How can you be so certain? (2019) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p1962r0.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> For those not wishing to read the pdf, these are Bjarne thoughts about the C++ evolution and about reaching consensus.

A couple of notable points:

"Say not 'This is the truth' but 'So it seems to me to be as I now see the things I think I see.' " (attributed to geologist David Love,)

"We are defining a language for decades of use. A bit of humility is necessary"

"We need to focus on "what?" and "why?" more than "how?" More on stable interfaces than on optimal performance given current techniques. A standard differs from most products by requiring stability over decades. I am of the impression that we have been focusing too much on detailed controls lately, on getting programmers to be very specific on "How?", thus making it harder to evolve use patterns and improve implementations. "

<comment><USER3> > "Say not 'This is the truth' but 'So it seems to me to be as I now see the > things I think I see.' "

When someone tells me "this is the truth", my brain already converts it to the longer, less certain phrase; no need to be explicit about it ...

<comment><USER4> But it's a translation in two parts, at least it would be for me:

1\. They say it's the truth; I interpret that they think it's true, but it might not be.

2\. They say it's the truth; this may be a signal of their character or motivations. Perhaps they are a bully or a zealot.

Even if I trust that you'll understand me in the (1) sense, I'd rather you didn't misjudge me in the (2) sense. Therefore, I don't tell people that things are simply true.

<comment><USER3> As long as you apologize whenever what you said turns out to be false, I don't see the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> C++ suffers this a lot particularly because its paper system rewards pages of meaning-free implementation details with little to no qualitative discussion. Where else can you find a random library that lets you template a Mersenne Twister with (I kid you not) 14 template parameters, but that makes it almost impossible for the average programmer to correctly seed one? Who is served by such a system?

Things don't have to be this way. Take a look at the average Python PEP or Rust RFC; they are 90% what-we-want-and-why, and the implementation details, when they do exist, exist principally to make sure that they are asking for something possible.

<comment><USER6> C++ is one of the very few performance critical languages, performance will always be it's #1 feature, even above safety (which can be pushed back to libraries if performance demands it) so implementation details matter a lot more than in other languages.

<comment><USER7> This is not the full explanation. The key problem here is that C++ runs on nearly everything, from your garden variety x86 to bizarre DSP architectures. The many, many template parameters are there so you can simultaneously say "you don't pay for what you don't use" and provide a library that works on weird systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone here would benefit from giving this a read, if you're in management or an implementer. My favorite quotes:

> It is not just members of the community who wishes for "just two more > features." We have a committee with 300+ members. It seems that essentially > every member has a feature or two that they'd like to get into the language, > and many have several. I have not changed my opinion that adding too many > features could "sink C++." _Remember the Vasa!_ [Vasa]. In fact, I think > that the flood of new proposals has increased since I wrote [Vasa]. I think > we are trying to do too much too fast. We can do much or do less fast. We > cannot do both and maintain quality and coherence. We have to become more > restrained and selective.

> Every design has advantages, disadvantages, and limitations. We should never > present a design without a serious and honest discussion of possible > problems and alternatives. It is part of a proposer's job to examine > problems; "pure sales jobs" are not intellectually honest. The joint "pro- > and con-papers" on coroutines written by people from "opposing camps" were > immensely useful ([Use][Impact]).

And later:

> Setting goals is usually far harder than the detailed design and > implementation of features. We are good technicians and we have theory and > existing practice to guide us with the necessary work once goals have been > established. Unfortunately, we are not good at agreeing on goals and > articulating them. Often, we end up in a mess of requirements. Language > design is not product development. We don't have a high management setting > fundamental priorities for us. Few of us have workplace experience for that, > if for no other reason that our firms are each in a specific business. I > think product-development analogies have been seriously overdone over the > last few years

The idea that traditional product design mentalities are insufficient for programming language design is very interesting. Indeed, a programming language's design must answer to theoretical truths in addition to mere user feedback (this is a point brought up in the paper). It sounds obvious that in many ways C++ is not a "product" as it doesn't have clients in the traditional sense. Where does the "language as product" analogy break down?

<comment><USER9> This is what reading Rust RFCs has thought me: every potential adition can be a liability or something that makes a language inconsistent (the feature feels "bolted on" rather than natural). You can wrestle your way through to good solutions tho — if your community understands the trade offs.

So to mutate your metaphor of language-as-a-product: what if we see languages as a narrative? A story we collectively tell ourselves about it — how it should be used, which people it is for, etc.

As a practical example the idea of something being "pythonic" or "rustic" can help — because it means people form at least a foggy common idea what fits the language and what does not.

<comment><USER10> > A story we collectively tell ourselves about it — how it should be used, > which people it is for, etc.

My personal opinion on this is that this is generally harmful, as there will _always_ be that one corner case which doesn't respect the "idiomatic" rules - and then you have to fight every time to explain the good reason which led these rules to not be respected in that place.

I much prefer to say - any string valid in the language grammar is fair game ; if we don't want a string / construct / etc, then build a language in which the construct doesn't compile (or create a linter which fails the build, etc). Especially, you can't assume how other people learned the language - <USER2> someone went on C++ from LISP and builds his code around lambdas and std::function, or from Java and creates IAbstractObservableFactoryDispatchers by the dozen, or is a grammarian mostly experienced in Boost.Spirit or any other combination - that's ok, you're a dev, reading their code will enlighten you even if you need to google a bit, and open you to some paradigms which may later turn out to be the best fit for some use case of your code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The gutsureness it takes to become a public figure appears to bleed into the certainty of their statements (e.g. causality, predictions). It's hilarious.

Could say we're in a certainty epidemic

<comment><USER12> I agree. I have always been suspicious of people that project absolute certainty, especially when they do it repeatedly across multiple complex and nuanced topics. For me that behavior is a giant red flag to not trust anything that person says without further evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Always love to read some Bjarne.

His books on C++ are as much about programming in general as C++.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, he does come out as a proper engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > No language feature (or library) exists in isolation (or at least it > shouldn't). Feature interaction is among the hardest of problems, and often > underestimated both as a problem and as something useful

The problem of feature interaction is not underestimated by anyone who has had to use C++ for any length of time.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not a C++ developer but I really enjoyed reading this.

</comment><comment><USER16> should (2019) be added to the title?

<comment><USER17> Is this a hard rule? I didn't see all submissions on 1st of January to have (2019) tags, and this paper is not that old (Nov 2019).

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, I did submit this in 2019, but it did get no traction; it got resubmitted by the mods as they thought it was interesting.</comment></comment></comment>


Sad Observations from a Boston Angel Dinner - <AUTHOR> http://www.robgo.org/post/1610778889/sad-observations-from-a-boston-angel-dinner <comment><USER2> It could be selection bias: the good angels are busy chasing good startups, not going for dinner with a bunch of has-beens.

Or it could be that there are no good angels nearby. Hard to tell. Hopefully, it's up to you to set the tone and find like-minded investors.

<comment><USER3> Luckily, my two partners were doing better things. There was some selection bias, but not too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a lot of places are in this boat, even strong second tier locations like Boston and Seattle.</comment>


Mac Creative Cloud update nukes everything in first hidden folder on boot volume - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/backblaze/status/697968656764899328 <comment><USER2> I've seen a lot of scripts written in my career and most of them do things that scare me. It boils down to "explicit is better than implicit", and there are too many lazy or careless developers out there.

Another good reason to demand open-source, to have a fighting chance that someone has proofread what is about to ask for admin privileges.

More than once I've seen people using "rm -Rf" habitually whether the target is a file _or_ a directory, because it will basically always work (remembering when to use "rmdir" is apparently hard). Well, great...now the side effects of using "rm -Rf ${dir}/${file}" where there's an undefined variable are just a bit ridiculous when all you wanted to do was delete a temporary file.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Affected me today by screwing up Backblaze's .bzvol folder and disassociating the volume from the backup service.

Luckily it didn't delete anything vital, and the temporary fix is to just make a /.aaaaa folder for now.

But what on Earth did Adobe do? How does something like that even happen?

Here are two videos showing the problem:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xKlFO3_j5E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xKlFO3_j5E)

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

<comment><USER3> Yev from Backblaze here -> sorry! It took us all day to figure out what the hell was going on. Kept getting folks writing in, when nothing had changed on our end. Our Mac dev probably left a dent in his wall from trying to figure it out. We finally narrowed it down to the ACC update. Then realized that WE were affected more than most apps simply because .bzvol starts with a "B" and so a bunch of our users were affected. Likely if a user had a hidden folder with data in it named anything /.0-/.a that folder's data could have been removed as well (we tested this). So hopefully they had a backup/hidden folders are rare and few were affected.</comment></comment>


Why we never sold Basecamp by the seat (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-never-sold-basecamp-by-the-seat-4482f3e6a195 <comment><USER2> I agree with the points in this essay, but I have paid attention to 37signals for quite awhile and I don't think this is actually why. I think the reason they priced as they did was because their first clients were agencies similar to themselves and they were selling to the whole agency. The second reason is because Jason Fried likes simple business propositions, and likes to picks prices based on how they look/sound/feel. This isn't a criticism; it's perfectly valid to commit harder to a pricing strategy as you realize other benefits. I just don't think that they started out this way and I think a new software company could make a case for per-seat as a way to sell to companies too small to pay $99/mo all-inclusive without giving too much away to slightly less small companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Too bad integrating with their API is about as great as pulling teeth. Maybe it's gotten better lately?</comment>


A list of 1 way to get rich in the construction industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0005-snagging-smart-phones.html

<comment><USER2> This is a nice idea, and would be useful to those in this particular niche (such as myself), but it is a small market if you just look at the architects. Also, it is more complicated a task now as most of the industry that is forward thinking (and thus potential customers) are using BIM (building information modeling), primarily Autodesk's Revit.

So to make it a vastly bigger market, to include all the construction participants including architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, you would need to make the app access the BIM model and be able to attach data to it. Revit has an SDK, so with a great deal of difficult work, an app could be made. Of course, a launch date around 2010 may be the best plan given the largest reduction in Construction that I've ever seen recently.

Update: I just realized that there is a growing movement in the construction industry called Integrated Project Delivery which is basically lean management applied to construction and involves the intense collaboration of all parties in construction. To that end, there are now a growing number of online BIM integrators where different participants can share in real-time their different BIM applications. So the iPhone app may be much easier than I thought if you can access into the online BIM data, say, with a REST api.

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

<comment><USER3> The availability of inexpensive hardware and AJAX is a powerful enabler once again, combined with high speed mobile networking. Publish all of these applications you propose as web applications, with a "tablet" mode -- actually several "tablet" modes each tailored to different screen form factors.

The economics of the US construction industry as a whole involve freaking huge numbers! Very low-cost applications (don't forget corporate licensing) that become a "must have" can make someone a billionaire.

(And yes, there are industries where certain mobile apps have become "must haves." ePocrates was one such app in the old Palm days. Don't know if it's still that way, though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another way: own your own heavy equipment, and charge an hourly rental fee.

<comment><USER5> I live on a yacht, and when I need to get it on land I rent a crane (with operator) for the job. Price: $1000 an hour.

I'm seriously considering buying a big crane and renting it out....

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did you change the title of the article to something entirely different, unrelated, and nonsensical? I wish there were a special type of flag for when people do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, the suggestion came from _authentic_ on the IRC channel:

[15:09] < authentic> for HN i would recommend a title of "A List of 1 Way to Get Rich in the Construction Industry (iPhone)"

I thought it was a brilliant title for submitting it to HN, and even considered changing the title of it to this article altogether, on the blog itself. However, I decided to keep the original title on the blog and use this title for submitting to HN. As one of the authors of the post, I feel I can allow myself the artistic freedom to pick a suitable title for submitting the article to HN. In practice, it seems the title definitely did what it was supposed to do, so I consider it a good move.

Oh, and it is related. I certainly feel that building out the tool mentioned in the article could provide a profitable business to someone. At the moment, we're busy with another part of the construction pie, but if no one else does it within a couple of years, we'll probably have a look at it ourselves. Hence the "way to get rich" part of things. The "List of 1 way" part if obviously poking some fun...

<comment><USER6> It just feels like the title is misleading for the purpose of getting clicks.

<comment><USER7> That's why I didn't vote. I felt like the candidates were just campaigning and running commercials to win votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a bit disappointed in you guys. Not one person has read the article and thought of another industry that these ideas could be applied to?

</comment><comment><USER9> hmmm... what about taking the Android Maps app ([http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-on- android-m...](http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-on-android- maps.html)) and enhancing it to create a 3D model of a particular building?

<comment><USER3> Ready access to information should be a huge boon to people on the ground. I remember a friend of mine who did HVAC work on large scale projects once told me about mistakes in plans where electrical conduit and ducts would intersect. Sometimes the electricians would get there first, so the people doing the ducts would put a little detour around the conduit!

        ____  ____
        ___ \/ ___
           \__/

This could really screw with the airflow to rooms fed by that particular duct. (I'm sure we've all been in office buildings with little climate control "quirks" like that.) Better communications might prevent mistakes like this from becoming physical reality. (Of course, more competent use of CAD software would prevent mistakes like this in the first place.)

<comment><USER10> my electrician friend tells me that electricians, HVAC, plumbing and other dudes sometimes get the same set of drawings, so each of them think in their heads "okay I'm gonna put my stuff here" and conflict happens. this essentially happens because the general contractor or a sub contractor hires everyone in parallel to each other, and while the same drawing is sent to each, none of them talk to each other to "plan" the actual deployment. This will likely change when more and more people jump on the BIM wagon, and move the conflict stage to 3D model space rather than on the site.

<comment><USER2> This whole problem is being solved with BIM and Integrated Project Delivery where all the systems are modeled in 3d well in advance of construction thus resolving all the 3d conflicts ahead of time.

<comment><USER3> Communication between groups could also be used to resolve such conflicts in real-time. Even with BIM and Integrated Project Delivery, there will always be errors in plans for large projects. The ability to clarify these as soon as possible (ideally before any mistakes have become physical reality) will save people money.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Caltrain July Proposed Service Changes - <AUTHOR> http://www.caltrain.com/riderinfo/Proposed_Service_Changes.html

<comment><USER2> Wow - this is a huge, and, if it goes through, will completely reshape how CalTrain is used.

For those not familiar with Silicon Valley, we have several major mass transit systems, "Muni" - which is a light rail system that serves the City (aka "San Francisco"), BART, which is a traditional mass transit system, that spans fairly broadly around the Bay, but does _not_ go all the way down the peninsula, or to San Jose. And finally CalTrain, which is responsible for covering San Francisco all the way down to San Jose (And a few cities afterwards - I've never been further south than San Jose)

Right now - when I'm coming home, or heading to the City, I only have to wait a bit longer outside of commuting hours. During Commuting hours, I usually just walk onto the train, and, if it's a bullet, I will be home faster than any car can get me there.

The elimination of the local stations, is _not_ a good thing. People who wanted to avoid those would take the express anyways. Now - you have no ability to get to those cities with caltrain.

Also, look at the Southbound schedule (Northbound is a reflection):

11 Trains Leaving, from 5:45 AM to 6:55 AM, And in the afternoon, 11 Trains leaving from 3:45 to 4:55 PM.

This is not a "drastic service cut" - this is a complete gutting of the peninsula transit system. These changes are so severe, I'm wondering if it's a bluff, and they will walk it back after public outrage.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a daily user of CalTrain (Mt. View → SF), I'm not at all sorry to it go.

The system is very broken, and is due for a reboot.

1\. Payments. Using conductors to check tickets on a mass-transit system is asking to loose on fares. My commute is long enough (3 zones) that I get my ticket checked nearly every time. But many commuters who only travel one zone could easily avoid paying altogether. Conductors simply don't have the time to canvas the whole train between each stop. CalTrain ought to realize that it's in the business of mass transit, not leisurely travel and implement a tag on/off system (i.e. Muni).

That aside, tickets are far too expensive. I pay for monthly parking and a monthly pass. That monthly fee is not much cheaper, if at all, than driving – and I don't have a hybrid or anything. Oh, and driving saves me at least 2 hours of commute time/day.

Mass transit is a failure if it's neither faster nor cheaper.

2\. Costs. I know nothing about trains, but I can't imagine that the full diesel engines they use for these 6~ish car commuter trains are necessary. There's got to be a lot of wasted fuel there. Further, do they really need to attach all those cars to every train? I have to think that less cars = less fuel use & less staff needed = cost savings.

3\. Logistics. Again, I don't know much about mass-transit systems, but some simple logic and personal experience states that a two-track system means that if one things goes wrong the entire system gets badly backed up. CalTrain has been a lot more reliable lately, but I can testify that when it gets backed up, it gets really backed up.

Tangentially, Caltrain relies on other systems to be useful – you have to either drive, bus, or BART to one of their stations. It's an incomplete system from inception.

</comment><comment></comment><comment>

My point: CalTrain is broken, I'd gladly suffer the hassle of not having it for a few years if it could be shut-down and reborn as an extension of BART or somesuch.

<comment><USER4> > 1\. Payments. Using conductors to check tickets on a mass-transit system is > asking to loose on fares. My commute is long enough (3 zones) that I get my > ticket checked nearly every time. But many commuters who only travel one > zone could easily avoid paying altogether. Conductors simply don't have the > time to canvas the whole train between each stop.

I travel one zone (MV to PA) and they ask for my ticket 10-20% of the time. What is the fine if you get caught without a ticket? $200?

> CalTrain ought to realize that it's in the business of mass transit, not > leisurely travel and implement a tag on/off system (i.e. Muni).

Uh, isn't that exactly what they've been pushing for the last 6 months, and now just stopped selling 8-ride tickets, and soon, monthly passes as well?

> Oh, and driving saves me at least 2 hours of commute time/day.

Are you telling me you can drive from MV to SF faster than the bullet train during rush hour?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No weekend service at all is troubling. I'm not clear as to whether these are just random proposals, or if they will actually be implemented. A fare increase might be the most palatable solution.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's worth noting that mismanagement (I don't think there has been significant mismanagement, but it's up for debate) is not the main cause of the requirement for cutbacks. The main issue is that CalTrain is no-one's responsibility in particular. Almost half of CalTrain's funding comes from ticket sales, which is not the normal pattern for public transit. The other local transportation agencies (GGT, SamTrans, and BART) have dedicated sponsors from municipal governments. CalTrain, as the name implies, used to be state-funded. A couple of decades back, CalTrans, the state agency, stopped funding it, and municipal governments stepped in. However, their funding has always fluctuated - and this year, has pretty much evaporated.

Remember, public transportation runs the way it does because it's a public good - it is pretty much by definition something that the market is bad at providing, but which people need anyhow. If CalTrain had to survive off of ticket revenue alone, it would cost more than twice as much to ride, and would thus exclude some riders, harming revenues further. On top of this, CalTrain relieves traffic - it provides a significant positive externality instead of capturing value. Government subsidies to public transportation agencies address this externality.

CalTrain is dying because of the tragedy of the commons: a great many people can benefit from it (traffic, air quality) without paying for it, and will resist any attempt to require that they contribute to it. This is the situation that many, many public agencies are in.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is seriously disconcerting. As someone just considering moving into San Francisco, and using Caltrain to commute to work, it makes me have serious second thoughts.

<comment><USER8> "Just work harder, then you can get a car!" - the peninsula

<comment><USER9> Blame San Mateo County for rejecting BART 50 years ago. <http://www.bart.gov/about/history/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe BART will finally be able to complete the loop and we can cut the awful Caltrain out of the transportation scene entirely. BART is so on-time and reliable.

It would be amazing if the Fremont line and the Colma line met up in San Jose.

</comment><comment><USER11> With all the trouble that the Caltrain is having, and with all the good that it does for employees at Valley companies, why don't they do something about this? Google could certainly buy the train outright, though they probably don't want to run it... but a group of companies such as Google, Facebook, VMWare, Oracle, NVidia, etc etc together easily have enough money to donate to help fix the Caltrain's financial issues.

<comment><USER12> The nice thing about being a multibillion dollar company is that you can run private shuttles and allow your employees to isolate themselves from the masses.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but that doesn't help their employees get around when one of their destinations isn't work. Having functioning public transit is a major selling point of the area and thus for those working for these companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The last morning train leaves SF at 8:30am?! Did they forget this is Silicon Valley, not Wallstreet? We don't all get to work by 9am!

<comment><USER4> Yeah the note about "commute hours" cracked me up. Did they mean the time Caltrain employees go and leave work?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A while back Caltrain had proposed cuts that actually gave me better commuting trains (SF to Santa Clara). Those never went through and now these are way more extreme. If this goes through I'll have to either start driving (45min to an hour each way) or move somewhere closer, and while I have that option not everyone does. I really hope this is just a scare tactic intended to force municipalities to change the way Caltrain gets funded so it stops getting jerked around by the various counties that fund it every time they need somewhere to cut costs, even as ridership increases. I also don't understand how places like SF can allow Caltrain to cut service to games and holiday events. I'd think that would cost them a lot of people who would go if they didn't have to drive, while in turn creating a real problem to figure out how to deal with the increased influx of all the extra cars from those who still go.

</comment><comment><USER14> CalTrain publishes annual financial reports just like publicly listed companies. Compare fiscal 2007 with 2010. Then check out how much of their total revenue comes from subsidies vs fares.

[http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Comprehensive_...](http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Comprehensive_Annual_Financial_Reports.html)

They also provide a quarterly CapEx breakout:

[http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Quarterly_Capi...](http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Quarterly_Capital_Program_Status_Report.html)

And a breakout of ridership per station (check out page 11 of the 2010 report):

<http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Ridership.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> I see something distinctly odd about their proposal.

It would actually make my commute (home at 22nd Street in SF) to work (Stanford, via Palo Alto) much _more_ convenient. I could catch a train every fifteen minutes.

I don't need this convenience. As it is now, I can catch express trains down every half hour (during commute hours) and back up at 5:06, 6:06, or 7:10. That is quite adequate.

However, under the proposed plan, I'm screwed if I decide to stay late, and of course some of my friends who make do without cars are much more screwed. It seems that's more important, and that there is room to accommodate this by thinning out the commute hour schedule.

</comment><comment><USER16> Of course my stop is one of those on the docket to be eliminated :(

How am I not surprised that Caltrain, who can't even process a credit card payment over the web and apply it to my Clipper card in 24, natch 48, or even 72 hours... can't seem to run their company at a profit. I'm shocked, SHOCKED!

San nothing of the asanine way they handle tagging on and off for 8-ride tickets within a given zone.

 _Sigh_

<comment><USER8> Isn't Clipper a separate entity from Caltrain? Or is Caltrain somehow handling that transaction for you on Clipper's behalf?

Still smugly using my Translink-branded card.

<comment><USER17> Yup. To be fair the intended payment model for the Clipper is to link it to a credit card and do autoload whenever your balance crosses below a threshold. Kind of silly in some ways but it works just fine after you get it set up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Although these are drastic service cuts, at least one proposal might mean faster commutes to SV:

\-- Suspension of weekday service at up to seven of the following stations: Bayshore, South San Francisco, San Bruno, Burlingame, Hayward Park, Belmont, San Antonio, Lawrence, Santa Clara and College Park</comment>


Smellr: It's like Flickr, but for your nose.. - <AUTHOR> http://smellr.com/

<comment><USER2> This link was posted, flagged and removed yesterday: <http://searchyc.com/smellr>

<comment><AUTHOR> It's April Fool's day, so I thought I'd have a bit of fun.</comment></comment>


The Design and Use of QuickCheck - <AUTHOR> https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-01-14-design-use-quickcheck.html?hn=1 <comment><USER2> One of my favorite examples of property-based testing is in the docs for Haskell's Text.ParserCombinators.ReadP module. The semantics of the combinators are succinctly (but fully) documented in the form of QuickCheck properties.

[https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-220.127.116.11/docs/Text-P...](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-188.8.131.52/docs/Text- ParserCombinators-ReadP.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The first line sounds like hubris, but amazingly it's actually true. QuickCheck makes extremely good (not over-complex or 'clever') use of return type polymorphism and applicatives.

Property testing is a good idea in any language, but its particularly elegant in Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also: it's the coolest example of type classes Simon Peyton Jones knows and he explains why here (around 34-35 min):

[https://youtu.be/6COvD8oynmI](https://youtu.be/6COvD8oynmI)

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems to be the way to go for testing.

I've wanted to use it for my current React-Native project. I found a JS implementation AND a babel plugin that creates the tests from flow-types.

The question for me here is, how long does this take compared to regular testing? I read people complained about AVA because of bad test performance (it does many parallel tests).

Also, where to put it in the chain?

Should I put it pre-push, pre-build, somewhere in the CI?

<comment><USER6> Can you please provide the link to the babel plugin which creates the random values from flow types?

<comment><USER7> Very likely this: [http://github.com/unbounce/babel-plugin-transform-flow-to- ge...](http://github.com/unbounce/babel-plugin-transform-flow-to-gen)

[https://medium.com/@gabescholz/randomized-testing-in- javascr...](https://medium.com/@gabescholz/randomized-testing-in-javascript- without-lifting-a-finger-8d616d7048af)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone here converted from 'regular' unit testing to quickcheck, or other property-based unit testing libraries? I'm wondering if it's worth taking the time out to learn, but I have my reservations regarding non-deterministic testing.

<comment><USER9> I never really understood the arguments against "non-deterministic" testing. A property based test will check more cases, and therefore detect more bugs, than the corresponding hand-chosen unit tests (in which you probably forgot at least 2 of the important corner cases).

All determinism guarantees is that you'll either reliably detect a bug or reliably not detect a bug, and hence get a nice aesthetic line of green checkmarks followed by red crosses in your test history. Or just get a nice looking line of green and not even know the bug is there. This seems like a small thing to sacrifice to detect more bugs.

Of course, regular unit tests have their place too, when your specification can't really be expressed as a "forall" property.

<comment><USER10> > All determinism guarantees is that you'll either reliably detect a bug or > reliably not detect a bug, and hence get a nice aesthetic line of green > checkmarks followed by red crosses in your test history. Or just get a nice > looking line of green and not even know the bug is there. This seems like a > small thing to sacrifice to detect more bugs.

The situation you want to avoid is this:

Run tests, find bug.

Try and fix bug.

Rerun tests, tests pass.

Deploy fixes to production.

Later find out that the bug is not fixed, your second run of tests simply didn't hit the right combination.

<comment><USER11> We print the rand seed and allow tests to take a set seed. This allows us to use random generated data and still have deterministic results for reproducing failed cases.

<comment><USER10> Yep, this is a really useful approach, and I highly recommend anyone here who is thinking of trying this stuff out to take a note of the seed (or ensure it's printed) as the first time you realise you want to do this it's often too late!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Go's standard library there is a basic QuickCheck facility. But apparently it has only been imported by 20 opensource packages ever (see bottom of page):

[https://godoc.org/testing/quick](https://godoc.org/testing/quick)

<comment><USER11> We've used it in at least one internal project. I found it to lessen readability and make maintenance harder. It could be the way things were set up. I like the basic idea, but that lib just wasn't doing it for me. We got close to something usable with test case generators where you replaced the intended bad value(s). There ended up being too much indirection for my taste for too little reward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You might also want to look into [https://clojure.org/about/spec](https://clojure.org/about/spec)</comment>


Solar storms are no joke - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/we-need-to-be-prepared-for-a-devastating-solar-storm-researchers-warn-1318509 <comment><USER2> > Even when the storm passed and the systems came back online, data in > magnetic storage (including all hard drives and SSDs) would have been > irrecoverably damaged.

SSDs? Would even actual magnetic storage like hard drives really be damaged? If I understand correctly the electromagnetic 'pulse' would come very slowly, cause huge spikes on long wires like electric distribution networks, but I don't see how it would wipe disks unless it's just by way of forcing lots of uncontrolled power from the electrical outlets through the computer. Would that really happen? Also, mobile devices not attached to the grid would then still work, also PCs not currently connected.</comment>


Humans may have accidentally created a radiation shield around earth - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2017/05/21/humans-may-have-accidentally-created-a-radiation-shield-around-earth/ <comment><USER2> The recent thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14366819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14366819)

</comment><comment><USER3> Link should be changed to original: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasas-van-allen- pr...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasas-van-allen-probes-spot- man-made-barrier-shrouding-earth).

</comment><comment><USER4> The youtube video seemed very hand-wavey, I found the paper that the NASA link refers to on arxiv: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03390](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03390)

I think the relevant part starts at section 8.3, page 48, but it's quite dense so I wasn't able to glean much more from it!

</comment><comment><USER5> The field seems directional. What will this shield do to radiation coming from larger angles of inclination? Is it unsafer to live near the polar circles?</comment>


Multiple News Sources - <AUTHOR> https://news.ao.gl/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm really into news and find that having this in the background (rectangle rotated 90degrees) is pretty useful to me. Just sharing because maybe others care about this nonsense too.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite history books? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The ones that cut through the stale version taught in schools.

Mostly Carroll Quigley's works like _Tragedy and Hope_ , _Anglo-American Establishment_ , or _The Evolution of Civilizations_.

Another I consider at the level of Quigley is Anthony Sutton.

There are quite a few less academically accurate books that are good eye openers anyway like Howard Zinn's _A Peoples History of the United States_. As a combat vet a couple that speak to the issue of war are _God 's War: A New History of the Crusades_ by Christopher Tyerman and _The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History_ by Philip Bobbitt (some really good stuff about the future of nation-states in a post nuclear world.)

Those are just a few key ones off the top of my head. Personally, what I find one of the best ways is to find a more narrow interest and find books written by or about the key players at the top. I often find that tidbits across various sources add up to very interesting insights.

Also, a must in my opinion for an American is the Norman Dodd interview about his investigations on the Reece Committee and how history was targeted as being needed to be _controlled_.

<comment><USER3> Carroll Quigley, Seconded!

[https://archive.org/details/TragedyAndHope_501](https://archive.org/details/TragedyAndHope_501)

Oh, and BTW, don't get spooked by the length or the Bill Clinton endorsement. Quigley transcends mainstream ideology, and this book is a real page-turner!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This might be a bit more on the national zeitgeist than the others mentioned so far, but I recently finished _Alexander Hamilton_ by Ron Chernow and am now halfway through Chernow's _George Washington_. They're very dense, but very readable. I'm enjoying them thoroughly.

I also recently finished _Beneath The Scarlet Sky_ by Mark Sullivan. He's normally an epic fantasy author, but he wrote a narrative account of a true story about a young boy in Milan who spied on the Nazis. I highly enjoyed it.

To hijack this thread a bit, though, I'm interested in reading more about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Can anyone recommend a good book on it? (Something digestible yet info-rich, like Chernow's books, preferably.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here are a few that come to mind right now:

 _Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East_ by Amanda H Podany - Covers how international relations worked between the different rulers of the Ancient Near East. Covers different things and in a different way than I had heard in a lot of other ANE history.

 _Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos_ by Jonah Keri - Lots of fun, interesting stuff about a sport I like and a team I didn't know too much about.

 _Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth- Century Mediterranean World_ by Noel Malcolm - This one is really good, covering the history of a single family amidst the relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian world.

 _The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code_ by Margalit Fox - Another excellent book, this discussing how Linear B was deciphered, with particular emphasis placed on Alice Kober, whose work was largely overlooked since she died before Michael Ventris ultimately deciphered it.

 _The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832_ by Alan Taylor - This one won the Pulitzer for history in 2014, so that should tell you something. This book covers an aspect of history I had never heard before, with a lot of focus on slaves themselves, rather than their owners or the people around them. The roles of the British as liberators and slaves as their aids in the War of 1812 is very interesting.

And one last one that I'm currently reading is _Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire_ by Peter H. Wilson. I haven't finished it yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's very interesting to hear about a large aspect of European history I wasn't too familiar with and that doesn't fit into the neat, centralized nation-state based history of the world that is predominantly taught.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America_ \- Really interesting to hear about the atrocities of the Nazis and the need of the Americans that they would actively recruit war criminals to keep up with the Russians.

 _Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America_ \- I read this a few years after Hurricane Katrina. It provides some historical context to the problems of Katrina, especially the levee system

 _Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln_ \- This is the current book to read on Lincoln

 _The Island at the Center of the World_ \- If you're interested in NYC history this is one of the books to read.

 _American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation_ This is a must-read if you're interested in religion in the US

EDIT: formatting and switched out the Triumph of William McKinley with American Gospel

</comment><comment><USER7> Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

[http://toptalkedbooks.com/books/aRnlEw/Lies-My-Teacher- Told-...](http://toptalkedbooks.com/books/aRnlEw/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Me- Everything-Your-American-History-Textbook-Got-Wrong)

[http://toptalkedbooks.com/books/_5tcQA/Lies-My-Teacher- Told-...](http://toptalkedbooks.com/books/_5tcQA/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Me-- Everything-Your-American-History-Textbook-Got-Wrong)

</comment><comment><USER8> BH Liddell Hart's tomes on WWII. Brilliant books. Although he clearly was a little "too sympathetic" to the German cause.

<comment><USER9> Upvoted, I'll include _The Other Side of the Hill_ as well.

It's true, he sounds too enthusiastic with the German operations and very sympathetic to some Nazi officers (Rommel and Manstein for example), but I think it stems from his overall enthusiasm with strategy and military operations in general.

While for most people a dead soldier is still a horribly murdered human, I think his view is that battles between armies do not count as atrocities (not an uncommon view) and officers who didn't murder civilians (or allege they _didn 't know_ civilians were murdered under their command) should not be tried for war crimes. Of course that's a bit too much to swallow, especially on the soviet side.

By the way, the same argument was applied for scientists as well (see Wernher von Braun and the operation paperclip bunch, who also "didn't know")

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rubicon by Tom Holland - [https://www.amazon.com/Rubicon-Tom- Holland/dp/1400078970](https://www.amazon.com/Rubicon-Tom- Holland/dp/1400078970)

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Germans Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution - [https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion- Soluti...](https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion- Solution/dp/0060995068)

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth [https://www.amazon.com/Zealot-Life-Times-Jesus- Nazareth/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Zealot-Life-Times-Jesus- Nazareth/dp/0812981480/)

The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates - [https://www.amazon.com/Poison-King-Legend-Mithradates- Deadli...](https://www.amazon.com/Poison-King-Legend-Mithradates- Deadliest/dp/0691150265/)

To End All Wars - [https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Wars- Rebellion-1914-1918/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Wars- Rebellion-1914-1918/dp/0547750315)

The Northern Crusades - [https://www.amazon.com/Northern-Crusades-Second-Eric- Christi...](https://www.amazon.com/Northern-Crusades-Second-Eric- Christiansen/dp/0140266534)

The Fall of Constantinople 1453 - [https://www.amazon.com/Fall- Constantinople-1453-Canto-Classi...](https://www.amazon.com/Fall- Constantinople-1453-Canto-Classics/dp/1107604699)

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane - [https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Enlightenment-Central- Conquest-T...](https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Enlightenment-Central-Conquest- Tamerlane/dp/0691165858)

The Indian Ocean - [https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Ocean-Seas- History/dp/04154453...](https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Ocean-Seas- History/dp/0415445388/)

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire - [https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Summer-Secret-History- Empire/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Summer-Secret-History- Empire/dp/0312428111/)

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%27s_Imperial_Conspiracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%27s_Imperial_Conspiracy)

</comment><comment><USER12> The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

</comment><comment><USER13> _The Korean War: A History_ , Bruce Cumings (2011)</comment>


Ask HN: 100+ people/companies were hiring at ClojureWest? - <AUTHOR>

So almost half the room raised their hands that they were hiring at ClojureWest. Where are these job postings at and/or can you post here if you are hiring? <comment><USER2> [http://functionaljobs.com/](http://functionaljobs.com/) seems to have a few postings. It is strange that there seems to be a huge desire for Clojure programmers but I have seen very little in the way of wanted adds.</comment>


The rules of racing (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://f1metrics.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/the-rules-of-racing/ <comment><USER2> This article is awesome. It shines a light into the different types of racing overtakes, and how both cars must cooperate in a way so the racing is clean. It also shows how some drivers try to keep to the rules but not to their spirit, causing several incidents along the way.

Since the article is from 2014, it only shows the first chapters of the years- long Hamilton v Rosberg battle. The issue there was that Rosberg was treating Hamilton like a teammate, trying not to crash and trying to race him as fairly as possible in order to avoid a crash. Hamilton didn't ever do this. When he felt threatened, he raced against Rosberg in the same way he would race any other driver from a different team. Rosberg crashing into Hamilton in Spa was a way to tell the team that Hamilton needed to be fairer and not force dangerous situations, or Rosberg would stop being fair to him. Hamilton never changed his attitude, and Rosberg started being way more aggressive in the following races. Finally, in Spain 2016 both cars crashed hard into each other and had to abandon. Rosberg ended up winning that year's championship.

A trait some of the great drivers share is that they completely disregard teammates. Schumacher, Hamilton, Verstappen, Vettel, and Senna are or were like this. Prost and Rosberg did something rare, they were quick enough to accept their teammates' challenge. Is rare for teams to have two best-in-class drivers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well highlighted. In the Change of direction scenario, there is a corner case that stewards dont usually punish. And done by Verstappen. When he is being chased by another driver, near a turn, he sells a dummy. Pretending to go one way (slight change) and then suddenly goes another catching the chasing driver off guard and unable to pass having to break suddenly. I dont know why this isnt illegal, cos it has caused several accidents over the years, predictably</comment>


Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter - <AUTHOR> http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/ <comment><USER2> I worked for geocities as a front end person back then. We got to work on some cool javascript stuff for the page builder app that was really pretty far ahead for its time. I got into trouble for bringing a laptop with suse linux on it into the office, back then linux was considered a major security risk, you notice all the machines are from Sun. They were also very early adopters of server side java, but most of the plumbing was composed of c code, the javascript people were kept far away from the server side and we didn't make it up to yahoo, but they did snatch up almost all of the unix admins.

<comment><USER3> Wow, Page builder (formerly Geobuilder) -- crazy times. I don't remember the Suse incident! But your mention of server side java reminds me that we also experimented with server side javascript via Netscape Enterprise Server. Compared to the C CGIs that comprised most of Geo's backend at that point it seemed a panacea. Too many bugs and not ready for prime time later we stuck w/ Apache (but moved more to handlers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great memories. During this era, I was at Citysearch and spent a lot of time in the Orange County Exodus DC. We had a nice rack of Sun gear, Extreme Networks switches and Alteon AceDirector load balancers.

I remember vividly that there was a cage down the row from us that was populated entirely by eMachines, which were a low end desktop PC that you could buy at Circuit City and Best Buy. We laughed at their cage but the company, 911gifts.com, ended up getting acquired for a nice sum, while our site and company was basically gone a few years later.

<comment><USER5> That's a great story. It'd be interesting to know whether that was all they could afford, or if they were being very forward-thinking in using COTS hardware and a failure-tolerant architecture.

<comment><USER6> probably a combination of both.

i worked at a startup in the late 90's and the price of sun microsystems gear was mind-blowingly high. from memory: ultra 5 workstation with a scsi card and disk array was $15,000+. an ultra e450 server was on the order of $100,000 and went up from there depending on how you wanted to build.

of course, that was exactly the time people started switching to linux on x86 en masse. pentium pro's were good and cheap enough to scale out less expensively on a per unit basis. today you can buy a 72-core xeon server with gigabytes of memory and terabytes of ssd's and 4x 10G ethernet for less than 10 grand. amortized over its functional lifetime, it costs less than a cell phone bill.

<comment><USER7> I got the impression "hardware dogma" still happens when I was planning our infrastructure. The datacenter world is still a place where you can spend $36k for something you can get for $1000 if you're not careful. I didn't use Cisco for our switches and some IT guys I talked to acted like I was a heretic. But the decision saved us several thousand dollars and we ended up with a design that was IMHO more reliable than stacking proprietary switches.

The big trick is to make everything redundant (redundant power, network bonding, Ceph instead of a NAS) and not have a SPOF. Then it matters a lot less if anything fails, and you can use cheaper hardware if you need to. That said, I still prefer server grade hardware - just not always the newest or the most brand name.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately storage dogma still seems to be a thing for EMC shops. Just try suggesting Ceph over Scale I/O. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love seeing stuff like this. Though I'd be a happy man if I never had to see the words "Veritas Volume Manager" again. Definitely one of my least favorite pieces of software from that era.

I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.

<comment><USER10> Brought back some memories for me as well. In corporate IT, unix sysadmins had to know how to manage multiple different hardware architectures and operating systems that all did things different. AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Ultrix, etc, all with different filesystems, raid hw/sw, command paths, and so on.

That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. AUI was a killer. We had a policy of turning it into 10base2 right away with an adaptor, then 10baseT when that became a thing.

I liked this era so much I used to skip dive all the kit that was chucked out. Had myself a nice stacked Sun 1000E as a desktop in 1999, until I got the electricity bill. Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.

Then I found HP/UX was horrid. Had a run in with some HP N-class systems with Oracle. Yeuch, and that turned me to open source.

<comment><USER10> >>Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.

I do remember some $100k - $300k invoices for larger SMP servers from HP, Sun, and the like. For machines that probably had less overall horsepower than my current cell phone :)

<comment><USER11> Yeah pricing was awful. I remember someone playing £12k for a single PA RISC CPU option and when they cracked it open to have a look it was 95% heatsink. Cue the _" bloody expensive heatsink"_ comments.

It had about as much go as one of those "big slab" xeon slot CPUs at the time which was 1/10th of the cost.

<comment><USER12> Well, I've seen appliances over $50k a piece ( you need at least two to be useful.) So systems like that are still here.

<comment><USER10> Right, because they aren't currently commodity items. Wouldn't take much, for example, though, to get haproxy to a state where it starts eating F5 lab's lunch. A nicer ui, etc.

It took Linux and commodity servers a while to kill the $100k+/each proprietary unix server market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff.

They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altavista.

We didn't own our Compaq servers - we leased them from Exodus, like a lot of firms. And when the bubble popped, all those startups stopped paying for all that expensive equipment (which was now _used_ and worth much less), and Exodus was on the hook as the owner of it all. Killed them.

Edit: Found this image from someone who picked one up for a song to add to their collection. From a prized million-dollar enterprise-class server, to being hauled around in the back of a pickup truck.

[http://imgur.com/a/lXvOk](http://imgur.com/a/lXvOk)

<comment><USER14> Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun. And Google used self-built high-density racks of Intel hardware.

Maybe it was Inktomi? I'm pretty sure they used Sun hardware.

<comment><USER15> "Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun."

Yes, they did. Remember - the original URL for altavista was: altavista.digital.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _" As you can imagine (and see from these pictures), this equates to a whole bunch of ethernet cables. Cable management gets increasingly difficult to grasp each time a new box is added to the mix_"

Eeeeeek. I'm not in IT and _I_ got the sinking stomach feeling when looking at this.

Thankfully there is [https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/) to cure that.

<comment><USER10> That mess wasn't common in any environment I worked at during the same time period. Pretty sure that would have got someone sacked in the various datacenters I happen to have worked in.

<comment><USER17> It was common in many customer cages. I even saw cages setup in 2000 where a cage contained 500k of sun and cisco hardware still in their box after 8 months. I guess that startup was growing so fast they hadn't gotten around to plugging things in yet /s.

More likely they either ran out of funding or never got the growth they expected. Back then there was often a large disconnect between H/w bought and H/w needed/used. But money was there and hypergrowth was "just around the corner."

<comment><USER18> My conspiracy theory was VC funding required companies to spend X% on Sun/Cisco equipment, whether they needed it or not. In any case expensive, unused Sun servers were lying around everywhere during that period. And you'd hear thing like people bragging about their spare E10K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So much memories from that era. I saw my first 1TB storage array back then, it was an EMC Clariion fibre channel raid box, it cost nearly 1m$ and it was a full rack of 9GB dual-ported 15k RPM disks.

<comment><USER19> And that was EMC's "low-end" array. The Symetrix (Symetrics?) I remember being much more expensive for the same throughput.

<comment><USER17> Symmetrix, two Ms. They were more of a mainframe thing I thought. I never really got to play much with the really big gear, Starfires, Superdome and so on. By the time I got to use a 64-way SMP box (Origin 3800) it was already obsolescent and replaced a few years later with a pair of dual-quad core Xeons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had forgot that GeoCities started migrating to NetApp filers after the Yahoo! acquisition. As many thousands (tens of thousands?) of the filers they bought from NetApp, Yahoo! really shouldve bought them when they had the chance I feel.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know of an article like this about the dial in modem systems and infrastructure for some of the early dialup services?

<comment><USER17> A few decent things I could find online that jive with what I remember:

[https://www.patton.com/technotes/build_yourself_an_isp.pdf](https://www.patton.com/technotes/build_yourself_an_isp.pdf)

[http://www.gwi.net/behind-the-scenes-of-a-90s-internet- start...](http://www.gwi.net/behind-the-scenes-of-a-90s-internet-start-up-2/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352432)

The absolute minimum, and representative of the very first dial-up ISPs: [http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2025](http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2025)

[http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own- priv...](http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own-private- ISP.htm)

There used to be a lot of nice material on this subject but a lot of it has been obsolete and rotted away from the web over the last 15-20 years. The larger dial-up ISPs used Cisco AS series boxes (or equivalent) with PRI (i.e.: phone over T1) connections (24 lines/each) to a centralized RADIUS server for authentication. They are/were the last hold outs providing dial up.

Smaller ISPs were more of a '94 to '99 thing. Usually they used cyclades or equivalent serial port cards with up to 16 serial ports per card and an external modem per port. Eventually this morphed into boxes with multiple modems in them and access servers that did the ppp termination and the authentication (to a RADIUS server) as scale increased. US Robotics was probably the best reputed player in the modem space.

<comment><USER22> Lots of people used the US Robotics Total Control boxes in the early 90s.

[http://www.kmj.com/tcont.html](http://www.kmj.com/tcont.html)

<comment><USER17> That's what I had in mind when I said "boxes with multiple modems in them".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> And then years later you could download all of Geocities as a few hundred GB Torrent.

<comment><USER24> Which makes me wonder: what would it take to match the capabilities of this setup with modern hardware?

<comment><USER25> Could be done with a moderate-spec single server. Replace the JBOD enclosures with on-server 8xSamsung EVOs in hardware RAID6, and gain a bit in speed because we don't have drives that slow anymore. Xeon E5v4 could replace the computational power. Network multihoming would be done the same, except with 10000baseT instead of multiple cables. Run nginx on it and you're good.

Or, one could host the entire thing on S3 with CloudFront at a fraction of the cost.

<comment><USER26> > Or, one could host the entire thing on S3 with CloudFront at a fraction of > the cost.

Or, you could rent capacity somewhere with decent bandwidth prices and pay 2%-20% of CloudFront/S3 bandwidth prices...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And right there is why Sun was such a hit in the 90s and crushed in the bust.

<comment><USER17> Everyone in SV in 1999 used Sun boxes. Racking Ultra-2 Pizza Boxes was being very Internet Professional and money was flowing freely enough to pay for them.

<comment><USER28> Yep. I was at Netscape in Mountain View around that time, and the data center was mostly full of SGI stuff and Sun stuff. The new datacenter on Ellis opened up, the AOL thing happened, and even _more_ Sun hardware started showing up. E4500s, E450s, you name it. I had an Ultra 5 sitting in my cube just because I could. And then the Intel stuff started showing up in droves. Compaq servers running Linux. And I don't remember seeing a single Sun box show up in that data center after that...

<comment><USER29> Sun hardware was everywhere in the late 90's / early 2000's. I remember working at a couple of startups that had E3500s (mini-fridge size machines?) and a few E450s. We had Ultra 5's and 10's on the developer desktops.

I have an Ultra 10 rotting away in my basement. It cost a pretty penny at the time, but I haven't booted it up in almost 15 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not sure what's the best find, the data center article or the author's boy band-esque photo: [http://www.detritus.org/mike/pics/inpark.jpg](http://www.detritus.org/mike/pics/inpark.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER31> Good memories.

Does anyone remember where an Exodus colo facility was in SF around that same time (1999-2001)? That was my first visit to the area and I can't seem to locate the neighborhood now that I live here.</comment>


Ask YC: Best Way to Send Out a Small Targeted Commercial E-Mailing? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to conduct a small direct e-mail marketing campaign to a small number of targeted potential business customers (probably no more than 100-200 or so, maybe even fewer). Is there a good, reputable and preferably free or low cost, service to do this, or should I just do it manually (making sure to be CAN SPAM compliant, of course)? <comment><USER2> there are many email marketing service providers... i just came across this particular company, they look professional - u may check it out - its free for 60 days so may be u can try it out ... in the future let us know which service you used and whether it helped ... thx

visit: <http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp>

<comment><USER3> I've used constantcontact before and it's fine.

I really want to know when the wufoo.com guys are going to incorporate emails with their forms. Having an autoresponder and newsletter would be amazing for us less technically inclined people.</comment></comment>


Can Smart Thermometers Track the Spread of the Coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/health/coronavirus-fever-thermometers.html <comment><USER2> From what I've read, temperature checks are still happening at many buildings throughout China, so even if IoT thermometers don't get put into place immediately they'd probably be useful after things are more under control and we are working on stopping any second waves of disease.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous thread about map: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22623955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22623955) \- probably worth repeating any worthwhile comments again here though since not many previously.</comment>


Aircall Is the Easiest Way to Create and Manage Your Phone Customer Service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/02/aircall-is-the-easiest-way-to-create-and-manage-your-phone-customer-service/

<comment><USER2> Cool product!</comment>


Show HN: Markdown Calculator Builder - <AUTHOR> I made a calculator builder called TextCalc ( https://textcalc.com ) that uses:
- markdown text formatting
- markdown-like form elements
- excel formulas for the calculations
feedback welcome <comment><USER2> Nice idea. Is there a way to embed this on a blog like Jekyll or any other that supports markdown?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think so, you'll get an iframe that you can paste in your site, should work in Jekyll too</comment></comment>


Full Stack Hustler - <AUTHOR> http://smitpatel.com/full-stack-hustler/

<comment><USER2> Why the f __* does drivel like this ever make the front page? Is Ninja Pirate Generalisimo taken?

<comment><USER3> It's a wonderful counterpoint to the "old innovators" piece earlier . . .

That snark aside, I commend Smit on his (meta?) self-promotion. He's "hustling" a blog post about "hustling". And we all read it. Success! I don't like the content much but there's a certain poetry to the whole thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words haha. The post was more to serve as a quick summary of what non technical founders should do :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _To summarize, a Full Stack Hustler can sell, market and understand technology. Instead of being a Growth Hacker, everyday I'm striving to learn and become a Full Stack Hustler. IMHO, this is what makes a great startup founder and work well with a technical founder._

The more I learn about businesses (from developing them and from helping people with them), the more I move away from this type of thinking. I use to market myself as a growth hacker. Because yeah, I can do that with no problem. But the issue is that growth hacking is a bad way to call it. I refuse to call it Full-Stack Hustling, because that is just plain weird. What I call it now is business development. From refining the business model, to finding new ways to profit, to negotiating better deals, to simply developing the business in any way. So, call me a business developer. That's all you got be focused on doing.

<comment><USER5> In my experience, good BD folks have to possess all of these skills / knowledge sets to one degree or another in order to be really good at what they do. However, "BD" in a role-description sense is usually limited to covering partnerships and (sometimes) sales.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you Felix. BD is normally associated with partnerships and sales which is why I decided to use Full Stack Hustler to cover a wider range of skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl,dr:

Being a good marketer/promoter/seller that understands technology is what makes a great startup founder.

EDIT: This is the summary from the article, not my opinion.

<comment><USER4> No, it does not. I know plenty of good marketers that are shitty founders.

<comment><AUTHOR> selling and marketing plus understand technology is what makes a good combination. cannot leave either of three out.</comment></comment></comment>


Lazarus Free Pascal RAD IDE 1.0.2 is released  - <AUTHOR> http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,18538.0.html

<comment><USER2> Excuse my ignorance but what do people use Pascal for these days?

I remember learning Pascal back in middle and high school, because it was the teaching language of choice, but now that Python, Scheme and Jave have taken the title of preferred teaching language in many schools, what else is it used for? Greenfield projects or mainly maintenance of legacy code?

I'm not trying to troll here. I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER3> Win32 apps from smaller teams often happen to be using Delphi underneath: [http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Good_Quality_Applications_Built...](http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Good_Quality_Applications_Built_With_Delphi)

As a dev environment Pascal is also (unsurprisingly) quite mature; both open source and commercial tools, a decent set of libraries, and a language designed to compile with blazing speed, which with modern extensions also has power somewhere in between C and C++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While Lazarus is maturing, they will never pose a strong challenge to Embarcadero.

I do not like their architecture because goes against the Delphi spirit of being platform integrative(firemonkey also violates this too but that is just a desperation move by Embarcadero). LCL eats up a lot of developer time and prevents people from contributing. The last time I looked at their bug tracker I saw tickets closed because LCL changes don't work on ancient versions of windows... and to work on LCL you really have to have domain knowledge of OSX, Win32, and GTK. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/65/LCLArchitectur...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/65/LCLArchitecture.png)

I really wish they would have adopted Qt as their cross-platform option and then built different widgetsets for OSX, Win32, GTK, etc... LCL is fine now I guess for the IDE and for people with old delphi projects they want to port, but they really do need to create widgetsets that evolve with the underlying platform if they want to get people like this guy onboard.

[http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/pipermail/lazarus/2012-O...](http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/pipermail/lazarus/2012-October/077000.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's great to see Lazarus finally maturing. What used to be done in an expensive IDE costing $$$ can now be done with free open source tools. Simply amazing.

<comment> johnx123-up AFAIK, open source is what killed Delphi

<comment><USER6> That is plain wrong.

What killed Delphi was the mismanagement at Borland.

The changes of the languages division between Borland, Imprise, Borland again, Embarcadero and finally Codegear, made many business move away from Delphi.

In the enterprise world, many of the former Delphi users have moved into Java or .NET worlds. There are quite a few Delphi users in Europe though. Germany is quite a strong country in Delphi usage, enough to still have Delphi articles in computer magazines.

As a former Turbo Pascal fan, I find sad that Delphi usage has decayed. The language is quite good, at the same level of C and C++ (minus metaprogramming), with better type safety and native code compilers available.

<comment><USER7> > What killed Delphi was the mismanagement at Borland.

... and VB and the (shift to the) Internet.

<comment><USER6> VB I doubt, at least not in the type of enterprise projects I usually work on.

You can do web development in Delphi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> johnx123-up Can it support latest Delphi codes? Has anyone tried the cross platform support? (Though I still love Delphi, sadly I'm now far away from it...)

<comment><USER3> When I last used Free Pascal(5+ years ago) it had a Delphi compatibility mode that worked "mostly correct" on the libraries I used. (changes needed, iirc, were minor)

Lazarus wasn't ready as an IDE at that time(lots of missing stuff, I used a text editor and the command line) but the story might be different today.

Edit: And it compiled fine on Linux!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I pretty much hate Pascal as a language but I recently used it on one of my project. I wanted a executable that would just WORK on any computer without any installation, dependency or a specific version of a .NET framework. I used Lazarus and it just worked.

</comment><comment><USER9> is this thing called lazarus because it is bringing pascal back from the dead?

<comment><USER10> AFAIK, yes that is the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have fond memories of Turbo Pascal. I'm already downloading. Thanks for this!

<comment><USER6> Me too, specially because it offered much more type safety and compile times back in the 80's that we are still struggling to recover.

If Borland had created an official standard from their Pascal dialect, maybe C wouldn't had taken off in the PC world.</comment></comment>


Google accidentally enables home smart speakers to listen in to everyday sounds - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-home-smart-speakers-listen-switch-on-smoke-detector-glass-breaking-a9652991.html <comment><USER2> Events like this is why I will never get a smart speaker in my house. If it can be remotely updated to be triggered by something as innocuous as popped bubble wrap, then why can't it be remotely updated to be triggered by, well, anything?

<comment><USER3> Same; they really need a push-to-talk-only mode and multiple LEDs inline with the mic power line.

<comment><USER4> This is actually interesting - Apple Research (when it was a thing) apparently did some testing for voice activated assistants in early aughts (or maybe even before, before they were disbanded by Jobs), and the conclusion was that push to talk presents a much better user experience. I heard this story at Microsoft Research from the researcher who did this work at Apple previously. Her name escapes me at the moment, however.

Anecdotally, I would very much prefer push-to-talk myself, actually. I don't understand why companies are so resistant to the idea. Google even has all the hardware necessary (although I would prefer a positive, tactile response when I engage the assistant).

I would also like a pure text mode assistant in my phone, for the situation where voice commands would be awkward or impossible (due to noise etc).

<comment><USER5> >Anecdotally, I would very much prefer push-to-talk myself, actually. I don't understand why companies are so resistant to the idea. Google even has all the hardware necessary (although I would prefer a positive, tactile response when I engage the assistant).

Maybe because they do not want to have the best Ux, and their goal is probably something different - like "accidentally" gathering data.

<comment><USER6> There are other possible goals. This kind of accidental gathered data is legally toxic.

In this case, I presume it is about friction while shopping. If you say aloud 'I want a dollhouse' and one is delivered to your house, more money is earned. When you need 10 seconds to walk to the device, thats 10 seconds to think if you really need it.

In theory, the free market should detect that a customer need is not met, and someone should provide an alternative.

This not happening is a clear signal that there is a too powerfull monopoly/oligipoly/cartel at work, and governemental intervention is required.

<comment><USER4> But you still have to walk to the device - any kind of a significant distance in anything but a completely silent room turns speech recognition into a game of broken telephone. And you most certainly aren't buying something as elaborate as a doll house through voice. Voice is best suited for things you routinely re-buy, such as coffee beans, cat food, etc.

And then there are devices like watches and phones that are always on you and walking to a device is not a concern.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/7/14200210/amazon-alexa- tech...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/7/14200210/amazon-alexa-tech-news- anchor-order-dollhouse)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Luckily this was the first time and totally just a fluke... wait: [https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/11/technology/google-home- mini...](https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/11/technology/google-home-mini- security-flaw/index.html)

<comment><USER8> Totally "accidentally".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shouldn't accidentally be in quotes? Every time google is busted doing nasty things with users privacy they use "accidentally"

<comment><USER10> yeah,

this stuff i don't understand

People keeping giving Facebook and Google the benefit of the doubt

AT what point are people going to realize these are fundamentally dishonest and deceitful companies

<comment><USER9> PR BS works, and Google and FB has enormous power when it comes to PR BS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems to happen pretty often with some companies. They should be more careful to not make such silly mistakes!

</comment><comment><USER12> Hahaha all these accidents that happen nowadays! Just a coincidence?

</comment><comment><USER13> accidentally, yeah right.</comment>


"The Go tree is now open for general work" - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/otCULnOjs7I

<comment><USER2> It would be cool if they could use a bot to help guide people posting pull requests. I'm sure there's a lot of cool ideas to play around with in that space.

<comment><USER3> They don't accept pull requests on Github, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER4> I think that's precisely the point. The bot would usher them to gerrit, with some pointers on how to interface with their systems. And it'd then close the pull request.

Since PRs can't be disabled on GitHub, it seems inevitable that they'll be getting them submitted.

<comment><USER3> Oh! That makes sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Just Serve - <AUTHOR> https://www.justserve.org <comment><USER2> I like the idea of local service projects to get me out of the house.</comment>


Health Service laptop goes missing with over eight million patient records - <AUTHOR> http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2079023/nhs-laptop-goes-missing-million-patient-records?WT.rss_f=Phil+Muncaster+-+V3.co.uk&WT.rss_a=NHS+laptop+goes+missing+with+over+eight+million+patient+records&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> And _still_ , even after all the accidental loses of data from the MoD, the NHSand the banks, people who hold sensitive data don't setup laptops containing data like that with decent encrypted filesystem setups...

OK so that isn't a perfect solution (the user could keep their passwords on a bit of paper clearly marked "passwords" in the laptop's bag, if the user loses their passwords the data is lost to them (unless a multi-key system is used and the IT dept keeps their own key so they can reset the user's access, though that probably requires the user sending the laptop into central IT for a time), data could still be emailed out to insecure places by the user, and so on) but it is a _far_ better situation than leaving the data unencrypted on the easily liftable device.

It really does surprise me that after the last five or more years a proper encryption regime isn't mandated on laptops holding such data.

<comment><USER3> I work for a very-well-known-and-frequently-mentioned-in-the-press organisation in the UK healthcare sector and I can assure you that everyone here has encrypted laptops.

In many ways it's a pain in the ass, because almost exactly none of us will ever use Patient Identifiable Data but we have to put up with machines that run much slower than they should due to the on-the-fly encryption. We're also physically incapable of burning CDs/DVDs or using USB sticks etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who exactly designed a system which allows a single laptop to store this many records at once? I could see couple of dozen or so at a time, even a hundred, if a doctor wants to download all his patient records for the week. But 8 million on one laptop? I don't even know what to say.

<comment><USER5> Based on my knowledge of what my wife does for a living, securing a hospital's reimbursement from Medicare/Medicaid, I think I can make a pretty good guess.

It's a single person, or small department, using some off-the-shelf tool like Excel or Access to massage data into the format necessary to integrate it with one of the various third parties that must process it in order to get full reimbursement while ensuring compliance with regulations. The problem itself demands that huge amounts of personal data are gathered together, and the way the system works generally forces it to be handled by a regular person, on their workstation.

Obviously this data needs to be shared with the payor (e.g., Medicare). The thing is that the reimbursement regulations change _constantly_ (not just every year or something, but literally weekly in the Federal Register), and changing regulations demand different reporting procedures and formats. The constantly-changing nature means that it's not a very good candidate for automation: every hospital (and every other healthcare provider) would need to have IT staff constantly active addressing changes, or at the very least, providers of hospital ERP/records systems would need to be constantly addressing changes, and hospital IT would need to constantly be integrating software updates.

And it's not just the payor that's a problem. There are countless third parties that communicate this data. Because cases are handled as cases rather than people, when a case is transferred to another hospital, or sent out to a specialist, that must be tracked. But frequently it's not the hospital doing the checking, it's the patient himself that checks himself out and goes to another hospital. That means that hospitals are constantly downloading Medicaid records to cross-check against their own data, and negotiating with other providers to determine who gets "credit" for the cases. Since all of these third parties have their own systems, and the number of combinations of transfers between providers is astronomical, the communication of this data tends to turn into one-off projects, demanding that a human compile the data in a way that both sides agree to.

So it appears that part of the need to keep human hands in heaps of personal data, is driven by the nature of our healthcare regulation.

(I know the article is written about the UK, but I'm assuming that much of what I've said generalizes across the ocean)

<comment><USER6> I can second this with my knowledge of what my mother does for a living.

The hospital inputs their data into Epic medical software. The home care agency tracks their data in an 80,000-line Excel spreadsheet (less than 8,000,000, which is good, right?). My mother copies down the name and other personal identifiers like insurance numbers from the Excel spreadsheet, counts (with the end of a pen on the screen) the number of billable visits, and enters this _by hand_ onto a printed form which receives minor changes as you noted. She then collates these forms into stacks for various insurance agencies, and faxes the piles to the appropriate numbers. She's an RN, has 20 years of experience, and this is what they pay her to do?

Oh, and her password for remote login to do this from home was (until last week when she told me because I was talking to my sister about password strength) literally abc123. This was the default set by the IT department about 2 years ago.

I will never work in medical IT due to real-life horror stories like this.

<comment><USER7> > I will never work in medical IT due to real-life horror stories like this.

I'd wager that there are real-life horror stories like this for just about any industry - they happen whenever non-computer-savvy people meet computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why the hell do organizations keep putting this kind of sensitive data on a laptop?

Even if your process requires someone remote from the office to work with the data in desktop tools like Excel, etc., it seems like it'd be good sense to require them to do it over a Terminal Services or Citrix connection to a secured server.</comment>


Auto Generated Tweets That You'll Never Know Are Spam with Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602109/this-ai-will-craft-tweets-that-youll-never-know-are-spam/ <comment><AUTHOR> This Article is about some tests on how to trick people in clicking spam-links with auto generated tweets</comment>


Fitbit Acquires Coin - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/18/fitbit-buys-coin/ <comment><USER2> I never really understood Coin.

It is basically all the negatives of having one electronic payment method (If you lose it, you have no money unless you have cash on hand or can somehow get money out of the bank... if your bank even has a physical branch nearby) with all the negatives of having multiple credit cards (It is a lot more attractive to thieves / skimmers)

With a whole bunch of new negatives like, if you lose your Coin, that means someone has access to _all_ your cards and even if you don't lose it, you are essentially handing people your entire wallet when you use it. Skimmers probably _love_ this thing. Oh, and not to mention: You can't use it online. So all those _pesky_ credit cards; yeah, make sure to keep those around because you still need them.

It just didn't make any sense to me. Pay $100 for no real upsides and a lot of really terrifying downsides.

<comment><USER3> It's moot because the product is now dead, but if I understood Coin correctly, all of your criticisms are invalid.

> If you lose it, you have no money unless you have cash on hand or can > somehow get money out of the bank

You keep the actual cards at home. So if you lose your Coin, you just go back to your separate cards.

> It is a lot more attractive to thieves / skimmers

The Coin was secured through your phone's passcode/biometrics/pattern, so yeah if they broke that you'd be boned. The same as with GWallet/iPay. A sophisticated mugger could do it I guess.

> if you lose your Coin, that means someone has access to all your cards

Not without the phone.

> you are essentially handing people your entire wallet

No, before you hand it to a waiter or whatever you lock it into the card you want to use.

<comment><USER4> >> It is a lot more attractive to thieves / skimmers

>>The Coin was secured through your phone's passcode/biometrics/pattern, so yeah if they broke that you'd be boned. The same as with GWallet/iPay. A sophisticated mugger could do it I guess.

Mugger A: " _Give me the wallet!_ "

(Hands over wallet)

Mugger A: " _Now unlock your phone and give it to me!_ "

(Unlocks phone and hands it over)

Mugger B: " _Better chop off his thumb too ... might need it to unlock some apps!_ "

(Gulps)

<comment><USER5> Holy shit, you've just convinced me to reconsider having fingerprint unlocking active on my phone...

<comment><USER6> That's why I use my toe.

<comment><USER7> Same.

Also, my iPhone 5s seems to read my toeprint better than my fingerprint.

<comment><USER5> You guys are joking, right? _Right_?

<comment><USER7> I did it as a joke at first but it actually works quite well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The promise of Coin is that you don't have to carry anything else. It is a fantastic idea.

However, unless it worked at least 95% of the time, it's useless, because you have to carry at least one backup card.

My experience with the Coin 2.0 is that it worked about 20% of the time and was very, very frustrating in every respect. It went in a drawer after a week.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand coin.

I have a debit card, I don't need to carry anything else.

It does contactless payments, chip + pin payments, ATM widthdrawls, verifies who I am at the bank and has my account details on it.

What else could I want, a credit card for things which belong more on credit? OK so now I have 2 cards, but really beyond that what else is there?

No amount of mobile hardware / phone apps are going to replace 2 cards both of which fit easily in a wallet and don't require charging, don't wear out for 5+ years (by which time the bank has replaced it free of charge), and I don't need to take out of my pocket for any other reason (so I'm not likely to lose it or leave it elsewhere).

<comment><USER10> > I have a debit card, I don't need to carry anything else.

If your card hasn't been stolen (via a hacked merchant) and your account wiped out yet, consider yourself lucky. You might want to carry a credit card as your primary instead. When (and I do mean when) it is stolen, at least it's only credit instead of your bank account balance that is impacted (and which can takes weeks or more to get back).

<comment><USER11> Have you actually ever had a card stolen or skimmed?

It's not as bad an experience as you're making it out to be. My credit union handled everything the last time I was skimmed, including giving me the money back and overnighting a new card.

<comment><USER12> There's a difference between credit and debit here.

Stolen credit card = bank is missing money; bank is incentivized to retrieve money.

Stolen debit card = _you_ are missing money; bank _may_ choose to help somehow.

<comment><USER11> They would need to know your pin code too (for authorizing debit transactions) right?

For the record it was my debit card that was skimmed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, that's just great. I was an original backer and got a Coin 1.0. They kept saying they'd ship me a Coin 2.0 due to the problems with the 1.0, but I never got it. Now it appears all mention of that has been scrubbed from their website.

It is kind of humorous that their website now as a big "Sold Out" banner right at the top next to this announcement.

<comment><USER14> I also got a Coin 1.0, but by the time it arrived I couldn't remember why I wanted it. I literally never tried it.

<comment><USER13> I just use mine for loyalty cards and magstripe gift cards (so they don't collect dust because I don't want a fat wallet). Might be worth a try if you haven't tried it for anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was an early backer of Coin, but by the time it actually shipped to me, years late, Apple Pay had been out for months. My Coin box went unopened into the recycling bin. And this was before I read reviews saying it only worked 1 in 5 times.

<comment><USER13> Honestly, I just used mine for gift/loyalty cards. Never loaded a real credit card to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does Coin have a future business model given the introduction of EMV? Did Fitbit just waste money buying them?

<comment><USER17> Coin 2.0 supports it via NFC (through agreements with banks, similar to Apple Pay, AFAIK). That's what Fitbit would want.

<comment><USER18> Coin 2.0 does not support EMV. They used slippery marketingspeak to dance around the subject (saying NFC enables "EMV payment standards") but the bottom line is your chip card would only work with Coin by reverting to traditional static magnetic stripe data.

<comment><USER17> Could you elaborate on this? Apple Pay et. al are "contactless EMV", and Coin very explicitly says that they support it for some banks:

[https://support.onlycoin.com/hc/en- us/articles/207353218-Wha...](https://support.onlycoin.com/hc/en- us/articles/207353218-What-is-EMV-and-NFC-)

<comment><USER18> No, they don't say that on the page you linked.

<comment><USER17> > _Coin 2.0 is equipped with contactless NFC technology that increases > merchant compatibility and allows users to transact using EMV payment > standards._

<comment><USER18> That is what I referred to as "slippery marketingspeak". It makes no mention of bank support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any mention of how much the deal was worth?

Seems like mostly an acquihire, does Coin even have a steady revenue stream?

<comment><USER20> Nothing about how much the deal was worth. Regarding acquihire, "the acquisition accelerates Fitbit's ability to develop an active NFC payment solution that could be embedded into future Fitbit devices, broadening its smart capabilities. The acquisition excludes smart payment products, such as Coin 2.0."

[https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press- relea...](https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-release- details/2016/Fitbit-Inc-Acquires-Wearable-Payments-Assets-From-Financial- Technology-Company-Coin/default.aspx)

<comment><USER21> Sounds like an acquihire + hardware tech. Coin has a decent NFC lower power transmitter and I'd guess some smart embedded developers.

I'm also guess getting NFC transmitter though FCA inspection/compliance isn't cheap nor easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember in September 2014 when Apple announced Apple Pay watching the keynote live on TV. I was visiting San Francisco at the time, staying in SoMa, and out the window adjacent I had a clear view of the Coin office. To be a fly on the wall during that time…

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't see much a fit for payment features in fitbit products. They should probability focus on iterating the hardware and experience regarding the "sport watch" idea. Their strength is also the simplicity of the product.

EDIT: interesting examples provided in the replies, thanks. To buy things while running without having anything with you is a good thing, also if this technology allows to, like, register in a gym or alike and enter without any other token.

<comment><USER24> I'm not saying I want this, but it would be possible:

Imagine your access card for the gym doesn't provide free access to everything, but every time you enter the sauna it bills you one dollar, or physically walking into a class bills you the individual class tuition. Unlocking the racquetball court door costs three dollars. Then after your workout you walk up to the vending machine to get your bottled tapwater or fancy water or whatever and pay with your gym access card. Inevitably there are not enough treadmills for peak times, so something is set up today like signup sheets and time use limits, but crazy as it sounds you could pay per use or bid to reserve, high bid on treadmill #7 from 6:00 to 6:30 tonight is two dollars, wave your magic token thingy here to give you the new high bid at three dollars. Gamify things such that every 100 miles on the treadmill means a free run next time. Insert anecdote of people hooking up their fitbit to a cordless drill to get 100 miles per day so as to get free treadmill time.

<comment><USER25> Why do you need to buy a company to do this? This sounds like the kind of thing one person working alone could bring to the market, modulo sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This smells more like an aquihire. FitBit doesn't need any of Coin's IP to provide payment functionality in their wearables.

</comment><comment><USER27> so only other player left here is swypcard

</comment><comment><USER28> "Acquires."

</comment><comment><USER29> jump the shark startup edition

</comment><comment><USER30> Ouch.

Coin was a company that stood by it's products, Fitbit is the kind of outfit that will find any lame excuse to not issue you an RMA.

<comment><USER31> Interesting. I've had a Fitbit since 2012 (the Ultra) and have had almost uniformly positive experiences with customer service.

<comment><USER32> Echoed. Bought a Fitbit Charge a few years ago, band started separating, I _tweeted_ them and got a response within 20 minutes, and a new Fitbit Charge about 8 days later. I've since upgraded to the Charge HR.</comment></comment></comment>


Uber rides down 70% in cities hardest hit by coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/19/uber-coronavirus-update/ <comment><USER2> Now if they could get me my groceries. And to everyone else. Grocery stores are where we'll see the next super-contagion events.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only 70%?</comment>


Class action lawsuit filed over "overheating" iPads - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/class-action-lawsuit-filed-over-overheating-ipads.ars

<comment><USER2> How often do class action lawsuits work out for anyone but the lawyers?</comment>


Better Form Inputs for Better Mobile User Experiences - <AUTHOR> https://css-tricks.com/better-form-inputs-for-better-mobile-user-experiences/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've yet to implement the tips in this article on my current project but will do so prior to launch. Maybe a lot of you here are aware of these attributes, but they were new to me.</comment>