Ask HN: What is HN reading? - <AUTHOR> Interested in seeing what others are reading.
My pick for now:
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel) <comment><USER2> _The Art of Electronics_ \- Horowitz and Hill

I'm a software guy, with a bunch of firmware experience, but I sometimes do data-center wrangling when I'm not slinging C++ and PHP around. It's really good to have a grounding in electronics and how things work under the hood, so you can have an appreciation for how (say) twisted pairs work, or how really fast serial cables work. Just knowing what's involved in pushing a signal from point A to point B in a rack or on a long-haul wire will help you make better decisions about what to buy, or decide to rip out.

 _AoE_ is a great practical introduction to how a lot of modern electronics stuff works. It has me tinkering with transistors and diodes again, and I may have to tell the wife I want an oscilloscope for Christmas . . .

<comment><USER3> Pretty pricey on amazon. How to get it?

<comment><USER4> It was published a long time ago. Second hand copies are not too hard to find although a third edition is apparently in the works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Masters of Doom - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom)

And it's being an extremely fun read so far.

<comment><USER6> I found it quite "meh" by the end, too much details about their private lives and didn't like the hyperboles when describing more "technical" stuff (e.g. when they built the engine for commander keen, described as something revolutionary never done before, i don't remember it was the case...)

Read that after the GREAT "Commodore: A company on the edge" and was expecting something with more gritty details (both technical and about the business) was somewhat disappointed.

<comment><USER5> You are right about the technical details part, it is indeed lacking. And the commodore book seems very interesting. I'll be sure to check it after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Traction by Gabriel Weinberg ([http://tractionbook.com/](http://tractionbook.com/))

<comment><USER8> All the reviews of this book are so positive. I have read free chapters. Is it worth purchasing?

<comment><USER9> I'm listening to the audio version and am several chapters in so far and would give it a definite thumbs up. There's little you couldn't divine from a lot of the articles online from those involved and interviewed, but having it all in one place wrapped up in a system of sorts is inspirational and more likely to get you using the good stuff.

(If I had any complaint, it's that the way you get the audiobook version is weird. I'd rather it were on Audible.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality -- a fanfiction with the twist that Harry was raised to believe in science; as such he applies logic to understand how magic works, to bend it to his will; IMHO it's easily on a par with the canonical stories :) --> [http://hpmor.com/](http://hpmor.com/)

<comment><USER11> I'm so behind on reading this that I barely remember lots of plot points, but at this point it might be easier to wait until the work is complete, then return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Masks of God series by Joseph Campbell - [http://www.amazon.com/The-Masks- God-Vol-Primitive/dp/0140194...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Masks-God-Vol- Primitive/dp/0140194436)

Various myths and themes persist across religions, history and geography.

American Caesar - [http://www.amazon.com/American-Caesar-Douglas- MacArthur-1880...](http://www.amazon.com/American-Caesar-Douglas- MacArthur-1880/dp/0316024740)

Biography of MacArthur. Interesting for its disclosure of relationships between politics, the media and the military in the absence of real time communication. Also, watch the death of Victorian values during the 20th century.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just finished reading Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival[1]. It's a about a piece of american history that I had no idea had ever happened. The Lewis and Clark expedition is generally well known...at least that it happened...but the Astorian expedition was completely unknown to me and to probably a ton of you as well.

Very interesting.

1 - [http://www.amazon.com/Astoria-Jeffersons-Pacific-Ambition- Su...](http://www.amazon.com/Astoria-Jeffersons-Pacific-Ambition- Survival/dp/0062218298)

<comment><USER14> Good one! I like reading about interesting, but lesser known bits of history. Another book in that mold is about John Fremont:

[http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/08/pathfinder- jo...](http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/08/pathfinder-john-charles- fremont-and.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Currently?

Fiction:

* _The Hollows_ series by Kim Harrison: [https://www.goodreads.com/series/40628-the-hollows](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40628-the-hollows)

* _Discworld_ series by Terry Pratchett: [https://www.goodreads.com/series/40650-discworld](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40650-discworld)

* _Dresden FIles_ by Jim Butcher: [https://www.goodreads.com/series/40346-the-dresden-files](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40346-the-dresden-files)

* _Wiz_ by Rick Cook: [https://www.goodreads.com/series/43084-wiz](https://www.goodreads.com/series/43084-wiz)

Non-Fiction:

* _Programming Google App Engine with Python_ : [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033219.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033219.do)

* The latest additions to the _Lean Series_ : [http://shop.oreilly.com/category/series/lean.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/category/series/lean.do)

* _Think Stats_ : [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034094.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034094.do)

</comment><comment><USER16> "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" \-- one of the books pg recommends. I've just started, so I can't provide a review.

<comment><USER17> Do you know if there's a list of books that pg recommends?

<comment><USER18> Would you be interested in a site that lists books that have been recommended by public figures like PG, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Obama, etc? I've been kicking this idea around for a while.

<comment><USER5> It's been 8 days since you posted this comment so I have no idea if you'll read this ( I couldn't find any contact info on your profile ) but yes, I would. I've also been kicking this idea around for a while so if you're interested in joining forces drop me an email: mail -at- phow.at

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This Book Will Make You Smarter - [http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Will-Make-You- Smarter/dp/055277...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Will-Make-You- Smarter/dp/0552778486)

It's a collection of essays from leading modern thinkers (Dawson, Pinker, etc) on which cognitive tools people should be equipped with. It's _fantastic_. I'm 1/4 through at the moment and I can honestly say it lives up to it's title.

You can read all the essays for free at [http://edge.org/responses/what- scientific-concept-would-impr...](http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific- concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) (book form is a lot nicer though) - edge.org is well worth poking about on. There's some seriously interesting stuff on there.

</comment><comment><USER20> Frigyes Karinthy - A Journey Round My Skull

A friend turned me onto an international bookstore in Budapest which has an entire section of translated Hungarian novels which is where I bought this. I had no idea Hungary had such a rich literary tradition and I'm counting the days 'til I can go back to Budapest :)

<comment><USER21> Depending on what kind of novels/etc. you're looking for, I could give you some recommendations -- or even send something by post :) (although not that much of the Hungarian literature is available in English). There's some stuff available online (on Amazon, like this gem: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Journey- Moonlight-Antal-Szerb/dp/190...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Journey-Moonlight- Antal-Szerb/dp/1901285502)) or in digital form.

<comment><USER20> Ha actually my friend bought Journey By Moonlight - I'll try to borrow it off him once he's done. I'm guessing you're Hungarian based, do you know of any HN-related goings on in Budapest? I'm only a few hours by train away and I'd love an excuse to go back :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization - Brownworth, Lars

</comment><comment><USER23> 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Am...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus))

</comment><comment><USER14> Here are the reviews of stuff I've been reading:

[http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com](http://davids-book- reviews.blogspot.com)

I'm currently reading "Made to Stick": [http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick- Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/140...](http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas- Survive-Others/dp/1400064287?tag=dedasys-20) \- which I put off buying for a while, but am actually enjoying quite a bit. It's got real, actionable advice in it.

I also read the transcripts from [http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/) on a regular basis.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning_ by A. D. Aleksandrov et al.

[http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning- Do...](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning- Dover/dp/0486409163)

</comment><comment><USER25> A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States))

</comment><comment><USER26> On the Steel Breeze by Alistair Reynolds (elephants in space!) [0]

Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.6 [1]

When the Clyde Ran Red by Maggie Craig [2]

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

[1]: [http://twoscoopspress.org/products/two-scoops-of- django-1-6](http://twoscoopspress.org/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-6)

[2]: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Clyde-Ran-Maggie- Craig/dp/18459...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Clyde-Ran-Maggie- Craig/dp/1845967356)

</comment><comment><USER27> I recently picked up Tim Geithner's book 'Stress Test' ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IN73B9E](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IN73B9E))

...but in the first few pages he referenced that _HE_ was recently reading a different book, which sounded more interesting, so now I'm reading that:

Liaquat Ahamed - Lords of Finance ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001QIGZEK](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001QIGZEK))

...so far so good; if you're into historical stuff.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years of Pilgrimage" by Murakami

</comment><comment><USER29> "The Expedition" by Bea Uusma. A forensic investigation into why three arctic explorers died trying to reach the north pole in a balloon—conducted over 100 years after they died.

It's a fascinating story, as well as a great insight into a mind that became obsessed with answering the question "they had enough clothes, food, fuel and ammo to survive. Why did they die?"

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Expedition-Forgotten-Story- Trage...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Expedition-Forgotten-Story-Tragedy- ebook/dp/B00KFDR028)

</comment><comment><USER30> Siddhartha is great--if you like Hesse I would also recommend that you check out "Steppenwolf" (same author), and if that also appeals to you, then "The Stranger" by Camus

<comment><USER31> Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" is well worth reading if a little enigmatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> __Advanced API Security __by Prabath Siriwardena

Just started it, but so far it's a well-written discussion of OAuth, OpenID Connect, UMA, and JSON for API security.

 __The State of the Art __by Iain Banks

I have been forcing myself to ration out the Culture books so I don't run through them too quickly. Such a great series.

The Trauma of Everyday Life by Mark Epstein

The fourth book I've read by him, a really good synthesis of Buddhism and psychology. I was pleasantly surprised to see him appear in Dan Harris's 10% Happier, too.

<comment><USER33> The Prabath Siriwardena book is too expensive. Any good cheaper alternatives out there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have two on the go. In the middle of moving houses so it's been about a week or so since I've picked up either :S

1\. Prelude to Foundation by Asimov 2\. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

I've read the Foundation series in the past, and I'm going through them again since it's been years. As for Greene, I've always had an interest in Physics, though I studied Computer Science. It's a nice introduction to String Theory that is approachable enough to be read during my leisure time.

</comment><comment><USER35> Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A truly outstanding economic research of the age. This book answer how and why inequality of wealth become part of our society and will continue to be... if we failed to change.

One more impressive thing about this book is the massive amount of data used to proof the writer's thesis. He find and represent data of wealth from several countries over 200 years and present it neatly to support his idea. He also open those data for others to proof it as well.

</comment><comment><USER36> Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software [http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B008PGKDOO](http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B008PGKDOO) This is one of the most enjoyable reads I have had in a long time, definitely recommended.

Introduction to Information Retrieval [http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR- book/](http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/) This is a free digital book, very good so far.

<comment><USER37> I will second the recommendation for CODE. Great book - you can even read that with your kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash)

</comment><comment><USER39> Finished reading The Center Holds recently, which was a page-turner despite being pretty aware of the events (spoiler: Obama wins 2012).

There's a section about the Obama campaign's digital strategy which is interesting.

Also read Jordan Mechner's "The Making of Prince of Persia", which is snippets of his diary from working on the game. It's insanely interesting, very sad I couldn't read more from his life (especially the making of Last Express).

</comment><comment><USER40> Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(novel)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_\(novel\))

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm enjoying my free month of KU and reading Hugh Howey's works at the moment. Halfway Home is pretty good, as are his short stories.

From what I have seen, there aren't a ton of amazing books in KU, but being able to borrow lots of foreign-language books might compel me to stick with it. I'm brushing up on my Spanish, and it helps to read children's books and short stories I probably wouldn't buy otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER42> "The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology" by Horace Freeland Judson; a masterpiece originally published in 1979 and based on ~10 years of research, interviews w/ more than 100 scientists &c.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11judson.html?_r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11judson.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER43> Awesome book - The Postmortal - [http://www.amazon.com/The-Postmortal-Drew- Magary/dp/01431198...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Postmortal-Drew- Magary/dp/0143119826)

See also Ready Player One. [http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-A- Novel/dp/0307887448](http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-A- Novel/dp/0307887448)

</comment><comment><USER6> _dt47, if you like it read everything else from Hesse (continue with Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game).

Right now, as late night reading, i'm in the midst of the sprawl trilogy of Gibson, i read Neuromancer more than a few years ago and now i'm checking out the rest.

Other than this, i started "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies", but i'm quickly getting bored.

</comment><comment><USER44> We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider. Kreider has a a blog on NYT. I liked this post [1] and bought the book. Enjoyed every single page of it. [1] [http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/i-know- what-...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/i-know-what-you- think-of-me/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Just started reading GEB[1] after having it recommended by many IRL and on HN/proggit. Thoroughly blowing my mind, would recommend even if you don't have a CS background.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach)

</comment><comment><USER46> It's been years since my last fiction book. I feel kinda guilty if I spend my time reading anything other than technical guides and reports.

I've just finished reading Addiction by Design: [http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9156.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9156.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> Just finished _Tiger Shrimp Tango_ by Tim Dorsey, and found out that it is 17th in a series starring the same ensemble of main characters (I'd never read Dorsey before).

If you want nothing more nor less than pure entertainment and hilarity, with plenty of social satire, this works.

<comment><USER14> Looked that up and it looks an awful lot like Carl Hiassen's books, which I enjoy - ever read any of his books?

<comment><USER47> I did, a good while ago. I think there is definitely a family resemblance, but I don't remember it very well (aside from remembering that I enjoyed it). I think there is almost a genre of Florida novels that take full advantage of that state's unique oddness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> 1\. Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Geoff Dyer with photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins

2\. Windhorse by Kaushik Barua

3\. 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart

4\. The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti

</comment><comment><USER49> "The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity" by Steven Strogatz

[http://goo.gl/ybI6KP](http://goo.gl/ybI6KP)

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm alternating between "1984" and "I am a strange loop" right now. I like to mix in some fiction with the serious stuff.

</comment><comment><USER51> Montaigne's Essays; and I'm reading (Bunin's Russian translation of) the Song of Hiawatha for my son at bedtime.

</comment><comment><USER52> How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, by Scott Adams. Highly recommended, and I still have half the book left.

</comment><comment><USER53> Worlds Together Worlds Apart ([http://amzn.to/1rzYmUg](http://amzn.to/1rzYmUg))

</comment><comment><USER54> Finishing up "Ready Player One" on Audible right now and just started "Neuromancer" the other day.

</comment><comment><USER55> "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History" by Nicholas Wade.

Controversial but fascinating.

<comment><USER47> Supported by some economists and social scientists, but widely regarded as rank pseudoscience by real scientists: [http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/a-troubling-t...](http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/a-troubling- tome) (just one example).

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg (guy behind Duck Duck Go).

Fantastic read so far.

</comment><comment><USER57> Wycliffite Spirituality from Paulist Press' Classics of Western Spirituality series.

</comment><comment><USER58> Age Of Reason by Thomas Paine

A Tour of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup

Effective C++ by Scott Meyers

Moon Walking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

</comment><comment><USER59> Paolo Bacigalupi "Pump Six and Other Stories" short sci-fi stories.

</comment><comment><USER60> Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, second part of the Southern Reach trilogy.

</comment><comment><USER61> Business Adventures By John Brooks. An awesome book. Must read for all.

</comment><comment><USER62> The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

</comment><comment><USER63> Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

</comment><comment><USER64> I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes. Yes, it's fiction.

</comment><comment><USER65> what if? - Randall Munroe - [https://whatif.xkcd.com/book/](https://whatif.xkcd.com/book/)

</comment><comment><USER66> Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

</comment><comment><USER67> The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz

</comment><comment><USER68> The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

</comment><comment><USER69> Israel: A History by Martin Gilbert

</comment><comment><USER70> The Chrysalids - John Wyndham.

</comment><comment><USER71> HN.

</comment><comment><USER72> Mindswap - Robert Scheckly

</comment><comment><USER73> Focus by Dale Goleman

</comment><comment><USER74> I have several in-progress.

"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling [5] (Kindle edition)

2012-06 issue of "Analog Science Fiction and Fact". I'm so far behind the current issue because I switched to an electronic subscription when a few years ago. At the time, it was only available from Barnes & Noble. The Nook app on iPad was pretty terrible, and I don't like reading on iPad in bed, so I fell behind. When it became available for Kindle [6], I switched my subscription to that, and converted my Nook issues with Calibre, and am now working my way through the backlog at a casual pace.

"Logical Chess Move by Move" by Irving Chernev [1].

"Build Up Your Chess 1: The Fundamentals" by Artur Yusupov [2].

"Understanding Copyright Law" by Marshall A. Leaffer [3] (Kindle edition).

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond [4] (Kindle edition, via Kindle Owner's Lending Library)

I've also been re-reading "Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories" by Arthur Conan Doyle [7] (Kindle). Generally what has been happening is that a PBS station here has been showing the 1984 British "Sherlock Holmes" TV series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes [8]. I'll watch that, and then often will re-read the corresponding Doyle story.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Logical-Chess-Explained-Algebraic- Edit...](http://www.amazon.com/Logical-Chess-Explained-Algebraic- Edition/dp/0713484640)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Build-Up-Your-Chess- Fundamentals/dp/19...](http://www.amazon.com/Build-Up-Your-Chess- Fundamentals/dp/1906552010/)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Copyright-Law- Marshall-L...](http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Copyright-Law-Marshall- Leaffer-ebook/dp/B008O84N12)

[4] [http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies- ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies- ebook/dp/B000VDUWMC/)

[5] [http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Half-Blood-Prince-Book- eb...](http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Half-Blood-Prince-Book- ebook/dp/B00728DYEM/)

[6] [http://www.amazon.com/Analog-Science-Fiction-and- Fact/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Analog-Science-Fiction-and- Fact/dp/B000N8V3EQ/)

[7] [http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Complete-Stories- Volum...](http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Complete-Stories-Volumes- ebook/dp/B000QCS8YM/)

[8] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_(1984_TV_series...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_\(1984_TV_series\))

</comment><comment><USER75> Not the New York Times, so stop posting it.</comment>


Paperwork: A Personal Document Manager for Scanned Documents - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jflesch/paperwork/#readme <comment><USER2> I'm working on something similar like on-and-off but i'm trying to remove the limitations in usability (e.g. unpack and run)

Features that _I_ for myself want / nearly have:

\- My mom should be able to install it.

\- Scan from phone, upload to central server / nas

\- Everything AES Encrypted when not logged in, decrypted on use (including sqlite database on shutdown)

\- Documents can be decrypted with plain openssh, without having the original program.

\- Fulltext search through invoices (by extracting PDF text and putting them in SQLITE fulltext indexes)

\- categorisation

\- built-in PDF reader / printer

<comment><USER3> I've actually been working on something similar, on and off for a few months. I work for an accounting firm, and we often need to scan and search thousands of invoices. I have a variety of ad hoc solutions slapped together, but an integrated, locally hosted document management solution that isn't an uber- expensive ediscovery service would be amazing. I just haven't had the time to do it myself. Meaning what you're developing could be useful in an enterprise context as well as for personal finance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks fantastic.

I've been working on a similar tool, but command line based. The idea is to create predefined profiles (e.g. bills go into a specific folder, with specified tags and specified resolution) and then just issue "$ scan bill" on the commandline. Never finished that one so far though. If Paperwork works for me, I probably won't :)

Edit: By the way, OCR-ed PDF archives in a directory structure can be searched nicely using pdfgrep ([https://pdfgrep.org/](https://pdfgrep.org/)).

</comment><comment><USER5> I'll definitely have to check this out, a personal document manager is something I've been meaning to write for years. I'm incredibly tired of hard copies but I'm also a packrat- documents for my cars, healthcare, family affairs, etc. It would be nice to be able to hang on to scanned copies of everything that doesn't need to be a hard copy (great for receipts, still doesn't work for birth certificates or vehicle titles).

</comment><comment><USER6> I built something like this myself using a Raspberry Pi: [http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2014-08/23-paper_backup_1_sca...](http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2014-08/23-paper_backup_1_scanner_setup)

<comment><USER7> Thats interesting - I was considering something like this myself. Now Im wondering if I can connect up my old android phone to do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does ist support scan to ftp?

I find the Linux/sane scanner drivers unbarable. I use a network scanner that uploads the pdfs to an ftp server, that syncs to dropbox. Works like a charm. Just need a tool to annotate an tag those pdfs.

<comment><USER9> The screenshot in [https://github.com/jflesch/paperwork/wiki/File- import](https://github.com/jflesch/paperwork/wiki/File-import) suggests that paperwork can import already scanned files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My wife will love this. But is it possible to persist everything to a postgresql database? We have one at home for bills and personal accounting, so it would be great if we could utilize it for this too!

<comment><USER11> Interesting approach! What do you use as an interface for inputting everything?

<comment><USER10> We have made the bill/accounting software ourselves in C++/Qt and it's not all that polished. But it works really good for our use :)

<comment> ross-life Out of interest, why not a "Web ui"? Do you use Qt for a desktop client or an app? I'm writing a sort of personal "life tracker/history application" and decided to go with a Web UI (with an offline manifest) because I didn't want to maintain both a mobile and desktop app.

<comment><USER10> Personally I can't stand html and javascript. In addition, writing Qt style C++ is really fun and productive. As a bonus, our software works in both Windows and Linux (and probably mac). Personal finance work is not so nice to do on mobile so the app route would not suit us either.

Not saying that other solutions would not be better, but it all comes down to what one prefer to use :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is as good a place as any to ask this: my wife has a lot of magazines that she wants to keep the content of but not necessarily the paper. I've been looking for quite a while for a tool that will automate the computer side of things but so far nothing seems just right. This is pretty close but (and being on Windows I can't test the functionality right now) doesn't seem to handle multi-page files? Does anyone have any input on this functionality for this or any other similar tools?

<comment><USER5> Depending on the magazines, I'd recommend Texture ([https://www.texture.com/](https://www.texture.com/), formerly Next Issue). It's a subscription service, but you get access to dozens of magazines and all the old issues for $10 per month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not to be confused with [http://paperwork.rocks/](http://paperwork.rocks/), an open source web-based notes app.

<comment><AUTHOR> and not to be confused with Paperless, upvoted a few days ago on HN as well (similar to Paperwork, but with less features).

<comment><USER14> Link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11063642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11063642)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My current (half-baked) system is using ScanBot for scanning / OCR. This saves to an "Incoming Scans" folder in Dropbox.

I then have various Hazel (OSX) rules to automatically organize things out into various folders w/ date organization: receipts, bank statements, bills, etc.

Works somewhat well! You can do a search in Finder, which will also search contents, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> This would be a great start to an Evernote replacement. I think the features already developed are the most difficult pieces.

</comment><comment><USER17> this looks pretty nice, I wonder how well the OCR works.

I would totally use this, but right now I have a hard time justifying actually having a scanner in my house. I just don't have enough paper coming in (well I do but I throw it away because I know I won't look at it)

<comment><USER18> It says they use Tesseract as the OCR engine. My experience using Tesseract in other places has been that it works pretty well and if you tune it a bit it can work very well. It struggles a bit with formatted text like tables or diagrams, but does pretty well with blocks of text.

The best (most accurate/flexible) OCR software I have ever used is ABBYY, which works so well I can only infer that it is powered by magic. Unfortunately that magic is proprietary, somewhat expensive (though not so bad really) and Windows only. I used it to help my mother digitize hundreds of pages of salary data for a consulting job she was doing where the text was formatted oddly and even with all that we only had a handful of errors in about 800 pages.

It doesn't have the awesome organizational stuff that Paperwork does however, which is what I've really been wanting for a while. This is reminding me of an awesome app I used to use when I had a Mac, which is DEVONthink. Basically a personal document database , Mac only and extremely useful, it was one thing I definitely missed. I use [the excellent, highly recommended for academics] Mendeley to organize PDF journal articles and such, but it's not so great for scans.

<comment><USER19> ABBY's OCR engine has been available for Linux since quite some time. [http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:start](http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:start)

<comment><USER18> Really? I haven't tried it, but also a big part of what makes ABBYY work well is its GUI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any good Windows equivalents to this? (The OCR + Search functionality, most importantly)

<comment><USER21> Evernote? Yes, it has a lot of flaws, but the OCR seems to work really well with my handwriting. I scan my notes in and Evernote makes them searchable.

I doubt if Evernote wrote their own OCR engine. Any idea what it is that they use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> would love to see this working on OSX

<comment><USER23> I wonder if it just might. It's using pyGTK and that can be installed using homebrew. But, honestly, I've only taken a literal moment to check so maybe there's another dependency that prevents it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can we achieve with 1.6 trillion dollar? - <AUTHOR> the world's top 15 military spenders spent in 2015 about 1.6 trillion dollar, I am wondering what are the things that humanity can achieve if such amount of money were put in a good use, for example in research, education, health care, etcetera. do you guys have any ideas ? <comment><USER2> Its not as simple as money in, progress out. Nations have unlimited money because they can print as much as they want, inflation aside. If their workforce can't do something, no amount of money will make it happen. Further there are forms of government in place that will limit the ability of the world to achieve goals. This is because many governments around the world will likely just take whatever excess profits arise out of any extra effort and people will have no profit motive to change the status quo. Most research IS motivated by military applications so defunding that would probably kill a lot of progress in space travel, health care, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Global disarming is a good thing until everybody participates without any exceptions. Unfortunatelly there is always someone ready to rebell against any rule.

<comment><USER4> It also falls apart if we make first contact and they aren't hippies and it also also falls apart in the face of large wild life not understanding that humans are sacrosanct and you aren't supposed to touch us (meanwhile, we are happy to destroy your habitat and/or kill and eat your kind).

<comment><USER3> Aliens and wild animals are also my biggest fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That military budget does go toward a lot of jobs. How many people work at Lockheed martin, boeing, bae, Raytheon, etc. That is why congressmen keep that spending up because it ends up going to their counties, districts, etc.

<comment><USER6> Another way to look at this problem is, given we are funding an enormous amount of people to figure out to drop bomps more efficiently. What other problems could these people be figuring out, or what other devices could they be building that would have a more tangible effect on our day to day lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> (if it) _were put in a good use_

Security _is_ a good use. If you think America would be a better place by completely disarming, think again. In reality, it would cease to exist in short order as hostile nations took it over and parted it out.

Same goes for any other nation.

"A man of peace must be strong."

The truth is that anti-military hippies only ever exist in secure nations that can count on their biggest worry being local crime. There probably aren't any hippies in Aleppo at the moment. They only sprout in secure, walled gardens that are created by the very military forces they decry as some kind of innate evil. Because they are clueless fools.

<comment><USER7> Do we really achieve more security through excessive military spending though?

Arguably, the world's less safe than it was 15 years ago in spite of massively increased defence and security spendings during that time.

Now the usual counter-argument to that of course is that it'd be even a lot worse if we hadn't spent so much on defence.

However, for instance both the war in Iraq and many of the new airport security measures in recent years were quite counterproductive in that they not only failed to make the world a safer place but achieved the exact opposite (the war in Iraq in particular, which gave us ISIS).

<comment><USER4> That is a totally valid point and one worthy of meaty discussion. It is also unrelated to dismissing military spending wholecloth as nothing but a waste of resources.

<comment><USER7> > It is also unrelated to dismissing military spending wholecloth as nothing > but a waste of resources.

I'm not sure this was the OP's intention.

I see this more as thought experiment in terms of "Mankind doesn't actually lack financial resources.". Ideas and measures that'd improve the quality of life often are bluntly shot down with the argument that we don't have the financial resources for implementing them.

We do have those resources. We just need to use them purposefully.

<comment><USER4> It may not have been their conscious intent, but it is the implicit assumption behind the question. Otherwise, the question could have been framed differently, such as:

"I think that is excessive and we could readily cut it by 10%, leaving 16 billion (or whatever -- not checking my math here) to put towards other causes. What good could governments do with that amount?"

"We spend X amount on (presumed frivolous expense, such as gold jewelry, haute couture or backyard swimming pools). What might be a better use of those funds if we could convince people to spend it differently?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Give that 1.6 trillion dollars to people as an annual basic income. As of now this would mean $230 per year for each individual, which would lift a lot of people from abject poverty. This in turn would help to eliminate a lot of the issues that require such huge military spending in the first place.</comment>


16 Don'ts of Career Growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2017/01/24/career-advice.html <comment><USER2> I'm actually not sure whether this is satire. There's a couple fair points there (read books, do open-source work, get out to seminars/etc), but the bulk of could be summed up as "be a sociopath that has no life beyond work." If you can sustain that sort of lifestyle and it looks appealing, good for you- without the connections and motivation you would have gained from _being a human_ and helping those around you, you likely won't be able to do too much damage to the world. But more likely, you'll find yourself burned out and alone, struggling to get out of bed every morning so you don't lose your six- figure salary from WhateverCorp.

There's more to life than career, and there's a reason that most people are content with mid-level developer jobs that leave time for other things. _Those_ people are the rational ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with almost everything here... except for GTA point!

<comment><USER4> Agree about GTA, it helps to drain steam out and recharge batteries.</comment></comment>


HTML Slidy: accessible slide shows with ease - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/2005/03/slideshow.html

<comment><USER2> I like the way it looks and works. One slightly weird thing is that on pages with incremental display if you select the text you see white boxes where the text is. This means that they must not be using transparent coloring.

Also in Safari if you click on text it sometimes highlights the text rather than advancing the page. I guess that is fine for copying content off the slide but it makes it is slightly irritating when you want the slide to advance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've long used Eric Meyer's HTML slide show format:

<http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice. I've always thought HTML was suited for more than just web pages. The browser is a sophisticated and flexible rendering engine sitting at our fingertips. CSS is much simpler than formatting in any office program I know of. I'm glad to see progress in the area of using the browser for other types of content.

<comment><USER5> If you believe CSS is simple, than Microsoft Office is not for you. I believe that 99.999% of people do not think CSS is simple, self included.

<comment><USER4> I think simple is the wrong word. CSS is flexible but it's also predictable (aside from browser issues). It's powerful but it's also just a text file. It has a learning curve, but once you know it, you can bang out a basic CSS file in minutes. I'm sure some of this applies to Office styles, but there's so much more too them. There's all these dialog boxes and sometimes stuff jumps around when you hover over an option, and all the formatting code itself is obscured so if something breaks, it's harder to diagnose what went wrong. There's no simple textual representation of the whole style all in one place. You can't do anything meaningful in Office styles by typing two lines of text, but you can in CSS. To me, that gives a feeling of simplicity, or perhaps lightness or understandability is a better word.

Not to mention, CSS files will probably outlive Office styles by quite a few years, so there's a sense of permanence which I also find comforting.

<comment><USER6> Danielstraight and NathanKP / please contact me in the email on my profile (I looked for one in yours) I would like to talk to you about how you learned CSS and what frame work your using or tools to Pump out CSS... thanks, rb

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It should be noted that this isn't new, at all. It was published in 2005.

</comment><comment><USER8> For a moment I got excited that they are proposing a HTML tag to deal with this. It would be cool though to have something which can generate slideshows, animated galleries, and banners.</comment>


The Startup Accelerator Trend Is Finally Slowing Down - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/19/the-startup-accelerator-trend-is-finally-slowing-down/

<comment><USER2> "Just 27% of companies were able to secure outside funding within one year. Ultimately, just 36% of accelerated companies since 2005 added to their seed and angel rounds."

"According to the New York Times, 72% of Y Combinator companies through 2012 raised money after their Demo Day, and the majority of these companies have raised increasingly larger rounds"

I'd be really interested to know what proportion of non-YC startups raised follow on funding. It seems like YC might be dragging the average up.

<comment><USER3> Techstars publicly posts as much information as they have about their startups here: [http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/](http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/)

Keep in mind, too, that this article seems to be referring to A or later rounds ("venture backed"), not necessarily convertible debt seed rounds. As many accelerated companies are still pretty new, many will not have completed an A round yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of information here, but it doesn't seem certain that this is a real slowdown -- at least with respect to the number of accelerators.

Truthfully, the slowdown in funding of "accelerated" startups could be down to other market factors (like the "crunch" that is widely touted) ... it'll be a few yrs until we can really see the effect here.</comment>


We Are Closing the Toast July First - <AUTHOR> http://the-toast.net/2016/05/13/we-are-closing-the-toast-july-1st/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing many HN readers aren't going to be familiar with the Toast (though I might be wrong?) and just wanted to preemptively defend it. Browsing the front page right now, it's easy to mistake it for clickbait-y sites pandering to 20 or 30-something women like Jezebel or Bustle. It's so much better than its peers, though. In some ways I actually see it as kindred with some of my favorite elements of the HN community: an unusually thoughtful and respectful comment section (relatively speaking), and an openness to the eclectic so long as it's interesting. For instance, among other things on the front page, there's this little snippet on "How to Politely Decline a Proposal from a Byzantine Emperor," which is exactly what it sounds like:

[http://the-toast.net/2016/05/09/how-to-politely-decline-a-pr...](http://the- toast.net/2016/05/09/how-to-politely-decline-a-proposal-from-the-emperor-of- byzantium/)

It was also one of the only independently run online publications that seemed to me to be on its way to being quietly successful in a "two or three people can make a small profit on it indefinitely" sort of way. Guess I was too optimistic. Anyway, RIP the Toast. I'll miss it.

<comment><USER2> I try not to be too grumpy, but you know, in light of the recent thread on here about paying for online content (bad!), paywalls (also bad!) and anything but static, self-hosted, non-targeted image ads worth probably under 1c cpm (other ads are superbad!) this is sort of the inevitable outcome...

I actually find gawker sites pretty amazing. You can dislike some of what they publish, but they've succeeded at the most important thing: making enough money to pay writers and keep publishing. And they regularly, by accident or not, commit serious acts of journalism!

<comment><USER3> Deadspin is actually pretty good. Sports journalism is kind of the opposite of tech journalism: smart things written about dumb people.

<comment><USER4> Why do you think athletes are dumb?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I thought about this before I posted. I mean, they're not explicitly selected on intelligence, so you get the full spectrum of people. And there are a lot of dumb people in the world, which kind of gets cut off by the process of deciding who gets to be on TV, etc, unless you're also a good athlete.

<comment><USER4> Most quarterbacks actually are quite smart. And also there are plenty of dumb people who get to be on TV: take Wolf Blitzer for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I guess after Mallory Ortberg took over Dear Prudence at Slate the writing was on the wall. The Toast was a deeply weird site, too bad its gone. Reductress is the closest substitute.</comment>


Visualize Value – The zero to one guide for design - <AUTHOR> https://shop.visualizevalue.com/collections/all/products/how-to-visualize-value <comment><AUTHOR> Taking the course right now and it's been really eye-opening. The bar was low, as I've never given visual design much thought, but I'm impressed. The instructor manages to convey the essence of what's being taught and gives you exactly what you need to start fiddling with the concepts in Figma.</comment>


Ten laws of cloudonomics - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/09/07/the-10-laws-of-cloudonomics/

<comment><AUTHOR> The title is horrible, but this is a very solid piece about how and when to use external utilities for computing.</comment>


Helium Shortage Is Hurting Parties and the Pharma Industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-11/helium-shortage-is-hurting-parties-and-the-pharma-industry <comment><USER2> Also [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/10/helium- short...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/10/helium-shortage- could-deflate-mris-manufacturing-and-research/1169464001/), via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888138).

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing about helium: once its released to the atmosphere its gone forever. Because it is so light it not only heads upwards, the velocity of the atoms is high enough that some exceed the Earth's escape velocity and don't come down. The only helium on Earth is either in tanks or still underground.

Its a finite resource, we are using it up, and we can never make any more until we get to the outer planets.

<comment><USER4> > One thing about helium: once its released to the atmosphere its gone > forever. Because it is so light it not only heads upwards, the velocity of > the atoms is high enough that some exceed the Earth's escape velocity and > don't come down.

I'm all for preserving helium, but sensationalist BS doesn't help.

> On the surface of the Earth, the escape velocity is about 11.2 km/s

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

The thermal velocity (at room temperature) of He is 1.245 km/s

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

There is no way that Helium reaches escape velocity without some sort of mechanical assistance.

I've heard it theorized that Helium, because it is prone to float at the outer edges of the atmosphere, is particularly susceptible to being stripped away by solar winds. I don't have sufficient expertise to evaluate this claim, but it seems at least plausible. This can't be happening very much, though, or our atmosphere would much more closely resemble that of Mars, which lacks a protective magnetosphere.

<comment><USER5> > There is no way that Helium reaches escape velocity without some sort of > mechanical assistance.

Thermal velocity is an average - there is a distribution of velocities around this average. It says that right in the article you linked to.

At the high end of the distribution, some Helium atoms will indeed have velocities greater than the Earth's escape velocity.

<comment><USER6> I had this impression as well, but there's something else going on. If you run the numbers, at T=293, there's a negligible fraction above 5 km/s. The atmospheric loss models typically use an exosphere temperature of T=1000, but again, negligible fraction above 10 km/s.

However, there were some contradictions I couldn't immediately understand. This source [1] says "Only about one in a million helium atoms is lost from Earth via Jeans' escape.". But it also cites a plot from [2] showing the rule- of-thumb for Jeans' escape: 1/6th the escape velocity vs the RMS thermal velocity. In this case, He has an RMS velocity of 2.5 km/s at T=1000, which is greater than 1.9 km/s.

[1] [https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Catling2009.pdf](https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Catling2009.pdf) [2] [http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Catling_and_Kasting_ch_...](http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Catling_and_Kasting_ch_5.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Agreed the article is not very clear. From the context of the surrounding paragraph though, I think it means one in a million helium atoms is lost via Jeans' escape _every year_. Which would obviously be quite a significant factor on any geological timescale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As far as I have understood it, the US government was selling off helium stockpiles cheaply for the last 20 years, and now the consumers aren't willing/able to pay prices high enough to encourage production to rise quickly enough...

<comment><USER8> Yes I was curious why cost were so low yet there was a shortage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The increased price of helium has also made it much more expensive to do deep scuba dives. More divers are buying closed circuit rebreathers, which are expensive and risky, but have the advantage of conserving helium.

<comment><USER10> OT, but I think you might find this link interesting:

[https://www.onr.navy.mil/en/Media-Center/Press- Releases/2015...](https://www.onr.navy.mil/en/Media-Center/Press- Releases/2015/Oxygen-Toxicity-Navy-Divers)

<comment><USER9> Thanks that's interesting. However as sport divers we're not required to take risks the way military divers have to in order to accomplish their missions. So rather than taking drugs which might or might not work, it's safer to just limit oxygen exposure even if that makes decompression times a bit longer.

<comment><USER10> I think the exciting part of the research is that ketone salts aren't really a drug, they're a dietary supplement to reproduce the metabolic effects of the ketogenic diet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Helium party balloons are Evil. They escape and end up as non-decomposable trash in the wilderness. This is not a theoretic concern: I usually find one or more every year.

<comment><USER12> Only the mylar ones, and the string.

Normal latex balloons are biodegradable.

<comment><USER13> Normal latex balloons take 6 months to 4 years to biodegrade, which is plenty of time to ruin scenery and choke a curious animal. [https://encenter.org/visit-us/programs/birthday- parties/ball...](https://encenter.org/visit-us/programs/birthday- parties/balloons/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The price of helium doubled about five years ago. That's why Airship Ventures, the people with the blimp over Silicon Valley, shut down.

<comment> m-p-3 Just fill it up with hydrogen, that should do it.

<comment><USER15> Well everyone immediately thinks of the Hindenburg, but the Graf Zeppelin flew 1.7 million km and 590 flights over 9 years until it was scrapped for its aluminium.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_127_Graf_Zeppelin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_127_Graf_Zeppelin)

<comment><USER16> R101 ... didn't.

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/airlines/a16637939/b...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/airlines/a16637939/british- airship-r101-engineering/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One proposed energy storage technology is via liquid air. Air would be liquefied at times of surplus power, then warmed to room temperature and expanded to generate power later.

If adopted on a large scale, tremendous volumes of air will be liquefied daily. One can imagine tapping this stream to extract the helium, which will remain gaseous.

<comment><USER18> He is like 0.0005% of air. This seems impractical.

<comment><USER12> Neon is 0.001818 (only about 3 or 4 times as much) and yet we collect it.

You don't really need much helium for what it's used for, it could work - prices would go up, but we wouldn't run out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I reject the thesis of this article. Specifically that a shortage of helium, and therefore balloons, is hurting parties. Not even at a child's birthday party would I think, "Where are all the balloons? This party SUCKS!!!"

<comment><USER20> A child might think that though, and if it's your child that is upset, it'd be natural to empathise, regardless of whether or not you think balloons are beneath you. Balloons generally aren't there for adults.

<comment><USER21> If your kid loves balloons so much why not fill them with air and tape them to the walls? That's what parents generally did when I was a kid.

<comment><USER13> Better yet, fill party balloons with hydrogen gas and light 'em off at the end.

<comment><USER22> Filling party balloons with methane is pretty much standard in south asia from what I've seen; it carries risks, but it also gives the fun of getting rid of the balloons explosively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can someone explain why we have a shortage? I'm a little confused given current drilling in the US.

<comment><USER24> _Can someone explain why we have a shortage?_

That would normally be the job of the journalist that wrote the article. 'dafuq, Bloomberg? "You know, _the helium shortage_." No, I don't know, Bloomberg. Is it related to the sell-off of U. S. helium reserves a while back? Or is it something different this time?

Instead, we get "will your kids get balloons at their party this year?" Oh, and some brief mention about pharma, but we don't really know how that works, so...yeah.

<comment><USER25> Ya, when I was a kid, we had balloons, but they didn't have helium in them. They just had DLA (dad lung air). This year, my kids didn't have helium balloons either... they just had DLA. They didn't care at all, maybe didn't even notice the difference. So ya, who cares about party usage -- the shortage itself is the real story. They buried the lead so deep they forgot to dig it up.

<comment><USER26> Gave me incentive to make hydrogen balloons from lye+Al reaction. Work just as well and then you get to blow them up later!

<comment><USER25> That sounds interesting. Is it reasonably safe to have hydrogen balloons around at a kid's party? Any major dangers to watch out for besides the obvious proximity to candles?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here in Australia (and perhaps elsewhere), the high altitude balloons used to measure upper atmosphere currents (aka radiosondes) use Hydrogen[0] for the balloons. They launch them often enough that they can justify the hydrogen generation and handling equipment, which has, as you may expect, more stringent requirements.

[0] [http://www.antarctica.gov.au/living-and- working/stations/dav...](http://www.antarctica.gov.au/living-and- working/stations/davis/this-week-at-davis/2017/this-week-at- davis-28-april-2017/the-davis-hydrogen-generator)

<comment><USER22> Generating hydrogen is very easy, there are numerous acid+metal and alkaline+metal processes that aren't expensive or use anything like rare materials. So as long as the exposure is such that explosive risks are minimal, it's a good option for lighter-than-air needs.

It's not, of course, much of an option for cryogenic processes where helium is required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand how there is a helium shortage and not a natural gas shortage. Doesn't helium come as a byproduct of natural gas?

</comment><comment><USER29> The market solves this (partially) by investors foreseeing the shortage and buying up stockpiles before they increase in value.

One problem is that when they later sell it these investors are often demonized as profiteers and speculators, and occasionally strung up in lampposts. Perhaps less so for this kind of goods.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a poorly written article that doesn't any cite sources or data.

Is it demand increasing prices or an actual shortage?

</comment><comment><USER31> This will be known as age where people wasted Helium on stupid things. We might need it in the future.

<comment><USER32> Remember that Red Bull sponsored space free-fall dive off of that platform? Brought to you by helium - that's how he got to space.

<comment><USER33> The stratosphere is quite a ways from space. Also what is the point you're trying to make? I don't think anyone on either side of the argument is very concerned with a one time world record attempt from 2012 when talking about helium conservation in 2019.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The helium shortage is a production problem.

At the current usage rate its estimated we have a 200 year supply left.

<comment><USER35> This is true, helium is present in basically all natural gas wells (it emanates from radioactive decay deep in the earth, and gets trapped in the same spots natural gas does).

Currently it is just vented out into the air, because capture isn't profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Oh. I thought you were going to say hurting the electronics industry as well.

</comment><comment><USER37> Another reason to get DT fusion working.</comment>


A New Concurrent ML - <AUTHOR> https://wingolog.org/archives/2017/06/29/a-new-concurrent-ml <comment><USER2> CML is great and really deserves more attention.

We're lucky to have Andy deep dive into so many interesting subjects (modern JS engines, Concurrent ML), explain them in enthusiastic and well-written blog posts, and back it up with open source Scheme code.

In a previous blog post he name droped Mike Sperber; for reference, here is Mike's implementation of CML using Scheme 48's optimistic concurrency features: [http://www.s48.org/cgi- bin/hgwebdir.cgi/s48/file/a4462425629...](http://www.s48.org/cgi- bin/hgwebdir.cgi/s48/file/a44624256297/scheme/cml). I wonder if that was ever used for anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> ML in this case is Robin Milners ML a statically typed functional language and not machine learning. ML is a wonderful language that lives on in ocaml, standard ml, and I believe f# and scala are also some it descendants?

<comment><USER4> Elm syntax also reminds me very much of SML. I was asked a question about Elm a few months back, and I was able to figure out what was going on purely from having played with SML in the past (so the syntax was familiar) and having used re-frame in clojurescript (so the semantics were familiar too).

I've never used an ML for anything beyond playing with the language (SML and OCaml), but I really enjoyed it when I did. ML is a beautiful language.

<comment><USER5> I like that SML isn't pure, isn't lazy and allows mutation. While it's less elegant theoretically, it's eminently more practical for real world conditions where it's easier to teach and reading about.

I've wondered quite a lot why SML/CML isn't more popular than it is. If we compare it to the darling that is golang, it is better in every way except inertia (which was about the same until the past year or two).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a scheme person I have always envied the ML camp because that's where all the cool stuff has been happening. It is so nice to have someone like Andy that has the brains and the time to bring some of it to guile.

Big thanks to Andy and his employer that pays him to work part time on guile.</comment>


Anti-parasitic drug, Ivermectin, eliminates SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures in lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.monash.edu/discovery-institute/news-and-events/news/2020-articles/Lab-experiments-show-anti-parasitic-drug,-Ivermectin,-eliminates-SARS-CoV-2-in-cells-in-48-hours <comment><USER2> This headline is somewhat misleading; just changing to the wording of "cell cultures" instead of "cells" would make the stage that this work is in more clear.

<comment><USER3> It's absolutely misleading and dangerous.

<comment><USER4> Hypochlorous acid (bleach) destroys SARS-CoV-2 in cell culture, too. So do ethanol and soap.

<comment><USER5> A revolver destroys the virus in-vivo. (At least vivo at the beginning of the study.)

<comment><USER4> That xkcd comic confuses me. Does a revolver really kill pathogens or does it just scatter them?

A flamethrower, on the other hand...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This one of those effective outside the human body tests that have a long way to go. We shall see.

But I mainly commented to say that it worked well on my scabies years ago. Good for keeping your guinea pigs parasite free too.

<comment><USER7> Yes. Title should better reflect the current stage of the drug (pre-trial).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ivermectin is approved by the FDA, but not (yet?) for treating COVID-19, and not at the doses shown to stop the virus in experimental conditions. The dose shown to be effective against COVID-19 is much much higher than the dosage approved by the FDA for other purposes.

<comment><USER9> from the paper: "..no toxicity was observed with ivermectin at any of the concentrations tested....

Ivermectin has an established safety profile for human use and is FDA approved for a number of parasitic infections1, Importantly, recent reviews and meta analysis indicate that high dose ivermectin has comparable safety as the standard low-dose treatment, although there is not enough evidence to make conclusions about the safety profile in pregnancy.

The critical next step in further evaluation for possible benefit in COVID patients will be to examine a multiple addition dosing regimen that mimics the current approved usage of ivermectin in humans. As noted, ivermectin was the focus of a recent phase III clinical trial in dengue patients in Thailand, in which a single daily dose was found to be safe but did not produce any clinical benefit. However, the investigators noted that an improved dosing regimen might be developed, based on pharmacokinetic data. Although DENV is clearly very different to SARS-CoV-2, this trial design should inform future work going forward. Altogether the current report, combined with a known- safety profile, demonstrates that ivermectin is worthy of further consideration as a possible SARS-CoV-2 antiviral. "

<comment><USER10> Years ago a friend invited me to help him brand his cattle. We rounded 'em up and sent each through a chute where we applied a dose of ivermectin to their back. The procedure was: measure, pour directly on their back and then spread it around with bare hands. We did this for an indeterminate number of cattle. He seemed unconcerned that _we_ were getting quite a dose through our skin too.

This friend has lived a remarkably healthy life - he was over 70, never got sick, and could toss hay bales with the best of them. Seeing how Ivermectin is applied, I'm fairly certain there wasn't (and isn't) a single parasite in his body, in his clothes, his pickup truck or his mobile home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In vitro things usually work out pretty well, but as soon as you hit human trials it becomes really difficult. Hydroxochloroquine worked well against covid in vitro (had a lower toxicity than remdesivir) but turned out that it could be fatal with certain diabetes drugs and actually increased ventilator time needed.

<comment><USER12> Source? HCQ has been used for a long time. It is a medication that is usually ordered for chronic conditions. So people might be expected to be on HCQ for YEARS. (Unlike COVID were they could be on the same doses for just days.) It has a well documented side effect profile and drug interact profile known well before COVID came onto the scene.

<comment><USER11> Et voila: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.31.018556v1....](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.31.018556v1.full.pdf) Also here's a source on the ventilator time: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/8b2govfsa6n0xbq/NEJM_Clinical%20Ou...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/8b2govfsa6n0xbq/NEJM_Clinical%20Outcomes%20of%20Hydroxychlorquine%20in%20Patients%20with%20COVID19.pdf.pdf.pdf.pdf?dl=0)

<comment><USER12> "Confidential: Destroy when review is complete" A look behind the curtain.

<comment><USER11> Yep. Ding ding ding! Tried to post this link onto hn but it couldn't accept for some reason. This was a leaked paper submitted to NEJM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782980)

</comment><comment><USER14> So does bleach. Neither one is a proven treatment for COVID-19 in vivo though.

Almost all in vitro (i.e. in a Petri dish) results are of limited value. A lot of things kill viruses in vitro, including air and water, but aren't actually treatments inside people. Until they do at minimum a phase 1 trial (to show basic safety) and have even draft results showing efficacy, I'd hold off on assuming this is relevant to the discussion /at all/.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure "heavy fire" can kill cell cultures in lab too.

</comment><comment><USER16> To paraphrase XKCD [1], a handgun also eliminates SARS-CoV-2 in cells.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1217/](https://xkcd.com/1217/)

<comment><USER17> And in people as well</comment></comment>


iMac Pro Teardown - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Pro+Teardown/101807 <comment><USER2> So there's no more hard drive, only a PCIE-based NVMe SSD. The largest consumer hard drive is 12 TB now, but there's no longer an Apple machine on warranty that will hold it.

<comment><USER3> Well they do have those Thunderbolt enabled external enclosures. Since TB is backed on PCIe I believe you'd be able to get max performance on a 12 TB HDD.</comment></comment>


Intro to Quantum Information Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3943 <comment><USER2> Not a MOOC, but I found this book well suited to beginners (such as myself):

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/quantum-computing- for-c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/quantum-computing-for-computer- scientists/8AEA723BEE5CC9F5C03FDD4BA850C711)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there any recommended Quantum Computing MOOCs for the beginner currently out there?

<comment><USER4> Check out Umesh Vazirani's course from UC Berkley's open courseware. It's accessible.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Can you provide a link? The edx course is down and the YouTube collection I found has a missing video.

<comment><USER4> Hmmmm. I'm not sure. I can't seem to access it any more either. Sorry! :(</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Growth Engineering at Netflix – Accelerating Innovation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/growth-engineering-at-netflix-accelerating-innovation-90eb8e70ce59 <comment><USER2> Why dont they innovate a normal mobile app experience. It just keeps getting worse and worse.</comment>


Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher Danah Boyd - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_makes_key_hire_in_researcher_danah_boyd.php

<comment><USER2> No offense to Ms. boyd, but when I think of some of the people who are or have been associated with Microsoft Research (Erik Meijer, Simon Peyton-Jones, Jim Gray, Pat Helland, Charles Simonyi, C.A.R. Hoare, Jim Blinn, Butler Lampson, etc.) I have a hard time thinking of this as a _"key hire"_.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that when those people were hired, there was a lot of maturing that needed to be done in the computer space. These people are titans by today's standards because the timing of their arrival on the scene had much to do with the amount of influence that they had. If you were to take ANY of Charles Simonyi's recognizable mainstream achievements (most notably Word and Excel) from the 80s and transported them to a startup today, they would hardly amount to a drop in a bucket (of course this is subjective, but I think you get the point!).

Today technology is commonplace and more widely distributed. I would place danah boyd in the same category as those you have mentioned because of the fact that the computer/tech/internet worlds are so much larger than it was in the 80s. She is a leading intellectual when it comes to social networking and I hope she has some influence at Microsoft in a positive direction. Because of her large amount of knowledge in the technology space as it applies to its social impact, this is indeed a key hire for Microsoft as they struggle to make heads or tails of how companies like Google and Facebook have had such a huge following.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the big difference is that she doesn't _make_ anything. All of those other people write software. Ms. Boyd produces treatises on social networks.

I'm not saying that she doesn't have value, but calling her a "key hire" at Microsoft is a pretty big stretch. "PR coup" is a lot closer to the truth....

<comment><USER3> We are entering a different era of computing where being a company as large as Microsoft needs much more than engineers. There is a social aspect to computing in large part due to the internet. To dismiss danah boyd as a cheerleader for Microsoft would totally miss the point of what she actually has to offer in terms of intellectual abilities to Microsoft.

Please remember that Microsoft has been flailing from the beginning when it came to accepting the internet. They need all of the intelligence they can get in order to be ahead of the curve in relation to social impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorry, but if she has so much deep understanding of social networks why isn't she creating her own social network?

Writting as a skill focused on one subject is nowhere near the understanding of the process of executing and causing evolution/creating something new.

In my eyes it's just a PR move.

<comment><USER3> _Sorry, but if she has so much deep understanding of social networks why isn't she creating her own social network?_

Because her interest is in the academic studies of social networking and how the current and future generations use them (something that is lacking in academia and needs more attention). If her interest were in creating a business around a web application that has a central theme of social networking then I think your question would be more applicable to danah.

You could ask the same question of Duncan Watts as well, but again, he is an academic who now works for Yahoo!

<comment><USER5> The best way to understanding something is by creating it.

<comment><USER6> The world needs _both_ creators and analysts. Both kinds of people suffer from a problem of limited perspective: The analyst spends so much time above the problem that she may miss the aspects that are only visible from the inside... but the creator is _stuck inside_ and doesn't really have the chance to look at her creation dispassionately from a distance.

Also, there's no guarantee that the designer of a thing has any understanding of it at all. That's pretty much the essence of the theory of evolution. I wouldn't argue that the design of social networks is a _totally_ mindless process of variation followed by selection, but it certainly does involve a lot of trial and error. I'm not sure that the designers of, say, Craigslist have much better understanding of why it works than anyone else does. They just happen to have made some initial choices that worked, and when they made changes they used feedback to guide them toward what their users liked. That's a _rational_ process, but it doesn't necessarily reflect _understanding_.

<comment><USER5> Trial and error involve a heavy amount of analysis. And as far as I know this is what happens in successful startups.

So, I can't see how any creator doesn't have the analytic-side in him/her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "If Microsoft is going to be relevant to the next generation of computer users, who better to pay attention to than the leading expert on how the next generation is using social networks?"

Yeah, just like hiring a leading expert in social networks helped Apple become relevant? Oh no, that's right, they did it by designing better products and software. Why not figure out how to do that again instead?

<comment><USER8> _they did it by designing better products and software. Why not figure out how to do that again instead?_

Right, because a company of Microsoft's size is capable of only doing one or the other. The purpose of MSR is not to directly ship software.

<comment><USER7> We'll just have to disagree on that one, since I think MS isn't doing well at either right now. I think more focus on their core would help them a lot more than following others in trendier areas.

Edit: I missed the part where you said MSR isn't about shipping s/w. You are right. I just disagree with the conclusions of the original article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> yeah and she can do for msft what she did for yhoo: BLAH BLAH BLAH</comment>


Today's Renters Are Worse Off Than Their Parents - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/29/todays-renters-really-are-worse-off-than-their-parents/ <comment><USER2> I realize that this idea is dead in the water because it would require landlords to "give up" a stream of income. However, if we ignore that for a second and entertain a bit of wistful "what if" ...

What if we lived in world where real estate was not an illiquid investment, with extremely high barriers to entry?

What if the monies taken in rent actually accrued equity by some schedule?

What if you could move at any point without losing your equity?

Crazy ideas, I know ... but via example:

1\. developer builds a house, has 100% equity.

2\. new tenant moves in and starts paying "rent", building up equity.

3\. Costs for repairs and maintenance have to be paid per your equity percentage (so if I've accrued 20% equity, I have to pay 20% of the plumber's bill while I'm living there).

4\. When the tenant inevitably moves, they take their 20% equity, and are paid 20% of the next tenant's rent payments, while still paying 20% of maintenance costs ... this % of course decreases as the new tenant makes more payments.

This gives you the mobility to move from city to city to follow jobs, while avoiding the money drain that is renting (ie. paying someone else's mortgage). If a tenant stays in that property long enough, they will eventually reach 100% ownership of the property, they will have purchased your "shares" in the house. So it remains an investment that you can get returns from, but those returns do not last forever.

I know, it's a crazy idea; in fact, this is the first time I've ever told anyone else about it ... but I think if it can be structured right, it could change society forever since real estate is one of the areas that is increasingly unavailable to the "have nots", thus contributing to ever-greater inequality.

<comment><USER3> Part of being a free market is people can set up a business any way they like. For example, there are neither legal nor regulatory barriers to setting up a commune (communes were popular in the US around 1900). People can set up workers' cooperatives. And your idea can be done if you can organize a bunch of like-minded individuals to try it. You don't need to change society to do it. Just do it.

<comment><USER4> >Part of being a free market

We are talking about the United States, not a free market. In the United States, the stated policy of the central bank (hint: free markets have no central banks that control interest rates and pick winners and losers) for the last 8 years is to inflate housing prices. The FED and the big banks still have trillions of dollars of worthless derivatives on their books that they have not "marked to market" because they are derived from mortgages on homes that are underwater. The FED has taken over 5 trillion dollars onto its balance sheet in the last 8 years in order to artificially inflate housing prices (not including off-balance sheet loans, guarantees, and other tangible efforts taken to prop up banks and home prices).

This is the opposite in a free market. In a free market, housing prices would plummet with demand and credit availability, and would reach an equilibrium with income. This is impossible in our centrally controlled economy that runs on debt service in which even a small bump in interest rates or a small drop in assets prices will cause the whole scheme to fall apart.

Edit: The Downvotes without replies are somewhat amusing. I can't decide if its out of ignorance of the financial system on the part of those who read the hacker news, or cognitive dissonance. I suspect a mix of both. I welcome anyone who thinks any of the above is inaccurate to chime in.

<comment><USER5> That is quite a good way of putting things in perspective about Fed and free money building up the asset bubble, which is only made worse by stricter zoning laws and NIMBY.

As far as downvotes go, HN leans left, that is not news, any conservative or libertarian views will collect the usual down votes. Strangely it happens in bunches too.

<comment><USER6> If you lean left you shouldn't be arguing for rent collecting oligopolies.

<comment><USER7> I believe the standard "party line" on housing costs would be something akin to Sweden. Purchasing a property for the explicit purpose of renting it is de- facto barred. Its not illegal but must be approved by your local tenant/owner association (like a condo board or home owner's association). This has the net effect of raising rents, making it extremely difficult to rent in the first place, while keeping home ownership within reach for nearly everyone due to depressing any kind of housing bubble or gentrification through property acquisition and flipping.

[https://www.justlanded.com/english/Sweden/Sweden- Guide/Prope...](https://www.justlanded.com/english/Sweden/Sweden- Guide/Property/Buying-property)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is just a small part of a wider shift in the structure of our society. We are moving toward a future where a small minority of highly educated, highly skilled people will live in complete luxury and have their every need fulfilled at the push of a button on their smart phone, while the vast majority of less specialized average people will serve them through various menial services until even those jobs are automated.

<comment><USER9> Are we? As a highly educated, highly skilled person I live in destitution, while some baby boomer jackass collects free money for buying an apartment decades ago.

Rent - or, rather, the inflation of real estate value in cities - is entirely about transferring money out of the productive part of society. If you make your living with "education" or "skills", you're on the losing end of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well yes, this is obvious. Nobody today is buying ranch houses in Palo Alto for $160,000 anymore.

<comment><USER11> Also, the size of new homes has risen from 1600 in 1973 to 2600 today. It's not like all factors remain the same. You can drive through old neighborhoods near me with 1000 sq ft houses that sell for $40k because nobody wants a house that small. I'll bet a lot of the homes being built in Palo Alto right now are not small.

<comment><USER12> > You can drive through old neighborhoods near me with 1000 sq ft houses that > sell for $40k because nobody wants a house that small.

How closely have you looked at those $40K houses? I've seen a handful of sub-$100K smaller houses listed in my region, but they're wrecks; they'd need a massive amount of work to get anywhere near the comfort and safety level of a modern, well-maintained house. They're basically the house equivalent of buying a $500 car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> House affordability seems to me one of the major issues in the US. (Along with high costs of college and Health)

It hurts families. But it also makes the economy less competitive. For example. It is hard to bring any manufacturing when you have to pay higher salaries that are barely high enough to pay rent.

Not only that. Because housing costs are high, people have less available income. They spend less money in other services like entertainment, dining out, etc.

So, it is a loose-loose. I don't even know if anyone wins. May be when you sell your house at the end of your life you win. /s

<comment><USER14> It depends on what area of the US you are in. In Western PA and the midwest, housing can still be found in decent neighborhoods at a reasonable cost. HSH did a study showing 27 metro areas and the cost to buy a house. [http://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home- buying-25-ci...](http://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home- buying-25-cities.html)

For Pittsburgh, a $29k takehome is roughly $40-45k a year. That is in the $20/hr range. I know at one point, my salary was $51k/year and I was brining home $36-37k annually. I was working a standard office job that was not particularly exciting, but all I needed was to have a bachelors degree. If you have one adult working full time and another part time for an extra ~15k a year, you can live relatively comfortably in Pittsburgh, and I am assuming other medium sized cities in the Midwest.

The big costal cities (SF, NYC, LA, DC) do make it difficult to own housing, but almost every country has cities where it is more expensive to live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this an apples to apples comparison, pretty sure we are not talking about only rentals available on the 1960s.

Median house sqft has increased - how do the numbers look if we compare not just median rent, but median rent per sqft?

</comment><comment><USER16> Support your local YIMBY group!

<comment><USER13> So yes. This may be a big part of the problem. One of those things that is good for the individual but bad for the economy as a whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Georgists and Geolibertarians would not be surprised with this state of affairs.</comment>


Is Bitcoin mining compromising the security of SHA256? - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/17132/is-bitcoin-mining-itself-compromising-the-security-of-sha256 <comment><USER2> I believe this question exhibits a lack of understanding of what "mining" Bitcoins means. Or possibly how Bitcoin works. Or both.

Mining Bitcoins is simply a search for an SHA256 hash matching a certain set of criteria. The mining hardware could theoretically be used to search for hash collisions faster than previously existing hardware, but that is of limited utility in the scenario of trying to find a specific hash collision (i.e. one that allows you to decrypt a file or login to a system) rather than one that meets certain qualifications (but doesn't have to be an exact match for one unique hash).

The set of possible values is _so large_ that even the next generation of ASIC mining hardware (which will continue the exponential growth of worldwide hashing power) would require hundred or thousands of years (I don't know the specifics and can't be bothered to find the numbers with specificity), on average, to find a specific hash. SHA256 is still strong, even assuming a vastly larger pool of searching machines.

In short: Bitcoin mining is not "cracking" SHA256. It's gambling on finding a hash that has one specific (rare, but not even close to unique) characteristic. Finding one, just like winning at poker or at the roulette wheel, does not make the next round easier.

<comment><USER3> What if someone is collecting everything, including the misses, from bitcoin mining and running some sort of statistical analysis on it to determine if there are patterns in the noise.

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin mining generates 160 quadrillion bytes (160 Petabytes) of misses per second. The limit would be the amount of data that you could reasonably store and analyze, and we were at that limit long before Bitcoin came around.

(Although you can't actually collect the misses from other miners, because they never publish them).

<comment><USER3> true. It is however, possible that some statistical analysis can be run on the hits, although interpretation would be convoluted since the initial value is SHA'd twice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Normally with questions such as these you don't come up with a ridiculous claim and ask others to prove it for you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Slightly. Bitcoin mining encourages people to build SHA256 crackers. It's not inconceivable that these things could be repurposed to attack other types of SHA256 attacks besides those relevant to the BTC block chain.

<comment><USER7> When "other SHA256 purposes" are implemented correctly, this is no issue at all. For example hashing passwords should use bcrypt or something similar, and HMACs should use long enough keys. While you may increase the search speed with ten orders of magnitude, it's still well beyond our current capabilities to successfully crack any SHA-2 hash.

See also the answer I just posted on the SE question.

<comment><USER8> Since the hypothetical brokenness of SHA256 is unknown, can we be sure there is a "correct" way to implement "other purposes"? Surely, it's conceivable a new attack could exploit an unforeseen weakness in all those uses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I usually find stackexchange's discussions more than ample. There are many sites whose comment system and content could use a re-hashing by HN's nerdery, but stackexchange isn't one of them. (Unless we are playing the wayback game of re-posting a question from several years ago).

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone had experience mining litecoin and bitcoin simultaneously? Does it make sense to do so on the same hardware?

<comment><USER10> Nothing you can build has any hope mining Bitcoin anymore. On the other hand, my pathetic GTX460 rig (~150kh/s) nets about 2LTC/month.

<comment><USER9> If it's lying around, would you want to do that? Litecoin is criticized for minimal infrastructure... ahh okay you are.. it's not hypothetical.

.. I've read extra memory really helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes. Sorta. Depends if you believe that the NSA is responsible for creating bitcoin as a means to get millions of CPU resources for free, which could be used to crack SHA and to track the comings and goings of criminals.

It is not so far fetched. Since we don't know who really created it, and we know that for something that the government should have been very "anti" and yet seem to have left it alone.

I am not one for conspiracies, but if it walks like a duck, and you haven't heard it make a noise who is to say it isn't a duck?

<comment><USER12> The hashes that come out of bitcoin mining aren't just any ordinary hash you could use to crack passwords, though. The hashes have to begin with a number of 0s corresponding to the difficulty.

Most password hashes (including the salt) hardly have these 0s so even as a lookup table the blockchain isn't very good.

<comment><USER11> You don't attack Sha with the miner, you generate prime factors. Those can then be used to attack any encryption.

Not convinced this is what is being done. Just saying it doesn't matter about the salt for this to be worth while.

<comment><USER4> SHA has nothing to do with prime numbers. Bitcoin also has nothing to do with prime numbers.

Further, prime numbers are only useful in a very specific case of cryptography, nowhere near 'all encryption'.

<comment><USER11> Nothing to do with prime numbers?

[http://www.femto- second.com/papers/SHA256LimitedStatisticalA...](http://www.femto- second.com/papers/SHA256LimitedStatisticalAnalysis.pdf)

[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4634.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4634.txt)

[http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/548.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/548.pdf)

[http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/548.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/548.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Yes, nothing to do with prime numbers. SHA-2 uses some constants. A lot of cryptography needs constants for various reasons. There is always some concern that the creator chose specific constants that weaken or give them a backdoor to the crypto scheme. To reduce this concern, they often choose constants from some simple mathematical basis, perhaps the numbers '1234567890', or digits of pi, etc. In SHA-2's case, they used the first 32 bits of the fractional parts of the square roots of the first n primes.

The numbers they use are not primes, nor are primes useful in any way for attacking SHA. The algorithm still has nothing to do with prime numbers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Standards support in Opera 10 beta (just released) - <AUTHOR> http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/standards-support-in-opera-10-beta/ Seems stabler than the alpha (for example, works with Facebook now) and has some new UI functionality, in addition to what's in the article.<p>Download here:  http://www.opera.com/browser/next/ <comment><USER2> You really start to feel just how huge and bloated a lot of web pages have become when you get a mobile broadband dongle and are charged £15 per GB by Vodafone. One popular British forum site has some pages weighing in at upwards of 1MB each!

Opera 10 attempts to remedy this with its "Turbo" function - if you've used Opera Mini on a mobile phone, it's basically this for the desktop browser, going through a proxy to shrink images and strip out unnecessary stuff. It's worth having Opera installed on your laptop just for this - on average, it's been shrinking pages by around 3x for me. A brilliant and unique feature.

<comment> andrewl-hn If you right-click the turbo icon in the bottom left corner there's a config menu where you can choose the Auto mode.

I'm on a fast connection, but I noticed that sometimes it still compresses pages. Not sure how effective it is, but worth trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been using the Opera 10 alpha as my primary browser, and I love it. The addition of in line spell check allowed me to leave Firefox behind 6 months ago.

I pretty much only use it for the Firebug plugin, but the Opera's clone of Firebug, Dragonfly is looking better all the time. To check it out click Tools>Advanced>Developer tools.

<comment><USER4> Dragonfly seems to have been improved quite a bit since the Alpha. Now you can click on the elements in the web page and have them selected in the source. Nice.

The only thing I miss in Opera now is Firefox's tags feature for the bookmarks . . .

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why my text summary isn't showing up, but anyway, here's a download link: <http://www.opera.com/browser/next/>. I figured linking to the article about the standards support would be more appropriate for HN.

</comment><comment><USER5> Small browsers implementing cool features always makes it painfully obvious how poor and inextensible HTML and CSS really are. There's no way you can use CSS3 for the next 4-8 years.

<comment><USER3> I can't imagine how long it's going to take to get HTML 5 supported in a decent percentage of installed browsers?

<comment><USER6> Google is pushing big for HTML5 and it seems to be in the works for Firefox 3.5, Safari, not sure about IE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the visual tabs. They were introduced by the discontinued Shiira browser and I am happy to have them back. I actually had a todo on my list to file a request, now I am happy. Thanks!</comment>


Source data and tile mill project for Burning Man map - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trailbehind/iBurn-maps

<comment><AUTHOR> You can hit the tile server to make web maps too: [http://com.gaiagps.iburn.s3-website-us- east-1.amazonaws.com/](http://com.gaiagps.iburn.s3-website-us- east-1.amazonaws.com/)</comment>


What a Blackface Photo Says About South Korea's Racism Problem - <AUTHOR> https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/what-a-blackface-photo-says-about-south-koreas-racism-problem/ <comment><USER2> Because a minstrel show in US America, which is given way too much cultural clout by its alleged ideological enemies, should determine how people behave in South Korea? We are truly in the age of ignorance.

This is impotent US American CSIS propaganda, doing what they claimed Russia is guilty of.

US America exporting ignorance...</comment>


Show HN: Link-aware Nginx-based Load Balancer Docker Image - <AUTHOR> https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/jasonwyatt/nginx-loadbalancer/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been playing with docker for only a week or so now and would love some constructive criticism!</comment>