Baffling Web Trackers by Obfuscating Your Movements Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/11/clive-thompson-10/ <comment><USER2> A big fan of work by Helen Nissenbaum's & co.! Check out her _Obfuscation: A User 's Guide for Privacy and Protest_ from MIT press.Adnauseam requires AdBlock. Wish it worked with the more lightweight uBlock!

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/issues/422](https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/issues/422)

<comment><USER4> see also [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/67](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/67)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > One, AdNauseam, clicks every ad on every page I visit, baffling ad networks.

This seems like a bad idea for everyone involved:

* You leak more information to the ad network (or at least make your datapoint it more prominent in the database)

* You get worst ads (if the ad network uses a smart algorithm to serve personalized ads)

* The ad network gets info with worse information, so it will probably serve worst ads to everyone else (if a lot of people use this)

* The site you visited might end up receiving less money, as it can be accused of click fraud (if a lot of people use this)

Using an ad blocker seems like a much better option (I believe they actually block most of the tracking javascript from even being loaded, so you are probably not tracked anyway).

Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER6> 1) I don't care if my datapoint is prominent, if it's bogus.

2) I've never once thought about the quality of the ads I see. I can't imagine being disappointed that the ads "are worse". They're ads, they're bad to begin with.

3) Again, not concerned with the quality of ads others get.

4) If lots of people use this, then it will be impossible for advertisers to distinguish between click fraud by the site and click fraud by the end-users. The goal is to make click-tracking futile.

The point of AdNauseam is to make tracking useless. So your points are all endorsements of its effectiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's unfortunate that AdNauseam is incompatible with uBlock

<comment><USER8> That is a shame :(

<comment><USER9> Somewhere in another comment is a link to the relevant issue in their Github. Might not be a problem for long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> from AdNauseum's website (adnauseam.io):

>Working in coordination with your ad blocker, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases.

Are they sure the visit is registered? This seems like a trick that would work strictly off clicks in circa ~2009-2012, where now, adnetworks tend to check if you've downloaded some snippet of content (like a pixel tag) before it registers a hit.

In order to "click everything" you'd essentially have to download a ton of pages, content, and 3rd party scripts that are never rendered on your screen.

I think the idea is wonderful, but ad trackers have grown more sophisticated now. I'll have to check out the source later!

</comment><comment><USER11> Another thing to do is to run bogus Google searches to obfuscate your own and have plausible deniability about what you were actually doing. Bogus searches could even be selected from topics related to your interests so as not to be easily identified by Google.

Another protection would be to automatically screen what information goes out and stop all leaks of sensitive data, like your name, email, card, ad-related cookies etc on untrusted sites. Dangerous searches could be routed to a different search engine automatically (say, for example, searches related to political activism). Making it easier for people to protect their information goes a long way to achieving privacy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Related to this, there was (some time ago) an initiative to build out a "haystack" proxy, which went a step further than this. For every link on the page, it would randomly follow 3-4 of them. On every page on those linked page, another random 3-4 links were followed, up to a random depth. The idea being that you ended up generating so much noise (the haystack) that the signal (the needle) was lost.

Of course, this wouldn't prevent a dedicated snooper from watching you, using statistical analysis to find your real trail, but it would certainly hinder your average tracking network.

</comment><comment><USER13> Any tips on fighting browser fingerprinting?

<comment><USER14> on the topic of chaff, I use an extension that rotates randomly between combinations of {Windows,OS X,Linux}, {Firefox,chrome} and various versions of those things.

though sadly this doesn't work alone, because it only solves the stuff sent to server (but is far more pleasing to screw with them than to just send nothing). you still have to use noscript to stop things like the canvas font rendering trick :(

<comment><USER15> What is this extension?

<comment><USER16> I have used user agent switcher in the past. It sounds like the extension that rickycook was referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I prefer to compartmentalize and hide. Each area of interest and associated communities has its own persona, or set of more-or-less linked personas. Each persona has its own VM, and setup for Internet connectivity (various nested chains of VPN services and Tor). I also take basic steps to reduce tracking. I use Disconnect for search, block ads, and allow only scripts essential for rendering pages.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why would you'd want to obfuscate instead of block the ads?

<comment><USER19> Since most advertising and tracking currently happens by loading third-party Javascript, it's trivial for clients to detect and block. If advertiser- hostile clients proliferate, the industry will shift towards techniques that are more difficult to block.

Proxy ads through software on the actual webserver; make them part of the markup like any other page element. Ingest the Apache access logs. Use website-level cookies and relay them to the ad network on the server side. Etc.

<comment><USER20> Would not that require the advertiser to trust the publisher ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A bit like Jam Elechon Day.

<comment><USER22> Background: [http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/jam.html](http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/jam.html)

<comment><USER23> Or the Jammers from The Prisoner: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Your_Funeral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Your_Funeral)</comment></comment></comment>


Kickstarter being sued for patent infringment. - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/241160/kickstarter_faces_patent_suit_over_funding_idea.html

<comment><USER3> Kickstarter is lucky that the America Invents Act that Congress just rammed through includes a porkbarrel clause that Sen. Chuck Schumer stuck in for the banks, making it much much easier to challenge business method patents in the finance industry. (Source: [http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=b967fda5...](http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=b967fda5-d0a4-4fbd- aad8-1be025ad172b)) "For purposes of this section, the term ''covered business method patent'' means a patent that claims a method or corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service"

</comment><comment><USER4> This should remind everyone to pressure the White House to respond to the very successful: "Petition to End Software Patents".

[https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/#!/petition/direct- pat...](https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/#!/petition/direct-patent- office-cease-issuing-software-patents/vvNslSTq)

<comment><USER5> Not very applicable since this isn't a software patent.

<comment><USER4> Not sure technically, but software patents are a subset of methods patents (which I'm guessing this is), but at least very similar to the point where I think it's very applicable to this. The discussion needs to keep going - <USER2> petition was a great success, but I'm doubtful that the administration dares to talk about it in anything other than platitudes.

<comment><USER6> The definition of "software patent" is about as misused as "impeachment" or "HTML5". Ending software patents fixes very little with what is wrong with the patent industry because most of what people assume are software patents, likely aren't. Take the Lodesys patent debate for example, at least one of those (#7,222,078) wouldn't be considered a "software patent". PG says Amazon's 1-click checkout patent isn't a "software patent" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html>). Software patents are not the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am going to take an unpopular stance here... I think.

When patents are enforced by big legal entities, we all scream foul, "Patents are meant to protect the little guy, not make lawyers rich!"

Now we have a musician (a "little guy") suing a much loved successful startup... and we are still screaming, but instead of "Stop the lawyers!" we are yelling "Stop the hipster artists!" (at least lhnn was).

If this musician was suing Real Player or Rhapsody or some entity we didn't all love, I wonder how different the response (here in the comments) would have been?

      if(!entity.isUnderdog())
        complain();
      else
        support();

I may be missing a case in there... :)

<comment><USER8> I think you may have misunderstood the average complaint.

The complaint isn't about little guy vs big companies, it's about _bullshit patents_. A big company using a bullshit patent to squeeze out a little guy is just the most egregious example of bullshit.

In this case, it's less so that it's a "hipster artist", but it's more that he's a "douchebag artist" with a bullshit patent. Bullshit patents cost all of us money by distracting people from doing awesome stuff.

<comment><USER7>
      > In this case, it's less so that it's a "hipster artist",
      but it's more that he's a "douchebag artist" with a
      bullshit patent. Bullshit patents cost all of us money by
      distracting people from doing awesome stuff.

All you did was validate my point (as annoyed is that is going to make you)... this sentence is dripping with preconceptions about both the person trying to assert their patent and the patent itself, neither of which I assume you are intimately familiar with.

If I took the _identical_ scenario and replaced "douchebag artist" with Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs and left all other facts the same (the same patent, the same timeline, the same lawsuit) this discussion looks A LOT different.

Now you have people asserting the patent validity and how it overlaps with X and infringes on Y, but with some easily dismissable artist at the helm, most people have the same response you do -- shove him into a socially defined box and throw it all out the window as bullshit antics of some random douchebag wearing a hemp necklace.

All of these discussions are _bullshit_ \- they produce nothing except strife and accomplish nothing.

<comment><USER8> No. I for one would be comfortable describing those people as douchebags as well.

Larry Ellison, for instance – widely considered a douchebag.

I can't speak for others, but I'm fairly certain the issue are bullshit patents.

>All of these discussions are bullshit - they produce nothing except strife and accomplish nothing.

Complaining is human, and it allows us to get a measure of everyone else's opinions. If you removed griping from HN you wouldn't have much else left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> if you file a patent, and someone else invents the same thing before the patent is issued, seems to me that should be prima facie evidence that the idea was obvious -- since at least in the U. S., patent applications are not published.

Utopian dreaming aside, I've studied the patent a little, and it looks like Kickstarter has a problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> But can the people building projects on kickstarter even be called artists ? They got to be called engineers or entrepreneurs... An awesome site and resource for funding being roughed up for protection money.

</comment><comment><USER11> When will the USPTO put a stop on such BS patents, seriously! One day we will run out of colors, layouts and "business models" to patent... and then what?

Patents are meant to encourage entrepreneurship... not fund court rooms and judges' salaries.

<comment><USER12> >One day we will run out of colors, layouts and "business models" to patent... _and then what?_

Then a countdown to the expiration of the last patent will start.

And then we will enter an era of freedom of innovation. You will be free to take any design you like and improve on it without fear of being sued into oblivion if your design sees any kind of success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given that the legal system's unlikely to change, as long as IP lobbyists pay off politicians, I'd like to see Anonymous take on the project of compiling the personal details of these parasites.

<comment><USER14> Personal details lead to personal relationships, which then can lead to innocents being hurt. Not cool.

<comment><USER15> Innocents will only be hurt during the transitional period before they learn that they should avoid relationships with patent trolls for the same collateral risk reasons they avoid befriending gang members, child-molesters, and other anti-socials.

<comment><USER16> > Innocents will only be hurt during the transitional period

Oh, well, if we won't be hurting them forever, that's fine then.

<comment><USER15> One of the arguments made against repealing Jim Crow laws was the harm that would come to business owners in terms of infrastructure and other spending. There were many such businesses whose owners were not racist but who had invested in locations and buildings out of innocent compliance with the law and the demographic business climate it created. The judicial system makes accomodations for parenthood but it does not refuse to punish parents despite the fact that it is absolutely certain that such punishments will be detrimental to the child. By definition, disruptive social change is disruptive and punishment is punative. Surely that no collatoral innocents be harmed ever is too high a standard that favors both the status quo and protects bad actors?

<comment><USER14> "Surely that no collatoral innocents be harmed ever is too high a standard ..."

When we're talking about independent outlaw actors, as opposed to the law and justice that you invoke in your response, then no, I don't think it's too high a standard.

<comment><USER15> Just to have you elaborate then: you are against all forms of civil disobedience that cause harm? Is it that you believe movements can succeed without such tactics (e.g. that the civil rights movement would have succeeded without the race riots and that the earlier mill rights movements would have succeeded without violence) or that you are against all such social change?

<comment><USER14> "you are against all forms of civil disobedience that cause harm?"

Mostly, but not absolutely. Unnecessarily exposing the existence and whereabouts of someone's kids for what amounts to little more than vandalism and tagging, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 'a former musician'. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about this guy and his motives.

</comment><comment><USER18> What a damned foolish patent.

"Methods and apparatuses for financing and marketing a creative work"

<http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=MNgFAQAAEBAJ>

Some hipster artist ("hipster" being an appropriate word here) sues a successful implementation of an offshoot of an idea he had 8 years ago, and then says,

"As an artist myself, I feel that KickStarter may be hurting artist by focusing on 'donating money' rather than celebrating the artist for what they do. Their model does not build fan relationships but just continually asks for handouts."

What a jerk. It's been said here before, but it's worth hitting again: "Ideas are a dime a dozen."

<comment><USER19> I'm sure this is going to be a very unpopular stance, because it's been unpopular almost every time I've asked it:

Why do artists assume that every instance of something that doesn't involve the typical exchange of work for money is somehow harming their industry? The most vocal of these people are those 'No-Spec' who thinks sites like 99designs are invariably killing everything they stand for. It reeks of that same mentality and resistance to new revenue models that's turning so many people off to the music and movie industries.

Passion for the rhyme can be cheapened by feedback, and I think that's exactly what's happening with these 'artists'. They're looking at what other people are doing, seeing that it doesn't line up with how they think the industry should work, and then pull these statements out of their arses that it's killing their livelihood.

<comment><USER20> I don't know if I can answer your question, but I could maybe clarify what I think are a few misconceptions.

The first misconception is that artists are generally opposed to new revenue models. Artists, designers, craftspeople have absolutely embraced new revenue models, and the number of artists, graphic designers, fashion designers, video artists, industrial designers, et al. using sites like kickstarter and etsy, or selling digital work like templates or themes, is staggering. And many of these don't involve the 'typical exchange of work for money,' but are on one level or another creatively or professionally fulfilling.

The second is about the 'no spec' argument. There are huge differences between new revenue models—they're not all equal, and they're not all fair. Design professionals find spec work exploitative because they're exchanging their services to a client without any guarantee of payment. Most people in most industries find this unfair. Programmers are no exception. Nobody likes to do a lot of work for someone else to only earn a chance of getting paid.

Working for spec is fundamentally different from working for free for yourself—to design and manufacture a product, for example.

And as a sidenote, while few designers are comfortable with the proliferation of spec-driven websites, most designers I know don't feel particularly threatened by them anymore. At their best, they provide an outlet for students, unemployed, and self-taught designers to build their portfolios. But the work that comes out of them isn't generally great, and the clients that use them are generally the kind of clients nobody wants: fussy, demanding, unimaginative and cheap. Clients who probably wouldn't be paying for design services otherwise. It still costs money to get good work. That's what it's really about: protecting the value of the work you do professionally.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the response, some viewpoints there that I did not consider (mainly due to my own ignorance as someone not entirely connected to the design and art communities). One thing you mentioned I've never really been able to wrap my head around:

 _But the work that comes out of them isn't generally great, and the clients that use them are generally the kind of clients nobody wants: fussy, demanding, unimaginative and cheap. Clients who probably wouldn't be paying for design services otherwise. It still costs money to get good work. That's what it's really about: protecting the value of the work you do professionally._

Why is this the concern of anyone but the person doing the work and the client receiving it? Granted, on the whole, by-and-large it's not anything that's going to destroy the creative design industry or invalidate a beautifully composed ad campaign (for example) but it is something that I've heard before.

"Well the work produced isn't that great, these designs sometimes suck".

At the end of the day, if the end goal is to please the client, and the client is pleased with what they have, does it matter if it came from 99designs or if it were produced by Sterling-Cooper?

I suppose the same can be said for spec-work. If the producer of a product/service/design understands that they are working potentially for free to win a contract, who's business is that but their own and the clients? It seems like there might be a disconnect in that if your goal is to maximize output and bring in a respectable wage-say as a freelancer-that you'll go for clients who _are_ willing to negotiate fair terms, and compensate you a decent wage. Instead, what I see (and this is just anecdotal observation) is people vilifying designers who choose to work on spec.

I might be missing the point entirely, so take what I'm saying here with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER21> Why do people on Hacker News routinely complain about business models, management pilosophy or funding methods in technology? Is it perhaps because they realize that their industry, at least, is an ecosystem of concepts and social pressures that will make it either worthwhile or worthless?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to sell a checklist that I've made with dropbox paper - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I've made a checklist with dropbox paper and now I want to sell it.
What is the best way to do so?
I've tried Gumroad but they only support dropbox files not dropbox paper.
Thanks <comment><AUTHOR> please anyone</comment>


Women of Sex Tech, Unite - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/nyregion/women-of-sex-tech-unite.html <comment><USER2> I really like the approach they are taking to make sex toys and the advertising surrounding them less pornographic. Buying sex toys can feel kind of dirty and sleazy a lot of the time, and not very women friendly. You have toys made for women anatomy, yet the packaging and advertising is obviously made for men. It's definitely gotten better recently and I'm glad to see the trend continue.

> was told by a potential investor that she'd be a good C.E.O because "you're > not Kim Kardashian-attractive, but you're girl-next-girl attractive," she > recalled. Another asked if she was going to demonstrate her products for > him.

Sigh... There has been more talk recently of publicly outing investors/anyone that makes these kinds of comments. I support it fully.

<comment><USER3> _Another asked if she was going to demonstrate her products for him._

Sigh... Anyone, of any gender, is probably going make this joke regardless of the gender of the other party.

If you can't laugh _with_ the joke you probably shouldn't be in the sex industry. At all.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

<comment><USER2> No. Absolutely not.

I'm sure you have a female in your life who is important to you. A wife, daughter, mother? Would you be ok with an investor talking to your daughter like that? Joking that she demonstrate a sex toy for him? I would be absolutely furious.

This is not something to just ignore.

<comment><USER3> Why should it matter if it weren't wife / daughter or my son / husband?

Buy anyway: passing joke? That's fine. Absolutely normal.

If the person demanded a demonstration that would be completely different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is a the slogan on a T-Shirt "The future is female" supposed to be better then the "patriarchal" system which is misogynistic? Excluding a group (half?) the population for your vision of the future does not seem constructive at all.

<comment><USER5> I choose to read it as "the future is more female than the past, which was predominantly male".

If you choose to read it as "the future is only female" you can do that, but I'm fairly certain that's not how it's meant to be read.

To me inserting the "only" into the phrase is a lot like reading "black lives matter" as "only black lives matter". Sure the original slogan's phrasing is ambiguous, but it's a slogan and slogans are by necessity simplified.

<comment><USER6> >If you choose to read it as "the future is only female" you can do that, but I'm fairly certain that's not how it's meant to be read.

But there are many well-intentioned people that WILL read it as that. And with this I fault the the writer and not the reader.

I think this is one of the biggest problems modern liberal movements have with messaging. And I say this as someone who 100% is in support of "the future is more female than the past, which was predominantly male" and "black lives matter".

I don't think the issue is in the nature of brevity in communication. When these movements create their slogans, their number one goal seems to be motivating and incensing the base of people that already agree with them. It seems that the question is never asked: "how will this messaging come across to people who don't already agree with us?" \- let alone, "how can we convince those people to acclimate to our viewpoint?" A shirt that says "the future is only female" seems likely to increase vitriol by pushing away and shutting down well-meaning disaffecteds that might otherwise be convinced of the liberal cause.

<comment><USER5> Are you saying that the slogan makes you anxious, or that it hypothetically harms the cause by being read badly by people who want to read it badly?

Because I'm not sure that it's possible to come up with a slogan that isn't read badly by opponents. If you have examples, I'd love to see 'em.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure how you interpreted anxiety on my part here?

The slogan does not make me anxious. I know what it "really" means, and as I stated previously I am 100% in support of that message. I am frustrated because I believe there are better ways to communicate it to people in a way that is generally more persuasive.

I don't think it "hypothetically" harms the cause, I believe that it does. I only need speak to my more traditional extended family members, who will read slogans like this and react in a negative way, even though I know they could be convinced otherwise. Does it suck that they can't "read behind the lines" with slogans like this? Yeah. But public messaging is hard, and just amplifying existing messages won't solve that problem.

Lastly, "I'm not sure that it's possible to come up with a slogan that isn't read badly by opponents" seems like kind of a cop-out. Of course it's impossible to say something _someone_ will take issue with. Communicating messages isn't an all-or-nothing game, what I am saying is I think people need to do a better job changing minds than they are now.

<comment><USER5> > who will read slogans like this and react in a negative way, even though I > know they could be convinced otherwise

I guess what I'm saying is "out of the closets into the streets" probably didn't convince anyone that gay people were not pedophiles coming out into the streets to molest their children when it was being chanted by "rioters" in 1969. But the people who were inspired by that slogan and came out to their families and friends... that convinced a lot of people.

Slogans aren't always about converting other people to join your cause, they can be about convincing the already converted to act on their beliefs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Container Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://ericniebler.com/2014/11/23/container-algorithms/

<comment><USER2> For all of the STL's power, and all the useful stuff in std::algorithm, it's still impossible to write something as elegant as a list comprehension in Python. It's really exciting to see Eric's work taking us closer to this goal.

On the other hand, I always worry about all the magic implicit behavior in C++, both in old and new language features. We're writing in C++, we care about efficiency. Eric addresses this by requiring rvalue references in the container algorithms, but in general it's pretty easy to write code that does more work than you expected.

Since most undesired magic in C++ boils down to allocating heap memory unexpectedly, it would be cool to add syntax to could tell the compiler that a block is not allowed to allocate, like:

        noalloc {
            bigvec = std::move(bigvec) | cont::sort | cont::unique;
        }

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why the lazy algorithms aren't enough. Can't we have an assignment to vectors from lazy streams, or constructors from them?

Why can't the

        std::vector<int> ints =
            read_ints() | cont::sort | cont::unique;

from TFA can't be done "as lazily as possible" (i.e., sort eagerly and uniq lazily). Alternatively, something like

        std::vector<int> ints(read_ints() | cont::sort | cont::unique);

or even

        std::vector<int> ints;
        read_ints() | cont::sort | cont::unique > ints;

What reason could we have for making `read_ints` and `unique` eager by default?

Performance-wise, the lazy filter works in constant space, will result in fewer dcache misses if the data set is large, and (I _think_ ) provides more opportunity for the optimizer to do clever things. The eager chain may have better icache performance if the filter is very complicated.

And it's easy to go from lazy to eager -- just put everything in a vector. If you want to go from eager to lazy, though, you're out of luck.

<comment><USER4> I think it comes down to a "memory bug" vs. "performance bug" trade-off. If you make it default-lazy you run the risk of having the stream evaluated multiple times. If you make it default-eager you run the risk of O(N) memory (as you said).

I agree with your side of the trade-off, a performance bug (result: slow application) is always preferable to a memory bug (result: failed malloc, likely crash) in production.

To make things more desirable, you could always do something even simpler than your example:

        auto ints = read_ints() | cont::sort | cont::unique | cont:to_vector;

That way fixing the performance bug would only need a one-liner.

Still, having the option is better than nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> as someone who knows C++, but doesn't use it everyday, nor keep up with the latest and greatest in the community, I was surprised to see the "pipe" syntax. It looks like the author is using them like unix pipes, or like the `|>` macro in Elixir. When did C++ get this? Is it just functions overloading the bitwise-or operator, or is it 'official' syntax?

<comment><USER6> This is achieved by overloading the operator|, although there is some special hackery to use static function objects to omit the constructor calls.

The first mayor library to use this syntax was Boost.Range and it is now being proposed as the syntax of standard ranges.

<comment><USER7> Actually, the authors of Boost.Range got the idea from an earlier range library of mine, which is noted in the Acknowledgements section of the Boost.Range documentation [here]([http://www.boost.org/libs/range/doc/html/range/history_ack.h...](http://www.boost.org/libs/range/doc/html/range/history_ack.html)):

> Eric Niebler contributed the Range Adaptor idea which is arguably the single > biggest innovation in this library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It still surprises me to this day how much minutia is found in C++'s standard libraries when it comes to data structures. I have a hard time imagining how one could write a more full-featured set of containers and the like.

<comment><USER6> Just look at boost and you will get an idea of what other containers are useful. Here is a quick list of the top of my head:

\- flat set/map \- multi_index \- static_vector (called SmallVector in LLVM) \- bimap \- intrusive containers \- various from Boost.Heap</comment></comment>


Hunting the Hidden Dimension - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/hunting-hidden-dimension.html

<comment><AUTHOR> click on the "Transcript" link to read the article.</comment>


AWS is down - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> [https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> We can't access our AWS EC2 instance which are located in the US from France or Germany. The instances are sitting behind Cloudflare.

The error message from Cloudflare is cf-error-522 :(

<comment><USER2> It appeared to mostly resolve itself after 15 minutes but we're still seeing reduced req/m

[https://imgur.com/a/JAQ5B](https://imgur.com/a/JAQ5B)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It was cloudflare. [https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/](https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/)

<comment><USER4> Technically it was a global transit issue; CloudFlare just plays the role of global observer and is well positioned to spot these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it? Cloudflare seems very slow, but ec2 looks ok

<comment><AUTHOR> I get nothing on my end. Buckets, EC2. Not even [https://aws.amazon.com/](https://aws.amazon.com/) or [https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/). Also I see other 3rd party services not working.</comment></comment>


The Mystery of Devil's Kettle Falls - <AUTHOR> http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/stories/the-mystery-of-devils-kettle-falls <comment><USER2> There are mine communication devices that can punch a signal through a few hundred meters of solid rock. Here's a simple one.[1] VLF can get through, with enough power, a simple signal, and a smart receiver.[2]

There's been a lot of work on "down-hole communication" for oil and gas drilling. Modern drilling involves com links to the sharp end, with info coming up and commands going down. Some of the techniques work through the drill string, but some are VLF radios.

There are also high-powered ultrasonic pingers, with a range of several kilometers in water.[3]

If you could get info for the first kilometer or two, you'd at least know where to look for the rest of the path.

[1] [http://radiolocation.tripod.com/](http://radiolocation.tripod.com/) [2] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010RS004378/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010RS004378/full) [3] [http://www.sonotronics.com/?page_id=96](http://www.sonotronics.com/?page_id=96)

<comment><USER3> But that only would work if the hole leads to an open tunnel. If there's a gravel bed on the bottom, your equipment just sits there.

<comment><USER4> But at least you get a clue there might be a gravel bed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the record lava tubes can happen in flood basalts; I've been to some at Hell's Half Acre in Idaho, and I'm sure there are others. But these are not like karst-type cave systems; they're much shorter.

It's really unlikely that the water goes anywhere other than the lake. It just might travel through a fracture network and seep out of the lake bottom miles away, but groundwater tends to flow broadly following the topographic slope (driven by the gravitational loading of groundwater surface called the 'hydraulic head') and there typically aren't isolated tunnels where some water can flow unimpeded by regional groundwater flow.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm reading this and wondering why you couldn't build a waterproof beacon? At least by tracking it you could prove that it didn't exit into Lake Superior.

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

[http://www.rjeint.com/aviation-underwater-locator- beacons](http://www.rjeint.com/aviation-underwater-locator-beacons)

<comment><USER7> You should drop synthetic DNA in it and then sample all nearby lakes and do PCR. Even aftera trillion-fold dilution it should be detectable. Would be cheap, easy and very likely to work. A cool weekend project for your kids!

<comment><USER8> Pardon my ignorance on this - but wouldn't dropping Synthetic DNA into the water be polluting it in some form?

<comment><USER9> The article mentioned locals claiming to have pushed down a car one night ... No idea what volume of synthetic DNA would be sensible here, but I can imagine it'd mass less than a car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. So many armchair geologists, both here and in the comments on TFA. Do you really think people haven't already thought of a dozen reasons why GPS beacons/synthetic DNA/blah blah etc wouldn't work?

Should we get some geologists in to comment on your issue tracker and propose solutions for your bugs?

Ninja edit: [https://xkcd.com/793/](https://xkcd.com/793/) applies to programmers, too

<comment><USER11> Alternately, it can be entertaining and mentally stimulating to brainstorm ideas and then pick apart why they wouldn't work.

It would be one thing if it was a funding pitch based on uninformed proposals but as a forum conversation on a Friday afternoon, it doesn't seem too awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Use a long thin cable on a motorized spool. Rig up a waterproof reinforced box with sensors that detect speed and direction (mercury switch type deals?... I don't know but I bet there is something). Hook them up to a board with some storage. Drop the box in and start reeling the cable off. If the cable goes slack the thing has probably stopped. Maybe it's hung up. Pull it back a bit and try again. If it keeps stopping in the same place it's probably all the information possible by this method. Retrieve the box, get the speed/direction information, do some distance calculations and graph it. Ideally the box will go all the way to the exit point and you will have a profile showing where the water ends up. But even if it doesn't, you will have a good idea of direction and depth the water is traveling for a certain distance at least. This will at least make better guesses in the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've boated the Brule. That is a definite portage ;)

Better photos here: [https://roadtrippers.com/stories/revealing-the-mystery- behin...](https://roadtrippers.com/stories/revealing-the-mystery-behind- minnesotas-devils-kettle-falls)

</comment><comment><USER14> They don't have to dam the whole thing but they could redirect the water going in the kettle to go over the falls on the right, so the hole is free to be explored via winch & harness, or remote camera.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why don't we block it off for a few months and see if it dries up?

<comment><USER16> Lake Superior?

<comment><USER17> No, I believe the idea is that if water wasn't flowing through the pathway that we would have a lot more options for exploring where it goes with various equipment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone attempted to map the first few hundred meters of the kettle? That might give us a good idea of where to look. Drop a sonar on a very long, strong wire to map out the contours?

</comment><comment><USER19> It could just go down into an underground aquifer, no?

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like a great place to dump a body...

<comment><USER21> I know right? If that hole could talk...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Dump radioactive waste in, see where the Geiger counter picks it up?

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe they could use radar sounding and a big bag of passive reflectors floating upright.

</comment><comment><USER24> are there any short life radioactive materials that can be used?

<comment><USER25> Iodine-123 maybe, but you'd have to make it on the spot.

The half-life is 13.22 hours, and it makes some detectable gamma rays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why not lower a camera equipped robot with a wire there?

<comment><USER27> How will you stabilize it to get a decent picture?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> why not just cut it open and see where it goes?

<comment><USER29> Last time this was posted, I suggested dropping a nuke with a 12-hour timer down the hole. I got downvoted too. :(

<comment><USER30> Well, cutting open is perhaps a bit drastic, but how about just stopping the river for a day or so? After all, the OP mentions that this hole appears at the split of a river, so diverting the water to the other arm of the river might not be that hard...

<comment><USER31> I've learned years ago that even the "interesting" things have little chance to happen if they cost money. While visiting one of the most interesting caves in Poland the guide said that geologists strongly suspect that there's an entire tunnel system underneath it, and have suspected it for 40-odd years. So I asked - well, it should be fairly easy to check with the right equipment, no? And he said that yeah, it should be fairly easy, and even though multiple universities expressed interest in doing it, no one is willing to cough up the money for it. I guess this is very similar - of course it would be extremely interesting to find out where that water is going,but redirecting the flow of water would be very costly, and apart from satiating some scientific curiosity there's little reason to undertake such large engineering project.

<comment><USER32> Just tell them you think there is a train full of Nazi gold in those tunnels :-). Something we don't have enough of these days are "gentlemen explorers" folks who are independently wealthy and spending their days exploring interesting places.

<comment><USER22> Bear Gryls?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ground penetrating radar?

<comment><USER34> Does not work very well in a wet environment (the energy is absorbed pretty fast). And if you use longer wavelength to get better penetration the spatial resolution goes down hard. It might help to map the part above though..

(No idea for longer wavelenghts, but we use GPR to measure ground water content in the MHz range. Normal penetration depth is at most a few meters.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow, that looks dangerous as hell!</comment>


Show HN: Track Twitter follower trends for publicly-traded companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/twitter <comment><AUTHOR> Over the past few months, I've been trying to recreate some of the alternative data tools commonly used by hedge funds and other professional investors to inform their trading decisions.

The goal of this project is to bridge the information gap between retail investors and Wall Street, by building a free, easy-to-use alternative data platform.

For this dashboard, I have been aggregating daily Twitter follower counts for members of the Russell 3000. I wrote a script to match each company to a Twitter handle (using Selenium to do Google searches for " _company name_ twitter"), and then used the Twitter API to update the follower counts every day.</comment>


Balancing Work / Startup / Life / Sleep - <AUTHOR> http://www.levirosol.com/index.php/2010/10/08/balancing-work-startup-life-sleep/

<comment><USER2> I try to minimize the number of things I'm working on at a time. If I start something new, I try (and fail frequently) to complete what I was working on previously.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> With the number of startup founder / employees on HN, I'm curious what things you guys do to keep everything in balance.</comment>


Keys Under Doormats [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.crypto.com/papers/Keys_Under_Doormats_FINAL.pdf

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I may be skeptical of the NSA, but at least they're capable of cracking things most others wouldn't have the capability to achieve.

But asking for special encryption keys to be made just for you is like a magician saying "Everybody close your eyes while I look for this rabbit."

<comment><USER2> This is an _incredibly_ subtle and very important point!! (Many people disagree with me.)

Firstly, let's get one thing straight: if the state acknowledges constant surveillance, then nothing separates this from the Stasi. It's all the worst parts of 1984.

So we can say, 100%, _definitively_ that acknowledged state surveillance has a chilling effect and creates a police state.

This is what I think everybody can easily agree with.

Now, the difficulty (and my disagreement with others) comes when you look at the magician's work. i.e., unacknowledged special and extraordinary skills that don't change the "protocol" of free, open, and unmonitored communication.

These special and unacknowledged powers can deter and prevent actual, real, crime, so that law-abiding people can focus on living their lives, not arming up against cyber-criminals.

We'll have to save that philosophical discussion (I'm undecided). But what you've said _certainly_ , I am quite sure, captures a lot of this important nuance.

(Another thing to think about is the relationship among state actors, i.e. cooperation versus competition and sabotaging each other's work. That is another difficult issue. If the Chinese government is keeping the Chinese from kidnapping each other for ransom the minute someone builds an important innovative business - which does happen! - and the FBI is doing the same within America, then what is the relationship to be between these countries' services? America can't be, and doesn't want to be, a worldwide monopoly on any government service protecting freedom around the world. For one thing, its population is outnumbered 20:1, and the rest of the world doesn't pay it taxes.)

<comment><USER3> > if the state acknowledges constant surveillance, then nothing separates this > from the Stasi. It's all the worst parts of 1984.

Why do you equate the act of surveillance with enforcing totalitarian rule with the use of surveillance?

<comment><USER2> There are a lot of ways to answer this question (for example: by appealing to human nature of those in power; appealing to 1984's description; appealing to history, such as all the governments where anybody had to watch what they say over the telephone.)

But the simplest is this: suppose someone gets to watch whenever my girlfriend and I have sex, and make comments about us (interrupting, us, etc.) and suppose that someone is the government and we have no choice about whether to have a live commentary. Is it possible that this does not equate to totalitarian rule?

No, it is not possible, because nobody would choose to have that happen, people have an expectation of privacy and so it is totalitarian for the government to have a say into this private communication and relationship.

This is a generalization of private communication and privacy: people simply have a right to a "protocol" of privacy. That means the government is _automatically_ by definition totalitarian if it removes the possibility of this protocol, by acknowledging that it is overseeing it. (This is an extreme example, but imagine you can no longer tell your friend a joke, because you have to include the government in on the joke. If they don't get it they will just come up to you later ask, "Hi, I'm the one who was surveilling you. Could you explain the joke about the blonde and the physicist, I didn't get it.")

You may think that my two examples are extreme: but they're _not_ \- on a human protocol level, this is _exactly_ what happens when surveillance of private communication and relationships occurs and is acknowledged. It's not _possible_ for it not to be authoritarian.

That's why I am very happy that these things are denied by the government. It would be a much scarier, and far worse world, if they weren't. People simply have a right to privacy, that you and I and everyone enjoys, it's best if it is never broken by anyone. They relinquish that right only when they do something like create a ransomware virus or some brazen criminal act that hurts everyone. You can't say it doesn't happen, because it does every day.

If the government has no extraordinary powers in these cases, that means it's up to everyone to personally armor up. That's a ridiculous waste of resources, and one of the primary reasons we have a government to begin with! (Public safety.)

<comment><USER3> > Is it possible that this does not equate to totalitarian rule?

Sure. Totalitarian rule is when government persecutes political opponents to ensure that power does not change hands. It has little to do with surveillance. Surveillance is just one of the means to achieve this goal. All it, does it helps to lower the cost of enforcement. No totalitarian rule so far collapsed because enforcement was too costly.

Besides what providing you with the commentary has to do with the surveillance itself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who would like a summary of the paper: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/08/security_giants_publ...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/08/security_giants_publish_paper_destroying_government_encryption_plans/)

I'm grateful for the fact that these pioneers took the time and effort to gather write this paper. If anyone had the ability to send a strong message, it's them.

</comment><comment><USER5> duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845328) ?

<comment><USER6> This version of the document is different — arguably better —, it has links.

<comment><USER7> FYI [http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em- dash.html](http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Update HN: I learned Swift and turned How a Car Works into an app in 6 weeks - <AUTHOR> http://www.howacarworks.com/app

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to answer any questions on the app, or the website. For those who are curious it has sold 61 copies in the past three days, all organically from the site. Not exactly retirement money but I'm very happy with that as a start.

<comment><USER2> Awesome work Alex! Who did all the illustrations for the book, how much did you spend on the content like diagrams?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The content for the book came from the liquidator of a company which held the copyright. It was a complicated situation - the illustrations I believe were licensed for print to a few different publications, including magazines. A friend of mine had plans to reprint the book but allowed me to turn it into a site.</comment></comment></comment>


Shutting Down a Dream - <AUTHOR> http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/08/07/shutting-down-a-dream/ <comment><USER2> _100 calls to talk to 10 people to get 1 in-person demo, frequently in another state. I got in the car, put on the suit, and did the demos. I put together some signage, set up a booth at ACTFL, IALLT, and military linguist conventions. My parents saw a lot of me (they live near a lot of colleges), I stayed in a lot of cheap motels, and slowly, I built a list of customers. Not a lot, never enough. Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other top schools were among my customers, but I never made the "big score" – the state school with tens of thousands of students._

This is, in a nutshell, why Bingo Card Creator has a price tag, a no-touch sales model, and no phone number. People write me, to this day, saying "I have a question about the product. Call me at 555 555-5555 between the hours of 3 PM and 4 PM." My response is a polite variant of "No."

I've had this discussion with a few people who make software for teachers/students and I hate to be the Business Guy, but just like "Buy for $2, sell for $1, make it up in volume" is not a sustainable plan, you can't use enterprise sales tactics (+) at consumer price points. If sales requires a phone call, we've low-bounded the product at hundreds of dollars. If it requires an in-person meeting, the lower bound is now $50k. That isn't "Could potentially be $50k if each of your 2,000 students pays $25", that's "You will be invoiced $50k."

\+ Absent heavy modification. There are low-touch/high-touch hybrids which can work at the $100~$500 a month mark.

[Edit: The definitive article on this is Joel Spolsky's Camels and Rubber Duckies. [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html) Search for [The reason I bring this up is because software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear.] My only quibble is that both the pricing model and emerging standard marketing/sales model for SaaS companies have made the no-man's land he talks about a very interesting place to be in the ~10 years since this was written.]

</comment><comment><USER3> "When you have children, you can have exactly one hobby. Anything else is an exercise in futility, self-deception, and ineffectiveness. Cooking healthy food is a hobby. Exercising is a hobby. Maintaining a website is a hobby. Writing a blog is a hobby. Bringing work home is a hobby. You have time to do exactly one thing after your kids go to sleep, if you want to do it well."

Yes. Ugh. And I cannot pick one.

<comment><USER4> Relevant to the story earlier today, John Carmack has three jobs and two children. He tweets regularly, speaks at cons, and occasionally blogs on altdev. He also reportedly lifts weights regularly.

It's not impossible.

<comment><USER5> your comparison is stupid

1 - he's a multimillionaire. He can afford to offload lots of cooking (restaurants), cleaning (cleaners), childcare (nannies), loss of income (stay at home partner), shorten his commute (purchase a house close to work, put a gym in the basement)

2 - even with all of the above, I still bet his wife does a big chunk of the household maintenance and childcare

<comment><USER6> > your comparison is stupid

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

      In Comments

      Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

      When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

      E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

<comment><USER7> He didn't say the OP was stupid, just the comparison. I would say a variation of that, but might actually say 'stupid', depending on how amiable the group/person is, and how well I could inflect my voice to my funny instead of mean.

<comment><USER6> Er, I didn't say that _he_ said the OP was stupid _either_

> E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say;

<comment><USER7> That's a poor example then. "Calling names" generally refers to attacking the person/people, not ideas/things. I saw nothing uncivil about the 'stupid' post, unless you chose to read it in an iflammatory tone of voice.

<comment><USER6> Take it up with PG

<comment><USER7> He's not the one who pointed it out; you did. ;)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's his rules, remember? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone save this site. It's a pretty cool site that helps people learn languages.

Man, so much crap out there with new flash sales websites, new aggregators for media consumption, startup's that do home cleaning. But a website that tries to teach people something enriching without a business model, but just tries to do a good job gets tossed on the way side.

We need a foundation or grant program for non-profit and NGO websites. Most startups are crap-shoots anyways, VCs and developers should waste respectively their money and time on things that do good than the usual social media crap or new online marketing channels for conventional businesses.

<comment><USER9> >Someone save this site

This someone can be you. Call up OP and give him an offer for all the code and IP.

<comment><USER10> Is there no one that could take this (and others like this) to the notice of a Moskovitz or a Houston, in a discreet way and without much fanfare, so that a lifeline could be had?

This should be chump change to any valley Mogul.

[http://givingpledge.org/](http://givingpledge.org/)

Self-pleasuring vibrator projects seem to be able to get funded with a lot more ease, for Pete's sake.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/29/sex-pun-goes- here/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/29/sex-pun-goes-here/)

<comment><USER11> There is funding going into language learning software.

[http://www.crunchbase.com/company/duolingo](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/duolingo)

[http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mindsnacks](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mindsnacks)

And as I mentioned below, the space is crowded with plenty of little guys... like myself. :-) Most of us will lose. That's capitalism. Hopefully, the survivors will be much better because they competed in such a crowded space, and the consumer wins big in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This story resonates so much! I'm in the same space as OP and even doing something similar at [http://membean.com](http://membean.com) .

Where our story digresses is that we got paid traction quickly. Early on we decided we wouldn't be free and we'd convince schools(& parents) that we offered enough value to pay for it. We narrowed in on a very specific need, focussed obsessively on quality, provided our teachers fantastic customer service, kept our burn rate very low, bootstrapped(it was hard) and just buckled down and executed.

Along the way, somehow, and this was crucial, our teachers turned into evangelists - parents, principals and administrators took note. It wasn't that they just liked what we offered -- they went to bat for it. Many of our teachers spent 8+ months convincing their principals and district officials to buy us. Private schools were crucial in the beginning to get our cash flow going, public schools took longer but we waited patiently (and nervously)

The current ecosystem is not friendly to Ed startups, it's stacked in favor of the large Ed vendors who have the manpower to closely follow budget allocations, develop long term relationships across 50 states and have deep knowledge on how to work the system.

OP, congrats for sticking to this for so long. I suspect that it was incredibly draining but along the way you've helped countless teachers & students and that should count for a lot.

<comment><USER13> You could probably get his contacts for a case of beer :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is the story of too many startups in the edtech space. Slow growth, grateful users, but not enough traction to grow the company through revenue or outside funding.

Very few edtech companies have managed to avoid this fate, and often come down to one or two people keeping the product going as a labor of love. There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that sales are inherently high- touch and expensive, and that the users (teachers/kids) and payers (administrators) have different perspectives and incentives.

Great article. Congrats on sticking it out so long.

<comment><USER15> What's funny about EdTech is just how awful some of the software is that has funding. Especially the LMS/SIS side of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In case anyone is wondering, the site he is referring to is: [http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Home.do](http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Home.do)

Articles like this scare me. I've been working for 8 months full time now on a bootstrapped website for learning vocabulary via reading ([http://readlang.com](http://readlang.com)). I've been advised a few times that it's extremely hard to make money with this kind of site but for now I'm ploughing ahead anyway. Reading this gives me pause for thought but as long as I've getting good feedback I'm happy to keep going and see where it might lead.

Even in the worst case though, I hope that I wouldn't ever need to shut down the site, and that it could at least pay for it's hosting costs and be automated to keep running with minimal maintenance.

<comment><USER17> I would encourage you to start charging customers or to find another monetisation strategy for it, unless youre getting mmassive traction you arent a aquisition target and if its nice but free then it may never make money.

<comment><USER16> It's still early days and I'm more focused on growing the user base right now.

Saying that, since last month I put a daily cap on phrase translations for free users and a 'Readlang Supporter' plan at $10 / year for unlimited translations and to support development through the beta period. So far I've had 13 payments, a total of $130, which I'm pretty happy with since a) the user base is currently small (about 500 signed up since I added the payment option), b) it's validation that people are willing to pay for the service, and c) I've got a lot of ideas for improving it in future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why not let someone else take it over for free? I don't understand killing it instead of looking at other ways to hand it off.

<comment><USER19> In certain cases this is easier said than done. If he hands it off he'll need to teach someone else how to run the site, how to deal with each customer, how to...

Shutting it down will let him breathe again without having to worry. It's like ripping off the bandaid.

<comment><USER18> I don't buy it. You can give someone the keys and say 'good luck, don't call me', and have a nonzero probability of it succeeding without any further intervention than you'd have to use for shutting it down.

<comment><USER20> Easy to say when its not yours, I suspect. If he got to this point by thinking he was wasting his life at this thing, why would he consider giving it to someone else to waste their life? And his customers are his friends. It's like giving his friends away to a stranger and saying "don't call me".

<comment><USER21> >It's like giving his friends away to a stranger and saying "don't call me".

Is that worse than locking your friends out in the cold, tossing them their stuff, and shutting the door?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sorry for sounding like a blatant marketing. But we just launched [http://sideprojectors.com](http://sideprojectors.com) where you can find someone else to take over your project. Hopefully we can help your project from being killed.

</comment><comment><USER23> In case the author is reading.

Kudos for finding the courage to stick with it, and the courage to quit. Those who have been in this position know what a heavy burden it can be. I hope you can find it within yourself not to turn cynical, and to use your skills and experience to make a positive change in the world. (Or, if you choose to just live your life, my hat still goes off to you)

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't imagine the weight of shutting something down which you've spent almost a decade on. While this is a tail of not getting to product market fit it's the struggle of every entrepreneur.

Knowing how long to stick it out and when to call it quits. There is no right answer. The right answer is when you reach your limits. Most people's limit is much less than 10 years.

Getting to the point where shit hits the fan (out of money with a family) has to be one of the hardest experiences outside of losing loved ones.

Congrats to the OP for their determination. At the same time I share my condolences at the time, energy and money that the experience cost.

He has this to hold on to...

> I'm glad I had the courage to try, and I'm grateful for the insight it gave > me into what it takes to build a business.

</comment><comment><USER25> As someone who can't let anything go, I found this is touching and inspiring. Thanks for having the courage to give it a go, and to stop.

</comment><comment><USER26> Dan, I admired the fact you hanged on to your dream such long. It takes lot of courage and perseverance. I have been in your shoes and have felt the pain when its time to let go of the dream. But when you clear it off, it feels great. Once i met a founder of startup who gave advice 'You should be passionate about your idea but not disproportionately passionate' All the best!

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like a very long lesson learned on product market fit. Best of luck to the op if he tries again.

</comment><comment><USER28> what's the site?

<comment><USER29> I would guess that it is this one: [http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Home.do](http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Home.do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If it is a profitable/good idea - surely someone out there would buy it from you for some small amount of money. Or is the monthly income not worth someone buying?

Wouldn't everyone win in that case?

</comment><comment><USER31> Really someone needs to do a marketplace to buy and sell these projects. I'm sure a project that has customers is worth something.

deadstart.com restart.com ...

</comment><comment><USER32> > When you have children, you can have exactly one hobby. Anything else is an > exercise in futility, self-deception, and ineffectiveness. Cooking healthy > food is a hobby. Exercising is a hobby. Maintaining a website is a hobby. > Writing a blog is a hobby. Bringing work home is a hobby. You have time to > do exactly one thing after your kids go to sleep, if you want to do it well. > The pointless waste of time had to go.

21 century, the first world, and yet raising children is an almost insurmountable task. No wonder fertility rates in the West are so low.

<comment><USER33> Maybe this is the case in the US, but it's not so for the West as a whole, viz.: the hands-off French approach: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020474090457719...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.html)

<comment><USER32> > Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, > I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids > growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

It's hilarious that she included a paragraph solely to excuse herself for complimenting a certain aspect of the French lifestyle, presumably in order to appease the (imaginary or not) anti-France streak in the American consciousness.

<comment><USER34> Off topic, but:I have seen this anti-French attitude a lot (in most cases, jokingly). What is the reason for the American dislike for the French? One Frenchman I talked to said that its because France does not always support US Foreign policy....is that really the case?

<comment><USER35> As you said, it's mostly a joke, usually exaggerated for comic effect. Even calling it "anti-French" may be too much; it's just playing off a stereotype of French people as snobby and overly "sophisticated" (in a slightly derogatory way). I don't want to link it to working class/upper class or rural/urban or whatever, since those aren't really right, but perhaps a vaguely similar impulse.

Trying to tie it to "foreign policy" or something is thinking about it much too hard.

<comment><USER36> That stereotype exists because, right before US elites started formalizing their own cultural scenario (before F.S. Fitzgerald, to give a rough idea), French culture was one of their main models, if not THE model. On the other side, French elites invested a lot in the American Revolution and were quite disappointed with the outcomes (a society characterized by freedom but also rough and greedy, which eventually chose The Anglo Way in most matters and stole their thunder as Beacon of Civilization). Ever since, both sides were locked in a constant and intense debate in a way that very few other countries experienced. It's funng because both French and US mainstream cultures agree on very fundamental matters (the need for a secular State, the power of technological progress, the importance of cinema and popular culture, down to comicbooks) but express them in completely opposite ways in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "The story of one man is the store of the entire world".

I think it's easy to talk down to someone who has admitted failure, but the truth is we've all been through it, although some of us hide it better than others.

My custom web-development business tanked last year after customers refused to stop asking for changes. Insomnia & anxiety were frustratingly close friends of mine too.

Maybe the site is shutting down and maybe you could have done something different that would have succeeded more, but super-kudos for trying!</comment>


Ask HN: Rules of thumb to test feasibility of Machine learning applications? - <AUTHOR> With the recent developments in the field of Machine learning there are plenty of problems that can now be solved that were not possible a couple of years ago. As someone with only a basic understanding of the field I find it hard to judge the feasibility of product ideas involving machine learning.
Given that unique and relevant data sets are often hard to come by (for obvious reasons) I'm wondering if there are any good rules of thumb to judge feasibility of different ideas.
Let me give you a concrete example; build a system that looks at medical records and approximate the risk for a certain illness. It is possible to fairly easy get overall data on the how common the illness is, which symptoms that are relevant and even if those symptoms are commonly recorded in medical records. But the granular data in the actual medical records are fairly hard to come by and would require a significant effort to collect. In this situation it would preferable to do some approximations on e.g. how many medical records are needed to get certain precision before pursuing the idea and start collecting data.
A less defined example would be; build an application that identifies if a picture contain a golden retriver dog with a red scarf around the neck. Also here relevant to have rough numbers on the number of data points needed etc (even if the actual data in this case is probably much easier to come by).
In the first case I could probably get ok approximations using statistics assuming normal distributions, but less straight forward in the second example. <comment><USER2> If you're interested in commercialization you should start from day one with some estimate of the value the application creates. That is, "saves $X dollars" or "creates $X in revenue".

I do work in the natural language and item matching areas and in those cases I do what I call "preliminary evaluation" by working a small number of cases (say 10-20) in depth and putting together some story about what kind of outputs would be expected, what the actual requirements are, and what a decision process is going to have to take into account. You've got to put together a plausible story that the decision process exists.

For your case I would say the dog example is more feasible than the health care one. The caveat is what the negatives are like for the dog: are we looking at photos that have a lot of yellow and red? Are we looking at photos of dogs, etc? As for health care, prediction just adds to the health care boondoggle unless you can make the case of making a difference in outcomes and cost as opposed to just getting a better score at Kaggle.

In the case of text examples I'd say you want 10,000 examples of items in the class and at least that many out of it if you are doing a problem that bag-of- words is able to do to get results that you'd really be proud of. You might get that down to as little as 1,000 if some dimensional reduction is in use.

The center of my approach, when precision matters, is case-based reasoning, where you really find that there is one simple strategy that works say, 70% of time, and then a patch that gets you to 80% and then you keep adding exceptional cases to work up the asymtope. In a lot of cases like that you can establish a proof as to a lower bound of how accurate the results are and work up to handling more and more cases.

A core issue though is evaluating what matters, which is why I say follow the money. There is no better way to destroy evaluators than making them split hairs that don't matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, first of all fully agree with you regarding the business side. Always need to have the customer, their problems, and the revenue model in mind. E.g. for the health care example I think there is a big upside from the insurer side to able to proactively identify illnesses and treat them early (typically cheaper than emergency care, but not always), not to talk about minimizing the human suffering.

But back to the actual question, rules of thumb to estimate feasibility of machine learning application without having access to a actual data set for the specific problem. Make sense to break it down in different problem domains as you mention, NLP, words, image classification, etc.

The 10,000 examples is for bag of words is something I will keep in mind going forward, thanks! When it comes to image classification I guess a fairly good benchmarks can be achieved by looking at available image datasets and public models built on top them (e.g. ImageNet and later versions) and then extrapolate on the precision and number of images needed to achieve it (assuming similar image datasets).

Anyone aware of other relevant rules of thumb for other problem domains?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A lot of what machine learning offers is beyond correlation and more about interaction between variables to get a result. So think multivariate analyses. If you can do a multivariate analysis to get to something that is statistically significant for a certain disease, then it would probably be worth checking out.

Think of it this way: machine learning is all about grabbing features from what we can normally say "duh its right there that's what is causing it." but in an automated manner. So how do we make the rules for it?

We need many, MANY, examples. If you can provide CONCRETE examples for each occurrence, then you MAY have a chance at giving it some sort of predictive capability.

The more important issue is HOW you plan to extract these features, the things that make you go "duh, that's whats causing it." So focus on this last part, and the rest will come easier.</comment>


Google creating wireless network - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/01/23/google-creating-wireless-network-but-for-what/?mod=WSJBlog

<comment><USER2> Based on the article, it seems like this could be a perk for Google Fiber users. Man, I can't wait to see that service spread to more cities. It'll finally hold the existing providers' feet to the fire.</comment>


Why Louisiana Stays Poor [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38 <comment><USER2> Fascinating. Everyone interested in economics should watch this. Thanks for posting!</comment>


Ask HN: How should I manage removing customer data and backups? - <AUTHOR> This question has a couple of different aspects to it, the main aspect to be addressed, though, is the relationship between customer data and backups.
1. One of our customer promises is to remove customer data when a customer has stopped using our service. Is a `DELETE FROM data WHERE userID=5` plus a `rm -rf data_attachments/customerID/5` sufficient? Are there other methods of data disposal I should consider? Are there other issues to think about?
2. We regularly backup all of our data. Because each customer's data is a subset of the application data, that data is stored in the backups. When a business entity says that it has destroyed all customer data, what does it mean for that data to still exist in the backups? Is this legal? Are there solutions to this? One "brainstorm" solution was to go back into the backups, decompress the archive, wipe that customer's data from that data set, recompress, and re-store it. It seems to me that fiddling with backups destroys the purpose of a versioned backup. <comment><USER2> You can encrypt the user data, let's say files or photos, with a user key and store the key in the user record in your database database. Even if the backup is on tape (hard to delete just one file) deleting the encryption key from the database renders it useless.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about logging your deletions so if you need to recover from backup you can play out the deletion log to take care of such things.</comment>


Show HN: MasterPassX, deterministic stateless password generator - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cretezy/masterpassx-a-better-stateless-password-generator-a06b93b9aa8c <comment><USER2> Once they capture your master password, it's game over.

How can you be sure your master password is being kept secure?

And what happens on those sites where the stateless generated password isn't accepted by the remote end? Or you are required to change your password after a while and you can't re-use any old passwords?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to be adding a better form input to highly recommended users to use good passwords.

Since it doesn't store the master password (just the key derived from it), that is the true "game over" but would require trying the whole 2^256 space with HMAC-SHA256 to brute force the key.

If they try to brute force the actual mastet password, it would be extremely slow since it uses scrypt with a high n, which runs at 2 hash/sec on a good desktop (probably could be a lot higher using dedicated hardware, but still very very low compared to SHA256 which stands at millions of hash/sec).

I don't understand your last point, can you rephrase it?</comment></comment>


How Google Buses Are Ruining San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/How-Google-s-Buses-Are-Ruining-San-Francisco-4249072.php

<comment><USER2> This is the normal, predictable demographic shift that occurs in any area that becomes popular quickly. Prices go up and poor people are pushed out. When the demand disappears and the town goes back to where it once was, then people hanker for the good old days when it was a bustling boom town.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagged for blogspam. Original: <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca- solnit/diary> I think this was discussed recently, but I can't find it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Summary: SF is changing, new people with more money are displacing people with less money. Boohoo.

I'm surprised this anti free market, anti capitalism BS gets play on here.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, the less rich people live in SF, the better?

</comment><comment><USER6> This used to be Town vs Gown - the conflict between usually rich University students and those who actually lived in say Oxford.

Are well funded techies forcing out old people from their homes? No. Are they crowding out the marginal turnover of housing stock - yes. Will this matter? I don't know enough about SF to say for sure, but a town with a proud history, functioning democracy and plannin laws and plenty of juicy tax income has a problem that lets say Detroits mayor can only dream of</comment>