My Dark California Dream - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opinion/sunday/my-dark-california-dream.html <comment><USER2> I go to work in San Francisco every day. I'm not an entrepreneur but as an engineer I am benefiting from the rise of tech. I look around the city as I walk to the office, seeing all these new condos spring up, seeing the work done on the new terminals and all the activity around me and it feels like a city that's alive and growing.

My family and I frequently travel all over California to check out all its beautiful places and I love this state. I grew up in San Diego so it's not like I'm a tourist. With the exception of the drought, I think California is getting better all the time.

<comment><USER3> _> except, of course, those living the most obvious new California dream, the technology gold rush. Try telling successful 25-year-old entrepreneurs in San Francisco that California's over and you'll get blank stares as they contemplate stock options, condos going up all over the city, restaurants packed nightly and spectacular organic produce at farmers' markets every day._

If you had read the entire article, you would have noticed the OP was well aware of your opinion here.

<comment><USER2> > If you had read the entire article

I read the entire article. Notice I wrote "I'm not an entrepreneur", implicitly referencing the passage you quoted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting personal take on recent California history. But the latent racial anxiety that is an important part of this story (and is ironically captured by the title of this piece) would be outrageous if it wasn't so comical. The author glosses the racial and ethnic diversity that makes California special and he seems like a good guy. But he ignores the ugly racial politics that still lurks in a diminishing but active part of the electorate. This headline from earlier this year, as much as anything, sums up the "darkness" that colors much of the nostalgia expressed by nostalgic Californians, especially those of the author's and author's parents' generation:

"It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California"

[http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census- latinos...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census- latinos-20150708-story.html)

One of the things I love most about California is its racial and cultural diversity. But a lot of that transition from the "agreed-upon, commanding" version of "modernist California" to the "post-modern phase" was embodied politically by a white flight impulse among people like my grandparents who beatified FDR then in the 1950s and 1960s started voting for conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan when he was elected governor and ended up reliably supporting a Republican establishment that sanctified Prop 13 and championed funding cuts for the public institutions that formed an important part of the foundation of the California dream. They got theirs and they were loathe to pay it forward for a state that they felt was being overrun by people who didn't share their values and were not like themselves.

With the election of Jerry Brown and the dominance of Democrats in the legislature, California seems to have turned a corner fiscally and a lot of the doom-and-gloom headlines that gleefully pointed to the deficits of the previous decade have faded away. California still faces a lot of challenges. At least it is facing up to them.

<comment><USER5> >> "It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California"

These sentiments are ironic, given California's history. E.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexico#/media/File:Mapa_de_Mexico_1835_1.PNG)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author is so focused on lamenting California's demise that he's missing what is still here.

I fixed up an old '73 VW westy bus and we've been doing all the things he said can't be done anymore. The cali dream is alive and well, I was out surfing today. El Nino is predicted this year and may spell the end of the drought. Things are looking up, and the solution to the sense of loss he's taking about is to be creative. Go to Kings Canyon or Anza Borrego instead of tourist-trap Yosemite. Its not that hard.

<comment><USER7> Only those aren't well versed in the regional history portend a single rainy season will end this drought. Bring some pleasant relief, which will only help to slacken regulation/thinking/policy.

However after a year the drought will still be - unmoderated and with even worse water policies.

But, if you can afford the water, Cali is still the same - although it's harder to see through the haze of selfie sticks and REI gear.

<comment><USER8> What about a second rainy season? New extremes are surpassed all the time.

<comment><USER9> Nope, shouldn't be within years of rainy seasons of being enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wanted to like California, but every time I visit (mostly LA) I end up spending hours stuck in traffic getting places. It kills it for me, it makes the joy of nice weather, palm trees, the laid back attitude, the views, the beaches, kind of not worth it. I tried the Metro, but it didn't go where I wanted to go somehow. I tried the buses, but there were too crowded and they got stuck in traffic just as much as the cars.

<comment><USER11> If you're only visiting LA, you're going to run into traffic. LA has arguably the first or second worst traffic in all of the US. As a counter-anecdote, I live in what could be considered an Oakland or SF suburb, and I can get everywhere I need to go by either walking or taking bart. I sit in traffic maybe two or three times a year.

<comment><USER12> I used to live in Berkeley and did the walk/BART/bus/carshare thing, and it was wonderful. I miss it a lot.

<comment><USER11> Having grown up in the midwest where everything is a 10 - 20 minute drive, I absolutely love it here. It's literally life changing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hm, the happy note on the end about the good parts of progress was light on the massive increase of income inequality. A city with foreign investment and state of the art medical facilities is good and well, but is unrelated to what makes San Francisco San Francisco, which is a generosity toward difference, and a welcoming "come as you are" philosophy. If nobody except the highly affluent can live here, we've lost our way.

<comment><USER14> San Francisco was only ever really tolerant of the _right_ kind of differences, AFAICT. For example, it appears to be a near-complete political monoculture. It even has a prominent road in the largest city park named after a living and active Democratic politician, just to make sure everyone knows whose turf it is.

More recently, there is the animosity against the tech crowd, which I don't need to describe.

<comment><USER13> Hm, I thought you were going somewhere different after that first sentence, because San Francisco history is actually deeply embedded with racism. It is often egregiously racist, in the late 1800s so much so to the point of the entire justice system being supplanted by vigilante mobs (composed of the white merchant class) that tried and hung Australian, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants. There are countless stories of SF being the first state to defeat some racist law or another, like how the city outlawed wooden laundromats for fire code reasons, but only used it to enforce on Asian laundromats (and not white ones). IANAL but that ended up being a Supreme Court case that more or less said laws had to be enforced equally, irrespective of race.

It's a deep history, and in interpreting it you have to be careful who you decide is "San Francisco" \-- is it the institutions at the time, or the citizens who act up against it?

I agree though that it's important not to take progressive politics for granted.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, I was not aware of that aspect of San Francisco's history. It does not seem to have much of a connection to the present situation, though - or maybe it does? The Democrats used to be the slavery party, after all.

Is there a good source for the political history of San Francisco that does not automatically take the point of view of the current incumbents?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a guy living on the east coast. I've wanted to move to Cali for almost a decade now. As a developer, there are 4 times as many job prospects in California. The weather doesn't hurt either. I bought into the American dream. Go to school. Get a job. Buy a house. Now I'm seeing if I can break even on my investment. I'm hoping the authors opinion is biased.

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't worry, it's about time for another dot-com crash. After the last dot-com crash, traffic in SF dropped so much that rush hour disappeared. Half the twentysomethings moved out. Downtown San Jose emptied out. Just be patient.

Which big company will be the first to go? Twitter? (And why is Zynga still around at all?)

<comment><USER17> The booms last so long, and are so big, and the busts are reversed so swiftly and completely, that the latter should really be thought of as the bubbles.

If you long at the long-term trend (like the last 20 or 40 years), it's clear that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso than previous ones did, there's a steady exodus from snowy states to warmer ones, tech isn't going away (except for occasional brief setbacks), and San Francisco and Silicon Valley are going to be the center of that world deep into the foreseeable future.

In other words, yes, a tech crash will happen once or twice every decade, but if you're counting on them to scare everyone else away and let you have the Bay Area all to yourself forevermore, you're in for a rude awakening.

[http://my.paragon- re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-...](http://my.paragon- re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-Shiller_Simpl-Percentages.jpg)

<comment><USER18> > it's clear that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso > than previous ones did

I don't know that it's necessarily that we want to, but we kinda have to. When you're starting off out of college with the kind of debt that your parents didn't have until they bought their first home, you've got to go where the money is. For some reason, it's been decided that packing people into open- office cattle cribs in a handful of cities across the country is the only way to do business... So we pack up and go live in shitty apartments in the city for a few years until we get out of debt-slavery and become skilled enough and connected enough that we can work from the places we actually want to live and raise a family.

It pisses me off a little bit. In my home town, I've got two hundred-year-old graves of relatives in the town cemetery, and I grew up in a house built on land that was part of a farm my great-great grandfather owned before the Great Depression. There are the hills and woods I stalked deer and turkeys in, the little mountain ponds I caught trout in, the garden I grew beans and corn and potatoes in with my family. The elementary and high school gyms I shot thousands of hoops in and poured out uncounted gallons of sweat on. I know every tree, every rock that sticks up out of the lawn enough to dull the lawnmower if you don't go around. It's _home_ , in a way that the other places I've had to live and work since then will never be. It just sucks, because there is no work, and so I, along with everyone else in my generation, has had to leave and go out into these concrete jungles and lifeless suburbs to make a living.

Someday, I'll have made enough money, and the world will move on enough that I can write software from my living room, and teach my kids how to grow tomatoes in that same patch of dirt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TLDR: you kids get off my lawn.

I mean the author admits this multiple times, that he's nostalgic for "1960s California" out of nostalgia rather than any actual reasons it was better.

</comment><comment><USER7> Article has the wrong title ... "Same as it ever was. Same as it ever will be."

Only, much more of everything. This is, inevitably, for the worse.

<comment><USER20> > This is, inevitably, for the worse.

Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Now he knows how the Native Americans feel.

</comment><comment><USER22> What can I say about this article?

I recently moved here, like many other people in tech. I didn't come for the draw of nature--which I love--but for a higher paying job and a chance to escape a poor, decaying, east coast city that increasingly felt like an urban hell. The whole undertaking was supposed to be a leg up, moving to that next level of adulthood (whatever that means in 2015). I am a well-paid, well- educated engineer in my early 30's. I am not a founder, nor do I intend to be, at least around these parts. California was a promised land, and I was glad to buy a one-way ticket there.

Now that I am here and a "resident," I faced with an ugly truth: the utter impossibility for me to ever buy any kind of property in the city, however modest or dilapidated, even if my salary somehow doubled overnight. The very thought of what it takes to "make it" here borders on the obscene. I'm lucky to pay $1,300 (which is cheap) for a one-bedroom in the city with 3 other people; outside, the prospects aren't much better.

The SF (and sadly the bay area in general) of now is a place where boomers made the rules. I can't help but feel impotent when thinking about the long- term political changes that will need to be effected in order to benefit newcomers and the working classes that are trying to make a home here. The old guard has such a stranglehold on the political machinations of this place and the chips are overwhelmingly stacked in their favor. I'm registered to vote-- and I plan on it--but I know deep down, nothing will truly change until the Daniel Duane's of the city finally flush down the bowl and don't resurface. People like him had the great luck to be born during an era where places like this weren't fully exploited yet. I can't fault people like him for taking advantage of the opportunity to buy when housing was cheap and relatively plentiful. Anyone with aspirations to own a home and have a family would do the same without a second thought.

The NIMBYism and political blockading of the old guard is unconscionable. The housing crisis plaguing not only SF, but the peninsula as well, is directly related to their shortsighted, self-serving political ends. It's as if they--"they" in this case are my generational bogeyman--never even considered how their children would live. Short of inheriting a property, "tough shit" is the answer to the housing question.

My choices now are to stay, make some money, and take it back with me to somewhere cheaper, or hope for a simultaneous bubble-burst and earthquake which will depress home prices and maybe scare some alte kakas to leave.

I want to stay here, but it's really damn near impossible.

So let the Daniel Duane's lament about their California dream of the past. I only know about what we've been left by the legacy of his ilk, and it ain't good.

<comment><USER17> Join the resistance: [http://www.sfbarf.org/pages/vote.html](http://www.sfbarf.org/pages/vote.html)

<comment><USER23> Here's the subreddit I found for those interested:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SFBARF](https://www.reddit.com/r/SFBARF)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This was a good article, and a lot of it resonates with me, since I did grow up in SF in the 70s and 80s. It occurred to me, reading the article, that Northern Californians may be unusually ill prepared to handle the changes that occurred in the State. People often say to me "well, you grew up here, so you aren't as shocked by the prices", but it actually may be the opposite. Someone who grew up outside SF sees moving here as a choice, a decision to accept the outrageously high real estate prices as the cost of living here. But the truth is, the high prices in SF are just as much of a shock to people who grew up here. Of course, this is a slight of hand, as it actually is just as much of a choice to stay here as it is to move here, but it is more jarring to have to leave your hometown due to a fairly sudden stratospheric rise in housing prices than it is to decide not to move to a place you've never lived (especially if it involves leaving family or lifelong friends behind).

Another factor is that the very low prices may have instilled a lack of materialism in California kids that left them, as I said, unusually unprepared for what was to follow. When a school teacher, humanities professor, or social worker can afford a 3 bedroom house in palo alto with a nice sized backyard In that sort of environment, their children will often grow up believing that it wasn't really worth chasing the money, that in fact, you _shouldn_ , that this would be to waste a gift. Yes, you'll still need an income, but why would you sacrifice a life where you enjoy your work and do good, if all that requires is that you live in a modest house in middle class Palo Alto or Noe Valley than a mansion in Pacific Heights or Hillsborough? What none of these people were prepared for is the reality that living in "middle class" Palo Alto (long, long gone) or Noe Valley will be complete off limits, and that a house in the Excelsior may even be just out of reach.

One thing that did make me cringe was the old, tired trope that doctors and lawyers are priced out, and that "only techies need apply". Rank and file "techies" were an integral part of the old SF that Dan Duane says he misses - hell, programming was even discussed as path to find the serene focus in "Zen and the article of motorcycle maintenance." Programmers and other techies were types who had renounced the big salaries of corporate law or banking to do something more creative and interesting. This view of tech was alive and well in the late 90s, and shows up in a lot of PG's early essays.

C'mon, Dan, the median salary for lawyers and doctors is waaay higher than for your typical "techie".

</comment><comment><USER25> The thing is, California died a long time ago. The state which elected Ronald Reagan as governor is long, long gone. I have family there, and every time I visit I'm struck by what a bureaucratic nightmare it is: everything is regulated, registered, taxed, adjusted, but most of all _controlled_.

As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless.

There's enough money in the world to pay me to live in California, but no-one would pay it to me.

<comment><USER26> >As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless.

Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American. Current-day California is nothing like:

* Present-day Russia

* Present-day China

* Present-day Mexico

* Pinochet's Chile

* Nazi Germany

* Soviet Russia

* Anywhere else in the Eastern Bloc

* present-day ISIS territory

Besides which, plenty of people hated Reagan.

<comment><USER27> > _Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American_

As I think you know, this isn't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is. Please don't do it here.

<comment><USER26> Calling people out for dramatizing their First World Problems into the collapse of society isn't allowed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."</comment>


AMD pivots: B450, X470 motherboards will support Zen3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcworld.com/article/3543777/amd-b450-x470-motherboards-will-support-ryzen-4000-chips.html <comment><USER2> AMD motherboards don't seem very cheap. Did vendors really not include enough flash memory capacity so that adding support for new CPUs requires dropping older ones, or was this just a convenient excuse to make everyone upgrade?

Anyway, a welcome development, although support is still dependent on individual vendors releasing BIOS updates. Will be interesting to see how this works out in practice.</comment>


Micropay.Rocks – a new micropayment platform - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@datashovel/micropay-rocks-dd311f1e6bfa <comment><USER2> This can't be a Show HN until people can actually play with the software (so we've taken "Show HN" out of the title), but it's still a good article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the clarification. I will keep that in mind for future submissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> beginning to see lot of domains with .rocks

it's easy to remember I find. like I was looking for react examples and came across react.rocks, I wouldn't have rememb

<comment><USER4> rocks are really frozen balls</comment></comment>


UK NHS Patient Data Uploaded to Google Servers - <AUTHOR> http://thesurge.net/2014/03/03/uks-nhs-patient-data-no-longer-private/

<comment><USER2> It was uploaded to BigQuery for analysis of a huge dataset.

Now there's a question about whether you can trust a US company, or any cloud company, with UK health data, but this article - and the Guardian article linked - are being deliberately misleading here, I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't intend to misleading intentionally. The data should be safe with Google as long as they choose not to use it for targeted advertising purposes, which is probably pretty unlikely.

Of course, many medical providers in both the US and UK already use cloud based services to store this data - I think the difference though is that usually the companies they use are geared towards medical data, and therefore don't have their hands in ads as they are paid as contractors by the providers.</comment></comment>


Tensorflow 2.0.0-Alpha0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v2.0.0-alpha0 <comment><USER2> One thing I've always wondered is, why is TensorFlow NVIDIA-only? I was hoping a new major release would fix that, but it doesn't appear to have.

I've recently gotten an eGPU for my Macbook Pro for playing games in whatever little off-time I have on Windows. I also wanted to use it on Mac, though, and Macs only support AMD graphics. So I got a Vega 64. The other half of the reason was that I wanted to play with deep learning.

Turns out TensorFlow just does _not_ work on AMD. There is a fork of it maintained by AMD, but they only support it for Linux, and the code in question reaches deep enough to hardware layer that it cannot be run in a VM. It's also always at least a few versions behind as well.

With NVIDIA GPUs more expensive and poorly performing per dollar than they have ever been, TF2 could have been the moment they made a major improvement. Sad to see that is not the case.

<comment><USER3> AMD dropped the ball by not dedicating the sort of resources that nvidia has on the deep learning space (and playing the long, but risky move of throwing all in with ROCm). Similarly, Apple dropped the ball by being so wed to AMD.

Coincidentally I was just digging through the Tensorflow code to find where it delegates to CUDA -- an enormous task given that it is a huge volume of dependencies many layers deep -- because ultimately most neural nets entail a significant amount of simple math. It seems, and I say this in the nonsensical, overly confident way that we do when we look on from the outside, that it should be trivial making it work with OpenCL or even just a branch for AMD.

<comment><USER4> AMD is a far smaller company than either nVidia or Intel, its two main competitors.

There are a variety of reasons for this - anticompetitive behavior from those competitors, chip designs like Bulldozer that focused on many wide execution units at the expense of single threaded performance, etc., but what it comes down to is that they just don't have a comparable amount of resources dedicated to ROCm compared to what nVidia has invested in CUDA.

I'm quite impressed with their current and near future designs in the CPU space, but GPU design is hard and beginning to hit a performance wall - witness the lackluster reaction to nVidia's current RTX chips in many areas.

<comment><USER2> I think the reason for the lackluster reception NVIDIA has gotten to the current RTX designs is only in a small part caused by the actual poor design. Yes, real-time ray tracing, the new feature in these cards, is so bad that it's barely usable — but we're used to that, v2 will be better. I have a lot of sympathy for NVIDIA engineers trying to improve the state of the art, it's never easy.

However, the issue with NVIDIA is that they have adopted the antics of the game development space they cooperate with, and they have a poor attitude towards their customers as a result. So far as outright saying that their customers are stuck, so that the pricing doesn't matter, you'll just pay for it and get on with your life anyway. One major example of this is the banning of their 'gaming' cards from data centres via an EULA, because they couldn't sell their 10X-priced 'enterprise' cards, since they performed within 10% of each other.

Another example is RTX, again. They've stopped producing their 10xx series cards to sell more RTXes at a higher margin, because, boy it turns out people still want and prefer older cards compared to the RTX ones, in consideration of the price-bloat that NVIDIA has saddled the RTX with.

<comment><USER5> > Yes, real-time ray tracing, the new feature in these cards, is so bad that > it's barely usable — but we're used to that, v2 will be better. I have a lot > of sympathy for NVIDIA engineers trying to improve the state of the art, > it's never easy.

Can you explain this more? All the tests of RTX in actual games have been very positive and showed significant improvements in visual quality.

<comment><USER6> The results I've seen show the $1200 GPU playing at 1080p resolution with less than 60FPS.

RTX is clearly a compute-hog: its barely usable even if you pay for the best- of-the-best GPUs. I mean, not to knock Nvidia down or anything, raytracing is one of the most computationally difficult problems in existence right now.

But from a practical and pragmatic perspective, you suffer a major loss in frame-rates and force the GPU to drop in resolution to make the jump to raytracing. Even if you spent $1200 on the card...

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>-----

I'm personally excited to see offline renderers use the RTX features to accelerate offline raytracing. That's probably the more important use of the technology. As it is, RTX isn't quite fast enough for "real time" yet. Just grossly accelerated offline raytracing (which is still impressive)

<comment><USER5> According to PC Gamer and Digital Foundry, the 2080Ti can drive Metro Exodus with RTX on at average 55fps with drops down to 30fps at 4K resolution so your claim seems grossly exaggerated - [https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/YhDHpgGrAmpmnP4LUBEgvg.png](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/YhDHpgGrAmpmnP4LUBEgvg.png)

Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/01/07/battlefield_v_nvi...](https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/01/07/battlefield_v_nvidia_ray_tracing_rtx_2080_ti_performance/3)

Battlefield V Ultra 1080p RTX on is ~63 FPS average (not minimum FPS, but average), which means it will regularly dip below 60 in practice.

> Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and > doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime.

On the contrary! RTX Cores are a hardware-accelerated BVH-traversal. That has HUGE implications for the offline rendering scene.

See NVidia Optix for details: [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray- tracing-powered...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray-tracing- powered-rtx/)

IMO, this is the killer-feature of RTX. Accelerating those Hollywood Renders from hours-per-frame to minutes-per-frame. NVidia Optix takes industry- standard scene trees and can use the RTX Cores to traverse them for hardware- accelerated raytracing.

Or more specifically: coarse AABB Bounds checking, which is a very compute & memory heavy portion of the Raytracing algorithm.

Even if RTX is too slow for video games, any improvement to offline rendering is a huge advantage.

<comment><USER7> Optix was developed a decade ago and doesn't require RTX cards. It run on any Maxwell or newer card. It's NVIDIA's version of RadeonRays.

What NVIDIA is trying to sell people is a denoiser.

And are you sure RT Cores even exist or are they just tensorcores by a different name?

[https://youtu.be/3BOUAkJxJac](https://youtu.be/3BOUAkJxJac)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also [https://medium.com/tensorflow/test-drive- tensorflow-2-0-alph...](https://medium.com/tensorflow/test-drive- tensorflow-2-0-alpha-b6dd1e522b01)

<comment><USER9> If you're interested in upgrading your models, also make sure to check out this Medium post: [https://medium.com/tensorflow/upgrading-your-code-to- tensorf...](https://medium.com/tensorflow/upgrading-your-code-to- tensorflow-2-0-f72c3a4d83b5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks god Tensorflow is doing something with global variables and sessions

</comment><comment><USER11> It feels more like Pytorch now: [https://github.com/tensorflow/docs/blob/master/site/en/r2/tu...](https://github.com/tensorflow/docs/blob/master/site/en/r2/tutorials/eager/custom_layers.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER12> What are you using in your projects?

Is TF the dominant tool in commercial or startup DNN projects?

<comment><USER13> TF (or Keras via TF) is definitely the most popular framework for newer projects, although some argue PyTorch is holistically better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any thoughts on how this version now compares to PyTorch 1.0?

</comment><comment><USER15> Cool. I would love to see pypy support for this major version.</comment>


Betting on BeyondCorp and Chromebooks - <AUTHOR> https://www.scaleft.com/blog/betting-on-beyondcorp-and-chromebooks <comment><USER2> > Like most tech companies, we've deployed Apple Macbook Pros to our employees > from the start.

Most tech companies? Really?

Maybe in the Silicon Valley echo chamber, but out in the real world Windows is still the widely deployed standard. Even in the < 20 person shop where I work I had to fight to get a Macbook Pro.

<comment><USER3> In the SF Bay Area, MBPs are the standard.

You're almost certainly correct about the wider world.</comment></comment>


Need technical co-founder for interest-based social network - <AUTHOR> http://angel.co/mylogic

<comment><AUTHOR> I have more than idea - first prototypes done, NLP technology there, detailed understanding of the product and interest from Ron Conway and co-investment commitment from one of VC in Silicon Valley. I'm very close to seed financing. I don't need programmer, I already have team of 3 people. I need strong ideological technical co-founder who can manage technical team and deliver final products. I offer equity and my strong commitment. My backgrounds are physics, cs, economics. Send me mail ikhmel at gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER2> So you have an idea and you want a programmer to make it happen. What terms are you offering? Most programmers have their own ideas they could work on, y'know.</comment>


The breakout of Ansible, and the state of config-management communities - <AUTHOR> http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2015/04/02/quantifying-configuration-management-communities/

<comment><USER2> The one thing I've noticed on ansible-galaxy is that there are a lot of overlapping roles. It's so easy to create a new playbook that it seems like instead of people working together, they just create a new project. Often there are similar roles that just install thing differently. For example one installs using apt but another copies files to /opt. I've seen other users create separate roles because they want the target machine to not have an internet connection so they download files to a controlling-machine and then copy them to the target.

I guess this could be viewed as a good thing since it is filling a specific need that the creator has. I just wish a lot of the roles could be consolidated and have more standardized conventions.

Recently I've been using packer.io to create docker images using ansible. It would be amazing to have the ability to use docker cache. For now I have just been creating intermediate docker images to cache things myself. It works but is harder to manage.

</comment><comment><USER3> With Ansible and Docker, what good is something like chef anymore?

My DevOps stack has become Jenkins, Ansible and Docker only at this point. It seems chef has been made redundant but am interested to hear other opinions.</comment>


No, Nate, brogrammers may not be macho, but that's not all there is to it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/technology-and-society/2f1fe84c5c9b

<comment><USER2> >It's quite true that a lot of these problems are "pipeline" problems. Decades of subtle processes can shape the number of qualified applicants and make it hard to hire people across the spectrum. However, it's not enough to throw up one's hands and blame the pipeline because the issue continues to persist at every stage and something can be done at every stage. [sic] Some of the offenders will be well-meaning people with blind spots, others might be malicious bullies. Some accusations may feel unjust while others will feel right on.

There are many commentators on HN who appear defensive of the industry or critical of those with complaints when discussing gender inequalities who need to spend some time with this article.</comment>


And this is why I think Palantir is behind PRISM - <AUTHOR> http://someoneweird.github.io/blog/blog/2013/06/09/its-a-trap-slash/

<comment><USER2> Palantir makes multiple products.

What their rep said is they sell a product that happens to be called Prism, and that product is used for banking.

Do a bit of reading and you'd also discover some high-ups in Palantir got there after attempting to develop a similar system in-house with US government intelligence agencies. IIRC, it's not known whether those programs were successful.

Did you actually just try to prove that Palantir has military/intelligence contracts to prove their involvement with NSA's PRISM?

</comment><comment> o0-0o And why is the CIA an investor?</comment>


Ask HN: Who Should We Hire Next? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
Myself an a mate started a small software agency 2 years ago (http://inoutput.io), and have been lucky enough to land some big clients (public transport/insurance/trading industries) building bespoke biz automation apps. We work on nerdy things: Big-data, desktop apps, system integrations.
Things are going really well, hired 2 more devs in our first year - and already feeling like we need to hire again.
My co-founder and I both love programming - and although I have done ok so far - neither of us wants to spend 100% our time scoping, writing giant docs, client management/comms, etc.
My question is, who do you think we should hire next (or rather, what "role")?
Another dev would probably mean I have to take the project manager role full time (or close too), and I don't really have experience with hiring a Project manager (or B.A) that is that technical to be able to fill that role... but I guess they must exist!
Is there such a thing as a magical developer that doesn't want to develop, but instead wants to do technical scoping, write documents and talk to clients? ;) <comment><USER2> I don't know if this would work in your specific business sector but when I read your description I thought: Take a page from the Pivotal Labs playbook. They did, and do, exceptionally nerdy things. But they steer their clients with a very deep Extreme Programming, Agile methodology. All of their engineers are also project people. All of their engineers can also talk to clients. But they do so in a very specific way. They plan projects the same way. They write documentation the same way. They interact with clients the same way. They have the "Pivotal Way" and they stick to it.

When they came into a project that I was working on they took two hours to look at what we were doing. They took another two hours to map our a plan to get us where we were going using an XP style story map. They spent an hour getting it into Tracker and having a planning meeting with us. Then they started working. Using Agile Principles they were able to keep up with the scoping, the docs, and the communication in about half an hour a day every day. This was no small project. I can't say how much we paid them for those few months, but imagine a number with seven digits. So, this was not a small project.

I have used this same methodology myself and it has been extremely beneficial and lucrative. We get a lot of work done, we make clients very happy, and we live according to principles we really believe in. It's amazing for business.

At any rate, hopefully this will help you a bit. To answer your question more directly, hire another engineer. Change the parts of your business that aren't effective for your style of work to something that is effective. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your right, we should probably focus on refining project & dev methodologies, which would free up some "space" (logistically and mentally!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are only really two ways to scale an agency, as far as I know.

1\. You can charge more.

2\. You take on more work in parallel.

The second is usually a thing to some degree, you add devs etc., but it doesn't drastically increase your earnings per head so there tend to be diminishing returns - network costs of a larger team, the need to sustain a flow of more and larger deals. This requires some drastic changes to the company itself, how you work, the type of deals you pursue...it can be profitable, but it's a mess.

Which leaves #1, increasing the value of deals you take on with roughly the existing team. What is stopping you from doubling your next quote? Skills gap? Type of project? I'm betting it's more "type of client" and "sales process" than needing another developer, since (from a once-over of your team section) you seem to have the major bases covered already, and perhaps more so than you'd need with a more narrow project type & target customer.

Re: specific roles you asked about...

There are technical writing specialists & sales engineers. A good sales engineer is expensive if they're any good, and very likely overkill for a small agency. It's usually up to the person or people running the agency to learn sales. There's a spectrum of skill involved, but even the shallow end makes you VERY dangerous in comparison to the median sales-averse developer.

As to a technical writer...how much does documentation affect your deals & billing rate? This can probably be better addressed by process, make improving doc quality a real priority by setting aside time for it every week & comping for training materials on better docs and copywriting.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are options that aren't mentioned that are worth considering:

1\. Don't grow. Maybe this means not at all. Maybe it means slowly. Maybe it means not right now because there isn't a good plan for handling it. There's nothing wrong with a lifestyle business and anyway that's more or less what a consultancy usually amounts to even at 50 staff.

2\. Merge. Buy or sell to or partner with with a company which is strong where you are weak and vice versa. This is also a long play.

3\. At the size you are, the Owners need to be dealing with clients on important issues. Bringing in another partner, and by partner I mean partner, will allow the client load to be shared among more people.

Good luck.

<comment><USER5> > and anyway that's more or less what a consultancy usually amounts to even at > 50 staff.

I recommend _Managing the Professional Services Firm_ on HN every few months, but it's really good. In the very first few chapters he shows that in a partner/associates model, brining in new customers doesn't actually increase profits for the partners, but only gives you room to promote associates to new partners. Not that that's perfectly true, but it's good to think through it.

<comment><USER4> Having been in professional services since before recorded time (in internet terms), that's true if the partners are adverse to screwing people over. But profits can be increased by convincing associates that 2% equity is a big deal and deducting an inflated cost of the equity from their salary and then giving a fraction back as bonus (maybe) at year's end.

The reason that's so common is that a consultancy never makes it's owner's Bill Gates and only rarely PG after selling ViaWeb wealthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An account executive? If you wanted to spend more time writing code, and less time getting bogged down with contracts etc. Plus, as a service provider myself, there will be dry spells. Having someone pounding pavement will help to smooth that out and continue to help your grow in the good times.</comment>


Top 100 Newsletters for Developers and Designers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/commit-push/top-100-newsletters-for-developers-and-designers-727dfc76c9a#.7pjbaahwc <comment><USER2> Thank you so much for these amazing ideas! I've been currently working on my own newsletter design using this ready-made template - [https://www.templatemonster.com/newsletter-email- templates.p...](https://www.templatemonster.com/newsletter-email- templates.php) . Hope, my newsletter will be included to your list one day!</comment>


Ask HN: Challenging math software for 8yo kid? - <AUTHOR>

She greatly enjoys mental arithmetic and I'd like to  find some software that challenges her.  There's loads of stuff out there but I don't know whether any of it is good.  Ideally looking for personal recommendations.
For context, the mental arithmetic she does is stuff like adding 3 digit numbers, multiplying 2 digit numbers and some basic algebra.  She continually asks me for math problems but I'm not sure where to go next.
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I'm making the assumption that she gets her regular mathematics lessons in school, and that is why you are asking about software rather than books. (Please correct me if that assumption is not correct.) A good set of books can be challenging and fun even if it is not on a computer. I like Miquon Math

<http://www.keypress.com/x6252.xml>

for starting out my children, and then the Singapore Primary Mathematics materials (which now have an edition aligned to United States curriculums standards)

[http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...](http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/134.htm)

appropriately supplemented by ALEKS

<http://www.aleks.com>

and EPGY.

<http://epgy.stanford.edu/district/info.html>

(The last two of these resources are online services with adaptive learning software.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do you need software? My suggestion is to pick a book with word problems appropriate for her level. Take a look at this article by Prof. Toom on "Russian-style" word problems.

[http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN- NEW.pd...](http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried DragonBox (iOS) yet? It's not exactly what you are asking for but it takes creativity, logic, and maths and jumbles them all together. My 8yo really enjoyed it.</comment>


Ask HN: Podcast Listening Numbers - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'm trying to build something in the podcast space and would love to have per episode listening numbers for, maybe, the top 100 or so Podcasts. The stats I found online are very high level (per publisher, or per podcast).
Is there a Paid API that does what I'm looking for? <comment><USER2> "Science Zone Radio" is a 24/7 podcast stream from the NSF [http://amber.streamguys1.com:4200/live](http://amber.streamguys1.com:4200/live) I seldom have time to futz around with individual podcasts, but this NFS stream provides a wide scope of science topics from dozens of podcasts. When I hear something especially interesting, I can search out the original podcast site. It has introduced me to many fascinating subjects that I would have otherwise overlooked. Tax dollars well spent!!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not in the podcast industry, but I'd listen to this episode of Darknet Diaries:

[https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/](https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/)

He dives into "podcast promoters" that are pretty effective at getting into the top charts. I mention this not because I think you should use these services, but because he actually gets some evidence around what the charts are based off of.

It's also a great podcast in general.</comment>


Show HN: Gmelius 6 – Gmail just got better - <AUTHOR> https://gmelius.com/?ref=hn <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if the privacy protection claims made by Gmelius are true.

The plugin claims that I am being tracked via tracking pixel (or other image) embedded in emails and that the trackers know when I read my email and where I read it from (from my IP address). Is this true? Google server attachments through a proxy. This would prevent trackers from seeing my IP address. If assets are cached or pre-downloaded by Google, then trackers wouldn't know when I read their emails either.

Gmelius might even decrease privacy. The plugin includes a JavaScript file hotlinked to inboxsdk.com. It's possible that inboxsdk.com is tracking users this way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Regarding your tracking remark, companies such as YesWare, MailTrack, MixMax (and so on) use pixel trackers. While such trackers are indeed made available through a Google proxy, the caching is overridable if you pass a no- cache header ([http://blog.movableink.com/real-time-content-and-re-open- tra...](http://blog.movableink.com/real-time-content-and-re-open-tracking- return-to-gmail/)). The Inbox SDK makes easier the interaction with Gmail's UI and does not transmit or index data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://gmelius.com/pricing/](https://gmelius.com/pricing/)

Presumably the free tier is for one account?

       > Number of Accounts:  --

makes it seem like "None", but then, why would you give "Best Effort" email support or any at all if I don't have an account :)

Would suggest "1" is clearer.

There's also a couple of sections with hashmarks but no "Coming soon/Q1/etc." \- presumably they follow on from the last section, but it's not immediately obvious what the hashing even means.

It also seems that you _do_ support Inbox by Gmail [1] - but I had to Google this, after nearly dismissing Gmelius because it makes no mention of Inbox on the site.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmelius-for- inbox-...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmelius-for-inbox-by- gmai/dlbjhjnahgmigifoggidegpakbcjomgg?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not just write an email client that has sugar for connecting to gmail? A lot of the gmail UI, to me, feels clunky. I switched my email client out to RainLoop as it has all of these features and it also allows me to connect to multiple inboxes at the same time, as well as different types of email servers.

</comment><comment><USER5> The thing I lack in GMail (or other mail clients / services for that matter): the ability to rename conversations, as well as split/fork them according to my wishes.

Anyone know of an alternative that does this?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can do that with Gmelius (premium tier) by enabling the so-called feature "Edit the subject line in reply and forward".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Regarding the overriding of a message's design with the theme-based reset: Are bulk precedence messages excluded? As they are more likely to be "designed" (and spam-laden mails using CSS obfuscation are effectively filtered already by Gmail, and thus shouldn't be a primary concern), I would humbly suggest excluding bulk or transactional precedence (changing styles of an invoice could complicate a vendor's life when the "reset" version doesn't look like a standard invoice, for example) emails from this trickery.

Are emails with certain CSS or markup designed for accessibility excluded? If I carefully selected a high contrast design, with heavy stroke-weight fonts because my recipient is vision impaired, or I included specific ARIA landmark roles or other markup, and that markup's semantics are changed when the presentation is changed ... Is Gmelius going to blindly overrule these considered choices?

Can a user choose to exclude senders from having their styles overridden, or themselves change the overriding style sheet? Maybe their contacts list senders don't get overruled?

It's bad enough that ISPs inject themselves into web sites, please don't believe that you are harmlessly changing things for the better. Unless you've got serious design and accessibility knowledge that will ensure emails' design intent or accessibility for disabled users aren't affected, it seems like a needlessly complex and burdensome thing to manage.

Of course, maybe your target audience doesn't care, or knows that accessibility is affected and proceeds anyway. I certainly don't assign malicious intent to the extension, either way. I think it's a nice collection of user styles/user scripts, and if I wasn't already using a different client, I'd at least experiment with your additions (after turning off that vexatious CSS reset, ugh, that kind of thing really bothers me).

TL;DR: Well done. Please consider using bulk/transactional precedence (used by most legitimate commercial senders) and/or user overrides via whitelist or de- facto lists like contacts to exclude emails from having their styles overruled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. When a user enables the feature that homogenizes the look of incoming emails w.r.t. its Gmail theme, Gmelius will not modify the style of well-formatted HTML emails (e.g., invoices, newsletters, etc.).

<comment><USER6> That's excellent news, and thanks for responding! Can you share how you determine this threshold?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tried to use as a free tier user but I think Gmelius provides almost nothing to me unless I upgrade to premium.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Subtle highligh effect

Missing a letter there :) Looks pretty cool, although I'm pretty happy with Gmail as-is.

<comment><USER4> I missed that when I was reading through, good catch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do need the "send mail later" feature, however I use Boomerang for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> In addition to our "email scheduling" feature, email follow-ups and reminders will be soon available as well. With the latter features and other ones Gmelius currently offers (e.g., To-do App, email trackers detection and blocking, email templates), I'm sure your will find a place for Gmelius in your browser...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would love it if they could add the 'trash' icon to messages in Inbox.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is on our roadmap and will be added to Gmelius for Inbox soon.

<comment><USER10>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Broke a lot of things for me like subjects not appearing and unclickable buttons .

<comment><USER12> Subject does not appear until I click a button next to the recipient field in replies and forwards in vanilla Gmail

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't it against Google T&C?

</comment><comment><USER14> Mixmax is my current favorite.</comment>


Interview: Damien Katz Relaxing on CouchDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/CouchDB-Damien-Katz

<comment><USER2> The interview was basic, but I enjoyed it. CouchDB is one of my favorite projects, and we've been using it on a few different things.</comment>


Ask HN: I made $1M - what now? - <AUTHOR>

I'm single, in my mid-20s. For the last few years, I've worked on a variety of my own projects and managed to strike it lucky on my latest one.
I've lived very comfortably on $30K a year and I'm not interested in making any more money- I intend to invest and live off what I've made. But I haven't got a clue what to do with my life!
HN is by far the smartest and most helpful community I've ever found, and I'd love to know thoughts, ideas or suggestions any of you have - what now? What would you do? <comment><USER2> If you intend to retire at 25 years old with only 1 million you will need to become a very sophisticated investor (and not lose your shirt in the process).

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not start with telling how you made your $1M? :)

<comment><USER4> In your mid 20s, made $1M.. Think you probably can take time out to write a book. And figure out what you want to do next. i.e. Build something interesting? Or invest in a startup?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow - congratulations. If you have managed to make 1 million in your 20's, you are probably a very driven person who could impact the world in a lot of ways.

I suggest doing a little bit of reflection on what you want out of life. Money is nice but in my opinion, it is only an enabler of doing other, more important things in life. So, I would suggest trying to write a list of 50 things you wish to have done before you die, doing a little bit of self reflection and to seriously consider working on something other than money making projects for a while.

</comment><comment><USER6> Studying might be interesting, find a community and activity you're passionate about and can connect with people. Our jobs play a major social role in our lives. Not needing a job means you need to have that social community some other way.

Maybe try volunteering? Code for America? Geeks Corps? Try going to school and getting a phd in something which interests you. It's important to be engaged in meaningful activity to lead a rich and full life.

</comment><comment><USER7> In your position, I'd either keep working or go back to college/university.

I'd keep working only on something I'm really passionate about, and do it for fun. I wouldn't do 40-hrs a week or something stressful. I'd work on something I love even if I can't make a lot of money out of it.

As for studying, I don't know what I would study but I always love learning more stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am so happy I was a whitewater rafting guide in college before I ever became a tech guy. The interests that I learned there have stayed with me ever since regardless of how financially successful I become. Get a job doing something random that sounds fun.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's great. Congratulations!

Read this book. It has all the answers for someone in your situation. Seriously. <http://www.amazon.com/Most-P-G-Wodehouse/dp/0743203585>

</comment><comment><USER10> If you're not interested in making more money, then asking people here what to do with may not yield many responses. ;) Congrats, btw.

</comment><comment><USER11> Take a vacation. Be frugal with your money and you should never have to work again if you can live on 30k a year.

<comment><USER11> Learn to play an instrument. I've always found that to be a rewarding waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Follow what's interesting to you and hopefully that will lead you to a passion.

<comment><AUTHOR> How could I begin to find what I'm interested in?

<comment><USER13> You seriously don't know what you like to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems crazy, but I've never properly considered it! I wanted think about every possibility, rather than just straightaway going for something I think I like.

<comment><USER14> The answer to what you love to do will come by getting involved in things, one door opens another door. Volunteer, teach, go back to school, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> if you can get a little more, do some altruism and then do whatever make u happy

</comment><comment><USER16> Are you in a rush?

</comment><comment><USER17> Starting a PhD ?

</comment><comment><USER18> What worked for me was travel - long term travel, working overseas. Then I became interested in the linguistics, art, geography and history of other parts of the world. I think I could pretty happily live almost anywhere now, and notice and value the good things about my environment a lot more than I used to, having gone without. Things like art galleries, museums, good cinema, interesting bars, global food.

<comment><USER19> Likewise. I was fortunate to live and travel through South America and Southeast Asia through my teenage years since my father took overseas engineering jobs. I cannot begin to express what traveling, and more importantly, immersion, will do to your vision and your priorities. It's a wonderful world out there.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What features would you like to see implemented in the Linux Kernel? - <AUTHOR> Also Reddit discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bf6j9f <comment><USER2> WireGuard is the only feature that comes to mind for me. Having it in the kernel will be a game changer and it can't come soon enough.</comment>


Mapping Traffic Fatalities - <AUTHOR> http://lucaspuente.github.io/notes/2016/09/01/Mapping_Traffic_Fatalities <comment><USER2> I'm very pleased (from a data insight standpoint) that the map doesn't look like a population heatmap [1].

As a next step, I suggest calculating the actual rate of fatalities in a particular location vs. some naive estimate for that area, based on traffic counts, car utilization, or nearby population. This will highlight places that have a higher-than-expected number of fatalities.

Some of these places can already be seen visually. For example, Florida is blotted in red even though the population is concentrated around the coasts and bays and the Orlando area; therefore US 301 and other 'interior' portions are more dangerous than population alone would explain.

The Carolinas are similarly covered, well-outside of the Crescent from Raleigh-Durham through the Triad to the Charlotte suburbs. California's Central Valley looks particularly dangerous too, despite most of the traffic sticking to the far western edge with I-5, or the eastern valley floor where the built-up areas are.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

<comment><USER3> It looks exactly like a population heatmap.

<comment><USER4> More like a traffic heatmap. California seems to have a lot of red dots on the I5 between LA and SF. Not a lot of people live there.

<comment><USER5> I wonder how much "proximity to a good hospital" changes it, as well. If I could zoom in far enough, and traffic can be assumed to be constant, would there be more fatalities on the remote parts of I-5?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would it help to use data like yearly per capita consumption of gasoline by state [1] (as a proxy for miles driven per person) in addition to the existing data? Would that make a difference and shed any more insight?

[1] [http://www.statemaster.com/graph/ene_gas_con_percap- energy-g...](http://www.statemaster.com/graph/ene_gas_con_percap-energy- gasoline-consumption-per-capita)

<comment><USER7> You can get vehicle miles driven by state directly, and also such data as fatalities per road user and per miles driven: [http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general- statistics/fatalit...](http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general- statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview)

However, you won't get much insight from plotting this data geographically: a table (as in that link) is enough. Basically you get exactly what is expected: Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "Law of the Canadian Border" \- southern states have more social problems.

If you want high-resolution geographical data for purposes such as finding problem roads, that would be a lot more difficult - you need to have a graph of the road network (from e.g. Open Street Map), with traffic data attached to the arcs of the network (I don't know of any public access databases like that, although such data is commercially available for road planning) plus accident locations accurately mapped to the roads. I suspect it wouldn't be a quick project to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am struggling with what will be the purpose of this. Any project that I work on with traffic analysis, PD&E, or roadway design includes a crash analysis.

The crash analysis includes an analysis of every accident within a five year period, identification of high crash locations and what caused the crash (high speed, inebriation, or a list of other options), and then what strategies can be adopted for the most impact in a benefit/cost analysis.

Just looking at heat maps of crashes without inclusion of traffic volumes (one crash per million miles is nothing compared to an area of one crash per thousand miles traveled) becomes meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER9> have a love-hate relationship with the NHTSA database. On one hand, it covers 40 years of data, and unlike virtually every other long-running dataset in existence, it keeps not only a relatively standardized schema, it publishes a all-in-one user manual that covers every year (and any changes between them); most places publish a new PDF for every year, which means you have to read through each one. Even better is that when they make changes or additions to their methodology, they publish an auxiliary dataset that you can use to retroactively update old datasets.

But then for some reason, they throw out all rationality when it comes to naming files and fields. It's as if there was employee who was old-school and was stuck in mindset of naming things under the 8-character all-caps limitation. And then someone else thought, " _Fuck this_ ", and went the entirely opposite direction by naming files with long titles and spaces, and the two employees had a passive-aggressive argument that never got resolved over the decades.

This makes scraping and collating the data a real pain in the ass. But compiling the data got a lot easier when I realized that wget works on FTP sites. Here's a mirror of the FTP site (around 1.7GB zipped) that I put up on Github (still working on getting everything together in one database): [https://github.com/wgetsnaps/ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov-- fars](https://github.com/wgetsnaps/ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov--fars)

</comment><comment><USER10> Already available for the UK, see:

[http://www.crashmap.co.uk/](http://www.crashmap.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it possible to make such a map for homicides? Does the data exist with sufficient location information?

<comment><USER9> The FBI Uniform Crime Report and/or NIBRS may be the most comprehensive/granular data there is on homicides nationwide, but I don't think there's incident-level geography:

[https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/NIBRS/](https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/NIBRS/)

Counting homicides, and even determining what exactly is a homicide, is not as clear as one might think:

[http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/homicide-watch-an- inter...](http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/homicide-watch-an-interview/)

Not that many agencies post the data themselves. Surprisingly, the NYPD does post it as part of their felonies dataset: [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-7-Major- Fel...](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-7-Major-Felony- Incidents/hyij-8hr7/data)

<comment><USER12> Good find with the NYPD link. I've seen New York data before that just went precinct by precinct, but this has exact latitude and longitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't it pretty much a US population density map (if it's not, I can't quite see the difference)? If there are differences, it would have been interesting to display the number of accidents in an area as a proportion of the population.</comment>


The Game Boy Camera, one of Nintendo's weirdest, most ingenious inventions - <AUTHOR> https://www.avclub.com/celebrating-the-game-boy-camera-one-of-nintendo-s-weir-1823194235 <comment><USER2> I had one of these back in my elementary school days, it was an incredible amount of fun. Went well with the Game Boy Printer.

In retrospect, the entire "game" was quite bizarre and somewhat psychedelic.</comment>


Why PostgreSQL for Analytics Infrastructure (DW)? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/nvquanghuy/why-postgresql-for-analytics-infrastructure-dw <comment><USER2> Nice presentation, however one part is missing. Displaying the most important metrics in an easy way, whereever you may be. We use Databox app for that, it can connect directly to PostgreSQL, as a bonus.</comment>


HN-esque conversations on Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/jyutu/i_accidentally_my_girlfriends_small_business/

<comment><USER2> I hope your title was sarcastic.</comment>


Startup Quote: Todd Garland, founder, BuySellAds - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1437206228

<comment><AUTHOR> Openly share and talk to people about your idea. Use their lack of interest or doubt to fuel your motivation to make it happen.

\- Todd Garland (@toddo)</comment>


Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet? - <AUTHOR>

To be clear as to the extent of Earth's "supposed" damage: think "Worldwide Burning of Alexandria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_alexandria#Destruction_of_the_Library)". How could we cope with a sudden breakdown in infrastructure and still hold the Internet together? I'm thinking that it would involve a lot of wifi hopping. I was looking to discuss some other hackerish ways.<p>Thinking about it more, what about:<p>* A lot of dedicated space on computers for p2p/reversion control gracefully degrading storage. To preserve knowledge.<p>* An ability to utilize any computer with a unified OS.<p>* Power and battery systems: UPS and a preservation of laptops and netbooks? Perhaps some mobile phones (though the iPhone doesn't come to mind, for obvious reasons).<p>* Mailing beacons? A way to Old Pentium II boxes with some puppy Linux and a wireless antenna?<p>* A change in culture: growing a hacker ethic in children and getting people to pass on their knowledge, rather than use it for profit (or limit the growth of such use to 3rd-world nations; etc). <comment><USER2> 1) I think we can all agree that porn would find a way!

2) It seems to me that the better part of building any technology is just knowing that's its possible in the first place. If memories of the internet "before the crash" were still fairly vivid in the people trying to recreate it, it could be done much faster the second time around.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ethernet, and the Internet, were build from the ground up to survive such a catastrophe. My best bet, although boring, would be that surviving copper pairs would be used, power generation would be very local (generators, solar, battery-operated microservers, etc.) and worldwide routing would coalesce slowly from there. We'd see random pockets of the world appear and disappear from the global connectivity since there would be little redundancy, akin to the old days of FIDOnet. With time, any dark fiber that survived would light up, redundancy would build up, and more people would have access. Wireless transmission, IMO, would take a longer time to appear since they are more power-hungry: first packet radio, and wifi only if laptops survived relatively intact (although short range would make wifi pretty useless, except in larger population areas).

</comment><comment><USER4> You'd be worried about a lot of other things before you were worried about building another internet.

How to grow food, how to stay alive, how to hold on to any posessions and how to avoid being murdered/raped/drafted and so on.

File sharing and email would be the last on your to-do list.

Also, the internet and any global span network would require a fair amount of power.

The one thing I'm fairly sure of would not be what would be the first to come, but what would be the last to go, which is the radio amateur AX25 network.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AX.25>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my primary concern would be to preserve the mnemonic qualities of the Internet; storing the knowledge within the Internet is not just a question of a physical apocalypse, but a cognitive one as well. Another concern I have is the growing government sentiment on censorship: New Zealand and Australia have already made strong legislation on censorship, and South Africa is considering this as well.

I myself faced censored Internet in Syria — I used a server back in the States to get to sites like youtube (it got to a point where I just used youtube-dl and rsync after additional compression).

Thanks for the link.

<comment><USER4> You could do worse than to download wikipedia and print it out.

Paper is pretty resilient, electronics are not. That's why it took a burning of the Alexandria library to wipe that knowledge.

And better use acid free paper. And print it out several times and spread as many copies as you can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There was a time a few years ago when I was absolutely certain that the world was going to return to sustenance level living really soon (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe>). And then I read The Road and got _extremely_ depressed.

So I've thought about this a lot, and even asked someone (who you may have heard of) if there was already a system or procedure in place so people could keep in contact after a global catastrophe. His answer was a simple "no." My thought was that if people could keep in contact, they could better manage their survival, to access information on crop growing and to get updates on any "nomads" who might be roaming around.

The best answer really is amateur radio. And hopefully information can be recovered from hard drives after the world becomes stable again.

But please don't get me wrong. I don't advocate people freaking out. My dad was a missile engineer (programmer?) who really pounded the peak oil thing into us, and his predictions on "wars over energy" really influenced my thinking, so it's hard for me to gauge how biased I am.

<comment><USER6> For communication purposes, Amateur radio would be the most common and accessible. Although, I have a feeling the internet would be much more resilient than it may be given credit for; it just might not be a _World_ Wide Web, maybe a _Regional_ Wide Web or _City_ Wide Web....

Someone else had it right too, if there were a large enough catastrophe to knock out the infrastructure supporting the internet entirely - you would be concerned with many other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You just read When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, didn't you?

<http://craphound.com/?p=1678>

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this will be rather simple: Export Servers to the Space along with satellites. Let the earth burn or boil, your servers are always safe and Internet is Up as long as sun is empowering it with Energy.

You the users, with a high speed connection you can securely and safely connect to the internet and access your data. People who care a lot about privacy, can send their private hard drives to the space too. A good idea for a startup ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> Question: Do we still have tubes?

</comment><comment><USER10> Carrier pigeons?

</comment><comment><USER11> awry

<comment><AUTHOR> danm</comment></comment>


Email Newsletters Are Still A Serious Business - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/email-newsletters-are-still-a-serious-business/ <comment><USER2> Email is huge for B2B. Executives -- especially those in non-technical fields -- generally couldn't care less about RSS or Twitter. But they spend half of their day in Outlook or (god forbid) Lotus Notes.

<comment><USER3> I've always thought that RSS would have had wider understanding and use if Outlook could discover, consume, and display RSS feeds -- formatted as email messages so as not to confuse the user of Outlook too much.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly what Outlook does.

<comment><USER3> True, I haven't actually used Outlook in years, last time I did I know the version I used didn't do this. RSS has existed in some form since 1999. Outlook seems to have just achieved the ability to consume the format with Office 2007 [1] [2]. And it's buried in the account settings [3]. Which I guess makes sense, but it really should be accessible from the folder pane/list.

[1] [http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook- help/introduction-...](http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook- help/introduction-to-rss-HA001230463.aspx)

[2] [http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/view-rss- and-...](http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/view-rss-and-atom- feeds-in-outlook-HA001175000.aspx)

[3] [http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/add-an-rss- fe...](http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/add-an-rss-feed- HA010159539.aspx?CTT=3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _I don't think things are going to stop here by any means. Content is a huge business and customer acquisition can be done fairly easily if you're sticking to a specific niche._

This is interesting to me because my family's business, Seliger + Associates Grant Writing (<http://blog.seliger.com>), runs an e-mail grant newsletter that's been far more useful to us than anything else we've done in terms of advertising and in terms of getting people's attention. In addition, we regularly look for e-mail newsletter where we can advertise but have trouble finding them—a lot of people want to sell us banner ads on their websites, which have proven useless, but relatively few have newsletters.

I'm not sure why this is; I would guess part of it is because people have to actively sign up for a newsletter, rather than merely finding the website through Google or whatever. Maybe the ads are better integrated.

</comment><comment><USER6> A number of pay per click affiliates found that by including an opt-in to a list during the sales process they were able to make sales again and again and again. Shifting from short term to long term profitability. Why make one sale to a client when you could make several?

<comment><USER7> Repeat sales to existing customers are the backbone of the economy, this should not be a surprise to anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, sadly not enough people pay attention to this. Jacques, I wish you'd write a lot more. You have a ton to teach/smart things to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish the article offered more insight into _how_ these newsletters are worth so much?

<comment><USER9> My understanding is that sites like DailyCandy, etc. do well by having very good open/CTRs for their emails and known/attractive demographics, and can therefore charge quite a bit to place ads. (They don't list ad unit prices, but some more info: <http://www.dailycandy.com/mediakit/>)

<comment><USER10> Wow, the sale price for DailyCandy is an eye-opener (125 million)

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

Edit: already stated in Jason's original post:

[http://jasonlbaptiste.com/commentary/email-newsletters- busin...](http://jasonlbaptiste.com/commentary/email-newsletters-business/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You mentioned a list of potential verticals. Care to name a few?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. It's funny. I almost ended up doing something in this space (mix of content and monetization). If it weren't for Andres pushing me + attending startupweekend, i'd be doing something here instead of Cloudomatic. Some verticals I identified:

\- Casual geeks. People who want to know what we know, but just don't have the time + know geeky tricks.

\- Urban demographic. It's valuable and something overlooked in the tech space. Why do you think all of those things trend on twitter with weird hashtags? It's because of the urban demographic.

\- Family living. People want tips for better family living. It's also a valuable demographic.

\- College focused. Do .edu email addresses only and segment by city. This is how facebook got started and college humor spread. It's highly viral and highly valuable. Think financial companies paying for a dedicated email to 100k college kids with good editorial content.

\- Male fitness. Sort of mens health meets GQ. Fashion, sex, fitness,money,etc. Women often get all the love here when it comes to content online, but this is a gaping hole. If you've ever picked up a fitness magazine, you would know advertisers spend a ton here.

I think there's more. I'd start with either the first one or last one. If you end up doing one of those, I'd love to help in some way possible.

<comment><USER12> Great post with some really great points in the comments as well. There are a TON of upstarts in this space and some already target the areas you've mentioned. Of particular note is Startup Digest (www.thestartupdigest.com), which already has thousands of subscribers and an established presence in tons of cities. At the moment, they send out a weekly newsletter with startup events in each city. Definitely worth subscribing to if you're an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER13> here is the link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489352>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not surprised HARO was successful. It's an incredibly useful service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. It was well run too. I'm actually very curious, what else would do well with something very HARO like - ie- 1-3 emails a day connecting people together.

<comment><USER15> Television/film casting is like that. Being from Los Angeles I had dabbled in "extra" work a bit (still have my expired SAG card! :) Casting agents always need certain looks or skills, e.g. someone tall with red hair that can horseback ride, or has a running car older than 1970. Stuff like that goes out in casting calls, and the best they can do is ask people to work their social network in the traditional way, i.e. family or friends they might know etc. Come to think of it Hollywood in general is pretty low tech...

<comment><USER14> Great insight. Sounds like HAPO (help a producer out) might work. Clearly not just LA because there's also NYC.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a really good idea. There's a service that does this I heard about on mixergy, but not email/haro like.

<comment><USER14> So, shall we build it? I've got next weekend free. Just need someone who can market it to producers.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, marketing is my weakest suit. I'm more of a developer role.

Edit: As a matter of fact this all reminds me of a project I started with an aspiring director, which I still think is a good idea. He approached me with the idea to connect script writers with studios. He had some web design skills and supposed connections. I was to build the backend of the site. I was enthusiastic about that project and even started the coding, but he never delivered on the marketing. He lost his motivation after a competitor site upgraded and corrected many of its flaws (inktip.com).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


High school seniors are making yearbooks on Instagram - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/style/instagram-yearbook-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> More power to 'em. Yearbooks are a racket</comment>


I switched from the cool iphone to iphone SE - <AUTHOR> I was testing on a very old iphone for my job and I was blow away by how great the feel and size of this iphone 4 was. So I went to apple store and got a brand new "SE" and switched my sim card from my now old but cool iphone x thing and I like this SE so much better. Pocket size. Everyone should try this. <comment><USER2> Yes. I own the SE, switched from iPhone 6 because I knew the SE form factor is perfect for me back when it was released.

I really hope that Apple continues the iPhone SE and upgrade it. It's still the cheapest but powerful enough phone you can get. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I own the 128gb SE. Compact form factor - i thought that was the point of phones - and tons of storage for music.

It's like having a smart phone with an oldskool ipod. Sometimes I just don't feel like streaming things.

<comment><USER4> > i thought that was the point of phones

agree 100%, so it seems odd to me that the SE is a 'niche' product and demand is largely for the bigger units. I bought mine from the palo alto apple store and i had to wait a week to get mine. the apple guy told me this was due to low steady state inventory relative to the other iphones.

and the fact that i'm less tempted to surf the web, etc with this 4" screen is another advantage

<comment><USER3> I remember in the nokia days it took one hand to take your phone out of your pocket, text a friend and put it back in your pocket. If i can't do what I need to do with one hand the phone is basically useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still tote my old 4S as a camera and test device. I love that it can stand on it's own edge.

</comment><comment><USER6> Me too. Went from 6 to SE. really hope they maintain this form factor.

</comment><comment><USER7> There have been reports about the SE getting very slow with iOS 11. Did you notice that?

I'm hoping for a March-ish release of an iPhone SE 2.

<comment><AUTHOR> haven't noticed that at all.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> also, i look cool again talking on the phone with the phone to my ear. No longer that huge phone dorky problem.</comment>


Slack is now easier to use with Microsoft's Office 365 apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18301736/slack-microsoft-office-365-apps-integration-outlook-calendar-onedrive-features <comment><USER2> This is a good move from Slack. Microsoft teams is an extremely high quality product already. Slack has to be wary of this competitive force nipping at their heels. I've seen teams make good penetration into large companies by starting as the alternative to sharepoint for new projects/working groups.

Team's live editing functionality of excel files is really really valuable for team collaboration. Slack closing the gap on O365 integration is important for enterprise sales.

<comment><USER3> > Microsoft teams is an extremely high quality product already.

This has not been my experience with MS Teams. If I respond to a message on my phone, and then return to my laptop, Teams has disconnected and I have to restart the app on my laptop in order to get updated messages. Scrolling back even 5 minutes in Teams' message history incurs multi-second latency sometimes, so reviewing the context of a conversation you're in is very painful. Threading is handled very poorly in teams and makes teams feel much more like a decades old forum than a chat application.

I do agree this is a good move for Slack, but only because organizations are adopting teams due to its bundling with Office 365, something most companies are already using. Slack has no other way to survive because the people in the org making these decisions aren't concerned with the quality of the tools they are choosing, just the idea they are getting something for free.

<comment><USER4> yep, teams has a lot of potential, but there's a lot of rough edges. for example until recently copy-and-paste didn't work. i was just thinking of moving from teams to slack. hopefully this is good news

<comment><USER5> We've moved from Teams, to Slack, and back to Teams over the last 2 years. Teams has come a long way since 2017, but the basic chat functionality is still pretty far behind Slack.

Next time, I'll stick with Slack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The headline for this article almost makes it sound like Slack was acquired by Microsoft, which is not the case.

</comment><comment><USER7> G Suite add-ons were also released at the same time (or at least the update notification stated so) and at least the calendar and email add-ons have been awesome so far.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe change the link to the original source: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18301736/slack- microsoft-o...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18301736/slack-microsoft- office-365-apps-integration-outlook-calendar-onedrive-features) \-- which also doesn't have a bunch of popups and autoplaying video.

<comment><USER9> Thanks! We've updated the link from [https://www.techradar.com/news/slack- joins-forces-with-micro...](https://www.techradar.com/news/slack-joins-forces- with-microsoft-office-365).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate these kinds of comments, but this time it's really bothering me. Actually interested in the headline, I stopped my adblocker; my fucking God, is this what normal people face regularly nowadays? It's insane...

<comment><USER11> There is a giant button on the popup that says "Continue with Adblocker"

<comment><USER12> Giant button? Id say it's more of a tiny, humble pale-white link on the bottom. yuck.

<comment><USER11> It's right in the center in bold text for me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This story is just a summary of: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18301736/slack- microsoft-o...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18301736/slack-microsoft- office-365-apps-integration-outlook-calendar-onedrive-features)

It also contains less information as it makes it seem like Slack and O365 are collaborating when they are not.

tl;dr: "Microsoft has shown in the past that it's willing to partner with rivals like Dropbox, but Slack's Office 365 integration was created using public APIs and with no special help from Microsoft. This Slack integration comes just months after Microsoft launched its free version of Teams to rival Slack, just weeks after the company unveiled creative new conference call features for its Slack competitor." (from the Verge article)

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, that site is awful. Mods, please change the link</comment>


Forget Big Banks, BankSimple Provides Same Services w/o Screwing You Over - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/09/27/forget-the-big-banks-banksimple-will-provide-the-same-services-without-screwing-you-over/

<comment><USER2> I really hope that they come out soon. I have been waiting since summer last year for it.

<comment><USER3> Yep, been waiting since then too. Lot's of talk and promise - really hope they deliver.</comment></comment>


US Court of Appeals: An IP address isn't enough to identify a pirate - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/news/76190-us-court-appeals-ip-address-isnt-enough-identify.html <comment><USER2> The court holds that the plaintiff must demonstrate reasonable evidence the defendant was the person using the computer.

In this particular case, the defendant ran what amounts to lodging, was deposed, and it was immediately figured out it wasn't him. The complicating factor is that because his lodging was medical in nature, he was not able to hand over guest information.

I mention this context because it's unlikely you would be able to get out of being sued by saying "Well maybe it was my roommate LOL"

<comment><USER3> > I mention this context because it's unlikely you would be able to get out of > being sued by saying "Well maybe it was my roommate LOL"

Well, the question is whether I'm responsible for the use of my computer network. If someone hacks into it and starts using it without me noticing, am I responsible?

<comment><USER4> France managed to create a law for that specific reason. France decided that any owner of a connection is responsible for it. So if you invite friends over and they start to torrent movies or else, you will be responsible.

<comment><USER5> This seems strange. If someone uses my car for a malicious act, or uses my house's electrical connection to damage the grid, or something like that, I'm clearly not liable.

<comment><USER6> > If someone uses my car for a malicious act [...] I'm clearly not liable.

It is not that simple if you left your car unlocked. Leaving an unlocked car around with the key in the ignition is clearly a public danger.

<comment><USER7> If you put a law like this, why even have a justice system? Either you are guilty of piracy or you are guilty of not securing enough your computer.

Having a case where you are guilty whatever you say makes no sense, especially for something where the damages to society are very abstract and not proven, like piracy.

<comment><USER8> It's possible to actually nor have your computer used in piracy, and the justice system would still be about proving whether it was. Also, even if there was liability for negligence in security contributing to piracy, it might be lesser than for willful piracy itself.

The law suggested may be bad, but it doesn't remove the role of the justice system in determine the existence and degree of liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It surprises me in a way that "big internet" (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast etc) and associated large enterprise interests have not been more staunch proponents of IPv6, at least for fixed consumer connections.

It would be trivial in that circumstance to blow away any kind of NAT and the pseudo-anonymity/plausible deniabililty it provides and make client devices performing illegitimate activity directly identifiable.

I wonder if such a ruling might be different in that context. It's a perturbing thought.

<comment><USER10> > It would be trivial in that circumstance to blow away any kind of NAT

Why do you think so? NAT can be used for IPv6 is exactly the same way it's used for IPv4.

<comment><USER11> IPv6 will _not_ have NAT be the default case... IPv4 NAT _is_ the default for the vast majority of [home] routers, and offers a bit of privacy protection built-in.

<comment><USER10> This is true, but if the op meant what they wrote, then the default is irrelevant. If you keep a NAT, moving to IPv6 doesn't blow anything away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was 18 or so a dozen years ago I had two detectives show up at my door (USA). Apparently my neighbor, with whom we were friendly, had connected to our wifi in order to try to hide his solicitation of a minor (luckily an FBI agent). They just stopped by to let us know trouble might be headed our way during the investigation and court proceedings. It was strange. They just left. Don't know if they ever contacted my dad about it further, but I do know he confessed to the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some IP addresses are more personal than others. What I mean is that yes, on it's own an IP address does not pinpoint persons, but devices. So it remains upon the complainer in the case of a copyright infringement case to present a further reasoning 'above the speculative level' that the by the IP identified device at the time of the infringement was under the control of the alleged infringer.

In this case they failed. That doesn't mean it will always fail.

If you're mobile ISP uses IPv6 for everything and assigned your mobile a static IPv6 address, then it will be harder to argue it wasn't you.

If you're Home router is provided and managed by your ISP, and it is configured to use DHCP Static Leases, then the local IP of your mobile phone (a fairly personal device) is close (not equal) to being equally as effective as a personal identifier as it's MAC.

If on the other hand you connected to an Open-Wifi set up by an amateur 4 NAT's down that does not keep logs, and you randomize your MAC every time you connect to a new network, it might be more difficult for tying an IP to your device without reasonable doubt.

In that last case if the pursuer wanted the open-wifi operator's operation could be made more difficult by DMCA complaints and leverage through the ISP's terms of service.

<comment><USER13> It usually points to a router, of which there can be hundreds of devices connected to it on your home network. Securing your wifi is one thing (which doesn't even absolutely prove that it was one of your home devices that did the torrenting, thanks to things like the KRACK attacks), but to then say "well you should secure your internal network such that torrenting cannot happen" is absolutely ridiculous. Torrent programs can work off any port, so that filters out port blocks. Is grandma going to install layer 7 traffic inspection so the grandkids can't doing illegal stuff on that newfangled interwebs? They'll switch to https then...

My point is that anyone with the technical know-how and very rudimentary internet access can bypass almost any restriction you try to put on it. What if the pirate is a minor and won't listen to their parents and keeps on torrenting? Do you permanently take their internet access away? How does that then stifle them for school homework or their social interaction? How can we expect each and every citizen to deploy NSA grade traffic monitoring on their router? The whole thing is ridiculous and the courts are still vehemently out of touch

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >>> Judge rules that copyright trolls need more than just an IP address if they want to go after copyright infringement. An IP is not enough proof to tie a person to a crime.

I didn't see anything in the story to suggest that the plaintiff was acting as a "troll" in the sense that I understand from reading about patent trolls. In this case, the plaintiff, while found to be in the wrong, was in fact the creator of the content and probably intended to commercialize it.

<comment><USER15> I would argue that in the case of file-sharing that it's Trolling when the plaintiff is going after an individual who, when removed from the system of distribution, would have no real effect on the rate or availability of the copyrighted work. Someone just downloading a copy would always fit this definition, and while BitTorrent always involves some amount of "distribution" by the legal definition, they don't represent a distributor in a meaningful way.

Going after this individual does not protect the the monetization of the copyrighted work. The individual's actions only represent the loss of motorization for the single copy they _might_ have purchased. The only possible argument for this protecting monetization of the copyrighted work would be some kind of "chilling effect" on others sharing, but given the prevalence of file sharing after decades of such legal cases, this seems like a extremely weak argument.

Given that, then only reasonable conclusion is that the they are attempting to make money using the law itself, rather then using it to protect the monetization of the copyrighted work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This doesn't seem to be anything new or different. Just because a muder victim's blood is found on your clothes and you are holding a knife doesn't necessarily mean you are the murderer -- but it is evidence.

At the end of the day you will be tried by a judge or a jury. If your only defense is some kind of grand, implausible chain of maybes and what-ifs, they will rule against you. If you have a perfectly reasonable explanation, then they won't.

An IP is just evidence.

</comment><comment><USER17> The content companies were so eager to settle out of court for just this reason; they knew that if enough of these cases went to court, a judgment against them results in case law that hinders their ability to strong-arm casual pirates.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good decision. It could have gone badly. That is, that hosting open WiFi without logging user activity makes you liable for infringement.

</comment><comment><USER12> The article states that 'this is a win for privacy advocates and pirates'.

I'm not disagreeing, but I hope this will not re-open doors of trying to leverage this into getting IP addresses out of being privacy linked data in a privacy regulation context.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it enough to identify state sponsored attacks?

<comment> wu-ikkyu It would seem so (though it shouldn't be). IIRC the Sony hack was attributed to NK because they found some NK IP addresses in comments in the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What aggravates me about using IP addresses to accuse alleged pirates is the same thing that aggravates me about traffic cameras: It's not my responsibility, duty, or privilege to enforce the law.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am really curious how this would play out if the user had been running a Tor exit node.

</comment><comment><USER21> Who's up for Gorsuch and Kavanaugh declaring it is?</comment>


Emvoice – Next-gen vocal synthesis - <AUTHOR> https://emvoiceapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't look like there's any Machine Learning involved, just a better (or at least more natural/western sounding) library of recordings compared to Vocaloid.</comment>


Let Developers Register for Your API with Their Github Profile - <AUTHOR> http://apievangelist.com/2012/07/18/let-developers-register-for-your-api-with-their-github-profile/

<comment><USER2> Having never used github for authorization, I clicked on the sign-up button that Singly provided. Among the bullet points that github issues, this one seemed a bit more than mildly concerning.

      * Update your public and private repositories (Commits, Issues, etc).

There is a zero chance of me ever agreeing to that.

<comment><USER3> Fixed. We now only request read access to public github data. Thanks again for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks fine if you're a single developer working on a (relatively) small project, but what happens when you grow to two developers? Or you hand off the project? At that point shouldn't the API registration be tied to the application and not the developer?

That said, it's probably more important to lower the initial barrier for entry to drive adoption.

<comment><USER5> Is there anyway to tie it to the team instead of just the developer?

<comment> mh- looking at the (GitHub) API.. doesn't seem like it

<http://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes>

edit: hmm, now I'm not sure. looking at my employer's organization (that I have the 'owner' role on) I can certainly authorize apps via GitHub.com.</comment></comment></comment>