Team Fortress 2 now free forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamfortress.com/freetoplay/ http://www.teamfortress.com/freetoplay/ <comment><USER2> If you care about gaming in any way, you owe it to yourself to give TF2 a try. It's quite complex, with intricate levels and lots of weapons, but it's easy to learn and you don't need to have every concept fully understood before you dive in.

I've also been surprised by the community that surrounds TF2. People are usually pretty nice about answering questions over chat, as opposed to Xbox Live where all communication comes in the form of racial slurs.

<comment><USER3> > I've also been surprised by the community that surrounds TF2. People are > usually pretty nice about answering questions over chat, as opposed to Xbox > Live where all communication comes in the form of racial slurs.

I think this is a byproduct of the demographic differences between console gaming and PC gaming. Console gamers tend to be younger (and thus less mature) than PC gamers because consoles are cheaper (the parents are paying) and more locked down (parents again).

<comment><USER4> It depends on the game, play competitive counterstrike and everyone is a dick (source or 1.6)

<comment><USER3> That makes sense - unlike TF2, you can pirate CS and your computer's specs don't need to be that great to play it. So even children can easily get a copy of CS and a computer to play it with.

I'm hoping that the fact that TF2 is free now isn't enough to cause a large enough demographic shift to ruin the online multiplayer experience.

<comment><USER5> Could you easily pirate CS? From what I remember when you connected to a server it would authenticate a CD key with Valve, and while I'm sure there were servers that had that disabled it was easy to avoid playing on those. Likewise, there were no doubt pools of stolen CD keys, but that was probably pretty hit or miss for those using them.

It also wasn't too hard to find servers with good a "culture" where there were so many well behaved regulars it didn't really matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been saying for years that US gamers have been voting for the Korean/Chinese economic model: free clients and paid content locked down on company-owned servers. Hug your local pirate; you won't be able to _buy_ any major PC games in ten years because the notion of selling games will be quaint.

<comment><USER7> I've heard people say that the Steam model - easier than piracy, lots of games, well-implemented DRM, not too expensive - works pretty well. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER8> 100% spot on. Steam is totally awesome. I find your reference to steam _model_ disconcerting though. If more companies try to copy it & we've got a distribution for each publisher then its back to square one. Actually make that square -1.

<comment><USER9> That's an easy one to solve...don't buy it unless it's on Steam. (though if Mass Effect 3 isn't on steam....)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the record, TF2 runs excellently on WINE and that's how I play it. Don't let the non-Linuxness of the game put you off.

<comment><USER10> Aw crap, there goes my weekend! I won't even have to boot Windows to try it.

<comment><USER10> Steam runs, but I can't seem to get TF2 to work on Wine.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's the issue? Console log + any records of errors please. You can bring this up on the appdb comments page for TF2, where I am a moderator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TF2 is an extremely fun game. Looks like there's a Hacker News group on Steam with a few members..

<http://steamcommunity.com/groups/newsyc>

<comment><AUTHOR> I have played TF2 for several years now and I haven't gotten sick of it. I think TF2 is really the only game that I can say that about. The mechanics are extremely solid and Valve is constantly pumping new content to shake things up and keep people interested. TF2 should be the textbook example of doing a commercial multiplayer game right. The one caveat may be Steam DRM, but as far the actual game goes, it is head and shoulders above everything else in its field and should become _the_ model for its genre.

<comment><USER12> I've been playing TF2 since beta and I'm still learning how to play! It's a very easy game to get into but it's also a very deep and rich game that rewards continued learning. There are also many, many different styles of play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious if they're planning to fund the sever maintenance cost simply by selling _hats_.

I knew that microtransactions were a viable money maker, but not to this extent.

<comment><USER12> Valve doesn't need to provide server infrastructure, individuals do that. They only provide the front-end for server searches. The only thing they need to continue to fund is ongoing development.

Also, yes, they _can_ fund continued development solely on the hat-conomy, as crazy as that sounds.

<comment><USER14> I think what the OP meant was paying for their content distribution servers, not game servers.

<comment><USER12> That infrastructure is amortized over all steam titles though, so effectively very tiny for TF2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> League of Legends is a free game that has been making a big splash in monetizing through in-game purchases, which I believe TF2 is doing now? I'm wondering if Valve is making a similar big play in this area?

<comment><USER16> Valve has Steam from which they take 30% of any game sale. So they will never hurt for cash. They can give away every game they ever make and still make a killing from selling others' games because they have the most popular and best working platform.

Valve is now in the content delivery network business and just happen to have a department that produce video games.

<comment><USER5> Heh, I remember how heavily Steam was derided back when they rolled out the beta. And people screamed bloody murder when they made it so you had to go through Steam to play CS online.

<comment><USER17> To be fair, it failed completely then -- Steam servers crashed, downloads were slow and it offered virtually no benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anyone hasn't seen this yet, I highly recommend watching this interview with Gabe Newell conducted by a high school marketing/economics class:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOMI0BxB0yA>

Gabe Newell is a founder of Valve Software and I believe he is a true visionary in the industry. Steam would likely not be what it is today if it weren't for his leadership at Valve.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there some other way download the game other than stream? With 16Mit connection, i can download only 17KB/second and it suspends all the time... Such times, i think that who designed and/or coded such a system/program should stop working on IT subject... I can understand low download speed (server load, too many downloads etc), but why suspend the download ? and why not f*ckin' auto-resume ?

<comment><AUTHOR> From Steam, go to View -> Settings -> Downloads + Cloud -> Download Region and choose a server located in off-peak hours right now. Downloads from Steam often are slow when big news like this comes out, but if you connect to a server in a place where its 2am, you usually still get pretty good download speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't suppose anyone knows _why_ Valve made TF2 free, do they?

edit: Steam adoption+in-app purchases. Good call.

<comment><USER20> Valve makes a killing off the in-game item store. With the game nearly 4 years old I'd say they're pretty much through most of the people who would have bought the game, and making it free increases the number of people playing (good for all the current players) as well as the number of sales of items. Valve makes use of it's community really well, it supports a lot of community events and encourages mod-makers to make items which Valve puts into the game.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will definitely be interesting to see how the influx of free users will affect the community and the games. I know that people used to detest free weekends when a lot of non-paid newbies would be allowed to play for free on the weekend of an update. Are we getting into an "Eternal September" for TF2?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think there's no doubt this is great for Valve.

But as a player who dearly misses vanilla TF2, how is Valve going to combat the influx of greifers and hackers? What stops someone from running TF2 in a VM and continually making new accounts?

I wish there was a way to bring back TF2 as it originally was (no hats, no gimmicks). But I guess the transition to gaming as a service was inevitable. Valve has been going in that direction for a long time.

I hope they do make a proper Half-Life 3.

<comment><USER22> I haven't tried it, but I think you can mod out hats. You can certainly host a server which restricts players to only the original weapons, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already done that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am really unhappy about the move towards premium-content, DLC, IAP or however you want call what's happening in the gaming industry right now. When I play a game I do not want to make financial real world decisions and I don't want my gaming experience to be altered by my real world wallet. Isn't it the point of gaming to get away from worries like that?! I also want to be able to experience the game as it was originally intended by the game designer. That last point is not so much of an issue with a game like TF2, but more so with RPGs like Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Is the game balanced right with the stronger bonus armor that I got for per-ordering or does this make the game too easy??

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how they'll deal with cheaters, since you can now have infinite copies for free.

<comment><USER25> I think the question becomes "Will people really want to make a new Steam account every time they want to cheat?"

<comment><USER4> You would be surprised by the amount of cheaters with multiple accounts in source games even though they weren't free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> i've been using Steam for Mac and playing TF2 since it came out, and eventually bought other games (L4D2, Killing Floor, all of Half-Life series games + Portal 1+2). Till then i have never bought some many games. I just love Steam, the way it works ("stores" your [save] games on the cloud). It's an amazing system and i hope other industries can learn some lessons here (something i tried to talk about here [http://zemanel.eu/on-filesharing- steampowered-and-the-film-i...](http://zemanel.eu/on-filesharing-steampowered- and-the-film-indu) ).

</comment><comment><USER27> Confession: I still miss the original TF.

<comment><USER28> Indeed, the old maps and the original Demoman with is bomb pack were awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In case you're wondering (and you should) you can craft any item you can buy. I have pretty much the best loadout possible, without paying for anything, and it's all from items that you get when you die (which is a lot).

<comment><USER30> The best loadout IMO is the one you get by default.

I won't deny that the other weapons are tons of fun to play with, though. (Everyone has to play a Demoknight at least once!). But you _will_ be competitive without a single drop. The guns are balanced well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've not heard of TF2, but the characters are quite unique in the sense that none of the them conform to our daily ideas of what heroes look like.

<comment><USER32> I wouldn't call the characters heroes. Demoman is a scottish drunk. Heavy loves massacres. The medic seems like a former nazi who delights in torture. They enjoy killing their enemies and celebrating the slaughter.

The cartoon-y style definitely takes the edge off though.

<comment><USER33> All the characters are adorable though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> And now Steam gets even more customers.

Brilliant move. Steam has consumed a lot more of my money than any other store like it, and TF2 is a fantastic hook.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow, I just paid for this game a week ago. No big deal though, it's a good game I hear. I have yet to have a chance to play it.

<comment><USER36> Dont worry. Paid games have additional features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I just paid for this like 5 days ago! BLARG!

<comment><USER38> Contact Valve tech support, they might refund your money.

<comment><USER37> Thanks for the tips, folks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Am I the only one who thought the headline meant Guy Steele's Fortress-the- programming-language team is leaving Oracle?

</comment><comment><USER40> What if I don't want to install that trashy Steam app?

If Steam is required, it's a gimmick and a joke.

<comment><USER41> Steam is completely integrated with the game. The server browser in-game is actually just steam, so it really would make no sense at all to have TF2 without steam.

What exactly is your critique of Steam, just that you are fundamentally opposed to DRM? I do agree that it's something that I don't really want automatically starting up with my computer (even though I'm a pretty heavy gamer, I don't use the steam friend chat or anything) but as a platform and a piece of software it doesn't seem too trashy.

<comment><USER42> The first time I installed Steam was when it came with Half Life, and back then it was a steaming pile of crap. So bad, in fact, that I deleted it and didn't touch it again until 2 years ago.

A lot has changed since then, but some folks might not yet be aware of it.

<comment><USER38> True, back in the days of Counter Strike 1.6 it was a terrible, buggy piece of DRM. It's improved by leaps and bounds since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well, at least until the Steam authentication servers go offline if Valve ever shuts down. While Gabe Newell has been quoted as saying that if that were to happen they would unlock everyone's games, it bugs me that there has been no official offer of such. Until then, people can continue to point at Steam and say "but DRM == evil!"

<comment><USER44> Game Newell sounds like a man that'll be good by his word. I may eat my own words, but I trust him for that.

<comment><USER45> You do understand that if anything happened to the company he'd be legally prohibited from releasing anti-DRM patches, right? It'd destroy the shareholders' value.

Unless it's in writing as a condition of your purchase, and the code is in escrow somewhere, it ain't happening.

<comment><USER46> You mentioned "shareholders". Think about who owns Valve -- I understand Gabe owns 100% of the company.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I should have said creditors. It's more to the point.

<comment><USER46> I find it hard to believe Valve has any debt whatsoever.

<comment><USER45> The point though is that these vague promises to unDRM products are probably not permitted even if they thought about it and had the patches ready. And this isn't just a Valve thing, id software said something similar when Quake3 first required an online auth check to play on registered servers.

But considering how much you'd lose if Steam went away I can see why people are nervous of using them versus buying CDs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Percona Toolkit and systemd - <AUTHOR> https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/09/03/percona-toolkit-systemd/

<comment> vezzy-fnord You're setting the service as Type=simple, yet are using a PID file and manually daemonizing at the same time? This is blatantly incorrect behavior, and I'm surprised systemd even accepts it without loudly warning. Simple daemons are supposed to be daemonized by the supervisor itself, it's forking daemons where the PID file hack is necessary to hackily bludgeon them into a supervisor tree. Here, it's gratuitous and subject to race conditions.</comment>


Resetting Passwords – What Could Possibly Go Wrong? - <AUTHOR> https://maxwelldulin.com/BlogPost?post=3702041600 <comment><AUTHOR> I have read for years about how evil is email enumeration... but guess what? I think the benefits of being able to tell a user that is using the wrong username instead of a wrong password, outweighs any theoretical danger of revealing that certain email is being used. Change my mind.</comment>


Banks should let ancient programming language COBOL die - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/25/banks-should-let-ancient-programming-language-cobol-die/ <comment><USER2> As far as I'm aware many companies are training new COBOL developers to help maintain systems written in COBOL.</comment>


Show HN: ElasticUI – AngularJS Directives for ElasticSearch - <AUTHOR> http://www.elasticui.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! Would appreciate any feedback on this project. It's something I think is definitely missing in the ecosystem so far.

What's your experience building a frontend on your Elasticsearch index, tips + something specific you would be looking for in a project like this?

<comment><USER2> It looks nice, certainly it would be useful to have something quick to throw up in front of an index. What initially came to mind as something I would look for is tangential - with no security for ES, I presumably can't use this approach in anything made generally available over the internet, as I'd have to open ES up to the world? Or is there a way round this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. From a security perspective you definitely want to be careful exposing your cluster to the outside and perhaps build an API around it as AznHisoka suggests (especially with recent security issues in mind).

However, imo this can be quite cumbersome for simply building a dashboard for internal or client-only use / prototyping. Also, a reverse-proxy limiting requests made to your cluster can also block a lot of malicious requests (e.g.: prevent unintended inserts / updates / deletes).

I probably should add a warning about this to the docs, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I rather build an API around my search index rather than call it directly from AngularJS, but that may just be me.

<comment><USER4> Their Kibana dashboard is just an Angular app that calls ES directly: [http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/](http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/)

"NOTE: Kibana 3 talks directly to Elasticsearch from the browser. This means that your browser communicates directly with Elasticsearch, not via an intermediary. You may wish to configure a reverse proxy to restrict access to Elasticsearch."</comment></comment>


An aluminum graphite battery that could charge your smartphone in 60 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/202778-an-aluminum-graphite-battery-that-could-charge-your-smartphone-in-60-seconds#.VSPd7MWTXws.twitter

<comment><USER2> Cool, but not terribly useful yet for the things that really need progress in batteries:

"Battery "breakthroughs" need to state power _and_ energy density (not the same thing), plus how long they last. " [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/585185843649716225](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/585185843649716225)

"[the] cells only carry 40 watts of electricity per kilogram compared to lithium's 100 to 206 W/kg power density." [http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/06/stanfords-battery- charges...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/06/stanfords-battery-charges-in- one-minute/)

They could be a nice replacement for lead-acid though, if they turn out to be stable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now imagine this with Tesla.</comment>


Blockchain info for 37,365 BTC seized by FBI  - <AUTHOR> http://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX

<comment><USER2> This is interesting but is there proof that these bitcoins have been seized? Is it related to Silk Road being shut down? I feel like I missed something.

Also it looks like there is a typo in the title, the linked site says that the transfer is for 27,365 bitcoins. Still a crazy amount.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no clue or context for what I'm supposed to be looking at, but the transfer of 0.1337 BTC is amusing at the very least.

<comment><USER4> haha yeah i saw that and had a giggle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If it were seized by the Feds it'll be interesting to see where it goes. You'd think the first action would be to transfer all of it to new address controlled by the Fed. Otherwise nothing stops a "man on the outside" from doing the same on behalf of DPR. Anybody, anywhere could do it and the destination could be an offline address thats never been used before (eg cold storage address).

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you have made this up.

the first transaction to this address happened yesterday, do you think the FBI waited for the whole world to know about the DPR arrest and then started seizing the bitcoins. I think it was you who after learning about the news items started making these transactions.

Congratulations on having such a huge number of bitcoins by the way

</comment><comment><USER7> Question from someone with little bitcoin experience.

Does this require action on the part of the original bitcoin owner? Or in this case has the FBI seized all the keys/credentials required to do this themselves?

<comment><USER8> All you need is the private key to sign a transaction.

<comment><USER9> Which is usually encrypted and requires action (password disclosure) from the owner.

<comment><USER10> Not necessarily disclosure. A court could probably demand that the owner enter his password and engage in a transaction with the FBI / with the court / some court-appointed escrow. One might argue that by transferring the money they would incriminate themselves e.g. by demonstrating that they control it, but I do not think that would matter in terms of _seizing_ the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If they shut down Silk Road, and they have a bunch of block chain info, a couple more cross references and a bunch of arrests could settle the bitcoin dispute pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER9> How can the FBI seize BTC?

"I'm sorry Mr. Agent, but I forgot my wallet password!"

<comment><USER10> "Funny how you were able to engage in a transaction yesterday, right before we arrested you. Let's see if the court believes your story about forgetting your password."

<comment><USER9> I'm sure most of the money is in a seldom used savings account. That's what's great about Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does this link show that BTC was seized? Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER13> ~= $3,248,000 USD at present rates.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand. How do we know the FBI seized the bitcoins at this address?

Also, there are only 27,365 BTC there, but I assume that's a typo in the title here on HN.

</comment><comment><USER15> if it is the FBI, at least they are making it easy to track.</comment>


Simple Garbage Collector for C in ~1300 lines of code - <AUTHOR> http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~gregory/GC/ <comment><USER2> Well, this is a simple and slow Mark & Sweep.

Much simplier and much faster is this simple copying collector from qish, which has ~740 lines of code. [http://starynkevitch.net/basile/qishintro.html](http://starynkevitch.net/basile/qishintro.html) This one beats BoehmGC in every benchmark, which is the optimal implementation of the slow mark & sweep GC.

The caveat for this fast copying collector is that you have to use volatile, as registers are not dumped to the stack, you cannot use stacked calls (same reason), and no threading.</comment>


Desktop Linux suckage: where's our Steve Jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://elliotth.blogspot.com/2008/09/desktop-linux-suckage-wheres-our-steve.html <comment><USER2> Shuttleworth wants to (I believe) step up to the plate. Not sure if he has the megalomaniac streak

<comment><USER3> Yeah... So I think this article might be a bit out of date.

Original posting about Shuttleworth: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=301738>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Steve Jobs is getting paid millions by Apple. "Our" Steve Jobs is probably somewhere getting paid.

</comment><comment><USER5> Couldn't agree more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is that always a Developer (instead of a Program Manager)responds to my Usability issues on Linux Forums?</comment>


Vim Ported to WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://rhysd.github.io/vim.wasm/ <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm](https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm)

Very cool. There are some graphical artefacts and some features that don't work properly (like search highlighting), but it is the real deal!</comment>


Ask HN: Personal carbon offsets - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in attempting a carbon-neutral life. I've noticed that Enterprise car rental has an option to buy a carbon offset for a car rental for a surprisingly small fee (less than $2 a day). And one can also purchase carbon offsets for flights. But I don't know how reputable or effective these are. Obviously it's best to emit less - use less electricity, use public transit, etc. but that's not a complete solution. What's the best, most cost-effective way to offset your own carbon emissions? <comment><USER2> Can you buy your carbon offset wholesale? How much would it cost to buy your estimated carbon footprint of a year?

Also, air conditioner and heater consume a lot. Try to get use to a wider temperature range (like 60°F to 80°F), it's not so bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Throw a chunk of steel/iron into the sea

<comment><USER2> Is this a joke or the idea is that the iron will be like a fertilizer to algae that will sequester more carbon and die and sink to the bottom?

(Is it posible to use raw mineral ore? The production of steel/iron use a lot of carbon.)

<comment><USER3> No its not a joke there's multiple processes one of which is the algae fertilizer. It's a very efficient carbon sink.

<comment><USER2> It looks like a joke, so it was downvoted when I saw it. It remembered some project to add iron to the sea, so I hoped that it was a serious proposal.

Try to avoid onliners, it's very easy to misinterpret them. (Bonus points for a link to Wikipedia or somewhere with more details.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elizabeth Holmes' financial jeopardy: Will court leave Theranos founder ruined? - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/19/elizabeth-holmes-financial-jeopardy-will-court-cases-leave-theranos-founder-ruined/ <comment><USER2> I'd highly doubt she was secretly extracting assets from Theranos so there is probably nothing to be found. Even that devious act would have taken a level of self-awareness that was beyond her. To me she seems like a true psychopath who believed her own BS. It is a common adage to say that lying to others starts with lying to yourself. I don't think her fraud was primarily a scheme to get rich (though that was part of it) but a scheme to emulate Steve Jobs and realize her grandiose self-image. She has no money and the people that invested are never going to see a dime.</comment>


Japanese school board bans acclaimed anti-war manga - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/26/japan-school-board-bans-manga-hadashi-no-gen

<comment><USER2> This ban has been overturned.

[http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ20...](http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201308260128)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would be interested in a Japanese viewpoint - is there a resurgence of a pro-Emperor viewpoint in Japan? I'm guessing there is an agenda behind this - similar to the same agendas persued in Texas textbooks or a hundred other education-as-politics decisions

But just as in Texas and elsewhere - the best innoculation is transparency.

</comment><comment><USER4> That is the only manga I have ever read. It's really good and touching story.</comment>


Where is my mind? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/fodo01_.html <comment><USER2> I think the author is right, but in the wrong way.

He posits that mind vs. world dualism is mistaken because I can for example map addresses on my iPhone, thereby allowing me to store memories of different locations in my iPhone instead of my brain, therefore the iPhone is part of my "mind", therefore separating mind from external world is mistaken.

I think there is truth here, but I would go further - that just as in a LAN many terminals can access the same file, and therefore the separation between terminals is fuzzy, so too "mind" is a fuzzy concept much as "terminal" is a fuzzy concept in a LAN. Where does one terminal end and the next begin? Where does one "mind" begin and the next end?

Maybe instead of attacking mind vs. external world dualism we need to re- evaluate mind. To me it is perfectly valid to say the brain can "out source" certain tasks, like storing locations in an iPhone, and therefore the line between "outside world" and "inside world" gets blurred. But instead of saying my iPhone is part of my "mind", let's say the iPhone gets read and written to by the threads of my brain. Let's look at the iPhone not as "part of mind" but as an external hard drive written to and read from by the threads of my brain. At the end, there is no "mind" as an irreducible entity. There is only a multi-threaded neural network application in the wetware of a naked ape lately out of Africa.

The real dualism to attack is not "mind" vs. "outside world" but "brain" vs. "mind". There is no "mind" per ce in my opinion. What we call "mind" are the threads running in the brain, nothing more or less.</comment>


The Benefits of Thinking Small - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/10/benefits-of-thinking-small.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting post. Perhaps a few other factors that affect this:

a) sector. consumer web is very different from medical devices or energy. Can't think of any drug or medical device companies that started without a IP portfolio.

a) east coast vs. west coast?

b) age / experience of the entrepreneurs, esp. if they've had any good exits in the past

I'm thinking of the local (Boston) entrepreneurs, who raised $x million from some big-name VC firm for their nth venture, after the first 2 had good exits. The risk profile is very different from that of a 20-something entrepreneur doing a consumer web idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting post and I think the "sassification" model will continue. The critical question is who will make on Saas to rule them all. One Saas to tie all your Saas services together & get 'em talking to each other. Without the magic integrator, you might wind up putting the same data in different silos, over and over again.</comment>


Philosophy's great experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10638 <comment><USER2> As a psychologist, my father has always deplored the fact that psychology, in the last 100 years, has focused on experimental and pseudo-scientific techniques as opposed to allowing for the usefulness of non-scientific ideas, practices, etc. A lot of psychology was discarded because it couldn't be measured, and what was left at the end of that process was less than what psychology was before.

In that context, I'd tend to side with the non-x-phi's in this. Scientific analysis is only _one_ way to understand the world, and it is not the best in every situation. You can't grow a tree with a hammer and nails.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but perhaps philosophy is too far to the non-experimental side. Experimental and theoretical philosophy can coexist. But philosophers should be careful to not let experimental philosophy take over; they should learn from the experience of psychology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those interested in knowing more, the Experimental Philosophy group blog has been running for a few years now.

<http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/>

It has a long and distinguished list of contributors, including Stephen Stich and Jonathan Weinberg, who carried out some of the earliest work in this nascent field.

</comment><comment><USER5> Experimental philosophy is called science.</comment>


Chris Anderson on increasing global IQ at Le Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/960322

<comment><USER2> Horrible quality video - borderline unwatchable (basically a slideshow of photos with audio), I guess the live stream was acting up, it's a shame.</comment>


Show HN: I made a journal app for Founders and Makers - <AUTHOR> https://mindwave.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Maker here. I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. I started all endeavors with learning as the primary goal. After selling my first company, two years ago, I gained some money and time (to travel). Great! But what about all my learnings and experiences? That's all in the back of my head, fading away.

Not documenting my entrepreneurial journeys is my biggest regret! So I build a journal for myself and for everyone who wants to capture their professional journey too.

I thought having a product- and startup blog was sufficient. I was wrong. "You are not your product!" I learned this the hard way. Your product evolves. Your startup evolves. You evolve.

Now I log, write, and document for me and the future me. No marketing purpose, no judgment. I keep most stories to myself, others I share with accountability partners, or even publicly for inspiration and support.

I think I got a solid basis now, with features like a private log, a personal writing space, and an integrated Telegram Bot. But there is still a lot to learn, build, and improve.

Looking forward to any feedback and questions.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm a user of this app and very happy so far. For me it helps having a moment in the day where I at least think about what went well or what didn't. I use the Telegram notifications where I get a daily reminder.

I'm using it now for a few months and I have my moments of using it a lot and some days none, but I feels great to be more aware of you life. Keep up the good work Marcel!

</comment><comment><USER3> Please forgive the off topic question, but why is your user name on hacker news shown in color? I've never seen that before.

<comment><USER4> New users are green for a little while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Monthly $10,00 Yearly $96,00

The pricing, especially the commas are peculiarly wrong

<comment><USER6> It can be quite confusing, but not everyone who uses English and Arabic numerals uses the decimal point for separating the whole part and the fractional part of a decimal number.

See the "decimal comma" related sections in this Wikipedia article, especially the "Examples of use" section:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator)</comment></comment>


What would it take 4 you to quit your job to cofound w someone else's app idea? - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to start my own startup for months now but convincing someone with a CS to join me has been impossible... I then thought... these people that ive been asking to be my cofounder have app ideas of their own yet they're not quitting their jobs to start their OWN ideas... why would they quit their jobs to do my idea? <comment> core-questions Probably good grammar as a bare minimum ;-)

Consider this: anyone quitting a decent CS job to work with you is giving up earning power and other opportunities over the time period they commit to you. You need to be able to pay them so they can afford to live, and you need to be able to convince them that you have staying power so that their own life outcomes aren't negatively impacted by their choice to work with you.

> hese people that ive been asking to be my cofounder have app ideas of their > own yet they're not quitting their jobs to start their OWN ideas...

Because they don't have faith that they can turn their idea into reality and make a living off of it. You need to be the source of that faith.</comment>


Dell's Upcoming XPS 13 Linux Laptop Includes a Highly Requested New Feature - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/01/03/dells-upcoming-xps-13-linux-laptop-includes-a-hotly-requested-new-feature/#30c5a6d8536f <comment><USER2> I have XPS 13 with Linux and it has been a good laptop. Comparable to Leonovo.

The problem is Thunderbolt Dock TB16. Even with software updates it's not working well with Linux. It has annoying cliches. You can always get it working after restarting some components, or restarting the OS but I can't recommend it.

With Leonovo you I never had those problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> > If you've been following the steady march of progress from Dell's Linux- > first Project Sputnik team, you're no doubt aware that the "Developer > Edition" variant of the XPS 13 is one of the finest Linux-ready ultrabooks > you can buy. Just ahead of CES 2020, Dell is pushing out a few more > improvements including a feature that's been hotly requested: fingerprint- > reader support.

So a fingerprint reader. Maybe I'm naive, but is that really _that_ much of a feature?

<comment><USER4> I can imagine password management and recovery may be the largest burden left in a well automated it support org. It's incidents are inherently user driven so it couldn't be fully automated away until now.</comment></comment>


Amazon, Google, Others Are Developing Private Air-Traffic Control for Drones - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-google-others-are-developing-private-air-traffic-control-for-drones-1520622925 <comment><USER2> This is a really good idea. I'd like to see some kind of REST api saying "Can I enter this X,Y,Z bounding box?", and then when getting back a HTTP 200 OK, a followup request can then be sent saying "I'm now out of this other XYZ bounding box".

As the skies get crowded, craft could even "rent" their airspace by the cubic meter. If you're a craft which can guarantee to be in a smaller space and fly close to other craft, like formation flying, you use up less airspace and save money.

Something like this for big planes would save massive amounts of fuel, because algorithms could be used to match flight patterns with weather maps to get a tailwind or uplift, rather than having a pilot having to manually ask ATC over the radio and then being forced to fly in a straight line at a fixed altitude as most planes do today.

<comment><USER3> It might also _cost_ large amounts of fuel when planes would have to take completely nonsensical routes to go around a scatter of tiny, blocked airspace areas everywhere.

Additionally, people might start to "squat" the airspace around airports and along preferrable routes and "rent" them to airlines at an increased price. (Or, if they are a competitor or have other reasons to damage the airline, simply block it and don't rent it at all)

<comment><USER2> I feel like an economist could solve this problem...

The "tiny blocked airspaces everywhere" problem is really how do you design an efficient market.

Perhaps for example, just because you have a piece of airspace doesn't give you the right to keep it. Someone else can come along and outbid you for it auction-style. That way, anyone squatting will have to pay handsomely to do so.

Obviously all the routing and bidding and allocation is done automatically and the pilot is just given a route to fly. While there is no shortage of airspace, most bids would probably be fractions of a cent anyway.

<comment><USER3> > * Someone else can come along and outbid you for it auction-style.*

Maybe I misunderstand your model, but which entity would run the auction? And who gets to collect the winning bids?

In the previous post, I assumed the whole market was to be a thing between the airspace participants while the air traffic authority just keep track who has blocked which part of the airspace. Would the authority now also conduct the auctions?

> _That way, anyone squatting will have to pay handsomely to do so._

I'm not an economist, but I don't see why the squatters couldn't have deep pockets.

Squatting for political/strategic reasons might be done by airlines themselves - who might have large enough war chests to play games. (If the goal is to keep certain competitors out, they might not even need to win the auctions - driving up the price enough so that continued bidding becomes unviable would be enough)

If squatting for profit is viable, there might appear speculators who use credit/investor money to stay in the aucton.

> _While there is no shortage of airspace, most bids would probably be > fractions of a cent anyway._

My suspicion is that, just like land on the ground, different areas of airspace would have vastly different value. For drone/airtaxi/etc participants, airspace above big cities would probably be very valuable - while long-distance flights need to choose the best route, while taking distance across the globe, jetstreams, weather, distance to nearest airports, etc into account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One precedent for this is FLARM, the air traffic system designed by glider pilots in Europe. It was one of the first systems deployed where aircraft had GPS equipment broadcasting their positions to each other. Developed privately and first deployed voluntarily. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLARM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLARM)

</comment><comment><USER5> > talk to each other through web-based applications

using web for this seems a bit heavyweight

<comment><USER6> I would characterize this as a "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail" thing. If you ask web companies how to have some devices communicate, it's pretty likely they're going to come up with a web platform.

<comment><USER7> Still too much.

It's like taking a bus to a race. Are they going to provide their own hardware? If yes go and improve the existing indicator system and then sell it back to FAA/airports. If not, I am going to get popcorn and watch as they kill our cell phone coverage.

I am not sure cell towers can take the extra load. I know I am rushing, but wait till instead of Fedex running around you see 1 drone per package, zipping through cells.

P.S. I think all these companies only care to get the FAA to sign off and allow package delivery (or spying, I mean "data collection" \-- who knows). I feel they will come up with a clunky system that people are going to hate for years.

P.S.2: Didn't say anything about security or fairness considerations. I can easily see Amazon blocking a wide path for their drones and be like, we paid for it we get to use it bugger off.

<comment><USER8> The extra load doesn't seem that much. It's a few more subscribers, but the data rates should be quite low. And if you have a swarm of drones, you could use a couple as hotspots for the others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Non-paywall archive version: [http://archive.is/76nw0](http://archive.is/76nw0)

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if the current outdated air traffic control system will eventually be folded into this new system being built.

<comment><USER11> Wat is it about the current system that makes it outdated, and what would 'the future' (for lacking a better descriptor) look like to you?

Not here to be the voice of dissent for its own sake, merely an aviation enthusiast.</comment></comment>


After the Big One - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/after-the-big-one <comment><AUTHOR> A five part series trying to translate the statistics of the upcoming Portland quake into understandable "speculative fiction".</comment>


Do animals feel empathy? the decades-long quest for an answer - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/2/8/10925098/animals-have-empathy <comment><USER2> It comes down to "do animals feel emotions" which is really just a sneaky way to ask whether animals have a first-person experience at all. It's easiest imho to apply a Turing Test here: if an animal behaves like it has emotions in every way, what authority can you claim to say they don't? If there's no test to distinguish between "fake" emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a meaningful question?

Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs, whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along with each other if they didn't have empathy?

<comment><USER3> Well, people always find a way to doubt that animals have a sense of "self". Like in the test where they painted a dot on a chimps forehead and gave him a mirror - he wiped the dot off after looking at the mirror, which you know - would be a pretty good indication that he understood, in some way, that the creature in the mirror is him and not some other chimp. But obviously you have people who will say that the chimp might have thought that touching his own forehead made the other chimp touch their forehead, without realising that the image in the mirror is him and not another animal.

<comment><USER4> But every scientific experiment should withstand scrutiny, regardless of how malicious or creative in its criticism it may be. We currently do not have any machine that can measure "qualia" in animals let alone a formal way of quantifying and making sense out of it.

<comment><USER2> We don't have a machine that can measure qualia in humans for that matter!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think anyone who's had a dog could ever question whether animals can feel empathy, it's just so obvious. I am sure that the level varies from species to species and also within a species, as it does in humans. But a story like this [https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped- friend-135355...](https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped- friend-1353550663.html) is hard to read and not feel a little warmer.

<comment><USER6> Slightly OT: according to actual scientific research ([1]) done by Rupert Sheldrake, dogs are even telepathic.

There is also a very interesting Google-talks video of Sheldrake explaining the experiments.

[1] [http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy](http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy)

<comment><USER7> I struggle with the telepathy argument. I think it's just a placeholder explanation for something a little less sci-fi. Such as scent, body language or just dumb coincidence.

However I do like the "Falling Skies" (a Sci-Fi drama starring Noah Wyle) explanation for telepathy; which was communication over the electromagnetic spectrum in a frequency that humans wouldn't normally detect (long waves IIRC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not some kind of crazy animal activist, but seriously what's wrong with people : researching empathy by dipping mice tails in hot water or injecting them with vinegar is seriously fucked-up.

Should we search for empathy the hard way in these scientists too ?

<comment><USER9> The article is clear that the purpose of the research was not empathy study, but pain study.

 _" Though he hurts mice for a living, Mogil says it's not for a lack of his own empathy. He research is about understanding why two people may experience pain in different ways, with the hope of developing better pharmaceuticals for managing it. "My sympathy is mostly reserved for chronic pain patients," Mogil tells me. For decades, Mogil and his team have conducted experiments testing the pain threshold of mice in order to see what role genetics play in pain tolerance."_

There are human studies on pain reception where people are exposed to cold water, where extreme cold water is reported to use similar pain receptors as heated water but cause less damage to the skin. Researchers also injects subjects with capsaicin (Mythbusters did this on camera in one episode), and I wonder why vinegar was used here.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like a terrible job nonetheless. I guess you'll have to have a lack of empathy to do it ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am a dog owner and I am completely in the belief that my dog can feel empathy. I see it from time to time. I have a really hard time understanding why some would even make the suggestion that animals generally don't feel empathy? If every animal does it, however, is a different question.

<comment><USER11> Tell me about it...

I took my sister's dog to my brother-in-law's dad's funeral. The poor mutt does not speak English, has not seen a priest before, has never been to a funeral before, yet the dog was behaving most unusually, not at all able to hold it together, shaking.

This was a small family gathering - it was not as if the dog was scared of some huge crowd - plus it was delightfully sunny without the slightest breeze. There were no other reasons I could see for what was going on inside the walnut-sized brain of this dog other than the events going on around her. Most strange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Empathy has been evolved in animal communities who collectively care about the offsprings. It is an evolutionary strategy to make communities possible. It is protection for offsprings from being murdered and eaten as it happens among reptiles, fishes, etc. It is a weak bond though. What they need a decade-long quest for, except funding? And, obviously, higher animals do have at least some cross-species empathy toward pups. Any villagers who had cat and dog pups will tell you that. The sexual attraction and parent-offspring bonds, including affection towards young, are the strongest evolutionary forces.

<comment><USER13> Could it be that all animals have empathy, but some have a much smaller and/or different set of feelings they experience? As an analogy, if I see you eating candy, I can understand that you're currently tasting sweet, but if a cat sees you, it has no concept of sweet, because its tongue doesn't have those receptors. You can also see this in people, the most egregious example being "Let them eat cake" oft mis-attributed to Marie Antoinette. If you have never felt something yourself, either due to your upbringing or because your species has no capacity to experience that feel, is it that you have no empathy towards someone having that experience or that you simply cannot so much as conceive of the feeling in question?

<comment><USER14> I know quite a few humans in the business world that I think don't really have empathy but have learned to behave as if they had it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To say that animals can't be empathic because they have selfish motives is bizarre - empathy _is_ selfish, as it's a social survival and ingratiation tool, whether you care to admit such or not. both sides falling into an anthropomorphic trap.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes, because humans are animals. Ignoring humans, while we are different to other animals, we are not really that different, particularly to other social mammals. So the answer remains yes.

Note that this answer is self-evident and did not require torturing other beings.

<comment><USER17> This is not at all self-evident, and your logic is flawed: you're saying that X (humans) is a subset of Y (animals), all X have property P (empathy), therefore all Y have property P.

<comment><USER16> The point was that, while you can raise the query from a western scientific reductionist perspective and put ethics completely on hold, we're ridiculously similar genetically and behaviorally, such that the certainty is very high without the need for torture.

<comment><USER16> To put this another way, all science is probability-based. To take your philosophical bent to its logical conclusion, you never know that all animals of a similar species have similar abilities for empathy so you should torture them all!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _The wrong conclusion to take away from all these studies is that these > rodents are humanlike. The right conclusion is that we 're animal-like._

And yet those two statements are totally analogous -- except for the irrational fear of anthropomorphizing...

<comment><USER19> They're not, actually. The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals.

You can see that there's a set of traits that are common among all animals, a smaller set common among mammals, an even small set common amongst primates, etc. And then each species has its own set of unique trait.

Rodents aren't like humans and humans aren't like rodents, rodents and human share traits that are likely common among many mammals.

<comment><USER18> > _The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and > animals._

One just uses "animals" as the universal (generic) thing we all participate in (as a continuum), while the other uses "humans" (or "humanity") for that.

Sure, we're animals too, but not "just another animal", but (what we know of as the) pinnacle of the thinking/empathy/etc spectrum".

We can think of being human-like in this sense as the top degree in that scale that animals can participate too.

(So, "human-like is used a stand-in for "empathetic/thinking/conscious", not as "like an actual human person" \-- as it doesn't concern other human attributes -- physiology, looks, etc, only emotional and cognitive ones).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Had an interesting experience a few years ago.

Me and some friends visited another friend that had a parrot.

      * When we came the parrot said hello to everyone.
      * One of my friends aggravated the parrot by
        standing on the far side of the cage and making funny
        faces.
      * When we left the parrot said bye to everyone but him.
      * When we came back a couple of weeks later and he had
        forgotten about the parrot and came too close to the
        cage it tried to bite him.

Would hardly have believed it if I hadn't been there on both occasions.

</comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps the thing we call empathy is just a strange side effect of the negative subconscious feedback a member of group-oriented species gets when their friend is, or is going to be harmed, physically or otherwise. The choice between gaining/saving an ally or gaining a treat can certainly be a selfish one, and in my opinion most likely is.

</comment><comment><USER22> data point:

Once saw a cat rush a squirrel in the back yard. I yelled at it and it ran away but apparently the poor thing died in fright.

What was amazed me was seeing another squirrel come over and actually hug the other one, trying to get it to stand up.

</comment><comment><USER23> As much as they can afford to I reckon.</comment>


Diablo II released over 15 years ago gets a new patch - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/64078-years-later-blizzard-releases-new-diablo-2-patch.html <comment><USER2> They really should make a HD remake of Diablo 2

<comment><USER3> Knowing blizzard. They'll make it and then scrap it the very last second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> And yet you can probably still play as a ninja without owning the expansion set. FYI, I was on the d2 patch testing team.</comment>


Ask YC:How did you first get to know about HN/Y Combinator? - <AUTHOR>

I first got to know about Paul Graham/YCombinator and the "Hacker News" when I did a Google search for the term "web 2.0" way back in 2007. I read his essay and over the course of time I have probably read virtually all his essays which have been a great source of inspiration to me considering the fact that where I live (Lagos, Nigeria) still has a very poor hacker/startup and VC community. Thats my story, so I would like to know how you first got to know about Paul Graham/YCombinator and Hacker News? <comment><USER2> I wanted to learn lisp a while ago, and stumbled on pg's ANSI Common Lisp after reading a few glowing reviews. Then I read some of his essays, then heard about YC, then arrived here. Don't remember exactly when I first saw this board or the day I registered, but haven't been able to stay away since.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember coming across a pg essay (via Google or Slashdot) a year or two ago then reading through a dozen more. That led to YC which lead to Jessica's book, Hackers News, and lots of hours learning web development (current career is in network architecture).

</comment><comment><USER4> I moved to silicon valley in 07 and was (and still am) very interested in the bookmarking space... I was doing an analysis of delicious and came onto a link for startupschool, which I then applied to and got into, not really understanding anything of what was going on until after the event... So actually, Jessica Livingston told me about what YC was at a reception for startup school, which is probably a unique way to get an introduction, if not the best way to make a first impression. (:

</comment><comment><USER5> I found out about Paul Graham through comp.lang.lisp. Way back in my freshman summer of college, I had an internship where I didn't really have very much or very important work to do, so I spent a lot of it reading about Lisp. Graham's name came up a lot, and his essays were interesting. Ended up reading On Lisp after that.

I moved over to Hacker News from Reddit the day it became publicly available.

</comment><comment><USER6> When kiko.com first came out and then I read about reddit.com. I then stumbled upon his essays and hid in the server room of work for two days to read them all in one sitting.

I'm still not rich yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Beating the Averages (<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>) is one of pg's more famous essays, and I've seen it make it's way some tech sites a few times in the past ~5 years.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of my articles got linked here, I found it in my referrer log.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am not sure about how I came to hear of it, but I remember accessing the website in 2006 while looking at funding options for a startup I had in mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wanted to purchase a lappy and a friend of mine posted my doubts here. Seeing the quality of response I started hanging out here regularly.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think I saw something about YC on VentureBeat, but I didnt really start reading HN until an angel investor recommended it to me.

</comment><comment><USER12> His essay on Lisp/HTML/Viaweb was a reading assignment in my Programming Languages class at Brown (thanks, Shriram!).

</comment><comment><USER13> Saw it mentioned offhand in an article about "Hackers", which of course made me come and take a look

</comment><comment><USER14> Looking for startup funding, hence via TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER15> joel mentioned it in the SO podcast, i used to read reddit, but it seems so bad lately.

</comment><comment><USER16> My adult son was talking about one of the articles he read by Paul Graham. I told him to send me the link.</comment>


Congressional Influence Model Shows How Much Congress Votes with the Money - <AUTHOR> http://dataconomy.com/congress-is-a-game-and-we-have-the-data-to-show-whos-winning/

<comment><USER2> Such an amazing display of corruption.</comment>


French constitutional council rejects law forcing platforms to delete content - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/19/french-constitutional-authority-rejects-law-forcing-online-platforms-to-delete-hate-speech-content/ <comment><USER2> Cookie wall. No thanks.</comment>


What are your UX/UI Thoughts? - <AUTHOR>

Please check out www.shopyourway.com and tell me what you think about the UX/UI of the desktop or mobile app. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'm struck by what looks like a 'go no futher until you sign in', enter your e-mail modal popup. Big and center screen, and I don't even know what you do yet.

Consider this the equivalent of you walking into your local shopping center and before you can enter, a stranger at the front door says "you can't come in until you give me your phone number (or fingerprint, or email, or whatever). You'd tell him to get stuffed and walk away. Why would I do anything different on your site?

Around the periphery, you've got some vague, barely noticable, bland and generic words around points, and purchasing and sales, etc. etc.

NORMALLY, I wouldn't have gone any further, I would have clicked away, but you're asking for feedback, so I'm giving this thing a whirl.

I entered a search for bikes. Looks like you guys do a very good job of understanding my request, I get bike, bike storage and similar results in the search.

Your content pages are fine, nothing mind blowing, but I don't think it needs to be. Thing is, I still have no idea what your value prop is.

Fix your home page, explain to me why you exist. Don't ask for my details until I want to give them to you (likely not until I buy something).

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a members only site that is why is asks for you info. Once you info is provide you have get perks like random deposits of surprise points for $5-$10 off any purchase. The site is more than Ecommerce it is also a social site that allows for friends/followers to use crowdsourcing, get advice, and for members to enter contests under the Sweeps icon. It seems your experience did not even draw any interest to those area...that is the UX problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should check out [http://ux.designreview.co](http://ux.designreview.co) :)</comment>


The War to Free Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls <comment> sci-hub > One big reason: pirates, including Kazakh neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan. > Her (illegal) website Sci-Hub sees more than 500,000 visitors daily, and > hosts more than 50 million academic papers.

Definitely citation needed on the "(illegal)".

FYI, this site is very useful and keeps track of the ever-changing sci hub links: [https://sci-hub.now.sh/](https://sci-hub.now.sh/)

<comment><USER2> Question - what makes sci-hub.now.sh, which is essentially acting as a kind of manual DNS, more resilient to censorship than the _actual_ DNS system that necessitates all these ever-changing links? And can we automate it?

<comment><USER3> The actual DNS system is vulnerable to domain registrar takedown requests.

<comment> ur-whale namecoin tried to work around DNS centralized failure modes such as this. sad it hasn't taken off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While open access seems great, and the reasoning behind it is inline with my ideals, I still have problems with "gold" OA, which seems to be what is being referred to within this article:

>Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.

Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far too much for many researchers to pay. It would seemingly largely prevent the publication of independent research within such journals.

This was mentioned in the article:

>In fact, many academics still don't publish in open access journals. One big reason: Some feel they're less prestigious and lower quality, and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.

However, the article seemingly (and contradictorily) earlier implies that Gold OA is a solution to pushing the cost onto the researchers:

>Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish.

However, under Gold OA this is only exacerbated, with large fees being everywhere on the publication-end. The readers don't have to pay, but now the authors do.

Additionally, this may create another pro-industry publication bias, as industry-funded studies may be more likely to have the money to publish in pay-to-publish journals, and this apparently has now been dubbed "e-publication bias" (bottom of [https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf](https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf), also see [http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544](http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544)).

Lastly, the article mentions predatory publishing, however fails to note that this phenomena is caused by Gold OA in the first place. In fact, it is sometimes specifically called "predatory open-access publishing". The idea behind predatory publishers is that Gold OA incentivizes publication (as they now get paid per-paper), leading them to seek out and accept as many papers as possible regardless of quality.

While open science certainly is in-line with my views, I'm not convinced that Gold OA is a good solution here.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately the term Gold Open Access has been co-opted by the publishers. When the OA movement was using the term, they meant "published open access by the publisher, rather than posting alternative editions elsewhere (Green OA)". The publishers then started using it to mean author-pays Open Access.

Thus, when OA advocates use the term Gold OA, that gets interpreted the way you do above - whereas they usually intend for the fees to be low or non- existent, for authors. Some have started to use Diamond or Platinum OA for that, but it's hard to get that to stick now.

The point is: there are definitely Open Access models possible where publishing does not entail thousands of dollars of publication costs. This has been proven by many quality journals already.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but unfortunately this is what it's become. I generally use the Green/Gold/Diamond split, where my own preferences go along the lines of diamond > green > gold. 'Diamond' journals exist, but they are rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I heard arguments where US Government employees were working on creating open access policies for the research they funded. People would lament, "Nobody will work with us if we force them to make their research open access." I would reply, "Who are they going to work with? The US Government is the only place with these big piles of money. Yes, they will take a principled stand until their next mortgage payment is due."

<comment><USER7> Seriously.

This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."

<comment><USER8> You probably need to explicitly ban publishing in publications with publishing fees, otherwise money from other sources will be used to pad out the difference.

<comment><USER7> No, that's letting the perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Outright bans make open access harder; editing+publishing with reasonable quality and archival levels of access guarantees can be cheap but it's never free.

Just limit it to a very reasonable $/page. Even upper bounding it at some obscene amount like $10/page would be a vast improvement and a completely trivial expense (you don't want to know what plane tickets to IJCAI cost this year...)

To clarify, I'm saying any research funded by the NSF should have this requirement imposed on all publications regardless of funding source. I.e., DON'T say "NSF $ can't be used for more than $X in publication fees", say "NSF $ can't be used AT ALL if you ever pay more than $X in publication fees".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a war every philanthropist should be waging.

Calling Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all others : please make science Free, Forever, For Everybody.

There's no bigger creator of human development opportunities than free science (imho).

More than a decade? ago, Bill Gates freed the Feynman lectures, only to lock it in Microsoft's Adobe Flash-competing technology, silverlight.

Now do it properly : make it free as in beer and free as in freedom. Yes Bill, you pay everything, we nothing.

<comment><USER5> The Gates Foundation incidentally is one of the strongest voices in the push for Open Access. As a large and influential scientific funder, they were one of the first to demand research they funded to be OA, and recently one of the first non-founding parties to sign up for the strongest push for OA so far: Plan S.

Unfortunately, it's not a problem you can solve just by throwing money at it. It's primarily an incentive problem, and the only influence the Gates Foundation has on that is through its funding of research. In that regard, it's doing very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >But there's a big thing getting in the way of a revolution: prestige-obsessed scientists who continue to publish in closed-access journals.

That's blaming the victim. It's not the academics who are prestige-obsessed, it's the universities that assess and rank their staff by publication counts within such journals. Most academics I know just want to keep their job.

</comment><comment><USER11> Elsevier seems to be a slowly self-correcting problem.

<comment><USER12> They've been around for 139 years so far. Too slow of a correction, methinks</comment></comment>


55M voters' details leaked in Philippines - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/07/philippine_voter_data_breach/ <comment><AUTHOR> There is more info here [http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/5...](http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/55m-registered-voters-risk-philippine-commission-elections- hacked/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is it only me who thinks that all this is being orchestrated. Starting from the panama leaks to Turkish leaks and now this. I don't want to pointlessly plug a conspiracy theory here. But I would like to know if this argument can be supported/refuted.

<comment><USER3> I have predicted it few years ago. You dump the database, zip it, and upload it to your Google Cloud. It's that easy if you are insider. You only need half hour and no one will notice. It is more likly to leak if there are more databases, like citizen db, voters db, social secufity db etc. We will see more leaks in the future.

<comment><USER4> It's only that easy if you work somewhere with zero network security. Given how mismanaged government IT departments seem to be, that's not unlikely though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "I want to emphasise that the database in our website is accessible to the > public,"

Was it supposed to be? :-)

<comment><USER6> > "I want to emphasise that the database in our website is accessible to the > public," Comelec spokesperson James Jimene said, the Philippine Daily > Inquirer reports. "There is no sensitive information there. We will be using > a different website for the election, especially for results reporting and > that one we are protecting very well," he added.

Yes.

> Based on our investigation, the data dumps include 1.3 million records of > overseas Filipino voters, which included passport numbers and expiry dates. > What is alarming is that this crucial data is just in plain text and > accessible for everyone. Interestingly, we also found a whopping 15.8 > million record of fingerprints and list of peoples running for office since > the 2010 elections.

None of this information is particularly secret or sensitive.

1) Fingerprints are left everywhere anyway. You aren't going to be able to hide these.

2) Passport information is recorded in 2930423904239049203 places already. Much like your IP address, social security number, etc. it should be treated like a username and not a password. [i.e. It is the publicly known portion of your identity]

3) If you are treating PII as private, you are doing everything wrong. These are all basically public record at this point and pretending otherwise is silly. The whole reason they are "identifying" is because other people can look at it and recognize you.

Other "sensitive information":

> Among the data leaked were files on all candidates running on the election > with the filename VOTESOBTAINED. Based on the filename, it reflects the > number of votes obtained by the candidate. Currently, all VOTESOBTAINED file > are set to have NULL as figure. > Included in the data COMELEC deemed public > was a list of COMELEC officials that have admin accounts. > list of peoples > running for office since the 2010 elections.

[http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/5...](http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/55m-registered-voters-risk-philippine-commission-elections- hacked/)

Yes, having a list of candidates that is already public knowledge is sensitive. Similarly, the list of election officials that have that access is also basically public knowledge.

This is being played up as some "great secret trove of knowledge" when the reality is you've given this information to 2903420934239042390 different people and its basically public record. Simply because information identifies you doesn't make it private.

<comment><USER7> > 1) Fingerprints are left everywhere anyway. You aren't going to be able to > hide these.

Most people don't leave their name/address/uid along side those prints. Imagine this scenario: you are hanging out at your friend's house, for whatever reason you find yourself handling his dildo, he sells it on ebay, 4chan buys it and lifts your prints, your mother gets a call...

<comment><USER6> [https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/are-fingerprints-from- a-c...](https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/are-fingerprints-from-a-criminal- proceeding-public-2269089.html)

> Yes. You may be eligible for a motion to seal or expunge and in that case > they would be sealed or destroyed. Otherwise, they are public record.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/little-fanfare-fbi- ram...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/little-fanfare-fbi-ramps- biometrics-programs-yet-again-part-1)

> Being a job seeker isn't a crime. But the FBI has made a big change in how > it deals with fingerprints that might make it seem that way. For the first > time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a > background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints > taken for criminal purposes.

[http://www.secureidnews.com/news-item/countries-adopt- biomet...](http://www.secureidnews.com/news-item/countries-adopt-biometrics- for-voter-id-fraud-prevention/)

etc.

1) There are tons of ways you can end up in a public database with all of that linked to your fingerprints.

2) Background checks require fingerprints, ever ask yourself how secure that information is? [ Hint: Not so much, much like SSNs, you have to assume they are public knowledge if you've ever had this happen. ]

3) Voting records in quite a few countries include this information and they are basically public record.

> Most people don't leave their name/address/uid along side those prints. > Imagine this scenario: you are hanging out at your friend's house, for > whatever reason you find yourself handling his dildo, he sells it on ebay, > 4chan buys it and lifts your prints, your mother gets a call...

Yes they do.

<comment><USER7> > None of this information is particularly secret or sensitive.

You are intentionally being obtuse if you don't see how a fingerprint database is "sensitive". The argument doesn't take practicality into consideration, potential bad actors just jumped from:

1) The government

2) Anybody who would go through the trouble of very noisily pulling all the scattered public data together

To:

1) Anybody

While I am of the opinion that any data held by a third part (to include the government) should be considered insecure, that doesn't blind me to the practical impact of a massive data dump.

<comment><USER6> > 2) Anybody who would go through the trouble of very noisily pulling all the > scattered public data together

I guess I consider that Anybody but fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't get it. What is the point of a breach like this?

<comment><USER6> Getting news coverage for the lulz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's here: [http://lulzsecpinas.ml/](http://lulzsecpinas.ml/)

<comment><USER10> Seriously? All links that aren't directly to one of their mirrors are facebook links?

EDIT: Also, looks like all their mirrors are down, so here's the magnet link (from the archive.org torrent): magnet:?xt=urn:btih:bf682442530dac923d030ce225e92fd6d0284f21&dn=ComelecDB1</comment></comment>


French court upholds order limiting Amazon deliveries amid coronavirus risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.eu/article/french-court-upholds-order-limiting-amazon-deliveries-amid-coronavirus-risk/ <comment><USER2> _> the court of appeal extended the list of allowed items to include, among other things, high tech and IT goods. The court also significantly reduced the fines in case of non compliance from €1 million to €100,000 per unauthorized item "received, prepared and/or shipped."_

That still sounds high enough and vague enough that I expect Amazon will keep their French distribution centers closed for now.

<comment><USER3> They extended the closure until Tuesday.

But I believe the general public doesn't really notice it because orders are still being taken and delivered via, I suppose, distribution centers outside France.

Friend ordered multiple things last Saturday (supposed to be closed) and he received some packages the next Thursday and today too (Saturday).

<comment><USER4> It seems rather odd that the order would not apply to things delivered from outside the country.

Is this a general way to avoid regulations? (i.e., France only receives from Netherlands, and Netherlands only receives from France)

<comment><USER5> How is that odd? The issue was the safety of its French employees, and therefore the order from the French court relates to the Amazon facilities in France.

<comment><USER4> It seems odd because of the moral hazard. Basically, the court is saying, "Treat your employees as you will, just make sure they're not French.".

Is this really any less of a problem if French deliveries are packed by abused Belgian peons?

<comment><USER5> No, but unless the French decide that they can force others countries to follow their laws, the only choice is between [French protection laws applied in France; French protection laws not applied abroad] and [French protection laws not applied in France; French protection laws not applied abroad].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 Seems fair enough - the courts are saying that Amazon has to restrict deliveries (in France) to essential items such as food and medical supplies until a risk assessment has been done on they way the are running things at the moment. To me that doesn't seem to me to be overly burdensome. Perhaps the stumbling block is finding someone willing to be the one signing off on it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is equal protection under the law a thing in France?

If so, they presumably need to apply the same standards to all warehouses and distributors, right?

<comment> Y-bar As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: 42 companies have received injunctions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The linked document from the court clarifies exactly which categories are opened for sale.

It's a list of 7 exact Amazon categories. Like they appear in the search bar and the left sidebar that you use to filter items. There is really no doubt possible about what's allowed.

<comment><USER8> sounds like there is still extreme room for question. like how 3p sellers are now putting electronics like flash drives into the kitchen item categories?

<comment><USER9> It was items in those categories as of a specific date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How do other deliverers handle this?

<comment><USER11> Note that what courts are blaming Amazon for is not to deliver unnecessary goods, but to not care enough for the security of their employees in their warehouses.

So basically, it's not a problem for other delivery services who took stricter safety measures.

If anything, telling them they can still continue deliver necessary goods is a bit lax, because their employees are not safer processing those.

The Amazon answer is quite unbearable, to be honest. Basically, it's "people can't live without us, so we should be above the law". It's time to show them we can live without them.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any evidences about other delivery services taking stricter safety measures?

<comment><USER11> This is the responsibility of the DIRECCTE, which handle inspections.

They've been asked by the ministry of work to intensify their inspections during the covid-19 crisis, and they've notified 42 companies they should put themselves in conformity (this is the first step before any legal action to give companies an opportunity to avoid problems, which Amazon ignored).

So all the other companies who did not got problems during their inspection had better safety measures than amazon.

Source [fr] : [http://idf.direccte.gouv.fr/Inspection-du-travail- elargissem...](http://idf.direccte.gouv.fr/Inspection-du-travail- elargissement-des-controles-sur-site-tout-en-priorisant)

Translated: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fidf.direccte.gouv.fr%2FInspection- du-travail-elargissement-des-controles-sur-site-tout-en-priorisant)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dynamic Memory Networks for Visual and Textual Question Answering - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01417 <comment><USER3> MetaMind papers are always pretty awesome. Couple of great highlights from this paper:

The visual saliency maps in Figure 6 are astounding and make their performance on this task even more impressive as they give a lot of insight into what the model is doing and it seems to be focusing on the things in the image that a regular person would use to decide on the answer. Most striking was on the question "is this in the wild?", and the saliency was on the artificial, human structures in the background that indicated it was in a zoo. This type of reasoning is surprising as it requires a bit of a reversal in logic to come up with this way of answering the question. Super impressive.

The proposed input fusion layer is pretty cool - allowing information from future sentences to be used to condition how to processes previous sentences. This type of information combining was previously not really explored, and it makes sense that it improves the performance on the bAbI-10k task so much as back-tracking is an important tool for human reading comprehension. Also its clever that they encode each sentence as a thought vector before compositing so they can be processed both forwards and backwards with shared parameters- doing so on just one-hot words or even ordered word embeddings would require two vastly different parameters since grammar is wildly different when a sentence is reversed.

Lastly, on a side note, if 2014 was the year of CNN's, 2015 the year of RNN's, it looks like 2016 is the year of Neural Attention Mechanisms. Excited to see what new layers are explored in 2016 that will dominate 2017.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the great comment! For a direct link to the visual saliency maps from the paper (Figure 6) which @nicklo mentions:

[http://i.imgur.com/DRfaNxB.png](http://i.imgur.com/DRfaNxB.png)

Being able to see where a neural attention mechanism is fascinating and allows for far more than just introspection. Indeed, one of the earliest and coolest examples are neural attention mechanisms learning to align words between languages without any help[1]!

[http://i.imgur.com/J5zFZzN.png](http://i.imgur.com/J5zFZzN.png)

New papers on neural attention seem to be coming out every few weeks. I devoted much of my weekend to a naive implementation of hierarchical attentive memory[2] that promises O(log n) lookup (important for improving the speed of attention based algorithms on large input) and can be "taught" to sort in O(n log n) - really exciting stuff!

For those interested, I highly recommend reading NVIDIA's "Introduction to Neural Machine Translation with GPUs"[3]. The three part overview is a great introduction.

I'd be really happy to see 2016 as the year of neural attention mechanisms :)

[1]: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473](http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473)

[2]: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03218](http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03218)

[3]: [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/introduction- neur...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/introduction-neural- machine-translation-with-gpus/)

(full disclosure: one of the authors of the paper)

<comment><USER5> Hi thanks for a great paper. I have read it as well as the nvidia articles a lot of times but I am failing to grasp some important details. If you could shed some light that would be great.

The attention mechanism is a feed forward single layer neural network. The problem is that the input sequence is variable length. How are the outputs of the bi-rnn fed to the attention mechanism. What happens if I have a 80 word sentence as input and what happens if I have a 10 word sentence as input ?

<comment><USER6> It is a dense read, but you might have a look at [1]. This is how attention is implemented in Theano. Basically the key is going "3D" per timestep (where 2D per timestep is the norm when doing minibatch training), then taking a weighted sum over the correct axis to get the right size to combine with the RNN state.

Short summary:

I: input length

M: minibatch size (same for input and output)

H_in: input hidden size (arbitrary/user selected)

H_out: output hidden size (arbitrary/user selected)

C: attention feature size (arbitrary/user selected)

Looking at the decode/generator RNN, "context" comes in _at every timestep_ as every hidden state from the BiRNN (I, M, H_in) projected to (I, M, C). We do the normal RNN thing (tanh, LSTM, GRU) for the generator at first to get a decode hidden state (M, H_out).

Next the "first" output hidden state gets projected to the attention size C (so now (M, C)), and using numpy broadcasting this (1, M, C) size thing gets summed with the (I, M, C) size "context" which is a projection of the input RNN hiddens. Now we have something that is looking at both what the output RNN has previously done (and seen), and some context information from the input RNN.

A nonlinearity (tanh) is applied to the (I, M, C) sized piece, partly in order to bound the activation to (-1, 1) and partly just because we like nonlinearity. This (I, M, C) size thing then gets projected to (I, M, 1), or "alpha", then the useless dimension is dropped via reshape so we now have (I, M), then a softmax is applied over the first dimension I. This means that the network has effectively "weighted" each of the I timesteps of the input, though at the start of training it can't know what is relevant, at the end of training this is the thing you visualize.

This (I, M) is the actual "attention" \- to apply it you simply take the original hidden states from the input BiRNN and use broadcasting to multiply again. (I, M, 1) * (I, M, H_in) gives a weighting over every timestep of the input, and finally we sum over the 0 axis (I) to get the final "context" of just (M, H_in) size. This can then be projected to a new size (H_out) and combined with the output hiddens to get an RNN that has "seen" a weighted sum of the input, so it can generate conditioned on the whole input sequence.

Note that this whole messy procedure I described happens per timesetep - <USER2> the neural network (given enough data) can learn what to look at in the whole input in order to generate the best output. Other attentions such as [2],[3] are constrained either to only move forward or to be a hybrid of forward movement and (pooled) global lookup. [4] is a good summary of the different possibilities in use today.

[1] [https://github.com/kyunghyuncho/dl4mt- material/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/kyunghyuncho/dl4mt- material/blob/master/session2/nmt.py#L452)

[2] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850](http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850)

[3] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.04395](http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.04395)

[4] PPT, [http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/ram/slides/session2/...](http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/ram/slides/session2/Smooth%20Operators- NIPS2015.pptx)

<comment><USER5> Thanks. That was the info I was looking for. Still a lot to digest but it is going to be really helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Out of curiosity, is this work being submitted for a conference or journal?

Also have you tried to run DMN on the Text QA / Reading comprehension datasets from DeepMind?

Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend [https://github.com/deepmind/rc- data](https://github.com/deepmind/rc-data)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's fascinating.

Could anybody answer what programming language is most likely to be used for development of this kind of systems? I haven't found information about it in the paper.

<comment><USER7> Python and lua both have good frameworks for developing such models (tensorflow, theano possibly with lasagne or keras, torch, caffe...).

The visual part need access to efficient GPU-based implementation of convolutions (typically using cuDNN from nvidia or neon from Nervana Systems).

You could write bindings for other languages or even work directly in C++ but I think that an interactive programming language with a REPL like Python and lua is very helpful for faster iterative model building, interactive exploration and evaluation.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for detailed answer. I didn't know about the frameworks you listed except tensorflow.

Btw do you know anybody who use Julia for this?

<comment><USER7> There is [https://github.com/pluskid/Mocha.jl](https://github.com/pluskid/Mocha.jl) but it seems more focused on vision tasks at least for now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Augmented Reality, Nokia Style - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/09/augmented-reality-nokia-style.html

<comment><USER2> Augmented Reality, Steve Mann style

<http://wearcam.org/industrial_design/></comment>


What kind of hard drive is inside a Western Digital external product? - <AUTHOR> http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1704/p/228%2C260%2C318/session/L3RpbWUvMTM3NzcxODU0OS9zaWQvOXZtNmlXeWw%3D

<comment><USER2> That's not what the linked article says. They won't commit themselves to a specific drive model in a given USB enclosure, that's the only reason for not specifying a speed.

<comment><USER3> I guess the link title here changed?

<comment><USER2> Yes, it has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd be better to have an actual measure of the unbuffered read rate after a seek. That's pretty much all the spin rate is good for, unless you're worried about its angular momentum or something.</comment>