5 Reasons You Shouldn't Incorporate Your Business - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/01/29/5-reasons-you-shouldnt-incorporate-your-business/

<comment><USER2> I'm confused.

If you don't incorporate "correctly", the author says, then you run the risk of being "very sorry" down the road when one of your founders wants to leave with all her stock in hand.

On the other hand, if you don't incorporate at all, then you can't work with other companies in terms of PO's and invoices, you can't get professional liability insurance for your group, you can't get group health insurance, you can't offer equity to employees, and you can lose your house to a frivolous lawsuit.

What part of the risk of writing that $75 check to Agents & Corporations in Delaware am I missing?

On an unrelated note: you guys got _rolled_ by your attorney.

<comment><USER3> Never understood the obsession with Delaware Corps. You have to register where you live anyway (presumably that's where you make $$$). So what's the big deal with Delaware?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you mean by, "have to register where you live". Apart from all the standard BS about corporate-friendly laws, the reason to do Delaware is simple:

Delaware makes it really easy to incorporate. You pay a small (periodic) fee, and that's pretty much it. You don't have to run an ad in the paper (like you do in NYC!). You don't have to wave a rubber chicken around. You can do it from a web app with a PayPal account, and then a week later have an EIN/tax id.

<comment><USER3> If you want to do business in California (for example because that's were I live) and your business is incorporated in Delaware, you have to "register" the business in California and designate a "registered agent". Plus you have to file & pay taxes in California and then file taxes in Delaware. Any business incorporated outside California is called a Foreign Entity (not kidding).

Here's a link for you

<http://www.sos.ca.gov/business/corp/corp_faq.htm#question8>

I agree the whole "corporation friendly" stuff is BS.

Don't know abut NYC, but you can form a business in CA just as easily. Go to a web page, press the buttons and a week later you get the legal looking documents. I did this to form an LLC.

A final comment. After I had setup my LLC (to do consulting) and I proudly showed up at my accountant's office at year's end, he basically told me I was wasting my time and money. Until you get to $1M is revenue per year lawyers won't go after you (there's no money in it for them). His words, not mine.

<comment><USER2> $1MM/yr is 4 consultants at heavy utilization, or a very good second year of shipping a product, so that number isn't at all scary, but more to the point, my tolerance for risks to my family and personal assets is pretty low.

I guess if you live in California, form a California corp. There are other reasons to avoid Illinois and New York corporations, hence Delaware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the most useful and relevant nugget from this article:

 _I am not a lawyer so I can't pretend to be giving any legal advice._

Edit: I had missed the last paragraph until now...apparently this guy is pushing an alternative to incorporation and is advising against incorporation, but has no legal expertise to be doing so. He's going to wish he had incorporated when someone sues his ass :)

</comment><comment><USER5> 1 great reason you should incorporate: So a business dispute doesn't end up destroying your credit for 7 years.

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny, the company making this software is incorporated. So much for eating your own dogfood.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll add that I went to Guy Kawasaki's presentation yesterday at Plug&Play (introduced by Ron Conway). As usual, great quotes from Guy, plus a free tutorial on twitter. If only this was taped for eternity to pass to fellow entrepreneurs everywhere...

<comment><USER7> I feel like "great quotes" are the only good thing that comes out of Guy Kawasaki.</comment></comment>


When Sears was a startup - <AUTHOR> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/09/when-sears-was-a-startup.html <comment><USER2> There's actually a bunch more parallels I spotted that didn't make the article:

\- User comments. There's thousands of customer letter extracts scattered throughout the book.

\- Transparency. They openly admit some of the really cheap lines are only there to match their competitors' prices, but they don't offer a warranty and recommend against buying them!

There's also a wonderful air of carnival hucksterism around the whole enterprise, your purchase won't just solve a problem it will change your life. That reminds me of the Utopianism I love about the tech world.</comment>


Sony discontinues the Minidisc Format - <AUTHOR> http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/04/sony-discontinues-the-minidisc-format#.URGBTbmNqmc.facebook

<comment> jack-r-abbit I was sure this was going to be one of those "Hey look at this old article I found" type posts for us to laugh at. Who knew the MiniDisc was even still around enough to actually announce they are going to discontinue it? lol</comment>


AOL CEO Apologizes For Public Firing - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/14/211910829/aol-ceo-apologizes-for-public-firing <comment><USER2> > I've communicated to him directly and apologized for the way the matter was > handled at the meeting.

Now you're fired again for making me look like a fool!

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes because an apology makes all the difference - NOT.</comment>


Stuart Russell on "The Long-Term Future of (Artificial) Intelligence" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mukaRhQTMP8 <comment><USER2> I reject his premise that consciousness and purpose are "mystical". But I agree intelligence is essentially computation and that computers will continue to advance. The danger of AI is not that it will become conscious and purposeful but that bad men will get it first.</comment>


Surveillance Capitalism - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism <comment><USER2> Really insightful book, just like her other books. The Age of the Smart Machine (1988) was truly visionary and well written. The Surveillance Capitalism is like bag of unique viewpoints and concepts: 'behavioral surplus', 'instrumentarianism', 'radical indifference' etc. Illustrations are funny.

<comment><USER3> Each time this links get posted to HN someone comments on these concepts but when I google them I don't get much back, would you elaborate on 1-2 sentences of each? (Please?) I'm super curious</comment></comment>


Twitter blocks two accounts on its Turkish network - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-blocks-two-accounts-turkish-network-164247186.html;_ylt=AwrBJSCWAFRT8woA0dbQtDMD

<comment><USER2> >Twitter's global policy team said it withholds content only "after due process", such as after having received a court order, and in a tweet said it would not do so "at the mere request of a gov't official".

This is disappointing. Legal standards on free speech are hopelessly inadequate in Turkey, as can be seen from the existence of court orders banning the whole of Youtube. If Twitter obeys whenever a Turkish court orders removal of content or banning of accounts, it will be assisting in censorship - plain and simple.

As for the specific cases of the two accounts that were withheld: The real content of the leaks are on Youtube, and these two accounts were used to 'announce' the leaks to the public, presumably by the leakers themselves. These accounts were retweeted by tens of thousands of people, so if the contents of these two accounts' tweets were illegal, so were those retweets. Will they ban the retweeters too? I don't think so, and this means Twitter's actions will contradict with each other.

The leaks were important in showing the corruption at the top of the government and should not be censored, whatever Turkish courts decide. Tax avoidance, invasion of personal privacy, etc. all seem to be excuses by the government, created to lull their supporters.

</comment><comment><USER3> And now thank you Twitter. We have just lost our information stream. Our "legal goverment" is so corrupt that nobody cares legal documents, do not process prosecutions but you idiots bow to Turkish government.

Again thank you. Because I respect the HN community I won't swear here.

But feel what I am denying myself to say.

<comment><USER4> It's either that or Twitter will be completely blocked in Turkey. They're playing a tough game but at least it's a game that the Turkish public can play too, as long as you're faster than the censors.

The alternative is for the government to take down the entire game field.

<comment><USER3> They have blocked twitter before, Youtube is even blocked right now. But knowing twitter is starting to bow Turkish government's requests is not assuring anyone.

It's blocking accounts right now. But what may come afterwards is really worrisome. Also Starting with Turkish government will mean other governments will start the same tactics against Twitter.

So any non-Turkish citizen should fear about what is about to come.

<comment><USER5> Or, they just did the expected. Those accounts were unlawful and there were court orders against them. You or I may disagree with it does not matter.

<comment><USER3> Like any whistle-blowing.It's illegal so no one should whistle-blow and any corruption should stay hidden.

<comment><USER6> These accounts will just switch to Russian social media or blogs.mail.ru which have Turkish language support and would be happy to host corruption docs of the Erdogan regime. Then use twitter to spread links to it.

Nothing twitter can do if thousands of Turkish twitter users are linking to pastebin entries and other moving targets hosting links where to get these docs.

<comment><USER3> We have seen haramzadeler switch accounts from @haramzadereler1 to @haramzadeler333 and many numbers in between beforehand. So they will just switch accounts hence it's a matter of time before twitter bows and creates a special api for AKP government just to deny any account they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why accept orders from Turkey and not e.g. Egypt, Iran, etc.?

<comment><USER8> This was the argument of the Turkish government all the time. Why accept requests from Germany, France, UK, USA but not Turkey?

<comment><USER3> Also their argument is Twitter does not pay Turkey taxes?

I, International community, Twitter, Turkish Government (or it equals Tayyip Erdoğan) all know what is at stake. It's never about the law or the taxes. It's just about shutting down whistle-blowers or political rivals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was wondering what the hell their recent tweets referred to: [https://twitter.com/policy](https://twitter.com/policy).

</comment><comment><USER10> Just get rid of Twitter and try Twister instead.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very very disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Haramzadeler does not mean "sons of thieves". It means "sons of bitches." AFP, so prudish.

<comment><USER13> It actually means "The Sinner Family". You're AK it, dont you?

<comment><USER13> It actually means "Sons of Sinners".

"Haram" means sin and "zade" is the "mac-" prefix You're AK it, dont you?</comment></comment></comment>


The Harvard MBA Premium: $1.4 Million - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/05/the_harvard_premium_14_million.html#more <comment><USER2> I'd have expected that median (200K/year for 20 years) to be higher.

<comment><AUTHOR> The number is low because it does not include stock.</comment></comment>


Is it possible to track an IP address that is using a VPN? - <AUTHOR> I was reached out to by an internet scammer via instagram to "invest" into their bitcoin mining scheme. Very obvious this person was using fake pictures and was trying to scam me.
I got them to click on a grabify link and got their IP address, but they are using a VPN. This person pissed me off and I am looking for any possible way to locate them/alert authorities of their BS. Do I have any other options?? <comment><USER2> Replace x.x.x.x with the IP to see who owns it. [1] Reach out to the ip admin, assuming it is not a shady reseller or someone using address space that belonged to a bankrupt company. Don't get your hopes up.

[1] - [https://bgp.he.net/search?search[search]=x.x.x.x&commit=Sear...](https://bgp.he.net/search?search\[search\]=x.x.x.x&commit=Search)

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm not sure what you mean by replacing x.x.x.x with the IP.. apologies, not much of a computer guy here.

I know the provider is M247 Ltd

<comment><USER2> Put their IP in the search box here [1]

[1] - [https://bgp.he.net/](https://bgp.he.net/)</comment></comment></comment>


The challenges gene therapies pose for logistics - <AUTHOR> https://medcitynews.com/2017/10/challenges-gene-therapies-pose-logistics/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know this is ripe for parody, but this sounds like a perfect blockchain problem:

"...therapies must be transported on time and in pristine condition both to and from the manufacturer and ultimately to the treatment site for patient administration. Delays and inconsistent temperatures can reduce the viability of the therapy"

1.) You have a product that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit.

2.) It needs to change hands multiple times during the production process.

3.) If KPIs fall out of range at any point in the chain of custody, its value falls to zero.</comment>


Testimony of a surgeon working in the heart of Italy's coronavirus outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ff8hns/testimony_of_a_surgeon_working_in_bergamo_in_the/ <comment><USER2> I find it interesting all this happened in Wuhan over a month ago but we are just starting to hear actual in person stories.

And I think it's mostly language. Censorship plays a role, but less than language.

Anyway this will be in your own community soon, so you'll be able to talk to mates about it in your local dialect.

You'll always have the lag from Wuhan which is x weeks ahead, a little time machine. You can easily extrapolate how bad it is, but it seems people need the finer details of a person telling a story.

[edit] Also a interesting comment how they are using surgical masks in the thread, how cheap(or any) N95/FFP3 masks can't be supplied seems like a issue we should have thought through. We put a lot of money talking about attacks, not so much preparing it seems.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ff8hns/testimony_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ff8hns/testimony_of_a_surgeon_working_in_bergamo_in_the/fjx9ywr/?context=3)</comment>


The Dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-dawn-of-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/283730/ <comment><USER2> The thing that's so aggravating about this article is what is so aggravating about AI: the arrogant comparison of software systems to true intelligence. The examples cited by the article are emphatically _not_ "intelligence" as we understand it: Siri isn't, Watson isn't, Google's self-driving cars aren't. They represent algorithms (clever, in many cases) executed by a stored-program computer -- or many. They take advantage of what computers are really good at: the ability to perfectly execute endless streams of simple instructions with astonishing speed; the ability to access vast quantities of data with zero error; and the ability to reliably transmit that data to one another. These innovations also reflect the fundamental brittleness of the machines that implement them: the machines can only do exactly what they're told -- and if they're told to do the wrong thing, they will gladly do it. The intelligence, then, is purely in the humans that are programming and engineering the thing -- not the thing itself. I understand that this distinction is entirely lost on those who have no understanding of what's behind the curtain -- but we do a broader disservice when we pretend that our adept sleight of hand is, in fact, magic.

And my apologies for just speaking the truths that many here already know; over my decades in computer science, I have tried to hold my tongue whenever the AI cultists scream at passers-by that the singularity is near -- but every now and again I must scream back for my own sanity.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't seem like you actually read the article, but are just commenting on the title. They're not saying any of these innovations are true intelligence. What they're saying is that computers (and robots) are starting to do things that until recently were thought to be solely the domain of humans. They're saying that we're at the start of a new industrial revolution (a second machine age) which will lead to enormous increases in productivity.

This article focuses on the positive effects. In their book they actually spend quite a lot of time discussing potential negative effects as well, such as unemployment. You'll be glad to hear that they agree with you that jobs like programming and engineering will be ever more important in that world.

<comment><USER2> As much as I might like to deny it, I did, in fact, read the article:

 _Because the exponential, digital, and recombinant powers of the second machine age have made it possible for humanity to create two of the most important one-time events in our history: the emergence of real, useful artificial intelligence (AI) and the connection of most of the people on the planet via a common digital network._

"The emergence of real, useful artificial intelligence" is what I dispute; if the article chose to describe this as the "emergence of real, useful, algorithms and systems to address meaningful problems" then, fine. But of course, that isn't news, either -- it's merely the story of humanity in a sentence: it is us using our bipedalism and our oversized brains to do what we have always done to survive and thrive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ugh, I know this is par for course, but these kind of articles really irritate me. Especially passages like these:

> _People with connected smartphones or tablets anywhere in the world have > access to many (if not most) of the same communication resources and > information that we do while sitting in our offices at MIT. They can search > the Web and browse Wikipedia. They can follow online courses, some of them > taught by the best in the academic world. They can share their insights on > blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other services, most of which are free. > They can even conduct sophisticated data analyses using cloud resources such > as Amazon Web Services and R, an open source application for statistics._

A. What does this have to do with artificial intelligence?

B. Access to technology does not equal access to ability to use that technology. I would argue that the problem isn't that people don't have access to powerful statistical processing and analytical software, it's that they don't know what to do with it, or with the plenty powerful software that has been available to them in the past decade. The parallel construction of "Everyone can now share stuff on Facebook" with "Everyone can now do statistical analyses via R and Hadoop!" is a gross error of characterization by the OP.

<comment><USER5> Search is an AI problem - computers have to try to return decent results.

Facebook has to crop photos in an optimal way - they do a pretty good job of that.

Either of those feel closer to AI than compression, which is sometimes given as another example of an AI challenge.

<comment><USER6> Compression doesn't seem that smart on the level of 'gzip'. But one can also look at what the brain is doing when learning (and classifying stuff into conceptual clusters) as also being compression. Given the enormous theoretical 'capacity' of the brain (however defined), the compression may not be required for space reasons - but it potentially serves an interesting function in terms of understanding.

<comment><USER7> _" Compression doesn't seem that smart on the level of 'gzip'."_

If I give you a pile of text, what compression ratios would _you_ achieve by hand?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What scares me the most is that by the time we have the technology to bring this artificial intelligence very close to our limbic system and subconscious mind, our computers (smartphones, desktops, tablets and other) will be so totally and thoroughly monitored, throttled, spied on, back doored, and censored, that we will be presented with the choice:

1\. Refrain from getting enhanced, and suffer the consequences of limited ability and limited existence. 2\. Get enhanced, and start the slow march where people aren't individuals anymore, we are drones in a collection of drones, with a queen.

But hey, maybe that's the best thing ever to happen to our species, to become half and half. Half of the humans become like a hive of bees or colony of ants, and the other half sees if separate and individual free agents is able to perform better. Then the wars that come later will see which one natural selection selects.

<comment><USER9> _people aren 't individuals anymore, we are drones in a collection of drones, with a queen._

Isn't this the best solution long term? Makes sense to me.

<comment><USER10> I'm starting to think that an intelligent species with the social hierarchy that we have, can only go to a certain level of advancement.

Then it becomes impossible to move further, without changing the social schema. Possibly into a hive form, where everything is easier to manage.

From an engineering point of view, it's the perfect choice: easy to manage, easy to enhance, divide labour and what not. From a social point of view, yikes.

Is there a branch of sociology or something that study the effects of different social schemas?

<comment><USER11> But then we might not have come here without our social hierarchy, exactly because it is harder to manage. It makes people want to outsmart each other. (This is actually a hypothesis in evolution theory.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> AI is limited more by language than anything else. NLP which I do a lot of work on at [http://plexinlp.com](http://plexinlp.com) goes a long way, but the computer doesn't have the ability to get metaphors, or sarcasm, or have any sort of "BS" detection.

CoreNLP (which isn't as good as our NLP but is the "standard" only gets the parts of speech right 95% of the time, by words, but about 75% of the time by sentence. Imagine you were a waiter and you only understood 75% of sentences. You'd not last too long.

But somehow we expect computers which not only are limited to 75% of sentences being "tagged" correctly, but then not having any idea about the concepts behind them.

AI as we see it today is not so much "AI" as it is Computer Driven Bucketing. Build a formula that gets as many things in to pre-sorted buckets as possible. For me it isn't AI until the computer can make leaps of its own. Create a new bucket and explain why it was needed, or create a new solution that wasn't proposed by the programmer.

I am working hard to bring all of that to fruition, but honestly we are a long ways off.

Here are some milestones I think we will need to hit before we get to AI.

Software powerful enough to convert Wikipedia (or any knowledgebase) to structured Data automatically.

Query system that takes any user input and converts it to something resembling a Database query (This is what I'm working on)

NPC's for Games/MMO's etc that pass a turring test with in the limits of their Virtual world. (Basically they don't have to pass for real, just as real as the DnD character a human would play)

These are really "simple" milestones that are the step before we see true AI start to work.

<comment><USER13> But why do we need to judge ai by our language? if were dealing with data and images, machine learning does do impressive things,including things that if were done by researchers would have certainly gotten them a place inside respectable academic journals.

For example ,a machine learning algorithm devised a new internet protocol that doubles the network capacity over best known methods.Another famous machine learning system understood own it's own how to classify images what belongs to the bucket of "cat" and many other object types.

Why isn't this enough to be considered intelligent?

<comment><USER12> Because those aren't Intelligent, they are just "handy".

Sorting doesn't require intelligence. You have X number of attributes and using them you do your best to get as many things in to "Like" buckets as possible.

Discovering new attributes is the start of intelligence. Discovering new buckets could be intelligence.

If the machine gets 100k pictures and can sort them in to Cat vs No Cat, and then suggests a new set of classification "Indoors vs outdoors" using attributes the developer didn't pre-identify that would be intelligence.

<comment><USER13> Google's famous experiment did something similar: it offered the machine plenty of content(from youtube) and the machine on it's own discovered the category "cat", and others.

<comment><USER12> You don't seem to want to have a discussion. So this is my last comment.

It was given all the possible traits. It didn't find a new category it had a collection of things with known traits. Google knew it would be able to find cats using the traits it was given. That's not intelligence on the computer's side.

If I tell you that there are things with lungs, things with gills, things with legs and things with arms, things with hair, I don't have to tell you there are mermaids and salamanders, you will figure it out when not everything fits in the bucket of Cats and goldfish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As much as I'm looking forward to all the shiny tech I can't help but feel anxious about the implications for humanity as a whole.

e.g. Right now the poorest of the poor can still resort to back breaking repetitive work to survive. If the tech keeps going then soon these people will not be able to compete...at all.

Its a recipe for inequality magnified 100x & I don't see the social fabric surviving that.

<comment><USER15> Something's going to have to give. If we don't plan for a peaceful transition, it will happen without planning, in a not-so-peaceful way.

We need to start thinking about basic income sooner rather than later: [http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/02/09/should- governmen...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/02/09/should-government- pay-you-alive/aaLVJsUAc5pKh0iYTFrXpI/story.html)

<comment><USER14> >basic income

Personally I oppose the idea - kinda. To be more precise I would prefer a system that stacks the odds in their favour heavily rather than "free money". e.g. Give them their cash...but make them guide school kids across a dangerous road in return. i.e. Extract some (extra) social benefit from it.

Makes little financial sense either way, but I'd much rather have them do the school kids thing & collect cash than sleep & collect cash.

<comment><USER15> Some people talk about "Guaranteed Minimum Income" as a conditional income guarantee, as opposed to an unconditional "Basic Income"

I don't feel strongly (either approach would be an improvement over the status quo), but I suppose I mildly agree with you. I think human beings need to have some Work to feel like their lives have meaning. Even if we made GMI conditional on 10 hours a week of charity volunteering, that could have positive mental health outcomes.

<comment><USER14> >need to have some Work to feel like their lives have meaning.

Agreed.

Vaguely relevant story time for 1st world crowd: In my country (South Africa) it is illegal for the public to refuel their own cars. There is dedicated staff that does nothing else all day - essentially behave like restaurant waiters but for petrol stations.

Realistically the law is only in place for job creation purposes - it is by most measures unnecessary. And yet I've come to appreciate it: I don't need to leave my car. The people handling flammable liquids do this all day long & received training - much better than random McDonalds munching idiots. Credit card speedpoint gets brought to my car window, windscreen washed, tyre pressure checked etc. I end up (voluntarily) tipping 0.5 USD - a drop in the ocean. I have a million problems so a guy making my life easier there & smiling whilst doing so...I'm totally ok with carrying him on my tax/fuel bill.

<comment><USER15> In the United States, Oregon and New Jersey also require an attendant pump gas for you. Supposedly gas stations have lower insurance premiums as a result.

<comment><USER7> _" Supposedly gas stations have lower insurance premiums as a result."_

I didn't know that part - presumably not lower enough to cover the wages, though, or we'd see it done voluntarily elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> AI is marching forward relentlessly. It may or may not be as close as most people think, but were are still getting there within a generation or two at most. Meanwhile almost nothing is being done to solve the friendliness problem. Since it seems to be much more complicated than building normal AI it may never be solved. There might not be a solution - our morality and values are just a bunch of messy evolutionary heuristics, and abstract concepts are hard to define concretely (eg "a human is a bunch of atoms in this specific configuration, but not this specific configuration. It's ok to kill one but not the other.")

Humanity's odds aren't good.

<comment><USER17> The effects of AI are an extension of human will. We will succeed or fall with or without AI. AI will only be a factor or artifact in this process, not its determinant.

<comment><USER16> AI brings the possibility of creating minds literally _millions_ of times more intelligent than humans. That kind of power is unimaginable to beings in a world where the dumbest village idiot still shared 99% of his brain structure in common with the greatest genius. An AI will either solve all our problems pretty much instantly, or crush us like ants.

It definitely the dominate factor in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How many times now has the age of AI been heralded without it ever actually arriving?

<comment><USER19> It's arriving right now. I can speak in plain English to my smartphone (or any other language really, it knows more human languages than I do), cars drive themselves, the world's billionaires are now focused on rapid AI development, etc. There are so many things different this time around that you shouldn't be so pessimistic. "It's different this time" (it actually is though)!

<comment><USER20> I am optimistic, but there were dolls capable of playing musics back in Medieval Age, I feel like e.g. Siri is one of those things.

<comment><USER21> The difference to me is that the dolls capable of playing music were made up of a small set of parts compared to 15 million lines of code for Wolfram Alpha. We are way more sophisticated today.

<comment><USER20> You chose a bad example. Wolfram Alpha is like 15000 of such dolls. Not an AI in any way though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Current AI does not even have a intelligence of rat, we are somewhere around insects.

<comment><USER23> In terms of general intelligence, that's probably true, but in terms of accomplishing tasks that are useful to humans, AI is far ahead of rats. There are many useful tasks that I can get an AI to do for, but practically none that I can get a rat to do for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I feel like this article is just another aspect of the bubble. We have people on the sidelines-- intelligent people, but unaware of what the "tech" industry is actually doing-- cheering on something they hardly understand.

Look, Google is a closed-allocation company. So, I believe, are Apple and Amazon and probably Facebook. Socially, we're stuck in the 1980s. If people at the 99th percentile of technical literacy are still stuck mindlessly churning tickets in closed-allocation environments-- note that basic research funding has fallen off a cliff in the past 30 years-- and raising VC is _still_ more about playing a feudal reputation economy than anything remotely approaching excellence, then what are most of the world's 7.1 billion people going to be able to contribute to this brave new world? Nothing. They'll have no leverage, nor the resources to learn what they need to learn because they'll have to spend all their time on basic survival. The only thing that seems to await the majority, barring some unforeseen social or economic right angle (the long- term odds of which are quite high) is joblessness.

We can't even deliver basic healthcare to middle-class Americans anymore, and here we have the gall to say that humanity's approaching some technotopia?

<comment><USER25> I don't understand how this seemingly random bunch of statements strung together is the top-voted comment in this thread.

<comment><USER26> Most of the times things we don't understand appear as random.

<comment><USER27> It's not random, just needlessly obfuscated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hey, fuck your invisible auto playing video/audio!</comment>


Ask HN: We have a promising app prototype and don't know how to proceed with it - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
We have a nice application prototype, which works decently.
We're planning to share it publicly to get some feedback. But, we're a bit afaraid of our app being copied and made production ready faster than we can do. We currently only have IOS app, but, both a web app and android app are also requires.
We also have shared the app with some investor, but, we haven't heard back them. We're living in a far away country and so face-to-face meetings with the investors are also not a realistic option for us.
We believe our app could become successful. Do you guys have any advice for us on how to proceed? <comment><USER2> Don't be afraid. Get a list of feed back questions ready, find people in your target market and let them try it, see how much they would pay for it...could be eye opening.

</comment><comment><USER3> > But, we're a bit afraid of our app being copied and made production-ready > faster than we can do.

Don't worry, only the most successful apps get copied.</comment>


The Tuesday boy problem, in under 300 words - <AUTHOR> http://mikeschiraldi.blogspot.ca/2011/11/tuesday-boy-problem-in-under-300-words.html <comment><USER2> The original article is more interesting and sheds light on the hidden assumptions that go into the calculation. It also considers under which sets of assumptions the answer is not 1/2.

[http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2011/11/08/the- tuesday...](http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2011/11/08/the-tuesday- birthday-problem/)

The attempt at shortening it down to under 300 words omits all the complications and subtlety involved in the problem.

<comment><USER3> > Now, we should mention at this point that we are discussing mathematical > children who have no existence outside the world of probabilistic > brainteasers. So we're not worrying about the fact that a disproportionate > number of children are born on Mondays and Tuesdays, since C-sections aren't > usually scheduled for the weekends. We're also not worrying about twins or > triplets. Or any other sort of "real world" consideration that might occur > to you.

The one that occurred to me is that the probability of getting a boy or girl is not 50%, and the probability of getting two same-gender children is not 50% either. Here are some nice real stats: [http://www.in- gender.com/XYU/Odds/Gender_Odds.aspx](http://www.in- gender.com/XYU/Odds/Gender_Odds.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I dislike about this question is the flavor text. It seems designed to mislead the reader by invoking their "realism node," and then requiring them to suspend it.

From archgoon's link:

> "This puzzle confounds people _legitimately_ , however, because most of the > ways in which you are likely to find out that X has at least one boy contain > an implicit bias which changes the answer."

Exactly right. The phrasing in the problem asks the reader to consider a particular scenario, not isolated facts. Consider what happens if you take the question at its word:

> If a person on the street says to you, "I have two children," what is the > probability that they're both boys?

Hell if I know. Maybe one is a boy and the other is a grown man? Or maybe he has five children, BBGGG. "I have two children, both of which are boys" is technically correct if there's two boys and three girls, right? Or maybe he's just outright lying! How do I assign a probability to any of those?

Consider this phrasing instead:

"If you flip a coin twice, and the first and/or the second is heads, what's the probability that both are heads?" I'd expect more people to get this right than the boy/girl question.

Also, as an aside, punctuation is important:

"I have two children. At least, one of them is a boy."

(Yikes!)

<comment><USER5> "I met a man on the street, he said he had two children. I asked him, is at least one of them a boy? He said yes. What's the probability both of them are boys?"

This removes the whole ambiguity of why he would assert "at least one of them is a boy," but still makes the question a bit tricky/counter-intuitive, which is useful for teaching the quirks of probability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is incorrect. There's no reason to assume that the stranger will say, "at least one of them is a girl" only in the case of GG.

In the case of BB, the stranger will always say, "At least one is a boy." Given GB or BG, they have even odds of saying "at least one is a boy" vs "at least one is a girl." Given GG, the stranger will always say, "At least one is a girl." The correct diagram would be this: [http://abughrai.be/pics/boy_probability.png](http://abughrai.be/pics/boy_probability.png)

For the probabilities in that post to apply, the stranger would say, "I have two children." Then you ask, "Is at least one of them a boy?" and they answer, "Yes."

Edit: Of course, the answer to, "Given there are two siblings and one is a boy, what are the chances both are boys?" is 1/3\. But the phrasing of the puzzle does not reflect that question.

<comment><USER7> Fine, then I pose to you the same problem description, with the added fact that the stranger is proud of having a boy, will only draw attention to a boy and will thus say "at least one is a boy", independent of whether the other is a girl, while he would never say "at least one is a boy".

You can't solve a logic puzzle by arguing the psychology of a persona depicted in the puzzle.

<comment><USER8> You can't solve a logic puzzle that way, but you _can_ explain the pragmatics of why the "logical" answer is contrary to our expectations based on interaction with real people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Afaict tell the initial range of possibilities is:

GG GB BB

The relative ages of the children play no part, they could be twins for all I care. So the initial probabilty of being BB is 1/3\. Knowing one of them is a boy then removes GG as an option, and the probability for BB unsurprisingly becomes 1/2.

What am I misunderstanding in this problem?

<comment><USER10> It matters if the assumption is that possibility of each child being boy/girl is 50%.

The first child can be boy or girl. The second child can also be boy or girl. So the probabilities are like this: BB: 25% GG: 25% BG: 50%

You can replace older/younger on the article with child 1/child 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What occurred to me is that as more conditions are added to the question the answer seems to tend toward the naive assumption of 1/2 (in his explanation 0.25, 0.33, 0.42, 0.48). This is like a strange cross-over between word problems, probability and unbelievably calculus. Essentially:

lim[generic -> specific] f(P("is one child of two a boy")) = 1/2

Obviously I have no proof for it but it is an interesting observation.

</comment><comment><USER12> What if they are twins? The explanation does not cover that and it sure changes the probabilities.

<comment><USER13> If we're going to bring reality into this, I think we have to take into account the fact that only very weird people tell you that "at least one child is a boy born on a Tuesday" and we have to consider the possibility that they are lying in order to test your knowledge of probability.

<comment><USER14> And if we're _really_ going to bring reality into this, then we'll need to consider the ages of the children, because of the at-birth sex ratio (105 newborn boys for every 100 newborn girls[0]) and differing mortality rates for each sex.

[0][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "I have a two children, one of which is a boy. What's the probability the other is a boy?"

Intuition wrongly treats the possibilities as sets and assigns probabilities 1/2 BB, 1/2 GB, rather than 1/3 BB, 1/3 GB, 1/3 BG.

</comment><comment><USER16> This explanation ignores the two perspectives of probability - assertions on states of the world (the "frequentist" view) vs. states of the mind (the "bayesian" view).

See also [http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/)

<comment><USER17> As far as I can tell, that blog post contains a "bait and switch." Here it is:

> But suppose that instead you had asked, "Is your eldest child a boy?" and > the mathematician had answered "Yes." Then the probability of the > mathematician having two boys would be 1/2\. Since the eldest child is a > boy, and the younger child can be anything it pleases.

No, it cannot be "anything it pleases." That is the whole _point_ of the blog post that we are all commenting about here on HN, which is re-told on the blog post you are linking to.

Since the post you are linking to is misrepresenting one side of the "argument," I strongly suggest that there is no actual apparentl contradiction here that needs to be resolved.

Yes, you can talk about the actual probability of something vs. making the best possible prediction you have. A good example raised in this post is the point about a biased coin; you know it is biased but not which way, so you assign odds of .5 for heads and .5 for tails. Fine. This is not some massive philosophical conundrum.

The fact is that actual knowledge is neither purely "out there" (e.g. "in the cards") nor purely "in here" (in the mind). This is the classic rationalism vs. empiricism debate, which was settled by Ayn Rand's theory of objective knowledge, where she answers that knowledge is in man's mind, but it is knowledge of external reality. So, "both."

Not understanding this, and other basic epistemological errors, seem to plague lesswrong.com. It is embarassing to see them supposedly championing "reason" under a non-objective epistemology. They come to bizarre conclusions, and that is, at least partially, why.

<comment><USER18> Ayn Rand _settled_ the age-old epistemology debate? I don't think so.

<comment><USER17> Well, there are only five reasonable ways to disagree.

(1) Do you hold that concepts and principles are purely "in" the referents?

(2) Do you hold that they are purely "in" man's mind?

(3) Do you hold that they are "in" man's mind, but refer to properties of the referents? (Rand's conclusion)

(4) Do you hold that Rand's argument and conclusion is correct, but somebody else made it earlier?

(5) Do you hold that there is insufficient evidence to answer the question (which then raises questions about why you would even engage in an intellectual discussion)? For example, you could "argue" for a subjectivist view of knowledge.

An actual answer along the lines of 1-5 would be useful, but stating "I don't think so" does not provide any reasoning, and thus is utterly devoid of intellectual content.

You seem to be dismissing a theory without considering and responding to its evidence, which is fraudulent science. Nobody wants to see that kind of "argument," even people who nonetheless do agree with the conclusion.

I do think you have the intellectual right to merely state that you disagree, but you have to say that you don't intend to defend it, or let yourself be subject to having it pointed out by someone, as I am.

That is because too many people today hide behind the assumption that agreement or disagreement without evidence presented is enough to establish or disestablish truth. As I said before, that is fraudulent science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is wrong.

In oversimplifying your table for potential idiot readers by introducing the silent variable of older vs younger child, you have introduced _order_ into a statistics problem wherein order is irrelevant and _masked the fact that what matters is which of the children you already know to be a boy_. You grant this difference for the BG pairing, thus producing two options, but not for the BB pairing. There is not ONE way of knowing this for BB, as you present in the table, but two: you know the older is the boy, or you know the younger is the boy. 2/4 = 1/2\. QED.

What you should have done in the first place, however (unless your aim is to produce a blog post which, apparently, can convince otherwise intelligent people that irrelevant information can magically become relevant) was simply remove the one boy from the equation and reformulate the question. What is the probability that this other child is a boy (and thus that both are boys)? 1/2\. Fuck the table. Had you not used a table, this would never have happened. But it _feels_ authoritative, right? Thank you for the psychology lesson.

.

.

.

Downvotes but not refutations, because there aren't any. I'll assume it's my tone. My opinion of the competence of the average reader on this site has plummeted reading the other comments, however, so hey, fuck you guys too. :)

<comment><USER20> I did an experiment: I kept flipping two coins [1]. If it came up tails, tails I ignored it. If it came up heads, heads I noted it down in one column. If it came up heads, tails I noted it down in another column. After many flips the ratio was 1:3.

As far as I can tell this is an accurate simulation of the problem. We have two things, coins or children, which have a 50:50 chance of being one value or another. We are told one combination of values isn't the case, so we discount them from the simulation. We then use the frequency of the target combination to approximate its probability. We haven't added any artificial ordering into the problem.

I know it's not well argued logical reasoning, but it supports the articles approach. Can you point out where I tripped up in the simulation?

[1] Of course I didn't actually sit there flipping coins. I wrote a program to do it. (let [sample-size 10000000] (/ (get (frequencies (take sample-size (filter #(not= % [:girl :girl]) (repeatedly #(vector (rand-nth [:boy :girl]) (rand-nth [:boy :girl])))))) [:boy :boy]) sample-size))

<comment><USER21> Instead of actually programming, I flipped 2 coins this morning and left them on my desk. They are still sitting there. Either HT, TH, HH or TT

I just remembered one of them is tails, so is there is a 1/2 chance that they are both tails now? Nope it's 1/3 chance they are both tails. Either HT, TH, or TT.

<comment><USER20> Of course that's a much simpler way to simulate the problem, but then you get people trying to argue that HT and TH should be collapsed into a single state.

By using a simulation with repetition it's easier to pose the states as 'TT' and 'not TT' and use frequencies to show 'not TT' occurs more frequently than 'TT'. I find this starts to help convince people that the states shouldn't be collapsed, even if it doesn't explicitly explain why.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Washington's rush to smash tech's liability protection - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/washingtons-rush-to-smash-techs-liability-protection-deb16ceb-580a-4125-909a-ba786ab07edb.html <comment><USER2> On the one hand it seems completely reasonable that websites like HN should be able to both display user generated content without liability, and also apply moderation at will. On the other hand that kind of negates the distinction between a neutral platform and publisher. Any platform could display user generated content, but curate it via moderation to only show the opinion of its owners, which makes it sort of equivalent to a publisher, but does an end run around the standard rules of liability for such an entity. I really don't know what the best way to handle this is.

<comment><USER3> Curated user generated content and a publisher are very different and this needs to be distinguished. This has been mixed quite a lot in the past few weeks of events.

While it is theoretically possible to moderate to th point they are close to each-other, this is not the reality of any of the cases being discussed. Such draconian levels of moderation will kill any community that was not already a full echo chamber without diversity, and not in the "oh Facebook is an echo chamber" way but in a true, cult-like following fashion.

Affiliation vs Promotion vs Allow - Publishers have directly affiliated authors. Algorithms and manually curated sets within UGC are promotion. Most all other social postings are simply "allowing". These distinctions are important, and arguably each have different legislative implications.

<comment><USER2> I don't think they are as different as you say. Take the example of the NY Times and Youtube. Both accept content from unaffiliated authors, monetize it, and pay the authors. They both apply censorship based on the ideas expressed by those creators (note the recent censorship of Tom Cotton by the NY Times). Why should the NY Times be liable for what it runs but at the same time Youtube avoids this liability?

<comment><USER4> Say YT censors after publication, NYT censors before. If you're liable either way, then the first model is just not possible.

<comment><USER2> Well that brings me back to my first point that on the face of it, the business model seems perfectly reasonable. I brought up Tom Cotton specifically because in that case the NYT moderated after publication like YT, but in any case I don't see why when the moderation is applied should determine liability or lack thereof.

<comment><USER5> In the real world, _when_ something happens is very important.

Applying moderation before publication is _active_ moderation, so everything that appears is approved by the "publisher." Applying moderation _after_ publication is _reactive_ moderation, so things the publisher disagrees with could get published.

It's like the difference between shooting someone to death and shooting a corpse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was a big thread about this yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550215).

I'm not seeing SNI (significant new information [1]) in this submission, so I think we need to downweight this thread as a follow-up [2].

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[2] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20follow- up&sort=byDate&type=comment)

</comment><comment><USER7> Rush? Are you kidding? If anything our policymakers have been delayed, led around with blinders on, unawares to the issues arising from tech's influence on society, for a decade.

If you don't think that these social media tech companies have done something fundamentally changing to our society and political process, then you've got a head in the sand. And at some point, like corporate finance in elections, the situation could grow to where they cannot even control it any more, and are just pawns in a social media game.

I'm not saying that Washington policymakers will handle it right, and should go headlong into poorly thought out action. But the idea that we have been in a rush to do something too soon, and should wait and see some more to figure out what's happening -- that is a joke.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel like attacks on 'the media' and so forth we'll see this just grow into a larger ball of cynicism about everything and everyone just clings to their given biases, ignorance, and ideology.

</comment><comment><USER9> The silver lining here is that this could potentially push companies to shift user generated content to data models that protect privacy in order to absolve the platform provider from any responsibility. Signal for example has avoided information requests thanks to their architecture that respects privacy.

</comment><comment><USER10> I find it remarkable that HN readers can be simultaneously in favor of Net Neutrality and in favor of censorship. How can these two opinions coexist? The flipside is also true: I find it remarkable that conservatives are _against_ Net Neutrality and censorship at the same time.

Whereas the right answer looks pretty obvious to me: I'm for Net Neutrality and against censorship.

<comment><USER11> Net neutrality is itself a (soft) form of censorship, in that you're taking away a private party's ability to make pricing decisions on information transfer. That said, I find it much less objectionable than what e.g. Facebook and Google are doing - mostly it just has negative economic consequences.

<comment><USER10> > taking away a private party's ability to make pricing decisions on > information transfer

Seems like it's a soft form of anti-censorship then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's very clear what is going on here, and it's concerning that none of these articles actually point it out. None of this is meant to go through. It doesn't matter if it will be struck down on First Amendment grounds, or if it will eventually lead to removal of more content. What does matter is how much money it will take to launch legal defenses, that the process will drag companies through the mud, and that it will not be over until after the election.

The timing of when this has started is not a coincidence. There are enough months left before the election to make a lot of noise and scare the companies, but not enough time for it to actually be resolved. During this time, they will be able to drum up a support on how bad "these liberals" are trying to censor conservative voices. All of it is a show to whip up The Base to come out to vote and "save our freedom".

These moves are meant as a warning to companies that the government plans to tie them up in legal proceedings for years if they don't fall in line.

Anyone making arguments about the logical end results (if these things go through) has missed the point.

<comment><USER13> Sort of a SLAPP suit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Welp, looks like if you decide to edit what people post you become a publisher. Just like it says in Section 230.

</comment><comment><USER15> Big tech gave up moral right for that protection as soon as they decided to interfere with what is posted. Its like claiming that you don't generate any of the content, because you "just" select what to ban from an endless stream of randomly generated content.

<comment><USER16> Moderation was explicitly considered as part of the reason for section 230. What are you basing your opinion on?

<comment><USER15> How many people on twitter were banned for "eat the rich"?

<comment><USER17> The parent's point is not that tech companies are unbiased or shouldn't be criticized for their bias, it's that §230 _was originally adopted specifically to allow subjective moderation_. It's a misconception that the law was predicated on a neutrality or objectivity obligation. Instead, it was meant to _reverse_ court decisions that suggested that such an obligation might exist as a requirement for protection of intermediaries. §230 was meant to _allow_ intermediaries to be protected while exercising editorial control.

That doesn't mean that platforms' actual editorial control is "fair"; it just means that the argument that platforms should obviously have to lose §230 protections over their editorial biases misrepresents the history of this legislation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act#Background_and_passage)

<comment><USER15> Shuting out half of a political spectrum doesnt strike me as the original intention.

The idea was "to keep internet civil" which makes a lot of sense, but that's obviously not what is happening and not what provoked this reaction.

<comment><USER18> On the contrary, that is exactly why it was created. Dog lovers forums aren't supposed to be compelled to allow cat lovers a platform to voice their opinion on the dog lover's private server. Private servers are not public forums in the legal sense. We can have a conversation on whether or not that needs to change, but basic US law on private property is very clear about this.

<comment><USER15> Law follows morals, so first we need to determine what we actually want.

Dog lovers forum is not at issue here because it doesn't matter to how society functions, giant twitters and facebooks on the other hand very much matter and should be re-evaluated.

<comment><USER18> Large websites, large skyscrapers. Still private property.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Svbtle Dead? - <AUTHOR> https://news.layervault.com/stories/44300-is-svbtle-dead <comment><USER2> What I remember about Svbtle may well be completely false, but these are the impressions I got from it at the time: it's an exclusive club for bloggers who see themselves as elite, enough so for that perception to get in the way of perceiving the actual content. I didn't even know you could sign up for it as a mere mortal without being invited, so the marketing message was quite strong.

It's not that Medium is great either. Those obnoxious gigantic pictures on top, serving a page that should be pretty simple but somehow manages to suck up a lot of CPU/GPU (enough to make my Macbook switch graphics cards), and annoyingly you can't drag and drop URLs into a Medium page which I do a lot to recycle tabs.

In the end it comes down to perception. Both services showed up too many times on HN initially, often for content that didn't seem very worthwhile. It's par for the course, as far as blogging is concerned though. But only Svbtle managed to actually convey a strong negative bias upon an article _before_ I even open it.

<comment><USER3> The ridiculous it-acts-like-a-clicked-link-if-you-hover-over-it-because- reasons "kudos" button didn't help matters, either. It sent a strong message (to me, at least) that Svbtle bloggers were more interested in looking hip than in how their blog actually worked, which was a big negative mark for people writing about tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My sense is that the business plan of:

* 1-2 good blogs ->

* Snazzy public interface ->

* Invite only blog network ->

* Status competition for invite ->

* User-generated content magazine

was clever, but didn't pan out, and when the project pivoted to being a Medium alternative, it got crushed; svbtle : medium :: posterous : tumblr.

(I could be wrong about all this and have no inside insight into Svbtle).

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, one platform has a slightly hard to type URL, and the other has [https://medium.com/@presidentobama](https://medium.com/@presidentobama) \- I think the winner is fairly plain to see.

That said, the fact that the US president has fewer than three thousand followers suggests Medium is quite a few orders of magnitude behind Twitter, Facebook, etc in terms of popularity, suggesting to me either a writing platform is never going to have the same sort of mass appeal or that there's still space for a big winner in that sector.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm in the process of migrating from svbtle to Ghost ([https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)), which is free if you can install it on your own web server.

I stuck with svbtle for a while because of the free early membership and custom domains. I still think the platform is good for editing – at its core it was a super simple way to publish posts in markdown (I was using jekyll before), but I was also turned off by kudos and the network. I would prefer to not use Medium for similar reasons.

<comment><USER7> There was also the much hated clone, Obtvse.[1]

[1]: [https://github.com/natew/obtvse](https://github.com/natew/obtvse)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Medium is pretty awful for code so I still use svbtle. Most of my page views doesn't come from the Svbtle site, but from direct links, Twitter, etc.

<comment><USER9> Medium also doesn't have custom domain support, which is a must for me. I consider personal branding very important and medium just doesn't have it

<comment><USER10> I highly recommend [https://www.silvrback.com](https://www.silvrback.com) for all of these things. Great code support, custom domains, and a bio page. Just a happy customer reporting in.

<comment><USER9> Really nice software. Would prefer something I could host myself in PHP, but if I was a more active writer $30/yr for that looks like a really great deal.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Is Bringing HERE Maps to Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.dignited.com/10547/hello-google-microsoft-bringing-maps-android/

<comment><USER2> I'm fairly certain "old" Nokia still owns the mapping stuff and just licenses it to Microsoft (and others), no?

<comment><USER3> Yup.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_(Nokia)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_\(Nokia\))</comment></comment>


Nissan Leaf electric cars hack vulnerability disclosed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35642749 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166852).

</comment><comment><USER3> Troy Hunt's original story has more technical details which are worth the read: [http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/02/controlling-vehicle- features...](http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/02/controlling-vehicle-features-of- nissan.html)

<comment><USER4> This should be the actual link, not BBC.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't seem to be a popular idea :). I searched for the story before posting and found it was already posted to not receive much love.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165561)

A second post received some though

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166852)</comment></comment></comment>


Five Reasons More Women Should Start Web 2.0 Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.promoterforce.com/blog/2007/06/04/five-reasons-more-women-should-start-web-20-startups/ <comment><USER2> 5) Meg Whitman didn't start eBay.

4) See Paul Kedrosky's post about flaunting your age.

3) Since starting a web 2.0 business is mainly about discovering and implementing something novel, the most similar academic measure would be the number of papers published about novel ideas. While I know that women receive more diplomas than men, it's completely unclear to me whether they are coming up with the majority of the new ideas in the field. They might be, I just don't know.

2) This seems like it would only help for women specific startups. How many women specific startups are there left to create?

1) I believe that men are, compared with women, more likely to be competitive as opposed to cooperative. That being said, only a very small subset of men start Web 2.0 businesses, and I'm betting they are already much more cooperative than average. At least this would make sense, since it having a cooperative mindset would seem to be an advantage in putting together a diverse team to create something of value.

That being said, women probably would do well to start more startups. I can never understand why women complain that only 2% of fortune 500 CEOs are female, instead of complaining that only 2% of high growth startups are founded by women.

Also, it drives me nuts when I see girls I'm friends with buying business books specifically for women. While I've never read one, I can't imagine they are any good, at least compared to the normal Seth Godin / Guy Kawasaki / Paul Graham / Joel on Software / etc. (If they were any good, men would read them too. After all, it's the same process...)

<comment><AUTHOR> great points!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A discerning feature of startups is that you don't have someone else telling you what to do. Where else would women be on a more _equal_ footing with men?

More interesting would be a (non-charged) list of reasons as to what prevents women from entering startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Startups are an ideal environment for merit based working relationships.

any ideas on the suggested topic: what prevents women from entering startups?

<comment><USER4> As stereotypical as it may sound: family? I think women are not as much under pressure to succeed as men are. There tends to always be an 'easy' way out, which is to have children and stay at home.</comment></comment></comment>


Ripple takes on Western Union with deal to grow payments - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-07/ripple-takes-on-western-union-with-deal-to-grow-payments.html

<comment><USER2> How does this compare to Regalii?</comment>


Learn You A Haskell For Great Good -- the book -- coming soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1593272839/

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on the site <http://learnyouahaskell.com/></comment>


A blog that is 100% free, can serve any traffic and is unhackable - <AUTHOR> https://www.qards.io/posts/a-blog-that-is-100-free-can-serve-any-traffic-and-is-unhackable/ <comment><USER2> Free is never free... the phrase is "at no cost to you" ;)</comment>


My Weekend Project: Not A New Yorker (Feedback Requested) - <AUTHOR>

My Weekend Project: http://www.notanewyorker.com/
Around 6PM last night I was watching How I Met Your Mother's latest episode.  One of the premises surrounding this week's episode was those things which make one a New Yorker.  I was instantly inspired with the idea of making a little website to capture those things.
Having spent some time around HN for the last few months one piece of advise that always pops up is, "Just Build It."  This seemed like a good project to apply that to, so I grabbed a friend who does front-end stuff, sold him on the idea and began work on the backend.
10 hours and 4 minutes later it exists.
The time was spent pretty much like this:

  -  6:15: Got idea from How I Met Your Mother
  -  6:18: Decied on domain name
  -  6:20: "I think I could build it in GAE really quickly"
  -  6:25: Asked a friend to write the front-end
  -  6:30: Started coding backend
  -  8:00: Finished coding backend
  -  8:10: Bought domain name
  -  8:22: simcop suggested adding a rater (backend now *un*done)
  -  9:16: Rating code for the backend finished and tested
  -  9:44: Added logic to determine the next page you view and tested
  - 10:13: Began merging frontend and backend
  - 11:10: Discover that neither Simcop nor myself know enough JS to write the front-end for the upvoter.
  - 11:20: Conned numerous people into helping us solve this (buu, jesus mostly)
  - 12:58: SimCop learned JS because buu and Jesus were sleepy.  Rating code finished and working on both front and backend
  -  1:40: Food while DNS stuff happens.
  -  1:45: DNS Done
  -  2:33: GAE doesn't allow ordering by a value which is not in an inequlity... rating >= -10 order by created = "FUUUU"
  -  3:00: Deployed!
  -  3:10: Deployed 4 or 5 more times
  -  3:35: Hackering SymPullCDN - Removed Revalidation (manual purge for update), Removed Cache-Control respect (same GAE and it's Cache-Control: no-cache), forced Cache-Control: max-age=604800 (things can be so much faster when you break rules)
  -  4:19: Final Version Posted
 Without having spent a lot of time around HN this would not have been done this quickly by any stretch of the imagination.  Thank you guys =)
So, now that's it's launched, what are the myriad of the things that could be done better? <comment><USER2> Traceback (most recent call last): File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 513, in __call__ handler.post(*groups) File "/base/data/home/apps/newyorkerwhen/1.345563940169596428/main.py", line 88, in post test = Quote.all().filter('quote =', message ).get() File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 1797, in get results = self.fetch(1, rpc=rpc) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 1848, in fetch raw_query = self._get_query() File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 2110, in _get_query namespace=self._namespace) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore.py", line 950, in __init__ self.update(filters) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore.py", line 1367, in update self.__setitem__(filter, value) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore.py", line 1309, in __setitem__ datastore_types.ValidateProperty(' ', value, read_only=True) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore_types.py", line 1324, in ValidateProperty prop_validator(name, v) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore_types.py", line 1215, in ValidatePropertyString ValidateStringLength(name, value, max_len=_MAX_STRING_LENGTH) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore_types.py", line 1205, in ValidateStringLength (name, len(value), max_len)) BadValueError: Property is 867 bytes long; it must be 500 or less. Consider Text instead, which can store strings of any length.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      $ curl --data "message=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" www.notanewyorker.com/post
      Thanks for playing the manual POST game.

Fixed. =) Thank you for testing it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm expecting to be able to sort the entries by score, but can't obviously see how to do that. Do I need to post an entry before I get that option? I've spent a total of around 12 hours in NY in my life, so don't really feel qualified :-)

A few minor tweaks to the visual design would make a big difference, but I'm sure you know that.

Longer term: maybe widgetise so people can put it on blogs etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are lots and lots of little visual tweaks that will be done to this as soon as I can con some more front-end time from simcop.

No ordering is yet implemented based on rating, everything is displayed based on the created date. Any posts which reach -10 are deleted. I figured that would be a good anti-spam method, and it seems like some spamming things are hitting that.

Once there is more data some "Best of" and such sort links will most likely be added =)

<comment><USER3> Sounds good. It might be worth thinking about whether something closer to the HN/Reddit/Digg model might make more sense, i.e. 'Best of' being the default option, possibly with tweaks so that new posts get enough exposure to be upvoted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Link: <http://www.notanewyorker.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Love it, already posted one myself.

Why isn't the list ranked?

On refresh of the page, could you swap the background image? I like the one you have, but since there are probably a thousand awesome, CC-licensed images on Flickr, you could play around with that, too..

</comment><comment><USER5> looks quite good to me. :) some suggestions: let the background image fade to black at the edges left and right, add eg 100px left and right for the fade, and center it. this way even very wide screens have a nice looking centered background. (that´s always the problem when using big bg images)

you could make the background (of the content) transparent black or white.

i´d style the text and links a bit. different font family and color.

the links to your own sites should open in a new window. otherwise you will lose every user to your sites.

i would center the headline.

but anyway, nice idea.

martin

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'lll be passing these onto SimCop. =D I've got a page load of suggestions from another friend on everything from text to images and fonts that should be incorporated. Pretty web pages are apparently difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just one suggestion for your timeline. I would suggest "decided on domain name" and "bought a domain" appear one after the other. I just don't trust sitting on domain ideas if they are available for hand registration.

</comment><comment><USER7> I clicked "A Post A Not A New Yorker Until" without any text inside text box, and got error "Error: Duplicate Message". I think you should add some checkers, because I saw empty message ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree with this. The post handler should raise an error inside of the normal template, and automatically put your text back into the textarea.

<comment><AUTHOR> And now it's implemented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You guys are amazing!

> 6:30: Started coding backend > 8:00: Finished coding backend

Usually it takes me that much just to name my classes and variables.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Due to popular demand (and random assault) ranked view: <http://www.notanewyorker.com/ranked/>

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks similar to thathigh.com. You might want to talk to the guy who built that (just search for thathigh on HN - he's posted about it a few times).

</comment><comment><USER10> i like that u posted the time line. very cool.

maybe you could make a platform so anyone could make a site thing like this... it's similar to FML or texts from last night... if there were a platform anyone could make this type of site... hit me up on gmail. i might be interested in helping.

<comment><USER11> There is a platform, it's called reddit!

Not to be snarky, I'm actually building something that similarly mimics reddit, but I constantly ask myself why I'm reinventing the wheel when i could just create a subreddit.

<comment><USER10> aren't sub-reddits much broader than something like... you're not a new yorker until?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> another thing i just saw: when clicking on the fb icon open a new window for it. the share on fb page look weird fullscreen, and many users won´t find the way back to your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> The links for my blog, simcop's blog, twitter/facebook sharing have now been given target="_blank". =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> the next page/previous page thing is confusing

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it will become less confusing as more content becomes available. Basically if the next page exists, show a link to it, otherwise give a link to the homepage. The same goes for previous. / is the "lastest" page, with /page/1 being the next latest page. This structure is the same as FML's as far as I recall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The page looks very broken.</comment>


Gates vs. Jobs: Keynote text analysis, 2008 edition - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/130036.asp

<comment><USER2> Jobs is an excellent speaker, Gates... well, he's getting better.

<comment><USER3> Check out Job's seminal announcement of the Mac in 1984 (along with several other interesting, excellent presentations).

[http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best- presentati...](http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best- presentations-ever/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to detect if app is pirated? - <AUTHOR>

I'm building a MMORPG for the iPhone.
The iPhone app connects to server to join the world. Between the app & the server, I can't figure out how to detect if the particular instance of the app is legit or if it's pirated. Is there a way to do this?
I know that I can grab the UUID off the phone ... but unless apple sends me a list of every UUID that purchased my app, I see no way to check for this.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> We check for pirated apps in our iphone analytics library (we haven't released yet) and provide some tools to combat it. One of the ways we do it is using this code:

       NSDictionary *info = [bundle infoDictionary];
       if ([info objectForKey: @"SignerIdentity"] != nil)
       {
         //app is pirated
       }

<comment><USER3> For the uninitiated, what does that mean?

<comment><USER4> This might help: <http://thwart-ipa- cracks.blogspot.com/2008/11/detection.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hand the software out for free and charge for user accounts on the server.

This turns the problem into one of "How do I prevent account piracy?", which is hopefully not dependent on characteristics of the iPhone.

edit: I'm not sure what sort of kickback Apple would like in this case. Be sure to check that out first.

<comment><USER5> That could be accomplished in the upcoming 3.0 SDK which supports subscriptions.

<comment><USER6> It cannot be with 3.0. Subscriptions and one time charges are only supported for apps that initially cost money. You could get away with charging .99 cents for it initially and then charging a subscription.

<comment><USER7> That's the first time I have heard of that... is that official?

<comment><USER6> Yeah it was in the iPhone 3.0 announcement: [http://i.gizmodo.com/5172200/iphone-app-store-revamped- for-c...](http://i.gizmodo.com/5172200/iphone-app-store-revamped-for-content- subscriptions-game-add+ons-in+app-purchases)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would agree with the don't worry about it comment. I make a MMORPG for the iPhone called Epic Pet Wars. Our paid versions are getting pirated at a rate of about 2:1, but I strongly believe that these users would not pay for the app anyway.

We are making enough money with the pirates and we have other ways to monetize these users like direct payments on our sit. Also, the pirates seem to be heavily active on the game.

<comment> barry-cotter Sorry if I'm being obtuse but are you making a profit from the average pirate? If you are making money despite them i'd imagine you'd be less sanguine, but if you're making money even from the pirates wouldn't it be in your long term interest to switch to free distribution to grow your user base much, much faster? Obviously the timing is an issue particularly if it'd leave you without much cushion, but shouldn't it be part of your strategy, because otherwise someone else will get there first in that niche and have the fast growth that could otherwise be yours (not necessarily sustainable but fast)

<comment><USER6> We have a free distribution model. We give away the application and charge (our app is #22 in top free apps) We monetize through character unlocks and virtual goods using paid versions in the app store. These versions are being pirated quite a bit, but yes we are making good money despite of it so we dont mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't worry about it.

The iPhone app store has enough DRM to move piracy below your radar. Casual users won't pirate your app; the few who might go to that effort aren't worth your time. If your app was available via direct download, an anti-piracy scheme might be useful, but for app store applications you needn't worry. Spend your time making other improvements to your app that will attract more players.

<comment><USER9> _The iPhone app store has enough DRM to move piracy below your radar._

Do you have numbers for that? Anecdotal evidence (forum posts from developers, statistics provided by companies hawking anti-piracy solutions) suggest that piracy is actually a significant percentage of all app installs.

I'm not entering into a debate about spending time fighting piracy versus spending time adding new features. I'm just curious about your assertion that piracy of app store applications is negligible. Is it based on specific experiences, or gut feeling?

<comment><USER8> Gut feeling.</comment></comment></comment>


DIY electronic leadscrew for metalworking lathe [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlWKv7KIIr90ZZ7Zqt-ge5nVVdS3WVgg <comment><USER2> Yep, he's right about the timing issues. I've taken a deep dive into LinuxCNC recently, as I'm using it as the motion controller for my custom servo-driven 3dp/Mill, and one of the most important decisions one makes up front is what Linux kernel to run. The real-time kernels are all but necessary for doing heavy number crunching and encoder reading, and that's even on a powerful i5-powered desktop machine with custom IO hardware.

As you start to climb into the multiple-thousand dollar arena on a project that was planned with just a couple, you really start to realize why the manufacturing industry routinely pays significant fractions of a $MM for their machines.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it more that real time kernels are necessary period? The number crunching itself can't be that problematic...I just upgraded an old Anilam mill controller that ran 3 axes. It was running on a 386.

The new encoders on the servos are way better, but the replacement modern hardware is also way better.

I think in both cases (especially the upgrade), the event handlers and drivers are all done in separate, dedicated hardware

<comment><USER2> Well, you can run the simulation and such without it, but for doing any real work, yes they are necessary. That was kind of my point though: you could in theory put one of those kernels on an RPi or something (barring compatibility issues with the chipset), but you'd probably still be lacking the proper IO hardware, etc.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely agree. Modern operating systems are utter beasts when it comes to complexity and are far less predictable than simpler solutions. There are reasons microcontrollers are still everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Linuxcnc on a raspberry pi 4 is fast enough to run the motion-control loop of linuxcnc with 1kHz, worst case latency is below 100us with current rt-preempt kernels.

Generation of stepper signals or interfacing with servo amplifiers and encoders is best left to an external microcontroller of FPGA card, connected either via SPI or ethernet.

<comment><USER6> How do the audio and video subsystems of standard Linux systems deal with real time requirements?

<comment><USER7> Badly.

Only macOS has an architecture to deal with low-latency audio and video properly. Presumably iOS has some of those features as well, but it was on OS X that Apple did some deep architectural changes for proper low-latency audio and video.

<comment><USER8> It was admittedly several years ago, but I worked on a voice chat app for iOS and Android, and the behaviour on Android was horrifying. iOS had very consistent and great audio latency (approx 10ms if I recall). Android devices were all over the place; I think the worst one I tested was over 150ms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting where he's pointing out the real-time debugging support in the chosen board.

One "weird" thing that popped out about that for me, is where he said it's not possible to do that with the "other platforms" he's shown.

Does anyone know if the debugging style he's mentioning is different from attaching a segger to the debug port on the Due? Asking because I've done exactly that before, when working through bugs in the g2core (multi-axis CNC controller) firmware.

To me, being fairly newbie level with it, it sounds like the same kind of thing. Perhaps the author just isn't aware some Arduino's do have a debugging port + commonly available tooling to use it?

<comment><USER10> I agree other ecosystems have similar debugging capabilities; I think the main driver for hardware selection was deterministic timing and ability to keep up.

See my comment further down beginning " _Starting about 7:09 he talked about why the Arduino wasn 't a good fit_..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure I agree with the bit about Linux + Raspberry Pi not being able to handle precision timing down to the microsecond level. I'd be interested if anyone has thoughts.

<comment><USER12> I've done a fair amount of timing-critical design, including control of stepping motors and encoders for specialized uses. My experience has been that "real time" programming on a mainstream computer with an operating system is a headache, if it's possible at all. It's just a lot easier to do that kind of stuff on a mid range microcontroller, where the processor has exactly one task and predictable sequencing of operations.

Granted, it was a long time ago, but I remember trying to work with a CNC milling machine that generated all of the timing on a Windows computer. Everything worked fine unless you touched the mouse, which would cause motion to stutter. So, there can be a lot of gotchas that have to be accounted for when using a "big" computer for "little" things.

<comment><USER13> _I 've done a fair amount of timing-critical design, including control of stepping motors and encoders for specialized uses. My experience has been that "real time" programming on a mainstream computer with an operating system is a headache, if it's possible at all. It's just a lot easier to do that kind of stuff on a mid range microcontroller, where the processor has exactly one task and predictable sequencing of operations._

Yes. This is just a "keep motor A in sync with encoder B" problem. That should be on something at the Arduino level, although you might need a faster CPU version. Something with no caches, no superscalar, just dumb static memory and fixed-time instruction execution. Linux would just get in the way. The loop that keeps both sides in sync should probably be running around 1000Hz or so. In one of the OP's rather long and numerous videos, he mentions 10Hz not being enough. Right.

If it needs a user interface, that might be on a separate computer, with an interconnect to set the ratio in the motor controller over I2C or something equally dumb.

Also, you can get stepper motors with encoders, so you can tell if you missed a step and correct. You don't have to use a servomotor, which seems to have complicated this project. Shopbots and Tormach mills use stepper motors with encoders.

Many people have converted existing milling machines to CNC, and there are kits for that. This is a much simpler project.

<comment><USER10> Starting about 7:09 he talked about why the Arduino wasn't a good fit and explained his choice of the TI board (including speed, single-cycle floating point hardware, responsive interrupts and dedicated peripherals to latch consistent, jitter-free reads of the quadrature encoder counts).

Note it's a 4096 step encoder, mounted on a different shaft than the one he's driving, that can run upwards of 2500rpm. His motor control loop (not the complete end-to-end, but the bit that maintains output position to that desired) takes under a microsecond. His code works with either a Nema 24 stepper or Nema 23 servo, and he demonstrated both.

In the second video he maths out some projections for error/drift (factoring in floating point representation error) and its ultimate impact on thread accuracy (which provides some motivation for what you might initially consider "overkill" hardware).

10hz is just the refresh rate for the tachometer calculation.

<comment><USER12> Indeed, a bit of confusion about "Arduino" is that it has come to mean two things. One is the original Arduino board and its "branded" successors. The other is the development stack. In the latter case, it's GCC with some libraries and a beginner friendly editor. It's bare-iron programming.

Thinking about dealing with an encoder, let's say it has 8k counts per revolution, and the motor can do 10 revolutions per second, which is pretty fast for a stepping motor. Then the encoder steps are coming in at an 80 kHz rate, but an 180 MHz MCU can execute a couple thousand instructions in that time period, so it's not even breathing hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have seen some other people using an FPGA board to maintain instructions at a specific clock rate and interfacing with it via LinuxCNC.

</comment><comment><USER15> When he talks about the interface [1] I think he touches a really important point: you have to know the user and usage to decide what interface to use.

As he says it is very tempting to use modern technology like touchscreens. But because he knows he will touch it with oily fingers that's not an option.

Great project!

[1] Part 1: Proof of Concept @15:10</comment>