Tech "Guru" Riles the Industry   By Seeking Huge Patent Fees - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122161127802345821.html

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't have WSJ subscription, click through this link: [http://digg.com/tech_news/Tech_Guru_Riles_the_Industry_By_Se...](http://digg.com/tech_news/Tech_Guru_Riles_the_Industry_By_Seeking_Huge_Patent_Fees)

BTW, Myhrvold's the ex-CTO of Microsoft who, as incredible as it sounds, missed the whole Internet thing. Were it not for Bill Gates, Microsoft would have been screwed. Imagine that... you're the CTO of the biggest software company in the World and you miss the rise of Internet. Needless to say, his tenure was over after that.

Edit: And if you're a fan of Gladwell, you will cringe as you read this: [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell)

<comment><USER2> Admittedly off-topic: I find Gladwell over-rated. He picks interesting questions to ask, all right, but he never gets around to answering them. Like: _why_ does the tipping point work? He proposes no hypotheses.

<comment><USER3> Raising questions of that calibre is a job in itself. I am glad he is not coming up with half-baked hypotheses. This whole thing about 'Not asking questions till you can propose solutions' doesn't cut it for me.

For instance in Blink, he points out that a very successful golf player doesn't even seem to understand the reasons for his success. This has important implications. Do successful people really know why they are successful ? Do we take them a little too seriously ? After all self- improvement is big business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> this is exactly why patent reform needs to happen now. innovation-stifling patents make everyone nervous, and cause neverending hassle for tech research and development. patents were designed to keep someone from copying someone else's designs, not to get a stranglehold on a wide swath of tech landscape. as they've gotten more generalized over time, they've also gotten more abusive.

which presidential candidate is talking patent reform? there's a snippet here (<http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=17320>), but it only says the obvious. whoever is serious about it, vote for that guy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Perfect. Another "visionary" who makes paper that prevents people from making things.

Just when I think its as broken as it can get...

</comment><comment><USER6> the patent system is the main reason why the Chinese will eventually overtake us.

</comment><comment><USER7> He is a tech guru the same way the BTK killer is a relationship expert.

</comment><comment><USER8> I once said to a tech legend that patents should _not_ be transferrable, because the owner has to be the inventor.

He said that was naive, but I still believe it.

<comment><USER9> If the patent couldn't be transferred, wouldn't this mean that only the inventor, personally, was allowed to make the product?

Invent a new type of fuel pump, and you've gotta spend the next ten years on the factory floor putting together fuel pumps. Doesn't sound like much of an incentive.

<comment><USER2> I think you've misunderstood the point of the patent.

 _If the patent couldn't be transferred, wouldn't this mean that only the inventor, personally, was allowed to make the product?_

In a word, yes: you, the inventor, have the right to build it. You can also say who else can build it. That was the point of the copyright/patent clause. Here, read it for yourself:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Nowhere does it say anything about Congress being allowed to make laws that enable the _purchase_ of said patents or copyrights. That's unconstitutional -- and if you doubt this, take a gander at the letters that Jefferson and Madison wrote about the issue _while they were debating it_. Jefferson, for instance, writes:

 _I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes, but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additons would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose._

Obviously they did not intend for "intellectual property" to develop. If you can't touch it, you can't own it.

More on the Jefferson/Madison correspondence here:

[http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=1...](http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=1999&post=1999-02-11$2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Millionaire Nathan Myhrvold, renowned in the computer industry as a Renaissance man, has a less lofty message for tech companies these days: Pay up.

Over the past few years, the former Microsoft Corp. executive has quietly amassed a trove of 20,000-plus patents and patent applications related to everything from lasers to computer chips. He now ranks among the world's largest patent-holders -- and is using that clout to press tech giants to sign some of the costliest patent-licensing deals ever negotiated.

In recent months Mr. Myhrvold's firm, Intellectual Ventures, has secured payments in the range of $200 million to $400 ..._

</comment><comment><USER2> Yes, this is precisely what the US founding fathers were imagining when they added the copyright/patent clause. By "artists and inventors", they obviously were referring to corporations whose sole purpose is to buy patents and then sue over them. Clearly they wanted patents to be bought and sold as if they were physical goods. That's why they started the clause with "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".</comment>


Why We're Not Photographing the Foo Fighters - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/general/2015/07/02/why-were-not-photographing-the-foo-fighters/

<comment><USER2> I saw nothing wrong with that contract.</comment>


Microsoft joins Open Invention Network to help protect Linux and open - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-joins-open-invention-network-to-help-protect-linux-and-open-source/ <comment><USER2> So does that mean they will not extort royalties from Chromebook makers anymore?

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/17/microsoft...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/17/microsoft- chrome-android-deal-foxconn-hon-hai)</comment>


Haiku Beta is finally here - <AUTHOR> http://medium.com/@andrewgreimann_62789/haiku-beta-the-release-heard-around-the-world-d776cae5f3e7 <comment><USER2> I'm highly fascinated between Haiku and ReactOS, but I havent had a chance to use both in a while. I want them to become available. I really appreciate that Haiku was meant to be a remake of BeOS (iirc) and it does a fantastic job. I feel like we don't do enough OS research like we used to. We've started to dive into making new languages like Rust and Go, but I guess the next wave I'm waiting for is new and interesting Operating Systems.

<comment><USER3> > we don't do enough OS research like we used to.

I feel projects like MirageOS[0], Qubes OS[1], and unikernels in general are laying a lot of groundwork for interesting new developments in operating systems. And as a bonus, there's a lot more automated work on security and safety!

[0] [https://mirage.io](https://mirage.io) (and cool sub projects like running Mirage on a ESP32 with reprocessing to make a homebrew gameboy-like platform [0.1])

[0.1] An operating system that can scale down to tiny platforms could be a lot of fun to homebrew tinkering [https://twitter.com/cem2ran/status/1034879037758496772](https://twitter.com/cem2ran/status/1034879037758496772)

[1] [https://www.qubes-os.org](https://www.qubes-os.org)

<comment><USER4> I wonder if I should start contributing to qubes-os. I'd really like to add something to isolate non-gui projects in docker instead of VMs.

<comment><USER5> If you're interested in contributing I'd look into it a little closer as I don't think containers align with the security model of Qubes. They'd rather support spinning up single container VMs which run separate Docker instances... probably not even in a Docker swarm due to the security channels that opens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's the _fifth_ time I've downloaded a USB live disk image, written it to a USB key, booted, and had it panic out with "no bootable partition" in the first four seconds.

<comment><USER7> Did you report any of these panics? If you didn't, why do you expect that it will be different? We can't fix bugs we don't know about.

<comment><USER6> Not about to duplicate a complaint that has dozens of pre-reported instances, none with an answer, no.

<comment><USER7> Each of those dozen or so has different causes. So until you file a report with a syslog attached, it's impossible to say whether or not yours is a new one or a duplicate.

But if it is a duplicate, and you already know about the existing reports, why are you frustrated that you've tried again and nothing has happened? We are pretty diligent about managing the bug tracker and closing tickets when they're fixed, so if the ticket is still open, it's probably not fixed.

Likely if you are booting from USB, the problem is your USB3 controller. Try booting from a USB2 port, or booting from another medium.

<comment><USER8> Is it worth reporting a panic over usb3, or is it a duplicate of the others?

What about unusable display flickering, lag, and corrupted framebuffers when switching resolution?

<comment><USER7> > Is it worth reporting a panic over usb3, or is it a duplicate of the others?

More than likely it is a duplicate of an already-existing one. Check the list here: [https://dev.haiku- os.org/query?status=!closed&component=Driv...](https://dev.haiku- os.org/query?status=!closed&component=Drivers%2FUSB%2FXHCI) \-- but if you don't see it in there, then please do file a new ticket.

Display flickering/lag/etc. sounds like the intel_extreme driver being broken; there is a ticket about this also. You can avoid that for the time being by blacklisting the driver or forcing "fail-safe graphics" (VESA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used BeOS for a little while, so I keep track of Haiku every quarter or so. It's missing two things for me to use it again, assuming the wireless drivers are done now: Power management (including suspend/resume) so I can set it up on an old netbook (for which it would likely be perfect) and an ARM port for the Raspberry Pi (which are the only "desktop" machines I have available).

</comment><comment><USER10> Really impressed with this project and that it is still going.

What do people use Haiku OS for in the real world (i.e. something more specific than "personal computing")? Or is it just a toy?

<comment><USER11> I like Haiku. In my experience, it has most responsive window manager for any operating system that runs on 90s-00s hardware. I think it has a lot of potential, but presently, I'd describe it as an alternative to something like Chrome OS. I wish the web browser situation was comparable to Linux, macOS, and Windows.

I should admit that I have an academic interest in operating systems and Haiku, for a variety of reasons, is exciting (e.g. it's a functional open source operating system that isn't strictly POSIX).

<comment><USER7> Except... Haiku is POSIX? The POSIX compatibility isn't just some compatibility layer, it goes all the way into the kernel. We use the fork- based process model, POSIX filemodes, etc.

<comment><USER11> Yep. Totally fair. I edited my comment to say "strictly POSIX." Is that a fair characterization?

<comment><USER7> What does "strictly POSIX" mean, and how does Haiku not meet it?

If there are POSIX APIs we don't implement, it's simply because we haven't gotten around to implementing it / nothing needed it so we didn't bother, not because we are explicitly avoiding said APIs.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I wasn't aware. Thanks for the correction! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> System requirements have doubled over time (e.g. the minimum RAM amount went from 128 to 256 megabytes). What gives?

<comment><USER7> packagefs aggressively caches decompressed data and builds a bunch of indexes in RAM, and that's where the larger requirement comes from. It's not very well optimized for memory, though, probably someone dedicated enough could bring the requirement back down to 128MB.

<comment><USER12> While optimization is indeed the hallmark of Haiku, the above difference does not matter much these days, of course. What could be a big deal, though, is the (missing) support for popular platforms with somewhat limited resources, such as the Raspberry Pi. Would not it be nice to have a smart TV or a monitor with Haiku built in?

<comment><USER7> It would indeed. Various contributors have been working on the ARM port for almost a decade now, and it's just stalled due to a lack of developer time for the most part.

IIRC, the current status of the ARM port is that the kernel is "mostly done", and at least one of the SDHCI or USB bus driver need to be ported (or written, in the case of the rpi) so that the boot can continue past the kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> does Haku have one of the popular web browsers ported to it (eg firefox or a webkit-based one)?

I searched but could not see it.

A desktop-oriented OS, should have, I assume, a browser that can work with the majority of the high-traffic commerce websites (eg ebay, amazon, etc).

<comment><USER14> A search for "Haiku Webkit" brings up...

[https://github.com/haiku/webkit](https://github.com/haiku/webkit)

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is the engine behind Haiku's built-in WebPositive.

<comment><USER13> this is fantastic. thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I run Haiku in a VM. Can I upgrade it from within Haiku or do I have to nuke what I have and start over? I haven't done a lot of customization but enough to make it a pain to do over.

<comment><USER7> If you are on the beta release or a recent nightly image, you can just run SoftwareUpdater and it will upgrade to the most recent build on either branch.

If you are on an older (i.e. pre-2017) nightly, you can still upgrade automatically, but you'll have to manually change package repositories to do so. If you are on an older release (alpha4, etc.) then you can't upgrade at all, you'll have to reinstall.

Going forward, it will be possible to upgrade from beta1 directly into beta2, or whatever the next release is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The font rendering looks awfully similar to that of Xorg. Does it use the library/code/fonts?

<comment><USER17> I believe the default font is Noto Sans [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This release doc looks like it was written by a cheap tech magazine in the early nineties... which i think is fitting, but oh well.

E.g. I do not care much if I can mount/umount drivers with a right click, but i do care about filesystem supports etc.

<comment><USER19> Release doc? This is some random person's blog.</comment></comment>


Why did Netflix choose FreeBSD over Linux? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Netflix-choose-FreeBSD-over-Linux/answer/Marcas-Neal?share=1 <comment><USER2> I can't comment about speed, but I think that his security claims are a bit off.

Now I never looked at Linux code or FreeBSD code (so it really can be that FreeBSD has fewer bugs), but the question is if you will be hit by them.

Application code tends to be the most dangerous code - it tends to not get stringent code review and tends to get less talented engineers relative to kernel engineers. So, in reality, if you use WordPress plugins, Linux security vs FreeBSD security is probably not relevant.

Now let's say you secured your webapp. You wrote it in Rust. _Now_ does it make sense to worry about OS security? Still not necessarily. Really, if you set things up right and apply patches as they come out, the chances of getting hacked are quite slim - is your site worth wasting a zero-day on? And if it is, its likely they'll find a zero-day in FreeBSD (or in nginx, or apache, or ...)

Now comes the million dollar question - where is it easier to apply patches? Linux or FreeBSD? And this is one of Linux's big advantages - RedHat, Ubuntu, and to some degree Debian has a multi-year "stable" track, where you get security, _and only security_ (OK, and non-security bug fixes) upgrades.

Meaning, that its set up that once software is in "stable" (or LTS), its API is locked. If the PHP foundation decides that the future is version 7, I don't have to jump on the bandwagon and rewrite my code. RedHat/CentOS will continue fixing the old release for _years_.

As a result, you can actually install upgrades unattended (yes, maybe it shouldn't be completely unattended, but you don't have to dread upgrading).</comment>


Virus Infects Space Station Laptops (Again) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/virus-infects-s.html

<comment><USER2> And I thought educating users would be easy when the users are ASTRONAUTS. Even with Windows, avoiding virii is as simple as using FF, not opening drive- by downloads/attachements, not downloading cracks etc. More than a technical solution, it's user education that could solve this.

<comment><USER3> 'NASA downplayed the news, calling the virus mainly a "nuisance" that was on non-critical space station laptops used for things like e-mail and nutritional experiments.'

... or PORN. Astronauts are people too. What do you want to bet this is how it started?</comment></comment>


Canonical enhances Kubernetes reliability for edge, IoT and multi-cloud - <AUTHOR> https://ubuntu.com/blog/canonical-enhances-kubernetes-reliability-for-edge-iot-and-multi-cloud <comment><AUTHOR> In MicroK8S they are using Dqlite (as a replacment of etcd), a marriage of SQLite and RAFT, previously discussed here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20836331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20836331)

"The move to SQL as a data store is mirrored in Canonical's multi-cloud Charmed Kubernetes, embracing corporate databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and Postgres, and public cloud SQL offerings like AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). Administrators will be able to use these familiar SQL databases for Kubernetes cluster data instead of etcd."</comment>


Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/12/23/why-programmers-are-not-paid-in-proportion-to-their-productivity/ <comment><USER2> That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's _actually_ easy, and no one gives you credit for it.

The military periodically runs war-games, in order to assess the effectiveness of various tactics/strategies/leaders. I wonder how much we would learn if the major tech companies periodically did the same thing. Come up with a complex task, spin up multiple groups to work on it in parallel, and examine what exactly each group does and how well that turns out.

<comment><USER3> Google does this to a degree. They sometimes give the same project/goal to multiple groups and pick the winning one.

Unfortunately, in the long run this decreases morale because you don't know if the project you are working on will ever be used

<comment><USER4> > Google does this to a degree. They sometimes give the same project/goal to > multiple groups and pick the winning one.

Yep, we've seen that with their messaging platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You don't pay me to solve your problems at my desk from 9-5. You pay me to do it in the shower, on a walk, when doing my dishes, etc. And I'm surely not going to be time tracking those things.

<comment><USER6> [http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-09-15](http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-09-15)

> Here's my time sheet filled out in increments of fifteen minutes.

> As usual, I coded the useless hours spent in meetings as "work", whereas the > time I spent in the shower designing circuits in my mind is "non-work".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> FTA: "Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code."

I'll take an average coder who only codes what is needed over a brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily.

<comment><USER8> > brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily

Ha, sounds like an oxymoron

<comment><USER9> Maybe - I think the missing component is their level of "laziness" as Bill Gates defined it. A brilliant, but "lazy", coder will find the most efficient way to compose a solution that meets the requirements.

But it's definitely not an oxymoron to say that some brilliant coders can go down rabbit holes at the expense of their own (and company's) time and productivity. They may spend lots of time reading white papers, improving a design/implementation/test-suite beyond what is required, etc. It's just these coders don't place a high value on being as efficient as possible from a PM's perspective, but might be able to solve a problem 10x as difficult as the guy who is closing his tickets within hours of assignment.

<comment><USER10> This reminds me of the following by General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord:

> "I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the > industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of > these qualities.

> Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can > under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The > man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He > has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But > whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too > dangerous."

<comment><USER11> I'm clever and stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good insights. In addition, there are good reasons to think that the value that programmers produce isn't even measurable in any practical way.

A couple of years ago, I spotted a latent bug in a piece of core infrastructure software that would have caused a lengthy world-wide outage of the company when triggered. I can see that that saved the company at least $10M. But how can managers/HR/etc measure such effects? And how can you account for it in compensation, even if you wanted to?

Programmers--like many other professionals--are simply paid the least possible needed to keep them in their seats.

<comment><USER13> When you save a company $$$, it's important to bring that up at annual review time, and definitely place it on your resume.

<comment><USER14> At Google I was explicitly told not to use $ value in my perf review/promo form by multiple managers. There and at other companies i worked for i found that management cares more about revenue (more engagement, new features, releases, etc) than costs (code quality, performance, etc).

<comment><USER15> Interesting! I have had the opposite experience at smaller companies.

A cynical view might be that in larger companies, the goal setting only materializes as dollar values higher up the chain so that they can benefit from that negotiation leverage.

A less cynical view is that business-speak and goal setting naturally abstracts away from money as you try to manage larger goals down a chain of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm generally baffled when companies opt to hire a junior dev for ~$110k, when an additional 30% more income can get them someone 10x more productive.

<comment><USER16> Or they spend the +30% and get someone who's just as productive or 10x less productive. It's not a magic price performance formula.

<comment><USER17> Have you ever worked on a team with only senior people?

Nobody wants to do any grunt work. So everything turns into an overly automated nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their > problem. They may cheat.

I have done this since I started learning to program, which is only 4 years ago. I have been able to complete many tasks quicker than my co-worker. I always assumed I was going about it lazily and not working hard enough compared to him.

My boss believes I quite productive and gets things done efficient and correct, so I kept doing these practices and only writing code that needed to be written from scratch.

I supposed my intuition wasn't wrong - even though it felt guilty.

</comment><comment><USER19> > _The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive > than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small > range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don't vary > that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why > aren't they paid 10x as much?_

Because the 10x Programmer is a pernicious myth.

Even if you believe the original study from the '60s, it found that the best programmers were 10 times better than than the _worst_ programmers, and only 2-3x better than the average.

<comment><USER20> Am I the only one who believe that the "10x programmer" might actually be someone who is just as good as the others, but actually work constantly and is self sufficient ?

<comment><USER21> I believe this, mostly. There are those who refuse to learn and do poorly, but compared to an average programmer instead of the worst, the real difference is ability to remain focused despite interruption (or a good mitigation strategy), a desire to improve oneself, and a willingness to continue working through a solution to either completion or determination of it being the wrong answer and finding an alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Like many "preventative" things, it can be hard to prove that problems _would_ have occurred with less experienced/productive people because you only have one team and outcome in any situation.

And there's a lot of easy-sounding ways to "measure" quality that actually suck (e.g. "number of bug reports" says nothing about the _kinds_ of bugs, and might encourage people to create micro-bugs to inflate numbers or mega-reports to make them smaller, depending).

<comment><USER23> Right. When the company dies or goes down for some while, you may be able to identify the minus-ten-times employee who allowed that to happen. But he's likely long gone by then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Measuring productivity is hard. Everywhere I've worked there were attempts and the system always became gamified and skewed. Incentive hitting a number(s) and folks will hit it.... at the expense of a lot of other things.

</comment><comment><USER25> The way I see it... Is that most good programmers are nerds who can program. Because they have been introverts and socially awkward nerds, their entire life... Those qualities have made them useful for everyone around them so they grow up to be nothing more than handy tools for their peers.

Because of that a salesman or a manager or even a taxi driver will always be able to walk over them, and "twist their arm" in a social sense.

So do we expect introverted nerds to stand up for themselves and ask for a fair wage???

</comment><comment><USER26> The stronger party will match the weaker's second best offer

</comment><comment><USER27> The code programmers write is worth $0 without the surrounding organization.

 _The company makes the code valuable._

Programmers are paid based on supply and demand. It's a completely different measure.

<comment><USER28> Everyone is paid based on supply/demand or rather how much leverage they have.

It would take a team of scientists and analysts to properly measure how much value each employee creates (and even then, probably wouldn't be 100% accurate).

If you can't even measure how much each employee's contributions are "worth" to the final product, how the hell are you supposed to pay people based on those metrics?

The answer is, you don't.

So if you want to get paid more, don't worry about creating more value, worry about increasing your leverage. Form a union or guild, learn a skill very few people have, form close relationships with your customers, etc.</comment></comment>


Finland makes 1Mb broadband access a legal right (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831-2.html <comment><USER2> 1MB as a legal right seems a little dubious, 100MB as a legal right seems even more dubious.

I understand that having access to the Internet is an important thing for numerous reasons, but why the arbitrary speeds? What benefits does a 100MB connection offer over a 1MB connection?

You can enjoy engage and benefit from the vast majority of important stuff on the Internet with a 250kb connection.

<comment><USER3> > I understand that having access to the Internet is an important thing for > numerous reasons, but why the arbitrary speeds? What benefits does a 100MB > connection offer over a 1MB connection?

It's a marketing/political thing. Most users think that a fatter pipe == faster connection, when of course we know that's not the case. Heck, most of the time when you hit higher port speeds it's a case of the content server on the other end not being able to saturate your 100Mbit pipe anyway!

Governments promise these "minimum" speeds or "universal access" as an attempt to appear in touch with technology.

For context, the Government here in Australia has started rolling out a national fibre network (National Broadband Network; NBN), with tiered _port_ speeds of 12/25/50/100Mbps. It's going to be a shock to many (and ISP's are going to bear the brunt of the complaints) when people realise their 50Mbit connection isn't going to give them 5-6MB/s throughput from any/every source.

<comment><USER4> I've had 50Mb/s for a few years now (UK). It doesn't protect your from network screw-ups, packet-loss or high latency, but it can still be really nice to have.

It opens up the possibility of 'What shall we watch tonight? Oh we don't have that yet? I'll just grab it now. Should be done in ten minutes.' Most digital distribution services seem able to handle uploading that fast these days.

So the main uses are downloading of videos and computer games. Not life- changing, probably not worth calling a human right at this point, but pretty convenient.

<comment><USER5> > _Not life-changing, probably not worth calling a human right at this point, > but pretty convenient._ //

The _availability_ of some level of access though does appear to be worth making universal (within the UK). Access to government services is increasingly being focussed through the WWW. This can have the effect of leaving behind those without a reasonable level of internet access available; making services for that sector of society more difficult to reach (a Trademark search say, or a check of the statute databases or ordering a book from the library or checking up on the MP or ...).

If such a disparity of available services can be readily avoided then it seems that it should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Calling access to a consumer good a "right" really cheapens the concept.

The right to free speech doesn't promise every citizen a printing press.

<comment><USER7> Have you read the article?

>the Finnish government said that no household "would be farther than 2 kilometers from a connection capable of delivering broadband Internet with a capacity of at least 100 megabits of data a second."

That doesn't say anything on who's going to pay, probably the people.

What do you mean by "cheapens the concept"? I don't understand this formulation. What concept?

From my point of view, water and food could be called consumer goods. Access to food is already a human right (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food>) while it's not yet settled 100% that water is a human right (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_water>)

<comment><USER6> >Have you read the article? >>the Finnish government said that no household "would be farther than 2 kilometers from a connection capable of delivering broadband Internet with a capacity of at least 100 megabits of data a second." >That doesn't say anything on who's going to pay, probably the people.

That's why I said _access_ to a consumer good and nothing about who pays. That said, as far as I can tell, there isn't a western democracy that forbids their people from buying internet access. So if this doesn't have anything to do with assisting people to pay for it and they aren't banned from buying it themselves, what does it do?

In reality this does have to do with assisting them to pay for it, because mandating construction of broadband connections is just a roundabout way of helping pay for it.

>What do you mean by "cheapens the concept"? I don't understand this formulation. What concept? >From my point of view, water and food could be called consumer goods. Access to food is already a human right (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food>) while it's not yet settled 100% that water is a human right (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_water>)

This is exactly what I mean. You are comparing getting internet access to getting food and water. If you don't have food and water, you die. If you don't have internet access, then yes you don't have access to the best, most modern way to communicate. However, in a nation with free speech you have access to many other ways to express yourself. I'm sure resourceful people will find ways to exercise that right without mandating some telco run fiber to within 2km of their house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This cannot be implemented without violating property rights, so it's morally wrong. The state should protect people's rights, not take them away.

<comment><USER9> Maybe the Finns have a different idea of what makes a good society than you?

<comment><USER8> As a Finn, I don't like the idea that other people can vote to take away some individual's rights, in this case, ISP's.

<comment><USER10> As a fellow Finn, I don't consider an ISP to be a person, but rather a service provider, and as such I'm fine with the concept of (some of them) being forced to have obligations rather than just the right to take our money.

<comment><USER11> ISP is the property in this case, not a person. You're really forcing ISP's owners to dispose of their property in a certain way. It may or may not be right to do so but those are real people, not abstract concepts or legal creations.

<comment><USER9> You could use the same argument to prevent any corporate regulation - including such noncontroversial ones as anti-monopoly regulation.

<comment><USER12> First, anti-monopoly regulation is not noncontroversial. Second, why do you think corporations are something other than a mode of cooperation of real people? When you are a customer - you cooperate with other people by exchange of money for the service. When you are a capitalist, you cooperate with others by paying them for the services upfront before the product is sold. When you are employee, you cooperate by renting your labor for money. And so on. Why do some people think they are entitled to intervene in the other persons' cooperation?

<comment><USER9> Anti-monopoly regulation is pretty noncontroversial. Libertarianism is, despite its popularity in places like HN, quite a fringe movement.

Do you think that the consequences of two entities cooperation is limited to those two entities?

Further, and I'm sure you'll vehemently disagree with me, I don't think people or corporations are islands. I don't resent owing society some cooperation, and I have no problem with corporations being in the same boat - more so, in fact, because as concentrators of power such regulation becomes more necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Original article is three years old. Here's two more on the subject, both less than month old. The first one also provides info about the scope of the plan and its implementation (like "Private Roads Act, Highways Act and Rail Tracks Act will be adjusted, so that cables can be placed within the infrastructure in the most economic manner possible overall").

"The Government is to keep the hundred megabit objective to be achieved by 2015, which was set during the election period. By 2015, high-speed 100 Mbit/s broadband connections will be available at no more than two kilometres from all permanent places of residence."

<http://www.lvm.fi/web/en/pressreleases/-/view/4109122>

In this news item, the Finnish Minister of Communications suggests that 10Mb would become the new minimum standard before end of election term in 2015.

[http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Legally+mandated+broadband+...](http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Legally+mandated+broadband+capacity+could+be+raised+to+10+Mbit+nationwide/1329103903453)

</comment><comment><USER14> Also keep in mind this is in a country with around 5 million people and an area of around 330K sq miles. By contrast, Texas has 25 million people in roughly the same sq mile area.

Making such promises shouldn't be hard considering the size of the population and the area you're dealing with in terms of having to lay fibre.

<comment><USER15> Surely in your example it is actually more economical for Texas than for Finland as the greater concentration of people makes it easier to deliver the service? Sure it would cost more but on a per head basis it should be cheaper . . .

<comment><USER16> It costs as much to lay the fiber to one person as it does to 2000 in the same place, so a greater area is a disadvantage.

<comment><USER17> He said "on a per-head basis". On a per-head basis it's 5 times cheaper for Texas to lay fiber than for Finland (greatly simplifying, of course).

<comment><USER16> No.

If you bunch everyone up, it's cheaper per head.

But if you spread everyone out, it's more expensive per head, because on average you're laying more fiber per person.

<comment><USER18> I think you misread. Texas is 5 times more dense than Finland, and hence should be cheaper per head to lay fiber.

<comment><USER16> But it's not.

Finland has vast, vast areas with no one. Texas has people thinly spread throughout.

You can cover only parts of Finland, because people only live in parts of Finland. You have to cover pretty much all of Texas.

So, once again, the size of Texas is a negative factor.

The so-called "average density" is not the key factor here, the amount of fiber you have to lay to reach everyone is.

<comment><USER19> The above is an invalid comparison. A better, more objective measure is linear population density.

Miles of roads in Texas: 152,054 miles Miles of roads in Finland: 65,617 miles ( _)

Population of Texas: 25,674,681 Population of Finland: 5,375,276

Linear population density of Texas: ~169 persons per miles of road Linear population density of Finland: ~82 persons per miles of road

Ergo, it is cheaper per head to provide wireline telecommunications services in Texas than in Finland, when building out to the whole population, as the linear population density is higher in Texas and most, if not all, permanent residences and business are accessible by road.

Sources: <http://www.aaroads.com/texas/> <http://www.stat.fi/tup/suomi90/lokakuu_en.html>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas>

(_) This road mileage does not include private roads in Finland. Including these roads would further lower the linear population density of Finland, but these roads were excluded from the calculation as the majority of the private roads are access roads to non-permanent recidency second homes and timer or agriculture roads.

<comment><USER16> This really isn't a good measure since roads will be denser in urban areas and less dense in rural areas, thus leading to exactly the same issues as directly using population density.

But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. <http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm>

<comment><USER19> > This really isn't a good measure since roads will be denser in urban areas > and less dense in rural areas, thus leading to exactly the same issues as > directly using population density.

Please be so good as explaining you point better, I do not understand it. If you are going to wire up every lot in the state, you will have to traverse all roads in the state to do a cable drop to every lot in order to do so. What does road density have to do with it?

When building wireline communication networks, the deciding factor costwise, is the number of linear cable sheet miles. As such miles of road is a good proxy for comparing deployment costs between locations.

Please note that I am discussing _wireline_ broadband. If you have you heart set on wireless coverage, then we have to talk different measures, and even there population density is not the tell all metric.

> But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of > two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. > <http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm>

My bad. However that does not still make it cheaper to build in Finland, it merely brings up Texas and Finland to par on miles of road per population. Several things still favour Texas in the cost per capita, such as: economics of scale, ability to perform construction year around and no need to put utilities under the frostline.

There are no technical or cost reasons for Texas to be unable to offer the same level of broadband service as Finland. It all comes down to other reasons, perhaps such as lack of political will in Texas.

<comment><USER16> A number of different factors at play.

Imagine a layout where cables do not have to follow roads.

Imagine a layout where one cable can serve buildings on two roads. Certainly much, much easier when the buildings are dense.

Imagine a thousand people living in one building in the center of a thousand square miles, served by one cable. Imagine a thousand people living one per square mile in a thousand square miles. The population densities are the same. The cabling costs are not.

<comment><USER19> Imagination will take you very far, and in this case, very far from the matter at hand. Texas and Finland are real places, not figments of imagination.

> Imagine a layout where cables do not have to follow roads. Imagine a layout > where one cable can serve buildings on two roads. Certainly much, much > easier when the buildings are dense.

Not very likely in the real world. Easements and rights of way are not available or not readily available among arbitrary paths. In any case, even if you were to cut through peoples back yards, you would still most of the time just be following a parallellish path to the roads.

> Imagine a thousand people living in one building in the center of a thousand > square miles, served by one cable. Imagine a thousand people living one per > square mile in a thousand square miles. The population densities are the > same. The cabling costs are not.

These are real places we are talking about. Have a look at a map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think defining broadband access like this allows them to move certain legally required things to the internet age. I believe there are a lot of small laws in Finland that say what the radio channel, newspaper or Tv channel should provide. For example we actually have a law that during icehockey World Championships our own matches should be broadcasted for free.

If enough people legally have access to a broadband internet, its easier to make laws to offering certain services through the internet (certain information delivery, services like taxes and maybe voting in the future).

</comment><comment><USER21> I think most people read too much into the speeds. What they are acutally saying is that you now have a legal right to get a decent-ish connection at any place in Finland. And this should be a right in any modern country, as so many things revolve around having access to the Internet.

Example: In Norway we do our tax returns, apply for school, read up on information about your properties, etc. You basically have to have access to Internet.

</comment><comment><USER22> I still remember the fiasco of spending lots of tax money to build a DVB television network. They were talking a lot of having a "callback channel" in those set-top boxes and lots of interaction in TV programs.

Well, we had expensive television network while Sweden spent the same money for better Internet connections.

</comment><comment><USER23> Meanwhile, in my country, regular people can't have anything better than 128kb (it's the law).

<comment><USER24> what? where is that?

<comment><USER25> Iran <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Iran>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> fyi, article is 3 years old

</comment><comment><USER27> The voice of the people will be heard.</comment>


Orkut shutting down September 30 - <AUTHOR> http://en.blog.orkut.com/2014/06/tchau-orkut.html <comment><USER2> I used Orkut in the early days (from 2004 - 2008). The growth trajectory was similar to facebook. All the elite colleges in India were using it in the beginning and then it rapidly spread across other colleges.

But the thing was:

1\. There was no News feed. You had to actually visit your friend's wall to make a comment/see what they were up-to.

2\. That other person would know the next day that you visited their profile. This discourages people from taking interest in the lives of others. You didn't want to come across as a creep or having nothing better to do with your time.

3\. Communities/Forums were a big thing. There wasn't too much to do so you visited "communities". It became a turf war between Indians, Brazilians and a few other countries over content. So if you were from another country, you would get the feeling of not belonging here. I always thought that it drove people from other countries away.

4\. Facebook created a personal bubble/universe centered around you. Discussions on forums/pages were not a high priority. News feed was the game changer. I remember people moving away en masse from Orkut to Facebook around 2007 - 08.

<comment><USER3> It's funny about #1, since when the NewsFeed appeared on Facebook most people were mad about the change. It was a weird thing going from assuming that only people who viewed your profile (e.g. enough to care) would see your goofy pics, and then now they were splashed in front of anyone you added as a 'friend'.

<comment><USER4> I unfollow all old/new friends and likes. I have no news feed.

<comment><USER5> Ads?

<comment><USER4> Adblocker.

<comment><USER6> A combination of NoScript and / or RequestPolicy works best for this. No need to rely on software that sometimes doesn't truly block all advertisements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This could have been something. First social network I joined was Orkut in 2004. Back in 2006, it was all rage not only in Brazil, but also in lots of other countries where facebook was virtually unknown (iirc the MAU was over 100 million). In fact, facebook didn't overtake orkut in India and Brazil until 2010 and 2011 respectively.

If google had nurtured this social network instead of ignoring it for years, it might have become credible rival to facebook in markets outside US/EU. Instead, years of negligence and atrocious design decisions turned it into a ghost town since around 2011 or so. One has only to blame oneself.

<comment><USER8> I was told (source who used work for Google) that Orkut required massive amounts of resources that made it hard to run at scale. And there was no money in it.

This is why I'm a bit surprised that G+ is so bloated, as there is no money in that either....

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell (or, tchau)."

I really kind of find this odd. I'm sure that other services have popped up to take it's place and that it's popularity is dropping, but I really find it hard to believe that they are Youtube (completely different service), Blogger (Which up until now I was under the impression that Google had forgotten that it even owned) and Google+ (More recent and less established than Orkut, and still a small amount of active users). I'm thinking more that non-Google services are the real threats, and that Google just has no benefit anymore in having users in any other service than Google+.

I don't find it odd, however, that another social network owned and operated by Google is shutting down though. While I think it's smart for them to try to consolidate their social strategy, I feel like they're engraining themselves in a service deeper and deeper that will, at some point, work more towards holding them back than allowing them to branch out into new products. That is all an incredible amount of opinion though, so we'll see.

<comment><USER10> From what I understand Orkut adoption at the moment is limited pretty much to just Brazil. Orkut simply had it coming for a looong time.

<comment><USER11> Brazil isn't exactly Luxembourg. Surely a population of 200 million isn't to be sniffed at.

<comment><USER12> They're migrating to facebook. Social networks don't make sense if they're nation limited, be it de facto or by design. People will migrate to the biggest most popular one eventually. I suspect facebook is just the best (by some people's standards) social network and social networking eventually falls into a natural monopoly.

<comment><USER13> As a counterpoint, I don't think China will ever migrate en masse to Facebook.

<comment><USER14> If Facebook were de-blocked today, you might very well see a mass migration. All my students (Chinese high schoolers and college transfers) going abroad immediately send me friend requests as soon as they get out from behind the Great Firewall.

<comment><USER13> Couldn't that be because once abroad, everyone they interact with are on Facebook?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Similar but less high-profile news: the once biggest hungarian social network site, iwiw.hu is shutting down tomorrow.

Launched in 2002, by 2006 it had pretty much every hungarian internet users signed up who could be bothered by such sites. T-Mobile/Deutsche Telecom acquired it for 4 million euros in 2006 and at the time it seemed unthinkable that it would lose its momentum.

As a result, Hungary was one of the very last countries for Facebook to overtake the local competition, but eventually people with international friends started to sign up for Facebook too and the network effect kicked in: for the past 1-2 years iwiw.hu was in a free fall and one month ago they announced that they would pull the plug completely.

</comment><comment><USER16> Unless you hang out with Brazilians, you would think this had already happened 5 years ago. Even the Brazilians have largely given up, which makes the announcement timed to the World Cup a little less ironic.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, and the post hints to that Brazilian user base by using the word "Tchau" and talking about communities that have sprung up "in every corner of the world" in other services.

Anyway, this should get the last stragglers on to Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting to see that this happened around when Orkut Buyukkokten, the site's founder recently quit Google for Hello Networks.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkutb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkutb)

</comment><comment><USER19> In case anyone from Google is reading this, the link to Google Takeout is taking me to your internal 'moma' sign-in page.

<comment><USER19> Fixed now.

<comment><USER20> Oh wow.. thats a bug... glad they fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What happens to the developers that are on the individual teams what maintain these projects? Are they all dispersed to different areas? Do certain groups that work well together get to stay together? Are some let go?

Google products remind me of HBO's Game of Thrones series. They have so much going on at any given times, they can kill plenty off and still have their head high above water with plenty of forward momentum. What would Vegas bet is next to go?

<comment><USER22> [http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns](http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns) is the famous post about divining what Google will shut down next, and seems to have proved accurate in its predictions.

Personally I suspect Groups isn't long for this G+-enabled world.

<comment><USER23> Groups is a terrible service.

Strike that. It works well on the groups I use, but the group that I founded and abandoned (Rochester Arabic Discussion Group) is quite literally now unrecoverable. I can ban spammers from my group, but I can't delete their whole post history with prejudice. Had I taken timely action against all spammers as they arrived, it is possible the community would have survived, but now it's in "Warning - Blocked for Adult Content" mode and the actions required to prepare for a review in order to be reopened for posting would take at least a month of nonstop clicking to clean it up. I guess it's my fault for trying to start a community in a language I was studying at a time when I was likely to be too busy with getting my degree to devote proper time to fighting spam and helping to focus the discussions.

There is no way to perform bulk actions of any kind from the admin area. This is my biggest gripe. Groups is a service that needs an overhaul, it does not need to be killed, but only time will tell what Google does with this one.

<comment><USER24> Groups was an awesome service when it launched back in 2001. It was _the_ search engine to go to if you wanted to search UseNet, which (in the pre- Friendster/MySpace/Facebook days) was the largest social network on the Internet. Google slapped a much nicer UI on it than DejaNews ever had, rivaling desktop Usenet readers but without the need to download anything or run another program.

It started sucking when they took UseNet out of it - then it became just another mailing-list site in an already crowded field. (Granted, UseNet itself was nearly dead at this point.) And the field was shrinking, since more affinity groups started moving to FaceBook, or MeetUp, or getting their own individual sites on the Internet with stock forum software. And IMHO, it really died when it went to the AJAX UI - there's no real reason for a content site like Groups (or Blogger, for that matter) to go heavily AJAX, it just makes it feel clunky.

<comment><USER23> Seconded. The AJAX UI sucks the most of all. Try loading up 100 pages of threads on one screen, selecting 19,850 spam threads to delete, and finding out an hour and a half later that your request is too large and all your work is lost.

<comment><USER22> Thirded. The AJAX UI is precisely when I stopped using Groups. It's not that AJAX is bad (obviously), it's that this is a really poor implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think this was a very well written sunset post.

<comment><USER26> Google has plenty of experience in that department.

<comment><USER27> Too soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google is cleaning up their slum properties. I bet Google Code will be next to go. Blogger and Sites need either to be EOL'ed or upgraded.

<comment><USER29> Yep. They had questionnaire about what things to improve with sites and which features are used and which aren't. So hopefully they're upgrading it.

<comment><USER28> I did not see the questionnaire. I use Sites for some simple Web sites, and my current blog is on Blogspot. There's a lot of potential to combine Sites, Blogger, and Plus to create a short-form/long-form continuum. I hope Google makes a good try at this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> On a slightly unrelated note, why do blog sub-sites always lack a link to the main web site? It _always_ takes time to realize the blog site's logo links to itself, that there is no obvious link to the main one anywhere on the page, and that you will have to edit the URL by hand. Such a trivial usability issue.

<comment><USER31> Default settings of blogging software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well, this was a long time coming. No surprises here. I'll fondly remember Orkut though. It was the first social network I really used and participated in. An interesting story: When I was in college, my friend and I figured out a way to see hidden pictures from users using a simple URL "hack". It was quite fun showing it off to friends, before they added an extra hash element to their URLs (if I remember correctly) and stopped our tinkering.

</comment><comment><USER33> From one of Orkut developers:

[http://ivan-gandhi.livejournal.com/2793482.html](http://ivan- gandhi.livejournal.com/2793482.html)

      I was in that team from about 2006 to 2008.
      We grew the subscriber base, reaching about 40M,
      beating FB those days, but FB was catching up.
      Seems like FB was doing everything right,
      and we did what Larry told us - "improve latency".

</comment><comment><USER34> anyone remember this brouhaha a decade ago where Orkut was accused of stealing source code to get off the ground? including bugs?

[http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046](http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046)

<comment><USER35> It was more a copyright dispute than a theft. The coders took their own code to a new company. Zuckerberg did the same thing to start Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Did Google start Orkut themselves or was this acquired?

Second, wouldn't they rather put it up for sale?

<comment><USER37> Started as 20% project from a Google employee.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kte...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten)

Perhaps it depends on too much of the internal infrastructure they wouldn't want to sell?

<comment><USER35> Legally, it was created at Google. Technically, Orkut software was copied from the startup that Orkut the person was hired from.

<comment><USER38> They should open source it.

<comment><USER39> It probably would take too much effort to make it usable without Google's internal APIs (storage, search, etc).

<comment><USER38> They could open source it and have other people use app engine if people want to use it. Otherwise if its open source people could implement what ever they want on the back end.

<comment><USER40> App Engine is very different from the internal APIs most production services depend on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wasn't Orkut invite-only at the start? I wonder how much that affected growth.

<comment><USER42> It's anecdotal but I remember being intrigued, not being able to get an invite, and then losing interest/forgetting about Orkut by the time it opened up. I think in general with invite-based launches there's a fine line between creating buzz and stifling it.

<comment><USER8> It worked well for Gmail, and it worked pretty well for Orkut at the start. For technical reasons, they weren't able to handle the huge influx of users that would have come from opening it up to everyone.

<comment><USER42> There have been some invite-only success stories to be sure. (You could almost count Facebook, too.) The usual way of handling it these days seems to be allowing people to add themselves to a waiting list as an alternative to being invited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Another product for the Google chopping block...

</comment><comment><USER44> I thought it was big in Brazil and India?

<comment><USER45> It was but then FB took over at least in India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Strange: FF 30 throws a warning [1]

[1] [http://imgur.com/zziDXJt](http://imgur.com/zziDXJt)

<comment><USER47> That's not Firefox throwing a warning. That's bitly having blacklisted a link.

<comment><USER46> yes, my bad. realized it later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> ..but what took them so long?

</comment><comment><USER49> Why not open source it?

<comment><USER50> It probably relies too much on internal technology that is not open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This proves again that you cannot trust any Google service in the long term. Is Gmail next?

<comment><USER52> Give me a break. People have been predicting Orkut shutting down for just about half a decade. Hell, a lot of people ridiculed Google for having two social networks.

Yeah, sure, gmail's next. Whatever you say.

<comment><USER53> Gmail is definitely not next. But google+ users should take notice.

<comment><USER52> Take notice of what, exactly? That social networks have a single point of failure?

What makes Google any different in that respect? How are Facebook users any safer than G+ users?

<comment><USER54> There is something to be said for companies doing one thing.

MySpace still exists. If MySpace (were still) part of a larger company, they probably would have been shuttered by now as irrelevant. As long as Facebook just has one thing, 'Facebook', it will also safely limp along long after it is the backwater of the internet, a place you can't believe still exists.

<comment><USER52> > There is something to be said for companies doing one thing.

Facebook doesn't want to "do one thing". The problem is, Facebook keeps failing at doing other things, so you never hear about them or remember them.

Hey, what do you think people remember best: The facebook phone or the iTunes social network?

<comment><USER8> But social networking is the core of what Facebook does, and that includes the failed phone. G+ is pretty much irrelevant to Google's core businesses, which are search and advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I will miss all the lasers.

</comment><comment><USER56> Orkwhut?

</comment><comment><USER57> Orkut could have been facebook if it wasn't for the stupid name.</comment>


We Asked Def Con Attendees Why People Are Still Getting Hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5yqn4/we-asked-def-con-attendees-why-people-are-still-getting-hacked <comment><USER2> It is not a joke, people still use "1234" as their PIN or "Password" as their password. I also understand that even today hardware is shipped with default passwords to set them up and one of the first things to do is to install a new password. BUT THEY DON'T!

Add in cheap management that does not pay for the tools the IT department needs.

Management that demands access to part of the network they never really need to assess.

And people install their own hardware to the network to bypass security so they can watch Netflix, use Facebook, etc.</comment>


Speaker Listing for TED 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://conferences.ted.com/TED2009/program/speakers.php <comment><AUTHOR> No need to upvote, just wanted to get the word out. Although if you have any strong opinions about the speakers, that would be interesting :).</comment>


TiVo Series 1 "Lifetime" Service lasted about 16 years - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/davezatz/status/765629650617982976/photo/1 <comment><USER2> The one someone gave me died a while back and I was unable to revive it. 16 years is an incredible "lifetime" for a technology, particularly in the modern era. And the $75 gift card is a nice touch.

<comment><AUTHOR> 16 years is a rather short lifetime if you're marketing towards humans. That's why they gave the gift card.

<comment><USER3> They did term it "Product Lifetime" after issues due to the original TOS being a bit vague as to whose lifetime it was.</comment></comment></comment>


ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source - <AUTHOR> https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/ <comment> WD-42 If any of you are interested in some of the software that made this discovery possible, check out two of the papers from Las Cumbres Observatory:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature24291.html?foxtrotcallback=true)

[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa910f/m...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa910f/meta;jsessionid=24CB64879B5A141DC8F45A67DC33EAA0.c2.iopscience.cld.iop.org#apjlaa910fs2)

We run a network of 20 telescopes that are triggered remotely (mostly via API). Because of our ability to schedule observations quickly, we were the only ones able to observe the peak luminosity of the kilonova.

Disclosure: I am a software engineer at LCO.

<comment><USER2> How did you get this job?

I studied astrophysics, but I mainly try to lure people into clicking on ads these days, when I am not doing consulting.

<comment> WD-42 Random internet browsing! I have a previous interest in astronomy and I stumbled upon our website, which had a jobs page. They were looking for someone with Django experience.

The field has an increasingly large demand for people with software engineering experience due to the complexity of modern observatories, instrumentation and data analysis. It's only going to grow from here. The problem is competing with SV, which tends to be a black hole for talented software engineers.

<comment><USER3> Just curious, do you mean that SV's a dead end for talented software engineers? or just that it tracts most of them?

<comment><USER4> I think the meaning implied is in terms of quality of work. Even the best Silicon Valley company you might join, the big ones that pay well, will largely have you parsing xmls or other mundane programming ritual done and demonstrated to death.

Controlling telescopes, photographing once in a billion year astronomical events obviously has its coolness factor associated with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A team from UC Santa Cruz used the data from the Swope telescope in Chile to locate the source of the gravitation waves and observe the light from the event. The data provides evidence of how gold and other heavy elements formed in the universe.

[http://reports.news.ucsc.edu/neutron-star- merger/](http://reports.news.ucsc.edu/neutron-star-merger/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5EkI5qbYYc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5EkI5qbYYc)

Full disclosure: I work at UC Santa Cruz and built the site linked above. :-)

<comment><USER6> Congrats!

How do you automate screening the sky?

Do you have robots that map stars, diff the images, and send an email when the diff has a new spot of light?

How frequently does the sky get fully screened? Could there be events fast enough that we don't detect them?

<comment><USER5> Apologies, I'm not one of the researchers involved in the discovery. I'm just the web developer who built the announcement site for UCSC. Ryan Foley will participate in a Reddit AMA tomorrow (Tuesday, 10/17). I imagine your questions might get answered there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To put this in perspective:

Since the first hominids looked up at the stars, till literally yesterday, mankind had only one fundamental force to observe the universe with: electromagnetic waves, be it light, radio waves or infrared. From today, we have two. The other two remaining fundamental forces do not operate at astronomical scales.

Of course, we had LIGO before yesterday, but for me, the confirmation through electromagnetic wave observations is key. This is an historic day!

<comment><USER8> We've also been observing the universe using neutrinos (generated by the weak force). In fact, there have even been one neutrino event linked to a possible astrophysical source[1], but with less certainty than this gravitational wave/EM detection.

[1]: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasas-fermi- telesc...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasas-fermi-telescope- helps-link-cosmic-neutrino-to-blazar-blast/)

<comment><USER9> Supernovae neutrinos have been detected for 30 years, it's not just one event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is so cool because we used our ears (the LIGO detectors) to hear/feel the gravitational wave hit then used our eyes (electromagnetic radiation telescopes) to focus in on where we thought we felt the ripple. And what's more, machines all over the planet were involved. Just awe-inspiring.

<comment><USER11> Wonderfully summed up. Thank you. By the way I thought gravitational waves have only been a theory. How can they be detected and is there such a thing as a gravitational quantum ?

<comment><USER12> Gravitational wave detectors like LIGO ([https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-is- ligo](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-is-ligo)) are very precise laser range finders used as rulers. They can measure extremely small expansions and contractions of space itself.

Discovering a quantized theory of gravity is possibly _the_ major open question in physics atm. We presume there's a 'graviton' of some sort, but have not observed it yet.

<comment><USER13> If I'm remembering the analogy in the livestream correctly, if you applied the laser's precision to astronomical scales, it would be the equivalent of measuring the distance to the moon with a tolerance the width of a human hair. And in the scales they deal with, a tolerance one-tenth the diameter of a proton.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Gravitational wave was detected 2 seconds before the Gamma Ray Burst. I wonder why it is faster?

> On 17 August 2017 the NSF's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave > Observatory (LIGO) in the United States, working with the Virgo > Interferometer in Italy, detected gravitational waves passing the Earth. > This event, the fifth ever detected, was named GW170817. About two seconds > later, two space observatories, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and > ESA's INTErnational Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL), detected a > short gamma-ray burst from the same area of the sky.

<comment><USER15> The gravitational waves here were measured for about 100 seconds (as opposed to the much shorter 'chirp' from the first gravitational wave detection made in 2016) so the whole event took some time to unfold.

The 2 second delay was due to the fact that gamma rays were generated by matter slowing down after it was ejected from the system and which collided with galactic gas. That matter was ejected from the black hole's axis of rotation and the black hole formed some time after the gravity waves were detected.

Take a look at this article: [http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2017/oct/16/spectac...](http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2017/oct/16/spectacular- collision-of-two-neutron-stars-observed-for-first-time)

"As this material was sucked into the black hole, a fast-moving jet of material blasted outward along the black hole's axis of rotation. When this jet collided with gas in the galaxy, it started slowing down and the lost kinetic energy was broadcast as gamma rays"

<comment><USER16> Is that essentially cherenkov radiation? That does seem to require charged particles, so it seems unlikely.

If not, is it black body radiation due to the heat, or just excess energy from nuclear reactions that are caused by the high-speed neutrons.

<comment><USER17> It seems to me it's Bremsstrahlung turned to 11 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> NPR article does a good job of simplifying this, I hope it is technically correct!

[http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=557557544](http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=557557544)

</comment><comment><USER19> It appears this was the discovery, they're talking about it on stream now: [http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/](http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/) (ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source)

The stream is at: [http://www.eso.org/public/](http://www.eso.org/public/) It's currently being explained right now.

<comment><USER20> Taking a while to load. The summary suggests that GRBs are caused by neutron star mergers:

"ESO's fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae — disperse heavy elements such as gold and platinum throughout the Universe. This discovery, published in several papers in the journal Nature and elsewhere, also provides the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are caused by mergers of neutron stars."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Veritasium summary is one of the best easily digestable I've seen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAyk2OsKvtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAyk2OsKvtU)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like much more this one by the Science Magazine:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_uIOKfv710](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_uIOKfv710)

and this one by The Georgia Institute of Technology:

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

<comment><USER22> I disagree, the Veritasium video has way more information than the two videos you linked. It shows how the gamma ray telescopes and gravitational wave detectors worked together to narrow the source in the sky of event. What a gravitational wave signal looks like, what a gamma ray signal looks like. The fact that the optical signal was made 11 hours after that. Etc. There is a lot more info on top of that which makes the video worth watching.

<comment><USER21> Yes, the fact that the negative detection by Virgo was actually significant was interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here is LIGO live stream:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/VideosatNSF/live](https://www.youtube.com/user/VideosatNSF/live)

This was LIGO (US) + Virgo (EU) + 70 ground- and space-based observatories collaboration:

[http://www.ligo.org/](http://www.ligo.org/)

[http://www.virgo-gw.eu/](http://www.virgo-gw.eu/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Relevant: if you want run their actual code via your browser, check out their jupyter notebooks:

[https://notebooks.azure.com/roywilliams/libraries/LIGOOpenSc...](https://notebooks.azure.com/roywilliams/libraries/LIGOOpenScienceCenter)

Click View to read or Clone to make your own copy and run.

</comment><comment><USER25> BTW, this is also the basis of a story by Greg Egan. Diaspora. (Aside: I highly recommend Greg Egan's work, especially Diaspora)

The claim he makes in the fiction novel, is that a neutron star-neutron star collision event would be enough energy to sterilize 100 light year radius around the event. The one in the novel happens closer than 100ly.

[http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html](http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> As a fan of the Astro-sciences I am so glad to be alive. I have all the confidence that within my lifetime hopefully (next 50 years hopefully) we will see great things maybe even a unification relativity and quantum mechanics.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can some astronomer or physicist actually make an image where the source is marked? All I see is some stars and a galaxy which is basically and some textual explanation where I should look for it.

<comment> WD-42 Here is a nice image [https://lco.global/files/blog/lco_skymap_logo.jpg](https://lco.global/files/blog/lco_skymap_logo.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The main paper about the detections:

[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9)

"Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger"

published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

PDF:

[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/p...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/pdf)

ePub:

[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/e...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/epub)

"Some researchers say it has 4600 authors," I haven't counted myself.

</comment><comment><USER28> Was about to submit [https://qz.com/1102917/observing-the-merger-of-neutron- stars...](https://qz.com/1102917/observing-the-merger-of-neutron-stars- finally-explains-where-in-the-universe-heavy-elements-are-made/)

</comment><comment><USER29> This seems to be the press release: [https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/)

Edit: The main link points here as well now.

<comment><AUTHOR> This link here always pointed to the link you have given, you probably confused this post and another on the first page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15483186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15483186)

That one is only an announcement of the press event, posted cca 7 minutes before the start of the event, not what was discovered, which was officially published exactly at the start of the hour, as the news conferences started.

Anyway, at the moment there are still live streams, like

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtLPKYl4AHs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtLPKYl4AHs)

10:00 am EDT - Press Conference (Part 1)

11:00 am EDT - YouTube Q&A (ask us in the chat, we will answer on camera)

11:15 am EDT - Press Conference (Part 2)

12:30 am EDT - YouTube Q&A (Part 2)

Also, in Europe (the European Southern Observatory), (edit: finished, now you can watch the recorded conference at the same link)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ISr4juIkDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ISr4juIkDg) )

There's a nice 1 minute animation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nziW8fywwmg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nziW8fywwmg)

There's also Reddit "AskScience AMA Series: European Southern Observatory announcement concerning groundbreaking observations" unlocked now, starting at 18:30 CEST / 12:30 ET:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/76ne3p/askscien...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/76ne3p/askscience_ama_series_european_southern/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> After observers found the source of the collision the scientist at the Chile observatory claims to have spent 45 minutes to locate it in the sky. Do they not have some sort of coordinate system they could use to pinpoint it?

<comment><USER31> The resolution of our present gravitational wave observations is very low. Adding VIRGO to LIGO helps reduce the area of the sky to look in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So, was there a telescope monitoring the light location already, or was the light only found after the Gr detection... I.e. Was it not truly concurrent?

<comment><USER33> they swung the telescopes around to look for it shortly after the detection event

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it just me, or does anyone else think that its strange that an observatory press release on the specific subject of the "observed light" can only lead it with what I assume is an artists'impression? I'm sure that there is oodles of data to go through, but after 3 months, surely a representation of the actual data imaged could be presented?

<comment><AUTHOR> The actual images are also on the very same page where you only see an artist impression: PR Image eso1733b, PR Image eso1733c, PR Image eso1733d, PR Image eso1733e, PR Image eso1733h, PR Image eso1733k, PR Image eso1733m.

There also are actual pictures in the scientific papers, for example:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/n...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nature24291_F2.html)

Also see the actual main paper, written by 4600 scientists together: there were many more observations and images than these two, but unfortunately they aren't "sexy" for the general public: a dot which appears and then disappears later. But the astronomers know how to even detect the presence of gold in that dot! Note: the chemical element helium, which today is even used to fill the balloons for the children, was first discovered on the Sun(!), using that kind of observations and analysis, and only later at our Earth.

There is also a video, directly linked from the page you criticize, and part of the press release, which was made from the real images taken at different times, where the changes in time are visible:

[https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1733c/](https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1733c/)

Also, there are a lot of papers that are published, most observers will publish or have published their observations.

The galaxy where the kilonova happened is some 130 million light years away, or 8 billion times more distant than the Sun is away from us, and what's observed (in different spectrums) is a source of a lot of light (or electromagnetic radiation) at the edge of that galaxy, and also the gravitational waves. To compare the sizes, there could be 1000 of our own galaxies placed one after another to fill the distance to that kilonova. There are around 400 billion stars just in our own galaxy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Cool, but i want more. All we have so far is confirmations of rather well- understood interactions. I want "we see these massive waves, but have no idea what is causing them." If they are being seen, such results aren't published.

<comment><USER36> _> All we have so far is confirmations of rather well-understood interactions._

Confirmations of _commonly assumed_ interactions. This is vital, as numbers of other hypothesise/theories/other rely on that understanding. Without results like these all that work is on shaky ground, now it looks far more solid.

Confirming current understanding isn't as sexy as discovering new physics, but just as important, possibly more so.

<comment><USER35> That depends. I'd bet money that LIGO was not pitched on the idea that it would only confirm the existence of waves. New instruments are pitched on the expectation of novel measurements. the "new physics". The parallels to the LHC and other massively-expensive instruments are striking. They confirm something that has already been widely accepted, generate the expected prize and raft of phds, but when it is all over the universe hasn't changed. I worry that those greenlighting these projects are being too conservative, only investing in projects that have clear pathways. This trend matters. Physics needs these giant instruments to generate something truly new otherwise the billions will drift towards other disciplines.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are wrong. The LHC was absolutely prepared to observe new "unexpected" (for the "Standard model") particles. It just didn't happen. A lot of theorists who had developed the theoretical extensions of the "Standard model" are disappointed about that, but that's what is observed.

Regarding the gravitational waves, you're also wrong, as the theory and the observations matched even without the gravitational waves being directly observed, the science is simply so good that completely unexpected results (in the sense you talk) are outside of the resulting limits of the previous measurements and calculations.

The level of the science we have now is really stunning. The only sad part of the story is that all investments in the science are really minute compared to all the money spent on armies and weapons (e.g. just as the order of magnitude one year of the US military budget is at least 30 times bigger than the NASA's).

There's immense amount of the new information that can be obtained by the repeated observations. But the expectation of anything to disprove too much of what we know up to now is simply not realistic.

<comment><USER35> LIGO is a new telescope. Everyone is hoping that, like every other form of telescope ever built, it will 'see' things that we didn't know were out there. There are lists of unexplained phenomena that telescopes see very regularly. Trying to explain such observations is the forefront of astronomy and physics (see dark matter/energy). But this telescope has yet to add to the lists.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics#Astronomy_and_astrophysics)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a huge observation, and many more insights are to come, and that this one or the previous three didn't add to that list you'd wish to be added to doesn't in any way diminish the achievement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is awesome! We should be able to find more gravitational wave sources and it will give us a better picture of the cosmos. Also, that we have more sources with better correlation and more information.

<comment><USER38> The best part is that gravitational waves stand out in a way that events in the visible spectrum do not, so these gravitational wave observatories will be helping find events and get them observed in every portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can observe. That means we'll be observing many more of these kilonovae now. This truly is a new era, as we'll now be able to use all these observatories at the same time to observe the same events, and this will yield the highest possible resolution imaging of these events, as far-flung telescopes are able to function as one really, really big, virtual one.

<comment> mark-r How often are these kilonovae expected to occur?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why is this post given so many points (521) ? Anyone can explain? Isn't it simply a post of something someone saw on the internet ?

</comment><comment><USER40> Non-scientist here, is this a Nobel Prize caliber discovery? Just trying to get some perspective here. It sounds exciting.

<comment><USER31> Basically they've made the first direct observations of what causes a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma- ray_burst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst)

I expect there will be a Nobel, not immediately but after years of accumulating statistics on many different GRBs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> awesome discovery. Can't wait to see the pictures. So much closer than the other detections of black holes - I assume the detection range of neutron starts is much smaller.

<comment><USER42> Yes. It mentions that in note 4 here [https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> And do the gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light?

<comment><USER44> For 130 million light years the difference between gravitational wave signal and gamma burst is 2s. That constrains the speed difference to 1.6e-18 m/s. This is fascinating number especially given that speed of light is 3e8.

<comment> alok-g Newbie question: While this is a very small fractional difference, could it be theoretically significant? What is the explanation of this difference? My best guess is that this difference must also be there in when the waves _started_.

<comment><USER43> I'm not a physicist, but I did do the 101 course a long time ago. I read "That constrains the speed difference to 1.6e-18 m/s" as "we measured as accurately as we could, and if they _do_ differ, they must differ by this amount or less, which could just be the tolerances of our experiment"

In other words, there's always a confidence interval, the trick is to measure it and minimise it: The speeds could be identical numbers, but what was measured was an either no or a very small difference. Larger differences have been ruled out. Identical numbers are _suggested_.

<comment> alok-g What is observed is the delay between the two signals. Fractional speed difference is calculated from it. As I understand, there is little chance that the 2 second delta isn't real.

<comment><USER43> OK, but there are other possible explanations besides fundamental physics: either the order of events at the source, or the effects of the interstellar medium along the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This stuff makes Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars relatively less exciting.

</comment><comment><USER46> Am I the only one that's a bit men about this given the pre-conference hyperbole? I was expecting aliens :(</comment>


Ask HN: Is there an OS-level screen reader that blocks distractions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sorry for the late reply:

Not at the OS level, but I've built a chrome extension that does this.

I had a hard time focusing in grad school. I'd be watching YouTube lectures or reading a Reddit thread on a subject I was studying, and all of a sudden It was like I'd blink and be watching some comedy video or browsing r/funny.

Rather than simply blacklist sites, The chrome extension I built uses a topic model to block webpages. You input the topics you need to focus on (for me it was often computer science and math), and the extension will block webpages, YouTube vids and Reddit threads unrelated to those topics.

You can check it out at ( [https://GetOnTopic.com](https://GetOnTopic.com) )

</comment><comment> just-juan-post Be more specific.

Perhaps "kiosk mode" software so you can only run certain app(s)?

<comment><AUTHOR> More like a kiosk mode where you can only engage in productive activity. You'd get to define "productive" as well as the time of day where you can only engage in productive tasks.

The distinction is that some apps, like Chrome, can be used for both productive and unproductive activities.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Books that blend math and fiction - <AUTHOR> Just finished 'The Housekeeper and the Professor'by Yoko Ogawa.  A really nice blend of fiction and mathematics, especially Number Theory. Loved it for it's ease of read, sensitive writing and the math. My favorite line in the book, a thought stream on whether to have a formula explained or discovered by oneself '... but I felt that I would have a much deeper understanding if I struggled it alone for a while'. I am looking to read more books like this one. Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> I personally feel that there are so many interesting true stories in mathematics and physics that I would point you towards nonfiction stuff like Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh, the Logicomix graphic novel about Bertrand Russell, or any of the lauded biographies on Turing, Noether, Erdos, Ramanujan, Riemann, Perelman, Feynman, the list goes on and on.

If you are sure you want to read some fiction, you can try the Quantum Thief series, Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem series, or the Goodreads shelf on "Math Fiction": [https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/math- fiction](https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/math-fiction)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not nearly so academic (in fact, it's for middle-grade readers) but Brandon Sanderson's The Rithmatist bases its magic system on a unique take on some foundational geometric principles.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lewis Carrol, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was a mathematician. His collection of short stories, A Tangled Tale, has a lot of math-related humor.

</comment><comment><USER5> There was a burst of this in the 1950s and 1960s, inspired by interest in/anxiety about science and math prompted by Sputnik, the space race, and nuclear war. So these are period pieces but you still might enjoy them -- I did:

 _Fantasia Mathematica_ (1958) and _The Mathematical Magpie_ (1962), two short story collections edited by Clifton Fadiman

 _Mathenauts_ (1967), short story collection edited by Rudy Rucker

 _The Space Child 's Mother Goose_ (1958?), poetry

Come to think of it, _A Wrinkle In Time_ by Madeline L'Engle (1962) fits right in with this group. The math and cold war anxiety themes are stronger in the book than in the recent movie.

</comment><comment><USER6> The "The Infinite Assassin" short story in Greg Egan's Axiomatic is awesome. Some other short stories embed mathematical thoughts as their main plot, for instance "Dark integers".

<comment><USER7> Measure theory showing up was a surprise.

On that note, also check out Dichronauts and the three Orthogonal books. Dichronauts ended terribly and I stopped reading Egan for a while after that book.

Come to think about it he doesn't really know how to end books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott is a nice little book. Abbott blends planar geometry and reality brilliantly. For example, every planar geometry object is a member of the flatland and as the number of points grow in the figure it becomes more wise; Circle is the wisest of all. It's funny how he describes personality types using isosceles triangles, equilateral triangles, and squares. In fact, he calls himself a square.

Be warned for sexist ideas and satirical writing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" is worth reading. Some concepts erring heavily on the side of fiction ("Teglons"), others firmly rooted in reality.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cryptonomicon, Anathem.

</comment><comment><USER11> Try The Algebraist by Iain M Banks, The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis / Christos Papadimitriou (comic about Bertrand Russell)

There's a big list here with reviews: [http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/](http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Can I suggest Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Its more on the maths side but has many short stories in it.

Also if you are more into the physics side of mathematics you might enjoy Greg Egan who writes sci-fi with ideas like about what if the speed of light was promotional to frequency. He also recently published some new adavances in the field of super permutations.

</comment><comment><USER13> I seem to remember the man who loved only numbers had some puzzles in and it's an interesting story about the mathematician Paul Erdos:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Who-Loved-Only- Numbers/dp/18570...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Who-Loved-Only- Numbers/dp/1857028295)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's a play, but Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" is probably the best piece of fiction ever written about math, and honestly, probably the best piece of English literature written since Hamlet.

</comment><comment><USER15> there's a splash of math in some of Georges Perec's works of fiction.

a fun literary example of a structure preserving transformation is the translation of Perec's "La Disparition" from the original french-without-the- letter-e to english-without-the-letter-e.

see also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo)

</comment><comment><USER16> I am a strange loop.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Surreal Numbers" by Donald Knuth!

</comment><comment><USER18> Another recommendation for Greg Egan

</comment><comment><USER19> Checkout books by S L Huang (slhuang.com), she combines math and action packed fiction

</comment><comment><USER20> Closest I've read is Borges' Labyrinths

</comment><comment><USER21> Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

</comment><comment><USER22> Most anything from Greg Egan.

</comment><comment><USER23> Logicomix

A wrinkle in Time</comment>


Chandler 1.0 finally released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/08/08/chandler-10/

<comment><USER2> This mattered six or seven years ago (around when the project started). It's since evolved/devolved in a half dozen different directions, tried to take on too many markets at once, and failed to ship working code repeatedly, all the while running at full speed in every direction at once.

Everything it set out to do (basically, it started as an ambitious Open Source effort to replace Exchange, though it evolved over time into a P2P something or other and now appears to be a really complicated todo list manager) has been replaced by web-based tools. Chandler seems to have a web-based version...but it's not the focus, and so it will never gain traction.

So, basically, a six and a half year long project has produced a todo list application. I'm happy that they've finally shipped code, and I hope it signals an end to the crazy tilting at windmills that all of the folks involved have spent so much time doing. Someone should have pointed them to <http://bikeshed.com/> years ago.

<comment><USER3> There was a whole book written about the failure of Chandler: Dreaming in Code.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I've read some of it (had to put it down because it was simply too painful to think about so much wasted effort). I once followed the project with interest. I was on the mailing lists, read the docs, checked out the early code, etc. I perhaps take it too personally because I did expect great things from the Chandler team. I just expected those great things five years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Release early and release often. They did the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER5> The FAQ doesn't even contain the word 'Exchange'.</comment>