Ask HN: How to stop Google Plus spamming someone when I add them to my circles? - <AUTHOR>

Google Plus often presents me with a list of people and says, "Maybe you want to add some of these people to your circle".  If I then do so, it sends them an email that says "MarkMc added you to his circles and invited you to join Google+".
This is really spammy behaviour.  When I add someone to a circle I am NOT inviting them to join Google Plus, and I generally don't want them to receive an email.  Can I stop Google Plus from doing this?
Thanks <comment><USER2> Wish I had an answer for you, but I'm afraid Google is using less than ideal methods to try to grow their network without providing an alternative.

If you don't mind me piggybacking on your Google+ question with a similar annoyance that I'm dealing with - I made the mistake of joining/adding the HackerNews Google+ circle that somebody here had created awhile back. Now my chat client (Trillian) thinks I've got over 700 Google Talk friends that I want to keep in touch with - these are people I don't know and will never chat with. I've tried re-installing Trillian, and deleting these "contacts" from Trillian, but they keep coming back. I've removed myself from the Google+ HN circle almost immediately. These people don't show up in my Contacts list in GMail. Anybody have suggestions on how I can get rid of them?

<comment><USER3> Link to that btw?

<comment><USER2> <https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only solution is not to add people not already on Google+. You can tell if they are already on it by checking if you can see a profile for them or not.</comment>


Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste, a Nobel winner suggests - <AUTHOR> https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/laser-nuclear-waste <comment><USER2> For all we know this is possible but not at all practical. The NIF [1] already does experiments with lasers that start nuclear processes in the ICF [2] capsule. An exeptionally good shot produces 2e16 neutrons [3], from (about) 2e16 nuclear reaction. But that single shot required more than 400 MJ of energy from the electrical grid to charge the capacitor banks that drove the flash lamps that pump the lasers that input 500 TW of laser light for a tiny fraction of a second into a hohlraum to heat it so high that the thermal x-ray compresses the implosion capulse in the middle to a sufficient temperature and density that nuclear processes start. Per neutron that was 2*10^-8 Joules. A typical large 1000 MW nuclear reactor produces 25–30 tons of spent fuel per year [4]. Assuming that nuclear waste has an average Z of about 50 and weights 100 daltons, 100 grams of material are one mole, so we have 3e5 mole to reprocess with 2e29 nucleii that need to be treated. Assume that on average only one neutron needs to be added or removed that will requires 3e21 MJ. But the 1000 MW reactor running for 365 days, 24 hours a day, 3600 seconds per hour only produced 3e10 MJ to begin with. In other words it would require 100 billion times as much electrical energy to convert nuclear waste that way than you get out of the reactor creating that waste. Can we make things more efficient by a factor 2 here and a factor 100 there? Probably. But that wont make a dent.

Transmuting elements with lasers is really cool for basic science, but completely useless as a solution for nuclear waste.

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

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

3: [https://www.llnl.gov/news/nif-achieves-record-double- fusion-...](https://www.llnl.gov/news/nif-achieves-record-double-fusion-yield)

4: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- level_waste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_waste)

<comment><USER3> To be fair, it looks like what he's proposing is fundamentally different from inertial confinement fusion. Inertial confinement with lasers is so hard because it's so tricky to apply perfectly even, symmetric force on every side of the hohlraum. What's being proposed here seems to be more on the line of <attosecond laser pulses _directly_ exciting the nucleus, so wouldn't be useful for fusion but would have very different yields and wouldn't have the same trouble with maintaining confinement.

<comment><USER2> Maybe. It is hard to find any scientifically accurate information on his proposal. But if you say he wants laser intensities that are directly sufficient to get 1 MeV (typical nuclear energies) across the 10fm of a nucleus he would need intensities that are about a factor 100 above the Schwinger limit [1] where the laser simply produces electrons and positrons out of the vacuum. Cool if you want to study the plasma environments of pulsars, but probably a HUGE loss mechanism in getting energy into the nucleus.

In the end it all boils down to the fact that visible light an laser operate on the energy scale of electronic transitions whereas nuclear transmutations occur at the vastly different energy scale of the strong force. This huge separation between electromagnetic interactions and strong nuclear interactions is btw also the reason why radioactive material is not typically green glowing goo.

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

<comment><USER4> Swinger?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, that was a horrible typo for "Schwinger limit" that is now fixed. An explanation can be found at [1].

The limit comes from the following process: Thanks to quantum mechanics there is an uncertainty principle between position and momentum. Less known it the uncertainty between time and energy. (If you have studied classical mechanic you will recognize that the variable pairs are the same that you know from Noethers theorem [3].)This implies that nature can (and will) violate conservation of energy by an amount deltaE for a time deltat up to hbar/deltaE. One such process is the creation of a electron-positron pair out of vacuum. That violates energy conservation by about 1 MeV and you have to return the (virtual) particles within hbar/1MeV or approximately 6e-22 seconds. If however the electric field is sufficiently large that the particles get accelerated to an energy of 1 MeV within that time they get to stay. An electric field that can do that has a field strength of 1.3e18 V/m.

At that intensity the laser light does not simply propagate through vaccuum as predicted by Maxwells equations, but is producing a pair plasma and gets damped. The process is fairly well described by QED. We are currently trying to get laser up to that intensity and to make accurate measurements of this QED effect as it does not only work for electron-positron pairs, but arbitrary particle-antiparticle pairs. Experimental deviations from the QED predictions would therefore imply the existence of additional light particles (and antiparticle) that we have not found through other methods.

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

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

3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know about such suggestion for about, I guess, 20 years. It was suggested as a way to clear radioactive waste in Chrenobyl contamination area.

And if you can read Russian, here a paper for your amusement for semisuccessful attempt to implement that: [http://www1.jinr.ru/Pepan_letters/panl_2017_6/13_Andreeva.pd...](http://www1.jinr.ru/Pepan_letters/panl_2017_6/13_Andreeva.pdf)

It contains a short English abstract which I copy here: _The influence of laser irradiation on the gamma-activity of aqueous solutions of both 137Cs and 134Cs is experimentally studied in presence of Au nanoparticles at laser intensity of order of 10^(12)W /cm2. It is found that laser irradiation reduces the gamma-activity of both nuclides. This decrease is not accompanied by excessful gamma radiation in the spectral range of gamma-activity of their spontaneous decay. Possible mechanisms are discussed of the influence of laser radiation on the activity of isotopes on the basis of laser field enhancement on the plasmon resonance of nanoparticles._

</comment><comment><USER6> ... Or just burn it in a fast reactor, and get some use out of all that leftover energy, instead of calling it waste?

<comment><USER7> Whats a fast reactor. I have never heard of it?

<comment><USER8> Neutrons come out of a fission event at high speed, about 20% the speed of light. These are called fast neutrons. In almost all nuclear reactors we've built, we deliberately slow these neutrons down with a moderator material (which must have light atoms in it: things like graphite, water, beryllium). It's much easier to get a pile of nuclear fuel to chain react when you slow neutrons down, largely because Uranium-235's liklihood of absorbing a slow neutron is much higher than its liklihood of absorbing a fast neutron.

(Aside: slow neutrons are often called "thermal" neutrons because they're in thermal equilibrium with the atoms around them. At room temperature they're going 2200 m/s, which corresponds to an energy of about 0.0253 electron-volts, slowed down from 2 million electron-volts when they emerged from fission)

A fast-neutron reactor ("fast reactor") is a reactor where the neutrons that emerge from a fission event are kept moving fast, simply by not putting a moderator into the design. These reactors use heavy nuclei or very low density material as coolants (sodium metal, lead-bismuth eutectic, helium, etc), so as to not slow down any neutrons. It takes much more fissile fuel to get a pile of nuclear fuel chain reacting in this configuration, but once you get it going, you get some very nice benefits.

Once started, fast neutron chain reactions have a vast surplus of neutrons going around. This is for two main reasons: (1) The number of neutrons emitted per fission increases dramatically as the neutron speed increases above a threshold around 1 MeV, and (2) parasitic absorption of fast neutrons is low for all nuclides. With so many extra neutrons around, you can afford to put extra "stuff" in your reactor, such as spent nuclear fuel (nuclear waste) or extra fertile material (uranium-238 or thorium-232).

You can make these reactors into breeder reactors (which convert U-238 or Th-232 into fissile fuel in such a way that could power the entire of humanity 10x over for a few million years, at least, using known resources), or you can make these reactors into burner reactors, whose job it is to transmute used fuel from other reactors into shorter-lived material (similar to what OP's article is about, but much more practical).

A definitive guide to understanding transmutation of spent fuel in fast- neutron reactors is put out by the UN's International Atomic Energy Commission [TRS-435]:

"Implications of Partitioning and Transmutation in Radioactive Waste Management" [https://www- pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TRS435_web.pd...](https://www- pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TRS435_web.pdf)

A handful of fast-neutron reactors have been built, starting with tiny single critical mass assemblies in the 1940s, to the first true demo of breeding more fuel than you consume in EBR-1 in 1951 to the EBR-2's safety demo weeks before Chernobyl showing that the reactor could passively shut down and cool itself without any human intervention or external power or control rods inserting, to India's PFBR fast reactor that's been under construction for the past 18 years.

Only the Russians have successfully operated fast reactors commercially, via the BN-350 and BN-600. In general, fast neutron reactors are considered more complex and expensive to build and operate than traditional water-cooled thermal neutron reactors.

We once thought uranium was very scarce, and so we put a lot of money into fast breeder reactors. Then it turned out that there's lots of uranium and fast reactors are largely on hold internationally. France just announced the cancellation of its national fast reactor program (ASTRID). Russia delayed their next BN fast reactor, saying their VVER (slow neutron) reactors are bout 4x cheaper. China and India are pushing forward. The US shut down its last fast reactors (EBR-II and FFTF) in the early 1990s. Many nuclear startup companies are now exploring options to get back into fast reactors.

The US DOE is putting forth a major project to build a new fast reactor very similar to the FFTF, but in Idaho instead of Washington and with metal fuel rods instead of oxide ceramic ones. The project is called the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) and is actively discussed in current nuclear news.

<comment><USER9> Lemme guess, they haven't become popular yet because there wasn't a way to weaponise the results?

<comment><USER8> No. Weaponization of nuclear fission technology was completed in 1944. Plutonium production plants of similar design to those used in the Manhattan Project were used throughout the Cold War (at Hanford and Savannah River). There are myths about various nuclear technologies being cancelled because they "couldn't be weaponized" (usually talking about molten salt reactors), but these myths are quite wrong.

Fast reactor tech hasn't been popular because it's more expensive than regular old water-cooled fission reactor tech. To keep neutrons going fast you have to use exotic coolants like sodium metal. Since you don't want to mix a chemical hazard with a radiological one, you insert an additional intermediate heat transfer loop into the system. Hot radioactive sodium transfers heat to hot non-radioactive sodium which transfers heat to water which boils and turns a turbine to crank a generator to push electrons around to provide low-carbon service to human quality of life.

<comment> 08-15 Can you please not call sodium "exotic"? Doing so adds to an irrational fear of relatively benign technology.

Molten sodium is easy to pump, non-corrosive to many metals including steel, and a good heat transfer medium. The chemical industry uses it routinely. In a nuclear reactor, it would also chemically sequester a particularly annoying fission product (I-131) in case of a fuel element leaking. Unpressurized, it is good up to 800C before it boils.

By contrast, water at 300C will corrode most steels. At higher temperature, it will corrode zircalloy, forming hydrogen. And it really wants to be a gas, hence the giant containment buildings around LWR.

What did you say? "But sodium explodes in contact with water?" That's easy to solve, just keep the water out. A sodium cooled reactor should be coupled to a supercritical CO2 turbine instead of a steam turbine. That removes the problem of leaking and exploding heat exchangers.

(Footnote: I like molten salts better than sodium. But sodium is still better that water.)

<comment><USER8> Sodium coolant is exotic from an operational point of view. Exotic doesn't mean dangerous. Sodium systems from a probabilistic risk statement are usually 100x safer than pressurized systems because of passive decay heat removal capabilities. Exotic means "different from normal." So far, all operating sodium-cooled plants have suffered from operational and economic challenges due to sodium's characteristics. This is solvable with experience, but it's not easy.

Have you ever studied a detailed procedure for heating up a large sodium valve from the solid sodium phase to the liquid? If not I highly recommend doing so. It's truly remarkable. Molten salt systems are the same level of complexity, but much more radioactive in the primary system. Remote maintenance of this stuff is totally doable, but it sure as hell is exotic. Rickover's characterization of sodium systems stands to this day.

Traditional sodium systems with void-swelling resistant structural materials may not go to high enough temperatures to strongly justify the tech development needed for a sCO2 balance of plant in the short term. Sodium-water steam generators with leak detection have worked well-enough to build a few more of them while sCO2 turbomachinery gets figured out at the 100s of MW scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone with more knowledge explain to me why it's so hard to reuse waste? Like if it is emitting enough energy to contaminate entire swaths of land, why can't you just build something to absorb all the radiation? I can't imagine it is that much less efficient than a solar cell if you just stick it in a box.

<comment><USER11> It's not, and many other countries do. However, there are still big concerns about the overall economic payback of reprocessing, and also concerns about nuclear proliferation:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/why- doesnt-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/why-doesnt-u-s- recycle-nuclear-fuel/)

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

<comment><USER12> Makes sense all the other power source industries would try to lobby nuclear into the ground - if it was used to its potential without political shenanigans and scaremongering in the way we'd have all the cheap green energy we needed with all the other sources out of business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems unlikely to me that this could be an efficient way to burn radioactive waste. However, there is another approach that combines a linear electron accelerator with infrared laser pulses to generate absurdly high power (compared to traditional accelerator sources) gamma rays: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110426160211.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110426160211.htm)

The tunability of this gamma rays source makes it possible to target and induce nuclear reactions in unstable atoms.

If I remember correctly, when I saw the seminar talk by the originator of the concept, a few years ago, he said that an existing super-conductor-based linear accelerator in Japan could feasibily by modified to generate enough gamma rays to burn thousands of tons of radioactive waste per year. (Don't quote me on the exact amounts, though, it's been a while).

<comment><USER14> Even if it somehow works, photofission will never be energy efficient. You will be spending gigawatt hours per gram of fissioning matter

<comment><USER13> Why do you say that? The approach I linked can be an absurdly efficient way to generate gamma rays with super-conductor magnets and electron recycling, like the Japanese electron accelerator has. And keep in mind, these atoms are already unstable. The photon just excites the nucleas out of the meta-stable ground state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _Take the nucleus of an atom. It is made up of protons and neutrons. If we > add or take away a neutron, it changes absolutely everything. It is no > longer the same atom, and its properties will completely change._

Are they talking about transmutation with lasers? Would it work for Lead -> Gold too?

<comment><USER16> Yes, but not economically. For an encore, the oceans contain plenty of gold too, a coupe of parts-per-trillion. It's yours for the taking.

<comment><USER17> (shhh don't tell him about biological fouling) Did I say that out loud?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is that figure correct, 22,000 m3?

That's just a cube 28m on a side, maybe the same size as a small apartment block.

Just dump it into a subduction zone

<comment><USER19> Nice idea, but refuted already: [https://www.nwmo.ca/~/media/Site/Reports/2015/11/11/06/32/12...](https://www.nwmo.ca/~/media/Site/Reports/2015/11/11/06/32/1287_baird- submissiononthetopic_cho.ashx)

<comment><USER18> Am I skimming this too quickly, or does it actually say sub-seabed/subduction sequestration is one of the few options that actually works - it's just not currently possible because of international "dumping at sea" treaties?

With such a small volume I think 'do nothing' is fine at the moment until we can find an economical use for it (fast breeder, traveling-wave etc, etc), or agree the best way to dispose of it - 20,000-year managed repositories don't seem viable to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand how high-intensity CPA photons with wavelengths in order of a micron are supposed to have any effect on the nucleus, but there definitely are a lot of electrons ready to absorb them. Regardless, there are many much more efficient ways to generate thermal neutrons if that's what he's after, which agree with, and you can get controlled energy out of it! Years ago I proposed a small nuclear waste fueled engine design based on this principle.

</comment><comment><USER21> My understanding was that you'd need gamma radiation for the nucleus to even notice it. Lots of low energy photons isn't the same as fewer high energy photons.

<comment><USER2> That is true until you have to so many photons that you hit the QED regime where photons interact with each other and electrodynamics becomes non-linear. However at that point no just the nucleii notice, but you start to get all kinds of other effects.

</comment></comment><comment> 08-15 Awful reporting about a bad idea.

The actual proposal isn't to irradiate nuclear waste with lasers. The idea is to use the laser to accelerate protons, irradiate heavy nuclei with those protons to get them to either fission or at least emit neutrons, irradiate long-lived waste with those neutrons to transmute it. It's possible in theory.

In practice, it's nonsense. These accelerators have low efficiency and produce few neutrons. This makes the process slow and inefficient. So inefficient in fact, that all practical (for small values of "practical") proposals are actually for sub-critical reactors that use nuclear fission to amplify the neutron output.

But then the idiocy becomes clear: instead of a sub-critical reactor and an unbelievably expensive accelerator, you might as well build a critical reactor, recycle the actinides directly and maybe transmute the fission products.

In other words, this is a guy who just likes particle accelerators. He has a solution, now he's looking for a suitable problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> If nuclear material is irradiated by tunable lasers, are there particular wavelengths that increase or decrease alpha/beta/gamma emission?

Short of neutron guns, are there environmental conditions that affect nuclear half-life?

</comment><comment><USER23> This must actually be about stimulated emission on the nuclear scale, with much getting lost in translation on the way to something politically marketable...

There is much to be learned in this space still.

</comment><comment><USER24> I failed physics but, in theory if you could keep pouring neutrons into fissile material, couldn't you lower the amount of nuclear fuel required to achieve critical mass (which is bound by the rate of neutron loss)?

Wouldn't this basically boost mpg and/or increase safety of reactors?

<comment><USER25> I believe there are some newer theoretical reactor designs based around this concept! In essence, they are designed such that the fuel is not in itself capable of sustaining a chain reaction. It is only with the active addition of neutrons that you can get the fission reaction underway. So if you halt that supply of neutrons from the neutron generator, the reaction dies off, greatly enhancing passive safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been waiting for Atomic Vapor Isotope Separation (AVLIS or MLIS or SILEX) to let a small group or small state produce their first nuclear weapon basically outside the current nonproliferation controls.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is storing nuclear waste even a significant concern? The entirety of US nuclear power generation's waste can fit in a rectangle that is 20 feet high and the width and length of a football field. This is trivial in terms of volume of waste disposal. There's really not much difficulty in disposing this. Bury it in a site without groundwater.

<comment><USER28> Nuclear waste storage is a huge issue politically though.

<comment><USER27> My point remains: is there any actual safety concern with putting nuclear waste underground other than potential groundwater pollution if the containment casks get perforated (which can be avoided by not burying waste where there's groundwater)?

The only scenarios that people have presented in which nuclear waste could result in contamination are borderline absurd, like if humanity hypothetically loses all records of where waste is buried along with knowledge of what radiation is and some future civilization might dig up the waste canisters and crack them open.

<comment><USER29> There's plenty of research on this topic. Perhaps you can find the Wikipedia entry a useful jumping off point. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- level_radioactive_waste_m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- level_radioactive_waste_management)

<comment><USER27> Nothing in your link covers the safety or dangers of waste disposal beyond the vague statement that, "There is general agreement that placing spent nuclear fuel in repositories hundreds of meters below the surface would be safer than indefinite storage of spent fuel on the surface." That article is a couple paragraphs on waste containers, and a list of different countries' waste management schemes. It doesn't dig into any long term risk assessment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe another idea is when rockets are cheap enough < cost of storing. Send them into the sun.

<comment><USER31> And if something goes wrong and nuclear waste is scattered through the atmosphere? I think we'll get to a point where we can do it safely, but there's always a chance. Maybe if costs are low, generating energy in space and shipping it back (either as batteries or a literal wire) would be better.

<comment><USER32> It's not a good idea, but it could be done very safely. Personally, I think nuclear power is simply to expensive to be particularly useful going forward, but IMO waste is a smaller issue than generally perceived.

Sure, you would encase them in something that could survive reentry or detonation of the rocket. Choosing a launch location and trajectory for easy recovery is also possible.

However, paying 1,000+$/lb to get rid of Nuclear waste is extremely expensive. Simply storing it in a pond for ~120 years and the stuff gets vastly less radioactive as short half-life material decays. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years so you get 6% as much of them and essentially everything with a shorter half life is gone. Plutonium-238 has a longer half life of 87 years, but you also get rid of ~2/3 of that.

You still have almost off the Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,000 years, but that stuff is not nearly as nasty and can be reprocessed for fuel. Further, reprocessing becomes cheaper after waiting for it to cool down.

PS: Plutonium-238, Strontium-90 and cesium-137 can also be used for space probes via: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> We see all these pie in the sky solutions all the time but please don't start counting on them becoming reality. It's great to dream and work towards the dream but don't count on it as a solution.

For now, the solution is to use nuclear fuel in the most efficient manner so as to minimize waste.</comment>


Physicists make most precise measurement ever of the proton's magnetic moment - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-11-physicists-precise-proton-magnetic-moment.html <comment><USER2> Doesn't seem to mention how this value agrees or not with predictions

The G-2 experiment at Fermilab is coming online soon and they're investigating the Muon's magnetic moment, which is suspected to not match the current predictions

<comment><USER3> Not a prediction, but comparison with previous work:

      Accepted value [1]: µ = 2.792847351   ± 0.000000009

      New value:          µ = 2.79284734462 ± 0.00000000082

[1] [http://pdg.lbl.gov/2017/tables/rpp2017-tab- baryons-N.pdf](http://pdg.lbl.gov/2017/tables/rpp2017-tab-baryons-N.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Nice that the new interval completely lies within the old.

I remember from college that there was an important physical constant where a new, more precise measurement was pretty far outside the range of the previous best measurement. I don't remember which one..

<comment><USER5> Depending on when you went to college, you may be thinking of the proton radius puzzle [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_radius_puzzle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_radius_puzzle) which (to gloss over an enormous amount of detail) amounts to tension between two different ways of measuring the same property of the proton.

<comment><USER3> Other possibilities: Neutron lifetime, Newton's constant (twice!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FTA: ...finding it to be 2.79284734462 plus or minus 0.00000000082 nuclear magnetons...

Ok, physicists can measure this quantity to 10 decimal places and Computer "Scientists" cannot understand the systems _we built_ well enough to reliably measure a 1% speedup.

/sigh

<comment><USER3> But you can measure how many bytes are free on a 10 GB disk.

<comment><USER7> So long you don't care about performance. Sure, "free space" sounds like a simple concept, but the simple version isn't terribly useful.</comment></comment></comment>


No, that's not why OO sucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.librador.com/2012/07/16/No-thats-not-why-OO-sucks/ <comment><USER2> As time goes on, my bafflement at our collective need to swear allegiance to our tools is turning into bewilderment. Our tools have objective, technical merits and flaws, but our love and hate for them is subjective and mostly useless. Cargo cult behavior is the real problem, and the endless bickering and correcting that articles like Joe's and this one contain only serve to perpetuate it.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the author was loving or hating OO, he was just pointing out the Joe Armstrong's points weren't very well argued. It's not bickering, it's discussion, and it helps people to understand the paradigms better.

<comment><USER4> I believe the commenter was talking as much about the person OP as he is the OP's cited article.

<comment><USER5> Is the author of this article known for being religious about paradigms?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really don't know why people seem to think that post is the _final_ position of Joe Armstrong about OOP. It's a very old post, without any context, and since then he has gone on record praising Smalltalk and Alan Kay's take on objects many times:

<http://infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop/> [http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang- questions/2010-August/052...](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang- questions/2010-August/052836.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the author and Armstrong have significantly different ideas of what a "type" is. That's not a huge surprise—depending on background, you'll often get several definitions from different people.

One way to see types are things with fundamentally different access pattern: individual entities, sequentially retrieved ones (e.g. lists), fixed-length ordered lists whose elements are accessed positionally (e.g. tuples/vectors, fixed-length maps whose keys are known at compile-time/records/objects can also be viewed this way), unordered collections of distinct entities (sets), etc. I'd argue Armstrong's view is similar to this based on what he put in Erlang.

I can't tell what the author's view is, aside from "a class is a data type". This suggests that he equates a type with the set of functions that can be called on something and not have the compiler or runtime blow up (or perhaps, the set of functions that the programmer, by putting them in the same file, has explicitly said won't blow-up, whether or not that set is correct or complete). This throws fundamentally different things like lists, tuples, sets onto the same level as Person, Account, and PayrollRecord—which are often just short-hand names for tuples with different arities or names for their elements' positions.

If one has the later view, confusion over the point 3 is understandable: creating a new type for time is easy, just do class Time and define a bunch of properties and methods. In Armstrong's example, time is just a 6-tuple (or 3-tuple if all you want is hms). If you wanted to store it or send it over the wire, anything that could handle a tuple of integers would already know how to use it. If one function calls the last member "sec" and another "second", they're local names, so it doesn't matter as long as they're both accessing the same member.

One can object that it's easy to write serializers or that a compiler or library could figure it out, or that having different names for the same data elements indicates inconsistency in code that should be caught earlier. De gustibus non est disputandum. But, don't throw up your hands and say "this makes no sense!" without considering another perspective first.

<comment><USER8> I propose that making the position of hour, minute and seconds the canonical definition is worse than using their names.

So this: { type: "hms", hour : 10, minute : 45, second : 16 }

is better than this:

      ["hms", 10, 25, 16 ]

Either go across the wire fine. The names are not just local names, they describe the meaning of the data.

In the JavaScript world we would call the map an object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Objection 1: The OP should take a look at the STL.

Coupling N algorithms and M structures may lead to M * N implementations where you really want only N + M implementations.

Additionally, decoupling algorithms and structures will probably make you write better interfaces for your structures.

<comment><USER10> But that's just because of bad programming, not because of OOP, I think. I mean, of course you can use OOP to make really crappy designs, but polymorphism should make you able to have N+M implementations and not M*N.

<comment><USER11> (Static) polymorphism is the very thing behind the STL. In order to decouple algorithms from data structures, you need a standard interface between them. In the case of the STL, that interface is iterators; other interfaces (such as stacks or ranges) are also possible, and in my experience much nicer to work with. But none of it _requires_ OOP.

<comment><USER10> Well, of course OOP isn't _required_ for a good design. What I'm saying is that, as far as not redefining functionality for different types, it doesn't work against it. At least not if we allow for static polymorphism, and I'm pretty sure that's considered an integral part of object orientation; at least I remember Kay talking about it.

<comment><USER11> Static polymorphism wasn't part of OO originally; in Smalltalk, everything was late-bound. And you can of course write things generically even in the "classes and methods" kind of OO, but I think the culture around that paradigm encourages coding non-generically. You might say OO itself works toward genericity, but some OO-branded languages work against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've noticed a pattern with people who rally against OO, that when you get down to the core of their argument and what irks them, they really just don't like Java, with all its superfluous-feeling ceremony code. Maybe try a lighter OO implementation first before you decry an entire methodology.

<comment><USER13> Why do Java invoke such a strong negative emotion from people? It is not like a gun put on the head to make them use it.

<comment><USER14> Because a lot of people have been exposed to Java, and a lot of people have been exposed to bad Java. There's not a lot of "good Java" (at least that I know of) that's publicly available for reading and understanding. Couple that with the infuriating environment (whoever came up with the 'application server' as exists in Java EE should just feel _terrible_ about themselves) and it's easy to see why it gets people's hackles up.

Me, I don't mind Java so much, but the loads and loads of ceremonious bullshit that Java forces upon me is annoying and I absolutely despise web development in any of the existing tools[1]. I'd love something more friendly for what I do. (I would punt many adorable helpless kittens for a working C# on the JVM.)

[1] - Please don't reply to this to tell me I need to try Play. I have. It's not much better to work with, its developers are absentee and don't seem to want outside contributions, and it has no community to speak of. Not good.

<comment><USER15> The problem is that this is not Java specific, rather enterprise specific.

Before Java EE, I was coding similar type of applications with CORBA frameworks, and before that RPC frameworks.

Now I am doing .NET, and we have to use a Java EE like framework as well.

Enterprise architecture has a Midas touch to make everything complex.

<comment><USER14> That's definitely true, but when you say "Java", most people _immediately_ think "Java EE", and that for things that should be simple (like a blog web app), you're forced into "enterprise" stuff.

It's largely cultural (and though they aren't doing a great job the Play guys should be commended for trying), but no less a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A better "functions should be separate from objects" is for the fairly common case where there is a function that takes arguments of two (or more) different classes as arguments; which class should that belong to? It gets even worse when the function is commutative.

<comment><USER17> Isn't that what multimethods are for? Multimethod systems (like CLOS in Common Lisp) allow you to specialize methods based on the types of more than the first argument.

<comment><USER16> Yep, but in CLOS, methods don't belong to a class, which is different from what most people mean when they say object oriented.

<comment><USER17> Once you have multimethods, you don't need to couple the method definitions to the class body. But you're still doing object oriented programming; CLOS is an object system. The fact that people assume that OOP==Java is unfortunate, but doesn't change the fact that CLOS is also OOP.

Beyond that, I think you're conflating how method bodies are placed in a file with "belonging to a class". I can define C++ methods outside of the class definition, but surely no one would say that such methods don't belong to a class.

<comment><USER16> Well if 95% of the population use a term to mean one thing, then arguing that no it really means something else doesn't get you anywhere.

And no, I'm not conflating those. In C++ and Java, classes are, among other things, namespaces. When you declare a method in a class, it ends up in that namespace. Where it is defined is unimportant.

<comment><USER18> > _Well if 95% of the population use a term to mean one thing, then arguing > that no it really means something else doesn't get you anywhere._

It's not about getting "somewhere". It's called computer SCIENCE, remember?

<comment><USER16> When someone says "object oriented" unless they define their terms, or are clearly coming from the smalltalk school, I assume they are talking about C++/Java style OO, since that assumption is right the most often.

This is particularly true when someone is talking about "what's wrong" with OOP

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not sure where I sit on the issue, but I wanted to add this:

By putting the functions in the class definition, they become locked into that class. Other data structures could potentially make use of the function, but now they don't own it. I would say the alternative is a namespace, which you don't instantiate.

Armstrong's grief is the idea that the functionality for classes can then only come from direct lineage. As I understand it, though, the OO-heavy languages (Java, C#, probably others) lean much more heavily on interfaces now to mix in behavior, which gets away from that specific problem.

[EDIT] I forgot that interfaces don't give implementation, so the mixing is pretty limited.

Not sure what I think of the state issue, though. Too green on the functional stuff to say how else it should work. I would point out, though, that programs hide state from each other; couldn't objects just be the same thing on a smaller scale? (That is, an opaque interface with a few access points.) It really comes down to how well it's made in both cases.

<comment><USER20> Java doesn't have multiple inheritance, so if you want to avoid writing the same behavior twice you instead get to write several interfaces describing the ability to do the behaviors and write several functions in each class that implements such an interface (but does not contain the implementation) calling the functions defined in the interface on its pet InterfaceImpl.

This is probably a worthwhile tradeoff, but checking in hundreds of lines of code that do literally nothing is still a bad place to be.

<comment><USER19> Ah, that's right-- interfaces don't give implementation. So yeah, Armstrong's criticism stands.

<comment><USER21> In C++ they do. In C++ anything goes. <insane laughter>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think in practice most OO programs end up with two general kinds of classes. Some are more for data structures, e.g. User or Address classes, and others are more for functions like IOWriter or DAOs.

But there aren't strict dividing lines between these two types, you end up mixing and matching functions and data as you see fit to help organize things. So you might put state into your function classes, such as the DB connection in a DAO:

      db = DBGetter.get("serverAddress;dbName;username;password;")
      userDao = new UserDao(db)
      User user = userDao.getUserById(123)

You might also end up putting functions in your data classes, but you might not. As an example, to calculate the distance between two addresses you could put the function in the Address class:

      float miles = address1.distanceTo(address2)

Or you could create a DistanceCalculator class that mostly just holds functions:

      float miles = distanceCalculator.distanceBetween(address1, address2)

There are pros and cons to either design, personally I would go with the second one, but the point is that you have a choice. OO provides a flexible framework and there are many ways to design your classes. That's why there are a bunch of books on OO patterns and best practices, to help design the structure of classes. You can even work in a very functional/stateless style if you want to.

What OO gives you are tools for organizing your code but you can organize in many ways, some ways that help and some that hinder. As others have said, it's just a tool.

<comment><USER23> The use of ORMs should/does eliminate the need to write any of the data structure classes. They still exist but they're automatically generated and updated. And the use of your second implementation allows you to separate your state from your business logic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The basic idea of OO is that data and functions are bundled together, which > is an idea that Armstrong seems to hold a grudge against (objection 1). But > he gives no arguments as to why this is a bad idea.

Code reuse. Functions that are tied to a data type are less likely to be reused, and if you find that you want to reuse one it will, a lot of the time, require major refactoring (perhaps you have to move the function to a parent class, or create an entirely new class that represents the thing that is common between this data type's use and other data types' use of the function).

Whereas if your data and function are never coupled you actually wind up writing more generic functions that don't care about the type they are operating on.

<comment><USER13> OO doesn't prevent the use of pure function class. You can group all your common util functions together into the util classes.

OO really isn't dogmatic in forcing one style or the other.

<comment><USER24> Utility classes are code smell (paradigm smell, even). They exist where the OO model breaks down and you want to get-shit-done rather than spend an hour thinking about where you can stick function X so that it's useable by class Y and Z. Same goes for verb classes; you know, those does-the-thing classes that you create which are just objects wrapped around a single function called execute(), run(), create(), etc. etc.

<comment><USER13> Utility classes serve merely as organization purpose. It has nothing to do with OO. It's like putting related files in a directory, or putting related Python functions in a module.

I don't get how "stick function X so that it's useable by class Y and Z" is relevant for consideration. As the name suggested, utility classes are function libraries that can be used by all.

<comment><USER25> The problem is that what you "really" want when you're doing this is a plain old namespace. In some languages, objects necessarily come with a bunch of baggage and implications you don't want without some way to opt out.

Yeah it works fine most of the time, but it's a bit like the opposite of primitive obsession. You wouldn't use an Integer class for an index in a for loop.

In Java you have little choice but to dump it all in one place. Contrariwise, Python offers you more options; you _can_ just make a module and put a bunch of top-level methods in there if you want. Go has some notion of "objects" but you can have methods or top-level functions in a given package. And so on.

<comment><USER13> No, the problem is not to use a namespace. The problem is I want to organize related functions as a group. Namespace is just one way to do it. There are other ways. Package, class, namespace, or module serve the same function in term of organizing functions.

What are the bunch of baggage and implication to use class as a way to organize functions?

I don't see the difference in usage you mentioned with Python module. Putting a bunch of "top-level" methods in a module is the same as putting a bunch of static methods in a class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> OO is a good fit for programming a lot of important types of software, such as GUI's or 3D graphics, where it is convenient to model the program data as consisting of widely different types of data structure, having a common interface, and which are easy to add new types to without having to change existing code.

Other than that, most use of OO is really just applying the language's OO structures to software idioms that exist outside OO, such as modules, or data hiding, or closures, and so forth.

The only times OO actively sucks is when you're trying to do non-OO stuff in a highly-OO language, such as trying to do algorithmic code in Java.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think that most people that bash OO fail to understand how to use it properly.

From my experience many are also pretty bad at doing ADTs in module based languages.

OO has quite a few powerful concepts, and not all languages that are OO based explore the same set of concepts.

This is why the best languages to work with, are the ones which offer multi- paradigms, allowing the developers to pick the best abstractions for each scenario.

<comment><USER27> I bash it not because I don't know how to use it but because I see if being used so often for jobs that would be better done using other techniques.

<comment><USER15> Why blame the technology, when the real problem was the person that made the decision to use it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't get how state being evil. Pure functional program also has state. Its state are the arguments passed around between functions.

What people talk about the evilness of state really is the scope of the state. In a typical program, there could be global state in global variable, local state in function local variable, and the state passed around in function parameter. OO adds the instance level scope state for instance variables.

All these different levels of scoping are tools for programmers to manage the complexity in a program. If you don't like global scope, don't use it. If you don't like instance level scope, don't use it. Pure functional code are NOT appropriate 100% of the time. A global variable can be simpler and cleaner to get the job done. There are times for different tricks in a toolset. Use the right tool for the right problem.

edit: added the NOT. Bad omission completely changed the meaning.

<comment><USER28> I like to joke that, if your program executes without any side effects, how can you prove it did? ;-)

<comment><USER26> You can look at it's return code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find it funny that programmers are debating why we should hate OO. It's like we know we should hate it but we are still in progress of figuring out why.

</comment><comment><USER30> The title suggests that the aurhor will provide reasons for why OO actually is bad, but he doesn't. Why is it so fashionable to bash OO anyway? It's just a tool, it can be used wisely, but often it is not, which gives no reason to blame OO.

<comment><USER31> OO is not "just a tool", because it's often coupled with a language. A wrench is "just a tool" because I can always reach over for my socket set if that seems to fit better. Once I'm in Java, I am locked into a whole ecosystem and Java work hard to make sure you write OO code. I can't just reach for a lisp halfway through if I think that tool would work better.

<comment><USER32> Are you saying no project can consist of multiple languages working together?

<comment><USER31> No, but I am saying that switching between them is not as easy as grabbing a different tool. The easiest place to switch languages is between abstraction layers or between functional components/processes. These language separations do not often coincide with the types of code that benefit from either OO style structure vs functional data processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> OO doesn't suck, it's just a tool among others in the toolbox. What sucks is making a religion of it.

<comment><USER34> This is a rather lazy argument I often see levied. It provides no real insight, and defends against everything equally. "Gotos are just a tool; On Error Resume Next is just a tool; null pointers are just a tool; etc."

That said, I think Joe's original article against OO was ill-informed (which is surprising, given his status), and this article rightly points out that Joe's arguments are bogus.

I don't think anyone disagrees that religious battles are stupid. But to sweep all discussion about tools under the "hey man, different tools for different jobs" just avoids critical thinking. If you don't want to participate in these discussions, don't. It's like a discussion on Windows Phone 7 UI, and someone comes along and says "lol, doesn't matter, Windows Phone 7 will never take off".

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Anyone participating in these types of discussions should start with a disclaimer whether they are talking about static typing, where types are largely equated with classes (aka "class-based" programming), or message passing, where types are largely orthogonal to classes.

The latter concept is what Alan Kay had in mind when he "invented" OO although arguably C++ and Java have really popularized OO as class-based programming.

<comment><USER5> Static typing is orthogonal to, although not generally paird with, message passing. You can have dynamically typed Java-style OO easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> OOP is just another tool in my toolbox. It makes a lot of sense for some problems, and none at all for all of the rest.

</comment><comment><USER37> Which is what makes PHP so good, as you're not forced to use any particular style of programming. Or C.

<comment><USER38> And, dutifully, most PHP programmers don't bother using any particular style of recognizable programming. When in Rome...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ad 4 I don't see how you can do OO without state.

</comment><comment><USER40> OO,really matters</comment>


Show HN: Fantasy stock market (w/shorting!) of 2020 Democratic candidates - <AUTHOR> https://2020madness.com/ <comment><USER2> _Hyperlinking to our Content_

 _The following organizations may link to our Web site without prior written approval: [...]_

 _If you are among the organizations listed in paragraph 2 above and are interested in linking to our website, you must notify us by sending an e-mail_

haha, what new drug is circulating in SF right now?

<comment><USER3> (Lenny here, one of the people behind this) Excellent point. Very much not intentional. Scrappy mode of using a ToS generator maybe wasn't the best idea. Fixing now. Thank you for pointing this out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm wary of this as a way to raise funds for a candidate. It feels like "Trust us, we'll totally give the money to someone, someday." Even if that is true, there are presumably costs to build and run the site, so less than 100% of you money will get to the candidate.

It seems like there would be more value in making this free to play, and using any popularity to get a message out.

<comment><AUTHOR> The donations are handled 100% by ActBlue which is the non-profit site (run on tips) that handles donations for all the democratic candidates. They raised >$1B for the Democrats in the last cycle.

We are self-funding our minimal infra costs and the work is being done by volunteers on a part-time basis.

<comment><USER4> OK, Cool - I did not know who ActBlue was. I know there is a link to them, but it might be worth surfacing some info about them on your page to avoid similar initial reactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was looking at the website and trying to connect the dots--the thing I'm wondering is how 2020 madness knows about a donation.

Is 2020 madness a wrapper to a candidate's ActBlue landing page / site, collecting form data for it's purposes and re-transmitting it to ActBlue or is there a tie to the receipt or some other mechanism?

Interesting gamification idea btw.

<comment><USER5> nvm--I signed up to see and was able to see that it's getting raised by 2020 madness' ActBlue ([https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2020madness](https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2020madness)), not a specific candidate and probably uses the refcode query of AB's db to make the connection.

Cool idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! The only downside is that ActBlue sometimes takes a little while to confirm the transaction. But usually only 2-3 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Built with GraphQL/Apollo, React, Node, Material-UI in a few weeks by some ex- Dropbox, ex-Airbnb and current Slack folks. Designed to raise money for the eventual candidate, whoever it ends up being. Ask us anything and let us know any ideas for making it more fun!

<comment><USER6> Any plans for a behind-the-app / how-it-works sort of blog post?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps! Currently focused on refining the gameplay, but let us know if you have any specific questions and we'll make sure to address here or in such a post!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If anyone wants a few free coins to play around with, reply with your twitter handle (that you used to sign in to the site) and we'll credit you! (But really you should donate because climate change!)

<comment><USER7> I think as a non US citizen, I'm banned from donating money (and the candidate would not be allowed to accept my donation).

Do you have some other cause for us evil aliens? (Would donate for NASA or ACLU eg.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea - we'll look into it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice work @kofman and team!

</comment><comment><USER9> Love this idea

</comment><comment><USER10> Shorting Bernie. Sorry ya'll. Riding Warren/Buttegig to the top :D

<comment><USER11> I assure you that the DNC prefers Trump to Bernie, by far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool idea

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Let us know if you have any feedback as you play with it!</comment></comment>


Show HN: We built manual user acquisition as a service - <AUTHOR> https://leadgeni.us

<comment><USER2> IMO the content on the site does not reflect it to be 'user acquisition as a service.'

Value Prop - I think the site/service is very generic and might need some specific niche. A lead for a plumber is very different than a consulting company or an airplane selling company. The site makes it look like I can plugin ANY type of B2B business and start getting leads.

Pricing - If I am a local roofer and paying $800 to leadgeni.us I'd pay for a specific number of leads rather than 20 hours of research. Further, the site doesn't tell me who will research for the deals. Are these interns, experts in my field or people who have minimum of 3 years experience in deal finding?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that useful comment -- much appreciated!

We might benefit from introducing some specialized vertical pages, and we'll provide some more color on who's doing the research work.

The part of the process that's masked is research and strategizing around likely customer sources, which varies significantly per business category. Users might definitely prefer to pay per lead, but that's much harder for us to model from a cost perspective – some users might be easy to target, others might be harder, and some might be impossible to uncover at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just signed up, but I really don't understand what you are doing. Will you be finding leads and emailing them? Will you just curate lists of potential leads? Either way- it's an interesting CA channel to try. But I think you should make that clearer...If it's wasnt for HN i would never pay up front for a service without seeing any benefit first (esp $800)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for signing up! We'll see if we can make it clearer on the front page. It's the former -- we'll be finding potential leads, curating the list, and emailing them using a variety of formats to see what works the best.

<comment><USER4> You'll be cold emailing potential leads? In Europe that would not be legal, you'd have to get email permission through opt-in before sending a mail, except in very particular circumstances. I would think it's the same in the US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing.. calling yourself "as a service" usually means it's a SAAS, no? Otherwise, why not call yourself an user acquisition agency? or user acquisiton consultancy? There's no real product we're paying to use is there? (not trying to put these guys down, just trying to nitpick on terminology)

<comment><USER6> I think "as a service" just means that your business can pay someone else to provide a service that you would otherwise do in house. Also, "as a service" means SAAS if it is software, PAAS if it is a platform, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The tagline for show HN sounds really interesting, but going to your site makes it very clear that you don't understand how the lead market actually works. People don't pay for "hours of research", they pay for the contact info of a person who has demonstrated that they are in market and ready to make a purchase decision. It's not clear that the leads you provide are in market - from the sounds of it, you're just creating a list of prospects? That could be interesting, but prospecting is very easy to outsource and there are already several companies (data.com, jigsaw, etc) already have a very robust database of prospects for a lot less than $800 a month. I don't want to rain on your parade, but I think you need to really deeply evaluate your product/market fit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the constructive feedback! Many of our clients have tried lead databases like Data or Jigsaw and haven't found them nearly specific enough, which is why they come to us. There are a few examples in the blog post that are well beyond the scope of Data/Jigsaw ([http://blog.mobileworks.com/leadgeni-dot-us-user- acquisition...](http://blog.mobileworks.com/leadgeni-dot-us-user-acquisition- as-a-service)) -- researching Github, analyzing payment platforms, finding new businesses as they emerge, and more. From your comment it sounds like "lead generation" isn't the way you'd describe these kinds of activities – could you suggest something more accurate?

Here's a more sophisticated use case: suppose a crowdfunding service is trying to construct a list of accredited investors in Los Angeles eligible for solicitation in particular domains of interest via the JOBS act. These lists don't exist in databases today -- generally the research element is the more complex part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What does _lead research_ entail? Will they cold call for 40 hours?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lead research means looking through a known set of public/private data sources to figure out if a target user is reasonable for a service. Generally it's not cold calling to get data, although we've done that in a few cases.

I'll give you an example: one client uses LeadGenius to identify each new small business incorporated in the state of California, and study 6 parameters about the business to determine if they've chosen a certain kind of service provider yet, and if they haven't chosen one yet, how to get in touch with them.

We'll see if we can make this more clear on the page -- thanks!

<comment><USER9> Isn't there a difference between _user acquisiton as a service_ and _prospecting as a service_? Clicking this link, I thought you did the whole sales process.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's useful feedback! It depends on whether your users can convert automatically based on information from an email. It takes some domain expertise to describe potential users, so we prefer to leave that to clients. We might step in that direction at some point -- I'd like to see us positioned somewhere between Adwords and true outsourced sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is very interesting! I had one question -- I couldn't figure out what types of leads you are capable of generating. Is it primarily for B2B enterprise leads of can it scale down to $100 digital products? Any verticals you're specifically targeting?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main use is definitely for non-enterprise leads, as long as you can figure out what kind of user you'd like based on a few qualification criteria.

B2B prospects are much easier to obtain than B2C users since the segment is so broad, but as long as you have a target segment in mind, we can narrow it down and research them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting idea, but lots of red flags here.

1\. This isn't user acquisition. Nothing even close to it. User acquisition would be getting users. This is at best getting leads that aren't even warm. A lead is not a user.

2\. Paying by the hour instead of by lead or something else seems bizarre. On the low end, it is $800 for ~88 hours of "lead research" along with nebulous "Strategy consultation" and "ROI analysis". Assuming they aren't lying, they are either losing money or your "Dedicated LeadGenius" is making minimum wage and they are maybe breaking even after taxes and overhead.

I would love to see a service like this that was simply commission based with perhaps a monthly fee. Do the full sales process instead of just lead gen as a test to see if sales will work well for your particular business. Much lower risk than hiring someone full time. Perhaps the churn on this would be too high?

</comment><comment><USER12> I find the service interesting. But, I suppose lead research is done through outsourcing somewhere cheap because at 800$ per month for 20hrs/week, how can they make a profit? It amounts to about 10$ an hour.

<comment><USER13> The about link at the bottom links to here [https://www.mobileworks.com/company/](https://www.mobileworks.com/company/) which indicates they are involved in a crowdsourcing and would have access to cheap offshore labour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lead Gen is a tough industry, good luck</comment>


The maybe worst captcha out there: SVGCaptcha - <AUTHOR> http://svgcaptcha.com/

<comment><USER2> I can't tell if this is meant as a joke or if the creator doesn't understand why captcha exists or how trivial it is to defeat their captcha.

<comment><USER3> Few of the sites we use at work have captchas that:

* Often don't load * Quietly expire the session on the server within a time that is shorter than it takes to fill the form in * Are trivial to crack by a computer * Are difficult to pass for a human

This is an improvement.

<comment><USER4> Open the SVG file. The characters are all there, you just have to sort them into the right order. Not much of an improvement. Or maybe not... * Are trivial to crack by a computer. * Are trivial to solve for a human.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also looks dead. Last updated 3 years ago.</comment>


What's at the core of U. Wisconsin's suit against Apple? - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2993852/smartphones/whats-at-the-core-of-u-wisconsins-suit-against-apple.html <comment><AUTHOR> Apple's late entrance into designing and building multi-core processors might put the company at risk of more related patent litigation.

The ubiquity of multi-core processors put microprocessor vendors on a collision course with Wisconsin. Intel already settled a similar lawsuit with Wisconsin in 2009.</comment>


Obituary: Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/10/obituary

<comment><USER2> I cringe to think that they had to have written this in advance.

<comment><USER3> Why? It's common practice to pre-write obituaries for famous people, no matter how healthy they are. And it leads to a better obit that can be richer because of the time invested in it beforehand (the Economist's obits are usually very well done).</comment></comment>


San Jose: Boring Company proposal "likely infeasible" - <AUTHOR> https://sanjose.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=8726291&GUID=153BEC2D-AD44-4983-BC7C-22DC81C08C71 <comment><USER2> San Jose's coming budget shortfalls are likely infeasible.

They had the option of betting on the future - without risk because it was a fixed-price proposal - and they've chosen to stay in the past.

We've seen this movie before with basic stuff like rocket reusability, electrification of the vehicle fleet, etc., all over the howls of naysayers.

Meanwhile, the Boring Company tunnels in Las Vegas have been such a success that they are extending it!

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/12/21285741/elon-musk- boring...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/12/21285741/elon-musk-boring- company-las-vegas-wynn-encore-resorts-world-casinos)

</comment><comment><USER3> This should have a [pdf] tag in the title.</comment>


The Failed Experiment of Software Patents - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2011/06/the-failed-experiment-of-software-patents/index.htm <comment><USER2> A friend-of-a-friend said, upon receiving pat # 4,956,809 ("Method for canonical ordering of binary data for portable operating systems") said "I can't believe they gave it to me." 1982, though, so this one is no longer a concern.

There's nothing more I can add except outrage.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is he really named "Cockburn" ? geez... Maybe this is why he is out of his mind: it hurts.

</comment><comment><USER4> aka "the failed experiment of full page adverts". TL to wait for the link to appear to the article.</comment>


Burning Man Responds to EFF criticism over digital photography rights - <AUTHOR> http://blog.burningman.com/?p=4599 <comment><USER2> "This reminds me of something I read years ago. If you move to a small town or rural area with a lot of former hippies and rednecks and want to do something different, usually the rednecks don't have a problem with it, it's the "free- thinking" former hippies that set themselves up as the aesthetics police and harass anyone doing anything they think "unattractive"."

The self-proclaimed "free-thinkers" in most cases just want to control everything; not surprising, doesn't anyone remember that the hippie-types this evolved from were ardent communists? (Several commenters on the original article mentioned the money the organizers make; I strongly suspect that is secondary to their being rabid control freaks).</comment>


New communication models to make group decisions fast and share knowledge - <AUTHOR> https://9mcollab.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, we wanted to spread the word there is a new collaboration tool - 9mCollab that developed new communication models. You can learn more about their advantages on the link> [https://9mcollab.com/#innovation-communication- models](https://9mcollab.com/#innovation-communication-models) We extended the free trial until end of September for all newly registered users. Enough time for everyone to try out. Give it a try and share your feedback w/ us.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your remote work chair? - <AUTHOR> I've been working from home for 7 weeks now and my back is killing me. What's your chair solution?<p>The Amazon mid-back mesh chair served me well for occasional work from home but the lumbar support snapped off and it's time to invest. Help me, hive mind! <comment><USER2> Steelcase cobi stool.

[https://www.steelcase.com/products/office- chairs/cobi/](https://www.steelcase.com/products/office-chairs/cobi/)

I like to work up high and transition from sitting to standing. The foot rest is a god-send for me.

I'm pretty high-energy and fidget/shift throughout the day, so this chair is awesome.

I would have bought a Herman Miller Aeron Stool, but I bought two Steelcase used for about $500 all-in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, where did you find the used Steelcases?

I've been looking for used Aerons, but there's a lot of scare stories about franken-chairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> People seem to really enjoy Ebody chairs from Herman Miller: [https://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/office- chairs/...](https://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/office- chairs/embody-chairs/)

If you are luck, you can find one at good price used on facebook marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have heard good things about the IKEA Markus but have not been able to get one at present.</comment>


Show HN: Tool for Creating SQL Pipelines – Structure.rest - <AUTHOR> Hi All! We've spent a few months on getting an MVP together, and would love to get some feedback on whether this tool meets you needs. Here is a link to a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBLi3vdKB-4&feature=emb_rel_pause
Here's a link to our website: https://www.structure.rest
And here's a blog article, I published today in the space: https://www.structure.rest/blog/using-a-data-analytics-stack-to-gain-business-insights <comment><USER2> I think there is a real market need here for Business Intelligence analysts, looking for new tools along with their new datawarehouse (ie. Snowflake).

Alteryx has been around this space for forever and has had great (really astounding) success with their UI. So, I think your idea of keeping the UI but using SQL (to version to control, etc.) makes sense. In the future, it seems totally possible that you add more drag-and-drop functionality that allows non-SQL capable analysts to make queries, join things, filter, etc. (like in Alteryx) but that then actually generates SQL.

From a company building perspective, I think there is an open question whether you need to reinvent the framework yourself or use dbt under the hood (already huge community & permissive license) and simply offer a better/alternative UI targeted at a different audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We are looking for more info on user needs in this space. Sounds like you currently use Alteryx + Snowflake. Any additional information you could provide about your use case/needs would be helpful. Seems like some people are more interested in open source tools that can be run on their own computer (like DBT) while others are looking for more of an enterprise use case. What about you?

<comment><USER2> I shot you (or your co-founder) a note on your Slack - let's pick it up there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The link to your demo video is actually a link to "Jazz Beats: Jazzy & Lofi Hip Hop Radio - Rainy Coffee Beats for Work, Study" in case you want to update it.

:)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't edit the post, but Thank you. Here is a link to the demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QddtEL45gNY&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QddtEL45gNY&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER3> Demo looks great and I really like the user interface. Nice and clean. I went looking for pricing however and did not see anything on your website nor did I see anything indicating your are in beta. Is this a paid service and if so what is your pricing structure?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Replwoacause! Do you have any additional information on what your individual needs might be? It would be very helpful to us to know what tools you currently use, and why those tools are useful to you. We have received a lot of positive feedback and some feature requests, so we are trying to group feature requests by common use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QddtEL45gNY&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QddtEL45gNY&feature=youtu.be)</comment>


US nuclear bombs at Turkish airbase complicate rift over Syria invasion - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/14/us-bombs-at-turkish-airbase-complicate-rift-over-syria-invasion <comment><USER2> > However, Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert and political scientist at the > Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said removing the weapons would not > be straightforward. "Extracting them under these circumstances may be > incredibly risky since it would involve removing 50 nuclear weapons from the > vaults, moving them on a Turkish base and flying them out of Turkish > airspace," Narang said. "They could be vulnerable to accidents, theft or > attack."

On the other hand, the weapons already are vulnerable to accidents, theft, or attack. A 2016 report notes:

> The continued presence of dozens of U.S. nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air > Base in Turkey raises serious risks of their seizure by terrorists and other > hostile forces, a new report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center finds. The > report titled B61 Life Extension Program: Costs and Policy Considerations, > found that it was an "unanswerable question," whether the U.S. could have > maintained control of the approximately 50 B61 nuclear weapons based at > Incirlik during a protracted civil conflict in Turkey. During the failed > July 15 coup attempt, power to Incirlik Air Base was cut off and the Turkish > government prohibited U.S. aircraft from flying in or out. Eventually, the > Incirlik base commander was arrested and implicated in the coup plot. The > report's findings come exactly one month after the failed coup attempt and > on the heels of a milestone earlier this month authorizing the production > and engineering phase of the B61 Life Extension Program.

[https://www.stimson.org/content/us-nuclear-weapons-turkey- ri...](https://www.stimson.org/content/us-nuclear-weapons-turkey-risk-seizure- terrorists-hostile-forces)

</comment><comment><USER3> Take this with a pinch of salt, but there are some rumors here in Greece that US will move nuclear bombs from Incirlik, Turkey to Araxos, Greece. From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araxos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araxos) : "From 1978 to 2001 Araxos Air Base was also home of the NATO 345 Air Munitions Company. This unit was responsible for U.S. B61 nuclear bombs"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _...Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert and political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said removing the weapons would not be straightforward. "Extracting them under these circumstances may be incredibly risky since it would involve removing 50 nuclear weapons from the vaults, moving them on a Turkish base and flying them out of Turkish airspace," Narang said. "They could be vulnerable to accidents, theft or attack."_

Yikes.

<comment><USER4> Note that all U.S. nuclear weapons have PAL systems that cryptographically secure the nuke. These ensure that a.) the nuke can't be armed unless the President authorizes it b.) the nuke can't be armed unless at least two members of the chain of command responsible for the nuke authorize it and c.) the nuke can't be armed unless delivered in the manner expected. For example, a gravity bomb like the B-61 would have to be dropped from the height that nuclear weapons are expected to be dropped from.

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

The worst that a hostile power could do with these nukes is to dismantle them, keep the plans to accelerate their own nuclear program, and store the raw nuclear materials. This is nothing to scoff at, but the threat model of "terrorist group steals nukes and blows up an American city" isn't actually realistic.

Incidentally, this is why the Ukraine is not a major nuclear power. When the Soviet Union broke up a significant number of their nuclear weapons were physically located in the Ukraine, but the PAL codes were all generated in Moscow, and so the Ukrainians had a bunch of useless U-235 & explosives. They eventually destroyed the nukes because they were of no use.

</comment></comment><comment> java-man The reality has changed (collapse of the Soviet Union), but the strategic thinking has not.

Now an increasingly authoritarian regime could become a nuclear power with just a small scale assault on the base.

We should remove the cores and ship them by sea under Navy protection.</comment>


My systemtap toolkit to online analyze on production - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/detailyang/systemtap-toolkit <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> <3 systemtap. Had a proprietary app and wasn't sure if it was using NODELAY on sockets, was able to intercept setsockopt() and find out.

Also: nice work with the diagrams.</comment>


Experiments generating video (and audio) of Chrome headless sessions - noah-kun https://blog.goempirical.com/how-to-use-headless-chrome-to-screencast-audio-and-video-to-an-rtmp-endpoint-216ccfdde4db <comment> noah-kun There is a video demonstration in the Google Docs slideshow linked.</comment>


Real-time Control of a Hexbug using Arduino, Pusher.com, and Websockets - <AUTHOR> http://www.charmcitynetworks.com/techblog/hexbug/

<comment><USER2> Nice little example of the Internet of Things</comment>


How to Make Maps Using Leaflet.js, PostGIS and Chicago Open Data - <AUTHOR> https://samc1213.github.io/2019/04/29/rideshare-dataset-getting-started/ <comment><USER2> A fun tip, if you're using PostGIS you can actually generate the Geojson directly in the SQL query with [http://www.postgis.org/docs/ST_AsGeoJSON.html](http://www.postgis.org/docs/ST_AsGeoJSON.html)

and if you're running a version of PostGIS with protobuffers enabled (Not AWS RDS) you can generate vector tiles on the fly with [https://postgis.net/docs/ST_AsMVT.html](https://postgis.net/docs/ST_AsMVT.html) which are great for displaying large datasets.

<comment><AUTHOR> The vector file seems really useful. I ran a query that resulted in a 1.5 GB geojson file... much too big for Leaflet. Maybe the Vector tile would be compact enough? Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Reduce the precision, 15 decimal places are useful for picometers, not a web map. Try 5-6.

<comment><USER4> It never seems worth the effort in my testing, as you have to come up with your own loop to do the truncating, and the benefit is marginal. In this case he'd have 1.2gb file, I doubt that fixes the problem.

<comment><USER5> for what it's worth, ST_AsGeoJSON lets you specify decimal precision as an optional argument, so you at least don't have to write a truncating loop.

Another good option with many polygon geometries is Base64 encoding the output of ST_AsGeobuf -- it is many times smaller than GeoJSON and still pretty easy to handle from Javascript. (Needs libprotobuf-c on the PostGIS side and geobuf.js+pbf.js on the JS side)

<comment><USER4> Thats cool, I should try AsGeobuf as a soft upgrade to one of the older tile GeoJSON site :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> steve-chavez Nice! I think you could have used pg COPY .. CSV[0] plus a CREATE TABLE .. AS to avoid the custom python script and do the importing with only SQL.

Also, as others have mentioned you can generate the st_asmvt format directly from pg. This plus PostgREST binary output[1] can get you a way to query your table directly through a REST API.

[0]:[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql- copy.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-copy.html)

[1]:[http://postgrest.org/en/v5.2/api.html#binary- output](http://postgrest.org/en/v5.2/api.html#binary-output)

</comment><comment><USER6> Kudos on writing a solid comprehensive article on mapping, the tooling available, and how to do it step by step. (GDAL and everything!) Not an easy task, and I found the format engaging. Great stuff.

It looks like the city of Chicago might be sitting on top of the Socrata API, which allows you to run a distinct - if you are visualizing counts for each tract (or averages and other types of calculations) it would save you the Digital Ocean resources to grab the API counts either on-the-fly or as static files for the tracts in Chicago and render them that way via Leaflet, but obviously this does not allow for quite as novel an analysis as PostGIS offers! (here's the API page that the City of Chicago links to from their page [https://dev.socrata.com/docs/functions/#2.1,](https://dev.socrata.com/docs/functions/#2.1,))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! I have 0 experience with mapping so it was fun to see all the tools out there. There's much more out there than I expected. I did notice they had the API, but figured I would learn something a little more universally applicable by learning PostGIS. I should try that out though for a more lightweight and cheaper option next time

<comment><USER6> Absolutely and that's critical knowledge - PostGIS is super powerful and the experience with GDAL is definitely good to have (and to understand the transformations that are possible)

One of my favorite primers is by Robert Simmon who I had the pleasure of seeing at OpenVis: [https://youtu.be/N_dmiQI1s24](https://youtu.be/N_dmiQI1s24)

RE mapping tools - I've been working a lot lately with Vector Tiles and their embedded props and from a web-mapping perspective it's nice to download the geometry once and then style many times in terms of over-the-wire efficiency.

Happy hunting and thanks for your post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A similar article, this one is a lot of fun: [https://blog.patricktriest.com/game-of-thrones-map-node- post...](https://blog.patricktriest.com/game-of-thrones-map-node-postgres- redis/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have a link to a decent primer on PostGIS please?

<comment><USER3> [https://medium.com/@tjukanov/why-should-you-care-about- postg...](https://medium.com/@tjukanov/why-should-you-care-about-postgis-a- gentle-introduction-to-spatial-databases-9eccd26bc42b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would seriously throw Leaflet down the cliff and replacd with Mapbox for just the performance alone. All of the features plus documentation are there with Mapbox and the performance is ridiculously better.</comment>


When Progressive Web Apps are better than native Android apps - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35504194/android-progressive-web-apps-vs-native-apps/39027789#39027789 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://whatwebcando.today/](https://whatwebcando.today/) is a useful link.</comment>


Skip lists in Python - <AUTHOR> http://infohost.nmt.edu/tcc/help/lang/python/examples/pyskip/

<comment><USER2> The relevant paper, "Skip Lists: A Probabilistic Alternative to Balanced Trees": [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117.6383&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Serious question: Is it worth implementing this kind of data structure in Python. Wouldn't Python's overhead overwhelm any speediness you'd get?

<comment><USER4> The speediness you get is algorithmic. SkipLists can give you log time operations on a list - Python can largely only give you linear time.

(The above is a serious simplification, but contains enough truth to be worth stating. No doubt others more knowledgeable than I can expand and enhance.)

<comment><USER5> "SkipLists can give you log time operations on a list"

So can balanced binary trees, and a number of other structures. I'd demand benchmarks, because Python is not C (and I don't mean just trivially, I mean, it is _very_ not just C); just as one for instance, are you hitting a pessimal case with the GC with this algorithm? You never know.

I'm not actually demanding them, since it didn't seem the point of this exercise. My point is that you can't just assume.

<comment><USER6> Besides, if I remember correctly, the most convincing point of skip list is that it provides better concurrency. In the environment where python still have GIL, I would be skeptical about that.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Skip lists are great for two reasons (and as far as I know, _only_ these two reasons):

1\. They're really cool and clever. This is a valid reason.

2\. They offer easier concurrency than most alternatives. It's straightforward (though not quite easy, unless you have transactional memory) to make a lock- free concurrent skip list. Try that with a heap or a red-black tree, and you'll quickly run into all sorts of memory conflicts and crazy-complicated locking. The fact that a skip list only provides probabilistic logarithmic time bounds really makes coordination between threads easier.

(Note that it's possible to do some similar stuff with modified versions of other data structures. For example, you can make a good concurrent dictionary by taking a red-black tree, relaxing the invariants, and adding a periodic rebalancing thread to run in the background. But that's a topic too long to fit into this post.)

<comment><USER8> I think the biggest advantage of skip lists is that if a man held a gun to my head and forced me to implement a logarithmic time algorithm I could implement skip lists in an hour or so from memory. Any of the others...maybe given a week and a couple of good books.

<comment><USER4>
      ... if a man held a gun to my head and forced me
      to implement a logarithmic time algorithm I could
      implement skip lists in an hour or so ...

Does this happen to you often?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacking on Google Drive/DropBox - <AUTHOR>

Looking for ideas or suggestions for a day worth of task to implement (and open source) on top of a file sharing service's SDK such as DropBox or Google Drive. Not looking for a business opportunity, just a learning exercise and maybe make someone, somewhere, happier. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> what about a file sync between the two services?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting suggestion. Will explore and consider, thanks !</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some popular meetups you attend or recommend people to attend - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> All of mine are local so I'm not sure how they would help. Maybe you're asking what kinds of meetups? If so, I attend mostly ones that are relevant to my career, software engineering, and they fall into two categories: networking or networking plus educational</comment>


Ask HN: What will you do in this situation? - <AUTHOR> https://gyazo.com/4048512519accc0babd1c902f2d2e34b <comment><AUTHOR> They deleted all of our data</comment>


The Secret To Only Working 8-5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.codesqueeze.com/the-secret-to-only-working-8-5/ <comment><USER2> Working more than 8/9 hours a day is all too common in this industry. Everyone is going above and beyond, so you might think you have to too. One Google HR rep has actually told me they expect you to do this.

I know people that work 60 hours a week at big companies. The article is true... Once you start consistently investing long hours of work, you'll be expected to continually do so.

So what's the balance between working hard enough to get recognized and having your own life too?

</comment><comment><USER3> The scary thing about this is the assumption that your job is a mere "day job."

Most people who do great things work hard. If you don't feel you're doing great things at your current job, get another job.

<comment><USER4> What about when the boring current job pays 50%+ more than the possibly exciting job down the street?

The grass is not always greener...

(this coming from the guy that struggles to force himself to work 40/wk [and who's paid hourly])

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes.

The key to not working overtime is to not work overtime. Don't be a wimp. I like a phrase I stole from "Lost in Translation":

"I have a previous commitment."

</comment><comment><USER6> what a depressing article.</comment>


Nintendo Just Announced a Labo VR Kit for the Switch - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18254019/nintendo-labo-vr-kit-switch <comment><USER2> Please tell me this didnt surprise anyone, i was slightly shocked it wasnt released with the first kits.

Next up: Nintendo announce a Switch with a sim card slot (or eSIM) moving them comfortably into the mobile phone market where they actually stand to do very well</comment>


The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html <comment><USER2> Google of the past has severe doubts about Google of the present:

 _...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers._

<comment><USER3> Young Jedi felt the power of the dark side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "There are two versions of this paper -- a longer full version and a shorter > printed version. The full version is available on the web and the conference > CD-ROM"

Does anyone have a link to the full version? I would love to read more in detail.. it is so inspiring

I think after E=MC2 , The PageRank algorithm "PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))" is the formula which changed the entire world..

<comment><USER5> This version is actually the full version. The short version was designed for printing out/conference while longer version is designed for hosting on web.

Also there is a book on the subject Google's PageRank and Beyond [http://books.google.com/books?id=KsHTl_2Pfl8C](http://books.google.com/books?id=KsHTl_2Pfl8C)

Other interesting articles: THE $25,000,000,000∗ EIGENVECTOR [http://www.rose- hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.pd...](http://www.rose- hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.pdf)

How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web's Haystack [http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc- pagerank](http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-pagerank)

The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/pagerank.h...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/pagerank.htm)

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love this. The first sentence is still very telling:

 _In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext._

</comment><comment> bulte-rs I remember citing this article in my thesis and thinking "damn has it been 10 years already". I was 23 back then. :|

Thinking of the PageRank algorithm as a eigenvalue problem was one of the few 'things' that were a real eye opener for me and allowed me to actually connect maths and computer science for these practical purposes.

</comment><comment><USER7> "So we are optimistic that our centralized web search engine architecture will improve in its ability to cover the pertinent text information over time and that there is a bright future for search" Wow!

<comment><USER4> Wow indeed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree, the first statement was captivating. It's nostalgic and yet, a form of forecasting in it's own right, what becomes future technology in this architecture

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading this is like time travel.</comment>


Facebook announces a payment method via Messenger - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/technology/facebook-announces-a-payments-feature-for-its-messenger-app.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if it's the best risk ever for FB this period.</comment>


Uber-Lyft driver union law can move forward after federal judge tosses lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2017/landmark-uber-lyft-driver-union-law-can-move-forward-federal-judge-tosses-lawsuit/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original title: _Landmark Uber-Lyft driver union law can move forward after federal judge tosses lawsuit_ (7 characters too long)

Techmeme summary: _Judge dismisses Uber driver lawsuit against Seattle 's unionization law, lifts injunction, allowing city to proceed with implementation_</comment>