The "Internet of Things" Needs a Fix - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-internet-of-things-needs-a-fix/ <comment><USER2> The actual Internet of things is Tesla collecting 130 million miles of autopilot data to make autopilot safer. It's GE collecting data from the jet engines they produce to understand failures and do predictive maintenance. It's Netapp collecting error logs from fileservers in the field, so they know how to prioritize their bug database, which performance bottlenecks to fix, and what limitations actual customers encounter.

That's the real internet of things. Just ignore all the (hype for) idiotic connected home crap covered by the popular press. Yes vendors are producing these products but the only feature I want is a a global disable for any such thing I accidentally bring into my home.

<comment><USER3> I don't mind Internet-connected home devices, as long as they:

a) are actually secure

b) do not send any data to the vendor or any third-party services

<comment><USER4> I would love it, but it looks like it will take time.

As for security, we've been building PCs and such for decades and still are just beginning to get it right. Looks like one really needs a TPM chip as in Chromebook or iPhone. That may be too expensive for many devices, hell, it is apparently too expensive for most desktops, laptops etc.

As for sending data. Seems like an IOT vendor would hope to sell the usage data. That does seem to have some value.

<comment><USER5> Raspberry Pi's SOC has had ARM TrustZone support right from the beginning (I'm pretty sure, definitely in recent models). I don't know if we can rely on crypto secure unique keys having been burned at some stage inside every Pi (Not sure if that'd be done by Broadcom or 'Pi?), but the "too expensive" argument seems unsound...

(I fully expect to read soon about some Chinese manufactured IoT device where every single one if millions manufactured has an identical MAC, GUID, and TrustZone private key...)

[http://hackerboards.com/trustzone-tee-tech-ported-to- raspber...](http://hackerboards.com/trustzone-tee-tech-ported-to-raspberry- pi-3/)

<comment><USER4> IIRC ARM TrustZone is not a TMP chip, just some software. And the other day we read that people managed to break it, possibly affecting many Android devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the name itself is broken. Most applications just need to be a local network of things.

Having a million device thats that are difficult to audit, configure and sensitive to internet and service outages is a nightmare recipe.

Not sure how to solve this in an easy to fix way but it makes me miss the days of RFCs and standards. Seems like we need something higher level than z-wave, zigbee and 802.11.

<comment><USER7> I've been saying for years: I _love_ the network of things. I _hate_ the internet of things

<comment><USER8> If it isn't connected to Internet how is it going to have new features. How is it going to take advantage of machine learning?

<comment><USER6> Exactly :D

 _edit: adding actual explanation_

I don't think I subscribe to the idea the that we need to instrument everything to collect data for eventual ML (especially if that data is going to be privately owned). I can see why that would be appealing especially if you are a large software company involved with ads.

If there really is a killer ML model for a particular IoT device then let me opt in/out and the data collecting can be anonymous, no login required. Being online should not be required for its function.

 _edit 2: realized I did not address the point on updates_

Self updating devices I am more on the fence about. Ideally I would have some control over what is getting updated and when and the ability to revert things and schedule the updates.

It would also be great if these devices used ssl and signatures for updates. There are horror stories of them opening up tftp and using http in the clear.

If this is too hard for IoT makers get right maybe hubs are the way to go? Not sure but the fewer things phoning home via the internet on my network the better I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It needs a massive fix, starting with WiFi.

"The drive, ability, and sheer will to change a WiFi password is inversely proportional to the number of devices one manages on a WiFi network."

[http://thefutureisastephenkingnovel.com/assets/player/Keynot...](http://thefutureisastephenkingnovel.com/assets/player/KeynoteDHTMLPlayer.html#31)

<comment><USER10> Every Wifi router needs to treat every device on the network as independently untrusted, except where explicitly told to do otherwise. Outbound connections aren't as big a problem as every random device having full access to a home network.

<comment><USER11> This is why I have two separate SSID's, one goes to my 'trusted' VLAN of home devices that have access to the rest of the network - the other goes to an 'untrusted' VLAN that has access to NOTHING except to pfSense for routing (and any access to the pfSense admin page is blocked from that interface since it's only bound to the other VLAN).

 _MY_ stuff (desktops, cell phones, laptops, game consoles) goes on the first, everything else goes on the second (guest devices, appliances that are less than trustworthy and have no reason to touch the rest of my network, etc).

<comment><USER5> I've been pondering this recently.

Does your setup (easily) allow for things like untrusted IoT powerpoints/lights on the untrusted network to be controlled by their regular apps running on a phone hooked to the trusted network?

I haven't quite worked out a simple-but-correct solution for that at my place yet.

I have come up with a concept of "any device who's software I'm not actively updating and managing for security shouldn't be on the same network as my backup NAS". That includes not just IoT crap, but my original (cant upgrade past iOS5) iPad, my printer, my 3D printer's Windows machine, most of my Raspberry Pis, and friends and family's phones/tablets/laptops...

<comment><USER11> I _do_ have access from my trusted network _to_ the untrusted one, but not the other way around (ACL's on my switch prevent the untrusted VLAN from accessing anything but my pfSense router for internet access). Regardless of this, however, they are separate broadcast domains, so if I can't just punch in an IP address to access it I won't be able to use it (and this excludes a lot of proprietary "Smart" devices that rely on mDNS+DNS-SD or TCP/UDP broadcast for discovery without any option for direct IP connection).

If I ever bought into the "Connected" / "Smart" home (and I probably will, it would be really nice to open my garage from my phone and have lights automatically turn on, monitor the thermostat remotely, etc) I will probably invest in standards-compliant devices that use Zigbee or Z-Wave and setup OpenHAB - all of these proprietary "Smart" devices just seem dumb when you have to rely on external services like IFTTT to integrate them, really defeats the whole purpose and I don't like being locked into specific brands / ecosystems when semi-open standards exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's one area where I think some government regulation is going to be called for. If nothing else, it should be mandated that one can "disconnect" and still have the device function to consumers expectations. That should apply to everything from watches to cars.

<comment><USER13> That kind of registration sometimes works in the beginning but quickly becomes a mountain of irrelevant requirements and paperwork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The way this ought to work is that you have a home server that talks to all your home devices, and can also be reached from the outside world with suitable security. A "cloud" service is unnecessary. Unfortunately, we're not going to get that, unless some carrier such as AT&T or Comcast pushes it.

<comment><USER15> To some degree both Apple and Google seem to be pushing towards that. In iOS 10 your phone/tablet talks directly to home devices, and if you have an Apple TV it allows secure tunneling (e.g., talking to your devices via the always-on Apple TV). Ditto Google is working on similar things, though the precise plans are a bit more uncertain.

An "actual" home server in the form of a computer in a closet is IMO incredibly unlikely. Piggy-backing this functionality into an existing always- on device seems much more likely for mass adoption.

The big issue is that IoT manufacturers will be fighting this tooth and nail. Nobody wants to be a commodity IoT manufacturer, and so all of them will try to push their own (shitty) cloud platforms as value-adds and avoid commoditization.

Similar to how Android OEMs keep crufting up a perfectly fine OS in a futile bid to prevent commoditization. It won't work, but they will try.

<comment><USER5> > An "actual" home server in the form of a computer in a closet is IMO > incredibly unlikely.

You're right - my Mom's not gonna install a "home server" when she convinces Dad some WiFi controlled lightbulbs or powerpoints from the supermarket are a nice idea.

It seems "the industry's" current solution to this is via some 3rd party P2P network:

[http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people- fear-t...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people-fear-the- internet-of-things/)

What could possibly go wrong?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sadly, knowing most companies, it will be more likely an internet of crap, with lock-ins and microtransactions up the wazoo.

<comment><USER17>
        Back in the kitchen he fished in his various pockets for a dime,
        and, with it, started up the coffeepot. Sniffing the-to him-very
        unusual smell, he again consulted his watch, saw that fifteen
        minutes had passed; he therefore vigorously strode to the apt
        door, turned the knob and pulled on the release bolt.

        The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

        He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you
        tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it
        remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in
        the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

        "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract
        you signed when you bought this conapt."

        In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had
        found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure
        enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a
        mandatory fee. Not a tip.

        "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

        From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel
        knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt
        assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.

        "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.

— _Ubik_ , Philip K Dick, 1969

<comment><USER12> PKD was, as usual, decades ahead of his time. I guess one can do that when one's mind is invaded by an alien superbeing.

<comment><USER18> Also a topic today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12023728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12023728) ("As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession." ;-)

Although he did find recognition and prizes, in his lifetime P.K.Dick made SF fans - who mostly tended to staunch rationalism, or a good facsimile thereof - uneasy due to the slightly unhinged mysticism coming through. But he did hit a bell with resonance in the mainstream: after Stephen King he's probably the writer with most movie adaptations of his stories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Internet of things needs a point. It's more about features for features sakes than anything else. Sure, a manufacture can add wifi for ~1$, but then what.

<comment><USER20> >Sure, a manufacture can add wifi for ~1$, but then what.

Analytics, surveillance and lock-in. Require the user to apply for an online account and charge them a monthly fee to do something online that used to be free, monitor their usage and make it difficult for them to use another brand's products without significant friction.

<comment><USER19> Great now what's the killer app? I have seen an internet connected blender, toaster, refrigerator, microwave, vaccume, coffee maker, oven, dishwasher, close washer and dryer. But not a single reason to buy any of them.

AV, lights, thermostat, blinds, sure. But, that's 30 year old home automation stuff not 'the Internet of things'.

<comment><USER20> A killer app for consumers probably wouldn't exist for most things, unless you could integrate streaming or delivery services.

But I think the real killer app will help correlate consumer behavior, advertising and the supply chain. You could have a refrigerator that keeps track of everything you buy and where you bought it. Scaled up to tens of thousand or millions of consumers, you might have very useful data for stores to use to predict what to stock and how much, and how to target advertisements. I'm reminded of the story of Wal-Mart predicting one of their customer's pregnancies based on their purchasing habits, and sent coupons for related products.

I also think integration with social media is going to be a _huge_ part of the IoT taking off but I'm not entirely sure how, yet, other than vague ideas about appliances having their own AI driven social media accounts and posting to your feed. That could both be useful, and an incredibly sinister way of getting consumers to empathize emotionally with a brand, even if only subconsciously.

<comment><USER21> wow, with all due respect, to me this vision of the future sounds horrifying. My refrigerator on Facebook? No thank you.

<comment><USER20> To you, it sounds horrifying. To your children, or grandchildren, though, It will be completely normal.

<comment><USER22> Things can be completely normal and still horrifying. No matter what section of the status quo you bring up, there will be someone who despises it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It will be vastly amusing when turning on a lamp or a microwave will require authorization from a machine in Kansas (or Kazakhstan, whatever).

<comment><USER23> As a casual gamer, I run into this quite a bit. Want to play online? Need a gigabyte update. Want to use Skype. . gotta merge your accounts. Makes me miss the days of the SNES and n64.

<comment><USER7> I've thought for a long time that internet connectivity was the worst thing to happen to console gaming. I liked consoles because games worked out of the box, without dicking around with accounts, services, etc.

If i want to deal with that, I'll just play on my PC

<comment><USER24> It also contributes to buggy games. If you know you can't update them, you make damn sure they work out of the box because refunds/recalls are expensive.

If you know you can just push an update whenever, you have a lot less motivation to get it right.

<comment><USER25> Sure, but I think we can say that today's games are much more complex that what they used to be.

<comment><USER7> We could, but that's a pretty shitty excuse. Just because something is complex doesn't mean the concept of testing doesn't work anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It was never intended to be internet of things literally. There's now way to scale to that level where all tiny devices are connected. It was ment to be the local network of things exactly like someone else pointed out here. The things will be connected on the local nerwork behind the home router. The IoT is a buzz word that was catchy and market pushed it farther cause it sells well. For as long as these things and what surrounds them are secure (as secure and safe as my router is) and they respect my privacy policies I will vote up them big time and they will grow farther be sure of that at the same rate and speed as the other tech wave is/was.

<comment><USER27> consumer routers are usually anything but secure in the iot sense. This because while they block unsolicited inbound traffic, they will allow any outbound traffic. And if you have upnp enabled on it, and most come with it on by default, all bets are off.

Damn it, Samsung managed to produce and sell a voice controlled TV that sends everything the microphones pick up back to the mothership unencrypted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> IoT is a corporate pipe dream. Just about the only thing that could use a internet connection is my fridge, and then only after every damn thing in it has a NFC tag to go with their bar code.

Meaning that it could keep a constant watch on its content etc, and allow me to check what is there (and not starting to develop its own lifeforms) when i am out shopping groceries.

For all the rest i need to be physically present to load and unload them with something anyways, so unless they come laden with enough sensors that i can bring up a full diagnostics on a whim (and actually do more than order a whole new machine, thank you very much) I'll pass on IoT.

</comment><comment><USER28> I honestly do not understand the IoT hate. Yes, there is a lot of insecure devices: mostly the not-cloud ones which needs an open port. But IMHO they provide a lot of value, especially if you are a developer. At least it does for me.

</comment><comment><USER29> Im very sorry Sir, your house has a virus. We have to put it down.</comment>


3 things you must know about Facebook ads in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidefacebook.com/2014/12/29/dennis-yu-reveals-the-3-thing-you-must-know-about-facebook-ads-in-2015/

<comment><USER2> Dont use facebook. Use adblock. Done.</comment>


Scott Santens – Cutting the Gordian Knot of Technological Unemployment [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/242456791 <comment><USER2> Reduce the retirement age. Problem solved.

Then ask yourself why it is predicted to go up.</comment>


Help us build a better Keen alternative - <AUTHOR> Article: https://link.medium.com/6cx1mvCaC4<p>Website: https://datawaves.io <comment><USER2> ???

This post is leaving me scratching my head. No link or content or anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man, looks like we just pasted the link from Medium, but it actually looks like this '"Tell us what do you need?" by Datawaves Dev Team [https://link.medium.com/6cx1mvCaC4'](https://link.medium.com/6cx1mvCaC4')

So I guess HN didn't accept it.

Sorry :)</comment></comment>


Faster Unsigned Division by Constants - <AUTHOR> http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/labor-of-division-episode-iii.html

<comment><USER2> Props. Nice results, and beautifully presented.</comment>


Dragnet Shuts Boston; One Suspect Is Slain but Second Man Is on Loose - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html?hp&_r=0

<comment><USER2> "The surviving suspect was identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Mass., a law enforcement official said."

So it is not Sunil Tripathi that the interwebs has led us to believe? Or there is still room for some more names and embarrassments?

</comment><comment><USER3> What's shocking to me about this twisted story so far is the seeming brazenness of the suspects, robbing a 7/11, moving openly through several neighborhoods, and most crazily, one "got back into the S.U.V., turned it toward officers and 'put the pedal to the metal.' The car 'went right through the cops, broke right through and continued west.'"

<comment><USER4> It doesn't surprise me that people who have no regard for human lives may also have no regard for their own. Very likely he is at this point completely detached from reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No one submitted the story from the Boston Globe or the Boston Herald? It seems if one is going to follow a developing story via a newspaper site a local source may be a better choice...

</comment><comment><USER6> Looking at this political story from a programming perspective... What software out there can help me accept as input millions of photographs, with timestamps, locations, angles and such, and generate as output a coherent time line of each individual in each photograph so we can identify the copycat bombers that will be occurring in the following years? Surly machine learning software could be made to find a person in one image from a different image based on analysis of the configuration and color value of the person's clothing alone.

It's George Orwellian, but it will be created one way or another. Is there some software that can help achieve this goal?

<comment><USER7> > Surly machine learning software could be made to find a person in one image

I would hope that that particular software wouldn't be surly.</comment></comment>


Australians pay 50% more for downloaded music,games,& software than Americans - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/downloads-its-cheaper-to-pay-a-wage-fly-to-the-us-and-back-twice-20120718-229in.html

<comment><USER2> I think most of the world pays 50% more than Americans for most things. It's just a fact of life for them.</comment>


Why you suck at Getting Things Done - <AUTHOR>

If you're a creative type and interested in productivity, you might have tried David Allen's Getting Things Done system. Supposedly, it works great. But for some reason, hackers, artists, and other creative don't seem to gel with the process. Why doesn't it work?<p>-	You don't need GTD! David Allen designed this system for individuals who need to do 50 different tasks in any one day and are constantly interrupted by meetings and phone calls. If you know what you need to do and can work on it for multiple hours at a time, there's no reason to spend extra energy on GTD.<p>-	You might not have worked with it long enough. For people I know, it's taken at least a year to master the process of thinking analytically while you input tasks, and then switch to thinking intuitively when you choose which ones to do.<p>-	Most likely, you're doing something wrong. Are you organizing tasks by context? Do you have a good reference system? Is your weekly review timely and consistent? Are all of your inboxes (including the one in your brain) at zero? GTD is almost all-or-nothing, and missing any one of these components could ruin your experience with the system.<p>There are plenty of jobs that can be done well without GTD. If you can manage without it, there's probably no reason to make the switch. <comment><USER2> Whoever said "hackers, artists and other creative types" DON'T often find themselves besieged with multiple tasks and countless interruptions?

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4060592></comment>


Ask HN: What data set would you like to see/use, but doesn't exist? - <AUTHOR>

I was inspired by the Movity guys post showing how they're collecting a dataset for noise in the Tenderloin.<p>So what other datasets would you like to see/use that don't yet exist? Perhaps there's a startup idea for somebody in here... <comment><USER2> 1\. open financial tick data -- opentick used to have some, but that's gone as far as i can tell. also, one of the biggest problems with financial data is cleaning it. with an open dataset, people might be encouraged to clean the open dataset like people contribute patches to open source code.

2\. open restaurant data -- comprehensive listings of restaurants with information like hours, address, possibly menus.

<comment><USER3> I've spent a non-trivial amount of effort trying to figure out how to do number two at scale, with a high level of accuracy, in a manner that could eventually be profitable. So far I'm not close.

<comment><USER2> I would be interested in finding out more about your approach to this or chatting about ways to make this happen.

I found this old thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911853> but couldn't find your contact information.

<comment><USER4> Over at Yell we have such data and I'm trying to persuade them to open it up through a public facing API.

Restaurants, locations, contacts details, opening times, photos of the facade and sometimes of the inside, some menus.

We also have a lot of other data for things like bars (what beers they have, do they have a garden, how many TV screens) and other business types.

The obstacles we've encountered to opening the data are: 1) Fear. Parts of Yell fear that the data they spend time and money creating and collating will be scraped and the crown jewels given away for free. 2) Politics. Different parts of Yell view the opening of data differently and will fight over any move even if they are in general agreement... nothing gets done.

I am trying to argue that on #1 that if they really need to fear something it should be not moving with the times. And also through the use of things like API keys that we could rate limit to some extent to prevent major scraping occurring if they really think it's a big problem.

And on #2 it's currently part of their business to argue a lot it seems.

I believe that if they could see the value in opening data that both would be a non-issue and it would just be done. So I'm also working on trying to document examples of how people could use such an API that is beneficial to Yell. And on that note... if anyone has such examples I'd be glad to hear them.

<comment><USER5> It's pretty simple. I've never heard of Yell before now. If they'd opened up this data, than I would have. Especially if they only allowed usage under an attribution required license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is so much data in government that could be useful for everybody. Just a quick brainstorm produced this:

I would like to see easy access to data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (and all relevant organisations from around the world), and to be able to have this linked directly to products.

You could then take use your phone to take a picture of a bar code while in a store and an app would check this against the above data for historical information about the vendor.

In the US and UK I see some effort being made with the new government portals to download data, I just wish this practice would be come more common around the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would love to have a complete tax filings for the US. Something like an anonymous list of people with revenue (with type) and taxes paid. It would very interesting to do some data mining and do some simulations of different tax strategies.

</comment><comment><USER8> All national real estate data with no MLS / IDX restrictions.

<comment><USER9> I think some aggregate, separate list of rental properties would be nice. MLS typically covers the available properties for sale fairly thoroughly but renters are left scouring through craigslist, newspapers, and shoddy realtor sites.

<comment><USER10> The strange thing about that problem is that it seems entirely an infrastructure/middle-man problem, because the people ultimately producing the data (landlords) _want_ it as public as possible, so they can rent out their properties. There are very few landlords who, if you managed to find them and ask, would not answer yes to, "may I include your rental listing in the Big Database Anything Can Access?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like a full dump of all okcupid data, including how people rate me, when they rate me, their ratings, etc. I'd like to know how long they stay on my profile, how often they click to my profile, and what they're searching for.

I mean, really, I want to know what every person I meet of the opposite gender is thinking, but that dataset won't exist until I build more hardware.

<comment><USER12> "I mean, really, I want to know what every person I meet of the opposite gender is thinking, but that dataset won't exist until I build more hardware."

You can build the dataset yourself by talking to them :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While only slightly off-topic, I find myself more in need of curated information than raw data in my sidebar research.

For instance, I searched for a while for a nearly complete dictionary of English verbs and their corresponding conjugations. My friend entitled this a "declension-ary."

<comment><USER14> Being overly pedantic, I wanted to note that

(a) Most dictionaries are also declension-aries,

(b) I really like your word declension-ary,

and (c) Declension is what you do to nouns and is analogous to conjugation of verbs, which I think is what you are looking for :-)

<comment><USER15> Yes, and inflection is the general case which includes declension and conjugation. It's unfortunate that most people are only aware of the other meaning of inflection, having to do with tone of voice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Product inventory for all retail stores - it would be really nice to be able to easily figure out where I can buy something locally without a lot of legwork.

Full Google search query logs - This would be a godsend for entrepreneurs. Imagine being able to figure out what things people are looking to buy that don't exist yet.

</comment><comment><USER17> Whenever someone gets something removed from their body at a research hospital, it gets put into a glass jar and stuck somewhere in the basement. It would be cool to sequence all of the dna in tissue along with the phenotype data (what is the tissue, what's wrong with it, why was it removed, etc) and put the data somewhere publicly accessible. I believe there are already pushes to do this but they are mired in academic and hospital bureaucracy.

<comment><USER18> Wouldn't you have to get a signed waiver from everyone?

Also, sequencing still isn't actually cheap. The price is dropping quickly and its cost is reasonable for research, but it's not reasonable for "let's sequence _everything_ " (yet)

<comment><USER17> Yes, when I was involved with this... privacy was a major issue. But I think everyone was over thinking it. In this day and age when people twitter their turds, it seems like it would be less of an issue. The sequencing is cheap enough.

<comment><USER19> How about if the data collectors just agree to ignore any personally identifiable information? Probably more interested in the data aggregate anyway.

<comment><USER17> When I was involved with some people who wanted to do this, they had a security expert on the "board" who would bring up that study where given 2 (or 3?) pieces of information about a person, you can ID them. I guess just knowing the hospital and the sample and the date, you could ID the person.

Anyway, these were the kinds of discussions I had for a year and then decided to leave the world of semi-academic meta-bio research because there were too many "committees" and "boardS" and "experts" and nothing ever got done.

<comment><USER19> Oh right, Information Theory. There was a cool article on HN about that a while back, showing you only need something like 3 bits (zip code, birth date, and something else iirc) to identify anyone in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd love to see open historical weather data by geography. It's definitely available but not that easy to get.

<comment><USER21> On a similar note, free realtime radar data could also be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> All medicines with their posology, side effects, etc.

A giant pharmaceutical database.

</comment><comment><USER23> Product UPC code data. It's much more difficult than it should be to disambiguate a UPC code to a product name.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd like someone to take a bunch of recently deceased human brains and apply very small amounts of voltage to the individual neurons while the brain is in some sort of Magnetoencephalography device (SQUID, SERF, Whatever).

Then average all of the samples together, shotgun the results (ala shotgun sequencing), and produce an overall average model of the relative capacitance between all the neurons in the human brain.

I'm sure it's a hopelessly naive idea, but man would it be cool to emulate an entire human brain, even if it was in 1/1000 or 1/100000 time.

<comment><USER24> Interesting idea. Extending this, I would like to see comparisons between different brains. Some people are more intelligent than others _in different ways_ , so perhaps by examining the relative differences, we can see how different people think differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A full dump of Wal-Mart's product inventory by store id and location updated in real-time

<comment><USER5> That would be fun. Especially when cross referenced with other data sets.

Things like 'Condom sales rise, when house is a rerun.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> All book sales. Not just bestsellers, but any book. If possible over time as well to watch as things become popular. A window into what people are reading would be fascinating to me.

<comment><USER27> Nielsen Bookscan collect that data but you have to licence it, alternatively you could get the data from amazon.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the tip about Bookscan! According to Wikipedia BookScan's US Consumer Market Panel currently covers approximately 75% of retail sales. That's pretty wide coverage, which is just what I had in mind. Amazon had occurred to me, but I didn't think they would have a large enough percent of total sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TV listings and ratings data for the last 20 years.

No idea what I'd do with it, but I'd find something to reference it against.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's everyone's birthright to have access to whatever genealogical records exist that can help trace their ancestry. The data sets exist as public records all over the world, yet a handful of gatekeepers are getting rich selling subscriptions for the "service" of getting at public records. That should stop and these databases should be standardized and open to the public for free.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've wanted for a while to see a heatmap of the price of icecream trucks or hotdog vendors in Toronto in the summer.

Transit-related data would be interesting too. Where people are travelling to/from, and how they do so.

I'm not sure what I'd do with either data set, but my sense of curiosity would have fun with them.

<comment><USER30> Couldn't help but have mental images of a human junk-food pacman, chasing trucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would love to find a database that describes all structures in the body and how they are connected to each other, including how these vary (not everybody has the same number of muscles, for example).

It would be great if it contained average dimensions for each, along with how each can vary.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd like to see statistics on the relative success of all medical procedures. I think you ought to be able to see exactly how successful the different options are, including alternatives like massage, exercise and nutritional approaches.

Being able to how well each option works for people of varying degrees of health would also be useful. Some options may work for the morbidly obese but fail miserably with Olympic athletes.

Such data would be very difficult to collect but could help people and organizations make better choices.

<comment><USER32> Note that one problem here is that the success of individual surgeons is highly correlated with how often they do a procedure. I.e. a raw rate for surgical success won't necessarily tell you the odds of the surgeon you end up with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd like complete pricing data for common purchases including both brick and mortar and online retailers. Eventually, I'd like a web site where I could enter my regular purchases (groceries + household goods) and it would tell me the cheapest way to acquire them (e.g. buy this list from the local supermarket, these items from walgreens, and order these 3 things from amazon). Obviously, the pricing data would need to be up to date esp. with regards to sales.

<comment><USER27> <http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/>

Does this for the four biggest supermarkets in the uk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Data that allows the ranking of companies in any major industry by their adherence to best practices, especially consumer-friendly best practices.

Example would be: average hold time. But this is already somewhat available. I'm thinking there's tons of other data that is not available. Such as: do doctors at this clinic/medical practice send reminders when their patients are due for checkups?

</comment><comment><USER34> Because of RateMyStudentRental, I'd love to see data that includes college student grade-point averages, retention/graduation rates, and quality of off- campus housing/landlord. My hunch is that the higher quality the housing, the better grades and higher retention/graduation rates the students have, but there is as of yet no dataset which includes the housing-quality metric.

<comment><USER35> I'd imagine 'quality of housing' is directly proportional to 'cost of rent'

So I'd have thought that grades are largely irrelevent in this case, you could have a really stupid person with rich parents etc

<comment><USER34> Actually I can already tell you from my own dataset that quality of housing has very little correlation with rent amount off-campus. An insane percentage of great landlords undercharges significantly and doesn't realize it (or maybe it's the bad landlords overcharging). Yet, because of the nature of student housing and the level of enrollment, all housing still seems to get filled at the same speed, whether under- or overcharging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to see the twitter archive available on something like AWS. There's lots of cool data mining you could do with it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Google's datasets. All of them. I mean, they exist, but not in completeness for anyone outside google.

</comment><comment><USER37> Government data. Everything that is legally open, put in databases with a standard, open interface.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd love a HackerNews data dump. Really.

Is it available somewhere (apart from scraping) ?

<comment><USER29> Depending on what you want to do with it, but this might be what you're looking for: [http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/03/six-months-of-hackernews- fr...](http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/03/six-months-of-hackernews-front-page- data/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Every website's publicly accessible forms. Think Yahoo Pipes, except using forms that already exist.

</comment><comment><USER39> prescription drugs inventory, by pharmacy/city/state, updated daily

customs (imports/exports)

corporate balance sheet

hotel occupancy rates

government contracts

</comment><comment><USER40> Short revisit satellite imagery for outdoor fire detection.

<comment><USER41> <http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/> is a good place to start. I think ESA has similar data but possibly not as easily available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Aggregate benchmark data for computer hardware

<comment><USER35> The gaming platform 'Steam' collects a large amount of data from peoples machines. While this isn't 'benchmark' data in terms of performance, it collects what hardware people are using so they have a good idea what the 'average' specification of their users computers are.

See: <http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/></comment></comment>


Guy Kawasaki: Can't spot a good investment, but he can run his mouth - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/guy-kawasaki/cant-spot-a-good-investment-but-he-can-run-his-mouth-306166.php <comment><USER2> I wonder how useful a heuristic this is: when people who fail at something tell you it's a crapshoot, and people who succeed tell you it's science. [Nassim Nicholas Taleb]([http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden- Chance-Market...](http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance- Markets/dp/1587990717)) made some money in the market, but he says most successful traders are lucky. But [John D. Rockefeller]([http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller- Sr/dp/0679...](http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller- Sr/dp/0679438084)) made a lot more, and he said his money was foreordained.

Another data point: most successful gamblers seem to treat gambling as a science; bad ones seem to have more OCD rituals to go along with their losing streaks.

<comment><USER3> Taleb's books seem to make a good case, though, for market success featuring considerable luck.

Also, a variation on this rule of thumb: When other people demonstrate a remarkable skill (dancing, drawing, playing an instrument) it's talent. When you can do it, it's hard work and practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He's just a lucky guy with a valuable name and some intelligent things that he regurgitates in his books.

Not very impressive. 250k old men with cats in their refrigerators? How deluded do you have to be to think that about the blogosphere?

</comment><comment><USER5> he's pretty damn good at running his mouth though...</comment>


Azure's new NoSQL document database, DocumentDB, is now Generally Available - <AUTHOR> http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/08/nosql-database-service-azure-documentdb-now-generally-available/

<comment><AUTHOR> Product team member here - happy to answer any questions you have :D</comment>


Studio Ghibli suddenly makes 38 albums of anime music available for streaming - <AUTHOR> https://soranews24.com/2020/02/21/studio-ghibli-suddenly-makes-38-albums-of-anime-music-available-on-spotify-apple-music-and-more/ <comment><USER2> Joe Hisaishi is one of the best composers, and a big part of the Ghibli charm. Anyone who hasn't had the pleasure yet should definitely check out his work, in any way you can!

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

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Joe+Hisaishi](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Joe+Hisaishi)

<comment><USER3> I agree. This is one of my favorite Hisaishi pieces outside of his Ghibli compositions:

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

Good movie as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has been geofenced to very few countries. God, I hope geofencing in the media market. It's so last-century. I understand it's all about price- segmentation and it helps producers, but it's so impractical, annoying, philosophically anti-internet, and it just pushes people into piracy. The anime market is a typical example of this. I understand Ghibli's protection of their status (they are, effectively, the "Apple" of animation: high-quality, somewhat-exclusive, and totally unapologetic about their behaviour, particularly after the bad experience working with Disney), but it doesn't help me showing my kids how wonderful their art is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Given that they are in the midst of releasing practically their entire catalogue of movies on Netflix I don't think it is surprising that they are following suit with their music.

Hope it will be available globally on Spotify soon. There's a lot of goody OST missing on Spotify still

<comment><USER6> > _releasing practically their entire catalogue of movies on Netflix_

Except in the US, Canada, and Japan.

<comment><USER7> They're on HBO Max in the US and Canada.

<comment><USER8> I'm getting excited for HBO Max, there will finally be a streaming service with quality television and movies (Criterion). HBO is the only video streaming service I pay for.

Here's a comprehensive list of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon original series that are HBO level quality:

<comment><USER9> I'm not the biggest fan of streaming originals, but Netflix has been Best Picture nominated 2 years in a row (Roma, Marriage Story, and The Irishman). And Netflix has pretty much reached parity with HBO in Emmy wins and nominations in the mainline categories.

<comment><USER10> Seems the trouble is that, in addition to their award nominated material, Netflix also produces a lot of low quality content tailored to niche viewer personas. I wonder if they've ever considered whether or not that hurts their brand more than it helps, or if it's helping more than it hurts?

<comment><USER11> Why would you care if you don't watch it? My grocery store sells food I don't like, along with the food I do; does that hurt its brand?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where is the link?

EDIT: oh apparently it's only on spotify

EDIT2: can't find it on spotify either

EDIT3: AH FUCK IT I'LL USE YOUTUBE [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK1Ij_- mank](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK1Ij_-mank)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's for Japan region.

Also I find the word "suddenly" kind of weird, as Japanese companies do this (unlock their popular work/artists in streaming without announcement in advance) semi-frequently.

<comment><USER14> They are all available in Apple Music for me with a US account.

<comment><USER15> And did you know that [https://musi.sh](https://musi.sh) allows you to stream music from your apple music account in your browser? Seems relevant here. I use it all the time on linux.

<comment><USER16> There is now [https://beta.music.apple.com/](https://beta.music.apple.com/) as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am discovering Studio Ghibli with the release of their movies on Netflix (better late than never) and it is an amazing feeling to watch something making you feel so much while being so different compared to western animation. Kiki's Delivery Service is from 1989 yet the animation, the music, and the topic (a girl becoming a woman via her first job: delivering packages with her cat and flying broom in a city that looks like La Rochelle) could have been made this year.

Really happy that I can now listen to Totoro 's soundtrack on Spotify, the joy of feeling in the Japanese countryside on a hot summer day while being in a rainy European city is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone else unable to find the Ghibli albums mentioned in the article in Spotify yet? I've tried the desktop and web app to no avail.

<comment><USER19> All of them are available on Apple Music in Sweden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If anyone finds a Google Play / Youtube Music playlist with these could they share it when they're available? I love the music from Studio Ghibli but oftentimes have trouble tracking all of the albums or artists that comprise a list like this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yeah, I cannot find any of these albums on Google Play Music in the US. It's frustrating bc I can't find a single article that states if this is a regional thing. Every article just says that it's suddenly available but doesn't say what countries. I'm just going to assume that it's not available in the US yet.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have most of the soundtracks ripped to MP3 over many years. Some of the standouts I prefer, in no particular order: Princes Mononoke, Spirited Away, Porto Rosso, Howls Moving Castle.

Some of the newer movies I haven't had a chance to really sit down and listen to. This was from the era when I was in school and needed study music.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems like not available in the US yet

</comment><comment><USER24> Fake news and lies. Yes I'm a little upset. I got excited and now its just BS.</comment>


Powerful new features for businesses on GitHub.com - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2325-powerful-new-features-for-businesses-on-github-com <comment><USER2> Tangentially related, but on our slack this morning everyone is griping about the updated blue text color on repo pages at Github. It's pretty ugly.

<comment><USER3> I too thought I was going crazy when I noticed it this morning... Funny, but that shade (or one very much like it) is forever etched into my brain as "porn blue" thanks to a k10k issue back in the day when the internet was still referred to as the information super highway and nobody knew what we were doing. Here's an excerpt from the first "lesson":

        You must never use this colour.
        You can like it as much as you want.
        You can buy a dress in this colour for your girlfriend.
        Your mum might have it as the colour of her eyes.
        Feel free to paint your house like it.
        But never use it on a website. Never.
        This colour is the porn colour.
        You must never copy the porncolours.

Source thanks to Internet Archive: [http://web.archive.org/web/20050404141942/http://www.k10k.ne...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050404141942/http://www.k10k.net/frames.aspx?section=issue&id=24)

Still cracks me up.

EDIT: for those who have no idea what k10k was, here's the story: [http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/kaliber-10000](http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/kaliber-10000)

<comment><USER4> What is the porn color? I don't understand the reference. What makes it "the porn color"?

Aren't links blue (#0000ff) by default?

<comment><USER5> It's "blueprint blue" \- a reference to the cheap printing process used to make the posters for pornographic films, and also the reason they got the nickname "blue movies."

<comment><USER3> Today I learned – thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SSO is important for enterprise.. but github presents a challenge where devs usually have pre-existing personal accounts which are added to company github accounts, rather than the company account being used.

<comment><USER7> Personal accounts will work fine under the Business plan. You'll just need to hit your organization's IdP for access.

<comment><USER8> Well, won't that require a different identity? My personal email account is funny-nickname@gmail but my work email is my-real-name@work. Github used to allow/encourage multiple identities but then changed it because it was super confusing and hard to manage. Maybe they've fixed that now. :/

<comment><USER9> They fixed some awkward "custom routing" screens a while ago. I've been using my single account with different companies for years now. I just make sure my git `config.email` is set right, set GitHub to route notifications for work repos to my work email, and it's done.

I've also been the admin on those Business accounts. It's easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would really just love to be able to group my repositories. Either logically in folders, or in another structure that cleans everything up. Tags help, but it is not enough.

I am happy that they continue to add features like this, but I feel like some of the more common wishlist items are not being addressed.

<comment><USER8> I never really thought about it but grouping by tags would be a good thing. Once you get over 10-15 repos it gets much harder to find stuff.

<comment><USER10> Yes - and there's also the fact that you have to get everyone on the same page with tags. It isn't as simple as just moving something where it belongs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The blue text color blinded me for like a minute

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a little frustrating to see that Github is holding SAML hostage with a more expensive business plan. SAML integrations should be par for the course with any SaaS solution.

<comment><USER13> It's because it's one of the few things an enterprise can't cheap out on. They have to have it.</comment></comment>


Lincoln vs. Douglas, Fourth Debate: Charleston, Illinois 9/18/1858 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate4.htm <comment><AUTHOR> > I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing > about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black > races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters > or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to > intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there > is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe > will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and > political equality. - Abraham Lincoln

I find my understanding of US history changing pretty dramatically recently. How do we confront long-held beliefs around many of the largest figures in our history without devolving into a partisan debate?</comment>


Why Apple should acquire Nokia - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/10/06/why-apple-should-acquire-nokia/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it make more sense for Apple to buy TomTom or Waze before buying Nokia? TomTom is much cheaper and Apple already has a cozy relationship with it. Not to mention Nokia is already in bed with Microsoft.

NOK: $10B market cap TOM2: $800M market cap

Even then, TomTom comes with a lot of baggage. A savvy operations expert like Tim Cook would choke in disgust at the financial waste of such an acquisition.

Apple acquiring Waze makes the most sense. It only has 80 employees already in Palo Alto. It is still private and only has $67M in funding. Its only product is a mobile app. And its product is actually an advancement for navigation rather than stuck in the old world.

<comment><USER3> Plus a hostile takeover of Nokia would probably start a bidding war with Microsoft as white knight. That would cost way more than $10 Billion (if successful, which is a pretty big if).

But Apple doesn't need to buy Nokia. They could just license their mapping data like Amazon is doing.

<comment><USER4> > _"Plus a hostile takeover of Nokia would probably start a bidding war with > Microsoft as white knight."_

If I were in charge of Apple and more evil, I'd do it just for that. Start a bidding war with the intention to lose it - and force Microsoft into an _extremely_ expensive acquisition that it would have no hope of properly managing or exploiting.

Then again, it _would_ be a $10bn game of chicken...

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, is such a move legal? Is there some sort of requirement that one bid in good faith or some such concept? As that would be a fairly nasty thing to do.

<comment><USER6> It's not only legal, it's standard business practice. One of the recent examples of this was when Google bid _against itself_ during an auction for spectrum that it didn't want, solely to drive up the price. As long as you are not colluding with the selling party to drive up the price (in which case, this is illegal, known as shill bidding) - all is fair in an auction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has Apple ever made any acquisition even a portion this size? It would be a pretty big difference between Jobs Apple and Cook Apple to make a purchase this big. Given that the likely targets would be maps and patents, the rest of the business wouldn't be of much value surely? But winding up a company Nokia's size would be a brutal hit that would inflict a lot of damage in many different areas - to Apple almost as much as Nokia I'd guess.

Edit: Auto predict. Sigh

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the NEXT acquisition, which brought Steve Jobs back, was in that neighborhood from a capabilities standpoint. From a dollar standpoint, you're right, it's substantially larger than what Apple has done in the past in terms of acquisitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like a popular blog title: [http://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple- should-acquire-noki...](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple-should- acquire-nokia-2012-10) [http://www.cultofmac.com/194130/why-apple-should-buy- nokia-t...](http://www.cultofmac.com/194130/why-apple-should-buy-nokia-to-fix- their-mapping-disaster/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I doubt it would be allowed by the regulators, but buying Nokia also gives you a lot of connections in places Apple does not have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple could argue that they need to do it to counter the threat of Android. With all the claims of more Android devices being out in the market, it's an argument that could hold water with regulators and get such a deal approved as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice article. A formatting nit: Having link hovers italicize means that hovering a link reflows the entire paragraph.

Example: <http://makeagif.com/i/6KTHGR>

<comment><USER10> And it's actually easy to end up in some infinite loop: <http://i.imgur.com/IDR64.gif>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually think they should acquire a carrier like tmobile... They always say they want to control "the entire customer experience from hardware to software".

<comment><USER12> Considering Apple is a global company, it wouldn't make sense to acquire the 4th largest carrier if all they get is some spectrum and nothing else.

How would T-Mobile (USA) help the iPhone across the board?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Honest question: Will the EU commission even approve the acquisition?

<comment><USER14> Most likely not, so good question. All that went through my mind when I read the post title was "Why Apple should acquire [Some Company With Way Better Maps]"...

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you miss the part about patents? and mobile TV? and more patents? (oh yeah, and maps too :) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If the rumours are true about Nokia wanting to sell off their HQ in Finland, it seems Nokia is a bit desperate for money.

This could mean at some point (in the interests of getting some cash in the bank) Nokia could sell off their mapping division (NAVTEQ etc) to Apple.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apple won't want products, considered by the market as inferior, to carry any association to themselves.

<comment><USER16> Nokia Maps as well as photo technology in their cell phones are considered quite highly. Nokia hardware is generally respected as well.

There are gems that Apple can mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny that ALU is mentioned given that the ADR is trading near >10 year lows

<comment><AUTHOR> Which makes a deal with ALU even more likely if no cash has to change hands (ie. ALU gives APPL a large set of patents and get the networking business, making it either #1 or #2 in telecom as a result). That deal would probably bump ALU stock up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How could Nokia suddenly do an about face heel turn away from Microsoft.

<comment><USER19> Hostile take over? Also, Elop's time is running out, so turning away from MS is possible in more than one way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It would be like Google buying Excite.</comment>


What if Microsoft had done Windows 8 differently? (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://hal2020.com/2013/03/07/what-if-microsoft-had-done-windows-8-differently/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Consumer upgrades of Windows 7 systems to Windows Desktop 8 would probably be a bit more robust, but that was already a fairly insignificant business for Microsoft. "

While the cost of WinSE would continue to increase with each new version due to the 10 years of support.</comment>


Content-Types Matter More Than You Think - <AUTHOR> https://textslashplain.com/2018/01/08/content-types-matter-more-than-you-think/ <comment><USER2> The X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff header is among the worst necessary things in HTTP. Browsers (I'm looking at you, Microsoft) should not have attempted to determine file content type ever, because they (and the operating systems that serve content) should not have been relying on the filename suffix to determine what to do with the content.

The ubiquity of problems on certain operating systems that arose out of treating the filename extension as the file type metadata for execution purposes has probably cost billions of dollars in damage.</comment>


Show HN: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock Using Magnet Message - <AUTHOR> http://magnetsystems.github.io/rpslspock.html

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd love some feedback - we developed this game as a fun way to kick the tires of our new messaging framework and realized it would definitely make a good piece of sample code.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice. Always wanted to play.</comment>


VC tiers? Who is where? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I keep hearing about third tier and top tier VCs. Other than the Ycombinator rankings I have not seen anything else that ranks VCs. How will you put them in their places ;-) ?

<comment><USER2> I don't know of anything except

<http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html>

In fact, that's why we had to make it; we wanted to know ourselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the ycombinator ranking is focused on internet companies. What about the VCs that invest in (yes I know yuck) enterprise software?

<comment><USER2> I think they're basically the same firms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The YCombinator list does not include Union Square Ventures whose portfolio includes:

Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Wesabe, Outside.in, and Indeed

Just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER4> thefunded.com is decent

<comment><USER5> thanks for the tip, useful.</comment></comment>


Lockbox: A new password manager for Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://mozilla-lockbox.github.io/lockbox-extension/ <comment><USER2> Note that the repository currently describes itself as 'experimental', so buyer beware and so forth. Please do open issues if you encounter any!</comment>


Show HN: Subsalad – Find fresh subreddits - <AUTHOR> https://subsalad.impetusnovem.com <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this simple app to accomplish 3 goals:

1\. understand what serverless architecture is 2\. learn the basics of frontend design with bootstrap 3\. learn more about AWS services I don't typically use

The architecture is S3 + API Gateway + Lambda + Cloudfront (so I can serve it over HTTPS). It's simple (just one web page) but I learned a ton by doing it. Hope you enjoy.</comment>


One Day Projet: Kerbal Space Station, a FOSS mod community - <AUTHOR> http://kerbal-space-station.herokuapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The first discussion thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1dcddf/i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1dcddf/i_could_build_a_better_foss_kerbal_space_port/) The latest thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1dluwt/u...](http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1dluwt/update_i_could_build_a_better_foss_kerbal_space/)

Total cost (outside of time) to me so far: $0.</comment>


Ping.fm acquired by Seesmic - <AUTHOR> http://ping.fm/blog/seesmicing-is-believing/

<comment><USER2> I've met Sean and Adam and they seem to be smart, hardworking guys. I remember Adam saying Ping.fm is about the tenth app, or "thing" they worked on, although I'm sure many of those other projects were completed over a weekend or given little attention. At any rate, these are the type of people that should be successful. I think Seesmic made a good move.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great move for Seesmic.</comment>


Blind Reviews Experiment to remove code reviewer bias on Bugzilla and GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blind-reviews/ <comment><USER2> FYI, when orchestras started doing blind auditions, the numbers of women hired skyrocketed. Even though you'd think music would be the one area where what a person looked like & whether they were male or female would be irrelevant.

I think this is a great idea.

<comment><USER3> Except sometimes blind hiring doesn't go the direction you are hoping.

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment- tria...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to- improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

<comment><USER4> Yep. Also, the orchestra thing was 1952.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a problem that needs a cultural solution, not a technical one?

Because knowing who submitted the code, I can better manage my time. E.g. if the submitter is known for producing high quality code, I only need to spend minimal time browsing through it.

But, if the submitter is known to cut corners I can prepare myself to spend more time and review each line carefully because I most certainly will find issues.

<comment><USER6> I think it could be helpful for screening first time contributions at the very least. You're right that a cultural solution is necessary, but in the mean time one way to deal with bias when you know you are biased is to remove the ability for it to operate (when practicable).

Otherwise, you're stuck in this zone where you know you're liable to make bad decisions, but you rationalise to yourself that you can correct them. No matter how you slice it, it's never going to be possible to exactly correct for your biases, you're going to undershoot or overshoot. Better to minimize their scope of operation.

I really like this line of thinking because it crashes into this realm of philosophy where some people think you can feel your way to a good result, whereas the other approach is to initially intuit the just result, and rationally design a system that achieves it regardless of your instantaneous emotions. Of course, such systems thinking is very very sensitive to getting the right intuition up front, so it's very important to train it and build in feedback systems in case you start getting things you didn't expect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great idea in general. Software dev has an unnecessary amount of politics, and this could reduce it.

<comment><USER8> Yes, this improves the environment :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting idea, but everyone I've worked with has their own distinct flavors of how they code, so this wouldn't really hide identity much, not unless you didn't know the coder in the first place.</comment>


Powerset – recursive algorithm in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://levinotik.com/powerset-recursive-algorithm-in-haskell/

<comment><USER2> Would this be faster if we not calculate powerset xs twice? I don't know how GHC works well enough so I ask.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure GHC will optimize that out since it's a pure function.</comment></comment>


One Year of 'College' with No Degree, but No Debt and a Job at the End - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-year-of-college-with-no-degree-but-no-debt-and-a-job-at-the-end-1523288219 <comment><USER2> Why submit content that's behind a paywall?</comment>


THT v0.6.1 – a language that fixes everything wrong with PHP - <AUTHOR> https://tht-lang.org <comment><USER2> Hmm.. PHP is a pile of crap for sure. Im wondering about this, as i have to maintain a legacy PHP project. The thing is if it were to be rewritten PHP would not be the choice. Tht seems like an improvement but it should be mixable with the old php.

Its such a shame PHP became what it is today, its mostly unmaintainable and has very obscure bugs (eg. datetime) that no test will cover. So i recon tht has the same bugs still. A new syntax is not enough to save PHP from itself.

However, i will look into this and see if is an actual improvement and helps in the long run.</comment>


Thoughts about TimeFit? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys, we are building an app - TimeFit - that addresses the issue of decreasing productivity and wellbeing at work. The short description of what we do is: During a break from work the app will give you advice on what physical exercises you should do, what exercises for eyes and what snacks to eat. We have called a break during which you try to do the recommended activities a Power Break as it enhances your productivity and wellbeing. You don't need to do a Power Break every time you take a break but three or four times a day will give you a great boost.
Please check our page for designs: https://www.timefit.mobi
Let me know what you guys think about this idea. Would you try it? We will very much appreciate any feedback :) <comment><USER2> My first impression is that I am more receptive to ideas related to Fitness (and eyes), but not so much about Diet.

That maybe specific to my own lifestyle choice, but I find dietary plans too intrusive and lacking in context(my health, dietary needs, food availability etc).</comment>


Show HN: Handmade Personalized Watch - <AUTHOR> https://www.omichronouswatches.com/products/bamboo-watch-w-green-backgroundmen <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the founder of this site. Anyone have any questions, comments, concerns?

<comment><USER2> Would be interesting to know that when will I receive the product , currently no information is there ( or my lazy eyes couldn't find it ) . Overall website design could improve , currently looks very basic .

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, sorry, I'll make it really apparent. You're right, that info isn't readily available.</comment></comment></comment>


Currying Favor with Partial Application to get JavaScript SQL - <AUTHOR> http://objrefnotset.blogspot.com/2013/03/currying-favor-with-partial-application.html

<comment><USER2> The language in the blog is very annoying, but the subject matter is nice. You've probably _seen_ it before but now you know how to implement it... or one way to implement it anyway.</comment>


Show HN: Better accounting software, what should my killer feature be? - <AUTHOR> http://getrunrate.com

<comment><USER2> I guess the first question off the top of my head is how is different than current competitors (i.e. indinero, etc)? Would love to suggest but would also make it a lot easier to know what you already have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment, I appreciate it. I was really hoping to get more feedback, oh well.

The big difference between inDinero is the philosophy behind how bookkeeping should be done. I think there are 2 big segments right now: Mint.com for small business (includes inDinero) and QuickBooks replacements (Xero, sassu). The latter is what we are going after, and the big difference is that all transactions originate from the user, and not the bank (you can't trust the bank, in theory). So accounting is a manual entry process, with those transactions reconciled against a bank account.

One thing we are working on is a mobile app for users to take a photo of a receipt and a corresponding transaction will be created based off of the information. This also digitizes all your receipts, and makes them searchable.

We're still validating this idea, and are getting mixed feedback. Some people love this idea, some don't see any value because they just use inDinero and trust the bank transactions. Some people save all their receipts and its a huge pain, some people don't care at all.

I hope this makes more sense, I'd love to know more of your thoughts. Feel free to email me at sean [at] orangeslyce.com too.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Smartly Organizing & distributing articles from HN,TC etc at ScoopSpot - <AUTHOR>

We (pillvin and I) have created a micro blogging website which helps people to follow their interests. Interests could either be in other people or topics.
http://www.scoopspot.com
We would like to highlight a key usecase to show auto tagging and tag based personalized feeds in ScoopSpot:
1. ScoopSpot has a tagging model that automatically crawls links in a scoop (300 character long text message) and detects tags automatically.
2. A user can follow other users and topics.
3. It provides a personalized feed of scoops from people & topics followed (we call them favorites) by a user.
4. As part of this use case, a news aggregator was built to consume rss feeds from some of the well known technology websites such as Hacker News, Tech Crunch, ReadWriteWeb, TheNextWeb, ZDNet, TheServerSide and BBC Technology. The aggregator create scoops for every article discovered by it. The scoop would essentially contain title of the article and the link to actual page. Scoops from news aggregator can be found at http://news.scoopspot.com
5. In addition, it would also contain tags to highlight important topics that are addressed in a particular article. This helps organize news automatically by topics. For example:- If you are interested to know about what's happening in Java of late, you can visit http://www.scoopspot.com/Java or http://www.scoopspot.com/Google to get latest buzz on Google.
6. Now with feature in point #2, it is possible for users to follow Java and Google in ScoopSpot. This eliminates the need to visit each topic page separately. The feature in pt#3 provides a consolidated feed of favorite topics and people.
We are in public beta now. We would like to get your feedback about this service in particular and ScoopSpot in general.
Please read the "Why join ScoopSpot?" section to get an idea of prime features of ScoopSpot. Please feel free to sign in with your google/yahoo/facebook id. <comment><AUTHOR> clickable link:

<http://www.scoopspot.com>

<http://www.scoopspot.com/Java>

<http://www.scoopspot.com/Google></comment>


Building columnar compression in a row-oriented database - <AUTHOR> https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-columnar-compression-in-a-row-oriented-database/ <comment><USER2> Reading this post is frustrating. What they are describing is where column store databases were 20 years ago. Perhaps at some point the folks at TimescaleDB will read Daniel Abadi's 2008 paper, which describes the key elements of how all modern column stores work:

[http://db.csail.mit.edu/pubs/abadi-column- stores.pdf](http://db.csail.mit.edu/pubs/abadi-column-stores.pdf)

The key takeaway is that columnar compression only accounts for a small minority of the speed up that you get for scan-oriented workloads; the real big win comes when you implement a block-oriented query processor and pipelined execution. Of course you can't do this by building inside the Postgres codebase, which is why every good column store is built more or less from scratch.

Anyone considering a "time series database" should first set up a modern commercial column store, partition their tables on the time column, and time their workload. For any scan-oriented workload, it will _crush_ a row store like Timescale.

<comment><USER3> > Anyone considering a "time series database" should first set up a modern > commercial column store, partition their tables on the time column, and time > their workload. For any scan-oriented workload, it will crush a row store > like Timescale.

Or you can set up a clickhouse instance. It's a seriously promising and underrated product.

<comment><USER4> Clickhouse is good, but it's definitely made for a very limited purpose; it's not a general purpose SQL database. Which is fine, but the attraction with something like TimescaleDB is that your time series data can coexist with normal data.

<comment><USER5> Many Time-Series applications do not need super complicated SQL. This is why there are many timeseries focused databases even without SQL support.

There is also PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper for ClickHouse which allows you to run all SQL PostgreSQL support and often with great performance

<comment><USER6> If you use Postgresql's query engine on the Clickhouse data, you lose all the benefits of the columnar query engine of Clickhouse so that's not correct.

<comment><USER3> No you don't lose them. Fdw supports push down of where clauses, only selects the required columns. You can also create views in clickhouse to make sur the joins are processed there.

<comment><USER6> You're right but if the syntax that you're using is not supported in Clickhouse, aggregate and predicate pushdowns won't work and this FDW ([https://github.com/adjust/clickhouse_fdw](https://github.com/adjust/clickhouse_fdw)) needs to map all the Postgresql functions / produces to Clickhouse in order to take advantage of push-down so the only use-case here is that you may want to join the data in Clickhouse with the data in Postgresql (or other FDW sources).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of anyone from TimescaleDB is here: I run a (very) small business using TimescaleDB in production, but don't need any enterprise features and so haven't purchased a commercial license. But I love it!

Do you have a Patreon, PayPal account, or any other means to receive money as a donation, gift or token of appreciation?

<comment><USER8> No, but we always love user stories! Shoot me email at mike (at) timescale.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested in columnar compression and columnar databases I highly recommend reading Vertica's Technical Overview White Paper [1]. I don't know how Vertica is doing now, but it's a beautifully designed columnar database with many interesting concepts which influenced a lot the product I'm currently working on.

[1] [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0cb4/d21ca5198819a85adae8ea...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0cb4/d21ca5198819a85adae8ea18fae83a0e9939.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Hey Timescale engineer here. Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER11> I'm building a relational lang (that could feel like a in memory db) and explored the idea of using a columnar backed structures.

How well could be apply the same ideas for in-memory processing?

If I understand correctly, you have something alike:

\- Store each column on a array of N=1000 \- Store the group of columns in pages, with metadata of ranges of keys to locate rows in the adequate page

<comment><USER12> This is commonly done in graphics and physics processing engines. In that domain it's the array-of-structures vs. structure-of-arrays design choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really like Postgres as an allround database, and putting monitoring data into Postgres is an attractive idea to me. One thing I'm wondering is how well you can mix a regular Postgres database with timeseries data using TimescaleDB? If I have a regular application using Postgres, can I just add timeseries in there with TimescaleDB in the same database? Or is that either not possible, or simply a bad idea?

<comment><USER14> You definitely can mix the two, and we actually find it a very useful thing so you can have your metadata available to query alongside the time series data. TimescaleDB will only make a table a hypertable if you tell it too, otherwise regular tables should work as you'd expect. And since we appear as a table in the contexts that it matters (JOINs, querying, inserting, etc), you shouldn't have any issues mixing the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great news! We at VictoriaMetrics [1] are happy that TimescaleDB eventually addressed high disk usage issue and implemented type-aware column- based compression. This should improve its' position and performance in TSBS benchmark [2].

One question: why do you use Gorilla compression for floating-point values? It works well for integer values, but is pretty useless for floating-point values [3].

[1] [https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics](https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics)

[2] [https://medium.com/@valyala/measuring-vertical- scalability-f...](https://medium.com/@valyala/measuring-vertical-scalability- for-time-series-databases-in-google-cloud-92550d78d8ae)

[3] [https://medium.com/faun/victoriametrics-achieving-better- com...](https://medium.com/faun/victoriametrics-achieving-better-compression- for-time-series-data-than-gorilla-317bc1f95932)

<comment><USER8> Gorilla is one of the few simple, efficent, _lossless_ algorithms that compress binary data.

Tricks such as renormalizing floats in base-10 (which I believe VictoriaMetrics implements) while great when they work, potentially truncates lower-order digits.

Lossiness is not a decision we're willing to make for our users unilaterally. And, as Gorilla is one the default compression algorithms we employ, it needs to be one that is correct in all cases.

Incidentally, we experimented with the binary equivalent of the renormalization algorithm, and it performed on-par with Gorilla in our tests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Too bad pipelinedb died. It was a nice complement to timescaledb -- with small oddities that sometimes took a production database down if you had no experience of advanced vacuum / repack features.

Any plan to bring back something like continuous views in timescaledb? (or to integrate pipelinedb work)

<comment><USER8> Continuous aggregates were first introduced in v1.3. Not identical to PipelineDB features, but address some of the very same use cases. We have some cool new features for continuous aggs planned too.

Tutorial: [https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using- timescaledb/continuo...](https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using- timescaledb/continuous-aggregates)

Example with Grafana dashboarding: [https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-to- quickly-build-dashboa...](https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-to-quickly- build-dashboards-with-time-series-data/)

Technical details of correctly handling backfilled data: [https://blog.timescale.com/blog/continuous-aggregates- faster...](https://blog.timescale.com/blog/continuous-aggregates-faster- queries-with-automatically-maintained-materialized-views/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> \- Timestamps are very easy to compress down to 0.01%

\- Floats are hard to compress without quantization or lossy compression. The Gorilla algorithm is not helping so much.

You can do your own benchmarks with your data with TurboPFor : [https://github.com/powturbo/TurboPFor](https://github.com/powturbo/TurboPFor)

or download icapp including more powerfull algorithms.

<comment><USER18> Nonrandom time series floats are often significantly helped by delta- compression before applying the actual block compression algorithm. I used to do this quite successfully in late 90s when sending FOREX quotes to clients over analog modem connections.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, for benchmarking it is important to use real data, because the compression ratio can significantly differ. You'll have better compression with lossy compression and better precision with user controlled and bounded relative error. see for ex. this benchmark for scientific data: [https://github.com/powturbo/TurboTranspose](https://github.com/powturbo/TurboTranspose)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Instead of trying to hack column like features and performance onto a row oriented structure, why not just develop a column storage for hypertables? All this work seems like a dead end performance-wise.

<comment><USER10> The article covers this in more depth, but the short answer is: The hybrid approach has benefits when your workload has both shallow-and-wide (fetch all data for user X) and deep-and-narrow queries (calculate the average number of logins for all users). Row stores excel on shallow queries, column stores excel on deep queries. For time-series data you want row-oriented structures when the data just comes in and convert it to a column store after it ages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> +10 for moar compression!</comment>


The Truth About Convertible Debt and The Hidden Terms You Didn't Understand - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/05/the-truth-about-convertible-debt-at-startups-and-the-hidden-terms-you-didnt-understand/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BothSidesOfTheTable+%28Both+Sides+of+the+Table%29 <comment><USER2> If anyone is interested in some additional material on this topic, MIT OCW covers entrepreneurial finance.

Relevant Lectures: [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of- management/15-431...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of- management/15-431-entrepreneurial-finance-spring-2011/lecture- notes/MIT15_431S11_lec08.pdf) [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of- management/15-431...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of- management/15-431-entrepreneurial-finance-spring-2011/lecture- notes/MIT15_431S11_lec10.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish I had read this before taking on a convertible - if only so I knew a bit more about the nuances of it

</comment><comment><USER4> There is a big point missing in the article: The dynamics of the folks entering the next round with those in the current round.

For example: The purchasers of the next round would be idiots to let the first investor execute the equivalent of a full ratchet, and all such provisions are usually throw-aways in a negotiation.

<comment><USER5> Not true. The full ratchet is implicit in the deal. If the deal said $8m cap and next investor invests at $4m then the deal gets done as $4m and doesn't impact the next investor. It comes out of founders' equity. It is the "equivalent" of a full ratchet but disappears after the deal is done.

<comment><USER4> > It comes out of founders' equity

And how is the next investor incentivized to let that occur?

Edit: I should be more explicit. The next investor is anti-incentivized to let it occur, which is why it gets negotiated away by sensible investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like the convertible note would discourage a down round and end up making investors less as more companies fold knowing their equity is about to get mostly taken by investors.

<comment><USER3> That's a genuine possibility, I guess it is an upside for the founders. They can see they equity is going to disappear and can take the out rather and accept the huge equity loss - although convertible loan is higher up the debt chain so the VCs will still get a chunk back

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _So to me the real advantages of convertible debt are:

1\. They often don't have control provisions. With equity often investors want "blocking rights on a sale or future finaning" that they often don't get in a convertible debt deal. If this is the reason you're doing it, then perhaps talk to investors about whether they'd be willing to give up that right in a Series Seed equity deal.

2\. They often don't have board seats attached to them. Again, this should be negotiable with a Series Seed._

\--Summary of the argument.

The rest of the article is useful, too. It provides good background and context for his conclusions.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend a yoga exercise book for a scientific person - <AUTHOR> tl;dr: Can HN recommend a good self learning yoga exercise book that doesn't go too far into claims about curing cancer, toxin removal and energy flows?
backstory: Working as a software developer I sit, or stay stationary, too much during each day. I walk 10km each day to work, alternate between standing (still stationary) and sitting, use a ergonomic keyboard, do resistance training a few times a week, and on top of all this take 42+°C hot baths couple of times a week but still I experience soreness in my back and limbs most days. After trying yoga a few years back for the first time, and having a rather bad first experience with it (too much talk about energy flow, not enough stretching etc) and giving up on it, I just recently gave it another go and have been doing yoga for a month now.
And I am a completely new man! No more aches, tired shoulders and neck pain. The problem is though my current yoga teacher still wants to lapse into talking about the mental side, and often the very much sudo science, of yoga.
And this is really difficult for me to sit through, even though the classes are really packed with exercises and the teacher takes good care in teaching the correct posture and performance.
So I want to start slowly zone out my classes, and replace them with doing these exercises my self at home. And for that I need a book, that I can reference for posture and movement purposes.
Any one have suggestions? <comment><USER2> Light on Yoga is a good no-nonsense reference:

[https://www.amazon.com/Light-Yoga-Classic-Worlds- Foremost/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Light-Yoga-Classic-Worlds- Foremost/dp/8172235011/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480119735&sr=1-3&keywords=light+on+yoga)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd _strongly_ recommend a video rather than a book.

I have maybe a dozen or two yoga books and not a single one of them talks about curing cancer, removing toxins, or energy flows--doesn't seem that hard to find one. Browse and find one that suits _you_ , not me.</comment>


Looking for a few good women and men to code and kick-ass for America - <AUTHOR> http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=239&sid=2877084

<comment><USER2> They want bad-ass innovators to apply startup agility to...five projects already laid out by government bureaucrats. RFP-EZ! What's wrong with this picture?</comment>


The Burj Dubai as Storm Machine - <AUTHOR> http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/burj-dubai-as-storm-machine.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a bad conspiracy theory to me.

I'd recommend the SPIEGEL article he references, though: [http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,667262,00.h...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,667262,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like an interesting way of harnessing solar power.

Perhaps all future skyscrapers could be self-powering, or even day-to-day energy-positive (I imagine paying back construction energy budget might be tricky).</comment>


Real time applications with Django, XMPP and StropheJS - The Agiliq Blog - <AUTHOR> http://agiliq.com/blog/2010/12/real-time-applications-with-django-xmpp-and-stroph/ <comment><USER2> Interesting work that looks promising.

In general though, is it just me or are we yet to see an API/library/protocol that makes it 'simple' to add real time capabilities to an app?

<comment><USER3> I think one of the easiest tools to work with is <http://tornadoweb.org/> \- hacking apart their chat demo will get you most of the way there.</comment></comment>


I'm 17 and I Deleted All My Social Media. Here's What Happened - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@coreyalex/what-ive-learnt-as-a-17-year-old-who-deleted-all-social-media-d282274d4edd <comment><USER2> Being a teenager wasn't all fun and games before social media. Growing up there was a preoccupation with status symbols, which video game console you had, how many cloths you wore from hot topic, etc. Having MySpace was a signal that you had a computer and Internet at home. Likes and friends on social media are huge status symbols now. There is an admission that the narcissism this fuels is harmful. It may be that the social media train is running out of steam and people are going to shift to something else. I wonder if Corey Simon is on the front of a type of new status symbol: having the will to stay off social media and the lifestyle improvements that accompany it.</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone tried python-on-a-chip on a Teensy++? - <AUTHOR>

I've been thinking of getting a Teensy++ (discussed here before, info at http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html and discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624327 ), mostly for the added analog inputs. Then I asked myself, and Google, if it would be possible to run Python on it, with the increased Flash and all.<p>Turns out that it's probably possible, using http://code.google.com/p/python-on-a-chip/ . Now I have new questions:<p>* Has anyone tried running e.g. python-on-a-chip on a Teensy++?<p>* If so, what's the speed like?<p>* Also, is support for the fancy peripherals included, or would I have to add bits and pieces of C to do that?<p>[edited for readability] <comment><USER2> For convenience:

<http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624327>

<http://code.google.com/p/python-on-a-chip/></comment>


Show HN: 13,000 Users in 2 hours - TalentMash - <AUTHOR> https://mercurypuzzle.com/mash/

<comment><AUTHOR> We just released our new feature, TalentMash two hours ago. It let's you import your best friends so you can rate their talents.

Any feedback is highly appreciated! Questions too of course. :)

</comment><comment><USER2> great idea guys. catchy webdesign, especially the hipster guy on profile button!

</comment><comment><USER3> pope vs obama :D how did you guess my best friends btw?

<comment><AUTHOR> well good question, while importing the fb data from the user we count all the comments,likes, and tagged-photos and aggregate them to a score.. this score is then used to measure how good you know each other. it took us a time until we figured out how to weight the different parameters but i think the outcome is quite accurate!</comment></comment>


The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gaming/the-making-of-the-beatles-rock-band/0 <comment><USER2> The NYT Magazine also had an article last month <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16beatles-t.html></comment>


Console for Mobile Browsers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/liriliri/eruda <comment><USER2> Hey, this is pretty neat! Certainly seems like something that'll make it easier to test webpages on mobile or what not.

However, the fact it's a script you have to install on the source page definitely limits its usefulness. Most of the time when I need a console for a mobile browser, it's to debug an error that's occuring on a client or customer's website. They're probably not going to be too thrilled with the prospect of another 100KB of code being downloaded by anyone viewing the site, even if it is behind a URL parameter or flag.

The way that old mobile version of Firebug was available as a bookmarklet just made it significantly more practical to use here.

<comment><USER3> It's easy to miss in the readme, but there is a bookmarklet! I've just confirmed it works in Safari on iOS. You need to edit an existing bookmark with the javascript snippet rather than just pasting it into the address bar, but it does work.

<comment><USER2> Oh yeah, I'm not sure how I missed that. Bookmarked that now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The website is actually a really nice demo of what's possible with this. [https://eruda.liriliri.io/](https://eruda.liriliri.io/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is impressive!

I wrote a much less impressive bookmarklet editor[0] (years ago) that can also be appended[1] to a mobile page for debugging purposes (note, it doesn't work on, eg, HN, because scripts are blocked by CSP).

[0] [https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/bookmarklets.htm](https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/bookmarklets.htm)

[1]

      javascript:(function () {
          var u = "https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/scripts/";
          var s = document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("script"));
          s.src = u + "js.js";
          s.onload = function () {
              loadScript(u + "bookmarklets.js", function () {
                  editor();
                  onload();
              });
          };
      }
      )();

To be a little meta: [https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/bookmarklets.htm?scr...](https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/bookmarklets.htm?script=\(function%20\(\)%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20var%20s%20%3D%20document.body.appendChild\(document.createElement\(%22script%22\)\)%3B%0A%20%20%20%20var%20u%20%3D%20%22https%3A%2F%2Fgabrielsroka.github.io%2Fwebpages%2Fscripts%2F%22%3B%0A%20%20%20%20s.src%20%3D%20u%20%2B%20%22js.js%22%3B%0A%20%20%20%20s.onload%20%3D%20function%20\(\)%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20loadScript\(u%20%2B%20%22bookmarklets.js%22%2C%20function%20\(\)%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20editor\(\)%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20onload\(\)%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D\)%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%7D%3B%0A%7D%0A\)\(\)%3B)

</comment><comment><USER6> How does this work on iOS? Safari tells me that I cannot execute javascript via URL.

<comment><USER7> to use on iOS you need to embed it in the source of your page, because iOS doesn't let you execute JS from the address bar. On Android you can use it to view pages without embedding it into the source of your page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of Weinre, though it's very old now:

[https://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/](https://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Firebug has gone full circle.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty neat but what's the use case? I'm struggling to see it

Edit: nevermind, I guess it's to make it easier to develop for mobile, no need to connect the phone using USB anymore

</comment><comment><USER11> ngl that logo is unexpected (unnecessary?) to say the least...

<comment><USER12> Why? It's not offensive or NSFW.

<comment><USER13> What is happening here is that the girl is drawn in a confusing way: with childlike and also with adult traits. Also, the big eyes form a supernormal stimulus [1]. As such it is "hacking" into the brain of the viewer. Some people are more sensitive to this than others. In any case it distracts from the actual subject (the console software). As for work, I wouldn't consider it appropriate.

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

<comment><USER14> > Also, the big eyes form a supernormal stimulus [1]. As such it is "hacking" > into the brain of the viewer.

Oh, come on, that's just the typical anime/manga style. You criticism applies equally to any software which has an attractive person as its icon as that would supernormally "hack" your brain as well. I see nothing about that drawing that is confusing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good Canadian hosting providers? - <AUTHOR>

We are currently hosted on AWS (US-East), and recently one of our new Canadian clients have the requirement to be hosted in Canada (for legal reasons).
I looked around and found a few options, notably iWeb and Netelligent, but was wondering if anybody has any other good suggestion? Also if you've used iWeb or Netelligent before, could you share some of your experiences?
We are looking for server hosting for web services and websites, both dedicated and virtual could work.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I used iWeb for almost a year in 2010. Never had any issues with outage, network performance. Later switched to OVH Canada for lower costs, but I would pick iWeb over OVH if cost wasn't a concern.</comment>


How it's made: Online Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/provado/how-its-made-online-games

<comment><USER2> Well, that was shit.</comment>