Intellectual Ventures ramps up lobbying in face of new legislation - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/21/intellectual-ventures-lobbying-patent-lawsuits-patent-trolls/3145691/ <comment><USER2> I regret having lived, for a short time, within trebuchet range of these folks and not doing anything with it.

<comment><USER3> A donation to the EFF might cheer you up :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> Intellectual Ventures spent $310,000 to influence federal policy from July 1 through Sept. 30, up from $165,000 the firm reported spending on lobbying during the previous months, according to a report filed with the U.S. Senate._

What does this mean exactly, and how is this different from bribery and corruption?

<comment><USER5> Paying a lobbying firm to push a particular policy is quite different than bribing a public official. Lobbying isn't, by and large, an act of "hey here's a $50 why don't you look the other way." It's: "hey, your staff doesn't have time to write a bill so here's some proposed text." Or: "hey, here is this study we commissioned showing that global warming is a sham, so you have something to throw back at people who claim you're being unscientific."

Lobbying involves a ton of leg-work and that's not free.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it still undemocratic? Since anyone with bigger pockets can buy more influence. If not bribery, it still looks like corruption.

<comment><USER5> A substantial amount of what people call "corruption" in American politics is instead two cherished principles of American society being fundamentally at odds as a result of our representative system. We want everyone to have an equal say in government, but we also want people to be able to freely express their political opinions.

Why is it wrong for an environmental group to be able to draft a proposed law to give legislators something concrete to work with? Why is it wrong for an industry organization, which usually knows way more about the specific industry than the lay public, to educate legislators about their industry? Why is it wrong for a rich person to buy media time to convince voters of his views?

These activities aren't inherently wrong. They're not inherently corruption. We might not like the consequences resulting from these activities. Often, we just don't like the people engaging in these activities. But as long as they're directed at convincing people (either voters or politicians), as opposed to giving out personal benefits, these activities aren't corruption.

<comment><USER4> What can be wrong is someone's selfish interest affecting negatively everyone else. I.e. acting not for the sake of making a useful law for the public, but acting for the sake of making a useful law for someone's particular pocket at the expense of the public. It's very clearly wrong, but how exactly this can be prevented is a good question.

<comment><USER6> The thorny issue of lobbying vs. democracy shares a lot of overlap with the realities of legal costs and the justice system. On the one hand, it's clearly unjust that the party who can afford more legal fees has a strong advantage, both in and out of the courtroom; on the other hand, it's also unjust to not allow someone to choose their own legal counsel, and how they make their case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man, the worst part is that Intellectual Ventures Lab works on some really cool stuff. Maybe a little impractical, but really cool and innovative nonetheless.

I'd totally go work for them if they weren't backed by one of the worst corporations on the planet.

<comment><USER8> Do they actually _work_ on really cool stuff though? As far as I can tell, they think up something that could possibly exist and patent it without actually making it, or if they do make it, they only do it halfway (aka not doing the actual difficult parts).

<comment><USER9> So I went to the IV dog and pony show. There was maybe 1 project that was actually interesting out of ~dozens. They don't have the technological research base to actually finish a project in house, so I think they tend to spin stuff out. Example (with dubious prospects): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower)

IV hasn't gone after the little guys yet, so I find the Lodsys-type guys a lot scarier.

<comment><USER10> Isn't Lodsys strongly linked to IV? As in, they're playing the shell game?

<comment><USER9> From what I have read from other hacker news threads, there is no evidence of that (and Lodsys apparently denies it).

Digging around, the only connection I could find was IV selling Lodsys some of its patents. Not much evidence for an actually connection, much less shell game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The sad thing is that they are capitalized by so many public and private pension funds ... pension participants are unwittingly sapping a core engine of growth.

</comment><comment><USER12> They fear a weakening of the patent system. We fear a strengthening of it. Our goals and fears are at odds. Our interests are misaligned. In a perfect world this company would exist to invent and license new ideas. In our imperfect world they exist to invent licenses for new ideas.

<comment><USER4> _> In a perfect world this company would exist to invent and license new ideas. _

No, in a perfect world this company wouldn't exist at all, and its founders would be jailed for racketeering. In our imperfect world these thugs claim they are a "legitimate business".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For some reason I read their name as "Intellectual Vampires."

<comment><USER4> More like Intellectual Vultures.</comment></comment>


Effective Testing with RSpec 3, Starting on the Outside: Acceptance Specs - the-red-button http://blog.travisspangle.com/effective-testing-with-rspec-3-starting-on-the-outside-acceptance-specs/ <comment> the-red-button Using a test file to guide setup was new to me. I'm going to start practicing with that.</comment>


Open Source Data Science to Fight Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/open-source-data-science-to-fight-covid-19-corona-virus-95bf4ebcb52c <comment><USER2> Good article! Hope this is used by many.</comment>


Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme–Right? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/ <comment><USER2> Facebook already has access to a larger repository of photos going back over a decade and all the years inbetween along with decent face recognition to create a much bigger dataset than resorting to a hashtag challenge. But I guess that wouldn't be newsworthy.

<comment><USER3> _Facebook already has access to a larger repository of photos going back over a decade and all the years inbetween along with decent face recognition to create a much bigger dataset than resorting to a hashtag challenge. But I guess that wouldn 't be newsworthy._

This was addressed in the article:

 _In various versions of the meme, people were instructed to post their first profile picture alongside their current profile picture, or a picture from 10 years ago alongside their current profile picture. So, yes: These profile pictures exist, they've got upload time stamps, many people have a lot of them, and for the most part they're publicly accessible.

But let's play out this idea.

Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g., how people are likely to look as they get older). Ideally, you'd want a broad and rigorous dataset with lots of people's pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.

...

In other words, it would help if you had a clean, simple, helpfully labeled set of then-and-now photos._

<comment><USER4> It tries and fails to address it. I could barely count the number of zeros I would have to put in front of the 1 in the percentage of Facebook's photo data this meme covers. And a good portion of their dataset will have EXIF timestamps. Training an algorithm on the meme only would be insane waste of their data set.

<comment><USER5> > their dataset will have EXIF timestamps

It used to be the case (still is?) that the dates on uploaded photos weren't applied to the photo album. I remember having to go through holiday snaps and change the date on each from the upload date to the actual date. The images were also resized down from what was uploaded.

So, if they have the originals with the full EXIF data, I'd like to be able to use that for my old photos!

<comment><USER6> Chances are they have and you won't be able to use them.

Why would it be so ? Because it profits facebook which is the only reason facebook exists. It profits them to have original with EXIF for data mining and you gave them permission to do so while also giving them the data, and it profits them to not make them available to you to save on bandwidth and processing costs.

<comment><USER7> eh, I think not. There is a reason why they resize the photos. To save space. Even at facebook scale the amount of space they save by doing this must be enormous.

Additionally, images used in AI are usually scaled down a lot more, 224x224 for something like resnet50. which means that they do not need your high quality original and the smaller one they generated are fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://globalnews.ca/news/4855500/facebook-10-year- challeng...](https://globalnews.ca/news/4855500/facebook-10-year-challenge- facial-recognition/)

[https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1085675097766031360?ref_...](https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1085675097766031360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1085675097766031360&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fglobalnews.ca%2Fnews%2F4855500%2Ffacebook-10-year- challenge-facial-recognition%2F)

and rebuttal.

I know that Facebook's actions mean that it no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt but this seems like a non story that someone really wants to be a story.

Thinking about it lest say 10,000 people respond, is that even enough data to move the needle? Which photo do you use for the old vs recent? There is alot of cleanup that manually needs to be done for this to be a decent data set. Basic common sense says this is a non story.

I did my post undergrad research in 2000 in neural nets and the data sets were our biggest limiting factor, second was computation time. 10,000 data points was a huge set back then and still wasn't enough for most tasks.

<comment><USER9> 10,000 ?

It's probably many many more times that about three times the magnitude.

It might be a bit of a noisy dataset now that it's a meme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is just stupid. Even if Facebook wanted to do something like this, they have the data. Millions and millions of photos are already time stamped.

<comment><USER11> not stupid, just good critical thinking. most people are too naive when using facebook as the past shows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "My flippant tweet began to pick up traction. My intent wasn't to claim that the meme is inherently dangerous."

He spun an offhand comment into full-on opinion manipulation, because we're now reading his article on the topic that not only has a clickbait headline, it seems to imply there's something more to the story, when in fact there isn't.

So now we've got all this digital ink spilled on the (entirely hypothetical) topic, and plenty of eyeballs buying it with their attention. But all of it is vapor, even at the admission of the authors.

<comment><USER13> The issue with internet nowadays to be honest. As soon as you got a bit of traction with a tweet or with a blog post people try to milk it in order to market themselves or other narcissistic interests.

<comment><USER14> It's not the internet. It's media in general. They need to create an artificial story to make a profit. Now that the internet is a profit making center, the media and its tactic has found a welcome home in the internet.

Hence the "arctic blast" about to "ravage the east coast". Or as someone who has lived in the northeast, just winter. Or any other superlative clickbait. Everything is a crisis, everything is a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Facebook and Google's facial recognition software is so advanced that they have no real use for photos of people explicitly tagged 10 years apart.

Google Photos has been able to track my goddaughter from literally her first photo (when she looked like an alien) to now (5 years later), with about 2 photos per year.

The subtle point here is that people have became so suspicious of these platforms that everything they do is observed with a sharper eye on privacy, speaking of which... I wonder how Portal is doing?

</comment><comment><USER16> A funny trend I've been seeing is posts from /r/conspiracy being mined by journalists for their stories. This exact idea was posted a few days ago to Reddit, and is not this tech writer's idea.

<comment><USER17> I don't believe that for a second, it totally sounds like a conspiracy.

<comment><USER18> If you were going for a joke, nice one!

If serious, I can confirm that I saw this on reddit a few days ago too.

<comment><USER19> I saw it as well, honestly I think journalists (the kind that are closer to glorified bloggers) have been doing this for quite awhile though. I can't remember what site it was for sure, maybe cracked, but I remember looking at the recent articles and it looked like a tl;dr of some of the top reddit posts of the week.

<comment><USER16> I've definitely noticed that with Cracked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This research has been in existence for over a decade[1]. Clearly this would be a valuable dataset, but as others have mentioned, Facebook has probably the most valuable dataset. Realistically, the biggest hurdle in modelling aging is in children. The bones/muscles/everything are so elastic that it makes it difficult to accurately predict how they will look. The primary use for this tech has been for catching high-valued individuals that have gone in hiding or children kidnapped into human trafficking (hence the focus on modeling child face growth).

This entire thing sounds more like someone made a joke about "Big Brother always watching" and people without a real understanding of what's possible freaked out when they realized it is.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- science/can-y...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/can- your-face-reveal-how-long-youll-live-new-technology-may-provide-the- answer/2014/07/02/640bacb4-f748-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html?utm_term=.1b3abfe183cd)

</comment><comment><USER17> Imagine the irony if that _wasnt 't_ the intent, but articles like this have now placed the idea in the heads of facebook engineers.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is idle speculation from somebody who has no idea what they're talking about. Because it was published on Wired it has gone viral.

It's just technical enough that most people who don't have a clue think that it might be right so they spread it.

Anyone who knows about data processing, programming, or AI knows that it's a very stupid idea due to easy-to-implement fault tolerance (such as random dropout) in machine learning models.

</comment><comment><USER22> This seems more likely to be a marketing move to me than a covert request for AI training data. They're struggling with engagement, so they seeded the 10 Year Challenge causing users to invoke the powerful emotion of nostalgia, made easy thanks to Facebook keeping all of your photos safe ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> Amount of non-stories about Facebook is getting boring.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can you think of other challenges from the past that might be good for training neural networks?

Also, is it hard to figure out the origins of a meme? Lots of them are categorized and researched pretty well already.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is saying a lot about what people think of Facebook these days. I don't believe that FB wants to gather data here. This is probably an idea coming from their marketing department. But hey, why would you not think they're evil after everything they've done?

</comment><comment><USER26> People above 18 don't have very different face biometrics between 18 and 118 years old.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe it's not the data in the meme but studying how memes spread and how well you can predict it?

</comment><comment><USER28> Exactly what I thought when I first saw this. Glad to see somebody wrote about it.

</comment><comment><USER29> What I like about this tweet is that society starts changing and realizing what possible things could be done with information that is shared. Good to see more critical thinking evolve when it comes to social media.

</comment><comment><USER30> How about you have 1.3+ billion subject?</comment>


A Pong Traffic Light In Germany. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wimp.com/trafficlight/

<comment><USER2> As long as people don't punch you in the face when you totally pwn them :D</comment>


The Dilemma of Anti-Semitic Speech Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/internet-you-can-scream-fire-all-you-want-unless-something-burns/574243/?single_page=true <comment> xkcd-sucks Apparently China's figured this one out</comment>


Weblog Project: Extracting Posts As Plain Text Files - <AUTHOR> http://zerodistraction.com/blog/2011/5/26/weblog-project-extracting-posts-as-plain-text-files.html

<comment><USER2> Here is how I solved a similar problem (project on Github included): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2576266></comment>


Google Docs, Not Found - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/

<comment><USER2> I keep all my most important documents in the "cloud"!</comment>


Solving design problems - <AUTHOR> http://design.canonical.com/2012/11/solving-design-problems/ <comment><USER2> Pretty funny seeing this come out of Canonical - maybe they should have considered this stuff before making Unity?

<comment><USER3> I think they did do a lot of this stuff, and probably put way too much weight on it. Someone has a mockup of some tweaked and dumbed down UI that streamlines some common tasks, and shows it to a newbie user. It tests well, because the stuff they are measuring is the stuff they implemented ("How well can someone find the internet browser? Easy, it's a big fat button! Yay, win."). Then it hits the real world and edge cases and inconsistencies abound, and you don't have the weight of experience and history to fall back on because you have a radical new UI philosophy. So the rough edges persist longer than they should and people complain, and it harms your brand in the meantime. This kind of stuff requires real investment, and investment is hard to come by in the FOSS world.

<comment><USER4> Excellent post except perhaps for the last phrase. Canonical is a for profit company, it has around 600 employees, and Unity is developed and tested by these employees. At this scale you ought to be able to do proper design, proper testing, and proper refinements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't getting GUI advice from canonical like getting advice about how to make fuel efficient cars from Chrysler?

<comment><USER6> Only if Chrysler didn't use PR firms to contain the delusional little Napoleons inside the company.</comment></comment>


Hacking the DSP-W215, Again, Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.devttys0.com/2014/05/hacking-the-dsp-w215-again-again/ <comment><USER2> This firmware is probably no better or worse than what you'd usually find on a consumer grade router from BestBuy. The difference is that this one controls AC power!

Hey manufactures: If you think there's nothing more to the Internet of Things than adding a relay and a power socket to the same insecure schlock you've been pushing for years, you're about to create a very interesting _(1)_ near- future for us all.

 _(1) In the Chinese curse sense:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_tim...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times*)

</comment><comment><USER3> This needs some context. DSP-W215 is a remote controlled power switch with WiFi.

<comment><USER4> Also, this is the third remote code execution vulnerability blogged in about as many days. Seems like dlink is having major quality issues with their software/firmware, which is spooky considering the things the device is supposed to do (manage power on an AC outlet). They did release a patch for the first problem but failed to review and fix similar flaws in the immediately surrounding code.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if 3 vulnerabilities in 3 days means this device has exceptionally bad firmware compared to other similar devices or is just suddenly getting a lot of attention from skilled hackers.

Guessing by how frail software on these types of devices (routers, access points, home automation stuff, DSL modems, cable boxes, consumer NAS enclosures, etc etc) often feels, I fear it's the latter.

<comment><USER6> In my stints doing QA, I've found that developers seldom look beyond the immediately presented problem/issue, even when that problem makes it apparent that further review and consideration is warranted if not demanded. [1]

Further, all too often, minimum mitigations -- sometimes, the word "solution" cannot even be accurately applied to these -- are conceived and implemented.

When you see repeated problems cropping up like this, based upon experience, I can express the opinion that the organization and/or the individuals involved are not really paying attention or respecting sufficiently the security aspects involved.

Hopefully, the repeated bad press will begin to change this. But... those in the organization responsible for setting or sanctioning such initiative, are often all-to-well insulated from the immediate "real world".

\--

[1] P.S. I guess I should qualify this to say that I'm speaking of what I consider to be a typical "corporate" environment. Lots of politics and inertia and, all too often, "just do what you're told".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I see these sorts of vulnerabilities I think that these devices are becoming _far too complex_ for their own good --- in this hacking series I've already seen mention of:

\- HNAP -> SOAP -> XML

\- HTTP

\- Linux

The first 2 items above are protocols that are primarily text-based and have no easy way to determine things like lengths. This is bad because it often causes whoever is writing the code to use an arbitrary length that "will probably be big enough", and IMHO that is never a good thing, for various reasons including security.

Making it controlled by a simple, _fixed-length_ (or length-delimited where absolutely required) binary protocol would've reduced or even eliminated many of these overflows, because such protocols are far easier to write correct code for. E.g., if a command is always 8 bytes, then you are always going to use a buffer of 8 bytes and read 8 bytes. Those that need variable-length data can prefix the data bytes with a length, and that must always be read first and acted on, since reading too much or too little just won't work. No need to parse text lines of arbitrary length, (un)escaping, etc. Each additional layer of complexity, each step that needs to be done, is an opportunity for bugs to be introduced.

Also, this is a device that absolutely does not need to be running Linux; its functionality would probably be achievable with an 8-bit microcontroller and WiFi module, running none or maybe a minimal realtime OS. Instead of over 4MB of firmware, a few tens of K would be sufficient. I've seen some very nice and robust embedded devices, and some that seem more like the developers just took a standard Linux devboard, put some code on it that looks like it works, then shipped it. This device is very much one of the latter.

<comment><USER8> The CoAP protocol does exactly this and is designed for the exact kind of restricted requirements you specified. It uses similar concepts to Restful HTTP to make the transition easier, but uses a binary protocol instead. You can even get gateways between it and HTTP should you need to use that for some reason (client side JavaScript etc).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protoco...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protocol)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do people always implement stuff like this in CGI (C or C++)?

Using nginx+php/perl/python would work just the same and prevent a whole slew of vulnerabilities in embedded devices, while at the same time reducing maintenance and development costs.

<comment><USER10> I agree with the sentiment but running nginx+Python on an embedded MIPS device? That's getting pretty ridiculous! Better to go the other way (lower- level), I think.

<comment><USER5> I don't think using Python is significantly more ridiculous than the current practice of either using shell scripts or your own C code to parse form-data and generate HTML. In fact, it's probably a lot less ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And the software is probably no worse than average quality for an appliance.</comment>


Redditor burnt by Paypal's "Rolling Reserve" feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/l4q2y/please_help_me_expose_this_newest_paypal_fraud/ <comment><USER2> The way PayPal risk management works is to dump the whole problem on the customer, never on themselves. This is why the "guarantees" on ebay are useless and actually a hassle for all parties, except paypal/ebay.

Try getting a false charge on your paypal card - the moment you notify them, they instantly cancel the card - but to get the money back you have to file a written snail mail report - and then they do not send you a replacement card automatically, they allow it to remain canceled and never support you otherwise unless you specifically ask for another card which will take at least two weeks to receive.

They have no problem with people leaving them as there is an endless supply of newbies and near zero competition with easy entry, because they aren't competing as a bank and don't have to obey banking laws.

<comment><USER3> As a merchant account provider PayPal has lots of competition.

<comment><USER4> I suspect OP (both here and at Reddit) would be interested in pointers to some providers who share PayPal's low cost of entry with hopefully much better service. I know I would be :-)

<comment><USER5> The only contender seems to be (as it's linked in the reddit thread) <http://www.stripe.com>.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, they're still US-only (so far).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see how he got burnt. He decided he wanted to accept credit cards directly, instead of having customers use their PayPal accounts to pay him, and so started using a PayPal service he had not been using before.

That means he's going to be subject to the same kind of things other merchants who accept credit cards have to put up with (everywhere, not just at PayPal), including acquiring banks deciding to hold a reserve to offset their risk.

The acquiring bank is on the hook to the credit card associations and issuing banks for any chargebacks that he can not cover. Worst case would be if he goes out of business leaving no money, and a year's worth of his customers chargeback. The acquiring bank is on the hook for all of that.

From a risk point of view, an acquiring bank is in about the same position as a bank that is giving you a loan, collateralized by your business, in the amount of a year's worth of your credit card sales.

<comment><USER8> I think there are a few key points that highlight why offsetting risk is not a valid justification for this behavior:

-A 30% default rate is absurdly high. There is no way 30% of the cards being used over the phone are stolen.

-Even if usage of the service stops, the Rolling Reserves are a permanent change to they way PayPal handles his account. He cannot turn this off, even if his risk profile goes to 0.

-PayPal is not even authorized to act as a bank in the state he lives and operates in.

<comment><USER9> _PayPal is not even authorized to act as a bank in the state he lives and operates in._

Does this matter? I use a bank which isn't authorized to operate in the _country_ I live in (Harris Bank, operates in the US; I'm in Canada).

<comment><USER10> I don't think it matters. Some don't seem to realize that when you sign up for any of the PayPal Pro features you're getting a real merchant account underwritten by a real bank. PayPal isn't underwriting it, it's usually JP Morgan Chase or Wells Fargo. You are asked to accept a separate agreement specific to that bank your account is assigned to when you apply for the upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> PayPal did something similar to me earlier this year. They instituted a 21 day hold on incoming payments because they suddenly decided my business was prone to chargebacks. This is after 8 years of service with _zero_ problems. Never a complaint or chargeback and 10's of thousands of dollars through my account.

I no longer have anything for sale (I open sourced my AIS Parser SDK late last year) so it didn't have a dramatic impact on my income. I decided to drop my PayPal and eBay accounts without argument -- if that's the way they want to play the game then I'll just take my business elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is still clear to me that all of the people complaining about Paypal as a merchant account provider have not dealt with regular merchant account providers.

<comment><USER13> Regular merchant accounts are actually not as bad as people think. One major difference is that merchant account providers make getting started a pain. That's when they do all of their analysis to determine if they are comfortable processing for the merchant. PayPal on the other hand does little vetting up front, making the signup process smoother, but can come down unexpectedly later in a merchant's life when it detects risky activity.

This also affects how each implements reserves. While merchant account providers may institute a 5% or 10% reserve over 3-6 months, it is more of an insurance policy spread across all of its accounts since it doesn't have a good handle on which individual account will blow up. Whereas PayPal implements reserve only after it has detected risk, it immediately places a larger reserve.

It never ceases to amaze me how negative the sentiment is towards PayPal from an audience that I would expect to be much more understanding of how difficult it is to process payments in real-time. And that PayPal became successful _because_ of its actions, not _despite_ them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the complaint he raised - "Oh no, I hand delivered it and wrote it with help of a lawyer. The complaint itself is about 50 pages long outlining everything from deceptive advertising to several violations of their state license."

</comment><comment><USER15> Square (<https://squareup.com>) is pretty cool. I have an account with them and can charge credit cards through my iPhone. They even sent me a small swiping device for free, which you plug into the headphone slot. No monthly charges and mobile capability are great, but I haven't had big sums processed with them yet so can't compare the customer service.

</comment><comment><USER16> They don't do everything that Paypal does, but Amazon Payments is working out very well for me with LiberWriter, so far. Anyone who wants to publish with Amazon is going to have an account already, so that makes for a very natural overlap that not everyone would have with their service, but... so far so good.

</comment><comment><USER17> Another shot in the arm for <https://stripe.com/>

I guess that, to take a phone order over Stripe you would need a small app to talk to the API, live. Someone should build that!

</comment><comment><USER18> When will people realize what a terrible company Paypal is? They've been screwing their users in the name of security and fraud prevention since day 1, myself included. I've lost track of how many class action law suits there have been against them.

</comment><comment><USER19> This needs more attention. I want to hear a response from Paypal.

<comment><USER20> "We don't have any physical presence in Illinois, so we don't really care about their laws," is what I'm guessing.

<comment><USER21> I was thinking "We're rich, sucks to be you.". But lying that the physical presence determines the location of a transaction would be high on the list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel sorry for the guy, however from the looks of the story he signed up to a new service with the company...probably without reading the terms and conditions

<comment><USER21> If something is illegal in your state then it's reasonable to assume that it's not in the T&C isn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> huh. I thought 'rolling reserves' were fairly typical for merchant accounts for people with bad credit. I don't remember what the rolling reserve was when I accepted credit cards directly (a loong time ago) but it was significant.

</comment><comment><USER24> Part of the reason why I think the new entrants Stripe and Samurai will kill it.

<http://samurai.feefighters.com>, <http://stripe.com>

<comment><USER25> If either of these new groundbreaking services gets very popular and attracts the eyes of the scammers, they'll be backed into the same corner that Paypal and every other merchant provider is in.

<comment><USER26> To sign up for paypal you must supply an email address (actually somebody else will have to).

But what if some other service required you to provide a copy of a goverment issued id as well as the address associated with that id?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is Paypal considered a bank and subject to similar regulation? I find that they seem to be getting away with a lot of things that wouldn't be acceptable with other financial institutions.

<comment><USER8> No, the article makes it clear that PayPal is not a licensed bank in the state of Illinois and this behavior is presumably illegal. The author claims to have filed a complaint with the state's attorney general.

<comment><USER10> The author of the article doesn't really understand the situation he's in. He signed up for a merchant account underwritten by a licensed bank (Chase or Wells Fargo) when he upgraded to PayPal Pro to get the virtual terminal. He accepted an agreement with that bank. That bank has the right to hold a reserve as outlined in that agreement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My site runs deals every couple of days leading to big sales influxes when a new product goes live and is sent to our customers. We've had these problems before meaning we haven't been able to refund clients or pay merchants. It's lead to a lot of stress.

<comment><USER29> So, care to describe some ways of dealing with it?

<comment><USER28> There aren't many, we just have to email our merchants and say they'll have to wait a few until paypal has released the revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> One sure way to earn my sympathy is to litter your post with image macros and troll faces.

<comment><USER31> Hmm, strange, seems to works pretty well. So far about 3000 upvotes and 2000 comments.

<comment><USER32> Well, 90% of the comments are "yeah, Paypal sucks!!", and it really has about 25000 upvotes and 22000 downvotes. And the dude is just ranting more in the comments. I'm not surprised he didn't name his product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is why people should use Wepay.com

I've been using them for years.

<comment><USER34> WePay.com does not do what PayPal does (yet), unfortunately.</comment></comment>


What Happens in a Measurement? - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06008 <comment><USER2> Some previous work on understanding measurement through decoherence: [http://perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/rblume- kohout/thesis/t...](http://perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/rblume- kohout/thesis/thesis.ssp.pdf)

Could someone explain the Lindblad equation in plain English?

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary in plain English?

<comment><USER4> Traditionally, in quantum mechanics a measurement "breaks the system": the state of the system is instantaneously modified in a way that does not follow the normal equation of motion (the Schrödinger equation). This is known as the "collapse of the wave function". The paper shows that there is a way in principle to include the measurement apparatus also within the quantum description, in such a way that the interaction with the system causes the system to eventually evolve into a state that corresponds exactly to the one that results from the traditional collapse of the wave function (but without a "break" in the description). It therefore supports the idea that classical behavior is an emergent phenomenon from the underlying quantum behavior, and that there is no fundamental classical-quantum divide

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Since I took quantum in college years ago I had the picture that this must be how it works. Is this at all controversial, among serious physicists?

<comment><AUTHOR> They seem intrigued and eager for further investigation from what i see, the paper showed up on my fb feed through a famous senior physicist sharing it and calling it interesting. ;)

<comment><USER4> It's definitely interesting! ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Openpilot and Remote Control - <AUTHOR> I've been wondering for a while about self-driving technology applied to trucks. There seems to be some ways to go before we have perfected self-driving technology to a point that can be safely used on semi trucks. Yet there are existing technologies such as Openpilot that allow some level of autonomous driving, my question is can we not combine that tech with an Internet remote control add-on that can be operated remotely by someone to drive the truck?
The remote control is used most of the time but when the Internet cuts out or if there is latency Openpilot takes over. This can be cost effective as an average US trucker makes ~$20/hr and an average remote worker in Philippines for example makes $2/hr.
Adding the 10x cost saving, there should be more attempts at this. What pieces am I missing or what are the things that you can think of that could go wrong. And also what are the things that could make this work if should someone were to try this? <comment><USER2> My first thought when people talking about self-driving trucks is how easy it would be to rip off a semi truck full of iPhones in the middle of nowhere when there's nobody even on board to worry about.

What happens when your self-driving truck breaks down hundreds of miles away from any of your employees? With hundreds of thousands of dollars of cargo on board?

Every hypothetical scenario you can possibly think of that your truck might encounter needs to be planned for, and every single solution needs to be weighed with the risk of how much cargo you might lose if something goes wrong.

Suffice to say, I personally think even once (if?) self-driving trucks become fully automatable, you'll still be paying someone to sit on that truck around the country, just because the risk of not having someone there may be far greater.</comment>


America has a monopoly problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/america-has-a-monopoly-problem-and-its-huge/ <comment><USER2> This is brilliant. I recently wrote in to my senator about net neutrality. His reply was a breathtakingly convoluted justification of not regulating companies like Comcast because antitrust laws would take care of it. I've never felt so insulted.

<comment><USER3> You felt insulted because he has a different opinion to you? Or did he write something insulting in his reply?

<comment><USER4> You can count the number of companies that own all American media on one hand. How is it that anti-trust is "taking care of it" again?

<comment><USER3> Maybe he thinks more than one company is sufficient then? But that's still just a civil difference of opinion! It's not insulting to be disagreed with I'm afraid.

<comment><USER5> Except in the context he is speaking of, extremely few Americans have more than one company supplying them with Internet access. It is definitionally a monopoly, and to say existing anti-trust legislation is sufficient is saying the monopolies as they exist now are acceptable and nothing needs to be done.

It is a dismissive comment from the senator, he should feel insulted. It is like saying "help I'm bleeding" and the guy next to you saying "its not that bad, get over yourself".

<comment><USER6> I'm not so sure monopoly captures the root of the internet access problem. Yes, in many markets there is a single provider (e.g., Comcast). There are other providers (e.g., Verizon). But neither enters the other's markets.

I'm not suggesting their is a spoken conspiracy. But when neither side benefits from direct competition, what's the word for that?

<comment><USER2> Trust, in the business sense of the word.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_(business)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_\(business\))

In the days of Rockefeller, these things were a little more formal. Nowadays companies know better than to put such silent agreements in writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Monopolies are a natural phenomenon in capitalism. I'm not sure why people glorify capitalism as much, given the fact that competition is impossibly hard in many areas, and that to reduce costs, and remove competitive pressure, companies tends to consolidate, i.e. reduce competition. Neither socialism nor capitalism makes sense today. We need a totally new system, but it's really hard to make a dent into the status quo, which is well-entrenched, and would resist any change!

<comment><USER8> "Socialism" and "capitalism" are not switches you turn either on or off, they're a set of policies and practices you can apply to varying degrees and extremes.

The military is quite socialist as when you enlist you're given food, housing, equipment, medical care, and other things to perform your job, but it's also part of a large capitalist system where equipment and supplies are provisioned from a (theoretically) competitive marketplace.

What we need to do is find the right balance between dog-eat-dog individualism and insufferable collectivisim.

<comment><USER7> I disagree that the solution is a balanced one somewhere between the only two puristic and unrealistic options as in both money is key, and I disagree that it should be the centerpiece of our society as it's already proven to be a weak motivator and leads to very negative consequences.

There are good things in both orders, we need to learn from them, but something in the middle we already have in EU, and it's not working so well.

<comment><USER8> Everyone is in the middle because no country, no political state of any kind, has ever been, nor likely ever will be 100% capitalist or 100% socialist. Achieving such extremes is so impractical as to be impossible.

The difference between the EU and America is actually pretty slight on these two scales, but tiny shifts in policy can have a huge impact on society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> America has a corruption problem. The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when you don't have to pay the taxes your smaller competitors have to pay and don't have to obey the same laws your competitors have to obey.

We have a systemic corruption problem (manifested in lobbying) coupled with greed on scales we've never seen before. Everything else is just a symptom of that problem.

<comment><USER10> Think of it this way: it's not that the larger companies are _breaking_ the laws or simply _not paying_ taxes that they owe - they're just being more innovative in how they approach those things. In a global economy, when there's pressure to pay lower wages by outsourcing labor, pay lower taxes by organizing some or all of the company abroad, or exploit loopholes in domestic laws for greater efficiency, that's just what you're going to do (given enough expertise and resources).

It's laughable to think a country could solve any of those things through stricter legislation; that will simply encourage those companies to move _more_ of their operations to jurisdictions with more advantageous laws/taxes/labor/etc.

So how do you "level the playing field"? One way would be bringing those advantages to smaller companies through businesses that exploit those same loopholes / tax strategies, providing them as services to companies who otherwise couldn't afford doing it themselves (i.e., exploiting legal loopholes as-a-service, international tax strategies as-a-service, etc).

Or, you embrace the global economy, specialize in what your country can do most efficiently (hint: it's _not_ manufacturing anymore in the US), and make it advantageous for companies to keep operating domestically. You lower taxes for everyone, so even the companies with few resources can enjoy the eased financial burden of taxes that normally only the big guys could avoid. In short, you _compete globally_ rather than stick your head in the sand pretending that your country is somehow isolated from the rest of the world and you can fix everything through legislation.

<comment><USER11> You're not mentioning the outsize influence that corporations have on government which leads to them permitting these loopholes. It can be fixed by legislation.

In 1952 corporate tax in the US was 33% of total revenue. Today it's less than 9%.

<comment><USER12> Corporate taxes abroad were also often higher than the US rate at the time. Now they are much lower. If you sell X in, say, the UK -- as a company you often have the option: book the profit in the UK, or in the US.

There's not much laws can do to change that, that is just the way having the flexibility to structure your business in whatever way you prefer works.

If you were to reduce the US corporate tax rate to 10%, a lot more profit would be booked in the US again.

<comment><USER13> >If you were to reduce the US corporate tax rate to 10%, a lot more profit would be booked in the US again.

Until other countries lower theirs, then it's just a race to the bottom, no?

<comment><USER14> _then it 's just a race to the bottom, no?_

The "race to the bottom" is the reason why free markets are so prosperous. Each business independently works to reduce costs and competition forces companies to share those savings with consumers.

The best example of the "race to the bottom" stopping are monopolies (often gov't supported) like Comcast where they can sit fat and happy raking in a ton of profits and telling consumers to shove it.

<comment><USER15> But in this case, we're not talking about business. We're talking about the funding to pave our roads, run our schools, be able to fight fires, and all that other good stuff we need.

<comment><USER14> The gov't is well within their right to change the tax code as they see fit. And they do all the time. It's not like we're seeing tax receipts declining. They've done nothing but increase over the last 100 years.

<comment><USER16> > They've done nothing but increase over the last 100 years.

Have they increased in line with the larger national budgets required for basic public services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the article

 _Firms like Microsoft led in the innovation in creating new barriers to entry. How could one compete with a browser provided at a zero price._

I think what happened to Microsoft is the perfect example of how to overcome a monopoly.

20 years ago, everyone thought that Microsoft's monopoly was unassailable. Google barely existed, Facebook didn't exist, Amazon was a bookseller and Apple was basically bankrupt.

20 years ago, Netflix had a few million DVD customers and AOL was the largest ISP.

Who knows what will happen in the next 20 years?

<comment><USER18> But importantly, the government went after Microsoft for anti-trust and actually won even if they didn't break them up. It's impossible to really know the counter-factual of what would have happened if it wasn't sued for anti- trust. But, you can safely say it wouldn't have thrown a lifeline to Apple with the investment and it may have been much more aggressive in these emerging spaces. I still think it was still not fundamentally "ready" for the Internet and mobile but I do think that lawsuit made it much, much friendlier to newcomers.

<comment><USER17> _But, you can safely say it wouldn 't have thrown a lifeline to Apple with the investment and it may have been much more aggressive in these emerging spaces._

Microsoft "saving" Apple is apocryphal at best. The $250 million that MS invested wouldn't have made a difference when Apple lost a billion the same quarter and spent $100 million buying out PowerComputings Mac license.

Microsoft tried aggressively to get into mobile, search, and the music business. They failed at execution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _We have become a rent-seeking society_

It just dawned on me while reading the article that this accurately describes the shift from licensed software to SaaS that has been happening in the past decade.

<comment> wu-ikkyu The digital landscape seems to be growing increasingly feudalistic. Users have increasingly less control over the products and services they use.

-Instead of buying a movie or a song, you stream it

-You don't own your data in the cloud

-You don't own the music you buy from Apple

-You can't even take the battery out of many newer model phones

<comment><USER20> feudalism

n.

A political and economic system of Europe from the 9th to about the 15th century, based on the holding of all land in fief or fee and the resulting relation of lord to vassal and characterized by homage, legal and military service of tenants, and forfeiture.

<comment><USER21> Parent clearly means feudalism in the abstract sense.

<comment><USER20> Honestly, I searched for the definition expecting to disagree. I posted it when I realized parent was right, and figured I'm not the only person who hasn't studied feudalism in a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> America has a capitalism problem. What the article fails to address is that the root cause is really capitalism. Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates, which in the case of businesses, that eventually means bad monopolies. Under a representative democracy that also means politics will always be corrupted because those with money and power will always be benefited by controlling politics, and they have the money and power to do so (who owns the news media? who can afford to buy off politicians, whether they start corrupt or not?). While the power of monopolies ebbs and flows as those without capital get angrier, the monopolies will always come back because that's what capitalism does.

Monopolies are not inherently bad. It's entirely possible to have a monopoly and have a great thing that everyone likes and is happy with and which keeps innovating. But under capitalism the primary incentive is the accumulation of capital which rarely lines up with creating something great long term.

<comment><USER23> I can think of at least one way to diminish companies power over legislatures. Pay representatives enough that they're indifferent to corrupt forces. It's not like there an expectation for representives to be broke.

<comment><USER24> Define "enough".

I don't think this solution really works. For some folks, nothing is ever enough. Then you also need to consider that it is less about money for some and more about friends and power. Maybe I don't do what corporations ask because they are going to pay my campaign. Maybe I do it because it makes me feel like a big man being the person they all come to for favors. Maybe I do it to gain acceptance into an aristocracy. I don't know how you can compete against that on a government salary, no matter how big.

Donald Trump is supposedly worth $3.5 billion. Do you think paying him more money would change the way he governs? I only use him as an example because he is the richest US politician, but there aren't too many poor ones at the federal level.

I guess I just don't see how you could ever pay a politician enough to be "indifferent to corrupt forces".

<comment><USER23> I'm dismissing Trump as an example as he's a clear outlier.

How much do you figure you would have to pay Bill Gates to babysit? Unless you're in his immediate circle that's going to cost quite a lot of money. People react to incentives in relation to their current wealth. A chartered flight or sweatheart real estate deal will mean a lot less to someone making plenty for their job of representing the people. They'll also be much more sensitive to scandals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Capitalism on a smaller scale is broken. Once you have achieved a monopoly they become entrenched in the socio-political system.

On a global scale, where laws can't protect I.P. we will see innovation coming out from new sources. If America is happy to stagnate, we will see India and China leading the future.

</comment><comment><USER26> Web link doesn't work if you've already visited the site, including incognito.

<comment><USER27> Archive link: [http://archive.is/02i6P](http://archive.is/02i6P)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> American has an optimism problem. Or rather, optimism seems to be unequally distributed. Feels like we need some leadership to raise our eyes to all the opportunities out there, and how we can get to a better spot.

<comment><USER29> So, we need someone to show us how to make America great again?

<comment><USER28> No, I think the opposite: current leadership is driven a lot of FUD. We need some honest optimism.

<comment><USER16> The reason we don't have any of those people is becauses they all recognise the rigged, cynical quagmire we have built for ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Peter Thiel (who works with YC) will tell you that monopolies are good for the world.

<comment><USER31> They often are, because companies in highly competitive industries don't have the excess profits to reinvest in research. Computing as we know it is largely the story of monopolies. Bell Labs bankrolled by the AT&T monopoly. Xerox PARC bankrolled by the Xerox copier monopoly. The Internet bankrolled by the ultimate monopoly (the military). The modern web bankrolled by the Google/Apple duopoly.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >companies in highly competitive industries don't have the excess profits to reinvest in research.

On the flip side, monopolies often have little incentive to invest in improving their products/services, and find they can profit from making their products cheaper/worse.

<comment><USER32> Or outright killing research that threatens their main revenue drivers. Like, OK, we eventually got digital cameras, but Kodak didn't do anything with it for a long time because they wanted to keep selling film. With graver consequences, Exxon decided to suppress its own findings about climate change.

<comment><USER33> Another ongoing example: suppression of research into male birth control due to fears of cutting into profits from the cash cow that is female birth control.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FPGA x86 Processor - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/fpga-x86-processor/ <comment><USER2> Good luck, this is very, very hard

Why?

Having tested an x86 processor from a 3rd party manufacturer (not the big ones, and not even the 2nd league)

\- Bios. Including ACPI stuff. So Windows XP would boot, with linux some would boot, some would work but with instabilities, some would not boot

\- Minor incompatibilities and every nook and cranny of the x86 spec.

\- Drivers for everything your board does different

\- The x86 (legacy) infrastructure. Not sure how much you need to boot and make Windows work for example. It may get nasty. A20? Chained interrupt handlers? DMA controllers?

<comment><USER3> It looks like he only wants to emulate 8086, so ACPI and booting Windows/Linux are not a possibility.

Not saying that its simple to implement an 8086, but it should be significantly easier than implementing an 80386/80486 (which is what one would expect today as a minimum when referring to it as x86).

<comment><USER2> Aah that changes the picture

Maybe he can boot FreeDOS then (not sure if it uses i386 mode, probably not)

It would be nice to boot, to show something, maybe even play an old game

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome. One of the running bets I've had is how many chapters of Hennesy [1] you can implement in an FPGA. Early on it was hard to do more than basic RISC architectures, the 6502 Etc. Then you could do the Z80 which was a good cisc variant that had some excellent code tests. The 8086 and 68000 make for good follow on targets. At some point we should be able to do a VAX, its sort of a local maximum of CISCyness.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative- App...](http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Approach- Edition/dp/0123704901)

<comment><USER5> > At some point we should be able to do a VAX

You mean a processor where all of the complex opcodes are implemented in loadable microcode?

<comment><USER4> That's the one! I happen to have what is a fairly complete collection of all of the 'chip' VAX cpus (for Qbus) starting with the KA610 (MicroVAX I), through the KA692 (VAX 4000/700a), and its fascinating to watch the architecture go from a nearly pure microcode implementation to a nearly pure 'gate' implementation. From the perspective of looking at the tradeoffs of microcode vs gates it is really an excellent tutorial on computer architecture.

<comment><USER5> If we want a microcoded architecture, I'd prefer the PDP-10, but that's me.

How much more complex is a mostly-microcode VAX implementation compared to a MIPS? The point about being able to move stepwise up the hardware complexity ladder by progressively replacing microcode with gates is a really good one, though.

<comment><USER6> > I'd prefer the PDP-10

yeah, or a Foonly...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Timestamps on the source code repo seem to date this to July 2009.

</comment><comment><USER8> My god, the ability to use this for tracing code makes me more excited than anything I've seen in a while. The debugging facilities on x86 are, well, limited to the point of being damn near useless. I may spend some time hacking solid trace functionality into this, if it ends up being an open core.

<comment><USER9> For an undergrad OS course, we had to build an OS from scratch. Part of that was doing the dance to get from real mode to protected mode. We had a bug in our boot loader that we were pretty stumped with; to solve it, we ended up hacking debugging printfs into the "CPU" inside QEMU and found the problem very quickly.

I don't want to be working at that level _every day_ but it sure was a fun project.

<comment><USER10> I remember dumping registers to text-mode screen memory so that I wouldn't waste a register. Half of the result landed in the color values, so sometimes I couldn't read all of the value because it was flashing green on green. I prefered Bochs' Port E9 hack.

Oh, OS courses at the university... good old time. (Some participants complained that going from zero to bare-metal x86 was too difficult.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most of the implementation is based on Zet <http://zet.aluzina.org/index.php/Zet_processor> and cpu86 <http://www.ht- lab.com/freecores/cpu8086/cpu86.html> as mentioned in the project description. The Zet implementation can already run several DOS games on a pretty low-end FPGA board like the DE1, but only does the older 16-bit instructions.

Not sure what he tries to accomplish, but it seems like a small system based on a CPU, memory, VGA controller(? not seen) and a 16550 UART and a lot of tests to proof correct implementation?

<comment><USER12> ya, I have posted that several times here but I keep getting shadow banned for some reason. here is my implementation of Zet PC-XT SoC that I did like 4 years ago. <https://github.com/donnaware/ZBC---The-Zero-Board-Computer>

<comment><USER11> will have a look at this :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmm, besides being from 2009, this looks very very incomplete, there's almost no real functional code, just a multiplier, divider, and a simple ram module (and not sure if any of those work properly...). So all in all, not too exciting, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER14> Actively developing a x86 FPGA project isn't easy. The ML403 boards originally sold for $495 each. Most SoC/Processor development requires large FPGAs and the boards cost even more.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome! Maybe one day we can extend it to more modern members of the x86 family (286,386) that introduced more opcodes (hence producing the complicated ISA encoding that x86 has) and operating modes (unreal mode, protected mode, SMM, ... )

</comment><comment><USER16> That seems insane. Even _decoding_ X86 is insanely complicated.

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome, that's a lot of connections to manage. Do you have any problems with memory or IO constraints on the Xilinx?

</comment><comment><USER18> I recognize Norton Commander in the first photo. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER19> EE? Extended Essay at the IB?

That's only supposed to be 4000 words. A project like this could turn into a book.

<comment><USER20> Much more likely EE => Electrical Engineering. This is probably a senior project or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What kind of clock rate could this achieve? As fast as a historic 8086?

</comment><comment><USER21> The first thing that I think of when I see this is bitcoin mining! Maybe could give the Jalapeño / Butterfly Labs guys a run for their ... satoshis.</comment>


Why Renewables Can't Save the Planet–and Nuclear Power Can - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-the-planet/ <comment><USER2> This is an opinion piece by Michael Shellenberger, an ambitious activist and eco-pundit whose writings on environmentalism are somewhat controversial. I wonder who is funding his crusade? Just asking.</comment>


Dear DoJ: You Need To Sue Apple Again - <AUTHOR> http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/dear-doj-you-need-to-sue-apple-again/

<comment><USER2> Anti-competitive behavior doesn't become a violation of US law until it involves the abuse of a monopoly position, involves market collusion, or breaks some other law. While anti-competitive, Apple doesn't currently exercise a meaningful monopoly in mobile device operating systems: either one looks at handsets where they are actually not even the market leader or one looks at tablets which is hardly a developed market.

Apple's actions with regard to the Agency Model aren't prosecutable because of any Apple monopoly but because it involves market collusion. Now, if Google and Apple colluded to prevent eBooks from being sold on mobile OS marketplaces without a 30% cut, THAT would be prosecutable.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Thanks for explaining this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is like arguing that Walmart shouldn't get a cut of book sales. It's Apple's store. Apple still allows iOS users to purchase and use books from other stores on their devices.

What's the point of operating a store if you don't get a cut of the sales?

But if you just get rid of the agency model, which the DOJ is trying to do, this naturally goes away. With a wholesale model, Apple, Amazon and the publishing companies can all make money on an ebook sale. The agency model doesn't leave room for two middlemen.

<comment><USER5> The analogy is flawed. Consumers don't get locked into a 2-year contract forcing them to shop at Walmart exclusively. If they did, and Walmart required, say, a cut of all DVDs purchased for play on a Walmart-sold TV, I think that certainly would qualify for restraint of trade. Target could push their DVD prices all the way to zero and shoppers would still be stuck with their Walmart contracts.

( _edit for those not reading carefully: Saying that the contract is willful has nothing to do with the argument. Consumers do not sign contracts with retailers. So applying logic about retail sales is a flawed analysis. Doing things like leveraging the illiquidity of platform choice to increase prices in a way that would be legal for a retailer is not, necessarily, legal for a platform vendor. Apple has control over the market that Walmart does not. That's what the whole idea of "restraint of trade" is about._ )

<comment><USER6> Nobody gets locked into a 2 year contract forcing them to do anything with Apple.

iPads are not sold on contract. iPhones come with a contract, but the contract doesn't force you to keep using the device - just the wireless service.

You can sell the phone and buy a different one to use with the same contract if you don't like it.

<comment><USER7> I am not a lawyer, but to me this seems like they were the market leader in smartphones at the time and using that monopoly to monopolize another market.

<comment><USER6> Being the market leader doesn't give you a monopoly in any market, and certainly not in a young and growing one.

<comment><USER7> Considering that Steve Jobs wanted to "destroy" Android, they were at least headed in that direction, and at the time, they had the majority of the smartphone market, i.e. phones where you could actually buy an ebook.

<comment><USER6> These things are irrelevant to the definition of a monopoly.

<comment><USER5> And the definition of a monopoly is irrelevant to the DoJ case being discussed. So it appears everyone is even.

( _edit: crap, just realized I'd been tricked into responding to rbarooah again. Apologies all._ )

<comment><USER6> When was the last time you saw anyone on HN directly insult someone else here in such a mean and insidious way?

You wrote that edit just to try to hurt and undermine me.

I think this is the first time I've seen anything like it here, and it has a really unpleasant schoolyard bully vibe to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Apple is quickly enjoying a dominant position in mobile devices that Microsoft once enjoyed with desktop computers._

This can't be true while Android is the dominant mobile OS, and Amazon is the dominant eBook reader.

<comment><USER8> Android is only dominent looking solely at phones (in the US). iOS is on more iPads, iPod Touches (and there are HUGE numbers of these), and iPhones than Android is on phones and tablets (in the US).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the real issue with the Agency model and Apple, it may or may not have prevented an Amazon monopoly on ebooks, but it did guarentee that nobody but Apple could make money selling ebooks via iPhone apps.

</comment><comment><USER9> The real question is, has Apple sold enough tablets to be considered a monopoly in the marketplace. Even if it is a monopoly, it definitely isn't in phone (even smart-phone) marketplace, so it is unclear what exactly the DoJ could do to influence the iPhone's in-app purchase fees.

<comment><USER8> I think once a lawsuit counts the number of iPod Touches and iPads or the total in app purchasing revenue, or total purchasing revenu of the iOS vs Android platforms, they may still try.

It's unfortunately still very lopsided.

<comment><USER6> A monopoly is more than just having the largest market share. There has to be no viable competition. With Google and Amazon in the game that's clearly untenable.

<comment><USER8> It's not just straight away monopolies as defined by economics that the government sues under the anti-trust act. It is a company or series of interlocked companies such that "they materially reduced competition or tended to create a monopoly in trade"

So if they make an add network targeting say, shopping on their devices, they may get targeted for anti-trust suits since they have the far and away majority of control of mobile shoppers: [http://gigaom.com/apple/study-apples- iphone-ipad-account-for...](http://gigaom.com/apple/study-apples-iphone-ipad- account-for-90-percent-of-mobile-purchases/)

The fact that iPad and iPhone apps store sales are considerably larger than Android sales is inching closer to the point where the govt can sue about that: [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/ios-revenues-vs- andro...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/ios-revenues-vs-android/)

If there is a dip in android sales for a given year (say, due to maleware problems, version upgrades, etc), then you're quite close to the level where they could get a court to not throw the case out at the summary judgement point. Once you can get a case past there, many people will settle to avoid the costs of a case or the dangers of actually losing (which could be braking up the company).

I think that the figures are still too far off on percentage of app store revenue, but don't be mistaken: Just because there is not an actual monopoly doesn't mean the gov't has no teeth to do anything to apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This blog has a strangely contradictory nature. The tagline is "Nature does not like or grant monopolies. Monopolies Fail", and yet the piece is all about how government needs to intervene.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree. If the conditions set forth by Apple don't please you, stop being their customers or developing for their platform. Simple as that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "By contrast, all eBook apps from competing eBook stores — such as those from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and others — cannot offer an identical shopping experience. They are disallowed by Apple. Apple has demanded from each of its iBookstore competitors a 30% cut of any purchases made using Apple APIs for what is called "in-app purchasing.""

Saying that Apple doesn't allow those publishers to sell books at all and then in the next sentence saying they do allow it doesn't help your argument.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I missing something? Nobody is forced to purchase an Apple device. Nobody is forced to earn all of their revenue through Apple's devices. Nobody is forced to use their iBooks app either. How is this a monopoly? If you don't like their conditions, don't start your business or purchase books on their platform.

<comment><USER11> _Nobody is forced to purchase an Apple device._

Actually a lot of people are forced to buy Apple devices. See Apple's educational efforts as a good example of that.

 _Am I missing something?_

Yes, you are -- Apple is big enough, and dominant enough, that even without a monopoly they can exert significant control over the rest of the market. How often do we hear on here -- strangely by people gloating on Apple's behalf -- that they have locked up complete supply chains, starving competitors? When Apple forced their book pricing model, it forced prices up at Amazon as well. When Apple limits or taxes competitors on the iOS platform, users who usually have no idea of this behavior will naturally migrate to Apple's solution because it provides just that much easier usability (geez why can't I buy that book I want in the Kindle app...oh well, here it is in the App Store). They are using their influence and control of that high-margin device that you paid for to build dominance in their other products. Not illegal or even immoral, but it eventually impacts everyone.

<comment><USER3> I'm honestly curious what instances you're referring to where people were FORCED to buy Apple devices. So if they didn't buy these apple devices what would happen? They would be put in jail?

Also, exerting significant control over the rest of the market of smartphones still doesn't mean Apple has forced you to buy their products. Just means they are the leader in their particular market. you don't have to buy ANY smartphone or start a business based upon smartphones. Not sure how this is a violation of anybody's rights.</comment></comment></comment>


Zoopharmacognosy - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoopharmacognosy <comment><USER2> The wikipedia has a section on birds but is missing this reference from 2012. City birds using the nicotine in cigarette butts to deter parasites.

[http://www.nature.com/news/city-birds-use-cigarette-butts- to...](http://www.nature.com/news/city-birds-use-cigarette-butts-to-smoke-out- parasites-1.11952)

</comment><comment><USER3> the wikipedia doesn't seem to have that one:

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-seem-to- us...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-seem-to-use-toxic- pufferfish-to-get-high-180948219/?no-ist)

"Footage from a new BBC documentary series, "Spy in the Pod," reveals what appears to be dolphins getting high off of pufferfish. Pufferfish produce a potent defensive chemical, which they eject when threatened. In small enough doses, however, the toxin seems to induce "a trance-like state" in dolphins that come into contact with it, the Daily News reports:

The dolphins were filmed gently playing with the puffer, passing it between each other for 20 to 30 minutes at a time, unlike the fish they had caught as prey which were swiftly torn apart. "

<comment><USER4> The article seems to be health focused, otherwise it could have mentioned Elephants burying fruit to get drunk when it ferments too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If a food-based approach to medicine was more profitable, our system of care might resemble something more "natural" as well...and who knows, maybe more effective. As Hippocrates said "Let thy food be thy medicine medicine be thy food"

</comment><comment><USER6> If this did not exist, I'd renounce science and admit the existence of the comedy god.</comment>


Coursera: Compiler Class, taught by Alex Aiken - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers <comment><USER2> Compilers is a great class. I took it as a sophomore, and each year afterwards, when the compiler project was announced, I'd spend a few sleepless nights (and days) banging out a compiler. I must have written four or five compilers for various architectures before I turned pro. No surprise my biggest exit was a software tools company.

<comment><USER3> Do you mean that you did your school's compiler class project each year despite not taking the class, and every year they were targeting a different architecture?

<comment><USER2> Yeah. They redesigned the class the year after I took it (we programmed in CLU and targeted the VAX) and different people taught it, so it was also changing. Also, I'd vary things. One year I wrote a sparc babckend (which had some unusual features like register windows) in C; that definitely wasn't what the class was doing.

<comment><USER3> I like that idea, and I think I'm going to try it. I'm slightly perturbed that my school doesn't have an advanced compilers course, but I could definitely use this strategy as a way of learning more.

<comment><USER2> A few other ideas to play with: you might go through a book like Programming Language Pragmatics by Scott and implement various kinds of languages and language features. Understanding how various language features map to the bare metal can be very illuminating. The second is to play with various backends. I was crazy about learning ISAs and computer architecture back then. Finally, you can play with "middle end" ideas: IRs, program analyses and optimizations. Once you get past the book stage, there is a HUGE literature on compiler analyses and optimizations.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a plan. Thanks for the ideas!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google trial in Italy: freedom v. responsibility - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gtjC2_LrovYuX8LbvBRoMfM-B4BgD9908DVG4

<comment><USER2> The main issue here is how far one should trace for the cause. If youtube can be blamed for bad videos, why not the company that manufactured camcorders, why not the ISP, why not the power company for enabling people to watch it?

If there is anyone to be blamed, it has to be the person who uploaded the video and no one else.</comment>


Node v0.6.1 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/11/11/node-v0-6-1/

<comment><USER2> Is it really necessary to post every minor version increment with no other context here? The 0.6.0 announcement was posted here just the other day and got no comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if it helped everyone, but it surely got me to upgrade.</comment>


Ask HN: Investing on P2P Lending Platforms? - <AUTHOR> I've been looking at putting some idle savings to work on peer-to-peer lending platforms like LendingClub.com and Prosper.com, and curious what kind of experiences HNers have had.  I'm specifically interested in hearing about actual returns and default rates, as well as any potential newbie investor landmines to be aware of.  Thanks! <comment><USER2> You may want to consider checking out forums where people interested in p2p lending come together for discussions.

Reddit [https://www.reddit.com](https://www.reddit.com). /r/sociallending is the primary subreddit though lightly used. I have also seen p2p lending discussions in /r/investing and /r/financialindependence.

Quora [https://www.quora.com](https://www.quora.com). The responders to questions related to P2P Lending, Lending Club, and Prosper (search keywords) on Quora tend to be industry participants and professionals.

Lend Academy Forum [http://www.lendacademy.com/forum/index.php](http://www.lendacademy.com/forum/index.php). This is the discussion forum exclusively related to all things P2P Lending. Most forum participants are individual investors in P2P Lending.

I have been lending on Lending Club and Prosper for over 4 years. I consider P2P Lending as part of my asset allocation to Junk Bonds.

I am attracted to these platforms as they enable direct access to an asset class, consumer lending, that was largely unavailable to individual investors previously. While debt segment is much larger than equities segment, individual investors have very little avenues to directly participate in debt/fixed income segments. P2P Lending opens up one such fixed income class - consumer lending. My primary interest with consumer lending is in the diversification aspects due to potential low correlation with other asset classes.

I enjoyed learning about consumer lending and other fixed income segments so much that in 2012 I started PeerCube [https://www.peercube.com](https://www.peercube.com), an online crowd-lending analytics and automation platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This was very useful. PeerCube looks awesome. Quick usability note--I am unable to get past the captcha to register (tried about 6 times).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have about 3% of my net worth with LendingClub. Returns have been 8%. I use the automated investing tools and don't focus at all on the number of defaults, etc. Just let the algorithm work for you. Realize that you are basically lending money in unsecured loans, so I wouldn't let this become a huge part of your overall assets. I might go up a bit higher to like 5% of total net worth. I like that LendingClub returns are not too strongly correlated with the S&P 500.

I would not even bother starting without $5K or so. Since the minimum investment is $25, you need a large number of loans to offset any harm a few defaults can cause.

One word of warning: HN folks might have a tendency to get too geeky with the hands-on tuning, creating their own special lending rules to optimize returns. I would say don't bother. You are better off writing code for money and investing what you make.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Realize that you are basically lending money in unsecured loans, so I > wouldn't let this become a huge part of your overall assets.

Great point, thanks for underscoring that. 8% definitely beats the 1.5% I'm getting in a CD. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> If you are just starting to dip your toes into world of investing I recommend: [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich- from-...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to- hero-in-one-blog-post/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've about $30K in LendingClub over the past 2-3 years. Experience has been great, I don't consider it to be as risky as people make it out to be. I have Automated Investing turned on.

      Account Value: $30,248.38
      Net Annualized Return: 8.68%
      Number of Notes: 1694
      Late 31-120 Days: 25 ($152)
      Charged Off: 58 ($1,934)

      Payments to Date: $22,813.38
      Principal: $17,433.59
      Interest: $5,378.99</comment>


First Pictures Of Single Window Gimp - <AUTHOR> http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/10/first-pictures-of-single-window-gimp.html

<comment><USER2> Finally the day I have been waiting for! I can't stand the multiple windows, especially on the Mac OS X version in which one initial click is required to focus the window and a second to click a button or begin using a tool.

<comment><USER3> There is a fix for the unnecessary double click issue:

<http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net/guides/install_leopard/>

(scroll to the bottom)

<comment><USER4> And the menu is is the wrong place.

And Ctrl is used instead of Cmd.

It's a weird app for us on Mac.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't it interesting how the many-windows paradigm has come and gone? Desktop software for the first ~15 years of personal computing was full screen, single "window" for any given task. And then, for the past fifteen years or so, we've been dealing with the increased complexity of many-windowed interfaces. Seems strange that nobody noticed that some of the changes that windowing systems brought were negative until a whole new generation of developers came along and reinvented the single window model.

<comment><USER6> I'm not so sure multi-windowing is quite dead when it comes to drawing and CAD programs. From a practical perspective, the paradigm of being able to move your palettes around, and pick which ones are displayed, is rather valuable regardless of how big your display is.

<comment><USER7> But having to position them manually is just tedium. Let me choose which palettes to display and which side of the window to display them on, and then let the application take care of the rest. If I'm running at fullscreen then I don't want anything covering up the document/image/model. Otherwise, I only want to have to move/resize one window.

<comment><USER8> This issue is solved fairly easily with a superior window manager.

[http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Screen-ohmega-tab- gnome...](http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Screen-ohmega-tab-gnome- twopane.jpg)

<comment><USER9> hm, my xmonad shows gimp with multi windows free floating. wich makes more sense for the current gimp.

<comment><USER8> By default gimp is floating. It's not hard to change the defaults.

<http://nathanhowell.net/2009/03/08/xmonad-and-the-gimp/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This? <http://bit.ly/1Yl9Su> This looks amazing? Really?

It looks fine... but maybe the linux dudes have standards lowered a bit?

<comment><USER11> I assume "it looks AMAZING" is perfectly within the usual editorial standards of "omgbuntu", but wouldn't mind seeing a different headline here.

How about "it looks REASONABLY GOOD" or "it looks ABOUT LIKE YOU MIGHT EXPECT"?

<comment><USER2> Sadly this is perhaps a measure of how desperate us GIMP users are. I'm just happy that GIMP is all going to be in one window. Its amazing that they finally decided to leave the old standard interface.

But relief and anticipation aside I have to agree with you that as far as aesthetics and design it is rather mediocre.

<comment><USER12> At the very least it is a start. Now that the maintainers are allowing the single-window mode to be created the onward march of open-source progress will keep improving it. It may not approach the elegance that Apple's designers deliver but we can sure as hell beat Adobe.

Edit: Did all of my downvote arrows disappear? I don't want to downvote anyone in particular here but that seems odd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't stand single windows for graphics stuff. ideal is to have the image take up one whole monitor and all the pallets and tools take up another.

<comment><USER14> That's why it's going to be optional. I, for one, can't stand multi-window interfaces (after almost a year of using a Mac, I still find parts of the interface annoying).

<comment><USER15> The multi-window aspect of Macs makes them _almost_ unusable IMHO.

I can't conceive of a particular reason to have some completely unrelated program showing up in the same visual space as the one I'm currently working with.

<comment><USER16> What about related ones? If I'm designing a page, I might want my image browser in sight so I can choose and then drag and drop images. Or if I'm writing an article and it takes a lot of research, I'll want a web browser to share the screen equally with the word processor.

The multi-window aspects of Macs makes them _more_ usable imo, especially because of the deep support for drag-and-drop interoperation. In the physical world, I mix and match media as suits the task, and the Mac mimics that. I don't fill my desk up with a notepad, then hide it and take out a calculator, then hide it and set up my easel.

<comment><USER17> _In the physical world, I mix and match media as suits the task, and the Mac mimics that. I don't fill my desk up with a notepad, then hide it and take out a calculator, then hide it and set up my easel._

Rather than taking out/hiding away your various tools and implements in your desk, I believe the idiomatic Linux strategy is to have nine desks, each with a single tool on it.

<comment><USER18> OS X has Spaces for that. You can even bind apps to spaces.

I have the following set up: Firefox and entertainment apps on Space 1, IRC on Space 2, XCode and MacVim on Space 3. I don't bind anything to the remaining 3 spaces. The combination of Spaces and Exposé makes for great window management.

And yes, I _love_ the multi-window aspect of OS X. Document-based applications are not only easier to use, they are easier to write, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm glad people are being so critical. Back when I started using The GIMP (v1.x), when people (including me) said Photoshop (v4) had a superior interface, people rushed to The GIMP's defense. The GIMP has gotten more Photoshop-like since then, and no one's complained, so apparently the defenders were blind apologists. Not everything should be like Photoshop, but I think doing it Photoshop's way would be better than this way.

<comment><USER20> From the minutes of a GIMP developer conference meeting not too long ago:

 _The user scenarios would be written down in advance. These scenarios should not be changed afterwards because it would lead to too much discussion. The goal is to cut down all this discussion. The product vision is to be used as a filter. For example: If someone comes with the request that the UI of GIMP should be like Photoshop, we can simply state: We are not trying to be like Photoshop, because we have a different product vision._

<http://developer.gimp.org/gimpcon/2006/index.html>

I think defining their software in terms of "not being Photoshop" hurts their software. Photoshop is free to add any features which they think will help users edit images, while the Gimp limits itself to the features that Photoshop has not already chosen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I actually loved the floating windows: that's what window managers are for, right?

However, since transitioning to StumpWM the multi-window approach just doesn't cut it. Now it's a trade-off between logging in with Metacity and doing gimpwork, or keeping StumpWM running and avoiding gimpwork. If Gimp 2.8 has this, then I can start spending more time with that peculiar but beloved graphics suite again.

</comment><comment><USER22> I used Gimp a few weeks ago to resize a picture .. I'm still finding Gimp windows on screen ...

thanks folks, I'll be here all week!

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow. It's about time. Have no idea what the holdout was.

</comment><comment><USER23> You can almost do that now, by just arranging your pallets.

But I like the tabs for images though - that's a big plus.

</comment><comment><USER24> Amazing? Hardly!

</comment><comment><USER25> This looks good. It's worth noting that on the mac at least, even PS can have a windowless UI. It's actually nice when using multiple monitors and a tablet. A single window won't make full use of 2 screens of differing vertical resolutions.

</comment><comment><USER26> The follow up also has a short how to on getting and building the new version [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/10/gimp-single-window- instal...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/10/gimp-single-window-install.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> "First Pictures Of Single Window Gimp - It Looks Vaguely like Photoshop."

FTFY.

<comment><USER28> Shoulda used a picture of all the dollar bills remaining after not buying Photoshop :) GIMP's pretty good for a free project, but using their own logo as the example picture makes it look like it's only good for editing sprites.

<comment><USER20> That's a clever idea for another reason, too: Photoshop will not allow certain operations on pictures of money, highlighting a disadvantage of closed-source software.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deterr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deterrence_Group)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awful, why didn't they do that 10 years earlier? I thought I just didn't understand the power of having dozens of tiny windows. Now I feel scammed.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't care how many windows there are, I just want cut and paste to work in a reasonably intuitive way. In the GIMP it does not.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there MS Windows build of 2.8 GIMP floating somewhere? I only found 2.7 which apparently doesn't have single windows goodness.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Bring out the gimp."

<comment><USER33> Looks like the Gimp is _not_ sleeping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> First thought: Well, that looks rather painful to use.

</comment><comment><USER35> Cool, but doesn't GIMPShop already do this?

<comment><USER36> The main purpose of GIMPShop was to adjust the GIMP hotkeys to work like Photoshop's. That's what it was when I used it years ago.

It's gotten a long way since, and yes it does allow you to work in a single window (MDI) mode - but only in Windows.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Thanks for correcting that title.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow that looks brilliantly usable. Why did they resist this for so long?

</comment><comment><USER39> Well this is a bummer. I quite like having multiple windows. I hope they haven't completely gutted the multi-window layout.

<comment><USER20> From the blog post linked in the article:

 _The news also revealed an interesting but previously rather anonymous group of people: multi-window zealots despising the idea of a single-window mode in their beloved multi-window application. I suspect they don't realize that single-window mode is going to be optional..._

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> there is an hint for statups in this thing: to blindly copy from the "best on the market" is not a good idea.

<comment><USER20> I take it you don't like this new development? It is perhaps the most requested GIMP feature. Are you saying startups shouldn't listen to user feedback?

<comment><USER40> No I mean, when the first version if gimp was created to copy photoshop was not a good idea. And actually is not natural at all to split an application into multiple windows. To just do the obvious (single window) was a better alternative even when they started :) but sometimes it's hard to follow your own ideas if you see that the absolute leader (photoshop) is doing something different.</comment></comment></comment>


Marketing Yourself: Why You Need a Blog - <AUTHOR> http://simpleprogrammer.com/2013/12/23/marketing-need-blog/

<comment><USER2> The first thing I saw was a giant pop-up advert that covered the content, so I quickly hit the back button and went back to HN.</comment>


Point of order: Standardised termsheets are not the answer for startups - <AUTHOR> http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/09/03/point-of-order-standardised-termsheets-are-not-the-answer-for-startups/

<comment><USER2> It's hard to judge the merits of the arguments posed by TC's guest authors, as they are invariably "what you'd expect," given the authors' profession -- i.e., always in their own best interest.

This obvious conflict-of-interest, combined with the discussion of semi- technical stuff (such as this particular article on legal terms), makes these posts impossible to evaluate on their own merits, and thus useless.

</comment><comment><USER3> So what do you do when you are fresh out of university with a great idea and a great team with no cash. All you need is £15K to cover 3 months living expenses and roll out a first version of your app. You manage to convince some friends / family / fools to part with just enough to get you going.

The deal breaker is that everyone involved wants something on paper that they can trust covers their best interests. What goes on that piece of paper when there is no cash available to pay for a lawyer?

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone who hasn't raised funds, but might be interested in doing so in the future, my interest in these sheets isn't so much saving money. I've followed these threads because it gives startups a baseline for what terms "should" be like. This jump starts the whole process. It would make you dive in a bit more when terms begin to deviate from these outlines.

I realize you get a crash course in these subjects when fundraising but how many companies out there go into the process with no idea of what half of these terms mean?</comment>


Ask HN: Resources to Calculate TAM (Total Addressable Market)? - <AUTHOR> Hi there, I'm doing some market research (US) and struggling with being able to find good data sets or websites to offer a detailed view of Total Addressable Market (TAM) in specific verticals. Any suggestions / resources? <comment><USER2> The VCs I work with often use a statistical method to find TAM. The data out there is extremely lacking and often incorrect. They find it by searching Google for targets, making phone calls, gathering the correct questions to ask, asking them, then making statistical inferences about the total market in some area (big or small). They have a small army of analysts to complete the work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the few websites [0] I've found with some data available (although, for more you need to pay and subscribe).

[0]: [https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-trends/market-research- re...](https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-trends/market-research- reports/information/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've used Forrester reports, plus some special ones related to our specific product / market.

<comment><USER3> What do your competitors say about market size?</comment></comment>


`content-visibility`: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering - <AUTHOR> https://web.dev/content-visibility/ <comment><USER2> This might end the need for Virtual Lists, great!</comment>


Ask HN: As a freelancer, where do you get your contract templates from? - <AUTHOR>

I assume most of the freelancer here sign some form of a contract before beginning work. Do you use a generic template? Where did you pick up that template from? Did you get a lawyer to write it up or did you pick one off the web? <comment><USER2> I _almost_ never user a lawyer or a legalese contract. The projects I do, custom CMS's and small business applications, just don't demand it.

What I have is signed work agreement.

It specifies deliverables, cost, cost and process of scope changes, an short term maintenance agreement(with cut off date) and how the software is licensed (I only deliver software which has an open source license, MIT usually).

Licensing the software under open source lets the client have it, and frees me to reuse it for other projects. There is also a warranty clause in the license.

Twice in 20 years I have not gotten paid. Neither time I had an agreement, both were for small amounts.

But, if you have large clients, a large budget, or intellectual property is an issue then consider a lawyer, and one who has dealt with software projects before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you word the work agreement yourself?

<comment><USER2> I do word them myself. And I go over it with the client to make sure they understand everything in it. I keep it simple, which is not easy and takes time.

I am also doing this with over 20 years of experience. When I first started I looked at and read over existing contract templates - and I was worried about protecting myself.

But, do have something in writing, do not work on a handshake (unless it is very small).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Go see a lawyer. I was lucky enough to have a friend who was happy to help initially, and a family member who I could call from time to time. Ultimately though, actually hiring someone to sort through the all minutiae can be extremely valuable when dealing with bigger corporate or government clients. Even more so if you plan to accumulate your own IP.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here is the template I have used in projects:

[http://rosskimbarovsky.com/contracts-for-software-and- websit...](http://rosskimbarovsky.com/contracts-for-software-and-website- developers.pdf)</comment>