If that's not enough, you could always pick up shop and shift your nexus to another state.

It's really up to the owners judgment, but a significant franchise tax bill on a small business might be preferred over the additional administrative requirements for running an S corp. At least in the former scenario, you are bringing in some nice revenue.

[UPDATE: here's some info on California S corp vs. LLC: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_corporation#California.2C_New...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_corporation#California.2C_New_York_City_additional_taxes)]

<comment><USER14> If you are physically present in California you will end up paying CA Franchise taxes (and corporate income taxes on revenue generated in CA). The additional administrative requirements for a SubS are at most an hour a year for a small firm.

Please don't confuse revenue and profits, it's possible to generate revenue, pay the CA LLC Franchise tax on it, and still have a loss on the year if expenses exceeded revenue. With a SubS you only pay tax on profits, which I agree for early years may be close to zero.

<comment><USER13> I think it's fair to say that you should consult a tax professional before forming a legal entity; however, it's also important to have a general understanding of each entity types' cost/benefit. There's plenty of info on the web.

Additionally, for purposes of this discussion, legal entities are formed exclusively under state laws. While you can incorporate anywhere, most states require a registered agent be present domestically. You can hire firms like CTcorp to fill this role. The second consideration is your "physical" location. What constitutes nexus (especially for technology companies) is the subject of some controversy, but the specific legislation varies among states. Generally, nexus for income tax occurs in the locations where _value_ is generated. This usually means the location of a firm's assets and employees. Sales tax nexus is even more ambiguous. Here's a better explanation than I could ever give: [http://web.archive.org/web/20021001165628/http://www.aicpa.o...](http://web.archive.org/web/20021001165628/http://www.aicpa.org/members/div/tax/praguide.htm)

Treatment at the federal level is uniform. Imagine that a significant portion of HN visitors are located in CA, so skmurphy's advice is worth paying attention to!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> anyone that has ever run a small business know how taxation and regulation make it much harder to hire new employees. sure, monetarily, but also in terms of simple time and increased risk (lack of ability to make truly binding employment contracts). you discourage things by taxing them, you encourage things by subsidizing them. if you reduce taxation on new employment (such as, say, waiving payroll taxes for the first 3 months of employment) it will increase the ability of employers on the margin to hire.

<comment><USER2> Just reducing the number of separate agencies you need to deal with would be a help, even if the net amount of taxes remains the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Forget government loan guarantees. Make capital gains on investments up to $1mm in small companies tax free. Make this process paperwork free for the small business and a 1 page form for the investor._

Someone wasn't paying attention to the State of the Union speech...

[http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/...](http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/archives/2010/01/what_obama_said.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> _That government is best which governs least._ \-- Thomas Paine

Something the American government seems to have completely forgotten.

<comment><USER18> The voters forgot first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What about people starting small businesses in accounting and law?

<comment><USER20> Exceptionally smart and driven people generally - they'll move into doing more productive things than dealing with the government. Also, thinking that creating new bureaucracy creates new value through accounting/legal probably is an example of the Broken Window Fallacy:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window>

<comment><USER9> Some of the smartest people I know work, or have worked, for NASA. Some of the most cutting edge work is done in aeronautics for military aircraft. The Manhattan Project had its share of exceptionally smart people.

I think you're confusing exceptionally smart with exceptional business skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One way around the complexity: establish permanent residency in a more friendly tax home.</comment>


The Johnson County War: 1892 Invasion of Northern Wyoming - <AUTHOR> http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/johnson-county-war

<comment><USER2> I love studying how large groups of people form and operate, and this was fascinating.

Especially fascinating to me wasn't the "Invasion", but the political aftermath.

The Republicans were coming off a successful invasion and conquest of the rebellious south. They ran the political tables, both locally and nationally. Since the same party had been in charge over 20 years at this point[1], there was deep corruption at all levels of government, as indicated in the article. (Rousing the president in the middle of the night to raise an army to free criminals that are your friends! Wow!).

So local voters, sick of the shenanigans, kicked the Republicans out. But the incoming party was terribly inept, perhaps because they'd never been in power. So they were a disaster. Then the voters -- who obviously understood what a bunch of bozos they were going to get -- voted the Republicans back in power!

You'd think that this would be an example of democracy gone bad, or how voting doesn't matter. But it didn't work out that way. Seeing the shift in the political wind, the Cattlemen's Association decided to let in all the small fry that they were previously trying to kill. Once the Association represented all cattlemen, large and small, the source of the conflict went away. No more armed gangs.

I would have really loved to be in on some of those early Cattlemen Association meetings where the new guys came onboard. I don't think "awkward" is a big enough adjective to cover what it must have been like.

[1] I oversimplify the political situation on purpose for sake of discussion.

<comment><USER3> There was a similar smaller scale revolt ( Battle of Athens ) against local corruption by retuning GI's post ww2.

They broke into the national guard armory and enforced fair elections after a short firefight.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29)</comment></comment>


Symantec CA Response to Google Proposal and Community Feedback - <AUTHOR> https://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/symantec-ca-proposal <comment><USER2> >require these applications to be recoded, recompiled and redistributed.

Aka "updated".

The entire post is basically "ok how about we be really good from now on and suffer no consequences, cause it'd be really shitty for us if we had to be penalised".

They also posture a lot talking about how big their customers are, almost boasting about how inflexible and slow these big companies are, as if that's somehow Google's or general Internet users' problem.

<comment><USER3> This comment irritates me.

1) The point of the first part of their post is not "we're too big", it's "a move like this would disrupt the lives of an awful lot of people." Even more so, consider what would happen if Google were to update Chrome to not accept these certs. For internal applications, the IT departments of all these companies—which likely total a few hundreds of thousands of users in total—would simply mandate that Chrome is no longer an acceptable browser. For external applications, companies would have to engage in an enormous PR effort to communicate to customers that their product doesn't work with Chrome. These companies have done nothing wrong, but they're the one being punished, as customers don't know and don't care about cert issues.

2) "Updating" can be an enormous effort. As the blog post states explicitly, there are a lot of use cases where updating a deployed app is very difficult, almost impossible, or cost prohibitive. Again, remember that the person being punished here is not Symantec; you're publishing some poor development company who happened to use Symantec—one of the most popular cert providers on the planet—for an SSL cert. Not good.

I'm not taking sides on the issue, because I honestly don't know that much about it. But comments like the above really trivialize the huge impact that something like this will have.

<comment><USER4> Part of the premise of Google's plan is that Symantec's customers will experience disruption. If you poll Symantec's customers, the overwhelming majority of them will day "no, don't punish our CA". We didn't need Symantec to tell us that.

On the other hand, Symantec's CA was caught mis-issuing certificates. That affects everyone, not just Symantec's own customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "survey" that accompanied the original customer facing message was so biased as to be ridiculous. Like "Will Google's proposed change be disruptive, massively disruptive, or business ending for you?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a significant amount of "we will" language in here, rather than "we have started" or "have already begun". The choice of language speaks volumes that they only appear to be willing to take necessary audit action if Google agrees to it, rather than something that needs to be done regardless.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Embedded devices that are pinned to certificates issued by a Symantec public > root to communicate to resources over the Internet or Intranet. Replacing > these certificates would result in immediate failures and the need to recode > and reimage the firmware for these devices.

> Mobile applications that have pinned certificates. Replacing server > certificates would require these applications to be recoded, recompiled and > redistributed.

Are either of these relevant? Isn't google's proposal to eventually have Chrome stop trusting the Symantec CA system? That change seems like it would have no effect on 1) embedded devices that aren't running Chrome 2) things that already are in place that trust the CA.

<comment><USER7> Imagine the embedded device or mobile app connects to a [https://api.example.com/..](https://api.example.com/..). and so does their web app. They need to use a new certificate for api.example.com, signed by a different CA root, because when Chrome tries to run the web app it won't trust the old certificate, nor a new cert signed by the old root. So they get a new cert signed by a different root so Chrome works, but then the embedded or mobile apps stop working.

In this case the story is more complicated - I think new certificates signed by existing Symantec CA roots would be trusted if their duration is 90 days or less. Historically, most CAs offered one, two, or three year duration. Presumably, the "big customers" would not accept the need to rotate their certificates for this purpose in less than 90 days, they need their 3 years because it takes over 90 days to get something through their bureaucracy. And presumably there are other things they can't do in 90 days, like update an embedded device configuration or firmware, or a mobile app.

Of course it depends on the particulars, but of course these "big customers" can't figure any particulars out in 90 days. But that's why Google proposed a slow sliding scale that would gradually reduce the max duration allowed over the course of a year, so random unknown stuff breaks more gradually throughout the year, not in one huge event like Symantec's blog post suggests.

<comment> X-Cubed An easier way around this sort of issue is to change their web app to use a different domain, and only put the new certificate from a different CA on that domain. It's not necessary to update every device.

Embedded devices => [https://api.example.com](https://api.example.com) (Symantec cert)

Browsers => [https://new-api.example.com](https://new-api.example.com) (New trusted cert)

Another approach is that if the devices are old enough they're probably using a deprecated version of TLS, so the existing [https://api.example.com](https://api.example.com) server could choose which certificate to issue based on the version of TLS offered by the client.

<comment><USER8> You have to have planned for this (or be lucky) though. Some people just put their api on www.example.com; assuming you have clients in the field which have pinned BIG CA, and you've got HSTS preloaded (because you're forward thinking). Unless you can detect Chrome N+1 from your existing clients during the TLS handshake, you have to pick between browsers or existing clients.

If Chrome ships this at the same time as re-enabling TLS 1.3 support, that would be a decent way to target, since presumably very few of your distributed clients are using TLS 1.3.

<comment><USER9> I know it's not going to help companies which pinned Symantec, but that's _exactly_ why every serious guide to HPKP will have you pin two separate CAs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > This cohort is an important constituency that we believe has been under- > represented to date in the public commentary that has been posted to the > Google and Mozilla boards since large organizations rarely authorize > employees to engage in such public discussions, particularly in an area > related to security.

Are these large organizations somehow incapable of putting out official statements regarding CAs? If they're being 'under-represented', it's their own fault for not speaking up.

<comment><USER11> To me it was really bold of them to take the tone and stance that they did with regard to these large organizations. They're making the case as to _why_ Google needed to do what it did ... all of these large organizations that will be severely impacted by having to replace all of these certificates are relying on a CA that has shown itself to not be worthy of the trust that CAs are relied upon to provide.

I'm at a loss for a good analogy so I'll pick a lousy one: it'd be like if Samsung's response to the exploding Note 7 recall mandate were "Don't do this -- you're going to keep some of the biggest customers -- users of our phones -- from being able to make emergency calls/check their e-mail/respond to texts" ...yeah, but I'm still not OK with the small possibility that carrying my phone in my front pocket _might_ result in third-degree genital burns.

<comment><USER12> As it happens, your hypothetical situation was exactly what did transpire: Samsung wanted to remotely deactivate the phones, but Verizon refused on those grounds. [http://bgr.com/2016/12/09/galaxy-note-7-recall-verizon- samsu...](http://bgr.com/2016/12/09/galaxy-note-7-recall-verizon-samsung/)

<comment><USER11> ... and here I thought comparing security to burning genitals might have been too much of a farce, but that takes the cake, there. :o)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think Google was soliciting for a counter proposal from Symantec. Will be interesting to see their reply, and whether it's a literal reply or just a version push of chrome with their original plan.[1]

[1] [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/bli...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/blink- dev/eUAKwjihhBs)

Edit: They did ask for community feedback, comments on risk, etc. But they do already have a timeline. See link above.

<comment><USER14> "This site does not support Chrome. Please use a browser that does not take unilateral CA authority action." might very well be the response of orgs married to Symantec.

As a user, you need your bank (or other large org) more than you need your preference of browser.

<comment><USER15> Mozilla seems in total agreement with Chrome on this, and it also takes unilateral CA authority action. This is not a negotiation where the orgs have the right side of the power dynamic.

<comment><USER14> It's always a negotiation. He who has the least to lose wins.

"Why isn't my browser working??" "So sorry about that, those darn nerds made a change on us."

I have seen this exact scenario play out. Mozilla and Google might be respected in the tech community; to most people they're an extremely tiny part of their life. "Your the IT man, just make it work"

<comment><USER16> You're arguing "Right" vs. "Easy".

<comment><USER14> Easy there Tex, I'm not arguing. I am simply describing the behaviors between large orgs in a dysfunctional ecosystem/marketplace.

As you get older, you transition from "this is how it should be!" to "this is how it works, what is a realistic amount of change that can occur?"

<comment><USER17> i would say the relevant "this is how it works" is having a globally trusted CA system that isn't abused by large CAs just because they think no one will dare punish them. What would any of these large Symantec customers says if in the future their security was compromised due to mis-issued certificates? I doubt they'd be thrilled they were saved some dev time getting their certificates signed by another root in exchange. it's very clear from Symantec's language here and elsewhere that they wouldn't be doing shit about this is chrome weren't taking it so seriously

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Symantec is just going through the 5 stages of CA grief. First they were oblivious to it, then they were angry about it and called Google irresponsible. They're now at the proposal stage. Next will be depression and finally acceptance for their incompetence.

</comment><comment><USER19> > _These customers include many of the largest financial services, critical > infrastructure, retail and healthcare organizations in the world, as well as > many government agencies. This cohort is an important constituency that we > believe has been under-represented to date in the public commentary that has > been posted to the Google and Mozilla boards since large organizations > rarely authorize employees to engage in such public discussions, > particularly in an area related to security._

... well that's their problem, right?

You can't simultaneously say "These are some of the most important organizations in the world and you'll cause worldwide chaos" and "Won't someone listen to these poor companies, I am the Symantorax, I speak for the cohort, for the cohort has no tongues."

<comment><USER11> > These are some of the most important organizations in the world and you'll > cause worldwide chaos

Thanks for that -- reading this comment connected a few thoughts I was struggling with.

Their response felt like "if you don't follow through with your plan to punish us we'll do all of these nice things for you." It reminds me of when my kids get caught doing something wrong and I get "but I'll do all of my chores and treat my siblings nice" along with a handful of other promises of future deeds which I know will be partially or completely not-done. How different the result would have been if they came to me with the chores done and some/all of the promises fulfilled already. It would have been much better for Symantec to have responded with these items in the "completed" category with a smaller number of "we will's".

But to the quote I highlighted: the issue at hand is the past failures indicate that "some of the most important organizations in the world" need to _not_ be trusting Symantec in the first place. They've had a big enough history of failures as a CA to get the attention of Google, who I'm sure isn't terribly interested in degrading the browsing experience of their customers. The choice becomes: (1) Banhammer Symantec, take the resulting pain all at once, visibly and obviously, and get the problem fixed painfully (but it's fixed) or (2) Trust that things will be different _this time_ and if they're not, have another security failure of some kind that results in these critically important company's customers' data being exposed, which is a circumstance that will almost certainly go unnoticed for a period of time, will be covered up if the exposure is minimal and covering up the exposure is possible or may not be discovered _at all_. The CA system is centered around _trusting a handful of rather powerful bodies_ with an _enormous responsibility_ around the overall security of the Internet. It's not a great model to begin with, but it's what we have and I haven't read about any alternatives that are viable. The _only_ way to keep a model like this secure is to ensure that the CAs themselves are actually _trustworthy_ and one of the more likely ways that will happen is to enforce violations of that trust in the manner Google is suggesting.

<comment><USER19> Yup. It's very interesting that the argument from Symantec is that their customers have to buy Symantec certs indefinitely - not that they can't replace existing certs in servers, but they've hardcoded the Symantec _root_ in enough clients, such that buying certs from a Symantec competitor will break their clients.

Among other things, if what Symantec is saying is true, this means there is zero financial incentive for Symantec to behave. The largest certificate customers in the world have all voluntarily made it infeasible to choose a Symantec competitor, so as long as Symantec has any product at all of any quality, the market will keep buying Symantec.

If what Symantec is saying is true, the mere fact that they went to their largest customers and said "Suppose you had to buy certs from one of our competitors, what would you do" and they replied "We've never thought about that before" is itself a major victory.

<comment><USER11> I hadn't read it that way and that's a really good point.

If you have too many trusted-third parties in a trust model like this, you run into difficulties with enforcement due to scaling problems, but what we're seeing is the converse of that. Symantec went out and bought up other CAs (Verisign is the only one I can remember for some reason) and they've become so large that them losing CA status would be prohibitively damaging to the internet-at-large. This affects not only enforcement (we don't want to move on a bad actor because the consequences of enforcement would be more severe than the consequences of a rule violation), it also negatively affects the trust model -- now if I'm a bad actor, Symantec is my only target -- even though I _could_ attack the others and yield some of the same benefits of attacking Symantec, if I breach Symantec, the rewards are larger by several orders of magnitude depending on what they store and how they store it.

To digress a little ... today ... I'm not all that surprised that Symantec has reached sort-of monopoly status in this area. Not because Symantec is a well managed company (I'm making no statement for or against that despite my personal opinions), but just because so much of The Internet has turned out this way. If you would have told me in 1998 that for the very vast majority of US Internet users, there'd be one search engine, one e-commerce company, one (expensive) ISP, one e-mail provider, all of it would be secured by services provided by one company's CA and all of that wouldn't matter much because the typical Internet experience would basically be a web-enabled, bluer version of AOL[0], I'd have called you some unfriendly things, but that's where we are. It's a centralized system operating on decentralized technology.

[0] Oh, and that the "one e-commerce company" was that bookstore web-site and would be responsible for hosting such a large part of the _rest_ of the Internet that when they had a major failure and people had that handful of rare clicks off of FAOLBook, they'd have about a 50% chance that whatever their target was wouldn't load.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> CA infrastructure business is built on trust. Symantec lost the trust and got thrown out by Chrome. I hope that as the result Symantec will lose significant amount of CA business thus making a show case for other CAs to demonstrate that good processes and trust are key for staying in this business.

</comment><comment><USER21> Notably missing from their post:

This is how we make sure issuing certificates for gmail.com, etc will never happen again. An external audit every 3 months is not going to fix anything.

</comment><comment><USER22> Read the statement carefully. Symantec still does not offer a verifiable audit trail like Google's Certificate Transparency requires. They just offer to have 3rd parties review the certificates sold to customers. Without a COMPLETE audit trail Symantec can still continue to secretly issue additional certificates not part of any audit trail. The whole announcement rather decreases my trust in Symantec even more.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone else get a blocking "Symantec Connect" and "Loading your community experience" for a good 10 seconds before it loads? Could just be my mobile connection but man is that lame.

<comment><USER17> I've heard elsewhere in this thread that blocking ads/tracking breaks their site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Archived copy, which can be read with JS disabled:

[https://archive.fo/FMemh](https://archive.fo/FMemh)

</comment><comment><USER25> The irony is, for an industry based on trust, if this abuse is not penalized, then the industry as a whole is pointless.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm still trying to figure out if my 36 month wildcard carts from RapidSSL are going to be distrusted. Their intermediate is signed by GeoTrust which is owned by Symantec, and a blog post says with Chrome 59, certs with a period over 33 months will be distrusted. Chrome Canary on v60 shows them still working.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Community" \- as if we are downstream, something easily managed.

I see it as a polite way of saying "You kids".

</comment><comment><USER28> I love how none of the example "dependencies" they give should be using public CA in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Given some of the internal CA systems I've dealt within the past, I'd almost prefer a public CA in some cases. Sometimes your internal CA is just the group with manual access to the certificate provisioning and signing systems with either no API or some awful re-implemented API.

<comment><USER28> What API do you need? The signing system should be airgapped or you end up with the same shit that is the public CA system such as roots sitting on public FTP servers.

It's a bunch of command line scripts because if you are using it any different way you are probably doing it wrong.

<comment><USER29> There's more to it than you've seen so far. Think about environments with hosts starting on demand. You need to encrypt data in flight -> how do you automatically assign a new certificate to an instance on startup? You can't do it with an airgapped system.

<comment><USER28> If you're going to automatically create certificates you are shifting the entire authentication burden to that automated system.

This is the exact issue with the public CA system, their automated processes have been found lacking and now what they certify can not be trusted.

<comment><USER29> The topic was internal CAs. Those have completely different requirements and possibilities than public ones. The authentication will look completely different as well. You just can't compare those issues.

And you're missing the point I raised as well - if you have hosts coming up automatically, you either need automatic certificates, or shared keys. As long as you rely on SSL, there's no other way to go.

(For example of authentication: public CA verifies your domain, internal CA can ask the hypervisor to verify a token on your instance - not remotely in the same class)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Incompetence needs to be penalized. Period. Symantec's reasoning is pathetic and infact a veiled blackmail attempt.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you rather learn Golang or Elixir in your free time? - <AUTHOR> Hey,
assuming that you don't know those programming languages, which one would you learn (and why)? Or do you prefer a different one?
Background: We're only using OOP at work and I wanna learn some different (new) languages. I've started with golang, until I've got an good idea about what's going on, A few weeks ago I "switched" to Elixir (including Phoenix). I am not sure if I should keep my focus on Elixir, or switch back to go - I love both languages, they are awesome.
Have a good day! <comment><USER2> I'd invest the time in golang. I never hear of Elixir outside of HN but golang appears to be dramatically increasing in adoption and interest, so if I were to put my time into either it'd be Go simply because I feel as though there'll be more opportunities surrounding it.

<comment><AUTHOR> More opportunities in terms of getting hired / new job / ...? Or more opportunities in terms of use cases, ...? :)

<comment><USER2> Opportunities for new jobs as well as opportunities within your existing job.</comment></comment></comment>


Elance for hardware: yay or nay? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there,
Just doing a little bit of customer discovery for a site I'd like to launch based on some feedback I received for a previous idea. (which wasn't so hot.)
Basically, hardware and software developers would join forces to work on specific hardware projects. (Say John Smith posts a project to have two arudinos communicate using WiFi Direct and he is seeking help on the wifi part while he focuses on the motor controller stuff. He is willing to pay $350 to have someone work with him in parallel and speed up the project.)
Does this resonate with anyone out there?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I actually have used Elance for hardware,like Arduino programming and circuit board layout. Your idea sounds a bit more collaborative. I would like to see this but expanded to prototyping machined and 3d printed parts as well. The cost to go from idea to design to part is expensive, but I think it could be a lot cheaper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Ashleyreddy. Prototyping and 3D printed parts are exactly where we want to go with the idea. When you used Elance, were you the person posting the project? What was the iterative process like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can outsource hardware development, prototyping and anything else involving hardware on Elance and even other sites like Freelancer.com already. Unless you can compete on price, I think you will struggle to compete with the bigger players in the outsource/freelancing market.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting. But unfortunately I don't have experience for that kind of stuff.

But I think that some things would be interesting. A version control for PCBs, designs, and that kid of stuff in sync with code. Also list of components, estimates of costs of production (for every revision).</comment>


VLC now most downloaded software on SourceForge - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/top

<comment><USER2> That's because everyone else has moved to GitHub..</comment>


Canv.as AWS account hacked - <AUTHOR>

Canvasaurs,
We were recently made aware of a security breach that affected all of our servers hosted with Amazon, which includes the ones that previously hosted Canvas. The person(s) used our account to order hundreds of expensive servers, likely to mine Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. When we detected this activity, we immediately locked down the account.
Unfortunately we have no way of knowing what, if any, information was accessed by the attacker(s). It's possible they only used our account to order servers, however it's also possible they accessed our database, and thus user e-mail addresses, encrypted passwords, and other information.
We'd suggest you consider changing your e-mail account password, and the passwords of any services you connected with Canvas. Although Canvas account passwords were encrypted in our database using a modern, secure method called bcrypt, it's better to be safe than sorry. To reiterate, we found no evidence of an attack targeting Canvas or its users directly, but since we're unable to conduct a thorough investigation, we can't know for sure what was accessed.
We're extremely sorry this happened, and will do our best to ensure no further breaches occur.
- Team Canvas <comment><USER2> Strongly suggest a service like Cloudability to help find out about such things as soon as possible...

</comment><comment><USER3> So why would I have to change my email account password? What does it have to do with Canvas? My Canvas password is unique.</comment>


Ask YC: job market for functional programmers - <AUTHOR>

I wasn't a computer science major in college, though I took some classes in it. My first programming job (most recent) was at a hedge fund, and most of my work was in the functional paradigm.
I'm not afraid to learn a new language, because that's always been easy for me, but I want to continue working in functional languages, e.g. Lisp, Haskell, ML.
What types of work are people doing with these languages? How is the FP job market, in general, where are the jobs located, and which of these languages are most employable? <comment><USER2> You're going to have the most luck in NYC and Boston, with some smaller success in the D.C. and SFO areas.

As far as I can tell, FP is mostly being used in the financial sector, with some smaller uses in research.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why is there so much FP in finance? I had the impression that finance used mostly C++, which is a big part of why I avoided applying for most quant jobs.

<comment><USER3> Hedge fund jobs here in Dallas are looking heavily for C# and vba (excel) skills.

There are about 2-5 hedge fund jobs that have been open for at least a year that just can't find someone willing to work their butt off for $110k and 50+ hours a week.</comment></comment></comment>