Tell HN: The Free Version of My GPS iPhone App Came Out Today (Gaia GPS Lite) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=333273242&mt=8 <comment><USER2> i was foolish enough to expect this would take me to a product page on apple.com

<comment><USER3> No affilaition, but I just came across this app-store web gateway and thought I'd pass it along:

[http://app-store.appspot.com/?url=viewSoftware%3Fid%3D333273...](http://app- store.appspot.com/?url=viewSoftware%3Fid%3D333273242%26mt%3D8%26ign- impt%3DclickRef%253Dcom.apple.jingle.app.store.xml.MXAutoSourcedGenrePage-US- Lockup_r1c1)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted the paid version a month or so ago, and a lot of HN folks downloaded it, so I thought I'd post the Lite version too.

A download would be much appreciated, and a rating or review would be doubly appreciated: [https://userpub.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZUserPublishing...](https://userpub.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZUserPublishing.woa/wa/addUserReview?id=333273242&type=Purple+Software)

Thanks for all your support everyone! For those of you with Gaia GPS, 2.0 is coming out soon, and includes GPX imports among other stuff.

Here's a link to our website too: <http://www.gaiagps.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi, the link tries to install some app on my (non-existent) iPhone. Is this the app?

<http://appshopper.com/navigation/gaia-gps-lite>

Based on the screenshot, my only nitpick would be that the colors on the compass are a bit too toned down. I would prefer a more colorful "N" at least.

Also, did any of the (hopefully) good ideas from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880814> help in any way?

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks like a nice GPS app. I am currently using instaMapper to record and display my GPS loc on my website <http://www.instamapper.com/ext?key=8445164355070808348>. I would like a really lightweight app to measure and upload my location to somewhere where I can plug the waypoints in to the google map API. Just a feature idea.

<comment><USER6> Give accuterra a shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> why does a gps recorder have "frequent/intense mature/suggestive themes" and require that i "must be at least 17 years old to download this application"?

<comment><AUTHOR> As it turns out, if you have a webview in your app that gives access to like wikipedia or google, you have to have this rating.

We found this out the hard way when version 4 of our first app got rejected, after being accepted with the same stuff for several versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the best app I have used in a LONG time! Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER9>
      user:	    maura777
      created:  241 days ago
      karma:    1
      comments: 1

Sockpuppet ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a friend on IM. A bit overzealous :)

<comment><USER10> I saw that you also posted this review of your own app (Gaia GPS, $2.99), claiming that you hadn't tried one of the features:

[http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewConten...](http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewContentsUserReviews?id=329127297&onlyLatestVersion=true&pageNumber=0&type=Purple+Software)

andrewljohnson: * * * * * (five stars)

"The new version of the app is a nice improvement on the original. I particularly like the map bookmarking button, though I haven't used the driving directions yet. The maps from CloudMade are also an improvement on the OSM maps."

What's up with that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course I review my own app. In addition, my co-founders review the app, my dad rates the app, my investors rate or review the app, and anyone else in the world I can get to rate or review it as well.

I don't consider that unethical in the slightest, considering my competitors literally hire PR firms to write reviews for them, and have armies of employees to do the same. I have written on this topic occasionally:

[http://www.andrewljohnson.com/article/Fixing%20the%20App%20S...](http://www.andrewljohnson.com/article/Fixing%20the%20App%20Store%20with%20Measure%20of%20Credibility)

It's not just that "everyone else is doing it" that makes it OK to do. If you want your star ratings to be in the same league as the rest of the apps on the store, then you have to generate more reviews than your regular users will provide to keep up with everyone else. It's not a matter of OK - it's a matter of survival.

I do wish there was more credibility to the reviews on the App Store, but that's just not the way it is. Maybe someday Apple's system won't demand all developers get all their buddies to buy and review their app. It's just absolutely pervasive - go check out some popular apps and see if you can pick out all the fake reviews. The clear giveaways are: 1) has only written one review, or only reviewed the app and competitors 2) references new features in the app 3) badmouths competitors 4) long and rambling. The fake reviews usually have some combination of these.

As long as the big guys are paying for reviews, I don't consider it even a little bit unethical to review my own app. Even in my little navigation market, the top app has a company and at least a dozen iPhones - that's a dozen automatic five star reviews. I can't compete on this front, but I can try.

<comment><USER3> You make a reasonable case for showing up with a review, to match competitive practice. And you didn't use a fake name.

But as CEO/Founder of a 4-person company -- and perhaps a code contributor as well? -- you really "haven't used the driving directions yet"? Even if that's true, it sounds like an embellishment to make the review sound like it's coming from a casual user.

Does Apple have a policy on self-reviews?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, my review was honest. I liked Map Bookmarks, and I haven't used the Driving Directions feature (which we actually cut from version 2). As you point out, I use my standard nick name for my reviews. A Google search for the word andrewljohnson is dominated by me, so when the other poster suggested I would be mortified at being found out... clearly not.

Apple doesn't seem to have a policy on self-reviews, but I'd assume that their feeling is anything goes since they know about companies hiring firms to write reviews and don't do anything about it.

<comment><USER11> I'm the other poster, and I believe you weren't Technically Lying (<http://lesswrong.com/lw/11y/not_technically_lying/>) but why did you bring up that you hadn't used the driving directions? Maybe this had nothing to do with deceiving people into thinking you weren't associated with the product but I find it doubtful. A more honest self-review (if this really is accepted practice on iPhone) would just say why you think your product is good. It seems you're skating a little over the edge at best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ironically, I think that my review is probably obviously not from a "casual user" and that changing it to be a general praise would make it more effective.

I don't think there are hairs to be split here. It's going to be deceptive as long as I don't announce who I am in the review.

It occurs to me that signing the review might be the most effective thing to do - at least I would be unique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This app is awesome! We are using it all the time. Thanks for the good work and keep it coming!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Russell :)</comment></comment>


Study of Face Masks Finds One Type That's Worse Than No Mask at All - <AUTHOR> https://gothamist.com/news/study-face-masks-finds-one-type-s-worse-no-mask-all <comment><USER2> here is the link to the study: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/07/sci...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/07/sciadv.abd3083/tab- pdf)

Note that they used an easily replicated experimental setup and some of the trials were conducted with only one speaker. I'm very interested to see if these findings are replicated.

</comment><comment><USER3> The mask was no. 11 fleece mask.</comment>


Show HN: iOS/Android system wide AdBlock and bandwidth saver - <AUTHOR> https://mobileadblock.com

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't this mean setting up a VPN on the phone and having all traffic routed through mobileadblock.com's servers?

In this day and age of NSA, privacy and spying - not sure too many users will be up for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> In long term for normal users, when they use public WIFI for example, its safer because they have to trust one party instead of all users of public WIFI. If people are willing to use Google Chrome bandwidth savers, this could work. But you are right, all traffic is routed through mobileadblock servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How it working? Proxy/vpn or mobile app or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> You connect to VPN, which sets a system wide proxy, which filters ads and gzips traffic (compressing images as well)

</comment></comment><comment> eugene-d The "contact" link in the footer gives 404.</comment>


JSBin - <AUTHOR> http://jsbin.com/

<comment><USER2> This suffers from one of the same problems as most live editors: try typing `while(true) {}` in the javascript editor - the UI thread will block and freeze up the whole page. Worst of all, you'll lose unsaved work (unless you're persisting to local storage on every character).

This problem is partially solved in the Khan Academy CS editor using a web worker - the code is evaluated in a web worker with most of the side effects stuff mocked out (which is going to be difficult for general javascript) and timed - if it takes more than a couple ms, we kill the execution and give an error. (Try `while (true) {}` in <http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/new>)

<comment><USER3> Any detailed explanation available about how this is implemented (other than by having to dig in the code...)?

<comment><USER2> There's a significant amount of voodoo involved (mostly crazy with() {} statements) in the CS editor that only John Resig fully understands AFAIK, but the rough idea used was to ship the code over to a web worker where all the global APIs it might use were mocked out. This was a relatively short list for KA CS since it's boxed into the processing framework with a few extensions, but would be pretty complicated for full browser environment (probably bordering on impossible). Then we start a timer in the main UI thread, and if the web worker doesn't respond in some amount of time, we kill the web worker and present the error message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I personally prefer <http://JSFiddle.net>

<comment><USER5> I think jsFiddle is great! However, I haven't really tried any of the others. This one looks nice, and just at first glance one thing that I find really interesting is the built in console. I think the devs at jsFiddle should totally implement something like this. Probably the biggest reason I don't use jsFiddle more often is that after I build a demo, occasionally I will need to use the Chrome console to get at and inspect one of my objects or the like, and for whatever reason I can't get at the objects in my fiddle, the console never seems to work right. I will probably give this one a whirl instead the next time I want to use jsFiddle. If everything else is on par with jsFiddle and it has a good console with visibility of all my objects then I'll probably switch to it.

Does anyone know if there is a way to get the Chrome console to work right, ie. have visibility to all the variables, functions, etc that I create in my fiddle?

<comment><USER6> In chrome you can change the context like this: <http://img42.com/oNrDj>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice for some quick and dirty testing, but if I'm going to spend more than 2m hacking something together I prefer Chrome and gvim. I can't work without the Chrome Dev Tools or vim, and jsbin just doesn't work well enough with these for my purposes.

It's good for sharing code and helping people though. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> How about <http://cssdeck.com/labs> ?

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice. I particularly like being able to spin off the final page on a separate URL. Great for demoing HTML5/CSS3 features. I am teaching a class on HTML5 tomorrow and will definitely mention this.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are some bugs, but i like the layout, workspace customization, and UX.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why did no one notice that Dave runs away if you get it too dizzy?

</comment><comment><USER12> No tab completion for tags. Bleh.

</comment><comment><USER13> great , i use <http://plnkr.co/> too which allows to create one's own files.</comment>


Ask HN: What will happen to make VR finally explode, if anything? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> VR - virtual reality, isn't really all that interesting outside of gaming/simulation and training. AR - augmented reality, is where the real money-making opportunities lie. Lots of companies have field services/technicians who would benefit greatly from AR. It's not hard to see the transportation and distribution sectors also benefitting. Even healthcare. The upshot of it all being AR is where the action is, not VR.

<comment><USER3> The map is not the territory and there is no value merging the two. Overlaying data onto vision is just a distraction and assuming something magical happens when you overlay data instead of putting it next to you on a screen is delusional

<comment><USER4> There is little reason to believe that humans are so good at matching from screens to reality that proper located AR information isn't better (in domains like mapping it's quite well studied how error-prone humans are/how hard it is to communicate the right subset of details, while VR research has demonstrated how well real-world representations work).

Regarding distractions, attention management is extremely important for AR, but has also been researched a lot. As long as we keep advertisers out of AR applications we'll be fine.

Not surprisingly, the military already uses it, and I doubt they'd give figher pilots AR helmets if a screen would be more efficient.

<comment><USER3> It adds efficiency for military grade targeting but the everyday applications are more novelty than explosive technology. A field technician will have minimal benefit from a heads up targeting display.

<comment><USER5> >A field technician will have minimal benefit from a heads up targeting display.

I can think of a lot of scenarios where AR would be a great benefit. For example, imagine an electrician running wires through a commercial building and having the wiring path displayed for him. No digging through documentation, measuring, and marking necessary to get the job done. Or imagine fire fighters with AR heads-up displays getting routing information inside building that is smoky and difficult to traverse.

<comment><USER2> In fact my company is exploring doing that for underground wiring. We're also looking into technicians going into a transmission substation and when looking at the equipment it's overlayed with voltage and temperature gauges with a link to access service manuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Answering the open questions would be a good start. I'm a geek and a man of means. Maybe I'll go get one of those HTC Vibes. Seems popular, Steam supports it. Look, all I want to know is how much is it going to cost me to walk into a store and walk out with _everything_ I need. If I get home and find out I need to place an emergency order to NewEgg to get it working, it's getting boxed up and returned. If I have to go digging through video card specs, no deal. Do I even need a computer to hook it to? If so, what OS? Will my 2012 Macbook Pro do?

Not a single one of those questions is answered by the HTC Vibe web site, at least not that I could find. So me, a tech worker with loads of disposable income and a willingness to take a bit of a chance on new tech, won't be dropping $800 on your new device. How in the hell does one expect the proverbial Joe Sixpack to jump on board?

</comment><comment><USER7> Porn?

I'm serious. The Porn industry has been leading technical changes and innovations more often than not.

<comment><USER6> Would you seriously use it? Seems like a bit of bother to me versus just firing up a fave on the ol' 2D 27" monitor, but perhaps my personal tastes don't run parallel to the market in question.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't no, I don't think so. But I think the industry has been exploring this option for a little while now.

TBH, like you, I feel that most of my personal tastes don't seem to mach the actual market (be it for movies, video games, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cheap high-powered graphics cards are one prerequisite.

If industrial history in general is any indication, than some sort of heavy use by militaries, probably for training.

</comment><comment><USER9> More computing power in the headsets that allow it to be used without needing a relatively beefy computer. When there is the ability to use the headset without a computer then it will be able to reach a broader audience

</comment><comment><USER10> Price of entry has to be lower. A vive + a gaming rig that can actually handle VR decently is quite expensive for the avarage consumer.

</comment><comment><USER11> When someone figures out how to move around inside VR. Right now you're stuck in a tiny room, but how awesome would it be to play FPS games where you run around and duck behind objects. Most htc vive games i've played have mastered shooting but I'm always stuck on a tiny platform or standing in one place.

</comment><comment><USER12> My own belief is that retail will benefit from the VR revolution the most, but mostly for using the VR headsets to access an in-store experience using live 360 video / AR .

(edited because mentioning my Y Combinator application didn't come across well)

</comment><comment><USER13> Plug into your brain, so it looks more like reality.

</comment><comment><USER14> Using Samsung batteries might do it.

(I'll get me coat!)

<comment><USER15> Going by usernames we should probably be friends Mr Winstanley</comment></comment>


How to Raise a Global Kid - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2011/07/17/american-kids-immersed-in-chinese-asian-education.html

<comment><USER2> If you take this articles as "Very wealthy man with the resources to do so moves family to where he perceives the focal point of future growth and opportunity will be," it's a rather uninteresting story.

However, if you take this as "American investor perceives future opportunity to be greatest in China, enough so to relocate family"...then it's a bit more interesting. Mostly, because I can be fairly confident in saying that he's wrong. Dead wrong.

Or maybe he's just narrow-sighted? Perhaps his vision is two crowded by the blinders of American investment activity to see that China's prominence in the world economy is directly tied America's prominence in the world economy. Perhaps he's ignored the impending Chinese demographic disaster because it doesn't look too different from the one America is now just starting to face.

Either way, this article reinforces for me the notion that to be rich doesn't require you to be the smartest kid on the block, just the gutsiest (with a good dose of good luck mixed in). You see, if it were up to me, I'd be moving my family to Brazil or Turkey. They have youthful populations. Their economies are well rounded and fairly diversified. Most importantly, though, they are going to be future hubs of their respective regions. Is there any doubt that Brazil will be the future superpower of South America? With Turkey's geographical, political, and demographic position, how can it not be the future nexus of the "East-meets-West-meets-Middle-East" economy?

China...you can have China. I'd even take India over China...but, China is fashionable. And somehow I doubt that Newsweek would write the article about the wealthy family that relocated to Brazil or Turkey.

<comment><USER3> Jim Rogers and his family moved to Singapore, not China.

<comment><USER4> Looks like he's trying to get his kids fleunt in Mandarin Chinese, so essentially he's betting on China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's one thing about it: growing up global does make you see the world different. I'm a Caucasian, English-speaking American, but have lived in Thailand since I was 11. My parents were missionaries, and while we were far from wealthy, we did get to see many of the countries around Thailand due to travels for visas and more. And, of course, we grew up bilingual, never thinking it was odd for others to speak a different language, have different customs or ideas, or eat different foods. Perhaps best of all, we _weren't_ in an elite part of the country full of foreigners, but we lived right in a neighborhood of normal Thais.

And it does make you see the world different. I'm always amazed how much most other Americans see the world as American-centric, and even seeing logos with a globe with the US front and center seem odd to me now. Economics and business classes have been much easier, since the ideas of foreign exchange, international law, and more were a part of everyday life. And speaking a second language as close to fluent as you can is a huge asset, and makes you analyze why you think what you do and why language and society work the way they do in a huge way.

Perhaps sadly, experiencing prejudice from others while being the minority in another country also helps you see the evils of disliking someone because of their language, the way they were educated or raised, their skin color, nationality, or anything else. That in itself can make you a much better person. This won't be the same everywhere, but I've experience enough of it to make my blood boil when I hear racist remarks against others in the US.

Living abroad is not for everyone, but I do think more people growing up with a global perspective would be a very good thing. You can do it right where you live, though. There are ethnic communities all around the world, and the internet brings content of every language to your living room. Raise your children to see diversity as normal, and make sure they know that they're not any different than someone from any other part of the world just because of where they were born, the language they speak, and the color of their hair. Help them see that they can make a difference in the world, and are not limited to jobs or lifestyles in their own community.

If more people were raised like that, the world would definitely be a better place.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your point (moreso than with the article itself), and I would add that growing up as a member of a "traditional" ethnic minority in a country also gives you extra perspectives (even besides the automatic learning of two languages).

This is far from obvious, many of my peers as I grew up saw it as a handicap or as a misfortune that they were supposed to learn two languages and cultures. I say, unless you are facing serious discrimination and as long as you have decent opportunities of practicing both languages, it is a great advantage.

Besides language, another thing I see as advantage is a natural skepticism towards nationalism and all sorts of "rallying" behind a flag (unless you find yourself locked into the mini-nationalism of your own group.) Growing up in minority you realize that countries are artificial constructs, not the most important in the greater scheme of things, that ethnic/linguistic identities are not nearly as absolute as they are made to seem, etc. etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I'm trying to prepare them as best I can for the world as I see it ... The money is in the East, and the debtors are in the West. I'd rather be with the creditors than the debtors"

I certainly think it says a lot about the way he sees the world that the location of global capital is apparently the most important factor in raising his children.

<comment><USER2> You may call it global capital, others may call it opportunity and if they do, then they can rephrase your statement as "the location of opportunity is apparently the most important factor in raising his children." Stated that way, I don't think he's any different than any other parent in history.

<comment><USER8> More precisely it is "economic opportunity". I've yet to see more than a handful of people search out places of opportunity targeted at raising flourishing children, as opposed to seeking out economic opportunity. Raising flourishing children requires a community with good social capital, amongst other things --- money is only one, small contribution, and it is possible to make flourishing communities and children without much money. When I saw the headline about a global kid, I at first thought along these lines, since American society sucks at the pursuit of happiness and human flourishing (despite the propaganda to the contrary) --- and so it makes sense to move to another country/culture for a better social fabric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"I am worried that in this interconnected world, our country risks being disconnected from the contributions of other countries and cultures."

Now there's a non-sequitur.

>"I'm doing what parents have done for many years," Jim Rogers says. "I'm trying to prepare my children for the future, for the 21st century. I'm trying to prepare them as best I can for the world as I see it."

Setting aside the fact that the future is unpredictable, and more unpredictable today than it's ever been, this demonstrates the fundamental error of human relationships: trying to get somebody to live out _your_ vision of what their life should be.

In the case of parenting, imo, it's better to try to be a _better person_ generally than to treat your children as products.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is raising an American kid to integrate culturally and economically with Asia really that great of an idea when taking into account all that we know about the future?

Yes, China is a creditor, but global trade is probably set to wane with the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels. It will certainly become increasingly expensive to pump liquid hydrocarbons into jumbo jets and criss-cross the Pacific. I think forward looking parents will impress upon their kids the importance of local and regional relationships because long-haul transport of goods will likely be seen as a blip on the historical radar.

<comment><USER11> My impression is that the majority of global trade is either in the form of services, which involve only transporting bits (e.g., a US hospital emailing X-rays to an Australian radiologist); capital, which involves even fewer bits; and physical goods that can be transported cheaply by ocean freight and rail. (Shipping a standard cargo container from Asia to the US costs less than US$2000; think of how many iPhones can fit into a box that size.)

<comment><USER12> > Shipping a standard cargo container from Asia to the US costs less than > US$2.00

That's amazing, can you point me to a source for that?

<comment><USER11> Sorry, US$ _2000_. (Which is still amazing, given the size of the box, but not so much.)

I got it from the "Recent liner freight rates" table on Wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship#Freight_market>) and misread the caption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article doesn't get all the facts. What it fails to mention and what I remember watching on MSNBC(?) a few years ago is that Jim Miller paid $80,000 per year for a Chinese nanny for his daughter since she was born. She is fluent in Mandarin from this, not from "packing up and heading to Singapore." Must be nice to have all the cash to do stuff with.

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems to me that this is a continuation of the old American gold-rush mentality: there's always someplace where a new life can be built and a new fortune can be won. The media whip up a frenzy around these topics while the vast majority continue what they've been doing.

This is why I'm not worried about the future of the US, we are always on the lookout for something new and different and despite all the flag waving we're always fretting about being left behind. Compare that with Europe, which takes the opposite approach and is currently on a return path to the nation-state.

</comment><comment><USER15> Jim Rogers is a pretty interesting guy. He's a well known author of "Investment Biker" and "Adventure Capitalist" about trips he took biking or driving around the world. He definitely has cultivated a unique world view for himself.

I grew up in Singapore (for 16 years), and there are fantastic international schools there. The local schools focus less on learning through creative problem solving and more on learning through repetition. I wouldn't put my kid in a local school, but that's interesting he did.

I think that living in another country as an expat creates it's own problems, but trying to totally assimilate is impossible, especially when you look nothing like the locals. The first tends to make you feel superior or separate like I'd imagine the colonials felt. The second will give you humility and expose you to what it's like to be a minority.

There are many ways to skin a cat. Exposure to thinking other than your own is good regardless of how it happens.</comment>


Mcasm – A Microcode Assembler - <AUTHOR> https://www.bedroomlan.org/projects/mcasm <comment><USER2> Funny, the microcode assembler for my toy-cpu which is written in newbie- haskell is called the same thing. [https://github.com/hansihe/ttl_cpu/blob/master/haskell/McAsm...](https://github.com/hansihe/ttl_cpu/blob/master/haskell/McAsm.hs)

This is an example of the syntax it has. [https://github.com/hansihe/ttl_cpu/blob/master/microcode/mic...](https://github.com/hansihe/ttl_cpu/blob/master/microcode/microcode2.tmcs)

It, along with the assembler is configured through a yaml file. [https://github.com/hansihe/ttl_cpu/blob/master/microcode/map...](https://github.com/hansihe/ttl_cpu/blob/master/microcode/mappings.yml)

If anyone is interested, there is an unfinished article about the project located here. [http://hansihe.com/2016/11/25/i-built-a-computer-from- scratc...](http://hansihe.com/2016/11/25/i-built-a-computer-from-scratch.html)

<comment><USER3> From your article:

> If anyone is interested in seeing articles on those things as well, please > tell me.

To which I'd like to respond: "Oh very much so! Please share!"

I've subscribed to your RSS feed, so you're sure to have at least one very interested reader.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I'll see if I can get something more written soon. Is there anything in particular you think I should prioritize?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone attempted to fab a chip in an older process? I have wanted to build a CPU for kicks, but it would be great to have real silicon rather than being stuck on FPGA. I'd consider it reasonable if you could fab a CPU for <$2000 or so.

<comment><USER5> Many years ago I worked on an electron beam lithography system that was a converted electron microscope. You need to control the X/Y position of the beam and need some sort of shutter/deflection mechanism which should be within the realm of what a very dedicated hobbyist or group can do. I wrote the software and designed some hardware. I wonder if you could pick up an old electron microscope for cheap somewhere if that would be a starting point for a home made chip fab ;) probably too many difficult parts though, wafers, resist, bonding, packaging, clean room etc. But who knows, sometimes these things can be done on the cheap if you're willing to make some compromises...

But here's another idea, if you live close to a university that teaches semiconductor physics or chip design check with them, the system I worked on was used by graduate students and for general research...

I don't think any fab will talk to you. A "real" chip is usually millions of dollars even for older processes.

If you don't care about the actual fabrication then you can use programmable logic like FPGA and get something very close to an actual chip design running on an actual chip. You can probably just get a design to run in a simulator ...

<comment><USER6> Check out MOSIS. They combine multiple small projects into a single reticle set to spread the cost of a fab run.

Been a long time since I looked at it. No idea if they have a packaging option.

<comment><USER7> If you can couple up with a local academic institution, and get them to submit your chip as a research or teaching project, MOSIS will fabricate your chip for free [1]. They will package up to 5 chips, though it's not clear whether the user or MOSIS pays that cost.

[1] [https://www.mosis.com/you-are/academic- institutions](https://www.mosis.com/you-are/academic-institutions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately your talking about something like $100,000 to get custom silicon made, even on an older node size. And you cannot get just 1, your minimum is about 100. If you insist on just 1 then they will still make a 100 and just throw the other 99 away, so you might as well get a 100 of them.

You cannot just throw some Verilog at the fab and get silicon back. You need to use some very expensive software that generates and validates the actual format they need. Hence you would go through a third-party company that specialises in taking your Verilog and does the work needed to get it to the point that the fab can make it.

<comment><USER9> There are some open source toolchains, such as Yosys [1] and Qflow [2] for synthesising Verilog into ASIC designs that can be fabricated. And with multi- project wafer fab services like CMP and MOSIS, fabrication can be had in the tens of thousands of dollars for a few hundred ICs. So things aren't quite as bad as you make it sound, but it's still a big investment and requires a lot of fairly niche skills and experience.

1\. [http://www.clifford.at/yosys/](http://www.clifford.at/yosys/) 2\. [http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/](http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I have not heard of those services.</comment></comment></comment>


Understanding XOR: it's just a diff - <AUTHOR> http://biesnecker.com/2014/10/06/swapping-variables-with-xor/

<comment><USER2> Actually bit addition in ALU is usually implemented using an XOR gate (with an AND gate to compute carry)...But as "diff" is essentially addition (over complement numbers), they mean the same thing...

Also note that XOR is associative -- that's the key to prove the XOR swapping...

For those who are interested in binary tricks, there are several good resources:

* HAKMEM, [http://goo.gl/F6sBjt](http://goo.gl/F6sBjt)

* Hacker's Delight, [http://goo.gl/llQumw](http://goo.gl/llQumw)

<comment><USER3> Hacker's Delight is one of the most fun tech books I have read. It is filled with fun tricks and algorithms, with each of them adequately explained.

<comment><USER2> I agree.

The book itself is very thin; but the content is incredibly rich...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> XOR is fascinating. It can be understood as binary addition, discarding the carry (the higher bit of the result). It is also useful for drawing a cursor pixmap: XOR the screen with the cursor, XOR again to remove the cursor, without ever copying the area below the cursor.</comment>


This little-known Monopoly rule completely changes how you play - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisisinsider.com/monopoly-auction-rule-changes-game-2017-11 <comment><USER2> This is news? In 2017?

Perhaps I just come from a strange generation that knew how to read the instructions.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's still a terrible boardgame.</comment>


The Idiocy of the Record Labels' Claim Vs Limewire, Put Into Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/News/Record-Labels-Claim-Limewire-Liable-For-75-Trillion-in-Damages/

<comment><AUTHOR> ...every single US household would have to spend all of its income buying nothing but music for over 13 years in order to arrive at what the music industry has deemed a reasonable settlement.</comment>


New research alliance cements split on AI ethics - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/23/new-research-alliance-cements-split-ai-ethics <comment><USER2> From Gulag Archipelago

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The hall echoed with applause, rising to an ovation. For three, four, five minutes it continued. Who would dare to be the first to stop? After all, NKVD men were watching who would quit first. The applause went on for six, seven, eight minutes. The director of a local paper factory, after eleven minutes sat down. The applause stopped.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That night the factory director was arrested, sentenced to 10 years. The interrogator remined him:

"Don't ever be the first to stop applauding"

I wonder if we could train AI to detect the first to stop applauding. Just a thought.

It is not intelligent AI, but the ability to review absolutely second by second history recorded by the FAANGs and the worldwide intelligence services that will fuel the next dictator.</comment>


On BritRuby - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.avdi.org/2012/11/19/on-britruby/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER3> Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. This ignores cultural diversity that is not related to skin colour, but place of birth and nationality, and other forms of identity.

Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference, I can make the assumption that a line up of Spanish, South African, German, Icelandic and Russian speakers - who are all white - isn't diverse.

I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum > of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin._

That is not what is being assumed, and that is also not what this discussion is about.

You can disagree as to whether diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is), or we can have a discussion about whether BritRuby was organized in a coherent manner (I would argue that there isn't really enough evidence to assess), or we could look at how other conferences have been organized (which is what Avdi does in this post).

What we should not do is take offense just to take offense, and take this away from a discussion of what it is that we can and should do, into an argument about who's more offended.

> _Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference_

Just sayin', but it might be helpful to find out what the lineup was before taking offense.

<comment><USER4> > diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend > that it is)

Can you point me to some literature about this please? I'd be interested in finding out how you, and the voting majority in the UK, have convinced themselves that diversity is so laudable a goal in and itself. I understand it on an evolutionary biology level, but not in terms of the make-up of a technical community[1].

As a bonus I'd also like to know why so many people think that it should be artificially manufactured when it doesn't occur organically. These ideas are not self-evident to me, but seem to be for a large number of people.

[1] Unless of course, your ulterior motive is to reproduce with members of the opposite gender of a variety of nationalities.

<comment><USER5> The reason is that many of us believe, backed up by various studies (unfortunately I am on a bus now, but I can go and find them when I get home if you like, but look up job advertisements with changed names, and women applying for orchestras), that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good.

I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby. Because things are so heavily biased at the moment, some help to begin moving things towards balanced can be greatly beneficial, to help people trying to move into the field.

I was recently in the unusual position of being the only man at a computing conference, and was surprised to find it an exhausting experience, even though almost everybody there made me feel very welcome.

<comment><USER4> > but I can go and find them when I get home if you like

Yes please!

> that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up > subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe > they are not as good.

If the problem is that you're associating with small groups of people, the solution should not be to make sure that this particular group of people gets artificially more diverse to satisfy a lacking in _your_ experience. You should just get out of the house and meet more types of people.

> I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including > Ruby.

Why? Do you believe that the Ruby community should have people who are good at programming and bad at programming? Racists and non-racists? Pacifists and militarists? Pro-choice and pro-life people? People who like gruyere cheese and those who don't? Why do we stick to race and gender in particular as an axis of diversity? Specifically, why aren't we arguing the corner of racist, cheese-eating pacifists?

> to help people trying to move into the field

As I've said in other comments, I find this attitude to be quite condescending. I do not need your help to move into any field. In Western civilisation at least, my own efforts will be good enough.

<comment><USER5> Blind orchestra auditions better for women, study finds

<http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/>

Employer's replies to racial names

<http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html>

One thing I personally like about these surveys is that they appear to tell us people do these things subconsiously.

You don't want my help or to be condescended to. I (and other white males) don't want to be called out as racist and sexist.

There always will be people who "beat the odds". It sounds like you have. I am from a poor background, yet I went to Cambridge University. My wife is one of the top AI researchers in the UK, if not the world.

My wife also brings in another perspective to me. Having helped run a couple of conferences, we didn't have to lower our standards to be more diverse. We just had to look more widely than we might have done if we were lazy, and just asked our close friends.

<comment><USER4> I agree with everything you've said, but this still doesn't address why you think that diversity is good in and itself apart from blind faith. As I've alluded to in other comments, I have a feeling it's more to do with alleviating some sort of cultural guilt about racism. If it's not about that, then why aren't we complaining about the other ways in which the ruby community is not diverse?

With numbers as they are, it's just as likely that the organizers could pick a random sample of people qualified to give talks and _still_ come up with an all white male audience. If you were to pick an entirely white-male sample out of a bag, would you resample because the results weren't sufficiently diverse? If so, I'm trying to find out why.

<comment><USER5> If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers. The runners of the conference seem to have made no attempt to say that is what has happened, but it is hard to see what has gone wrong.

Personally, it is not an issue of cultural guilt. Personally, I knew people as a young child who were poor, and I believe would have made excellent computer scientists if they had had better opportunity. My wife knows females who gave up on computer science because they could not fight through the male-dominated area (there is a whole other long discussion to have about the issues they faced, this is perhaps not the place).

In general, given my experiences with women and the poorer members of society, I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society. I think computing is great, and people should not be held back from it for real or imagined reasons (or course, some people might not like computing. That's fine to). If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.

If computing was already (for example) 50% women, then I would feel much less need to push particular conferences or events.

<comment><USER4> > If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / > minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable > quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and > have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers.

I think then that it's fair to say that diversity in and of itself is not the goal here, i.e. you don't have an underlying reason for pursuing diversity for the sake of it.

I would note that I believe that rooting out and debugging your own cognitive biases[1] is a worthy goal, and can only commend efforts like selecting conference talks blind.

My only beef is with the intentions behind it, primarily because we need to debug this whole diversity thing before we can deal with actual racists, rather than you guys who appear to be just trying to rule yourselves out of the witch-hunt.

> I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no > reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the > distribution of people in wider society.

Very well then, but this leads to some interesting questions:

* Roughly 90% of the UK population is classed as "White" or "White (Other)". Therefore, 9/10 attendants to a ruby conference in the UK should be white (they won't be). If you're totally focused on making the demographics match the general population, doesn't that mean you should be stopping non-whites at the door to make sure you have a high enough quotient of white people so that they're not just going along with the status quo? Is it conceivable that BritRuby would have been cancelled for not having enough white people?

* The largest age group in the UK is between 40 and 55, therefore the majority of attendees to a ruby conference in the UK should be in this range (they won't be, they're outnumbered by the 20-something year old programmer). Doesn't that mean you should be trying to balance the numbers out by stopping younger programmers from coming to conferences?

(These suggestions are of course absurd).

> If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going > along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.

This is not 'all well and good'. In the UK, where state education is compulsory (and _legally enforced_ for crying out loud!) it's condescending paternalism at best. The results kind of speak for themselves here, us minorities are doing a pretty spectacular job in the UK without your help, in all sorts of fields, way out of proportion of what we should be for our numbers. If you need convincing of this, turn on your TV to any news channel or take a ride on any tube line that runs through the City. Have a walk around the campus at UCL or Imperial College and tell me with a straight face that 9/10 people you see there are "White" or "White (Other)". When the BNP worry that foreigners are taking all the good jobs, they kind of have a point (we are).

Save that paternalism for people in countries like Pakistan where there is no social mobility _at all_ at the lowest rungs of society. Living in the UK is _Star Trek levels of utopian_ in comparison. Some of my relatives who come over for the first time literally cry when they realize (in their own words) that "This is a country where we treat each other like human beings!". When you/we go over there with your big ideas about democracy, equality, freedom of speech etc, you're right, they're wrong, and you/we are totally correct to be paternalistic and condescending about it.

What I think you allude to and what I believe would make a hell of a lot more sense here is to encourage people from difference _economic_ demographics to participate in technology in general, regardless of race or gender. The benefits of this to both individuals and society are easy to intuit. You'd do this through outreach at schools and other community centres etc and I believe there is already a movement underway in the UK promoting programming in schools[2]. Randomly selecting talks at a technical conference in order to account for the cognitive biases of the organisers is a noble goal, but totally inconsequential in comparison.

[1] <http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

[2] <http://www.codeclub.org.uk/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I share the sentiments of one of the commenters, iain barnett, which is probably going to be at odds with most people reading this (and as such, I'll get pointlessly downvoted). An excellent quote from him that I think sums up this entire mess:

> If you choose not to do something because the group you'd be joining are > different to you, then I'd say you're the one with the problem regarding > race or gender or whatever.

That tweet about one of the women not wanting to be the token one or whatever...what a load of crap. That's her personal problem if she THINKS she's going to be perceived that way, not the organization's. Has it ever crossed anyone's mind that perhaps those original 15 speakers had the best and most fitting presentations...and maybe that is why it was coincidentally all white males? It really is quite pathetic that all it takes is one wannabe righteous whistle-blower to say something about race and an event can be derailed...in this case, completely.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _It really is quite pathetic that all it takes is one wannabe righteous > whistle-blower to say something about race and an event can be derailed...in > this case, completely._

Are you really focusing in on a single tweet as the cause of a conference being canceled? You think that they decided to fold up months of work and organizing just because Sarah expressed her disappointment and dissatisfaction?

Blaming her for the organizers' decision seems super weird to me.

Also... Iain's quote there misunderstands what it's like to be a minority. The problem is not being different (we're all different in various ways), it's being _singled out for being different_. That's also why BritRuby couldn't fix the problem by tacking on diversity speakers at the end, the damage was already done by then.

My humble opinion is that they should have tried to weather the storm, issue a mea culpa and endeavored to do better next time. Instead we have flame wars.

<comment><USER7> _it's being singled out for being different. That's also why BritRuby couldn't fix the problem by tacking on diversity speakers at the end_

So it would have been better if they singled people out for being different and tacked on diversity speakers from the beginning?

You either single people out for being different or you pick the best speakers and let the racial/sexual chips fall where they may. There really isn't a middle ground.

<comment><USER8> You're presenting a false dilemma. As the linked article makes clear, it's not either/or, it's about avoiding an initial mis-step that poisons the initial pool of speakers.

The crucial part of the linked article is when he talk to Josh Susser, one of the initial tweeters who triggered the issue, and who organizes GoGaRuCo, which receives plaudits for diversity. GoGaRuCo very pointedly reaches out to evangelists in the community who will bring in a diverse selection of speakers, and then do a blind judging of submitted papers. The result is that, by making sure the pool of speakers is diverse to start with, they can pick the best papers blindly to gender and race, and still get diversity.

<comment><USER9> _The result is that, by making sure the pool of speakers is diverse to start with, they can pick the best papers blindly to gender and race, and still get diversity._

By your logic, as a caucasian person I shouldn't submit a presentation to GoGaRuCo because they are determining the pool of speakers based on diversity (read: gender/race/taste), before they determine what I have to say. Since I somehow have a lighter shade of skin and because I have these dangly bits between my legs, I'm no longer eligible for inclusion into the speaker list.

I'd call that a clear case of discrimination.

Edit: Since I can't reply directly to fatbird, I'll reply here. I see we're using "diverse" and "diversity" differently here. Looking at your comment again, I can see how you are thinking. I personally don't know how BritRuby opened their CFP process. I assumed (ass - u - me, I get it) that they would just open up the CFP to the Interwebs and papers would just roll in. Maybe they did something differently, and narrowed their advertising for papers, there's not enough information to know whether they did that.

<comment><USER8> They're not determining the pool of speakers based on diversity, they're making an extra effort to broaden the pool of potential speakers. They're not excluding white people or in any way causing white people a disadvantage. Unless, that is, you think that white people deserve not to have to compete with non-whites.

I'd call that a clear case of discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Agree 100% with that post... and I'd urge folk to follow the links and read some of the underlying tweets that started this whole thing off.

I'm gonna take the liberty of copy and pasting something I wrote on the other thread about this since I think it's relevant to what Avdi said:

\----

There's some text up on the main <http://2013.britruby.com/> \- among other things it says:

"We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things? "

I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a tad... sub-optimal?

In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the quality of the female speakers I did see that they were not chosen for their sex.

Great female speakers are out there. You don't have to pick by gender quota.

I helped organise the UX stage of Agile 2012. We had a 50/50 male/female speaker split on that stage with zero effort on my part - apart from rabidly pursuing good speakers - some of which were female (the selection process was briefly discussed in another thread for those who might be interested <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049>). Plenty of female speakers on the other stages too.

At the moment I'm organising a UK conference for early next year (<http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013...>) and the survey has already produced some great possible speakers of both sexes, and a volunteer team of one man and four women.

Wearing my conference organiser hat: If my CFPs and my personal network had only produced a list of male speakers I'd be going "Fuck. I've messed up somewhere." because I see great female speakers every time I go to any major conference.

I'd be reaching out to folk like <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/>, or <http://www.womenwhotech.com/>. I'd be looking to how other folk got more great women speakers at their conferences like [http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women- speake...](http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at- my-tech-conference/)

Because if I didn't have some really excellent female speakers in my bucket list of possible speakers I'd take it as evidence that my network for finding good speakers is not as effective as it should be.

\----

As another data point - I notice that the London Perl Workshop - a one day event next weekend - has two women speakers running three sessions. Surely the Ruby folk have as many smart women speakers as the Perl folk ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic post. It's infuriating to read all the comments by programmers, both on github and reddit, who seem to think there was a tumblr-esque witch hunt by the evil PC brigade against the poor BritRuby organizers, when that just wasn't the case— and hardly ever is.

If anything, the responses by the community only prove there's still a problem with diversity.

<comment><USER12> One of @joshsusser's comments:

"@BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female?"

This seems to contradict itself - if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people. Which is wrong for both the token speakers and those who missed out.

JSConf EU handled this very well and managed to get 25% female speakers - <USER2> the best talk, but pick them blind. This stops both implicit bias towards 'people like me' AND token selections of 'people not like me'.

<comment><USER13> _if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people._

But women should not be among them, surely? According to the Office for National Statistics (see [http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop- estimate/population-estima...](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop- estimate/population-estimates-for-england-and-wales/mid-2011--2011-census- based-/stb---mid-2011-census-based-population-estimates-for-england-and- wales.html#tab-Mid-2011-population-estimates-)), in 2011 the population of England and Wales was 50.8% female and only 49.2% male. So the bizarre statistical anomaly would be a BritRuby panel of fifteen speakers with no women, or even _one_ woman.

<comment><USER14> What's the percentage of male programmer to female programmer?

In the extreme example, if 0% of female in England were programmer then it wouldn't matter if 99% of the population were female, you were still not going to expect 99 speaker out of 100 to be female. Now adjust the example back to reality, 50.8% female population doesn't tell you anything about how much female programmer should be expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I ultimately side with Avdi and co, I think the whole thing wound up coming across as a bit self-righteous ... unfortunately.

Dealing with something like this requires a lot more tact than it seems was brought to bear, exactly because it is such an explosive issue. Its very difficult to be on the receiving end of something like that and not feel very personally attacked, no matter how logical the arguments ... the air of negativity surrounding something they worked so hard to bring to fruition would be too much to take. So I do empathize with BritRuby on some level.

I think in the future, it might not be a bad idea to try to try to handle something like that a little more privately and only move to twitter when it is clear there is a concerted effort to exclude people.

This 'public shaming' ideal that the rise twitter seems to have encouraged, just seems to be a little lazy (it doesn't require a lot of thought to be snarky) and counter productive in most situations, as it automatically puts the target on the defensive.

</comment><comment><USER16> And what about diversity of species? Personally, I find the prevalance of homo sapiens in the list of speakers absolutely alarming and unacceptable. Where are the dolphins?

<comment><USER17> I know you're making a joke, but can we please avoid demeaning references to animals like this? I understand everyone isn't bothered by the fact they there aren't "people like them" as positive role models in the community, but it sure is something that makes me uncomfortable.

And to see my distress about it casually written off makes me feel like shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I didn't realize we had to engage in nose-counting when evaluating the value of a conference on a technical topic.

</comment><comment><USER19> Given how much of the programming community is made up of white men (especially in Britain), I don't see a 100% white male speaker lineup as being too far-fetched, barring some form of affirmative action. Given the situation, the selection process should have undergone some level of scrutiny to make sure there's no discrimination, but I don't think it's worth cancelling the whole conference over.</comment>


Death: From Dungeon Crawl to Meat Boy - <AUTHOR> http://www.mandible.net/2012/10/31/death-from-dungeon-crawl-to-meat-boy/ <comment><USER2> One of my favorite death concepts is the Death Alternative[1] mod for Skyrim. It weaves "death" into the narrative. Instead of dying, you're robbed and left for dead by bandits and then can go on a quest to get your items back, or you're captured and enslaved by vampires and must escape (or, IIRC, join them). I love that it makes defeats part of the story. They become part of your character's history, helping define who your character is. It makes death meaningful, more so than checkpoints or saves, but not as frustrating as permadeath, while being a powerful mechanism for procedural storytelling. I would really love to see it in more games, by I believe Death Alternative is the only place I've seen it done.

[1]: [https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/45894](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/45894)

</comment><comment><USER3> Three games' approaches to death come to mind immediately:

First, Braid, where your character can die in the usual way for a 2D platformer, killed by monsters or falling in holes. But the game lets you manipulate time, so the answer to death is just to rewind a few seconds while the music plays backwards and you come back to life.

Second, the original Monkey Island. Unlike the Sierra click puzzlers of the time (King's Quest etc) you couldn't die. But if you stood at the edge of the cliff, you fell off and got a Sierra-style Game Over screen... for a few seconds. Then you bounced back up on a 'rubber tree'.

Finally, there's the original ZX Spectrum isometric platformer version of Batman. In that game, if you died in a particularly frustrating way or at the same puzzle repeatedly, the game would sometimes give you a "Dog's life", an extra life as a consolation prize.

Interesting article.

<comment><USER4> I have some faint kind of an impression that I've once played (?) some game (?), where if your character died, it woke up in some kind of "netherworld", and there was also something to do there. (I seem to recall being hugely surprised and impressed by this course of events.) Does this trigger some more concrete memories about particular name of a game to anyone here?

<comment><USER5> Are you thinking of Prey? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_\(2006_video_game\))

<comment><USER4> I don't _think_ so, but I'm not sure. I didn't play Prey; but then there's some chance I could have watched some playthrough on Youtube, and only see that happening to someone else. Don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a very casual gamer and have been very turned off by the recent (?) Hardcore fetish.

By which I mean a combination of games that are increasingly difficult with no meaningfully fun easier mode and the disdain for anyone wanting such a thing.

In particular I miss out on some awesome story and design work by authors and artists because I lack the reflexes and/or hours of dedication needed to be able to truly experience these games. When I ask (or find where someone else asks) about how to deal with difficulty and the NICE responses are "this game is not for you" it is a real letdown.

<comment><USER7> difficulty can be a powerful game mechanic if it's treated carefully.

<comment><USER8> Case in point: Cuphead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dying in games has very different meanings. For some, you've lost 3-10 seconds of progress. For others, you lose 3 years of time invested (and potentially money). There is also an emotional connection to death in games. Some are happy death, some are dreadful.

Take roguelike games for example, dying can be a good thing, you might have been stuck with a weapon or ability you got at the start, and by dying to get rewarded a new 'random' package which happens to be much better.

<comment><USER10> You can't really play roguelikes without getting some enjoyment out of dying (or save-scumming). Failure is almost inevitable.

<comment><USER11> Not necessarily: I personally dislike death in roguelikes. What I like is that I _fear_ death. It gives a weight to the game thats normally absent

I normally quit my roguelike binges when I stop caring about keeping my characters alive, even on a good/long run. In fact, too good a run can even get boring, when I get too confident in my capacity to survive (though this naturally resolves itself when I inevitably splat because of that confidence).

But never because I haven't gotten the fun of dying recently; its because I stopped worrying about the possibility/consequence.

<comment><USER12> I think there's two separate concepts, and it can be worthwhile to separate them out, namely ironman (or permadeath), versus roguelikes which encourage more frequent, "short"(-er) games.

E.g. you might play a game like XCOM or Europa Universalis on ironman, and that is what will give the situations you encounter the seriousness / gravitas that they deserve, and it can be thrilling.

On the other hand, a game like Everspace actually pulls of the "fun of dying" quite nicely. Games are relatively short, especially early on, and unlike most roguelikes your character's skills and weapon choices do survive deaths to some degree. So much of the time, you're dying with a smile on your face, because you know you've just achieved an important milestone, and you can't wait to try again with whatever you just unlocked. I thought it was an interesting hybrid take on the roguelike genre.

<comment><USER11> >roguelikes which encourage more frequent, "short"(-er) games.

I wouldn't say roguelikes encourage shorter games; they encourage long games, and are mechanically designed around long sessions. The difficulty makes it more ..difficult.. to achieve a longer game, but there's absolutely nothing to encourage killing off your character.

Someone new to roguelikes, I think, might be perceive that everything revolves around the initial roll of the dice, and the items you find, but the games are balanced such that you should be capable of surviving _regardless_ of the initial roll (except in really, awful, just plain terrible starts). And you'll still trivially die with even a great start.

You're encouraged towards a long session, but unlike most games, roguelikes fight really hard to not let you have it. in a similar fashion as [https://i.imgur.com/mHXiz.png](https://i.imgur.com/mHXiz.png)

roguelites on the other hand encourage shorter sessions to some degree, by the usual mechanic of meta-rewards that persist between sessions. With it, it's not just less punishing to die; it actively encourages you to die, because you'll be able to start again with a better character, with better equipment, abilities, whatever. And this will inevitably mean you take more risks with your character (like say, investing more in health, because you have a guaranteed strong weapon), and eventually reach the same point as where you died but stronger than before. They push death onto you, whereas a roguelike offers _next to nothing_.

Just another roll, but you'll get those anyways if you push on..

<comment><USER12> Yeah, good points re: rougelikes and rouge-lites (though [1]). I think there's still an essential element of difference between a rougelike and normal ironman games, which is that rougelikes nevertheless typically expect you to die. While it's true that it's not RNG-based as badly as many believe (since top players can usually achieve wins consistently despite bad rolls), there are usually dead-ends which you have no way of knowing about without prior experience, realistically. Contrast that with a game of XCom on easy + ironman, and there's a chance that a new player may actually win that. Whereas with NetHack, that chance is about as close to zero as it can get. So, while dying might not be outright fun in the literal sense, it might be "Fun", and at the same time you may learn something critical for your next playthrough. In that sense, roguelikes are very much intended to be replayed many dozens of times, which differentiates them from normal ironman games in my view.

[1] My main experience is with ToME, which I believe is considered a roguelike rather than a rogue-lite, and I'm pretty sure games don't tend to go into dozens of hours, normally. Assuming you don't die very early, it's probably closer to 5-6 hours, in my experience, which is far shorter than other normal games.

<comment><USER11> Imo the charitable/interesting view (for roguelikes) is that most games expect you to progress, and want you to, and will actively help you. Roguelikes on the otherhand don't particularly care, and you as a player have to overcome it despite the game's negligence. Which I think is where most of the difficulty comes from: how little it helps you when you get into a bad spot, and you've got 20 unknown potions. or rather, how little it tries to stop you from getting into such a bad spot.

More extreme down that line would be dwarf fortress, particularly adventure mode (fortress mode doesn't help my point: they even have the motto "losing is fun"...)

I agree that roguelikes are self-aware, and make it mostly painless to restart, but I think its more a result of roguelikes actively working with the permadeath mechanic, whereas ironman is more of a "game mode"; that is, the game isn't built with iron man in mind. Ironman is a variant of the gameplay. Both I think still are primarily valued for the _fear_ of death, and I don't think either require, expect or encourage death. Its just more that, ironman is _worse_ at the mechanic, primarily because its a rather shallow, incidental feature, rather than at the heart of it.

It _happens to be easy_ to tack on ironman mode, on a non-ironman game; you just remove the save slots, and delete it on death. But they're still normal, non-permadeath games at heart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing beats the death system in (early) Ultima Online. Not only could you lose everything you had on you. If you were unlucky to get killed while having your house key in your inventory a looter could rob you clean.

Dying was a serious business and being a robber/PK/looter was super lucrative. Going outside the city was the biggest adrenaline rush ever.

<comment><USER14> I really wish more games would use this sort of mechanic. I understand that many players don't want to have to worry about losing their stuff, or being hassled by other players griefing them, but I love the feeling of actually going on an adventure when you leave a safe area. Danger is a part of that, and let's face it, other humans creating some of that danger is a lot better than an AI.

<comment><USER15> The problem is when you have 0 chance of making it because other players outgear/outnumber you.

<comment><USER16> That's when you need to make friends. It's a multiplayer game, after all. Some of the most enjoyable moments I've ever had in a video game happened like that in UO. There were relentless groups of PKs killing our miners. So what did we do? We grouped up together and went out in force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I don't really like in a lot of video games is the learning through death mechanic, when you basically need to die in order to learn how to defeat a boss or to advance to the next stage. It's mostly popular in action adventure games, some of them (Dark Souls, Bloodborne) are amazing games but there has to be a better way to learn how to advance, instead of just dying and repeating.

<comment><USER18> I imagine it is just easier to balance that way. "Death" in these games really just means teleporting you to a predetermined position and restarting the encounter (in the souls games also adding a chance to permanently lose some of your gathered resources, which based on the non-linear stat leveling don't actually matter all that much). I would also add that in the souls games the dodging is very lenient, if you spend the first couple of minutes of a boss fight simply not getting hit you can usually see most of the bosses attack animations and beat it on the first try if you don't mess up.

Based on the alternatives that actually exist the cure may be worse than the disease. In many modern AAA games you never really have to learn anything, the game just lets you progress regardless. Unless you play on the extremely hard difficulty modes that just completely break the balance of the game (the hardest difficulty mode on the Uncharted remastered is a good example of this).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That mirrors the development in tabletop RPGs. While nobody's trying checkpoints there, the attitude towards getting killed by sheer game master fiat or happenstance changed a lot. When the mechanical complexity was lower and players often didn't have elaborate back stories, starting from scratch, even with a new level 1 character, didn't seem that disturbing.

So today you see all kinds of mechanics helping player agency (like "fate" points that serve as extra lives), wanton PC murder like Gygax' Tomb of Horrors mostly sells to nostalgic players these days.

<comment><USER20> This reminds me of the Paranoia RPG. The GM was expected to kill off many PCs, usually in a funny and elaborate way, so each player got 6 'clones' that activate upon death. It was a really great game for letting off steam! [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role- playing_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_\(role-playing_game\))

<comment><USER21> In the original "Traveller" RPG (we called them the "little black books") you could get killed during character generation!

The game also had a fairly deadly combat system; often the only way to "win" was not to fight. (If you died, you could always introduce a replacement character at the next spaceport.)

It probably cost them some popularity long term, but it also made for an entire galaxy of world building.

(Younger kids will probably not realize that Traveller was likely an inspiration for the "Firefly" show. When I first saw the show, I said "That's Traveller.")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The "I don't understand death in WoW" made me laugh. The discussion is all "then you don't win", but win is never is WoW.

</comment><comment><USER23> Skinner boxes like WoW are extreme examples of trying to make you play for as long and often as possible. So when dying, if your choice is between quitting on a low or grinding a bit more to get at least a bit of satisfaction out of the session, I suspect a lot of people will do the grind.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interestingly, it seems Blizzard agrees with him; WoW has moved sharply away from the system he describes as nonsensical. (The time penalty has been sharply decreased in all cases, and essentially eliminated in difficult group content.)

<comment><USER25> To be fair, the author mentions that they're discussing death for PvE content:

> _And more specifically, let 's talk about losing in a PvE game, either solo > or cooperative._

And through that lens, the death system for WoW is pretty lame. But I'd beg to differ for PvP or RPPv(E|P). The run-back system allows people to camp your corpse. This would cause you to request help from your guild or hop on an alt and get help in trade chat. Now you have an overworld faction battle going on. For RP, it becomes an RP element.

<comment><USER24> Yes, quite right. The runback makes sense in PVP; it largely doesn't in PVE, where it's mostly been eliminated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I found this article underwhelming. There are a few examples, whereas concept of death in games is way broader.

Moreover, it does not go to extremes (I mean, I didn't expect Saw-like scenario, or Russian Roulette). E.g. "You Only Live Once" is even harsher. Once you die, you die. There is not "play again?": [https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/505914](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/505914) (warning: Flash)

<comment><USER27> The prime example of that are true Rogue-likes where it takes hours to bootstrap a character. And even more so, simulations like Dwarf Fortress.

<comment><USER26> I played ADOM a number of times. And liked its death mechanics, as it dissuaded from reckless behaviours. For a faster-paced and more gateway (to RL hell), there is [https://drl.chaosforge.org/](https://drl.chaosforge.org/).

Still, after dying, I could play again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The parody platformer _I Want To Be The Guy_ adjusts difficulty solely by adding or removing checkpoints. The hardest difficulty has no checkpoints; good luck becoming The Guy.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think that permadeath is not as bad as it seems if the game is properly balanced. For example, I remember playing Super Mario Land on the Game Boy before ~ 25 years (I was 10). When I first played it, I couldn't pass the first level, but after a couple of times I was able to move to the second, third etc. Each time I played it I felt that I was better at passing the levels (knowing when to jump, when each enemy will approach etc) and I almost universally felt that I acomplished something (i.e "oh wow I reached the Boss of the first three levels"). I never felt frustrated because I lost because I knew that next time I play I'll probably do better; even if I didn't make it further away I'd improve my playthrough of the previous stages.

Now, this "play/learn, lose, repeat" lasted (IIRC) for about 1-2 months until I finished the game. I then continued playing it for a little more time to discover more secrets and/or improve my score. The thing is that I never was angry that I needed to repeat these stages because I had learn that the game was fair (balanced).

That was also the case for some (not all) arcade games I remember like Shinobi, Double Dragon, Snow Brows, Bubble Bubble etc; you needed to play them some times to discover their secrets and become better and then you'd be able to reach further and further with a single credit (and even finish them).

This experience was contrary to what I felt when I played games that were not properly balanced (which felt non-fair to me then). For example, I remember that while I played Castlevania on the game boy I was always frustrated, I had reach the final stage but I couldn't pass some obstacles; and if I could was by pure luck. It was like dropping a coin 10 times and needing to get heads in all 10 times. One time after many hours of trying I had reached the final boss but I was killed before actually seeing anything on how he attacks etc. I was so frustrated that I thrown the Gameboy at the floor and broken it! The game was so unfair!

TL;DR: If the game has good gameplay and is properly balanced then repeating stages is not bad; not many games are properly balanced though :/</comment>


Tech Companies Face Greater Scrutiny for Paying Workers with Stock - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/technology/tech-companies-face-greater-scrutiny-for-paying-workers-with-stock.html <comment><USER2> Hopefully they face greater scrutiny from employees as well. It's annoying to be compensated in stock. I don't want to deal with complex wash sale chains just so I can dump my shares as soon as they vest. Just give me cash and let me choose if I want to buy shares in the market like anyone else. If they must give me golden handcuffs then do so in the form of cash bonuses at set dates.

<comment><USER3> What's the best way to eliminate the market risk you get when you're issued RSUs? Short selling? Put options?

<comment><USER4> I could be wrong, but I think most companies prohibit their employees from short exposure (shorting equity, being long equity puts, or short equity calls) to the company, even if they're still net long the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are alot "oh its wallstreet" comments here, but I'm not sure its warranted in this case.

Investors in this case are pension funds, hedge funds and in some cases ETF managers like BlackRock and Vanguard who are speaking up.

I can see how some tech employee's who get part of their compensation in the form of restricted shares or stock options may look at this as wall street attacking them, but in all honesty, run of hte mill employee stock rewards pale in comparison to C level executive compensation.

This is targeted squarely at the Marissa Mayer's of the world not the average Google employee.

This is a long running controversy. Below is a Harvard business review article from 2003 about the issue. I remember that at one point it was a contentious issue as to whether or not companies had to account for stock option/stock grants in their GAAP counting.

[https://hbr.org/2003/03/for-the-last-time-stock-options- are-...](https://hbr.org/2003/03/for-the-last-time-stock-options-are-an- expense)

<comment><USER6> > This is targeted squarely at the Marissa Mayer's of the world not the > average Google employee.

You miss the point of _my_ "Oh, it's Wall Street scrutiny..." comment. If it were _government_ scrutiny, we might see changes in how the current value of the stock of a company that's not publicly traded is reported to its employees.

At the "startup" I used to work for, I got stonewalled _every_ time I asked for the valuation (whether current or near-to-medium-term expected) of the stock options I had been offered. Friends at other startups report similar stories.

Requiring companies to keep up-to-date information about current and expected future stock valuation, shares issued, & etc would be nice. Requiring companies to _disclose_ that information on demand to current or potential future employees (along with _where_ in the queue the shares that one is either being offered or are currently holding are) would be another nice step.

I get that keeping this information up to date might be a hassle. On the _other_ hand, just how the fuck do you raise money without this information? :)

<comment><USER7> > At the "startup" I used to work for, I got stonewalled every time I asked > for the valuation (whether current or near-to-medium-term expected) of the > stock options I had been offered. Friends at other startups report similar > stories.

OMG same here! Shit like this had me considering if any engineers would bite in joining a union-like entity.

But life is all around still too decent for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can't have it both ways people - when a company strikes it rich people complain that the regular employees didn't get a big enough piece o the pie. When companies do poorly, people complain that the employees totally got screwed because their equity is worth nothing now.

You either can get paid in pure salary and have a lower ceiling (because you're paying for less risk) and then be left out when the company does well. Or you can get some stock with a higher ceiling/lower floor and be screwed if the company goes down the drain. Either way you're not forced to take equity... developers are in demand.

This is before even considering about trying to align interests of the employee with the company..

<comment><USER9> That's not an example of trying to have it both ways. There's no law that says you can't have both a solid base salary _and_ a good equity grant, so you increase the upside but get screwed less on the downside.

I don't see people on HN often arguing that companies shouldn't be _allowed_ to offer equity, more that people shouldn't blindly accept equity grants they don't understand - that are smaller and more limited in upside than they think - in exchange for greatly below-market salaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the case of the big publicly traded companies, I have been assuming that this was simply a way to securitize the large overseas cash holdings in these companies. If the stock market values the overseas cash holdings as though they were local reserves, then the companies can effectively pay some of their biggest expenses (local employees' salary) with the investor's collective belief in the overseas money.

A strictly rational market might price the book value of that cash at its face value, less the tax burden of moving it to where it would be used. But I don't think they are being rational overall: The potential future tax liability is not counted as a liability, and the company's management is also being given a multiplier as a reward for keeping all that cash (ex, trusting Alphabet/Facebook/Apple as investment firms of sorts, expecting returns greater than the investor's next best alternative). That's really weird to me, since I would expect that to count as a discount against the company for holding onto it as opposed to paying some of it back to the investors through dividends.

The net effect is that means that it costs the company somewhat less to pay its people in stock than in cash.

<comment><USER11> It's better to withhold remitting profits to the United States if they are used to pay for expenses which would have otherwise used after-tax dollars from the U.S. This also incentivises the offshoring of production, since a dollar overseas is now "cheaper," on a tax-adjusted basis, than a dollar domestically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > While the median number of restricted shares granted at Standard & Poor's > 1500 companies to executives and employees in 2014 equaled 450,198 shares, > tech companies granted a median 798,000 shares of restricted stock to > workers, according to data from Equilar, a research firm that provides data > on executives, boards and compensation.

It doesn't appear that the author understands how this works...

<comment><USER13> I agree, the number of shares is of less consequence than the total value as the price of each companies shares varies wildly. If they all got the same number of shares, I would choose to work at Google with a $790 share price rather than LinkedIn with a $40 share price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this article boils down to two statements,

 _" Mr. Mahaney said stock-based compensation could "distort the quality" of a company's earnings and "make them look stronger than they are."_ \-- this has been a refrain from analysts for years, and the whole reason companies now report options as an expense. The argument goes, if it doesn't "cost" anything to give someone an option, then for a salary budget of X and a revenue of Y you mis-report the cost of revenue so the revenue "looks better" than it really is. In my experience, anyone who has worked at a job where part of their compensation was stock options has never considered options "pay" like the dollars that show up in your paycheck twice a week. They are always lottery tickets, and given the trading restrictions at public companies, usually a pain to exercise or cash out. Further distancing them in one's mind from the notion of compensation. The second statement is this one;

 _" Ms. Hindlian says that while it can be reasonable for companies to pay workers a lot in stock, the practice can become scary when the stock starts to fall. "Particularly with software companies, you run the risk of losing your leading salespeople, engineers and developers when the stock falls, because employees feel like they're getting a pay cut,"_ \-- For the folks that I know, they don't consider it pay so if the options which they haven't exercised are underwater they don't consider them a "pay cut."

It is closer to the truth to say that options with value (so called "in the money") _do_ have a retention power on employees but only if they continue to be worth something. And sometimes even that isn't enough.

But it is true to say that employees with options don't behave like little autonomous drone actors moving in collective self interest, and that makes it a lot harder to evaluate the enterprise value of a company. That difficulty arises from the understanding that it is the people that make the company what it is, and not being able to predict if those people will stay or leave adds uncertainty.

The desire for mathematical evaluation is strong in the analyst community and they continue to argue against anything that seems to affect that.

<comment><USER15> This is nonsense. Remember that they're talking about public companies here, and the stock grants aren't options but typically come in the form of restricted stock units.

Of course people treat RSU grants as pay. It's taxed like pay and otherwise acts exactly like pay except that it's tied to the stock price. For many people it's the majority of the pay or an otherwise substantial component of the compensation structure.

<comment><USER14> If we're talking RSU's sure, if we're talking ISO's not so much.

I would certainly agree with you on the RSU front, although there is the other twist that some companies, like Google, don't equate RSU's 1:1 with actual shares, they can go up or down depending on other factors. So you can have 100 RSU's that convert to 1 share or 200 shares depending on how much your manager likes you. In that case it really doesn't matter if the stock price goes up or down.

<comment><USER16> Wat? An RSU grant of 100 shares won't actually result ownership of 100 shares?

<comment><USER14> Not at Google, in California. When I was working there, one of the things they really liked was a dynamic compensation system. Basically everyone got a calibration score and that score dynamically adjusted your compensation, up _or_ down.

To be fair it is a very creative way to avoiding the trap of over paying people. The bottom line is that all grants are legal contracts, generally very long and dense legal contracts, and it is useful to spend time to understand them. California is an "at will" state, if either you or the employer doesn't like the situation, either one of you can end it and be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what they'd say if said tech companies opted to increase salaries in lieu of stock based compensation. After all, they complain at Costco for compensating their workers too well and giving them benefits that are too good.

Then you look at Wall Street and realize that the companies have some of the highest worker compensation expense ratios around (though I think this is a model to emulate for tech companies rather than shun. Say what you will about WS, but despite their outsized pay for directors at the top, they do compensate the average worker better than other industries)

</comment><comment><USER7> Wall Street is wrong about this. Tech employees are still undervalued.

Feel free to bid the share price downwards. That would be a good thing.

Regarding the conflict of interest for management to do things that get the share price up... what? How hard are we going to manufacture controversy here? If there is a real optimization then reveal it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh. It's Wall Street "scrutiny", rather than federal, state, or local government scrutiny.

<comment><USER18> "Investors are concerned with stock option grants".

reads more to me as "investors are reluctant to pay market rates for engineers, but worried about losing control through dilution - want to find an easy answer that doesn't cost them either"

<comment><USER19> free lunches and dinners!

<comment><USER6> A $30 value -yours free- if you act _now_! Our recruiters are standing by!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The econony is slowing, so this shouldn't be a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER21> Damn those companies, trying to pay their workers with stock instead of giving it to Wall Street.

<comment><USER22> Actually, yes. Damn them. They should be paying workers with money, instead of lottery tickets that will likely be worthless or diluted to worthlessness by the time it's vested. (Doesn't apply, I suppose, to already publicly traded companies).

<comment><USER21> Yeah - the entire article is about publicly traded companies.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did you buy ethereum? Why? - <AUTHOR>

Project link: ethereum.org <comment><USER2> No because betting on a network effect before there is a network effect is speculating, and I'm not into speculation. This doesn't mean it won't go up, or won't work, I'm just not sure those two things are correlated.

I'm still developing my understanding of how Bitcoin works, but I am also unconvinced that some of these things won't happen in the Bitcoin blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, because:

1- I can afford to lose that money (positive ROI from buying btc in 2012)

2- I think someone has to push the boundaries of cryptocurrencies with new ideas (specially explore Szabo's Smart Contracts in its full potential)

3- I believe this team can "deliver"

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sick of knowing about things and not jumping in early. So rather than brag that I knew about Ethereum before everyone else did, yet not have any, I figured I'd get some to play with.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, because I think after launch ethereum will go down before it goes up again and that we'll see a point where ethereum is going for below IPO price in the first 6 months of existence.</comment>


Firefox gets complaint for labeling unencrypted login page insecure - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/firefox-gets-complaint-for-labeling-unencrypted-login-page-insecure/ <comment><USER3> Previously discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13917778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13917778)

<comment><USER4> It's marked as a dupe (and presumably flagged) despite the original story now linking to a locked Bugzilla entry, with no information about context.

Could we un-dupe it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Update: As several commenters have pointed out, the site's subscription > page[0] transmits credit card information over plain-vanilla HTTP pages as > well.

0\. [http://www.oilandgasinternational.com/SSL_Subscribe/subscrib...](http://www.oilandgasinternational.com/SSL_Subscribe/subscribe_us.aspx)

<comment><USER6> It's got other issues as well. It spewed an error page for me with snippets of source code. [http://imgur.com/a/UiPDf](http://imgur.com/a/UiPDf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was sympatehtic of the site owner until I read that they are sending credit card information over HTTP on a page that claims to be doing so securely. With that level of negligence they deserve what they get here

<comment><USER8> Still, the chances of that number being caught 'in transit' are a lot smaller than the chances of it being caught 'at rest'. The risk here is mostly in exploits on the page and absent those you're going to have to trust the party on the other end to keep your data safe or to not keep it at all.

It's a risk roughly equivalent to speaking on the phone to a hotel registry and giving them your CC#, or a car rental agency. And in that case, at least one other person now has your number (and that's besides all the other people that already have the numbers and those that handled the card in your absence, waiters in restaurants and so on).

Credit Cards working without something along the lines of VBV is a bug, not a feature and the fact that 'just a number' is worth money is where the real problem lies, not in how it got transmitted, that's just a reduction of the risk, not an elimination.

All that said there is absolutely no excuse why they should not use HTTPS, and it also makes you very wary of doing business with this party at all, likely their other security sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would be nice to have an option to disable this for intranets. Otherwise - <USER2> very good thing to do.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't you just set up a Private CA since you'd have to customize things anyways?

<comment><USER11> Exactly. You should never consider a network perfectly secure, no matter if it is the internet or your intranet.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon confirms it keeps your Alexa recordings basically forever - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/amazon-confirms-it-keeps-your-alexa-recordings-basically-forever/ <comment><USER2> I thought there were articles a while ago (related to some murder and Alexa recording) that Amazon don't keep the recording? Am I miss remembering things or this was well known. Regardless this seems another example of just hoarding data while the users are none the wiser. And when this leaks and current or future ML solution makes a mess of peoples lives with false recordings it will be too late.</comment>