Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/ <comment><USER2> >Heroku declined our request for further comment. "Unfortunately, we can't publicly comment on legal matters," said spokeswoman Dana Oshiro in an email. "Heroku is committed to our customers' success and focused on delivering the best possible product and experience. We'll continue to update our customers via our blog."

I don't run a company, and I'm not responsible for maximizing return on my shareholders' investment. So maybe I lack the mental schemas that make these sorts of statements seem reasonable, but they always strike me as short- sighted. Yes, admitting wrongdoing may open you up to legal liability. But it seems to me that, in the long run, it's far better to take your licks and own up to your mistakes than to hide behind the shield of pending litigation. My gut instinct is to offer a sincere mea culpa and provide a transparent roadmap to improvement, and if you lose a court case then so be it. I'd like to think that the good will and respect you build from accountability and honesty will ultimately outweigh any short-term losses from court settlements or judgements.

As I said, I don't live in that world. I would be saddened, though not necessarily surprised, to learn that I was wrong.

<comment><USER3> Seeing that there is a website/lawfirm[1] threatening legal action, I can bet Heroku/Salesforce lawyers jumped on that ASAP and let all their employees that are allowed to talk publicly not to comment on the issue anymore.

The US legal system is setup that if a company admits fault in something like this, it makes defending yourself much more difficult. Meaning if a lawsuit is brought about, it's not about proving innocence anymore, it's about mitigating the damages you will have to pay. Your lawyer is going to want to have as many options available to him/her to deal with your case during it's lifespan, and admitting fault before the lawsuit even begins will limit the lawyers options when it comes to negotiations and what tactics they can use in the courtroom.

[1] <http://herokuclassaction.com/>

<comment><USER4> In the grand scheme of things, this is why it's always better to defect in the simplified idea game of the prisoner's dilemma. Collaboration is rarely rewarded once lawyers get anywhere near an issue and opting to collaborate (i.e.: admit fault and try to fix it) more or less wins you no points in court, in the U.S.

Given that each possible liability is its own case and stands on its own merits, it pretty much matches the simplest case of the prisoner's dilemma perfectly, IMHO... and so here we are. Sadly.

<comment><USER5> _Collaboration is rarely rewarded once lawyers get anywhere near an issue and opting to collaborate (i.e.: admit fault and try to fix it) more or less wins you no points in court, in the U.S._

Might, in part, have to do with how lawyers get compensated. A short case or a quick settlement will result in very little compensation for them. Over the course of years and decades that matters so we see everything analyzed to death. At $500+ an hour. Per lawyer.

<comment><USER6> The careful decomposition of problem domain into solution domain followed by recursive search of the solution domain is the lawyer's job. If they don't analyse to death, they are breaching their fiduciary duty.

Don't like the legal method? Don't hire a lawyer. Try doing it yourself. See how far you get when the other guy's lawyers have done the exhaustive analysis and found the deciding element buried in a logical node on a distant subgraph you didn't even know was there to be explored.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, other developed countries are all going downhill for not being overlawyered up like in US.

It's a system set by lawyers for lawyers so of course you need a lawyer more than in many other countries. "Everyone" sues over everything

<comment><USER6> The overlawyered US is the richest and most powerful country on Earth by a country mile.

<comment><USER5> _"The overlawyered US is the richest and most powerful country on Earth by a country mile."_

Thanks to the lawyers, no doubt. I am sure you didn't meant to say that if we pass some tort reform and limit some nonsense lawsuits (IP, malpractice etc) the country will lose it's wealth /power rank.

<comment><USER6> The rule of law is a key part of the mix of institutions, geography, culture and luck that have made the USA the richest country that has ever been.

And with the rule of law comes lawyers. I know it's fashionable to hate lawyers, but they're a necessary profession.

Law is a field in which small details can have very large consequences once the full line of reasoning is unfolded. Because of the importance of exhaustively covering all lines of argument to the maximal possible depth, lawyers are _required_ to do so.

They don't do it to bill you more. It is their _legal duty_.

If you don't like that lawyers are required on pain of loss of income, loss of profession and potentially loss of personal liberty to give you the fullest and most complete service that they are able to give you, then you are entitled to represent yourself.

<comment><USER7> Let's be honest, it isn't this firm's _legal duty_ to set up a marketing website to try to find a plaintiff to launch a lucrative lawsuit. Law firms seek to offer the level of service that maximises their returns, just like any other corporation.

<comment><USER6> No, but once they have a client for a lawsuit, they're still bound by fiduciary duty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In MIT's Mathematics for Computer Scientists course (6.042), I remember learning from Tom Leighton that in certain cases randomly distributing jobs actually IS the optimal solution to load balancing. This technique was somehow associated with Akamai, Professor Leighton's company.

Maybe I am misremembering...

<comment> w-ll I dont know, but I would assume it has to deal with the fact you can't predict how long a job will take to complete, and a random selection would have more resources-more free-more often, verses FIFO where a group of really large tasks could halt everything.

<comment><USER9> And what if they turned the whole thing into a request queue and workers get the "messages" as they become available? To ensure there are no timeouts, they could define a max time a request may stay in the queue, and then take it out and handle it with emergency workers or kill it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IANAL, but my understanding is that _threatening_ a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud.

The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?

Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?

<comment><USER11> > If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of > technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?

We didn't know how bad the performance was because Heroku's tools (logs and New Relic) reported incorrect performance data (i.e., they said requests weren't queuing when they were actually spending a ton of time queuing)

EDIT:

> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct > and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?

To be clear, we have no official association with <http://herokuclassaction.com/> or the lawyer behind it – I actually found out about the site from the article's author when he interviewed me for the story.

(But I do think Heroku owes its customers a refund)

<comment><USER12> New Relic isn't Heroku's tool, man. It's like a car dealership selling you a Pioneer stereo.

<comment><USER13> It's certainly not a disinterested third party that Heroku knows nothing about: [http://news.heroku.com/news_releases/heroku-and-new-relic- pa...](http://news.heroku.com/news_releases/heroku-and-new-relic-partner-to- provide-ruby-developers-with-performance-management-for-the-cloud)

<comment><USER12> Agreed, but it's not the one true monitoring system. I happen to be biased and think it's pretty good, but it's not a first-party monitoring system that they swore on a bible was correct.

<comment><USER14> Maybe they didn't swear on the bible, but when you use a tool from a company with which Heroku has a partnership, you expect that tool to give accurate readings. I would, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the article, Heroku says, "The problem affected an older version of Heroku's service, he said, and those who use a new version of the service would not have these issues."

As far as I understand that is not really the case. The newer version is the Cedar stack which supports concurrent apps where Bamboo only supports non- concurrent apps. This would reduce the problem with random routing, but not eliminate it.

<comment><USER16> The problem is not that they provide random routing, the problem is they said in their documentation that they provided intelligent routing, a design choice they backed off of when they switched stacks.

Customers still have a problem, but Heroku doesn't from a legal / class action-y perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> At the end of the day Heroku are in the wrong here. Performance issues which Heroku basically wouldn't admit until they were outed about them meant that companies would have invested tonnes of time and effort which in turn equals money on trying to fix issues that were caused by Heroku the whole time.

<comment><USER18> I'm sorry, did I miss something since aphyr's analysis? [http://aphyr.com/posts/278-timelike-2-everything-fails- all-t...](http://aphyr.com/posts/278-timelike-2-everything-fails-all-the-time)

Why is Heroku "in the wrong" exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Heh, nothing will make people go back to taking Heroku's side faster than a class action lawsuit on the other side. This would be an awesome form of submarine marketing if they were actually behind it :)

<comment><USER20> Um, why? I was one of many plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against EA (which was settled in our favor). That did not help EA's image at all :)

It looks pretty bad when your customers complain about problems that are hidden by your own monitoring tools, and then you tell them to buy more crap to fix it! It's not a small amount either -- as mentioned the queuing time was larger than the request time. And on top of it you're paying out the nose for this crappy monitoring tool.

<comment><USER19> Even people who have been somewhat screwed by this issue with Heroku tend to love Heroku; Salesforce could make this right with generous payouts to affected people and 2-6mo of engineering to offer a better load balancer as a service (Actually, I think I could build this as a third party provider, even)

EA is basically a lost cause; their business model and culture is the problem. Having better sacks at Dachau wouldn't have helped the Nazi image, either (to auto-Godwin)

<comment><USER20> Well that's what they should have done BEFORE the threat of class action lawsuit. It makes them look at a lot worse if it happens after.

I'm pretty surprised they didn't offer refunds already. It was pretty clear they were asked for, and with no update by now, it's safe to say they were refused. That seems unreasonable to me. If you were in the position RapGenius, would you honestly not have expected a refund already?

<comment><USER19> I wonder what happened to Heroku. They used to be awesome. They still have elements of being awesome, but seem either resource constrained or self destructive. I find it hard to believe Salesforce wouldn't give them what they need to do things correctly -- ranging from "go multi-AWS Region or move off AWS" to building a decent load balancing system to handling this fiasco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On one hand the Rap Genius expose seemed like they got duped and mislead, but on the other hand something about this lawyer mentioned in the article comes off as ambulance-chase-y to me.

<comment><USER22> Class action lawyering usually sound ambulance chasey, because any given person doesn't lose that much in a given instance and so the actual people harmed have little incentive to sue.

At the same time, it's an edge case in the economy. If you harm a large number of people a small amount, they won't sue you to recover for their injury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess I saw this coming:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5237920>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5241686>

Really, though, given how much money Heroku charge and how much money Salesforce.com would be able to stump up in a settlement or judgement ... it was inevitable that a fast-moving law firm would jump on this.

</comment><comment><USER23> If the decisions made by Heroku to misrepresent the product were made prior to the Salesforce acquisition (December 2010) do the founders of Heroku have any liability? Would this sort of thing be a consideration with an acquisition?

<comment><USER24> I don't believe any decision was made to misrepresent the product. The product just evolved and the product documentation didn't. The end result is the same — the product was advertised with inaccurate claims — but this appears to be more a case of neglect than a deliberate misrepresentation.

<comment><USER6> It's not a criminal matter. _Mens rea_ \-- "guilty conscience", the intention to act unlawfully -- is a component of crime. But it's not necessary for lots of civil legal matters.

For example, if we both enter into a contract, you can hold me to my end. If I fail to hold up my end without intending to fail, then you can still insist that I make right or seek remedies for my failure.

(IANAL, TINLA).

<comment><USER24> That all sounds right to me, but I think you've mistsken my meaning. The point wasn't that they lack mens rea, but that the decision to misrepresent the product can't have been made before the acquisition because that decision was never made at all. It was misrepresented by reality gradually changing out from under initially truthful statements.

<comment><USER6> You don't have to decide to misrepresent in order to be misrepresentative. If your material is wrong, it's wrong, and depending on the jurisdiction you may be on the hook.

Ridiculous? Well consider that it gives a strong incentive to ensure that claims made to customers are somewhat accurate. Reducing the cost of _caveat emptor_ makes society richer by reducing transaction costs and so encouraging trade. Sellers have a strong informational advantage over buyers; in general the cost to them of making a correct statement is much lower than having each customer having to find out the truth independently.

Not that this is the _purpose_ of torts law, which evolved mostly to fill glaring, unjust gaps in the remedies of the older forms of common law. But that is the social and economic _function_ that it has come to serve.

(IANAL, TINLA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "[The attorney who set up this site] has spoken with one customer, who has since backed off. "That being said, I am in the process of drafting a complaint, in case their feet warm up," he told us."

</comment><comment><USER26> Only lawyers think it's a good idea to deploy lawyers into the routing mesh.

<comment><USER27> But you can bet money will be intelligently routed to their pockets

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> <http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/>

HIEROKU!?

Ignoring the funny url. I doubt this will go anywhere besides in the domain expiry list.

</comment><comment><USER29> It really disgusts me how quick people are to bite the hand that feeds them. Heroku is not perfect, but they give a whole lot more value than they charge for.

As unlikely as it is, I hope that Heroku terminates the account of anyone that joins the class action against them.

<comment><USER30> >It really disgusts me how quick people are to bite the hand that feeds them.

Really? Because it really disgusts me when a company:

        * Misrepresents their product (saying it's A when it's actually B)
        * Privately acknowledges this misrepresentation under the radar
        * Makes large and ridiculous amounts of bank on this misrepresentation (since you have to throw more dynos at the app to mitigate the lag caused by the misrouting.. and Heroku may be many things, but economical it isn't)
        * And on that note, provides very expensive monitoring and performance analysis tools that further perpetuate the misrepresentation!
        * And then force you to resort to litigation to get some portion of this huge mis-spent investment refunded. (Looking at the suit, this is all that's being asked for)

This wasn't a mistake on Heroku's part, this was calculated. And even if you accept that it was a mistake, the fact of the matter is that their negligence in this matter made them a hell of a lot of money.

This is definitely grounds for a suit.

<comment><USER31> By misrepresents you mean that the end users didn't exactly understand how underlying architecture worked, didn't like the performance, but kept using the service anyway. If every customer I dealt with while working on the EC2 platform could sue because they didn't understand how every technical detail of AWS worked and they couldn't optimize for it...well there would be more lawyers employed by Jeff Bezos than engineers.

This lawsuit will go nowhere and it is sad that such a supposedly tech savvy crowd wants to bring out the pitchforks so fast. But I guess since Heroku has a lot of cash they are now the enemy since they've made it and they should be taken down.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that Heroku made claims about their architecture and subsequent performance characteristics that were flatly untrue.

The further problem it looks as if they _knew_ the claims were untrue.

These are not matters of internal consideration. They cut directly to the heart of the Heroku marketing material: "Write for our platform, our expensive secret sauce will make your stuff linearly scalable."

In which case people expect that it will be linearly scalable. Not exponentially anti-scalable.

<comment><USER31> The same can be said for EC2. "Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change."

If my instances don't launch "quickly" or I've designed my app in such a way that it isn't 100% linery scalable I can now sue Amazon? You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak.

<comment><USER30> >You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak.

You can sue anyone for anything, success is not assured.

That bit of pedantry aside, Heroku led people on to believe that their queueing backend was intelligently distributing requests to nodes. Rather than randomly.

You are not allowed to argue this, as Heroku themselves acknowledged it!

Furthermore, _they blatantly lied about it_. From the rap genius article:

 _Heroku claims that though they received reports of unexplained latency over the past couple of years, they weren't able to figure out the request queuing issue until they read the Rap Genius article. But there is evidence that Heroku knew about the problem for more than 2 years._

And the conclusion, also from the same article:

Based on Heroku's response so far, it appears their approach to fixing the problem is, "We promised you intelligent routing, we delivered random routing (which is worse than intelligent routing), so we're going to change our documentation to make it clear that we're only promising you random routing."

This works for future customers, since once Heroku makes these documentation changes, everyone who signs up will understand exactly how routing works. But it does nothing to address the time and money that existing customers have spent over the past few years. What does Heroku owe them?

<comment><USER31> Who's to say random routing doesn't qualify as "intelligent"? What if random routing is the most efficient routing schema for 99% of their users? Trying to sue because "intelligent" doesn't mean what you think it means isn't going to be very successful.

<comment><USER30> >Who's to say random routing doesn't qualify as "intelligent"?

 _Heroku themselves!_

Again, they changed their documentation.

<comment><USER31> You mean..they changed their marketing speak. Suing because buzzwords don't work the way you think they should isn't a very good basis for a lawsuit.

<comment><USER30> >You mean..they changed their marketing speak.

Marketing speak is not allowed to be misleading or flatly untrue (as it was in Heroku's case). This can and has been the basis of successful lawsuits.

<comment><USER31> I don't know how "intelligent routing" can be defined to mean anything. It can be interpreted a million different ways. This is probably one of the reasons why they used it in their marketing because it sounds cool and is a generic term that could be applied to anything.

I don't see much of anything in a lawsuit unless specific metrics related to SLA's that were agreed to were broken.

<comment><USER6> The documentation used to say that requests were routed to the next idle dyno, but the behaviour was silently changed to be random distribution, which is substantially worse for the customer. There seemed to be previous cases where Heroku were aware of the discrepancy but didn't act to fix it.

That's generally considered uncool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the money for this class action lawsuit would be better used if it would go for a sysadmin/devops person to actually deploy the systems involved.

"Bait and switch"? If a couple of Dynos is not enough for your load, you should be moving to self-managed hosts

</comment><comment><USER32> TLDR: RapGenius (YCS11), in a painful attempt to remain relevant, decides to sue their web host for running their slow code slowly.

<comment><USER33> If you're going to tldr; an article you should really read it. Rap genius isn't suing. No one, in fact, is actually yet suing.

<comment><USER32> The first line in the article "Rap Genius founder Tom Lehman says Heroku misled him and cost his company money."

I have to imagine they're involved based on the number of articles I've read about them over the last week. Their own article, tech blogs interviewing them about the article, and now the founder's picture at the top of this article.

<comment><USER34> Granted, the article is poorly written and seems to imply their involvement. But it explicitly states, near the end, that the law firm involved has yet to find any plaintiffs:

 _He's spoken with one customer, who has since backed off. "That being said, I am in the process of drafting a complaint, in case their feet warm up," he told us._

Furthermore, Tom (the dude pictured) commented in a thread above saying he didn't even hear about the lawsuit until Wired called him to interview him for the article. Consider putting away your "Jump to Conclusions" mat and joining us in the world of facts.

<comment><USER32> You're right. I wish I could delete my comments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EU puts Cayman Islands, others on tax blacklist - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/eu-adds-jurisdictions-blacklist-tax-havens-69042200 <comment><USER2> Jersey isn't mentioned. I wonder why? (Not a sarcastic "why", a sincere "why".)

<comment><USER3> do you think an iPhone built itself? I don't. Don't tell me the only reason I say that is because I am looking for patterns.</comment></comment>


The way we think about charity is dead wrong - <AUTHOR>

Apologies if you have seen this but I saw this Ted Talk on this site (http://www.getinspired365.com/21501270) last on Non for Profit's. I thought it was excellent and given Y Combinator have taken on their first 'non for profit' in Watsi (http://ycombinator.com/watsi.html) I thought the audience may find the talk interesting.<p>The talk is from the Activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta, he calls out the double standard that drives our broken relationship to charities. Too many nonprofits, he says, are rewarded for how little they spend -- not for what they get done. Instead of equating frugality with morality, he asks us to start rewarding charities for their big goals and big accomplishments (even if that comes with big expenses). In this bold talk, he says: Let's change the way we think about changing the world. <comment><USER2> > _he asks us to start rewarding charities for their big goals and big > accomplishments (even if that comes with big expenses). In this bold talk, > he says: Let's change the way we think about changing the world._

It's true, they way we think about charities is dead wrong.

But not for the reasons stated above (which is also in the "dead wrong" region).

Charities are a kludge, an aspirin for cancer. It's a way for the privileged to feel good about themselves (and do some minor good) that never "changes the world" -- just perpetuates the same sad state of affairs and maybe gets them some tax cuts.

You want to "change the world"? Then CHANGE the world, that is make systemic changes (changes to laws, politics, etc). Don't merely poor your excess money on problems.

If a problem needs funding, then make sure it gets funding, not that some rich folks can opt to give whatever they feel like for the cause.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clicky <http://www.getinspired365.com/21501270></comment>


Linkarchiver, a new bot to back up tweeted links - <AUTHOR> https://parkerhiggins.net/2017/07/linkarchiver-a-new-bot-to-back-up-tweeted-links/ <comment><USER2> URLTeam (part of the larger ArchiveTeam) are doing this for quite a few different URL shortening services and they're providing torrents to download the database[1] (similar to how they created torrents for the entirety of GeoCities[2]).

I would recommend contributing to their various tools[3] so that the archive can be maintained for future digital archeologists.

The Wayback Machine is run by the Internet Archive (and ArchiveTeam is a project run in part by folks from the Internet Archive and a whole gaggle of volunteers), so I'm not really surprised they were happy with you providing backups of URL shortened links. But I would recommend helping URLTeam more directly (since their method of keeping archives of URL shorteners is much more efficient).

[1]: [http://urlte.am/](http://urlte.am/) [2]: [https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_- _The_Tor...](https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent) [3]: [https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/terroroftinytown](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/terroroftinytown)

<comment><USER3> ArchiveTeam and URLTeam do great work, but those projects and the OP have different goals. (I'm the OP.) This bot will NOT produce any kind of corpus of tweeted links or links shortened by Twitter's t.co shortener; in fact, it bypasses t.co entirely and I don't have any kind of record of those shortened links.

Instead, it backs up the contents of the pages that are linked to at the _time_ of the tweets. Frankly my tool doesn't do anything interesting at all with the URLs — it just submits the "expanded URL" that was tweeted to the Wayback Machine and lets it sort out any and all 301s.

<comment><USER4> It might be nice to save as well:

(1) the tweet-detail page, for the tweet that includes the link;

(2) the t.co mapping, so that the tweet-detail page's t.co link can somehow be resolved to the (archived) page to which it links.

I don't think there are any blocks against doing (1).

Unfortunately for (2), Twitter has a blanket robots.txt prohibition in place for domain t.co. Perhaps IA could be convinced to ignore that robots.txt in the public interest.

Alternatively, perhaps another site could be set up that itself accepts t.co link-paths, in the background queries t.co, and returns both an HTML page and working redirect that _isn 't_ robots.txt-blocked. LinkArchiver (and any other similar sites) could as a convention archive responses of this other site whenever they'd like to archive t.co.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It also required that I figure out how to "daemonize" the script[.] I found > this aspect surprisingly difficult; it seems like a really basic need, but > the documentation for how to do this was not especially easy to find. I host > my bots on a Digital Ocean box running Ubuntu, so this script is running as > a systemd service.

Agreed on the relative dearth of well-gisted tutorial content re: routine sysadmin tasks.

Outlets that pump out tons of marginally-differentiable content on <today's unnecessary stack element that'll have you terraforming the noosphere 333% more, free> tend to prevail by sheer numbers.

That being said, systemd is its own problem in need of abstracting away from. Supervisor⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾ might be the layer you're looking for.

____________________

¹ [http://supervisord.org/index.html](http://supervisord.org/index.html)

² [https://digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- install-...](https://digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and- manage-supervisor-on-ubuntu-and-debian-vps)</comment>


The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-04-discrete-time-physics-continuous-time-world.html <comment><USER2> This immediately makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder's book "Lost in Math".

Just because the math is pretty doesn't mean the universe actually works that way. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Sure seems like the universe doesn't seem to care much about our math.

I think the authors of the paper are being perfectly straightforward (e.g., they explicitly include the phrase "in a certain very limited sense" RE: time proceeding in discrete time steps), but the title of the article itself feels a bit misleading.

<comment><USER3> > Sure seems like the universe doesn't seem to care much about our math.

Well, some mathematical truths are so universal even the universe can't escape them. the incompleteness theorems [0] come to mind.

Regarding the article, I think most physicists consider the continuous models they use to attack the problems at hand a hack to make the mathematics consumable. I don't think they consider the universe itself to be non- discrete.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

<comment><USER4> Perhaps those who expect quantum computers to scale to millions of qubits do. The amplitudes involved seem to defy discreteness...

<comment><USER5> There are workarounds for that: for instance, do not use such a poorly conditioned basis to describe the system. In particular, problems in physics that appear only in one particular basis are probably human-created notation issues, not something fundamental, as physics should be basis independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Scientists believe that time is continuous, not discrete—roughly speaking, they believe that it does not progress in "chunks," but rather "flows," smoothly and continuously.

Is this true? I didn't think there was any kind of consensus on this topic. I also thought some scientists believe the Planck time(/length) is the smallest unit of possible time i.e. they would say time is discrete

<comment><USER7> Just because Planck times are the smallest possible measurement of time intervals doesn't mean that time progresses in discrete Planck time chunks. That's obvious enough, but maybe seems unmeasurable ... and so what difference does it really make?

A bigger way to think about it is ... is the a universe like a movie where each still image lasts a Planck-time (or some other smaller chunk)? Is the entire state of the universe encoded in stasis for that instant, and then boom ... it's time for the next "Planck frame".

It's really hard to resolve that kind of universal time chunkiness with the ordinary time dilation effects that can be observed at relativistic energies. Whose frame of reference counts? We do know that space-time can be warped ... it's harder to imagine that this kind of warping and curving is discrete. That's one reason why many believe it's a smooth flow.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but not just unmeasurable by like a guy with a measuring device, unmeasurable in the sense that it _can't effect anything at all_, right? (if it caused an effect of any sort you could eventually measure or observe in any way... nope).

To say that time is "really" continuous under such circumstances seems like a weird philosophical claim.

<comment><USER6> Thank you, you eloquently expressed the point I was trying to make. To say "we know that quantity Y can never be measurable or observable below discrete length X... but also, Y is continuous and can be subdivided below X, just trust us on this one" doesn't sound like science. Philosophical at best.

<comment><USER9> Philosophy is not just saying random stuff and "trust us".

And inversely, science is not just measuring -- that's the naive positivist (and later Popperian) view of what scientists do.

For example:

As Thomas Kuhn (1961) argues, scientific theories are usually accepted long before quantitative methods for testing them become available. The reliability of newly introduced measurement methods is typically tested against the predictions of the theory rather than the other way around. In Kuhn's words, "The road from scientific law to scientific measurement can rarely be traveled in the reverse direction" (1961: 189). For example, Dalton's Law, which states that the weights of elements in a chemical compound are related to each other in whole-number proportions, initially conflicted with some of the best known measurements of such proportions. It is only by assuming Dalton's Law that subsequent experimental chemists were able to correct and improve their measurement techniques (1961: 173).

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/measurement- science/#EpiM...](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/measurement- science/#EpiMea)

<comment><USER6> >Philosophy is not just saying random stuff and "trust us".

Ok, enlighten me. I've read philosophical works where that certainly seemed to be the case. There's also this weird thing where only a specific lineage of schools of thought and certain ancient Western philosophers are "real philosophy" and others (e.g. anyone with a non-Anglo last name) are "not real philosophers". No True Scotsman at its finest.

>And inversely, science is not just measuring -- that's the naive positivist (and later Popperian) view of what scientists do.

In graduate school, I worked at a lab in Stanford (I didn't attend there, but was fortunate to have spent some time there). Your statement would certainly be news to the PI I worked for, who was a heavy Popperian. You can't falsify the existence of sub-Planck lengths or times, that's for sure. Science was absolutely nothing more than that to him. And while you can certainly claim an Appeal to Authority fallacy, Stanford, at least, considered my PI competent enough to award him a PhD in a scientific discipline, so I'm not sure how much I can agree with your post.

<comment><USER10> People like to say that "modern" science has moved past Popper. In my opinion, this is because it allows them to attach the gravitas of Science [0] to whatever their pet topic is, even when that topic does not admit falsification.

This is not to suggest that we should not inquire on these topics, but rather that they should fall under some other umbrella besides Science.

[0] Or whatever is left of it at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this is highly interesting, but while reading the comments here, I think one should be very careful about the actual content of the paper. It is deriving results about the (phenomenological) master equation. It has been some time since I have studied this, but we are not talking about some first principles theory here. It is possible to derive master equations in some limit from a fundamental theory, but the setting here is purely phenomenological. I.e. the hidden states would be anyway present in the fundamental theory and would be lost due to some integration and limit process in order to arrive at the master equation.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Scientists believe that time is continuous, not discrete—roughly speaking, > they believe that it does not progress in "chunks," but rather "flows," > smoothly and continuously.

The jury may still be out on that. A few of the quantum gravity theories (like loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulation, or causal sets) propose a discrete spacetime as a consequence of background independence.

Edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. Though I didn't read the underlying papers.

I'd still like to know _what_ either "flows" or "chunks".

Time? Sure, ok, time flows, or time chunks. But what exactly is it?

Time has been one of my favorite topics to read about in the last 20 or so years, and I still feel like we have hardly made any progress in figuring it out.

<comment><USER14> It seems to me there's a bait and switch of sorts that we play on kids. We tell them science can answer their questions about the world, or that they can use science to answer those questions, but it kinda can't. Keep digging and pretty soon you're lost in not-quite-accurate metaphors that may have nothing to do with reality and "we can tell you how it behaves, it's [pages of equations], isn't that good enough?"

It may be (probably is) that "what is this" or "why does it do that" are just meaningless questions, in the sense a child (or adult who hasn't re-calibrated their expectations of what science can tell them) means them. Which is interesting itself, I suppose, but at that point just go study philosophy and art, if that's why you were into science in the first place—and I think it's why everyone at least _begins_ to be interested in science.

[EDIT] in particular it's frightening how fast kids' questions stymie an adult because the adult realizes that they're only a step or two away from "why is there something instead of nothing, and also what is _something_?" and... good lord, at that point seriously just go become religious or get really into philosophy or something, because you're outta luck, kid, sorry, we don't have any actual answers, just observations about what all this stuff does, but no we can't tell you what "stuff" or "does" are.

<comment><USER15> Noam Chomsky usually has this point, that the human mind seems limited in its "native understanding" to a mechanistic view of the world - that is the only kind of model that is truly satisfactory to us.

He also points out that, ever since Newton, the dream of mechanistic world was shattered, and with it, any hope that science would help us "make sense of the world" in a truly satisfying sense. Instead, we have become content with modelling the world mathematically and predicting how it will evolve.

Of course, space-time and quantum mechanics have driven additional nails in the coffin of a truly understandable world.

<comment><USER16> >Of course, space-time and quantum mechanics have driven additional nails in the coffin of a truly understandable world.

I'd think the opposite. The fact the world can work at least as strangely as relativity and quantum mechanics suggest, and we still figured those out as much as we have so far, reassures me in our ability to figure out the world we exist in.

<comment><USER15> What I meant was: quantum mechanics and relativity have shown that not only is the physical world _slightly_ different from the kind of world our mind can picture (e.g. "mechanistic, but with the universal attraction force"), it is in fact nowhere near our built-in mechanistic model, and we can never hope to build a real intuition about the world.

However, we can still hope to model and predict it more accurately than we would have ever hoped before, so there is that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I mean, I've always thought that Planck's constant _defines_ the discreteness of time and, as it were, reality. Isn't it rather obvious that this is the case?

"Planck time"..the unimaginably small 5.39 × 10−44 s, is as fundamentally important to the fabric of the universe as it's much more well known "brother", the speed of light in a vacuum _c_.

Now, we are nowhere near able to measure that short a time frame...we are limited to around 10x-19 or so, but without a doubt time is discrete, we just are unable to get there yet.

<comment><USER18> I'm no physicist, but the layman explanation I've heard is that the concepts of Planck length and Planck time _do not_ imply that spacetime is discretized into little "voxels"; instead these quantities are just limits on the uncertainty of any possible measurement.

As I understand it there are two contributing facts:

a) the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that there's a tradeoff between certainty in position vs momentum, so if you're more certain in a particle's position you're less certain of its momentum. (For photons, momentum is proportional to frequency, i.e. wavelength, and frequency is proportional to energy.)

b) By mass-energy equivalence, anything with energy has mass, therefore higher frequency photons are more "massive". A single photon of sufficiently high frequency would form a black hole.

Putting those two together, to measure a distances accurately, you need higher and higher frequency photons with shorter and shorter wavelengths. For example, radar creates blurry images at ~5cm wavelengths, while ordinary photographs can be razor sharp at ~500nm. The Planck length is just the wavelength at which the photon would have so much energy that it would collapse into a black hole and break our current mathematical models. That's why it's nonsensical--with current models--to talk about lengths smaller than a Planck length, but it _doesn 't_ mean that space itself is quantized. Similar argument for time.

(Also, the same logic applies to other particles like electrons, protons, and even up to macroscopic items like baseballs; everything has a wavelength...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Like an atom and then its composition.

[https://nobeliefs.com/atom.htm](https://nobeliefs.com/atom.htm)

</comment><comment><USER20> What flip one bit must involve a hidden varable? Is that related it's being continious to discrete and vice visa?

</comment><comment><USER20> Some issues in the discussion:

Scope: Many equate maths physics and universe all and only science. Whilst they may be "easy" science not all human observed phenomenon are reduced to them. Even left and right wing ideology?

Process-wise: whether the in principle refutatable may be naive to describe how human work (and likely we do not all do maths in axiomic way). It is a way to make a distinction of science and myth (and in maths axiom is good for proof not necessarily generate maths)

</comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr: This is a (cute!) technical detail of an approximation technique used in studying the thermodynamics of computation. It has nothing to do with fundamental physics.

Imagine you have a system with N states, represented as a vector of length N. You have a linear operator that transforms that vector into the state in the next step of time. That's basic linear algebra. Now make the linear operator random, so you have stochastic transitions. That makes it into something called a Markov chain.

Now, physicists love differential equations. They've got lot of tools for working with them, and to bring those tool to bear, some folks a while back took a Markov chain and wrote down a set of linear differential differential equations for how the probability distribution over states evolves in time. That's called a "master equation."

Now say that you have an arbitrary function from initial state to final state. Can you describe it as a dynamics governed by a master equation? Not in general. That's not a huge surprise. We know there are lots of things you can't describe with linear differential equations.

If you're working on thermodynamics of computation, though, it would be nice to salvage the master equation framework because its relationship with thermodynamics is well understood, and you don't have to rebuild that. And getting to thermodynamics from straight up stochastic processes is beyond the mathematical abilities of most physicists. That's not a slight on physicists. The mathematical path from a stochastic process to a thermodynamics is an area of deep, difficult specialization in mathematical physics and if you go down that rabbit hole, it will likely be your career (see, for example, Elliott Lieb).

There are two ways to extend this linear world to get better approximations of things:

1\. Imagine you have two points on a curve. A linear approximation is drawing a straight line between the two points. To get a better approximation, you take some more points between the two on the curve and draw a sequence of linear going through those points. The equations of each of those lines are going to be different (they have different slopes and intercepts or however you want to parameterize them). Or, in the context of master equations, you insert some additional, "hidden" steps in between your primary time steps with different stochastic matrices.

2\. Imagine you have a dynamical system that moves in time steps, and depends on the last two steps for its current move. You can make it into a system that depends only on the last step by expanding the state to include the previous time step as well (that is, instead of the dynamics of x(t), I track the dynamics of (x(t), y(t)) where y(t) = x(t-1)). These are called "hidden variables." It's the same idea as hidden variables in quantum mechanics. Or even in classical mechanics, I can't write down a first order equation for the position of a classical particle...but I can write down a pair of first order equations for the position and momentum.

Lots of folks working on thermodynamics of computation have done both these things to patch their tool.

What this paper does is try to calculate how many hidden steps and how many hidden variables you need to patch the tool for a given arbitrary function that you're trying to approximate, and shows that if you use more hidden variables you need fewer hidden steps and vice versa.

For thermodynamics of computation, they point out that if you are engineering a system with master equation dynamics, you have to pay for the extra hidden states/steps that you need, so the simple statement that invertible functions are thermodynamically free and noninvertible ones require work isn't the only cost accounting to do.

Aside: I have complained before about only whiz bang articles rising on HN. Here we have a straightforward, technical calculation on the front page. Progress!</comment>


Who is your dream co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to wear this theme thin but a comment on my dream investor thread made me think about this. If you could start a company with anyone in the world who would it be?

As a non-tech person I'd probably pick something who was strongly technical - most likely Steve Wozniak.

<comment><USER2> Steve Jobs has the midas touch. I would rather have him as the cofounder.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Although I'm sure by the time he's through with you, that "co" will be but a distant memory..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My dream co-founder doesn't have to be someone famous. It certainly doesn't have to be my friend. (Friends sometimes don't take friends serious. Trust me, I had some experience). My dream co-founder is someone I know; someone I can trust; someone I can share the vision with. Ironically, my co-founder is not too far away from that; he's a great guy.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a lot of industry veterans that I would love to work with.

But as far as a co-founder goes, I'm happy with my current one. We have a great working relationship and we're good friends -- plus our skills compliment each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> we're all happy with our co-founders, this was intended as a more theoretical question. i believe that people are always the best way to find the best people and asking the question who would you most want to work with, is a more perceptive way of seeing which entrepreneurs people respect the most.

<comment><USER5> I understood the intent of the question. :)

I wasn't making a point of any sort, just making a side-note that I wouldn't want to work with anybody else with my current project. To more relevantly answer the question: there's a lot out there that I respect. As my dream co- founder? I'd have to give that a little more thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick

</comment><comment><USER7> deVinci

</comment><comment><USER8> Bruce Perens.</comment>


Ask HN: Allow multiple free accounts? - <AUTHOR> I want to keep this beneficial for everyone, so I won't go into too much specific detail. Basically, we have two plans (the limited free plan) and then the paid plan. The free plan limits the # of images and projects a person can upload; the paid plan lifts many of those restrictions.
The problem is that a lot of people, at least a few thousand, have multiple accounts -- I've even seen a few people with three -- and this obviously means that they're choosing to spread their files across multiple accounts rather than upgrading to the paid account. Now we have enough data from tracking IPs, etc., that we could go in and shutdown the multiple accounts and even stop duplicate IPs from signing up for another account, but the question is… should we?
Is it worth pissing off a few thousand people, but maybe convincing a few hundred to sign up for the paid plan? What would you do in this situation? Should we just let it slide and chalk it up to "at least they're happy and probably telling their friends" or do something about it? <comment><USER2> Tread carefully; in some cases it might legitimately be two users behind the same NAT or on the same computer.

Or, people whose main motivation isn't avoiding the payment but getting some other benefit -- two identities? -- from two accounts. In which case, making sure a single paid account has the same benefits could help.

If you start to crack down, you might want to mix it with a bump-up in free quotas. "Even as we are more generous with our free accounts, we need heavy users to subscribe..."

It also sounds like the population is large enough to try some A/B approaches to get them to sign up -- more steps in logout/login (if they're using a single browser), an option to merge accounts, interstitial upgrade appeals, etc.

<comment><USER3> _[http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2009/07/15/howto- start-u...](http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2009/07/15/howto-start-using- lisp-in-your-work-environment-part-1/*)

That's why you have cookies. Session identification; IP + cookie + url- rewriting + timeout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few thousand out of 133,000 isn't a huge percentage. I would say that is bound to happen statistically, and you wouldn't want to divert resources to addressing it unless it was a significant percentage of your overall. Chances are those people who are willing to go to the effort to maintain multiple accounts wouldn't pay anyway.

<comment><USER5> > _A few thousand out of 133,000 isn't a huge percentage._

Also, how many of those multiple accounts are actually using _all_ of their accounts ? I can easily imagine people creating second account after they played around with the service using a throw-away account, and then actually liked it enough to create a 'real' account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> i would try to display a polite message through the site to those specific users that makes it clear you know they are using multiple accounts and that your "cheap paid plans can easily be purchased [here]" or something. guilt them into it, but don't cut them off.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think something like this might work actually. Keep it super polite and guilt trip them. "I see you've got two accounts, you know you're missing out on features X, Y, and Z unless you upgrade one plan."

<comment><USER5> For what it's worth, this would've not worked on me if there were some uber- useful service that would've not wanted to pay for.

I would simply put IP and email-based duplicity checks in place and would leave existing multiple accounts alone. This should work just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Artificial scarcity is a hard businessmodel to make work for the die-hard freeloaders.

You'll lose a bunch of them but they were not your best users anyway.

I've always tried to really differentiate the offerings between the 'free' and the 'paid' parts of the site so that multiple free accounts would not give you more than what you had when you had a single one.

But for artificial scarcity that does not work.

Isn't there some other metric where you can tighten the bolts without a simple workaround by your users ? Speed ?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's differentiation between our two plans -- and more in the works -- but the "base" feature of being able to upload files (images and video) has to be on both plans. I think what you're getting at is the correct approach, though, and that's to continue to work on distinguishing the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it possible that they're creating multiple accounts so that they can show different portfolios to different types of clients? I'm curious if this might be a workaround a missing feature instead of just trying to get by quotas.

(Perhaps you already support this, I just quickly played with the demo and didn't see it. If you don't offer it, it might make a nice feature to offer for paid accounts.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think that's what is happening. We offer 5 projects for the free plan, which should be enough to show off your illustrations AND your photographs, but it seems as if some people want all or none.

We do allow people to hide projects, so if you just want to show off your illustrations you can do that by hiding your photographs, but still doesn't really combat people from wanting BOTH online at once.

...there's definitely some missing feature there, though, it's just not clear what it is.

<comment><USER8> From the demo, it looks like you provide a subdomain per user. If that's correct, maybe you could allow paid users to assign a different subdomain to each project?

Have you talked to any of the users doing this sort of thing? Asking why they're doing something will probably point you in the direction of the feature far better than a comment thread on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1 IP != 1 user.

Even if it is always the same for the same user it could be that they're behind a NAT or just simply sharing a PC.

Being behind a NAT myself I have a lot of problems with websites discriminating by IPs.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should budget for your free service under the assumption that people will create multiple accounts. Then you should allow merging multiple free accounts into one paid account to provide a tempting upgrade path for multiple-account people, who after all are among your most dedicated users. If you can detect multiple-account people then you can advertise the account-combining feature to them directly.

</comment><comment><USER11> An interesting tangential question would be:

How do you disallow multiple accounts if you really don't want them at all? I.e. I have a multiplayer game and I really don't want users to have multiple accounts because it might spoil the game experience. How do I disallow multiple accounts?

<comment><USER12> A subscription pay wall would give the most noticeable drop in duplicate accounts. As long as your service is free and account creation is simple (which it should be), you'll get duplicates if there's incentive to do so.

Things you can check if you want to prevent dupes: (But be aware that some of these can and do target legit users)

        - IP checks
        - Browser Cookies (if same value for multiple users)
        - Flash Cookies (same principle)
        - E-mail
        - System-specific metrics (if you're running native code)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The real question is, how do you know they are using multiple accounts unless you are invading their privacy and looking at their private data stored on your servers?</comment>


Loopy C Puzzle (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.susam.in/2011/10/loopy-c-puzzle.html <comment><AUTHOR> Here are the solutions to the puzzle: [http://blog.susam.in/2011/10/solutions- to-loopy-c-puzzle.htm...](http://blog.susam.in/2011/10/solutions-to-loopy-c- puzzle.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> ... -i < 6 is the only thing I can come up with

</comment><comment><USER3> I wanted to say i % 6 but that fails for i=0.</comment>


Alleged Foxconn insiders leaked details about Apple's forthcoming devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/4/15736990/apple-alleged-foxconn-insider-details-iphone-8-siri-speaker-glasses <comment><USER2> Sounds a little farfetched. These employees know they're completely burned in the industry if Apple / Foxconn finds out who they are, and they still send the Reddit mods verifying documents? That's career suicide.

<comment><USER3> Both the leakers and subreddit mods are just begging for some administrative subpoenas to Reddit to dump their accounts for industrial espionage or trade secret charges. Speaking from personal experience here, Reddit can't and won't defend your information.

<comment><USER4> _> Speaking from personal experience here, Reddit can't and won't defend your information._

Could you elaborate on your experience?

<comment><USER3> See [https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/30tudk/psa_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/30tudk/psa_5_reddit_accounts_subpoenaed_by_ice/) ; I also discuss how easy to get and unlimited administrative subpoenas are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had no pressing need to upgrade to the new MacBook Pro and I'm glad I've waited but the reintroduction of the magsafe charger would be pretty awesome. As much as I want that I don't know if I can see Apple backtracking on that, but I'd love to be wrong. Also no USB-C on the new iPhone is slightly disappointing even if it does mean I don't have to buy all new cables.

<comment><USER6> Has Apple ever backtracked on something as significant as the MagSafe?

<comment><USER5> Nothing comes to mind, I think there is about as much chance of that happening as them bringing back the headphone jack...

<comment><USER7> I think they could "backtrack" to MagSafe and save face by framing it as an enhancement to USB-C. "We're embracing standards, but we also designed an elegant MagSafe connector for USB-C."

As for return of a dedicated headphone jack on iPhones, I think that is highly unlikely as it was fundamental to their ideas about "wireless future." MagSafe they can return to ideologically.

<comment><USER8> This honestly seems like the most likely way to reintroduce MagSafe. Reintroducing the non-USB-C connector would be even more infuriating that its removal for those that have already purchased the newer MacBook Pros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If true, I'm a bit bummed that the full iMac redesign is coming in 2018 instead of at the end of this year. I have a 2011 MBA that is starting to show it's age. I was thinking a new iMac would be it's replacement.

Also, it would also be amazing for Apple to add Mag Safe connectors back to their laptops. Certainly, there must have been a sharp rise in destroyed laptops at coffee shops for them to backtrack?

<comment><USER10> I'm quite happy with the current iMac myself, I just bought a refurbished 27" at the end of April and don't have many complaints. If there was one, it would be how ludicrously expensive SSD's are from Apple compared to the cost of standard NVME drives, I ended up deciding the fusion drive in the refurb model I bought was "good enough" since I didn't want to spend the extra money buying a new machine plus another $200 or so to upgrade to a 512GB SSD.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just curious, but since when do HN mods get to change a post title without saying so? This was not the title I posted.

</comment><comment><USER11> So no progress on Mac Pro, which is weird, because we know Apple is working on it.

<comment><USER12> I thought the Mac Pro was made in the US, so why would Foxconn even know?

<comment><USER11> I was talking about the cheese grater Mac Pro revamp that Apple seems to be working on. Not sure that one is made in US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > That's _career_ suicide.

That would be something new for Foxconn.

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

<comment><USER14> I don't wish to make light of any suicides or potential worker mistreatment at Foxconn, but it's important to keep in mind that when the Foxconn suicide nets made the news there were 14 reported suicides that year. Foxconn has something around one million employees. It's possible that the number of suicides was under reported but it's important to keep in mind that China's suicide rate is somewhere around 22 per 100k residents and the US's hovers somewhere around 10-13 per 100k residents.

14 suicides for a company of Foxconn's size doesn't seem particularly unusual, except for maybe being below national average.

<comment><USER15> This is a BS comparison. People do not usually kill themselves at work.

<comment><USER16> Most people do not live on a factory campus the size of a small city where the definition of "at work" becomes a bit hazy.

<comment><USER17> Gee I wonder if that contributed at all.

<comment><USER18> Well going by the statistics above the people living on that factory campus city had a lower suicide rate than the national or US average right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> looks like a hoax to me

<comment><USER20> While possible, it's mod-verified[0] and IIRC at least the second time they've done this, the previous one being[1]

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/6ezhwm/iama_foxconn_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/6ezhwm/iama_foxconn_insider_with_information_on_next_12/dief0d0/)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/572ds6/video_tip_of_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/572ds6/video_tip_of_apples_new_smart_macbook_and_smart/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your company have a BYOD strategy? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Yes. The company (hint: the brand is on your computer) has 2 different BYOD strategies.

The first is BYOM - Bring Your Own Mac. You pay for your own Mac, and they'll give you the corporate Windows image on your choice of a VM or on the hardware for you (not sure if it's via Bootcamp or complete system wipe). Your cost center incurs a surcharge for Mac support, and you can't take it to the local PC service center for most things.

The second is BYOD, and has 2 parts - phones/tablets, and laptops.

You can buy and bring any laptop you want, and we'll install the IT image, put on full disk encryption, etc. There's no subsidy for both BYOM and BYOD. You just get to chose what hardware you wanted to run with. I'm not sure if there's a requirement to buy $OURPRODUCTS, but the employee hardware discounts from Dell, Lenovo, etc only apply to them, so most people end up with our hardware. I think the largest increase in BYOD was after the Ultrabooks came out, but before they were available as a normal hardware refresh option.

You can bring your own phone or tablet. I don't know anyone with their own tablet, but the phone is popular. Very few people actually have corporate cell phones, but you can get a discounts on plans and select phones. If you bring your own phone, you grant IT remote wipe privileges in order to get the calendar and email, and a couple dozen apps.

If you Google for the company + BYOD, you'll find a lot of literature on the program; we're actually pretty open about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wait, at your company, you have to pay for your own work computer?

<comment><USER2> Only if you BYOD. If you get the IT computers (large bludgeoning devices with power bricks to match), then they're of course billed to your cost center and refreshed periodically. At refresh time you get your choice of like 3-4 models, but on initial hire your manager will just pick something for you.

So here's the BYOD pitch:

1) Pay for your own computer, making sure it has Windows Ultimate or Enterprise. Stipends were determined to not have the right ROI, so it's all out of pocket.

2) IT will install all the security software so you can get it on the production network (I actually think it's wiped and the corporate Windows Enterprise is put on, which is why you needed to buy it in the first place-- otherwise the license isn't valid)

3) Support your own computer. IT has loaners if you need to send it off for warranty support or whatever

4) You get to mix work and home stuff on the same computer!

4% of the employee base has apparently taken them up on this offer, based on a public whitepaper I found about it..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No. Where I work, its ONLY-BUY-OUR-DEVICES rule. I work for a large global handset manufacturer (hint: largest in the world). Every morning and every evening I pass through big metal detectors and stand in a queue to get frisked everytime. As per policy, I can only buy devices made by my company if I intend to use it in office. If I buy something else, the security guards at entrance are happy to pack my device in a one-time sealable, semi-transparent bag, which ofcourse has to be in the same condition when I leave office. In case you are wondering... NO, I dont get discounts for buying any mobiles.

<comment><USER4> Sorry can I clarify?

You work for $BIGMANUF and you can use one of _their_ phones in the office, and carry it through security. But if you try to carry a iPhone in, it will be sealed and bagged.

Huh?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If anyone is interested, Ericom is hosting a webinar on BYOD.

The webinar is tomorrow (Wednesday, July 26). To sign up: [http://ow.ly/mjMA3](http://ow.ly/mjMA3)

The same webinar will be repeated on July 10. [https://ericom- event.webex.com/ericom-event/onstage/g.php?t=...](https://ericom- event.webex.com/ericom-event/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=708274465)</comment>


Verizon launches 4G LTE network in 27 new markets - <AUTHOR> http://news.verizonwireless.com/LTE/Overview.html

<comment><USER2> I just got my Verizon 4G JETPACK mifi device today. Still has a 5GB data cap :(

I am not sure how fast ill hit that limit - but I hit that limit on my T-Mobile MyTouch 4g in about 5 days previously...</comment>


Increase Productivity with Proper GitHub Issues and Scrum Workflow - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cookiengineer/increase-productivity-with-proper-github-issues-and-scrum-workflow-25fb48eee0ed#.1luie3cg6 <comment><AUTHOR> We've been using Waffle.io which provides a nice Kanban style board and lets you tag and order the issues in Github. I'd be interested to hear what others are using?</comment>


"When dealing with RMS, keep the following things in mind" - <AUTHOR> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RichardStallman <comment><USER2> I know RMS is a special case but it annoys me when people say/act as if they're too busy to properly respond.

One of my favorite people in Microsoft is Ray Ozzie. Every single time I've mailed him, I've gotten a long, thoughtful reply. He is probably the best email handler I've seen.

BillG is pretty good at email and sending you prompt replies.

<comment><USER3> I'll say giving a thoughtful reply to every random person that emails you is not really the best use of time.

Sure, it's great for you to get an answer and kudoz for the people who really have the time to do that.

<comment><USER4> It depends on the type of email. In general, when I give people thoughtful replies _I learn something_. But I can see this wouldn't be true for some categories of email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know how many of you guys have ever actually contacted RMS, but whenever I did, his answers were quick, polite and to the point. Anecdotal, I know...

<comment><USER6> I'm sure it depends on the topic of conversation, your stance on said topic, etc., etc., too.

<comment><USER7> This is somehow different than other people?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminded me of this old Jamie Zawinski joke: [http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why- cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...](http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation- with-rms-is-impossible.mp3)

(ObOld: I remember the time when it was why-cooperation-with-rms-is- impossible.au, not .mp3)

<comment><USER9> The applause he gets at the end of that "song" makes listening to the whole thing worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _He has very very little time, so his answers may seem impolite at times._

I always hear this but what is it exactly that he is doing that keeps him so busy?

<comment><USER11> This is such a bad excuse. Being polite requires extremely little time, and it's a requirement for interacting with humans.

In my experience, autistic-ish people (often geeks or nerds) sometimes confuse being polite with being social, which _does_ take time. They then seem to think that if they don't have time (or really, the skill and desire) to be social, then they don't have to be polite.

This is a minority of geeks and nerds, of course.

<comment><USER12> I think the statement that his answers may seem impolite is more a commentary on many people's inability to distinguish terseness from impoliteness. It's not saying that he's rude.

<comment><USER13> _many people's inability to distinguish terseness from impoliteness_

That's exactly it, though. Politeness and terseness are often diametrically opposed in our society, and since there is no standard of politeness outside what society finds to be "polite", I'm not sure how you can say many people have an inability to distinguish.

If you email a long question to someone and they respond with "No.", many people would find this to be impolite or downright rude. It might be the most efficient thing and the hacker-type might think it's OK, but if most people think it's impolite, _it is_.

<comment><USER11> That's because if it's a long question it generally requires a longish reply to _explain_ to the other person why the answer is "no". Saying simply "no" strongly suggests that the other person's understanding is not worth your time, or that they should accept your answer without understanding it because you are higher status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Keep in mind that RMS' email policy should not be confused with his face-to- face conversational style.

I ran into him at a train station in Milan, and completely commandeered his time and attention for a good 30 minutes, despite the fact that he had a train to catch. He politely answered all of my questions, and he even responded to my criticisms with civility and respect.

If you ever get him in a casual, face-to-face conversation, you will find that he actually comes across as quite meek and restrained, rather than the arrogant blow-hard that he is generally portrayed to be.

<comment><USER15> It may also be that face-to-face, he realizes it's a lot easier for someone to haul off and smack a hippie than it is via the Internet.

On the other hand, I think just about everyone comes across a lot friendlier in person, merely because it's easier to portray interest and friendliness than over email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> He is a fascinating creature. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be alive at the same time as various historical characters. With him, I think I am. I believe history will treat him kindly, regardless of his idiosyncrasies.

</comment><comment><USER17> They forgot "his ideas about software economics only make sense if you have a $1M grant from the MacArthur foundation and tenure at MIT".

<comment><USER18> His ideas seem to be scaling pretty well. The GNU ecosystem is as big as ever.

<comment><USER17> ... Thanks to IBM.

<comment><USER19> Seems like you're having it both ways: Do his ideas only make economic sense because he's an academic grant recipient or because one of the largest commercial technology companies on earth has embraced the output of his work, helping foster an ecosystem around it?

<comment><USER17> There's free as in speech, free as in beer, and free as in working for IBM without getting paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone else gotten unsolicited emails from RMS when you inadvertently use one of his "words to avoid" on a mailing list or the like? <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html>

It's kinda fun.

</comment><comment><USER21> Lots of famous and busy people manage to be approachable without needing you to read a wiki page first. In fact it's really pompous to tell others they need to follow special guidelines because you're so busy, as if the rest of us sit around all day.

</comment><comment><USER22> RMS is a bunny ears laywer (<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BunnyEarsLawyer>).

<comment><USER23> tvtropes is NSFWorking. Tangent: I disagree with Jack Sparrow being Crazy Awesome. He succeeds by the Rule of Cool, but I can't think of an instance where his craziness _made_ him succeed (though that may be just because I'm very tired right now.) eg. at the start of PotC, he looks completely freaked as he flies up to escape from the pier. Or is the fact that he even tried it Crazy Awesome? Great movie, anyway.

<comment><USER22> I guess it's the new rickrolling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> He doesn't have web access? Really? I don't think I understand.

<comment><USER8> From a post from 2007[1]:

        For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer.
        (I also have not net connection much of the time.)  To look at
        page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page
        back to me.
        It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

[1]: <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979>

<comment><USER24> Interesting, I'd never come across that quote before today. Anyone have any idea why he doesn't like the WWW? Is he still on Gopher?

<comment><USER8> That piece of news was widely circulated back then, if I remember correctly it even spawned a few RMS == Chuck Norris posts.

In a more recent article[1], Stallman voices his opposition to web-based SaaS applications, as they take away your basic ownership of the data stored there, limiting your freedom etc.

I can understand him in this regard. I'm not that idealistic and love the convenience of some web apps, so right now that wins in the end. I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people seem to be annoyed of RMS – we never like to be shown that we maybe compromise a bit too much. But I digress…

So you don't like webapps. You do most of your discussions in usenet or email lists (this might sound sacrilegious here, but we I don't think reddit/HN/4chan is a step up from moderated newsgroups). You can just download news, either via the above-mentioned wget trick or via RSS. That does eliminate most of your web-browsing needs, or am I missing something really important? Especially if you live in Emacs, an don't care too much about rounded corners, gradients and typographical text.

He's basically like the guy you know who tells you that he doesn't watch TV and rather reads a book. You tell him that there's quality programming and you read enough books, too, but then you remember this conversation and feel kinda guilty while watching Castle.

[1]: <http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/stallman.php>

<comment><USER24> I kindof get that. But SaaS != WWW. What's more, some SaaS supports data portability--as of yesterday, even Facebook does this! So I can't really understand the concern, at least framed this way.

The web as a timesuck is I guess a good argument, but limiting yourself to checking e-mail surely won't harness any inclination people have to read news or watch media. Right?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The US Library of Congress has put 25M items free online - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/the-us-library-of-congress-just-put-25-million-records-online-free-of-charge <comment><USER2> Meanwhile Elsevier, who is widely known for inhibiting science progress by setting incredible high prices even for government funded research papers, makes a move against SciHub [1] and LibGen [2] again [3].

[1] [https://sci-hub.cc/](https://sci-hub.cc/)

[2] [http://libgen.io/](http://libgen.io/)

[3] [https://torrentfreak.com/elsevier-wants-15-million-piracy- da...](https://torrentfreak.com/elsevier-wants-15-million-piracy-damages-from- sci-hub-and-libgen-170518/)

<comment><USER3> I find scihub/libgen a very important project actually. Mirrors should be done (not an order, just a plan).

<comment><USER4> I've never heard of libgen but it's blocked by my ISP (in the UK)

<comment><USER5> Indeed.

        Access to the websites listed on this page has been blocked pursuant to orders of the high court.

<comment><USER2> SciHub has onion site scihub22266oqcxt.onion, I don't know about LibGen though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I added the raw .gz files to IPFS when Library of Congress announced this last week: [https://github.com/ipfs/archives/issues/152](https://github.com/ipfs/archives/issues/152)

It's slightly more than 100GB and here it is: [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWSzgkftVrkh2859bGT44ahzoqcGhFkjsrQUtH...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWSzgkftVrkh2859bGT44ahzoqcGhFkjsrQUtHen9hVw9/)

(Note that the filesizes in the directory listing are all wrong -- that's the original index.html from loc.gov/cds/downloads/MDSConnect/)

This makes it a lot easier to use this dataset at e.g. hackathons, where a lot of people would simultaneously pester that LoC server, which already seemed pretty bandwidth-limited on its own when I downloaded the files.

<comment><USER7> Did you push them into the Internet Archive yet? If not, going to grab a beer and start iterating through your IPFS objects.

<comment><USER6> Go for it! :) I've never pushed anything to IA so far to be honest.

<comment><USER7> For future reference then! [https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive](https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive)

<comment><USER8> If someone wants to pay for / donate 100GB worth of bandwidth on a VPS somewhere, I'll do it.

<comment><USER9> scaleway: €2.99/m 200Mbit/s Unmetered bandwidth

<comment><USER8> Okay, so who's going to spot me 3 EUR? ;)

<comment><USER7> Could TransferWise you the $3.35USD. That work?

<comment><USER8> This thread is getting too long; how do I contact you?

<comment><USER10> This amount of usage falls well within most VPS companies' free trial / promo codes offerings and should cost you nothing. Use a throwaway email account and drop it after a month.

AWS will give you a whole year if you haven't tried them yet and the other popular VPS companies (DO, Linode, etc.) all will give you at least $10 startup credit. This is probably simpler and faster than figuring out how to receive <$4 from some random internet commenter.

<comment><USER8> Yes. This isn't the first time I've tried to contact toomuchtodo.

Anywho, the amount of data is actually ~19GB which is well within what I can upload with my home connection. Unfortunately the ia tool is failing for me: [https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/issues/176](https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/issues/176)

Also, it's not really about the $3, more that a tonne of "$3" projects really add up over a year or so.

<comment><USER7> Email sent.

<comment><USER8> I have been advised that the data already exists on archive.org.

<comment><USER7> Email me back. Would still like to buy you a beer for your troubles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just in case anyone else is wondering: This is, as I understand it, 25M pieces of metadata, not 25M books, songs, movies, and treasures from the past.

<comment><USER12> It's something along those lines. It looks like the music is all "cover songs" :( one of the heavier metadata types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's the copyright? Would it be legal to unzip those and serve them directly, so archive.org or anyone else can make them more inviting for access?

I know you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth but there's not even an index or a rough idea what something like "Name Authorities" might mean. That's not what I call wide open doors, that more seems like doing some legally required minimum.

<comment><USER14> I wonder how much more extensive the release could have been were copyright laws not in the way.

Then there's the old question of whether the works under copyright today will ever go in to the public domain, or if their copyright will be extended forever by future changes in copyright law.

<comment><USER15> Release is 25 million bibliographic index files and has nothing to do with copyright, since none of the data was ever covered by copyright protection.

<comment><USER14> They didn't have to limit their release just to bibliographic index files. If they wanted to, they could have released manuscripts, letters, newsletters, videos, or any other media they have. But they may have felt inhibited by copyright laws.

So my question is, had copyright laws not been an issue, how much more would they have released?

There is also the larger question of whether the value of copyright law outweighs the value of not having it, so that everyone can benefit from this treasure trove of knowledge.

<comment><USER16> I don't think these records meet the standard definition of 'media' anyway. This is really just data that can be used for cataloguing purposes and other media custodian/librarian applications.

Given that the LoC has made it their goal to archive at least one copy of everything, I think they are not quite the right people to fall into your anti-copyright cross hairs. However, I do strongly agree with your overall premises.

<comment><USER17> I don't think the op has anything against the LoC. More like they are lamenting that the LoC has its hands tied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For those who haven't ever worked with MARC record data before, there's a python library that's a pretty easy interface called pymarc:

[https://github.com/edsu/pymarc](https://github.com/edsu/pymarc)

</comment><comment><USER19> Can someone change the title to match the article? s/items/records/

<comment><USER20> Another nit -- paid for via taxes.</comment></comment>


NSA and the Pandora's box of surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2013/06/24/nsa-and-the-pandoras-box-of-surveillance/

<comment><USER2> A pretty good article on the response of the NSA.

"We've changed the passwords." Excellent job boys, you deserve a raise. And two-person requirements to access the data? Yeah, that will take 5 years to develop, cost $2 billion, and never really work.

There must be thousands of people who knew this system existed. You can't keep that secret forever, Top Secret clearance or not.

What if the next "national traitor" uses his Top Secret clearance to use that data stream to his own financial benefit? Blackmailing senators on their affairs, or exacting revenge on targets given to him by outside crime bosses.

Maybe I watch too many movies... But for every good guy like Snowden, is a bad guy.

<comment><USER3> Hmmm, blackmail.... could be the way to go. Strong word, but, negotiating from a position of power?

My presumption is that the politicians are playing this down because of perhaps the information the NSA has on them. I assume the power is in the web of information people have on each other. So, a balance is maintained, or something like that. Well, going public seems ineffective. It seems these people have games to play to mitigate the damage caused by public disclosure. You know, divide up the issue, make it black and white, make it about traitors and good guys, and so on. So, maybe the next person who feels a tug of conscience might decide: OK, I have all this info, I can either release it to the voters, who will no doubt be manipulated, or I can bowl up to a few senators and use the information to make them force change, like like the system already seems to.

Makes me think of the end of Clear and Present Danger, where Ryan has some information that could kill off the presidency. The President points out that what he actually has in his hand is a chip which he can play in the halls of power. Perhaps Bradly and Snowden had it wrong. Perhaps why should have played their chips?

Dunno. Is that how it should work? Play them according to their rules? Forget the whole honest, open and decent thing, and get secretly, politically dirty? Do deals under the table? Get change that way?

I really don't like the idea of that at all, but it seems that anything decent and honest is easily disposed of as a matter of routine.

<comment><USER4> If anyone could "negotiate from a position of power" in this situation, it would be General Alexander himself...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Briefly interned (two weeks) for Booz Allen this Summer. While the people I met and interacted with for that short amount of time were excellent and of good spirit, the general opinion I got was that people did not enjoy their day. Much like a traitor of a country is usually disgruntled with their homeland, I can't imagine more leaks aren't right around the corner. Tech consulting firms do not share in the amazing atmosphere of tech consumer- facing companies, and as such may be the last place for loyalty.

</comment><comment><USER6> How do we know that they haven't been?

His supervisors, by the way, are at Booz Allen, not the NSA. Although certainly the NSA has to take responsibility for the contractors it does business with.

<comment><USER7> And someone at the NSA needs to be taking responsibility for why Snowden had access to as much as he did, sysadmin or not.

<comment><USER8> to further the above, he was also an NSA employee prior to working for Booz Allen. And a CIA employee before that, I think....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Other BAH personnel and BAH corporate liability are dependent on whether there was either process negligence (e.g., Snowden's team members didn't enforce policy) or inadequate measures. One man acting alone, even within a corporate structure, doesn't implicate his co-workers or the company as a whole. (Of course, this isn't always the case in court. See also: Arthur Anderson.)

<comment><USER10> A serious organization with a serious mission such as the NSA would be reckless? hapless? (a lot of very bad things) to rely on the civil courts this way for operational security. If the NSA had so little or no oversight or operational security, that's just crazy.

<comment><USER9> Agreed: like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

<comment><USER10> Like, these Keystone Cops don't know a damn thing about horses or barns, and should never have been trusted to look after them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this means that the NSA is going to fail it's annual PCI audit?

<comment><USER12> Following PCI is a contractual requirement, not a statutory requirement. If you want to do certain things with credit cards, such as accept payments using them, then you have to enter into a contract that says you'll follow PCI.

If you have no need of any service that requires entering into such a contract, than you can completely ignore PCI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Note that the host never asks the general if anyone was fired. Perhaps someone was fired, and it didn't come up.

After all, if somebody asks why this couldn't happen again, you don't say, "We fired the guy who designed this system." You say, "We changed this, this, and this."

He talks about implementing a two-man rule, which is an excellent idea. I'm not sure how that's going to work in practice, though. Is there a way to make the linux root password composed of two passwords?

<comment><USER14> > Is there a way to make the linux root password composed of two passwords?

This could certainly be done via a custom PAM module. Of course, we should also consider that admins will often have physical access to the systems. I can't think up a purely technical solution to enforce the 2 man rule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Likely nobody has been fired because the investigation is still underway.

</comment><comment><USER10> Finally, someone other than Greenwald starts asking critical questions.

<comment><USER16> THE critical question (in my mind) isn't whether NSA/FBI agents are listening to people's phone calls, or reading people's emails. The key question is whether all of this information is being captured and retained and available on-demand (regardless of current or future legal authority). Does the government, or any of its agencies, affiliates, contractors, or allies keep a repository containing this data available for future analysis.

Answer that question - and answer it without linking it to "this program" because you've already said "this program doesn't authorize that" and don't link it to "this country" because you've said the laws of this country forbid that type of thing.

Plain and simple.

Does any representation of this information exist in any state (analog, digital, audio, waveform, transcription, encrypted, modified, converted, fucking pantomime) that differs from a layman's understanding of where their communications data resides?</comment></comment>


Tomo: Low Cost Impedance Tomography, Alternative to MRI, CT - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/Tomo <comment><USER2> This is huge, considering how simple the circuitry is.

Based on the prototyping process, they have gone for an expensive impedance analysis DSP chip with 0.1Hz resolution and a relatively wide frequency range. If this gets adopted by a major manufacturer, you could spin an ASIC for pocket change at the optimal frequency (40KHz empirically derived by researchers). Additionally, put the multiplexer on the same chip and make a single chip solution.

The paper is focused more on the machine learning aspect but there are obvious points to improve on the electrical bits!

I'll be waiting until this appears as a Myo-like form factors for hackers to play with.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is amazingly cool in general. The idea of a lightweight, wearable sensor that can detect gestures is very exciting. I wonder how hard / practical it will be for somebody else to implement this? I'm almost intrigued enough to take a stab at it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't see how is this an alternative to CT or MRI. It is more likely analogous with regard to the principle of imaging, not an alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> It might not be a "competitive" alternative, but it does what CT and MRI do — takes picture inside the body.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Itchy Feet - Problem Worth Solving? - <AUTHOR>

	Hi, all - I have had 4 jobs in different fields and tech stacks (enterprise - J2EE, web startup - RoR, health care - Java and web scrapers, and technology - Groovy with Swing), all of them lasting about 2 years before I get itchy feet and decide to move on. At first, I figured it was just a matter of outgrowing the positions I was hired for, and as I kept getting increasing levels of responsibility at each new position, that seemed to make sense. However, I'm starting to see a pattern where I take a new job, dig in and learn everything I can about a new tech stack and problem set, get bored and then move on, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
I started my current job 15 months ago, and yet again, I'm starting to get itchy feet. What started out as a challenging job has become routine - it's just a matter of banging out features as quickly as I can. There's always the option of overcomplicating features to steal a chance to do more challenging work, but that's a temptation I do my best to resist. I've mentioned this to my boss and asked for a chance to do something new for a few months (mobile development, devops, even some design work), and she's been less than receptive. Hence, I'm starting to look around, and I'm wondering if I'm going to wind up in the same cycle. I'd like to find a place I can stick for a while, if possible, without winding up in the same rut.
Is anyone else familiar with this sort of pattern? Anyone have any tips? <comment><USER2> I had this exact same pattern for a while!

It sounds to me like contracting is worth exploring. When I contracted (for about 7 years), I was exposed to new technologies and business domains every couple of months. I fondly remember about 2 weeks into every contract there was an 'oh sh*t' moment where I realized I was in over my head and running to keep ahead of what the client needed. Of course, that was nicely counterbalanced by the 'aaah' moment about 6 weeks in when things were finally jelling.

(I mostly worked on custom web applications and ecommerce and made a decent living working 30 hours a week.)

If you pursue this path, you might want to consider going out on your own as a single person consulting company, rather than going through a contracting company. You'll have more control, though less security, and will have a wider scope of project domains. That said, if you are interested in certain types of projects (J2EE, big data) you might find it hard to contract as a one person show.

Of course, I don't know what your financial situation is, but if you pursue this, I'd start going to meetups, have about a year of expenses saved in the bank, and read a couple of good books like this one: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Secrets-Consulting-Getting- Success...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Secrets-Consulting-Getting- Successfully/dp/0932633013) and this one: [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/027363707X/002...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/027363707X/002-1084596-0500848?v=glance)</comment>


Ask HN: I've got 6-7 hours of uninterruptible time. What should I do? - <AUTHOR>

just curious what other people would do?<p>I've got a long flight ahead of me. <comment><USER2> Take an open source git repo you've made, or open source a project you've got somewhere on your hard-drive and a) polish it (absolutely without adding new features), and b) document it. Both will teach you new skills and stretch you as a developer in ways that might surprise you. They'll also help make the ecosystem better for others, whether you have 2 or 2 thousand watchers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Great suggestion. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sleep. Look out of the window. Read. Forget you own a computer.

<comment><USER4> I had a fear of flying (still do, but I can manage it better) and sleeping would have been the best thing to get through the flight. However, I could never do it. Therefore, I would do everything possible to distract myself from the fact that I was in a plane for the next 7-12 hours. In fact, I recall reading the entire Akka documentation from start to end on a red-eye flight from Washington to London. It was very dry, but it kept my mind off it.

The crazy thing is I loved flying when I was a kid. How nice it is to be ignorant

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, I'm the opposite. I was terrified of flying as a kid due to an irrational fear that it might fall out of the sky, and I would refuse to ever get on a plane. As I grew older, I eventually realized the odds of the plane crashing are quite low, and the fear pretty much dissipated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll say stay away from devices as well, but I mainly mean staying away from social networks, news sites, and anything else that's idle browsing/talking. Also, stay away from work. Too much work, work, working all the time. Come up with new ideas, write blog style posts amount different subjects, look out the window and think, think about where your life is and where it could be, read some good books, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Building a startup (actually others are doing the building, I'm doing everything else :) I would bring one or two books (Traction, Lean Startup, Smartcuts, etc.) and my iPad.

I would use some time reading and some time writing either ideas/notes or blog posts.

</comment><comment><USER8> sleep. try to stay away from devices, see if you can even do this.. :) - meditate take a pen and paper, write down random ideas plan your day/week ignite a conversation with someone sitting next to you.

</comment><comment><USER9> I tend to take time like this to simply write. Be it reflecting on the last 6 months of my life, or some sort of short fiction. Sometimes its good to forget about coding and look at the bigger picture.

</comment><comment><USER10> Start a $10 billion business like this guy did on a bus trip:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27579790](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27579790)

</comment><comment><USER11> Read a book.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like to a book on a completely new subject and read it on flights.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just day dream. Imagine your future

</comment><comment><USER14> obvious question: do you have a laptop?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.</comment></comment>