Colour Analysis Charts by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1902) - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/color-analysis-charts-by-emily-noyes-vanderpoel-1902/ <comment><USER2> Here are some other resources if you're interested in learning about color: [https://github.com/melling/DesignNotes_MobileAndWebApps/blob...](https://github.com/melling/DesignNotes_MobileAndWebApps/blob/master/color.org)

<comment><USER3> Albers is great (non-dogmatic, focus on learning through practice), but ugh, Itten is such bullshit (an arbitrary system not grounded in concrete evidence about human perception). No offense, but 50% of your links are pseudoscientific nonsense.

In my opinion, the best online source about color is [http://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html](http://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I added your link. I don't know enough about color, or design in general, to comment. I'll create a Short List of recommended references once I get a better handle on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any indication of the process used to perform this color analysis? Seems like an interesting technique for breaking down the palette and percentages. Effective templates could easily be generalized for non-specialized designers to work from.

<comment><USER3> The author eyeballed the sources and manually decided on an abstracted color scheme representation. (Remember, no computers in 1902.)

You could do the same thing today in a more automatic way by using by using some kind of clustering algorithm on the colors of pixels. I would recommend first applying some kind of bilateral-filter blur, then clustering the pixels (or some random sample of pixels), representing each cluster by its centroid in a roughly perceptually uniform color space (e.g. CIELAB or CIECAM02), and then apportioning squares to each cluster based on the relative number of pixels included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Original post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321027)</comment>


Apple Music changes policy after Taylor Swift stand - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33220189

<comment><USER2> She has a fair point though, if the tables were turned and I decided not to pay apple for an iPhone for 3 months while using it, they would most certainly have a problem, especially when I could potentially hand it back in 3 months time and say i don't want it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is unreasonable for Apple to pass on the cost of promoting it's business to artists.

With more money than god, why does Apple insist on being a asshole?

</comment><comment><USER4> One one wonders if it's all not just manufactured drama/PR, and Apple has known all along that it's gonna pay artists during trials.

<comment><USER5> No, or why decide to not pay the artists at first place?

Apple fears bad P.R. , because Apple brand is built on good P.R. T.S. has some power right now, she is using it while she is still relevant. I don't think it was manufactured.

The initial decision was bad. If Apple wants to promote its plateform then it should bear the cost of that promotion. Artists shouldn't be taking a haircut because "future benefits".

I don't work 3 months for free for a business because that business his offering its customers 3 months of free service, no professional would be willing to do that, at least if one isn't a company stock holder.

<comment><USER6> The is a major Dutch bank that expects freelancers to work unpaid for their first two weeks. I expect them to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, but they seem to be having this policy for a couple of years now. For me it's been pretty easy resisting their offers, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Busybox: remove systemd support - <AUTHOR> http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=accd9eeb719916da974584b33b1aeced5f3bb346 <comment><USER2> Obviously that's the wrong approach. He should have made systemd-busyboxd and everything would be OK.

Sorry. It was cheap but I couldn't help it :)

</comment><comment><USER3> * [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10473474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10473474)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483780)

</comment><comment><USER4> The "take marbles & leave" approach.</comment>


The latest version of Dexter walks faster and more robustly. - <AUTHOR> http://anybots.com/videos.html#walking_080302_title

<comment><USER2> Pretty impressive! However, regarding the practical prospects of humanoid / antropomorphic robots I remain pretty sceptical. Why? Because wheels (or sometimes threads) are so much simpler and cheaper! It seems to me like a classic case of "Worse is better".

The usual arguments for legged robots aren't very convincing, IMO:

\- "legged robots are better for difficult/uneven terrain": look at some videos showing the iRobot PackBot (which runs on threads): Although it's very small, it can climb stairs.

\- "humanoid robots have an advantage because people can interact more naturally with them": maybe, but people also interact with Roombas, dogs, cars etc. - none of which are humanoid. Regarding the Roomba, I have read an article that many people name their Roomba and even pity them if it gets stuck. So the question will be: is the advantage of "better interaction" worth the considerably higher price for a humanoid robot body?

\- Isaac Asimov said that humanoid robots will have an advantage because the whole world is already build for humans. Again, maybe - but when the car was introduced, we rebuilt the whole infrastructure (i.e. streets) to meet our new machines' needs.

Perhaps I'm just not getting the point of humanoid robots - apart from beeing technically impressive and cool to watch.

<comment><USER3> I think you answered your own question: "Isaac Asimov said that humanoid robots will have an advantage because the whole world is already build for humans."

Given the choice, do you really think we would rebuild the whole world's infrastructure?

<comment><USER2> "Given the choice, do you really think we would rebuild the whole world's infrastructure?"

No - because we already _have_ built the infrastructure in such a way that most important places can be reached with wheels rather than legs.

And if I had the choice of

1\. maybe buying a small ramp for the stairs in my (not yet existing) house so that a wheeled robot can drive upstairs

2\. buying a humanoid robot that can use the stairs himself

I would of course consider the costs - my guess is that the ramp will be much cheaper. What would you do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As Trevor was kicking his legs and pushing on his knees, I was waiting for Dexter to turn around and slap him silly. Guess I've been reading too much SciFi.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just wondering: Do the people in robotics realize that the real money is in getting machines to pick cabbages and the like? These sorts of inventions (like any others) really need to replace labor to be economic.

<comment><USER6> Picking cabbages is a pretty hard problem. I'm pretty sure they realize the economic potential, but Dexter took his first baby steps not too long ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Do note that the "total" time spent (e.g., time spent in Ruby, instead of waiting on IO) is much lower for Sphinx than for Solr. For both of them, the socket overhead is a constant penalty, and won't increase."

Hey, why not write a pure Ruby indexing and search engine?

Oh right, because Ruby is too slow.

<comment><USER8> Wrong article, perhaps?</comment></comment>


Abbott Launches 5-Minute Covid-19 Test for Use Almost Anywhere - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-27/abbott-launches-5-minute-covid-19-test-for-use-almost-anywhere <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708535)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do we have any old Theranos machines we can repurpose?

</comment><comment><USER4> great. give me precision, recall, and accuracy please.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I'm wondering the same thing.

With the sheer number of pharmaceutical companies jumping on this opportunity and desperately trying to be the first to market with a test, treatment or a vaccine, we the public absolutely need to know the efficacy of whatever is proposed. Especially in light of the fact that the FDA is currently under enormous deregulatory pressure.

<comment><USER6> The equipment is excellent for the other diseases it can test for. I think the numbers I saw earlier today were 95% sure for negative and well over 99% sure for positive, but I can't find that source back anymore. Numbers for this specific virus would be poorly understood, but ought to be similar to the numbers for other viruses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> non-paywall version:

[https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/fda-gives-the-green- li...](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/fda-gives-the-green-light-to- portable-covid-19-testing-kit/2263068/)

doesn't list absolute accuracy, but indicates the genome RNA can be identified in as short as 5 minutes, and 13 minutes can be "definitive".

it is built on an existing platform:

"The technology builds on Illinois-based Abbott's ID Now platform, the most common point-of-care test currently available in the U.S., with more than 18,000 units spread across the country. It is widely used to detect influenza, strep throat and respiratory syncytial virus, a common bug that causes cold- like symptoms."

<comment><USER8> 13 minutes for a "definitive" _negative_. So it's fast to detect high viral loads, but takes longer for smaller quantities.</comment></comment>


Making security better: Passwords - <AUTHOR> https://cesgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2015/09/08/making-security-better-passwords/ <comment><USER2> _Unlike previous guidance, this doesn 't focus on trying to get ever more entropy into passwords. Instead we're encouraging system designers and security architects to think more about where they're requiring passwords, and what they're trying to achieve with them_

Great from the system side. From the user end however, I had a revelation when I realized that I need to make a distinction between strong passwords and disposable passwords. Much has been said already about strong passwords for keys, log-ins, encryption, but disposable ones for almost all websites? That are easy to remember? I've been using SuperGenPass[1] for that and have loved it.

[1] [http://www.supergenpass.com/](http://www.supergenpass.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Finally someone with credibility who states that regular password changes are pointless, and may even reduce security. It's even backed by scientific publications from Microsoft.</comment>


The what, why, and how of transferring data to the US - <AUTHOR> https://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/04/the-what-why-and-how-of-transferring-data-to-the-usa/ <comment><AUTHOR> Max Schrem's case caused some change.

> If your organisation is still relying on Safe Harbor as the legal basis for > transferring personal data to the US, you need to review your position. The > law says you can only transfer data with adequate protection, and Safe > Harbor is no longer considered to give that protection. Doing nothing is not > an option.</comment>


Show HN: A star map creation tool with Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://thestarmaps.com/ <comment><USER2> This is a specialized market if anything is.

I can see that it could work beautifully if you can develop a customer base 100-200 customers who sell products based on these maps.

Incidentally this is where I think Common Lisp will win big. Small companies or research groups who keep developing special products and expertise over long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you able to speak a little to the Lisp engineering without giving away "secret sauce"? Is Lisp serving the web pages too or only generating the star maps? Did you use CLOS heavily? MOP? FFI? Anything else "exotic" that I've failed to ask and you can speak about?

<comment><AUTHOR> I use some CLOS, but most of it is plain old Lisp trying to avoid side- effects. Deploying is just dumping an SBCL core with the right functionality in it. It lives in a private server inside a VPN, listening to a port. Nothing fancy, really. I did consider at some point serving the web with Lisp as well ([https://edicl.github.io/hunchentoot/](https://edicl.github.io/hunchentoot/), because I trust Edi Weitz's code) but I ended up doing it in python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had no idea what this did until I watched the video.

Suggestion: let people play with the map customization tool directly on the landing page, then charge them for changing the date/location and for hi-res exports.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I may explore this idea. Thank you for the feedback. And I am glad I have the video!

<comment><USER5> yeah, I thought it created the cartooney ones shown on the home page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reading PG's ANSI Common Lisp was a pivotal event on my career as a programmer. I wrote a high-resolution star map generation tool in CL about 14 years ago, and have been working on it and selling the maps it produces for many years.

Now I am moving away from the things I don't do well (ranking in Google and promoting) to what I think I do best (making beautiful maps) with this new site, where I open the engine to people who want to add custom star maps to their own products.

<comment><USER6> > PG's ANSI Common Lisp

Would you say PG's _ANSI Common Lisp_ is better or worse (as a zero-to-hero intro to CL for an "experienced" programmer in other languages) than Peter Seibel's _Practical Common Lisp_?

I'm curious because I'm currently teaching myself CL (slowly, as a leisurely hobby), mainly because I realized that I need a hyper-flexible un-opinionated language in my toolkit for some types of experiments I want to try on and CL seems to fit the job. But I found the "practical" part missing from _Practical Common Lisp_ with the non-plausible problems/examples and also missing stuff about packaging/ecosystem and little on modern concurrency patterns...

<comment><USER7> Packaging and ecosystem has changed a lot recently, so On Lisp or ANSI Common Lisp would both be outdated quickly (as would Seibel's PCL; PG does not have a book with that title). Most of that you can find online: practically everything is available through Quicklisp and it's a very intuitive piece of software. Concurrency is harder and Bordeaux Threads might be too new for detailed inclusion in On Lisp or PCL.

I would highly recommend On Lisp once you have gotten the syntax down. I ordered a printed copy of the PDF (legal since PG released it) and have been working through it. On Lisp won't show you things that are easily done in other languages; its goal is to teach the power of CL. Certainly by the time you're done you'd be comfortable with many types of macros, closures, the REPL-based workflow, and other strengths if CL, able to find more about how one uses it in practice without much trouble.

<comment><AUTHOR> PG's Lisp books don't deal with packaging and ecosystem at all, do they? I think they are still very much relevant, and I completely agree with your recommendation.

<comment><USER7> I don't think so. I only have On Lisp on hand and it deals solely with the language itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have no idea what a free account gets me, but the fact that the lowest "Explorer" tier costs $39/month for 1 map per month causes me to lose interest immediately.

I have two suggestions:

1\. Show a bunch of prominent examples of star maps on giftable items like mugs and shirts memorializing various events like a birth or a wedding. The more explicit you are about the stars matching the night sky on the day and place of the event, the better. I could see these making for cool party favors, but I think the concept will go over a lot of people's heads (pun intended) unless it's spelled out for them.

2\. Offer a la carte pricing. The couple planning their wedding on a shoestring budget might buy a star map for $40, but starting and cancelling a $40 subscription could be too much of a hassle.

Longer term, I might look into partnering with a company like zazzle.com and integrating into their create-your-own-shirt-or-mug-or-whatever pipeline for a royalty.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have just updated the Plans page. I hope with the new changes the pricing is more clear, and also the benefits of subscribing. The rest will take a bit longer...

Thank you again.

<comment><USER9> It's still unclear to me who the plans are targeting. I'm guessing maybe you're targeting creators (Etsy store owners, etc), and not the end consumers? That isn't clear if so, and I would still expect to be able to use your site to buy one-offs as a consumer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried again, thank you for the feedback. I have added the prices in the Plans page, I hope this will make it crystal clear what you can do. Today is being a very instructive day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd drop the tattoo example on the gallery page. You would have a very difficult time finding an artist who'd even attempt that, much less one who'd do it well - and you'd be wanting to have it covered up inside a decade, most likely, in any case, given the way ink gradually migrates under the skin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken, example removed. Thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool, and I'm heartened that you've formed a business around this. What kind of projection do you use? DO you select the displayed stars from the zillions in that azimuth by their distance to Earth, or brightness on earth?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It has been an amazing experience, if a bit exhausting (I am a single founder and the only developer). I did it because it was cool, started giving them to friends, and then it became obvious that they were making a very large impact in some people's lives. So I decided to try to reach a larger audience, which had the nice side effect that now I can make a living from it.

I am using the stereographic projection, and I display up to magnitude 7. The conversion from magnitude to diameter is one of the key elements of getting a beautiful result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I keep hearing about Common Lisp, but I just don't "get it". Is it really as mind-blowing as people say when you "get it"?

<comment><USER13> For me the Eureka moment with Common Lisp came when I read 'The Art of the Meta Object Protocol' (Kiczales) [1], which made me rethink OOP, the power of macro's and the power of Lisp.

Lisp is an extremely fundamental and deep language, but although it is conceptually interesting, I find it rather unpractical. A language needs some syntactic structure to help in pattern matching.

We read code more like a map than a book: scanning, skipping between files, functions and expressions. And, like a good map, it should guide our eyes: highways and byways are differently coloured and a quick glance tells us whether we are seeing a forest or a city. Code should be similar and due to the syntax of LISP, we have little to no guidance on what we are scanning, except by manually reading the code.

I don't think Lisp is the only language suffering from this. There are similar problems at the deeper end of the functional programming scene: we have to _read_ map, flatMap, fold, apply, etc. in order to make sense of the code. We cannot 'scan' the code to understand its structure. It does not help that, for a syntax highlighter, these methods all get the same formatting.

The solution? Personally, I think we should seriously consider enhancing our editors to project our code based on the type-classes it participates in to enhance guidance.

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

<comment><USER14> I program in Common Lisp professionally on a sizable team of other Common Lisp programmers, and I find Lisp to be much easier to explore and navigate than other languages, by a huge margin. Why? Lisp IDE's don't need to build indexes of your projects that go out of date or anything like that. IDE's participate by interacting with the running Lisp image itself.

I'm not sure what you're missing about syntax. Indentation by default gives an excellent view of what's going on, and most editors color important symbols as needed.

I find the lack of syntactic noise makes you focus on the important aspects of the program in the big picture.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: WeRemoto – Remote job board and community for Latin America market - <AUTHOR> http://www.weremoto.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello!

Gaston here from Argentina Happy to introduce you WeRemoto, a remote job board & community for LATAM people (or anyones who speaks Spanish).

A few months ago, as I was searching for a remote job, I noticed most of the offers demanded being at US or Europe, so I built WeRemoto where all the positions are open for Latin America workers.

Since launching three months ago, we have had more than 15k Latin American folks apply for remote jobs! Plus a mailing list of 11k and growing.

I'd love to hear feedback or any suggestion! Thanks.</comment>


Violentacrez Did It All for 'Meaningless Internet Points' on Anderson Cooper - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/10/violentcrez-admits-he-did-it-all-for-meaningless-internet-points-on-anderson-cooper-360/

<comment><USER2> He may have used those words, but they aren't 'meaningless', they do have value. They represent that some group of people that he considered peers or an audience appreciated what he was doing. And so by having a large amount of karma he felt good, that's not meaningless.

<comment><USER3> I think you're looking too far into the word. In the real world, Reddit points are about as meaningful as how much Farmville cash or crops you have.

<comment><USER4> I'm a long time Reddit and mod for a big subreddit - it's not meaningless. There are TONS of perks you get when having a high comment karma count. Physical, actual benefits.

<comment><USER5> Hola Sergio.

Just out of curiosity. Could you comment on what are those perks? Thanks

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I can't but the perks are small enough to not be a big deal for the sender but big enough to be useful to me. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is an Oscar meaningless? Is it meaningless when the team you root for wins a world championship? Or when Time names you Person of the Year?

Why are those considered more meaningful than internet points?

<comment><USER7> > Is an Oscar meaningless?

Yes.

> Is it meaningless when the team you root for wins a world championship?

Very much yes.

> Or when Time names you Person of the Year?

They already did, and boy was it meaningless.

> Why are those considered more meaningful than internet points?

Some people don't consider them more meaningful.

And if you're the raldi that I think you are: That thing you worked on might have been bigger than you gave it credit for.

<comment><USER6> What about the respect of your peers? Do you also find that completely meaningless?

<comment><USER8> This would make more sense if reddit karma corresponded to respect. I post some really lengthy replies on reddit that take a lot of time to put together and are really helpful - these usually get 1 or 2 upvotes at best. I was slowly building comment karma and then I posted a 9gag link in a comment and tripled my karma overnight. It took 20 seconds to post.

And as far as the value of link karma - well look at the stuff that gets the highest votes on the site.

I'd have to lean towards reddit karma being meaningless/worthless/whatever you want to call it.

<comment><USER9> And, which meant more to you?

Say you're playing a video game, and trying to collect points. It makes a difference whether you play at the easy or expert level, because the points are not fungible, and are only a reflection of your performance rather than an objective measure.

If you care about what you are writing, whether it's genuinely helping someone, or it's trying to explain the counterpoint to some popular misconception on an issue, simply getting a positive score, or a score > -4 where it effectively disappears, could keep your effort from being a complete waste of time. And yet, even if you were all-knowing and all of the readers were misinformed, downvotes and upvotes still matter because they are an indicator of how well you made your point and how well it is being received.

In Anderson Cooper's case, does he follow his ratings exclusively for the ad revenue they facilitate, or is it rewarding to see how many viewers he is reaching? Furthermore, do the ratings numbers mean as much to him when they are a thousand households shown a personality during a daytime talk show and a thousand households shown an in depth story? I can see how both would be rewarding, even if they had no effect on his earnings whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've read some comments in other places to the effect of complaining about free speech rights. As I always say, everyone has the right to say/post what they want (within legal boundaries) ... but everyone else is 100% free to react to what you say/post as they see fit. So the fact that he was fired is that freedom being exercised.

<comment><USER11> Gawker's behavior is shocking, not in terms of free speech, but in terms of journalistic ethics. This story is, in the most literal sense, fabricated news.

The point of the article wasn't that there existed trolls on forums getting a kick out of being as offensive as possible. It can be summed up as "Hi Brutsch, I'm about to try my best to ruin your life, how do you feel about that?". The article was about the article itself (more precisely the previsible consequences of the article's publication). This is trolling, not journalism nor any self-respecting form of news reporting, and the guy who did that stands on no higher moral grounds than Brutsch.

At least Brutsch had no illusion about the value and ethics of what he was doing, wasn't purposefully ruining someone's life, and wasn't making money out of it.

So neither of them likely broke any US law, but the filthiest asshole isn't Brutsch IMO.

<comment><USER12> > but the filthiest asshole isn't Brutsch IMO.

Gotta disagree with that. What this kid was doing on a micro-level hurt and affected far more people than Gawker ousting him. Plenty of trolls have been made public before, but outside of the risk of finding a job and the initial backlash, they aren't doomed to lifelong persecution. Whereas his words and actions could have prompted someone to hurt themselves or just cut themselves off from the world.

<comment><USER13> Kid? He's 49 years old.

People hurting themselves over trolling is an education issue. Education on the part of the troll for one, and education on the part of the victim as well. Children, teens, and young adults need to know that life is not over if you get trolled. Too often I see someone hurt themselves over online comments and lawmakers/advocacy groups begin clamoring for new regulations to clamp down on anonymous trolls online. That's the wrong approach.

I don't like what VA did, I find it distasteful. But that's his prerogative, and he literally hurt no one online. If anyone was hurt by his actions or comments while he was on reddit, then there is an education issue that needs to be solved. Electronic bits on a screen, even if they represent real words, cannot hurt you. It's the actions taken offline that hurt.

<comment><USER12> > People hurting themselves over trolling is an education issue.

You can tell someone plenty of times that they shouldn't take something to heart, but it takes a lot more than "education" to give them confidence and self-worth. On edit, I don't mind calling him a kid. What he did was childish.

<comment><USER13> I think it would be interesting and worthwhile to study the effects of trolling on different personality types, to see if there's some kind of link between taking trolling to heart and some other factor. Say, a root cause for being offended. I believe it's upbringing and education, but I have no data on that. It's just a random guess.

I do know that there are millions of people who have no adverse reaction to being trolled. I also know that there are a lot of those people who also have low self esteem and very little confidence. I believe these people are people who understand what the Internet is, understand the psychology of Internet trolls. They know that it's a joke, or at worst they know that the troll is harmless. An annoyance at most. And they know they can do the same thing right back again.

The issue seems to be in when the two major subcultures online clash: the ones who know the Internet's darkest reaches and have an understanding of how awful the Internet can get, and the casual Internet users, the Facebookers/MySpacers/etc. It's like nudists strolling through The Vatican.

<comment><USER12> I would say that pseudonyms do more than just allow us to be anonymous with our opinions, but it also allows us to be anonymous with our emotions. In that sense, everyone has - or realizes - their jimmies are likely to be rustled at some point and it's best to shield your real identity from that person hitting the fan. But I agree I think we need to do a little bit more to figure out who gets hurt and why, and what we can do to curb that or provide them with some sort of kiddie pool to wade in. Sounds kind of silly, but I think it'd help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Mr. Brutsch, who was fired from his job following Gawker's expose, is now soliciting programming work in the porn industry."

I don't know the porn industry all that well, but it does seem slightly unlikely they'd want someone with a history of pre-18 sexualisation on the team given how hard they have to fight to stay legal.

<comment><USER2> The porn industry is very well aware of the age of its performers. Pretty much any porn company will point you to its 18 USC Section 2257 record keeping (<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2257>). As a random example, on the front page of the site www.bangbus.com there's the following text:

"All girls appearing on this website are 18 years or older. Click here for records required pursuant to 18 U.S.C 22557 Statement."

And that click here leads to <http://help.bangbrosonline.com/2257.php>

<comment><USER14> Oh I know that side of it, but given that they have to be careful to stick within the legal framework I'd be interested how many would take the risk with a guy who's been accused of teenager sexualisation on a large scale on the internet. I'm sure a few won't care of course, he didn't break any laws after all.

<comment><USER15> What risk? You are implying there is some risk to having a programmer who is attracted to teenagers. I don't understand what that risk is.

<comment><USER14> More in terms of PR and the regulators.

<comment><USER15> Your post didn't say anything. What is this risk? Be specific, I have no idea what you think this magical risk is. You think the porn industry has "programmers can't find teenagers attractive" regulations?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Free Speech" is not relevant to this situation. Free speech rights are limits placed on the government. The only rights you have on Reddit are whatever rights Reddit grants you. And they are free to change those on a whim, or apply them as unfairly as they want.

<comment><USER6> They're not talking about free speech _rights_ ; they're talking about free speech _principles_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One very helpful side effect, however, was that he exposed Anderson Cooper for the integrity-free yellow journalist he is (at least for those paying close attention).

<comment><USER15> Huh? Did anyone's view of Cooper change over this stuff? I can't imagine anyone who had any respect for him before would change their mind over it, and anyone who would be upset about his "journalism" recently would never have had any respect for him in the first place.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, my view of him changed. I used to think he was a relatively benign centrist pundit, and I didn't have very strong opinions about him. That changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Man, what a thing to risk your life as you know it for.

</comment><comment><USER19> At-will employment has its drawbacks.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's not free speech, he was enabling stealing girls' pictures and posting for the internet to wank over. Free speech would be speaking out to advocate that, but actually doing that? We don't have complete freedom of action, and quite rightly so.

</comment><comment><USER21> This post will get removed soon, it seems any posts on this subject are being removed.</comment>


Ask HN: Reccomendation, Hand Written Notes to Text File, Smart-Pen - <AUTHOR> I want to set something up where I can write on pen and paper and convert it to a text file. I do a daily org-mode journal file that I would like to append to with text data from a hand written source.  I'm looking at "Smart Pens" like LiveScribe. There are a few models and not clear what the to-text support is on each. Hoping some one else has experience here. <comment><USER2> I've looked into automated services and have always ended up just hiring someone overseas for cheap from a place like [https://upwork.com](https://upwork.com) to do the transcription.

I've had success creating videos as training materials hat very specifically go over how I want the task done and exactly how I want the resulting text file to look.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know you're looking for paper, but I've had a lot of success with a tablet with a digitizer and stylus. I have a sony vaio duo 13 - only because when I bought it the surface pro wasn't great yet. It uses the ntrig pen used for the current surface pros. Microsoft's handwriting -> text is fairly robust.

</comment><comment><USER4> These smart pens are dumb and not worth the cost/trouble. Focus on improving your handwriting and then write stuff down on normal paper and use a decent handwriting OCR.

Even the one Microsoft developed for OneNote/etc is pretty good.</comment>


Fraudsters just stole $7M by hacking a cryptocoin offering - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/17/coindash-website-hacked-7-million-stolen-in-ico.html <comment><USER2> I don't pay much attention to the crypto currency world but it seems like in the last year every headline is a bad one. Is this just selection bias as to what appears in my Reddit and here on HN (ie no one reports good news) or is the current state of affairs a complete mess?

<comment><USER3> > Is this just selection bias as to what appears in my Reddit and here on HN

Yes.

Lots of great things are happening or about to happen. Litecoin got segwit earlier this year. Bitcoin looks like it's going to get segwit soon. It's looking more likely than it was 12 months ago that Monero will get hardware wallet support within the next 12 months.

Don't pay any attention to ICOs, they are almost universally scams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> previous discussion yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14788620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14788620)</comment>


Ask HN: Difference Between '/' and '/News'? - <AUTHOR> Can anyone explain to me the difference between the homepage and the /news page of hackernews? Thank you in advanced. <comment><USER2> \--

<comment><USER3> There certainly _is_ a /news here. Hover the Hacker News text beside the [Y] logo. The logo itself links to the home page.

<comment><USER2> ah,I never pay attention to it. It seem doesn't has any different</comment></comment></comment>


I want to learn Python for web scraping - <AUTHOR> I have never programmed anything. I am 28 years old. I want to learn Python for web scraping and some basic website. I would prefer video courses. What resources would you suggest? <comment><USER2> One great video-course I can think of that fits your question is perhaps "Programming for everybody", by Dr. Chuck. I followed one of his other courses on language theory, and enjoyed it a lot. You can find it for free @ [https://www.coursera.org/learn/python](https://www.coursera.org/learn/python)</comment>


Debunking "But Bitcoin is like the early Internet" - <AUTHOR> https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ <comment><USER2> There are a lot of points here — many of which have been rebutted elsewhere

But I would like to point out that this article fails in the beginning, by mischaracterizing the Bitcoin-Internet comparison.

People comparing Bitcoin to the Internet are not saying "the internet was big and so will be bitcoin".

The internet comparison is most commonly a counter-argument to people saying "bitcoin is technically confusing and hard to use, so it will never gain mainstream adoption". If one can point to an example of another technology that wasn't always easy to use and understand, that now everyone uses, that demonstrates bitcoin _could_ still succeed.

<comment><USER3> The thing that made the Internet adoptable by the masses was centralization: first onto the single protocol of HTTP, then onto the single search engine of Google, and then onto the handful of Web giants today. If Bitcoin follows the same path it will be abdicating it's very _raison d'etre_.

<comment><USER4> HTTP is standardization - eg LN/BTC. Google is centralized service on an open network, ala Coinbase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article does point out one use case: (updated flow)

      [Do I need blockchain?]
                 |
      <Do you buy illicit goods on Tor?></comment>


Remote.com - jamey-aha https://remote.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> The forced import contacts feature is a non-starter.</comment>


The Intelligence Community's Role in Countering Malign Influence on Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://www.lawfareblog.com/intelligence-communitys-role-countering-malign-foreign-influence-social-media <comment><USER2> > in the aftermath of Russian online manipulation in the 2016 U.S. > presidential election

Really? I am getting confused. So is it Russians or Communists that subvert the people and weren't they the same just a few decades ago?

I think the intelligence "community" misjudged the situation severely while still being encroaching on private information. In other words, executive powers stepped over multiple lines they should never have crossed. But anything can be justified in the name of national security, right?

Of course and that is why people leak on you and are justified to do so.</comment>


The Privileged Character of 3+1 Spacetime (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://tetrahedral.blogspot.com/2011/12/privileged-character-of-31-spacetime.html

<comment><USER2> Another fun fact is that the +−−− metric allows relativity to be described in a spinor calculus (which are in turn isomorphic to quaternions).

The basic idea looks like this: annex the identity matrix as σ_0 = onto the 3 Pauli spin matrices σ_1, σ_2, σ_3 and then form the product with any 4-vector v^μ to find that every 4-vector is a 2x2 Hermitian matrix,

        V = v^μ σ_μ.

Of course there's nothing special about the +−−− metric here; but when you calculate the determinant of V you find:

        det V = v^μ v_μ

so that the determinant is the Lorentz metric. This means that Lorentz _transforms_ preserve determinants in this system. There is the 4-reversal C = \v → -v as well as the parity transform P = \v → (det v) v^(-1), with time reflection T = CP as usual. Lorentz transforms which do not have those reflections in them instead have some complex matrix det L = 1 such that they take the form

        \v → L v L†.

Now think about the vectors in this system. A good way to poke inside the vectors is to look at matrices which are _projections_ , det V = 0 so that

        V = [α] [α* β*] = u u†
            [β]

If you actually work it out, things like α/β work out to be stereographic projections of that null vector on the celestial sphere. The Lorentz transform takes the vector u above to the vector L u. So when you look at, say, incoming light rays to a point (say, yourself), those points are shifted by this L matrix, performing a bilinear/Mobius transform of the incoming light rays.

By ignoring rotations (which are unitary matrices!) and going for boosts, you can quickly convince yourself that as you boost in a direction, the stars all "tilt forwards", and you can dream that maybe if you were a photon, in addition to living a timeless existence, maybe only the event which emitted you is behind you, while the entire universe lies in front of you.

<comment><USER3> This is a classic example of something I feel I should be able to follow and understand, but in fact cannot interpret as anything other than technobabble. I'm going to point to this as an example of how there are different levels of familiarity and expertise.

And to be sure: this seems to be a fantastic comment. I'm going to spend some time slowly working through it until I grok the terms.

<comment><USER2> Okay, so, four-vectors have four components: v0, v1, v2, v3. The last three components are "spatial" and the first is "temporal". An example of a four- vector is a 4-position of a particle moving from position (0, 0, 0) with speed u in the x-direction:

       r0 = c * t
       r1 = u * t
       r2 = 0
       r3 = 0

This is actually a family of points, one for each number t.

The 4-vector is a thing which everyone can agree on. (Mind you, you might disagree on the _components_ of the 4-vector, but everyone agrees on the "arrow" in 4d space which the vector represents. That's a little abstract and philosophical but it means that there is one objective reality which people are seeing in different ways. In particular if one person says "these two particles collided at this place and time," everybody else has _some_ place and time where they also saw those two particles colliding.)

In particular, everyone agrees on a number based on the 4-vector, which is the number v0² − v1² − v2² − v3². This is called the "magnitude" of V under the "Lorentz metric". In our case above, the magnitude is (c² − u²) t².

In the particle's own "rest frame" (v1 = v2 = v3 = 0) it must agree with these coordinates so we must find that its coordinates in that frame are: [√(c² − u²) t, 0, 0, 0]. But of course this must be equal to [c τ, 0, 0, 0] for the particle's own time coordinate τ (Greek letter tau), because everybody agrees on the speed of light c and in this formalism it's a conversion factor between space-dimensions and time dimensions. The conclusion is that t = τ / √(1 − u²/c²). This conversion factor occurs so much that it's usually just written with a γ (Greek letter gamma) as t = γ τ. The general transform which preserves the Lorentz metric in this direction is the "x-boost":

        v0' = γ * (v0 − (u/c) * v1)
        v1' = γ * (v1 − (u/c) * v0)
        v2' = v2
        v3' = v3

We can perform this "boost" twice, once with speed u = +w, then again with speed u = -w, to find that v0'' = v0, v1'' = v1, which proves that the mathematics is totally consistent. We can also compute (v0')² − (v1')² to confirm that it is the same as v0² − v1². There are other possibilities too for preserving the Lorentz metric: there are 3d space rotations with no change to v0, and boosts in other directions, and combinations of the two (what are called 4-screws). There are also reflections (flipping vi to -vi). But that's about it. When we want to ignore the reflections we talk about "proper" Lorentz transforms, with the idea that reflections are somehow improper (mostly because they're not a continuous family of transforms).

All of the stuff about the Pauli matrices is basically about forming the 2x2 complex matrix V =

        [v0 + v3     v1 − i v2]
        [v1 + i v2   v0 − v3  ]

The determinant of a matrix [a b; c d] is the product of its eigenvalues and can be calculated as a * d − b * c. This has a nice property: the determinant of a product of matrices is the product of the determinants; det(A * B) = det(A) * det(B). This matrix is also nice because it is _Hermitian_ , which means that it is its own conjugate transpose. Hermitian matrices are complex matrices which have real eigenvalues.

Every proper Lorentz transform can be thought of as a 2x2 complex (non- Hermitian in general) matrix L. We take its conjugate-transpose L† and convert the matrix V above to be V' = L V L†. This arrangement keeps V' Hermitian, and we can work out v0, v1, v2, and v3 from its above components. The only problem is that the Lorentz metric may have changed, unless det(V') = det(L) det(L†) det(V) = det(V). This amounts to demanding that det(L) = ±1. However, we can throw away the det(L) = -1 solutions as redundant, because if det(L) = -1 then det(i * L) = +1, but when we complex-conjugate that we get:

        L V L† = 1 * L V L† = (-i * i) L V L† = (i L) V (i L)†

so they have the exact same effect on these four-vector matrices. The Lorentz boost in the v3 direction has a very nice Lorentz matrix which looks like:

        [e^(k/2)     0   ]
        [  0     e^(-k/2)]

Running through the motions gives v0' \+ v3' = e^k (v0 + v3), v0' − v3' = e^-k (v0 − v3), which works out to v0' = cosh(k) v0 + sinh(k) v3 while v3' = sinh(k) v0 + cosh(k) v3, where sinh and cosh are the hyperbolic sines/cosines. Conclusion: the v3 boost by a speed u is defined by that matrix with k = atanh(-u/c).

Again, lightlike vectors (det V = 0) are projections of some 1x2 complex vector called a spinor, V = s s†. Expanding V out with s = [α; β] we find that β/α = (v1 + i v2) / (v0 + v3).

This is essentially a stereographic projection. To fill in the gaps, let us assume that we've got future-pointing vectors (v0 > 0) which are "coming in towards us" and need to be projected to a point on a sphere at radius 1 from which they came. After scaling the null vector by dividing by R it has some components (1, -x/R, -y/R, -z/R) where (x, y, z) is the point on the sphere of radius R which the null vector seems to be "coming out of". Then -β/α is an actual stereographic projection of (x, y, z) onto the complex plane; if we take the last formula with R = 1 we get back just (x + i y) / (1 - z).

Lorentz matrices then transform these components directly. In the case of the v3 boost, we're transforming -β/α to (-β/α) * e^k, so we're just scaling the complex plane by a constant, k = -atanh(u/c).

If u > 0 then we are boosting towards the North pole and k is negative, so all of the stars that we see (lightlike vectors) get compressed in the stereoscopic projection towards z=0 on the complex plane. In other words, all of the stars tilt in the direction we're going.

Final freebie: if something has a round outline when it is stationary, then it has a round outline when it's moving past you, because bilinear transforms map circles to circles. The image that you see within that circle is distorted (you can imagine a bullseye target, the interior circles "shift" towards one of the walls of the outer circle uniformly) but the outline is still circular. In this respect, Lorentz length contraction is "invisible".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with this analysis is that it is basing its anthropic conclusion on anthropic physical theory. In other words, it compares what would happen if the number of dimensions changed using theories devised for a 3+1 universe. Obviously if the dimensions changed, the theories have to change. And in an alternate universe with a different number of dimensions the theories would not be the same.

<comment><USER5> I agree. I like this topic, but I have to say that there are better, more fundamental arguments in favour of 3 space dimensions. For example, two space dimensions only allow planar graphs, which seems pretty limiting for the development of complex structures. On the other hand, as you increase the number of spatial dimensions, the curse of dimensionality becomes more important and space in general becomes "emptier". Also, knots are only interesting in 3 dimensions.

Arguing about time dimensions is harder, because time is tied more strongly to our subjective experience of consciousness, which is something that we really don't understand yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Greg Egan has a whole lot to say about 4+0 spacetime: [http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGON...](http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html)</comment>


Is Heroku down? - <AUTHOR>

Two of my apps just disappeared, heroku-cli "can't connect to api.heroku.com", and http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/heroku.com claims that it's down from their perspective too.  status.heroku.com claims everything's ok, though.  Any idea what's going on? <comment><USER2> I think their problem is upstream, a few Amazon Web Services hosted apps are down at the moment. No word from AWS about an outage yet: <http://status.aws.amazon.com/>

Edit: They have a notice up now.

      2:40 AM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region.

<comment><USER3> They are acknowledging a networking problem now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Upon regaining access to our servers, Pingdom did not report the site as back up until 15 minutes later. In our configuration, Pingdom checks once a minute, from all over the world - which did imply a network connectivity issue.

Would love to know the root cause. Especially if international connectivity takes 15 minutes to come back. Maybe DNS related?

</comment><comment><USER5> We're hosted in AWS and pretty much all of our servers are now unreachable.

This is going to be a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER6> Down for me as well. Perhaps log a service ticket?

</comment><comment><USER7> My app at East coast and still up thankfully.

</comment><comment><USER8> The East coast EC2 servers were down.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes, AWS East went down.

</comment><comment><USER10> Should be back up now

</comment><comment><USER11> Down for me as well

</comment><comment><USER12> had a short outage- but its back now</comment>


You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/ <comment><USER2> Articles like this always bring out the part of HN that simply _can not understand normal people_.

It's kind of funny that as a community we make a bunch of web apps paid for by ads, yet all swear we don't click on ads. We all swear that we don't read spam, yet somehow half the businesses on HN heavily use email marketing.

There are people out there that click on ads. There are people out there that click through emails. If you don't understand that, and your competitors do, you will get crushed.

<comment><USER3> Not really. He is offering incentives that normal people wouldn't like in order to get hackers emails.

I totally would want to do something with email if my target was normal people.

<comment><USER4> I write code, and subscribe to a lot of newsletters.

When I get an email that provides me with some immediate value, and then pitches me to exchange some money to deliver more value, I'm probably going to open up my wallet.

Peepcode is a great example. I'm not going to spend time checking back to see if there's new content, but I occasionally get emails for them advertising a new screencast. It benefits me ("Hey, I'm partially interested in X, and I can get a good baseline understanding of X for an hour of my time and $Y"), and I know for a fact I'm not the only "hacker" who gets these emails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have _no idea_ why Patrick gives this amount of value-drenched information away for free. What's encouraging is that the advice has gone over the heads of the majority of commenters here, and no matter how hard he tries, his advice on A/B testing doesn't seem to be catching on at large.

I don't have a product to sell (I'm working on it!), but I've found a fantastic way to monetize patio11s free advice. The money I've made (and saved) by doing this will feed and clothe my unborn child, ETA November.

1\. Read everything he writes about helping people make money. Automating SEO, split testing and now email marketing (<http://startupbook.net> by Rob Walling is also mostly about email marketing).

2\. Use that advice to help people make money. You can do this at work, or with your freelance clients (neither will mind you trying to help them make more money). Rather than theorize about whether his advice works or not, actually try and see if it moves the right needles. You will be pleasantly surprised.

3\. Read the stuff he writes about consulting and having the confidence to charge higher fees. Then go be a consultant and start charging high fees for the advice that you got from patio11.

You may feel bad about taking patio11s advice and selling it for a daily rate. I did. So I send all clients that I talk to about implementing basic split tests links to pertinent blog posts on his website. To date, not one has shown signs of reading them.

They're a great deal more excited when I install visual website optimizer and a full 20% more people click through when we change button copy from "Start Here" to "Get Your Widget".

Somewhat relevant anecdote: I've recently been working with a client that implements many of of the tactics and techniques that patio11 describes for making more money. This client happens to be richer than Croesus. Their process is centred around conversion (i.e. _conversion parity_ on a 10% sample is a post-QA requirement for rolling out new site functionality). They have entire departments with 10+ employees dedicated to SEO + Content, Email Marketing and PPC.

Every month, they get richer than Croesus with a higher conversion rate. Unless I win the lottery, all the money I'm likely to make in my twenties won't amount to the average monthly _increase_ they see in revenue.

<comment><USER6> Here's the beauty of this system: you're becoming a local authority on these topics, but _your_ (and probably many other people's) authority is patio11. What does this mean? At least two things:

1) History will probably remember patio11 as a Great Guy

2) People who are really interested, will ask where you got your inspiration, and your reply will most likely be something like "there's this guy called patio11 on the internet...". These will serve to further the impact of patio11s ideas.

Without having any sources or immediate examples, I'm pretty sure this is how things have worked for milleniums. It's quite a robust system that's good both for you, your audience and the "originator".

Naturally, this assumes patio11 can still pay his bills, which I think he can, anything else would be a injustice given his expertise.

<comment><USER7> Suffice it to say while I'm touched by the concern you don't have to worry about me being able to make rent.</understatement>

<comment><USER6> I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't - it was meant as a general statement of people in a similar position, though my writing didn't really make that clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sadly, I think Patrick's going to receive a lot of _but I don't like receiving email_ -type responses from people here who just don't want to understand that they personally do not represent the average computer user.

It's an important point: just because you personally don't like something doesn't mean that everybody else is the same.

It's also equally important to apply some filters when taking advice; my favourite example being, by and large, ignore pricing advice from people who would never buy your product _at any price_!

<comment><USER9> If he didn't want people talking about their own preferences when receiving e-mail, he probably shouldn't have dedicated an entire section of the article to telling us that we should sign up for his mailing list and how awesome it will be for us when we do.

<comment><USER10> I believe that's kind of the point. Despite the fact that you hate email so much, there will be value to both parties if you do sign up. That's the only way to prove you're "wrong" about email. :)

<comment><USER9> Except the so-called value that we're supposed to get from his mailing list consists of exactly the sort of items most of us want to _avoid_.

<comment><USER7> I respect that you might not like some things I offer, which is why I describe them accurately and then deliver exactly what it says on the tin. My favorite sushi guy sells lots of raw fish attached to rice. There are cute little pictures of raw fish attached to rice to help you decide whether raw fish attached to rice is for you. If raw fish attached to rice is indeed not for you, my sushi guy will not think less of you. You may believe most people seeing raw fish attached to rice pictures would be uninterested in that. My sushi guy, if you asked him, would tell you that he really doesn't need to sell to most people, he only has to sell people who love raw fish attached to rice, and as to the topic of whether _anyone_ could possibly want something disgusting as raw fish attached to rice, he might just modestly shrug while standing in the middle of the building that raw fish on rice built.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I get that not everything has to appeal to everybody. But this article got posted here, which is basically inviting this community to comment on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Have you ever heard the phrase "You can't judge a book by its cover"? (...) > it is an empirically observable fact that most people, when presented with a > book, will judge it by its cover._

But isn't the phrase "You _shouldn't_ judge a book by its cover"? (And even when "can't" is used, what's meant is often "shouldn't").

Of course people judge books by their cover; they also judge people by the clothes they wear, their height or skin color. Should they?

It depends. Prejudice is our own little Bayesian filtering; it works sometimes but it's not "pure": it tends to have a strong effect on reality (for example, CEOs are mostly of above-average height: not because being tall makes you a good CEO but because we expect tall people to be leaders).

> _99% of geeks will report never having buying anything as a result of an > email_

 _bought_ (just to show that I read at least this far!)

<comment><USER12> I judge books by their covers. Heck, I judge a lot of books by their _spines_. Publishers put a lot of work into designing book covers so that you can, in fact, get a pretty good idea of their content, tone and style based on their cover.

For instance, compare

"The Planet Wizard" [http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2012/05/Plan...](http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2012/05/Planet_Wizard.jpg)

to

"Taken By You" <http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n16/n82162.jpg>

The actual maxim should be "Judging a book by its cover actually has an extremely high success rate and can be safely done in many cases, however it has a finite failure rate especially in terms of determining the _quality_ of a book and so should be avoided in cases where incorrect judgement will cause problems".

PS. Yes, I know those examples were entirely unnecessary, I just wanted to take the opportunity to show off some amusingly terrible book covers.

<comment><USER13> This really only works for cheap commercial genre-material. This doesn't work for quality works of literature.

Which leads back to the original point.

<comment><USER7> Given that you see a jacket with a buxom woman in a skimpy dress being embraced by a leprechaun with Fabio-pecs, would you assume that this fact has no predictive value with regards to the question "Is this, in fact, a quality work of literature?" No, of course you'd assume it is pulp, which is why people whose business is selling quality works of literature don't package it as pulp.

Most of us are not in the business of selling anonymous writing written by people of no particular expertise which is designed to have a shelf-life of twenty minutes _and yet_ we spend extraordinarily amounts of time producing things in a cover which says _exactly that_. We should, instead, devote more of our limited resources to creating work in the cover that says "important things you should act upon immediately from the people you trust more than anyone in the world about this topic."

<comment><USER11> Only if it's true, though. If you try to sell pulp in a package more suitable for serious litterature, you won't reach readers who are interested in pulp and you will upset people who seek serious books.

I think the real problem you're trying to address is the lack of confidence of programmers into their own writings; their bullshit detector is too sensitive when placed too close to the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> About email, what I feel is that:

\- I hate to receive unsolicited email: from people I don't know or businesses I've never heard of; I always make sure to hit "spam" in Gmail for those

\- at the same time, I feel I don't get enough email from businesses where I'm already a customer. For example, I bought custom-made shirts from Youtailor a year ago; they never emailed me since last year to inform me of new fabrics or new products, or simply to remind me that the delivery time is 5 weeks and that if I want a shirt for a given time in the year I'd better order 5 weeks in advance. I have hundred of stories like these.

<comment><USER14> On the other hand, I can't stand unsolicited emails from companies I do business with. My first action is to click the unsubscribe link, and if that doesn't work (quite often the case), add the company to my spam filter and hope that their invoice emails still get through.

Unsolicited email is a scourge upon cyberspace. If you as a company want to send me periodic emails, ASK me first. I'll probably say no, but who knows? I might just say yes.

<comment><USER15> OTOH, I like receiving most email, excepting for the really low quality "v1agra 4 u" spam, or Nigerian 419 scams or whatever. But well written, non scammy email, which is pitching a product or service that I actually might have a need for, doesn't actually bother me at all. And the emails from companies I'm already doing business with are usually very valuable. Amazon, for example, "knows" my musical taste well enough to email me and let me know when there is, for example, a new Motorhead album out. That's cool. Mondo cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the title is misleading. Maybe "You would make more money if you sent more email"? I certainly believe that mass email marketing works, in the same way I presume that someone must be making money off all the Viagra spam that gets sent. But there is quite a leap from "You would make more money if you sent Viagra spam" to "You should should send more Viagra spam".

More and more small local businesses are sending me spam, and I don't like it. Many of these businesses are small enough that I feel socially awkward unsubscribing if it requires sending a polite personal email saying "Please remove me". Instead, I just angrily delete everything they send. While I may be an outlier, and almost definitely am not your target market, be cautious taking silence as a positive response.

<comment><USER17> >> More and more small local businesses are sending me spam, and I don't like it.

Weird, where are you based? I'm in the US, and I've never had a local business get my email address without me giving it to them. (Of course I gave my email expecting to receive email from them; otherwise, why bother?)

<comment><USER16> I'm in the Bay Area, and run a business myself. My address is listed as a contact with a number of associations. Some of other members of these groups seem to think that adding the full list of contacts to their mailing list is a service to the community. Some are companies that I've corresponded with in the past, who about once a year seem to take their entire list of emails and slam them onto to their new mailing list. Others (recently a spate of real estate companies) seem to have found my address by some other means.

Sometimes I've given them the address for some other purpose like notifying me for when a special order comes in or to register for a specific event. I'm not using "spam" in quite the legal sense --- I'm sure it could be argued that I have a pre-existing relationship with some of these businesses. But unless I have explicitly checked a box that says "please send me email about your business until I tell you to stop", I consider these unsolicited commercial messages to be spam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I agree with him about email, but not about RSS feeds. I've trimmed my RSS reader to remove all the blogs I rarely read. The TechCrunch slurry pipe was one of the first to go, but I also removed lots of blogs that did occasionally have good articles but drowned it out with too much noise.

I still subscribe to over 40 blogs, but most of them update very infrequently and the articles are consistently great. (Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Weinburg, Venkatesh Rao, etc). The people who do update frequently generally produce short-yet-high-value content (Sebastian Marshall, Josh Spodek). In fact I often find run out of good stuff to read pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER19> "I have probably told a hundred anecdotes like "I just did an A/B test and increased software sales by 70% with 99% statistical confidence. The change was a two-character configuration tweak that I dismissed on a hunch six years ago." (That totally happened this May. Ask me for details later.)"

Would now be a good time to ask for details?

<comment><USER7> It's worth talking about in a wee bit more detail, but

@new_user.card_limit_for_free_trial = ab_test("user-card-limit-may-2012", [8, 15], :conversion => "purchase")

gives away a bit of it. (That's literally all the code. The old default was 15.)

Funnily enough, I mentioned I might do that test eventually on HN ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3864079>) and at the time panned its likelihood of success. Shows what I know, for the 495th time with A/B testing.

<comment><USER19> Interesting. I remember you talking about how it likely wouldn't make much of a difference, because almost all parents have less than eight kids, and almost all teachers have more than 20, so the number of people who'd be induced to buy the software by an eight card limit shouldn't really be much higher than the number who'd need more than 15 cards, anyway. Any theories on why it ended up mattering after all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hard to disagree with this statement: most people read all their email

And: most people miss most of their feeds/blog posts

Which is the incentive for true spam, but if you have something useful to tell your associates and customers, you aren't spam right?

</comment><comment><USER21> I have the impression that he's trying to glamorize spam. I suppose it also depends on the concept you have of what's spam.

For me, if I receive a marketing e-mail from a company that I never made direct contact with, that's spam. I don't care if they have a "commercial agreement" and got my e-mail from a "legitimate" vendor; if I haven't specifically subscribed for updates from you, you're spamming me, and I will not care about your "content".

He makes a point of saying that this is a marketing strategy and that we should not be outraged because someone is trying to sell us something. But this is similar to someone knocking on your door to sell stuff; it's no illegal, but it's annoying and I hate you for doing that. I like my personal e-mail to be personal, and I hate having to filter out the garbage I never subscribed to.

If I want to buy something, I'll go and search for it, or I'll ask someone about it, but I will not look in my e-mail to see if I ever got an e-mail from someone saying they sell it.

<comment><USER22> You've misunderstood him. He's not suggesting that you buy email addresses from vendors; he's suggesting that you establish the relationship that opts in email addresses yourself. There is obviously nothing spammy about allowing people to subscribe to your mailing list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I realize I'm not representative, but I had to seriously consider whether I should sign up for this a week or so ago (I did, and it's great content). I hate getting "extra" email, other than direct personal email. I filter mailing lists to folders which I read even less than RSS feeds (which, for my top 10-20, I read pretty seriously). I also am much less likely to "action" a ~15 page email than virtually any other form -- the only worthwhile long emails I get are document attachments, which I save and read separately. Pretty much any email containing text over 3 paragraphs is something I don't want to read (usually, from crazy people).

Email is also a pain to refer back to. I don't need a SaaS pricing insight right now. I will need it in 2 weeks. If it were on a blog or in a feed reader, I'd bookmark it. As email, it goes into some kind of grey area of read email which I'll have to find in Lucerne or something later.

Plus, the patio11 emails are "moral equivalent of your password" to forward, which kills the one advantage of email for me (easy forwarding). A web url which I can copy from my address bar is a lot more tolerable.

It's reasonable to do all this to me if either I'm non-representative or that it makes it way easier for you to monetize. I'd consider sending email myself since I'm sure one of those is true, but I still would be a lot happier paying $x/yr for the secret patio11 email-blog feed. I guess I could figure out a way to move the incoming mail into Google Reader or Instapaper.

</comment><comment><USER24> Its not that people hate receiving mail, they just hate mail that tries to make a quick buck out of them.

You should really email your customers and prospects. But don't just send them a boring borchure. Approach them in a personal way. Ask them what is bugging them at the moment? Offer to help. Give them some love in the form of an email.

I've been emailing people from HN for about a month. Everyone responds. They all just keep the conversation going as if we were old friends. Some even go out of their way to help me build my startup.

How do I do it? I really care about them. Every time I contact somebody, it is because I think they are someone worth knowing. Not for networking connections, but as a person.

Treat your customers in the same way. Talk to them. Be friendly. I know this is hard for some people to do. It used to be so hard for me to do it. But I realized that people want to deal with those who relate to them. In fact, thats my biggest marketing weapon: I focus on making a connection with people. To really interest myself in their dealings. The sales just happen by themselves after that.

Note: This does sound like a lot of self-help books. I know. And it doesn't work with everybody, because not everybody likes you. But it works with a lot of people. I'd rather be mistaken for a friendly fool, than for an arrogant know-it-all.

Do a quick exercise. Click on the usernames in this thread. Find someone who posts their email on their profile. Send them a message with the title: "Just saying hello from HN". Inside, say hello, and ask them what they have been up to. Everyone will answer. Everyone.

</comment><comment><USER25> So my story is, I once started a blog. I added an RSS feed and everything. As soon as I showed it to a few friends, one of the first responses: "How do I get this via email??". That's when I learned that most of the world still likes to receive things they care about via email, and don't care about RSS at all.

That's when I had the same realization as Patrick. Email is awesome. If I care about something, I used to run circles to remind myself to check it out when it became more important to me. Now, I just sign up via email, and it saves a lot of cycles.

And hey, if I don't care about it anymore, I get rid of it. We're at the point, with spam filters and legal forces, where 99% of what pops into my inbox, I can make sure never gets there again if I don't want it. To most things, unsubscribing works (it has to by law). The few things it doesn't work for are probably not getting past your spam filter anyway.

</comment><comment><USER26> I disagree. I only "like mail" when it's sent to at most three people. All the rest is unsubscribed to or I'll ask the sender to remove me.

Mail isn't made for broadcasting in my opinion. Aggregator sites like forums and blogs work much better with commenting, tagging, even liking etc.

<comment><USER7> If you are accurately reporting your preferences (and hey, you might be!), you are accurately reporting preferences which many people do not share with you. Those people are numerous enough such that nearly every software company would profit from giving the option to have their preferences catered to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another thought to the difference in email and news aggregators; If I want to read a blog post later (but am busy now) I need to mark it in some way to remember to get back to it later. My email inbox, on the other hand, keeps it there for me till I read it.

</comment><comment><USER28> _> (The predicted future value of a customer is an odd duck for many SaaS companies. I'll sketch out the shape of the curve some time. It's a weird snake that requires a bit of explanation.)_

I'd be very interested in hearing that bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry Patrick, you couldn't be more wrong.

I always read the articles that pop up in you feeds, if at all possible. Even if they are long. There are few others I do this for.

I don't do it for all feeds, and I unsubscribe if I feel like they haven't posted sufficient high quality stuff as of late.

On the other hand I dread getting an email newsletter. Most are deleted or marked as spam on sight.

You know that emails are worth less too, or you wouldn't need to bribe with great content.

I realise I am not the average user, but the average user doesn't need to know how to improve his software either...

</comment><comment><USER29> Best thing I learned from this? "Please confirm that you want that free video and other emails from me" is a _much_ better subject line than the standard "Confirm subscription".

</comment><comment><USER9> "Give me your email address and I'll send you things that you'll enjoy. For example, immediately after you confirm your email address, I'll send you a link to watch a free 45 minute training video on improving the first run experience of your software."

This is satire, right?

<comment><USER30> I'm not at all sure why you would think that is satire. If you're his target audience (people who build web-based software), that 45 minute video is quite valuable. Keep in mind, this is someone who does consulting on just that topic, at a good price, so getting his opinion on this topic for 45 minutes is valuable.

<comment><USER9> I have no idea who this person is. I just know that his article basically says, sign up for my mailing list and I will give you a _free_ video that will tell you how to earn $10,000 for just two hours of work. Maybe it's completely legitimate, I don't know, but it certainly _appears_ to be one step removed from "housewife earns $500/hour from home!" ads.

<comment><USER30> To regular HN readers, he's known. As he mentions in the article, he appears here frequently as a commenter. Generally, anything he writes ends up on the homepage of HN. He's one of the more respected members of the HN community.

<comment><USER9> Funny, this is just about the last place I'd expect to be told to pay attention to the author and not the message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't send more email because I personally don't like to get that kind of mail. (not saying everyone needs to do this).

I just don't like getting the mail the article mentions. Quote from article: "[Give me your email address] (link) and I'll send you things that you'll enjoy. For example, immediately after you confirm your email address, I'll send you a link to watch a free 45 minute training video on improving the first run experience of your software."

How many of you clicked and signed up?

edit: Several people downvoted me (fair enough) but did anyone sign up to the guy's link?

edit: elsewhere in thread there's a valid point about not everyone being like us. this is ok, though I don't know anyone who likes getting this type of mail. anyone?

<comment><USER7> Howdy. I'm the guy.

So, you're pretty much exactly who I wanted to reach with the second half of this post, because there is a great gap between a) your prior prediction of reality and b) the actual state of reality. The actual state of reality is "350 emails submitted in the last hour, approximately 60% confirmed."

This is useful signal for you, because the next time you have to make a similar prediction about the nature of reality, where that prediction might be consequential, you will ideally make a _better_ prediction. All HNers who run a business have to make predictions like "I have a limited budget in terms of time, focus, and resources. If I spend effort on getting permission to email customers and then emailing them, will that do good things for the business?"

You might have had incomplete data prior to making your prediction of reality. Here's some things which are probably material to that prediction which would have suggested biasing it in the favor of more confirmed opt-ins.

1) I've spent a wee bit of time on HN for the last three years or so, and some folks around here find that I say helpful things.

2) People will, generally, leap at the opportunity to get something which is presented as being something of value. (Covered, in depth, in the blog post.)

3) A lot of people -- including people who are very similar to you in many ways -- would happily ask to receive email if that were communicated to them as being something of value from someone they trusted.

There's other things which would have suggested guessing a lower number than one might have otherwise:

1) The call to action in this blog post is not graphically prominent. (See my other comment on this thread regarding a squeeze page, which means a page designed to encourage conversions to an email submission. This page is very much not a squeeze page.)

2) You have to read things, go to a separate page, and _then_ take action.

3) The list requires double opt-in (the first opt-in is giving your email address, the second is clicking a link in an introductory email to you saying "Yes, I want to receive email from you"), which will always and everywhere decrease uptake versus single opt-in.

<comment><USER31> Thank you for this detailed reply. You've certainly convinced me to at least weigh the option more carefully. (And you're right, I never would have predicted that many confirmed emails off of that link, in part for the reasons you cite about prominence etc. And my low prediction was even though I knew that HN traffic numbers, just in terms of number of hits to the submitted page, could be potentially staggering. I thought your link would have very few takers despite the extra traffic to the page it's on.)

I think one thing that is missing is that there is not an obvious social norm of how many emails are absolutely okay. (e.g. if you bought something from me this year, is it okay to email you once a month? once every two months? twice a year? weekly?) wonder if you have any thoughts about this. (Sorry if I missed this in the post.)</comment></comment></comment>


Review HN: BillMeBob.com - Generate free invoices with no signup - <AUTHOR> http://billmebob.com

<comment><USER2> Very cool! Invoicing is a terrible (and least interesting) part of freelancing and consulting. This looks like a great MVP. I especially like that when I print it out, that there's no big "billmebob" logo at the top there.

I think it would be fair to put a self-promotional link/tagline at the very bottom of the page though.

Also, allowing me to email directly from the page would probably be nice. At the very least, just do a mailto: link with the subject and body filled in for me to just hit "send" :)

Awesome MVP, definitely keep us up to date on the iterations!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this is awesome. Everything I need and nothing I don't. If you allowed me to upload my company's logo for each invoice, that'd be even better.

I do freelance from time to time, but not enough to justify spending any money on an online invoicing service. This does exactly what I want without having to have an account.

Bookmarked, great job!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would have a preview of what the invoice would look like before making me fill out everything. If the formatting is not what I am looking for, I wouldn't want to spend the time filling out the form.

<comment><USER5> I tried it. Don't waste your time.

<comment><USER6> It's certainly not world class but its still not the worst I've seen around here. Give the guy some constructive critique, give him a chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very clean, and simple = Time Saver (as opposed to InDesign etc). I'm glad you launched this app, and from one who has studied SaaS - it's a great business model. Kudos. I must agree, the simplicity is something I value. I will refer this to my friends. Keep up the good work, SA.

</comment><comment><USER8> I used to do freelance web development work and invoicing was always such a pain. You either roll your own, use a paid system, or something totally bloated like quickbooks. This is great for individuals doing short projects. Great MVP. hope you pick up some adoption.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks nice. One suggestion, when you change from products to services, it could change the quantity to hours and per unit to per hour as a default?

</comment><comment><USER10> Great, super easy to use. Liked it a lot. couple of suggestions:

1\. White labeling - Let me get rid of the logo at the top and replace it with my own. Similar on the domain, maybe something like my_company.billmebob.com. Maybe these are things you could charge for.

2\. Sign in - let me sign up after the first one and have it remember things like my company name, address, and maybe even companies I've billed before (I'm likely to do it again and don't want to repeat entering that all the time). Possibly something else you could charge for.

3\. Recurring invoices - email the same invoice every month/week/etc. automatically. Probably need some kind of user account for that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here are two ideas that could be interesting, while keeping the product bloat- free: \- Add an option to print the invoice in another language; \- Add a link to a PDF version (although I could "print to PDF" if I weren't lazy).

I'll bookmark it for sure, though I am waiting for the French version of the invoices. I've had such an idea a while ago but never really went forward with it, you beat me at it ;) By the way, I love the name!

</comment><comment><USER12> I really appreciate the simplicity. Please keep it simple. Don't listen to all the naysayers who want X,Y,Z feature. You'll end up alienating the users who actually enjoy your product.

Thanks, I will actually be using this.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's excellent!

If you take fields for the google checkout and paypal links it would be better. If it also generated a emailable letter which could be copy pasted into an email it would be fantastic.

<comment><USER13> You also should point out what you use the data for.

I know I'd be hesitant to type my customers' addresses into such a system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone for your feedback and suggestions.

The data will be used for nothing except displaying your invoice. Also, i made the urls look dirty with those random characters instead of letting people choose shorturls to keep invoice details private. There's no/will be no page anytime that would list the invoices. So they are all safe.

P.S: pdf and mailing option coming in the next few hours.

<comment><USER13> Another tack is a "don't take it off the page" javascript thing that generates the invoice without ever submitting the address to the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think that the interface is very nice.

Re. privacy, it may be a good idea to disallow invoice URLs in robots.txt, using a common pattern or subdirectory.

</comment><comment><USER15> Although simple, I do think you could use a little more design. I'm not talking about eye candy graphics. Just some CSS touch-ups would do.

</comment><comment><USER16> A minor usability point. If you hover over an X on the left, your cursor should change to a hand. Site looks good.

</comment><comment><USER17> It looks like an ugly version of the original Invoice Machine (which also offered free invoices without signup).

</comment><comment><USER18> Great little MVP.

Any way of keeping track of invoice numbers? Will require a login or maybe just cookies.

</comment><comment><USER19> would appreciate your thoughts on Invoice Bubble which is my app. It's not free, but it does have SSL security, PDF attaching, client management and stuff like that - but really simple and only $5. <https://invoicebubble.com>

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice - I was expecting it to be US-centric in terms of currency or something, but it's not. Thanks!</comment>


Dr. Hoover wrote 335,000 opioid prescriptions in 7 years, says she did no wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dr-katherine-hoover-accused-fueling-west-virginia-s-opioid-crisis-n909366 <comment><USER2> Assuming 1 year has 52 weeks, and 1 week has 5 working days, and 1 working day has 8 hours, that's 23 prescriptions/hour, or 2:36 minutes per prescription.

<comment><USER3> Assuming many of those are "doc, my symptoms are the same as before, can you renew my prescription"?

Those renewals probably take 10 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article

>First-timers paid $450 in cash to see a doctor and get a prescription, undercover investigators discovered. Returning customers paid $150 to a receptionist, who would hand out new prescriptions after asking a cursory question or two about their health, investigators found.

So the renewals didn't even come from Dr. Hoover, but from her receptionist using her prescription pad. That's crazy!

<comment><USER4> 335K prescriptions x $150 = 50mil / 7years = 7 milion a year :o

<comment><USER2> Damn, that's a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that the US has been taking a completely wrong approach to the opioid crisis. Trying to limit opioid prescriptions will just inevitably lead to users turning to the black market to get their fix. It's much safer to get opioids from a doctor, even if under questionable circumstances, than to gamble on fentanyl-spiked street heroin.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to program epaper - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>I'm looking for some cheap epaper that is easily programmable (via usb if possible). Does anyone have a suggestion ? <comment><USER2> Try these: [http://www.adafruit.com/category/63_150](http://www.adafruit.com/category/63_150)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is only slightly related, but does anyone know of an e-ink device that can run a desktop operating system (like Ubuntu)?

</comment><comment><USER4> Here are some that would work with an arduino, you could drive that via USB. [http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/05/23/e-ink-dives- int...](http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/05/23/e-ink-dives-into-the-diy- market/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I was looking for. Except, none of them support big screens (size of a kindle or A4 paper). Also, E-Ink doesnt seem to sell those big screen to hobbyist...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Check out [http://repaper.org/](http://repaper.org/) and Pervasive Displays products. No connection with me whatsoever.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great. Only issue is that it supports a maximum of 2,7" display...</comment></comment>


Powerful interviews w/ Founder of WikiHow & Founder of Apptopia - <AUTHOR> http://www.themutinyproject.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Jonathan Kay is the Founder & COO of Apptopia (<https://www.apptopia.com/>), the online marketplace for buying & selling mobile app ownership. Jack Herrick is the Founder & CEO of WikiHow, the 165th most visited site in the world.</comment>


Introduction to AI Techniques [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/sp.268/www/gamesearch.pdf <comment><USER2> Funfact: IBM Deep Blue v2 used the minmax with AlphaBeta pruning to defeat world champion Garry Kasparov. Most of it was brute force and the computer was so huge it had to be water cooled.

One of the moves that Kasparov accused was made by human (The bishop move if I remember right) was done by Deep Blue after a long thought but today, even a smart phone can come up with that move in few seconds.

Interestingly enough IBM for few years declined to release the logs of computer lines (especially for that moves) however I used to work at IBM and had access to the research logs. It was just mundane lines with this Bishop move as most promising line. IBM did later release the logs

Modern chess engines like Stockfish running on our phones are much more power than Deep Blue with both hardware and software improvements.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the link I'm currently studying about adversarial search and it will help me a lot !</comment>


Ask HN: Non US Engineering Internships? - <AUTHOR> I have a son that's a sophomore at a US state college in Chemical Engineering.  He is motivated and has good (3.9) grades.
The school has a requirement for either a study abroad, or intern abroad period.  Unfortunately, they have little to offer to meet the requirement.  One "approved" company, and zero info in housing, visas, costs, etc.  Grr.
His "academic advisor" is totally useless on the matter.  Bonus points for suggestions that would minimize my costs. Biased, but he's a crazy smart kid that would add more value than he drains. I'd happily match him up with any of you on organic chem, calculus, etc.  He truly has talent.
My son would love to be an intern in the UK, Germany, Dubai, France, etc, but Google is failing me on what companies might offer this.  Keep in mind that "chemical engineer" is a pretty broad scope.  He could intern in pharma, nuclear, silicon level chip issues, oil and gas, battery tech, food additives, etc.
Any insider knowledge or advice? <comment><USER2> Inbox me his CV in ali dot. elouafiq at. teal dot. ma our company do have internships industry scale project, mainly related to phosphorous-tech and agri-tech

</comment><comment><USER3> Does he speak any foreign languages? 20 years ago I had an internship in Germany. But I was also a German major. I got the internship via connections from my professors. The company helped with the visa.

Note most other countries don't pay interns. So expect to cover your own expenses.</comment>


Launch of new Galileo navigation quartet - <AUTHOR> http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/Galileo/Launching_Galileo/Launch_of_new_Galileo_navigation_quartet <comment><USER2> As a sidenote that I discovered reading about the new Galileo system, the precision you can get from it is 1 cm (encrypted, presumably paid service) which is something I barely can believe. That's extremely accurate considering that the satellites themselves are 23,222 km above the earth. It seems the public will only get 1 meter precision, but comparing it to GPS which has a precision of 5 meters, I see this as extraordinary.

More values:

BeiDou Navigation Satellite System - 10 m (public) - 0.1 m (encrypted)

Quasi-Zenith Satellite System - 0.01-1 meters

Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System - 10 m (public) - 0.1 m (encrypted)

<comment><USER3> >the precision you can get from it is 1 cm (encrypted, presumably paid service) which is something I barely can believe.

You can actually get this level of precision with GPS too, using RTK - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Kinematic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Kinematic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just discovered there are now 18 galileo satellites for alternative gps coverage.

So we have now glonass, gps, and galileo to get geolocation from. Also we can get it from wifi to get better accuracy and... anything else? I am missing any other method?

<comment><USER5> LORAN-C and eLORAN

<comment><USER6> Those have been shutdown as of the end of 2015.

<comment><USER5> Only in some parts of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Alternative news sources with extra info.

BBC: "Europe launches Galileo satellite quartet" [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-38000538](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38000538)

Spaceflight Insider: "Ariane 5 booster soars into orbit with four Galileo navigation satellites" [http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/arianespace/...](http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/arianespace/ariane-5-booster- orbit-four-galileo-navigation-satellites/)

NASA Spaceflight.com: "Ariane 5 ES successfully launches Galileo quadruplets" [https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/11/ariane-5-launch- gali...](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/11/ariane-5-launch-galileo- quadruplets/)</comment>