Binary marble adding machine - <AUTHOR> http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/ <comment><USER2> The entire website is incredible. Good find, Colin.

What I don't understand why this is not sold as constructor toy sets? There's a lack of _simple_ interesting educational toys for 5+ year-olds. These are just a perfect fit. Just look at the combination lock [1] or the Hui Game toy [2], for example. What kid wouldn't want to have this? I would buy a good half of these creations in a jiffy.

† Assuming they are well made and reasonably priced (under $100).

[1] <http://woodgears.ca/combolock/index.html>

[2] <http://woodgears.ca/hui/index.html>

<comment><USER3> This is one of my favorites do to its extreme simplicity:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zELAfmp3fXY>

Examples in Little Big Planet:

<https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lbp+calculator>

Not digital stuff but still neat-o, wooden gears:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYcqJ5HdxA4>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In a similar vein these completely wooden clocks are somewhat interesting:

<http://www.lisaboyer.com/Claytonsite/Claytonsite1.htm>

I have mostly completed an "Horologium" and then intend to finish the simple perpetual calendar. The "Celestial Mechanical Calendar and Orrery" is more of a retirement project, with nothing to compare against its hard to tell that its about four feet wide by two feet tall, full of cams and gears.

I tend to cheat and cut my axles outta brass on my metal lathe, but the projects "officially" can be built completely out of wood.

It turns out from personal experience that its pretty easy and fast to cut wooden gears to shape, but a real puzzler to sand them and finishing is a huge problem because most finishes look nice but gum up the works if any gets on the contact area of the teeth. From the outside the challenges simplistically look to be reversed.

Folks in an "electronic" business like this need a "non-electronic" hobby and butchering wood is more or less mine at this time, although I mostly make furniture not clocks. If you're willing to follow the rabbit hole deep enough, woodworking turns out to be about as deep as computer science. If you think you know everything there is to know about woodworking, you probably don't know much about woodworking. Ham radio is like that too.

<comment><USER5> > _If you're willing to follow the rabbit hole deep enough, woodworking turns > out to be about as deep as computer science. If you think you know > everything there is to know about woodworking, you probably don't know much > about woodworking._

Every once in awhile, I throw up my hands at my computer and tell myself that I'm going to quit and become a carpenter, instead.

Now I need a new less-ambitious ambition.

<comment><USER4> LOL there's a difference between woodworking and being a carpenter. Probably 90% of carpenters build cookie cutter houses same thing every day. On the other hand there's probably not very many people in the whole world who know what ornamental turning and geometric chucks are, much less actually do it.

One wood supply shop nearby me is apparently haunted by people who make wood pens. That's it. They just make really cool looking homemade pens. They have tons of gear and parts and supplies specifically for that kind of work.

Another example, there's a guy named Roy Underhill who's been doing mostly traditional jointery on a PBS show continuously since 1979. Over 400 episodes and still going. 200 hours just of one obscure historical corner of woodworking.

Then there's carving, pyrography aka woodburning...

Rather than ambitionlessness I use it to avoid thinking about a problem for awhile when I get stuck. Not pure procrastination, but there's a whole class of bugs that can only be identified by a fresh mind and the longer you stare the less likely you'll see it unless you take a break. Donno if I should be encouraged or discouraged by all the furniture (and scrap wood) I've made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also the DigiComp II, which could do multiplication:

<http://digi-compii.com/>

They have an enormous one that uses pool balls:

[http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2011/a-video-introduction- to...](http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2011/a-video-introduction-to-the-digi- comp-ii/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this. I've been showing the video from woodgears.ca to my classes for some time now, and despite having spent a fair amount of time on Evilmadscientist, I'd never noticed the Digi-Comp.

<comment><USER7> Its pretty awesome, I played with one at the Maker Faire in San Mateo and the rhythms of the marbles clicking were fascinating! At some point I am going to need to record that and put it into a music track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really awesome, what a great teaching tool for binary. When this register overflows, it really overflows!

</comment><comment><USER9> What a fantastic method for making technology seem less daunting.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is possibly the best way to introduce the fundamentals of computer science to a really young kid I've seen. I'm even thinking of trying to simulate one...

Anyone got any recommendations for js physics / animation libraries?

</comment><comment><USER11> Even if you ignore the binary adding part, looking a the behavior of a single gate is a fantastic, concrete example of what a flip/flop is and how it functions.

<comment><USER12> Those are half-adders, not gates or flipflops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain how it works? How does it add something like 5 and 4? (What do you put in, when, and how do you interpret the output?)

<comment><USER14> Five would be 4 and 1... since those are numbers that can be represented by a binary "marble" in the right position, and each of those positions has a slot in the machine.

So you put a marble into 4 and 1 slots, and let them drop to store a "5" in the register. Then you put another into the 4 slot and let it drop, it clears the marble already in 4 through the drop-chute, flipping the flip-flop and pushing the new marble up from 4 slot to the 8, and you very simply get 9 which is 8 and 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How about creating brainf __k engine using marbles and restricted memory slots? Parts excluding the marbles could be 3D printed etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> I grew up spending weekends with Grandpa in the workshop. This is great!</comment>


Pact (Gympact) is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/PactApp/ <comment><AUTHOR> There's no official word on this on their site, but users are getting emails about the shutdown. Some of the emails are posted in their Twitter replies: [https://twitter.com/MacWyznawca/status/880791711789830145](https://twitter.com/MacWyznawca/status/880791711789830145)</comment>


Paul Graham's stock pick, March 2005 - <AUTHOR>

I was looking at an old essay, "Return of Mac" where pg discussed the reemergence of Apple.<p>"So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these."<p>Have a look at the stock prices of Apple, Google, and Microsoft between then and now: http://preview.tinyurl.com/23a4vd , that's a pretty solid call <comment><USER2> AAPL experienced significant growth during that 2005-2008 stretch. Volatility comes with the growth. Anyone investing in AAPL during that time should have been buying with the intention to hold and realize the returns on the grwoth. My biggest regret with AAPL was not buying more of it when I got my first Powerbook is late 2003.

The 2008 decline was a factor of questions exponentially raised into panic (by the current economic conditions) about the iPod's sales growth as well as the iPhones ability to gain market share. Even with those questions, it's still a stock worth holding onto and buying more of. That stock dropping to 119 recently was an absolute joke. Once the stimulus checks start going out, iPhone apps take it to the next level, and the the 2nd gen. iPhone with 3G hits shelves, AAPL will be back around 200 -- probably sometime in July.

</comment><comment><USER3> Volatility is one of AAPL's trademarks. Had you bought in January '05 , you were already at a decent loss halfway through the year. Same sort of big loss from the beginning of 2006 to halfway in. Not to mention the huge drop since the beginning of this year.

Had you had the balls to buy _and hold_ AAPL these 3 years, you'd be happy, I guess, but with a few years off your life worrying whether they'd rebound. Meanwhile, MSFT has been pretty steady, all along paying dividends...</comment>


What do you use to develop desktop application.  - <AUTHOR>

I know people are moving to browser based application but some people still want to have a desktop application and probably talking to online server. What is your choice of platform for a lightweight application and why? <comment><USER2> We use MS Visual Studio to build WPF desktop apps (what MS is calling "Windows Clients" this week) in C#. Why?

1\. Great dev environment (IDE, debugger, docs, online resources).

2\. Powerful API (3D graphics, networking, local device access, application interop).

3\. Versatile security model (can install under user credentials, lock out features).

4\. Versatile deployment (local or remote install by users or administrators).

5\. Can share code with server and web teams.

6\. Targets 99% of our installed base.</comment>


How to use Enums for Django Field.choices - <AUTHOR> http://blog.richard.do/index.php/2014/02/how-to-use-enums-for-django-field-choices/

<comment><USER2> Not really the same but I typically just do something like this to prevent magic numbers sprinkled all over my consuming code...

<code>

class Section(TransformerCommon): """ working model """ TEMPERATURE_COLD = 20

        NONE = 0
        END = 1
        BOTH = 2
        END_INSULATION_LOC_CHOICES = (
            (NONE, "None"),
            (END, "End"),
            (BOTH, "Both"),
        )

... end_ins_location = models.IntegerField( choices=END_INSULATION_LOC_CHOICES, verbose_name="End Insulation Location") ... try: if self.end_ins_location == Section.NONE: ... elif self.end_ins_location == Section.END: ... elif self.end_ins_location == Section.BOTH: ... else: ...

</code></comment>


Startup Slack Group - <AUTHOR> http://ssg-slack.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm one of the admins on SSG, thanks for posting!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe good to describe the group somewhere. But great idea.</comment>


First Came Gizmodo, Then Engadget. Now, GDGT. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/technology/internet/02gdgt.html?src=twr

<comment><USER2> Gizmodo will always garner my affection simply for their humour. Absolutely no other gadget site has been able to reach their level of hilarity. Gadgets are great and all, but after the twelfth Samsung phone or the thirteenth camera phone of the day, Engadget's dry prose just gets to me.

GDGT seems like a new take on the idea. Personally, it sounds like Weardrobe for geeks. That's not a bad thing, but complexity really waters down content. Hopefully they can overcome that.

</comment><comment><USER3> FTA: "We view this as the final act," Mr. Block said. "Gizmodo was the prototype. Engadget extended the idea. This could possibly be the last great gadget site."

I hope it's a success because it sounds like something I'd use, but the last sentence here sounds like hubris.

</comment><comment><USER4> GDGT won't be here for long if they can't get their website up...</comment>


Visualization tools heating up - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/arts/08iht-design8.1.18432778.html

<comment><USER2> The map mentioned in the article: <http://www.softhook.com/sanfran.htm>

It's, um, not very helpful, actually; seems like it could be done a lot better. Maybe use the yelp api to average user ratings across the city?

</comment><comment><USER3> Too bad there aren't more visualization tools for sports stats...oh what, there is and I developed one: <http://statplot.com> :-)</comment>


Why everyone hates the mainstream media - <AUTHOR> https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hates-the <comment><USER2> I can't stand it because it's not 'news'. It's the latest hot topic which is subsequently politicised to form part of the latest narrative. And unfortunately the political narrative up until most recent events has been intentionally divisive.

This is not news, it's control with a hammer.

Let's take a look at any given nation state. In its day to day life it has many many events which are of interest. National holidays, regional holidays, state level events, laws being passed... etc.

To my mind each of these is an event and report worthy. But no, we spend the majority of our time being guided by the nose from one emotionally evoking non-story to the next.

<comment><USER3> TheMightyLlama says> _" It's the latest hot topic which is subsequently politicised..."_<

Yes. MSM _generates_ its own narrative to fit left-wing politics. Most, if not all, of the narrative is false. E.g., "Russian influence of USA politics" is now a dead topic to the press, abandoned for the next false narrative.

So MSM lie and lie again, generating a series of (coordinated) lies (usually based on the lies of others so they have some form of deniability) in an attempt to overwhelm and mislead. And the narrative is indeed very confusing to readers. Thankfully it cannot withstand the scrutiny of reporters, publishers, congressmen and citizens who use the "Five Ws" to investigate. But that takes time and real effort. Lying is as easy for a MSM reporter as it is for a 4-year old child. Investigate? Well, that takes time and sweat and besides, investigation would not support what they (the MSM) believe!

After awhile you begin to recognize when the MSM has abandoned their previous topic and moved to a new narrative topic (a new lie). They don't even try to tie up the loose ends of their failed arguments/claims, they simply abandon the whole narrative topic and move to the next. And you learn to ignore them. But dealing with alarmed friends/coworkers is always a difficulty.

<comment><USER4> > Yes. MSM generates its own narrative to fit left-wing politics.

Did you pick up that talking point from Fox, also a member of MSM?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe if the facts of the story was more important than the narrative or opinion of the writer, people wouldn't hate them so much. Everything feels like an undercover opinion piece. People want to know what's going on and not be manipulated into what they should be thinking.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have no idea why people have a hard time comprehending that facts are always seen through opinions and worldviews from people who are all unique and have unique interpretations of what they observe. Everything is bias and eye witnesses of one event will have different descriptions of what is happening.

Also why do people struggle with basics like primary, secondary and tertiary sources? They expect all three to be one and the same.

<comment><USER7> There's been this large push on the internet towards this idea of complete objectivity from my experience. Reviews shouldn't be about your experience, it should be about the product. News shouldn't be about perspective or opinion, it should be about objective fact. You can't tell one side of a story without being perfectly impartial about the other (even if the other is completely nonsensical). The problem with this is that you delude yourself into thinking that you're somehow more objective or logical, which then just makes your own bias cloud your view further because obviously anything that doesn't fit into your world view is illogical.

As you've mentioned the interpretation and context matters a lot. Every site, video etc has some sort of bias associated with it and some sort of narrative it's trying to push. That's the nature of humanity, the key thing is understanding what it's trying to do and balance that out with other sources that have different perspectives.

The mainstream media has a very obvious bias towards the status quo, for example. That much should be apparent because the mainstream media was born in the status quo and movement away from it will harm them. Alternative sources of media often have a bias towards a very specific narrative and will shape their entire channel / site etc around that narrative.

The thing that annoys me the most about this situation is that people automatically take said alternative sources at face value because they conflate non-MSM == higher truthiness when usually there's just as much bias there as anywhere else, it's just bias you agree with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "mainstream media" encompasses such an enormous breadth of different things that any analysis of it would be unhelpful, and comments here are likely to be just as unproductive. One person will say something while thinking about Fox News while another posts a response refuting it while thinking of The Economist and a third replies with something else while thinking of The Guardian.

Edit: the article is actually quite interesting (yes I did originally comment before reading it!), although I disagree with some bits of it (e.g. maybe they're annoyed you missed a story that they read about elsewhere because it suggests there are other big stories you missed that they never found about). But it's not about "mainstream media" in general but a small particular part of it. Which is fair enough, and I don't think the title needs updating. But most or all of the comments here are generalising about the whole of the mainstream media, not just the particular type discussed in the article, in a way that I still think is unproductive.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even if you hate the mainstream media, they are at least a good source to tell you:

\- what the big players want you to care about

\- what the people care, or will be made to care about

\- what are the current economical and moral powers fighting to influence us

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do I hate the mainstream media?

You only have to look at a famous photo to see. It's the one of Anderson Cooper standing in a flooded ditch, water up to his chest, while a cameraman stands feet away on flooded level ground-- with water up to his ankles.

That sums it up. And it's not just on one side or the other.

<comment><USER11> > You only have to look at a famous photo to see. It's the one of Anderson > Cooper standing in a flooded ditch, water up to his chest, while a cameraman > stands feet away on flooded level ground-- with water up to his ankles.

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anderson-cooper- hurricane/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anderson-cooper-hurricane/)

> Photographs document CNN's Anderson Cooper faking the depths of Hurricane > Florence floodwaters.

> Rating: Miscaptioned

> ...However, the various available clips of the program document that the > waters in the immediately surrounding area were both fairly deep and quite > variable. As Anderson noted during that broadcast, his taking two steps > backwards from where he was standing would have caused him to sink in neck- > deep water:

> Cooper also noted that the floodwaters had actually receded significantly > before he began his report, and that although he could have stood in a > higher-level adjacent roadway where he might have remained drier, he would > have risked interfering with emergency vehicles and others attempting to > traverse flooded roads.

> So while Cooper might have been able to find a somewhat drier spot to report > from and instead chose one that provided a visually dramatic appearance, he > wasn't misrepresenting or "lying" about the general state of the flood as > seen in the finished program. And his positioning seems "fake" only when > contrasted with that of the camera crew's, who obviously could not operate > under the same conditions as Cooper and had to be situated either on higher > ground or on platforms that kept them and their equipment above water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fear Based Media. That is why I can't stand the main stream news.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mainstream media have abandoned the "Five Ws" style of reporting events:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws#cite_note- Hart-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws#cite_note-Hart-1)

I hope news services that adhere to this style will survive, but they face a difficult struggle with the political propaganda engines that dominate the WWW today.

</comment><comment><USER13> Strange title for a story that's a mix of 'how the sausage is made' and an editor's observations of 'what people want' based on the letters of criticism he received. I thought this was going to talk about the 24h cable news industry--that's a dumpster fire.

This a good piece. I worked in graphic design, for years, and it's clear from the story he's paper news. But let's get to the point of the title, which may not be delivered by this piece. Who doesn't know there is limited real estate 'above the fold'? Who doesn't know ...

\- not everything is going to fit.

\- there's only so many hours in the day

\- news stories involve reporters gathering the news.

\- news is funded by advertising more than subscribers

We're all consumers. We're all consumers. Today's news is more exciting than it was yesterday. Tomorrow's news is going to be even better.

Author Andrew Potter is just having a down day.

</comment><comment><USER14> >"The lesson I took from this is that for a great many readers, consuming the news is not about gaining information.

Instead, it is about _routine_ (hence the calls about the messed up horoscopes and crosswords) and _identity_ (hence the anger about missing stories they knew about).

People don't pick up a daily newspaper to learn new things.

 _They do it to have their habits, lifestyles, values, and identities validated and reinforced._ "

</comment><comment><USER15> Because it's propaganda, manufacturing consent.

<comment><USER16> That is useless generalization. I offer another one: Our whole civilization is little more than manufactured consent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem with this article is that they made all of these assumptions from those people who actually called in. But what if this vocal minority doesn't match the silent majority? You will get the wrong idea of the issues. I don't know if this is case here, but I think the author is incorrect about what most people are looking for in news.

I think the biggest problem with the legacy media today is that they are so incredibly biased, it's hard to get any good news out of them. A lot of major outlets flat out refuse to cover stories because of bias (the Tara Reid case), or they focus exclusively on certain kinds of stories (like Obama is bad or Trump is bad based on the outlet's bias). Many times I've read an article and realized the journalist is intentionally manipulating the facts, or using language that implies something happened that didn't happen because they want to convince you of something, rather than trying to report what actually happened.

I don't mind a journalist with a bias, I mind when the article reads like some propaganda piece I would find in a North Korean newspaper.</comment>


FAROO: Distributed Search Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.faroo.com/ <comment><USER2> Javascrippled and no response from [https://www.faroo.com/](https://www.faroo.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks awesome. We need more projects like these.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> let's just hope they don't get bought and shut down... =(

ps. still needs tons of work though it seems</comment>


Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin <comment><USER2> "She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."

How much talent has been wasted down the centuries due to nonsense like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> There many people indignated by this: [https://twitter.com/marcuschown/status/366132278381903874/ph...](https://twitter.com/marcuschown/status/366132278381903874/photo/1)

<comment><USER3> Yeah I think comparing her to Galileo, Newton and Einstein is a little over the top.

That is so typical feminism, trying to frame things as if bad things happened to her just because she was a woman. If I remember correctly, Einstein was also not believed by the physics authorities of his time at first - he didn't even get a job in academics, remember? Galileo was almost burnt on the stake for his research. Professors trying to steal their students work also happens all the time. There is a debate that Newton might have stolen calculus from Leibniz.

Not saying these things are OK, but they didn't happen because Cecilia was a woman.

If she is not as famous as other physicists, perhaps it is because her work simply didn't inspire the imagination of people as much. Marie Curie is famous, and she is a woman.

Also her name might simply be harder to remember than other names. Life is a bitch. To be honest, my brain just goes "Cecilia prubschichdjadfw-whatever" when I read her name. That's not fair, but it is not because she is a woman, it's just that her name is longwinded and foreign.

Maybe Marie Curie is only famous because Kraftwerk made a song about her, and Einstein is only famous because there is that iconic picture where he sticks out his tongue. I don't think many people adore physicists because they understand the actual physics. Everybody can write down e=mc^2 and probably even know that they wrote down something significant. If you want Cecilia DJSjug-whatever to be famous, make a better story. Make a song about her, create an iconic formula, whatever. Don't complain that she is a female victim. In fact she seems to have been quite successful anyway.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand we have tons of data on how women in science are currently treated, and I don't think it's a huge leap to assume things used to be worse. So yes I'm pretty sure it's because she was a woman.

"according to the National Science Foundation research, after examining other factors such as age, experience, and education as the causes of why there is a gap in success between men and women, they concluded that discrimination is the only explanation for the poor positions and salaries of women and minorities."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science#Statistics_abo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science#Statistics_about_women_in_science)

<comment><USER5> The source that the quote is pulled from (Schiebinger, Londa (2001). Has Feminism Changed Science?. United States of America: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674005449) includes (in the very next paragraph):

"In 1996 salaries for women in professional fields increased to 85–95 percent of men with similar jobs. Younger women in the United States (childless women between the ages of 27 and 33) earned nearly the same (98 percent) as men in their age group."

The quote from the National Science Foundation in the book is unsourced, however, the only related information from the National Science foundation I could find was [http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib99352.htm](http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib99352.htm) which is not necessarily contradictor, but paints an entirely different picture.

While I disagree with who you are responding to, there has been a massive improvement in 1 1/2 generations and it removes a significant amount of credibility to present information in a way to try and say that widespread systemic discrimination still occurs in areas where it does not.

<comment><USER4> The most recent information I can find says that the wage gap for similarly educated women in the physical sciences is 12%

[http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/gender_wage_gap_lower_i...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/gender_wage_gap_lower_in_scien.html)

While I agree there have been drastic improvements, I don't think you can say structural discrimination no longer exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a nice bit about her in Chandrasekhar's APS history interviews

[http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4552.html](http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4552.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> And she inspired Joan Feynman: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman)

<comment><USER8> This was the more striking part of all this for me. I've read a lot of (Dick) Feynman biographical material, read his layperson books, his lecture series, etc.

Until today I had no idea he even had a sister, let alone that she also went into physics.

<comment><USER9> Really? Have you read _What Do_ You _Care What_ Other _People Think?_ Because she's mentioned fairly prominently in the chapter about how he faced down a rent-a-mob accusing him of sexism ('Feynman Sexist Pig!').

(To be clear, Feynman actually _was_ sexist, but not in the way that the rent- a-mob was complaining about.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wikipedia's creative begging for donations is annoying. IMHO.</comment>


Why I stick with Perl - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jrock.us/articles/You%20are%20missing%20the%20point%20of%20Perl.pod

<comment><USER2> From the article:

 _But it irritates me when I need to get at gpg from a web application, and can't just use a "libgpg". I have to fork a gpg process, setup file descriptors just right, write input to a pipe, wait for input on another pipe, and then parse the result_

It boggles the mind that a perl programmer, of all people, would think this. The relevant code for the above is generally something like:

      my $data = `gpg --decrypt --passphrase=$PASSWD $FILE`;

or:

      open INPUT, "gpg --decrypt --passphrase=$PASSWD $FILE|";
      while(<INPUT>) { ... }

The incredibly tight integration with external programs (e.g. the code to "setup file descriptors just right" consists of one byte!) is _the very essence_ of what makes perl great and special. I'm just dumbfounded here. He likes perl but doesn't understand how to fork a process?

I mean, the whole premise of the point is counter to the perl philosophy, which is that you're already on a great and useful platform and just need a tool to tie things together nicely. If you want a single platform designed around the idea that all meaningful tasks are available in a library without leaving the sandbox, you are looking at Java or .NET, certainly not perl...

<comment><AUTHOR> Now $PASSWD is available to anyone running "ps". The GPG manual suggests that you open a separator file descriptor for the passphrase.

Basically, it's easy to do things if you aren't aiming for security or correctness, but in this case, I am.

<comment><USER2> Heh, cool, the trap worked:

$PASSWD was available to everyone on the box anyway. You stick it in memory, it's readable. That's the way life works. You probably stuck it in a database too, right? Did you lock down the socket from local users? Probably not. Did you store the database password off-line? Probably not, because you wanted unattended startup to work.

The bottom line is that if you want to do password storage in your web app that is secure against local users, you have _vastly_ more work to do than just finding a CPAN library somewhere.

<comment><USER3> > That's the way life works.

Just because security by obscurity is not a barrier you should lean on doesn't mean that it lacks value in combination with other measures.

Script kiddies will struggle to isolate data from memory in order to get passwords, particularly if they can't get binaries on the machine and it has no compiler. On the other hand, they will have no trouble using a copy and paste ps usage.

And when I say script kiddies, I also mean the sort of 9-5 culture, corner- cutting production support teams that exist in some organisations and who might have accounts on shared hardware that your application runs on. Do you really want to make it easy for them to do favours for people on the business side who want passwords they shouldn't have?

> The bottom line is that if you want to do password > storage in your web app > that is secure against local > users, you have vastly more work to do than > just finding > a CPAN library somewhere.

I strongly disagree.

<comment><USER4> > Just because security by obscurity is not a barrier you should lean on > doesn't mean that it lacks value in combination with other measures.

Damn straight. Check out the DNS spoofing defences - using random ports to issue requests on. There's a known limit to port numbers, and you could probably circumvent it with massive amounts of traffic, but using an unknown port number makes it hard enough that performing that kind of attack is significantly more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _If you are like me, most programming you do is about gluing things together with libraries._

Then I am not like you.

<comment><USER6> And not nearly as productive.

<comment><USER5> I'm a high performance systems researcher, not a professional developer. If I could write my code by just combining existing libraries, then it wouldn't be research.

<comment><USER7> Did you even _look_ for the DO_RESEARCH library?

<comment><USER8> I highly recommend Phd::Simple

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every article like this should come equipped with a disclaimer link to Spolsky's Lord Palmerston essay:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html>

Because, though this is a relatively sober and even-handed example of the genre, it still inevitably contains howlers like this:

 _Search for "rails". Most of these programmers will depend on one library, Rails, but then get the rest of their code by cutting-and-pasting from blogs._

Someone has never heard of gems:

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

Which is hardly surprising. This is the canonical problem with articles like this one: The guy doesn't waste time tinkering with Ruby, because he's busy being productive with Perl, so why should he be expected to know anything about how the Ruby community works?

(This is why I try not to write about Python except to assert that it must be one of the best languages in the world: I'm literally unsure how to write _hello, world_ in Python, but smart people use it all over the place, so deference and politeness forces me to assume that it's _utterly perfect_ until proven otherwise.)

Anyway, I'll help out by saying that I think jrockaway's point still stands, albeit on fewer legs than before: Perl is a considerably older language, its community is more experienced, it's (among other things) a traditional tool of system administrators -- who are, in my experience, relentlessly pragmatic people who crave stability, reliability, and clear docs -- and so it has had a lot more time and incentive to organize and standardize its packaging and documentation systems. Ruby _does_ have docs difficulties, as do many open- source projects which have recently experienced explosive growth.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Someone has never heard of gems:_

I've heard of gems. They are more like tarballs than CPAN modules. For one thing, there is no canonical place for All Things RubyGem.

<comment><USER10> I know - isn't it nice?

<comment><USER11> Is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meta-comment: I find it interesting that perl related posts tend to generate so many comments. I attribute this to the fact that:

a.) A lot of people really like perl and b.) A lot of people really hate perl.

<comment><USER11> And:

c.) A lot of people really like hating Perl.

I think it goes beyond basic dislike of the language...that would require knowledge of the language, which is pretty clearly lacking in many of the flames. I suspect it's often human tribal tendencies. Rubyists and Pythonistas see another tribe competing in the very same environment with very similar capabilities (because, let's face it, mild syntactic differences aside Perl, Python and Ruby are more alike than they are different when compared to almost any other language), and they also see an opportunity to combine to beat up on a currently larger and older tribe.

By the time you've spent enough time with a language to get past identifying with just that one tribe, you don't feel as aggressive an urge to pontificate on the suckage of other languages.

<comment><USER4> d) A lot of people who like Perl like to troll people who dislike Perl, by telling them they "don't know Perl".

<comment><USER11> I think maybe you're categorizing me in group "d". ;-)

I've never said there aren't valid criticisms of Perl...just agreeing with msluyter's very astute meta-comment, and adding one more option. I believe that people exist in both groups "b" and "c"...I wasn't overloading method "b" to actually mean something else. Some people in "b" probably even have valid reasons for hating Perl...but, I think we can all agree that the majority of flames in any language thread come from a place of ignorance about the language. After all, if you really don't like a language, odds are good you don't do much work in it, and so don't actually know a lot about it.

But, if you think we need one more option, I won't argue. There probably are people in category "d" (in addition to me, it seems), as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _But why did Common Lisp need to build in at least 3 separate ways to map keys to values (getf, assoc, and hash tables)? The answer is because the language designers wanted all three._

Actually, the answer is that those three do different things. GETF is for property lists which look like '(key1 value1 key2 value2), ASSOC is for association lists which look like '((key1 . value1) (key2 . value2)), and GETHASH is for a hashtable which looks like a vector/array and not a list.

GETF returns the value of the first key that matches. GETHASH will return the value of the hashed key that matches. ASSOC allows you to return any value for whatever key you're getting or whatever test you're using.

So each one has a different purpose. The trade-off is how _you_ choose to map keys to values. It may be faster to use a hash-table instead of an assoc-list, or it may be easier to interact with an assoc-list rather than a property list. The point is that there's a choice and a reason why the choice is available.

This reminds me of all the newbie Java programmers who use the ArrayList class instead of looking for just the right data structure for what they want to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> My complaint was having all of these in the core language. If I want to use property lists, why can't I just load the "plist" library? If I want association lists, why can't I just load the "alist" library? And so on... the core programming language is not the place to dump every algorithm ever created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So Perl is like Java then: the language sucks but the platform is great?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perl is the syntax, CPAN is the language. So no.

<comment><USER15> Isn't that a bit like saying "C is the syntax, and all of computing is the language"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, in the sense that the pattern of the sentence is "$foo is the syntax, $bar is the language." Semantically, however, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "As an example, the software that runs this blog (Angerwhale) uses 212 different Perl modules."

Blog software needing 212 different Perl modules: _Not a strong argument for Perl._

<comment><USER16> Once there was an idea in perl-land, that we should take 150 or so different little modules, package them together and make a Big Monolithic Release with Lots Of Stuff in it.

They thought they'd call it Perl on Poles.

Then we realised that big monolithic releases were a good idea in the same way as vista was a good idea, and went back to depending on the exact things we needed for our app, conveniently cut up so we could depend on lots of little libraries rather than one giant one that contained lots of stuff we never used.

I'm sorry you find a culture of software reuse an argument against a language. Here, let me sell you this dot net - fifty pee and a windows license.

<comment><USER4> Your post is a troll.

He's not complaining about using modules. He's complaining about using one hundred and fifty modules, and you're attacking him on an argument he's not making.

Your last statement is especially childish. See 'be civil' at <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER16> Bugger. I was aiming for sarcastic hyperbole rather than trolling. Sorry.

I'm trying to attack the idea that using lots of small modules is worse than having a few big dependencies - CPAN dependency chains often -look- big because we try to break things down into the smallest unit of viable reuse. It's a bit more work but it's part of what makes CPAN so effective a toolkit.

If you want, re-read my post and try and mentally apply a deadpan english voice with more than a hint of sarcasm and see if that makes up for my poor phrasing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Programming languages are just as much _social/cultural_ constructs as spoken ones. The language's technical merits are just one factor. Sometimes, a bigger factor is the community which uses that language.

Choice of language makes a difference in productivity to your team, but in many cases, this will be swamped by other factors, like how experienced and knowledgeable they are and how well they work together.

Then again, there are highly specialized domains where a language will make you 100X more productive than another.

</comment><comment><USER18> From a pragmatic point of view, if you need to "reinvent" stuff for some reasons, e.g to implement them in C or whatever, prototype it in perl as generic as possible and just translate it to C or your language of choice... look how they did it in perl (there's next to nothing they didn't implement by now), then implement the algorithm in "your" language. It saves you really lots of time.

</comment><comment><USER19> > The end result is that the syntax and implementation compromises of your > language don't really matter much.

Hm. To me that's pretty much all that matters. I want powerful features and a nice syntax.

> Python doesn't have lexical closures like Perl's

What does that mean? Doesn't Python have lexical closures?

<comment><USER20> Python has closures but has issues when changing variables within them. This leads most people to agree that Python's implementation of closures is insufficient.

See the following link for an example and more details:

[http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2004-July/27095...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2004-July/270951.html)

Instead of list boxing, you can also use a function attribute to handle changing the variable in the correct scope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is this attitude that leaves us stuck with things like Unix and Windows.

The reluctance to break free from legacy technologies allows them to build more and more momentum. Unfortunately, this momentum delays innovation.

<comment><USER19> I think I agree with you: as benevolent programmers, we should pick the best tool for the job, without consideration for the platform, or the libraries. This would advance the art of software faster in the long run. Unfortunately, we are forced to make decisions based on the ecosystem of our tools, because of short-term constraints.</comment></comment>


Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who-would-rather-be-building-stuff/ <comment><USER2> I fly out to Microconf 2013 in approximately 20 hours and haven't finished my presentation yet, so I thought I'd procrastinate by finishing the editing on this transcript of my Microconf 2012 talk. Also includes slides/video.

Feel free to ask questions if you have them.

<comment><USER3> Excellent advice as always. One question: When talking about marketing for internet businesses, I don't remember you mentioning branding much, if at all, mostly direct response marketing stuff. Is this by choice? Have you got an opinion about branding for internet startups - eg how many resources they should devote to it compared to direct response marketing?

<comment><USER2> Most of my businesses are aggressively unbrandable (with the debatable exception of myself personally). Branding strikes me as not really playing to my strengths and not being maximally compatible with the sort of time and resource constraints most small businesses / startups are operating under. (If I were in a confrontational mood I'd also describe it as "A great way to spend a lot of money while avoiding any responsibility to actually produce meaningful business results.")

<comment><USER3> I suspected something like this :) I come from a technical background too, but I think that not thinking in branding terms is very often a big weakness of us technical founders - one of the reasons why inferior products often have the upper hand. I'm also trying to make a business out of this realization, but I'm not there yet and for now I'll just try to sow the seed of doubt here.

By the by, I also think that a lot of what you suggest for direct response marketing also has branding effects - just think about educating people by email for free - so the two things aren't necessarily in contrast. And I don't think that there would be much to debate about the value of your personal brand here (meaning no offence - if you don't like the word brand, just substitute "reputation" to it!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My $0.02 worth:

      For many of you, assistance directly from the CEO in integration is a really
      compelling offer, because wow, you can't get that anywhere else. [...]
      We'll do the copy‑pasting for you ... and it will actually be done by a freelancer
      that we've hired and told them how to FTP stuff.

If one claims "assistance directly from the CEO", I would be disappointed to learn that access credentials to my website were handed out to some third- party freelancer who performs the integration rather than being handled directly by the engineer-owner. If you mean something different such as "our CEO ensures the job gets done to exacting standards" then that's freelancer- compatible as the statement makes no claims about who provides the assistance.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've followed/stalked you for years Patrick. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. You helped transition me from grey to white.

On a side note, if your Vimeo account is Pro/Plus, please check the 'make accessible for mobile devices' option in account settings.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm super sorry to have just learned about microconf only to find that it is completely, totally sold out for this year (plus being only a few days away).

Any other good conferences like this one? From what I can see, this is all content and zero fluff, not cheap but not outrageously expensive either. I'm more than ready and willing to book even if it's a few hours from now for something like this. Share your thoughts, guys!

<comment><USER2> BaconBizConf and Business of Software are the other two software business conferences that I'd fly to America to attend even when not speaking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not trying to take anything away from you at all, because what you've provided is very good. However, I'd like to say something about _marketing_ vs _sales_ , in that it seems like your material is more geared towards sales than marketing. I'm going to go off on a tangent here somewhat, bear with me...

To explain in my eyes, I see marketing as everything you do to promote your project (i.e. brand/product/etc.), which may not always have a direct financial payout tied to it. For instance, FOSS projects have their own motivations for gaining usage and popularity, and revenue may be tied to that, but they're not explicitly selling anything. But, they do wish to get noticed, to have people try them out, etc. and so they are selling the idea of their project even though they're not actually ringing anything up at the register.

On the other hand, "sales" is much more closely coupled with driving a user to purchase (or maybe even just 'sign-up' for) your service or product. This is what I'm mostly seeing in the slides: pricing, email campaigns, conversion rates, etc. These are all pretty exclusive to making a _sale_ , and while they do embody marketing concepts, there's a lot more to marketing than simply corralling the customer to the register.

Why am I droning on about this? I'll admit that it's for selfish reasons; I was hoping to see some marketing guidance for the page itself. I review lots of projects, and a majority of them that are created by engineers fall into one of the following buckets:

* zero marketing whatsoever, possibly only a github page with a couple sentences in a readme

* poorly-constructed marketing, such as using lots of buzzwords and generic phrases without actually telling me anything at all about what the project actually is or does; for instance, many times the only blurb given is akin to "cures what ails you"

Now there are some that get it right, though I suspect that many of these either have someone with marketing skills on the team, or they've had an actual marketing guru help them out. That, or they're generally really observant and pick-up on it without having to study.

Either way, when I review a project, it's a shame that the basics are so often neglected:

* problem definition: in explicit terms, what problem(s) does your project solve?

* product differentiation: if yours is "the best", "an alternative", "the new way", etc., then why do you think that? Why should I choose yours over X? If you can provide some concrete examples here, all the better.

* product demo: if it can be demo'd, then please at least create a simple working demo. Note: I don't consider projects that include demos as a part of the source code, which must be downloaded, built, and configured as a proper demo. I also don't consider any that require you to register or provide an email address as a proper demo, either. Unless it's a very pressing need that I have, I'm not going to spend 5-15m fiddling with your source or giving away my info. Just host it somewhere so that I -- and possibly my CTO/CEO/purchasing agent -- can see it in action.

* licensing, terms and conditions, etc.: make them prominent enough that I don't need to browse your source files or open a support request to find out if I can even use it.

Sorry, this got longer than I anticipated...

<comment><USER8> Four classic functions of marketing teams at product companies:

* Product management: the feature/function/benefit of the product and (most important function in all of marketing) pricing/packaging.

* Marketing communications (marcom): what you've defined "marketing" as: promotion, promotional writing. Also, advertising.

* Sales support: awareness campaigns and events and, particularly, lead-gen. This is what the CEO see as the most important function of "marketing".

* PR/AR: relationship management with publications and analysts.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the info. I was mainly speaking of the audience that the OP was addressing, i.e. engineers who likely haven't had much if any formal marketing training (I've only had 1 semester worth), as they are the ones on small (or solo) teams that are likely to not pay much attention to any sort of marketing. It's good to see a top-down perspective from a large organization like you've laid out too, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could you post your list of the 400 new things you could do with Twilio? It seems like there ought to be a lot but I can't think of any.

(Or at least post your process for coming up with them.) I think bitcoin might be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?

<comment><USER2> _Or at least post your process for coming up with them._

Think of a business. Think of any phone call, incoming or outgoing, which is sufficiently standardized that you could teach any college graduate to execute that. That person can be replaced with a Twilio script, at a fraction of the cost.

My wife is sleeping in the room with my business notebooks so I'll hold off on finding and scanning it for the moment, but it was literally as simple as a) write down business, b) write down the calls they make, c) star the ones that sound like _money_.

 _I think bitcoin might be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?_

We will have to agree to disagree on that one. Bitcoin's core innovation is the distributed self-organizing boiler room. As a transaction processing system it's technically innovative but wildly inferior to legacy payments for transactions which need to touch the real world. (It's interesting for transactions which don't, but could be replaced with a SQL update statement, which would improve upon it in virtually every way.) As a currency/commodity, the arguments in favor of it having a sustainable value north of zero are not credible to me. The main reason I have not nailed an 8,000 word stake in its rotten heart is that I think there's a non-zero risk that people will use every additional quantum of attention given to it as a reason to convince other people to "invest."

<comment><USER10> Outgoing unsolicited calls, once removed, might lighten the load of what people are imagining here, unless I'm not up to date on Twilio's TOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The video was great! It would be nice to hear about how you get people into the funnel so that we could do a lot of the things you recommend. You already covered SEO, do you have any other customer acquisition techniques?

<comment><USER2> SEO and AdWords are my mainstays for my software businesses. This year I'm going to be dipping my toes into a bit of offline marketing, like e.g. going to the (without loss of generality) Omaha Conference For Orthodontics Practice Managers and just talking to people. Given what I currently surmise about the per-account LTVs for higher-end customers of Appointment Reminder, at many plausible guesses for how many conversations I can have per day and how many people I can convert, it might be worth my time to do that. (Step 1: Do it. Step 2: Do it systematically with predictable ROI. Step 3: Pay someone to execute on Step 2.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am having trouble processing some cognitive dissonance when comparing your parable of the "Crazy Egg Enterprise Edition" but then using pricing strategies to take advantage of the sane kind of managers. While, I understand the concept of feature segmentation, I supposed should not be concerned with how other people run their business. I only need to focus on my profitability and not being a sucker.

<comment><USER13> I suppose it's all in the wording. Have the cheaper options but don't call them enterprise, and then have the really expensive enterprise option for managers for who the pain of being called anything but is more than a slight blip in the budget.

Giving them ways to pad their budget was also an eye opener for me. The idea that they might not even be conforming to our rational actor model of balancing cost and value opens up new pricing considerations. I wonder if a monthly 'flex' option where they can temporarily boost their budget to some ridiculous figure would work. The engineer in me does cringe at the thought of it though

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everyone who has a startup should watch this at least once a day (me included). This is great stuff, Patrick.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, glad you liked it. What would you like to hear more about? (I'm shamelessly fishing for ideas for this year.)

<comment><USER15> These are a few things off the top of my head that I'd love to read a blog post on:

\- SAAS Pricing when marginal costs are fairly high. For example, how would you price a service that offered human translation of a company's social media posts into N different languages?

\- Accounting / corporate structure for bootstrapped SAAS companies: do you use an LLC, and if so things to take into account for cash vs accrual accounting, pass-through vs. corporate taxation, guaranteed payments vs. distributions, finding a good accountant, etc.

\- The 8,000 word "stake through Bitcoin's heart", or at least the part that talks about how and why banks are going to stop taking Bitcoin exchanges as clients. There is a surprising amount of doublethink going on to allow people simultaneously believe "Bitcoin and traditional banking are natural enemies", "at least one Bitcoin exchange will always be able to access the banking system", and "the nominal price of Bitcoins can only increase in the long run."

<comment><USER2> _Accounting / corporate structure for bootstrapped SAAS companies: do you use an LLC, and if so things to take into account for cash vs accrual accounting, pass-through vs. corporate taxation, guaranteed payments vs. distributions, finding a good accountant, etc._

My accountant, Cameron Keng, is giving an attendee talk on this very topic at Microconf this year. I'm going to be taking notes. (The cheapest advice from him I'll get this year, for certain. ;) ) Remind me to post them if he doesn't.

Noted on the other two suggestions.

<comment><USER15> Thanks! I'll look forward to it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Hibou – Use spaced repetition to remember what you read - <AUTHOR> http://gethibou.com <comment><USER2> Nice work.

Any plans for creating notes with cloze deletions? I have been looking for a lightweight implementation of an incremental reading system as described at [http://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm](http://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm). Part of the system includes converting what you have read into question/answer material.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, and I'm so glad this is the top-rated comment. Rereading isn't the same as retrieving information, and I want to work on this.

I'd love to implement cloze deletions. My thought is that if there is a note associated with a highlight, the user could click an eye icon to toggle the highlight's visibility. Cloze deletions would then be achieved by copy-pasting the highlight and removing the portion that you want hidden.

If you're familiar with the Hibou UI and have other ideas on how I could smoothly integrate cloze deletion, let me know.

<comment><USER3> Below the pencil for note taking have a ? or lightbulb that allows the user to enter a question? Since I think users creating their own cloze tests or prompts would be beneficial. This also lets it be optional.

e.g

[http://i.imgur.com/YKrI6Ad.png](http://i.imgur.com/YKrI6Ad.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hm, very interesting idea. The extension seems to be a buggy. Or, maybe I'm not supposed to use the Firefox addon they have since the founder writes here that this is a Chrome extension.

Anyways, I'm logged into two Google accounts, one work and one personal. I want to use Hibou with my personal account, so in the extension I selected my personal one. But when I use the webapp, it tries to log me into my work one, since it's the first one I logged in with on Google in general. So I switch the account in the top right but then the application dies, reloads and doesn't allow me to login again.

And, I can't really figure out how to save the text I've selected, it just stays yellow forever

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry to hear this. It should work okay if you only have one Google account. Unfortunately, maintaining the Firefox version isn't a priority right now. I love Firefox and it was a tough decision to switch to Chrome, but it's the more popular browser these days.

As I wrote below, updating the Firefox version really depends on how successful the Chrome version becomes and how many people request this.

If you write me an email (firstname.lastname@example.com), I can keep you up to date with my plans to update the Firefox extension.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Hibou is a Chrome extension that allows you to highlight whatever you find interesting, then sends you a notification when it's time to review those highlights. Spaced repetition is a proven technique that waits until you're about to forget something before reminding you to review it, thus helping you remember as much as possible as effortlessly as possible.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of the HN community

Will

<comment><USER5> So are you a techzing listener, or was it a coincidence?

<comment><USER6> This was the first thing that I thought of. Jason calls the idea "Memory Hole", which is both a much better and much worse name than "Hibou".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaha, I totally agree. I've just reached out to them for some feedback. Seems like they've spent a lot of time thinking about this.

<comment><USER7> Nice work! I think we need to bring you on the show.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My first thoughts was "Slander / Abuse". I'm going to go with the naming wasn't meant to be in Japanese (or Chinese), but thought you might want to be aware of that. :)

This is great. A reminder to go through what I'd normally slap in a bookmark with an intention of "reread later". I'll give it a test-drive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks for the heads-up. It means _owl_ in French and is pronounced ēbu. Owls being wise and all.

Thanks for trying it out. Hope you like it.

<comment><USER3> When I get home you'll be getting another 5 star review. I saw the algorithm you use on the About page which was my only question. Being familiar with SRS, I'm already trusting of how SRS works, so I'm not judging the app based on "what is it supposed to do" but rather "how does it look and function".

It's well designed and easy to use which is all I could ask for for an app like this. Thanks for sharing!

Two things I've found that are both minor so I'm not "docking points" ;)

 _> Click the Hibou highlight button. It will be saved here until you make a highlight._

I think you mean "Highlights you make will be saved here."?

And if I activate Hibou on a page, I can't seem to disable the highlighter without refreshing the page. Pressing Alt+H doesn't get rid of it and neither does clicking the button to deactivate the highlighting cursor. This is an annoyance, but it's unlikely that I'll ever press Alt+H without the intent of highlighting something - so isn't an issue I'd run into day to day.

Clicking onto the page to close the app dialogue and then re-clicking the icon to bring open the options shows that the highlighter reactivates itself. Upon reactivation or clicking the bubble I expect it to remain disabled until I activate it again.

[http://i.imgur.com/SQGXKbI.png](http://i.imgur.com/SQGXKbI.png)

Lastly - it should be clarified what benefits "Logging in" gives. How does it make Hibou "even better"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. Thanks for the review and thoughts on design.

>Click the Hibou highlight button. It will be saved here until you make a highlight.

 _Here_ refers to the _Reading list_. If you click the highlight button, but don't make any highlights, Hibou will save that page in the reading list (the left-most icon in app.hibou.com). That way, you can go back and highlight it later. You won't get any reminders or notifications until you create your first highlight on that page, at which point it goes from your _reading list_ to your _queue_ (middle clock icon), and of course the highlights are saved. I'll make that clearer.

Thanks for pointing out the disabling bug. If you only use the keyboard shortcut, enabling and disabling should work fine. If you use the popup, disabling seems broken. I'll fix that today.

Logging in allows you to * see your highlights on another device (which means another computer right now, but will soon mean your phone) by going to app.gethibou.com and logging in with the same gmail account. * Store an unlimited number of highlights. Everything is saved locally if you don't log in, and you're limited to 5mb of local storage in an extension, so eventually you'll run out of space (you'll get a warning if you're running out of space). * Sort all highlights by tags. As I roll out features, sometimes things need to be coded on the server _and_ within the extension. In those cases, I'll write the code on the server first, so by logging in you'll get access to newer features. Sorting by tag is the first of those features.

I'll add this to the guide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do you have a way to quiz the user? If it's just review instead of attempted recall, it's not near as effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but I agree. See my reply to @rcy's comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The newest update had me remove the extension straightaway. I don't need a 'get started with hibou now' layer on all my pages if I haven't used it yet on which I can't even press 'not now' because Hibou injects some google analytics which µblock blocks of course causing the JS to break...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, you're only supposed to see that once. That should be fixed as of 0.4.6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting. Are you planning to do a firefox extension too ?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was originally a Firefox extension, and it is still available if you visit the above page on Firefox, but as pointed out in another comment, it's a bit buggy and I'm not sure when I'll have time to bring it up to speed with the Chrome version. Frankly, I had high hopes when Mozilla announced that they were making it easy to port Chrome extensions to Firefox, and my plan was to contribute to [that project]([https://github.com/jetpack-labs/chrome- tailor](https://github.com/jetpack-labs/chrome-tailor)), but it doesn't seem to be very active.

It really depends on how successful the Chrome version becomes and how many people request this.

If you write me an email (firstname.lastname@example.com), I can keep you up to date with my plans to update the Firefox extension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Upon updating Chrome this morning I got this page: [http://i.imgur.com/iCU0100.png](http://i.imgur.com/iCU0100.png)

The button didn't work and I'm leaning towards this being a bug. If this is intended, I'll be uninstalling. I do not approve of this behavior in apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely a bug. Are/were you on 0.4.6? Someone else mentioned this being a result of µblock, but even with that installed, it should now be working correctly.

<comment><USER3> No idea to be honest, just glad to hear it was a bug. Given it was more or less non-functional I was erring towards "bug" over intentional to begin with. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is awesome! Loved it. I'd love it even more if there was an android app with offline access.

<comment><AUTHOR> I glad you enjoy it. Given that I'm working on this alone, I won't have the resources to make a native app soon. That said, I'm working on the mobile webapp right now and will try to implement service workers so you can get notifications and have offline access.

Install to home screen removes the browser UI, so it won't be native, but it'll be close.

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/20/8454613/push- notifications...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/20/8454613/push- notifications-android-chrome-42-mobile-web)

Hopefully iOS will support service workers in the future.</comment></comment>


Near-Eye Wavefront Emulating Display - <AUTHOR> https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/075-319-127-149-044 <comment><USER2> I always enjoy reading about this kind of thing. I don't know what's the novel aspect of this patent though — the idea of using multiple overlapping projectors so that the display can be farther from the eye and still paint the full retina through the pupil? Something else?

<comment> jf- I imagine that it's focal length. With current headsets you're staring at a screen directly in front of your eyes, only giving the illusion of depth. This appears to be modulating the wavefront so that optically it's similar to a scene that is actually x distance away from you. Your eyes can tell what distance you're focusing at, so this should be significantly more immersive should anything come of it.

In other words, with this device, objects would actually _be_ in the distance, rather than being smaller on a nearby screen.

<comment><USER3> It reminds of a video about research Nvidea was conducting on lenses that allowed to have a display closer than the 7 or so cm that was the limit in how close our eyes could focus on an object. In other words, this isn't just about being more immersive, it's about having headsets that are not these big blocks of plastic we put on our heads, but more like everyday glasses or at least goggles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Suggestion: tag these links with [patent] or something similar. Those who work in the industry in question may appreciate the heads-up, in order to avoid inadvertently gaining knowledge that could expose them to willful-infringement claims later.

</comment><comment><USER5> A hologram is by definition a wavefront reconstruction. This sounds a lot like the Hololens?

The intellectual property game has gotten extremely confusing. The more I study it, the less firm it has become.

At least this patent _application_ has some decent figures.

<comment><USER6> I think it's doing what the hololens does (waveguide) but the hololens is not particularly near-eye. If you can put the display closer to you, you can have less bulky gear (assuming the focus-distance of a wave-guide was the issue...?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> OK I'll say it. It's describing the next gen. VR headset from Ready Player One.</comment>


Amazon Camper Force - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazondelivers.jobs/about/camperforce/ <comment><USER2> This is how a lot of the world used to work (ok, minus the wi-fi, and the accomodation was even more basic). Unskilled laborers and anyone else out of a job would move around, taking jobs as and when they were needed and often living "on site" for a while. Much of the work was seasonal such as harvesting, although some places like dockyards and coal mines you could turn up and work by the day or week most of the year. No such thing as benefits if you fell ill, of course.

Here's an article about hops pickers in England [1] and the related Wikipedia article [2]. I also recommend Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath".

[1] [https://mashable.com/2017/06/03/hop- pickers](https://mashable.com/2017/06/03/hop-pickers) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_hut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_hut)

<comment><USER3> Should we consider this, then, a regression?

<comment><USER4> Acknowledging the way the world works and trying to improve conditions without addressing the root cause is sometimes one of the best possible outcomes.

When a doctor helps you with the arm you broke because a car hit your bicycle, a doctor doesn't try to improve road conditions for cyclists.

<comment><USER5> That's a bad analogy. Doctors very much participate in trying to prevent injuries and chronic disease through educating and planning with patients, and lobbying government (ASCRS, AMA, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't heard of this program before so I did some digging. According to this source [1], Amazon Camper Force seeks to hire people who live in Campers (aka RVs) as item pickers for Amazon warehouses.

 _" As part of the CamperForce program, Amazon hires workers on temporary contracts from early October until December 23, paying them near minimum wage while covering the expenses of staying in an RV park._

 _The company targets older workers, who they believe have a stronger work ethic than their younger counterparts._ "

The program has been around since 2008. Apparently Amazon does not work them as hard as regular hires, as they only need to hit 70% output (in items per hour) of year-round employees.

[1] [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/06/camp-n06.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/06/camp-n06.html)

<comment><USER7> Drove past a parking lot full of RVs next to the Amazon facility in Campbellsville Kentucky. Quite startling to see.

<comment><USER8> I worked at that facility up until last year. It's one of the oldest Amazon buildings around.

<comment><USER7> Half my family is from right there. Amazon and Walmart. The modern day fruit of the loom factory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Health insurance after 90 days, for a program that runs from early October through late December. Returning campers welcome. I wonder if returning campers get to count last year's 90 days.

It kinda feels like Amazon is bragging about not paying health insurance, just like they list frugality as one of their company values, and are looking for a place with a low cost of living and tax breaks for HQ2.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a book out about this phenomenon. More info here: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadl...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadland- living-in-cars-working-amazon)

<comment><USER11> So it seems Hobo'ing has finally made a comeback in the US. If this isn't a sign of the times, I'm not sure what is.

<comment><USER12> The US is hitting new record highs in median income: [https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2018/08/july-2018...](https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2018/08/july-2018-median- household-income.html?m=1)

<comment><USER13> Medians are a meaningless statistic in a country with such a massive gap between top and bottom earners.

The ratio of income bracket to income growth is literally a hockey stick graph: [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/8/8/16112368/pi...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/8/8/16112368/piketty-saez-zucman-income-growth-inequality- stagnation-chart)

<comment><USER14> It's meaningful if you don't care about the top and bottom earners.

<comment><USER13> Not if there's no actual data points left in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kind of low on details, but I guess they're looking for warehouse workers that can drive somewhere, live in an RV for a few months, and then get another job?

I am not sure who can do that that is also willing to work 12 hours a day lifting boxes.

<comment><USER16> Folks who retired at 50 and want to earn a little extra cash occasionally? I doubt most Amazon packages are that heavy.

<comment><USER15> It says the minimum workday is 10 hours. Who would retire at 50 and want to spend 2 months intensely working 10 hours a day? You obviously had the work ethic and happened to find the right line of work to both afford an RV and retire at 50... why go back to what is the most entry level of entry level jobs to get a little extra cash? What would you use the cash for? $13/hour * 60 hours a week * 8 weeks = $6240 * 30% tax = $4368 for your entire duration (plus free utilities). I don't see how that's worth it. That's less than two weeks of an 8-hour-a-day job for pretty much any professional in New York City, and they get a 401k, insurance, etc.

I'm not sure I'll retire at 50, but I am sure I won't be working 60 hour weeks out of a van. Unless something changes dramatically, of course. You never know.

<comment><USER16> I think there are two types of folks. In one camp you have those that retire early because they are wealthy and buy an RV to travel. On the other hand there is a segment that is normal folks who are sick of the rat race or got laid off and have enough money to retire if they live extremely frugally and living in an RV is a way to save money and forgo the expense of a house.

I imagine this Amazon thing is attractive to the latter type of situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hourly wages listed are $11-$13. Is the website just out of date?

<comment><USER9> My guess is that it's accurate, and that Amazon still considers it to fall within their promise of a $15 minimum wage, just like the federal government and some states allow restaurants to pay less than minimum wage to servers who get tips – only in AMZ's case instead of tips it's RV parking.

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

<comment><USER18> Wifi and power extra, shit pump and water free for prime members.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought their wages were all supposed to be at $15/hr. I see several $11/12 listings on that page.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not from the US, so I don't know about that "RV Culture". But if I'm cynical, it sounds like Amazon is looking for people who can't afford to say no (which is why they live in a camper van for starters...), which is unethical in my opinion.

If I'm being optimistic, they're engaging with a community, who actually loves the RV lifestyle, and wants opportunities like this for limited periods, so they can save up for their "next adventure". I just don't know how working 12 hour shifts while living in an RV is called an "adventure". But hey, that's marketing these days - everything should be (over)sold.

My gutfeeling tells me, that the first is more likely to be the case than the latter, which is just another bad mark in the book for Amazon...

<comment><USER21> > I'm not from the US, so I don't know about that "RV Culture". But if I'm > cynical, it sounds like Amazon is looking for people who can't afford to say > no.

Plenty of people outside the US, too, live in caravans for a considerable portion of the year. Go to southern Morocco or Western Sahara in the winter, and you will see many hundreds of camping cars owned by German, French, and Italian pensioners who want to spend the cold months in warm, sunny weather. If there actually were seasonal work down there, I would totally expect some portion of them to take it, since some people do feel the need to make some extra money or to do something "productive" during the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When we were sailing there were times where we were hunkered down at a marina or anchorage. Most of our neighbors were white hairs and they enjoyed the independence. These boats were kitted out to go months between provisionings.

Anyway, jobs like these seem dystopian, but unless your career was already highly mobile it's very hard to make a consisten income and be a nomad. Corporate remote jobs are extremely rare and the few that exist are being pushed towards expensive city coworking spaces.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not just packers. Airport/airline employees also can live in RVs nearby.

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106970...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106970003)

It seems like in both cases, they profile divorced old men who have economic woes as a result.

</comment><comment><USER24> Strikes me as a little bit dystopian frankly.

<comment><USER25> Me too. My first thought was that the title used on HN was some kind of joke, but nope, there really is a staffing initiative called "Amazon Camper Force" at Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Having a semi-itinerate workforce seems like an extremely effective way to avoid any risk of labor activities.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't believe these temp workers qualify for the $15 per hour wages. It's interesting how the Amazon web page puts such a "cheerful spin" on this slumlording . . . "They also list witholding a part of their wages until they've successfully completed the season"

</comment><comment><USER28> Whoa, this has Snow Crash all over it. What's next, some Gillionaire is gonna tie a few ships together out in the plastic gyre?

I mean, doesn't the dystopian nature of having a mobile workforce like this, you know .. with their entire lifestyle hinged on the warehouse-de-jeur ethos .. isn't this just really not kind of creepy?

Maybe its me, but I'm seeing this as the sprawl, sporing.

<comment><USER29> Warehouse-du-jour, and from the looks of it, it seems that laborers are willing to accept these conditions, which sound pretty average to me.</comment></comment>


Market Madness in the Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/opinion/coronavirus-stock-market.html <comment><AUTHOR> This passage struck a chord with me:

"We are, you might say, in a time when the smart money lacks all conviction, while the dumb money is filled with a passionate intensity."</comment>


Goldman and IDG Put $50M to Work in a Bitcoin Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/business/dealbook/goldman-and-idg-put-50-million-to-work-in-a-bitcoin-company.html <comment><USER2> Official Circle announcement:

[http://blog.circle.com/2015/04/29/new-circle-investors- new-u...](http://blog.circle.com/2015/04/29/new-circle-investors-new-us- dollar-account-features-china-horizons/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting, but I'd not focus on Bitcoin too much. This could be a test-bed for Goldman for something much bigger, because central banks are seriously thinking about digital, potentially Bitcoin style, currencies.

From the Circle announcement oska linked, emphasis mine:

 _" As the financial services industry continues to become more digital and open, we see significant opportunities in companies and solutions that have the promise to transform global markets through technical innovation. We think that Circle's product vision and exceptional management team present a compelling opportunity in the digital payments space."

What is the Connection to China?

IDG Capital Partners likewise brings a strategic capability to Circle as we bring our products and services to China. We believe in a hybrid digital economy in which value moves freely around the world and converts into other currencies -- including both crypto and fiat currencies -- seamlessly, safely, and instantly."_

I'd like to link this to the Bank of England's recent report, the One Bank Research Agenda [http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/onebank/di...](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/onebank/discussion.pdf) [PDF, 50 pages] posed topics related to digital currencies, including the question "Why might central banks issue digital currencies?" [on page 31] Again, emphasis mine.

 _" The emergence of private digital currencies (such as Bitcoin) has shown that it is possible to transfer value securely without a trusted third party. While existing private digital currencies have economic flaws which make them volatile, the distributed ledger technology that their payment systems rely on may have considerable promise. This raises the question of whether central banks should themselves make use of such technology to issue digital currencies.

There are two parts to this question. The first is whether there is any rationale for a central bank to issue a digital currency supported by some form of distributed ledger payment system. The second addresses the economic, technological and regulatory challenges of doing so."_

Goldman are getting experience at the second question with this largely before anyone else, and waiting (for now) for the first question to answer itself.

<comment><USER4> |This is interesting, but I'd not focus on Bitcoin too much. This could be a test-bed for Goldman for something much bigger, because central banks are seriously thinking about digital, potentially Bitcoin style, currencies.

So bitcoin without the bitcoin? Have a think about what you said and what attributes bitcoin lacks that don't qualify it for widespread adoption. The narrative that's being pushed by the media is that bitcoin is almost perfect but unfortunately the big guys can't use it. The reason is that they can't print more of it, for free, on a whim.

<comment><USER5> Well banks used to use gold as an asset and then give loans on top of that, nothing stopping anyone making Bitcoin IOUs on top of bitcoin holdings. The problem is the same that was solved by banks hundreds of years ago, why would someone store gold with them instead of storing it at home, replace gold with bitcoin in previous sentence ;)

Anyways this might explain Goldman Sachs involvement, when one puts bitcoin into Circle you do not control the keys (the "gold" is no longer yours) you get a Bitcoin IOU and you put your trust in Circle, down the road once Circle have millions of users they could offer a lending service and/or make it easier for people to get into stocks (and hence Goldman Sachs profit) and other investments

<comment><USER6> You can't send perfectly divisible quantities of gold halfway around the world in seconds. You also can't store gold in your brain and thus move unlimited quantities of gold across national borders undetected. Furthermore, unlike gold, Bitcoin storage and transaction signing needs can and will be satisfied by low-cost dedicated computing units, opening the freedom to store bitcoin to any who wish to use it, and the chance of possessive governments successfully trying to prevent people from doing so is about as likely as governments stamping out smartphone use.

<comment><USER5> You don't need to "sell" bitcoin to me :) I use it almost daily since 2011-2012 ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Circle transactions are free... What is their revenue model?

<comment><USER5> Well bitcoin transactions are almost free (miners fee is what nowadays 1-2 cents regardless of amount?) as is. It is hard to compete with that

Their aim is to grow and acquire users and become an import cog in bitcoin and financial worlds

Once you get lets say to a few million to a hundred million users then you endup with all sorts of possibilities such as becoming a bank and offering loans (this alone coupled with a good database of users could be a money maker), offering checking/savings accounts, hell making it easier for users to invest in stocks etc (might be what Goldman interested...) and so on

Remember the likes of Facebook and Twitter didnt have a "revenue model" at start either, look where they are now...

edit: another possibility would be mobile payments (nfc or qr code) to any merchant accepting bitcoin of which there is a growing number thanks to bitpay, think of all the data that could be mined there, they can basically make the whole credit card network obsolete by bypassing it

<comment><USER8> > Remember the likes of Facebook and Twitter didnt have a "revenue model" at > start either, look where they are now...

Facebook's doing OK (they have the advantage of not locking themselves into being a simple 140 character messaging service), but Twitter's quarterly results were fairly abysmal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds great.</comment>


Encrypted Google Searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=173733&hl=en

<comment><USER2> Google is feeling the heat from <http://duckduckgo.com/> ;)

By the way, for me this does not work, <https://www.google.com/> redirects to <http://www.google.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More info: [http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/05/encrypted-google- sea...](http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/05/encrypted-google-search- coming-to-a-browser-near-you.ars)</comment>


LiveU Puts the Power of a News Van in Your Backpack (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/02/08/liveu-puts-the-power-of-a-news-van-in-your-backpack-video/

<comment><USER2> I'm still tryin' to figure out how they fit the producer in that there little bag!</comment>


A Bosnian pine growing in Greece has been dated to be more than 1000 years old - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/4438.html <comment><USER2> I have no clue where the author of this article is pulling the fact that this tree is the oldest in Europe. I was just in Croatia on the Island of Pag a few months ago, standing in front of an Olive tree [1][2] that is 400+ years older than this tree:

Either the Croatians lied to me (and the internet, and the world) or this article is just completely invalid

[1] [http://www.autocampdrazica.com/en/island-pag-novalja- lun-s5....](http://www.autocampdrazica.com/en/island-pag-novalja-lun-s5.htm)

[2] [https://secretdalmatia.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/olive- trees-...](https://secretdalmatia.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/olive-trees-of- lun/)

<comment><USER3> Aye. Plenty of trees in UK older than this, including one at 4,000+

[http://www.ancient-tree- hunt.org.uk/discoveries/newdiscoveri...](http://www.ancient-tree- hunt.org.uk/discoveries/newdiscoveries)

<comment><USER4> Yep, the tree I spent alot of my youth playing with is over 2000+ and I had no idea at the time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While impressive, it is not the oldest tree in Europe. see: [http://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/records/europe/](http://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/records/europe/) And: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA2ks_cFr90](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA2ks_cFr90)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am convinced that superlative trees are cursed. The oldest tree in the world was killed while being dated (a core sample killed it). The most isolated tree in the world was hit by a drunk driver. The (2nd?) largest tree in the world was set on fire by a couple people smoking meth; and in the same forest, a super rare Chimera Albino Redwood was slated to be destroyed because it was in the path of a proposed railway.

<comment><USER7> This chimera redwood was moved for a railroad track, and is apparently doing well still. [http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/4402215-181/rare-cotati- re...](http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/4402215-181/rare-cotati-redwood- thriving-a?gallery=4406677&artslide=0)

<comment><USER4> Im surprised, but glad to hear it, thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, I certainly wouldn't date a pine, even if it would make it 2000 years old. Pines are way too introverted for my taste.

<comment><USER9> Cedar? I hardly know her!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not even the oldest in Greece. The olive grove of Plato is 2300 years old or the plane tree of Arna.

<comment><USER11> You mean this one: [http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-basics/platos- sacred-...](http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-basics/platos-sacred-olive- tree-vanished/32262) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You should check out Pando, a grove of this one quaking aspen tree that is supposed to be about 80,000 years old. It's bonkers how old trees can live.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not the oldest tree I've heard of, but the article describes it as the oldest in Europe. What makes other cadidates for oldest tree not count, and is there some political significance to the combined type, age, and location of the tree?

</comment><comment><USER14> How do they measure the tree rings on a live tree? How else do they determine the age?

<comment><USER15> They take a small core using a hollow drill. This is enough to determine the rings and the age, and won't harm the tree.

<comment><USER16> IANA botanist, but I think this method doesn't work on some trees (i.e. millennia-old olive trees) because old tissue is not there anymore, or because they have messed up rings, or on trees that have multiple trunks.

So IIUC they integrate carbon dating, ratio between total size and growth rate and other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would love to see that core sample. The tree isn't, or at least doesn't appear to be very big, so the rings must have been tiny.</comment>


Computers could soon be our best developers - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/27/computers-could-soon-be-our-best-developers/ <comment><USER2> Oh yes, you wish. But AI field promises that for a long time already and still hasn't delivered.

Apart from verbalizing the wish that artificial intelligence would replace programmers some day, the article is devoid of content.</comment>


Autograph is a machine that produces an image using nails and a single thread - <AUTHOR> http://www.laarco.com/ <comment><USER2> Awesome! It would have been nice to see a video of the machine in action.

<comment><USER3> If you scroll down there is a time lapse video :-)</comment></comment>


Good vs. Bad VC Due Diligence    - <AUTHOR> http://www.robgo.org/post/638212533/good-vs-bad-vc-due-diligence

<comment><USER2> This is worth listening to, I've seen bad or at least subpar VCs and angels pull some of these tricks.</comment>


How an early telephone silencer took on AT&T - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-battle-over-net-neutrality-started-with-the-1920s-era-hushaphone <comment><USER2> > _A modern analogy would be if AT &T was somehow able to ban putting > protective cases on smartphones_

A couple decades ago, one of the telephone companies in Canada sued a business that was giving away free protective vinyl covers for printed telephone directories. The vinyl covers were plastered with ads[1], so the telephone company argued that it was theft from their business or an infringement. I don't recall how the case turned out.

[1] Example: [http://www.westsky.com/phbkcvr1.jpg](http://www.westsky.com/phbkcvr1.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> _No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the telephone company, whether physically, by induction or otherwise_

That begs the question of whether, in some interpretation, the human holding it might also be considered a "device not furnished by the telephone company"...

<comment><USER4> There is an acoustic coupler involved that converts the signal into electromagnetic waves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Despite this ruling, for years the only way to get online was via an acoustic coupler (I used one to connect to CompuServe via Tymnet). In searching for images of them, I came across this set of someone connecting to a pay phone out of their van. I can't imagine how many quarters it took to get their email...

Reposted on imgur to avoid hug-of-death: [http://imgur.com/a/n4PMb](http://imgur.com/a/n4PMb)

Original site: [http://wrybread.com/WryRoad/gadgets/coupler.htm](http://wrybread.com/WryRoad/gadgets/coupler.htm)

<comment><USER6> It sounds like preceding the Hush-A-Phone decision, even an acoustic coupler would have been against the terms of service

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is exactly the business model for Apple or Sony and nobody seems to care. and treat people that boycott such companies as crazy.

<comment><USER8> Neither Apple nor Sony have monopolies. Their respective offerings have plenty of competition. This is why "nobody seems to care." Don't like Apple's walled garden? Go elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> they "aim" for monopoly.

They lock you in at every step they can. In hopes to archive monopoly, or quasi monopoly market cornering.

ever since the walkman, sony tries to have a monopoly on media production. from betamax to memory stick cards to mini cd to blueray. oh, wait, they got it. what is the alternative to blueray when dvd goes away?

Apple tried to do that with custom ports and data formats and now found the sweet spot with apps and media. Adobe also tried that with formats a while ago but is giving up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And I always thought the landmark telephony "net neutrality" decision was Carterfone [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone)

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting how it was used in Washington, DC (especially Congress) and New York, yet when it was banned by the FCC, Congress wasn't able to make it legal.</comment>


CS grad students: their talk will drift to automatic weapons - <AUTHOR> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/autoweapons.html

<comment><AUTHOR> wingo's contribution here, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962959>, reminded me of this old favourite:

Shivers, Acknowledgements to _Scsh Reference Manual_ , <http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html></comment>