CIA's Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/04/08/cia-skincare-startup/ <comment><USER2> As someone who likes their database tables correctly named, without duplication and containing all the data, I can understand the urge to deploy this as a handsoap to all public restrooms with sinks that can collect water samples.

It's just too neat and clean of a trap to not use it.

<comment><USER3> This is a small example of what might or might not be done, but its also a great example of the corrosive effects of lack of trust in institutions of society, and one of the largest reasons why the NSA et all are so incredibly dangerous.

Our society works because of trust, take that away and stuff breaks down, badly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its not clear to me how this would be useful for nefarious purposes. Surely, to apply this detergent and collect the resulting biomarkers in a controlled fashion, they would require fairly complete access to the target individual? As in, the target would have to be sitting there letting an agent rub their arm with some swabs. And there have to be easier ways to do the same thing- file a sharp edge into the back of a door handle could likely get enough skin cells to extract DNA, without being too obtrusive. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> Nope, article is garbage

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ironically they're targeting the wrong end of the person. The sewers would be a great place to collect DNA and narrow down a manhunt in a large metropolitan area.

<comment><USER7> Wow, mind = blown. You could perform binary search on the sewers to find a criminal. Hah, that would be ridiculous if that was possible.

<comment><USER8> There were some indications that we attempted a focused attempt in Pakistan during the hunt for Bin Laden.. From an interview with the Bureau Chief of Time who wrote the full detail story about how it went down:

> _CROWLEY: Right. Unfortunately, Allison 's language had to be a little bit > cryptic. They couldn't confirm exactly what they had done, but he writes > that in some of the option they consider were testing. It's not pleasant > testing the sewage in the town for genetic markers, and then, another was > this UAV. Actually, it wasn't an eagle size UAV. It's much smaller._

[http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1204/26/sp.02.html](http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1204/26/sp.02.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> History is going to be so monumentally unkind to this period of American history. :/

<comment><USER10> Eh, not necessarily. This could be the last period when things were still really really good.

<comment><USER11> Barring disruption of the government, the future will be fairer and more just than today, just as today is fairer and more just yesterday.

<comment><USER12> Can you provide any examples of things that are less fair and less just now than they have been any time in the past 100 years?

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure there must have been a few times in the past 100 years where the US's crimes against humanity as broadly detailed in the CIA torture report wouldn't have been as widely & flat-out ignored ... (as the forces behind your collectively turning a blind eye aren't very fair or just either)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can others confirm/deny this:

Google this, no quotes: snopes Skincential Sciences CIA

Then duckduckgo the same, no quotes.

Did anyone else get disturbingly little response from google, but very detailed and recent results from duckduckgo?

I searched this precisely because I was skeptical, but that search result was just weird.

EDIT: For me it happens both in regular, tracked search and in an incognito tab.

EDIT2: Dropping snopes gives a regular result from google and searching just snopes does too. I think google's ML initiative may not be working out as well as they hoped.

<comment><USER15> The DDG results are about snopes, or Skincential Sciences CIA, but not both. If you remove snopes, the Google results look fine to me.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the confirm. Maybe someone at google listened to people complaining (or their algos learned) that when people search many specific words they are looking for a specific thing and not to randomly drop it.

Also, as a side note (not directly to you but so I don't clutter the feed). The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm". The company in question is a private company, who's purpose is to develop intel tech and sell it to the CIA. They are not associated with the CIA in any official capacity, but they do seem to have a cozy relationship: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q- Tel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel)

Edit: Also, on duckduckgo the first two results I get are specific to both this story about skincential and the cia.

<comment><USER16> > The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm".

Plot twist... YCombinator is the venture capital arm of the CIA /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You might want to catch the 1997 scifi flick Gattaca on Amazon Prime before it becomes anachronistic.

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought one of the reasons why everything had to be done by the free market was that government is bad at picking winners. But what do you know?

</comment><comment><USER19> Why are we letting this go on?

<comment><USER20> I'll bite, why is this something we shouldn't "let go on?" The CIA invests in companies doing research that support it's mission. You can disagree with the mission and work to change it, but what is wrong here? Why is it a crime to let a company develop this technology?

<comment><USER21> I agree, we can all sit and bitch about this all day but if you want to make a change in their policy why not go work for them?

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-- Just to note, the later part of this isn't directed at you @noobermin, just my own rant (sorry) \</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Also, there are plenty of companies that are in their portfolio that we are happily using without complaint.

What this company is doing isn't wrong and assuming that the CIA is going to abuse it is wrong as well. Do people realize the hoops and hurdles these folks have to go through before they are even allowed to even be in the room with some of this stuff?

The people working there are everyday folks that feel the same about the abuse of technology and work very hard for little pay to ensure that they aren't infringing anyone's rights. Sure it isn't perfect all the time, but for the most part they do their job well considering we almost never hear about their successes till several decades later.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why in God's name does the CIA have a VC fund?

<comment><USER23> If you step back from the conspiracy theory stuff, why _shouldn 't_ the CIA have a VC fund? They have a vested interested in fostering technology that could serve their purposes, so why not ensure that technology finds the funding it needs to mature?

Consider also that research grants from the Department of Defence are effectively the same thing, the government sponsoring technology that it might find a military application for, and those grants brought us the internet so it's not all bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why covertly collect when they summon anybody?

</comment><comment><USER25> I wouldn't be surprised if they already collecting DNA samples in bulk from the sewage systems of America

<comment><USER26> When I was a child there was a government program to take bio samples (blood and finger prints) from children in case of abduction. This was in the early 80s. So I would wager that this has been going on for a great long while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "CIA's Venture Capital Arm"

Stahp

</comment><comment><USER28> I am not too worried. CIA isn't what they show in TV dramas. It is just another incompetent organization that will go after weak. These are the same jerks who have not really achieved any strategic objectives of importance. The are one major public scandal away from serious trouble.

<comment><USER29> Hi, you don't seem to be aware of the awful crimes against humanity the CIA has committed without "serious trouble".

For example, consider the scandal where they stage a coup in a foreign government, kidnap American citizens to experiment in brainwashing or assassinate a political leader to protect economic interests.

[http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html](http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html) / Google for any of these headlines</comment></comment>


BLIT: An Early Windowed Graphic Interface from Bell Labs – AT&T Archives (1982) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr1XXvSaVUQ <comment><USER2> "You see, compiler errors still show up while I am playing asteroids."

Earliest example I've seen of a "I'm not slacking off, my code's compiling" reference.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find interesting stuff to read besides HN? - <AUTHOR> I've gotten stuck in a rut online. Aside from a couple blogs and webcomics, I'm pretty much trapped inside of HN and Reddit. How do you guys find interesting stuff--word of mouth, random Google searches, or what? <comment><USER2> I actually try to actively fight the urge to seek out "interesting" things to read. The content on HN is of fairly high quality, and seeking out more stuff to consume outside of it leads to diminishing returns on time wasted.

I find if something is important enough, it will get to me one way or another. Or I'll see it passing by on HN.

<comment><USER3> +1 for that. You can spend practically infinite time reading interesting stuff on the internet. Take some time and do something productive. I promise you won't be missing anything by spending a couple days away from HN, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A subscription to The Economist is great for having some printed material to read in the head.

<comment><USER5> And it's cheap for students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Art & Letters Daily : <http://www.aldaily.com/>

<comment><USER7> Long-time reader. One of my favorite things about it is that it presents articles and editorials written from everywhere on the political spectrum, from the soppily liberal (the Guardian) to the frothingly conservative (City Journal).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://del.icio.us/popular>

del.icio.us/popular and HN are my absolutely required readings every day.

Try AideRSS for other blogs if you you want a better signal/noise ratio:

<http://www.aiderss.com/>

Besides this, websites I visit sometimes:

* iTulip (<http://www.itulip.com>) - alternative economic news

* Boing Boing (<http://www.boingboing.net>) - my favorite blog.

* Your Rights Online Slashdot (<http://yro.slashdot.org>) - about the coming orwellian state

* Pitchfork Media Best New Music (<http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/best_new_music>)

</comment><comment><USER9> I go to a major chain bookstore, the bigger the better. I look around for something really good, when I find something I like I then take the laptop out of my bag and I look up the book at Amazon. Quite often one of Amazons recommendations ends up being more interesting to me, so at that point I'll use my mobile to call a smaller, independent bookstore and special order the book. In the several days it takes to arrive I usually just read the same blogs you guys already mentioned.

<comment><USER10> Why don't you buy it from the bookstore you're already in?

<comment><USER9> Because I have a soft spot in my heart for independent bookstores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I try and get friends who read blogs to use google reader and then constantly cajole them into sharing stuff. Some of my favorite stuff comes from things my friends have shared. Especially things that wouldn't show up on my radar normally.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like to use Google Reader to keep track of interesting blogs and news sources. Usually when an article is linked from HN I take a look at the site and see if it's interesting, then check if it has an RSS feed.

<comment><USER13> Good point. I do this too, though it takes regular pruning of the RSS feed list to keep it interesting. I'll usually sign up for a feed from a blog or site that seems interesting, and after a few weeks or every few months check how often I actually read that feed. If not, out it goes.

<comment><USER12> Indeed, pruning the feed list is important. I usually only remove a feed if it keeps annoying me with frequent irrelevant content. What I want to prevent is having too many unread items in my reader because it leads to either wasting too much time filtering through them or deciding it's not worth the hassle and missing out on good articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I run across a particularly interesting post--linked from a favorite blog, or HN or reddit--I'll often subscribe to the site's rss feed for a week or two on the strength of that experience.

If the site's quality is consistently good, it stays in my feed reader. Otherwise it's booted fast. As a bonus, that high-quality site will probably link to other things I've never heard of, which might be worth reading long- term.

There's no universal recipe, and very few good aggregators online. But you can usually depend on the principle that good stories will link to other good stories.

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://givemesomethingtoread.com> features some of the most saved articles on Instapaper. They're usually pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER16> A Google reader full of smaller blogs and the mindset that I DONT have to read everything. 3083 unread, as of right now, in fact.

Smaller blogs are generally one-man shows, but that's what makes them special to me, they aren't out to make money, and their opinions (about generally geeky tech things, in my case) are priceless. I don't care if they are the wrong opinions, or daft opinions, just that they are alternative opinions. It helps me see different angles of new technologies, languages and startups.

I love sites like Hacker News, they filter out the good stuff, but at the end of the day its a group opinion, and sometimes even upvoted due to the title or subject, rather than the content of the linked to article.

</comment><comment><USER17> A lot of time it happens haphazardly. Whenever I read my subscribed feeds, a lot of the posting will have links to other blog postings. I also find great reads through my own community of forums, blogs, meetups, social networks, etc...

</comment><comment><USER18> <http://www.metafilter.com>

</comment><comment><USER19> Socialbrowse has been a cool way to find stuff "word-of-mouth" lately for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> I read a couple of forums(a few for my hobbies, a few general ones, a few for politics). Then I have HH and Techcrunch for tech etc. And finally I visit reddit/digg to see if there is anything interesting on the front page.

This way I tend to find all of the interesting stuff as soon as it happens.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm incredibly biased but I recommend Socialbrowse! Send me an email if you would like an invite

dave at socialbrowse

</comment><comment><USER13> Word of mouth (or email) works for me. I send things that I find interesting to some friends, and they return the favor. Saving those links to read during "free" hours, you can build up quite a reading list.

</comment><comment><USER22> Feel that way sometimes myself...

I do like The Register:

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom>

The have a slightly European bent (which is refreshing at times) and take sarcasm to new heights.

Cheers

</comment><comment><USER23> A subscription to paper version of WSJ is the best $100/year you'll spend. The content is authoritative, exceptionally well researched and complete. The opinion side of things is pleasantly conservative.

<comment><USER24> As much as I like the WSJ, I can't stand the form-factor of newspapers. They're so awkwardly large that you can't read them on a bus/train or almost anywhere else comfortably... not to mention the ink smudging on fingers and anything else it rubs up against. I'd go for an online or Kindle (do they have that?) subscription.

<comment><USER25> But I love newspapers. I can't think of anything else that would make a more convenient and effective covering for the bottom of my bird's cage. And a supply that lasts me several months only costs a buck! Now that's what I call technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I get my news from: HN + Proggit + RSS Feeds from a few smaller, but important blogs (mostly personal blogs and other very specialized stuff) in Google Reader.

That's enough interesting news for me.

</comment><comment><USER27> <http://www.boingboing.net> <http://www.kottke.org>

</comment><comment><USER28> It is forbidden to speak of the time before HN existed.

</comment><comment><USER29> Try FriendFeed. It is definitely a work in progress but it can really help if you subscribe to a limited number of people.

</comment><comment><USER30> I usually checkout techmeme for hot news for the day. Othe than that, techcrunch,gigaom and some voip blogs.

</comment><comment><USER31> Stumbleupon

though, I only actively seek things when I have time to kill which isn't often at all. Usually its just YC News.

</comment><comment><USER32> Twitter has replaced Google Reader for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> Well, you did specify "online" but what got me out of a very similar rut is . . . reading good books. I read on my machine 99% of the time, and I even use the browser to read said books quite often :)</comment>


"Why Chess Will Destroy Your Mind": Outlook of the Game in 1859 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/why-chess-will-destroy-your-mind-78ad1034521f <comment><USER2> Chess in the 19th century is my go to example when trying to deprogram someone from anxious preoccupation with whatever moral panic is currently fashionable. I use the word 'deprogram' in the sense of helping someone recover from a cult deliberately.

You can often find an article from some newspaper of the period decrying chess and its pernicious effects on the youth, the mind, morals, et cetera. Change the instances of 'chess' to 'video games,' 'violent/sexy movies,' 'dungeons & dragons,' 'smartphones,' or whatever item is the focus of a moral panic. Maybe change a few of the sentences in the article where context demands it.

Have your pearl clutching friend read the modified article. Then show them the original.

Fear mongering rhetorical devices become impossible not to notice.

<comment><USER3> I don't find this line of argument compelling. It's a form of moral induction that specifically selects things that are still in play today (like chess) while ignoring valid warnings that altered a trend (vehicle safety) or halted a trend (smoking). Every moral or health threat needs to be evaluated on its own merits regardless of whether it has the syntax of a historical warning that ended up in hindsight seeming kind of absurd. This is exactly the kind of argument corporations exploring potent forms of addiction want trotted out.

<comment><USER4> There's a difference in bring alarmist but making good points and bring alarmist and using rhetorical tricks.

You are describing the former, they the latter.

A problem should stand on its own without the emotional manipulation.

<comment><USER5> It should, but it doesn't. If you have a conscience and want to make a change, you need both logos and pathos.

<comment><USER6> But you start with a good argument. Without one, you are wrong to continue on making emotionally manipulative appeals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's more of its perceived usefulness over the entrance barrier rather than the old vs. new thing. Video games and social networks today are much easier to start with than chess while its usefulness (recognized by society) is questionable (not much higher than chess); so it seems more wasteful, i.e. "bad"

Compare this to computer programming. This is clearly new and pretty addictive thing IMO but its entrance barrier is rather high and it looks useful (to the eyes of parents and teachers), so they tend to accept it.

Similarly, there's not much novelty in a fidget spinner but it's blamed and banned from school. It's extremely easy to play with while its apparent usefulness is unclear. Hence it's "bad".

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if any parallels can be drawn between this and the inordinate amount of time children today spend starting at smartphones. While my personal opinion is that it is probably harmful to have so much of our attention focussed on phones at such a young age, we don't know how future societies will view this activity in retrospect.

<comment><USER9> My prediction is that everyone will be fine just like every other time a new thing came around, and phones won't finally be the one "it's different for real this time super seriously" thing.

<comment><USER10> You may be right, but it's clear that the _level_ of the addiction, and its ubiquity, are more powerful than anything before. It's basically _everyone_ is doing a minimum of a couple hours a day (but spread out, so without any prolonged cessation), with the average now like 4-5 hours I believe. Television is probably the closest competitor, but that was typically confined to blocks of after-work hours.

<comment><USER11> Search phrase most likely to match previous moral panics: "You may be right, but it's clear that..."

<comment><USER10> Ha! True enough. In fairness, "they" weren't wrong about TV...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article, in fact, reinforces the idea that chess has more commonly been seen as an intellectual pursuit. The amateur in historical criticism will point out that the existence of this article affirms the popular thing and milieu that it is objecting to, and in fact even says that

"Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, because it requires a strong memory and peculiar powers of combination. It is also generally believed that skill in playing it affords evidence of a superior intellect."

hence we should not take this author's opinion of the general perception of the game in that period.

</comment><comment><USER13> Eh, at least for me chess didn't play in dreams, the way Tetris did back in the day it was new.

<comment><USER14> I used to dream about software development flaws applied to "reality". E.g. I've had radios in my dreams that wouldn't turn off unless I unplugged them because they didn't properly implement graceful shutdown. Or microwaves I couldn't physically use because I made that function private instead of public. Usually it was more like a nightmare - all sorts of things not working for nonsensical reasons.

<comment><USER15> Hahaha. That's the funniest thing I've read all day. "Aaah, I put my car keys on the heap and didn't keep a pointer!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you enjoy stories like this, and podcasts, check out The Pessimists Archive. Their latest episode was about chess and they have 6 other excellent ones before it. [http://pessimists.co/](http://pessimists.co/)

</comment><comment><USER17> What happens when mass-media-enforced morality is obviously engaging in an endless parade of ridiculous moral panics based on flimsy redefinitions of words like "harassment" and aggressively doxxes, downvotes, bans, and supresses anyone trying to call it a moral panic?

EDIT: Exhibit A.

<comment><USER5> Even if I agree with you, your comment is grossly offtopic and admits no constructive response.

<comment><USER17> HackerNews: the last line of defense for the moral status quo... and hiding it under the guise of TOS conformity.

I mean, sure, what would a comment about the moral outrages of 2016 games and 1800s games, both manned by stuffy Victorian-esque pearl-clutching couch feinters desperately hiding their grotesque physiques under an abusive reliance on contemporary styles, possibly have in common?</comment></comment></comment>


Implementation of adversarial attacks and defences - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sarathknv/adversarial-pytorch <comment><USER2> Note that this pertains to exploiting ML systems so that you control the inference (output) of the system.</comment>


How Puerto Rico Became a Tax Haven for the Super Rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.gq.com/story/how-puerto-rico-became-tax-haven-for-super-rich <comment><USER2> For those looking for a different, and maybe deeper perspective on this; this was an interesting podcast. It is maybe the latest example of the shock doctrine / disaster capitalism pattern where disasters often lead to profits for those with access to capital.

[https://www.blubrry.com/thedig/34718421/naomi-klein-and- merc...](https://www.blubrry.com/thedig/34718421/naomi-klein-and-mercedes- martnez-the-battle-for-puerto-rico/)

<comment><USER3> The source really undermines itself with the starting sentence - both the crypto-bros and the dystopia assertion without any text elaboration.

That sounds kind of obvious from a capital standpoint alone. Disasters cause expensive damages so anyone in a position to repair stands to make money. Anyone who lacks the reserves and needs loans and financing would be needed. I don't think it in itself qualifies as unethical even - while uncomfortable to make money from the misfortune of others the alternatives are worse.

Now other associated unethical practices may be involved like price gouging, and probably happened with certainty given both the breadth of history and human greed. It goes without saying that causing the bad situation and then benefiting is an ethical failure even without any bad intent. Deliberately causing it being clear evil.

<comment><USER4> Price gouging drastically reduces shortages because anyone with supply will be tempted to quickly move in to capture the high price on the curve. It also encourages people to actually plan ahead so the entire population isn't trying to buy a full tank of gas the same day.

You think price gouging is unethical, I think price capping is unethical and harmful since it encourages hoarding and shortages.

<comment><USER5> After a hurricane, water sometimes goes for $100 per bottle. While that seems like price gouging...

At $100 a bottle I'm going to be loading up my SUV with as many water bottles as fit and I'll be driving to the disaster area. I'll take work off, maybe even risk getting fired for that type of payday.

Is it unethical? Some people would say so, I did make tens of thousands off of a disaster. But on the other hand, if people were dying because of a water shortage, I made tens of thousands of dollars saving lives. I probably wouldn't have done that without the financial carrot.

The free market is a very powerful thing.

<comment><USER6> That's true only if you can readily bring in new supply to compete with existing suppliers. But if market entry is difficult or impossible--on an island and unable to quickly arrange transport--then no price is sufficient to bring new supply to bear on the market.

Price gouging in this context might imply existing suppliers with more than enough supply to keep water at affordable rates until new supply comes online, but who choose to charge exorbitant prices simply because they can. Or more realistically, they charge just below the price at which outside suppliers could profitably enter the market given the temporarily enormous transaction costs (e.g. transport) in emergency situations.

Furthermore, when discussing essentials such as water, society cannot tolerate a system that explicitly puts people into conflict. Maintenance of law & order requires a minimal degree of equal treatment regardless of circumstance as part of the social contract. And while we can argue that a $100 bottle of water might help to ensure that, e.g., only the severely sick receive water because, facing imminent death, they or someone close them is willing to pay the price, often the price may far exceed what the impoverished are capable of affording, no matter how they value it. Again, maintenance of the social contract--incentivizing the impoverished not to begin violating property rights--is often a collective action problem and not something free markets can ensure.

I agree that people use "price gouging" far too liberally and don't appreciate how price signaling works to moderate supply and demand, but there are situations where free markets cannot adequately serve a population.

<comment><USER7> Even if you can't quickly bring new supply into a market, allowing prices to rise to reflect the new supply/demand equilibrium prevents (or dramatically reduces hoarding).

No one goes to a ballgame to stock up on $5 bottles of water...

Force retailers to keep bottles of water at $0.50/bottle and the sensible thing to do post-disaster if the water supply is uncertain is to buy all of them. In the worst case, you bought something at a normal price that won't spoil essentially ever. In a not unexpected case, you have secured a supply of water for yourself and family and have something that may be barter-able for other supplies that you might need.

<comment><USER8> Congratulation, you just noticed obvious problems of a rule like "don't change prices at state of emergencies". Thus, no reasonable/battle-tested actual regulation will have such a rule. Surprisingly, simple principles like "free market", "planned economy"/"communism", "free speech", "equal opportunity" etc cannot solve every problem on their own and we tediously need to balance all of those tools for the best possible outcomes for society.

Here a compromise might be something like caps on price increases (maybe max 500%) and some mild rules to prevent hoarding. I remember reading something like that in actual law, but it's been a while and I'm not sure about details anymore.

It's also interesting many forms of disaster relief are provided by the governments or non-profits instead by the free market directly. This development seems like a good indicator that free markets might have significant drawbacks in such situations.

<comment><USER7> And yet, you have people like the AG of Texas threatening to investigate any business who raised prices by more than 10%. Actually happened; not theoretical.

See the quote from the Texas AG in the article here: [https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-attorney-general-warns- price...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-attorney-general-warns-price- gouging-aftermath-harvey/story?id=49503480)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. FWIW, the pertinent law in Texas is recited at [https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer- protection/dis...](https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer- protection/disaster-and-emergency-scams/how-spot-and-report-price-gouging)

      [Illegal to sell] fuel, food, medicine or another necessity
      at an exorbitant or excessive price

The only thing that might be worse than leaving the standard so open-ended is actually specifying hard numbers.[1]

I wonder what the caselaw looks like, and what are some actual price multipliers involved in successful and failed prosecutions.

[1] Sometimes vague standards like that are deliberately designed to incentive conservative behavior while permitting equitable treatment (give defendant benefit of a doubt) in actual disputes. Being scared you could easily run afoul of the law is partly the point. That works better when designed for enforcement by private plaintiffs where quantifiable harm must plausibly have occurred. It's prone to abuse when enforced by regulators preemptively as there's no limiting factor of manifest harm. If everybody was happy to pay $50, no harm no foul. If somebody's grandmother passed out from dehydration because she couldn't afford a bottle even though the shelves were full, then not only do we have harm but we have a concrete context to gauge "excessive". Preemptive enforcement lacks these contextualizing facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Governments should be competing for wealthy taxpayers. And as income sources become divorced from physical locations, they will be forced to do so more and more every year.

I run venture backed businesses. Teams are distributed. So I count days across the world and do not pay taxes anywhere (i am not a US citizen so it is much easier). In the process my company and I benefit from low cost of capital raised in silicon valley, low cost of excellent talent hired in russia, my personal expanded social network in markets in Asia. And it easily pays for itself just in terms of not needing to pay any taxes anywhere.

It just makes sense to live this way once you have high income, are building something that is not physically in one location, understand how to be healthy/social/etc while living in many places.

the current tax system has no future. the fundamental reason is that there is simply no point for anyone to pay crazy taxes. the United States (or any other country) just do not deliver enough marginal value from being there for more than X days per year to pay an extra 20-40% in taxes.

to help your community – donate to things you care about and add value for other people that way. i want health research to benefit. it makes much more sense to donate/invest there, than to send the fruits of my work to the NSA to fund them to spy on me.

i hope more and more people do this.

<comment><USER10> So you're glorifying being a parasite?

<comment><USER9> i pay my way, create jobs for people, fund/promote things i consider valuable for humanity (e.g. medical tech).

i have never claimed a medical, educational, unemployment etc. benefit in my life. and i am a citizen of a country that will never give me any such benefits anyway.

my approach adds more value to society than funding inefficient social programs, armies of bureaucrats and bloated spy agencies.

yeah, i glorify this.

<comment><USER11> I guess what is missing from your equation is that the model you are advocating for is not sustainable for large parts of the population. Just imagine everyone doing this, do you think the countries could still exist the way they do? It's all and well that you decide to fund some medical tech but what about all the other areas that need attention? Your giving portfolio doesn't really strike me as well-balanced in that regard. Additionally, I would question that you are actually giving an amount similar to what you would be paying in taxes. So your argument that you provide more value to society doesn't strike me as obviously credible. I would urge you to really do some more comprehensive estimations and analysis before making such a claim – at least if you are interested in the "truth" and not just making yourself feel good about yourself.

On the other hand, I see the possibility for what you are doing to have a positive impact depending on what you do and what you use your money for (maybe have a look at 80000hours.org to get some inspiration). But you have to keep in mind that this is just a marginal possibility for rather small parts of the population and that this model probabaly wouldn't scale at all. So, it might make sense to keep this in mind when you discuss and think about this topic.

<comment><USER12> > I guess what is missing from your equation is that the model you are > advocating for is not sustainable for large parts of the population.

I don't think anytime we'll have more than 0.1% of population living digital nomad lifestyle. Even most people who have the opportunity, still prefer living in one place, with their family.

<comment><USER11> I think in this thread two things might be conflated. Afaik not all digital nomads dodge taxes or do it purposefully to evade taxes as presented in the top post. So, everything I have been saying is coined to the specific situation outlined in that post. I don't want to criticize a digital nomad lifestyle in general.

But back to your point and assuming that the digital nomads you are talking about are the ones dodging taxes. It doesn't really change anything about the argument. The problem that not taxing these people seems arbitrary to the normal person because there is nothing special that those people provide compared to the average entrepeneur. The average tax dodging nomad doesn't pull his/her own weight => this lifstyle wouldn't scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Lots of Bitcoin millionaires moved to Puerto Rico to avoid their capital gains taxes. Peter Schiff mentions this on his interview with Joe Rogan.

</comment><comment><USER14> Politics aside, Puerto Rico's Act 20 is an interesting opportunity for American SaaS businesses. Avoid most federal income tax and employ at least 3 locals in the process.

[https://www.quora.com/Do-Puerto-Rico-Acts-20-and-22-apply- to...](https://www.quora.com/Do-Puerto-Rico-Acts-20-and-22-apply-to-software- including-development-consulting-and-SaaS-sold-to-clients-located-in-the-USA)

[https://prbusinesslink.com/act-20/](https://prbusinesslink.com/act-20/)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the kind of thing that people mean by "disaster capitalism". PR is wrecked and desperate for money, so it resorts to tax competition - but only for wealthy foreigners, not its own residents. This drives up local inequality while also taking away from the mainland's tax base. And in the end it doesn't quite manage to solve the problems for the rest of PR.

<comment><USER16> > And in the end it doesn't quite manage to solve the problems for the rest of > PR.

As long as the Jones Act is still in place, there is no tax policy Puerto Rico could implement that would solve its economic problems in the long-term.

<comment><USER17> That is like 99th on a list of 100 of PR's problems. [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/18/broken-bonds-wall-streets- ro...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/18/broken-bonds-wall-streets-role-in- wiping-out-puerto-ricans-savings.html), poor access to capital/need for capital after Maria, and an apathetic (if not antagonistic) administration are absolutely worse right now.

How much would you really estimate is wasted above what would be paid for non- US flagged ships? How would a race to the bottom in terms of flag-of- convenience destinations be detrimental to the long term interests of the US shipping/shipbuilding industries? Would repealing it have any security impacts? Who would benefit most from it.

I don't expect you to answer those, but they are all complicated questions and worthy of better discussion than this.

<comment><USER16> > That is like 99th on a list of 100 of PR's problems

Look, I never said that the Jones Act was Puerto Rico's _only_ problem. I said it's a major problem, and that it alone is significant enough to hamper Puerto Rico's economy indefinitely.

As a separate note, it's weird to frame it (as you do) as the aftermath of Maria and the federal government's apathy being _worse_ , when in reality the two are heavily linked. The Jones Act severely hindered the recovery efforts from Maria. (Every other hurricane since Katrina has prompted a temporary waiver from the Jones Act in order to aid relief - including Harvey, which happened just before Maria).

Yes, keeping the residents of Puerto Rico in the dark for a year and without reliable access to shelter and clean water is obviously an immediate problem. I'm saying that _even if the lights were turned back on overnight_ , that still won't fix the long-term problems either.

<comment><USER17> They waived the Jones Act after Maria, albeit briefly.

I think PR's debt problems are an order of magnitude worse than the excessive cost of shipping. They need to be a full US state, and they need federal aid to fix their balance sheet (beyond PROMESA). I think a Jones Act subsidy would be a reasonable policy to preserve a US shipbuilding industrial base while not doing so on AK, HI, PR, et al's dime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Similar story from months ago

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurrency...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurrency- puerto-rico.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> This was talked about at length on Joe Rogans show by Peter Schiff:

[https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI](https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI)

I think its a net benefit to Puerto Rico to be in this position.

<comment><USER20> Not if Puerto Rico isn't able to tax those super-rich using them as a tax haven.

<comment><USER21> Puerto Rico now has rich consumers who pay the salaries of poor Puerto Ricans. Who then pay income tax.

Small slice from a big pie is better than big slice from non-existent pie.

<comment><USER20> Trickle down economics was long ago shown to be a complete fraud.

<comment><USER21> You're right. Money doesn't flow too easily from the most rich to the most poor without government intervention.

But state finance is separate issue from that. And money flowing to the most poor would not do much to state finance, because the most poor typically are unemployed and hardly pay any taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Curious who else is in Puerto Rico. I'm moving to either Rincon or San Juan later this year, decided back in January.

</comment><comment><USER23> Read this article then ran in to ... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxKArhySbko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxKArhySbko) ... couldn't stop laughing!

</comment><comment><USER24> tl;dr US territories often times have the ability from Congress to create parallel tax systems. Some have made attractive ones.

protip: Some other US territories have favorable tax laws too, if you want to dig. Its nice that they aren't being written about by EVERYONE right now.

Nobody's going to spoil it for you because that'll be spoiling it for themselves too.

ALL US territories have the same catch: they are underdeveloped bad neighborhoods, and changing the laws doesn't get the comfortable New England elites to move from their gated communities. New money MIGHT be interested.

<comment><USER25> I hope Los Zetas see the opportunity here. They could net a few million from running their playbook on a newly minted crypto-bro thinking he found a "haven" for his money.

<comment><USER24> Los Zetas are in the Caribbean territories? I thought they were just in east Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula

I mean they are well funded and connected and can go anywhere but... don't?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Government is a business, and its most important customers are the rich.

I think that's a bit jaded. A better phrasing might be: "Modern absentee democracies are leveraged by those who can extract the most value from them."

<comment><USER27> They do operate 'kinda' like a business:

They charge rents (property taxes), protection fees (taxes for military/police), and collect royalties on every good bought or sold on their turf (sales tax).

The only difference between them and a business is that government gets your money by force (by threatening imprisonment if you don't pay). A business must use persuasion & manipulation to get your money.

However, since govt. uses force to collect revenue rather than voluntary payment for goods/services, they more closely resemble a mafia (protection racket) than a business.

<comment><USER28> Sigh.

The differences are manifold. Start with the purpose - modern government exists to serve all of society, which it mostly does. The mafia exists to serve the mafia, although it can be incidentally generous with the public. The social contract between the public and the government is that revenue the government takes in through taxes is spent on things that help the public - schools, roads, emergency services, etc. The public has substantial if indirect influence on this balance, via elections. Of course, some people won't be happy with the arrangement, but the majority are generally satisfied.

Additionally, modern government functions in part by a monopoly on the use of violence, which we agree to as part of the social contract. Individuals who refuse to participate in the social contract are subject to government violence, whether they're not paying their taxes, or shooting their neighbors. As part of the contract, the government is not to abuse that monopoly on violence at a large enough scale that most of the public feels threatened by government itself.

Et cetera.

<comment><USER27> The ridiculousness of your social contract idea, is that a contract cannot be binding if it was made on your behalf, before your birth, without your consent. Implied consent is lunacy especially when there's lots of people saying "I do not consent", to which you must reply, "Oh you're just too stupid to know what's good for you".

Before you get upset and too emotionally invested, I will say I am not against government or the state. This is like accusing irreligious people of being against Christianity. I'm not against government, but I cannot in good faith use government's own language to describe the actual, material function of government.

Words like "public good", "social contract", these are propaganda words with more of a religious and spiritual connotation than any truth grounded in reality. They are lofty ideas invented by men trying to justify the French revolution. There's definitely value in their ideas and worldview, but mistaking an ideology or worldview for actual reality, is childish.

Government does not exist to serve society, it exists to preserve the state.

Public services -- healthcare, schools, roads -- all those things are great and helpful to society but the government does not give them to us to "serve the public".

Public services exist for one reason, and for the same reason a birdfeeder exists. A birdfeeder exists to keep the birds all in one place (to study them). Similarly, public services exist to keep us all in one place, to make us more easily accessible, so we can be more easily taxed, and more easily controlled. By giving us public services and a good quality of life, we are willing to give up even our own lives in the preservation of our state, and to kill other humans living under a different state, like the Vietcong, who were doing nothing more than trying to defend their own system against invaders.

The public services government provides, almost always come to us through granting lucrative and over-priced government contracts to their own powerful donors and wealthy associates. Notice how after leaving office, politicians always go work for a big corporation that donated to their campaign and was recipient of government contracts, grants or tax-breaks.

The alternative to government is government. There's no way around it. Anarchy creates a void which is filled by another government. I'm fully aware of that.

But making government more fair means acknowledging the ACTUAL functions and purpose of government. Being naive about those functions doesn't help anyone but the people who seek to exploit and take advantage of us under the guise of "serving the public">

People who believe government exists to serve us will inevitably cede unreasonable, arbitrary, and vaguely defined (unlimited) power to the government under the false assumption that government intends to use these powers for our benefit.

You see this all the time where a party expands the role of govt, then complains when the next party gets elected and uses this same power for something they don't like. It practically happens every election cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Gee maybe if they taxed these people themselves we wouldn't have to buy them a new electrical grid.

<comment><USER30> I'm no expert on these matters, but it's the internet so I have an opinion. These territories face a catch-22: to the extent they raise taxes they become less attractive to the Super Rich (well outside investment in general). You might also end up with a race to the bottom scenario, where taxes go to zero, labor laws go to heck. You actually see all of these issues and more in practice so it is not just theoretical. It is a difficult quandary to escape from. You basically need an engine for real organic growth that doesn't rely on tax gimmicks. Finally, I think Puerto Rico itself also suffers from an artificial handicap with respect to the Jones Act.

<comment><USER31> What you do is you hide a land mine inside the law. In this case, I think it's probably the bit about having no significant ties with the mainland. Maybe the number of days on the island, or something to do with the "one minute" rule.

So you let them move in, thinking they legally owe no taxes, and meanwhile, you gather the evidence related to your land mine and then wait. You sit on it. For years. Then you blow up the mine and demand a heaping pile of back taxes. You can then settle for less than the amount you are demanding, so nobody goes to court and no precedents are set, but you still get the cash.

The mistake people make is in thinking they can use the law to put on over on the government, when the government makes and enforces the laws. All those people in the article were getting the best tax deal an American can even dream of, and some were still openly discussing ways in which they could cheat the requirements! It seems like all you might have to do to catch a cheater is just watch someone for a day or two, or record them during a few minutes of bragging.

They say you can't cheat an honest man, but you sure can con a cheater.

<comment><USER32> > "hide a land mine inside the law"

This isn't a great idea and there are things wrong with it at a couple of levels.

1) We do not want the government to be in an adversarial relationship with rich people. Most rich people maintain their riches by adding tremendous value to society. While they may be reticent to pay taxes, they are not enemies.

2) We do not want the government rules-lawyering the law. I'll risk being opinionated and say that the law is not meant to contain random gotchas, it is supposed to codify usual and expected behaviour.

The law is meant primarily to be followed, not broken and enforced.

3) As sibling posts mention, people who change jurisdiction to avoid taxes are going to get an actual legal opinion and have sufficient influence to get the law changed. It'd never work in practice.

> "They say you can't cheat an honest man, but you sure can con a cheater."

Reminds me of the three felonies a day business [1]. We want less of that thinking, there are enough problems caused by unclear regulations without adding more on purpose.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842)

<comment><USER33> > Most rich people maintain their riches by adding tremendous value to > society.

That's not the impression I'm getting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The problem is that once the rich have settled, populist movements will grow to tax them, and the rich being settled as they are, can't easily escape these politically coordinated expropriations.

The result is that the rich begin to slowly trickle out, at a rate that is not fast enough to make the negative repercussions of the involuntary income redistribution that voters support apparent to them.

<comment><USER35> And what are those negative repercussions?

<comment><USER34> For the rich individuals: they either get taxed at high rates, resulting in a loss of enjoyment in their rights, or have to suffer the disruption of emigrating to a new country.

For the former tax haven: it loses out on capital growth, which means less economic growth.

<comment><USER36> What does a rich person actually lose (ie. materially how is their life different) when they're taxed at a higher rate?

<comment><USER7> I think that Act 22 folks are often the "barely rich" or "incorrectly categorized as rich", where differential tax policy actually has an effect on their lifestyle (and therefore more strongly drives behavior).

Take someone with $5MM in investable assets. Using a simplistic 4% rule of thumb, that can generate $200K of income per year. Tax that at 4%, and you have $192K to _spend_. Tax it at a blended 25% and you have $150K to _spend_. At that level of income, $3500/month is very much a noticeable difference, IMO. ($16K/mo vs $12.5K/mo spendable.)

Now, consider that $150K/yr living in the mainland US goes farther than $150K/yr on Puerto Rico, and someone with $5MM and eligible for Act22 isn't going to move to PR without Act22.

Peter Schiff's quote in the article sums it up very well, I think: "Who would come to a bankrupt island to pay high income taxes?"

<comment><USER37> That's still $150k for doing effectively nothing. That person could choose to supplement their income with a paid job or a business. I'd love to be in that position, as would the vast majority of people in the world.

<comment><USER7> Of course! No one ever argued that having $5M investable assets was a poor position to be in. That family absolutely has wide variety of choices they can make, all of them pretty damn good.

The question is Puerto Rico's motivation/justification/choice to offer Act 22 tax advantages to bring the majority of that $192K of spending onto the island or not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub's Price Hike – A Great Time to Migrate to BitBucket and Save a Lot of Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.squrb.com/blog/2016/5/11/githubs-new-pricing-structure-a-perfect-time-to-migrate-to-bitbucket-and-save-a-lot-of-money <comment><USER2> > It seems the time has come for unicorns to justify their hefty valuations.

Sorry what? It seems the article author knows nothing about Github. Not a unicorn and only took investor money after being profitable for a long time.

Yes the cost is going up for many people. No, my company doesn't plan on moving anything off of Github. It's well worth the cost.

<comment><USER3> One of their mascots is the unicorn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mentioned this is another article on the subject but... I "upgraded" to the unlimited plan immediately and it saved me over $100 a month. For some people this pricing change is awful, for others like me it's great.

If it were to get more expensive I could probably use self-hosted GitLab however.

<comment><USER5> Or consider using the SaaS GitLab.com [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/05/11/git-repository- pricing/](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/05/11/git-repository-pricing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Try Gitlab, it's free and partly open source and much closer to Github's UI than Bitbucket.

</comment><comment><USER7> The tone is inflammatory and that graph is a joke. Changes are a function of two factors whereas advisory focuses on only one dimension. With unique insight authors claim to have, I'd expect something more comprehensive.

That being said I'm pretty sure that some will be unhappy with the change. As andraz mentioned in another comment - moat gives leverage. But even though I'm pretty sure GitHub is fairly elastic in terms of pricing with large enough companies (with large enough probably still being not that large), I find it hard to believe that their bottom line suffers. This means that customers are picking up the tab and as silly as this article is, prices did go up and some people should migrate.

</comment><comment><USER8> As usual, when moats are deep enough, prices raise. I think this is basic economics that governs all such businesses. Github feels they have entrenched themselves enough that they can increase prices by segmenting the market differently, which is probably true.

Naturally this opens up space for competition which will figure out how to take a bite here and there. But that will take quite some years.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not moving to bitbucket and not upgrading at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's time to try Gitlab</comment>


Generating random text - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/sec153.html

<comment><USER2> Another practical example of Markov-chaining is <http://www.x11r5.com/> \- a robot that's various trained from IRC, Twitter and Identica content.

There's even a weekly podcast generated from news headlines: <http://www.x11r5.com/radio/>

<comment><USER3> I got an awesome one: "Wtf are you doing in 2008?" obama gave them to read it as a utility to basically throw random hacked kexts at the corner store stocks mexican coke."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I accidentally reinvented this algorithm many years ago as a C++ project. Here is an example of passages that it created:

sections of ice fell through the. invectives in which he had been wondering how. roman scales was in readiness. occasional murmur of pain that continued to torment. desavanchers dicksen dickson dochard du chaillu duncan durand was a. waging a war of extermination against. lively about it no snap or bite. chairs cane sofas carved wood pillars rose pillars. skirting an acclivity covered with woods and dotted with trees of very deep water. scratching as though he'd tear his nails out and sharp bite out. jerked by a sudden stoppage of the sled dogs barked. mentioned a cemetery on the south the four brilliants of the sky great and. ranks plunging into the flames would extinguish them beneath their mass and the rest were seen in numerous flocks hovering about the borders of some beautiful river until it fell. fridays well i hope that we shall overcome. emphatically an' i make free the. profitable the captains of the sea and consequently the balloon remained.

You can see more info about it or download my source code at:

[http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/11/software- tool-f...](http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/11/software-tool-for-low- order.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Markov chains are always good fun to play with... a few months ago I worked on a class project which generated markov models from Final Fantasy SNES tracks. (<https://github.com/IsaacLewis/MidiMarkov>). I should blog about it at some point.

I hadn't seen Shannon's algorithm before though, which looks a bit more memory efficient than the approach I used.

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember reading about that in "The Information", where it is described how Claude Shannon did it.

Now I'll have to tweak my spam detection even more. Joke aside and somebody correct me if I'm wrong, spam probably runs on a simple wordlist type algorithm.

What is then the usefulness (I define usefulness extremely wide) of such a generator?

<comment><USER7> If you have a good generator for text, you have a useful language model that can be plugged into applications such as speech recognition, OCR, predictive text entry systems and compression.

<comment><USER6> Could you somehow use it in reverse? What I mean is, is it possible to get a random text generator for a certain language and then use it to determine, whether a given text is in that language or not?

<comment><USER7> Yes.

Given the string so far, see how probable it is that the generator would generate the next character, p(x_n | x_<n). Running through the whole string you can build up the log probability of the whole string: log p(x) = \sum_n log p(x_n | x_<n). Comparing the log probabilities under different models gives you a language classifier. For a first stab at the one-class problem, compare the log probability to what the model typically assigns to strings it randomly generates.

For more on information theory, modelling and inference you might like: <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bentley's collection of Programming Pearls radically changed my outlook (when I read it as a novice programmer, I considered programming itself to be an end, not a means to an end). I still read and re-read selections to this day, and I always seem to learn something new each time.

Would anyone care to share books of similar quality or importance?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it possible to generate text by a sort of reverse-LDA, where you have topics (per-sentence or per-paragraph, ideally) and estimate the probability of a word to appear in a given topic?

You could then use these topics to generate more realistic-looking text as this ostensibly wouldn't have the wild jumps from one topic to another that naive Markov chains have.

Has anyone done anything like this, or should I give it a shot?

<comment><USER10> That sounds possible, but gathering all the data for topic-specific training might be somewhat maddening. The problem you get with larger groupings of words is lack of cohesion. If you trained it at a sentence level, you might be able to produce coherent sentences. But as you generated more sentences to produce a paragraph, it would likely meander.

I created a kind of Mad Lib generator using CFGs. A paragraph consisted of: [Intro] [Supporting sentence 1] [Supporting sentence 2] [Supporting sentence 3] ... [Conclusion]. All the sentences had placeholders for various nouns and adjectives that could later be filled in programmatically, and I extended the grammar spec to both permute sets of sentences and generate null productions with certain probabilities.

The base sentences were created by humans, about 15 per grammar rule. A single person could create a topic-based paragraph/grammar in less than two work days. The chances of it creating the same template twice was about one in a billion. Of course, the probability varied depending on how many seed sentences were present.

If the person writing the seed sentences is literate and passed the 6th grade, then everything the program generates is indistinguishable from human text.

It works marvelously.

<comment><USER9> That's interesting, do you have any code or examples?

My thought about topic detection is to have it learn which words go together, and then augment the Markov chain model by some method that would weigh the Markov chain probability with the topic probability to select the next word, so it would at least generally stick to topic-relevant words. Perhaps you could even select one topic (a sample sentence, really) in the beginning and have it generate sentences based on that for the entire document.

<comment><USER10> I wish I could publish it, but my company isn't very much into open source. It's a standard context free grammar framework modified to generate output in a stochastic manner. So it's basically a stochastic context free grammar (SCFG). I can go more into depth in private if you like.

The phrase for finding word pairs in text corpora is "cohort analysis". I was a on research team that did studies of that; mostly finding them, not generating anything with them.

It's an interesting subject area.

<comment><USER9> That gives me a good idea for further research, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Dive into Python" contains chapter on XML processing[1] that uses grammar defined in XML to generate random English passages. A very funny and informative reading.

[1] <http://diveintopython.org/xml_processing/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Markov Chains are really handy. You can also use the Hidden Markov Model to do voice recognition. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition>

</comment><comment><USER13> Shameless Plug: This is very similar to what I use in <http://wordum.net/> but instead of letters, I use whole words to generate the text.

<comment><USER14> That's exactly the idea that popped in my mind when I started reading the article (except I would have done it for free).

How successful is it? What are the advantages compared to eg randomtextgenerator.com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I did this exercise on my blog at <http://programmingpraxis.com/2009/02/27/mark-v-shaney/>.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/> DadaDodo is a fairly old implementation that may be of interest.

</comment><comment><USER17> Weren't they looking for help data mining the Palin emails? That'd be a better selection of random gibberish wouldn't it?

<comment><USER18> Please, no, just don't.</comment></comment>


Face recognition in images and video with Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2018/06/18/face-recognition-with-opencv-python-and-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> We released a C/C++ computer vision library (Python binding to follow) earlier this month which let you perform face recognition at Real-time from IoT or Raspberry PI devices. The library is dependency free, cross platform and should compile fine on most modern architectures with a C compiler.

[https://github.com/symisc/sod](https://github.com/symisc/sod)

<comment><USER3> Speaking as someone with limited and theoretical knowledge of computer vision, does CV usually overlap with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?

I read through the readme and don't recall any references to identifying text, so I was wondering if and where a separation between OCR and CV might exist in the development process?

<comment><USER2> Yes, CV is always the first pass before character extraction. It envolve a lot of image processing routines including morphological operation like dilation, noise removal, etc. and finally blob detection[1]. All of the preprocessing routines are implemented in SOD.

[1]: [https://sod.pixlab.io/c_api/sod_image_find_blobs.html](https://sod.pixlab.io/c_api/sod_image_find_blobs.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bit unrelated but I'm in a need for some sort of cat deterrent that will spray water at all cats except mine. Also it would be nice if humans were exempted as well.

I haven't done the legwork myself yet, but would this be an appropriate project to check out for this? (As for identifying my cat I've been thinking about alternative solutions such as rfid necklace or something but it is quickly getting past 'quick hack').

<comment><USER5> It might be easier to cheat and put a bluetooth or similar beacon onto your cat to suppress the water spray than try and distinguish your cat from others?

<comment><USER4> One of the goals is to create a safe place for my cat, on the porch or something. And still be able to fend off neighbor cats. She is getting old and has had fights on the porch which makes her scared to go out.

So I guess it depends on how easy it would be to limit the scope/direct the receiver to only activate when she is on the stairs which is probably the optimal target range for the porch (and not activate when she is lying just beside the receiver).

Thanks so much everyone for the answers! Can't believe I forgot about the squirrel presentation. My cat is all black and I'm not sure how I'd go about distinguishing it. A really colorful necklace perhaps, but it would have to be quite ungraceful to not be covered in fur when watched from the front/back (a second camera 90 degrees from the first could perhaps help).

In the QA in the squirrel presentation someone also mentioned OpenTLD, which seems to be superseded by CMT ( [https://www.gnebehay.com/cmt/](https://www.gnebehay.com/cmt/) ). Worth a look.

I hope I can find the time to experiment on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I automated half of my first desk job by writing this Python CLI tool, which wraps the OpenCV `detectFace` method:

[https://github.com/leblancfg/autocrop](https://github.com/leblancfg/autocrop)

Pyimagesearch is a great repository of everything OpenCV related, great to see them on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pyimagesearch is great. I'm just a tinkerer / hobbyist in the computer vision space, but this is a site I come to time and again to get up to speed on topics that just seem harder elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> true that - a lot of very practical examples and posts on this site ..and python makes them a joy to play with!

edit: fwiw - I've been playing with motion detection / background subtraction [https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/05/25/basic-motion- detect...](https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/05/25/basic-motion-detection- and-tracking-with-python-and-opencv/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice.

I did something simple here awhile back with a CFFI wrapper for OpenCV.

[http://tech.magnetic.com/2015/11/real-time-facial- recognitio...](http://tech.magnetic.com/2015/11/real-time-facial-recognition- in-python.html)

<comment><USER10> Ditto :-) [http://persagen.com/about/victoria/projects/cv_facial_identi...](http://persagen.com/about/victoria/projects/cv_facial_identification.html)

<comment><USER11> But Jurassic Park theme!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If your use case is archival (running this on many videos stored on disk) as opposed to realtime (running on a live video feed), we built a research tool called Scanner [1] for maximum performance in offline video analytics, e.g. see our face detection example [2].

[1] [https://github.com/scanner-research/scanner](https://github.com/scanner- research/scanner)

[2] [https://scanner-research.github.io/scannertools/#face- detect...](https://scanner-research.github.io/scannertools/#face-detection)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can it track eye movements? A cheap eye tracker would be awesome so all the window's i'm looking at are in focus.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like a great idea. I would be a little worried about how often I actually am not looking at the window I am typing in. Though, I suspect there are obvious patterns.

<comment><USER13> I think it would be easy to train for novices.

<comment><USER14> I think that is what worries me. For most purposes, this is fine. I do, however, sometimes have a transcription use case. This is fairly uncommon, but I worry that I would get bitten by it being taken away.

That make sense? I still think this is worth trying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great article. I'm working on a project to identify buildings, and it seems this technique would apply. Does anyone know of a good buildings dataset, or a pretrained network? 3 million images is no easy task to find... Thanks!

<comment><USER16> Aerial images?

<comment><USER15> Sorry, forgot to mention this would be for street level recognition. I don't think aerial views would work for that application, perspective issues notably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article is very similar to readme.md and samples from the github repo of face_recognition.</comment>


Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Databases - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/05/amazon-aurora-design-considerations.html <comment><USER2> Wow. Fantastic and deep analysis of what Aurora's doing at a deep technical level.

Not exactly light reading, but I feel I understand what the point of Aurora is now in a way that AWS's marketing collateral fails to communicate.</comment>


"Who's Hiring" for non-engineers? - <AUTHOR>

I think the "Who's Hiring" thread that shows up every month on HNN is fantastic, and a great way to help people network. However, a successful startup needs more than just engineers-- you need sales, marketing, PR, etc.<p>Is there any comparable thread on HNN or anywhere else for startups to source? <comment><USER2> I'd be interested in a "Who's Hiring" for non-engineers, Even just 'other tech roles' would be a great start for lots of HN readers.

For example, I'm looking for a application/product support role. I have a CS degree, 5 years exp, willing to relocate, I know Python, RoR, HTML, CSS and I build basic iOS apps in my spare time, but I'm certainly not a developer. I get my job satisfaction from living and breathing amazing customer support and interacting with users. From knowing a product inside out.

This type of role is SO important to a startup yet it gets regularly forgotten and is never included in the hiring posts!

Support is the link between developers and end users.

A great support team allows your developers to do what they're best at.

So please, post all of your roles on HN! I'm sure you'll get some amazing applicants.

<comment><USER3> You should really look at the Sales Engineer positions I know are open at Asana and Mix Panel.

I've been looking at these because I'm about to graduate and have similar interests!

Links: [http://mixpanel.theresumator.com/apply/Eoh3qJ/Solutions- Arch...](http://mixpanel.theresumator.com/apply/Eoh3qJ/Solutions- Architect.html)

<http://asana.com/jobs>

<comment><USER2> I'm really keen on the Mixpanel role! I'll check out Asana too, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my own experience (as a non-eng)- if you want to get a job at a startup outside of the engineering roles, you need to be a lot more proactive. That means emailing companies that you find interesting, and telling them why you find them interesting (do not send the same cover letter to every company without any mention of why you like their company - that's what people on craigslist do, and that's why a lot of companies are forced to use a jobvite/etc system).

Most startups have non-eng needs but don't know they need them until after they're hurting pretty bad. I've had the most success applying to companies (instead of jobs) - tell them what you're good at and why you like their product - if they think there's a fit, they'll get back to you. By applying to companies this way, you also manage to avoid a lot of the potential competition you'd have for the job once a formal job req/post has been generated (no one else even knows the job exists, because you just sent in your stuff and asked them to respond if they think there's a fit).

Do keep in mind - the more hype the startup has gotten, the more generic cover letters/resumes they get - so find a way to stand out, and understand it's a numbers game! Lucky for you, there's tons of startups that need great people in SV, so if you play the game enough, you'll get a job with an awesome company.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response!

This was a more generalized question for the community to think about. I actually _am_ an engineer, and was seeing if there might be a positive way to help startups ease the pains you mentioned.

It also seems that topics like this would be useful to discuss in the HNN feedback loop, given that many people on here are experienced engineers and entrepreneurs who are well acquainted with these pains.

<comment><USER4> oh. That makes more sense.

Honestly - it seems like there's not really a premium for non-eng roles, so that might be why the threads haven't really arrived (I haven't noticed them either). Not to say any given startup can't use a rockstar marketer or biz dev - they just probably don't expect to get them from HN :) It seems that by most standards, hackers are engineers. I don't agree with that (and not saying anyone here necessarily does either) - but that might be another reason for it.</comment></comment></comment>


Build vs. Buy: How to blow $100k saving money - <AUTHOR> https://baremetrics.com/blog/build-it-buy-it <comment><USER2> > Next thing you know, you've spent literally hundreds of hours building a > tool that's not core to your business.

Unfortunately often the problem is the opposite. You may spend 10 units of time integrating a 3rd party system into your workflow versus 100 units of time writing your own custom system, but then you'll spend 1000 units of time uncovering gotchas in the 3rd party system, fixing them - which means learning system outside of intended scope and developing your own code, or inventing workarounds for less than perfect 3rd party system, or skipping some functionality in your workflow because you need something which you can't get from 3rd party tools etc...

Not core to your business? Doesn't mean you can't waste both time and money buying.

<comment><USER3> > developing your own code

In MS Excel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course a seller of a $250 tool would argue buy vs build.

How about an option C, shop around? Profitwell for example has reasonable SaaS metrics and it cost $0. Seems like the best of both worlds, no code for me to write and $250 in my pocket.

<comment><USER5> I can't find any pricing page for Profitwell

<comment><USER4> Because they do not charge. (For this part of their stack)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're working on small sites which are worth ~30x monthly net, a $250/month recurring cost will remove $7,500 from the value of your business... or a month of engineering at $90k/year.

If you're technical yourself, build it for no cost and save the $7,500. If you're deciding between buy/build, it's a wash on this imaginary scenario so do whatever you like better.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's $250 cost. And then there's... Optimizely. 5 figures a month. Then you look at other tools and realize most the work is meh at best. They don't integrate with react without work anyways.

Point is, it all depends.

<comment><USER8> It is also wise to be a little skeptical about the speech that a tool seller gives about the virtues and wonders of buying tools from tool sellers such as himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If your into Dev &| Ops the example of A/B testing should be something that you engineer in really no time. Be it reconfiguring your existing webserver or re-using an elastic search instance your anyway running I think it's like cooking an Asian meal as an Italian cook, you have the tools , you have the knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember paying for things like analytics and video chat where there were still major blockers that I could have fixed myself easily if I had written the software myself. Instead, the high priority requests for us were triaged as low priority for them and never got resolved.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes cost isn't the issue.

My advice: If the tool is right, buy it. If nothing out there fits your wants, then build.

There's a big advantage to controlling your own stack. It's why companies like Google built things like file systems.</comment>


Endocannabinoids Sculpt Sex Differences in Juvenile Rat Social Play - <AUTHOR> https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30115-1?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627319301151%3Fshowall%3Dtrue <comment><USER2> [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190301160901.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190301160901.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: The article points to explanatory mechanisms that explain how androgens (testosterone) cause differences in the amygdala (fear and anger regulation center of the brain) before birth. These differences go on to cause difference in play behavior later in life.

It seems to me this kind of science is currently politically inconvenient. It points to gendered behavioral differences that have an innate cause.

<comment><USER4> You're the one who brought the politics with you into this thread :^)

Ok, let's say the amygdala is different between men and women. Now, give me a quantitative model that explains observed social differences derived from that.

The issue people take with biological essentialism is that it uses the _plausibility_ of genetic/developmental differences driving sex differences to dismiss or outright deny the very obvious reality of coercive social forces that also definitely drive sex differences. It is a "gender of the gaps" argument that draws ire: "this difference might be physiologically inherent to sex, so I don't think it's an issue worth investigating".

But you're not making that argument, of course.

<comment><USER5> > The issue people take with biological essentialism is that it uses the > plausibility of genetic/developmental differences driving sex differences to > dismiss or outright deny the very obvious reality of coercive social forces > that also definitely drive sex differences.

This is a _huge_ strawman, and fallacies seem to be part of a lack of intellectual rigor from people who object to discussing biological differences.

Why not flip your point on its head: can you show me a model of discrimination that focuses purely on the social component, and shows that the results we see with, eg, the wage gap result purely from social components — or have a social component at all?

Because what I see is frequent dishonesty — discussing the "wage gap" but not "hours gap" or "risk gap", for instance — and the denial of inherent biological differences has become dogma to people pushing false social statistics, because an analysis of those differences would show them to be liars.

It's just gaslighting to demand a rigor from people advocating biological differences that's never been shown by the cultural differences crowd — we have _massive_ evidence of biological differences in evevery system of the body, including the brain; we have no quantitative models for how culture impacts outcomes. (Actually, we have a bit: it seems to be that more liberal countries express greater gender variation between jobs, because there's less social pressure to accrue power, eg, fewer women go into programming in better off countries. This is what you'd expect, if there's an underlying difference in biological preference.)

The objection to your position is that it's an anti-scientific, anti- intellectual one that drives you to public dishonesty, such as the fallacies and double-standards made here.

It's entirely political people don't want to talk about this — sex based differences might imply the ratio of, eg, CEOs is skewed for the same reasons the ratios of top athletes are.

<comment><USER6> " _Why not flip your point on its head: can you show me a model of discrimination that focuses purely on the social component, and shows that the results we see with, eg, the wage gap result purely from social components — or have a social component at all? "_

This can be argued to be possible, and have at least one social component. [1][2]

1\. [https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873](https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873) (The widely known paper describing racial callback differences in resume submission)

2\. [http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality- impact...](http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality- impact-%E2%80%9Cblind%E2%80%9D-auditions-female-musicians) (The widely known phenomenon describing blind auditions in applying for orchestra employment)

<comment><USER7> >In short, "blind" auditions significantly reduced gender-biased hiring and the gender gap in symphony orchestra compositions.

so, even blind audition couldn't eliminate the gap?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon CTO: 'You should be able to walk away' from cloud providers - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/042012-aws-lockin-258519.html

<comment><USER2> "Koffler says it's not necessarily hard to move data out of S3, it just may be more expensive than putting it in."

This is a ridiculous statement. PUTs are $0.01 for 1,000 requests, and GETs are $0.01 for 10,000. Deletion is free. Data transfer out per GB is comparable to the monthly cost per GB.

Sure, putting data in is cheap because you don't get charged for bandwidth, but storing it costs just as much per month as moving it out would. If you've got somewhere better to store your data than S3, you'll come out ahead price- wise after a single month, so you should do it. That's not lock-in, not even close.

 _Convenience-wise_ , yes, there's a lot of lock-in with AWS, no question. But that's a different problem, it's not fair to imply that you're locked in because of charges to actually get your data out.

<comment><USER3> You'd be pretty silly if you had all your data _only_ stored on S3 without a backup under your own control. So moving out should come at a cost of $0. You should be able to cancel your account at a moments notice and not lose a single bit, if only because the other side can do the same.

<comment><USER4> where do you put this backup? Another cloud provider? Servers you manage? Etc.

I think you're understating the cost of keeping such a backup, and the complexity that may come with it.

<comment><USER3> I think you're underestimating the cost of not keeping such a backup. That's a terminal mistake if there ever was one.

<comment><USER5> I would love to hear both of your estimates of the costs.

<comment><USER6> Not having a backup: your company goes out of business.

Having a backup: $1000 a year for a dedicated server you physically own.

<comment><USER7> Not all businesses would go out of business if some data was not backed up. If Chartbeat lost its data, it would be a minor inconvenience that the feature of their real-time dashboard where you can rewind and look back at an earlier point of the day wouldn't work until it repopulated the next day. They probably wouldn't even lose a customer over it. When they were a young company without much funding, it might've made business sense to only back up their accounts and not the historical data for the sites being tracked.

Not all data can be backed up for only $1000 a year either; it's not just a matter of storage costs and a server. A write-heavy service like Foursquare can't just turn off and do a dump at night; to have backups they need enough server capacity to replicate data as it comes in. For those servers to keep up, they have to be as beefy as the ones they're replicating -- a year or so ago, that was 64GB RAM per database for their Mongo instances. That's definitely more than $1000 a year's worth.

<comment><USER8> > a year or so ago, that was 64GB RAM per database for their Mongo instances. > That's definitely more than $1000 a year's worth.

You are mixing data, memory and processing power. In the case Amazon crashes and burns, they need that CPU+Ram+bandwidth etc. near the data.

But to just keep a copy of the data (not available online) they don't need a really beefy server -- just store all the updates from a node, and replay them later at your leisure. 5400rpm will often be fast enough for this purpose (of course, you would need days to recover in this setup ... but that might be ok if past data is not needed online)

Take twitter or foursquare for example: They need everyone's most recent max(4, tweets/checkins in the last day) available online at any given time. But if last years' tweets/checkins are not available online when the system is degraded in case of backup restoration etc -- that may be acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My friend Tom and I did a talk about this at various conferences, wow, 2 years ago. The interesting thing is that we're following the same evolution as the old snail-mail network and the SMS network. Eventually we'll realize that "cloud peering" is the best solution. But there will be lots of sturm und drang before we get there.

[http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/31/The%20Cloud_s%20Hidd...](http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/31/The%20Cloud_s%20Hidden%20Lockin_%20Network%20Latency%20Presentation.pdf)

[http://www.slideshare.net/sh1mmer/the-clouds-hidden- lockin-n...](http://www.slideshare.net/sh1mmer/the-clouds-hidden-lockin- network-latency)

There were four separate things needed to bring about what we think of as the modern international mail system. First you needed better infrastructure inside and between countries. You needed literally more portable objects, envelopes with stamps on them, instead of loose sheets, scrolls, wax seals, etc. You also needed standardization of the rates and address formats so one letter can travel anywhere. Last was a uniform rate, no-questions-asked promise to deliver via optimized routes, what we would now call a "peering agreement". Two ends of the agreement would treat each other as peers, and honor each others' comminucations as they would their own.

It's that kind of system we don't have, but should, in the cloud. We need better infrastructure in the form of optimized routes between clouds. We need to be able to move our virtual machines and configurations around without special help. We need to make sure we don't get locked-in by screwball APIs or data formats. Most of all, we need the various cloud and web services vendors to commit to honoring each other's traffic without clobbering us, their customers, with metered billing.

<comment><USER10> Hi there,

This is super-interesting - may I ask where you learned about this part of the history of the postal service?

<comment><USER9> I started researching peering, and came across references to the SMS study and the Treaty of Berne. From those two clues I found everything else via Wikipedia and the library. Iirc there is a book about the history of the Berne treaty but the name escapes me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just tried to find the original source of the quote "the best SLA is choice" that I originally heard from Matt Mullenweg from WordPress. It seems relevant now.

</comment><comment><USER12> EC2 is one thing and is fairly simple to move away from, more problematic is S3, DyanmoDB or Google App engine or anything like that. They touch only lightly on the subject to be honest. ORM's lol will not solve your problem in this case.

This article is way to fluffy to offer any proper advice.

</comment><comment><USER13> While there are a lot of AWS offerings/cloud services which have vendor lockin, the core EC2 API is supported by Eucalyptus (<http://eucalyptus.com>) and OpenStack (<http://openstack.com>).

<comment><USER14> I don't think it's fair to call richer services lockin. GAE has lockin, in my opinion, because basic services use GAE-specific APIs and common needs (like scheduled jobs) are accomplished in uncommon ways.

If you're using auto-scaling or beanstalk or whatever, that's an example of AWS offering something where there isn't a norm, isn't a "normal way" to do it, and if you need that thing, your other alternative is to build it yourself - which is still an option should you decide to move away from AWS.

Lockin is avoidable switching cost which benefit the party imposing the switching cost. Are there examples of AWS doing that?

<comment><USER2> One I can think of is related to RDS - if you run your own MySQL instances, you can pretty easily migrate away to another set of (MySQL) machines by replicating off the master onto a new slave, and then promoting the slave to master and shutting down the original master. RDS doesn't allow (external) replication, so your only option to get away from RDS altogether is to do a mysqldump, which can get nasty if you are trying to migrate away without downtime (a full export/import via mysqldump can take a long time, and you'll miss any updates during the process). At the very least, it involves either a chunk of downtime or a decent bit of manual migration, which is unfortunate.

That said, I don't think they set it up this way to specifically cause lock- in, it's just technically difficult to allow users to manually manage replication alongside RDSs automated system.

<comment><USER15> Their messaging is a non-standard protocol. AMQP standard would be kick ass.

Same with their cloud search - sooo obviously solr/lucene-based but 0 exposure to the lucene syntax.

Not a big deal though, it's not like it totally locks you in to use these.

<comment><USER16> > Same with their cloud search - sooo obviously solr/lucene-based

Except it isn't. <http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/>

"Amazon CloudSearch was created from the same A9 technology that powers search on Amazon.com."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another project forwarded me by a fellow KPS engineer is the DeltaCloud project from the Apache Software Foundation. An API abstracting differences between clouds.

Not using it (yet), but it's on our viewscope.

<http://deltacloud.apache.org/>

</comment><comment><USER18> For reference, here is the original blog post on Data Gravity:

[http://blog.mccrory.me/2010/12/07/data-gravity-in-the- clouds...](http://blog.mccrory.me/2010/12/07/data-gravity-in-the-clouds/)

<comment><USER19> It's ironic that two vendors are so desperately trying to convince people that there is no issue with storing large amounts of data with them because it is so trivial to get it out. Never taking into account the dependencies that are created (and then broken if you try to move the data). Dependencies include: Latency and Bandwidth, Data that you don't own, the sheer volume of the data (try moving 10PB around), proprietary or specialized APIs, regulatory, and cost...

<comment><USER16> None of those dependencies are unique to the two vendors. With large amounts of data, most of those apply, even if you're on a fully open stack.

<comment><USER19> Absolutely agree, there is no magic fix for the effects that Data Gravity has (there are ways to lessen the effects). The only exception is in the API, a fully open stack gives you greater portability of your app and export of your data is easier because transformation isn't required (just export/import or replication/copy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something like this is why I'm really, really excited for Ubuntu 12.10, Juju and Awsome. A huge step in the right direction for sure.

</comment><comment><USER21> If they really meant this they would AGPL their stack. It's the only way to provide your customers with the sort of ecosystem that allows them to freely choose their suppliers.

<comment><USER22> Clearly, they do not mean this in the way that you're implying. Amazon is not about to change their business model to become a professional services company. They are still retail first, cloud second (though that may change, of course).

<comment><USER21> I wasn't implying that Amazon should change their business model to focus on services any more than they are currently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apple, as always, was not available for comment...

<comment><USER23> Downvoters should turn on their brains before voting. This was very much on topic. gggrrrr</comment></comment>


The Fields Medal should return to its roots (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00513-8 <comment><USER2> "Our current understanding of the social impact of mathematics and of barriers to diversity within it is decidedly different to that of mathematicians in the mid-twentieth century. If committees today were given the same licence to define the award that early committees enjoyed, they could focus on mathematicians who have backgrounds and identities that are under-represented in the discipline's elite."

This is yet another call to recognize people based on demographics rather than achievement.</comment>


A $430 27" WQHD (2560x1440) S-IPS LED Monitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/6131/nixeus-vue-27-a-430-wqhd-2560x1440-sips-led-monitor <comment><USER2> You can get one for $285 on eBay with free shipping:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/27-Inch-Matrix-NEO-LED-270WQ- IPS-256...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/27-Inch-Matrix-NEO-LED-270WQ- IPS-2560x1440-WQHD-Quad-HD- Monitor-/150864434755?pt=Computer_Monitors&hash=item2320389643)

<comment><USER3> DisplayPort is worth ~$100 for many people since otherwise they'd have to buy a dongle. Also, there has to be a reason why the Korean brands are not stocked by _any_ US retailer.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Web developers who didn't go to college, how did you get your first job? - <AUTHOR> I'm writing a book teaching developers how to take their skills to a professional level and learn the soft skills required to be a great developer (communication, personal branding, collaboration, etc.).<p>I'm trying to do a bit of research. I learned web development using online resources, built a few sample apps, and used that to get my first job as a developer. I'm just wondering what everyone else's path was here who didn't go to school for development or computer science. <comment><USER2> I simply applied for the job. I was changing my career from something completely unrelated to coding. The company was OK with hiring fresh folks because honestly it takes just a few months to learn up to a decent level. They gave me a basic coding test just to check that I understand the basics of manipulating the DOM.

My company continues hiring people fresh from college or those who didn't have a related experience/education, and it always turns out great for us, because smart people learn fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got a job in a non-technical company that needed someone in a somewhat- technical role. Then took initiative to make my own role more technical and drive the company forward technically (which they liked because it opened up opportunities for them).

Got a title change that reflected where I wanted to be going with my career. Then I was able to apply to fully technical jobs and point to a few years of experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> I did lots of side projects, hit the pavement to find little local businesses that needed websites, and eventually landed a couple of clients. While building sites for people, I kept learning and applied for jobs constantly. Eventually someone gave me a shot at real work.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Spent 14-months learning to code by building side projects and using websites such as teamtreehouse.com

2\. Attended meet-ups regularly

3\. Listened to developer podcasts

</comment><comment><USER6> first i built a website for my band

then i got some freelance gigs thru word of mouth

then a recruiter contacted me and got me in as a contractor at a local design agency. while there i became a badass at css

then i started getting bigger freelance clients. jumped from agency to agency. finally matured enough to get senior-ish corporate 9-5 jobs on payroll</comment>


Intel Goes for 48-Cores: Cascade-AP with Multi-Chip Package Coming Soon - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13535/intel-goes-for-48cores-cascade-ap <comment><USER2> I wonder if it doubles the PCIe lanes as well as the core count and memory channels.

It is .. interesting that they are only at 1.3x EPYC for Stream. I guess it is a mix of their lower core count (48 vs 64) mixed with their likely higher memory bandwidth (12 channel vs 8 channel).

I'm looking forward to AMD's New Horizon announcements tomorrow.</comment>