Why (Digital) Education is the new eCommerce - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextbigwhat.com/digital-education-is-the-new-ecommerce-297/

<comment><USER3> That sounds frightening to me. A bunch of people getting into the education market just because its the next big money maker is wrong. I deal with current education software on a daily basis. A large percentage of that is made or owned by Pearson as one example. The amount of money charged for something that is just terrible in every facet is sickening.

<comment><USER4> Pearson is not strong outside institutionalized education, which is not the growth space and is VERY hard for startups to address anyway. They have money to buy stuff, but their margins are eroding in print and the company isn't structured to innovate elsewhere, in large part because no-one running any division wants money-losing investments on their balance sheet. So the company has to acquire rather than innovate, and isn't even very good at that (Tutorvista???).

There is really interesting stuff happening in the adult education market that will eventually trickle into K12 and higher ed. It just isn't generally covered by edutech press because of the focus on institutional money. So don't fear the reaper and all, although I agree about the quality problems now things will look differently in ten years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> While the author believes that "the ease, access, convenience and lower cost [offered by online education] appeals to people just about everywhere" the huge - giant - glaring omission here is that education is not so much about enjoyment, ease, or cost as it is about developing your core competencies, content knowledge, and cognitive development - it must, in a word, work.

And, it doesn't.

I'll be quick to change my tune when online education proves itself effective - but right now online k12 education is failing miserably all around the country despite great promises and powerful support(e.g. there are current 16 online k12 charter schools in Pennsylvania getting terrible results).

This isn't a field in which innovators are allowed to fail for a year until they find appropriate answers to their problems - that year of failing is a year of their students failing to advance. There is no stomach from teachers, administrators, or parents for such bumbling - nor should there be.

<comment><USER6> I absolutely agree with your concerns. However there are very high number if success stories indicating that technology is the only solution. Very large scale adoption of services like Google apps for education, Edmodo, BetterLessons and Desire2Learn are the examples.

<comment><USER5> They are strong education tools, no doubt - but note that each of them is a support technology for traditional education, not a replacement for it. These success stories could not succeed (or usefully exist) without a well established traditional education system.

These are also not the sort of tools the article here is discussing (which instead posits that the future of education will be the replacement of traditional flesh-and-blood education with digital education platforms - <USER2> will fail).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Calling it _the next eCommerce_ might sound almost sinister if you are only considering it as a money-making opportunity.

However, working at kenHub (kenhub.com), a very small startup which aims to help medical students learn anatomy online, I personally find it very refreshing. It feels good helping the next generation of doctors and nurses. It's not really that much about money as it is about making a positive impact, and making student's lives easier.

It is an uphill struggle, against big publishers and the academic establishment, but students deserve better tools that are more agile, and fit with their existing lifestyles and habits.

</comment><comment><USER8> All the data mentioned there is all good... but I would suggest that you put some reference links to back it up...</comment>


Bypass Paywalls Clean for Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean <comment><USER2> I am not sure if I want to use this but I am happy to see an extension like this.

Of course the sites in question are allowed to try and raise money from me, and I feel I am allowed to try to dodge this.

More important however, I feel that these serious news sites with their current behavior are contributing to the fake news proliferation as people keep on reading news but since they cannot read serious news sites they are forced to read facebook's and other crappy sources their gossipy, manipulative and spammy propaganda.

I contribute money to The Guardian because of this, they vowed to keep their serious news site open and reward them a contribution for it, I hope more people will for the same reason.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have mixed feelings about this. My feeling when faced with a paywall is to simply click "back" \- if you don't want me to read your content, that's fine to me. You don't expect to be reading a full-text (say) Harry Potter out of a HN link, and I'm good with that, and I paid for my own copy. But a page that looks like content and then won't show it is bait-and-switch, so no thanks.

<comment><USER4> I approve this observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I really do not like about this fork is that it requests permission for all sites while the original version from iamadamdev only requests permission for sites the extension actually affects.

They briefly switched to all access (like the linked "bypass Paywalls Clean" above) but came around pretty quick to go back to their less invasive model.

See this issue thread on the original repo: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox/issues...](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox/issues/488)

<comment><AUTHOR> Permission for all sites is needed for adding custom sites. But I also saw a request for a release with limited permissions though (loosing custom sites feature).

<comment><AUTHOR> New 2nd limited-permissions release was added. Customs sites are not working, but now users have a choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this based on the plug-in by iamadamdev?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, major committer switched to clean version. Iamadamdev is just copying his fixes lately ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for making this! :D

</comment><comment><USER8> what's "clean" about this?

<comment> _-___________-_ Apparently the original extension has Google Analytics embedded in it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22482333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22482333)

<comment><USER5> I've just searched that and it appears that the Chrome version does have a GA embed, the Firefox version does not.

Here is the issue someone filed for it on the original repo: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- chrome/issues/...](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- chrome/issues/293)

<comment><AUTHOR> Adam's Firefox add-on supports fewer sites (even compared to his Chrome extension) and has lots of bugs (even more after reduction of permissions) ...

<comment><USER5> I don't know. Advertising a fork as "clean"ed from something the original project (the ff extension) never had feels a bit disingenuous, marketing-wise.

I'll stick with the old one as it requires less permissions. It seems to work as expected.

You seem to be very eager to point out the superiority of the fork. Are you involved in the project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, goodluck sticking to an 'inferior' repo. It's a free world after all ;-) Btw Clean postfix comes from Chrome extension. I'm just informing users of the new repo which also has an limited permissions release (custom sites not working then).

<comment><USER5> ...so you are part of this project, right?

That's not a big deal, of course. Usually quite the opposite. But usually people here don't try to deflect the question either, so..

It sounds a bit bitter as well. I'd love to see those projects ending up competing in a productive way!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm an user and close observer of this repo. But you're done now 'judging' my intentions?

<comment><USER5> I questioned your intentions, I didn't judge them - as I can't know them. I did judge your responses though. That's a good thing and something we owe to each other in a meaningful conversation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, disingenuous and bitter isn't anything like judging ;-) But goodluck with Adam's repo, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER5> > Sure, disingenuous and bitter isn't anything like judging

This was about your responses, not your intentions. That's also why I said I judged your response, not your intentions.

Quote:

> I did judge your responses though.

How would I know your intentions anyway?

If you search for "good luck" in this HN thread you'll see what I'm referring to.

<comment><USER9> If you're 'afraid' to move to a new and better add-on then don't blame the messenger for it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Refactored extension (no google analytics)/add-on with lots of new sites, bug- fixes, add custom sites and update-notification.

[https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox- clea...](https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean)

[https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome- clean](https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean)

<comment> _-___________-_ Did the original extension have Google Analytics embedded in it somehow?

<comment><AUTHOR> The original Chrome extension does indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very usefull extension indeed. Quick fixes and updates. Adding custom sites is a very interesting feature also.

</comment><comment><USER10> For as much as I'd like to receive the utility of such a thing, I don't see how this is anything different than outright theft and therefore it should not be something promoted by any means.

<comment><USER11> Clearly, if the websites didn't want you to read the article, they'd not send the content to your computer.

I usually just F12 and remove the offending elements or their styling, so that I can read the article. There's only two reasons that's possible: Either the developer hated that they block information, and left a way through for people, or they're incompetent. I like to assume the best in people and believe the former to be the case.

<comment><USER12> Clearly, if the websites didn't want you to download their customer db, they'd not let you inject SQL queries!

<comment><USER13> Is modifying the data that the server sends to my local machine as part of the server's expected operation, and then me not retransmitting that data a problem? That's how a user uses any accessibility feature (dark mode, screen reader mode, magnification/zoom, etc).

<comment><USER12> >Is modifying the data that the server sends to my local machine as part of the server's expected operation, and then me not retransmitting that data a problem?

Why not? It's pretty clear that you're knowingly doing this in order to exceed authorized access. Why is this different from exploiting a vulnerability?

Accessibility features are not intended to defeat access controls.

<comment><USER13> If that's the case, then browsers allowing people to view and manipulate the source of a web page (both initial download and XHR requests) are aiding in that process. If the ask is to walk back decades of being able to do exactly this sort of local manipulation of received data, then this form of the Internet would be like cable or satellite television with permitted forms of interactivity.

Why bring content to the Internet if there is desire to change the rules and norms of how the Internet works? Why not roll a separate version of the Internet with those desired rules? Yes, laws exist to protect copyright, prevent theft, and forbid illegal access, but those laws are insufficiently aware of how the Internet operates with respect to things like client-server communication. In fact, the design of the Internet predates many (if not all) of these laws, and the specifications of how the Internet works are a de facto law expressing how clients and servers interact with one another. Should lawmakers give requirements to the W3C to specify desired and undesired operations on the Internet?

I genuinely ask these questions in good faith: they are simply follow-on thoughts of mine from taking your point as a premise. If my ideas seems extreme or exaggerated, then that's simply where my mind goes first as opposed to necessarily being criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From a developer point of view, wouldn't it be more useful, ethical and financially effective to reach out to these websites and teach them how to implement paywalls right?

<comment> m-p-3 They want their articles to be indexed, but they don't want the end-user to see the content. You cannot have both effectively.</comment></comment>


The Real Problem In Working From Home (It's Not What You Think) - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/06/24/working-from-home/

<comment><USER2> I get the criticism of remote working; but the thesis statement "The very technology that enables telecommuting and working from home could be destroying its value" doesn't even make sense.

Somebody was working a little too hard to have a clever headline.</comment>


Tim Ferriss Wants to Hack Your Body - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_qa_ferriss <comment><USER2> Isn't anyone else here skeptical of Tim Ferriss?

Sure he's rich now, but he graduated from Princeton and self-admittedly worked 7 days a week in order to get his dietary supplement company BrainQuicken up and running. All this flies in the face of his 4-hour workweek book.

<comment><USER3> He addresses this in his book - creating the original "muse" is something that requires huge amounts of work and time. But the objective is to only develop the kind of business you can later automate, thereby reducing yourself to only 4-hours of busywork eventually - not total "work", mind you - so you can focus on the things you care about. In Tim's case, that "stuff you care about" appears to be creating a personal brand as a sort of life coach / marketing guru.

Like all business and self-helpy books, you have to take the 4HWW's subject matter as a skeptic, but there are some great nuggets in the book.

<comment><USER4> > there are some great nuggets in the book.

I typically detest self-help books but a small number of ideas from the book were enough to change my life: not checking email first thing in the morning; checking email at scheduled, limited times during the day; setting critical goals for each day and prioritizing them; and setting short limits on the amount of time I set aside for particular tasks.

I don't really care what criticism anyone might want to level at 4HWW (and I'm sure there's plenty), but for me, these simple ideas increased my work enjoyment and productivity tenfold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _In perhaps the most extreme undertaking, he packed on 34 pounds of muscle while dropping 3 pounds of fat in 28 days._

I could probably gain 31 pounds in 28 days if I wanted to too... In all seriousness, I'd like to see how he measured fat vs. muscle here. These self- aggrandizing lifestyle / diet gurus tend to make a lot of claims that fall flat when subjected to any sort of peer review.

 _... to compete in the kickboxing nationals... I weighed in at 165, and the next day I stepped onto the platform at 193._

So in this instance, he gained over a pound an hour... Is that really possible, even if it's all water?

<comment><USER3> Not to defend his actual results, as I am unaware of them, but this can be tracked by measuring your mass and volume (through water displacement), since fat and muscle have different and known densities.

You can also use a body fat caliper for more of an eyeballing of body fat percentage.

<comment><USER6> Sounds rather error-prone. If I wanted to fool myself into thinking that I'd swapped a lot of fat for a lot of muscle, what could I do? I'd try to increase density from one volume measurement to the other -- I could breathe in a lot of air during one measurement, and eat a lot of.. I dunno, fruit cake before the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am deeply skeptical that anything in this book will be even remotely healthy, but it should at least be good for entertainment value.

</comment><comment><USER8> It isn't an experiment without a control. There aren't any mentioned in the article - are they in the book?

<comment><USER9> The hair trim, lighting changes and Photoshop on the pictures in this related blog entry will give you an idea of how scientific the content is likely to be:

[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek- to...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-to-freak-how- i-gained-34-lbs-of-muscle-in-4-weeks/)

<comment><USER10> Not to mention the weird scaling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried the diet that he outlines here: [http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to- lose-...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs- of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise/)

I only did it for a few weeks before I went on vacation, but it worked really well. Not sure that I lost 20 lbs of fat, but I definitely lost some weight.

Now, his ideas weren't all that earth shattering, but I wonder how the intricacies of his diet generate different results from straight up Atkins. I'll never know for sure, but it worked for me.

<comment><USER12> > How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise

A pound of fat has 3500 calories. A 170 lbs. man needs something like 2500 calories per day if he doesn't exercise. (I think roughly 2000 for truly sedentary, 3000 for moderate activity.) That means that if you go _without any food whatsoever_ for a month, you just barely lose 20 lbs. (And if you do this, you'll probably become so weak and lethargic that you'll start burning less than 2000/day.)

There's just no reasonable way to lose 20 lbs. in 30 days without drugs, starving yourself, and/or a _very_ strenuous exercise regime. If you ran 10 miles per day (at 125 calories/mile) you'd still only be able to eat a very meager 1200 calories per day. You'd have to run almost a marathon every day in order to afford a normal calorie intake.

<comment><USER13> I've personally lost that much twice. The second time was due to illness while traveling, but the first time was when returning to serious distance running training after a multi-year layoff. Not only did I lost 20lbs in a month, it was a total of 55 lbs over three months. I went from struggling to do an easy one hour run to running over 150km/week.

I'm almost positive your math is off on the calorie burning. As an overweight guy, you should be burning over a 100 calories per _km_ , not mile. Also, there's more to it than just what you burn while running. After a certain tipping point (about an hour a day for me), it seems my body just doesn't _want_ to store fat. I'm not sure if it was a factor, but like most successful distance runners, I stuck to a low-protein mostly plant-based diet while training.

The other factor to consider is that someone approaching running from being a sedentary programmer (as opposed to a bodybuilder), you'll be building up muscle and even some bone mass as well as losing the fat. This is the case for pretty much any weight-bearing activity (eg, skiing, snowshoeing, etc)

<comment><USER12> > I went from struggling to do an easy one hour run to running over > 150km/week.

I think 150km/week qualifies as pretty strenuous! I'm not saying one _can't_ lose 20 lbs. / month, I'm saying it doesn't happen by just eating healthier, smaller meals.

> you should be burning over a 100 calories per km, not mile.

Well, 125 cal / mile = 78 cal / km, so we're not off by much. Certainly, there will be that much variance depending on whether you're (a) healthy but not lean or (b) fairly overweight

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really skeptical of what this book talks about (adding muscle mass in x days, weight loss by this, extend orgasms by that and what not) and sounds like a whole bunch of miracle cure type bullshit.

His diet outlines etc. are nothing but mashups of good nutrition advice out there and cherry picking some points about certain diets .. it almost seems like he spent a whole lot of time on messageboards and compiled what he read into a book ..

Blindly following the advice in the book could well be a recipe for disaster .. there's nothing like one-size-fits-all for the stuff he talks about in the book ...

btw .. have you ever seen those fat loss pill ads (hydroxycut and what not) where they show a reasonably inshape guy/gal in the before picture and an extremely ripped version of that person in the post picture? it's someone who's already well chiseled from the get go (fitness models basically) who don't workout for a few days and put on some fat by eating certain types of food .. then they go back to their nutrition and workout regimen to get back in the shape they were already in ..

e.g. the VPX Meltdown model had some sort of a genetic makeup that made him put on muscles very easily while losing fat (or appearing to do so) .. read that on a fitness board.

</comment><comment><USER15> _In any sport where power, speed, or endurance is a determining factor, everyone is using drugs._

I suspect he'll get a lot of "feedback" on that point. I'm no pro-sportsman, but that seems like quite the hot potato to throw out there.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am really surprised the by the reception here on HackerNews. Tim has a few hacks for the human body and knows how to market it well. That is all.

</comment><comment><USER17> When will we start seeing links to Kevin Trudeau on HN?

</comment><comment><USER18> > he packed on 34 pounds of muscle while dropping 3 pounds of fat in 28 days

sure.</comment>


Ask HN: Where in the world should I host my own services for privacy? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering what it would take to reduce my dependency on cloud services to see if I could tolerate the inconvenience. But one question is - where should I host it? Obviously these things change, but what are the good jurisdictions from a data protection point of view? <comment><USER2> Home? Can you beat your own house's privacy? You'd be in charge of security, encryption and everything else.</comment>


Emscripten gains experimental pthreads support - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/emscripten-discuss/gQQRjajQ6iY

<comment><USER2> Looks like this announcement is from two months ago. Anyone have experience using this?

<comment><USER3> I found some bugs and commented on the original pull request for the pthread support. [https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/pull/3266](https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/pull/3266).

In my opinion, the pthread support itself works well now. But the biggest problem of the implementation is that SharedArrayBuffer, the pthread support calls for, is implemented only in Firefox currently.

One of the purpose to use emscripten is made an application cross-platform web application. You can get a "non-webbish" code runs only in Firefox with pthread-supported emscripten as of now.

I'm looking forward to other browsers with SharedArrayBuffer support, especially Mobile Safari.

<comment><USER4> Looks like it's coming to Chrome: [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink- dev/d-0ibJwCS24)

But agree iOS Safari would be a great addition for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate all this web stuff so much. It's slowly reinventing the last 40 years of computing, only a slow, badly designed, unreliable base.

<comment><USER6> I don't think reinventing is quite right, reimplementing more like it.

Remember the thing that Microsoft was afraid of for the Web? A middle layer that makes your OS mostly irrelevant.

It took a roundabout way but we're getting there. Extremely high performance virtual machines that are all fairly compatible, are deployed across a vast range of operating systems and devices today.

Together with an UI toolkit that renders fairly similarly across all these devices.

Technically this maybe can't do things that a single computer couldn't do ages ago, but now every computer can run that code. And via LLVM you can compile almost anything to js.

And with a much better security model than "download random exe and run" as well.

The sneering merely shows that you haven't really thought about what is going on here.

<comment><USER7> The VMs aren't even close to "high performance" (although they are very wonderfully compatible), and the UI toolkit is not one (it's a document markup toolkit with buttons and such glued on, it's pretty awful compared to Mac OS's Interface Builder).

And any computer can run just about any kind of code now. Ask someone to download Python or LuaJIT and they can run your code.

Security models? In Lua, you can empty the environment and start fresh. You have a perfect sandbox with the flip of a switch.

I don't think the grandparent comment is sneering. I think he has an opinion that disagrees with yours.

<comment><USER8> >And any computer can run just about any kind of code now.

Not if it's compiled (C, C++ etc.), uses compiled libraries (many Lua, Java and .Net apps) or any system calls/libraries (.Net)

<comment><USER9> ...Did you miss that this article is about Emscriptem, which allows you to run C on JS? (this resolving your first issue)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project Atlas - <AUTHOR> https://www.bittorrent.com/project-atlas/ <comment><USER2> > Project Atlas will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network and the TRON > blockchain network via a set of bittorrent protocol extensions, a custom > token, and an in-client token economy to address existing limitations and > open a new borderless economy for exchanging value for computer resources on > a global scale.

I prefer the currencies of goodwill, altruism and data hoarding to provide humanity with access to media.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but isn't this the current system, which flaws (too many leechers not enough seeders) this project is trying to solve?

<comment><USER4> It's been a solved problem in private tracker communities - where users leach bandwidth is on a credit system and they need to maintain a ratio of upload/download to keep their access.

What TRON is trying to do is sell tokens to users to be able to access bandwidth. Where do these tokens come from to begin with? TRON just whips them up for free.

If I remember right, a famous Bittorrent group based out of the UK called Oink was shut down because they took donations for running the site. One can imagine the same fate would await TRON once the tokens are found facilitating pirated MPAA and copyright IP works.

<comment><USER5> I'd posit that such a setup will lead to users with low speed connection or connections which aren't online constantly to be banned or required to buy a pardon from the site when not fulfilling the seeding requirement (as every site policy I've seen required maintaining a ratio over time).

This happens because users with high speed connections are incentivized to seed well beyond 1:1 and thus there is rarely any demand for seeding. Downloading is super fast which just exasperates the problem as your share ratio drops below the acceptable rate quickly.

Thus such sites tend to make their money off the people who can likely afford it the least, while rewarding people with the disposable income required to live in a neighborhood with unlimited high speed internet and pay for said service.

There's also the matter of keeping content alive to consider. I'd consider it much more valuable to keep content with no or relatively few seeders alive than incentivizing seeders to add additional bandwidth to already popular torrents. I has not seen an site policy which encourages this, rather it likely punishes such activities as it bans users who are trying to reach a required share ratio without constant demand thus taking the content offline rather than keeping it available.

Whether or not Project Atlas will enable incentives for all users and multiple scenarios or if it will simply perpetuate a similar system to what is seen in the private torrenting communities remains to be seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TRON is the greatest scam the world has seen. Justin Sun hyped the price to unreal levels without a product, then sold at the height around new years '17/18\. Bought BitTorrent with the money. I'd stay far away from TRON

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't say "greatest scam the world has seen"; that's really selling the grand history of scams short. TRON may have been _profitable_ , but it was not terribly clever or high-effort; the crypto-speculation space was just abnormally high in unreasonably-enthusiastic suckers.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough, but TRON created $14B out of thin air.

<comment><USER4> "$14B" on paper - but the real value of what could be extracted from market sells would be immensely less.

Those numbers are based on the market spot price, and not the order book support from real world buyers. Cryptocoin exchanges are mostly bots and the order books are mostly loaded with spoofed bids that are pulled away once real buyers and sellers start pushing one way or the other, hence the volatility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What happened to IPFS and Filecoin? Project Atlas seems to be bad copy of that since it is very much connected with TRON scam: [https://twitter.com/juanbenet/status/950142785373405184](https://twitter.com/juanbenet/status/950142785373405184)

<comment><USER9> And Filecoin is not a "scam"? So far there has been no proof that "proof of replication" and "proof of spacetime" is even possible.

<comment><USER10> Can you point me to some resources on this topic. Would be quite interesting for me.

<comment><USER11> Here's Proof of Spacetime:

[https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf](https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf)

and here's Proof of Replication:

[https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf](https://filecoin.io/proof-of- replication.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Project Atlas will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network and the TRON blockchain network via a set of bittorrent protocol extensions, a custom token, and an in-client token economy to address existing limitations and open a new borderless economy for exchanging value for computer resources on a global scale."

How did we get to the point where words simply don't mean anything anymore?

<comment><USER13> You mean proactive award winning innovative solutions leveraging state of the art leading technologies don't engage with industry standard customer expectations on value proposition, or what?

<comment><USER14> I paradigmed in my pants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore? At least in first world countries? Besides, bittorrent works great as is, if people start making money on seeding, they will be way easier targets in court when sued by majors. What's the advantage here?

<comment><USER16> Let's talk purely about piracy for a second, as a legitimate use for legitimate owners, based on something that happened to me a couple of days ago:

I own two copies of this game, From Dust (which is fantastic, by the creator of Another World), one of them on disc and one of them on Steam, separate keys.

I installed it from Steam because I don't have an optical drive handy and the key is not on the case for some reason. So the game makes me sign up for a UPlay account (in addition to having the Steam stuff), which apparently I did in the past, and not with my primary email. So I can't play because it's already activated... and installing it from Steam doesn't tell UPlay that I own it on Steam.

So then I go and email Ubisoft tech support and say I have this key and haven't played in 5 years how can I swap it over to my new email.

A day later I get a reply that they want me to go screenshot my transaction history and my CD Key (which I already sent them) in the Steam UI.

...meanwhile, I was able to download ("pirate") and install the game in 5 minutes, and it doesn't require either the Steam or the Uplay account to work. AND it'll keep on working 50 years after Steam and Ubisoft are both bankrupt (or keep working on your OS/vm/whatever when Steam and Ubisoft discontinue support for it).

So yeah, there's a use for bittorrent & piracy, since DRM ruins your ability to archive any-damn-thing now. Without bittorrent, playing that game would be a terrible ordeal, if it is even possible at all. Paying for it (twice) only made it worse.

<comment><USER17> This is one of the reasons I make efforts to buy games via gog.com rather than Steam (the other reason is that Steam is dangerously close to a monopoly, and that never ends well).

<comment><USER18> Gog and the Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot of titles just have Steam Keys).

You do lose the save game/cloud sync, but you gain copies of your game that will always work without needing to verify your licence over the Interwebs.

<comment><USER19> > Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot of titles > just have Steam Keys)

I've been griping lately that Humble Bundle seems increasingly watering down their principles. Early Humble Bundle made it a big deal that they always included DRM free copies and more often than not full soundtracks or soundtracks at a discount. Today's Humble Bundle seems much more and more to "just" be a Steam Key reseller, without DRM free copies of many games, and without access to nearly as large of a percentage of game soundtracks.

(I realize that last is a weird gripe, but there were a lot of games I picked up for their soundtracks because of artists I enjoyed, and sometimes I'd be surprised and really enjoy the associated game, but even if I didn't like the game I still got my money's worth from the soundtrack. I've now switched to buying from the artists more often directly from Bandcamp and rarely if ever buying the associated games, or just waiting for a direct Steam or Microsoft Store sale.)

It certainly feels from Humble's emails that they are very deeply focused on their Monthly Pass, and it feels almost to the detriment of everything else, but then Monthly Pass things don't really appeal to me in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've waited for about half a minute and the page still doesn't display anything but just loads my CPU (I have retried a number of times with no luck).

<comment><USER21> I can load it on mobile, but it won't let me scroll down to read more than the first half sentence.

<comment><USER22> Yeah same here on android chrome. How can something so simple as a blog post can have so many problems just rendering?

<comment><USER11> Any marketing blog posts / pages should always be (cached) static HTML.

Helps a lot if you don't have to render content that will remain mostly static to thousands upon thousands of visitors instead of just fetching a file and returning that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Back in the day, Mojo Nation (one of Bittorrent's ancestors -- sort of) incentivized people for sharing their disk space and network bandwidth. You'd earn "mojo" for doing that, and could trade it for faster downloads.

An interview: [https://www.salon.com/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/](https://www.salon.com/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The entire page must be an advertisement... it is rendered as blank white page (uBlock Origin).

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice, not even 4 months after releasing this.

[http://blog.bittorrent.com/2018/06/19/user- message/](http://blog.bittorrent.com/2018/06/19/user-message/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks similar to [http://joystream.co](http://joystream.co) which has been paying users with BCH for the past few months.

<comment><USER27> would much rather use bitcoin cash over a tron backed token.

Tron is nothing more than a pump and dump with a pagiarised whitepaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It avoids saying pay for files, I feel like the music/media industry's lawyers would have a fieldday with anyone using this to "share" music files

</comment><comment><USER29> Firefox doesn't like the site:

> The resource at "[https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc- > valid...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc- > validate.js") was blocked because tracking protection is enabled.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it just me or is scrolling broken on mobile?

<comment><USER31> Works fine in the in-app browser of "Hacker News" on iOS

<comment><USER32> The only browser engine allowed on iOS is Safari's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great website, doesn't load with an ad blocker enabled. Fucking late stage ad tech..

<comment><USER34> cannot scroll on chrome (android) either

<comment> nevi-me Use Desktop mode, someone didn't check whether the website loads properly. Also had the same problem with Chrome on Android</comment></comment></comment>


ICANN seeking input on ceding control of WHOIS privacy to governments [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/proposed-interim-model-gdpr-compliance-summary-description-28feb18-en.pdf <comment><USER2> Clickbait title. This is out for community review, nothing is final yet.

[https://www.icann.org/news/blog/data-protection-privacy- upda...](https://www.icann.org/news/blog/data-protection-privacy-update- seeking-input-on-proposed-interim-model-for-gdpr-compliance)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, time will tell what happens after the review but we all know what ICANN has done in the past!

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed it. I guess now it's better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This sounds like the whois privacy that we all know and have to pay for, will be mandatory to implement on all domains everywhere, becoming free?

<comment><USER4> That's the impression I got from reading the EFF report on it; the GDPR makes WHOIS essentially impossible.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/europes-gdpr-will- forc...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/europes-gdpr-will-force-icann- improve-whois-privacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is amazing.

Finally I can stop all that "SIGN UP YOUR WEBSITE FOR <SERVICE>" spam incoming from my whois entries.

<comment><USER6> Think so?

"The public WHOIS would include an anonymized email address or a web form from which messages could be forwarded to the registrant email address."

<comment><USER5> That's far better than the current system.

Atm I have to expose my email domain, which means some spammers just fire a broadside of this crap.

When it comes from an anonymized email forwarder, I can easily just redirect it into the spam folder.

<comment><USER7> What purpose does the Whois email serve if most people want to directly send it to their spam box? Seems like they should just scrap it.

<comment><USER8> What if there's something illegal, violating copyright, etc. on the site? Or to take a less legal example, what if someone's site is hacked? You need some way of getting in touch with the owners.

<comment><USER9> The snail-mail address of the registered agent would suffice. The cost of postage is sufficient to deter the least-determined spammers. And the most- determined spammers would be deterred by the most potentially profitable targets having legal departments handling the mail received by their registered agents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone else think things like this, dns, ssl authority, and lots more a better areas to focus blockchain tech toward?

<comment><USER11> Everyone ignores that in order for a blockchain to work, there needs to be a governance model that weeds out bad actors. In finance markets, this is somewhat ok because the governance model of laissez-faire economics (a common mental model to apply to finance) is simply "buy at your own risk". That governance model won't work for something like DNS — if control of a DNS name is maliciously reassigned, there would need to be some agreement around how that gets done and who has the authority to do that.

Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized authority model that Bitcoin has, it's going to be a tiered trust authority in the same way that SSL roots work today. You're going to end up with very similar governance models and the same organizations, just implemented in blockchain.

I think some of the important impacts of blockchain are yet to be recognized: I do think it will force us to fundamentally think about what consensus and rule of law means in any given scenario, and that will have some pretty outsized social impacts — especially in the way we run organizations.

We will have to be _far_ more deliberate about how we design our governance models, but I worry they will become so complex as to grow beyond the possibility of oversight...

<comment><USER12> > Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized > authority model that Bitcoin has, it's going to be a tiered trust authority > in the same way that SSL roots work today.

it's going to be very difficult to code for:

"we, as a network, accept this authority... to a degree"

I still think it can be done.</comment></comment></comment>


NSA agents illegally spied on love interests 'only' 12 times - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/usa/nsa-agents-spied-lovers-only-463/

<comment><USER2> From the people that admitted themselves. Also, let's not forget that Snowden managed to get all sorts of data they didn't even know he took until he went public with it - and they still don't know exactly what he took in full. How many actual spies could've done that and then sell that info? Even CIA admitted that there are a lot of people trying to become double agents at CIA, and that's just for people they find out about. It can probably happen at NSA, too, especially with 3rd party companies having access to that much data.</comment>


London Bus Stop Distance Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://www.michalpaszkiewicz.co.uk/blog/busdistributions/index.html <comment><USER2> Needs a discussion of the methodology of calculation.

The distances I'm getting from the downloaded "bus-sequences.csv" (from TfL's API site) differ substantially; e.g my 53 has averages of 317m and 357m vs his 201m and 219m.

Additionally, my numbers match up with those of 'superqwert from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029476) for the 389 and 631 routes.

(I measured a bunch of stops of the 78 route with GPS earlier this week. My calculations correlated closely with the real* distances when the looseness of GPS from downstairs on a bus is taken into account.)

<comment><USER3> The numbers on 389 and 631 agree with my post linked above to 3SF... Rerunning my previous query on 53 gets me:

min: 11.176937891670061

lq: 69.77607205565486

med: 147.79705350080133

avg: 219.3995096050874

uq: 291.84606245281907

max: 1121.239174918762

I wonder where you got your csv data from exactly? I found a csv ([https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/stop- sequences-e...](https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/stop-sequences- example.csv)) that is labelled "The example feeds below are not updated and for demonstration purposes only".

For my query I called the route sequence API directly:

[https://api.tfl.gov.uk/line/53/Route/Sequence/inbound](https://api.tfl.gov.uk/line/53/Route/Sequence/inbound)

<comment><USER2> The CSV is this one - [http://tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/bus- sequences.csv?ap...](http://tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/bus- sequences.csv?app_id=&app_key=)

I get the same sequence of stops from that API link that the CSV has for route 53, run 2, albeit with northing/easting location instead of lat/long.

(I'm extremely sceptical about the 11m minimum distance too - having done the entire 53 route a few times, I can't remember any stops that are basically _on top_ of each other.)

<comment><USER3> I think I've found the issue with the 11m distance - the 11m distance is:

[-0.126102, 51.502769] to [-0.126018, 51.502714]

What is happening is that the TfL sequence API is starting the bus route sequence on one side of the road of Parliament Street, before turning it around at the corner with Whitehall Place. The bus stops on either side of the road are very close together. Other maps/sequences elsewhere start the sequence at the end of Parliament Street, meaning the short distance is avoided.

<comment><USER2> Ah, you're parsing the `lineStrings` blob? I'm looking at the lat/long pairs in the `stopPointSequences` structure[1] which gives a different set of coords (in particular, 51.502769, -0.126102 doesn't exist as a stop for the 53.)

[1] `.stopPointSequences | .[0] | .stopPoint | .[] | [.name, .id, (.lat|tostring), (.lon|tostring)]` in jq parlance

<comment><USER3> Interesting! I wonder why the Line strings blob differs... Maybe it doesn't represent bus stops at all, but points at which the route changes for the purpose of drawing?

<comment><USER2> It does seem to be "the route as you'd show on a map" \- if I plot the two sets points on GPSVisualizer, it's fairly different.

[https://imgur.com/a/BUSW3C2](https://imgur.com/a/BUSW3C2)

I guess the 389/631 routes are reasonably simple and don't need more "drawing points" than you'd get from the bus stops anyway?

[edit: added the 389 bus stops and line points to the imgur gallery]

<comment><USER3> nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> TFL uses so called PTALs to put a number on public transport accessibility.

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

On a map - [https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/urban-planning-and- construction/...](https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/urban-planning-and- construction/planning-with-webcat/webcat?intcmp=25932)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish we had more "long distance" buses in London.

It takes forever to get anywhere on a bus because it stops so frequently. I'd be really keen to get buses that dont stop until they get to major places.

E.g. you could have bus routes that only go between stations on different routes. Take Camden Town to Finsbury Park as an example - no direct rail route between them, about 2.5 miles apart by road. The 253 stops _sixteen_ times (according to Google Maps) when going between those stations.

<comment><USER6> To the exact opposite side of that spectrum/opinion; I rarely use buses in London -underground is more convenient for my routes- but the few times I have to use a but, it mostly is the Night Bus(es).

It amazed me how it makes one stop almost on every block (statistics seem to agree on that). Yes it becomes annoying if your route is 5k-10k (or start-to- end), but I was thinking of all the people that need to use the bus, in the middle of the night, on areas that may not be very well lit, it is MUCH safer if they have to 50m-100m than 1km.

It is just a trade-off between speed vs safety/comfort/convenience.

I am also thinking that during the day this makes the life of older people, people with mobility challenges, parents with prams, shoppers, school children so much more comfortable.

<comment><USER7> In San Francisco there are some block with maybe five different bus stops on them. In general many routes stop every block, or nearly every block. Part of the reasoning is that there are standards for stop spacing. Off the top of my head I don't remember the specifics but it's along the lines of x% of the city's population must have a bus stop within y feet that provides service at least z hours a day. Stops along a line must be within n feet unless it's on a grade > j% in which case the distance is some fraction of n.

This all works extremely well in theory but is incredibly resource intensive. There've been plenty of discussions on how to speed up service by eliminating some stops — but this is complicated by Muni being a system with a dependency on transfers and by people having their own favorite pet stop. So what happens? Muni goes after lightly used lines — like the line that served Treasure Island. Of course the geniuses at Muni didn't seem to care that you can't walk/bike to Treasure Island. It's personal or public motorized transit only (or it was when they first tried to gut the 108).

The night buses in San Francisco are a godsend, and quite unique in the Bay Area, but not particularly well utilized — partly a visibility issue I'm sure. The stops are generally about as frequent but the service itself is much less frequent (once or twice an hour typically — or roughly 1/2 to 1/4 the daytime service) and there are fewer routes (a few routes run 24x7, there are bus lines that replace the rail lines stop for stop, and two or three dedicated "Owl" lines). Aside from the really infrequent schedules, the biggest challenge is that runs go missing all the fucking time because absolutely none of the street supervisors even notice when the first run or two doesn't go out. Of course once you get on a bus, if you're on an owl route… good luck figuring out where the driver is going to stop.

Meanwhile in London I remember taking the bus from Liverpool St station around 1am ages ago (the 23?). The service seemed reasonably frequent and there were plenty of stops (same as the daytime as far as I could figure). The big challenge I had was understanding the driver — I couldn't see very well out the window. I remember the bus itself seemed fairly crowded — compared to SF where the night buses really empty out as you get away from downtown / market st.

The one thing I've seen that I think would benefit SF (and to a lesser extent London or any area looking to beef up their late night service) was in New York. If you're on a bus at night the drivers are allowed to let you off anywhere along the route as long as it appears safe to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029476)

</comment><comment><USER9> For the TfL API, have a look at [https://api.tfl.gov.uk/](https://api.tfl.gov.uk/). You can also get GeoJSON line strings of the bus stops (or other modes of transport!) if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some people who you might not normally expect to, do concern themselves about bus routes.

[https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm](https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm)

<comment><USER11> Does this person have some reputation that others of us could recognise, that would lead us to expect him not to be interested in bus routes? I found the site mystifying, but clicking around suggested someone more on the Timecube than the eminent-public-figure side.

<comment><USER12> W.J. Sidis was one of the 20th century's most well known classical polymaths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks all for the help - some of you noticed the data was erroneous. It is all fixed now</comment>


Pinterest acquires Jelly, a truly terrible search engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/8/14857360/pinterest-jelly-acquisition <comment><USER2> much snark.</comment>


The Man Who Invented Modern Probability - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/the-man-who-invented-modern-probability <comment><USER2> > _Kolmogorov armed a group of researchers with electromechanical calculators > and charged them with the task of calculating the rhythmical structures of > Russian poetry_

And this is what "big data" and NLP were like before computers :).

One can only imagine what he could have done with a modern computer. (Which is particular hard to imagine because he's responsible for advances which ultimately led to these same modern computers...)

Also, as an aside, I'm very impressed by the quality of nautil.us articles. I've come a across a few randomly, and they've been uniformly high in quality, interesting and insightful.

Moreover, unlike much popular science/math reporting, the articles are not ridden with obvious errors and yet are easily followed by somebody not in the field. An impressive combination. (Not surprising for this particular article, I suppose: it was written by a professor teaching the history of mathematics at MIT.)

<comment><USER3> >And this is what "big data" and NLP were like before computers :)

aside, I recently interviewed a candidate for a "Big Data" position. He got quite chatty about Kolmogorov & Measure Theory, so I quickly cooked up an interesting problem to relax his nerves. I opened the interview with "If the side of a cube comes from a uniform distribution between 1 and 5 inches, what's the expected volume of the cube ?" I thought he'll give me the answer in 10 seconds & we'll move on but instead he was completely stumped & just stared blankly. I asked him to use the whiteboard but he simply drew a cube and wrote a^3, a~[1,5], and then went back to staring at it. Finally after 10 minutes of pin-drop silence, my partner, a non-math guy, took over the interview & asked him some Hadoop related technology questions & he started speaking again.

<comment><USER4> 27?

<comment><USER5> 39

<comment><USER6>
        from random import random
        sum([(random()*4+1)**3 for x in xrange(1000000)])/1000000
        => ~39

Weird.

<comment><USER7>
      sum(random.uniform(1, 5)**3 for i in range(10000)) / 10000

Many people don't know that the random module allows to sample from many distributions directly without having to construct your own.

<comment><USER8> I like the first version better because everyone knows what infix * and + do.

<comment><USER9> I like the second version better because it taught me something I didn't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The treatment of the Paradox of the Great Circle in the article is not very good. If you're left wondering, Wikipedia helps:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel%E2%80%93Kolmogorov_parado...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel%E2%80%93Kolmogorov_paradox#A_great_circle_puzzle)

<comment><USER11> tl;dr Because Great Circles have measure 0, any treatment of probability on them must instead use limits that asymptotically approach Great Circles. Also because they have measure 0, such limits don't converge in a consistent fashion. As it turns out, the two most common limit constructions give different results for that particular problem.

The closest analogy I can think of is trying to assign a value to the expression 0/0\. It doesn't have a value, but you can construct limits that appear to converge to it. One such limit is lim{x/x} as x approaches 0, which tends to 1. Another limit is lim{x log(x)} as x approaches 0, which tends towards 0. Both of these constructions have claim to being the value of 0/0, and they don't reconcile with each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My father was the grand-grad student of Kolmogorov. He (Kolmogorov) is a very impressive mathematician. My father's advisor, Yakov Sinai, is equally impressive and arguably one of the founders of Dynamical Systems, a very interesting subfield of mathematics (and, in some ways, probability theory) in its own right.

<comment><USER13> Do you mean Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy? I just read about this in _Chaos Theory Tamed_ by Garnett P. Williams. Really interesting stuff with respect to information theory in dynamical systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> An interesting take the Kolmogorov system can be found here:

[http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/cappal.pdf](http://www- biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/cappal.pdf)

In it E. T. Jaynes compares Bayesian statistics Kolmogorov probabilities and finds them essentially identical in result even after working from very different first principles.

<comment><USER15> For anyone interested, the above appendix comes from ET Jaynes's _[1]_ magnum opus, _" Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" [2]_.

Which, IMHO is deserving of it's grand title and provides an excellent framework for using Bayes in the real world.

_[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Thompson_Jaynes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Thompson_Jaynes) _

_[2][http://shawnslayton.com/open/Probability%20book/book.pdf](http://shawnslayton.com/open/Probability%20book/book.pdf) _

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have no reason to particularly disbelieve the research that went into this article. But I'm just naturally skeptical when he reels off a list of puns that depend on the english language used by a group of Russian researchers. This seems unlikely to me. It seems like unnecessary color of dubious provenance.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why haven't I heard of this journal? Looks great.

<comment><USER18> It's a startup! They started publishing about a month ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >For example, irrational numbers—those that cannot be written as fractions— almost surely have no pattern in the numbers that appear after the decimal point. Therefore, most irrational numbers are complex objects, because they can be reproduced only by writing out the actual sequence.

That's false. Pi is irrational, but there's many short algorithms to calculate it's digits.

<comment><USER20> The key phrases there are "almost surely" and "most irrational numbers." There are irrational numbers like pi which can be defined algorithmically, but taken together as a set they have zero Lebesgue measure. (In fact, they're countable.)

<comment><USER19> I didn't know that. Any link to a proof?

<comment><USER21> Consider the set P of programs that take no input and generate an infinite stream of digits. Each program in P has a finite length and is written out of a finite set of symbols, so there must only be a finite number of programs of any given length. That makes P countable. Let Q be the set of numbers described by programs in P. Each program from P describes exactly one number, so Q must also be countable. The set of irrational numbers is uncountable, so there must be an uncountable set of "complex" irrational numbers remaining after you take away all the "non complex" ones in Q.

<comment><USER19> Your proof seems to only prove that a finite number of programs (described by you) which can produce a finite number of irrational numbers, while there are infinite number of irrational numbers.

But we're surely not talking about a finite number of programs.

I'm not even sure what the Kolmogorov complexity of a "complex irrational number" means. If you need the sequence of digits and you cannot use an algorithm to produce the digits, then the complexity is infinite?

<comment><USER21> For each fixed length there are a finite number of programs of that length. If we use 8-bit bytes for the alphabet, there are 256^N programs of length N. The set of ALL programs is infinite (we don't limit the length of programs), but it is countable.

The "countable" part means we can put the set into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. The correspondence starts with 0 mapping to the empty program, then 1-256 mapping to programs of a single byte, then 257-65793 mapping to the programs of two bytes, and so on. This mapping will hit each program exactly once, and it will hit every program because every individual program has a finite length.

Different types of infinities are not intuitive so don't feel bad if the concepts are confusing. These issues troubled lots of very smart mathematicians for decades. The existence of irrational numbers was hugely troubling to Pythagoreans. The existence of uncountable infinities discovered by Cantor was shocking [1].

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_theory)

<comment><USER22> In some sense, the existence of irrational numbers with no pattern in their digits is an illusory artifact of the number system. We can talk about them collectively because decimals are not required to have an end, and we have to postulate them to fill in the gaps in the number line, but such numbers lack any description or means of being separated as individuals.

But then, is any mathematical abstraction real? I guess it's all beside the point.

<comment><USER21> > But then, is any mathematical abstraction real? I guess it's all beside the > point.

I actually think the reality of mathematical abstractions is hugely important because of... computer programs! In a real way, programs are the embodiment of mathematics. I want my programs to work so I need the underlying math to work as well.

That's why I'm a constructivist. I reject the law of the excluded middle because proofs that use it don't translate into real programs; they translate into programs that ask an omnipotent oracle to decide which branch to take. Constructive proofs translate into working programs.

It also ties into philosophy. I am a skeptic, so when someone tells me either A or not A must be true even if we can never know which one, I ask for proof or justification of that fact. The justifications that I get are remarkably similar to logical "proofs" that god exists, and just as fallacious. This isn't to say that there couldn't be an ultimate truth about A or a god, just that it is not logically necessary.

<comment><USER22> Interesting. I'm not all that up on philosophy, and I had to look up constructivism and the law of the excluded middle. Computers can only deal directly with discrete math, so that eliminates quite a bit of mathematics. Moreover, despite being regarded as Turing machines, you could in reality count all the states that a computer could be in, by counting the bits of memory, and you will find that it's a finite number. So computers are, in fact, only finite state machines. It's often overlooked that what makes a Turing machine a Turing machine is the infinitely-long tape. So computers occupy a fairly small sliver of the infinite universe of math.

Philosophically, my worldview is like that of science: the way to know something is by making observations and formulating and testing hypotheses. What we can observe is limited, and hypotheses are only models that are tested by successive approximations. I'm not sure I understand what you mean that that statement isn't required to have an ultimate truth. Presumably a statement like that has an answer, but the fact that something is knowable in principle doesn't mean that there's any way to get the answer. For instance, the Hubble telescope can see far away galaxies that we can never get an up close look at. The question of whether there's life somewhere else in the universe must have an answer, but we can't know what's in those galaxies; even with a better telescope, we'd be seeing what they looked like a billion years ago. Many things will never be known.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought this was going to be about Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace who wrote A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities in 1814.

[http://neuroself.com/2012/01/21/pierre-simon- laplace-1814-a-...](http://neuroself.com/2012/01/21/pierre-simon- laplace-1814-a-philosophical-essay-on-probabilities/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I am not a statistician, but if I found myself in an infinite forest, I would probably get drunk, too.

</comment><comment><USER25> Discovered, not invented.

<comment><USER26> > Discovered, not invented.

This refers to a philosophical debate that asks whether mathematics is part of nature or an artificial invention of man. I think the debate has begun to lean toward mathematics being part of nature, in which case yes, the proper term is discovered.

<comment><USER27> Interestingly enough this notion, that there is only this one type of probability was debated before Kolmogorov by people like Ramsey and Keynes. Now the subjective interpretation of probability is called Bayesian statistics, which is not a helpful term.

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability- interpret/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How is this not about Francis Galton?!

<comment><USER29> For those not in the know, Galton invented the simplest way of understanding normal distribution. Here's a copy you ca ceck on your phone. www.intromath.ca/aakkozzll

A quote from Galton: [http://www.aakkozzll.com/docs/order/galton.htm](http://www.aakkozzll.com/docs/order/galton.htm)</comment></comment>


Separating from the Flock - <AUTHOR> http://blog.embed.ly/post/48863115964/separating-from-the-flock

<comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of embedly and will continue to use them, this is a bit aggravating though. I think it's important to lay the blame with the party responsible here - twitter; for their increasingly developer hostile attitude.

Why the hell does it matter to them how I acquire the embed code? I'm still using the same damn code, all this does is make my life harder.

</comment><comment><USER3> Twitter cannot call this oEmbed. Their API documentation is lying.</comment>


Tenmiles - A Bootstrapped Product company - Journey so far - <AUTHOR> http://tenmiles.com/journey.php Tenmiles is bootstrapped software company based out of Chennai. !2 years old :) <comment><USER2> The key here is the initiative taken by a few employees, to make something special for the company and it's founder. Tops!</comment>


Chile crisis: Fearlessness and anger drive protesters - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50151323 <comment><AUTHOR> I just want to say that if the deaths would have happened Hong-Kong or Venezuela you would see western journalist calling for intervention. Inequality is something that has taken the world and it's not about ideology. Chile Government and YouTube have been taking down videos showing the military violence against civilian.</comment>


WalmartLabs Discusses how Node.js Performed on Black Friday - <AUTHOR> http://nodeup.com/fiftysix

<comment><USER2> I tried, but couldn't make it through.

Here's an approximate quote from about 25 minutes in (on mobile clients):

"between latency, long connection, disconnects, just incomplete socket transactions are not very polite in terms of how TCP is being used so you don't always get your heartbeat or your acknowledgement or the termination of the connection. And so it really creates a lot of stress on your servers because they end up with quite a lot of crap that they have to maintain. And Node does a really great job of doing it all for you."

To be fair, he does go on to explain some of what it doesn't do for you though.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a lot of interesting takeaways in this interview, at least for me. Some of them include:

\- They are a very distributed team and that seems to work well for them. Interesting to see at a large company like Walmart.

\- The node.js framework they use (I believe they are the original authors as well) is [http://spumko.github.io/](http://spumko.github.io/)

\- There's a ton of upside in the network centric nature of node.js for them.

\- They sound like a very competent, small team, so some of the successes can also be attributed to that, rather than necessarily be all thanks to node.js (despite my own bias)

\- It's great to have such high traffic installation of node.js out there, since it brings up the production quality of node.js

</comment><comment><USER4> I will wait for a blog post with pretty graphs.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, they've got an army of underpaid workers in China putting one together as we speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> transcript?

</comment><comment><USER7> dtrace would catch the leak in 10 minutes!

</comment><comment><USER8> TL;DL !</comment>


Open Source AI for Economic Policy Recommendations - <AUTHOR> https://blog.einstein.ai/the-ai-economist-moonshot/ <comment><USER2> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification)

Preference Falsification is likely the most important, under used theory in economics. I suspect these models will fail miserably because they will always have bad data until we stop silencing opinions we do not agree on.

Let's have constructive conversations please, please, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Huge amounts of economic data come from inherently boring, unbiased sources (employment records, tax records, exports, manufacturing output, etc...). What data do you think is being falsified? You seem to be referring to survey-type data.

<comment><USER2> Claiming any data as unbiased seems illogical to me, note how they are constantly revised.

Yes, people's response to surveys are one. Their reaction to policy is another. If this "ai" is modelling policy decisions and outcomes, what data is being feed in?

Further, how does one explain said "ai" recommendations and rational to the public?

(edit)

After looking over the code, I find this model incredibly simplistic and not capable of nearing the complexity IRL.

<comment><AUTHOR> People's reactions to policy decisions/outcomes don't matter nearly as much as the actual outcomes. I think most people will agree that simultaneously raising GDP per capita while reducing inequality and increasing innovation would be a good outcome. Those are all things that can be quantified and measured with very little bias. Survey data isn't as important comparatively.

As for the model explaining itself: the model can show relationships and patterns that humans hadn't previously detected, because there were too many variables. We can deduce new economic strategies by observing model output, such that we can even carry out those strategies without further use of the model. There are also ways to make ML models explain themselves.

<comment><USER2> I will respectfully disagree with the last two paragraphs without going point by point. I sense too much attachment to the project and biases therein.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do to with crypto miner? - <AUTHOR> Last year at the height of the crypto craze I spent about $6,000 building an ethereum miner. Now that crypto is lower than when I built it, and the summer heat combined with the heat from the miner is making my office nearly uninhabitable, I'm wondering if I should convert the miner to a rig for ML, a gaming rig, or disassemble it and sell the parts. The miner has 6 RX-580s and 2 GTX-1070s, an i5, a decent motherboard, a 1350W power supply, and a 8GB of RAM. I'm curious if anyone in the HN community has suggestions, or stories about similar scenarios. All serious replies will be considered and are appreciated.<p>Thanks folks! <comment><USER2> Honestly, I would continue mining with it. ETH and a lot of other coins will recover one day. You may take a hit now, but when it spikes again...

<comment><USER2> Also out of curiosity if you don't mind, what sort of rates were you getting, how many coins had you mined and what hive were you part of?

<comment><AUTHOR> I use ethermine and have been getting about 180Mhs. I've only mined eth, as it has been the most profitable and I have less confidence in other coins that don't require specialized hardware.</comment></comment></comment>


Natural nuclear fission reactor - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor <comment><USER2> _Published in 2010, a controversial hypothesis about the origin of the Moon proposes that the Moon may have been formed from the explosion of a georeactor located along the core-mantle boundary at the equatorial plane of the then- rapidly rotating Earth, 4.5 billion years ago._

Whoa, I didn't know that was even an option. I thought Verneshots were scary, but that's just orders of magnitude more impressive.</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't there a "Manhattan project" for Covid19? - <AUTHOR> Trillions of money are being printed but the funding of specific efforts is not coordinated, apart from maybe the contributions of rich people like Gates. Lots of scientists are basically sitting idle. <comment><USER2> COVID-19 has been called[1] a 'wicked problem'[2] -- tackling it requires efforts across various social systems that may interact unpredictably.

That makes it challenging for organizers to set up and assign funding to one individual project. Instead we're seeing lots of initiatives spring up to improve outcomes in specific areas.

It'd be great to match people who want and are comfortably able to help with effective, useful projects that need their skills.

From what I've seen so far around the Hacker Newsiverse, 'Help With Covid'[3] seems to be a well-organized meta-organization that is responding to the crisis, and I'd be glad to hear of others.

[1] - [https://apnews.com/bee165affca84bf3f447453eb2034e13](https://apnews.com/bee165affca84bf3f447453eb2034e13)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem)

[3] - [https://helpwithcovid.com/](https://helpwithcovid.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of scientists are busy working on Covid19. I'd wager that there are more of them working on Covid19 today than there were working on the Manhattan project then.

The Manhattan project was also, and perhaps mostly, an industrial effort: 90% of the budget went into industrial capability to produce the fissile material, and it took years to achieve.

In industry if you invest twice as much you double your production capability, but in research it does not add up that way. Things do not happen overnight even if you offer to pay more, a la Trump.

</comment><comment><USER4> The US at least no longer has the unity, trust, or will to coordinate collective action through government.</comment>


Rackspace CEO: 'We're playing a different game' than Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/rackspace-ceo-were-playing-a-different-game-than-amazon/

<comment><USER2> Can anyone tell me what goes into Fanatical Support by rackspace?

I've always considered them for my deployments, but they end up being 3x the cost of other managed hosts that I've been happy with.

So what exactly is it that Rackspace does?

<comment><USER3> It's pretty good, ranges from things like pre warning of issues like disk failures, right through to detailed breakdowns of what went wrong if one of your machines goes down.

It's among the best it support I've ever received</comment></comment>


Product Managers, Stop Pissing Off The Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissing-off-the-engineers/#more-444 <comment><USER2> You know... This brings a part of my life back to mind that I hoped to forget... FS, if you're reading and recognize this, I still respect the hell out of you and wish you well. I can't go into too much depth here without revealing more than allowed. I am purposely vague and I apologize if that bothers or offends you but I don't want to see any litigation in my future.

I don't know how to take this article. I wish some of the insight had been around when it mattered to me (working 60 - 80 hour weeks because of management over-promising because they wouldn't take the time to understand the scope because the PM was sure it was "trivial") but some of it also smacks of the PM thinking of her/himself as some kind of deity whose wishes would make the work happen magically. Me, personally, I like my deities to be left in church where I can ignore them as I deem necessary...

Anyway, the best PM like being I ever had contact with was a QA department head who had been in the line of business his whole life and knew _exactly_ what something needed to do to succeed in that business. He had a second in command that was also a lifer. Between those 2 guys, when they got interested in something, that something did some smooth sailing. If they were disinterested or too busy with a fire, all hell would break loose.

Well, at this particular company, every time all hell would break loose, they would, instead of fixing the original software, buy something similar and try to massage it into the product. During the ~19 months or so I was there, they bought, had been in talks to buy or were suing the seller over the bought product not working for _4_ different products. The funny thing was, all of these products were based on disparate technology... The original software was built in a combination of Delphi, Borland C++ and the Borland DB engine. Of the bought software, One was Java based, it wouldn't run for 12 or more hours at a time. One was based on .Net and it crashed more than it worked. 2 were based on popular C++ App Frameworks. Those 2 kinda worked, sometimes, if you held your mouth right and kept your support contracts up to date.

Now, we have a company with at least 4 different technologies with maybe 2 of the original developers of any of the software left. The only guy that remains with any sense and sanity is the QA guy because his family is tied to the company. And all along he's been yelling/screaming/cajoling/nurturing, whatever he can do to get the management to leave the programmers alone and so they can get the work done.

<comment><USER3> A bad PM can be countered with good engineering management. That said, I've been at a place that had both. Weekends were planned into the schedule and they thought that was the norm. At a certain point, the brain drain was pretty serious (myself included). Not meeting deadlines isn't always an engineering issue it is a management and planning issue.

Another more recent example, boot strapped startup. General engineering goal with a high level of what pieces are needed. Most of those working on it are contractors not always onsight. Functionality decisions are made between a couple of parties, but not communicated down resulting in added effort. In this case, there isn't a lot of engineering pushback, but the PM should be aware of the need to communicate more directly, yet doesn't. When pressed for specs, a blank face. An example, for me, of a bad PM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Thanks for the comments. We actually wrote recently about a "goal first" approach where you start with the strategy and why you are doing something and then clearly articulate the features in a collaborative way. Consider checking it out here - [http://blog.aha.io/index.php/goal-first-a- product-roadmappin...](http://blog.aha.io/index.php/goal-first-a-product- roadmapping-how-to/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Being an engineer (by schooling) myself...I've always found it confounding how non-technical product managers do what they do...I've seen plenty of "shut up non-techie" posts (including this OP) but are there any really great non- techie product manager musings on this topic, explaining how they are able to reliably judge timeframes and output without having hands-on experience?

I do think producers are valuable...in the art/entertainment world, for example...you don't have to be an actor/model/writer to be vital to a production's success. However, in software, it just seems that the implementation of the process is so vital in fully realizing the gains that code can bring you, that if you have a product manager who doesn't understand that, than the PM can do as much harm as good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the author and I built my career as a "non tech background" PM before I became a CEO. My super secret to success (not really that secret). Be great at explaining the "whys" and "whats" and work closely with engineering on the "hows." Understand what it will take to build something before agreeing on the roadmap. Building great product requires awesome PM and engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate articles like this more than anything. If you really want to help product managers, do you have to spend the first half of the article telling them that you're so much more important than them? It takes two hands to clap.

<comment><USER6> I see one paragraph that might fit that description. The one that starts with

> However, the reality is that you need engineering more than they need you.

And it's basically true. But I thought the line

> You are overhead.

Was too harsh and a slam.

If the author really feels that's a notable point to make, it deserves _a lot_ more explanation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been a PM for most of my career. Lose engineering and you have no ongoing product, sales and you can not sell it, support and you can not service it. You get the picture. PM is not required for the basic operations of the business. Great PM is fundamental to success, but not to the day-to-day management of the business.

<comment><USER7> There are such things as "one developer shops".

There are no "one PM shops".

Case closed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're having non-technical product managers owning technical products you're asking for trouble. Since when did any non-technical product person become the domain master go-to-guy for any technical product? I have seen product managers provide great leadership on technical products but they have always been supremely capable and the engineers respected them for it.

Some product person with an inflated ego spinning buzzwords is not going to be respected by engineering and will not succeed in influencing them in any way.

 _What you may think: I have been around engineers a long time and know the difference between NoSQL and MySQL. And there is no doubt that I would have been a great engineer if I had lerned to program, found it rewarding, and led a ton of open source projects._

Anyone who seriously thinks this way is most likely _hated_ by engineers and probably gets made fun of a lot behind his back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, all of the "what you might think" points were exaggerated but not intended to be ridiculous. Great PM works and respects the value of what engineers can contribute during the plan AND build efforts.

<comment><USER8> I think I am responding more to the way you have set the scene where we have non-technical product managers owning technical products. I think if this situation exists you've actually got a fucked company or at least some serious org-level trouble with the division of roles and responsibilities and probably not something you could fix by head-shrinking your product people.

Actually it's funny if you think about it the only way non-technical product managers maintain their positions owning technical products is by finding such companies and actively partaking in all the _what you may think_ behavior. Forgive me if this whole piece is intended as subtle irony in which case I say well done and humbly accept my swoosh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Eh—hoarding credit is sort of the M.O. of a really great product manager.

A PM has to compete with all the other PMs to get her features implemented. And if the PM's feature gets implemented first, this PM looks super productive.

I think if you're an product manager looking to be the best product manager, _taking credit_ is imperative. Because at the end of the day, your feature is just paper until it is implemented.

Not being hated, well, that's another matter... I sympathize with the enormous friction between folks who assign work and folks who finish it.

<comment><USER10> _I sympathize with the enormous friction between folks who assign work and folks who finish it._

I don't. If you create this separation between the two categories, you'll have a terrible organization and when it caves in on itself, I will cheer that process on.

That's why open allocation is morally superior (in addition to working better). People "assign" work to themselves (without noise) and then do it. None of this parasitic high-horse management bullshit.

You know how much better the world would be if "work" was a culture of doing things rather than delegating and taking credit? It'd be a different world. People might actually, like, work when they go "to work".

<comment><USER4> You know how much better the world would be if everyone was good at work? If everyone had a correct estimation of his/her own ability? If everyone knew when to defer to those with better judgement?

The world would be awesome. But that's not the way the world is. And not all well-oiled machines will stay well-oiled...and in such a situation, sometimes it may be worth it to have someone who manages the process and can play King Solomon anytime two workers are fighting over a baby.

I'm not sure if the PM role does this well in practice, I'm just saying, I can imagine such a role in an imperfect work environment paying off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In what world do PMs actually think the supposed thoughts in this article? Yes, it's important to document well, focus on why not how, and be a shit umbrella not funnel -- though these have been PM 101 everywhere I've worked.

But when PMs infringe on these issues (and yes, all PMs do) I find it's rarely a conscious decision as much an impulsive/instinctive thing from being torn in 100 directions at once.

<comment><USER6> For example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5930324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5930324)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh great, another Product Manager/Project Manager/XYZ Manager has pissed off the software engineering masses post again. Another "we can live without you, but you can't live without us scribe...". Really? You mean I can't go find a top notch, $15/hr engineer to build in Kathmandu to build the product to my specs? Get a hold of yourself boys. You're not all that. I can (and have) built plenty of products with a wide assortment of engineering resources worldwide. If you're worth your salt, you recognized that it is the relationship between disciplines that matters - nt your "Engineers will Rule the World" mantra. Get over yourselves....

<comment><AUTHOR> I built my career as a PM before becoming a CEO, so this might not be just another one of those posts. Are there market-leading products that have been built with lead $15/hr engineers? Please call out a few, I would love to learn about a few of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to add "Don't give estimates to other stakeholders (especially a client!) without talking to engineering." Even if you have some technical expertise, your guess may be off due to a lack of knowledge of the specifics of the platform, framework, gotchas, other priorities the team may have and a million other things.

The reality is that you can get yourself (and your team) into a bind if you commit to an estimate/schedule without discussing the details of what will be delivered with engineering. Don't do that.

</comment><comment><USER14> What a short-sided article. I actually think it's more often the other way around--that engineers keep pissing off product managers! ;-)

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that engineering tends not to give feedback, as much as they give derision. And product management tends to be too timid to stand up for themselves.

In reality, we all piss off each other. We'd all be better served if egos were checked at the door, and we could have open, collaborative conversations about creating really great products.

</comment><comment><USER15> Let me add couple more:

(1) Asking for a feature and then never showing up once when it is being built. "Hey, we are adding this page here. Is it okay?" <No answer>. "Hey, is this workflow good?" <No answer>. Once implemented, come around and ask "Why is this built this way?"

(2) Not being interested in any feature that engineering is interested in.

It is okay to talk to customers all the time, but once in a while turn around and talk to engineering too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. I think the best PMs actually leave at least 20% of their roadmap for engineers to tell them what else needs to be built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I read most of it, but you really lost me in the first sentence. If you are _actually_ the CEO, that's one thing, but one sure fire way to piss off the engineers is to think of yourself as "the boss" simply because your role has "manager" in the title. Everywhere I've worked, the engineers answer to an engineering manager, and the engineering manager is a peer to the PM.

</comment><comment><USER17> slightly off topic - anyone moved from coding to product management? I thoroughly enjoy product management - market research, coming up with new product ideas, feature ideas etc. No clue how to make the transition though :(

<comment><USER18> It's a tough transition, but I've seen it done in a few ways:

1) Internally apply for a Product Management job. Expect to have put in at least 3 years within the company and make sure you know the business domain better than most other engineers. Play politics successfully and hop on the first open PM position available. You may have to pick a product in pretty bad shape as a proving ground.

2) Build your own product either on the side or quit your day job to focus on it. Make sure it's something a bigger company like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, etc would be interested in. Make a real go at building a business, and doing the hard PM work. Hire others to do the engineering work so you can focus on the PM skills. This may also take 5 years before you land your dream PM role. If you play your cards right, you may land in a PM role with a nice exit as well.

3) Go get an MBA from a top school that Google, Facebook, and Microsoft actively recruit from. Make sure your program has a focus area on Technical Product Management so you can get into the right recruiting circles. This may be a faster track, but expect to lose 2 years of income and rack up a lot of tuition debt to make it happen.

<comment><USER10> This is good advice but the reality of it is goddamn depressing. "Proving ground"... "at least 3 years"... "MBA from a top school". We fucking lost our industry. Because we failed, we have to deal with executives.

Product management shouldn't be a special job for high-horse do-nothings with MBAs and connections. It should be a concern for all engineers; something everyone should care about and be able to influence.

<comment><USER18> Ha! I guess my negative bent around becoming a PM bled through. I have considered going into a PM role as a future career move but the reality of it usually depresses me into sticking with engineering.

It is pretty depressing that in most software companies, engineering makes little to no decisions about features, market strategy, or operational efficiency. You really have to get out of engineering to have any influence in those areas.

With engineering being so lucrative, you see a lot of self-selection where the weaker engineers end up making these transitions, which only makes the whole situation worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I stopped reading here: _Involve engineering management early and often, so everyone has a chance to contribute to the product vision and buy into where the product is headed._

This is tailored to people in inefficient VC-istan companies where engineers don't get to speak for themselves, hence "involve engineering _management_ ". Ok, we're done here.

I agree that there are a lot of terrible, arrogant PM's out there. PM is the ultimate MacLeod Clueless job in many organizations (with engineers closer to the MacLeod Loser tier) because it involves a lot of context-switching and annoying work, but is ultimately just as subordinate as anything else, since the job still involves serving executives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I deleted "management" from the post. The best orgs (and also the most successful) are those where everyone has a voice. Maybe you will keep reading now and let me know if anything else in the post really tweaks you the wrong way.

<comment><USER10> In general, quite good and I agree with it.

Minor nit: (1) you used the term "executive team" and I hate that phrase. Don't get me started on teamism. I hate this cargo-cult bullshit where every group of people is called a _team_. Executives are a _court_ , in the medieval sense.

Also, I still sense that you're writing from a closed-allocation perspective. (I'm not even sure that proper open allocation would have a PM/engineer distinction. Why not hire people who are willing to do both?) Closed allocation is doomed to produce garbage and no amount about of telling other people to be better will correct for its foundational problems.

<comment><USER19> "Closed allocation is doomed to produce garbage and no amount about of telling other people to be better will correct for its foundational problems."

I've been thinking on this lately, it does make sense. Never been in a position to try it until now.

<comment><USER10> What is your strategy for trying it? Are you starting a company?

<comment><USER19> I quit one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no wall plug with multiple USB-c ports - <AUTHOR> I can't be the only with multiple usb-c device (computer, phone, battery pack, switch) that would like to have one wall plug with multiple usb-c exits. (to enjoy full speed charge on all devices). Is there some technical reason this is not possible? <comment><USER2> I'm no electrical engineer, but the spec says each usb-c port can provide up to 5amps at 20v, which you would need to do the full speed charge you wish for.

If you think about the size of the adapters that can do this already, you'd probably have to imagine nearly doubling the size for each additional port you added. Plus thermals, etc.

I could be wrong but I imagine its related to the physical limits of providing that much power in a small space.

</comment><comment><USER3> I work in this space. The question that should be asked is how much power do I need to charge my devices? Am I charging my phone (18W) or am I charging my laptop (60W)? The technology exists to create a multi-port USB-C PD charger. However, is there enough market demand today to drive a company launch a product. Would the market accept a giant wall adapter, do to the space needed to dissipate the heat on a dual 60W charger?

I believe as more devices switch to USB-C PD charging, you will see more of the products you want on the market place. And technology will keep improving to reduce the size of the adapter.

I saw this on Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-Type-C-Travel-Charger- Adapter...](https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-Type-C-Travel-Charger- Adapter/dp/B07M97XGNZ/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=usb-c+wall+adapter+multiple&qid=1551883842&s=electronics&sr=1-4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I forgot to reply but thanks for the recommendation, I bought it, it is exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you mean by "wall plug"?

Something like this:

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/USB-Type-c-Wall-Socket- High-...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/USB-Type-c-Wall-Socket-High- Speed-4-8A-Charger-Adapter-Wall-Mounting-Power-Outlet-Plate/32842323549.html)

Or you mean an adapter like these:

[http://www.tnpproducts.com/product/quick-charge-3-0-usb- wall...](http://www.tnpproducts.com/product/quick-charge-3-0-usb-wall-charger- multi-port-5-port-40w-fast-charging-station-power-adapter-plug-usb-c-usb-type- c-for-galaxy-s7-s6-edge-plus-iphone-7-6s-plus-ipad-pro-air-2-mini/)

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Smart-Led-Display-Power- Adap...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Smart-Led-Display-Power-Adapter-Fast- Charging-Station-Multiple-USB-Charger-40W-8A-8-Port-Desktop/32881322334.html)

but with multiple USB-C ports?

</comment><comment><USER5> Unless I am mistaken, isn't this what you are looking for?

[https://store.google.com/product/usb_c_dual_port_charger](https://store.google.com/product/usb_c_dual_port_charger)

</comment><comment><USER6> They exist. You won't see them for a few years at Walmart or whatever because not too many people have a need yet.</comment>