GazeHawk (YC S10) Does Eyetracking With Web Cams - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/y-combinator-backed-gazehawk-heatmaps-with-web-cams/ <comment><USER3> About 2 years ago an acquaintance of mine suddenly had a stroke. When she came to she was conscious but completely paralyzed. The only way could communicate was with her eyes [1].

She's since recovered and is able to talk. But she describes an intense loneliness and frustration at being a prisoner in her own body. When she was finally able to use an expensive, specialized computer to communicate by slightly moving her fingers, it was an amazing encouragement.

Part of the problem right now is that these input systems are extremely expensive and specialized. Even if the family can afford to pay for one, they still have to spend time researching which system is the best.

I imagine a free, open-source system that will allow for rapid eyetracking- based writing. Say, a live cd that contains many commercial webcam drivers and boots into a system like Dasher ([http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.htm...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html)).

This would provide instant communication, however crude, to a person who has recently been through a tragic experience.

Is webcam eye-tracking imperfect? Yes. Do commercial systems exist that solve this problem better? Yes. But the idea here is to have something someone could put into hardware they already have to get _something_ working right away.

OpenGazer: <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/opengazer/> A nice list of eye trackers: [http://www.cogain.org/wiki/Eye_Trackers#Open_source_gaze_tra...](http://www.cogain.org/wiki/Eye_Trackers#Open_source_gaze_tracking.2C_freeware_and_low_cost_eye_tracking)

*Yes, someone would have to help the paralyzed put the cd into the tray and boot the computer

[1]: <http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/conniemchaddad/mystory>

<comment><USER4> Props for linking to OpenGazer and Dasher. AEGIS is absolutely a terrific project, and I've been inspired by the work that Emli-Mari Nel and others are doing on exactly this problem.

Something to keep in mind when you're thinking about eye tracking for accessibility is how much custom hardware can greatly enhance the experience. Even if you're just mounting a webcam on a head bracket and removing the IR filter, some inexpensive work can really improve the user interface. (Of course, mounting a camera on your face isn't necessarily conducive to unbiased usability testing!)

One of my greatest hopes, personally, is that our approach to webcam-based eye tracking will yield algorithms and methods that we can give back to the community. Eye tracking has its shortcomings, to be sure, but the potential benefit is too great to be ignored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there an example page where we can test the accuracy of the eye tracking software?

I like the idea, but for $490, I'd like some assurance that the eye tracking technology actually works and that it's not just tracking the mouse or something else.

<comment><USER6> Haha, a reasonable request. We're working on a good way to let people demo our technology. Part of the problem is that this is computationally intensive, and we didn't want all of TC killing our processing servers.

The other part is we found that people demoing the software are less likely to follow the instructions (since they're not getting paid) and we worried about having a lot of poor tracks that would look bad. Our testers have been amazingly good at following instructions :).

<comment><USER7> It's only computationally intensive because you're using the processor on your end to do the work. Why not have a large portion of the work done on the clients machine?

<comment><USER6> Two main reasons:

1) Our processing can't be done realtime (i.e. it takes more than 1 second per second of video), at least for now, so there would need to be a lag that can get significant if they user has a slow enough computer.

2) We currently don't require any software to be installed client-side (we use Flash + JS), which we consider a big perk.

<comment><USER7> I can see the advantage of not having to install client side stuff, but if that's such a performance penalty that you have to charge so much more you're opening yourself up to competition by someone that does the same thing but finds a way to do it client side.

Looks like you have a bunch of tough optimisation ahead, much good luck with that.

Very nice idea by the way, eye tracking used to be the domain of specialised setups using cameras behind half-transparent mirrors, it's quite impressive that you've gotten this far with just a cheap webcam as an input device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having done a bunch of user studies in the past, one of the big issues I've seen is the Hawthorne Effect ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect> ) -- just the fact that the user knows they are being watched, they change their behavior so much that the study is irrelevant.

I think GazeHawk has the chance to push usability closer to being unbiased -- very promising!

<comment><USER6> Thanks! We didn't even realize this was one of the extra benefits of our technology, but it seems to be a pretty important one: people have reported completely forgetting that they're being tracked when using our early prototypes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can now do something very similar on the iPhone 4 because of the front facing camera. Imagine if you can hit-track when someone is looking at an ad. You could have an advertising business model at cost-per-glance. This works great if the ads are mainly for branding impact.

<comment><USER10> Would it work with such a small screen?

<comment><USER4> People typically hold the iPhone closer to their face than they hold their laptop. Since accuracy in eye tracking depends on the angle between the calculated gaze vector and the true gaze vector, this means that error will be reduced.

The amazingly high pixel density on the iPhone 4 means that that the calculated gaze focus may be more pixels away from the real point - but we're working on some ways to compensate for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised how most commenters here are willing to accept the idea of Gazehawk without questioning it. No disrespect meant to Brian and Joe, but any experienced researcher knows that any new research technology / method needs to be welcomed with a healthy cynicism until its value has been proven in the real world.

Firstly, can it really be as accurate as commercial eye tracking hardware? We're talking about the difference between $40,000 and $40 here - a Pepsi challenge is needed! Some leading figures in the UX industry claim that even the top end devices can easily become de-calibrated and provide bogus data.

Secondly, even if the technology is acceptably accurate, is the gazehawk research method effective at delivering findings that actually help you improve the design of your sites?

The idea of a predefined panel of 'users' is rather worrying. A user is defined as someone who actually uses your site. In the standard gazehawk offering, they provide a group of trained testers (who get paid $8 a pop), who may simply not care about the problem your site tries to solve. For example, if you have a webapp about mountain biking, you're going to get a panel of testers who may simply not care nor understand about types of bike, trails, nor understand any of the terminology you use. Eye tracking heatmaps are a product of conscious thought (as well as low level visual processing) - <USER2> testers don't care about nor understand the problem your site is trying to solve, the heatmaps you'll get from them will be almost entirely worthless.

Thirdly, analysis of eye-tracking data is very tricky. There are a lot of mistakes an untrained analyst will make, which could have major repercussions. I did a presentation on this at User Experience Lisbon a few months ago:

[http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/what-you-need-to-know- abou...](http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/what-you-need-to-know-about-eye- tracking-new-uxlx-version)

I really don't mean Brian and Joe any ill-will. All of these concerns can be dealt with if they share case study projects and having an open channel of discussion with the UX research community.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a shame this is for webpages only. I would very much like "focus follows eyes" in my window manager.

<comment><USER13> Yes, if it could actually be made to work accurately (down to the few-pixel level) and in real time then it would be a brilliant user interface element. Why should I click a mouse when I can just stare at the "reply" button for half a second?

(Yes, all sorts of potential badness which could happen if implemented unwisely.)

<comment><USER14> There is a big problem with eye-controlled interfaces called "Midas touch".. It gets extremely tiring to force yourself to look/not look in one point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like you beat us to the punch with the article!

Questions and comments are welcome. Thanks everyone!

<comment><USER15> Any more info about the actual test users? Are they using their own computers, or do they come to a test lab?

<comment><USER6> They use their own computers and webcams, providing a much more natural environment for testing. That's one of the reasons we can offer such a low- cost service.

If anyone is interested in being one of our users, sign up at <https://www.gazehawk.com/tester/signup/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like an amazing idea... strikingly similar to the idea I pitched to YC in an interview in November, 2006 :-/. I guess they didn't like our team or progress. Bummer.

</comment><comment><USER17> Brilliant.

we spend all day thinking about conversion rate optimization via conversionvoodoo.com - some of our larger clients have full hardware rigs and I can tell you this data is invaluable WHEN it's accurate.

Certainly moreso than usertesting due to the speed at which the eye moves / tracks - killer product, great release and can't wait to test it - check your site support email, I'd like to see how we could leverage this for more of our clients & case studies.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very cool software and I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to use this, HOWEVER we make a hardware appliance and we can't let people on it (via web access) to do testing. I'd rather pay like $5k for a webcam and a software package to install and run tests with my customers (which are NOT normal web users, they are security experts) to see how they view our interface.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback. Right now we're targeting web-based interfaces, but expanding into different products is definitely something we're considering. It depends on what kind of demand we see for it.

<comment><USER18> The product portion I want to use is a web-based interface, however it can only be used for internal network use and we wouldn't be allowed to make it internet-accessible.

I think we should be able to webcam/monitor our users here, have an app gather data on our computers, then have our computers (which can access the internet AND our internal network appliance's interface which we are testing) upload the data to your website to be parsed.

<comment><USER6> I see. We may be able to work something out, email me at brian _AT_ gazehawk.com and we can discuss the details. Our upcoming plans to let you use your own users may solve this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very impressive. They deserve to succeed for being so clever.

But are there more samples/examples? I can't find any on the site.

At $5 per site viewed, I hope the qualify the viewers! (oh wait it's " _up to_ " $5)

( <https://www.gazehawk.com/tester/signup/> )

<comment><USER6> Good point, we'll add some example links to the site. In the meantime:

<http://www.gazehawk.com/img/techcrunch-heatmap.png>

<http://www.gazehawk.com/img/wakemate-heatmap.png>

We pay $2 for trying right now, $4 for actually completing, and $5 if you give us some incredibly insightful feedback or bug report. We may decrease this in the future, but we need to figure out our supply/demand curve first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The next step is to reorganize the ads on the page dynamically so you can't avoid them!

</comment><comment><USER20> it would be extra useful if you could see the order in which people look at things

<comment><USER6> We have a nifty feature that let's you replay someone's gaze in a dot that moves around the screen. In the near future we'll have more quantitative things like how gaze order and fixation time.

<comment><USER20> awesome, once you get enough data like that you can do real cool analytics like "what color draws the most attention", "do drop shadows make it easier to focus on sections", etc... it would make for a great blog, something along the lines of <http://blog.okcupid.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would try your service in a heartbeat, but the pricing seems quite high. There's a big disconnect between charging $49 per user and paying them $5- couldn't you significantly lower pricing and still be profitable?

<comment><USER6> There's a significant overhead to eye tracking in terms of computation, so our costs aren't just paying testers. We wanted to price ourselves competitively compared to sites like UserTesting.com, but of course pricing was/is something we've discussed a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you can add where a user looks first, that'll be great. Something like order of gazes on a page?</comment>


Rogue Amoeba Product Screenshots Hint at Sprint iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/ios/

<comment><USER2> I think we are being trolled. :)

<comment><USER3> There are even plugins to do this on jailbroken devices. I bet Paul K. is just trolling to drive up traffic to their site. Linkbait at it's finest 8-).</comment></comment>


Physicists carry out Maxwell's "demon" thought experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform

<comment><USER2> This is cool. But it should be noted that it has already been proven that there is a minimum amount of entropy associated with a single irreversible bit flip, and as a result Maxwell's demon cannot actually violate the second law of thermodynamics.

<comment><USER3> That's the trouble with exciting phrases like "This seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics". It is known that Maxwell's demon does not violate anything, and the article does explain this later. But that's not quite the point.

I think this is a better explanation of the experiment: [http://blog.joerg.heber.name/2010/11/14/the-demon-is-out- of-...](http://blog.joerg.heber.name/2010/11/14/the-demon-is-out-of-the- bottle/)

It's direct empirical support for the idea that "there is energy in information", and it demonstrates how even supposedly tried-and-trusted science is still subject to empirical validation.

<comment><USER4> This is the part I never understood about Maxwell's Demon:

> If the demon itself doesn't use up any energy (which can be done), entropy > would decrease, right?

Would anyone care to explain? Energy isn't spent moving the door around? (Particularly since the demon has to make sure the fast-moving molecules don't go right back through it... though I suppose with a sufficiently large box for fast-moving molecules, this may not happen...)

<comment><USER5> One nice way to think about is to imagine a very light but strong door, and very massive particles. The energy it would take to move the door back and forth would be trivial compared to the energy of the system.

You can even use a reversible process (e.g. the doors on a spring so the energy put into it to close the door is regained by letting the spring's energy reopen it) to make it use effectively zero energy.

Then all the "energy" in the system is in the demon's observation of the system, and not in the actual mechanics of opening and closing the door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much energy was used to manipulate the stuff around the bead, and how much energy would be used to just directly move it up.

</comment><comment><USER7> "The bead is driven as a mini-rotor, with a information-to-energy conversion efficiency of 28%."

What exactly are the units of information in this case? The statement doesn't make much sense as I think the OP just took the quote out of context.

A simpler way to visualize what's going on: imagine your trained dog picks up a ball and tosses it up in your hands and you catch it. Now the ball is 1.5 meters higher off the ground than it was before. E = m * g * h = 1 kg (it's a heavy ball, all right?) * 9.8 m/s^2 * 1.5 m = 14.7 J. That's 14.7 J _you_ got for free. But the _dog_ expanded more energy than that to pick up the ball, overcome gravity and air resistance and toss it up. The total system (= you + ball + dog) lost energy and increased entropy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I may be missing the point here... but this seems like a simple feedback system, just with a slightly more complex energy exchange (i.e. the experimenters observation and action) which hides the fact and allows it to be presented as a "paradox".

In actual fact this is just bad reporting, really. The experiment is about showing energy exists in information, which it seems to do successfully.

</comment><comment><USER9> s/energy/entropy/ and then proof read.</comment>


Apple iOffer (Offer letter done the Apple way) - <AUTHOR> http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/10/unboxing-you-won-see-on-gizmodo-or.html <comment><USER3> That does indeed look very nice. I've heard some not-so-great things about actually being an Apple employee, though. Can anyone comment?

<comment><USER4> I contracted on-site in Cupertino for a year. They have 35,000 employees, so if you're looking to join a tiny start-up where everyone is 23 years old and best friends, you're not going to find that at Apple. Actually, I used the large crowds of employees to my advantage and basically "snuck" into the offices every day for the last few months I worked there when my security badge stopped working (long/uninteresting story.)

I've never worked for a big corporation, but working for Apple is probably like working for any other company with that size of a workforce. Some people love their job, some people are bored and a lot of it depends on which group/department you're in. I was a little turned off by the cubicle/office farms in some of the buildings, which are probably setup like that due to security.

I saw Steve Jobs a few times at the cafeteria. But he did not yell at me. Or anyone else.

<comment><USER5> _and basically "snuck" into the offices every day for the last few months_ : In the unlikely event that you haven't already read <http://www.pacifict.com/Story/>, you should. As should anyone else who doesn't immediately know what story that is from what I just said. It's simultaneously inspiring and horrifying. (More of the former.)

<comment><USER6> One of the reasons I come to hn so much is for motivation when things get tough (which is often). I don't think I've ever read anything here that motivated me more.

This is already on my bulletin board. So the next time I opt for the "easy way out", I can look at this and remind myself not to be such a wimp.

Just a few of the gems inside:

 _The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code...It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone._

 _Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive._

 _"This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo)._

 _This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity._

 _It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - <USER2> attention to detail - makes a good product._

 _The secret to programming is having smart friends._

 _I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs."_

 _programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices._

 _...we were in full crunch mode, working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week...If this story were a movie, you would now see the clock hand spinning and the calendar pages blowing away in the wind._

 _...it was a macho computer guy thing - we had never shipped a million copies of software before_

 _I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked...We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work._

<comment><USER7> The Graphing Calculator Story.mp4 54:26 - 3 years ago goog://

I find the story to be just the opposite: such behaviour of The Corporation is not motivating at all, in the productive sense. It is rather motivating to do something completely different from productive coding/work.

<comment><USER8> He's talking about the behavior of the employees who made the program.

<comment><USER9> And _he's_ talking about the insidious behavior of Apple.

<comment><USER7> I think you('ll) enjoy the play:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_&_Guildenstern_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_&_Guildenstern_Are_Dead_%28film%29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _This is, as it appears to be, a small, light folder with a few pieces of paper in it. Easily under a pound, it feels lighter than an iPod._

Steve Jobs is the messiah and Apple his gospel.

</comment><comment><USER11> Company that is renowned for its brand-centric business practices uses branded paperwork.

It must be a slow news day.

<comment><USER8> Did you see the headings on those pages? "Ah, paperwork." "Ready, Set, Go." Details like that fascinate me. It suggests that even when making a document that very few people see, Apple sweats the small details.

Also, it's not branded paperwork. It's _well-designed_ paperwork. There's a difference, though I suppose if you're the sort of person who still thinks a Mac is just a "branded computer" we'll have to disagree here.

Also also, I'm going to rant a second at you, because Apple is _not_ brand- centric. I've got a Samsung phone that uses AT&T. The word Samsung appears three times on the phone's hardware, the word AT&T twice. When I open the phone, the AT&T logo is on the front screen and the back screen, and then it remains in the top bar no matter what I do. THAT'S branding for you. It's desperate, ugly branding. Meanwhile, if I total up ALL the Apple products I have with me, and that's a power cord, a laptop, an iPod touch, and an iPod cord, the Apple logo appears a total of three times, once a product; the name Apple appears a total of three times, once a product; I see the Apple logo briefly when I start up my Macbook Pro, but not when I open my iPod touch.

Mac products are very _not_ branded, compared to their competitors' products. The thing is, Apple's brand has a _reputation_ , unlike Samsung/Motorola/Nokia or Dell/HP, and so when you see an Apple logo it means something. When you see a Windows logo plastered on the _front_ of your laptop you don't call it "brand-centric" because nobody cares about the Windows brand. So when people complain about Apple's logo being ubiquitous on their product, I scoff, because the complaint's really that Apple made stuff good enough that people recognize the name Apple over their competitors.

<comment><USER11> Let's be clear. My comment was made in jest at this subject appearing on HN and not at Apple. This was in no way suggested.

\----

Branding is much more than logo and where it is placed on an object. It is an entire experience targeting the consumer, employee and stake holder. It is entirely about product recognition and generating brand equity, which in turn provides real value to the business. Apple are masters of this. These documents are sample proof of this at work. It is all part of the Brand Experience.

Apple are about as brand-centric as it gets. They are a case study on how to manage a brand properly.

Perhaps next time you should familiarize yourself with the concept of branding and all it entails before you direct an unnecessary and ill advised rant (your words) at me or anyone else. Familiarity of the individuals background and knowledge of the subject might also be a good idea.

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

I wrote this on my 24" iMac by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dick Hardt's brilliant presentation on Identity 2.0 is on similar principles. <http://identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Okay, so what do their bong letters look like now? I've got one from the 1991 recession that's pretty nice. Let's compare!

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen It's very classy and has good production value. Really reminds me of the Caltech letter of admission.

</comment><comment><USER14> And yet us iPhone developers get the shaft. I can't help but think whatever part of the corporate culture that breeds this kind of stuff got cut off near the iTunes Connect department.

<comment><USER8> Okay. Tim. I understand why you're mad about the iPhone development situation. I would like to offer you, however, the following points to give you a teensy bit of perspective:

* 99.9% of all applications submitted are approved without controversy.

* The App Store is still new. It's slightly more than a year old. Therefore, it's still got glitches in its processes, very obviously.

* For something so young, it's exploded in use. Two billion app downloads in just over a year? That's insane. That's so insane I doubt anybody can quite process it mentally.

* Therefore, every small error in Apple's process has been magnified to the point it looks like a gaping wound.

* Apple is certainly working on this, and putting a lot of effort into it.

* Apple won't TELL you they're working on this until they've already come up with what they believe is an iron solution, because Apple doesn't like admitting their ideas don't spring fully-grown from the head of Zeus.

* Apple's got an amazing track record, and so it's logical to think that within a year or two they will figure out how to suck a lot less. That's a reasonable amount of time to give them.

* No excuse about "I can't make a living reliably until they fix this", because anybody insane enough to try and make a living from a brand-new piece of software ought to at least know the risks they made.

<comment><USER15> Do you work on the iTunes Store or in the Apple Developer program? If not, I question the authority of your "99.9%" claim.

As far as all of the other arguments, they are very touchy feely. "The App Store is new" but it's built on top of a store that's been around for 7 years. And that store already processes billions of transactions annually, so those numbers don't strike me as crippling.

I don't know what Apple is or isn't doing, but I do know what they've admitted to publicly, and I do know dozens of (well respected) developers who have had issues with the app store. I also know that Apple has lied about the store in the past. So, I think some criticism is deserved here.

As far as relating it to the employee paperwork, that was absurd. They've been using the same paperwork for years. It's completely unrelated.

<comment><USER8> Selling an mp3 file is different from selling a bundled application that contains a slew of different features and functions. Apple has a whole bunch of things they _don't_ want appearing on applications, because they want to control the coding environment. A song requires no control. An app requires a lot. So no, this isn't something that's been around for 7 years—though I recall iTunes store having its own problems when it launched.

 _I do know dozens of (well respected) developers who have had issues with the app store._

Dozens out of thousands of developers. 99.9% _might_ have been a stretch, I don't know the exact numbers. 99% wouldn't have been.

 _So, I think some criticism is deserved here._

There's a difference between criticizing Apple and hijacking a conversation about something entirely different to rant about the App Store. There are critical essays about the latter every day or two. We can complain about Apple there.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Prostitution decriminalized: Rhode Island's experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/item/105393-prostitution-decriminalized-rhode-islands-experiment <comment><USER2> It's weird seeing this. In Australia prostitution is completely legal. There was actually a publicly listed brothel for a while. Strange to think other societies criminalise it.

I think being legal is best for the health and wellbeing of the sex workers and minimises the criminal involvement.

There are brothels all over the place but mostly they are pretty low key, often hidden in backstreets or warehouse areas with only a red light and a sign to indicate they exist.

I wish we had such an enlightened position on drugs, which remain almost completely criminalized, whilst other parts of the world move towards legalization of various aspects of drug law.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. A bunch of my friends are sex workers. They make literally ten times as much money as me per hour and love their jobs.

<comment><USER4> Says more about how little tech workers are paid in Australia, than anything else. Work for Google in US and earn more than a hooker!

<comment><USER5> Not sure where in America is paying $300 per hour for software developers.

<comment><USER6> in the valley as an "rockstar" iOS developer.

<comment><USER7> With $299.95 per hour in rent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Either as a society we accept that some people will trade sexual favors for money or we refuse it. I can see arguments both ways. In the end, that is a stance on how you weight two values:

1\. The morality to add financial consideration in the decision to provide consent to a sex act.

2\. The amount of freewill that a person has within the job market.

What is interesting is that you can have different liberal or conservative position on both of these considerations and still be unsure about the side the scale weights in:

As a conservative:

1\. Social conservatives tend to consider sex like a serious matter, set apart from the rest, so they will say that consent is not to be sold.

2\. Fiscal conservatives tend to consider freewill in the job market is close to absolute: you are always free to refuse a job, so people deciding to go into prostitution really chose it without constraints.

Depending on how you weight sex-is-special vs job-market-is-free, you can be against or for prostitution as a conservative.

As a liberal:

1\. Social liberals will tend to consider that consent is important in every part of life but that sex is (or can be chosen to be) an activity like any other. If someone is really willing to sell sexual favors, under what principle forbidding it? (and it turns to be a fetish too)

2\. "Fiscal liberals" (is that an expression? Not sure, non-native here, I mean the opposite of "fiscal conservative) tend to consider wages and employment to be a tool of oppression and control. In that respect, they will be less likely to consider that someone who works for money chooses to do so freely.

Depending on how you weight you-are-free-to-sex-as-you-want vs wage-is-a-way- to-control you can be a liberal and be for or against prostitution.

<comment><USER9> Your "fiscal liberal" doesn't make that much sense. I suspect their claim would be towards regulating the business, making sure the workers have rights, can negotiate better conditions and ultimately resign if they wanted. Probably education would be pushed to be cheaper or free, programs to transition people out of it put in place, etc.

<comment><USER8> Maybe that's a French bias, but here we tend to consider that poor people usually have less job opportunities to choose between and that some prostitutes do this because they are out of option to make additional money.

"Have sex or starve" can be seen as a breach of consent.

Most prostitutes do not work out of a vocation or because they enjoy having sex with random people (though I guess on can find a few who do) but they do that for money. Some will think "that's so much easier and enjoyable than flipping burgers at the fastfood" and that's fine by me, but some others will think "that's the only way I can make enough money to feed my kids and pay our debts" and that's less ok.

<comment><USER10> > "Have sex or starve" can be seen as a breach of consent.

Most people in the developed world feel that "do X or starve" is not the right model and want their government to take care of that. This, however, is done via public assistance, not by tweaking rules for X1, X2, ..., Xn, ... ("have sex or starve" is wrong, but "clean toilets or starve" is OK, etc.).

<comment> vertex-four "Clean toilets or starve" is, in fact, the model that one of the main sources of aid for the unemployed is built on. If you turn down a job without a damn good reason, you lose your unemployment aid. Very few people with any political power want to change that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a German where prostitution is just seen as a regular trade, some general points. 1.) While paid sex is surely available at many places, we still do not live in one big brothel.

2.) Why should people have to film their act of having sex and then publish it (porn is legal in the US...)

3.) There is a problem with human trafficking that has to be dealt with. But dealing with this problem in some manner is surely the better way than making prostitution illegal. As long as there are hormons in this world, prostitution will exist. Learn to live with it.

<comment><USER12> The USA moralises issues more than any other Western democracy as far as I can tell. To a large portion of the electorate, it's not a question of what's [better for women, better for the planet, better for x], it's a question of what's _right_ and what's _wrong_. Prostitution is obviously wrong, therefore nobody _good_ should be doing it, therefore criminalising it only affects _bad_ people, which is fine, they're bad and they deserve punishment (maybe they'll see the error of their ways and become good people).

Or that's how it seems from over here anyway. The UK's better, but not much.

<comment><USER13> The eternal battle of deontology vs utilitarianism.

For example, just a few months the Polish government made emergency contraception pill prescription-only. This government is strongly against abortion of any kind, yet it passed a bill that will surely increase (illegal) abortion rates. Yet, it does not THINK about consequences of action, just if it supports "right" or "wrong" causes (for them any non-Catholic sex life is "wrong").

<comment><USER14> > This government is strongly against abortion of any kind, yet it passed a > bill that will surely increase (illegal) abortion rates.

This isn't a very good argument. If you care about "abortion of any kind", then increasing the illegal abortion rate while decreasing the overall abortion rate is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

<comment><USER13> Unlike most EU countries, in Poland there is no legal abortion (except for rape and women's life in danger).

I added "(illegal)" as an indication that all of such abortions are illegal in Poland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never understood this: it's your body so you have the right to an abortion, but...

Someone does it for free, someone for a promise to marry, someone for marriage, someone hoping it leads to something, rent paid etc etc. Who are to decide what "currency" is legal and what isn't for "her body"?

<comment><USER16> > I never understood this: it's your body so you have the right to an > abortion, but...

There may be less to understand than you think: there is a _huge_ overlap between groups of people who are very anti-abortion and groups who are very anti-prostitution. The religious right to give the most obvious example (as they are loudly vocal, highly active, and in many places countries pretty controlling via lobbying), but that is definitely not the only example.

There are reasons to support one but not the other though they are contested. Many see prostitution as something that will lead to people trafficking and other crime. The opposing views, that legalising it will reduce such crime by bringing the activity more into the open so availability is not an issue for those who wish to take part (reducing the trafficking to bring in resource) and so those who chose to take part are better protected, don't generally win out in relevant debates.

Studies of real world examples show wildly differing results (in part because most of them are run and/or funded by those with some bias towards one result or another) and experimental studies have problems getting through ethics committees for obvious reasons - so it is going to be a complex issue to resolve (and is unlikely to ever be resolved to the satisfaction of all).

> someone for a promise to marry, someone for marriage, someone hoping it > leads to something, rent paid etc etc. Who are to decide what "currency"

Again, in many cases you'll find the judgement applied to selling sex is similarly applied to this form of currency, or if not other moral judgement is often found.

<comment><USER15> The "NO" side, IMO, is mostly for religious /morality reasons or the ultra- feminists that think women will be abused by men. The first part I understand, it's at least consistent. But I don't see how a bunch of women in DC or ivory towers can claim that a 16 yo girl can decide /has the right to abort but 40 yo woman can't decide to have sex for $150 a shot.

<comment><USER16> The latter are merely a very vocal minority though. Very _very_ vocal, but in the grand scheme of things in what is a massive debate that has been going on for centuries in various forms with strongly defended positions on all sides, a drop in the ocean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've always thought about how brutally sexist it is to take this industry where women have a massive competitive advantage, and criminalize it.

<comment><USER18> Yes it is long due for a major overhaul. Fortunately with new tech it is finally possible to do something about it. Imagine a large scale union of sex workers with strong protection. They will be able to demand safer working conditions and join together to leverage power over abusive clients. They can coordinate and accurately judge demand. The company can then do marketing and logistics on their behalf. It would also enable women that are not as entrepreneurial but do not want to give up all their personal control to a local representative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Summary of results from prostitution decriminalization experiment:

* Female gonorrhea rates decreased 40% * Reported rape offenses decreased 30% * No evidence that decriminalization increases human trafficking

> She has a theory, though, in that while she knows for some men rape is about > power, "I think the argument that we're making is that that might not be > true for all men, and for some, these activities could be substitutes."

> In other words, for some men, rape may be just about sex. And if there's a > legal and accessible market for it, the number of rapes in a community may > go down. This has not been a popular theory or study. And for many, it > challenges the notion that rape is about violence and power, and not sex. > "So I consider myself a feminist, but I think this finding angers a lot of > feminists," Shah said. "It is a very controversial idea."

What the hell is this "rape has nothing to do with sex" nonsense and why does challenging this absurd assertion anger feminists? How removed from reality do you have to be to believe that forcing sexual intercourse on someone has nothing to do with sexual attraction?

But back to the topic of criminalization, it's downright disingenuous to conflate prostitution with human trafficking. And I don't believe the government should be in the business of imposing its moral whims on the decisions of consenting adults.

<comment><USER20> > What the hell is this "rape has nothing to do with sex" nonsense

This is because feminists (and everyone else) started rejecting Freud's theories of sex in the '60s. Freudian theory states sex and aggression are interconnected (e.g. the much misunderstood Oedipus complex). Even now people think violence is due to our culture, not biological drives or instincts. This is why feminists say we have a "Rape Culture," and that all we have to do is fix culture, then all rape and violence will disappear. Freud was much more pessimistic. "Civilization and Its Discontents" is a good summary of why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Banning anything that has a high demand mainly gives criminals control of the market. It has little impact on demand but is an abrogation of any responsibility to regulate.

The same was true of the US 18th Amendment, of the "War on Drugs" in the US now, of the banning of sex work, or most anything else. When the government decides to just ban something, others step in to control the market without any rule of law or responsibility to the public.

</comment><comment><USER22> TFA: _Still, perhaps even more surprising than the decrease in gonorrhea was another public health development. Sexual violence, or rapes, dipped dramatically. And this wasn 't just amongst sex workers. It was across the board, according to FBI crime reports and jurisdiction level data.

"Reported rape offenses decreased by about 30 percent," Shah said.

That's another big decrease. Shah says, if anything, you'd expect rape to go up as when prostitution is decriminalized, sex workers are more likely to report rapes. She compared this to neighboring states, too. The drop was only in Rhode Island. So she examined other crime data in Rhode Island, like burglaries and murders, to see if there had just been a drop in crime generally.

It didn't match._

</comment><comment><USER23> I love how in the past hour, a NYT op-ed discussing motherhood and women's agency is flagged as irrelevant but an article on decriminalizing prostitution is at the top of hacker news with a lengthy discussion on the nuances of policy and practice /s

<comment><USER24> Is that [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/opinion/sunday/motherhood...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/opinion/sunday/motherhood- family-sexism-sacrifice.html) by any chance?

<comment><USER23> That's the one! Comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944904)

<comment><USER25> I have little sympathy. The author decided to pick an "edgy" title to get clicks and it clearly backfired.

If you posted "Motherhood Isn't Sacrifice, It's Selfishness" as a comment here it would get flagged to death too. Putting it as a title of an OP-Ed doesn't change that even if the author will slowly break down why that ISN'T true (or more complex/nuanced).

If the author wants to generate legitimate discussion, they should talk to their editor about dropping the faux-controversial titles. Particularly as it sets the tone for the discussion is such a negative way.

<comment><USER26> The headlines in newspapers aren't written by the people that write the columns and articles.

<comment><USER27> From what I can tell, the title unfortunately reflects the article well. Sure, the article does skirt around some interesting thoughts on ingrained societal bias / roles (which _has_ been discussed here quite a bit). But the article struck me as preachy / opinionated, in that the author had a fairly exact idea of what she thought the motherhood of everyone else was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I neither endorse nor reject this paper, but it is an interesting argument: [http://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71503.pdf](http://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71503.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER29> As someone from a country where all form of prostitution is legal and regulated it did not really ever come up as something odd when I grew up. Prostitution is becoming less prominent in recent years because families move into places traditionally frequented by prostitutes but the industry is healthy as ever as far as I can see.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's legal in Germany too.

My girlfriend grew up in a red light district.

She said it was mostly okay, the nights were a bit rough, because the clients would often argue loudly with the girls right before her window.

But the "madame" of a brothel around the corner would always look after the children going to school in the morning so they wouldn't be bothered.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone else see the article presenting for a mutually agreed on act as women innocent / men predatory?

For example

> _The Swedish or Nordic model takes aim at the demand, making it illegal to > buy sexual services but not to sell it._

but

> _In a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District of Rhode Island, COYOTE 's > lawyer argued that the state's law on prostitution was too broad and > discriminated against women, given that female sex workers were arrested far > more than male customers._

Saying "takes aim at the demand" for a mutually consenting interaction just seems a way of targeting men without explicitly saying it. Different countries and situations, but the reporter doesn't note the different treatment by the state when one sex is criminalized versus the other.

Or

> _" You see the silencing of victims," Hughes said. "It is just very harmful > to women. It really is a libertarian approach, but the ones who get freedom > are the pimps, the sex buyers, the businessmen who then can rent properties > to the massage parlors, and to the sex buyers. There's very little freedom > for the women."_

or

> _As for Robinson, the online escort who moved to Rhode Island? She was > angry._

> _" It pissed me off. I didn't know nothing about activism, I didn't know > what a sex worker rights organization was," she said._

> _Robinson changed that. She became active with COYOTE, the sex worker union > and advocacy group._

> _" Criminalization is a punishment for women who won't conform," Robinson > said. "And we're just supposed to go live in the streets in poverty and not > complain about it, and be good women."_

Nothing wrong with a woman's perspective, but men's behavior was criminalized too. I would think it would add to the article to get some of their perspective.

Not including men's perspective, except as the business _men_ who make money off the women and the rapists, makes the article sound like the reason for prostitution's negative reputation is men. Would a quote like the following fly?

> _" Criminalization is a punishment for men who won't conform. We're just > supposed to go live without sex and not complain about it, and be good > men."_

</comment><comment><USER32> Speaking of various models of legislating sex, I found this TED talk quite informative: [https://www.ted.com/talks/juno_mac_the_laws_that_sex_workers...](https://www.ted.com/talks/juno_mac_the_laws_that_sex_workers_really_want)

</comment><comment><USER33> off topic: This is why states rights is so important. Each state acts as an incubator for ideas. Its 50 experiments running all at once.

<comment><USER34> When nearly all of the states have pretty extreme anti-sex worker views, the experiments don't happen. It's, honestly, embarrassing how long it's taking for the US to get sane policy regarding sex work. The US is perhaps too homogeneous to provide good experimental data.

But, it's great when experiments do happen. And, I guess we're reaching a tipping point on drug policy, at least with regard to the most popular (still mostly) illegal drug.

<comment><USER7> Keyword there is "nearly", though. Greetings from Nevada, land of the free and home of the Mustang Ranch.

<comment><USER34> Isn't it legal in only a handful of counties in Nevada, though? So, wouldn't that mean it's not really an entire state full of freedom, just a few enlightened counties. Also, as I understand it, the only legal prostitution is within licensed brothels. So, no independent contractors allowed anywhere in the state. That seems more like rent-seeking by brothel owners rather than rights for sex workers.

I'm not saying it's not a positive thing that prostitution is less criminalized in some parts of Nevada than in the rest of the US. But, it's still pretty repressive and it still victimizes sex workers in the general case by putting their livelihood at the mercy of brothel owners.

<comment><USER7> "Isn't it legal in only a handful of counties in Nevada, though?"

Indeed; it's notably illegal in both of Reno's two largest cities (Las Vegas because Clark County has too high of a population, so prostitution is automatically illegal per state law; Reno/Sparks because Washoe County specifically outlawed prostitution), which really hinders the effectiveness of such an experiment. About 90% of Nevadan prostitution happens illegally, from what I understand.

Still, that's better than 100% illegal statewide, which is the case in pretty much every state bordering Nevada IIRC.

"no independent contractors allowed anywhere in the state"

I'm pretty sure most (all?) prostitutes in Nevadan brothels are independent contractors. They still report to brothel owners, though.

"it's still pretty repressive"

Indeed it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if government-operated brothels could be a better solution, this way there is a constant monitor on sex workers and human trafficking while providing extra income to the government and being able to protect the sex worker/citizens its meant to protect.

Not sure what would be the obvious cons. Happy to know if anyone points any out.

<comment><USER36> Public workers tend to get away with anything, like politicians or cops get away with murders, theft or even rape. Putting these unaccountable people in charge of brothels sounds like a nightmare.

<comment><USER37> There's a reason that Patty and Selma work for the Department of Motor Vehicles. They "suck the life out of everything".

If they worked in a brothel it would be even less fun than visiting the DMV.

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

Yes it's a cartoon and a stereotype. But the reason it's funny is that it's so close to peoples' everyday experience with government employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Do you guys think that the majority of sex workers really enjoy their work or prefer it? Do you think that this is the career they prefer? Do you think it may have some affect on their psychological well-being?

I believe prostitution is an indication of a lack economic and social well- being both in the case of buyers and sellers.

Within about one or two decades maximum there will be revolutionary advances in robotics including things like much better weight-to power ratio artificial muscles and increased bio-mimicry. This will lead to truly life-like sex robots. Along the same lines, the majority of "ordinary" jobs that humans can currently do without high-bandwidth connections to computers or control over them will be replaced with sophisticated AIs and robots or automation. The perspective on sex work and general objectification of women will shift more towards one side then.

<comment><USER39> Working in a poisoned corporate environment has some effect on psychological well being.

<comment><USER40> It is easy to reason about these things on an armchair, much like it is to reason about war.

And much like soldiers who have actually been in the battlefield, many prositutes suffer from PTSD. I suspect the percentage of corporate drones suffering from debilitating PTSD is much lower than among soldiers and prostitutes.

<comment><USER41> The article mentions a decrease in both STD rates and sexual violence with legal prostitution. So it's not crazy to think that there may be a reduction in PTSD as well. And making their trade legal makes it easier to provide (mental health) services.

<comment><USER40> For sure. I was just trying to explain why the "corporate effect on mental well being" is not comparable to the effect that sex work has on sex workers (which is closer to PTSD in the military).

The only way I can understand the downvotes to my comment is the missing /s on the first line; I somehow completely failed to communicate that, it seems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I just can't understand how people think that you can regulate sex between consenting adults. Did we not learn anything from prohibition? Trying to make something that almost everyone wants illegal is just not possible. Hell, we can't even enforce a speed limit on the highways.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think the best way to handle prostitution and recreational drugs is to let each neighborhood decide what is allowed. If the majority of residents and majority of property owners are okay with a particular activity, it should be legal there.

There are always going to be problems allowing these activities and problems with banning them. If you let each neighborhood decide, at least you're moving the problem to areas that are ready and willing to deal with the problems. They can tax it, regulate it, provide security, drug treatment etc. That means the neighborhood has to form some kind of legal entity, of course.

And you're giving the customers reasons to go where they are welcome. By doing it on a neighborhood level, it becomes much easier to comply. It's easier to drive 15 blocks than to go to the next county.

And I think enforcement where it is banned can just be done with fines, giving people a good reason to take their business to where it is welcome. There's no reason to put people in prison.

<comment><USER44> That's an amazingly dumb idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> A fitting phenomenon for the "Red Island" :)

</comment><comment><USER46> I highly recommend the document Whores' Glory by Michael Glawogger which gives you a different look on what prostitution can also be like.

</comment><comment><USER47> Look no farther than some South Asian societies. Countries with no madness around prostitution are better off socially.

It is not an accident that Thailand is a Buddhist country - people are tolerant to whatever is not harming others living beings.

Too much pressure on sexual issues is a sign of primitive authoritarian societies (who are cooksure that they know better what is right and what is wrong than biology and evolution).

<comment><USER48> _It is not an accident that Thailand is a Buddhist country - people are tolerant to whatever is not harming others living beings_

Oh really?

[http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/05/07/thaila...](http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/05/07/thailand.drugs/)

So tolerant!

<comment><USER22> Haha you wouldn't have to go back 14 years for most nations...

<comment><USER48> Perhaps not even for Thailand; I just happen to know of this particular episode. But regardless, Buddhism's influence there certainly didn't start 14 years ago!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> prostitution is probably the oldest profession.

</comment><comment><USER50> Rhode Islander checking in. I'll share a story I heard from someone downcity many years ago, before this law was reversed in '09.

Buddy's (7-time wiseguy mayor of Providence, and 2-time convicted felon) usual driver was unavailable, and a detective was assigned to escort him. The mayor gives his new driver an address. The detective recognizes it, bit can't quite place it, and gets on his way.

When he gets there, it hits him. "Buddy, this is the address of a known brothel".

Buddy quips back "you must be a detective" and disappears into the building.

<comment><USER51> Did you listen to the podcast "Crimetown?"

<comment><USER50> No, but everyone keeps telling me about it, it's on my TODO list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Honest question... for those of you on board with this: how do you reconcile the complaints about the objectification of women as sex objects (and how that harms women) with this?

<comment><USER53> The objectification of women will be present either way, the only difference is that in one scenario, we criminalize a woman's sexual agency and in the other we don't. We know that decriminalization creates better outcomes in terms of safety and public health, so at the end of the day I feel like the hand wringing over objectification is not helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Legalizing prostitution increases human trafficking:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453)

The correct approach is to decriminalize providing, and crack down hard on buyers.

<comment><USER55> this always strikes me as a mistaken case of white-knightism. it does not help these girls who would have to lower the price to adapt to adjust to lowered demand. you need customers to run a business.

<comment><USER54> The idea is to get demand to dry up, so prostitutes will be incentivized to find other lines of work. Ending prostitution, and the exploitation it brings, is the goal. Criminalizing johns but not prostitutes will make prostitutes fear the authorities less and come forward if they have been victimized.</comment></comment></comment>


New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/new-theory-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> NN look like black boxes because we're not stripping out spurious axons in the network to understand the computational circuit. If you can remove a weight (w_ij -> O) from a NN with no change in the network's function across a broad spectrum of inputs then it clearly wasn't necessary in the first place as that weighted edge was not involved in the information processing. Training networks will not only tune certain weights to dial up on signal but they will also (effectively) zero out certain weights that don't carry information (if they're not effectively zeroed our then they introduce noise and compromise the network function), in effect reducing the noise and focusing on signal. For anyone interested I wrote a paper in Natures Molecular Systems Biology in 2008 which goes into this. It describes artificial gene regulatory networks but my background was in AI and the NN math is the same. I believe the results are universally applicable across a broad range of NN-class network. Lots of relevant remarks in the supplementary as well. This includes a description of an algorithm to prune the network of spurious interactions.

[http://m.msb.embopress.org/content/4/1/213.abstract](http://m.msb.embopress.org/content/4/1/213.abstract)

</comment><comment><USER3> Waste of a read! Reasoning that going from many input nodes to few output nodes results in compression (or shedding of nonessential data) isn't a brilliant theory, it's common sense.

The author even beats the dead horse of AI being a potential existential threat.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly what I was thinking. Wow, a neural network discards information at each layer by reducing the number of cells in each matrix? Water is wet.

How else would a network make a final decision? If it never discarded any information, it would be just as heterogeneous of a dataset as when it started. It would be as if a linear regression algorithm "fit" a dataset by connecting the dots, except even more useless.

I truly don't understand what this "new" theory is trying to say.

<comment><USER5> It's so basic I was thinking they could have called me, someone who studied neural networks only for half a year in uni, ten years ago. I could have told them that.

Either the journalist compressed the information a bit too much and lost the essential amazing insight. Or it's just not amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So there's not chance the brain does back propagation right? I wonder what it might do instead?

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't say not a chance, we have no clue what the brain does.

Only because a brain can learn building on old concepts doesn't mean anything about the basic algorithm being different. The brain is a much bigger and longer living neural network.

What they were explaining with the child learning character recognition with the knowledge about strokes. Why would you think our brain doesn't simply connect some of the stroke recognizing neural networks to a higher level neural network built for character recognition. You can increase the depth of the network basically indefinitely. Stack various neural networks to produce more complex ones, etc.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's a good idea to be calling the human brain a neural network in this context, as cnns/dnns only sort of vaguely resemble brain neurons. The differences are massive, both due to different neurotransmitters as well as different connections being formed, and other stuff

<comment><USER5> That doesn't have much to do with my point, also the brain is the original neural network. If anything you should argue to call artificial neural networks by a different name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How big of a deal is this from 1-10?

<comment><USER8> Like any other theory in science. Nuclear power or glow in the dark toys, usually both, if enough time pass</comment></comment>


Show HN: News Shield – A Safari Extension to Redact or Remove Sensational News - <AUTHOR> https://newsshield.app <comment><AUTHOR> Op here! I started working on this project a year ago in a attempt to bring myself some sanity. Reading the news nowadays is a real struggle for me because of all of the sensational, non-news, click-bait, and fluff that is stuffed in to try and entice readers to click on a story.

I'll get around to open sourcing the whole project and I'll write a proper blog post about the process I went through to build this, but for now I'm looking for feedback on whether people here think this tool is personally useful or not.

edit: Also, the the training set for teaching this model is extremely small (1700 examples) which I paid mTurkers to tag. If you see sentences that look like they should not be redacted, add them to the training data set[1].

[1] - [https://github.com/getshields/newslist/tree/master/TrainingD...](https://github.com/getshields/newslist/tree/master/TrainingData)</comment>


How I use MindNode to help me write articles - <AUTHOR> http://tosbourn.com/2012/05/wordpress/how-i-use-mindnode-to-help-craft-blog-posts/

<comment><USER2> I like www.mind42.com - a decent web based mind-mapping tool that allows you to share the mindmap with other people. Also it's free, which is a plus. I like mind-maps for any kind of stream-of-consciousness note taking and idea documenting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I might look into this - I have my maps synced via Dropbox but as MindNode is a native Mac app I can't get access when I am on a Windows box.

Cheers!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: List of people willing to be mentors? - <AUTHOR>

There is a lot of people on here that have a lot of experience and expertise to offer as a mentor.  What are peoples thoughts on keeping a spreadsheet of people willing to be mentors and their areas of expertise? <comment><USER2> Not a bad idea. The trouble is getting the people with real expertise and experience to identify themselves as a mentor.

Usually, if I need advice from a fellow HN member, I'll reply to their thread (if it's relevant) or email them my question (if it's random or off topic). Most people here are happy to answer questions or give advice, but most of the mentoring on HN comes from reading and interacting with everyone's comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> Consult with our handy HN proxy desk neighbour list :)

[https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?authkey=CIqAl7wO&hl...](https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?authkey=CIqAl7wO&hl=en&key=tFgepUuuBHSgfeuKPKccxTA&hl=en&authkey=CIqAl7wO#gid=0)

Original discussion / inspiration here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517204>

Good luck :)</comment>


Show HN: Instantly Capture Your Learning Using Browser Extension - <AUTHOR> https://dnote.io/browser-extension <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I made a browser extension to quickly write down what we learn. When you are reading Stack Overflow or technical blog articles, you can jot down new lessons with minimal distraction, and get a email digest every Friday to refresh your memory.

12 Months ago, I made a CLI called Dnote to track what I learn inside a command line. The reason was that I forgot most things I learned because I neither wrote them down nor revisited them. This is a browser extension version, and integrates with CLI and both are open source.

I wrote more about my idea here: [https://dnote.io/blog/myth-of-learning-by- writing-code/](https://dnote.io/blog/myth-of-learning-by-writing-code/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Saving the url of the current page together with the note would be a nice addition</comment>


Make Something People Will Buy (Corollary to YC's Make Something People Want) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/01/25/make-something-people-will-buy

<comment><USER2> Make something people want... more than their money.</comment>


Google's Toughest Search Is for a Business Model (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/business/google-s-toughest-search-is-for-a-business-model.html <comment><USER2> "Google is a technology-driven company -- one founded by computer science prodigies who have hired more than 50 computer science Ph.D.'s."

In 2002 this was weird.

Internet entrepreneurs were not expected to be compsci Ph.Ds back then.

AVC discussed a new kind of tech CEO recently:

"The new tech CEO archetype is a computer scientist who got into product management early in their career, led large product teams at a big important tech company, is in their 40s, and has great taste in technology, tech talent, and most of all tech products."

Google was one of the first internet businesses to succeed big with computer scientists at the top, leading product.

 __EDIT, again: __

Google is quite a different beast from Sun, SGI, or Viacom. You might disagree but that 's OK. Somebody is always wrong on the Internet.

2002 was shortly after the dotcom bubble. Nobody knew what was going on or going to happen. The rise of computer scientist lead consumer-facing tech companies would have surprised people who had expected Pets.com to rule the world.

As the NYT article noted, Google was swimming against the tide at the time. History has proved them right.

<comment><USER3> SGI was pretty big.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics,_Inc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics,_Inc).

<comment><USER2> You're right. I should have said "first internet businesses", and now I have.

I could still be totally wrong, but at least now it's genuine ignorance not a typing mistake.

<comment><USER4> Google was really part of the second wave of successful internet businesses, including search. Yahoo was going public as Google was getting started. Inktomi was worth over 20B at some point, in fact I was there when the company had an opportunity to acquire Google and said no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of the comments here assume that this is a story that eventually had a happy ending, but I'm not 100% sure that's true.

Google eventually did find its business model in AdWords, of course, which moved the company from the fringes of the online advertising market to its heart. But the logic of advertising as a business model eventually led them to have to reject a lot of the things that early Google held sacred.

Back in Ye Olden Days, for instance, that if you looked at Google's "Ten Things We Know To Be True" manifesto ([http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/](http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/)), you would find a flat statement that one thing Google would _never_ do was provide content like stock quotes and weather reports. Why? Because being the place people went for stock quotes and weather reports was how Yahoo did things, and early Google went out of its way to let you know that it was not going to be Yahoo. Yahoo was a big, messy, unfocused portal; Google was laser- focused on one thing and one thing only, search.

But then came advertising, and suddenly the logic that had led Yahoo into all those niches led Google right into them too. The advertiser's dream, of course, is to be in every last place where people turn their eyeballs; and things like stock quotes and weather reports aren't sexy computer science problems, but they _are_ looked at. So Google quietly dropped that language from the "Ten Things" document and started Yahoo-ing themselves up.

Fast forward a decade-plus, and like kudzu, Google has slowly expanded into a million niches nobody back then could have foreseen. It's in my maps and my phone and my TV and my car; it's _everywhere._

In other words, Google found success by becoming the thing they originally positioned themselves as never wanting to be. Which turned out to be a pretty good business model! But it's also one of the hardest pivots in the history of pivoting.

<comment><USER6> A key difference is how the two companies approached their nichification. Yahoo took a kitchen-sink approach——trying to cram every category link into its homepage, in the process transforming itself into a cluttered mess, and ultimately defeating its core purpose as a search engine: to make things easy to find.

Google, on the other hand, kept its homepage relatively clean and simple. It held to the belief that the search query should be the point of entry in any session, and that nothing should stand between the user and her query.

Basically, Google never tried to become a portal. The SERPs may have changed dramatically over the years, but the starting point is (more or less) the same.

 _" It's in my maps and my phone and my TV and my car; it's everywhere."_

That's because various devices are supplanting the web browser as points of entry into the internet under specific circumstances. Google's integration into those apps and devices is its attempt to maintain its position as the internet's de facto user interface. (It's also a good way to collect and organize information from the ever-growing, ever-diverging set of sources _generating_ information.) Whichever way the internet goes, Google needs to go with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 13 years later, Google could say that about The New York Times.

<comment><USER8> But the headline wouldn't be near as catchy.

<comment><USER9> "The Headline at The New York Times is 'How are We Paying For this?'"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think what's most telling about this article is how little people outside of tech understood about the internet. I guess the dot com crash helped with the FUD, but the takeaway for me is that usually news orgs are behind when trying to understand where tech is going, and their insight can be stunted because of this.

<comment><USER11> That's interesting, because I actually found the article pretty impressive considering the timing. It's easy to look back 13 years later and laugh at the title, but some of the finer points were pretty insightful. Many parts of the article are very foretelling, even if they weren't the personal opinion of the author.

For example, pointing out that using text ads over graphical ones improved the speed and was an important aspect for users is noteworthy, as well as Brin and Page's insistence that focusing on the technology would bring users and, in turn, ad revenue is as well. This article was written just a couple of years after a major crash of tech stocks that had absolutely no way to make a buck, so some skepticism was in order, I believe. In fact the vast majority of .com's were not profitable so it's not as if a company that at the time was trailing Yahoo! and Overture and barely profitable was inevitably going to become the Google we know today.

<comment><USER10> Yeah maybe part of it is hindsight on my end. I agree that the FUD is because of the crash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's amazing about Google is how problematic the quest for new business models is for them in spite of their advantages, and they are almost cursed by their success in one domain polluting the others.

But their really large problem is they're too smart and strategic for their own good. If you look at the ecosystems they construct the only long term winner in them is Google, and other companies are now highly aware of this.

<comment><USER13> >> only long term winner in them is Google, and other companies are now highly aware of this.

Actually Samsung did very well on android, probably much better than if Google hasn't shared android with them.

Ass for small companies working on their ecosystems(app authors, youtube creators, site owners),those are decent ecosystems, and generally Google is not worse than any other large ecosystem owner.

<comment><USER12> Samsung clearly do not share that opinion, and justifiably so.

For other partners, for example Chromebook makers or YouTube, Google is worse than others for the simple reason they work to make everyone else they're working with interchangeable with someone else they're working with, resulting in near perfect competition with them as the gatekeepers. Today's YouTube stars have brands, but they are second in the customer relationship position behind YouTube. The likes of Apple certainly do get themselves in the mix here, but Apple prefer to use their leverage to compete against another ecosystem as opposed to setting their own off against each other.

One of the biggest changes in the tech industry in the last ten years is the wider appreciation of the need to own your own customer relationship, and to prevent others from grabbing yours.

<comment><USER13> >> Samsung clearly do not share that opinion, and justifiably so.

And Samsung would be wrong.If Google hasn't decide to add Samsung to android, it's very likely that Samsung would be in somewhat similar fate to that of microsoft. But Google did share it with them , and they did make lots of money, and probably still do.

Sure they would want more, and more control, etc. And android is a tough business. But still Open Android was a great thing for Samsung.

As for Apple behaving better towards their partners - it's hard to tell , because they target a different customer segment than android so the dynamic is different.

But if you look at every big company - MS, Amazon, Wireless carriers - commoditizing a complement is a very common technique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> they had soemthing that attracted a lot of eyeballs, but nobody wanted to pay for.

using ads as a substitue for micro-transaction was a brilliant idea, made google possible.

and ever since then, no other venture/product coming out of google has reached even a fraction of that revenue. you could argue that the alphabet split is not honest enough. core google should have been the ad engine, that's it. the one real, tough business they're operating. the rest seems like a PhD playground with not a lot of accountability.

whoever at google really had the idea for ads is the true genius behind their success.

<comment><USER13> >> and ever since then, no other venture/product coming out of google has reached even a fraction of that revenue.

That's not true. They started with search ads, expanded successfully to various types of display ads, and now their video business(youtube) and the android app store making 15% of Google's revenues.

>> the rest seems like a PhD playground with not a lot of accountability

Maybe public(i.e wall street) accountability isn't the correct model for long term r&d.But technology wise, they do seem to get lots of work done, often in areas with few/no strong competitors, on problems that will be worth lots of and with time that could mean lots of revenue.And i don't know of a better way to judge the commercial value of long term r&d.

<comment><USER14> how does youtube make money for google? ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [2002]

</comment><comment><USER16> Ads subsidize the existential 'can we try to solve this before we die' projects that Larry and Sergey consume themselves with.

Those projects were starting to weigh down Google's bottom line. Alphabet was a reaction to this in that - 'ok brainiacs at these side projects; you have a limited window to become remotely self sufficient; this won't go on subsidized forever'.

But again, most of Google's other web products are subsidized by ads. Google is _trying_ to become a pay-first product company, but they really have a disdain for support - they hate support. It's going to be interesting to see Google try and become a product company if the ad spigot starts to slow.

<comment><USER16> downvotes - truth hurts.</comment></comment>


How to Ask for an Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://www.tonywright.com/2010/how-to-ask-for-an-introduction/

<comment><AUTHOR> Normally I feel tacky submitting my own stuff to Hacker News but I think (hope) this will help anyone in the fundraising stage out.

<comment><USER2> "When we were talking to investors, we created custom (private) pages for each investor we were courting giving them a ton more to dig through and get excited about if they wanted. The emails were short and sweet with a "want to learn more" link at the end. We used Google analytics to track which people clicked through and which individual pages they clicked on so we could know what to focus our discussions on when we met them."

This is fucking brilliant, Tony.

<comment><USER3> It really is a low-cost high-ROI touch, and is applicable to many, many of the types of things we do as programmers. I'm amazed that people spend umpteen hours customizing their resume and cover letter and can't bother to make a web page for the decisionmaker. What's up with that? With your MVC framework of choice you can take a few building blocks, customize them on a per-target basis, snap them together, and get feedback on what works. Trackable and A/B testable, too, although if you're savvy enough to do this you're probably going to get hired before that A/B test returns statistically significant data.

(Although you can always make "Hey decisionmaker, I am A/B testing this page." a selling point for yourself. It is theatre which suggests to the decisionmaker that you're the kind of guy who would A/B test his freaking resume.)

You can do this for pitch emails, for contacts with the media ("Hey ABC News we prepared a press kit just for you!", "Hey New York Times we prepared a press kit just for you!", etc), for pitches to bloggers (take the Peldi email and twist the knob to 11 by customizing a post on why Bob's File Format Blog's readers would benefit from hearing about your service), for your YC applications, for resumes, for requests for contract work, etc etc.

I think I remember having an example of one which would transition potential investors from the elevator pitch in the email to a deeper engagement with your company at a web page you control (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814827> ), and from then it is just a wee bit more work to get them to actually talk to you. Sure beats doing what everyone else is doing, since what everyone else is doing fails 90% of the time almost by definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Practical advice from a man in the trenches. Recommended.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for this - I probably would've thought it tacky to suggest what to write for the introduction... like I'd be expecting you to read from my script and putting words into your mouth. It's good to know that you'd actually appreciate help with what to say.

</comment><comment><USER6> You don't ask for an introduction... you make one. Brightly colored suits and killing an endangered owl always helps.

<comment><USER7> Dumb and Dumber! I love that movie!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Google Mail for Domain is Not Free? - <AUTHOR>

So I just noticed this when I saw the message " You have 30 days until Google Business Apps expires" or something like that. I already have domains that uses Gmail but I am not paying anything for those.<p>Does this mean that new domain I bought and added Google account for will expire after 30 days? so I can't get firstname.lastname@example.com anymore for free? <comment><USER2> I setup my first Google Apps account with the free version - my domain deep- bay.com is still on this free plan (and I guess will be forever more).

That said, I've paid for every subsequent Apps account as I think it's still the best online productivity suite out there.

</comment><comment><USER3> On December 7, 2012 Google discontinued the free version of Google Apps.

Previous domains that had the free version still are free. But new domains now have a per-user fee.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps)</comment>


Silver Lake, Sixth Street Partners Invest $1B in Airbnb - <AUTHOR> https://news.airbnb.com/silver-lake-sixth-street-partners-invest-1-billion-in-airbnb/ <comment><USER2> Having to raise another round before their planned IPO? I'm assuming this is a down round?

</comment><comment><USER3>
        "Airbnb announced today that Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners will invest $1 billion in Airbnb in a combination of debt and equity securities."

What does this mean relative to a private stock purchase?</comment>


The tech industry's God complex is getting out of control - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/06/13/the_tech_industrys_god_complex_is_getting_out_of_control/ <comment><USER2> If you think of the dangers and flaws in technology today as a big bug list full of critical showstopper issues, this article is a bug report that not very clearly describes issues that have repeatedly been closed as "not a bug" or "will not fix."

</comment><comment><USER3> The article splits into two streams on the "God Complex" subject and fails to address them _separately_ , which would be the proper treatment.

There's the god complex of thinking that your latest social-mobile-local disrupt-a-service-industry start-up is world-changingly important and entitles you to be a douchebag to everyone else around you. Yeah, that's just hubris; I say "just" hubris because if you go around thinking like that, the business cycle can and will punish you for your overly inflated view of yourself. It is a temporary inconvenience but an eventually self-correcting problem. The rest of us just have to keep our money in index funds long enough to remain solvent until the markets stop being irrational.

(Mind, so far the markets have actually behaved _rationally_ , as technological innovation is cheaper when capital is cheaper, and when there's no place _else_ for capital to go for high returns, it floods into low-impact consumer technology for socially suboptimal but economically rational reasons. Anyway!)

And then there's the god complex in which _we are actually playing God_. You know: genetic engineering, pervasive surveillance, greenhouse-gas emissions, automation destroying jobs, anything and everything to which the adjective "transhuman" can be attached, all that stuff. In an economically "ironic" way, most of these require both massively more capital investment to work than VCs are prepared to part with at once, but all stand to have utterly massive historical impacts. Also, these are _real technologies_ , not consumerist gimmicks: the markets will _not_ automatically punish us for spreading Roundup Ready genes across a continent's worth of crops or building a human-unfriendly artificial general intelligence. We will _merely_ suffer the natural consequences of our own actions.

So in the first category, we in the tech industry are hubristic and irresponsible if we believe ourselves godlike, while in the _second_ category we are hubristic and irresponsible if we believe ourselves _mere mortals_. We ought to remember that Oppenheimer, too, was a _mere mortal_.

</comment><comment><USER4> I disagree strongly with this article. Yes, sure, there are probably some in our culture that think they can do no wrong. But life has a way of disabusing us of these illusions.

But this article isn't attempting to change their minds. Rather, it's attempting to instill paranoia into the minds of _non_ -technical readers.

So, I mean, good luck with that. Maybe he'll succeed (probably not, it's one article). But I have a hard time taking this extended sidelong remark seriously.

</comment><comment><USER5> Marc Andreessen pioneered the web browser and contributed greatly to the very platform we're using to have this discussion. After that, he became half of the pre-eminent VC firm that funded so many later developments in web tech. That's why I assign weight to his opinions and tweet sets.

Why should I assign weight to the opinions of the author of this rambling piece?

> _" Marc Andreesen tweets that tech superpowers "upgrade us as creators, > builders, inventors, designers, artists: _producers _." And it is certainly > true that the smartphone — infinitely more accessible and far cheaper than > the personal computers of yesterday — democratizes access to the information > age. But what he fails to mention is that, when everyone has superpowers, > that's the same as nobody having superpowers, and the same social inequities > that give some people advantages over others will reassert themselves. The > advantages of class, wealth and location don't vanish. "_

This is a huge logical jump. Everyone having superpowers is _not_ the same as nobody having them. Yes there are some positional goods but there are also many, many others that aren't. Consider the _typical_ person's existence now compared to 50 years ago when most the world lived in poverty. Or compare it to 4000 years ago when lives were shorter, more violent and offered fewer options. Simply put the difference between everyone or no one having superpowers is the difference between a life of abundance and one of scarcity.</comment>


Korean Shipbuilder Uses Exosuit to Help Build World's Largest Freighter - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/Korean+Shipbuilder+Uses+Iron+Man+Exosuit+to+Help+Build+Worlds+Largest+Freighter/article36339.htm

<comment><USER3> I see people practically laughing at the suit's 30 kg limit.

Well, I gotta say that carrying 30 kgs back and forth all day long is actually pretty damn tiring, and the long term benefits of this first generation suit are obvious - better health and the worker is less tired at the end of the day, which is not to be discounted - less depression, more time for your hobbies, and hitting the gym becomes a pleasure again instead of just another tiring necessity (because if you don't exercise regularly you increase the risk of injuring your knees or back at work).

Plus, this is good for developing more advanced versions, like the mentioned gen2 that would lift 100kg, which is nothing to scoff at.

But I'll still say that remote controlled or automated robots would be better suited for this kind of work than humans.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Lifting 30kg is "easy". Lifting 30kg a dozen times isn't that hard. But the moment you have to carry the weight around a lot, or lift it into weird positions, it's an entirely different thing.

I do power lifting. I'm an advanced lifter (but not quite competitive levels) for my weight class and age. I e.g. deadlift 180kg raw (without equipment/belts etc.).

Yet carrying my 25kg son around gets exhausting after a few minutes, and that's when he's cooperating and holding on. I _can_ do it for quite an amount of time, but not without being a wreck afterwards.

Most people don't have the strength or endurance to carry 30kg of dead weight around for long in _any_ position, but more importantly, even if you can carry 30kg around on your back or clutched to your chest, does not mean you are able to _do anything_ useful with that weight, such as being able to lift it up to chest height and push it into place, or rotating it to slide it into awkward spots, or any number of other things.

E.g. being able to overhead press 100kg still means I'm just barely able to safely push a 30kg server into place high up in a rack without assistance - precision movements or moving into positions that affect your balance or leverage in any way _very_ substantially reduces the amount you're able to lift.

Increasing the amount of time you can carry a weight around, or increasing your ability to move the weight into various positions alone will be a big deal.

<comment><USER5> Lifting an awkward weight or moving around carrying it also brings a much higher risk of injuring your back, compared to lifting weights with proper form.

I can deadlift 220 kgs but have hurt my back moving house a few times, carrying awkward boxes, furniture and appliances up and down staircases and such. It's so important to have the weight close to your hips and not out in front of you--but that's not always possible with an awkwardly shaped weight.

<comment><USER4> True. I was stalling on back squats at 60kg for months on end and kept hurting myself trying to pass it because lack of flexibility (and stupidity...) meant I kept loading my back wrong until I finally gave in and got proper advice.

Just luck that prevented my stubbornness from causing real damage. In a way I'm glad I learned my lesson while I was stuck at a relatively low weight,though.

<comment><USER6> What kind of advice did you end up getting? Was it classes, or a personal trainer? I'm in the same situation myself, having a very hard time getting technique down for back squats

<comment><USER4> I paid for one hour with a physiotherapist, who basically took one look at me. My problem was basically that my hips were way too inflexible, so the according advice was stupidly simple.

Basically a bunch of simple dynamic stretches of the hips. E.g. put one foot forward and bend over as far as you can with a straight back, trying to touch the floor, and up again, take a step so the other foot is out front, and repeat. Or stand and hold on to something and swing one leg back and forth as well as left/right on front of your torso.

To that I added "asian squat". Just practice sitting in the squat position as long as you can as much as possible throughout the day.

It took me a couple of months to get to the point where my back squat started going up with good form. In less than 6 months I went from hurting myself at 60kg to doing 5x5 at 150kg without pain (though keep in mind that at I had been stalling at 60kg for ages and done what I could to compensate with other exercises).

I'd recommend a physiotherapist and/or a personal trainer you are _very sure_ knows squats properly. A lot of personal trainers are clueless about strength training. If it's technique, the trainer is your best bet. If your problem is actually flexibility, a physiotherapist or a personal trainer that's experienced with e.g. gymnastics or yoga might be just as good for you.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reply. I am working on my flexibility. I'm still scared of squats, but I'm seeing real results in my flexibility, and squatting slightly more without discomfort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another interesting invention is described in one of the figures ("DSME's New Technology"):

Freeze Pirates! - <USER2>

DSME launched its new pirate alert system 'DSME Anti-Piracy System (DAPS). ... DAPS is a total ship security system for recognizing and eradicating piracy. By using the ship's radar signal, the DAPS is able to analyze image information. This system automatically judges suspected targets based on the analyzed information. If suspected pirate ships approaches [sic], DAPS will warn the target through a high output speaker and sound an alert on the ship. If the pirate comes closer, a sound cannon or water cannon will be used to incapacitate the pirate.

\--

In many ways, that is more impressive (and scarier).

<comment><USER8> Don't forget to turn it off when coming into port.

The tugboat operators will be none too pleased when they get blasted with a water cannon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone in the know (or who wants to guess): What tools/technology is this trying to replace? Are there cranes or other tools in use at this kind of a high tech shipyard that would normally be used to lift a 30kg piece of metal while welding it into place?

I assume we're not going to see strongmen in the unemployment line after being replaced by skinnyfat geeks with exosuits…

<comment><USER10> I've been in DSME for a while now and this yard is massive and consists of probably near a thousand forklifts of all sizes and types, along with hundreds of cranes and mobile heavy lift cranes but I don't see technology like this replacing any of those things any time soon. You still need to bring material from workshops and storage areas to the projects like ships getting built which would be done with a forklift and/or truck. I could see these being used inside of workshops to stack materials and maybe replace a few jobs that forklift operators or a crane would normally take care of. So only thing you'd probably see this in is fabrication shops building pipe spools or cutting large pieces of metal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Exosuits (is that what we're calling it is at the stage where progress is building, shipping, and finding a financially viable markets for products. That opens the door to a version 2, a version 3 mini, a version X nano.

Looking forward to seeing these in use in more contexts.

</comment><comment><USER11> We are living in the future ,Ladies and gentlemen!

Call of Duty Advanced Warfare

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphc8MlwDs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphc8MlwDs)

<comment><USER12> Before, there was Crysis (2007) with its _Nanosuit_ ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crysis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crysis)) which itself was inspired by real-life US military _Future Force Warrior_ concept ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Force_Warrior](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Force_Warrior))

<comment><USER4> It's much older than that: Hardiman [1] was an actual prototype from 1965. And of course in fiction there's a ton of examples, such as Starship Troopers (the novel) from 1959.

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

<comment><USER13> Can probably trace it further back to "Waldo" which I believe was written in the late 30's

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> previously discussed here last year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133808)

</comment><comment><USER15> SCV reporting for duty!

</comment><comment><USER16> read title as "Korean shoplifter uses exosuit..."</comment>


Why is HP producing now more TouchPads? - <AUTHOR> http://www.i4u.com/47614/why-hp-producing-now-more-touchpads

<comment><USER2> It's an excellent question. An article that actually had an ANSWER to the question would be quite interesting. This article has nothing more than some speculation that perhaps HP has a bunch of parts inventory to get rid of, which is admitted to be nothing but speculation.

My personal opinion is that the senior management at HP is trying to find the fastest and most effective way to destroy the company, and they belatedly realized that selling tablets at a significant loss per unit was even MORE effective at that goal than getting out of the business that the company has mastered in hopes of out-IBM'ing IBM.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me they disrupted the market with a limited $99 firesale, got some mindshare of customers, and may not have been wanting to kill it after all.

There's an article out there that said HP wanted to be the #2 tablet company after iPad and they did it with the firesale.. lol.

</comment><comment><USER4> _sure, we're losing money on each unit, but we'll make it up in volume._

I've heard the supplier argument because, but I think perhaps it's because Samsung may be interested in buying it, to escape Apple litigation (along with the PC division). Easy to sell as a going concern. But the simplest explanation is: _today's HP is stupid._

<comment><USER5> From the America version of The Office:

Oscar: I don't see how we can possibly sell these for that little without losing money. Delivery alone will cost--

Michael Scott: OK well sometimes, sometimes, it makes financial sense to lose money, right? Like for tax purposes?

Oscar: Actually, I ran the numbers on this, and in this case, it makes financial sense to gain, money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that the author asks the question about how many were sold, and then mentions a few hundred. We already know that at least 5 digit values of TouchPads were sold before the great unraveling of HP, and now that number is no doubt into the hundreds of thousands, judging by demand and ad impressions (as well as the download numbers on my webOS app).

</comment><comment><USER7> As near as I can tell from all this, there is no longer a way to sign up to be notified by email of availability. (I.e. the only people who will be emailed are those who already signed up some time ago, presumably during the first round of the fire sale.)

If this is incorrect, can someone point me to the instructions to sign up for email notification?</comment>


Ask YC: Best smartphone? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be giving the one-month notice to Orange (in the UK) in January and move to another operator. So with the move I get a new phone and I want a smart phone.
In consideration: anything but iPhone or anything Orange-"exclusive".
Thanks! Pierre <comment><USER2> Not sure what you can get in the UK, but I've been really happy with my HTC Tytn (AT&T 8525 if you're in the US). The OS is WM5 (eh), but the features are pretty sweet and it's a pretty solid phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep I've seen that here. I'll take a closer look - thanks!

BTW, AT&T's website links to a download for WM6 from <http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/8525/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like blackberries for extremely convenient email...</comment>