MPEG-G: the ugly - <AUTHOR> https://datageekdom.blogspot.com/2018/09/ <comment><USER3> This bit is revealing:

> There are clear non-royalty based incentives for _large companies_ to > develop new compression algorithms and drive the industry forward. Both > Google and Facebook have active data compression teams, lead by some of the > world's top experts in the field.

Google and Facebook can afford to spend money on R&D because they throw off gobs of money from near-monopolies in important economic sectors. This is one of the archetypal models for R&D, and has a lot of precedent: AT&T Bell Labs (bankrolled by AT&T's telephone monopoly) and Xerox PARC (bankrolled by the copier monopoly built on Xerox's patents). Much of the really fundamental technologies underlying computing were developed this way.

But MPEG is thirty years old now, and the MPEG-1 standard is 25 years old. Until recently, the MPEG standard has been pushed forward not by a single giant corporation that can afford to bankroll everything, but a consortium of companies using patents and licensing to recover their investment into the R&D. This is one of the other archetypal models for R&D. Many of the other fundamental technologies underlying computing were developed this way.

(The third archetypal model is the government-funded project, _e.g._ TCP/IP, which is also an example of a monopoly bankrolling R&D.)

The "benevolent monopoly" model obviously has advantages for open source-- because the company bankrolls R&D by monetizing _something else_ , it can afford to release the results of the research for everyone to use. But it's not sustainable without the sponsor (and we know this, because open source has been around for a long time, and there is little precedent for a high- performance video codec designed by an independent group of open source developers).[1]

I see people demonizing MPEG and espousing reliance on Google and FB as the way forward, but it's not clear to me that everyone fully understands the implications of that approach.

[1] Query whether Theora counts--it was based on an originally proprietary, patented codec.

<comment><USER4> I think that's the only excerpt from the blog post suggesting that companies will do this research out of good will. The reality is that this work is largely being done by academia and government research groups for now and it's unclear that MPEG is pushing the state of the art forward more than incrementally.

There's also the idea that our personal medical data (which is only a portion of all genomic data currently but it's increasing rapidly) should be entirely open to reading, no licenses required.

<comment><USER5> It's not good will. It's in their interest to have better compression ratios and higher quality video.

<comment><USER6> It's in all our interest to have better codecs. Self-interest is called good will when it benefits everyone.

<comment><USER5> It's in all our interest to have better codecs, but not at any cost. Only if you are serving billions of videos a day does it make sense to freely contribute improvements to codecs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "barrage of 12 patents from GenomSys"

Based on the patent titles (I'll see if I can read some of them in detail tomorrow), most of these sounds almost exactly like the code I wrote while working at the JGI[1][2][3] in the early 2000s that managed moving large amounts of reads from the ABI (Sanger) sequencers, running it through phred/phrap, and storing it all so the biologists could access it easily. This included a custom Huffman tree based encoder/decoder to efficiently store FASTA files at (iirc) about ~2.5 bit/base (quality scores were just stored as packed array of bytes), a _very_ large MySQL backend, and a large set of Perl libraries that provided easy access to reads/libraries/assemblies/etc. It was certainly a "method and apparatus" for "storing and accessing" \+ "indexing" bioinformatics data using a "compact representation" that provided many different types of "selective access".

I even had code that did a LD_PRELOAD hack on (circa 2002) Consed that intercepted calls to open(2) to load reads automagically from the DB. Reading Huffman encoded data in bulk from the DB (instead of one file per read) reduced the network bandwidth required to open an assembly with all it's aligned reads by ~90%. That sounds a lot like "transmission of bioinformatics data" over a network and "access ... structured in access units". It defiantly involved "reconstruction of genomic reference sequences from compressed genomic sequence reads".

They may have a more efficient compression method, and we didn't do anything re: "multiple genomic descriptors" (was that even a thing <2004?), but... no... they didn't invent what is basically a bioinformatics-specific variations of the same methods used everywhere in the computer industry for as long as "text file formats" have existed.

[1] [https://jgi.doe.gov/](https://jgi.doe.gov/)

[2] These are my personal comments and opinions only, which are not endorsed by or currently affiliated with the Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or the U.S. Department Of Energy.

[3] While I have no idea if any of that code even exists today (I left the JGI in 2004), I _did_ mark the source files with the BSD license, since there was historical precedent.

<comment><USER8> > ~2.5 bit/base

Given that there are four bases, i would have thought you could reliably do it in 2. What am i missing?

<comment><USER7> At a minimum there were two additional symbols:

"N" for uNknown, where the raw sensor information - which should be a series of nice Gaussians[1 top] - was too ambiguous/low-quality for a useful basecall, but the presence of _something_ can be inferred from the timing information[1 bottom, with "N"s in some bases]

An additional unused bit pattern was reserved for future emergency additions. It used the longest bit pattern so future additions wouldn't be balanced properly, but I wanted something simple, guaranteed binary-compatibility, that could handle a sudden change in requirements.

In some situations, a variation was used that included a few symbols for partial basecalls like "unknown purine" (A or G) and "unknown pyrimidine" (C or T).

[1] [http://image.slidesharecdn.com/binoinfo-8-141021112354-conve...](http://image.slidesharecdn.com/binoinfo-8-141021112354-conversion- gate02/95/7-11-638.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Makes sense, thanks. Back when i was phredding for a living, i had the luxury of just cutting off the file when the quality of the read got dodgy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If there are really patents protecting this format, it makes it a complete non-starter for a great deal of work (commercial and academic). Posts like this scare me. I don't want to devote effort to support a format that I might not be able to use in the future. The only thing that I could think of that _might_ work is putting the patents in some sort of defensive portfolio in much the same way that the Open Invention Network protects Linux.

I understand the desire to develop bioinformatics file formats in a more disciplined way than we have done in the past, but this process seems like it may be more of a pain than a benefit. Unfortunately, I couldn't see some of the MPEG-G talks at ISMB this year (other talks were concurrent).

Could anyone explain what the benefits of the MPEG-G format is over something like CRAM? I mean, we were already starting to get close to the theoretical minimum in terms of file size. I personally would like to see more support for encryption and robustness (against bitrot) in formats, but this could be done in a very similar way to current formats.

<comment><USER10> I agree, the comparison with CRAM is in the whitepaper of MPEG-G. But the author of the blog has some more recent posts, where he is very skeptical of the claims made with respect to the CRAM format. It's worth the read.

<comment><USER11> Disclaimer - I am the author of the blog.

There are no "comparisons with" CRAM in the MPEG-G preprint, only comparison between CRAM and DeeZ, taken from the DeeZ paper. Those comparisons are fair and correct, but obviously were done at the time that paper was written - <USER2> 4 years ago. Since then CRAM has moved on (as has deez), but modern CRAM generally beats modern DeeZ if we restrict ourselves to the formats that permit random access (DeeZ has a higher compression non-random access mode).

So far there have been no direct data on how well MPEG-G does bar an old slide from a year ago; ISMB talk I think.

[https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/sites/default/files/events/Mat...](https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/sites/default/files/events/Mattavelli.pdf)

From that we can glean some compression ratios at least. I attempted to compress the same data set with CRAM, but that data set, while public, is in FASTQ format instead of BAM. I asked for author of the talk how he had produced the BAM, but got no response. I tried my best stab at creating something similar, but it's not a satisfactory comparison yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How did MPEG get involved in genomic data? I thought it was specifically chartered by ISO for audiovisual formats.

<comment><USER13> Interesting isn't it? As a biochemist I can see only a slight correspondence between a sequence of audio or visual data and of genetic data, (as a contrary notion, there is only a small statistical expectation of correlation between frame N and N+1 for DNA data; yet a lot between whole sequences in terms of evolutionary homology). But yet there it is plopped right in the middle of the wikipedia standards page[1]. Likely more easily explained from the business point of view than science.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, they got a lot of patents for DNA compression standard MPEG-G. But there is no way to get a license of it? That's unusable standard for 20 years!

What are they thinking?

</comment><comment><USER15> All MPEG standards have patents and this one is not an exception. If companies are interested they can license its use (assuming fair terms). This is far better than having proprietary formats which are locked or formats made by a single company which you don't know the patent situation clearly. Also, companies involved invested in the development of this standard and expect some return.

What I don't like in this post, is the call for non-adoption when the author has a competing format (CRAM) for which the patent situation and the performance is not clear. It seems a biased opinion.

<comment><USER11> I am the author of _an_ implementation, although not the author of the file format itself. Although yes that it is still a fair point if you look at just the one blog post. However there are a series of them where I clearly explain the process and my involvement, so don't just look at the last.

I agree though the message would be better if it came from a third party. I was hoping this would happen, but it didn't look likely before the GA4GH conference (where both myself and MPEG were speaking), so I self published before that to ensure people were aware and could ask appropriate questions (to both myself and MPEG of course).

As for royalties, CRAM comes under the governance of the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health ([https://www.ga4gh.org](https://www.ga4gh.org)). They stated explicitly in the recent conference that their standards are royalty free (as far as is possible to tell) and promote collaboration on the formats / interfaces, competition on the implementation. For the record, we are unaware of any patents covering CRAM and we have filed none of our own, nor do we intend to for CRAM 4.

<comment><USER15> I recognize that I only have read the last post and had searched in the past for royalty information about CRAM and never found it. Thanks for your answer.

In my opinion, there is clearly the need to assess both solutions with clear and meaningful data, not only in terms of performance but also in terms of patents. Conferences are a great place to do it and thus, I completely agree with you.

However, I don't see an MPEG standard as evil (or ugly) and I do think that both types of standards (CRAM and MPEG) can coexist. Every company should decide (based on factual information) what is the best solution for their needs and if the MPEG standard brings some advantage, a company may use it despite the licensing costs. The same happens for video coding standards, where the patent heavy HEVC is nowadays used in some scenarios (e.g. iPhone) and the royalty free AOM AV1 is used in others (e.g. streaming video). It is up to the market" to decide. The main problem with MPEG-G is that the licensing information is not known yet since it didn't reach draft international standard yet.

<comment><USER16> CRAM is a standard that was started at Sanger/EMBL/EBI and developed freely in the open by the genomics community over the past decade. As others have told you, it is royalty free and unencumbered. The work behind the first version of the standard was published in 2010 ([https://genome.cshlp.org/content/21/5/734.full](https://genome.cshlp.org/content/21/5/734.full)). Since then CRAM has undergone many revisions and improvements from a plurality of sources, and is widely adopted among users whose use cases demand genomic sequence compression.

MPEG-G at this point is a three year old attempt to patent troll the genomics community and grab money. The people involved are not experts and are not aware of the actual state of the art or motivating requirements in sequence compression, and are instead trying to dance their way around prior art, as evidenced by the contents of their patents and presentations.

There is no equivalency here to fit your worldview.

<comment><USER11> Some of the MPEG-G authors are experts in genomics data compression, while others are experts in video compression. It should, in theory, be a good mix.

MPEG _are_ also well aware of the prior art. The authors of various existing state of the art genome compression tools were invited to one of the first MPEG-G conferences where they presented their work. Do not assume because they do not compare against the state of the art, that they are not aware of its existence or how it performs. It's more likely simply that "10x better than BAM" is a powerful message that sells products, more so than "a little bit better than CRAM". It's standard advertising techniques.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is a mistake to take for granted that "more technological advance" is worth the price society would pay for it. That price, imposed through patents, is unacceptable in this case.

We are better off if other people encode in older, less efficient codecs that we can support in in free/libre software, than if they encode the files a little smaller and we are forbidden by the MPEG patent portfolio to handle it with free software.

See [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-literary- patents.htm...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-literary-patents.html) and [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/limit-patent- effect.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/limit-patent-effect.html).

You'll note that I do not use the term "open source". Since 1983, I have led the free software movement, which campaigns to win freedom in our computing by insisting on software that respects users' freedom. Open source was coined in 1998 to discard the ethical foundation and present the software as a mere matter of convenience.

See [https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point.html](https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html) for more explanation of the difference between free software and open source. See also [https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme- hustler](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler) for Evgeny Morozov's article on the same point.

Which one you advocate is up to you. If you stand for freedom, please show it -- by saying "free" and "libre", rather than "open".</comment>


MUTUAL TAIL RECURSION FOR FUN AND PROFIT [Scala] - <AUTHOR> http://www.oweinreese.com/blog/2016/6/15/mutual-tail-recursion-in-scala <comment><USER2> Please change the title so it's not in ALLCAPS. This is not explicitly in the guidelines, but it's between the lines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment>


The World of Medieval Dogdom - <AUTHOR> https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/world-medieval-dogdom <comment><USER2> >These old-time hunting dogs reached a high degree of training, but the methods used must have been something of a trade secret, for not much is divulged – far less than was written on how to train hawks.

The "old time methods" are as varied as the modern ones but not likely to be much different in practice. It will depend on the person running the pack.

If your hounds are hunting for themselves, they'll do it differently. If they're hunting for their people, they'll do what their people want. You just need to let them know what that is. The ability to tell a pack "we need food now" or "we're looking for something sexy for the idjit on the horse to kill" is still a valuable skill, which takes years to learn plus years to build a pack.

Gratuitous puppy anecdote: My coon hound brought home a raccoon, by herself, some months after I gave up hunting with her for health reasons. "We ain't been out for a while daddy, so I brought you one!"</comment>


Ask YC: Help with how to save data from crawler - <AUTHOR>

Hi all!
We are creating a web spider/crawler for experimenting with classification of sites.  We are at a point where we can't make a decision and I was hoping someone out there who has done this kind of thing before might help us make a decision.
Here's what we are doing as an experiment
1. Taking 1-2 million domain names and crawling index page plus approx 10 internal pages based on whatever links we get
2. The above will be done in a polite way so not to overload the resulting server and the spider will have a link back to us.
3. We want to run 3-4 downloaders on individual machines and we are using either Twisted or Pyro to do this
The above bit we're OK with and its done.  We have two options we think for the next stage. Either:
- Push all downloaded data into mysql to process and for our parser machine to access and parse/classify
or
- each downloader saves the data as a file to its HD and then our parsing machine takes this information across the network
I can't find easy information about how search engines save their data (into a database or just locally to the filesystem) and we kind of feel at this end that it is fundamental at this point to decide on the correct path.
Any help or advice appreciated.  Even criticism :)
John <comment><USER2> When you are working on big problems, it's sometimes easy to let yourself get stuck on some unimportant decision. Usually it's a sign that you are unsure of something more important but you don't want to think about it.

If you just want to run an experiment on 10M pages, then use whatever you feel comfortable with. The important thing is NOT files vs sql but whether your classification idea is worth spending time on. Who cares if it's inefficient? That's not what your experiment is about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Smells like 500GB of data. I'd save keep the crawled data in filesystems on the crawling boxes. Then you can load your mysql database and when it fails because <<insert-unforeseeable-circumstance>> you can take another shot at loading it from your data.

After you resign yourself to working with a subset of the data in mysql you will learn how to compute what you really want to know and write a fast processor to just scan the spooled data you have on your search machines and put that into the database instead of the raw data.

[[edit: maybe 500GB instead of 5TB, got a little crazy on my zero key in bc]]

<comment><USER4> I agree that initially you should dump it to a local filesystem. Since this is an experiment you don't want to get bogged down in DB performance details.

Also, if HD space is a concern, occasionally tar/zip up a bunch of the data. HTML is very redundant and I'd bet you could squeeze 500GB of HTML down to < 50GB, even more if you have a lot of pages from the same site.

Really, a lot of this depends on what resources you have available and how you want to process the data later on. If you are classifying pages independently of one another then why bother pooling them to a centralized DB? Just run your classifier on each node and pool those results instead.

An alternative solution is S3, which I've used for crawling storage before. Its not ideal for data processing since you have to constantly pull data over the network, but its an easy way to get centralized storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Take a look at what is out there.

If you run a simple crawl with Heritrix (as example) you'll notice it stores everything in 'ARC' files which are basically compressed (zip) archives with an index to access individual records (via offsets).

I would avoid sticking everything in a database, although you could probably get away with it -- but I agree with aristus that it probably doesn't matter at this point.

Another idea is that you could look at a static html dump of Wikipedia and see how their structure their tree (three letter prefixes)

On the flip side, having it in the DB will probably be easier in terms of managing it (one place to backup) and possibly as an easier way of splitting up workload across multiple boxes -- ex: three boxes could query db, suck down all pages for a couple hundred domains, do processing, insert when done

</comment><comment><USER6> > I can't find easy information about how search engines save their data (into > a database or just locally to the filesystem) and we kind of feel at this > end that it is fundamental at this point to decide on the correct path.

There are other possibilities, including both local and remote datastores that aren't really databases.

However, their approach doesn't matter because your problem is significantly (>1000x) smaller and different (for one, you're not running continuously).

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know what the big search engines do, but storing the data in a database for the single purpose of parsing it later sounds a bit unecessary. If you are only using the database as storage, the file system will do a better job.</comment>


Earth's magnetic North pole is officially moving rapidly - <AUTHOR> https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/article/earths-magnetic-north-pole-is-officially-moving-rapidly-may-cause-trouble-to-military-nasa-airports/361092 <comment><USER2> The obvious connection is to climate change and polar ice melt.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's not as if the magnetic pole is constantly in motion or anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting !!!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to Kickstarter? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on several LED lighting projects for the last five years, and the latest is quite close to coming to fruition. It's a pretty awesome little gadget, fully open-hardware and open-source light with a 10W RGB+white LED and an arduino core that I'm targeting trying to sell for $70 each.
Unfortunately, the time it's taken me to design this has meant that I haven't had a full-time job in over a year. So, I don't really have the $40k or so it'd take to build 1000 first-run units.
As such, my first thought turns to kickstarter. But they charge 5% fees on the project, plus the 3.5% credit card fees, plus I may have to pay Philips patent royalties (probably not since these are prizes, not sales), plus I may have to do FCC certification tests (probably not since these are prizes, not sales), the list of "incidental" expenses goes on and on.
I think I might be able to do better if I could do something equivalent to kickstarter pre-orders on my own website, but how does one go about managing an eskrow of this kind? Is it possible, or is the only reason it works because kickstarter is there to manage it and make sure that the eskrow works properly? It may not sound like much, but that 5% overhead fee is a noticeable chunk of my revenue; enough that I have to remove components from the light to accommodate it.
If anyone is curious also, here is a link to the schematic: http://db.tt/ResLCCbY
It started with a lot more stuff, then got pared down to almost nothing, then had a lot more stuff added again, and then got pared down again... I think that everything that's left is going to be legitimately useful and cool to have available. <comment><AUTHOR> Oh, if anyone is curious, the older projects are at:

<http://led-artwork.com/>

and

<http://saikoled.com>

Neither website is very good, just some html I threw together to get something online. Naturally I would significantly improve those sites when I'm shifting from "show and tell" to "trying to sell stuff for realz".

</comment><comment><USER2> Also, this: <http://selfstarter.us>

built by the guys behind Lockitron (<https://lockitron.com/>) because there were issues with kickstarter.

but don't forget: having a donation/payment setup all wired up does not ring the cash register just yet. it's 90% promotion, 10% collecting payments.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome stuff! Ditto the comments that the biggest challenge will be getting your name out there. Depending on your focus and bandwidth, the DIY approach of Lockitron may work, or you may wish to just go Indiegogo/KS and focus on the promotion side yourself and let someone else handle the payment plumbing. You'll have to promote either way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just charge 5% more. Think of all the work to build, maintain and market your own selfstarter site. It's not worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm open to the idea, but I feel like $70/system is about the sweet spot for this, if not on the high side already. I'd rather be at a $50 price point; I think that at that price point they'd find all sorts of new applications.

If I raise that to $80, I know that I personally start going from "that sounds reasonable" to "that's almost $100". And since I've been trying to get a product off the ground for five years, I feel like I have a reasonable sense of what "too expensive" looks like for what will largely be considered a toy.

I am curious as to thoughts of whether the 5% kickstarter tax is worth the possible additional exposure from going through the big crowdfunding site. I've seen Rock the Post, and now indiegogo, but since I had never heard of either before a few weeks ago I feel like they can't possibly be as popular.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget it's 5%, not 50%. That means $50 will become $52.5. Not a big deal.

Indiegogo is also hugely popular. They charge 4%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion about Indiegogo. I guess I'm just not very in the loop. Too old or something ;-)

I realize 5% isn't that much, and I have seen enough projects fail due to penny pinching that I want to allocate value as value deserves. But for my margins, 5% of $70 is $3.50 -- the same cost as my entire case... I'm just nervous about it being quite tight while feeling like I'm already at the ceiling of what I can ask for in price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'm working on a similar project: <http://www.indiegogo.com/aircubus/>

been using indiegogo after kickstarter seems to be very cocky about identify validation (bunch of great e-mails).

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks very nice! Do you have a microphone on there? It seems to be responding to music quite quickly for having to go through a computer and web server. Either way, very impressive.

Feel free to copy anything you like from my schematic if it'd be helpful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why not charge more to account for that 5% overhead, FCC certification, etc. ?</comment>


Square's scary and impressive identity confirmation screen - <AUTHOR> http://zaidfarooqui.com/squares-scary-and-impressive-identity-confirmation-screen/

<comment><USER2> If you've ever done a credit report, you'll recognize these questions; these sorts of questions are standard fare.

I suspect it's not Square doing them, but rather, they're just farming identity verification out to another vendor who already does this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm fairly certain that they are using 3rd party service to run these checks. It's a well-established industry with banks, credit unions, car dealerships, etc as their clients.

</comment><comment><USER4> Banks, credit card companies know a lot about you - residences, employment history, family history etc.

All the data is tied to your SSN.

<comment><AUTHOR> They never took my SSN.</comment></comment>


Video: Urgent Messages from Italians in Coronavirus Quarantine - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/nMY0-4p9P-M <comment><AUTHOR> The word "quarantine" derives from the Venetian word "quarantena" meaning "40 days" separation due to the Black Death because "trentine" (30 days) wasn't long enough.</comment>


Named Data Networking [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://named-data.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tr-ndn-0019-ndn.pdf

<comment><USER2> This has been on my radar ever since Van Jacobson's 2006 tech talk. Are you involved in this somehow? I want to help make this happen, as in really build the network, just writing more papers isn't what's needed at this point.

</comment><comment><USER3> get it</comment>


You are not our product (Apple) - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/15/tim-cook-on-privacy/

<comment><USER2> I seem to recall a story about a man who got arrested because she asked Siri how to hide a dead body.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/murder-suspect-asks-siri- wher...](http://www.businessinsider.com/murder-suspect-asks-siri-where-to- hide-dead-body-2014-8)

Somehow the Police were notified that this man asked Siri how to hide a dead body. I'd say that Apple does collect some sort of data on the user. The gives it to the police in case of crimes.

NSA Backdoors?

[https://prism-break.org/en/categories/os-x/](https://prism- break.org/en/categories/os-x/) Apple, Google, and Microsoft are allegedly a part of PRISM. Their proprietary operating systems cannot be trusted to safeguard your personal information from the NSA. We have two free alternatives: GNU/Linux and BSD.

[https://prism-break.org/en/categories/ios/](https://prism- break.org/en/categories/ios/) iOS and WP are proprietary operating systems whose source code are not available for auditing by third parties. You should entrust neither your communications nor your data to a black box device.

That is open for debate.

<comment><USER3> That Business Insider post about the Pedro Bravo case is false. It was widely reported that Bravo asked Siri "I need to hide a dead body". But actually, he just had a screen shot of Siri. It was in the cache of the Facebook app on his iPhone.

Here's the story that BI refers to: [http://www.independent.co.uk/life- style/gadgets-and-tech/flo...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life- style/gadgets-and-tech/florida-man-accused-of-killing-his-roommate-asked-siri- where-to-hide-the-body-9665437.html) The Independent eventually corrected their story, but Business Inside didn't bother to.

Here's some other stories:

Media mistake goes viral: Pedro Bravo did not use Siri to search for spots to hide a body [http://www.gainesville.com/article/20140813/ARTICLES/1408197...](http://www.gainesville.com/article/20140813/ARTICLES/140819792?tc=ar)

No, Pedro Bravo Didn't Ask Siri Where to Stash His Roommate's Body [http://www.wuft.org/news/2014/08/13/no-pedro-bravo-didnt- ask...](http://www.wuft.org/news/2014/08/13/no-pedro-bravo-didnt-ask-siri- where-to-stash-his-roomates-body/)

Murder accused DIDN'T ask Siri 'how to hide my roommate' [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/14/siri_how_can_i_dispo...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/14/siri_how_can_i_dispose_of_a_corpse/)</comment></comment>


Apple responds to Spotify with words, but no real answers - <AUTHOR> https://char.gd/recharged/daily/apple-responds-with-nothing <comment><USER2> Apple:

> Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify's aim is to make more money off others' > work. And it's not just the App Store that they're trying to squeeze — it's > also artists, musicians and songwriters.

OP:

> Apple saying that it's "trying to make money of others' work" while ignoring > that the App Store is doing exactly that on an unprecedented scale by > restricting choice is truly ironic.

<comment><USER3> Not just the app store but Apple's music store as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple is pretty much saying "I own all the rails and it's ok for me to compete with the transport companies that use them". This might not be ok in EU, but US doesn't give a sh*t. No matter how much developers, songwriters, consumers, etc get screwed by some greedy corporations. $1000 is not enough for a phone, we still need to pay 30% of all the apps we're using... It's a crazy world.

<comment><USER5> Then don't buy an iPhone?

<comment><USER4> That's how ended up with Comcast...

<comment><USER5> Comcast has a natural monopoly given by the government to do last-mile internet, that's why they get to be the sole provider, Apple has no such monopoly, that's why you get to choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The App Store is a voluntary system for all developers. Nobody is forced to write apps for the iPhone—and Apple did put a lot of work into making the ecosystem work very well for developers. Whether they deserve exactly 30% of revenues is a valid debate, but there is no doubt that Apple's efforts adds value to the market.

What has Spotify done for anyone? What is so genius about saying "hey, you can have this really cheap product because we've somehow convinced our suppliers to sell us the product for next to nothing!"

<comment><USER7> Negotiating product for next to nothing seems like an attractive offer to whoever their customers are.

Spotify is much better than any of their competition.

<comment><USER6> So then what's the problem? They have a cheaper supply chain, they have (according to you) a better product and their biggest competitor isn't attempting to undercut them. And the vast majority of their revenue isn't filtered through Apple's 30%. They've got nothing to complain about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apple's official response (direct link): [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing- spotifys-c...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys- claims/)

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems like an overly emotional interpretation of things, written in an intentionally aggressive style.

Are there any lawyers here who can actually make an interpretation of the situation free of emotion and PR speak? I still don't understand the fundamental basis for why Apple is legally obligated to "play fair" on the App Store. Reasons I've heard that don't make sense to me include:

\- XYZ, inc. made a business on the App Store, so XYZ should be free to pay a cut to Apple that is intuitively "fair" in some vague sense, simply because their entire business is on the App Store.

\- 30% just sounds intuitively too much, so they aren't playing fair

\- 30% is higher than other, vaguely related platforms charge for vaguely related services, so that means it's unfair simply because the number is higher

\- Apple also makes apps that sell the same types of subscriptions, so Apple should be fixing prices of competing services at a point where...? Spotify can make a profit? Consumers are just always charged the same amount for any "music app" from any competing company? This seems to be the one that a lot of people hang their hat on as the nuanced way to look at it.

"No, but it's about the _competing product_ they offer, they _undercut_ Spotify's price." etc.

But, undercut what? Spotify's price point relative to their current business model? I don't understand the argument here. Spotify is another business. We're not talking about some minimum wage thing for a person where you have a moral imperative to keep the price above a certain point, inherently.

I don't understand why any legal system should be forced to take Spotify's current business model as the peak optimal one possible, and then say that they couldn't possibly lower their price to match Apple's competing service without irreparable harm to their business. Why does any of this matter, legally? Companies make money, industries grow and fade, niches pop in and out of existence as paradigms shift, business cycles up and down. What are the laws that mean Apple must be civil with Spotify here?

<comment><USER10> The main issue is that Apple doesn't allow you to use any other payment method - even via linking to a website - to use in-app purchases.

Take this analogy: Apple is a city and has exclusive say over whether or not you can build a brick-and-mortar store on their land. Apple here exclusively owns all of the land, and won't let anyone else build on it without their permission (required distribution via app store).

In the current situation, Apple is saying "you can rent the land here for free, as long as you give us 30% of your sales". As per their press release, A bunch of game apps take advantage of the free property and make money via ads, which don't give Apple any cut of the revenue.

Spotify is complaining that, in order to build on Apple's land, they have to pay this 30%. They say "fine. we'll pass the cost on to the consumer." and institute a $13/month charge instead of $10.

Now that Apple sees music streaming is a profitable market, they build a store right across the street from the established Spotify store. Since Apple is both the city (who takes a 30% cut) and the store itself, they can decide to make the consumer price $10/month without actually losing any profit as Spotify would. This makes a bunch of iOS (iOS-only) Spotify customers cancel Spotify and switch to the cheaper Apple Music.

Now Spotify is angry, and is taking it up with the state government (EU).

<comment><USER9> >they can decide to make the consumer price $10/month without actually losing any profit as Spotify would

What in the world does this really mean though? What do you mean "without losing any profit"? How do you know what Spotify vs. Apple Music operating costs are? Why should they have equal operating costs? I just don't get this exact part of the whole argument. So what if they undercut Spotify, maybe Spotify should take 30% less profit when they sell using Apple channels?

<comment><USER11> Let's assume neither Spotify or Apple have a crazy price advantage in the licensing of music.

Spotify and Apple Music get to keep $6.99 of the $9.99 they charge users. They are both forced to pay $3.00 to Apple App Store.

See how this helps Apple out a huge amount? One side has a 30% cut taken, the other has to deal with having their accounting made more complicated.

<comment><USER9> I am in no way trying to deny that an advantage exists for Apple & Apple Music. Can you explain why that's a legal problem for them though?

<comment><USER11> I didn't know we were talking legality. The point raised above was "So what if they undercut Spotify, maybe Spotify should take 30% less profit when they sell using Apple channels?" I was trying to point out that it is economically unlikely Spotify has a 30%+ profit margin.

Legal problem _may_ exist in different areas. Ianal, but I wonder about Spotify's claims, refuted by Apple, about locking them out of watch and app store rejections. I am also interested in the practice not only requiring payemt though Apple, but banning any mention of other ways to purchase the same product.

<comment><USER9> >banning any mention of other ways to purchase the same product.

What's the problem with this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw it is possible for netflix to direct user to a website to update his/her payment method. On the other hand spotify is not being allowed to develop such button in their app.

Netflix and spotify both delivering digital goods.

Why does such policy difference exist?

I asked apple officials and waiting for a reply.

We also have a digital goods transaction based app.(digital photo) We are also not allowed to use such button. Why does netflix have that option to use such thing?

</comment><comment><USER6> If I was advising Apple on how to react to this manufactured crisis, I'd use it as an opportunity to voluntarily raise whatever royalty payment(s) go directly to the artists.

They already pay more to artists than Spotify, but the best way to win the argument is to make the comparison comprehensively unambiguous. Turn it into a competition on which service supports the artists more.

<comment><USER13> Neither of them pay artists. They pay labels. And then labels pay artists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wait a minute. Apple actually directly addresses most if not all of the Spotify claims. I did not read the entire article but this is absolutely not true. I don't think Spotify has a leg to stand on here. I'm all for equal opportunity, but aside from being a music sharing service, what have they really done? Apple built the platform, store and payment system. Spotify is welcome to complete with something better.

<comment><USER11> Apple built the platform, store and payment system. They invite developers to make services available on said platform.

If Apple decides, they get into the same market and compete with a 30% price advantage. That's hard math to beat in business.

And that's ignoring Spotify's other claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's an argument of rent-seeking vs rent-seeking. Apple technically has a right to a cut on all purchases made through their platform; however there may be a conflict of interest in this case as they own one of the direct competitors to Spotify (Apple Music). Regardless, at the end of the day the artists are the ones that lose out on $$$ and are getting screwed.

<comment><USER6> The difference is that everyone who interacts with the App Store platform does so knowingly and voluntarily. (And Apple adds value for developers and for consumers, which means it's not technically rent-seeking.)

Whereas the artists who make music didn't do so with the intent of publishing on Spotify.

<comment><USER16> Unless I misunderstand you, artists who own their music and don't intend to be on Spotify aren't on Spotify. When artists make the choice to sign the ownership or their music away to someone else, they face the potential consequences of that choice.

<comment><USER6> Correct.

I am, however, specifically talking about the music that is available on Spotify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I feel like Spotify has 3 arguments:

1\. Apple music too cheap

2\. Apple tanks Spotify app

3\. Apple's 30% is too much

For them Apple responded:

1\. Spotify has much more freeloaders than paying users, so it has to be more expensive than Apple Music

2\. Responded in length, that Spotify is not special, and got same treatment as anyone else

3\. Responded that same as Spotify, far from all apps are payed, and infrastructure is shared by everyone. So 30% cut is not to support only paying apps, but all the App Store.

I am pretty satisfied with Apple's answers.

<comment><USER12> I don't agree with 2.

I saw it is possible for netflix to direct user to a website to update his/her payment method. On the other hand spotify is not allowed to develop such button in their app.</comment></comment>


My new Roomba + iPhone 4 = this video - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/14894913

<comment><AUTHOR> The opening and closing shot were done with my roommate's 7D. The rest of it is about half an hour (squeezed into a couple minutes) of iPhone 4 resting on top of the Roomba.</comment>


The Oculus Rift Made Me Believe I Could Fly - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/08/oculus-rift-birdly-fly/

<comment><USER2> > The consumer version of the Rift should be out in about a year.

Yeah, and will I be able to buy one and use it without Facebook keeping a permanent record of everything I do with it (tied to my real name of course)? Will it refuse to work unless it's online? I was really looking forward to the Oculus, but man ... if there is an alternative that doesn't have FB integration, I think I'll buy that instead.

<comment> TD-Linux Sadly, the license of the library used to talk to the Oculus Rift (libOVR) is also under very restrictive terms - you can't use it with competing systems, can't distribute it in part, and lose the license if your users have health or safety issues with your product.

With the source code available, it's hard to make a clean-room reverse engineered version of the hardware communication layer and shaders.

I haven't actually seen the source code, so maybe me and someone with a DK2 could do it by sniffing USB packets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder, what do you guys think virtual reality do to the tourism industry ?

<comment><USER4> VR won't replace going there. But, it's a huge improvement over not going there. In practice, saying "Most people do not go to most places." is a bit of an understatement. Therefore, VR can be a huge improvement for most people.

<comment><USER5> Completely agree. My grandma is afraid of driving & flying but she loves to watch travel TV shows. I think a VR headset with travel content would be great for people like her and would really improve her quality of life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty neat. What other potential, non-gimmicky solutions could be built with VR this way? What about 10 years from now?

Also, who remembers the movie: FireFox, with Clint Eastwood? :)

<comment><USER7> "You must think in Russian... You must think in Russian. Do you think you can do that, Mr. Gant?"

<comment><USER6> Haha, Yes! Thanks. That post make me smile; well done Madam/Sir.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Correction:

Virtual reality goggles and the Birdly apparatus made them think they could fly.

The copious references to Oculus make me think the Facebook PR team have swung into action, to try to bolster waning interest in Oculus after the disastrous sellout to Facebook.

I'm eagerly awaiting an Oculus alternative, having canceled the DK2 plans. I don't really want to be tying my code into the horrendous Facebook codebase and agenda.

</comment><comment><USER9> Video: [http://vimeo.com/91069214](http://vimeo.com/91069214)

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone SCUBA dived with an Oculus Rift yet?

<comment><USER11> Will probably be awesome too. However, actually going scuba diving, for real, is much easier than going on a flight like that. Closest thing is probably hang-gliding, which is much more dangerous than scuba diving.

<comment><USER12> I can't go scuba diving at all, so I would especially love to see it. To me it has a different kind of thrill/interest factor than flying or hang-gliding anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Birds are for wimps. Make it do a Night Fury.</comment>


Flywheels for energy storage -- Pros and cons as compared to batteries - <AUTHOR> http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8428

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a fascinating article looking at the somewhat low-tech (at least in its early incarnations) flywheel for energy storage, relative to batteries.

The charts are great for comparing the Specific Mass and Specific Power of different devices. In particular, while traditional batteries can store more energy in a smaller place, flywheels show promise when energy needs to be quickly absorbed or deployed, for instance in breaking / accelerating.

I was awestruck by this statement:

"[A] flywheel with 1 kg and occupying about half litre could store the energy needed to bring a car moving at 100 Km/h to a standstill."

The article also mentions some interesting tech involved in the newest flywheels: interesting materials and magnets to reduce friction.</comment>


Working class white men make less than they did in 1996 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/05/news/economy/working-class-men-income/index.html?iid=hp-stack-dom <comment><USER2> This was an interesting view on pay:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-28/health- ca...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-28/health-care-costs- ate-your-pay-raises)</comment>


A Quick Buck by Copy and Paste - <AUTHOR> http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-paste/

<comment><USER2> These things always lose me when they start saying gaming has no rewards.

Hopscotch, okay... I don't see a reward to that. But when, as an adult, have you felt the need to play a game on the level of hopscotch? It's a kid's game. And they probably get something from it, but we don't remember what.

Risk? That's a competitive game. Every single competitive game has a reward: An ego boost. Besting someone else at something.

And that's what points are about. That 'press a button for 1 trillion points' game? I guarantee that someone has played a game like that and bragged about their score... Because they clicked more than they think anyone else would have. Bragging rights.

Gamification of most websites loses sight of this. If you can't brag about your accomplishment (or don't want to) then simple achievement-based gamification doesn't work.

And let's face it, people who are 'gamifying' their sites are doing so because they think they can pay a 1-time fee and increase customer loyalty forever. It's not like an actual rewards-based program where they'll have to pay out constantly to maintain it.</comment>


Thinking Straight about Curved Space - <AUTHOR> https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Thinking_Straight_About_Curved_Space <comment><USER2> So a philosopher is going to tell the physicists that the way they're thinking and talking about space is wrong. Priceless.

</comment><comment><USER3> What separates curved space from Euclidean space is not an abstract 'curved path' representation it's the fact there are several different directions you can travel that take you from A->B. Picture someone standing on the North Pole, if they walk a strait line then any direction leads to the South Pole. As to curved space, there are multiple orbits that all lead back to your starting point but that's not really what people think of as curved space.

Gravitational lensing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens) demonstrates that same idea of multiple paths to the same point.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/HST- Smil...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/HST-Smiling- GalaxyClusterSDSS-J1038%2B4849-20150210.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER4> This author has serious cases of both my-intuitions-trump-your-predictive- models and lack-of-joy-in-the-merely-real.

> _The most obvious assault on space is analogous to that which time has had > to suffer: reduction to a pure quantity. Space is translated into points, > lines, surfaces, and volumes; to dimensions or quantitative parameters x y, > z. Places – habitats – are stripped down to decimal places. Much is lost in > consequence._

It's really ironic when people use written examples to complain about symbolic representations being inadequate.

My viewpoint is directly opposite to the author's here; their modus tollens is my modus ponens. Because points and lines and formulas can be used to predict things in the real world, they are clearly not lacking-of-the-original-essence w.r.t. what they represent. Math is not a muted version of reality lacking the core substance, it is _unreasonably effective_ [2].

> _The putative curvature of non-Euclidean space is intrinsic: it is present > at every level above that of an infinitesimally small spatial point. So > resistance to the idea of curved space does not arise from a superficial > misunderstanding that can be cured with the help of a simple analogy. > Rather, it is resistance to the odd idea that emptiness can have any > topology, curved or straight._

The author seems to be assuming that the lack of any topology is equivalent to flat space, i.e. Euclidean topology. Why would that be the case? They have no actual grounds for expecting space to "default to" the L2-norm. Why wouldn't it default to the much simpler L1-norm (i.e. taxicab geometry [3]), or just a disconnected set of points with no distance relationship between them at all?

> _The unintelligible idea of 'curved space' is the product of misidentifying > a system of representation with that which is represented. This habit has a > long history. [...] However, the immense power of mathematical physics – > which requires abstracting from phenomenal reality and the reduction of > experienced and experienceable reality to mere parameters to which numerical > values are assigned – does not justify uncritically accepting concepts such > as 'curved space' that attempt to re-insert phenomenal appearances into its > abstractions._

Curved space is a concept so well defined that you can explain it to a computer. It is the opposite of unintelligible.

The reason we think it's a good model of actual reality, thus justifying the statement "space is curved", is that it makes _new_ , _different_ , and _confirmed_ predictions. If you think it's so easy to come up with an interpretation of general relativity that doesn't involve mixing space and time, _why don 't you learn it and try to do that_? (Fun fact: it's easy to do in _special_ relativity; just pick a preferred rest frame [4].)

1: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/)

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

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

4: [https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-is-the-pfs- policy...](https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-is-the-pfs-policy-on- lorentz-ether-theory-and-block-universe.772224/)

</comment><comment><USER5> What a steaming pile of unmitigated bullshit.

Prof. Tallis has constructed a critique of something he clearly isn't willing to understand: his example of a straight line connecting two points on the earth's surface through means of a tunnel is simply the invention of an extra dimension, a simple concept that even a superficially educated but curious layperson (like me) would recognize.

He creates a bizarre straw man equivalency between 'social space' and curved mathematical space based apparently solely on the fact that they're both labeled by the same word, then kind of axiomatically assigns legitimacy to the former over the latter without any explanation. The whole thing is bizarre in the extreme.

The picture is just wonderful, however.

<comment><USER2> I think Tallis is thinking at the level of the words and the analogies. But the thing is, what the physicists _really_ believe are the equations. (Hat tip to C. S. Lewis, from whom I stole that observation.) Tallis is expecting the physicists to talk in the same way (using the same tools of communication) that philosophers do, and they don't, so Tallis misses the point.

<comment><USER5> Oh I agree. And if you're right, it's a pretty thumping indictment of Prof. Tallis, don't you think? On what basis does he form that expectation? If a man is so conscious of language and meaning that he feels confident dissecting a long-established tool of physics on the grounds of semantics, and he simultaneously ignores the existence of jargon, culture, and context in another field, then I think it's hard to take him seriously at all.

(Sorry if that sentence was hard to parse; this horrid article infected me.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Flagged.

Author is a medical doctor who has written several non-academic books on philosophy. His metaphysics has never been peer-reviewed.

<comment><USER5> That may be a bit strong. There are interesting fundamental links in some of the replies here. He is wrong, but it's educational to understand exactly how he is wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find this funny, because from thinking about the idea of empty space having topology, I went down a path of thinking that given light curves only slightly in the gravitational fields, density variations and scales that we happen to inhabit, and also that we use it as our major sense, reality just happens to look reasonably Euclidean most of the time.

However there are still a few acres missing due to gravity from the earth's surface, and other measurable discrepancies around, so while generally we can observe triangles behaving nicely and stuff, the strength of the concepts of space behaving nicely and straight lines existing is partly an accident of location and biology.

<comment><USER6> Forget about empty space and light, by far the most significant curvature in human experience is _the curavature of the Earth 's surface_ You only need to travel by boat or air (and maybe automobile), or set up some mirrors to bounce light around the Earth (for example: radio), to gain an appreciation of that curvature. But travelling on foot, the curvature is not really noticeable.</comment></comment>


Hands-on with Peach, a new iOS-only social network that feels a lot like Slack - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/08/hands-on-with-peach-a-new-ios-only-social-network-that-feels-a-lot-like-slack/ <comment><USER2> So what is the advantage of this over say Zulip. Or Mattermost. Or RocketChat. Or Kawai? (I'm missing a lot I'm sure.) A particularly great user interface on the iPhone?

<comment><USER3> seems like you can't actually chat with people directly. You can ping them with an emoji but i think all interaction is just like you posting stuff to your timeline or whatever they call it

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really see why I'd use this. It doesn't seem to have any features twitter and instagram don't and it feels something like a strange mix between the two.

I has 'magic words' that are (very) approximately like slack commands. I'm going to be skeptical and say they look to be about user profiling as much as utility.

</comment><comment><USER5> Slack for normal people</comment>


Dogecoin not notable - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dogecoin

<comment><USER2> Dogecoin should probably be on Encyplopedia Dramatica, or Know Your Meme, or Urban Dictionary. Probably doesn't need more than a footnote on WikiPedia.

<comment><USER3> At the same time though, isn't it kind of notable that a 'meme becomes a currency'?

<comment><USER2> I think it's still merely a meme. There are literally hundreds of "altcoins". This one is only marginally more notable than any of those, and those aren't notable except in aggregate, mostly as an attempt by the founders of the coins to cash in. (There are a few exceptions. Litecoin maybe, Namecoin probably, Peercoin possibly.)

Making a new Bitcoin derivative takes a few minutes. The Dogecoin developers didn't even bother to do a search/replace on the word Bitcoin in the source and documentation in the source. It is a very, very, half-assed fork of the Bitcoin code base (I looked, for a laugh).

<comment><USER4> It should be deleted because some people consider it not notable?

Personally I consider it notable because they did in a week more than most altcoin did in their existence. Yeah the modification are nothing more than a CTRL+F with some joke added but what it caused is way more important than that.

Should we delete history for that? As small that history could be for you... I don't believe that. Some people suggested to merge it with Doge (meme) and it's not a bad idea, however I believe an altcoin that's currently worth nearly 3 millions deserve its own page.

<comment><USER2> I think you should probably review the WikiPedia notability guidelines: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability)

I didn't make the rules, I'm just saying I believe Dogecoin fails to meet the qualification for notability. A few blog posts about it and a storm of facebook status updates does not "notable" make, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even so, there are a lot of people using the mining pools. One pool I looked at has 43 Megahashes/s and doge.cryptopool.it has 232 Mh/s going.

<comment><USER4> This minning pool has 2408 MH/s. [http://doge.netcodepool.org/](http://doge.netcodepool.org/)

The current network hash rate is 6100 MH/s. It's impressive for a 1 week old altcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would live to contribute to save it on the Deletion page, but unfortunately I don't have a Wikipedia account.

</comment><comment><USER7> I knew about it before coming to HN today, so i'd say it's at least minimally notable.</comment>


Zoom forces me to install the client, I give up - <AUTHOR> When using a link like https://zoom.us/wc/join/123?wpk=blah I need to solve 2 captchas, every time: pick name and solve captcha, accept terms, click on the link again cuz zoom asks for password even though it is in the link, pick name and solve captcha -> then I join. solve captcha = click on the Buster button, but still (also that fails sometimes)
Some features are only available in the client, why? (You can see all profile pics in the client for example.)
And other stuff I can't prove (like we think the client has less lags).
I swear they just want that I install their fricking client, and I give up. Frick you Zoom, I give up, you may leave the browser sandbox and do what you want...
(No my employer won't stop using Zoom... we tried) <comment><USER2> Maybe you are just not the target audience, or you're in a geographic location that is flagged, or you're browsing in incognito mode?

For the target audience, it happens: Dropbox became useless to me when the client stopped syncing because they dropped support for encrypted Linux filesystems.

Box doesn't have a Linux client.

This makes them exactly the same as the storage services they set to replace fifteen years ago from my perspective.

</comment><comment><USER3> you can go into account settings and enable web-based video

EDIT: you can downvote me all you want but this is a fact, I have just tested it again myself.

</comment><comment><USER4> VMs are something everyone should have installed already exactly for these kind off reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but I won't spin up a VM to answer a call... Also, I think the zoom client is just in Electron, so there's no reason it shouldn't _just work_ in my browser!

<comment><USER5> It is actually written in Qt

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Use Jitsi meeting.jit.si

<comment><USER7> OP mentioned:

> (No my employer won't stop using Zoom... we tried)

I don't think that's going to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thing is, it's still pretty good...so

<comment><USER9> Except when they leak your data to Facebook, or tell you your video's encrypted...

edit: Or open up RCE

Link: [https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2020/06/vuln-spotlight- zo...](https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2020/06/vuln-spotlight-zoom-code- execution-june-2020.html)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445325)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> use it on your smartphone</comment>


Snopes rolls its own crowdfunding infrastructure to prepare for 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/20/snopes-rolls-its-own-crowdfunding-infrastructure-to-prepare-for-2020s-disinformation-warfare/ <comment><USER2> Why bother? If we can impeach a president on hearsay, rumors, and speculation..investigative journalism is dead.</comment>


Why events are bad idea? - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos03/tech/vonbehren.html <comment><USER2> "In many cases, fixing the problems with events is tantamount to switching to threads."

You might also say that implementing a thread facade over an event driven runtime is tantamount to switching to events.

If it makes programming easier I am all for it though.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Couchbase Server under-represented here? - <AUTHOR> While Couchbase Server looks like a viable alternative to MongoDB, CockroachDB, TiDB, or even Cassandra, I see very little discussion about it here on HN in the past few years.
Is there any reason for that? Is the technology not living up to the marketing? Is it not hipster enough?
It looks like a good technology stack with easy to use server administration and integrated features most app can use (e.g. full-text search). I am a bit surprised that it is not featured here. <comment><USER2> I have built applications that uses couchbase both on server side and couchbase-lite on Android. Couchbase with the ability to sync between client and server replication is the best thing to happen and available free (community edition) today.

Unfortunately couchbase-server consumes lot of resource on the backend and it's heavy, which brings an entry of barrier from a start up point of view.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have some numbers about the resource usage that you can share? 4GB minimum memory (16G recommended) is necessarily a heavy requirement given the wide variety of things the server does. CockroachDB may be similar to this, and my servers consume between 1-2GB memory usually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have wondered the same thing. But their strategy was enterprise-first as opposed to developer-first like some competitors.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is AWS so popular despite being impossibly complex? - <AUTHOR> Was planning to move to AWS & consolidate out server from Linode and Digital Ocean.  OMG, it's been like the month from hell!  I've had to spend incredible amounts of time trying to learn AWS & now I have a $1900 bill (highest Linodo bill was $150) b/c I checked the dedicated instance box I was playing around with.<p>I can't put into words the kind of frustration AWS creates compared to Linode or Digital Ocean.  Why the hell are they still so popular? <comment><USER2> Because what VPS providers give you is more or less what only EC2 + EBS gives you. AWS provides ~30 other services which tightly integrate with the rest.

If you used one instance and did it by mistake while trying things out, chat to support / billing. Tell them you're in the process of migrating to them and don't understand the system well - they may cancel/reduce the initial bill just to keep you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointer. I was really freaking out about the crazy bill for checking the wrong box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> AWS can be easy and can be confusing.

If you want to use it like DO/Linode it isn't hard. Just fire up an EC2 server and you are good to go.

It can get confusing when you start linking multiple services together, but many of these services are life savers when it comes to scaling your apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> You forgot the bit about configuring a million options before launching an EC2 instance, the persistence (hard drive) supposedly disappearing if you shut down the matchine, not to mention, the SSH key that you MUST set up in order to access the server. DO is significantly more intuitive and faster.

<comment><USER2> EC2 is not persistent. It uses ephemeral storage and they're pretty clear about it.

The launch is not that complicated - it's 7 pages, most of which you can ignore to go with defaults. You're interested in what you're running, what size, network security, and storage - that's about it for the start.

Maybe you need to just take a break for a while... anger and billed services don't mix well :) Alternatively, if you're just testing, make sure you click "free tier only" at the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Best analogy is knife vs swiss knife. AWS has a great toolset and comes handy when it comes to scaling, at the same time it seems complex if you don't know how to use it.

</comment><comment><USER5> FWIW, I accidentally left a machine running for a month and ended up owing ~$700. I called them and told them I wasn't using it and they gave me the money back. I'd give it a try if I were you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why did you plan to move to AWS? If you just want a fixed set of virtualized servers, they are neither the easiest nor the cheapest option. What's the pain with Linode/DO you are trying to fix?

<comment><AUTHOR> We wanted to use a platform that could implement things like PCI, HIPAA & similar compliance issue we may run into. To be honest, as our startup is getting bigger, we just wanted to start going with a "big boy" solution. Don't have an IT team yet, but after talking to a few potential IT folks, it seemed like AWS was the gold standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Things be hard to learn in computers.Keep trying, it takes time.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is sort of like asking why anyone would want a manual transmission instead of an automatic. Not all of us find the complexity hopeless.</comment>


Re/code removes onsite comments - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/11/20/a-note-to-recode-readers/

<comment><USER2> I'm a re/code fan, but it would be a shame if other sites followed this move. User comments posted in social media are difficult to find after some time has passed, so removing comments from articles makes it difficult for future readers to get sense of the discussion around an article.

While some re/code stories do generate great discussions, most don't. This move is a way for them to avoid reinforcing the feeling that there aren't many readers.

</comment><comment><USER3> See my rant on the HN submission when Reuters removed their comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574156)

...although, in this case, not many people used Re/Code's comments anyways, mostly because it never worked due to a combination of LiveFyre and SSO.</comment>


Unofficial GitHub Atom Windows Builds - <AUTHOR> http://atom.strieber.org/

<comment><USER2> Thanks.

I installed it and initially enjoyed the concept. The settings screen was very pleasant. Adding keybindings was almost a joy.

However, the simple task of navigating between words with ctrl+arrow keys didn't do anything. I'll check it out again in a couple weeks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The newest version fixes issues with package management.</comment>


Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns - <AUTHOR> https://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns <comment><USER2> This is the sixth time this article was posted. It also is somewhat biased, not that anyone wants to have an intellectual conversation about gun control.</comment>


Capital Control Cuts Off Greek Access to iTunes, iCloud, and PayPal - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/capital-control-cuts-off-greek-access-to-itunes-icloud-1715839063

<comment><USER2> Greeks may have cut of their own nose to spite their face.

Given the minimal impact on world markets, it appears the smart money wrote off Greece a while back.</comment>


Visa for Startup - <AUTHOR> What are the best ways to start a startup as a non-US resident? Some possible options (I am not sure about the validity of them all): - Get a CEO having a green card and register yourself with some other position? - Come to US with L1A visa to get green card quickly<p>Do you know how did top companies with non-US founders deal with this? (e.g: Stripe). As far as I know Stripe has Irish founders. Also, I think Romesh Wadhwani of Symphony Group completed PhD in US and later worked to get Symphony started. <comment><USER2> There is this convenient thing called "the rest of the world".</comment>


Visualizations that make no sense - <AUTHOR> http://wtfviz.net/ <comment><USER2> Really amusing, but there is a deeper interesting point here: people are susceptible to the "Rhetoric of Data". Apart from simple mistakes, it seems clear that people are getting _utility that is not related to the information presented_ out of these graphics, and I hypothesize that utility has everything to do with the rhetorical utility of fancy looking graphics, bright colors, and lots of numbers. "Oh," the audience thinks, "I don't understand this but it looks complicated, so the speaker must be very smart and the point they are making very profound."

This is why skepticism is only second to honesty as the most important quality in an organization. Some organizations punish skeptics as being disruptive, but the simple fact is that many times people don't know what the fuck they are talking about, and skeptics are an organization's immune-system. If someone is presenting on something complicated and there are not probing questions, then something is terribly wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> With a little bit of context, the 3D elevation plot actually makes a lot of sense: [http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/haiti20101014img.h...](http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/haiti20101014img.html)

It turns out it's like a continuous contour plot (showing deformation from a Haitian earthquake). Thanks to Google image search, such poorly documented images can be traced back to their source - and context! - quite quickly. This one was on the first page of results.

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this site is missing a lot of content from the news media: [http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/10/01/a-history-of- dis...](http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/10/01/a-history-of-dishonest- fox-charts/190225) (this is specific to FOX but the same can be applied to most other major news sources, too.)

I really want to know the context of some of these, like the social media 'chart': [http://wtfviz.net/image/59427832631](http://wtfviz.net/image/59427832631)

<comment><USER5> I agree. Of course, including the context would make a number of the visualizations make sense, which would defeat the purpose of the site. Of course, visualizations that make sense with no context are the sort I guess the creator of this site likes. Someday, we'll all get our news in nice graphics, without all that bothersome reading and thinking that goes along with context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I physically twitch reading these. It's worst than cringing. It really physically hurts having so much data that I can interpret. Some of this would be interesting info graphs but then I can't glean anything from any of it and that bothers me to no end.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, the sort of graphs you use when you don't want to be understood.

I remember, back when I was doing some research having to explain to people what a standard deviation was and what confidence meant.

There are ways to talk to people who don't know statistics - for instance if you talk about percentages people glaze, however, if you talk about 25 people in every hundred, that's something they can tend to engage with better.... If you use a bar chart, people tend to be used to looking at those. Drop 'correlates with' and use 'relates to' \- that sort of thing.

It seems silly, it's all the same stuff. But some people have addition, division and multiplication as more or less the extent of their mathematical skills - because that's all they've been called upon to use since school. There's nothing wrong with that most of the time, I mean it's entirely understandable, it just means that if you're talking to them half the job is putting it in forms that they can understand.

</comment><comment><USER8> I sympathize with the NASA chart. It was clearly created using IDL, which is powerful but also suffers from allowing lazy scientists to use automatic plot parameters.

<comment><USER9> Even worse is when said lazy scientists plot time series data as a set of images where each image is autoscaled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A basic statistics course should be required for a college degree.

<comment> bun-neh It often is. Whether or not students learn anything is the issue.

Perhaps you could say that basic statistical competency should be required for a college degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually, the 'Becoming a Data Scientist' one is awesome. The caption derisively says 'Disconnected subway map? Sequential, linear relationships?', but that is exactly what it is. I searched for it and read up on it, and the author thought he'd represent learning paths as subway routes. Data science is now a lot of tools, and I got into reading this map. I know probably 20% of the tools there at the moment. Actually, I found and bookmarked that viz, because it's going to be handy. Sure, it's not perfect, but I like it!

</comment><comment><USER11> Could this also be called "data twerking" ?

<comment><USER12> I actually _might_ pay to watch Miley Cirus do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love the pretzel to illustrate "soft"

<comment><USER14> And the pretzel to illustrate "flexible"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's worse than visualizations that make no sense is visualizations that are good at misrepresenting data.

Example:

[http://themonkeycage.org/2013/01/08/how-2012-stacks-up- the-w...](http://themonkeycage.org/2013/01/08/how-2012-stacks-up-the-worst- graph-on-record/)

<comment><USER16> That is a bad example of a bad example. It is clearly labeled and shows what it wants to show: The previously hottest years and the large jump of that record in 2012. How would you have done it better? What is it misinterpreting?

<comment><USER15> The axis should start at 0 degrees, not 53. The 3 dimensionality distorts it as the orange bars slightly angle to the left and makes 2012 look much bigger in relation to the other bars. If you actually plot all the hottest years on a 2d bar chart starting from 0, it gives a much clearer picture of climate change while still revealing that 2012 was indeed the hottest year on record..

<comment><USER15> Also (this may be my personal opinion), but I think people are used to seeing the x-axis encode time. That visualization makes it look like its slowly getting hotter year after year if you don't pay attention to the labels.

<comment><USER17> visualization rule #1: read the labels

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excellent "enterprise" presentation skills! (and this morning's best posted story, IMO)

<comment><USER18> er, I meant "presentment", rather than "presentation".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some illustration forms are bad.

However, if they were demonstrated in an interactive media, e.g. a touch screen tablet, I bet the situation would be quite different, given that some components were designed to be highlighted through user interactions.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's wrong with 'The layered pie slices.'?

<comment><USER20> Apple, at 34%, is almost as big as Google, at 89%.

<comment><USER21> The percentges add up to 130%, too.

Assuming a simple typo, where the 89 should be 59, the pie slices still look wrong to me. Looking at the relative sizes of the 4% and the 3% slices, that might be a rounding issue (could of instance be 3.7% and 3.3%), but the Apple and Android ones look too big to me.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, a typo can explain the total percentage issue.

But I don't see how wrong it would be to use the pie graph in such a way per se. IMHO, the foremost feature of pie graphs, the angle of sector, is kept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> interesting. the anti-grammar of graphics.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is hilarious</comment>


Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/ebook/the-book.html <comment><USER2> In theory yes you could. RL is based on trial and error. The agent senses the environment in the form of states (ligh=state1, dark=state2) and it performs actions according to a policy to receive positive or negative rewards. For example your goal is to have a room always lighten, the agent will sense the environment (it is dark) it will turn the lights on and it will receive a positive reward. Eventually the agent will learn that in order to receive positive rewards it needs to turn on the light when it is dark and turn it off when it is light. Actually RL it is more complex than that but that is the basic idea. If you are interested go to scholar.google.com and search for papers about reinforcement learning. Important authors are Barto, Sutton, Watkins (Q-Learning), Littman, Kudenko, Stone, Clauss, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could I train a robotic hand to catch a ball with this? What would be involved?

<comment><USER4> That might require you to throw the ball in every possible combination, and capture a high resolution time series of its positions, in order to train the AI. Taking into account all the various parameters.

There will also be some heavy image processing, in your motion detection engine.

I recommend you start with a computer screen, and train your robot to follow the motion of a virtual ball on the screen. That way you can control every part of the experiment without a heavy investment in equipment (or all the pesky details of the real analog world.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been here before : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795388></comment>