The Road not Taken - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK <comment><USER2> Classic Harry Turtledove story from 1985, in the Golden Age SF vein (compare to Clarke's 'Rescue Party'). It's a prequel to Herbig-Haro, which mostly inverts the idea. You can also view it as a precursor to Turtledove's Worldwar series.

But as the pastebin is a blatant copyright infringement, and the story isn't new, I don't think it's appropriate for HN.</comment>


Oracle's MySQL misses the NoSQL mark - <AUTHOR> http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/oracles-mysql-misses-the-nosql-mark

<comment><USER2> Are people really still writing these silly articles? Is it 2009 again?

Author does not know the difference between a caching layer, a transactional RDBMS, and distributed non-structured data store.

NoSQL is not ACID, any database NoSQL/RDBMS can be slow when not designed properly, caching is great when you can, and of course not enough people read documentation, only sensationalist trollop like this.

<comment><USER3> _Author does not know the difference between a caching layer, a transactional RDBMS, and distributed non-structured data store._

The author was not referring to using memcached to store the results of a query, but rather the new memcached API in MySQL 5.6. With this API, you can access data in InnoDB just like you do with memcached (key/value get/put/update), while at the same time retaining SQL query flexibility. [http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/whats-new-in- my...](http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/whats-new-in- mysql-5.6.html#nosql)</comment></comment>


Google AppEngine 1.7.7 lowers pricing a bit - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkForJavaReleaseNotes

<comment><AUTHOR> Billing enabled apps will no longer be subject to a $2.10 minimum weekly spend. Instead, apps will only be charged for their actual usage.</comment>


Where and When Did the Symbols "+" and "–" Originate? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.stsci.edu/livio/2013/03/12/where-and-when-did-the-symbols-%E2%80%9C%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9C%E2%80%93%E2%80%9D-originate/ <comment><USER2> This always amazed me: "A Jewish tradition that dates from at least the 19th century is to write plus using a symbol like an inverted T. This practice was adopted into Israeli schools (this practice goes back to at least the 1940s)[11] and is still commonplace today in elementary schools (including secular schools) but in fewer secondary schools.[12] It is also used occasionally in books by religious authors, but most books for adults use the international symbol "+". The usual explanation for this practice is that it avoids the writing of a symbol "+" that looks like a Christian cross.[12]" [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_and_minus_signs#Alternativ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_and_minus_signs#Alternative_plus_sign)

<comment><USER3> I have an uncomfortable memory of my 1st grade teacher showing this to us and me refusing to go along with what I insisted was an irrational superstition. I didn't understand the context or what her old age meant.

Similarly, I was shocked as a kid when I visited the US and saw apartment buildings skip the 13th floor numbering.

People are weird.

<comment><USER4> Similarly, in Japan one pronunciation of 4 is also the word for death, so it's frequently omitted.

<comment><USER5> This is also true in China (at least in Mandarin-speaking regions, I don't know about Cantonese or other dialects).

<comment><USER6> Also in Korea because of the Sino-Korean word for 4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What fascinates me most about this story is how it illustrates what a young race we humans are intellectually.

If we ever want to be anything more than warring tribes, we must learn to accumulate knowledge together. Universal symbols for addition and substraction are the first small step on that very long road, yet it's only been a few hundred years since we took that step.

On the scale of the universe, we are like a baby who just minutes ago learned to grab onto objects and already is hell-bent on pouring a hot pot of tea on herself using this new capability.

<comment><USER8> And we're still using '*' for multiplication in our programming languages instead of '×' because using anything other than ASCII for programming is just too hard, or too weird, or whatever.

<comment><USER9> We already tried going full-APL but it only proved that it wasn't a good idea. I mean this is impressive <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4> but I still think the notation is too obscure.

<comment><USER10> Full APL isn't just unicode, though, it's also a total commitment to single- character operators as the primary language construct. Take a look at some Agda or Unicode-enabled Haskell code to see it really improving readability... though hampering type-ability.

<comment><USER11> Agda's use of Unicode makes it far less readable to me. Readability is a subjective thing, of course.

<comment><USER10> Fair. It's definitely in the eye of the beholder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always felt the origin of the equals sign was wonderful: "I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of parralles, or Gemowe lines of one lengthe, thus : ==, bicause noe 2, thynges, can be moare equalle."

<comment><USER13> It's what permits those two lines to be essentially irreducibly perfect in describing "the same" that fascinates me. Any 'samer' and they would converge and simply be -.

The opposite of something. It's only when we can separate nothing, that we can begin to describe something.

(And is the universe the mathematical manifestation of everything that isn't nothing?) /stoner

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _The Hindus, like the Greeks, usually had no mark for addition, except that "yu" was used in the Bakhshali manuscript Arithmetic (which probably dates to the third or fourth century)._

That's interesting. The Silk Road (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road>) was in full swing at that time. This is pure guesswork, but multiple classical Chinese characters now pronounced _yu_ (予,与,餘,逾,與) meant something close to addition. I wonder if there's a link?

There were a great many languages in operation there, and the Chinese were primarily interested in trade. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were a regional patois language of business utilizing Chinese idiom that the subcontinent and others were able to borrow from.

Likewise, the borrowing may have gone in the other direction.

Note that some of the above symbols are not so dissimilar from the + symbol, allowing some minor scope for simplification.

On further investigation, [http://www-history.mcs.st- and.ac.uk/PrintHT/Bakhshali_manusc...](http://www-history.mcs.st- and.ac.uk/PrintHT/Bakhshali_manuscript.html) claims the Bakshali manuscript _yu_ was "for yuta" (apparently Sanskrit/Devanagari: युत). Apparently _yu_ is a well recognized word root meaning "to mix" or "(equipped) with" within Sanskrit, _yuta_ being some kind of derived or more expanded/standalone form. (Sources: [http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/sarasvati/dictionary/9...](http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/sarasvati/dictionary/9ROOTS.HTM) <http://vedabase.net/y/yuta> [http://dictionary.tamilcube.com/sanskrit- dictionary.aspx?ter...](http://dictionary.tamilcube.com/sanskrit- dictionary.aspx?term=yuta) [http://www.hinduwebsite.com/sacredscripts/sanskrit_dictionar...](http://www.hinduwebsite.com/sacredscripts/sanskrit_dictionary.asp))

That _yu_ is apparently the same Sanskrit / proto Indo-European root as _yoga_ , or even the far-western-Barbarian modern derivation in English, _yoke_. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/yoke> [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_Proto- Indo-E...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_Proto-Indo- European_roots/y)

Hrrm... there must be something published on this already. Anyone with academic library access? :) I'm up in the Himalayan foothills, hehehe.

<comment><USER14> Had a quick check for Basque/Estonian/Finnish online dictionaries as the major outlying European languages out of further interest. Basque alone seems to use the recognizable root _ek..._ (one would suppose from common root with the Sanskrit for one: _eka_ ). Estonian and Finnish seem way closer to Latin languages in most cases .. I checked words like _and, plus, sum, total_. Lots of readily distinguishable slight variations, but no _yu_ to be found. What about English _union_ , _unit_ and _unity_? Same root I suppose. Dictionary.com claims union is from Latin _ūn(us)_ (one) via middle French but that unit is only attested to 1642. It seems the Romans had some of that _yu_ going, too.

I guess that's as far as exploration will go with western sources: apparently the Romans weren't big on composing etymologies. Perhaps Indian sources are useful though: _Nirukta_ (Sanskrit: निरुक्त, IPA: _[n̪irukt̪ə]_ , explanation, etymological interpretation) is supposed to be one of the six _Vedānga_ disciplines of Hinduism. One of the primary texts there is available at the Internet Archive: <http://archive.org/details/nighantuniruktao00yaskuoft>

Potentially related tidbits I found there: " _Yosa_ (a woman) is derived from (the root) _yu_ (to join).", " _Yutham_ (herd is derived from (the root) _yu_ (to connect).", " _Dasyu_ (demon) is derived from (the root) _das_ , meaning to lay waste: in him the juices are wasted, or he causes works to be laid waste." Also had some good discussions of _soma_ (a psychadelic draft).

OK, curiosity sated. Obviously there was some _yu_ going on circa Central Asia at the dawn of history. Anything more specific seems like guesswork only. My take is it was to _soma_ takers what _PLUR_ is to early ravers. Party on man!

<comment><USER15> For Finnish, you may have missed the now deprecated word for summation, "ynnä", meaning "as one". It's not from Latin or Chinese, though - at least not recognizably so.

<comment><USER14> Interesting. It would probably be seen as a Proto Indo-European root rather than anything else. They were the folks tottering about Central Asia at the dawn of history. There's an amusing bit of video about them at the start of the BBC's _History of India_ series, featuring a crazed Russian archaeologist who has been career-excavating early sites in Uzbekistan, and the neverending human quest for intoxication!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Several earliest known uses of other mathematical notations can be found at: <http://jeff560.tripod.com/mathsym.html>

<comment><USER17> Interesting. The close parentheses form of division from 1540 looks like the basis of the long division form of division, i.e. 2)6 with a bar or vinculum, extending from the top of the parentheses over the 6. The long division form finally takes its modern form in 1888. The transformation of that symbol seems somewhat obvious and natural. I wonder if we are likely to see further changes, as modern typesetting should resist the variations that handwriting would introduce. I believe any change in the future will have to demonstrate improved readability before it will be accepted.

<comment><USER18> Also interesting: the form for long division that is used in the 19th century in the US: divisor ) dividend ( quotient, is very similar to the long division form that is still used in the Netherlands today: divisor / dividend \ quotient. Looking at Wikipedia, it seems all other countries have gone on to different notations, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We discussed this article in the office and among other things we found that even today the notation for division (when calculating it by hand) varies wildly:

In Czech Republic we would write

453: 12 = 37.75

In Netherlands:

12/453\37.75

In Russia:

           453 | 12
               | 37.75

all of them are listed on Wikipedia

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

<comment><USER20> In India its usually written: 500 ÷ 4 = 125. Its not a + sign, it a bar stuck between a :

<comment><USER21> That's normal division, which is a notation. The GP is talking about long division, which is a technique used to divide large numbers.

The symbol in Australia (and I'd say most of the English speaking world) looks like a long square root sign with a curved vertical part:

      _______

12)12345

<comment><USER22> That's also very much the standard in Britain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Kind of weird that no consensus have emerged for multiplication (·, ×, *, or horizontal juxtaposition) or division (÷, /, or vertical juxtaposition with horizontal line between) yet.

<comment><USER24> _Everybody_ uses juxtaposition for multiplication (or dot when some separation is required) and horizontal line for division.

* and / are poor man's substitutes when all you have is ASCII.

× is used for vector products, Cartesian products and products of algebraic structures in general.

The only place I've ever seen × or ÷ being used in arithmetics was primary school. No idea why they use them.

<comment><USER18> In primary school in the Netherlands (and maybe elsewhere?), : is used for division.

<comment><USER25> It's actually widely used for division, but only in some contexts. (It signifies a ratio, eg. "3:2 odds".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I always thought the plus sign had to do with two entities meeting or being placed on top each other, like a road crossing or a pair of sticks, and that the minus sign was just a spinn-off of that sign and also made sense in the same way that Descartes used "..." according to the article.

</comment><comment><USER27> The next logical question is, "Where did × and ÷ originate?" From there, I've always wondered how multiplication migrated from "×" to "∗"? And recently, I've wondered if we will migrate "-" to something else? (This last derives from having to annotate a range of numbers including positive and negative. When "-" is used for both range and negative, it causes confusion.)

p.s. I tried to post this to the original poster's blog, but was told "...your comment seems a bit spammy." Really? I'd say their blogger spam settings a more than a bit off.

<comment><USER28> I always thought the * was used for multiplication to avoid confusing × with the English alphabet X. We can usually distinguish them while writing equations on paper(I write x in a cursive, for example).

<comment><USER29> * was used for multiplication because there weren't enough bits to fit every symbol everyone would have liked into ASCII, so compromises were made, including preference for symbols that could be 'overloaded' with multiple meanings in different contexts.

<comment><USER30> Also to avoid ambiguity. Since x is alphanumeric it's a valid variable name in most programming languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Overall, what is perhaps most impressive in this story is the fact that > symbols which first appeared in print only about five hundred years ago have > become part of what is perhaps the most universal "language."

They appeared just at the right time to be carried around the world by conquista and colonialism. Same goes for time notation, etc.

<comment><USER32> One of the interesting things is why are there 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes per hour, etc?

Mathematically, those values are useful because they can be factored in many ways. But who picked them?

I was at the British Museum one time, and they had an horological exhibit (clocks throughout the ages), so I asked one of the curators. He said it was the Babylonians that chose those values.

But since this thread is about notation, I should be asking who picked the colon (:) as the time separator that is generally used. And are there other conventions for this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Medieval manuscripts are full of strange squiggles used to abbreviate words or word endings. It's almost like reading shorthand. Here is a short list for Middle English [1] but for Latin there were dozens if not hundreds. So I'm not surprised that + and - originate from that time.

[1] [http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic453618.files/Cent...](http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic453618.files/Central/editions/paleo.html#abbrev)

EDIT: In fact, the second symbol on that list, the abbreviation for "and," seems half-way to becoming a +.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's an interesting note near the bottom about the ÷ symbol. Even today in the Netherlands, a symbol like -/- (like a percent sign, but with minus signs on both sides of the slash) is used as a kind of emphasized minus sign, especially in money calculations in a vertical layout where otherwise addition would be assumed. I don't know if this is used elsewhere, but it seems probable to me that it derives from the ÷ symbol mentioned in the text.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting that there is no mention of ancient China, where money and accounting were invented.

The Chinese for buy and sell are 买 and 卖 respectively, the first indicating spending money and the second indicating receiving money.

Granted I don't know what I'm talking about, however I do know Chinese, and I believe these characters far predate the 15th century as do most Chinese characters.

Perhaps someone can elaborate on whether this is a sound theory.

<comment><USER35> Both those characters are simplified, which is to say largely different from how they would have appeared throughout Chinese history.

Buy in traditional is: 買 Sell is: 賣

Both of these would be closer to the ancient form of expressing these characters. I don't see "+" nor "-" in either of these characters.

<comment><USER14> Fun fact: the one on the left, everything but the top part is a pictograph of a shell, which was used for a kind of status symbol or possibly something roughly equating our modern money in many early societies. When Marco Polo arrived here in southwest China in the Yuan Dynasty (ie. just post Mongol- invasion), shells were still in widespread use. In fact, Chinese literary records document special requests to the emperor to except the region from the national law requiring use of imperial money by the provincial governor they placed in the region, who was an Uzbek and son of the then-king of Bokhara who had ridden with the Mongol horde to take China. One of his father's later successors was one of the Prokudin-Gorskii images (first colour images in the region), over here: [http://pratyeka.org/prokudin-gorskii/the-emir-of- bukhara-191...](http://pratyeka.org/prokudin-gorskii/the-emir-of- bukhara-1911.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Chinese write it as 加, if you start making the strokes you get a + in the upper left. Consider this is over 6000 years old, probably the origin. My theory.

Edit (more evidence): "The plus symbol as an abbreviation for the Latin et, though appearing with the downward stroke not quite vertical, was found in a manuscript dated 1417 (Cajori)."

There is an assumption here that it's an abbreviation for the Latin et. But the downward stroke can be seen in the Chinese word.

<comment><USER34> And 卖买 are sell and buy respectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I remember to read the answer of this in an Isaac Asimov's book: Asimov On Numbers.</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone been able to truly practice David Allen's GTD? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for people who were able to acheive results like Allen describes in his book. Also looking to get a sense of how many here are interested or using the methodology of Getting Things Done. http://gettingthingsdone.com <comment><USER2> I've been using it for about 10 years in a somewhat modified and ever-evolving version. I spend about 15 min per day staying organized, plus maybe an extra 30 min once a week.

Results? I've been told by co-workers at multiple workplaces that they're impressed with my organization and follow-through. I've seldom had a boss suggest that I'm focusing on the wrong priorities at a given moment. Mind like water? Maybe an exaggeration; but I'm able to handle about 10 times as many simultaneous responsibilities now than I was a decade ago, with less stress.

Though flexible, GTD is an extremely extensive system that can require a pretty significant amount of overhead, and doesn't fit everyone's style or type of work perfectly. Personally I find it less helpful outside work, for instance. But it offers a lot of principles and techniques that you can adapt into a personalized system that works for you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had limited success with it so far. Could keep my system working for a few weeks at a time before urgent tasks getting in the way of the process and organize steps and making the whole system untrustworthy, so even adding things to my inbox felt pointless.</comment>


Why is your brain wrinkled?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/08/03/unfolding_the_mysteries_of_the_brain/?page=full

<comment><USER2> Too long in the tub.</comment>


The Improbable dream to radically transform online gaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-05/29/improbable

<comment><USER2> Offtopic: but jesus wired is crap on my phone lately, something running somewhere that makes scrolling a pain.</comment>


Audiobus Will Democratize Apple's Proprietary 'Group Jamming' Feature - <AUTHOR> http://m.gizmodo.com/5898510/audiobus-will-democratize-apples-proprietary-group-jamming-feature

<comment><AUTHOR> Since the time this article was written, audiobus has been opened up to all developers, and the big news this week is that apple just added audiobus support to GarageBand -- essentially giving it the Apple seal of approval.</comment>


I Hate Captcha- Come beta test my alternative - <AUTHOR>

I am getting ready to launch BaffleBot, a captcha alternative.  In a nutshell, it's a picture/question combo challenge, and the challenges are submitted by humans.  It's monetized with a small ad, with revenue share for bloggers, and challenge creators are rewarded with a link shown in every challenge.  So, if you want to contribute or check it out, please go www.bafflebot.com.  If you are a WordPress blogger, I'd especially appreciate it if you would install the plugin and give me feedback on how well it works.  The beta code is "baffleboy" (all lower case). Send me an email if you have any questions or comments (kapauldo AT gmail.com).<p>Thanks, Kevin <comment><USER2> Hi, I just connected to your website and the first "bafflebot" submit to me is "what is this character's name" (a yellow bird) I'm from France, I dont know all the US kid cartoons so I cant answer to that captcha.. Whereas 1+2 or "enter the word" is pretty universal.

Second try, I have in front of me a red apple with legs and arms and the question is "what is it?" The question is wayyyyy to broad, what should I answer? is it another cartoon that I'm not aware of? is it an apple? a red apple?...

A captcha must be VERY simple and universal.

I read a few months ago a good captcha idea, a picture of a human and the challenge is to say if it's a man or a female. A bot cant read the picture well enough, but the human eye/brain is trained to identify a man or a female in less than a second!

My 2cents, good luck with your project. I agree captcha generally sucks

<comment><USER3> Male vs female is a poor test because you can guess correctly about 50% of the time. Thats on par with some current CAPTCHA bots.

<comment><USER4> It's also not so good for the visually impaired because you can't really provide an audio version of the challenge, whereas identifying the letters in a random string is easier to present as audio.

<comment><USER5> Do captcha bots ever use the audio string? Could you not hook up a voice recognizer to the audio portion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate to say it, but I think this is a huge step in the wrong direction. First, there appear to be multiple correct answers for almost all the challenges. One showed a picture of a woman watering plants that appeared to have dollar bills as leaves. It asked me what she was doing. I had no clue what to put; is she "watering plants," "growing money," or just "watering?". I think you should at least provide multiple choice answers, even if the user has to enter in the full answer word for word. Forget about spam bots being able to figure these out, most humans would have a hard time!

Second, and this is a big one, I don't think there are many bloggers and web developers out there who are so frustrated with captchas that they'd be willing to use an ad-supported system, no matter how easy it makes things for the end user. I know I wouldn't. The ads also add a lot of confusion to the captcha. Again, on the money plant watering example, I saw an ad about making cash online. Combined with the strange money tree it made for a very confusing experience at best. I think having the same crap that spambots are likely to post on a site as advertisements on the _very captcha that is trying to prevent it_ sends some pretty mixed signals.

Third, why does this need to be crowd-sourced? This seems like it's adding myriad quality control issues. I think if you sat down and came up with 10 or so internationally universal puzzles that are easily solved by all humans and not by robots, you would have enough variety to keep the bots guessing.

What I want to see is a captcha that determines I'm human without me having to do anything. I don't even know if this can be done, but to me all captcha solutions should be aiming toward that goal. In the meantime, I'll deal with the captchas that are out there right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, the ads right now are low quality, but remember, the ads are revenue shared with the blogger. so it's a way to monetize your comments. if it gets traction, i'll be experimenting with deals, coupons, localized offers, etc. the current ads are really just there as a placeholder.

<comment><USER6> My advice is to be selective with your advertising partners. It still seems like an odd place to have ads, but if they were more tasteful or I had a say in what they were, I might be more inclined to use it. That said, it strikes me as a very odd revenue stream. If it were me, I would concentrate on making this the captcha of choice and _then_ focus on monetization. The ads seem like they might kill off any chance of this happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How many different questions do you have? I ran it ~20 times and saw the same question 4-5 of those times.

One problem you might have is that classical captcha has 25^6 combinations, and you can generate a new set every x days by changing the algorithm used to generate the images.

Your set is human generated, and it seems that it wouldn't take long to build an answer set to use to break it, especially since it gives you a second and third chance at an answer.

A spammer could build a 'quiz' site with your questions and answers, and store the image hashes along with the answers in a db.

<comment><AUTHOR> right now there is a set of seed data on there. there will hopefully be new challenges being entered every day, then i plan to use a quarantine, IP logging, etc. strategies to prevent catalog attacks. this is crowd sourced, so ihope to have a lot of people contributing challenges and grow the catalog base. also, i've got image mogrification working, so after a few days of use, each challenge can be modified to prevent automated catalog attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Overall I thought it was great. I went through about 20 questions and got them all right. I also went through them about twice as fast as Captchas and I probably would have missed a few too.

I agree with the other posters though that it needs to be a bit more forgiving with spelling and adjectives. "Yellow Car" and "Red Apple" should both be accepted. I never saw Big Bird but if you decided to keep it, "bird" and "yellow bird" should be correct unfamiliar users.

I tried to use tineye.com to see if a spammer could automate searches to determine what the picture is of (obviously wouldn't work on all pictures though) and it failed for 'car' and 'pencil'. Google Googles on my phone identified the bird as a Lark: [http://www.tropicalbirding.com/tripReports/TR_SouthIndia_Nov...](http://www.tropicalbirding.com/tripReports/TR_SouthIndia_Nov2006/WEB- Malabar-Lark--Goa.jpg) which was interesting but not a correct answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> The human submitters get to see what answers people have submitted. So, they can see that you typed "yellow car" and then decide if that is a legitimate answer. It's all crowd sourced. If you submit a challenge, you OWN that challenge, and you can see your hit and fail rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thoughts: ugly and mostly useless.

The problem is not beating bots. There are all kinds of ways of achieving that (some fairly effective ones without even requiring user interaction).

The hard one is stopping an outsourced third-world cubicle farm of human spam submitters. Solve that one and you're on to something.

<comment><USER10> like with email (where spam fighting has been quite successful) submitted posts should be run through spam-filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I definitely agree that the need is there. This was me when setting up google apps recently <http://twitter.com/jackowayed/status/22408310028>

Since people really have no way to know what kind of challenges you offer, it would be good if you had some screenshots/demos on your homepage instead of a generic "private beta" page.

You also might want to think about doing things like Google's image rotation captcha experiments. I was really excited when they announced that they were playing with those because I was hoping they'd kill traditional captchas. Here's a PDF of a paper by some Googlers: [http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha...](http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> Allowing the person that writes the answer to submit a link is problematic, IMHO. Of the 3 I tried, 2 said "I love you" and linked to Glenn Beck. I personally dislike Mr. Beck very much, and that alone would keep me from using this on any project.

You are going to run afoul of people just as easily if someone links to Keith Olbermann, or a site about Gay Rights, or kicking out immigrants, or atheism, or the KKK, or [insert inflammatory thing here].

The whole reason for captcha's is so someone can't put arbitrary links on YOUR site, embedding your anti-captcha solution just makes sure they are always in the same place. No thanks, I'll just use ReCaptcha.

<comment><AUTHOR> that link was submitted by an alpha tester. he submitted one of the picture/question challenges, and in exchange, he gets rewarded impressions of his link.

<comment><USER13> I think you missed his/her point though. Captchas should prevent spam, allowing a user to include an arbitrary link that will appear on any random site is not much of an improvement to the site owner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but this problem already exists on WordPress comments for example. People are free to add whatever link they want with their comments. I don't think a Glen Beck link is spam, (though I do personally think he's a gimmick).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi Kevin,

I like this, some feedback:

* Asides from the cultural challenges (I don't know who big bird is either) these are mostly better experiences to solve than captcha.

* The submit button is outside the rectangle. It's not visually part of the bafflebot area.

* Have a pay option with no ads. Let people pay per 1000 provided challenges, perhaps upfront. The ads are distracting and I run my own ads on my site, but I'd be happy to pay something reasonable for a captcha alternative

Overall, I think it works. Drop the cultural stuff, let me pay, and make it better looking and you'll have yourself a customer.

</comment><comment><USER15> What are you doing with the data you collect?

I assume you're trying to followi in the footsteps of Luis Van Ahn... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvVAViDtKeA>

<comment><AUTHOR> i only collect answer data for the purposes of improving responses, nothing else. (not a huge fan of luis von ahn, for reasons i'll keep to myself).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Publishers likely won't want the sort of user leakage that comes from an offsite link.

The most interesting CAPTCHA innovation I've seen recently is from AdCopy, who replace it with an advertisement that contains an answer the user must then provide - guaranteeing that the user pay attention to the ad. A portion of the revenue gets paid to the publisher, turning the CAPTCHA into a revenue stream.

Sample here: <http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/savetsl/captcha>

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://www.bafflebot.com> \- clickable

beta code: baffleboy

</comment><comment><USER18> Hum... yellow car. I entered Camaro told it was wrong. Was it a Chevelle? Are you using a semantic dictionary to decide if the answer was right or wrong or a predefined word list?

<comment><USER19> _Hum... yellow car. I entered Camaro told it was wrong. Was it a Chevelle?_

It is clearly a Mustang Mach 1...'69 or '70 ([http://www.bafflebot.com/challenges/main_image/39a43dd6d6e34...](http://www.bafflebot.com/challenges/main_image/39a43dd6d6e347721b65745503a874a1ebd2ca8d) vs <http://www.classiccarstudio.com/images/auction/1166/1.jpg>)

I got one that could have been a rat or a mouse...hard to tell, but both were accepted. Same with the bird picture, bird and sparrow were accepted. But the picture of the corvette with the question "how many wheels does this object likely have?" is ambiguous. It could be 4, 5 (counting the spare tire), or 6 (if you're cheeky and count the steering wheel).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not a bad idea, but some of the questions + pictures I've got have just been plain stupid. One was of a character which I had never seen, let alone know the name of.

"What are these beds called?"

There are about 4 separate names for bunk/cabin beds.

Typos are another issue. "Where do you where these things?" Also, how the hell can you expect people to answer such a vague question?

I have to say that I think this is both harder, and less accessible than a traditional CAPTCHA.

</comment><comment><USER21> Less annoying than most traditional captchas, I think it may cause problems for international users. You are asking for relatively specific words (I noted pencil, saw and puzzle) that not everybody will know. Also, the pencil sharpener on one challenge is not a common type in Europe AFAIK.

Idea: why aren't you using photos instead of vector graphics? They are also much easier to create (and more difficult for a machine to recognize, especially if you add some random noise).

<comment><AUTHOR> i definitely have to add country codes for localization. the reason i'm using pictures is because everyone some of the challenges are from photos, but i grabbed a bunch of royalty-free clipart for the seed data. a few of my early testers did upload photos, and they work fine too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is no good for those of us who aren't native English speakers - I keep getting the words wrong (writing English is not that beg of a problem as small errors doesn't destroy the readers understanding and if you don't know a word, hey use another), and my English is better than 70% of the rest of my country.

This will go where all the other captcha replaces have gone - nowhere, sadly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hmmm, I think a major problem is going to be culturally specific questions. E.g. I got a picture of 'Big Bird'. I'd imagine that this would be easy for most beta testers who are likely to be of a certain demographic and from a country where Sesame Street was aired, but it's going to be baffling for everyone else, as well as giving a feeling of being excluded.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I got several which were impossible for me to answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was checking out a few of your "baffles" and ran into a bug. After clicking refresh a few times I got stuck on a puzzle piece; the caption and description said to refresh it, but it just returned to the "please refresh".

I've repeated this 3x now; it appears to occur after the first reload.

(In Safari 5.0.1)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm au fait with US culture, but I got it wrong about a quarter of the time, which is no better than reCaptcha.

</comment><comment><USER26> Your stuff is not culture free. It requires knowledge which may be or not known by people. This knowledge may be obvious to you but people are quite different all around the world. Usually captcha is about copying numbers. Arabic numerals is way more wide-spread than english language.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I read the title, I was hoping to see a real alternative to captchas. What I see is not that different (pictures vs. letter/numbers)

Something revolutionary different is needed.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's going to be problems with spelling and phrasing -

e.g. 'sewing machine', 'sowing machine', 'sewing'

or 'a jigsaw', 'jigsaw'

etc

<comment><AUTHOR> the human in charge of maintaining that challenge will see answers come in and decide to accept them. If you sign up for an account, you'll get a dashboard, which shows you stats on all of your challenges, how many impressions you have, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> when I went to go sign up this is what i saw: <http://imgur.com/QGEhB.png>

I would suggest not using that banner on that page. While one could just click hide, it is just one more step for a user to say "nah, why bother".

BTW, that was in FireFox 3.6.8 on Windows 7 Professional

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the catch, i really appreciate the screen cap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Where can I see this actually working?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can see it on Pikk.com and on my blog kapauldo.com.</comment></comment>


Runscope Is Joining CA Technologies – Runscope Blog - <AUTHOR> https://blog.runscope.com/posts/301 <comment><USER2> God, I saw this and thought it said Runescape.</comment>


Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle.html <comment><USER2> His startup MBA Polymers <http://www.mbapolymers.com/home/selling-plastics-to- us> has a research plant in Richmond, CA but has only built production facilities in other countries so far. Does anyone know why?</comment>


Planet-sized 'waves' spotted in the Sun's atmosphere - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/planet-sized-waves-spotted-in-the-sun-s-atmosphere-1.21704 <comment><USER2> That is pretty cool.

Are we just now learning about these because the sun is hard to observe? I understand its distance and brightness are both impediments.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why it took so long to look at the data collected "from June 2010 to May 2013". Maybe brightpoints are just not that interesting compared to other features, and it took a while for someone to take an interest?

<comment><USER2> Sometimes astronomical data sits around for years before academics and amateurs get the time to use their preferred techniques on it. Each pass over the data has another chance of finding something and sometimes people learn new things from 40 year old data.

Somehow I guess I thought waves the size of a planet on our home star would be faster finds than more distant things.</comment></comment></comment>


Idea Validation for an Ad Blocker Services - <AUTHOR> Hi Hackers !
It's Tony here, a fullstack developer. Love to building kinds of interesting stuff. Right now, I'm working on an ad blocker service. The very early demo is almost out now. Here I need your suggestions or ideas about it.
When Google ad block on the web, most of them come out with content blocker, specially on iOS. Have to install kinds of software for specific platform or device. It's ok and good enough, but is there any better solutions ?
So here it is my ad blocker service, didn't have a name yet ( welcome to help me to give a name).
This ad blocker service works well on any devices that support http proxy, iPhone, Android, MacOS, Windows, Linux. And we do care about your online privacy and security. Help you to block kinds of annoying ads and log report services like google analytics. Blocking ads and protect your privacy. With such service, the spy (https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/06/iphone-session-replay-screenshots/) on your phone will happen less.
How much would like to pay per month or per year, and what's your most concerned?
By now, I've built a very early demo for such service, as a developer welcome any technical or non technical (marketing, product) guy comment here about this idea for more details, and welcome talented marketing and product guy join me to build it better and let more guys know.
Thanks!
tonywang.data#gmail.com <comment><USER2> Do you support sites with https? It looks difficult to remove the ads/trackers without breaking the signatures.

<comment><AUTHOR> That depends. Most of the ads or logs from independent ip or domain names, are easy to identify. Of course, if the ads content is combined with normal data from same domain, it's impossible to block without breaking the signatures.</comment></comment>


Why can't San Francisco's tech culture solve the city's social problems? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/262e2b2c-d423-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9 <comment><USER2> Why can't New York's Investment bank culture solve the city's social problems?

<comment><USER3> Valley is the new Wall Street. Time is a flat circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Why can't San Francisco's tech culture solve the city's social problems?_

Because social problems are not technology problems?

</comment><comment><USER5> The article doesn't really quite get to this, though it hints at it in parts, but largely because San Francisco's tech culture is a symptom of, and largely oriented toward reinforcing, the economic conditions underlying the social problems.

</comment><comment><USER6> As always, people think their sphere of influence is larger than it actually is. Even for tech.

Social problems are not caused by tech, so tech might not be able to solve them.

Head out into the poorer parts of SF and the surrounding area, and see how very little is shared in common with SF other than geography.

<comment><USER7> Social problems aren't caused by tech? You don't think that the massive increases in cost-of-living in San Francisco have nothing to do with the tech industry's presence?

<comment><USER8> There definitely are social issues caused by tech, but the fact that tech is raising prices isn't necessarily the responsibility of one single person or business.

But even with having tech as the scapegoat doesn't mean that tech will have the answers (it probably guarantees that the answer isn't in tech at all).

But there are many social issues, in and out of the Valley, where issues are amplified by tech, but not necessarily the ideal way of solving them (for instance, the fact that so many people online engage in trollish behavior, it's a symptom of people and not necessarily one that tech can cure, but tech does definitely amplify it).

Housing had so many different factors that influence it, you can look at everything from governmental policy, cultural changes, land mass and infrastructure to support commuting, and overall consumer preference.

SF's housing issues, while not 100% preceding the rise of tech, definitely were a problem already that tech has amplified.

If a city isn't prepared for economic success, it's going to have a really tough time adjusting to economic pressures (even the success of it's neighbors). However with San Francisco, it's hard to pass it off as being unprepared, but, TBH, while a generally forward thinking community, there is a lot of NIMBY-itis and a pro-conservationist movement that doesn't always desire to compromise. Not having lived there for any great length of time, I'm conjecturing based on what I read, so take my opinion with a large grain of salt :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Because the tech culture thinks it can solve the social problem?

</comment><comment><USER10> "There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit." ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

</comment><comment><USER11> It is not for the lack of money spent. San Francisco spent $300 million on housing homeless people in 2017. That's $40k per homeless person in the city.

I think benioffs solution of spending by relocating homeless and vulnerable families outside the city is quite promising. Instead of the $500k per unit in SF it is conceivable to build more than 10 times more for the same prize elsewhere.

In one years city budget for homeless housing we could conceivably build housing for all if we are willing to follow benioffs solution, making necessary housing less of a lottery.

<comment><USER12> And then what? Do you bus them back to the city to panhandle on weekends or are they just supposed to stay in their new cheap and isolated housing twiddling their thumbs? Will you bring them snacks?

<comment><USER11> Similar to the Utah model you provide social services that help rehabilitate. We can also structure it similarly to theirs. The goal is to free people from the cycle of homelessness. As you can see in the article there is very little that would not improve upon the current situation.

<comment><USER12> This Utah model[0][1][2][3]?

I'm all for getting the homeless into homes, and for the chronically homeless perhaps sending them somewhere cheap and giving them a lifetime of social services is the answer. But the majority of homeless are not chronically so, these people need economic opportunities, and the places with the cheapest housing are also the places with the fewest economic opportunities. If we want to prevent this class of homeless from slipping into the former group then finding ways to provide them housing in booming cities is preferable.

[0] [https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865678779/Is-Utah- still-...](https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865678779/Is-Utah-still-a- model-for-solving-chronic-homelessness.html)

[1] [http://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/10/12/leading- homel...](http://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/10/12/leading-homelessness- expert-says-operation-rio-grande-is-a-disaster-at-annual-utah-summit/)

[2] [http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-utah- shelters-20170707-s...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-utah- shelters-20170707-story.html)

[3] [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah- solv...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah-solved- homeles_b_9380860.html#)

<comment><USER13> Utah is kind of at a sweet spot here, with housing that is not ridiculously expensive, and yet with decent amounts of economic opportunity. Not Silicon Valley levels of opportunity, but I'm not sure that most homeless should be looking for Silicon Valley-type jobs as their first step.

<comment><USER12> Even with Keurig people in Silicon Valley sometimes need someone else to make their coffee. There are good arguments for having a range of affordability in housing so the people working these service jobs don't have to commute 4 hours on a bus every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A better question would be why can't San Francisco's political class and housing authority solve the issue.

<comment><USER15> Their profits depend on not solving it. Of course if people decide they don't want to live there anymore because it's one drug den then perhaps tunes will change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Because engineering does not solve political problems

</comment><comment><USER17> Techies have created the culture that has the: motto there is an app for that, yet they hate any blame for the social ills they have created.

</comment><comment><USER18> paywall

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I think the paywall answers the titles question honestly.</comment></comment>


Why Apple Is Afraid Of Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/13/why-apple-is-afraid-of-bitcoin/

<comment><USER2> Their current model seems to be they want a 30% cut whenever a developer so much as farts. If you don't give them their 30%, they kick you out.

BitCoin not being a real currency probably jumps over their legalese a little and would allow somebody to make an in-app payment without giving Apple their "dues".

I frankly think the whole situation is ridiculous. God knows how Apple (and the others, to be fair) justify hogging 30% developers' revenues but conversely, what idiots are going to put their livelihoods on the line with something as changeable as BitCoin? It's not just that its rate can crash but that Apple can very swiftly make you an ex-developer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I seriously doubt that any executive at Apple has given 5 minutes thought to Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't honestly see anyone trusting Bitcoin at this point, aside from people that need it for illegal activities.</comment>


Single div Sierpinski triangle - <AUTHOR> https://yuanchuan.dev/single-div-sierpinski-triangle <comment><USER2> Y'know, I suspect certain groups of modernist painters would have a field day with CSS. De Stijl for instance would love it. There is something so elegant and fun about using a medium that forces you to use only circles, rectangles and a few select curves under a few simple transformations.

I was visiting a 20th century art gallery and was joking with my friends about which painters could be implemented in CSS (Yves Klein ofc). Maybe I should go ahead and do it. There's a few Mondrians that'd be fairly easy.

<comment><USER3> You can go pretty darn far with CSS if you are ok with multiple divs...

[https://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-francine/](https://diana- adrianne.com/purecss-francine/)

<comment><USER4> Ok. It crashes my galaxy s9s chrome browser so let's put up a warning about it being an insane browser expwriment

<comment><USER5> Seems to be okay on Firefox on my S5 (though it takes a minute to load), in case you want to view it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have made a funny Sierpinski carpet clicker recently, it's only 30 lines of code in react and unfortunately not one div, but it's still quite performant (safe to open, even on low-tier phones)

[https://recursivebuttons.mcalus.dev/](https://recursivebuttons.mcalus.dev/)

i love all kinds of fractal generative art :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Beautiful. I love that it looks like it's all being built on its side but then he skews it back and it's really just been there the whole time, leaning over so you don't notice the structure.

</comment><comment><USER8> >Chrome can render as many triangles as possible but Safari and Firefox don't work well as the triangle is getting smaller.

Web is awesome, and browsers are the most advanced tech! But it seems to be hard to draw flipping triangles at fixed coordinates. Maybe that could be fixed with e.g. a special planar geometry library that makes precise calculations. Like 500x3.125%==15.625 and not 27.

<comment><USER9> I also didn't find a way to reliably draw a non-smooth line on HTML 5 canvas, one that does _not_ use sub pixel rendering.

Sub-pixel rendering is often nice, but when you actually want a simple monochrome diagonal line filling only whole pixels on purpose (because, e.g., you don't want your intended 1-pixel wide black line to become a two-pixel wide gray line, or you're simply making something pixel-arty), the only reliable portable way to do it is to implement bresenham and draw it pixel by pixel yourself...

The standard methods on a canvas that are supposed to make a non-smooth line, such as using exact pixel centers (shift 0.5) and width 1, work in some browsers, not in others, not for some angles of the line, and sometimes it even depends on the width and height in pixels of the canvas whether it'll look smooth or sharp, even for the exact same absolute coordinates of the line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome!</comment>


Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000% - <AUTHOR> http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/

<comment><USER2> This is confusing. Here is someone with a _FANTASTIC_ first outing of a book and he's whinging about it?

The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take?

Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).

So what is his complaint? That he didn't read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?

Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?

And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn't he 'get' that he could not have published this book at this level of success _at all_ prior to Amazon?

[1] [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book- is-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-about- travel?ref=live)

<comment><USER3> Having a great time with the book, sorry if I came off as whining.

A few notes. A high % of the KS money went into rewards (books printed averaged $20 shipped).

I did make 3x though Amazon, but if I had gone through gumroad, I would have done double the revenue.

Biggest tl;dr complaint is that as an avid reader of about a book a week I had no idea that authors paid both 30% of the total price plus the delivery fee. The other main competitors don't do this... just found it odd and wrote about it.

<comment><USER4> But if you had gone through gumroad, you wouldn't have done the same volume. If they renamed the "delivery fee" as "hosting and market placement" would you feel okay about it?

<comment><USER5> Or even "oversize book surcharge". If you saw that on your bill, you'd probably say "oh gee, I have to make my book smaller to avoid this."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OK, so for a $10 book, Amazon collects 30% for themselves, which is $3.

For a 19MB download delivered via 3G to a Kindle, Sprint, the wireless carrier, charges .15/MB, or $2.85/19MB. This is paid to Sprint, not Amazon.com. The article errors by comparing this fee to the cost for server bandwidth using S3 to come up with his markup value, but S3 bandwidth covers the internet only and does not include fees involved with passing through any sort of cellular network.

<comment><USER7> If I were to buy the author's book and download it to my non-3G Kindle over my own wi-fi connection, the author would still be charged $2.85 for it.

Surely the 3G Kindle owners should be paying for it - and only then if they use whispernet. Or rather, I always thought they _were_ because the 3G Kindle touch is $50 more expensive. A cellular radio only costs a dollar or two, I always figured that most of the $50 price difference represented average download costs over the expected lifetime.

<comment><USER8> The article does _not_ say that downloading it over your wi-fi connection will result in $2.58 in delivery fees. It says that the average delivery fee for the book was $2.58.

<comment><USER7> Amazon apply the fee regardless of delivery method. Check out the link posted by kennethcwilbur elsewhere in this thread.

[https://kdp.amazon.com/self- publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...](https://kdp.amazon.com/self- publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B)

Amazon charge $0.15/MB and the book was approximately 18MB in size.

<comment><USER9> And that fee would be more reasonable if Amazon allowed authors to provide optimised versions of their book suitable for e-readers that don't have high resolution colour screens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personally, I'd be more depressed by something that says "Amazon charges authors $2.58 to deliver an e-book ( _after_ 30% cut)" than some big fancy number like that 129,000%. It's more meaningful.

<comment><USER11> I agree. "Amazon's takes 55% of my ebook sales" or "Amazon's hidden 25% ebook fee" would have meant quite a bit more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is naive as it fails to consider that Amazon has probably made a considerable loss on the Kindle hardware business to create this market the OP is lucky enough to participate in. This investment alongside the investment in their own AWS infrastructure is why there is a reasonably sized market for ebooks right now. Also how about the cost of cellular data?

The cost might be a little high but if you don't like it, you have the choice to take your business elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> I think the complaint focused on other costs that were pushed onto the author. If amazon presented a larger cost structure (increase their per-unit charge) but covered costs like content delivery, I don't think the author would have as much of a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some commenters say the post is wrong to complain when the author is making money through amazon's distribution, or when amazon takes a loss on selling kindles.

I disagree with both sentiments.

Main point: It does not cost amazon an average of $2.58 to deliver the author's pdf. Amazon is being dishonest by calling this a delivery cost. I consider it unethical to name a fee something that it is not.

"Be grateful for what you do get" is not a valid argument against dishonesty. If Amazon makes a business decision to take a loss on kindles, this also does not justify dishonesty.

<comment><USER15> It's called "delivery fee", not "delivery cost". It makes no sense to require a business to charge fees solely based on variable costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Consumer here. What I don't like about this absurd per-megabyte price is that it discourages authors from including quality pictures in their books.

This finally explains why the Kindle version of some books I've bought were garbage. In particular, I was enormously disappointed with Lonely Planet books - the maps are poor quality and split out among several pages so it's almost impossible to find anything. It was a terrible mistake not to buy the PDF.

Between the awful maps in Lonely Planet and the absurd number of OCR glitches in _Modern Times_ , I've spent my last Kindle dollar.

<comment><USER17> Completely agree on this. Moreover, the price of a Kindle book is often HIGHER than for the printed version, which is outrageous, especially because of the poor quality of the layout of many kindle books layouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The separation of "service fee" and "delivery fee" is disingenuous, you are basically paying amazon 50% for the use of the marketplace. If you think it's an unfair price, don't put your book in the marketplace. If you think it's fair but deceptive, say so, don't pretend like it's deceptive _and_ unfair at the same time.

Complaining about a 50% margin for Amazon when they have basically created the entire ecosystem for ebooks feels a bit like complaining about the large markups on pharmaceuticals to make up for the millions are poured into R&D.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't get his complaint. I have written books for Springer-Verlag, McGraw- Hill, J. Reilly, Apress, etc., etc., and I am used to seeing 10% to 15% royalty.

About 50% royalty from Amazon seems pretty good, but regular publishers provide a lot of help producing a book.

Publishing books with Apple's AppStore also looks pretty good.

It is all good(!), one just has to appreciate having multiple markets available and choose which ones you like.

</comment><comment><USER20> This post is ridiculous. Amazon has spent billions upon billions of dollars building and maintaining a ridiculously efficient delivery system for electronic content. THAT is what the markup is paying for.

And from a common sense standpoint, if Amazon were really charging the crazy markup this guy claims, then some other company would mark up a mere 1000% or whatever and massively undercut Amazon's offering. Given that this hasn't happened, it is pretty safe to assume that the true costs are much higher than his math suggests. Either that or other companies have just ceded massive eBook profits to Amazon out of the goodness of their hearts. I'm going to guess it's the former.

<comment><USER21> $3 to transmit 15 megabytes is fucking absurd, regardless of the delivery medium. Full stop, end of story.

<comment><USER20> It's not $3 to transmit a file. It's $3 to:

Design a great UX

Handle Credit Cards safely

Give you access to a robust infrastructure that won't crash

Market the site

Build and research a top quality e-Reader

Build data centers all around the world

etc etc etc

Bottom line is the guy made WAY more selling with Kindle/Amazon than with any other format, even given their large cut. That didn't just happen by magic. He is free to sell only with other vendors and make less money if Amazon's fees upset him so much.

<comment><USER21> No, it is indeed $3 to transmit a file. They even call it a "delivery fee". Consider that the percentage cut they take should cover all of the above.

I can get a physical pizza delivered for less than Amazon charges to send me an electronic file. That's just messed up.

Hell, I can get physical goods delivered, from Amazon, with 2 day shipping, for less than they charge to send an electronic file! And how much do you want to bet that the infrastructure involved in sending me physical goods is a lot more expensive and finicky than the infrastructure required to blast a file out over 3G?

<comment><USER20> If it bothers you so much, you are free to not use Amazon. It's not like they have a monopoly in the eReader market. What exactly am I missing here?

<comment><USER21> >you are free to not use Amazon

Much like I am also free to call bullshit when I see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a pretty huge piece of free advertising for Gumroad and its ilk. I know Andrew, and I know he's put his heart and soul into this book. It's a downright shame to see Amazon taking that size of a cut for self-published works.

</comment><comment><USER23> I strongly suspect Amazon is offering well-known, "must have" authors a much better deal -- possibly even losing money on sales of some of their books -- and making it up by giving a raw deal to less-well-known, independents like Andrew Hyde, the author of this blog post.

Does anyone here know if this is indeed the case?

<comment><USER24> The well known must have authors don't self-publish directly on amazon, they have publishers who handle all that sort of negotiation for them. And part of that negotiation surely includes talking amazon down on the delivery fees.

However, authors who publish heir work through a publisher also don't make 55% royalty, so the author of this blog post is still better off than he would have been.

<comment><USER23> notatoad: I didn't write or even imply that well-known authors self-publish.

FWIW, I have heard from a second-hand source that one well-known author is receiving net royalties from Kindle sales that are greater than the Kindle price of his books. I don't know if this is really true, but it _rings true_ ; hence my question to the HN community.

<comment><USER24> you said that amazon is offering deals to authors. my point is that amazon doesn't interact with well-known authors, they interact with those author's publishers. if any author receives better royalties than the kindle price of their books, it may be because their publisher is receiving even more money from amazon, or it may be the publisher that is taking the loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's not 129,000% markup. You're paying for outgoing bandwidth (at S3 prices) and you're paying for the Kindle's incoming bandwidth, which could be over an internationally-roaming 3G network. Yes, it's dumb that Amazon charges authors and not themselves, but would you prefer they take 40% instead of a fixed $2?

<comment><USER26> Realistically, how many downloads are really done via international 3G roaming? Much less than 1% I would suspect. And while it's true that there are some plans with absurdly inflated roaming costs that could still drive up the overall average to $2+, it would be beyond incompetent for Amazon to agree to such plans for their Kindles.

One factor that nobody seems to have mentioned so far: was this massive delivery fee in any way knowable to the author beforehand? I'd consider it a bit disingenuous of Amazon if they hide it.

<comment><USER25> My guess is that you're not paying a lot for each bit transferred internationally, you're paying for the ability to be able to download content internationally. (Authors may be subsidizing the devices, as well. It makes sense, though; if Kindles were less ubiquitous, how much money would you make selling e-books.)

It's kind of like complaining that your ISP charges you the same monthly fee even if you don't download anything. The charge is for having the ability to transfer bits, not for each bit transferred.

I guess the complaint is that Amazon transfers much of their financial risk to authors via a $2 delivery fee. All I know is that I wrote a traditionally- published book and saw about $5 for every $40 the publisher charged. I would gladly take $38 instead of $5 and they could call the fee whatever the fuck they wanted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The pricing scheme may explain why so many Kindle books have crappy lo-res images. Text is small (the whole bible is 5 MB == $0.75 delivery charge) but quality images, like in the travel book in the article, bulk it up.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you use the end user cost you can get a high end estimate for total cost of 3g service. $30 for 2GB of data makes $0.015/MB * 18.1 MB file makes for a total cost to user of $0.27 for delivery.

<comment><USER29> The fact that you can get 2 GB of data for $30 doesn't mean that you can get 18 MB of data for $0.27. Most people paying $30 for a 2 GB data plan are using far less than 2 GB of data.

<comment><USER28> Very true, but the fact that the author is paying a distribution fee an order of magnitude more than the $.27 seems pretty fishy.

<comment><USER30> Doesn't amazon promise delivery to anywhere in the world? These high prices might be subsidising places with crazy high data rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why not make it $10 on Amazon and $9.50 on all the other services. That way, people who are indifferent will go for the service that nets you the highest margin while people who prefer kindle won't care that much about the price differential.

Personally, I'm pretty much indifferent to iBooks vs Kindle since both are just apps on my iPad. If they're both $10, I choose Kindle simply because it's a bigger brand name. If there's even a tiny price differential, I'll choose the iBooks.

<comment><USER32> You can't. Amazon reserves the right to drop the asking price on your book to the lowest price listed anywhere else. ("Most favoured nation status" is the term used to describe this kind of clause in a contract.)

<comment><USER33> An alternative solution might be to just sell DRM-free pdfs, mobis and epub files on a non-Amazon service, since most people hate DRM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can the market beat this? Or is the gravitational pull of the giant Kindle market too great?

<comment><USER35> Step one is to make this cost transparent to people considering selling via Kindle (and to readers who care about this sort of thing). I'm preparing my first novel for sale right now. It's a novel, not a travel book, so I'm basically just delivering a cover image and text so I would expect my "delivery fees" will be much lower, but I didn't even realize that it would be in the realm of possibility that delivery fees would add up to any kind of significant expense. How could I know? Amazon doesn't advertise this anywhere. So we need blog posts like this in order to inform authors so they know that there's strong incentive to look into the other markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This kind of thing only works when users looking for "ebooks" are channeled through Amazon. Paid placement on Google may help them in that regard. What happens when users learn they can download ebooks elsewhere?

It's nonsensical to pay a fee for distribution when the distribution channel is the internet.

Project Gutenberg's and Archive.org' ebooks are better than this e-paper or super hi-res screen nonsense. Reading books on these devices is dog slow and awakward. It is just text. It should be searchable using Boyer-Moore algorithm. Fast. searchable ebooks.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems like the telco's are the ones making out here. They charge Amazon some ridiculous fee to deliver the content and they charge the consumer for a data plan for the device.

<comment><USER38> Most Kindle purchases are coming from a Kindle, which never has a consumer data plan. 3G Kindles' cell usage is paid by Amazon.

<comment><USER39> At [https://kdp.amazon.com/self- publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...](https://kdp.amazon.com/self- publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B) it shows that the delivery charge in the UK for a 18.2MB book is $2.82.

That rate is actually pretty good. According to this page, [http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/affo...](http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/affordable- world-packages.jsp#data) AT&T sells a 120-MB international roaming data package for $30/month. That implies an effective download charge of $4.55 for an 18.2-MB file.

Now if Amazon's data charge is $2.82 in the UK, where they do significant volume and the wireless market is competitive, imagine how much higher it must be in less developed countries where the company has less pull. I got charged approximately $800 for 40 megabytes of data usage in Lithuania last year, where AT&T did not have a partnership with any local carrier. I talked AT&T down to about $400 but they would not budge beyond that.

And think about the target audience for this book. Probably a lot of people spread out all over the world. It might not take all that many downloads in places like Lithuania to push the average delivery fee up to $2.48.

The only problem I see is that, arguably, Amazon should give authors the ability to opt out of paying for international downloads, or let them set different prices in different countries.

But it seems that the current delivery charge is pretty good - certainly it's not the enormous markup the headline claimed.

<comment><USER32> The author is charged the delivery cost whether the delivery happens over 3G or Wifi.

Personally, I doubt the cost to Amazon to deliver the average e-book is anywhere near their quoted rate. If they wanted to charge separately for 3G or wifi delivery I'm sure they could do so: they have simply chosen not to. Possibly it's simply inertia: the original Kindles were 3G only IIRC, so they would have had to pay steep costs themselves for data delivery back then for all downloads. Now they've discovered that authors are willing to eat those charges, why change them?

The consequence of course is that it's uneconomic to sell image-heavy works through the Kindle platform, despite the move to wifi delivery & full-colour tablet Kindles which could exploit them to their full potential. Even books like the OPs find a huge chunk of their profit margin swallowed up by these delivery charges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Most US authors pay only a few cents per delivery. [1] Books with lots of images can become expensive but it seems like the images are likely unnecessarily big for an ebook, and that is why his costs are so disproportionately large.

1 - [http://www.thepassivevoice.com/06/2012/amazons-markup-of- dig...](http://www.thepassivevoice.com/06/2012/amazons-markup-of-digital- delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm curious if anyone has experimented with educating potential customers about the fees associated with each delivery option. For example:

1\. Buy on Amazon.com for $9.99 (I earn $5.10)

2\. Buy on iBooks for $9.99 (I earn $7.00)

3\. Buy a PDF for $9.99 (I earn $9.25)

If I felt any connection or goodwill toward the author (highly likely) I would be inclined to pick the best option for me _and_ the author.

</comment><comment><USER42> You've gotta divide by the usability factor of a digital book, which I'd loosely equate to a value of 3.26 times print. Still the markup is sorta ridic.

</comment><comment><USER43> How about re-downloading books several times over over roaming 3G for the lifetime of the user? I don't think it's a one time delivery charge fee.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't like the AWS pricing either (or at least how it's communicated). I have considered AWS but no matter how much time I spend looking at their pricing, I can't figure out how much I should expect to be charged each month.

I agree the tone of the article is a little over-victimized though.

</comment><comment><USER45> The delivery fee is not hidden. I found it right away when I was investigating digital comics and why so few are available via Amazon. That fee is why. We're not bound to see comic fanzines in digital form via Amazon explode as they did with mimeo and ditto. Bit of a shame.

</comment><comment><USER46> Two misconceptions: 1) services are properly priced at what the market will bear, not the cost to deliver them. 2) Many Kindles get their content over a regular cellular network which the Kindle owner does not pay a monthly fee.

</comment><comment><USER47> _"... Don't buy my book on Amazon. Or do buy it. Or don't. I could sell the X through Y ..."_

That's a new startup idea right there.

</comment><comment><USER48> ctrl+f whispernet 0 results found

He's forgetting about the cost of delivering over a cell phone network.

<comment><USER49> If you actually read the article you'll see that he addresses this and that it applies to wifi purchases.

<comment><USER48> But there's no difference from amazon's perspective, because once you bought the book, you can download it over 3g at any time, multiple times.

<comment><USER49> There is no way that the average purchase costs $2.50+ to deliver, even amortized over the lifetime of the book.

Amazon can charge whatever they want; I just think they should be transparent about what people's net pay will be. It's disingenuous to advertise that you take a 30% cut plus "delivery costs," and then mark up the "delivery costs" to over 25% of the average book price. Apple uses a similar paradigm (processing fees do not come from their 30%), but they only deduct the _actual_ processing fees.

<comment><USER50> Maybe kindles are manufactured at a loss and these delivery fees are then part of the device cost?

<comment><USER51> But that's not a "delivery fee", which makes it kind of dishonest. Amazon already take a fixed 30% cut, which ought to include any subsidy on the devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The author doesn't mention if the delivery fee includes the credit card transaction fee.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sms 150.000 times Voice 1500 times

</comment><comment><USER54> Check how much Amazon pays to its employees

[http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/amazon- corpo...](http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/amazon-corporate- llc-324660.html)

</comment><comment><USER55> Mathematician here. Anyone care to clarify how he came up with 129,000%? That is, one-hundred twenty-nine _thousand_ percent? I'm not good with numbers. Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER56> He's comparing the stated delivery fee to Amazon's S3 costs for outgoing data, which he says costs $0.01 per 5 books.

<comment><USER5> Of course, if he had a 50 kB book that had a $0.01 delivery fee, it would still be the same percentage markup, but he wouldn't care. So I question whether percentage is useful here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> These fees are part of the 70% royalty deal he signed up for. See [https://kdp.amazon.com/self- publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...](https://kdp.amazon.com/self- publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B)

(updated with direct link to Amazon's royalty page)</comment>


Tsutomu Shimomura of Kevin Mitnick Fame - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know what happened to this guy? After helping capture Kevin Mitnick in 1995, he seems to have fallen off the face of the planet. Google and wikipedia are no help. I ask hacker news... Does anyone knows where Tsutomu is now and/or what he is up to? <comment><USER2> You can try contacting Michael Crawford (see his post here: <http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2008/4/10/17522/2391/4#4>).

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh? then this is outdated? This is from google too.

<http://www.takedown.com/bio/tsutomu.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Copyright © 1995

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hiding. :)</comment>


Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Might Be Backfiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2017/07/seattle_s_huge_wage_hike_might_be_backfiring_it_won_t_stop_the_fight_for.html <comment><USER2> I can only talk about the article, as the paper itself sits behind a paywall, but the most interesting question seems to be missing: How is that possible?

Restaurants are location-bound. Short of shutting down, they don't have many methods of moving jobs away, so how is it possible for them to reduce hours worked? I see a few options:

\- Less demand. The shops increased their prices to compensate for the new minimum wage. Less people wanted to pay the new prices, so they had less need for workers. Possible, but I think unlikely because all competitors have been hit by the same minimum wage increase, so they all would have this problem and I haven't read that people are less likely to eat fast food

\- Shorter, more stressful shifts. Shops could feel motivated to threaten their low-wage employees with loosing their jobs if they don't work faster. This looks to me like a labor safety issue, i.e. something laws and associated controls could and should fix. You cannot just up the pressure on people without harmful effects

\- Alternatively, the shops had more employees than strictly needed and now just removed those. This seems unlikely in the competitive restaurant business.

\- More mechanization: In some (more or less far off future) all this low-wage jobs can be done by machines, so maybe the wage increase forced companies to replace people with machines earlier than they wanted. On one hand that is sad, on the other hand it would inevitably have happened and is something society still has to find an answer for: There will be an increasing number of people unable to get a job, because machines can do what they can do for less money.

So - which one is it? Or if it is a mix: Which one is the dominating factor? The answer to that question is IMO extremely relevant to discuss if minimum wage "might be backfiring"</comment>


Corporations Misusing Our Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/12/corporations_mi.html

<comment><USER2> bingo. we need more articles like this, that get under the hood, and expose the sloppy and cavalier ways that (irresponsible) companies are handling user data, thereby putting them, their employees, and customers at even greater risk.

i hope everyone who "likes" this, makes a point of sending a copy of schneier's article to their fb friends.

awareness is achieved, one set of eyeballs at a time.</comment>


Evaluating the performance in sales team? - <AUTHOR> Can i use different levels as in a video game to pump up enthusiasm in my sales team ?<p>will it ensure perks and evaluation of performance in my sales team. <comment><USER2> I think your thinking is in the right direction, since gamification hasnt been applied much to sales yet. I have introduced a loyalty/ gamified program to endorse every activity (call, meeting, proposal)and showcase how active people are correlated to their revenue/ target. Awarding activities, besides actual revenue in a loyalty dashboard, can activate the intrinsical motivation of your sales team. P.s. ping me if you have any additional questions!</comment>


Would you like to see popular products filtered by social media for Macys? - <AUTHOR> http://meruki.com <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


Benchmarking TPU, GPU, and CPU Platforms for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10701 <comment><USER2> Forgive my criticism on a minor point, but that paper's figures are the main content, and the author makes them the size of thumbnails.

If you're going to write a paper like this to share such results, do yourself a favor and make the major conclusions graphically large!

Every one of Figures 8-12 could take up 1/2 a page and not be inappropriate. It's arxiv - what's the benefit of economizing?

<comment><USER3> There is a lot of text commented out in the original files [1]. I reckon they were concerned about the length of the paper. Unfortunately, the original images are still quite small.

> do yourself a favor and make the major conclusions graphically large!

Or add the data and the script to plot them in the gzip file you submit to arxiv.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/format/1907.10701](https://arxiv.org/format/1907.10701)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be awesome if there were a video channel where folks reviewed these articles in a forum style.

Recognize this likely happens naturally in academia and at conferences but for those of us outside it all, it would (hopefully) raise the level of conversation as opposed to puzzling through some of it.

Likely challenging because so many starting points at different places. I can just imagine a twitch stream with someone reading through providing their thoughts.

<comment><USER5> This youtube channel[1] may be what you're looking for. It has presentations of popular ML papers followed by some Q&A. It seems to target a technical but non-academic audience.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfk3pS8cCPxOgoleriIufyg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfk3pS8cCPxOgoleriIufyg)

<comment><USER4> My God. Thank you. I don't know why I didn't think looking this up.</comment></comment></comment>


What is DRM doing in my garage? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/what-is-drm-doing-in-my-garage.ars <comment><USER2> This article is really interesting. It made me think about something I was reading yesterday and how these legal principles might apply.

Emotiv is about to release their epoc brain-computer interface headset that uses EEG technology to attempt to divine intentions and emotions from thought alone. It has 14 electrodes and costs $299. You can read more about it at <http://emotiv.com>.

Anyway, the concept seems very interesting to me, and I was thinking it would be cool to use it for research or to play around with the SDK that it comes with. However, it turns out that the SDK only includes "interpreted" data from Emotiv's software, not the raw EEG data. For that, you have to pay $7500 for a license (or $2500 if you're a research institution), even though it sounds like it's the exact same device.

IANAL, but this article makes it sound like it would not be illegal to buy one and then circumvent whatever DRM scheme they've likely implemented to capture the raw data and use it however you want. In particular, these two lines about Lexmark's attempt to restrict 3rd party cartridges:

 _Because Lexmark's DRM only blocked access to the functions of the printer, not access to any copyrightable code, the court was unwilling to give its lockout behavior DMCA protection._

 _The judge concluded that "patent holders may not invoke patent law to enforce restrictions on the post-sale use of their patented product. After the first authorized sale to a purchaser who buys for use in the ordinary pursuits of life, a patent holder's patent rights have been exhausted... Because Lexmark's patent rights in its toner cartridges were exhausted by the authorized, unconditional sales of the cartridges to end users, Lexmark's attempt to impose single-use restrictions on the cartridges fails._

I'd love to hear what others think about the subject.

<comment><USER3> A friend of mine bought Emotiv SDK(the one with 16 electrodes) and mentioned that they are being extremely protective/restrictive on what you can do with the device (he also said it is very promising but the technology still needs a lot of work).

What I suspect is that the device, if it could reach real mass-production, would be very inexpensive to make, thus they are putting in all kind of pitfalls to prospective competitors.

Not that one can blame them for being so protective, but it could backfire in the long run, if a nimble competitor open sources most of the software and focuses on hardware or at the very least, makes developers job easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the article misses a critical point; to make a universal remote, no copying of any copyrighted material takes place. To activate a garage door opener, no copying of any copyrighted material takes place. So... copyright law simply does not apply; no copying is happening!

(The reason that software EULAs are theoretically valid is because you are making a copy of the computer program when you click the icon; from disk into memory. Since this copying is theoretically illegal the EULA allows it if you agree to certain conditions. I say "theoretically" because the law does not say this anywhere, and no US federal court has ever upheld this. But when you use a remote control to activate your garage door, there is no copying happening, so this is completely irrelevant.)

So anyway, non-issue. You can say whatever you want in an instruction manual -- but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be laughed out of court in 30 seconds if you tried to enforce it. My advice is to not do businesses with slimy vendors like this, however.

It is also worth noting that anyone who has ever been near a math textbook can design an algorithm to make it impossible for burglars to execute replay attacks on the garage door. The manyfacturer is trying to solve a math problem with copyright law, which is dumb, plain and simple.

<comment><USER2> I thought that was the exact point the article was making. For example:

 _In addition, Skylink argued that the rolling code was not DRM, since it did not protect access to some copyrighted computer code but to "an uncopyrightable process" (the opening of a garage door)._

and:

 _By way of example, DVDs marked 'for home use' or 'non-commercial private use only' are not legally restricted as such. Unless there is a contract, those representations are not true. A given use, e.g., classroom showing, is permitted or infringing depending on copyright law, not what is printed on the packaging—unless there is a contract including that restriction. Rightsholders still print such claims on the packaging, however. They might as well print that infringers are obligated to forfeit their first-born child."_

<comment><USER4> Hmm, must have skimmed past that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The garage door opener in question is _weak_. It has rolling codes to deter replay attack, but its behavior in "resynch" mode is a classic example of security by obscurity: "Send two incorrect codes, then another off by three."

If you're going to have a protection against replay attacks, why are you going to have a resynch scheme so vulnerable? This may or may not not be vulnerable to replay attacks, but it sounds like something kids would use to authenticate entry to a treehouse!

This is especially sad, since freely available block ciphers could do a fine job with a challenge-response protocol, and wouldn't require a resynch function. One could assume that both the opener and the remote are securely in the hands of the owner, so both could be programmed with the same secret key.

Even without challenge-response, a more robust protocol should be possible with a little memory and a time stamp. Just keep a list of last few day's successful attempts, and don't accept any already sent. The encrypted hourly time stamp would be incorporated into the encoded passphrase, and a passphrase from the hour before or hour after would be accepted. A passphrase might consist of a number appended to it's inverse, appended to the timestamp.

The attacker cannot overrun the successful attempt record, because she cannot produce a new successful attempt without the symmetric key, and replaying the old one doesn't do anything.

To make this proof against losing the time synch, just do two things: 1) have the opener adopt the timestamp of the last successful attempt and 2) provide a time-resynch passphrase, which is activated by a different button, and which also results in a "already used" record in the case of a successful attempt.

EDIT: It's gotten to the point that I can imagine the lack of an idiotic law like the DMCA could be a _strategic advantage_ for some other country, which will result in far greater technical innovation. (China, perhaps?)</comment>


I'm surrounded by people – but I feel so lonely - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45561334 <comment><USER2> Current discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18110731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18110731) (56 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Therapy for people who are "too rich" - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/bank-therapy-super-rich-occupy-wall-street

<comment><USER2> When they delivered her first Porsche, instead of being happy and high, my sister had a soul crushing rumination.

"Do I really deserve it ? What about all the others who are just like me ?" and so on. She was feeling guilty and concerned, but she knew that she had to accept it otherwise the "gift" from life will be taken away. Then there was the penthouse, then another one, then other cars and each time it was easier and easier, because she's managed to work it out, she's managed to convince herself that yes she deserves it, yes she's better and that's why she has to have all this stuff. People are looking up to her, she _must_ be an example for them to follow.

But then oftentimes we'd sit at the table and she gets all existential and feels guilty again. And afraid that she'll loose it all some day. The only way to get over that is to convince herself that she's worth it. And you do it by earning even more, by being even more exclusive.

"Do not pursue what is illusionary - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night." \- Soljenitsyn.</comment>