Switzerland in the age of automatic exchange of banking information - <AUTHOR> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/financial-transparency_switzerland-in-the-age-of-automatic-exchange-of-banking-information/45234706 <comment><USER2> To me as a Swiss citizen, born in Switzerland, living in Switzerland, it's an impertinence that every time I open a bank account with a Swiss bank I have to fill out at least 1 form with information about my relation to the US, about my travels in the US and whether I _might_ have to pay taxes there.

As a side note, the only other country besides the US that collects taxes based on citizenship and not based on residence is Eritrea. The tax policy of Eritrea is described as extortion by a lot of western governments and media.

<comment><USER3> Swiss banks are in that position today because some of them engaged in criminal conspiracies to help US customers commit tax fraud. If they want to participate in the US financial system then they have to play by US rules.

US citizens residing in other countries can still receive some services and protection from the US federal government. So it's completely fair to tax them for that. We can argue about the value of those services but clearly it's >0\. Those who don't like the deal are free to pay an administrative fee and renounce their citizenship.

<comment><USER4> Every single bank in every country that wishes to use USD is in that position today, it is not related to whether they were shown to help in some criminal activity.

> US citizens residing in other countries can still receive some services and > protection from the US federal government.

Seriously, like what? In how many percent of situations does this ever come up. Sure it's more than >0, but if it is like 1$/person does it really make sense? This is economic bullying by a country that right now happens to be in a position (having strong military, influence and their currency being the reserve one) to be able to get away with it.

<comment><USER5> For starters the first $103,900 is tax free if you qualify and are living abroad.

What it comes down to is that because of its size and economic power there is an enormous incentive for wealthy people who earn their income (in an actual sense, not a tax law menagerie sense) in the US to try to avoid US taxes by living abroad and moving assets, their "home", etc outside of US jurisdiction while still in reality earning their income from the US.

One of the basic benefits is always being able to return to the US. Being inside American borders is very much safer than being anywhere else if/when the next major global military issue arises.

You also get the benefits of the US legal system if you maintain ties, investments, etc.

If you don't want to pay those taxes you are welcome to renounce your citizenship, but you have to get another country to accept you first. (they won't revoke your citizenship if the result is your being stateless)

<comment><USER6> > One of the basic benefits is always being able to return to the US. Being > inside American borders is very much safer than being anywhere else if/when > the next major global military issue arises.

It's a funny fear, because today, being in the US vs. some other developed country takes about 7-8 years off your life.

Meanwhile, those developed countries with functioning health care systems that you can return to whenever don't bother with worldwide taxation.

<comment><USER5> >It's a funny fear, because today, being in the US vs. some other developed country takes about 7-8 years off your life.

Does it actually?

I assume that disparity is more to do with the populations of impoverished people around this very diverse country that can't compare to smaller European countries that just don't have those populations.

There is no Mississippi in Germany, those populations are in other countries.

If you compare the whole European Union to the US the disparity is much smaller.

>It's a funny fear, because today, being in the US vs. some other developed country takes about 7-8 years off your life.

I think that is an exaggeration, I can't find that statistic anywhere.

But you have to look at people in your demographic, not the entire country.

The US has the best health care in the world _if you can afford it_.

Just about anybody can get insurance and set aside the max out of pocket costs to insure themselves and their family, but they will take a considerable hit in quality of life, home size, luxuries, etc. In other countries that health care is paid for with lowered salaries through taxes and quality of life takes a hit anyway.

<comment><USER7> You would have to be very rich indeed to achieve the same level of cover as is provided in comparable economies (UK/DE/AU etc), because the insurance is expensive and out of pocket costs / copay is high, and you may discover you cannot get or maintain insurance once you develop a chronic condition.

But even if you dealt with a broker and crafted a special insurance insurance product to deal with the eventuality of being denied further insurance, you are ignoring something significant: you don't improve the quality of life or lifespan of the _population_ by making healthcare only accessible to the rich.

<comment><USER8> The ACA has removed the pre-existing condition problem, and significantly changed some of the pricing considerations. It's more affordable now than many are led to believe based on the old structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> USA is overreaching, European countries should stand up this crap. I'm a Polish and US Citizen and I remember a situation where I was at an airport in Poland and was not let onto a flight after presenting a valid US passport and Polish ID card to the Polish border patrol. They didn't allow me onto my flight due to lack of a Polish passport (Polish law says I need a Polish passport when travelling to the US). I called the US embassy which told me they couldn't help me because I was Polish citizen on Polish soil. In that case why should I pay taxes while abroad? Will the US come to my rescue if a war broke out or major disaster occurred? They couldn't even get me onto a flight back to the US.

I ended up getting a hotel for the night, bought a plane ticket to Germany the next day and another one from Germany to the US. I was offered a small refund for my round trip tickets from Poland to the US. Only person I could count on was myself that day.

<comment><USER10> > USA is overreaching, European countries should stand up this crap. [Recounts > story about issues at Polish border due to Polish law and Polish > citizenship.]

So you would have liked the US to stand against Polish crap on your behalf?

<comment><USER9> I pay Polish taxes on the money I earn in Poland and I abide by Polish law while in Poland, why should I abide by US law while in Poland? What's the benefit to me? I mean if I'm paying an overreaching tax then yeah I kind of expect them to overreach for me.

<comment><USER10> > (Polish law says I need a Polish passport when travelling to the US)

What would you have expected the US to do? Smuggle you out of the country?

<comment><USER9> Honestly, one call from the embassy and I would have been on that flight, believe me.

<comment><USER10> As far as I understand, if you were trying to fly from the US to Poland using a Polish passport you would have faced the same problem (or even worse, as you wouldn't have had a legal way to exit the US at all without a passport).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> 88840-8855 I am no expert, it would be great to read it from someone with knowledge in this field.

What if a shell corp is created in a country that is not included in the list of the ownership info automatic exchange? Instead of option A, someone could go with option B and would be fully protected:

Option A: Owner in the UK -> Swiss Bank account

Option B: Owner in the UK -> Shell corp & legal entity in a country not included in that list -> Swiss Bank account not on the name of the owner, but held by the shell corp/legal entity

<comment><USER11> That's where the concept of UBO comes in - the reporting party is supposed to trace this through to the ultimate beneficial owner. And if they can't then they're not supposed to accept the business (KYC fail).

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

A lot of the offshore locations a laymen can name report this stuff anyway (to varying degrees of course).

The whole straight up hiding money approach(Or to put it in hn terms "security through obscurity") isn't really a thing anymore.

<comment><USER12> Wasn't there an article recently describing how you can register a company in UK through a web portal and put absolute rubbish in a UBO field without having to submit any single piece of documentary evidence?

<comment><USER11> No idea what UK company registration processes look like.

Possibly. You're not gonna get far moving your mountain of coin without the help of lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, banks, prime brokers etc.

...none of whom will touch you if you can't prove this stuff reasonably well.

As for people submitting straight up fraudulent info - rules don't stop people like that in the same way sternly telling a mugger that it's illegal won't stop them from taking your wallet. Checks & balances sure but beyond a certain level of illegality more rules achieve nothing.

<comment><USER13> Analysis by Global Witness shows 87,000 properties – 40% of them in London – are anonymously owned by firms registered in tax havens

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk- news/201...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk- news/2019/mar/17/100-billion-of-uk-propert-secretly-owned-anonymous-firms-tax- havens)

<comment><USER11> Would be curious what you (and the guardian) reckon "anonymous" means in this context?

Shareholder data for private companies aren't generally publicly searchable regardless of country...(hence the "private" part)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is not something that Switzerland was happy to do; it took a lot of pressure to get them to stop being an asset haven for international tax avoiders.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be precise: pressure from the US. Now the US is Switzerland.

<comment><USER15> Many people are missing this point. US banks, until this point, do not exchange information on their foreign customers. FATCA is more like: Hey Hong Kong, Swiss, London, nice business you have over there, maybe I can get in the action too. All of the action actually.

<comment><USER16> And as a result of that the US is now the worlds largest offshore banking center for the rest of the world. It's a pretty safe place to hold your money, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't worry, Switzerland is still attractive for many reasons as a stable, competitive, well connected financial center.

I think a lot of people don't realize that bank account privacy is just 1 of 20 distinctive qualities of Swiss institutions and regulatory structure.

Switzerland is attractive because its not just shell companies and PO boxes, compared to other nations that try to offer similar nominal regulations. Instead it has a vibrant regulatory system with competition amongst each state and no expensive federal government. As an example Google pays the same as it does in Silicon Valley, with employees being only subject state level tax. The state of Zug is a fintech hub with an income tax rate of 7%. Territorial only. The Swiss franc is currently pegged 1:1 with USD, having ditched Euro peg almost 5 years ago.

The regulators and public sector representatives are very accessible because everything happens at the sparsely populated state level, and they all operate under the swiss brand which includes access to the global financial system.

Switzerland is better thought of as a loose collection of sovereign states with a small national government. The concept may seem familiar but recognize how small all of Switzerland is and that has factored into why the national government never grew arbitrarily large to maintain cohesion and assume its own intrusive identity, and why direct representation has been possible there for almost 200 years (they did represenative democracy before that, like the US, but figured out how to remove it since the flaws were obvious and they're smaller)

Outside of finance and regulatory structure, Americans may also find the vibrant gun culture and visible military to be refreshing and familiar. A stark contrast to the ideals and vocal opinions that neighboring Europeans would have about guns as soon as they find out you're American, possibly unaware of what Switzerland offers and has offered for a very long time.

<comment><USER2> > The Swiss franc is currently pegged 1:1 with USD, having ditched Euro peg > almost 5 years ago.

It's not.

<comment><USER17> The Swiss central bank actively tries to maintain parity

Use whatever word you want to quickly convey that thought to a broad population

"Peg" also does that.

<comment><USER10> Over the last four years the USD has moved in the range 0.92-1.03 CHF (a +/\- 5.6% interval around the midpoint). The average rate is 0.985, the standard deviation 0.019 (2.0%).

Over the last four years the EUR has moved in the range 1.06-1.20 CHF (a +/\- 6.0% interval around the midpoint). The average rate is 1.117, the standard deviation 0.034 (3.1%).

Even though the exchange with the USD is slightly more stable in this case (it depends on the period and metric chosen) saying that it's pegged is an exaggeration.

By the way, the CHF was not pegged to the EUR either. There was a minimum rate set by the SNB at 1.20 but it floated as high as 1.26 in 2013.

<comment><USER18> > ... but it floated as high as 1.26 in 2013.

Just before they abandoned the peg as too hard to maintian.

<comment><USER10> Maintaining the 1.20 floor (not peg) is not hard when the CHF is weakening against the EUR, the SNB doesn't need to do anything at all when the exchange rate is moving in the direction they want.

They abandoned the floor more that a year and a half later, in January 2015, when the exchange rate was back at 1.20 despite their efforts to keep CHF appreciation under control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Swiss banks doesn't actually disclose to swiss authorities, even though the have a wealth tax based partially on the money in your bank account.

<comment><USER20> > Swiss banks doesn't actually disclose to swiss authorities, even though the > have a wealth tax based partially on the money in your bank account.

(i'm swiss)

I believe there is no way in hell they could have passed this legislation if it included giving data of swiss citizens to the swiss government.

People here cherish their banking secrecy and it's still somewhat part of the national identity.

From a swiss point of view it was/is pretty much: The US is pressuring us too much, we'll have to give up banking secrecy, _but_ only for foreigners.

If they didn't do that, i'm fairly certain it would have been shot down by the people with a referendum.

<comment><USER19> I loved in Switzerland recently, and I never really understood how the wealth tax works when the banks don't talk to the tax authorities. Is it entirely optional?

<comment><USER2> You fill out a tax declaration every year. If you don't disclose some values and this is discovered later on, you will be punishable with a fine (between 30% and 300% of the tax on the non-disclosed values). The fine can be avoided in some cases by self-indictment, but of course you'll still have to pay the avoided taxes plus interest.

If you even fake documents to avoid taxes, then you can end up in jail.

This system of "voluntary" tax declarations is like a contract between the government and the citizens: Government doesn't stick their nose into bank accounts of citizens, while citizens pay taxes on their assets. I'm not sure if it's a good system, but it has mostly worked out so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have to say that I find the attitude I quoted below from the link, ever more prevalent in today's political and social climate, to be extremely dangerous in how one-sided it is.For one thing, competition is a cornerstone of better development. Yes, it sometimes needs to be moderated but as a basic rule of anything economic, it works at delivering more and better options and keeping exploitative tendencies in check. This applies to the regulatory frameworks of countries just as much as to any other economic actor and the just as many of us would probably agree that it's a bad idea for every company in X industry to collude on fixing prices, the notion of stamping out competitive tax regimes among nation states should be looked at with the same suspicion and for the same reasons of curtailing abuse against those who have to pay for everything.

Secondly, at what point does it allow for the question of just how much government should be allowed to spend? The entire onus should not simply be placed on crushing tax avoidance, and a serious debate about the size, scope and sheer spending done by governments today needs to balance things out. This isn't an argument against social programs or helping the poor it's just a recognition of the basic fact that a tremendous amount of money extracted by states gets wasted on all sorts of immense bloat. We complain about bureaucratic mismanagement by various countries all the time but for some reason should applaud their obsessive efforts to crush any exit valves on abusive tax practices by them, and not just tax avoiders or evaders?

 _With the support of the G20 and the EU, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) therefore drew up international standards in 2014 to enable countries to exchange bank information automatically. More than a hundred countries have so far decided to adhere to these standards, almost half of which have already started to exchange information in 2017. Participating countries must undertake to treat the data they receive confidentially and only for tax purposes.

These rules also aim to create a level playing field for all financial centres by putting an end to tax havens. Countries - or territories - that do not meet the criteria set out in international standards or that are not cooperative are included in grey or black lists of the OECD and the EU. "Defensive measures", in other words sanctions, are envisaged against them._

</comment><comment><USER22> A related read: Swiss bank employees who are domiciled outside Switzerland are exempt from Swiss banking secrecy laws.

[https://www.economist.com/finance-and- economics/2018/10/18/a...](https://www.economist.com/finance-and- economics/2018/10/18/a-court-ruling-knocks-another-hole-in-swiss-banking- secrecy)

Also at [https://archive.is/lbO8j](https://archive.is/lbO8j)</comment>


Start registeri.ng, .NG domains go on sale - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/industry/2010/12/30/interesti-ng-nigerian-domains-go-on-sale-so-get-registeri-ng/

<comment><USER2> After checking a few registrars, I found they only sell third-level domains (.com.ng, .net.ng), not second-level domains (like "amazi.ng") which is probably what most people here would be interested in.

Example: <http://www.webdomains.com.ng/myaccount/whois.php?step=1>

It's a shame they're missing the opportunity to sell such a nice top-level domain - or perhaps it's done on purpose?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think .com.ng kind of domains have been around for a while, the latest news is that they are going to open .ng domains for everyone, really soon. at least i believe thats whats going to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> People should probably stop voting this story up; the .ng domains are not currently on sale anywhere I can see, and there's no sign that they will be generally available any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article mentions 27 registration-capable companies but fails to provide any names or links. Any voices of experience for which service should I use for purchasi.ng a Nigerian domain?

<comment><USER5> The list of registrars is here: <http://www.nira.org.ng/index.php/registrars>. I looked through the list of the platinum, gold and silver levels and none of their websites support .ng yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi, I happen to be a Platinum Registrar [www.websoft.com.ng] & below are documents regarding the 2nd level .ng domains which are to be auctioned.

<http://www.nira.org.ng/index.php/auction>

[http://nira.org.ng/media/pdf/NIRA%20AUCTION%20PROCESS%20Marc...](http://nira.org.ng/media/pdf/NIRA%20AUCTION%20PROCESS%20March%202010%20v1.pdf)

Its sad that just a minority of Nigerians [0.05%] of a population of 150million have completely destroyed the reputation of an entire nation. Nonetheless, Websoft has been able to earn the trust of some Fortune 500 companies & hence our selection as the Registrar in Nigeria & we stand committed to building a New Image of Nigeria & flush out these unscrupulous elements.

</comment><comment><USER7> Should have read the comments first. Just wasted 20 minutes trying to find a registrar.

<comment><USER8> This is an example of why 90% of the time, I read the HN comments and _then_ decide whether the story is worth checking.

<comment><USER9> And when I don't, I usually regret it. Like now.

It would appear that second-level .ng domains might be available, but only for companies incorporated in Nigeria, which is probably not a bad idea.

<comment><USER10> I went searching for a registrar as well. There are a couple of ng domains that might be interesting to use though I'd still be worried about the Nigerian scam stigma.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did a little more research and it looks like the second-level .ng domains are being sold through an auction slot process. The starting bids are around $50,000.

<comment><USER11> Can you cite the source of that?

<comment><USER5> Direct email from Websoft (<http://websoft-ng.com>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With the stigma of Nigerian emails scams would you really even want to be associated with .ng?

<comment><USER13> I guess one of their goals is to change this stigma by having more legitimate Nigerian online presence

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nigeria is one of the last countries I would ever trust with any sort of credit card information. However, if namecheap can nab these as an option, I'll probably snag a few of them

</comment><comment><USER15> Lame.</comment>


Lickable Screen Can Recreate Almost Any Taste or Flavor Without Eating Food - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/this-lickable-screen-can-recreate-almost-any-taste-or-f-1843609903 <comment><USER2> I had to upvote this. There has to be some good jokes just waiting to pounce on it. And I have to admit I'd lick it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Given than so much of the sense of taste is related to the sense of smell I wonder that there isn't anything about Smellavision replacing Television in there [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_qvjwLmrHo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_qvjwLmrHo)</comment></comment>


The "no self-defeating object" argument - <AUTHOR> http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/the-no-self-defeating-object-argument/

<comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Terrence Tao's blog -- even though I (with a first-class undergraduate degree in Math) can only really follow maybe 20% of the articles he writes.</comment>


Unicorns Watch in Horror as Uber Careens Towards a Down Round - <AUTHOR> https://markstcyr.com/2017/04/16/unicorns-watch-in-horror-as-uber-careens-towards-a-possible-extinction-event-a-down-round/ <comment><USER3> This is some of the worst writing I've read in quite some time. It seems like we're so excited about the chance to upvote bad news about Uber that even poorly written (and poorly reasoned) pieces are bubbling up.

<comment><USER4> Yes. There's no new info there. I thought this was going to reflect Uber going for a round of financing on bad terms. But it's just blithering.

The numbers are clear. Here are Uber's financing rounds so far.[1] The $1.1 billion in loans in 2016 from Morgan Staley [2] wasn't on favorable terms for Uber. What's keeping them alive right now is a $3.5 billion equity investment from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. That was made before Uber pulled out of China, and may have been made for political reasons involving Saudi Arabia's relationship with China. They also got some undisclosed amount of money from Victor Orlovski, but the biggest investment to date from that source is $27 million, so it's probably not that big compred to Uber's burn rate. So Uber raised about $4.1 billion in 2016, $1.1 billion of which is debt which must be repaid.

Uber lost about $3 billion in 2016. There's been no new capital in 2017. Unless they can find a bigger sucker than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, they go broke in 2018.

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding- rounds](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds) [2] [https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/new-reports- confirm-1-15b-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/new-reports- confirm-1-15b-leveraged-loan-raised-by-uber-at-5/)

<comment><USER5> Well it's like that classic Getty quote: when you owe the bank $100, it's your problem; when you owe the bank $100 million dollars it's their problem.

At this point, Uber's stakeholders - who are large, rich, and powerful - <USER2> so vested in their success that I'm sure they'll be able to find another fool to pass the bag to.

<comment><USER4> Where are they going to find a bigger sucker than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That seems a little pessimistic.

I think most people can realize Uber is an outlier in many aspects, most of which, its inability to produce a profit.

It isn't even burning cash to continue growing, like Amazon, it is just burning cash to exist. Amazon at least has proven it has a valuable model but chooses to continue burning.

<comment><USER7> Do a bit more history study and you'll realize people used to say the same thing about Amazon. It's only recently that people decided to acknowledge the fact that Amazon's "burning money" is a feature not a bug. You said "Amazon at least has proven it has a valuable model...". What you don't realize is it took almost a decade.

This is actually why I have infinite respect for Jeff Bezos, he stuck around through all the criticism (almost a decade of constantly hearing "it won't work! they're not making any money" even though they have been clearly the market leader for a long time and I'm sure he had clear vision all along) and finally managed to get to a point where even the naysayers gave up.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, Amazon was investing all of their money on creating moats to fend off current/future competitors, like warehouses and packing/shipping infrastructure.

Most of Uber's spend is on subsidizing the cost of the product. This is a competitor moat in the sense that it outprices less-resourced competition, but it's a moat that can only be maintained by continued subsidies. The moment those subsidies end, so does the moat.

<comment><USER7> I know that, and I'm sure guys at Uber knows that too, and probably know much more than all of us combined. They are not idiots and they think about these things every single day. If people like us who only think about it once in a while when a related article shows up on HN knows it, they do too.

Just to be clear, I also think what you say is a very possible scenario, but the problem is this thesis is based on the current state of the world. Things change all the time (For example who knows where Uber would have been if this whole autonomous vehicle thing never became the reality, and there can be all kinds of variables in the future that may work for or against them)

You really never know what will happen. It's easy to say the moat is not as obvious as amazon's, but Amazon's moat was not as obvious as we think nowadays back then. Not just Amazon, every single disruptive tech company went through this, nowadays it's so obvious that you can make money with search ads but when Google first came out people never understood how they were going to make money by sending people away from their site as soon as they arrive. Obvious things are only obvious in hindsight.

<comment><USER5> It's not a matter of obviousness, though. The real question is: are they spending their money on creating a real moat that will remain once the money spigot is turned off or not?

Amazon purchased real things. Uber is spending their cash on subsidizing the price. I guess you can make the argument that their moat is also their brand, but I think its very apples to oranges to compare Uber's subsidies with Amazon's infrastructure spend.

I also don't by the "they are not idiots" argument. Remember, there were plenty of "geniuses" at Enron, at Bear Stearns, At Lehman, etc.

<comment><USER7> > I think its very apples to oranges to compare Uber's subsidies with Amazon's > infrastructure spend.

Yet you are comparing them. My point was exactly that comparing these are apples and oranges. And it _is_ a matter of obviousness because you seem to think it's obvious that Amazon's "moat" was an obvious moat whereas Uber doesn't have a moat at all.

I'm not even saying Uber has found their absolute moat either. I'm saying a lot of analysis we take for granted was never obvious when the companies were in their early days.

Youtube's model was never obvious either (and still not obvious in terms of profitability) yet they managed to near monopolize the online video sector. You could say the same thing about Youtube. They didn't know how to make money, and they just kept bleeding money. So bad that they had to sell themselves. Yet they have built something valuable, and someone wanted to buy them to use as a very important strategic asset.

Who knows what will happen to uber but I don't think it's so bad that they will obviously fail. It's more like 50/50\. They do provide great value to people, and I am sure they are doing whatever they can to create what you call a moat, just not visible to you. I still stand by the fact that Amazon's "moat" was never obvious until recently.

If you really think it was as easy as "Amazon was spending money purchasing real things so they were actually accumulating value, compared to Uber", you should read this book [https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos- Amazon-eb...](https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon- ebook/dp/B00BWQW73E/ref=pd_sim_351_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=N701XJT8QX5WZAT0MGEX)

There were so many points in Amazon's history where everybody mocked them and criticized them just like you're doing right now for Uber. For example at one point everyone thought a decentralized marketplace (eBay) was the future and Amazon will die off because eBay never kept inventory, which came with a lot of benefits such as high margin and low operating cost, not to mention people used to say "eBay is the true internet marketplace, Amazon is just a web1.0 company and won't survive in the world where every sale happens online peer to peer".

So basically what you're referring to as a moat now was actually considered the biggest weakness for Amazon at one point in history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flagged.

This is obviously just poorly written clickbait to piss people off. Unicorns shouldn't be worried about Uber's down round unless they have as many skeletons in their closet as Uber does. Apples to oranges. I think Uber is a horrible company, but I also don't think that random clickbait should be getting up the ranks on HN.

<comment><USER9> I've flagged it too -- after unintentionally upvoting it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This guy (whom I've never heard of) actually quotes himself on his own about page.

"I am quoted as stating: ..."

That's some next-level self-promotional mojo.

</comment><comment><USER11> I never read an intro so well calculated to make me not give a shit about startups.

<comment><USER12> It's like a stream of consciousness piece that barely hangs on to the main thread of what it's supposed to be about.

<comment><USER13> This article opens up with an analogy between nuclear war and an Uber down round.

Why are people upvoting this?

      sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 markstcyr.com" > /etc/hosts'

<comment><USER14> _> sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 markstcyr.com" > /etc/hosts'_

You just overwrote your hosts file.

<comment><USER13> LOL was a typo. I did do >> in my terminal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm watching in amazement that they are still able to raise money at all. Damaged brand, losing on every sale. There have been some examples of such companies in the past (Airlines during the oil crisis for instance) but at least those had competent management.

The drivers have long ago figured out that they shouldn't bet on a single horse so even that advantage is eroding.

</comment><comment><USER16> Amazon lost billions to create/invent/perfect the shop-online market and dominate it; a decade-plus of losses and dire predictions later, it's profitable.

Uber has lost billions to create the global smart-phone ride-sharing market, vastly expanding the "pie" of consumer/users/riders in cities that had been artificially restricted and ruined by the awful regulated no-competition taxicab model for 80 years. Uber deserves a Nobel Prize of some kind for destroying the old -- very bad -- order and has made riding around in first- world cities affordable, safe and reliable -- all of which regulated taxis were not. Millions of people happily/gratefully use Uber or its competitors every day. If Uber wants to make a profit, all it has to do is raise its fares 10 or 15 percent and fend off competitors/upstarts. Why does everyone assume Uber can't handle the competition in an ever-expanding market for its kind of service; Uber is still an under-30 market. If Uber wants to make its whiniest drivers happy and shut half of its moronic media critics up, all it has to do is add the tip function to the app. If it wants to get the rest of the press off its back, Uber has to learn how to do PR 101 -- which means it needs to point out the benefits, enormous benefits, that its micro-transit has brought to cities and the poorish people who until Uber/Lyft came along had to live with lousy public transit systems and the thieves and idiots who run them. It may be too late for adding tips to the app; Uber soon may be forced to add tips by the moronic politicians who mis-run NY City -- the same morons who artificially held down the number of taxi licenses for 85 years until the price for a medallion hit 1 million bucks (before Uber came along). In any case, it doesn't matter to non-investors much if Uber survives; it's already contributed greatly to urban society worldwide, in spite of the personal and professional shortcomings of its execs and a creepy few of its 1 million drivers. If Uber goes the way of the Sony Betamax, no biggie; we'll still be able to push a button on our smart phones and get a ride.

</comment><comment><USER17> liked kara swisher's point on cnbc, that so much wealth + influence has bought into uber that it is truly too big to fail. too many wealthy investors and deep SV network will ensure that it not melt down (unlike ?).

<comment><USER13> This makes no sense.

Enormous enterprises with tons of buy-in that failed:

\- Bernard Madoff Investment Securities (yes, of Bernie Madoff fame)

\- Enron

\- Bear Stearns

\- Lehman Brothers

Too big to fail means the government will step in to prevent a failure. Only the government has the backing of the entire economy.

<comment><USER17> clearly this was not a literal statement ..] but the elbow grease of the powerful will go a long way for the corp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "In my opinion: They are all teetering on the edge of extinction if (or when) Uber has to do the near unconscionable act and hit the button and launch – a down round." is everything wrong with the VC funding mentality.

Surely it would take the sheen off what has been a meteoric rise, but the hype cycle will continue to turn. Hopefully they can figure out the multitude of cultural problems if there is a harder reset.

<comment><USER19> If the people with the money don't believe the hype it doesn't matter because they won't pour good money after bad. These people did not become wealthy by backing losers. What it means is they may be able to raise money in the short term but with worse deals than they have been getting, and in the medium to long term even that will start to dry up. How long can they burn cash to make a market that they can exploit. They may put other ride sharing companies out of business but small taxi firms will pop back up again so they will never be able to monopolise the market such that they can start setting a price that would result in a good return for investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes, Airbnb and Stripe are shitting themselves.

</comment><comment><USER21> Big difference between Amazon and Uber: Amazon didn't rely on subprime loans

</comment><comment><USER22> ARRO App or CURB app will get you a reliable taxi in NYC

Why even think about UBER?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some mod nuked/censored this off of the front page... cc @dang

<comment><USER23> Given the number of negative comments, I suspect many users have flagged the story. It doesn't take a mod to cause a submission to drop in rankings.</comment></comment>


How Craig Barton wishes he'd taught maths - <AUTHOR> https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/12/22/how-craig-barton-wishes-hed-taught-maths/#more-6435 <comment><USER2> _More precisely, in order to decide whether it is a good idea, one should assess (i) how difficult it is to give an explanation of why some procedure works and (ii) how difficult it is to learn how to apply the procedure without understanding why it works._

Well, teaching basic math at a commuter college years ago, it felt like the issue of "teaching procedure" to "teaching understanding" was complex. The course I was teaching was close to the end of the math requirements for a significant percentage of the students. I was very attracted to teaching ideas but this group of students essentially had the attitude that they wanted a procedure to memorize rather than an explanation, _not matter how complex the procedure_. It had a certain logic - mathematical explanation would have touched a world they were happy to and committed to leaving forever soon after this. They'd suffered through this world up this point and _thinking_ about it was more painful than simply acting.

Which is to say, I don't think there any easy answer for how to teach math. The failure of American "new math" years ago is something of a lesson in the push-pull of concepts versus concreteness as they can become ideologies in society at large.

<comment><USER3> This is a widespread tradeoff. I'd a conversation with a first-tier college biology professor, about a way to give a more integrated, transferable understanding of a topic. He liked it, but observed, my students will shortly be taking the MCAT (high-stakes medical school entrance exam), and our time together is limited, and the MCAT doesn't test for understanding of the topic, only for something superficial and memorizable, so, I would be doing my students a disservice if I reallocated time to understanding.

Perhaps early primary school is an opportunity to escape this tension. With weaker test constraints, and more years of payoffs over which to amortize the costs of better understanding.

<comment><USER4> My understanding of learning is that it both takes a longer time to actually learn something useful and that we're inefficient in learning or retaining anything because we rushed from one topic to another in our courses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that vector space question is a great example. It's the kind of thing that _should_ be straightforward for anyone who has taken a linear algebra course, but I can also totally see students getting it wrong. This is especially the case because it's actually very easy fundamentally (the set of all integers does not comprise a field, and so a vector space cannot be defined over it).

But to my recollection, most of the popular linear algebra textbooks[1] don't spend time showing why the integers cannot form a vector space because it's "easy." Instead they spend time tediously walking through examples of bizarre sets defined over R and C to show which axioms are fulfilled and which are not.

In a similar vein to the way students might overthink the elementary probability question, I could see university students trained to disprove each of A), B), C) and D) - perhaps making a mistake along the way - instead of quickly scanning the options and picking out the one which simply isn't defined over a field.

__________________________

1\. I'm thinking of Friedberg et al, Hoffman & Kunze, Axler, Strang, etc.

<comment><USER6> As a bumbling idiot who never did university level math, I don't understand the question or the answer. (I did understand the probability one and knew the right answer to that at least.) I'm trying to catch up. Would you be kind enough to explain it?

<comment><USER5> Sure.

Operations in applied linear algebra - such as matrix multiplication and solving systems of linear equations - are formalized by the theory of vector spaces, much like calculus is formalized through the theory of analysis. Vector spaces are algebraic structures which axiomatize the linearity you need to carry out these operations. If you can establish your equations exist in a vector space, you can prove that they admit linear relations and are thus solvable as linear systems.

More precisely, a vector space V is any set S defined over a field F which is _closed_ under both vector addition and scalar multiplication, where the elements of S are called vectors and the elements of the _underlying_ field F are called scalars. The term "closed" means that for every pair of vectors _x_ , _y_ in V there exists a vector _x_ \+ _y_ in V, and for every scalar _c_ in F and vector x in V there exists a vector _cx_ in V. There are eight axioms in total, for things like associativity and commutativity, but those aren't germane to this particular example. What's important is that vector spaces are what allow you to form linear combinations of things, which is the scaffolding you need to prove things like linear dependence and independence; whether or not a system of linear equations has no solutions, one solution or infinitely many solutions, etc.

Fields are the algebraic structures which formalize the elementary arithmetic you're already familiar with over sets like the the complex numbers, the real numbers, the rationals, etc. They are sets which are closed under "regular" addition and multiplication. Notably, integers do _not_ comprise a field because integers do not have multiplicative inverses. Multiplicative inverses are the axiomatic way of establishing that in any field, division must be possible. So concretely, there is no multiplicative inverse _1_ / _n_ for any integer _n_. There is in the set of rationals, but not the set of integers. Therefore integers are not _closed_ under multiplication, and they cannot comprise a field.

Since the integers do not comprise a field, you cannot define a vector space over the integers, because the scalars used to define scalar multiplication in vector spaces are just elements of the underlying field. If you try to define a vector space over a set without multiplicative closure, the vector space cannot be closed under scalar multiplication. Among other things, linear combinations stop being invertible (or even possible in general), and linear relations don't exist.

So circling back to the specific question: it's asking which of the given sets comprises a vector space. You can make all kinds of abstract vector spaces (e.g. the set of all polynomials over a field, the set of all polynomials with degree at most _n_ over a field, the set of all continuous functions, etc). But if you stick with the definition of a vector space, you don't need to tediously test each of the given sets for the eight axioms. You just have to remember the integers don't comprise a field, so the set of all triples of integers can't be a vector space either.

Hopefully that's clear, let me know if you'd like me to clarify anything.

<comment><USER7> The integers are totally closed under multiplication. They lack an inverse under multiplication that's why they aren't a field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Quotes from OA that struck me as on the button...

 _" A prejudice that was strongly confirmed was the value of mathematical fluency. Barton says, and I agree with him (and suggested something like it in my book Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction) that it is often a good idea to teach fluency first and understanding later."_

Agree fully with Barton and OA here. Until recently I taught GCSE Maths re- take students aged 16 and over in a further education college. They were constantly tripping over really quite basic little skill issues and that prevented them from seeing how to tackle the longer and more complex problem solving questions.

 _" I would go for something roughly equivalent [in the solving of equations such as 4x - 8 = 2x + 2], but not quite the same, which is to stress the rule you can do the same thing to both sides of an equation (worrying about things like squaring both sides or multiplying by zero later). Then the problem of solving linear equations would be reduced to a kind of puzzle: what can we do to both sides of this equation to make the whole thing look simpler?"_

The idea of just playing with the notation is one I fully intend to try but getting people to think in that abstract way is hard work.

<comment><USER9> > Agree fully with Barton and OA here. Until recently I taught GCSE Maths re- > take students aged 16 and over in a further education college. They were > constantly tripping over really quite basic little skill issues and that > prevented them from seeing how to tackle the longer and more complex problem > solving questions.

I also agree fully. A little while back I did some support tutoring for A-level maths students. The number of students who turned up who mysteriously "had problems with longer questions"... I wish I'd known the example of calculating the perimeter of the rectangle with fractions. That would have really helped explain why the problem wasn't really the length of the question, it was the fact that the student had never properly learned the component skills separately.

Unfortunately, the problem of building impressive-looking edifices on shaky foundations is absolutely endemic in British high-school maths teaching. Thousands of students who never quite understood fractions are "learning" calculus through being taught recipes, and the easier exam questions are formulaic enough that they get through with Cs at least, without any mathematical understanding.

The A-level statistics modules, in particular, have very impressive _sounding_ syllabuses. Students learn T-tests, Chi-squared tests, all this sophisticated statistical machinery. If all these students really understood this stuff, Britain would have a vast army of highly trained statisticians. But nothing of the sort is true, of course: students are just learning a recipe for processing numbers. I can't imagine the carnage if a statistics exam asked the students to write an essay explaining the principle by which a T-test works.

Pardon my rant, this has been on my mind for a while.

<comment><USER8> Going back around the millennium or before when I last taught A level maths at college, we had them in over the summer before term started for a two week intensive algebra and basics course.

Seemed to help.

The original author (Tim Gowers, a Fields medallist and professor of mathematics at Cambridge) has a totally hilarious blog post about being asked to coach a teenager doing A level maths...

[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/what-maths-a- level-d...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/what-maths-a-level-doesnt- necessarily-give-you/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for linking that, it's a great read. I really should read more of Gowers' posts.

The phrase "memory works far better when you learn networks of facts" was a happy find - I've never been able to express that idea so concisely.

I remember discovering they'd moved "differentiation from first principles" away to a further-maths module, as if it's a peripheral, difficult little oddity for the keen kids to hear about. It was the surest, saddest sign that the powers that be had given up on genuinely educating the average A-level maths student.

<comment><USER3> > memory works far better when you learn networks of facts

One challenge with teaching a more rough-quantitative Fermi-question-ish introduction to sciences, is it's more sensitive to integration and correctness of understanding. With a Trivial-Pursuit memorize and regurgitate style of "understanding", damage from misconceptions and fragmentation of knowledge is local. Whereas rough-quantitative reasoning benefits from being able to... slide around the knowledge space. Jagged misconceptions and fragmented knowledge seriously impedes the sliding. I imagine memory is similar. Nice phrase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Math is done very very wrong, I don't think most teachers know enough math (sorry for that dubious and bold claim).

As a computer guy who hates state machines and was always obsessed with math, I feel that just about everything about maths is taught wrong from the get go.

Just the other day I learned about something inductive function got me curious about: linear ordering of structures as proof of termination. Turns out it's been studied in math for long: it's called a well-order. Fine.. thing is we're taught about linear recursion in HS .. but we have no pragmatic notion of induction except ~~ P n-1 => P n ~~ It's so cryptically compressed that I suspect no student beside aspies and other prodigies can have the slightest clue about that. Yet it's so important (and so obvious when shown).

<comment><USER11> Induction is baked in the most "common" way of defining the naturals (Peano axioms). IIRC, it's the definition I got for the "proper naturals" when I was in HS (but, my Maths teacher was a mathematician, and was who got me interested in them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I skipped two years of school which also happened to be when a lot of the basics of Algebra were introduced. When I returned to school my scores were good enough to not repeat but the gaps didn't become obvious until it was too late to fix.

Reading that article I now realise it was that I lacked fluency. I didn't instinctively "know" how to do simultaneous equations because unlike my peers I hadn't spent two years doing them, so I had to remember how to solve them every single time.

All I can say now is thankfully there is the Khan Academy which rapidly improved my mathematical understanding when I needed it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I consider myself pretty strong at math (in university right now) and I was stumped by the vector space question. I never considered, actually, what domain scalars should be drawn from.

Wikipedia says "the scalars can be taken from any field, including the rational, algebraic, real, and complex numbers, as well as finite fields."

<comment><USER5> Does Wikipedia actually say that? That's pretty misleading. For any vector space V defined over a field F, V is only closed under scalar multiplication using the scalars of F. You can't choose scalars from arbitrary fields for any given vector space. The scalars have to be chosen from the underlying field of the particular vector space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > One question I had in the back of my mind when reading the book was whether > any of it applied to teaching at university level. I'm still not sure what I > think about that. There is a reason to think not, because the focus of the > book is very much on school-level teaching, and many of the challenges that > arise do not have obvious analogues at university level. [...] I think at > Cambridge almost everyone would get this question right (though I'd love to > do the experiment). But Cambridge mathematics undergraduates have been > selected specifically to study mathematics. Perhaps at a US university, > before people have chosen their majors, [...] More generally, I feel that > there are certain kinds of mistakes that are commonly made at school level > that are much less common at university level simply because those who > survive long enough to reach that stage have been trained not to make them.

Note the "I think [...] almost everyone would get this question right (though I'd love to do the experiment)". This is a familiar state. Widespread. Call it, teachers who have not yet had their "oh shit!" moment.

One of the blog comments points at Eric Mazur's (Harvard, physics) oft- repeated talk "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer". Who describes the first time he gave students a Force Concept Inventory. Worried about wasting their time with such easy questions. :) Unaware physics education research was about to become a focus of his career.

Many have been surprised by "Minds of Our Own" (1997) [https://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html](https://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html) The short (3 min) introductory video shows MIT and Harvard students struggling to light a bulb with a battery and a wire. Full episodes are below (by clicking on "VoD" buttons).

Harvard Center for Astrophysics has both first-tier astronomy and astronomy education programs. When meeting a new CfA graduate student, I've a little drill, prompting for the color of the Sun, and then of sunlight. They almost always get the first wrong, and then get a conflict, often with a nice "oh, wait, that doesn't make sense does it" moment. The collision of two bits of non-integrated and flawed understanding. Of the few who get it right, halfish (but small N) learned it from CfA instruction on common misconceptions in astronomy education, rather than from their own astronomy education.

But perhaps mathematics is doing better at robust integrated understanding than are astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and medical school. It seems possible at least.

It's not just people who have had, or not had, their "oh shit!" moment. Professions too. Medicine realizing that medical errors were a major cause of mortality. Realizing even cheap easy universally-approved interventions (aspirin for ER chest pain) weren't consistently being executed. Realizing other industries had decades of experience on how to pursue quality, to which medicine had been oblivious. When the New York Times babbles about "Truth" and "The Journalism You Deserve", I shake my head and think, there's a field that has no clue how badly it's doing, how much work on process quality it's unaware of; a field that has not yet had its "oh shit!" moment.

</comment><comment><USER14> Soon someone from HN is going to come and remove the word 'how' from the headline. Why? Because clickbait!

Except, of course, the book really is about _how_ he feels he should've taught math.</comment>


Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://crna.cc/b/11 <comment><USER4> Sadists.

The Pi's choice of picking one of the most egregiously unsupported and anti- open source CPU cores was absurd. The people doing the absurdly hard work of taking up the slack that the Raspberry Pi Foundation created from this pick AND the RPI Foundations complete unconcern about the situation and open source at large is to me beyond belief. For a thing that purported to be an educational platform, this situation ought never have happened. At the time at least the low price of the decrepit old core was a good useful competitive advantage, I can acknowledge that, but it remains revolting to me that the #1 cheap Linux system is the spawn of some ancient horror Broadcom dropped with ghastly documentation and unsupportable drivers.

But congratulations. For some reason people have kept the march of progress going on this beast. The RPI3 is rated for 24GFLOPS which is 1 more than a PS3 cell processor. It's been an unbelievable amount of work to get anywhere near unlocking the unique video core to get anywhere near there, but people keep pushing, so good on them. I still think it's a mistake for volunteers to work so ridiculously hard to build drivers for a core whose maker has contributed so little, spent so long releasing even basic docs, and who implemented so many really weird abnormal subsystems, especially when it was originally atop such an ancient core.

But I am sincerely impressed and it has been amazing work slowly wrangling this abomination into order.

<comment><USER5> Are there SoCs at a comparable price/speed that are more open?

I can understand being disappointed at this choice, but if no other options exist, then either you're sacrificing price or performance to get more open- ness. My impression has been that this has mostly been about giving a cheap, easy to use software platform, and they've succeeded at that because of the price/performance balance.

That was then, though. Now that this platform is more established, I imagine they can apply _some_ pressure to get things like the video core to be more open.

<comment><USER6> The Orange Pi PC is $15, roughly comparable to the Pi 3 performance wise, and doesn't require any of this hilarity to boot with open source code.

<comment><USER7> Not sure why this is downvoted.

The OPi chip maybe for not cone from a "respected" western company but it is in all regards a more open chip.

While the datasheet is almost as thin as that of Broadcom it is mostly because they use _standard_ components where the full datasheet is available from arm.

There are also far less magic blobs and crazy boot gymnastics in there.

<comment><USER8> > The OPi chip maybe for not cone from a "respected" western company

This isn't some petty nationalist agenda like you're claiming. AllWinner's lack of respect stems from their pathological refusal to cooperate with the Linux kernel and their many GPL license violations. They throw out new hardware cores very frequently, but the hardware is impossible to keep updated (and is thus insecure and hard to use) because AllWinner won't release hardware documentation or source code. I've got a few AllWinner devices, and they're poorly suited as general-purpose computing devices if you need both graphics and a recent kernel. They collect dust with my other nigh-unusable hardware.

Most of the AllWinner support in the kernel has been added despite the company's deplorable position, and the major community repository of information is highly critical of them ([http://linux- sunxi.org/Allwinner](http://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner)). It's sad for a company when your major users and developers think so poorly of you.

Broadcom also acted like this for many years, and was similarly hated. The Raspberry Pi has been a bit of a paradigm shift in corporate policy which has earned them a lot more respect. And it's still been a rather slow journey.

If AllWinner wants respect, they can earn it by making their hardware easy to use for the hobbyist and non-commercial developers they're courting with all the cheap knockoffs they're releasing (e.g. Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc which try and profit off brand name similarity). Blaming it on Western propaganda is just pitiful self-deception.

<comment><USER7> > This isn't some petty nationalist agenda like you're claiming

That's not what I am saying. I'm saying Broadcom is getting a pass because they are a household name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I confess. I'm completely ignorant about the Raspberry Pi even though I have a 3rd generation I bought recently. So I don't really understand what the significance of "Blobless Linux" is.

Is the Raspberry Pi an open-source software and hardware platform? If not, what is? What should I have bought if not the Pi3?

<comment><USER10> There is no sane reason which would explain why you should not have bought a Pi. Open or not it would not make any difference to more than a small room full of people. A bunch of people spent years designing hardware and negotiating with people to get the Pi built at a low cost and it's become the best selling UK computer ever with over 10,000,000 sales. It's succeeded at what it was supposed to do; provide an educational platform for kids.

<comment><USER11> It's really doubtful that more than a tiny fraction of RPi sales have gone to kids. Be honest here, whatever the RPi Foundation's marketing, the overwhelming majority have gone to hobbyists.

The RPi is uniquely unsuited to an educational environment anyway. The SD cards are unreliable, especially in combination with the RPi's poor power filtering and the cheapo phone adapters it's usually paired with. Anyone who has used a RPi has had to deal with filesystem corruption and SD card failures, intermittent USB bus brownouts, etc, and I can only imagine the nightmare of having to maintain a lab with 50 of the things. You can't PXE boot them (let alone remote-manage them) because they have no BIOS, just a blob on a physical card that needs to be swapped out.

The Pi should have had eMMC day one, and shipped with a proper power adapter and better power filtering. But much like their choice of Broadcom SoCs - <USER3> made a _political_ decision that they were going to market primarily around the $35 price point, and so they cheaped out on $5-10 worth of hardware and ended up with a device that was entirely unsuitable for their stated purpose.

And the terrible thing is - the PC is not the sole component in the system anyway. The Pi still needs a case, a a monitor, keyboard, switches, etc, and if you are trying to stand up a lab for the first time it's not like you have 50 monitors or keyboards laying around for free, you need to buy those. So you are looking at more like $150 per system anyway, and the $10 you save on cheaping out on the hardware becomes a meaningless fraction of the total cost. Just buy the right hardware the first time. An ECS Liva is only like $75 anyway, it comes with a case, onboard eMMC, AC adapter, and wifi, you've made up the difference in cost in accessories included in the box.

There were many other terrible design decisions as well - such as the choice of USB as a system bus, which is again entirely unsuitable, especially when you are running on a low-power processor where running the USB bus full-tilt eats a significant fraction of your CPU cycles. It's like that shitty Mac Performa x200 road-apple design with the split half-width left-hand/right-hand busses which couldn't talk to each other, it eats up all your cycles by just using your disk or network. Even if the processor on other boards is no faster in synthetic benchmarks - they have a proper system architecture with SATA and often USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet that makes an enormous difference in real- world performance.

[http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and- performa-x200-road-a...](http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and- performa-x200-road-apples/)

Furthermore - the Pi was plagued by driver problems with its USB stack for years. It would randomly drop USB frames when operated at USB 2.0 speeds, and it took upwards of 2 years after launch for the Pi foundation to get around to pushing a fix (again, because they chose a processor for which they could not release documentation, and they did not employ enough staff to actually fix their issues). How on earth are you supposed to do education on it when they can't even get their system bus to be stable?

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5249](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5249)

[https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19](https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19)

[https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/9](https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/9)

You know what I would do if I was running an actual lab? ECS Liva Xs, or other cheapo x86 PCs running a standard stack. Or go down to your university surplus store and pick up as many generic Dell boxes as you need for $50 apiece, out the door, ready to work. The Pi is good for embedded hobbyist work (the i2c interface is very powerful), but it totally fails as a machine for teaching programming compared to Ye Olde White Box.

I tried to run a pair of RPis as my fileservers for about a year and a half, and I finally just gave up and sold them. They aren't good for the "mini Linux PC" application at all, compared to properly-designed hardware that you can buy for only a little bit more money (or sometimes even less money, especially when you work out the total system cost).

(note: Pi3s can _finally_ PXE boot without a SD card, which is like the bare minimum requirement for running an educational PC lab without going insane)

<comment><USER12>
        SD card failures

I'd love someone knowledgeable to explain why this happens. According to general opinion on the RPi forums, it's because SD card manufacturers cheap out all the time.

I'd have something like a dozen SD cards running things like cameras over the years, and probably a hundred booting ESXi servers. And I've never seen a failure.

Across three RPis, I've bought about seven SD cards, and from everything RPi users tell me, that's a totally normal failure rate.

Edit: In regards to cheap whiteboxes, no such options allow access to GPIO ports. I've learn plenty of interesting things about soldering circuits by having these, without considering the Pi a PC learning tool.

<comment><USER11> > Across three RPis, I've bought about seven SD cards, and from everything RPi > users tell me, that's a totally normal failure rate.

Sounds about right. I went through maybe 4-6 cards on 2 Raspberry Pis in a year and a half.

> I'd love someone knowledgeable to explain why this happens. According to > general opinion on the RPi forums, it's because SD card manufacturers cheap > out all the time

SD cards are basically uniquely ill-suited to be used in a Raspberry Pi.

First off, cheap SD cards have no wear levelling. The flash controllers are super primitive. They are designed to be written sequentially until full, and erased, like you would use a camera. A regular Linux operating system is not designed to moderate its writes, it will happily do all kinds of work and logging on /var and other places, doing tons of heavy random writes that put tons of wear on the card (write amplification/etc), and there is no levelling taking place. The flash cells just burn out.

Real mobile OSs are much smarter about what they write to flash, and they have eMMC that usually has at least a slightly smarter controller optimized for more random-ish loads, and/or is totally under the CPU's control with a filesystem designed to work with flash.

Next, flash doesn't like to be powered off during erases or writes. In some cases it can actually corrupt operations that were _successfully completed_. The flash cells do not get as much charge as they should and can decay prematurely.

Nor does flash like operating under questionable power conditions either. The flash can _think_ it's successfully completed the operation, the processor will keep on trucking, but if the voltage drooped too much, the write doesn't persist. In some cases, this can cause the flash to get trapped in a "bricked" state that needs a hard reset to clear properly (which can't be done with a SD card).

[http://superuser.com/questions/290060/can-flash-memory-be- ph...](http://superuser.com/questions/290060/can-flash-memory-be-physically- damaged-if-power-is-interrupted-while-writing)

The Pi also has no/very little power filtering. Your phone doesn't _ever_ run off the charger. It uses the adapter to charge the battery and/or feed the regulator circuit, the key being there is a regulator circuit here. The Pi does not have one.

In short - the Pi is an absolute worst case in terms of power. Your average camera or phone has a battery, so the power is clean, full-on power faults are quite uncommon, and the device can monitor voltage and stop doing writes before things get critical. Not only is it really, really easy to accidentally or purposefully unplug the Pi, or flip the power strip off, but the shit-tier phone chargers that get used with it have terrible power filtering and tend to have wildly insufficient power delivery capacity. Under load, the voltage droops and the noise on the power line gets pretty intense.

With the first-gen Pis, there was an additional physical issue with the SD cards. The cards are just made of plastic, they are meant to go into a slot in a camera or phone that physically supports them, they are not intended to just hang off into space. The Pi does actually get fairly warm, especially if you have it in a case, and hot plastic warps. The card loses contact half-way through a write and there goes your file system.

[http://likemagicappears.com/2014/03/11/sd_card_issues/](http://likemagicappears.com/2014/03/11/sd_card_issues/)

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=39843&p=3...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=39843&p=327342)

[https://bigdanzblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/raspberry-pi- fa...](https://bigdanzblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/raspberry-pi-fails-to- boot-red-light-only-due-to-warped-sd-card/)

Adding a "UPS" board that can command a soft-poweroff, a decent microSD card (Samsung EVO are reputedly the most reliable on a Pi), and a "low-profile" microSD adapter that doesn't hang off into space quite as much reportedly make a pretty big difference in reliability, as does using a purpose-built adapter from a reputable vendor like Adafruit or something. Not running it in a case probably helps too.

Again though, once you spend the money to fix the flaws, you could just buy something that just includes what you need to boot up right in the box.

I really can't emphasize enough how much all of this is actually the result of poor design. If the Pi Foundation would have chucked a 2 GB eMMC chip on there and added a barrel connector and a decent power supply, these issues would be essentially eliminated. And IMO the issues are pretty much show-stoppers for any chance of reliable operation.

> In regards to cheap whiteboxes, no such options allow access to GPIO ports. > I've learn plenty of interesting things about soldering circuits by having > these, without considering the Pi a PC learning tool.

That's definitely true, but you can also buy a Bus Pirate that will be capable of adapting most simple embedded units to any PC.

You really only need the Pi's GPIOs when you are doing something that involves really high throughput or really low latency. The examples I've heard are video streams and using a GPS board as a reference for an NTP server - <USER3> exist, but for your every day "talk SPI/I2C to a sensor" or "count freqency counts from a sensor" the Bus Pirate does very well.

<comment><USER13> >it uses the adapter to charge the battery and/or feed the regulator circuit, the key being there is a regulator circuit here. The Pi does not have one.

Wait, what? Of course the RPi has voltage regulators. Do you think the Broadcom chip runs at 5V? There's a LP2980-N and NCP1117 shown in the schematic.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, and microSD cards run at 3V3. The problem is that a phone usually has better filtering capacitors, which the Pi lacks and thus any noise from the power line directly goes from 5V down to 3V3. Oh, and people usually buy the 2-5$ range of power adaptors from Amazon, I'm amazed that no one has managed to burn down their house with this stuff.

<comment><USER13> >Yeah, and microSD cards run at 3V3.

Err, yes. Hence the LDO regulators.

>The problem is that a phone usually has better filtering capacitors, which the Pi lacks and thus any noise from the power line directly goes from 5V down to 3V3.

The RPi has filtering capacitors. In general filtering capacitors are regular cheap X5R or X7R caps. They don't need to be anything special. Look at any LDO regulator datasheet.

> Oh, and people usually buy the 2-5$ range of power adaptors from Amazon

What does that have to do with the designers of the RPi? They don't have any control over which power supplies people buy.

<comment><USER11> > The RPi has filtering capacitors

It's hard to specifically assign blame to noise since it's such a personal and transient problem, but as a general statement power quality is one of the biggest problems with the Raspberry Pi and I strongly suspect that the Pi is not really equipped to tolerate 270mv swings as are seen on cheap USB adapters. Phones deal with this quite fine, but the Pi has less filtering and if anything is doing things that are much more sensitive to noise due to its OS.

[http://www.crazy-audio.com/2013/09/raspberry-pi-power- supply...](http://www.crazy-audio.com/2013/09/raspberry-pi-power-supply-noise- on-the-5v-rails/)

> What does that have to do with the designers of the RPi? They don't have any > control over which power supplies people buy.

 _You shouldn 't have to buy a power supply at all_. The norm is that when you buy a piece of hardware it comes with an appropriate power supply. When I buy a $15 gigabit-ethernet switch from D-Link, it comes with a power adapter.

Again, the Pi Foundation wanted to hit their price target so they could put "A computer for $35!!!" in their advertising, so they cheaped out on something that probably costs $2 when you are buying a million of them. At quantity 500, you are already down to $4 when sourcing them from Mouser.

They also pretty much openly encouraged you to use whatever crappy USB charger you had lying around. The reality is most knockoff chargers are total crap, their current ratings are dramatically overinflated, and they certainly won't be delivering _clean_ power anywhere near their current ratings, which again amplifies the problems with the Pi's lack of filtering.

All of this has been well-known for ages. Check out Ken Shirriff's excellent series of teardowns on cheapo USB chargers and his comparison to a genuine Apple charger. This was not news even at the time.

[http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger- and...](http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why- you.html)

[http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab- ap...](http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple- is.html)

[http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger- teardown-...](http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown- quality.html)

<comment><USER13> >but as a general statement power quality is one of the biggest problems with the Raspberry Pi and I strongly suspect that the Pi is not really equipped to tolerate 270mv swings as are seen on cheap USB adapters. Phones deal with this quite fine, but the Pi has less filtering

What is your source for all these statements? How do the voltage regulation circuits in phones differ? If anything the phones ought to have more noise, since they're using switching regulators rather than linear regulators.

>Again, the Pi Foundation wanted to hit their price target

Yes, you got it. There's 1001 improvements that could be made to the RPi. If you made all of those improvements, it would not be affordable.

>They also pretty much openly encouraged you to use whatever crappy USB charger you had lying around.

They say to use a charger that's rated for at least 2.5A. That does not include most crappy phone chargers. They also sell an official RPi power supply which anyone is free to buy if they're concerned about this issue.

<comment><USER11> > What is your source for all these statements? How do the voltage regulation > circuits in phones differ? If anything the phones ought to have more noise, > since they're using switching regulators rather than linear regulators.

It's pretty self-evident that the circuits are different. The phone normally operates from its battery, the amount of ripple present from a battery is zero. I'm not sure what source exactly you want me to provide to cite the fact that a phone has a battery, anyone knows that.

Also, typically a phone will use a buck converter (or perhaps buck-boost) to drop its voltage, rather than a switching regulator.

Some phones do have problems operating while plugged into crappy adapters (the power does pass through), the most common being that the touchscreens stop working.

> Yes, you got it. There's 1001 improvements that could be made to the RPi. If > you made all of those improvements, it would not be affordable.

And yet any network switch you buy off the shelf for $15 comes with a workable power supply.

But yes, that is my point, the parent was asking for reasons why you wouldn't buy a Raspberry Pi, and the fact that it's got a shitty power system that tends to result in SD card corrupt is a major reason you should not purchase a Pi and prefer a properly engineered product. I think we're in agreement.

The Pi Foundation themselves cite the cost of the switching-mode power supplies on their alpha boards as adding $2 to the bill-of-materials cost, leading to their decision to remove them from production boards. Terrible anti-consumer move, how much have you spent on burned-out SD cards so that they could hit their $35 price point?

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/power-supply-confirmed- as-5...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/power-supply-confirmed-as-5v-micro- usb/)

Anyway, any random piece of electronics comes with a power supply. A $15 network switch comes with a power supply, or a drive enclosure (those are even quite beefy ones!). Competing products like the ECS Liva come with their own power supplies too, and the total cost of the system is the same as the Pi.

> They say to use a charger that's rated for at least 2.5A. That does not > include most crappy phone chargers.

They've backpedaled on this since the launch after problems started appearing. The official spec at launch was that the Pi pulled 700ma for Model B and 300ma for Model A, and pretty much any random charger meets that spec. Anyway, most chargers are significantly overstating the amount of _clean_ power they can provide, because they expect the phone to be using them for charging, not for operating.

You can see the original statement from the Pi Foundation here: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/power-supply-confirmed- as-5...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/power-supply-confirmed-as-5v-micro- usb/)

And then after launch they started realizing they had problems: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5420](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5420)

> I'll be testing PSUs soon as well, although maybe not as thoroughly. It > certainly seems that the Foundation may have been wrong in assuming that USB > chargers produce the current they say they do and that all USB cables are > reasonably constructed.

The fact that $1.99 adapters you get off eBay were built like shit wasn't a shocker to anyone, even at the time. That's a hilariously naieve assumption for them to make.

> They also sell an official RPi power supply which anyone is free to buy if > they're concerned about this issue.

This only launched within the last year. Good on them for finally doing it, but it should be included with the device, and should have been included from day 1.

[http://www.electronicspecifier.com/power/stontronics- manufac...](http://www.electronicspecifier.com/power/stontronics-manufactures- dedicated-power-supply-for-raspberry-pi-3)

<comment><USER13> > The phone normally operates from its battery, the amount of ripple present > from a battery is zero. I'm not sure what source exactly you want me to > provide to cite the fact that a phone has a battery, anyone knows that.

I was asking for a cite on the claim that the phone has a better voltage regulation circuit. AFAIK both the RPi and phones are using jellybean switching regulator ICs to convert and regulate the voltage. Even an expensive switching regulator is going to have a hard time competing with the PI's linear regulators in terms of output noise. (The Pi, of course, can afford to waste a bit of power, whereas the phone needs to juice all of the battery capacity.)

>Also, typically a phone will use a buck converter (or perhaps buck-boost) to drop its voltage, rather than a switching regulator.

Erm, a buck converter is a kind of switching regulator (one that drops rather than increases the voltage). See for example the buck/boost/etc. options under 'Topology' in Mouser's switching regulator category, or the Wikipedia definition:

[http://www.mouser.co.uk/search/refine.aspx?N=10368713](http://www.mouser.co.uk/search/refine.aspx?N=10368713)

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

>Some phones do have problems operating while plugged into crappy adapters (the power does pass through), the most common being that the touchscreens stop working.

This undermines your point that phones somehow have better voltage regulation circuitry than the RPi. Many that will run directly off USB power have exactly the same issues.

>Good on them for finally doing it, but it should be included with the device, and should have been included from day 1.

But why are you _still_ advising people not to buy the Pi because of power supply issues? I bought my first Pi a few months ago and made sure to get an adequate power supply (not difficult). I haven't had any problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stupid question: does this now mean that you can boot a RPi to Linux with zero blobs involved?

Additional question: does anyone have a list of devices that you can boot without any blobs involved? E.x. if someone wants to go "full Stallman" what are the options to do that?

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish the RPi could net-boot without an SD card inside...

<comment><USER17> I think you can: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-ii- ethern...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-ii-ethernet-all- the-awesome/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be nice to add RPi support to the u-boot bootloader.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have considered it, however, because there's still a need for a firmware, the first stage bootloader and the firmware itself are using a common driver framework, it just makes things easier. Besides, the firmware will later run an RTOS (for example LittleKernel) and Uboot doesn't provide RTOS-like services.

<comment><USER19> Would be nice to chainload U-Boot from your firmware/loader though, because FreeBSD boots via U-Boot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any news on the Amber Chip? Hopefully it'll ready for prime time on the Raspberry Pi some time this century.</comment>


Student Builds Daphne Oram's Unfinished 'Mini-Oramics' - <AUTHOR> http://www.gold.ac.uk/news/mini-oramics/ <comment><USER2> Tom Richards, who built the machine, has a very short blog here with a couple of bits of extra info on the machine:

[http://minioramics.blogspot.co.uk/](http://minioramics.blogspot.co.uk/)

Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of info about how the lines on the film map to the synthesizer controls - I found it very odd to watch the film go by, and see busy sections with short discrete notes, sections with long interesting curves, and almost empty sections, but to hear no discernable difference in the audio.

<comment><USER3> I think the disjoint between the audio and the visual is amplified due to the fact that the read head(s) are a couple inches to the left under the cover. So there is always a perceived delay to the audio from where you are looking. This magnifies if you for example look to the right edge of the view while it's playing a couple inches past the left, less so if you can project the last "bar" past the left edge in your mind.

This device would be better I think if the read head could be moved directly to the left edge or even perhaps placed in the center of the view. But I have a feeling it needs to be in darkness to read best.

Interesting idea none the less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Radio 3 documentary on Daphne Oram, "Wee Have Also Sound-Houses":

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ct1y1](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ct1y1)

\- is, predictably, not available to listen to on their site, but you can find it on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNaqvAH7R34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNaqvAH7R34)

<comment><USER5> Another documentary that anyone interested in this period of the Radiophonic Workshop might like is one on a colleague of Oram's: Delia Derbyshire, famous for being the creator of the Dr. Who theme.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXnmSgaeGAI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXnmSgaeGAI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The music which it plays in the demo video is a meaningless mix of scribbled sounds.

Whatever the musical potential of the instrument might be, it is not shown in the video.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure that was some Schoenberg actually.

<comment><USER6> I respect if others discover meaning in this music. To me it sounds like a child's scribble.

<comment><USER5> I find the art of children to often be much more unaffected, creative, and interesting than that of most adult artists. In fact, so do some adult artists themselves, who admire and even seek to themselves emulate the art of children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I almost heard Flight of the Bumblebee at one point (0:50 in the video). I think something like this could be useful as a music transcribing device -- listen to a piece and move your pen up/down as the pitch rises/falls while the medium scrolls by. Then rewind and play.

</comment><comment><USER9> Could someone explain to me what the creative advantage of this is? Particularly over a computer? I don't have a background in electronic music, so maybe I am missing something?

<comment><USER10> In the 60s/70s, composing on a computer wasn't the same experience as today. Incidentally, today it's still pretty frustrating.

The creative advantage is in being able to express pitch, (and presumably generic control voltages) intuitively as continuous lines, which is a natural fit for analog synthesizers. The alternative is sending discrete events, which is how midi works, something not invented until later. There is a school of thought that to limit synthesizers to the discrete world of "notes," with quantised durations and pitch values as a hangover from our ideas of keyboard instruments, is to waste their potential.

Ribbon controllers were popular in that period for expressing continuous pitch, and I suspect the Oramics was designed as a way of recording these sorts of expressions, like a kind of analog punch card.

Also consider that the main compositional method of the radiophonic workshop at that time was splicing magnetic tape with razor blades and sellotape.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, to me the article wasn't clear on whether the machine was built for historical reasons, or whether it had modern uses.

I agree that it seems restrictive to limit synths to discrete notes (like playing guitar without bends) although I probably wouldn't use the word mellifluous to describe the sounds made in the video.

<comment><USER11> I agree that quantized pitches are a great waste of a synth's potential. William Sethares did some very interesting research on consonance perception, which can be used to construct microtonal tuning systems without the dissonance usually associated with them. Here's an good demonstration of what you can do with arbitrary pitches:

[http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/mp3s/three_ears.html](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/mp3s/three_ears.html)

"As each new note sounds, its pitch (and that of all currently sounding notes) is adjusted microtonally (based on its spectrum) to maximize consonance. The adaptation causes interesting glides and microtonal pitch adjustments in a perceptually sensible fashion. "

<comment><USER10> Wow, that makes me feel seasick. Looking forward to playing it at the tail end of parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous Daphne Oram on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993961).

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone made an iPhone app which simulates one of these machines, if anyone is interested in playing around with one:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER14> Sounds interesting, but the article doesn't show up for me.

Ad-block shows it's blocking some font files, but everything else is getting through. I hope it's not a new trend to not display anything if custom fonts don't load.</comment>


Keep your woman safe - <AUTHOR> Women safety is very important issue these days in India. Sadly, we are still in 2014 and the precog (Minority Report) has not been invented to stop the crime before it happens. But atleast we can find where it happened and act on it immediately to save our loved ones. So my brother and I came up with an idea for a mobile app named "Aura" to track your journey and keep your friends and family members up to date.
This simple app just emails or text your current location to your family members in case you did not make it.
Do try out and provide your feedback.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.indimaza.aura <comment><USER2> I believe that Smith & Wesson have "an app for that". I'm sorry to say that I don't think it's available in India. Petition your government.

<comment><USER3> Related, a picture I saw a few days ago.

A pistol, held by a feminine hand.

Caption: My rape whistle goes "bang"

<comment><USER2> There's also the old saying: "God made Man and Woman. Samuel Colt made them equal."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the problem you're trying to solve is way more than "let your family members track you". The more important thing i would say , is a way to alert the nearest police station incase you need help. family members more often than not know where you are.

</comment><comment><USER5> Your intentions are good I'm sure but I'd ask you to reflect on the four words chosen for the title of your submission. As an outsider it's quite telling re how woman are viewed in the culture.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not mean that. I thought the title would be catchy that way for people to atleast visit the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can you explain what the point of the title of this post? Its pathetic. Plus, In conservative culture as ours, women prefer not to tell exactly where they are to have their bit of fun.</comment>


Conserve the Sound – museum of vanishing and endangered sounds of old tech etc. - <AUTHOR> https://www.conservethesound.de/en/ <comment><AUTHOR> not new really (2013?) but a fun site for those that haven't seen</comment>


Apple Said To Prepare ITunes Changes To Improve Sharing - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-27/apple-said-to-prepare-itunes-overhaul-improving-storage-sharing.html

<comment><USER2> I thought that Google's I/O demonstration of the Nexus Q was quite interesting. You just tap your phone on the Nexus Q and then you can use your phone to direct/stream any of your media for playback on that Nexus Q. For example anyone at a party could tap their phone on the Q and then select their own music to add to the playlist. Or if you're visiting a friend and want to watch a movie or TV show together, just tap the Q with your phone and you can then watch it on their TV without mucking with the DRM. It just works. I think it would be very interesting to get this sort of thing into hotels. Tap your phone and your Netflix queue shows up without all the login pain. Or send your own photos/videos from Picasa/YouTube. It looks very liberating and has the potential to make all the DRM pain go away.

<comment><USER3> Most of the demonstrated Nexus Q functionality has already existed on the Apple side with AirPlay and Apple TV. It's a different take, and the Q certainly has some interesting features, but it's not new, and the price is an issue.

<comment><USER2> Well, that's pretty cool--I'm not much of an Apple user lately (iTunes not available for any of my devices/OSs) but I don't think iPhones have NFC and that's the part that I'm pretty impressed about. I guess I view streaming as a solved problem, so that's not really what I'm impressed about.

What excites me more is I think Nexus Q is showing us how a future can work where we're surrounded by networked displays and screens that we may or may not own, but we can still get full use of just by being physically in front of them. That's what I think is exciting. I can see the functionality of the Nexus Q built into TVs in the future--just connect the TV to the internet and touch your phone to it and boom, everything's set up without fussing with passwords and accounts. Visit your parents, touch your phone to the TV and boom it's as if it's your own TV.

<comment><USER4> I'm not really sure why they are even using NFC for the setup. All the streaming is done over wifi anyway. I guess NFC could be used to reconfigure the wifi as needed which could be useful in some cases where your streaming target is on a different network.

<comment><USER2> No, it doesn't stream from the phone to the Nexus Q. It tells the Nexus Q where to get it from the cloud. The NFC is a handshake based on physical proximity to establish credentials for the Q to access the your cloud ephemera. (wifi streaming may also be available as a feature, not sure)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Didn't they just remove Ping?

<comment><USER6> At WWDC they showed off more Facebook and Twitter integration with the new Share button that's being implemented throughout the OS. My guess is that iTunes will also get some form of the Share button, allowing you to post about songs you like to Facebook or Twitter.</comment></comment>


How to Self-Study for a Computer Programming Job - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/08/12/how-to-self-study-for-a-computer-programming-job.aspx <comment><USER2> A horribly titled article by Steve McConnell.

I can't believe he is writing entry-level industry advice now. My my, how things have changed.

<comment><USER3> I didn't bother to sign up / sign in in order to look further, but skimming leaves me with the impression that this is some sort of consulting pitch?</comment></comment>


Looking for Feedback for Dev/ PM Tool - <AUTHOR>

We are building tools to help developers gain insight on how productive they are, how they do against goals and continuously improve.
We aim to gather information from the various tools developers currently use and do some magic to extract relevant and present information that will be useful to helping the developer or team be better.  Some of the things we are working around are code coverage, continuous integration, measuring and forecasting Sprints, retrospectives, feedback loops, etc.
If you use Pivotal Tracker, JIRA, GitHub, Phabricator or Jenkins (thats what we have integrated to so far), we would love to talk with you to show you some stuff we have done, get your feedback and maybe help you/ your team improve.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> blog post w/ screenshots would be awesome</comment>