Ticket to Dine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/buying-tickets-to-restaurants-114e5b9c768f

<comment><USER2> Obligatory: the first thread on HN about Tock, including a writeup from Patrick McKenzie, wherein Nick Kokonas himself shows up to answer questions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786)

</comment><comment><USER3> The only issue I see with implementing a ticketing system with a restaurant is how long people stay at the table. If you're having a great time you might stay at your table for a bit longer and have dessert and a few more drinks, while if it's bad you might box up your meal and head out pretty soon. I supposed this is not a huge problem since the only places likely to implement ticketing are these blockbuster restaurants with reservations months in advance.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't the same problem occur with reservations?

<comment><USER5> Right. But a ticketing system doesn't solve this problem either.

A pre-paid ticketing system could make this problem worse because there is no "cue" as it were. At least a bill being placed on the table, paid, and then picked up later by the server. Having the bill picked up by the server is, ostensibly, the last interaction aside from refilling the water.

Of course, tickets could get handled in some special way like being redeemed at the end of the meal, or the ticket pays for the core meal, and a separate bill is given for drinks and extras not handled by the ticket.

<comment><USER6> At Alinea, it works just like you suggest - the ticket price is just covers the core meal, with the drinks being extra and settled at the end of the meal. Interestingly enough, though, the sister restaurant Next does require you to purchase your drinks option as part of the ticket. But I doubt there is much problem, as they provide a highly-coordinated service that already requires a constant awareness of where you are in the meal at all times.

For the non-high-end, non-pre-fixe market, the ticket is normally a deposit on the meal price, so you'd still have to settle the remainder of the bill when you're finished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great move to address the historically paltry and inconsistent profit margins of restaurants. Looking forward to seeing what this does for the industry - I'm hoping it helps push forward other big-kitchen / small-dining-room places like Achatz's restaurants.

</comment><comment><USER8> Paying to book a restaurant? Probably just for an event. Otherwise I don't see people paying for it. Also, what is more easy? making a simple call or using an app/website, enter payment methods, accounts, etc....?

I know there is an app for everything, but making a call is 1000 better than using any app at the moment.

<comment><USER9> Well to be fair Next and Alinea have been dramatically successful with the model. And for that class of restaurant, I much prefer the model of "buy ticket" to "call and be told there is nothing available".

<comment><USER10> But how many of those restaurants are there really?

<comment><USER2> Probably at least 5 in every major metro, and more in NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco. With the current customer perception, that is: for "destination" restaurants, like Alinea, Saison, Ko.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So this addresses a 'need' but that 'need' doesn't have a market. In fact, that shadow-market is merely a consequence of the failure other markets. The need for this service is completely dependent upon the failure of the local restaurant industry to properly manage its demand, which in turn is likely due to the failure of a real estate market to provide profitable space for restaurants.

If EITHER of these two markets are disrupted, your market evaporates. Considering how popular food blogs and food trucks are becoming, I would not bank on this.

<comment><USER7> The 'need' is that there are open seats at restaurants that don't have any open reservations, due to people showing up late or not showing up at all. This inefficiency can be looked at as unavoidable friction, or as opportunity for innovation.

Other industries in the hospitality world have their own ways around this. Most hotels have 24-hour cancellation policies and airlines have dynamic pricing. This is a new one for the (fine) dining industry, and one that will likely spawn different models for different types of restaurants.

<comment><USER12> Some higher-end restaurants do take a deposit when you make a reservation but it's not common. I find it interesting that there's so much variation among different types of services (hotels, rental cards, hotels, restaurants, theater) with respect to cancelation or no show policies. It doesn't obviously always track to the cost.</comment></comment></comment>


CNet's Download.com now bundling Nmap with malware - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2011/5 <comment><USER2> Shit. I just found that my application which was updated last week and is the 10th most popular system utility app on Download.com is also being similarly bundled [1]. This was not the case last week.

I think Softpedia and FileHippo are the only big sites left not doing this ridiculous practice. I'm debating whether or not to pull the application listing. What do you guys think?

[1]: <http://download.cnet.com/EasyBCD/3000-2094_4-10556865.html>

EDIT

The benefit of our freeware not being open source is that we retain full control over distribution and packaging. Unlike nmap and others, we actually have a legal right to demand that CNet, et. al. either host the unaltered EXE or pull their listing.

I have just sent CNet a "cease and desist"-ish open letter, which we've also published on our blog. We will be forwarding this to any and all download sites we find bundling EasyBCD with their intrusive downloaders and installers, as that goes explicitly against the products' licensing agreements, which are there to prevent exactly this type of behavior.

Link: <http://neosmart.net/blog/2011/open-letter-to-cnet/>

tl;dr of link: C&D bundling of EasyBCD with installers and downloaders or pull the listing.

<comment><USER3> While you're here:

The gallery link appears to 404:

([http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/gallery/album/view/neosmart/Easy...](http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/gallery/album/view/neosmart/EasyBCD/EasyBCD+2.0/))

<comment><USER2> Thanks. It was a absolute link missing the leading / so it went elsewhere. Should point to [http://neosmart.net/gallery/album/view/neosmart/EasyBCD/Easy...](http://neosmart.net/gallery/album/view/neosmart/EasyBCD/EasyBCD+2.0/) now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> C|Net / download.com has been doing this a while. They're even doing it to companies that _pay_ to have their product(s) promoted on download.com. From what I understand, a C&D isn't necessary. If you email cnet- firstname.lastname@example.com, they will remove the wrapper from your application.

BTW, here's a discussion about this from ~three months ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910554>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is one upside to using trusted repositories with signed applications in the Linux Distribution model. It's not perfect but at least this kind of sadness doesn't happen. There's no good reason this couldn't be done for Windows as well; it's just that users are conditioned to download from assorted random sites to collect the apps they want.

Would be a good community project which would likely attract the kinds of people who use nmap anyway.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I do have one word of caution though:

I downloaded VLC to my netbook through apt-get and ran it from the terminal. When run from the terminal it was outputting errors like the below (not actual domains): cannot reach 442g.com => skipping... cannot reach muzak.com => skipping... cannot reach 3g3.com => skipping... cannot reach gewedw.com => skipping... cannot reach ewfr.com => skipping... I've always wondered _why_ but never really looked into it.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps it is looking for details of your music/CD/DVD. There is an option for it automatically fetch such details as a list of tracks, artist, etc, to display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember the first time I found Sun bundling the Yahoo! toolbar along with the Java runtime.

I knew at that moment that Sun had lost its self respect and had no credible strategy for Java. I immediately went back to developing C++ for MS Windows and Perl for Linux.

<comment><USER9> > I remember the first time I found Sun bundling the Yahoo! toolbar along with > the Java runtime.

Rest assured that they have now ceased this insane pratice.

Now the JRE installer force install the Ask Toolbar instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's often a huge divide between business people and consumers on what is fair.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/when-business- can...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/when-business-cant-foresee- consumer-outrage-economic-view.html)

That's why companies trying to increase revenues are continually blind sided when their actions outrage people.

</comment><comment><USER11> This, and preinstalled "crapware" on newly bought computers/phones happens because vendors have no incentive _not_ to do it, except perhaps out of goodness their heart. Yes, it disgusts me too, but moral issues aside:

(a) Vendors are looking to make money (simply speaking) and bundling crapware is a low-hanging fruit to do so. They have a choice between making $X per customer and $X+30 cents. Which choice should they pick?

(b) Users are not savvy or discerning enough to notice that they are getting the said crapware. We, techies, care. Do mainstream users care? They buy a new computer (or download an app), and they get the computer or the app, as far as they are concerned. How can grandma know that the "monthly anti-virus subscription" popup is "unwanted"?

People will buy/download from $VENDOR _with or without_ crapware. Companies want to make more money and they have no reason to be "good." They gain more than they can lose. Until these variables change (say, if users revolt, or class action suits arise, or $CONGRESS_PERSON complains, or advertising revenue somehow diminishes, etc.), this will sadly keep on happening.

<comment><USER3> See also Sony offering to sell Vaios without the bundled junk for an extra $50.

([http://www.pcworld.com/article/143677/sony_removes_bloatware...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/143677/sony_removes_bloatwarefor_a_fee.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What an egregiousness abuse of user trust. I hope this destroys their brand forever.

<comment><USER13> Until this story hits mainstream, there's no hope of that happening. Even if it does hit mainstream, you need a bunch of talking heads that are able to explain to luddites what the implications are.

<comment><USER14> One can hope it destroys the brand for power-users. It's been a while since I've been using windows, but in the past I've trusted download.com when I needed some piece of freeware. I'll be more careful now.

What about all the the open source projects hosted there? A quick search shows that they offer VLC and Firefox - are they clean?

<comment><USER15> The guy in the Nmap mailing list says

        I've just discovered that C|Net's Download.Com site has started
        wrapping their Nmap downloads (as well as other free software
        like VLC)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is disgusting behavior from what could be considered the first "app store". What a shame.

<comment><USER8> And to think that Microsoft is paying them for it.

O how the mighty have fallen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Worth noting that CNet is under new owners (CBS Interactive).

<comment><USER17> Worth noting that if enough bad PR gets into the lamestream media about this it could be a death knell. CBSi doesn't exactly monetize well, and CNet has always bled money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Way to destroy one of the remaining strong brands from the (relatively) early days of the web, CBS. (CBS owns CNET.)

Hope it was worth it.

<comment><USER17> Not that I want to defend CBS, but CNet pretty much runs itself, and had run itself into the ground way before CBS "saved" it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This happened to software from my company (ActiveState), and we made a request to remove the extra wrapper bits (very much not the user experience we wanted), and CNet complied. Someone just has to ask. [edit: of course, we did also find out _after_ the fact, which we didn't appreciate. We would have pulled our various bits, had they not complied ... but they did]

<comment><USER20> Their reputation is already tainted. Especially since your company is finding out after the fact.

What stops them from doing it again a month later?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Off the topic here, are there still many people download software programs from download sites, like download.com, brothersoft.com or softpedia?

<comment><USER22> Yes. Download.com is the 173rd highest traffic site in the world. They're probably pushing over 100-200k downloads a month at least. Nothing compared to the Apple or Android app stores, but still a significant number.

<comment><USER23> I'm guestimating that you're off by an order of magnitude.

According to Alexa, somewhere between 0.6% and 0.8% of the entire web goes there every day.

<comment><USER24> Download.com users are probably over-represented on Alexa simply because of all the tracking crapware they have installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm confused. Did Microsoft make a deal with Cnet to include this on every download, or did a third party do this? StartNow (startnow.com) is run by an independent company:

"The StartNow Start page is owned and operated by Zugo Ltd, a start page platform company. Our start pages are usually official operated on behalf of one of our clients or partners. Some pages may be "unofficial" and in support of/dedicated to improving the user experience for an existing product or extending a product's existing functionality."

This sounds like really bad PR for Microsoft. I wonder what they will do.

<comment><USER26> Microsoft, as well as Google, pays for searches you bring to them. That's why many free applications offer you toolbar and/or default search. They make money out of it. Similiary, browsers (Opera, Firefox, ..) make money out of it as well. So there's probably nothing wrong here done by Microsoft. It's CNET that is abusing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's something gone very wrong with download sites in the last few years. Aside from this nonsense I've noticed a predominance of very misleading advertisements on download sites (attempting to misdirect you into thinking an ad is your download link). The site owners _have_ to know about this but it seems they don't care enough to do anything about it.

Given the cheapness of s3 storage and such-like I'd say it's smart to avoid hosting on download sites in general.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not saying this is right or wrong.. but there is something worth pointing out.

Technically speaking Download.com is not modifying the original EXE file as some people alleged but using an 'download manager' to intermediate the download of the file.

The bundled 'malware' comes inside this intermediary application and does not touch the original installer other than downloading it to the disk.

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems to a phenomenon unique to Windows and growing.

No wonder everybody complains about Windows being slow and full of popups and spam, almost everything you try and install on it seems to want to also install some free trial/browser toolbar/sign up for some online service etc.

<comment><USER29> I've had good experiences with Windows, but then again, I have some idea of what to do and not to do. (Of course, some of the rampant problems are's Microsoft's fault, such as having everyone run as an administrator in XP.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Surely this is a case for a DMCA take down notice? If they are distributing the copyrighted software outside the terms of the licence, then they are violating copyright and the DMCA can come into play?

<comment><USER15> Yes, of course, that's exactly what the takedown notice is for. But only a copyright holder can send it (or someone legally allowed to act on their behalf).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> People who have Symantec anti-virus will already have this flagged. No, not the malware but nmap itself!

Many anti-virus software packages flag nmap, netcat & other network utilities as malware.

Thankful for apt-get install beauty.

</comment><comment><USER32> That is a nicely written & researched complaint. I hope he finds someone to actually sue c|net for this, and not just make them stop doing it for this particular product only.

</comment><comment><USER33> I work for CBSi just got this response from the dowload.com team:

"We remove the installer from pretty much all publishers who request it removed, and the wrapping of nmap was an error. Fyodor has been contacted and had the issue explained. The Download.com Installer has been removed from the product, and we shouldn't be wrapping open-source software. It was a mistake and when Fyodor contacted us, we fixed it."

</comment><comment><USER34> This should be sufficient cause for all web filters and security software to block access to CNET due to the malware. But will it actually happen, or are they treated with a special standard?

<comment><USER35> As the "malware" is only downloaded after you installed a download manager, I doubt the Cnet website will get marked as the distributor.

I believe it goes like this: \- User clicks on link to download software \- User is being asked to install Cnet download manager \- Download manager downloads more software, including the crapware

Because the actual download does not happen on the Cnet site, it does not gets marked as a distributor.

I can be wrong though, this is just my hypothesis of what is happening.

<comment><USER8> I clicked the 'Download' link for my application and I received an exe for something else with my application name in the file name. So if a user asks to download my application they receive a confusingly-similar one instead and have no choice but to run it to find out what it does.

This is indistinguishable from malware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is why, generally speaking, you want to get software directly from the developers.

</comment><comment><USER36> This top download site in spanish also use this scheme <http://nmap.softonic.com/descargar>

</comment><comment><USER37> CNet's reviews are also worthless too. So little content, so many skeletal SEO keyword pages.</comment>


10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes archived - <AUTHOR> http://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/10000000000000000-bytes-archived/ <comment><USER2> The internet archive is a wonderful thing. I recovered much of my web site when my server burned in a fire, it was cheaper than the $2400 to try to pull it off the melted hard drives. It has also provided fodder for a ton of lawsuits, of the patent/IP/he-said vs she-said varieties.

Given the latter use, and subsequent 'retro-takedowns' that have occurred on the archive, I wonder if there is a market for 'a copy of the archive right now' which would be hard to retro-actively modify? And I wonder what the legal theory would be around having a tape archive of something that was 'clear' at the time you took it, but then later 'redacted'. Could you use your copy of the unredacted information?

<comment><USER3> I wonder if archive.org actually _deletes_ things when taken down, or just makes them inaccessible? Likewise for when archive.org takes content down due to a new robots.txt file that didn't exist on the original site, as often happens with domain squatters.

<comment><USER4> They only disable access, not delete. There was once a court case where the defendant got the court to compel the plaintiff to alter their robots.txt in order to allow the defendant to gather evidence from the archive. (Apparently, the Archive managed to convince the court that manually producing the info hidden in the archive would be too onerous.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do wonder what the best form of compression would be and given there web pages if some form of customed compression that was optimised for HTML would be useful.

There again with that volume of data, what would CERN do for storage/access for a data pool that size and still be useable.

Reason being if you wanted to back that lot of up ship copies for research purposes then with todays technology the humble memory stick, even the biggest would fail to even handle the file index on this scale. Scary amount of data. But certainly a data set many would like to play with and try things out, being the geeks we are.

<comment><USER6> CERN has a variety of techniques to access, store, and backup their data. I know from experience some experiments, or at least some parts of experiments, use layers and layers of abstraction, like scalla/xrootd which operates on clusters of servers directly or with nfs.

In addition to this, there's levels of processed data. For example, raw data is usually level 0, and basic processed data is level 1 Processed and calibrated data is usually level 2, etc... but experiments often have different definitions for each level. Reprocessing of any later can happen at any time, although level 1 reprocessing is usually an extremely intensive operation because it operates with the largest amount of data.

Level 0 data is usually heavily compressed when it's left on disk, because it's typically the largest amount of data, but also least touched.

Most scientists will use level 2 or level 1 data. This data will be on low latency clusters.

So, while CERN has petabytes of data, typically a fraction of that will be accessible.

In the past, level 0 data was often left to tape. While the raw data is still backed up to tape (I know this is the case for ATLAS), for many experiments with large amounts of data they might leave it on lower cost HDD in simple RAID arrays for redundancy and not worry about performance so much. The BaBar experiment has done this for their long term data analysis.

In addition to all of this, it's still occasionally easier to transfer large amounts of data via tape instead of the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> google does something interesting when you use google.com to convert that number to say gigabytes by doing a search such as: 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes to gigabytes

the result is 9.31323e6

Notice the e... because it's in the same font your eye might miss it like mine and then you'd say to yourself... 10 gigabytes is so small who cares... but if you do the same search again but this time to petabytes you'll realize it was an 'e' in the gigabyte number...

So google says 8.88178 petabytes that's a lot

<comment><USER8> It's exactly 10 petabytes. Giga/peta are SI prefixes and hence are in base 10.

BTW, take google's conversions with a grain of salt. As I understand it, google's conversion was just a minor project and not something that is maintained at high quality. For these things Wolfam Alpha is almost always better because it's the kind of thing Alpha was designed to do.

<comment><USER9> Google Calc is a bit behind the curve. The proper prefixes for 2^30 and 2^50 are gibi and pebi, not, as you point out, giga and peta.

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

<comment><USER10> Exactly what he was pointing out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love the Internet archive, but is there a typo? At Quantcast we collect more than 10PB of logfiles each year, and we process 30PB of data in a day.

Something seems off about the number

</comment><comment><USER12> That number has a lot of zeros at the end, but really, it's just barely getting started. This may be the greatest electronic civilization archival project in human history, but it is also the smallest and most impoverished. It has a lot of growing left to do.

</comment><comment><USER13> You know it's a great party if the music is performed live by the guy who wrote the book in your field.

</comment><comment><USER14> > On Thursday, 25 October, hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, > volunteers, and staff celebrated addition of the 10,000,000,000,000,000th > byte to the Archive's massive collections.

So, I bet everyone is dying to know, what was the 10,000,000,000,000,000th byte then?

<comment><USER15> If you look at the picture, they SHOW the actual byte in binary!

looks like it is 236 or 11101100

<comment><USER16> I want to know what this byte was a piece of. Probably Philosoraptor or some cat video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting note at the bottom for those who may have missed it (Donald Knuth on the organ is very distracting):

 _> The only thing missing was electricity; the building lost all power just as the presentation was to begin. Thanks to the creativity of the Archive's engineers and a couple of ridiculously long extension cords that reached a nearby house, the show went on._

</comment><comment><USER18> That is already about five times the identifiable storage capacity of the human brain!

</comment><comment><USER19> The Internet Archive uses 10TB more storage every month. I don't know how they do it.

<comment><USER20> i'm interested in their server setup: DIY or vendor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did anyone else read the title as "10 bajillion bytes archived" or was that just me?

</comment><comment><USER22> "Ten Petabytes (10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of cultural material saved!"

Not quite 10 petabytes: (10 * 1024^5) > 10^16

edit: this is wrong, silly me.

<comment><USER23> I think by now we have more or less standarized on 10^15 as a Petabyte, as this is consistent with the SI system. For the powers-of-2 based approach, the -bi- prefixes are now well established. So:

1 Petabyte = 10^15 Bytes

1 Pebibyte = 1024^5 Bytes = 2^50 Bytes.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte> .

This way we no longer need to abuse/redefine the SI prefixes!

edit: definition of Petabyte corrected from 10^16

<comment><USER22> Oh interesting, thanks for that tidbit of knowledge! I always thought they all (mega, tera, giga, etc) went off the powers-of-2 system.

Also, you have a typo, 1 Petabyte = 10^15 bytes I believe.

<comment><USER23> > Also, you have a typo, 1 Petabyte = 10^15 bytes I believe.

Thanks!

The power-of-2 system was quite popular for a long time when applied to computers, but always clashed with the much older (and well thought out) SI system where everything is defined in powers of 10, and that is used everywhere else (think physics,...). I think harddrive companies where the first to switch their definitions to the decimal based system (for the obvious reason that their disks would then seem bigger to people accustomed to the common power of 2 system...). A decade or so ago the kibi, mebi, ... prefixes where introduced, and at some point people more or less switched to those. There seems to be an even more detailed article about this at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix> .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 10,000,000 GB archived, sounds more cool.</comment>


Bye bye Nokia - <AUTHOR> http://www.nokia.com

<comment><USER2> Microsoft didn't buy Nokia brand, it only licensed it. Nokia still manages the brand. Agreement forbids Nokia from manufacturing or selling mobile phones until 2016. Same applies for licensing the Nokia brand for other phone makers.

ps. Microsoft didn't by Nokia Research or the patents. It's possible that Nokia enters into the consumer markets with their own products.</comment>


Twitter Is Struggling to Contain the Bitcoin Scam Outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://slashdot.org/story/18/11/13/2130208/twitter-is-struggling-to-contain-the-bitcoin-scam-outbreak <comment><USER2> Woah, slashdot link, it's been a while, let's see if anything has changed...

Top comments:

Hacking the stupid is always easy. (Score:5, Interesting)

Twitter needs to stop being retarded, and just remove the 'Verified' mark if a user changes their display name. (Score:5, Insightful)

...nope, everything is as ever was.

</comment><comment><USER3> After mistakenly posting one such scam to HN a few days ago, this is fascinating to me. The scams are effective in convincing people they are real.

Why does Twitter allow verified accounts to change their name? Requiring some level of reverification seems like one way to greatly reduce this type of spam.</comment>


Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nickkokonas/why-we-are-self-publishing-the-aviary-cookbook-lessons-from-the-alinea-book-e89236ab6ca1 <comment><USER2> The heart of this piece is the author's realization that (relative to their cover price) glossy, expensive cookbooks don't actually cost that much to print:

"Until one-day I got lucky. Just by chance I spoke to the print broker who actually worked on the exact bid for that famous book. And he told me precisely: that super amazing cookbook that I truly loved, which at the time retailed for $50 and had won every award imaginable, cost $3.83 per book to print, shrink wrap, and ship to the US. I thought he must be mistaken and I said so. "No way." He replied, "well that was the first edition, I'm sure the cost has gone down since then." He thought I was implying that $3.83 per book was too high!"

One implication of this is that the cost difference between digital and physical publishing is probably much less than most people think. While a weighty tome may literally feel like it's worth a hefty premium, this is due more to consumer psychology than anything inherent to cost of production.

<comment><USER3> But that's the cost of just getting the books to your warehouse. There's the additional labor cost of unpacking them and individually shipping them, which is probably more than $3.83/book.

<comment><USER4> actually that part is easy. You can use a fulfillment company and the costs are known and passed to the consumer. We are using www.Blackbox.cool to do it this time around. Last time we used Warepak

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The publishing industry is slowly going to unravel.

If you write a very successful book with traditional publishing cut you might make 30-40k. Average is lower. There are power laws at play, but as few as 5% make it past six figures.

So when I wrote a book about step-by-step user acquisition ([https://secretsaucenow.com](https://secretsaucenow.com)) I self-published. Made $60,000-ish in presales, sold another $60,000 while I was finishing the book. And now pull in 4-8k/month.

If I signed a deal with a publishing company selling the same number of books I would have made ~10k. Instead I found a freelance editor and typesetter ($400), printed the first 100 ($700), and sell the vast majority as eBooks. It's done well, but not earth shatteringly well, and I'm up above $140k in profit.

There is very little reason nowadays, IMO, to not self-publish.

<comment><USER6> There's one thing you have to factor: the near-instant credibility a physical book published by a big-name publisher gets you.

This credibility can often turn into some very lucrative gigs.

I wouldn't mind publishing fiction myself, but if I was doing non-fiction, I would want to go through traditional publishing.

It doesn't really matter whether people like, say, Malcolm Gladwell made any money off their books. The credibility their books earned them pays off in the longer run.

<comment><USER7> > There's one thing you have to factor: the near-instant credibility a > physical book published by a big-name publisher gets you. > This credibility > can often turn into some very lucrative gigs.

Does success with a self-published book (or multiple books) translate into making it easier to get books published by big-name publishers on more- acceptable terms?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great writeup on the under-belly of publishing!

The first 11 books I wrote were published by mainstream publishers (McGraw- Hill, J. Riley, Springer-Verlag, Morgan Kaufman). While I am grateful for the advance monies paid and great support in writing, I eventually decided that I wanted the freedom to write on whatever topics I wanted and all my new stuff is self published, first through lulu.com and now through leanpub.com.

I encourage people to write a book (or books). It is a really fun process. I would suggest using a publisher for a book and then also try self publishing using leanpub.com or some other platform. Decide for yourself with you prefer.

<comment><USER9> When you you self publish can you stil sell kindle edition on Amazon?

<comment><USER10> The big caveat is that Amazon wants you to enroll in the Kindle Unlimited program—and they'll require exclusivity. This is, to be extremely generous, a bad idea for the author.

<comment><USER11> It is not a requirement of Amazon

<comment><USER10> Not a requirement that you participate in Kindle Unlimited to sell Kindle ebooks, but Kindle Unlimited requires Amazon exclusivity. (I could have worded that comment better.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Always exciting to get something up on the hacker news board... weekly reader here for a long time.

Happy to answer any questions you may have.

\-- Nick

<comment><USER12> What drove the decision to forgo a recipe tester? Is it at all driven by the target audience? Will the new book have a professional tester, or does the subject matter make a tester even less necessary?

<comment><USER13> Why would you need a recipe tester for recipes from an award winning restaurant? The audience likely isn't regular home cooks, rather professionals and serious 'foodies'.

<comment><USER14> Recipes intended for home cooks from a restaurant are generally, as I understand, not the preparation methods actually used in the restaurant, because home and restaurant equipment is different, and restaurant cooking relied on par cooking and other techniques to optimize order to delivery time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm in the process of writing a book about FinTech industry holistically and I'm interested to know if someone has any tip of publishing business- technology book. My target readers are students, professionals either in tech or finance, entrepreneurs and investors.

If anyone could share a bit more about the cost of self publishing would be great.

For some reason, I'm more worried about the copy editing at this point than anything else.

<comment><USER4> You can easily hire a professional copy-editor. In fact, in many instances publishers hire outside third-party experts depending on the subject of the book.

Publishing a text-only book with no or minimal pictures is shocking inexpensive.

<comment><USER15> That's a great insight. I am planning to add some graphs but theycanbe black and white. Maybe that doesn't add much additional cost?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm actually surprised that printed cookbooks are still economically viable using _any_ kind of publishing model.

They remind me of those books from the 1980s filled with printed copies of the source code for computer programs. You would input the text from the book using your keyboard, and compile/interpret the program. That was how many programs were distributed, because a printed book on a truck had higher bandwidth than any other readily-available channel. And then there were also books about _learning to write your own programs_ that may also have included some source code. I think that cookbooks filled with recipes are like the former, and books about _learning to make your own recipes_ are like the latter.

Those recipe books simply became obsolete with ubiquitous Internet access. Countless recipes are open source and freely available. Barely anything in a recipe book is eligible for copyright protection. You can basically rewrite instructions in your own words and make your own drawings or photographs, if any, and that boxed spaghetti with canned marinara recipe is now printable as part of your own cookbook.

So it is very smart to--as with the book in the article--load up all your recipes with copyright-protected photographs, rather than leaving them out to cut print costs. But even so, that book as described seemed more about trademarks and brands than content. It might be useful for franchisees or for professional imitators. When I am cooking at home, I rarely even refer to a recipe, and when I do, it is just one of the thousands of results from an Internet search.

Does anyone here still bother buying cookbooks? Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to recipes? Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their own kitchen?

<comment><USER14> > Does anyone here still bother buying cookbooks?

Yes.

> Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to > recipes?

They aren't mutually exclusive ideas; if you have a basic understanding of cooking, recipes are great points of departure.

> Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their > own kitchen?

Consistency is not the only reason to buy a cookbook.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I buy cookbooks as sources of inspiration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Kind of off-topic on-topic: I went to that restaurant/bar in Chicago to try their cocktails and it was one of the best experience I went through there. Way better than the Milk room (haven't tried Violet hours though). I wish there was an Aviary where I live now :(

They do "experimental" cocktails (or artistic cocktails). Cocktail in a bag, Smokey cocktail, bubble tea cocktail, cocktail in a tea pot, ... and they taste amazing as well.

If you read that blogpost I suggest googling or checking on TripAdvisor/Yelp for some visual pictures :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Had a chance to do the kitchen table at the Aviary.

Pretty unforgettable experience despite how much booze they give you. I'm definitely more interesting in this cookbook knowing it was self-published.

</comment><comment><USER20> Mr OT here. IMO the best cookbook ever written was the one my mother had in secondary school. I don't know the name of it and I'm sure it's long out of print. She swore by it, used it all her life and was a marvellous cook.

<comment><USER21> I'll go OT with you. Is there any attribute of 'the best cookbook' that you can remember that'd help us figure out which one it was/is - example recipes, cooking style, memories of the food made from it, or the book itself? Is the book still in the family?

I once had a copy of the Alinea cookbook, it's a wonderful object. For mere mortals like me, 'The Way To Cook', by Julia Child is the cookbook I refer to most often and suggest most often to those looking for 'the best cookbook.'

<comment><USER20> All I can remember is that it was hardback with a plain red cover (if there had been a dust jacket, it was long gone) and she'd have used it in home economics class in 1950s Ireland. It was mainly what I'd call wholesome simple British/Irish food, beef steak and kidney pie and the like but the sweets and cakes are what I most fondly remember, queen of pudding, bread and butter pudding, eve's pudding, dundee cake, shortbread, lovely dark soft gingerbread, sponges, madeira, buns etc etc. Look at what we've lost!

<comment><USER21> Hmm. Thanks for the description. I'll see what I can dig up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook?

too many birds ...</comment>


ViewHue - Anonymous Thoughts Sharing Community - <AUTHOR> https://viewhue.com/

<comment><USER2> What's this all is about?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a pretty young startup dedicated to letting people discuss stuff anonymously.</comment></comment>


Tiptop: Hardware Performance Counters - <AUTHOR> http://tiptop.gforge.inria.fr/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that this software has reached version 2.2 and it is not available in Debian yet. I filed a RFP: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754932](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754932)

<comment><USER3> Preliminary work on the package: [http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab- maint/tiptop.git](http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/tiptop.git) I will change to ITP soon. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible to use these same hardware performance counters to perform a side-channel attack on another process?

</comment><comment><USER5> Could someone please explain the differences and advantages of tiptop over using a program like htop for analysing performance for every day operations (if any)?

<comment><USER6> I think they're not really in the same class. The article states,

> software developers identify critical regions of their applications and > evaluate design choices to select the best performing implementation.

Which is what I'd use metrics like cache misses and branch prediction misses for: really fine-tuning some section of the code that needs to execute lightning fast.

htop, on the other hand, gives a more high-level overview. Like, "who's eating all the RAM?". (Or, perhaps more often, "who do I need to kill?")

<comment><USER7> Once you've identified that a process has a lot of branch mispredict (or other counters), how do you identify _where_ those lots of branch mispredictions are caused?

<comment><USER8> You can use {call,cache}grind for that, but sometimes it's a bit unpractical if the software is big.

An approach I sometimes use is to throw a generic profiler at the program, make the program do something that is not fast enough (and that would need to be optimizes), look at the profile to identify the function(s) that are too slow, extract them from the big code base, get a good set of input data and run that with {call,cache}grind.

Then you can use the awesome kcachegrind to look at the data (where you can look at different cache misses, branch misdirect, etc.).

Of course, most of the time, simply running in the profiler show a non-optimal algorithm, or terrible allocation patterns, so you don't have to do all that, but I found this approach useful when writing inner loops for numeric computations (and of course, extracting the code if rather easy for this kind of stuff).

And also, this is osx/linux only, sadly.

<comment><USER7> That's cool. Right now I'm at the stage "I know how to profile, I can identify algorithmic problems and change them for a better ones, I can find allocation issues and use buffers/pools".

But lower level things like "I know which branch mispredict kills me" or "I know which access patterns results in page faults" are out of my reach. I mean, before asking the question and getting answers like yours.

So thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly off-topic (maybe) but can this or another readily available tool be used to track counters during startup/shutdown and provide a log of it which can then be imported in some viewer? (think something like windows Performance Monitor/Event Tracer and the likes)

<comment><USER10> Like [http://www.bootchart.org/](http://www.bootchart.org/)?

<comment><USER9> exactly!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> it mentions intel instrumentation instructions , does it work on other hardware though goes unmentioned in requirements? Say spark/...</comment>


The connection between Earth's magnetic field and climate - <AUTHOR> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207270 <comment><USER2> From the article:

 _This result provides new clues on the existence of a link between the geomagnetic field and the Earth's climate in the past and on the physical mechanism involved because, thanks to the application of the transfer entropy, we have determined that the sense of the connection seems to go from the system that produces geomagnetic field to the climate system. Of course, the connection does not mean that the geomagnetic field is fully responsible for the climate changes, rather that it is an important driving component to the variations of the climate._</comment>


Are API's the New Open Source? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newcommbiz.com/are-apis-the-new-open-source/ It's amazing to me the amount of innovation brought on by comapnies opening API's for developers to tap into. Everything from allowing 3rd party applications to run within your site to API's that let developers pull all your data and do cool things with it.<p>It reminds me of the whole Open Source movement, but better. I love Open Source. I use it everyday in my life but if I had to choose between getting a companies source code versus getting that companies data? I'd choose data any day. <comment><USER2> I think what we see these days is confusion, where APIs are trying to take over what has traditionally been handled by _protocols_ and _file formats_.

I prefer that APIs actually _do_ things, such as calculations, or composite actions that would be awkward to perform individually. (Yes, APIs _can_ exist primarily to expose data, too; but I think APIs that do this are wasting time in unnecessary encapsulation; all they really need to do is something simple, like returning the URL of data in a certain format.)

If I am looking for only data, it should have a (preferably popular) format, optionally with a protocol to access it using whatever network and/or database. This opens you up to multiple implementations, too: so if it turns out that Social Networking Site Du Jour's API isn't _actually_ the most efficient way to do X, you might find an alternative Y that is better, but _could use the same data_.

APIs are also not good for data for the same reason that APIs can be a problem for code: instability. You can't be sure what languages will remain supported, and when things will change. You have to wait for an API to do X, even if it might have been possible given the "raw" data. And ultimately, a company could go out of business and leave your API unusable, whereas actual data can be copied to avoid this, and cached for performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree. From a startup standpoint we are able to decrease a lot of expenses by simply utilizing public API's. The advantages of open source code for companies meant that you didn't have to go out and purchase software. We are seeing the same thing with API's. The only problem I see with this trend is the dependency of those API's. With open source software such as PHP & MYSQL once I have it installed, I own it, where API's are real time dependency i.e twitter going down, will cause twitter dependent applications to go down as well. As as a developer myself the value proposition is that the data is also available with the API.</comment>


I Use Ugly Languages - <AUTHOR> http://connorberry.com/2012/12/21/i-use-ugly-languages/

<comment><USER2> This is insecurity masquerading as insight. One does not need to invoke mental frailty in order to defend the use of a particular language. Nor is there a dichotomy between "a focus on getting things done quickly" and beauty or elegance.

In short, this is lazy writing capturing a lazy thought process. Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER3> It's a pointless article without knowing what the project is.

I wouldn't use perl for my multi-threaded enterprise messaging solution, but I might use it for a useful text analysis tool.

<comment><USER4> >It's a pointless article without knowing what the project is.

Exactly. I recall being assigned a small project years ago to print a route list in a particular way. I'm sure it could have been done with maybe a hundred lines of Go or Python or whatever language du jour. But it came down to a two line shell script. Which one is supposed to be the elegant one again?

Also, there is a reason that a C compiler is written in C but a Java virtual machine is not written in Java.

And anything with substantially more than a thousand lines of code that isn't written in a strongly typed language is all but guaranteed to be a maintenance catastrophe full of security vulnerabilities. (Or a pile of slow, hideous fail as a result of all the manual runtime type validation you have to do to prevent that from happening.)

Elegance is a function of adaptability to purpose. A screw driver is an elegant tool to screw in a screw but an inelegant tool to hammer a nail.

<comment><USER3> I manage the maintainance of millions of lines of scripting code that's not type safe. Type safety is definitely not a significant problem, nor is speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here are the alternatives that I have seen posited as being cleaner / more correct for the ones mentioned:

        Perl -> Python
        PHP -> Ruby
        C++ -> Java or Go
        Erlang -> Haskell
        Tcl -> Python or Scheme
        Prolog -> Lisp
        Shell -> ?

These aren't so much my designations, as what I've seen in various references on the internet over the years.

Confer for citations of peoples elegance / cleanness opinions:

        Tcl war usenet posts
        Perl vs Python wars
        C++ - Paul Graham's article on what languages solve,
        Rob Pikes reasons for creating Go.
        Erlang - Damian Katz "What Sucks about Erlang"
        Prolog - see above (re prolog syntax in Erlang)
        Tcl - Eric Raymond's comments on Tcl and Perl vs Python
        Shell - no citation, but I think defensible

In almost every case I would face the mental blockage mentioned if I were to try to use the language to the right, compared to the one on the left side.

<comment><USER5> Prolog -> Lisp ? Prolog is a logical and Lisp is Multiparadigm/Functional, completly different.

I'd also change Erlang for Go, and maybe add Scala there too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yet whenever you see prolog or datalog reimplemented (see On Lisp, PAIP, AllegroGraph, Clojure Datalog implemetation, etc) the implementers have tended to appropriate Lispy syntax rather than the original Prolog syntax.

This might also just be laziness, or perhaps simply love for lisp syntax by people using lisp.

<comment><USER6> "the implementers have tended to appropriate Lispy syntax"

But doesn't it make sense that, once you're extending a Lisp dialect to add some Prolog implementation, you'll keep using the Lisp syntax?

I don't see it a question of lazyness or love: one of the main point so many people accept to deal with Lisp's seemingly crazy parentheses is homoiconicity.

It's not that parentheses are that great and that we love seeing: ))))))))) or )))]))]))) (in Clojure).

It's that the benefit (homoiconicity) far outweight the cost of using that syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If these are the ugly languages, what are the elegant ones? Python might cover some of the items on this list, like Perl and TCL, but what is the elegant alternative to Erlang? I can't think of anything. Most of these language have a strong niche where they are simply the right tool for the job, regardless of their elegance.

Trying to shoehorn a more elegant language into one of these niches would probably lead to awkwardness, especially if it's something the language wasn't designed to handle. In a way, I think using the right tool for the job is itself a form of elegance, regardless of the tool's superficial appearance.

<comment><USER8> Erlang is actually a fairly elegant language, it's just weird-looking to people who are used to C or Pascal.

Perl and PHP are ugly not because of how they look on the page but because of their bodged-together semantics, with magical variables that do magical things, keywords that don't mean what you think they mean, etc.

If I had a word to describe Ruby it would be, fittingly, "kawaii". Like a girl from a third-rate anime whom you think is adorable as a teenager, then you get older, grow some taste and it dawns on you that her nose is in completely the wrong part of her face.

<comment><USER3> The pro erlangers I know are mostly lisp or haskell programmers who consider erlang as a pact with the devil.

It's all relative. Joe Armstrong himself said he made engineering compromises in the design of erlang because he was concerned about software useful for the telco industry, not an academic exercise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would prolog be considered an ugly language? Maybe weird, but not ugly: minimalist syntax, very few special cases, isomorphic to first-order logic and almost equivalent to the pure mathematical notation. I would not recommend it for general-purpose programming, but it solves a specific set of problems better than any other language.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. Prolog as a language is about as direct and minimalist a representation of its concept as it's possible to get (along with Lisp and co). In that respect I would say it's rather a fine language as beauty goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "I Use Languages I Already Know" might be a better title.

</comment><comment><USER12> Content-free

</comment><comment><USER13> I feel the same when I write in English versus French. When I write in French, I feel like I am spending much more time trying to make my text elegant. I think I've heard this from other people as well but in the end, it's probably mostly subjective.

</comment><comment><USER14> "But is it better for me to get started and end up with messy code, or to not start because I want things to be correct or good?"

Ruby looks good without any effort.</comment>


Awesome Front End Tool for Web Developers - <AUTHOR> http://myui.io <comment><USER2> A shame there isn't an awesome tool for making the site responsive, because it doesn't work on mobile.</comment>


Ask HN: What are worthwhile extracurricular activities in college? - <AUTHOR>

For an aspiring entrepreneur, what EC activities should be pursued in college? <comment><USER2> Most extra-curriculars are contrivances, designed either explicitly or implicitly to convey some false sense of campus culture to the public at large, alumni, or even the student body itself. I know little of college athletics, so I'll stay away from that category of activity. What's left are a bunch of campus clubs. Since when has the student government had any real power? It either plans homecoming week or takes political positions on issues over which it has no control (like South African politics). Does being student body president get you anything in life? Yup. Those who have an incentive to legitimize this false system might accept you into law school or some other graduate program which can result in real, tangible outcomes. However, you will likely better yourself more by volunteering for a real campaign for a real elected office instead.

Fifteen years ago, I was my dorm's food service council representative. No, I'm not kidding! Every month, I went to a meeting where representatives of the firm who contracted with the university to provide food for $800/semester tried to pretend to care what a bunch of kids said about their over-cooked burgers. Actually, they seemed to legitimately care, and I learned a lot from the experience. What I learned was how helpless those managers were when it came to changing the behaviors of their minimum-wage staff. Once, a student said that his dorm-mates wanted more kinds of cereal at breakfast time. Immediately, it was promised that the number of cereal bins would be doubled! Then, when another student wanted the grill to actually be staffed during lunchtime (often, employees would take long breaks whenever they felt like it), management said vaguely that they would consider their options. That they would spend hundreds on frivolity but wouldn't attempt to control their employees left a strong impression on me and has influenced how I consider the behaviors of other managers I encounter in life.

Did being on the food service committee help me out in any direct way, like getting a good job? Nope. I would have been better off finding something more real to do where the outcome of my work meant something. Start an on-campus computer repair company, whatever.... I learned more from doing IT work for a small commercial roofing company during a couple summers than I did in any on- campus activities with official, paid advisers.

In a nutshell, the contrivances of college life might provide benefit, but the hours spent are less fruitful than those filled with "real" stuff. YMMV if one wants to impress a law school admissions officer or similar.

Edit: I didn't really address the "for an entrepreneur" part, but I think my comments still apply.

<comment><USER3> You're getting the wrong lesson out of your experiences. For the record, ignoring athletics and focusing only on student government ignores a whole plethora of non-athletic programs out there.

First off, athletics, which serve a valuable part of the college experience. What's funny is I hated athletics till I went to school that had none and realized just what purpose they were playing at the first college I attended. Sports programs attract certain types of people with certain interests. Kind of like how we intellectual sorts have writers/programmers/artists/scientists, each with their own personalities and interests, athletes too have very similar characteristics between sports. It's not a completely brainwashing clique, but if you like a sport then there's a good chance people who like that sport too will get along with you in more ways than one.

Most extracurricular activities are solely for the purpose of entertainment. Student Atheist Club, Board Game Club, all the frats, exist so that you can find whatever sort of entertainment you're looking for. If you like debating religion, there's a club for that. You do it for _fun_ , not as part of an ongoing business agenda. It's for being nonserious and whimsical.

As for your own experience: You seem to think that just because you worked in a shitty program, all college programs have to be shitty. That's not how it works. Some of them are very polished and tightly-run, just as some companies are shitty and some are great.

But they all have that social college element, and that's what counts. When you do work on your own, you miss out on the people around you, you miss the chance to be with dozens of people. Now, I've heard the "misanthrope" defense, where you don't like 99% of people and so don't mind missing out on them, and my response to that is that if you're in a college where you hate everybody, _you're in a bad college_. Transfer to a place where everybody is incredible by your standards. They exist, because somebody like you at some point decided to make a place like that and it worked. This is why you want to research your college opportunities before you go to a mindbogglingly shitty place.

Now, my college is the sort of college where in your class you work on actively making the college a better place and where a part of graduation is interning with a company and securing a potential job offer after graduation, so perhaps I'm spoiled by my "nonreal" college stuff, but all the people complaining about how bad college was seem to be people who just ended up at shitty colleges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm no entrepreneur, but I think you should consider just finding stuff you enjoy and where you'll meet people with common interests. E.g. if you like dancing, join a dance club. It won't help you out in the future, but once you graduate, its likely you won't have a lot of time for a dance club afterwards.

Might sounds a bit cliche, but still, I think that spending all of your college life focusing on your future career is a bit of a waste (thats my opinion anyway).

</comment><comment><USER5> Slack on boring homework assignments, and work on a personal (and exciting) side project instead.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but only to an extent. Some of the boring stuff ends up being the foundation for something interesting (it just doesn't look that way at the time). Before giving up on something boring, try to find out what it's useful for, then decide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Debate. Hands down.

If you want public speaking skills, you will get them at debate. When I started, I could hardly keep my sentences going the whole time. Very recently I got into the finals of a tournament where we were judged primarily on speaking style.

If you want to be able to structure arguments, as you will probably have to do when pitching a startup. There is hardly a better way than trying a billion times, and at the same time seeing how the best in the club do it.

Thinking on your feet? You often only have the 7 minutes of your opponent's speech to come up with arguments and your own 7 minutes of refutation. At first you are terrible, but eventually you get to the point where you are never at a loss for something to say.

Coming to university with a minimal of social skills and an overload of technical skills, I have ended up getting a lot more out of debate in my first 2 terms than out of the courseload.

</comment><comment><USER6> I ran a robotics design team. I learned that managing people is not trivial, and I learned it the hard way. I also learned a lot about Linux, embedded systems, and putting electronic circuits together.

Another thing I learned was that I strongly prefer working with software to hardware. I am pretty good at connecting components together, but I wouldn't want to design these chips. I ended up switching my specialization, and it's good that I did this then rather than after graduating.

My marks suffered, but overall it was worthwhile. I'd still say do something you like rather than what you think will impress a committee. But I don't (yet?) have any incredible success stories to share to back up this opinion.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just go to everything at first and find what you're interested in. As time goes on you'll settle in to the activities you're most interested in and where you enjoy the company of your fellow participants most.

<comment><USER9> Can't agree with this enough. From club judo to breakdancing to the microfinance club, I tried everything and anything while in college, even if I sucked at it or quit after a while. In my mind, this is the best chance to try out whatever your heart desires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Depends on your major. If you're a business major, and are thinking of being an entrepreneur in the software industry, pick extracurriculars that are CS- related. And vice-versa.

With any luck, you'll be able to meet potential business partners with skill sets that complement yours.

</comment><comment><USER11> Meet people. Lots and lots of people. And find a co-founder.</comment>


Who do you use for your credit card processing? - <AUTHOR>

I'm developing in Rails and it seems that Authorize.net will be the easiest way for me to accept credit card payments. What reseller do you recommend?<p>I'm definitely open to other suggestions, but I refuse to do business with Paypal as a result of the company having stolen over $300 from me in the past. <comment><USER2> I'm researching this just now -- will write something up soon. So far:

PayPal can be a pain, and I've had issues with the support for PayFlowPro back when it was Verisign.

Authorize.net is the heavy -- they are behind a lot (most?) of the payment processors out there, like Chase/Paymentech. Their API is nasty and their approval process can be cumbersome.

TrustCommerce has a very nice and documented API. For basic subscription charging I think they might be the winner. I am still evaluating their support, sales, fraud protection, etc.

Google checkout is nice but no support for automatic subscriptions.

Amazon FPS is very very nice -- especially if you are accepting payments from overseas and from consumers -- but a lot of people don't like whisking the user off to another site.

If possible I will do an A/B test of TC and Amazon to see if there really is difference in conversion rates, errors, fraud, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are two categories: companies that put their own brand on the experience, and companies that don't. There are advantages to each, and PayPal makes it confusing because they have a product in both categories.

Assuming your asking about traditional merchant processing (the latter) I'd recommend CyberSource, combined with your own merchant bank that actually knows you (not one of those "specialized" merchant banks that just handle your credit card processing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Braintree is awesome with Rails apps (and particularly rock solid if you needed to implement recurring charges). The only issue is you would need to process $1+ mm through your site, otherwise, there'd be an additional monthly charge. Highly recommended however.

Also, I'd assume that you're integrating the APIs through ActiveMerchant? I'd definitely use that regardless of which reseller/merchant provider you choose.

<comment><USER5> Quick question: how much is the additional monthly charge? I've got an application on the back burner I was considering using them for, largely on the recommendation of the guy who wrote the Rails kit for credit card processing.

<comment><USER4> When we had started back in Oct - the quote was an $200 additional fee on top of the percentages. It's eliminated as soon as $1mm is processed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We use MTrex. It was created by some people who worked on Autorize.Net. I've met with the CTO and he seems to know what hes doing. It has most of the same features, and I have enjoyed their tech support.

They have a nice api and their website is easy to use also. I have used authorize.net in the passed and this has been a little bit easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.creditcards.com/merchant-accounts.php>

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have any recommendations for credit card preocessing in UK? It looks like I will go with PayPal to begin with, but I am also very interested in looking at other alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER9> I currently use Authorize.Net and it's not bad.

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://vxsbill.com/></comment>


Self-driving cars fail to detect dark-skinned pedestrians - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/5/18251924/self-driving-car-racial-bias-study-autonomous-vehicle-dark-skin <comment><USER2> I do not like the conclusion of the article.

Increasing the diversity of the team members might be good for reducing bias, but the fact remains that darker skinned people are harder for machine vision systems to work with due to the lack of contrast.

Like that fuss a few years ago with the laptops (I want to say it was Toshiba but I'm not certain) not being able to use facial recognition to unlock the OS.

Also, this seems to be only vision systems - you'd hope LIDAR would be able to detect a pedestrian regardless of skin color.

<comment><USER3> > the fact remains that darker skinned people are harder for machine vision > systems to work with due to the lack of contrast.

Is it also harder for human drivers?

<comment><USER4> Depending on clothing and light conditions, yes. We don't have LIDARs, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Step 1 - find an object detection model that's not used in self-driving cars

Step 2 - show that the model detects dark-skinned pedestrians 5% less often than light-skinned pedestrians

Step 3 - write a clickbait title implying that self-driving cars will run down dark-skinned pedestrians with precisely zero evidence

Step 4 - post the article on HN with an even more inflammatory title than the actual article

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI - I had to trim title because the original title was too long.

Take this up with HN

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The report [...] hasn't yet been peer-reviewed. It didn't test any object- > detection models actually being used by self-driving cars, nor did it > leverage any training datasets actually being used by autonomous vehicle > manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER6> How information gets propagated in 2019:

1\. The study talks about how some vision-based object detection systems don't work as well on black people.

2\. The articles makes the leap to self driving cars, ignoring that self driving cars uses Lidar and probably custom made algorithms. To their credit they do say that it's a " _potential_ risk".

3\. Everybody shares (including this HN submission) or rewrite the article dropping the "potential" part.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like a physical issue, about how dark surfaces reflect less light and the car can't analyze that information. They'll find a way to fix this eventually.

</comment><comment><USER8> For those interested in learning more about these problems there are two interesting book to read. "Technicaly Wrong" and "Weapons of Math Destruction"

</comment><comment><USER9> how do idiots blame bias for everything? if you have a dark room of course it'll be harder to detect a dark skin person! the same with a couch that's black instead of white.

<comment><USER10> its an issue for ocular recognition specifically. I'd say that is worth noting!

If a automated car is _better_ at detecting threats on the road than humans then there is little point to using them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> surely this is simple physics (white surfaces reflect more light), rather than algorithmic bias</comment>


Smartwatches: Moto 360 takes top place – Samsung leads brands - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2849939/opensource-subnet/why-the-moto-360-is-winning-the-smartwatch-race.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Market researcher Canalys reports another spike in wearables, Gartner predicts health and fitness wearables will disappoint in 2015.

Last quarter, the Moto 360 topped the list of smartwatches, taking 15% of all shipments, according to Canalys. While Samsung's offerings netted 52% of shipments, the overall category of wearable bands grew by 37% last quarter. Canalys credited the Moto 360's success to its "appealing design," which gave it an edge over other Android Wear products.

Compelling physical design is never a disadvantage, but in this case Motorola having sidestepped having to force consumers to embrace both an entirely new concept of wrist-worn hardware and a behavioral change driven by wearable software</comment>


Developers furious over App Store "Line Cutting" - <AUTHOR> http://macenstein.com/default/archives/1494 <comment><USER3> So they trim non-alphanumeric chars - how long before we see _AAAJirbo Break_. They should disable alphanumeric sorting and instead sort by date (newest), rating (popular) etc. Good faceted navigation would likely remove the desire to sort by name.

<comment><USER4> You're right, little reason to sort by name. I can use search to locate an app if I know the name, and when I'm just browsing sorting by popularity or reviews would be more helpful.

On the other hand when I see "!! asdfasdf" and "AAAasdfasdf" I know it's likely a terrible app so I don't even have to bother checking it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of game companies that distributed their shareware games with similar tactics via BBSs. You can even see vestigial evidence of this today. Check out the Apogee / 3D Realms download page (<http://www.3drealms.com/downloads.html>), and note the non-insignificant number of filenames that start with the number 1. This caused the files to sort first on most BBSs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pretty shady company... no about us page, no corporate info, no address on the contact page, no privacy policy, no terms of service and their WHOIS entry is anonymized by Domains by Proxy.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's time for Apple to exercise their proprietary software/benevolent dictator/gatekeeper abilities and drop all this shit like a bad habit.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd sink them to the bottom of the list, no less. As well as fixing the problem, of course.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is that the fantastic marketing Apple promised for iPhone applications - <USER2> them in an alphabetically sorted list?

</comment><comment><USER9> By the way, can I sign up and make an iPhone app now, or is there still a waiting list and approval process?

<comment><USER10> there's still an approval process for most steps, but it seems now most people who've applied are getting acceptance into the program itself.

now, getting your app into the app store and upgrading your apps is a slightly different process, and it looks like there's a huge backlog there :(

<comment><USER9> If I just want to write a program for my own iPhone, do I still have to get them to put it in the store, just for me to be able to install it on my phone?

<comment><USER10> no, there's something called ad hoc distribution that lets you run your app on up to 100 phones on the standard program...I think more if you purchase enterprise.

It doesn't have to be on the store for you to install it on your phone. But you do indeed need to be part of the program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazon does the same thing with Mechanical Turk Qualification Tests (Only has A-Z sorting):

[http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findquals?requestable=false&e...](http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findquals?requestable=false&earned=false)

</comment><comment><USER12> This has been a problem in every online game with a serverlist that I know of.. It's quite funny as it's gotten extreme enough that some of the names are just spaces.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know if this was a problem for Facebook when the apps were released, or did it not matter because everything was recommended by your friends anyway?

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it's been fixed, at least with respect to spaces. I checked, and many of their applications don't come up as having spaces anymore.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apple will fix this.

</comment><comment><USER16> appName.trim() or equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER17> I say Apple has done a wonderful job doing input validation on their AppStore data right here.

I wonder if you can name your Application as a SQL injection as well.</comment>


The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth <comment><USER2> Related Nature link regarding this interesting topic: [http://www.nature.com/news/anthropocene-the-human- age-1.1708...](http://www.nature.com/news/anthropocene-the-human-age-1.17085)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think we can set the exact date and time. The holocene ended and the anthropocene began at precisely July 16, 1945, 5:29 am

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_\(nuclear_test\))

<comment><USER4> Ugh, can't we just use the Unix epoch? Time's already too difficult to program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand the sentiment of these sorts of things, but they end up coming off as quite ignorant of history.

There has definitely been a change in the nature of mankind's relationship with the Earth's environment, such that human actions have become a dominant factor. However, that happened at some time during the bronze age. Humans have been completely changing biomes and drastically impacting the environment for thousands of years. Huge swaths of forests were cut down, much of the remaining forests were managed, farmland and grazing lands replaced natural habitats, numerous megafauna were hunted to extinction, etc. The difference between the bronze age and today is merely that it's become much more obvious how significant our impact on the world is today.

<comment><USER6> You are right that the Bronze age produced huge changes. However, most of the planet, like the oceans, the rain forests, the Arctic, and the deserts, stayed basically the same. Now great changes are happening everywhere.

<comment><USER5> I don't have time to fully answer this, because it's a big topic, but I think you missed what I was saying.

There's this zeitgeist that mankind was largely at the mercy of nature until the industrial age, but that's based primarily on our foggy view of history, not on reality.

During the neolithic and bronze ages, humans cut down and/or "managed" most of the forests of the world. Read that again, it's accurate. There's almost no such thing as a primeval forest that hasn't been touched by human hands anywhere on Earth, nor has there been for a very long time. In Europe there was a significant reduction in forested land during the bronze age. Not only were forests cut down to make room for planting, but the forests that were left standing were managed for timber et al and for game hunting. In the Americas and Africa, for example, it was quite common for the locals to use fire on huge scales to modify the environment, either for slash and burn agriculture, or for forest management (e.g. to make game hunting easier). The image of the primeval American frontier is one that is based on a recently depopulated post-Columbian exchange New World, which hides the massive extent of the impact that the native americans had on their environment.

This is true for the rain forests, the arctic, the deserts, etc. Which saw massive changes due to the presence of humans. They affected rates of desertification, they became the apex predators in many cases, driving out others, and they extensively modified the local environment (as in the case of rain forests).

We see such things as untouched by human activity primarily because we don't know any better. Our knowledge of ancient history is limited due to lack of record keeping and the difficulty of piecing together data from just artifacts (if we are lucky enough that the artifacts survived and were found during a research dig, which requires luck stacked on top of luck stacked on top of luck), and we often lack the context to know the difference between what a landscape that has seen the impact of pre-industrial human activity looks like and what a truly pristine landscape looks like. There are a lot of areas which people think are natural but are the result of the activities of prehistoric humans (such as many of the unforested regions in Scotland, which were deforested and made into farmland but have lain fallow for centuries and reverted to a semi-wild state, though not a pristine natural state).

The difference today is that we can more readily see the changes happening directly, because we have much better record keeping and can compare observations over recent decades and centuries. And, of course, the pace of change has been accelerating, with impacts on new things. But the _start_ of mankind having a dominant role in the environment happened a long, long time ago.

Of course, there are folks who have a vested interest in denying this fact for a variety of reasons. Environmentalists (and I count myself one, for the record) might find this fact somewhat disconcerting, because if mankind has been a driving force in environmental change for 5 thousand years, maybe that implies that its nothing to worry about, right? I can understand wanting to avoid having that discussion, but it's no excuse for denying the reality. And indeed, sometimes the impact of humans on the environment has had extreme negative consequences in the past, on human beings and on the environment, even going back thousands of years (but, of course, such things can be hard to suss out because of that pesky spotty historical record).

<comment><USER6> That's a good reply, and you clearly know much more about this topic than I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's skip forward a few years and look for the HN post regarding when precisely the dawn of the AI-influenced age occurred.

Since I'm pretty sure it already happened, and quite some time ago, depending on your metric.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure it's the same scale. AI has the potential to change human lives quite a bit, even expand humanities reach. Our actions since 1950 though have altered the earth's climate. Steel comes in 2 forms Pre-1945 steel, and new steel. In less than 100 years we have left an unmistakable mark on the planet. It affects everything. AI will be most impactful to humans.

<comment><USER9> In case you are curious:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low- background_steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Demo's conference beat TechCrunch40 - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/capitalism/why-demos-conference-beat-techcrunch40-304838.php <comment><USER2> Very interesting take on why it's good to charge companies to present at conferences. My initial thought was that Valleywag was only covering this because they've got it out for Jason Calacanis, but their incisiveness disarmed me.</comment>


Django Migrations – A Primer – from Real Python - <AUTHOR> https://realpython.com/blog/python/django-migrations-a-primer#.U81JalLtMXI.hackernews <comment><USER2> the table comparing the old South workflow to the new Django Migrations workflow is great.

one thing - so you just blow away your old migrations? is there a way to save them in case we need to revert? seems like this is a little different than it was w/ south.</comment>