Google Wants $15M in Tax Breaks to Build a Data Center in Minnesota - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/blog/2019/03/04/google-wants-15-million-in-tax-breaks-to <comment><USER2> > Google is promising to bring 50 full-time positions to the area. The company > also projects that it will create 2,300 jobs during the 18–24 month > construction window.

Is this a joke?

> State Sen. Andrew Mathews (R–Milaca) and state Rep. Shane Mekeland (R–Clear > Lake) recently introduced a bill to provide an additional $20.1 million in > state bonds to give the Becker Business Park—where the data center would be > built—a facelift.

So, invest 1 million in politicians get tens of millions from the public treasury.

> Such incentives are typically justified by politicians as a crucial way to > stimulate the economy.

Probably their own personal economies.

There are reasons to give corporations tax breaks. Like for example to expand green energy or to give jobs to people in risk of exclusion, or another hundred reasons. But, it looks like now it is used for everything without any real justification beyond "the company will bring business to the town". That can be covered by any kind of business willing to pay for lobbying and that does not present any social benefit. And it is a zero-sum game where another town loses the possibility for you to gain it. It is hardly a justifiable situation.

<comment><USER3> ==And it is a zero-sum game where another town loses the possibility for you to gain it. It is hardly a justifiable situation.==

This is the most critical piece. What would legislation to address this at the national level even look like?

<comment><USER4> The only way seems to be to either to completely outlaw these negotiations, or create a standard rate (i.e. if the project will bring 100 jobs, the cities have the option but not the obligation to offer $10m in various forms of tax breaks— or maybe capped at $10m).

The trouble is that, at a higher level, this unwillingness to play ball may just result in the companies fleeing to other countries rather than other states. This involves a higher switching cost for most companies, and would require more incentives than that for intra-nation migration, but it's still possible.

<comment><USER5> You can't outlaw them without modifying the US Constitution due to the 10th Amendment as it concerns states rights. Individual states could outlaw it, but they would just be putting themselves at a disadvantage relative to other states that did not.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to understand why the 14th Amendments provisions for due process and equality under the law aren't applicable. Seems to me that whatever taxing regime a state designs should be applicable equally to all legal entities (people/corporations/llc/etc). No favorites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the linked MPR article ([https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/02/25/wind- energy-tax-bre...](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/02/25/wind-energy-tax- breaks-sought-to-bring-google-to-becker-minnesota))

> A Google data center often attracts other major technology-based companies > to invest in the same area, Bertram said.

I'm confused why this would be. What economic benefit would proximity to a Google data center bring, besides lower latency to some of Google's services? I can't imagine 15ms lower latency to a Google service being the deciding factor for where to locate your company.

<comment><USER8> _I can 't imagine 15ms lower latency to a Google service being the deciding factor for where to locate your company._

It can be, depending on your industry. Financial firms are like this. I don't know if Minneapolis still has a commodities exchange, but if it does it would be attractive to those kinds of people. Probably others I've never thought about.

But overall, I think $15M for a data center is too much. Data centers don't make a dent on employment or property tax in most places they're located.

It may also be worth noting that Cray supercomputers has a big presence in the area.

<comment><USER9> Why would a financial firm care about 15ms latency to a google service? It's not like they would be using the cloud in the first place.

<comment><USER10> True. They go straight to the exchange.

<comment><USER9> Colocation costs have gone down in recent years and any firm who cares about latency (which, honestly, is only a small minority), already has it. No one, and I mean no one, gives a shit about Google's latency in Minnesota.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly- revenue...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue-of- google/)

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/2/16842876/google-double- iri...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/2/16842876/google-double-irish-tax- loopholes-european-billions-ad-revenue)

This company doesn't need tax breaks, it actually needs to pay more taxes. We have to stop this idiotic behavior. There's a word for what the tax breaks are- bribery.

<comment><USER12> I don't think corporations should be allowed to negotiate tax breaks like this, but I think labeling this as bribery is disingenuous because it is neither illegal nor dishonest.

<comment><USER13> You're right, it's not illegal. However, I would say its dishonest. Let's be real. Corporations exist solely to make money. Why should taxpayers fund the winners? Who gets to choose that Google deserves taxpayer dollars and for what reason?

If you read the sales marketing pitch for new data centers they talk about billions in economic viability - if that were indeed true to the extent that the marketing material wants you to believe then corporations would fill that datacenter void and compete with one another to do so.

Because they're asking for incentives seems to suggest that the viability isn't there or that the corporations have so much control that they not only impose their will upon employees but not the governments and municipalities they operate in because there is potential for some long tail tax opportunities that Google doesn't take a risk on but the towns do. That's what ticks me off. Nothing in life is guaranteed but here we are guaranteeing google that they will win.

There was a time when a big city in NJ could do no wrong building HUGE telco buildings with no windows and huge tax incentives. It ended up building a downtown no one wanted to live or work in and the city has no money because the corporations exist tax-free and the city actually has to carry their liability even those services are being shut down, abandoned or aren't worth the promise they sold to the city to begin with.

Mostly because companies realized its cheaper to quit city and move to another if there is free money on the table

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a little confused here; 15MM over 20 years doesn't sound like a huge amount of money, and if the data center is being built on the grounds of a coal power facility that is being decommissioned, it's not clear how Sherburne County was going to see that money anyways. Becker is a very small town 45 minutes away from MSP; what negotiating leverage do they have? Even with the tax package, how is this a net negative for Becker?

Google is apparently getting a bigger break from New Albany, which is on the outskirts of Columbus OH.

<comment><USER15> I think the negative reaction has something to do with the ROI for the tax money forgone?

From the article:

> After construction wraps, with 18 remaining years of tax abatement, there > will be a $270,000 tax shortfall for every full-time position created.

It's not as bad as Wisconsin's Foxconn cluster-F, but for a rural area, 15k a year per person is not peanuts. Difficult to make that up someplace else.

(Well, not "difficult" from a technical perspective, you can just raise taxes on people in the rest of the state. But politically speaking, what if the people in the rest of the state figure out what you're up to? That's what happened in Wisconsin.)

<comment><USER14> Thanks! I feel like I'm still not understanding. The tax breaks Google is asking for are city and county property taxes. If Google doesn't move in, the county isn't getting that money anyways. What's the "shortfall" here?

<comment><USER15> The shortfall represents the money not present assuming that Google _DOES_ move in.

If Google moves in, and they maintain the current tax rates on people currently living in that municipality, then the shortfall is about 15k per Google head. If Google _DOES NOT_ move in, there is no shortfall at all.

Of course, they can just increase the taxes on people already there in residence. But again, rural area. Not a lot of money. So I expect it'd be more likely for them to try to get money from the state coffers to cover the shortfall. Not really sure what the plan is to cover the shortfall in the event that Google moves in using the subsidies outlined.

<comment><USER14> Help me understand.

If Google moves in and pays property taxes, the county will see an additional $15MM (over 20 years).

If they move in and don't pay property taxes, the county will not see that money.

If they _don 't move in at all_, the county will still not see that money.

Game-theoretically, how is the county better off if Google doesn't move in?

<comment><USER15> No no no no.

I'm not speaking game theoretically here, because there are a good many more factors that go into determining a "win" than the financials.

Now from a money perspective, they won't get money from Google if Google DOES NOT move in, and they won't get too much money from Google if Google _DOES_ move in. This is because the expenses on the infrastructure improvements to support a 600 million dollar data center for 18 of those 20 years is higher than the $15 million bucks they're gonna get from Google. Those expenses are, obviously, not there if Google does not site a data center in that municipality.

So if you want a, sort of, game theoretical optimum, then the question people on both sides of the issue should be answering are:

1 "What are the benefits to this municipality, or to the state, of Google moving in?"

and

2 "What is the value of those benefits in tax dollars?"

If the answer to 2 is greater than or equal to 15K per Google head, then you break even or profit. If it's not, then you lose.

<comment><USER14> I'm sorry, I'm lost. What are the expenses Becker (and the county) will incur if Google sites here? All we've identified so far is a 20MM bond for a waste pipe extension from the site, which doesn't appear to be part of Google's demand.

Wisconsin coughed up (IIRC) over a billion dollars in direct infrastructure spending to support Foxconn. Nothing like that appears to be happening here; it looks like here we're just talking about property tax money, which Minnesota was not already expecting to receive, that they'll forgo in order to get Google to site here and not in Ohio.

You refer to the expenses in infrastructure Becker will incur if Google sites here. What expenses are those? Becker isn't building the data center or even clearing the land: the land is owned by Excel Energy, which is selling it to Google, and Excel is also providing the power for the data center itself. What is the county spending to make this happen?

Help me understand why Becker would turn this down? How do they stand to lose anything if Google plops a data center down here?

<comment><USER13> Why should taxpayers have to take the risk for Google if the opportunity and reason for Google to be there is already there? If it's already win-win for everyone, why even have the tax abatement?

Google being the extremely profitable company it is, shouldn't need to create liabilities for a market it's trying to promise jobs too.

a lot changes in 20 years and if its anything like the telco industry it will mean they will rely on these incentives for everything they do in the future because people seem willing to give it to them.

<comment><USER14> What risk are taxpayers taking?

<comment><USER13> They're taking on growth with an abatement on revenue

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > After construction wraps, with 18 remaining years of tax abatement, there > will be a $270,000 tax shortfall for every full-time position created.

Maybe add a $270k tax to each of those employees to break even? /s

<comment><USER17> That figure is for 18 years; it's actually $15k per employee per year.

Adding a tax to offset the tax abatement seems to defeat the purpose.

<comment><USER18> It's also excluding the 2300 people constructing the datacenter for 1.5 to 2 years. Overall, it sounds like they're trading $15M in tax credits for between 4350 and 5500 person-years of jobs over 20 years. So around $2700 to $3500 per person-year.

<comment><USER19> 2300 seems way high even if you're counting each different person that comes through and most of those won't be working the whole time. They'll come through and do electrical/HVAC/frame construction/etc for a few months then leave. Only a few will be there the whole construction and those will mostly be management and supervisor/contractor roles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I read some oregon or washington rural county threw incentives at a data center.

It ended up being so automated it employed 6 people total. Maybe in 100 years they would recoup the incentives.

... edit: but I can't find the original story. I did see ones where the automated centers still produce a lot of property tax revenue but the lack of jobs is good because it doesn't further load municipal resources...

I guess it comes down to smart accounting.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just for comparison, there's a data center in Lenoir, NC (nearest thing to a "tech hub" would be considered Charlotte, NC about 1-to-1.5 hours away).

The report [1] claims: "In its analysis for Google, Oxford Economics shows the data center in North Carolina's Caldwell County is responsible for 1,024 jobs. The total includes 250 jobs directly attributable to Google activity, indirect jobs in the data center's supply chain, and induced jobs (those generated by the "multiplier effect" of spending by Google and its vendors in the community). ... Google has invested $1.2 billion in the data center in Lenoir, and its 250 direct jobs generate a combined recurring income of approximately $22.5 million, the report says." (And I assume the "recurring income" is (OLD: tax-revenue-to-government-entities) actual income for workers, about $90K average.)

[1] "Report Examines Economic Impact of Google Data Centers in N.C. and Across U.S." \-- [https://edpnc.com/report-examines-economic-impact-google- dat...](https://edpnc.com/report-examines-economic-impact-google-data-centers- lenoir-n-c-across-u-s/)

( My father-in-law worked 40 years ago at this campus location (around when my wife was born) when it was part of the furniture industry. He himself fared well enough in the that industry in various companies/locations till he retired about 5 years ago, working in HR. While the furniture design-side still lives on, especially around High Point, NC, much manufacturing has moved overseas. )

EDIT: I revised, now I think the "recurring income" is for workers, not government entities ... also, added father-in-law's connection

</comment><comment><USER22> There is a larger issue of a level playing field. These kind of subsidies are a race to the bottom.

Instead of business growing the overall economy they shrink the economy by the amount paid out in subsides, since these businesses will be built anyway if not here somewhere else in the country that is a overall loss to the country. So you are actually subsidizing business on the national level, which is why businesses should not be allowed to cynically play off states against another.

Focusing on localized gains by the logic of 'something is better than nothing' misses the bigger picture and is misleading and disingenuous.

It's like if tax payers could be incentivized to file in different regions by competitive breaks to grow the local tax filing economy and revenue of various regions, that is a shrinking of overall tax revenue though it may be a rise for specific regions.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's a lights out DC that won't be a hub for Google jobs.

Are they going to give rebates on the taxes paid by the other DC's that have been built without incentives? If not, why not?

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone else can say "fuck you google"? They're going to have to build it anyways. I know that the NSA will profit from it, but still... that is pushing it.

</comment><comment><USER25> For 20 years? and close it in 19?

</comment><comment><USER26> Money must be tight at Google

<comment><USER27> Those $100M yachts and Montana ranches aren't going to buy themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can I get $10k of tax break if i move to XX and hire my wife (and kids)?

On a serious note - taxes are too high and world is too mobile. More people and more corps will find a greener pastries easy way or hard way.</comment>


How does a TCP Reset Attack work? - <AUTHOR> https://robertheaton.com/2020/04/27/how-does-a-tcp-reset-attack-work/ <comment><USER2> GFW rarely adds any new RST rules today, largely because most traffic are encrypted with TLS and it's useless to sniff on port 443 with RST attacks. They just blackhole the IP range completely with Cisco NetFlow if anything is suspicious

<comment><USER3> Yes, I think most DPIs and Firewalls these days terminate the connections after the ClientHello message which contains the SNI

<comment><USER4> Companies are dragging their feet with encrypted SNI

<comment><USER5> Encrypted SNI still has a few years to go before it's deployed. Meanwhile, the Great Firewall continues to block TLS connections with an unwanted SNI via a TCP Reset attack. "news.ycombinator.com is on the list, too.

<comment><USER4> I mean if we get ESNI faster, the GFW is going to have a hard time keeping up. What do you even do at that point? Just block every CDN?

<comment><USER5> My opinion is that it's basically a mutually assured destruction game. Either the censor blocks everything and creates significant damages to the national economy and popular support, or it has to allow free access to these websites. I'm optimistic, and to me, both outcomes are good outcomes. I support these aggressive industrial efforts to increase security. Free access is the most desirable result, but a complete block is not really a big issue - it cannot last forever, and the collateral damage will force the censor to eventually back off.

But there are some potential issues. One problem is the assumption that MAD as a forever-lasting situation may be flawed. In the Telegram incident in Russia, the Russian government literally blocked all Amazon servers and created massive disruption, however, Amazon also suffered economic damaged so it surrendered first before the Russian government backed off, and blocked the domain-fronting technique used for censorship circumvention. It's a way that the plan can fail. So the key to a successful ESNI deployment depending on the fact that cloud providers will never surrender after they received a total block.

Another argument says the possibility to bypass censorship is ultimately a dynamic balance - on one hand, the Great Firewall has loophope that allow circumvention, on the other hand, it's effective enough that the censor lack an incentive to implement stricter control. By introducing aggressive web security measures, this balance will be broken. As a result, an process to implement stricter censorship that would take 5 years otherwise, will instead take 2 years, and the result is a net negative, thus it's a terrible idea.

I maintain my own opinion, but I do find these are interesting and persuasive arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I was affected by this sort of interference in the UK when using T-Mobile about 8 years ago. I blogged it up with a solution related to dropping RST packets:

[https://www.grepular.com/Punching_through_The_Great_Firewall...](https://www.grepular.com/Punching_through_The_Great_Firewall_of_TMobile)

<comment><USER6> When I'm port scanning my own server through my mobile operator (Bouygues Telecom), I see ports that are open that I know are NOT open on the server. Could it be interception tentatives ? Is there any reason to mascard them as open if they are not ?

Ports that are NOT supposed to be open : 21, 53, 554, 1723

<comment> mike-cardwell Can you actually fully connect to those ports from the outside? I recently moved to somewhere that is using Virgin Media broadband in the UK, and I noticed that when running "masscan" against my home IP from outside, it started finding ports that weren't actually open.

On closer inspection it seems that either the router or the ISP has some sort of threshold over which it starts responding to all SYN's with SYN-ACK's, completing the second step of the three way TCP handshake. I assume it's some sort of port scanning interference system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article starts with GFW and then goes onto RST packet validation.It's great to see people re-learning the classics. Awesome! Extra points for using "scapy".

The injected RST are often easy to drop once you know what you are looking for. For example Netsweeper RST was easy to spot. In past I caught them with simple tcpdump looking for window size=4096. It worked well "tcp[tcpflags] = (tcp-ack|tcp-push|tcp-fin) and tcp[14:2]=4096"

Anyhow, with L3 RST injection systems it's easy to abuse them. For example - they don't have rate limits usually and they don't verify IP's. By sending a spoofed packet in the direction of such netsweeper / GFW you might be able to trick it to .... generate two packets aginst some host. For example

       from scapy.all import *
       payload = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: censored.com\r\n\r\n"
       ip = 'b.b.b.b' # the target IP,
       p = (IP(src=ip, dst=ip)/TCP(sport=9999,dport=80,flags="PA")/payload)[IP]
       p.show()
       send(p, iface="ethx")

If such a packet is directed against an L3 censoring device, it might generate TWO RST packets and send them towards b.b.b.b. The takeaway: L3 packet injecting is hard, and fundamentally flawed. Of course.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author states:

>"If the sequence number is completely out of range then the receiver ignores the segment entirely. If, however, it is within the window of expected sequence numbers, then the receiver sends back a "challenge ACK". This is a segment which tells the sender that the RST segment had the wrong sequence number. It also tells the sender actual sequence number that the receiver was expecting. The sender can use the information in the challenge ACK to re- construct and re-send its RST.

Before 2010, the TCP protocol did not impose these additional restrictions on RST segments. RST segments were accepted or rejected according to the same rules as any other segment. However, this made blind TCP reset attacks too easy."

If the "challenge ACK" communicates that sequence number that was expected doesn't this in fact still aid reset attacker? Or am I reading this passage incorrectly and the "challenge ACK" procedure is no longer in more modern TCP stacks?

<comment><USER9> the author is writing, in that section, about blind (i.e. off path) attacks. Given the attacker in that model is off-path they don't see the challenge ack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Had the great firewall of china block one of the sites I was building for a customer once many years ago. It could only do it for http and not https so assuming it reads the request from the client works out its a http request to an unauthorized IP and sends the reset packet. You cant read the payload for https so didn't know to send the rst packet i'm assuming. Took a while and some playing with wireshark to work out what was going wrong.

Spoke to someone in the Datacenter we where hosting in and they got us adding to some goverment whitelist and it all started working again.

<comment><USER11> I guess if it worked at the IP level it wouldn't matter whether or not the transport was encrypted. I'd wager how it worked was by sniffing the Host header in the request, and as this was "many years ago" most likely predated Server Name Indication in TLS so encryption was enough to thwart a host-based blocking approach. Now of course with SNI the host is in clear text in the ClientHello (unless using TLS 1.3 ESNI) so the GFC could still block using hostnames even with TLS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's no authentication in IP datagrams. When you receive an IP datagram, your network stack just trusts it.

Therefore anyone can craft an IP datagram with a source address and send it. That affects higher layer protocols like TCP.

Solution? Use a secure alternative to IP, like IPsec or Wireguard.

<comment><USER13> Why not just use TLS?

<comment><USER14> You can read the SNI without decrypting[0]. You can see it in the ClientHello when I connect to news.ycombinator.com:

        Internet Protocol Version 4, Src: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, Dst: 184.108.40.206
        Transmission Control Protocol, Src Port: 64962, Dst Port: 443, Seq: 1, Ack: 1, Len: 517
        Transport Layer Security
            TLSv1.2 Record Layer: Handshake Protocol: Client Hello
                Content Type: Handshake (22)
                Version: TLS 1.0 (0x0301)
                Length: 512
                Handshake Protocol: Client Hello
                    Handshake Type: Client Hello (1)
                    Length: 508
                    Version: TLS 1.2 (0x0303)
                    Extension: server_name (len=25)
                        Type: server_name (0)
                        Length: 25
                        Server Name Indication extension
                            Server Name list length: 23
                            Server Name Type: host_name (0)
                            Server Name length: 20
                            Server Name: news.ycombinator.com
                    Extension: padding (len=172)

The server name is right there, in the packets, even for TLS! Since the Great Firewall sits between you and the website, it can know the sequence number and send an RST as soon as the connection is initiated.

For a less destructive use of this packet introspection, I've been using Istio to inspect ClientHello SNIs to control egress traffic from Kubernetes[1]. The SNI extension is useful, but it can leak some metadata to adversaries.

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

[1]: [https://istio.io/docs/tasks/traffic- management/egress/egress...](https://istio.io/docs/tasks/traffic- management/egress/egress-gateway/)

<comment><USER8> Did you use Tshark for outputting this TLS handshake? I ask because it's so nicely formatted and legible.

<comment><USER14> Wireshark -> [select the field you want] -> Right Click -> Copy -> All Visible Items

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > max_seq_no = max_acked_seq_no + window_size

What about the packets below max_acked_seq_no which _haven 't_ been ACKed? Shouldn't the total number of those be subtracted from the sum above?

</comment><comment><USER9> QUIC is considerably more resilient than TCP to RST attacks because it authenticates the transport itself once the handshake is complete.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you try to up nc tcp server from topic, you need to set port correctly with -p option (nc -nvl -p 8888).</comment>


Kill Your Desk Chair—and Start Standing - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-28/kill-your-desk-chair-and-start-standing

<comment><USER2> When will this ridiculous fad end? If you want to stand, stand. A standing desk is no substitute for getting regular exercise, and this has nothing much to do with hacking.</comment>


Israel and Palestine: Co-operation in the ether - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14098321 <comment><USER2> <http://www.g.ho.st/home/Screenshots.jsp>

The article makes it sound like Dropbox, but from what I can tell, it's more like YouOS, the defunct Y Combinator startup:

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

<comment><USER3> Was YouOS flash based as well? I tried this out and it's fairly impressive. But there was some lag in using it which I suspect is because of all the Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow! This is a fantastic service. I can't believe it's free. The 15GB alone should cost me at least 5$ a month. I hope they keep it free and look for more distribution deals ala the Opera browser model. They can make a ton of money. They're well financed (Benchmark Capital) so they actually have a chance to pull this off.

</comment><comment><USER4> G.ho.st, as most startups are facing a major challenge nowadays. I wish that G.ho.st will make it, even if i was the software architect in G.ho.st and the one who built the RND, i have debates as which model is better: Google model offering services through out the browser, or G.ho.st model offering services within one browser instance!

<comment><USER4> [http://blog.yousefgh.com/2009/03/moving-online-with-your- dat...](http://blog.yousefgh.com/2009/03/moving-online-with-your-data- and.html)</comment></comment>


Geopolitical stratagy web browser game - <AUTHOR> https://www.vpopulus.net <comment><AUTHOR> Any question about it, ask here or on vPopulus Discord ;)</comment>


The 'Geno-Economists' Say DNA Can Predict Our Chances of Success - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/16/magazine/tech-design-economics-genes.html <comment><USER2> To an extent that's true - genetics can detect your race and gender, both of which have a very strong correlation (although definitely not causation) with success.

That said ever since we have been able to run genetic tests people have tried to use them to demonstrate that group A is "worse" than everyone else, or the group B is superior. Before that they tried to use phrenology. In every case they successfully came up with a measurement that demonstrated that some group was inferior.

Weirdly the measurements confirmed stereotypes of the time, it's almost like there was some kind of external bias effecting their results...

<comment><USER3> Those studied in this article were all white.

<comment><USER2> You're aware that race doesn't mean "white" vs "black" right?

While obviously these systems were used to justify treating non-white races as being fundamentally inferior, it was also used against other groups ("proving" that the Irish and scots were predisposed to drunkenness, etc).

The idea of racism being purely a skin color concept is relatively recent. Look at the historic treatment of the Irish, welsh, and Scottish in Britain over the last few millennia - or Italians up until the the mid to early 1900s. The treatment of people from Eastern Europe, the polish, today.

All of these races can be distinguished genetically - or even through external features.

Similar discrimination occurs other countries among people with the same skin colour- I'm sure countries like China and Japan could point to "objective" measures like genetics that can be not related to negative aspects of groups they discriminate against.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unless we have a complete picture of "success", which means:

\- How much of our behavior, habits, intelligence and success comes from the environment ?

\- How much of stuff like education levels, income levels come from birth, social and environmental factors?

\- How epigenetics shapes our life in a dynamic fashion? This field is pretty new, and we have just begin to understand it.

\- What is intelligence or success in the first place ? How do you measure it that is all encompassing and diverse ? I have never seen a solid definition of that. Should we care about their definition of success? Can there ever be one definition of success for all groups? My own personal definition has changed over the years.

\- Is Gene state correlated state or unchangeable predictors (which I extremely doubt in light of above points)

\- Has there been a complete study of exceptions?

all of this is extremely reductionist at best and trying to push a malicious self serving agenda at the worst which can cause havoc in hands of any stupid policy makers.

From what I understand, we are very far off from getting a full picture of these questions. At least decades away if not more.

<comment><USER5> Points 1 2 and 4 are pretty well studied in academia concerning intelligence. Intelligence is defined as "g", and it's 60 to 80% heritable depending on the study (leaning towards 80%).

More info for the curious: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_\(psychometrics\))

<comment><USER6> It's easy to misunderstand what heritable or even genetically heritable means.

Consider just few hypothetical ways genes can increase g-factor:

* Metabolic trait increases nutrition intake in high calorie low nutrition junk food environment. This leads to faster brain development.

* Improved immune system against certain parasites that makes individual healthier and leads to statistically higher g-factor.

Genes that improve intelligence can change from generation to generation and be different in different geographic areas.

<comment><USER5> Huh, what? Are you talking about the appearance of new genetic mutations? I think evolutionary timescales are a bit longer than a few generations.

Anyway, I don't understand how this is supposed to explain what heritability is...

<comment><USER6> No. I was talking about existing genes interacting with rapidly changing environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Combining GWAS data with social science... sounds like a recipe for generating incorrect conclusions from noise to me.

>"before the Human Genome Project had fully sequenced human DNA"

The human genome is still not complete by any normal definition, they just redefined "complete" to mean "we did our best". It is like if someone turns in homework with only half the questions answered and argues they should get 100% since they "completed" it.

<comment><USER8> >The human genome is still not complete by any normal definition

Well considering that the human genome is a moving target, it can never be "complete". However, it can be 99.9% complete, which is all but complete for all scientific intents and purposes. The rest is just semantics.

<comment><USER9> [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/our-human- reference-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/our-human-reference- genome-is-missing-a-lot-of-material/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems clear to me that the role of genetics is to prepare you to survive/thrive in your parents' (and grandparents') environment. I would assume that as the environment changes over time, that the genetic makeup of their children would change (over generations), due to varying demands and "marrying up." Maybe environmental changes are limited to epigenetic changes, and "marrying up" produces the real genome variation, but still, the story is more complicated.

A short-sighted focus on "keeping people where their genes fit" ignores our tendency to improve our communities by conscious effort, up to and (by collaboration) beyond our innate capabilities.

I really dislike the focus on the individual and the "sorting problem", as distinct from the focus on community.

</comment><comment><USER3> When we constantly pound the table and shout that all people are all exactly the same, they often self-identify as oppressed victims, if they look around themselves and see others that are better off than they are.

This is a recipe for societal tension, although it is handy in politics.

Minorities and non-minorities alike, after having been assured that everybody is exactly the same, often feel that they have been cheated in some way. This is sadly often used by politicians to marshal them against their fellow citizens in the next election or referendum.

</comment><comment><USER11> Things are too conflated in society to really get around gene vs societal/circumstantial-pressures on success. However, I can see animal models with random assignment uncovering genes that help animals solve tasks. Comparing identified genes from animal models with frequencies in human populations would seem a fruitful path (even if we may not like some of the answers), that I am sure is being done already.

</comment><comment><USER12> From the paper itself:

>it suggests that the GWAS effect-size estimates may be biased upward by correlation between educational attainment and a rearing envi-ronment conducive to educational attainment.

A full 60% of the already modest 'effect' of correlated genes can be immediately attributed to environment according to their sibling study.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this obvious?

I mean height is one of the largest factors of success for men. If being of smaller stature that is when a Napoleon complex forms.

Just extrapolate dating economics for shorter guys and that pretty much sums up society.

I would say heightism is one of the largest biases currently still allowable.

</comment><comment><USER14> > All men are created equal.

\- U.S. Declaration of Independence

The above statement is false. That's more clear than ever and geno-economics contributes to that clarity. If you live your life by this assumption you will get many important things wrong.

Yet this clearly wrong statement, as applied to the operation of the rule of law, is also one of the most brilliant, important and useful concepts invented by civilization. As a proposition for how to engineer law to support a flourishing society, it is true and right.

I think that's the right way to deal with this controversy. Acknowledge that people have significant and important differences that are beyond their control, while also acknowledging that such difference can be overwhelmed by the effects of their nurturing and other controllable differences, such that it's better to judge them holistically and personally when that data is available.

<comment><USER15> That line is taken out of context a lot - the Declaration of Independence does not try to assert that all humans are equal in ability, its main focus was to state that all humans have equal rights to their life, liberty and freedom to pursue happiness. That means that even if a human is weaker, or even disabled, he or she still has equal rights to a human who is in good health.

<comment><USER16> Yes and no. Classical liberalism uses the assumed equality of all people to argue that the people are capable of and ought to engage in self rule. If by some miracle of science we can prove that this presumed equality is mostly false, then you can begin to attack the fundamental justification for self rule. There is a lot of complexity here (for example, what does it even mean for for a disabled person to have an equal right to good health?) and this discussion could go for days, but assumed equality is a huge foundational point for classical liberalism.

<comment><USER17> _> Classical liberalism uses the assumed equality of all people to argue that the people are capable of and ought to engage in self rule._

"Equality" in the sense of equal rights, yes. Not in the sense of equal capabilities. Classical liberalism, as exemplified in documents like the Declaration of Independence, was based on the idea that, even though people have differences in ability, those differences do not give any person a right to rule over any other person. That's where the justification for "self rule" comes from.

Since this reasoning already recognizes that people have differences in ability, "science" showing that people have differences in ability (did we really need "science" to tell us this? isn't it obvious?) does not invalidate the reasoning at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you have the DNA of a billionaire, you'll probably be successful. If you have the same postal address, that's also likely.

</comment><comment><USER19> I bet it can. It can also tell you how much you are likely to inherit and what network of people you are linked to as well.

<comment><USER14> > It can also tell you how much you are likely to inherit and what network of > people you are linked to as well.

Only to the extent that your parents have the same DNA. The point is that economic success is strongly correlated to genetics independently of social position and nurturing.

Of course this will be controversial; it's the same kind of conclusion that spurred the Soviet Union to promote Lysenkoism and suppress Darwinism.

<comment><USER20> Here in the UK, about 1000 years ago, the French invaded and took over, siezing control of the (basically German) population by replacing the top level of society.

Suddely, the lords were French and the serfs were German.

1000 years later, you can predict someones socio-economic level by surname. French surnames do better than German ones. Surnames linked by blood to royalty do better than both.

1000 years. Lack of social mobility overrides genetics?

[I'm sure you can do better than this link but its what I found: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8424904/People- with-Norman-names-wealthier-than-other-Britons.html)]

<comment><USER21> Like many things here though there's a chicken and egg type scenario. Society mostly started with increasingly isolated tribal groups. Over time, and lots of killing, the most successful groups started to form into larger and larger groups. And the most successful individuals among these most successful groups were in turn on top of the top. At some point leadership implied what was an extremely high probability of a genetic advantage. And that advantage can persist through the centuries. It can also deteriorate.

A great example of this is the House of Habsburg. [1] They were one of the most powerful families in history completely dominating Europe politics with lineages of kings and emperors throughout the entire continent for some 5 centuries, including holding the throne of the Holy Roman Empire for more than 300 years. But the reason they're an interesting example is because they're also the namesake of the Habsburg Jaw - a genetic deformity that was greatly exaggerated in the family through the years due to excessive inbreeding. If you've seen a cartoon depiction of royalty they often are drawn with the extreme protruding chin, which is a reference to this deformity and family in particular.

That family was almost certainly _extremely_ genetically fit at one point. But through excessive inbreeding they destroyed their own genetic lineage. In Spain this was especially pronounced with Charles II. [2] He was described as "short, lame, epileptic, senile, and bald before 35." He learned to talk at age 4, walk at 8. His Habsburg Jaw was so extreme he could not chew his own food. He, unsurprisingly, died childless at the age of 35 - ending 200 years of Habsburg rule in Spain. And to emphasize -- this is just one example. This family did not just rule Spain. They had lasting dynasties in Germany, Hungary, Croatia, England, Boehmia, Ireland, Portugal, and many other nations.

Today, the entire house of Habsburg is extinct.

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

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain)

<comment><USER22> Only the male line died out. The Habsburg-Lorraine cadet branch took over and although they don't actually rule any countries since WWI, they are still quite wealthy and well-connected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If they were smart economists, they would have pushed the words together to say "genoconomists"

<comment><USER24> In the same way as 'econophysics' which is a fascinating field in itself.

</comment></comment><comment> comonad-colaboy Time to rewatch Gattaca I suppose

</comment><comment><USER25> Geno-Economist is an interesting way to spell eugenicist.</comment>


Should I Get the New Kindle? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a programmer (both professionally and as a hobbyist). I have a huge amount of books (mostly technical) that I enjoy reading, and I spend probably 100 -> 200$ USD / month on new books. Most of the books I read are O'Reilly, Apress, Pragmatic Programmers, and a lot of the other big tech publishers.
My question is--should I buy the new kindle? I've always been interested in it, but I have an attachment to my book collection, and worry that I won't be able to find as wide a selection of ebooks for download, or that the device won't be as pleasurable to read as a real book.
From a logical standpoint, having a kindle would help me save some money, reduce clutter around my house (I have a lot of books), and be far more convenient to reference old information (via searching a book on the kindle vs. flipping through pages).
Do any of you own a kindle? Do you find that it is pleasurable to read from? I'm especially interested in the opinions of other software developers who read a lot of technical books.
EDIT: The kindle I'm thinking about buying is the new graphite model DX which is 9.7" http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002GYWHSQ/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=5676908467&ref=pd_sl_1bi5098qpb_e <comment><USER2> I could have written this question myself. I, like you, read a large quantity of books on programming, mathematics, entrepreneurship, as well as interesting non-fiction titles.

First and foremost, I think that for technical books, a Kindle DX rather than a regular Kindle is a must. I used to own a severely underused Sony eReader. The main issue with it was the screen size. At 6" it was useless for technical books.

I don't expect the Kindle DX to be perfect for technical books either. In fact, I heard that anything that doesn't come straight from the Kindle Store tends to look less than ideal (PDFs in particular). But since people like you and I pay for books, the inconvenience may be limited to research papers and a few free PDFs (Amazon offers a conversion service as well, but I don't know how well it works).

The truth of the matter is that, I love to be surrounded by books and have a large collection of titles. Having more books than I could possibly read in a lifetime gives me a constant incentive to read more and more to satisfy my passion for learning. If I want to learn about X, I can immediately grab a book off my shelf and immerse myself in it.

Being able to buy books in 60 seconds accomplishes the same thing without having to buy as many books or take up as much room.

A Kindle DX will decrease the expansion of my physical book collection, but the convenience is definitely there. Books are cheaper, immediate to buy, easier to search, and in many cases the Kindle will be lighter than the corresponding physical books.

It's clearly the future of reading, whether we like it or not, so I decided that it will be my gift to myself for my birthday in August. If I'm not happy, I can always resell it with little loss.

An even cheaper alternative would be the iPad and a Safari Online subscription. But even indoors, I assume that the backlit iPad is not nearly as nice on your eyes for extensive reading (plus, as is essentially an internet enabled computer, it could be more distracting as well). I'd be happy to hear different opinions in this regard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your comment inspired me. I've been thinking about this for a long time, and after reading this, I think it's definitely worth the investment (only 400$), and if it doesn't work out, there's always ebay.

Thanks for your thoughts!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's tough to read pragmatic bookshelf books on a Kindle - the fonts are not quite right and the screen is small. The Kindle is a rough device. The UI is clunky, but it gets the job done.

The iPad versions of the books are better, but still have odd font issues that I don't much like. If they used a reasonable font for the code, it would be great. I'm still deciding which display I like better.

The iPad is more polished, but the Kindle is smaller, cheaper, lighter, and has a battery that lasts for weeks. I keep wanting to touch the Kindle screen, though.

In the end, I prefer reading technical books as PDFs on my laptop, where I can work and read at the same time. The layout is better, and it's nice to switch between code and book quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> You said that the Kindle UI is clunky and that it is small to read on. The Kindle I'm thinking of buying is the new DX model with the 9.7" screen. I'm wondering if you think that one is still too small, or if that is suitable?

And regarding the clunky UI, what is the problem with it? The most important things to me, I think, would be easily flipping pages (back and fourth), and searching for text.

<comment><USER3> The bigger one would be better for technical books, but I'd prefer the small one for regular books. By clunky, I almost mean it literally. The little joystick thing is small and awkward to use - you move the cursor around the screen one step at a time, and there's a very slight, very annoying delay between input and action. It's begging for a touch screen and color. The keyboard is small, and probably slightly less usable than the ipad keyboard. Flipping pages is also strange, in that there are dedicated buttons, but I keep finding myself clicking the wrong one. That would probably go away over time, but it's annoying, and I did not have that problem with the iPad, which is very intuitive.

Given the price difference between the big Kindle and the cheapest iPad, I'd probably go with the iPad unless money is a huge factor. The keyboard is nicer, the touch screen is a huge benefit for things like using the dictionary, table of contents and bookmarks. Flipping pages is more intuitive. Install the Kindle app and iBook, and you're good to go. The only caveat to this would be if you really like the kindle display. It is different, and I can image some people putting up with the Kindle's lack of polish to have the screen. I wouldn't call it better, but it is different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use my DX to read PDFs and papers in bed, on public transport, etc, so while it's good for actually buying books, don't forget about its PDF viewer.

<comment><USER5> I've been thinking about getting a kindle for a little while now, and the PDF reader is a huge factor for me. I already have a fair amount of PDFs that I read on my laptop and (somewhat painfully) on my phone. I'd love to be able to sync my location on a PDF between multiple devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have the previous DX model, and use it extensively for technical and personal reading. It's not perfect, but it's convenient, light, and very easy on the eyes. Since I'm in front of screens all day, I greatly prefer it to a tablet, at least until the Pixel Qi screens arrive in force.

I do buy a few books via Amazon, but mostly I buy PDFs so I can read them on my dev box, phone, etc. as needed. The PDF reader isn't perfect, but it's good enough.

So yes, in my opinion the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. I'd suggest you get a slip case for it, though, otherwise you'll always worry about it when you carry it around. (That goes for and tablet format electronics, though.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I owned and tested various readers (including the previous Kindle) but until now a traditional book is unbeatable (at least in my eyes). Here is my major reasons behind this:

\- The setup cost is too high for an electronic reader. Starting or jumping in a book is faster than starting a reader especially when you have 5 minutes to kill in a traffic jam or while being in a train/metro.

\- Comfort of reading is still much better with a traditional book. Having an electronic device emitting light while reading a book in your bed is not really comfortable if you want to sleep afterward.

\- Annotation. I'm writing, adding post-it or even adding pages in my books... Sorry but beating a pencil in a book is difficult for a software reader. I think annotation is really important for technical books when you start to use and master a specific technology.

\- Social impact. I like to share books with other and even with strangers in the train. With electronic reader socialization is much more difficult than with traditional books where everyone can read the cover.

I'm still not really convinced or found a real practical use of such readers for my day-to-day technical reading. The only advantage for electronic books is the fast look-up but with some nice placed annotation you can even beat the ebook look-up/search...

<comment><USER8> I don't have a ereader yet, but the fact that a single slate like device can hold a mini library full of books is very tempting one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do you combine the Kindle service with the Kindle device. There are two questions here: Should I be using the Kindle service (e.g. on an Android phone or iPad) and should I buy the Kindle.

I don't have a Kindle, but really wanted to because it's light. But the screen flicker (will happen a lot esp. with technical books), useless buttons, and he inability to do pretty much nothing except reading books killed it for me. Also I believe, Amazon will redesign the Kindle soon to make it cheaper and better.

The Kindle service, though, is a winner.

I have a subscription to O'Reilly's Safari. The interface and text quality leaves _a lot_ to be desired but it is unbeatable in its breadth. especially when I'm consulting a technical book, I'd rather have the physical book because I do a lot of shuffling around.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not only do I buy a DX which is US-only (wireless-wise), not knowing they'll make the Web available in the UK (my Global kindle 2 could only access Wikipedia until the 2.5 update recently) but 2 months later they drop the price by $120 and make the case black! I'll never buy another Amazon product as an early adopter, but rather, wait until it's really cheap. I now have to read about 100 books to pay this thing off.

What annoys me is paying £50 in customs charges which I can't get back. Caveat emptor!

<comment><USER8> This happens to every product we purchase. The product gets continually upgraded even after we purchased it- Look at all the cars, cell phones, computers etc in the market.

Instead of feeling bad of our purchasing decision, we should remember that during the time when we purchased it, we did it because we believed the product fulfilled all our needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> No, get an iPad and use the Kindle App - it's 1000x better than the hardware Kindle. Since the Kindle App became available for iPhone, my hardware Kindle has gathered dust - and now with the iPad, I can read on a large- or smaller- format device.

It's great for illustrations, too - all the drawbacks of the hardware-based Kindles disappear when you use the Kindle App on the iPad.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you live in the US, yes, kindle redefines reading.

If you live in Europe, the device, due to whisper-net limitations is crippled: no images in subscriptions, no simple web browsing, no blogs and the books are often more expensive than the paperback editions (!)

<comment><USER12> btw, even with these limitations (I live in Europe), I _love_ my Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It SUCKS for technical books with illustrated examples and diagrams. If you read lots of other books, buy it.

<comment><USER14> Totally agree about the Kindle DX not really being great for technical books. I have a DX, love it, but I generally still by technical books in hard copy because the charts, tables, etc are much easier to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love my Kindle (1st Gen). I took it into court with me every day. It was the smallest, lightest item in my briefcase.

Despite its ugly appearance, it's easy enough to use that octogenarian judges were able to start using my Kindle without any assistance.

Plus, even though the Kindle uses proprietary DRM, that DRM is easier to remove than the ePub DRM. I've archived DRM-free copies of every book I've purchased from the Kindle store.

As other commentators have pointed out, the Kindle is not a good choice for technical books _in the Mobi format_ because the Kindle overrides fonts and spacing. However, I haven't had any problems reading technical books in PDF format on my brother's Kindle 2.</comment>


Hello Agent – Say hello to your new home - <AUTHOR> http://helloagent.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Agent is a home search organization tool that boosts productivity and communication for real estate agents and home buyers.</comment>


Show HN: Gazétor – A unique newspage selected for you - <AUTHOR> http://gazetor.com <comment><AUTHOR> I just realized, I haven't left any notice on this post.

This is a website I have developed, because of two reasons:

1: I hate reading news with the bad design and ads all over the place that most popular newspaper-pages propose.

2: I wanted to be able to choose what I want to read about. As for music for example: We choose playlists and only listen to music that we enjoy. Than why do I have to read about Trump or Clinton on every news related website. I am not even in the US!

I would love a feedback from you guys. The design, the idea, or if the website is a good application of the idea.

</comment><comment> java-man > HOW DOES THIS WORK?

there is no link. how DOES it work?

Alternatively, [http://news-ai.com/](http://news-ai.com/) works by personalizing news to each user real interests without a need for keywords or tags.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that link problem. It now works fine: [http://gazetor.com/howdoes.php](http://gazetor.com/howdoes.php)

By the way, I would like to hear what you think about this project!</comment></comment>


House pares NASA's 2013 spending back to 1959 levels, suggests Europa mission - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/05/us-house-pares-nasas-2013-spending-back-to-1959-levels-potentially-forces-nasa-to-explore-europa.ars <comment><USER2> Wow. That article is eye-opening.

I had no idea that Congress had so much specific direction over the operations of Nasa. Overall budgets? Yes. But to have Congress mandate that they build a large rocket that no scientist thinks we have use for is insane. For them to increase money for a rocket that nobody wants or needs, and to decrease money for SpaceX and programs that are actually working is equally insane.</comment>


1Password forces users to upgrade to v7 in order to use Safari extension - <AUTHOR> https://support.1password.com/kb/201909/ <comment><USER2> I personally switched over to Keypass a year ago when 1password switched over to their cloud solution. I just don't like the idea of my entire vault of passwords being stored on the cloud.

However, my dad needed a password manager recently and the cloud solution works well for him. I also don't have to worry about him not backing up his passwords/losing it all if he gets malware.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried LastPass yet? Their basic offering is free and offers cloud sync and backups.</comment></comment>


Webware 100 2009 Winners - <AUTHOR> http://www.webware.com/100/?tag=smallCarouselArea.0 <comment><USER2> How many major awards for websites are there, and where does Webware 100 rank in terms of prestige and accomplishment vs. Webby Awards, etc.?

</comment><comment><USER3> Cuil is a winner. That tells me all.

<comment><USER4>
      Site: Cuil and Mobile Me
      Category: Editors' Choice, Failure to Launch</comment></comment>


Ask HN: MacOS open source word processor-- what are you using in 2018? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Honestly? LaTeX. Does that count? It does presentations, too.

Does it have to be open source? Because LibreOffice is a mess, especially on macOS. Apparently, something called NeoOffice is LibreOffice for macOS, and while sold commercially, is GPL.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on what you want to achieve. Taking simple notes => MacDown, as iDemonix said.

Complex documents (long reports, mathematics notes, ...) => LaTeX. (TexMaker for example).

It is totally worth it to spend 1 or 2 days struggling with LaTeX.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not Pages?

<comment><USER5> It says "open source" in the title, but I'm not sure if the OP might make an exception for Pages since it comes with macOS and macOS itself isn't free software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> LibreOffice

</comment><comment><USER7> MacDown</comment>


Please Scan My Towel: How I turned my hotel towel into my RSA conference badge - <AUTHOR> http://jerrygamblin.com/2016/03/01/please-scan-my-towel/?platform=hootsuite <comment><USER2> From the manufacturer of the tags:

 _Target Applications_

      * Electronic ticketing in public transport
      * Road tolling
      * Airline tickets
      * Access control
      * Multiple applications

Do these have additional security features that the badge didn't use?

</comment><comment><USER3> It says "how" but it doesn't actually provide any technical details at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Like the punch line at the end. :)</comment>


Samsung in 'exploding washing machines' probe - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37503116 <comment><USER2> Is it just me or does 'Samsung' seem to be Korean for 'BOOM!' ?</comment>


Ask HN: Should documentation include sample code? - <AUTHOR> Should sample code be included in the documentation? I always find myself hitting up google after looking up the documentation just to see an example. Am I not grokking the documentation correctly? Are samples, even just one line, sacrilege? Any tips for understanding documentation like apple developer docs better? <comment><USER2> I've always loved the Lisp Hyperspec* way of doing it. On the sample link below, you'll notice it demonstrates how to use the print functions by showing equivalent write functions. Almost all of the built in functions and macros are described this way, and some even provide practical code snippets - whichever happens to make sense for the given reference.

* [http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_wr_p...](http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_wr_pr.htm#print)</comment>


RadEventListener: A Tale of Client-Side Framework Performance - <AUTHOR> https://css-tricks.com/radeventlistener-a-tale-of-client-side-framework-performance <comment><USER2> > React and ReactDOM total about 120 KiB of minified JavaScript, > which > definitely contributes to slow startup time.

I don't doubt this but I'd like more info on the root cause. Is it loading 120KB of JS (which I doubt) or interpreting/compiling 1MB of decompressed Js (which I suspect is the cause)?</comment>


Gladys Project – Creating an open-source home assistant - <AUTHOR> https://www.patreon.com/gladysproject/overview <comment><USER2> I wish you the best of luck. I'm also using Patreon to sponsor my work on open source [https://www.patreon.com/microhq](https://www.patreon.com/microhq). It's a great platform to enable this opportunity. I hope you receive more contributions to help you do it full time!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I'm impressed by your Patreon! Congrats :)

<comment><USER2> Cheers! If you build something of value people will pay for your efforts as long as you give them a way to :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the project itself but the emojis seem like an odd choice. Including them in a document that's intended to get people to pay you money seems unprofessional to me.

I could be totally wrong about that though, I don't use Patreon so I'm not sure what a page would usually look like. To be honest I've never really understood the culture or appeal of the whole Youtube/Podcasts/Patreon/Internet celebrities thing.

<comment><USER4> Dead wrong. Emojis make copy more personable and increase conversions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly that's the goal

It's a community project, not a contract :) So I try to be as close as possible from my community

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good luck for your project. Note that there is also Mycroft the Open Source Virtual assistant : [https://mycroft.ai/](https://mycroft.ai/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Are there many developers who make a living off of donations to their open source work? Curious about whether it's viable to build a career off of open source.

<comment><USER7> I've been rolling an idea around my head to interview and write up stories on some of these people. Here are some that fit (or come close to fitting) your description that I've been talking to:

\- [https://sindresorhus.com](https://sindresorhus.com) \- [https://github.com/slact](https://github.com/slact) \- [https://www.patreon.com/microhq](https://www.patreon.com/microhq) \- [https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/index.js](https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/index.js)</comment></comment>


Much faster testing in Django - <AUTHOR> http://tech.marksblogg.com/faster-django-testing.html

<comment><USER2> I've also recently desired faster tests with django, so I've switched to the 'nose' test runner, which allows DB reuse between runs:

[https://github.com/django-nose/django-nose](https://github.com/django- nose/django-nose)

It takes testing down from dozens of seconds to minutes in my case to a few seconds or even less.

You just need to remember to run 'clean' (no REUSE_DB flag) once, and also remember that if you change your DB/have new migrations, run them and re-run the tests clean. Then you can can go back to reusing the DB again:

Prime it: ./manage.py test mystuff --failfast -s -v0

Run it: REUSE_DB=1 ./manage.py test mystuff --failfast -s -v0

Ran 22 tests in 1.475s</comment>


Show HN: VexFlow – JavaScript Music Notation and Guitar Tablature - <AUTHOR> https://vexflow.com <comment><USER2> Is it possible to drag and drop the staves?</comment>


JOE – Joe's own editor 4.5 released - <AUTHOR> https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/NEWS.md <comment><USER2> I've used JOE for 15 years. I recently upgraded form JOE 3.x to 4.4 and was unimpressed with the recent decline in quality to the point of considering switching editors. Hopping between open/close braces with ^G no longer counts nested pairs correctly; TAB now randomly inserts 2 or 3 spaces instead of the 2 I have it configured for and that my files use; and my home-key settings in my config file are ignored.

I'm completely baffled how the developers can add such bugs to a stable, decades-old product. Regardless of whether the bugs get fixed, it's shaken my confidence that I can trust JOE not to screw up my work. (Even 3.x JOE gets into screwed-up states and crashes from time to time; I trust 4.x JOE even less. Even the "save often" mantra I'm cautious about, since I don't want to save data from a screwed-up state. That's worse than straight-up crashing.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you are seeing- it's possible the config file syntax has evolved. Anyway, if you find issues, please submit bug reports for them:

[https://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/bugs/?source=navbar](https://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/bugs/?source=navbar)

This is the best way to influence the development direction and we certainly do fix issues.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it looks like both the joerc and the ftyperc formats have changed in a non-backward-compatible way. At least, wiping those fixed the ^G issue for me. (I can't tell yet about the indent issue since I can't reproduce that reliably; if it persists I will file a bug report.)

Thanks for all your work developing and maintaining JOE. My apologies for such a negative earlier post; I would not get so easily frustrated if I did not rely on JOE every day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I found JOE while looking for a free cross-platform, preferably open source editor that could handle huge files with ease - you know, file sizes that make most editors choke and die (or make your system freeze while trying to allocate an insane amount of memory). Even vim isn't especially effective handling very large files. JOE was the first (and for the time being, the only) free cross-platform editor I found that handles the largest of files easily.

Found it here (noticed this link was submitted to HN in the past):

[https://github.com/jhallen/joes- sandbox/blob/master/editor-p...](https://github.com/jhallen/joes- sandbox/blob/master/editor-perf/readme.md)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using joe for over 25 years, I just like how easy it is to use.

<comment><USER5> For me, over a decade. It's simply easy and does not pull any confusing tricks like nano with long lines, or vi with... incomprehensible behavior.

<comment><USER6> My one use for vi is to edit /etc/joe/joerc to enable -nobackups.

<comment><USER7> That was one of the reasons I gave up on using Joe for system administration. It showed rather big mismatch between my mental model of how a system editor should work and what Joe did.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will continue to debate making nobackups the default, but what other behavior is wrong for system administration?

<comment><USER7> Scrolling, not wrapping, of lines that do not fit screen.

<comment><USER8> I would argue that scrolling is the sanest default for systems administration since text files are usually formatted to a fixed width and are sensitive to line breaks.

<comment><USER7> Yet try to edit with horizontal scrolling XML or JSON file written without line-breaks. Or perhaps some other config files written on assumption that a terminal window will always be maximized and get at least 200 character width.

In my opinion an editor for system administration should try to show as much information as possible by default and horizontal scrolling is an opposite of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> jmacs is my go-to lightweight emacs - not as light as mg, but comes with syntax highlighting and keyboard macros.

The hex editor is reasonably nifty too.

<comment><USER10> mg also has keyboard macros, but it doesn't have UTF-8 support yet, which is the reason why I prefer to use jmacs for quick edits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who's Joe? Is he still around? There's a bit of history about the editor here but not too much about Joe himself (well, he appears to have children and own a house these days :-) [1]).

1: [https://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/mercurial/ci/default/tr...](https://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/docs/history.md)

<comment><USER12> I think he's replied to a few comments here as "jhallenworld"\--so guessing he's around!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wont use software on sourceforge. period.

<comment><USER14> Why? Question mark.

<comment><USER15> I'd guess because of their bundling of relative malware (sometimes against devs knowledge).

[https://www.howtogeek.com/218764/warning- don%E2%80%99t-downl...](https://www.howtogeek.com/218764/warning- don%E2%80%99t-download-software-from-sourceforge-if-you-can-help-it/)

Supposedly it's better now??

<comment><USER14> They haven't done that for a long time now, ever since they changed owner. The site is ugly and old fashioned, and a little spammy with the ads at times, but that's it.

<comment><USER15> If you invite me to a dinner party and I shit on the table it doesn't really matter how much I claim I'm reformed you're not going to invite me back unless you're really short on company. If there's any other source then there's no reason one would spend time checking out if sourceforge is really reformed or they just did a legal manoeuvre and started hiding the malware better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait. People still use sourceforge? I thought it was a wasteland of old projects that had crapware attached to all their downloads.

<comment><USER17> Sourceforge doesn't belong to the company that did the crapware thing anymore, and the new(-ish by now) owners stopped doing that.

EDIT: relevant announcement from January 2016: [https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and- fut...](https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future- plans/)

<comment><USER18> They should just shut it down.

It's hard to think of a domain name with a worse reputation in tech circles.

<comment><USER19> It's got an excellent reputation with open source fans who were around at the turn of the century.

<comment><USER20> That describes me and I didn't follow its course after the crapware thing so it had a terrible reputation with me until I just learned about the acquisition in this thread. I wouldn't be so sure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon EC2 gets statistics, auto scaling and elastic load balancing - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/new-aws-load-balancing-automatic-scaling-and-cloud-monitoring-services.html <comment><USER3> How many startups does this put out of business?

This keeps happening repeatedly - so let there be no more startups offering missing features of EC2. Go back! Build something else! Amazon has made it clear that you should not build a general cloud offering on top of EC2 - <USER2> must be niche, or not an enhancement of their offering, or they will simply do the same thing and kill you. And I don't think its that they're copying anyone. They've given lots of notice. Its just that their product vision fits with most anyone's who looks at what EC2 is missing.

<comment><USER4> Check out the marketing language for RightScale:

<http://www.rightscale.com/>

Their "Key Features": (1) Auto-Scaling, (2) Monitoring & Alerting, (3) Load Balancing. Ouch.

But you're right -- the opportunity to provide unique value is in harnessing EC2 for specific purposes and applications.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, our marketing web site has gotten old, and it'll change within a couple of days. We haven't been selling auto-scaling and assorted features for a while. As Amazon is moving up the stack so are we. We're integrating a lot of the various features and really provide a platform for all the config management, automation, access control, etc. Plus pre-configured stacks that you can fully customize. If you actually try to use Amazon's monitoring and auto-scaling you'll find you have a lot of wheels to reinvent...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the case of websites, auto scaling is useful only if your application is not too dependent on DB but most web apps have DB as the bottle neck. The way auto scaling works is to launch new instances but that works only for application servers. You can't autoscale a DB by launching new instances.

So, even though this feature is useful it is not taking away the biggest headache in website scaling..i.e how to scale your DB.

<comment><USER7> Does anything prohibit someone from hacking together a way to scale their DB using this service? i.e. fire up instances that of a certain ilk? Not sure how detailed CloudWatch is, but you could conceivably automate anything that involves looking at numbers and taking steps to reduce load on your DB.

<comment><USER8> Hum, funny you say that, that's exactly what I'm working on: <http://code.google.com/p/hotrepart/> The idea is to repartition a DB across multiple hosts while it's running. It's only a demonstrator project right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's my take on these features...

Monitoring and autoscaling I'll pass on. You can get better monitoring with collectd for free and autoscaling based on just load age or disk util and not app specific stuff is plain crazy.

The load balancer is pretty nice but I'll stick with haproxy until you can do httpand https on the same lb and also currently you can only do CNAME dns so no foo.com only www.foo.com and wildcard subdomains don't work unless you use tinydns(bind can't do it)

So I feel like this is a good start but I won't be using any of these services until they get more fully baked. The load balancer is the most interesting part but is currently seriously flawed.

<comment><USER9> I guess I spoke too soon and they did add support for multiple ports through the sam lb access point. So http and https can be served from the same lb. This makes the lb much more interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> amazons offering adds a pricing model to this space. if anything, i think amazons move into this space, although certainly anticipated, validates those that are also competing here. others who wish to compete know the price/value proposition they need to meet in order to have a chance.

<http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/>

</comment><comment><USER7> As a startup based on EC2, our greatest risk last year was not scaling in time to meet demand (yes, even on EC2). That makes this fantastic news.

</comment><comment><USER11> How long before they start offering the full commodity application stacks? LAMP is the same on every shared host.

<comment><USER12> You can already use publicly-available AMIs that contain a wide variety of application stacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While in my company we are loving S3 since it's really cheap and good, we can't say the same for EC2: the small instances are too slow, and the bigger instances are too costly and still can't compare with a decent Linux box. Overall we made our math and to have our servers in the server farm is going to cost less compared to EC2. Of course it's not going to be as simple to manage as EC2 is, but it is an acceptable compromise for now.

I think that here there is space for new startups _if_ they are able to provide better performances at the same cost. I wonder if a configuration where in a cloud real hardware is selected in order to run an instance could work, instead to use virtualization technologies. This does not allow to take advantage of the fact that most boxes are not under high load most of the time, but maybe could work if it will be possible to use very low energy in this condition.

</comment><comment><USER14> AWS CloudWatch seems remarkably expensive: 15 cents per instance per hour! Considering that all they are doing is aggregating and distributing per-VM statistics.

Woops: Brainfade. Yes, 1.5 cents/instance/hour, not 10x that. Still, quite expensive I think.

<comment><USER15> From the Amazon page its $0.015/hr:

With Amazon CloudWatch... at a rate of $0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance you choose to monitor...

As an example, a developer may want to monitor 10 Amazon EC2 instances 24×7 for a 30-day period. The Amazon CloudWatch cost would be $108 (or $0.015 per Amazon EC2 instance hour x 10 Amazon EC2 instances x 24 hours per day x 30 days)...

That is close to what it costs to run a single instance to collect all your statistics (75$ if its small + your time is worth something!).

<comment><USER14> Yeah, my bad. Still, I think it's quite expensive. If all they are offering is some simple runtime stats, then a 15% surcharge on the cost of a small instance is pretty expensive. If you have 50 instances, you're paying $540/month just for _monitoring_.

 _That is close to what it costs to run a single instance to collect all your statistics_

Assuming you need a completely separate instance which couldn't do anything else but monitoring, which is unlikely to be the case.

<comment><USER16> Think of it as a bailout for the third-party cloud monitoring startups; at least they have a chance to be cheaper than Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does auto scaling mean my instance will grow in ram/cpu/other resources or i'll be just given more new instances?

<comment><USER18> Hot-CPU/memory switch would be a little freaky.

<comment><USER19> It's here, it's simple, and it works..

Usage: xm mem-set <Domain> <Mem>

Set the current memory usage for a domain.

Usage: xm vcpu-set <Domain> <vCPUs>

Set the number of active VCPUs for allowed for the domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If anyone is willing to share... Who here does this solve a specific problem for, and are you actively/planning on implementing it ASAP? What is your use case? It's a sweet feature, and I can't wait to see how it manifests in the hands of hackers.

<comment><USER21> We have several application components that use software load balancers (HAProxy) so we can manually scale each component quickly. The load balancing service will let us shut down each of those instances for a decent savings. Our QA environment is a copy of prod (scaled-back, but identical, including LBs) - more nodes to shut down, more money saved.

This is easy to implement and is basically found money, so we'll be doing it ASAP.

My expectation is that an Amazon (LB) access point is more reliable than a generic EC2 instance. For these components, we'll be paying less for something that's both more reliable (hopefully) and easier to manage.

Auto-scaling is powerful and easy to set up (even in the private beta, before tools were available), but as we're heavily integrated with RightScale (specifically, using templates throughout) migrating to pre-configured AMIs would take some effort. We'll have to do some internal review before making a decision on rolling out auto-scaling to existing apps.

Monitoring is, as expected, also provided by RightScale. Amazon requires you have CloudWatch turned on for instances in auto-scaled pools (for obvious reasons), so that's one way we may end up using it. RightScale's blog post mentioned they'll be integrating their alerting and reporting with CloudWatch, but I'm not sure it's worth the extra $0.015/intance-hour to have the data come from Amazon instead of RightScale. I expect that, for now, CloudWatch is more relevant to: 1) users not on RightScale, Cloudkick, etc. 2) users who want direct access to their monitoring data (for archival, custom graphs, whatever - not currently possible with RightScale, not sure about other cloud management vendors)

Amazon's move up the application stack (Elastic MapReduce, for starters) may create additional use cases for CloudWatch, but that's entirely up to Amazon.

What I'd really like to see in the near-term is an open source tool to read in and graph CloudWatch data that's been archived somewhere (SimpleDB would be cool, but S3 would work too). Of course, I can see why people would be hesitant to start down that path given that Amazon has a console that's begging to include this functionality.

-Mike B @ ShareThis

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not clear whether Auto Scaling can only be based on inputs from CloudWatch, or your own inputs as well. Anyone know?

Also, you better trust Amazon to fairly determine when to scale up... more instances == more profit for them.

<comment><USER23> The day someone comes up with solid evidence that they are using the system to skim money off unsuspecting customers is Amazon's last day as a hosting company.

Trust of a web host is of paramount importance. I know a lot of people who stuck with more expensive hosts just because they trust them and have a good working relationship with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> really sad that they only provide a cname and you can;t associate Elastic IP to it. You can;t point it to your root domain....

</comment><comment><USER25> The load balancer seems nice. We used HAProxy, but it seemed like the sort of thing that Amazon could easily take care of on their own. I see that it has health checks, but I wonder if it's generally as nice and configurable as HAProxy.

<comment><USER26> Elastic Load Balancing isn't yet a replacement for HAProxy, for now it only seems to handle HTTP traffic, and not HTTPS: [http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/lates...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/US_SettingUpLoadBalancerHTTPS.html)

<comment><USER27> I don't think HAProxy supports SSL either, does it? I had to put an nginx layer in front of HAProxy to get SSL working.

<comment><USER25> HAProxy certainly supports SSL.

<comment><USER28> Reference or tutorial?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "UP with me! up with me into the clouds!

For thy song, Lark, is strong;

Up with me, up with me into the clouds!

Singing, singing,

With clouds and sky about thee ringing,

Lift me, guide me till I find

That spot which seems so to thy mind!"

\--William Wordsworth</comment>


Why Programmers Thrive - <AUTHOR> http://sumof.xyz/Why-Programmers-Thrive/

<comment><USER2> The same reason why two centuries ago mechanical engineers throve.

<comment><USER3> Thrived? Thriven?

<comment><USER2> As far as I know, this is an irregular verb, but I may be wrong.</comment></comment></comment>


Editing Photographs in Three Dimensions - <AUTHOR> https://experiment.com/projects/editing-photographs-in-three-dimensions

<comment><USER2> 9 hours to figure out the 3 dimensional rotation of the chair?? Wow, I don't think that solution is the path to go down. Why not allow the user to put down some sort of control points to narrow down the search space? You know, it's okay to ask the user for help sometimes.

*Edit: The reason it took 9 hours is because they rendered the model in every single possible camera position and orientation until they found one that matched.

<comment><USER3> Another problem,is that they need to have a 3D model ready of whatever it is you're trying to manipulate. Have a slightly different chair or different car make? Tough cookies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool research but something bothers me about students/professors asking for money on sites like indiegogo/kickstarter/etc.

<comment><USER5> Looks like that's the whole point of this site. Why does crowdfunding science bother you?

<comment><USER6> > Why does crowdfunding science bother you?

There is already a fair crowdfunding scheme for science called "taxes".

I feel the increase of popularity of crowdfunding schemes for science or health care is detrimental to the cause. They will never be able to approach the same level of funding that a state can give away, yet they will be a good excuse for the politics to reduce the amount of money spent on these issues: "The crowdfunding schemes are already taking care of it, aren't they? Why should we waste taxpayers' money? If prof. X wants its experiment to be funded why doesn't it ask for money on indiegogo?"

For those who may thing "nobody is going to ever suggest that", well, the current government of UK as been elected exactly on this promise: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Society](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Society)

<comment><USER7> You should consider the proposition that funding science with taxes is a great excuse to politicize science. Moreover, the notion that science funding could ever be objectively "fair" is complete hokum, and the idea that a political apparatus could find a particularly fair solution is even crazier.

Of course, I have to disclaim that I ran a successful science crowdfunding campaign ([http://pledge.indysci.org](http://pledge.indysci.org)). As to why it couldn't be funded by taxes, it's because the NIH coordinator for the subsection working in the division that would have funded it used to lead the project I'm continuing so there's a conflict of interest.

Now, this is a relatively 'boring' and particularly coincidental reason for the inability for taxpayers to be able to fund this project. Usually the real reasons are internecine conflicts within sciences competing for funds, personal differences, political connections, etc. Consider for example the case of Leo Paquette, who denied funding to a group and then turned around and stole the idea for himself. (ScienceWeek. 1998-03-20) Of course the system came to a settlement whereby Paquette got a slap on the wrist (agreed to not accept funding for 2 years) instead of kicking him out.

My personal opinion is that if people want to say they fXing love science, then they should be willing to reach into their wallets and pay for it themselves. Science has a clear social benefit and to that end, everyone should want to help out. Forcing other people to pay to make you feel like you have chipped in yourself - is just patting yourself on your own back for making zero personal sacrifice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unless I'm missing something, for this to be useful, at least to normal people, there would seem to be a huge step missing whereby every object in the world has to be modelled and put in a database. Also you'd have to be able to locate your 2d objects in the 3d database, but that is at least theoretically tractable I guess.

Edit: It sounds cool, but maybe a bit misleadingly advertised.

<comment><USER9> I think that 3D scanners would be a perfect solution to this. It becomes easier and easier to digitize real world objects, even based on a single- camera video.

[http://youtu.be/gu5Ywwb4RaU](http://youtu.be/gu5Ywwb4RaU)

<comment><USER8> That stuff looks cool, and I want to play with photogrammetry stuff when I have some spare time. I think it's a bit optimistic to say it's a "solution" to this though. It's another tool that can help with the modelling + positioning + texturing + lighting + rendering + compositing workflow, but I don't think we're anywhere near a "3D photo editing tool" that can be used by normal people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is amazing technology, I'm excited for it to actually come to photo editing/manipulation. Sometimes I wish the programming world and academic world intersected more to solve problems.

<comment><USER8> You can already do it. Use content aware fill to cover your object, then find a 3D model of your object and composite it over the top. Afaict this is intended to streamline that process a bit, but it's basically something you can already do, eg using Gimp + Resynthesizer and Blender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool application. I don't see much justification for double precision arithmetic in this case though, so why would they need the Teslas? Going with Titan Z cards instead I believe they'd come out with comparable single precision performance in the ballpark of half the price? That might be closer to what could be reasonably expected in the target workstation too...

<comment><USER12> It's also a bit weird because NVIDIA are usually pretty generous in giving out free K40s to academics. Wonder why they couldn't get some from NVIDIA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting project!

I'm just curious about her degrees. It seems she achieved both a B.S. and M.S. at the same time from the same university. How is that possible/allowed? The schools around me don't even accept people into their masters programs until after you have completed a B.S. and have some relevant work experience as well.

<comment><USER14> Some schools have combined B.S./M.S. programs.

<comment><USER13> Oh man, I'm at the wrong University then!

No but really, I think it's more beneficial for a student to take a year or two off after completing their BS and work in their field. The experience you pick up in the workplace actually doing the thing you went to school for is invaluable. That is unless you worked in your field prior-to or while you were attending university.

<comment><USER2> Some universities, such as the one I went to, have degrees that combine some normal B.Sc degrees with honors. Such that after completing it, you can start with your masters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hm, I would imagine a university like Carnegie Mellon had plenty of money, or that they could use some centralised computing resource to do the work.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't believe 90% of the examples in that video. They perfectly fill the gaps left by the object every single time, including the person's fingerprint, the carpet pattern, the patterns on the road.

I call BS.

<comment><USER8> The paper says:

""" We compute a mask for the object pixels, and use this mask to inpaint the background using the PatchMatch algorithm [Barnes et al. 2009]. For complex backgrounds, the user may touch up the background image after inpainting. """

So they're not really claiming perfect object removal is part of their thing. What they are actually doing is quite interesting, but their pitch is making some rather extravagant claims IMO.

<comment><USER16> Go ahead and try it. No algorithm will fill in the details like that.

<comment><USER8> I am not disagreeing with you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Valtrex For Geeks - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=374 <comment><USER2> Two types of viral.

1\. Artificial virality. Huge audience. Capture a part of the audience, you're in for a good userbase. Exponential increase. This is his Hotmail example.

2\. Natural virality. "John has sent you $20 over PayPal. Create an account to transfer to your bank." Built in a certain fashion that forces it to spread virally. Who wouldn't take twenty bucks?

</comment><comment><USER3> equating ebola and AIDS to hotmail and youtube. has human life become so cheap?

i don't have a problem with the use of virus outbreaks being used to explain network effects, i do have a contention with the apparent disregard for the reality of, say, ebola spreading through zaire.

<comment><USER3> please explain why you downmodded me so i can improve the quality of my posts.

<comment><USER4> I'm not the one who modded you down, but I'll bite.

You have a problem with the author's irreverence towards virus outbreaks in Africa. Regardless of whether this is "correct", it is not of interest to (some large proportion of) readers here.

If you want to criticise the authors' tone, the comments attached to his own blog may be a more effective venue.

<comment><USER3> oh, i see your point. i will keep matters of style on the originating site, and matters of content here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>