Cingulata: Run C++ code over encrypted data with fully homomorphic encryption - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/CEA-LIST/Cingulata <comment><USER2> FHE is undergoing standardization right now. The leading algorithm candidates are based on lattice crypto which is currently quantum-safe: [https://homomorphicencryption.org/](https://homomorphicencryption.org/)

Here are some mature and actively-developed HE libraries:

[https://github.com/homenc/HElib](https://github.com/homenc/HElib) (By IBM, employed the inventor of FHE)

[https://github.com/Microsoft/SEAL](https://github.com/Microsoft/SEAL) (Best tutorials)

[https://palisade-crypto.org/software-library](https://palisade- crypto.org/software-library) (High-quality codebase)

[https://github.com/tfhe/tfhe](https://github.com/tfhe/tfhe) (Fast boolean logic, used by Cingulata)

Good introductory material is hard to come by, but I like the first half of this talk: [https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/intro-fhe-and- tfhe](https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/intro-fhe-and-tfhe)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great work! This allows to perform arbitrary computation on untrusted devices.

However last time I checked computation in this scheme is ridiculously slow: on modern machines, cutting edge implementation of FHE manage to get around 100 integer operations per second.

Never the less there have been some brave startups trying to commercialise this technology:

[https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/18/enveil- raises-10-million-...](https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/18/enveil- raises-10-million-for-enterprise-scale-homomorphic-encryption/)

Other interesting things build on top of FHE:

sql database where data and queries are fully encrypted: [https://github.com/zerodb/zerodb](https://github.com/zerodb/zerodb)

fully encripted brainfuck vm: [https://github.com/f-prime/arcanevm](https://github.com/f-prime/arcanevm)

<comment><USER4> There are two main approaches to FHE: homomorphic boolean circuits and homomorphic numerical processing.

In the former (eg Cingulata), you convert a program into a boolean circuit, and evaluate each gate homomorphically. While this is general purpose, it also means you decompose functions that could be done in one instruction into multiple binary operations (so very slow). That's usually what people refer to when they say FHE is slow.

The other approach consists of operating directly on encrypted integers or reals, and finding ways to do more complex computations (like a square function) in one step. While this is obviously much faster, it is also limited to whatever operations is supported by the scheme. This is what people refer to when they say FHE can only do certain things.

For years, the tradeoff has basically been slow and general purpose, or fast and limited. But there are new scheme being worked on that will be published soon that enable to go way beyond what's currently done, such as doing efficient deep learning over encrypted data and other complex numerical processing.

Lots is coming out of labs and will be on the market within 2 years!

<comment><USER3> ohh interesting! Are there any opensource implementations of homomorphic numerical processing?

Were there any efforts of combining both approaches?

<comment><USER5> Note that most useful homomorphic numerical encryption schemes are easily breakable. Once you have equality you can usually de-anonymize user data. Many companies have been burnt by this.

With a less than operator and the ability to encrypt chosen plaintext values, you can decrypt arbitrary messages in a linear (in message size) number of steps.

Arithmetic operations can often be used to build gadgets that bootstrap comparison operations. For instance, with addition and equality you can implement a comparison operation for low-medium cardinality fields.

The field is littered with negative results that are being sold as secure, practical systems. Be careful when using them on important data.

<comment><USER6> > _and the ability to encrypt chosen plaintext values_

Isn't this a big assumption? The way I envision it is

1\. client encrypts data with their key

2\. server computes on data without decrypting and without needing the key

3\. client decrypts computation output with their key.

Or is it always required at step 2 that the server also has the key needed for encryption (but not decryption obviously)?

<comment><USER7> > Isn't this a big assumption?

The standard resilience criteria for modern multi-purpose encryption suppose that your scheme should be resistant to adaptive chosen-cipher attack. Chosen plaintext is a way weaker attack (the hierarchy being: known plaintext < chosen plaintext < chosen cipher < adaptative chosen cipher).

It may be OK for some situations, but it requires to be much more cautious than with regular crypto (which is already error-prone…).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How encrypted and private is the encrypted data in such systems?

When I looked at encrypted databases, the real ones, not the encrypted at rest databases, I read comments saying that the crypto was relatively too weak to have any use outside research. That it is a neat research topic, it will be great eventually, but it's not ready for production.

So I went with the classic and simple solution : encrypt with aes256gcm, and decrypt and reencrypt if I manipulate the data.

Does a system like cingulata offers encryption as strong or better than aes256gcm?

<comment><USER9> Systems like Cingulata are true end-to-end encrypted systems. No data is decrypted at any point in the process.

All data manipulation and -processing takes place on encrypted data, as opposed to the encrypted database you mentioned, which still decrypts its contents in memory prior to processing.

The reason homomorphic encryption is far from being ready for production, is that all operations (e.g. all your algorithms and programs) need to be transformed to a virtual circuit that operates on cipher text encrypted by a specific algorithm.

This is akin to translating your software into an inefficient byte code that's then dynamically executed by an obnoxiously slow interpreter.

The great part is that you can simply encrypt your data on a local (and trusted) machine, send the cipher text into the cloud for indexed storage or processing and do your queries or operations on encrypted data. At no point will your data ever be decrypted on the remote machine.

So there's great potential there w.r.t. privacy and cloud computing (and especially AI where training data is often the "magic sauce" that gives your company an edge over the competition) and SaaS.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the explanation. The byte code analogy made me understand the technology a lot better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of my work with CryptDB. A framework to run SQL queries over encrypted data: [https://github.com/CryptDB/cryptdb](https://github.com/CryptDB/cryptdb)

One important fact about homomorphic and other encryption schemes you can calculate on: It leaks information! E.g., if enc(x) + enc(y) = enc(z), you gain the knowledge that x + y = z. With enough data, it's easy to obtain the unencrypted data without the secret(s).

<comment><USER11> I think you meant homomorphic, not homophobic...

<comment><USER10> ah, hehe, yes indeed. Thank you, auto-correct

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> During the COVID freakout, I opined that all the CPU/GPU spent on Folding@Home was unlikely to create any sort of interesting breakthrough and it used an absurd amount of CPU/GPU to not make breakthroughs. In the past, I've been kind of opposed to using FHE on health data (seems wasteful; instead, should be run on trusted compute with a decrypt and encrypt key). But for the amount of wasted compute in CPU/GPU for molecular dynamics... coudl we instead process encyrpted health data on consumer devices (I'm not aware of any health data analytics problems that need to scale over millions of consumer devices).

<comment><USER13> For "big data" type tasks, the cost of shuffling around the data to thousands of different consumer devices probably makes it ineffective. You're better off just paying for one centralized data warehouse, rather than all the custom coding and decentralized bandwidth to make some consumer-based strategy work. This seems more like it could be useful for building things like decentralized encryption protocols.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Cingulata (pronounced "tchingulata")

As an English speaker, this makes me more confused about the pronunciation, not less.

<comment><USER15> Same. You can't just steal words[1] and change the pronunciation!

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

<comment><USER16> Cingulata comes from the Latin words cingŭla or cingŭlum and it should be pronounced with the soft C (like in Tchaikovsky)

> History and Etymology for Cingulata New Latin, from Latin cingulum, cingula > girdle + New Latin -ata

[https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/Cingulata#:~:text...](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/Cingulata#:~:text=History%20and%20Etymology%20for%20Cingulata,cingula%20girdle%20%2B%20New%20Latin%20-ata)

It's a common mistake English speakers do all the times

The rule is quite simple: a C followed by the vocals e and i is always pronounced tch in Latin.

Latins used K for "hard C" like in "corn" and S for the s sound like in "cent"

<comment><USER17> If Tchaikovsky is Russian and the translation of his name into written English is arbitrary and it's pronounced "Chaikovsky", what is the "T" for?

<comment><USER16> That's also very simple: it's the transliteration of the phonetic symbol _' tʃ_ which represents the soft C sound as in cheese.

That's what happens when a language steals a foreign word (Latin in this case) and changes its pronunciation

In Latin the way groups of letters are pronounced it's (almost) unambigous, it's a phonetic alphabet itself

If you change the pronunciation, that part is lost and you have to rely on recollection instead of recognition

It also means that if you don't already know a word you can't be sure on how it is pronounced

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 47 upvotes, no comments. I'm guessing no one understands this.

<comment><USER19> Yep. Was hoping for someone to debunk or explain. My (probably deeply flawed) hunch was that one would need some kind of specialised virtual machine or something to make homomorphic stuff. I'm babbling now.

Yes, someone please explain Cingulata.

<comment><USER9> Cingulata is a system for secure, privacy preserving applications based on homomorphic encryption.

Homomorphic encryption is a form of cryptography that allows for operations on encrypted content to yield the same results (though encrypted) as if applied to plain text input.

Basically, the framework takes algorithms implemented in C++ into a virtual boolean circuit that operates on encrypted data. This means you can run your database, AI training, page ranking, etc. on encrypted data for a truly end- to-end encrypted processing or computation on untrusted devices or environments (cloud computing!).

This comes at a price, though, as the virtual circuit is basically a software interpreter for your original algorithm and thus is abysmally slow compared to the original code...

At least that's my understanding of the system.

<comment><USER20> So I can give an executable to anyone in the world and they cannot get to my source code?

<comment><USER21> No.

You have a function F which maps inputs x to outputs y. You transform this function into new one F', that will map the encrypted inputs encrypt(x) to the encrypted outputs encrypt(y), _without knowing how to decrypt_.

       F(x) = y
       F'(encrypt(x)) = encrypt(y)

<comment><USER22> This is correct. Additionally, the entity performing the computation does not get to learn the answer. This is an important distinction between a technique such as this, and software obfuscation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Every Question You Could Ever Want to Know About Skinny Jeans, Answered - <AUTHOR> https://www.tryfitfirst.com/home/every-skinny-jean-question-youve-ever-asked-answered <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everybody. A little bit about this. I've been measuring hundreds (looks like over a thousand by now) jeans with my partner over the past year. We've become a bit obsessed with turning clothes shopping into more of a science, mostly because we've found clothes shopping incredibly opaque and frustrating.

I've taken a bunch of the measurements and other data I've collected and turned it into a fairly comprehensive write-up.

Hope you enjoy, and let me know if you have any more technical questions I couldn't cover in the post!

<comment><USER2> I'm far from your target audience as I rarely wear jeans.

I was curious about the origin. You wrote "Elio Fiorucci invented the modern skinny jean in the 1970s".

What makes something a "modern skinny jean"?

That is, I did a quick (and non-exhaustive) search of archive.org and found an advertisement in the UCLA Daily Bruin from January 15, 1971, on the bottom left corner of page 16, at [https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin55losa/page/n89/mo...](https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin55losa/page/n89/mode/2up/search/%22skinny+jeans%22?q=%22skinny+jeans%22) .

"""Newest body decorations. Skinny jeans with just the right flare. Low-rise. Scoop-front pockets. Sharp, multi-color stripes in a bunch of different widths for whatever is in your head. Permanent press Fortrel® polyester and cotton. $9"""

These are not made of elastane.

OTOH, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim- fit_pants#The_1960s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim-fit_pants#The_1960s) says that in the 1960s, "By 1962, Sears were selling tight jeans made from "stretch" denim that incorporated elastane."

So, what defines the modern skinny jean different from pre-Fiorucci skinny jeans?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! The term skinny jean has changed over time.

What I could have been more careful in defining is what a "modern skinny jean" is: it is designed to be form fitting throughout the seat and leg. That means a tapered leg opening: the knee is larger than the hem. That also means the garment measurements are smaller than your own body measurements everywhere, except possibly at the leg opening.

Lycra/spandex/elastane had been incorporated in jeans in the 60s (I checked the Sear's catalogue to verify material composition when I was researching this), but the jean silhouette of the pants they sold were closer to what we'd call a "slim fit" today. Same with denim in the early 1970's: it hugged the body, but wasn't skin tight everywhere, and often was boot cut at the leg opening.

Fiorucci was the first to add stretch to denim with the purpose of making the jeans skin tight and tapered at the leg.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pwntools – CTF Framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Gallopsled/pwntools

<comment><USER2> Was I the only one who found it hard to figure out what CTF referred to here without having to actually look at the code? I haven't actually looked at a collaborative translation framework before, besides wondering what ctfmon.exe was in my task manager.

My everyday experience with the acronym has been in the context of Capture The Flag, and given that it originated with FPS games (Quake, Unreal, etc), the name pwntools makes it only further misleading (or was it supposed to be clever?). I would have appreciated the github readme filling that acronym in at least one place.

<comment><USER3> You might have read too much into this :)

CTF is a common kind of 'hacking competition'. The acronym does, indeed, stand for 'Capture The Flag', but instead of the physical game, you get people competing to hack ('pwn') a piece of software.

Basically this is just a little library of utilities that come handy when playing CTF: hexing, assembly, shell code, etc. Think of it as a bunch of pre- made snippets that you'd normally reuse when trying to hack something.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. How would one get into systems CTF? Sure, google returns plenty of hits, but are there any active communities that are better geared towards newbs or better resources, etc...

<comment><USER5> The best place to start is by doing one. The easiest to get into, by far, is [http://www.microcorruption.com](http://www.microcorruption.com)

It is the best beginner CTF I have ever seen in my life, and I've been CTF'ing for 9 years.

Incidentally, if anyone here finds that they really like this stuff, my team (Samurai) is all about teaching those who want to learn. Email me at email@example.com :)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for this link, it's really good fun though I suspect I'll get out of my depth soon enough :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did you guys change your name from Pwnies? Too bad, I liked that name :(

Glad to see you're still actively developing this, though -- I've used it more than once :)</comment>


Ask HN: Good or bad, how are you doing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I reading document of COVID-19. I want understand this problem. Then watching free museums. And you @adatavizguy?</comment>


Charted – A new way to share data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/data-lab/introducing-charted-15161b2cd71e

<comment><USER2> I used to work at Medium on the product science team before this tool was created. I didn't work on it myself, although I can appreciate how well it works in practice. The simplicity-of-use of this tool, both as a data provider and as a visualization consumer, is incredible.

I can imagine some HN readers thinking they want more detailed graph control, but the few options + the defaults on this tool cover a surprising range of use cases. I think you have to try it on your own data to appreciate the subtle decisions that went into the design.

<comment><USER3> So is this supposed to be an easy way for people to write blog posts that have data attached to them?

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm on the team at Medium that launched Charted today. No, Charted wasn't built to be used in blog posts. It was built as an internal tool to, among other things, share simple data query results and create ad-hoc dashboards (as part of the general data analysis our Product Science team does).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's beautiful. Really well done in terms of UI/UX. I did find a minor bug however, in the notes section newlines are completely discarded upon refreshing or sharing the link.

Anyways I thought I'd add a CSV file I had generated with Ebola outbreak data from the WHO where you can see a decline in the rate of infection and mortality of the virus.

[http://www.charted.co/?%7B%22dataUrl%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fr...](http://www.charted.co/?%7B%22dataUrl%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fmontanaflynn%2Febola- outbreak-data%2Fmaster%2Febola-outbreak- data.csv%22%2C%22charts%22%3A%5B%7B%22title%22%3A%22Ebola%20Outbreak%22%2C%22note%22%3A%22Ebola%20outbreak%20data%20from%20the%20WHO%20compiled%20by%20Montana%20Flynn%20and%20available%20in%20multiple%20formats%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fmontanaflynn%2Febola- outbreak-data%2F%22%7D%5D%7D)

<comment><USER6> interesting chart - just as an aside, im getting a 'phishing warning' on that link from Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.datacopia.com/](http://www.datacopia.com/) does something similar - but goes a fair bit further - actually trying to work out what's in your data and the best way to display it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would hesitate to say "A new way to share data". I would describe it as "reducing the barrier to entry for data visualization to copy and paste".

I like it. Didn't work on the first time I tried, but thats fine, it is kind of a weird data set (some categorical data).

</comment><comment><USER9> Google used to have this simple gviz charting device that would take data in urls and return pngs of charts.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure about the "gviz charting device" but they still have the chart service up. Here's an example:

[http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=500x250&chco=...](http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=500x250&chco=6699CC,CC33FF&chxt=x,y&chxr=0,70|0,70&chdl=first+legend%7Csecond+legend&chbh=a&chtt=My+Google+Chart&chts=000000,24&chd=t:10,50|35,45)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to Quartz's Chartbuilder? I just started using that for quick graphing.</comment>


Putting the S in DBaaS - <AUTHOR> https://cloudant.com/blog/putting-the-s-in-dbaas/

<comment><USER2> Great article, Jay definately hits the nail on the head "Kreps argues that there is high value in having the same folks that write the database software run the database software"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are obviously many providers that we could have put on here. I had fun debating how to classify certain examples. E.g., Heroku's Postgres service. Hosted or Managed?</comment>


10 things to learn on the way to becoming a JavaScript Master - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/gitconnected/10-things-to-learn-on-the-way-to-become-a-javascript-master-f4fc632b2bb7 <comment><USER2> That was a great article! Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Quantum Physics and the Abuse of Reason - <AUTHOR> http://steve-patterson.com/quantum-physics-abuse-reason/ <comment><USER2> Seems like the author is falling into his own trap by having a bias for determinacy. For the same reason he states that observing a blurry photograph does not make the thing blurry, observing classical mechanics as deterministic does not make the world deterministic. Yet he has a bias for determinism simply because it is what he sees, comprehends, and is familiar with.

First, he brushes away the many world's interpretation, which I believe has superceeded the CI in popularity now. It addresses pretty much all of the issues he has with CI including collapse, obersvation mysticism. It even addresses Einstein's issues with CI in that God no longer plays dice.

Second, they've experimentally disproven local hidden variable theory in a quantum interaction like entanglement via disproving bells inequality. In other words scientists have already considered there might be hidden particles and properties at play affecting quantum interactions and they have disproven their existence.

<comment><USER3> Any links to a source to this claim? I was unaware it had became possible to disprove a negative.

<comment><USER4> If quantum-entangled particles exist (they do) you can use them to coordinate in a way that's impossible within a "hidden variable" model of the universe. You can dig into this by searching for "bell's inequality" or "bell test experiments", there are a few different experiments that have been done many, many times. There's a pretty good Veritasium video that explains one such experiment in non-physicist terms: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvK- od647c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvK-od647c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many of the people arguing that quantum physics undermines logic are _physicists_ who understand QM as well as anyone. For example, Lawrence Krauss often suggests that theistic arguments based on classical logic are undermined by QM (which shows that reality isn't "logical").

The idea that QM is deeply weird, counterintuitive, challenging, profound, etc., is one that's relentlessly pumped out by the physics PR machine. In other words, physicists are fine with _physicists_ making wild philosophical speculations about QM; they just don't want anyone else to join the party. Well, it doesn't work like that. Either this stuff has philosophical implications or it doesn't. And if it does, those are fair game for philosophers to comment on. (And sure, some of these philosophers don't always know as much about the physics as they should, but their ignorance in this respect is usually nothing in comparison to modern physicists' ignorance of philosophy.)

<comment><USER6> Of _course_ it has philosophical implications. The problem is that philosophers largely don't understand QM well enough to talk about them. To be fair, many physicists don't either.

<comment><USER5> Could you give a specific example of such a philosopher? Or some kind of justification of the "largely"? How carefully have you examined that body of work?

<comment><USER6> >How carefully have you examined that body of work?

Don't be ridiculous. Very few professors of philosophy would have even had enough math to read the basic expressions necessary for such understanding. I don't need to survey the literature to be confident that the significant majority of philosophers don't understand quantum mechanics, cannot explain the chemical or electrical mechanisms by which brains work, and don't understand statistics well enough to interpret experimental data.

Those things require a deal of training and experience that a philosophy education is not likely to provide. There are plenty of philosophers out there that do understand any or all of those things, obviously. Did you think I was trying to claim that there are none?

<comment><USER5> Have you read any bad papers about quantum mechanics by philosophers? You're playing the hard-headed empiricist here, so don't just speculate -- show us the data.

The philosophers who write about physics usually have some training in it besides their philosophy education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think most attempts to support mysticism using quantum mechanics are made by people who know very little about either, but know quite a bit about what people want and how to make money from it.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author initially sets up this piece to be a criticism of quantum mysticism. However, as the post goes on, it seems to become a dismissal of quantum mechanics all together -- based on an obvious bias for determinacy.

</comment><comment><USER9> You don't need QM for paradoxes... they come up in all kinds of classical systems with feedback loops. You also don't need QM to do a number on determinism. Look up the work of Ilya Prigogine.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can skip most of this but the bit about the Afshar experiment looks important. According to Wikipedia it's still controversial. Does anyone know more about it?

<comment><USER11> Yes, but it's hard to explain succinctly. TL;DR: the Afshar experiment does not actually show what it purports to show. It's a bit of rhetorical sleight- of-hand. The reason is the presence of the lens, which supposedly creates an image of the two slits, but in fact does not. What it really does (which can be demonstrated mathematically) is create an interference pattern that looks like an image of the two slits but really isn't. So it is not the case that because it looks like a photon went through one slit or the other at the end of the experiment that it did in fact go through one slit or the other.

If you're interested in the details, Feynman has a good explanation in "QED: The strange theory of light and matter" using a mirror rather than a lens but amounting to the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me, a simple litmus test for a quantum phenomenon is: Can it be turned into a proposal for an experimental determination of Planck's constant? It doesn't have to be a great experiment -- determining h to within an order of magnitude would satisfy.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Category: philosophy

Undoubtedly.</comment>


Would The Blind Be Pinterested? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.michaeljanger.com/2012/01/30/would-the-blind-be-pinterested-the-disability-markets-perspective/

<comment><AUTHOR> Pinterest is redefining the Internet search experience, and delivers new and lucrative opportunities for businesses to advertise their products and measure consumer attitudes toward these products. From the perspective of someone who writes about marketing and business opportunities in the disabilities market, what does Pinterest mean for people with disabilities? It is not accessible to the blind, for starters.</comment>


Chua Circuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Chua_circuit

<comment><USER2> Wow! Chaos on an electronic circuit. That is something I could not imagine to have existed.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has even some application in electronic music. This is certainly an unusual way to produce sounds, very experimental.

Here is a video, sounds generated by Chua's Chaotic Oscillator: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGQi9GCWRY0>

Another article "Chua's Oscillator in Musical Applications" with sound clips and oscilloscope images: <http://jamesnsears.com/archive/ecechua.htm>

Chua's Oscillator as a syntheziser, a mysterious silver box with one knob: <http://1010.co.uk/org/shop.html#sec-1.2.4>

I think this is very cool!</comment></comment>


Minus Integrates Aviary API for Photo Editing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aviary.com/minus-integrates-aviary-api/

<comment><AUTHOR> our mobile android and iphone app along with website, chrome extension and firefox extension now have Aviary enabled ! :)

<http://minus.com/pages/tools>

<comment><USER2> Does Aviary's web API work well on mobile safari?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not tested, but Aviary's Mobile API for Android and iOS works really well!</comment></comment></comment>


Theophrastus' Characters: An Ancient Take on Bad Behavior - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/theophrastus-behavior <comment><USER2> This was a nice little review so I went to my local library website to reserve and found that they have two copies of this book published in 1967 from the Harvard University Press. The review's affiliate link to Amazon shows that this particular book is new and perhaps significant:

> "The Greek text of Characters is rather messy, with lots of sentences in > dispute (or simply unintelligible) due to copyists' errors in the > transmission process. Only a few years ago, a new edition of the Greek text > by James Diggle sorted out many of these problems. This new English version > by Pamela Mensch takes advantage of that cleaned-up Greek text."</comment>


Ask HN: Finding hackers with the entrepreneurial virus - <AUTHOR>

I'm a software engineer with lots of experience in web app. development and would like to meet smart people that share my passion about startups and innovation. The problem is that although I do have my share of friends, none of them share are really attracted by entrepreneurship, risk taking and the startup lifestyle.
I currently have a couple of startup ideas that I'd like to brainstorm over, but have no one in my network to do so. It's too early yet to go after a co-founder since I am not even sure at this point which of my ideas has the biggest potential (if any does at all).
Where can I find like minded people that are willing to discuss & brainstorm?
PS: I know there are sites for finding a co-founder, but that's not really what I'm trying to do. My approach is to first meet people, brainstorm and eventually become their co-founder.
I know this isn't the right place, but in case anyone else is in my situation, you are welcome to add me on msn / email me: olalonde at gmail.com <comment><USER2> Just get out and start meeting people. The best way to expand your social circle and network with like-minded people is to just start going to as many events as you can. Recently I've been going to different biznik events as well as whatever entrepreneur events happen in Seattle. Most people in the startup scene are immensely helpful and if you just start asking, you're bound to find someone who knows someone you might be interested in working with, and will introduce you.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you just want to brainstorm, pick an idea and throw it out here on HN to see what you get. They often say: Ideas are worth little to nothing - it's execution that matters.</comment>


PeteSearch: Launching the Data Science Toolkit - <AUTHOR> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2011/03/launching-the-data-science-toolkit.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fpetewarden+%28PeteSearch%29 <comment><USER2> This strikes me as a novel approach of getting around the difficulty of setting up large numbers of little scripts and dependencies on a server.

However, for those of you who don't want to both renting out an EC2 instance or launching a VMWare image, the GitHub account for the code is here:

<https://github.com/petewarden/dstk>

In particular, there are instructions for setting up an Ubuntu server from scratch here:

[https://github.com/petewarden/dstk/blob/master/docs/serverse...](https://github.com/petewarden/dstk/blob/master/docs/serversetup.txt)

Very thorough line-by-line instructions. Just skimming it it looks like it boils down to: apache, Apache Portable Runtimes, etc., PostgreSQL, Ruby, and then all the scripts.</comment>


Scala is the new golden child - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/14/scala-is-the-new-golden-child/ <comment><USER2> I dread reading techcrunch technical articles. This wasn't an exception.

The author, a data scientist, interviews at start-ups and is asked to solve algorithm / data structure questions. Some of these were challenging in Python due to the lack of available data structures in the standard library (he used an example of a heap). He swapped to Scala and got better results.

Scala is also great with Spark. Scala is the new golden child.

<comment><USER3> heapq is in python's standard library...

<comment><USER4> why is it called heapq?

<comment><USER5> heap queue

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to discount Scala, I don't know it well enough to have an opinion, but this article is shit >(

So the authors anecdotal experiences and subjective feelings after a few interviews is suppose to tell us what the "next big thing is" ? That's really hard to predict even for those _who do some actual research_. Most of the people he talked to did not even know the language FFS!

<comment><USER7> My opinion although I know others will feel differently.

Scala is a good language and serves its purpose very well when working with Spark. I think the environment surrounding it is still shit. I think Play is not good, and other related frameworks are still not where they need to be. Even the ORM solutions I think are more complicated compared to every other major language. Yes you can use Java with it, but then the benefits of using scala and switching between your Java and scala become burdensome. I think Scala has many more features almost to a fault. Its a large complex language, unless you have a dedicated team with a defined coding style it'll be hard to maintain. With that being said, I do like the language but I prefer opinionated languages like Java and Go

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _This is a classic heap problem. However, Python doesn't have a proper collections library, so to solve it I would try to import a specialized module like heapq, which usually wasn't included in the interview environments._

This is an odd thing to say - heapq has been part of the standard library since 2.3. The fact that it isn't part of collections... just doesn't mean very much.

 _With a few exceptions, Python was clearly frowned upon. Of course, no one ever explicitly told me I couldn't use Python to solve a problem. The coding environments always had a Python interpreter, but the interviewers would usually suggest that I use "a compiled language" (read: Java)_

Well, actually they _were_ explicitly telling him, right there. But if their interviewing teams would let a candidate go on and code in the "wrong" language (obviously a huge waste of both the candidate's time and theirs)... then they have much worse problems than any of us are likely to be able to help them with.

<comment><USER9> There's probably an entirely different discussion that can be had about interviewing techniques for data science positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have done a lot of interviews, and also been interviewed a few times.

I think:

\- Interviews are significantly easier in a higher level language. You will get more done in less time in Python than C in general. Also less tripwires I think.

\- Even more important, choose a language you know really well. If you can pick the language I will assume you pick one you know well, so if you don't know something basic that is a major red flag.

So I think learning a new language for interviews is a bad idea. Use it on some hobby projects first at least.</comment>


How Does This Garden Grow? To the Ceiling - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/nyregion/food-produced-by-the-high-tech-urban-farming-reaches-new-heights.html <comment><USER2> Why does this keep hitting the news? Yes, if you grow stuff in doors it's going to end up more athletically pleasing and cost far more. Umm, end of story?</comment>


RuboCop 0.80: Ruby static code analyzer and code formatter - <AUTHOR> https://docs.rubocop.org/en/stable/ <comment><USER2> In my opinion RuboCop is too strict. Every code standard analyzer takes some tweaking to get it set up for a particular project and team standards, but RuboCop needs changing of a ton of rules to make it even usable in a reasonable fashion.

I love it because it brings some order to a meta-everything world, but it'd be nice if it came with a reasonable set of rules by default

<comment><USER3> Every RuboCop rule is reasonable. That is, you can look up the reason and see if you agree or not.

Our team has overridden about a dozen rules (we bumped up line length and class length), but I find most of the default rules are fine.

Out of curiosity, what rules are unreasonable to you?

<comment><USER4> Not every rule has a reason, some of it is just "because style guide" and if you try to look up the rationale there, you'll find none.

Classic example is Perl style %w(literal arrays) vs ['traditional', 'arrays'].

> Prefer `%w` to the literal array syntax when you need an array of strings

Which was introduced[1] into the style guide nearly 9 years ago with practically no reasoning. Prefer `%w` because why exactly?

[1] [https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style- guide/commit/b27eff...](https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style- guide/commit/b27eff1b2ca6ee7502bb0c53afec4f25ae154a19)

<comment><USER5> I prefer the brackets to parens because it makes it more clear at a glance that the result is an array.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A related thread from 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162711)

Since the project hasn't been discussed much on HN, we changed the URL from [https://github.com/rubocop- hq/rubocop/releases/tag/v0.80.0](https://github.com/rubocop- hq/rubocop/releases/tag/v0.80.0) to the project page.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, much appreciated! (RuboCop's author here)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Takes the prize for best open source project name (and logo). FWIW I was a huge Robocop fan as a child. It's filled with fantastic one liners: "Dead or alive, you are coming with me." "I'll buy that for a dollar." "Serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law." "Who cares if it works or not? Spare parts for 25 years!"</comment>


Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/our-feel-good-war-on-breast-cancer.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Read a great book last year on cancer -- The Emperor of All Maladies <http://amzn.to/10fEm78>

If I remember correctly, most of the breast cancer that develops early is fast-spreading, while most of the cancer later in life is slow-spreading. So as you screen younger and younger people, you quickly reach a point where you cause more harm than good. You're only finding more disease you can do nothing about, and the false positive cause tremendous hardships on tens of thousands of women.

I also seem to remember that there's some serious discussion over the idea of categorizing cancer based on where it's first detected or starts. Cancer is much more a cell-based disorder than a location-based one. We may have created this huge categorization and treatment system that describes the problem in an inefficient way.

Good read.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, many times over this is a great book. Not many books have over 500 reviews and a 4.6 out of 5 star rating.

Here's the link without the affiliate code: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439170916>

<comment><USER4> I don't get why you have to post a link without the affiliate code.

<comment><USER5> I agree. If you weren't aware of this book, followed that link, liked what you saw, and then purchased it, why shouldn't the person who linked you to it in the first place have some kind of reward? (particularly since Amazon pays it, not the purchaser)

I think some people get all up in arms about it when larger publications do it, since it throws into question the validity of what they've written if they're trying to make money from referral links. However, the above is clearly someone's personal opinion , and I don't think that it should be scrutinised as if it were deceitful.

<comment><USER6> At least the person who shares the link should have the decency to say it's an affiliate link.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand what's "decent" about that. What do you expect the benefit of that information to be, in Consequentialist terms? That people get the opportunity to be dissuaded from clicking on a link they'd have otherwise clicked on--and thereby disuaded from purchasing something they'd have otherwise purchased--because clicking that link _makes someone else money with no cost to them?_ Even though it was a link to something they already saw enough objective value in to click without knowing that?

Would you also like Dropbox to add disclaimers to all their referral links reminding people that the person who sent them the referral is getting extra space as well?

<comment><USER6> What's not decent is when there is an artificial asymetry of information for no reason. If you tell me it's an affiliate link, at least you are being honest and transparent that the link will benefit you. Whats wrong with being transparent ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slightly related anecdote that I share because I found the perspective so interesting:

A few years ago I built an event management website for a decently large lung- cancer awareness program. During some of the meetings, I met with a world- renowned surgeon who supported the cause and we got to talking about how the breast cancer movement had grown so large. His perspective on it shocked me. Basically he said that breast cancer, in the large scale scheme of diseases, is actually not that dangerous. The mortality rate is incredibly low. Cancers like pancreatic, however, are incredibly high. When a woman gets bc, the cause gains her, her sons/daughters, brothers/sisters, significant other, etc and that support lasts for the duration of treatment, and typically up to a year and a half to two years. With pancreatic cancer, the person usually dies, the family experiences a grieving period, and maybe only gets involved for a short period of time because they spent a large portion of their time focused on the disease in grieving. It was interesting to think about.

edit: changed prostate to pancreatic

<comment><USER9> > _Basically he said that breast cancer, in the large scale scheme of > diseases, is actually not that dangerous. The mortality rate is incredibly > low. Cancers like pancreatic, however, are incredibly high_

You may have taken away the wrong message from the surgeon, or maybe I'm reading it wrong. One of the major reasons breast cancer prognosis is so good is because it's often caught early. Pancreatic cancer has no early symptoms, so by the time it's caught it's often too late.

Indeed one school of thought is that improved detection methods system-wide are going to be the #1 factor in winning against cancer long-term.

<comment><USER10> But conversely, pancreatic cancer that _won't kill you_ is probably never caught because it is symptomless. Thus, you "survive" it and you don't even realize it. Improved pancreatic-cancer detection might well increase the amount of early pancreatic-cancers caught and the survival rate of pancreatic cancer _without saving a single life!_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't disgree with the viewpoint of this article.

However, having served on a hospital credentials committee, and bearing witness to what type of lawsuits medical providers have been subject to, I can assure you that if a physician advises against a screening mammogram to a woman in her early 40's despite the fact that there are "organizations" that encourage it, and she ends up with breast cancer and possibly dies, that physician will get sued and will in all likelihood lose, or have to settle. Task forces can make all kinds of recommendations, but unless there are changes to the legal system to back them up , don't expect major changes. Somewhere in this discussion it was suggested that doctors are ignorant. It is, in fact, the exact opposite.

<comment><USER12> I am the guilty party, and I think your counterargument is a good one.

It is not the actual screenings that I particularly care about -- that is just data. The elephant in the room is the implied _massive_ amount of overtreatment that are justified on the basis of the screenings -- overtreatment that inflicts a tremendous physical, emotional, financial, and health toll on the patient.

What are the long term health costs of unnecessary chemotherapy? Is it ethically okay for a doctor to inflict torturous poisoning (chemotherapy) on a patient for fear of potential lawsuits, when it could easily be true that 75% of those patients gain zero medical benefit?

<comment><USER13> _Is it ethically okay_

I'd think in the general case, yes. The patient is going to want it, even if it is only 25% effective. I'm not an expert on medical ethics, but in my mind if the patient has complete information and still wants the treatment, the doctor is not morally bankrupt in providing it. The doctor can certainly advise otherwise if they choose, of course.

<comment><USER12> You are assuming the patient has complete information. If actually true, I would agree. What is "complete information"? Do the doctors offer the statistics that the treatment is _not_ 25% effective, that by American medical treatment norms chemo is 75% worse than useless and of the remaining 25% many will still die?

The patients are scared. Doctors are playing on those fears, acting on the assumption that fast and aggressive treatment is the wisest course all the time. The patients are reacting out of fear, not getting second opinions, and are hurried into the operating table to be cut open.

That is the norm. I have seen it happen.

It is my personal opinion that, no, most doctors are not offering complete information. So your argument, while reasonable, simply does not apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most people lives happily for decades with many cancers. The difficult question is finding those cancers that are likely to actually cause harm. Mammograms are not very useful here, and may be a net negative for health outcomes because...

The "Feel-Good War" is causing a lot of harm: tens of thousands of women tortured by medically unnecessarily poisoning and radiation, inflicted by well-meaning but ignorant doctors.

<comment><USER14> It's not just because doctors are ignorant. It's largely in part to a health issue that has become an overwhelmingly political issue that ignorantly preserves the status quo of "more screening = better." For doctors not to abide by such screening procedures then if their patient gets breast cancer and were encouraged not to screen given the low yield and high risk they can be sued for negligence.

<comment><USER15> > It's not just because doctors are ignorant.

So, doctors are ignorant? That's news to me, I know a few doctors and they don't strike me as ignorant at all.

<comment><USER12> Your superficial impressions are very persuasive.

Many of the best con artists are sincere. So if they do not recognize their own ignorance, why should you? If there was an important gap in their knowledge they were aware of, would they be confessing that to you, a non- doctor?

As for my evidence, our HMO is run by doctors. My wife's clearly reasoned decision to not get a mammogram before 50, _based on her own reading of the medical literature_ , has proven unpersuasive to her gynecologist or the people who set the policies that "provide" the harassing phone calls.

<comment><USER15> Do you second guess your mechanic in an auto workshop? (I do, but then again, I've restored a couple of cars from the ground up). How about a contractor, an engineer or someone working on a high voltage line? Maybe the pilot of the airplane that you're taking to your holiday destination or the cook in the restaurant where you ate yesterday? Based on a reading of the literature you could easily become an armchair expert in just about anything. But that does not give you the years of practical experience that typically go with the territory and that should count for something.

Doctors are emphatically not con artists.

I applaud you wife's reasoned decision, clearly she is in control of her own destiny and her decision (if by unfortunate chance it is the wrong one) will mostly affect her and her immediate family.

But if we spend a good sized fortune and several years educating someone I really wonder why we'd bother with that if all that it would take to counteract all that effort and knowledge would be a lay persons reading of the medical literature. Most of which is not exactly written for easy consumption by the general public.

Whether you're in a risk group for certain cancers depends on a lot of factors and you'd need to know all of those to make a weighted decision. This is not always as easy as applying the general case to yourself calling it a day.

Age and sex are obviously the big ones but there are many (not sure how many) contributing factors that may cause doctors to be more concerned about one individual than another. We call those people specialists because we recognize that the amount of knowledge required is typically larger than what one person can acquire in a lifetime.

The time when I'm going to trust my own interpretation of a pile of google'd medical papers over a qualified specialist is still a while away.

In the meantime I'm terribly happy I'm not a medical doctor, I'd hate to have to continuously defend each and every minor decision to a general public that I'd be trying to help in an already time-constrained practice. It's hard enough when non-technical (read: totally clueless) customers question evaluations of technical issues based on some popular text they've been reading, at least there are usually no lives on the line.

<comment><USER16> You make a bunch of really good points. However, there is a need for patients to learn the right questions to ask of doctors.

"How do you know this is the right treatment?" and "What happens if we do nothing?" are two good questions.

Doctors are overwhelmingly not con artists or stupid, but they do make mistakes and they do have to keep up with changing science.

This is especially important with doctors. They're science based, they're educated, the stuff they do has plausible mechanism of action. But this is exactly the time we need better science; double blinded studies etc. See, for example, knee arthroscopy which was found after controlled studies with sham operations to be no more effective than the sham for many people.

<comment><USER15> I'm all for doctors informing their patients and for a proper dialogue. Obviously it is a lot simpler to be treated for a broken arm or a gallbladder infection than for something as invasive as cancer or something that is hard to diagnose.

Screening (especially um-necessary screening) is doing more harm than good. But who to screen and who not to screen is _still_ a specialist decision and depending on your locality more or less care will go into the making of that decision. Categorically rejecting screening before you're 50 if you're in a risk group is not smart (not saying the OP's better half is, but these things tend to be complex).

The doctor-patient dialogue is a tricky affair and I think that somewhere along the line doctors lost the ability to clearly communicate with patients about their treatments and the necessity thereof. On top of that doctors now see so many patients that there simply isn't time enough to have a proper conversation with every patient.

Those things are the crux of the problem here, not that doctors are out to make money of unsuspecting citizens or that they would perform procedures or generate referrals because there is money in it. Though I'm sure that occurs the Hippocratic oath is still very much a part of medical education.

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

> See, for example, knee arthroscopy which was found after controlled studies > with sham operations to be no more effective than the sham for many people.

I noticed a 'many' in that sentence, that's a bit of wiggle room there, if it were a really ineffective treatment there would be an 'all' in there. So now the question becomes one of degree and how to tell the people for whom that treatment is effective from the ones for whom it isn't.

On another note, the communications problem in part stems from the vast body of knowledge in modern medicine, two specialists already have a hard time communicating their ideas to one another, a doctor explaining the intricacies of some treatment to a patient would have to be at least as good an educator as a doctor, however education is typically not their specialism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I recently went in for a checkup and, as a part of that, got a blood test. My liver panel had an elevated ALT, so I was referred to a gastroenterologist. He sent me for an MRI, where he saw what he thought was cancer. So, then it's off for a liver scope, which gave me pancreatitis and put me in the hospital for a solid week of really intense pain and tens of thousands in medical bills.

Turns out the scope found nothing and I'm perfectly healthy (I have a suspicion that the elevated ALT was from riding my bike to the doctor's office). The lesson I learned was that every time you step into a medical facility you're increasing your risk for disease. You shouldn't be afraid of tests, but they are absolutely not without risk. But everyone thinks that more tests and procedures make you healthier and that anything less than the most is "rationing". It's insane.

<comment><USER18> > The lesson I learned was that every time you step into a medical facility > you're increasing your risk for disease.

Sort of the antithesis to "primum non nocere."

On the other hand, people like me are afraid to go to the doctor for anything at all; even yearly checkups are taboo. I'm completely insured, but still hate trips to the doctors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the most damaging impressions the public has relating to cancer is that "cancer" is a single disease. This article touches on this idea ("... at least four genetically distinct breast cancers....") but even this is a _gross_ underestimation of the complexity of cancers.

Essentially, the only thing that unites cancers together is that they represent a class of diseases in which your own cells multiply in an uncontrolled manner. Beyond this idea of "out of control growth", there are a number of common ways which these distinct phenotypes occurs (such as too much of pro-growth molecules, not enough "slow down" molecules etc) but genetically/molecularly there are many, _many_ different routes which these phenotypes can be achieved.

This, again, is still only touching on the surface. After you have the molecular underpinnings of the "out of controlness", you have genetic and non- genetic factors relating to things like where the tumour is, how do the cells change once the cancer begins to progress, how your body reacts to the cancer, how your body reacts to drugs etc.

In 100 years time, I'm confident we'll look back on our present day way of thinking about cancer in the same way people now look back at our previous ideas relating to mental illness 200 years ago, or general diseases 500 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER20> There have been similar issues around prostate cancer and things like "Movember". The jury is still out I suppose, but a number of doctors believe prostate exams are doing more harm than good.[1]

[1]: <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/health/07prostate.html>

<comment><USER14> Well the PSA test specifically, not prostate exams in general (i.e. rectal exam palpation). And like mammograms it depends on the population of interest and repeated tests.

What bothers me is the lack of equal awareness and emphasis of prostate cancer with breast cancer even though it has a greater incidence and more profound negative effects from treatment. When a guy gets prostate cancer and has a prostectomy, he will more often than not experience severe erectile dysfunction. I hear a lot about how women feel disempowered when they get a mastectomy even though it can be replaced without any loss in sexual function, but much less on the scarring effects of prostate cancer on men with permanent sexual dysfunction.

<comment><USER21> Just as an FYI: Women can also have some loss of sexual function, either physically (due to ligation of the 4th intercostal nerve that supplies the nipple), psychologically or both.

<comment><USER15> It is also possible that due to a mastectomy menopause onset is accelerated.

<comment><USER21> I wasn't familiar with that. Is that stress-related? Mastectomy without chemo should not induce menopause, as far as I understand the physiological processes at work. If the patients are also being treated with tamoxifen or other estrogen receptor antagonists then the menopause is, I believe, reversible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just a quick NB here: I installed the 'churnalism" add-in that was talked about here a few days ago, and it popped up with a note that some of the text had appeared in a press release from the British Medical Journal.

In this case, it is no big deal, but what a cool use of technology to inform and extend our knowledge.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> An edited group blog post by a medical doctor who researches breast cancer treatments has a good discussion of the science behind mass screening trade- offs:

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/once-more- into...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/once-more-into-the- screening-breach-the-new-york-times-did-not-kill-your-patient/)

<comment><USER23> That opening anecdote fills me with rage. I've seen lotteries do loss-aversion advertising: wouldn't you feel bad if your numbers came up but you didn't play that week? Now we have doctors doing it, too: wouldn't you feel bad if you were one of the cases where screening would have helped but you didn't do it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Single page link: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/our-feel-good- war...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/our-feel-good-war-on- breast-cancer.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER13> _you can't irradiate the same body part twice_

Can anyone provide more details?

<comment><USER25> Yah, I wondered about this as well.

The only thing I can think of is that perhaps the radiation will cause cancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wow, I never heard of doing annual mammograms, or even "base-line screening" (!). Wouldn't that actually count as personal injury?

EDIT: Continued to read the actual article -- I didn't know about the mammography madness in the US. AFAIK doing X-Rays or CTs without reasonable suspicion is considered personal injury here (in Germany).

</comment><comment><USER27> Research pink ribbon, it's a very large scam.</comment>


Using motion sensors to automatically schedule meetings - <AUTHOR> https://robinpowered.com/blog/using-motion-sensors-to-automatically-schedule-meetings-via-occupancy/

<comment><USER2> I was wondering what motion sensors had to do with scheduling. When I think scheduling, I think of putting in advance that you will be using the room at such and such time for this long.

This isn't really scheduling, it's just an occupancy indicator. It marks the room as occupied when it detects motion inside, I guess so that somebody else can check for a currently free room without having to walk to it and peek in.

Looks like they combine it with a beacon system. The beacon picks up people who work there who have the app, and the motion detector tries to catch visitors who do not have the app.

Sounds like you could do the same thing with a turnstile. Or better yet, a light switch to indicate occupancy.

<comment><USER3> > _Or better yet, a light switch to indicate occupancy._

Assuming people actually turn the lights off when they're done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope that someone will create some crazy loud alarm that goes off once someone stretches their meeting too long and people who booked the follow-up time slot are waiting outside.</comment>


How I use Emacs and Org-mode to implement GTD - <AUTHOR> http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/gtd_workflow.html <comment><USER2> Org-mode is an unmatched tool for keeping track of your day to day tasks. I have yet to find an alternative that offers scheduling tasks with as much flexibility as org-mode. The biggest barrier for me, however, is that org-mode runs inside of Emacs. As a Vim user, I have tried all of the org-mode implementations for Vim and have yet to find one that can come even close. Further, fitting something similar to org-mode into Vim goes against the simplicity of Vim which I value so much already.

Taskwarrior is a decent command line alternative to org-mode, but is lacking in the scheduling of tasks department.

<comment><USER3> Why don't you just shell out to Emacs for the things you need?

E.g. I have a Git repository that hosts an Org-mode file, when you push to it emacs is invoked on the server and converts the file to a HTML file that serves as a shared TODO / Bug list.

You don't have to use Emacs for everything to use Org, just have it export the data you need from the text you're editing in your $EDITOR of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Procrastination at his best! _Writing_ a blog post about how to _optimize_ your tasks by _customizing_ and _configuring_ a mode of _Emacs_!

Obviously, I'm not totally serious here since it seems that he use it effectively each weeks; And I'm also happy that he shared it with us. However, talking for me, my best todo process consists of "Do it _NOW_ else write it in todo.txt".

<comment><USER5> I know!

He could probably better optimize his tasks by typing C-x C-c, then going out & buying a small notepad & pen ;)

(I kid! I kid! Cool project really)

[edit] downvoted! I'll C-c r & remind myself not to make cheap emacs jokes in future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's another good overview of an org-mode workflow, goes WAY more in-depth that just GTD:

<http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> I use orgmode every day. There is also a nice iPhone/iPad app to have your schedule on the go. <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobileorg/id335805599?mt=8>

<comment><USER8> You're all almost making me switch. Almost...

Quick! Help me, vimsters.

<comment><USER9> I was a vimmer then org-mode got me and beat me down. Now I'm part of the Cult of Emacs. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let alone the switch to Emacs, but I've been trying to implement GTD since college, using all sorts of tools, and I've read the book I don't know how many times, and I still feel like it's over my head.

Are there any alternatives?

<comment><USER10> Try Autofocus [1]. I quite liked it though I eventually gave it up as too simple.

[1] <http://www.markforster.net/autofocus-system/>

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I tried that too, though it was a few years ago. What made you think it was too simple to work though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know where you can see other user's org configurations? Or a canonical configuration? It'd be interesting to see how users use org-modes capabilities in different ways. (I don't mean blog posts, just raw configs)

<comment><USER6> Lots of people store their .emacs files on github, so you can start plugging variations of "org-mode" into search and it'll usually hit on either filenames (for those of us that split our .emacs into multiple files) or setup code itself. Will probably be a bit messy against all of the people forking org, but it's still worth a shot.

If you want to stare into the abyss, mine's at

<http://www.github.com/qdot/conf_emacs></comment></comment>


The interview now available on XBOX Video - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/24/the-interview-now-available-on-xbox-video/

<comment><USER2> Google Play & YouTube later too. The first HN post was flagged for some reason.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793575) [http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2014/12/the-interview-now- avai...](http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2014/12/the-interview-now-available-on- google.html)

<comment><USER3> > The first HN post was flagged for some reason.

It was actually killed by user flags, but we unkilled it.

There has been a tug of war going on between upvoters who like the Interview release story and flaggers who apparently feel it's an advertisement, or perhaps have Sony fatigue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The Interview" is this generation's "Spies Like Us."

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised Sony chose to release this on XBOX instead of PlayStation.

<comment><USER6> It likely wasn't even thought about.

Sony pictures and Sony Computer Entertainment have a weird rivalous relationship. I have a friend who worked on the earlier star wars MMO which was months away from being released by EA or some other game publisher before someone very high up pointed out that SCE also publishes games, why give EA the money?

Sony is designed as a bunch of internally competing fiats and often several groups will work on the same thing competing with each other. The idea is that the best idea will win out. It works some times and other times it leads to them being very disorganized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems crashed

<comment><USER7> Me too:

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/24/7423421/sony-the- intervie...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/24/7423421/sony-the-interview- online-youtube-google)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> But only in the US</comment>


Microsoft Makes Concessions to Disgruntled OneDrive Fans - <AUTHOR> https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-consumer-services/onedrive/62949/microsoft-makes-concessions-to-disgruntled-onedrive-fans <comment><USER2> This whole saga has been terribly embarrassing for anyone who was evangelizing for onedrive, whether they were employees or just excited fans.

They now have to go back on their word and explain that 30gb is actually somehow 5gb unless you provide a credit card # then it's 1tb for a year for free and after that if you don't remember to opt out $100/year or something. Why not leave everything as it was for current customers and just limit new ones. They've done it before when they had skydrive/windows live mesh/windows live folders/office live workspaces which each offered an independant amount of free data (usually somewhere between 5-25gb) when they eventually consolidated them all anyone who had previously used the services got 25gb while OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) offered 15gb.

And in general grandfathered deals aren't unprecedented, nearly every credit card/cell phone plan/[any service with long term agreements] that changes lets people who had the original keep what they had and just changes things for new customers.

<comment><USER3> I don't evangelise exactly, but I do try to raise the issue of backups generally with the teenagers I teach. Sync to online storage is relatively easy to do and hard to forget to do (if you see what I mean). College work is relatively small in file size. The 'stuff' can be larger (into 10s of Gb).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They should just add a cap at 1 TB (plus maybe a pay option for more) and leave Onedrive as it was. And by that I mean: Onedrive like it was on Windows 8.1, with file representations. I convertet many people to their ecosystem in the Win8 days, but now my advice is a bit embarassing in retrospect as they do not prove to be reliable.

<comment><USER5> Its seems so silly. Like they give out unlimited storage and market the crap out of it. Then what do they expect consumers to do be stoked on having it but politely not use it? Then cutting storage down for it free tier... I don't know man I mean how much money do you really think they could be losing?

<comment><USER6> Seen from very far away and totally outside, this looks like an internal push- and-shove, with the (new ?) head of OneDrive saying "screw it, we're not paying out of our budget for the prizes that the hardware teams are handing out to their customers".

The worrisome part is that it took one month to sort this out. Sort of.

<comment><USER5> Ahhh good ole Microsoft

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> tldr; Use link below and your account will not be affected when the amount of free storage changes from 15 GB to 5 GB and the +15 GB camera roll bonus is discontinued.*

[https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus/](https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus/)

<comment><USER8> Looks like it's an OAuth2 client application that you grant permission to top out the reduced free storage with an equal amount of bonus storage.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand what you are trying to explain.

<comment><USER10> You have to sign up for OneDrive Preview to keep your current (free) storage limit. OneDrive Preview adds the storage back to your account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You pay for Office 365 and you can get only a refund, you're a free user and you get a full free year.

Yap, this is how Microsoft creates loyal customers, punishing them

</comment><comment><USER12> Anecdotally I think that products like OneDrive are mostly in competition with USB hard drives rather than other online services for consumers. The massive free account is a very good deal, but the recurring payment certainly is not compared to just buying a $100 drive.

Why not offer a product for $100+ that lasts for 5 years. This is what people wanted with the free product, so maybe they would actually pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wait, so do Office 365 Home customers not get "unlimited" storage anymore?

<comment><USER14> I believe it is capped at 1 TB now.

<comment><USER15> Which is 1TB per person. Home supports 5 users so that's 5TB.

Even at 1TB, it's reasonably cheap online storage....</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Stripe equivalent in the EU? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I'm putting the last leg on a product here, and that of course entails getting payments set up. The model is simple; monthly recurring billing via credit cards. The problem is however, that I'm in the EU (Denmark, to be exact) and while it is relatively easy to get set up with a merchant account etc., the up front costs are relatively high.
So, I was wondering if anyone know of any services equivalent of Stripe (www.stripe.com) that bypass all this bullshit and just let you get on with it? I know that PayPal to some degrees offers this, but with the recent scandals, I'd rather not risk taking this route.
Kind regards, Nick <comment><USER2> There's GoCardless (<https://gocardless.com>), currently UK only, but their FAQ says they're planning a European rollout by mid-2012.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can get started with 2Checkout or PayPal, get some traction and include multiple gateway support when you are ready to get a merchant account. You could also use a good subscription billing abstraction service to use like ours who do not charge minimums. ;)

Your customer card info stays with PayPal or 2CO and if you are building a business focused product that requires beta with fewer customers initially, you could request them to migrate over in the interim if that is possible.

The place I come from most startups are at a disadvantage with gateways demanding huge upfront fees or yearly minimums and this is one approach that generally works. See Deskaway or VisualWebsiteOptimizer that have built their entire business around 2CO or a combination of 2CO & a local gateway.

<comment><AUTHOR> From your signup forms, it seems like you guys are limited to the US as well...?

<comment><USER3> 2 US gateways integrated currently & launching with 2CO. PayPal support is coming soon.

EDIT: 2CO accepts & settles in DKK/EUR. <http://www.2checkout.com/international-payments/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think payments in Europe are beginning to catch up with the US services of stripe and square.

iZettle are running a beta test and you can request an invite on Twitter. However, no stripe equivalent yet.....

</comment><comment><USER5> Just use Paypal, don't violate their terms and conditions, sweep payments to your back account daily and move to another solution when it's commercially viable.

</comment><comment><USER6> This question regularly pops up here on HN.

Seems nobody is bold enough to tackle this problem :)

<comment><USER7> Heavy regulation (due to customers protection) prevents small players to engage the market. Without few millions and an army of lawyers, you can't.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that exactly the problem which VC funding claims to address?

<comment><USER9> VCs will not tackle this because it's considered "risky".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A similar implementation to stripe available in Europe would have a lot of fans.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm in the exact same situation, it's a real problem in Europe :(</comment>


Please, please, please: don't suck at email - <AUTHOR> http://ccarnino.tumblr.com/post/5130118558/please-please-please-dont-suck-at-email

<comment><USER2> "The first is don't reply quickly or don't reply at all!"

Pretty sure that first "don't" is a typo, given the rest of the post.

However, I thought it was good advice! Don't just skim my email and shoot back 'Nope'. Actually read it and give me a good reply. If that takes a couple days, so be it. I didn't send the email just for the fun of it, and I'd like a real answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! I'm investing time to contact you and no one like waste time</comment></comment>


Where to begin when learning C? Part 2 - Entry points - <AUTHOR> http://morganwilde.svbtle.com/where-to-begin-c-entry-points

<comment><AUTHOR> I greatly appreciated all the feedback I received last time, hopefully this article will show for that.

</comment><comment><USER2> Brilliant job. I've been a C programmer for over 30 years and I love your approach here.</comment>


Ask HN: Life insurance? - <AUTHOR>

I saw a few threads on here about health insurance for entrepreneurs, but didn't see any on life insurance. Any advice on that? Is it necessity for a late-20s generally healthy single male? I'm trying to calculate my total costs, strongly considering leaving my job, and any advice would be much appreciated! <comment><USER2> If you have no dependents then you don't necessarily have a need for life insurance. I never bought life insurance until I was ready to have a child, and I think that was the correct decision for me.

If you have any near-term plans to get married or have children, then buying term life insurance now might make sense. It's cheaper to buy when you're younger, but on the other hand you don't want to pay for several years of insurance that you don't end up needing.

<comment><USER3> _If you have no dependents then you don't necessarily have a need for life insurance._

I agree, but this statement seems unnecessarily cautious. Can somebody give me an example of someone without dependents who _should_ pay for life insurance?

(Some companies take out big life insurance policies on their employees. This is a tax loophole, and I believe it doesn't apply to you or me.)

(And, no, "I plan to fake my own death and collect insurance money under an assumed name" does not count as a good reason. ;)

As with all forms of insurance, life insurance is only worthwhile if the consequences of a loss are so big that you can't afford to self-insure. Generally, the estate of a single person with no dependents has little need for an immediate source of cash after their death. If you want to leave money to someone it's better to simply invest the cash, then write a will to bequeath your investments to the people of your choice, rather than blow the money on a life insurance premium which -- by deliberate design, to keep the insurance company in business -- is statistically likely to be an additional cost rather than a benefit.

<comment><USER4> Funeral expenses can be quite high. I can't think of anything else, but if you want to cover all your bases, that's something to consider.</comment></comment></comment>


Hands on with the JooJoo (nee CrunchPad) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/hands-on-joojoo-crunchpad/all/1

<comment><USER2> _JooJoo runs a custom OS created by Fusion Garage, which means it's unlikely to have the cool apps from independent developers that made the iPhone a hit or juiced the PC ecosystem._

How custom is it if it runs Flash? Gnash is not powerful enough to recompile across platforms and play video off of Hulu. And I don't think they have the binary-translation technology to convert the flash-player binary, or even flash swf/flv files, to their own binary format (if they did, they wouldn't be in the gadget manufacturing business; they would be entitled to double digits in Adobe's shares/market-share.)

So, Wired, what Linux or Windows Mobile based OS is JooJoo really running? You couldn't get your hands on the device just long enough to find out? Tried about:config or similar tricks? How about finger-printing the hell out of it with nmap until you arrive at a ballpark?

<comment><USER3> They've publicly stated it's "unix-based" or some such nonsense, so it's linux.

<comment><USER4> freebsd can also run flash pretty well too, so it might be bsd based too... I haven't tried hulu on my system yet, but most flash sites work pretty well so I'd be surprised if hulu doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _But it only has Wi-Fi connectivity. That means unless you are in a hotspot with blazing fast Wi-Fi, the tablet can seem terribly slow._

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average Wi-Fi is much faster than 3G or Wimax. Unless the reviewer is suggesting that someone would want to plug a tablet into a wired LAN.

<comment><USER6> Watching streaming HD video doesn't go that well with a slow internet connection through Wifi, I guess that's what the author is aiming for.

<comment><USER7> With the new 802.11N WiFi protocol, HD streaming works great on a speedy internet connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _JooJoo is an interesting gadget only if you buy into the premise of a completely web-oriented lifestyle. That means using just the internet and what it offers. There's no way to save documents locally or access .pdf files or create documents and presentations locally._

I'm getting bored of this and speculation by journalists that this device won't sell for the going price. Does anybody remember how many units of the first Kindle sold? It really feels as though the "journalistic" opinions about this device have more to do with siding with Arrington than actually talking about the merits of this accomplishment.

<comment><USER9> Wait, what does the Kindle have to do with anything? I remember journalists loving the Kindle when it came out. There was a slight backlash months after the original sold out, but it's been very positively received by everybody but Hacker News, which still thinks Amazon is Orwellian because let's face it, we're not quite as bright as we think we are.

Are you saying JooJoo is interesting if you _don't_ buy into the completely web-oriented whatever? Because they're not saying _It won't sell for this price_ in your quote. They're just saying, unless your goal is to use the Internet, this isn't what you want.

<comment><USER8> _I remember journalists loving the Kindle when it came out._

Exactly my point. Throw in the fact that Google is putting all of their effort into relying fully on the web/cloud, I would think that the journalists would love this device too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From watching videos of JooJoo, UI latency and scrolling performance are quite terrible.

It seems that rendering is done on the CPU, when it should've been on a GPU accelerated compositor or tiled surface manager.

That would probably save significant battery life (which we haven't heard anything about) and really kick ass at performance.

SoC GPU + CPU combos are fairly inexpensive parts, but even the first gen iPhone PowerVR MBX lite would've had reasonable performance.

More ranting on my blog: <http://www.satine.org/archives/2009/12/08/gpu-my- joojoo/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I get the feeling that somewhere in Cupertino, a room full of Apple engineers are giggling.

<comment><USER8> Yes, how dare a company run by an Indian CEO put out such a remarkable device...they should be giggling their heads off.

EDIT: Based on the immediate downvotes I've received I would like to know: _why_ should Apple engineers be giggling? Honest question.

<comment><USER11> You got downvoted because you baselessly accused the parent poster of being racist in his comment. If you had left out that comment and just asked the question, you would have likely been upvoted instead.

Apple engineers might be laughing because their prototype tablet - which they have likely been working on for a year - is probably far beyond the the JooJoo pad in innovation. The JooJoo pad is not bad, but it's also not particularly innovative (an iPod Touch resized to 10" would already be a better product, just to give an example).

Also, in order for the JooJoo pad to succeed, it needs strong marketing. Apple is the master of marketing, and the team behind the JooJoo pad abandoned someone who would have been an effective marketer and buzz-generator (and who gave it a great name - the CrunchPad). No matter what happened between Fusion Garage and Arrington, FG should have hired a competent marketing team to come up with a name and strategy for promoting the device.

<comment><USER8> The parent comment in itself was vague enough to be interpreted as such. I'd rather have an open discussion about such issues instead of covering them up as though they are not there.

I should also point out that the key word in your comment is _might_. I can just as easily say that somebody _might_ be justified in being offended by the parent comment.

<comment><USER2> Do you know how many Apple engineers and product managers are Indians? Silicon valley is not the place you wanna play the race card. Desi-coders are a fact of life.

<comment><USER8> Which is why I doubt somebody at Apple would be giggling, regardless of what they have up their sleeve. Hence my initial comment and follow up question.

To be clear: the parent comment is vague enough to be interpreted as offensive.

<comment><USER11> _the parent comment is vague enough to be interpreted as offensive._

This is false. There is absolutely _nothing_ in the parent comment that could reasonably be interpreted as racist/offensive toward Indians.

I assume you're fixated on the "Cupertino" part of the sentence, but this part of his comment is a completely normal construct of English to creatively refer to a person or organization. Another example of this would be if Microsoft lost a patent suit against a European company and someone said:

"Somewhere in Redmond, a chair is being flung against a wall.".

The above quote would have nothing to do with racism or "US vs. Europe". It would be a creative way to refer to Microsoft, specifically to Steve Ballmer who is rumored to have thrown a chair across the room after receiving some bad news.

Your interpretation of the possibility of the comment being offensive is simply wrong, and it's unacceptable to accuse someone of racism based on an incorrect interpretation of a comment which you weren't even sure about. At the very least, you should have politely asked the poster to clarify.

<comment><USER8> Linguistically there is no reference in the parent comment to _what_ the Apple engineers should be giggling at; also, the word _giggling_ can be interpreted as ridicule. Based on my life experiences in seeing how "non-Indians" have dealt with off-shore development teams in India, I think my interpretation is perfectly reasonable. I know these are isolated cases and not the norm in the IT world, but the parent comment in itself is fairly non-representative of HN.

<comment><USER11> "Giggling" _does_ refer to ridicule in this comment. But why would you assume that the ridicule refers to the race of the people involved rather than the actual product? There is no basis for coming up with that conclusion.

I'm sorry that you have witnessed mistreatment against Indians by non-Indians in the past, but that does not give you the right to baselessly slander the reputation of a stranger because you _personally_ misinterpreted what they said.

You don't know anything about the original poster; he could be Indian (or have partial Indian ancestry) for all you know. He might have been the leader of a campaign for equal treatment of off-shore development workers. You don't know him, and here you are accusing him of racism because you witnessed some _other people_ being racist to Indians in the past. I don't know what else I could say to you to explain why this is wrong, so I'll just stop here.

<comment><USER7> Your analysis is 100% correct.

I regularly work with Indians, and have plenty of Indian friends, and co- incidentally love Indian food. Race did not even enter my mind upon writing my original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The biggest issue for this device is the fact that it is supposed to be used as a web browsing device only - yet it only supports wi-fi. I think that is a huge oversight.

How will one use this anywhere if you can't connect to a 3G network?

</comment><comment><USER13> The pictures of said device look nice, but $500 for a web only tablet seems a bit steep. But then, perhaps there is a market for such a device - for people who only use web apps and want something convenient to surf the web on.

In some ways I think it is a rival to the litl netbook. And of course, with Apple's reputation and all the rumours of an Apple tablet they are going to have to face a market which will include a lot of people who are just going to wait and see what Apple release.

Still its nice to see a new company producing some hardware. Will be interesting to see how they do.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would actually consider buying one if it could run a proper OS (e.g. proper Windows or proper Linux). I have been looking for a device for ages I could use for reading e-books in bed before sleep (notebooks are too "heavyweight" for that and I think that the Kindle and other e-book reader hardware are way too underpowered and painful to use).

This one looks like it has just the right dimensions and a responsive iPhone- like touchscreen would make it really easy to use for reading.

<comment><USER15> Wouldnt it be possible to do the same through an iPod or iPod Touch? Given that the joojoo has no keyboard or apps, there isnt much of an advantage except for the screen dimensions.

<comment><USER14> Well I've got a G1 which is very similar in this respect to the iPhone (although the touchscreen is a bit less responsive and the config is slower) and in my experience it's quite a painful experience to read books on it. The screen is very small and generally it isn't as much fun as reading a dead tree book. Also, it can't read Microsoft Reader .lit files (which is a very common e-book format) so I would prefer something Windows based.

<comment><USER16> i use my G1 to read news and articles everywhere ... when awake in the middle of the night, while eating lunch, at a coffee shop, etc. You can't beat it for convenience, I suppose in a few years when my eyesight gets worse I'll need to rethink this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So how are they not screwed once the first Chrome tablet comes out?

It's basically the same thing, but Chrome OS is open source and has the weight of a massive company behind it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I expect some branding issues.</comment>


Treksit – Graph theory game - <AUTHOR> http://treksit.com/?graph <comment><USER2> Nifty. The arbitrary size of the playfield (and its invisible border) was annoying at times, though.

More suggestions:

* A reset button when things get too messed up

* A "check my work" button that highlights errors, which can be hard to see when there get to be a lot of points and edges

* Ability to select and drag multiple points (particularly useful when you need to shift an entire section over to have more room to work

* A clearer explanation of the UI (I was reluctant to click on the diamond icons for fear of losing my progress)

* Some sort of ending (even just a "Congratulations" message)

<comment><USER3> There is a reset button if you click the upward-pointing arrow at the bottom of the playfield then the "play" icon.

Also loved this game. Found it challenging - seems like a good starting point is to find the nodes with the least links and put them around the edge, maintaining all the symmetries you can. Love the feeling of inversion that you get when you eliminate a load of crosses in one move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fun! This is similar to Simon Tatham's Untangle ([http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/](http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/) and the sgt-puzzles package on Debian systems).

<comment><USER5> Original version is [http://planarity.net/](http://planarity.net/), made by me!

I rewrote it in JavaScript a few years back: [https://github.com/tantalor/raphael.planarity](https://github.com/tantalor/raphael.planarity)

<comment><USER6> I wanted to say thanks for your game! I loved it when it first came out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice. Went through maybe first 8-10, but it becomes boring without some kind of 'progress bar'. How long before something happens? Will it become harder with time, or what? A commentary or some hint at what's next would be interesting :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like this is just a mashup of Tronix by Danijel Duraković with some other visual effects.

[http://pulzed.com/demo/tronix11/](http://pulzed.com/demo/tronix11/)

</comment><comment><USER8> J age 11yo says it's "cool-a-rooney". Personally I liked it, but the instructions were too terse to get us started properly and the hyperspeed thing is a little strange, I assume it's just a distraction?

One problem we had was that J opened the menu at the bottom of the [small] playing area, that covered the "right arrow" that moves on to the next map. It wasn't obvious how to get back to playing, the "play" button didn't close the menu and the collapse arrow wasn't visually apparent.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice game, but as others have mentioned, the game area is way too small, and you need to able to move the entire graph as one, as you often get points placed towards a corner when you are trying out different positions of points.

Also the "restricted area" link with the "Bonus" alt-text feels like it takes you on a bit of a spammy ride. I tried it, and it took me to a site that said something about randomly generated music and a link with the text "show me something cool", which took me to yet another page, in yet another window with a bunch of animated dots.

Completely irrelevant and distracting.

</comment><comment><USER10> loved it. it's interesting how quickly the brain develops a sort of intuition how to solve them after a few levels.

Would be good if there was a leaderboard with times

</comment><comment><USER11> And here I thought that my years fighting with UML modeling tools would go completely wasted.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was doing a puzzle and it showed me a button to a "restricted area"\- is this normal?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm more impressed by the background than the game itself, though both are well done.

</comment><comment><USER14> what happens after 20? there was nothing?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Easy peasy puzzle

<comment><USER15> Easy peasy? Isn't graph planarity NP-complete?

<comment><USER16> No, graph planarity can be determined using Kuratowski's theorem, which essentially states that a graph is planar if and only if it doesn't contain K_{5} or K_{3, 3}.

I believe the planarity test algorithm has been improved, such that it can be done in O(n) using the edge addition method [1].

[1] [http://www.drdobbs.com/planarity-by-edge- addition/184406070](http://www.drdobbs.com/planarity-by-edge- addition/184406070)</comment></comment></comment>


Why GCP: The Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.chriscox.org.uk/why_gcp_the_network/ <comment><AUTHOR> Some reasons that you might choose to run your workloads in GCP.</comment>


Zuckerberg to raze 4 adjacent homes in Palo Alto - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Zuckerberg-to-raze-4-houses-surrounding-Palo-Alto-7940437.php <comment><USER2> > He first began buying the homes — two two-story houses and two single-story > homes — in December 2012 after learning of a developer's plan to build a > large house next door that would have a view of Zuckerberg's master bedroom.

> Trulia reported that Santa Clara County property records showed that one > homeowner sold to Zuckerberg for $14 million. The home is just 2,600 square > feet — half the size of Zuckerberg's residence — and valued at the time at > $3.171 million.

Well... I now have a new startup idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anybody else find it ironic that a CEO of one of the least privacy-respecting companies is so obsessed with his own privacy?

</comment><comment><USER4> Who the fuck cares?</comment>