Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs' - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25598791 <comment><USER2> Heroin, coke, and alcohol. Quickest way to overdose, even if it is fun... RIP mate, we'll miss you.

My worst OD was with that mixture as well, only I was lucky enough to have people with me and live in a country where calling the emergency services doesn't end with police at your door for overdoses. Narcan in the back of the ambulance brought me back. I got clean a month later, and am still clean 20 months later.

Some of my friends weren't so lucky, and neither was Jack, the poor bastard. He did awesome work. Mudge had an awesome talk at Defcon where he told a story about Jack in Dubai, go have a listen, it's well worth it.

Drug abuse (opiates in particular) is more common in our field than we think, I believe.

<comment><USER3> _Legal_ opiates are now the biggest killer of addicts, according to at least one new study:

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/vicodin-oxycontin-drug-deaths- vos-l...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/vicodin-oxycontin-drug-deaths-vos- lancet-502721)

<comment><USER4> I think the fact the use and abuse of legal opiates are much more common (abuse is estimated an 10% of US population each year) than heroin (use is estimate at only 1.6% of US population even once during their entire lifetime) explains this.

Heroin is made much more dangerous because it is illegal and therefore of unknown potency and purity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't know him, but was familiar with his work and this obviously is all very sad.

Infosec is a very strange slice of the tech industry/IT. I've been a generalist sysadmin for more than 25 years so I have broad exposure to most of the specialties in the industry. What strikes me about infosec is how the cult of celebrity is very prominent. Maybe it's just where my interests lie, but I can name a dozen high profile "hackers" or infosec researchers. If you ask me to name the names of linux kernel hackers or nginx hackers or whatever and I'd struggle.

Also, it seems like every week there is a security conference somewhere in the world. I guess maybe it's sexy or flashy but the security industry seems to have proportionally way more extrovert-type people in it.

</comment><comment><USER6> He died in July but the autopsy has only just been made available? Or did the news of his death just fall off the radar so much that no one checked the coroner's office earlier? (coroner reports in newsworthy cases are generally public record)

For reference sake, Paul Walker, the star of "Fast and Furious", had his autopsy reported on today but he died on Nov. 30 (roughly 35 days) [http://www.tmz.com/2014/01/03/paul-walker-autopsy-report- rog...](http://www.tmz.com/2014/01/03/paul-walker-autopsy-report-roger-rodas- death/)

Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter who also died in a car accident, died in mid-June and his autopsy report was made available in mid-August: [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/michael- hasting...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/michael-hastings- buzzfeed-autopsy-drugs)

Both of those deaths may have been more in the news than Barnaby Jack's, but they also involved fiery car crashes. It's possible that Barnaby Jack's death was just forgotten about, which is not unheard of (how many people not related to you can you recall the date of their deaths, a month later?). I guess you can assume that news orgs don't follow up as quickly on non-celebrities, and that tech advocates don't do as much public records requesting.

<comment><USER7> The SF Medical Examiner is particularly slow, per a recent article in the Chronicle: [http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-medical- examiner-l...](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-medical-examiner- lags-in-ruling-on-deaths-5006771.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember the conspiracy theories surrounding his death so close to the event where he would reveal how to hack pace makers... Since his family/friends said nothing and he had drug problems in the past, this seemed like the most plausible reason for his death to me. Incredibly sad.

</comment><comment><USER9> My Dad once said, the world would be a better place if drugs and alcohol only killed people we didn't care about. Sadly the world is not like that.

<comment><USER10> There'd be a lot fewer minorities if that was the case.

<comment><USER11> Can we please give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he intended to note that society doesn't allocate opportunity evenly across all demographics, even though it should.

Don't vote the comment up though - let it fall peacefully to the bottom of the pile where it belongs.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. I think his comment is being taken way out of context. Drop the pitchfork guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not usually one for indulging in conspiracy theories, but if there was ever a shady coincidental happenstance. This "overdose" definitly deserves to be looked at more thoroughly under a metaphorical blacklight.

</comment><comment><USER14> His 2010 demonstration [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss_RWctTARU&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss_RWctTARU&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER15> Why was he doing drugs?

<comment><USER16> For recreational purposes most likely? It's sad that this highly intelligent person has died, but drugs are a thing. And people do them, and sometimes it gets out of hand and those people die. There's nothing too unique about this.

<comment><USER15> This whole thing sounds highly suspicious. There was also no reason for the downvote.

<comment><USER17> I don't see why. Lots of people take drugs, they're very available in San Francisco, and that particular combination is famously risky. Sure, common sense would tell you that the risk isn't worth it, but people often take foolish risks in pursuit of a good time.

<comment><USER18> Especially since intelligence and drug use seem to be correlated.[1][2]

[1] [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific- fundament...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific- fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs)

[2] [http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/the-crackademics- more-t...](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/the-crackademics-more-than- one-in-10-cambridge-742933)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> RIP mate. i was still coming to terms with you being gone and this news article just brings everything back.

</comment><comment><USER20> Did anyone know him to have a drug problem? I still find the timing suspicious.

<comment><USER21> Yes, it was widely known. Don't be surprised that none of his friends wanted to discuss it in public after he passed.

<comment><USER20> Certainly. Thanks. I'm still keeping my tinfoil hat on though.

Sad that he went.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How well know was he? Will HN have a black banner to remember him?

<comment><USER18> I'm certain many a reader here can attest to being awed by his cracks on pace makers and ATMs. I know I was.

Not sure what gets you a black banner. Did Steve Jobs get one? I've never seen one personally. If it's only based upon how well known you are in the tech community than Steve Jobs would certainly deserve one.

What about Aaron Schwartz? Probably less known among the general populace but a minor celebrity within the tech community prior to his death. And much more well know post-mortem like many great and talented persons through the ages.</comment></comment>


Microsoft insiders discuss present, past and future of the company... - <AUTHOR> https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7555958&postID=6168054658946624967

<comment><USER2> This is the comment thread for this item: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494023></comment>


The business model for botnets - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611123/inside-the-business-model-for-botnets/ <comment><USER2> >30,000 bots [generate] well over $20 million a month of profit

that's $666/month per user

>"Re-infection costs have been estimated at $0.0935 per device," say Putman and co.

>For example, potential botnet masters can make use of pay-per-installation services to set up the network. These can be bought on the dark web, with a fixed fee of 2 to 10 cents per device for installing the malware.

So I can buy bots for 10 cents per device and make "well over" $3/day on them? Not sure the math adds up on this one.

<comment><USER3> I assume it works the same way as renting a server. you can get a vpn for $10 a month and it's not unimaginable to make 30 times that back with whatever service you run atop that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The team say that distributed denial-of-service attacks using a network of 30,000 bots can generate around $26,000 a month. Spam advertising with 10,000 bots generates around $300,000 a month, and bank fraud with 30,000 bots can generate over $18 million per month. But the most profitable undertaking is click fraud, which generates well over $20 million a month of profit._

Does anyone know how those hacks can generate revenues? I mean how can a DDOS generate revenue? What kind of bank fraud can a botnet do? How can click fraud generate profit (I guess if you suddenly receive $20 million on your adsense account google will immediately ban you)?

<comment><USER5> > _I mean how can a DDOS generate revenue?_

You rent out the capacity. Few hours of N Gbps flooding, courtesy of 20-30 thousand compromised home systems and IoT shitware units: tens to maybe low hundreds of dollars.

Now assume that's only a couple of percent of the total capacity under the botnet's control. Also, there are 24 hours in a day - once the current blaster's rental time expires, you have another one lined up already.

I recall seeing numbers in some fairly old Krebs article, but can't find it right now.

<comment><USER6> Spot on - they're often referred to as 'stressers' or 'booters', and can make a nice chunk of money. There's always someone looking to knock someone off of Xbox Live or PSN, or even chance it and try to take down a popular website. Depending on the technique used and the size of the botnet, you can cause some sysadmins or SOCs a headache.

I'm sure anyone else in the ISP industry will tell you that anytime kids are off school (summer holidays or half term here in the UK) the DDoS alerts go up a notch or two.

<comment><USER7> A bit more than two notches I'd say. The correlation between those is pretty enormous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> these numbers are utter shit</comment>


APFS in Detail - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part1/ <comment><USER3> What a great and valuable post, especially since this info is the result of talking to the APFS team at WWDC, and has not been published anywhere else yet.

Of particular interest (to me) was the "Checksums" section:

        Notably absent from the APFS intro talk was any mention of
        checksums....APFS checksums its own metadata but not user data.

        ...The APFS engineers I talked to cited strong ECC protection
        within Apple storage devices. Both flash SSDs and magnetic media
        HDDs use redundant data to detect and correct errors. The
        engineers contend that Apple devices basically don't return
        bogus data.

That is utterly disappointing. SSDs have internal checksums, sure, but there are so many different ways and different points at which a bit can be flipped.

It's hard for me to imagine a worse starting point to conceive a new filesystem than "let's assume our data storage devices are perfect, and never have any faulty components or firmware bugs".

ZFS has a lot of features, but data integrity is _the_ feature.

I get that maybe a checksumming filesystem could conceivably be too computationally expensive for the little jewelry-computers Apple is into these days, but it's a terrible omission on something that is supposed to be the new filesystem for macOS.

<comment><USER4> Talking to the Apple engineers it really didn't seem to be an issue of computation. They seemed genuine in their belief that they could solve data integrity with device qualification. While I asked them 100 questions they asked me 2: had I ever actually seen bit rot (yes), and what kind of drives did we ship with the ZFS Storage Appliance (mostly 7200 nearline drives).

<comment><USER5> That would suggest that APFS is only relevant for internal storage procured by Apple. Do they not intend for it to be used on external storage?

<comment><USER6> They mentioned that it would be used on removable media as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I get that maybe a checksumming filesystem could conceivably be too > computationally expensive for the little jewelry-computers Apple is into > these days, but it's a terrible omission on something that is supposed to be > the new filesystem for macOS.

Checksumming has another cost that isn't immediately obvious. Suppose you write to a file and the writes are cached. Then the filesystem starts to flush to disk. On a conventional filesystem, you can keep writing to the dirty page while the disk DMAs data out of it. On a checksumming filesystem, you can't: you have to compute the checksum and then write out data consistent with the checksum. This means you either have to delay user code that tries to write, or you have to copy the page, or you need hardware support for checksumming while writing.

On Linux, this type of delay is called "stable pages", and it _destroys_ performance on some workloads on btrfs.

<comment><USER8> For desktop computing, I'll take data integrity over good 'performance' _any_ day. The use-cases for iDevices might be different, coloring Apples perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly worried by the vibe that comes off this. "I asked him about looking for inspiration in other modern file systems ... he was aware of them, but didn't delve too deeply for fear, he said, of tainting himself". And (to paraphrase): 'bit-rot? What's that?'.

I would have hoped that a new filesystem with such wide future adoption would have come from a roomful of smart people with lots of experience of (for example) contributing to various modern filesystems, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and dealing with data corruption issues in the field. This doesn't come across that way at all.

<comment><USER10> Given Dominic's other output, I'm going to believe there's more to the story because he didn't strike me as someone who would actively ignore past innovations. I know it's a popular concept to NIH stuff when devs believe they know enough to build it, but so much stuff is just built poorly without consideration for existing designs and it shows in the poor software we have to live with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm extremely confused by this:

> With APFS, if you copy a file within the same file system (or possibly the > same container; more on this later), no data is actually duplicated. [...] I > haven't see this offered in other file systems [...]

To my knowledge, this is what cp --reflink does on GNU/Linux on a supporting filesystem, most notably btrfs, and has been doing by default in newer combinations of the kernel and GNU coreutils.

This guy seems too well-informed and experienced in the domain to miss something so obvious, though. So what am I missing?

Also interesting to me is the paragraph about prioritizing certain I/O requests to optimize interactive latency: On Linux this is done by the I/O scheduler, exchangable and agnostic to the filesystem. Perhaps greater insight into the filesystem could aid I/O scheduling (this has been the argument for moving RAID code into filesystems as well, though, which APFS opts against) -- hearing a well-informed opinion on this point would be interesting. Unless this post gets it wrong and I/O scheduling isn't technically implemented in APFS either.

It _seems_ like this perspective might be one written from within a Solaris/ZFS bubble and further hamstrung by macOS' closed-source development model. Which is interesting in light of the Giampaolo quote about intentionally not looking closely at the competition, either.

<comment><USER4> This guy (i.e. me) wasn't aware of this functionality in btrfs. Are reflinks commonly used? Yes, I know more about ZFS than the other filesystems mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my opinion, APFS does not seem to improve upon ZFS in several key areas (compression, sending/receiving snapshots, dedup, etc.). Apple is reimplementing many features already implemented in OpenZFS, btrfs (which itself reimplemented a lot of ZFS features), BSD HAMMER, etc.

Maybe extending one of these existing filesystems to add any functionality Apple needs on top of its existing features (and, hopefully, contributing that back to the open source implementation) would cost more person-hours than implementing APFS from scratch. Maybe not.

Either way, we will now have yet another filesystem to contend with, implement in non-Darwin kernels (maybe), and this adds to the overall support overhead of all operating systems that want to be compatible with Apple devices. Since the older versions of macOS (OSX) don't support APFS, only HFS+, this means Apple and others will also have to continue supporting HFS+. It just seems wasteful of everyone's time to me.

Also: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER13> Classic comic, but I don't think it applies. APFS looks intended to solve Apple's product problems really well, and it doesn't even try to be a filesystem for everyone.

Apple has said from time to time that they're all about owning and controlling the key technologies that go into their products. APFS makes a lot of sense from that perspective, and this seems one of those cases where going their own way is better than importing someone else's constraints. ZFS on an Apple Watch? LOL.

<comment><USER14> I would not be surprised if one could write a ZFS implementation optimized for more constrained devices. If you already know you are going to a have flash storage you can probably ditch some of the N layers of cache you see in common ZFS implementations. Not that ZFS is a one size fits all, but the file systems specification could be implemented in more than one way.

<comment><USER13> If you assume Apple cares about having a disk format in common with other platforms, sure, I'd agree that's probably possible. But I don't think they do; they seem to care a lot more about things like a unified codebase across their platforms, the energy-efficiency initiatives they've been pushing for a few years, owning the key tech in the products, etc.

One slide in the WWDC talk deck showed a bunch of divergent Apple storage technologies across all their platforms that are being replaced by APFS. If ZFS has to fork into weird variants to run well on the phone or watch, that seems less appealing than a single codebase optimized for just the stuff Apple products do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _For example, my 1TB SSD includes 1TB (2^30 = 1024^3) bytes of flash but only reports 931GB of available space, sneakily matching the storage industry's self-serving definition of 1TB (1000^3 = 1 trillion bytes)._

Great article, but a couple nitpicking corrections (which seem appropriate for a storage article) Per: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte) \- Terabyte is 1000^4, not 1000^3.

Also It's been 6+ years since we all agreed that TiB means 2^40 or 1024^4, and TB means 10^12. Indeed, _only_ in the case of memory does "T" ever mean 2^40 anyways. It's always been the case that in both data rates, as well as storage, that T means 10^12. This convention is strong enough that we most of us just have thrown up our hands and agree when referring to DRAM memory, that Terabyte will mean 1024^4, and 1000^4 everywhere else.

Indeed, in the rare case where someone uses TiB to refer to a data rate, they are almost without exception incorrectly using it, and, they actually mean TB.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Also, APFS removes the most common way of a user achieving local data > redundancy: copying files. A copied file in APFS actually creates a > lightweight clone with no duplicated data.

No, it doesn't. APFS supports copying files, if you want that. It's just that the default in Finder is to make a "clone" (copy-on-write).

<comment><USER4> Fair enough; and right now cp doesn't use the fast clone functionality, but it assuredly will. I'm not sure 'cat <file >file.dup' is reasonable for most users.

<comment><USER5> Just teach everyone to use dd instead - dd if=file of=file.dup :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm still looking for a widely supported (at least FreeBSD and Linux kernels) filesystem for external drives to carry around that doesn't have the FAT32 limitations. There's exFAT but no stable and supported implementation. Then there's NTFS, but that's also not 100% reliable in my experience when used through FUSE (NTFS-3G). I've considered UFS but that also was a no go. I'm hopeful for lklfuse[1] that also runs on FreeBSD and givess access to ext4, xfs, etc. in a way like Rump and allows you to use the same drivers on FreeBSD. I'm cautious though, given that I don't want corrupted data I might notice too late. Let's see if lklfuse provides LUKS as well, otherwise Dragonfly's LUKS implementation might need to be ported to FreeBSD or something like that. External drives one might lose need to be encrypted.

[1] [https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/fusefs- lkl/](https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/fusefs-lkl/)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for this! I didn't realize (or had forgotten) LUKS had been ported to Dragonfly. Also you touch upon my #1 frustration with APFS without really knowing anything about it: simple portability.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I believe it's by the same Dragonfly developer who also wrote tcplay[1] for TrueCrypt volumes.

[1] [https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web- man?command=tcplay&sec...](https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web- man?command=tcplay&section=8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The file-level deduplication [1] is interesting. Not being a filesystem expert, this sounds like it fulfills a similar usecase to snapshots [2]. Or am I reading this wrong?

Is NTFS's shadow copy like Snapshots?

[1] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part3/#apfs- clon...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part3/#apfs-clones)

[2] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part2/#apfs- snap...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part2/#apfs-snapshots)

<comment><USER18> NTFS Shadow Copies are more like LVM/ZFS snapshots than APFS's file-level CoW snapshots, in that they both operate on the entire volume at block-level, rather than having a per-file level of granularity.

There are other FSes that allow the behavior that APFS is demonstrating - <USER2> at OCFS2 and Btrfs, both of which allow you to do cp --reflink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the value of this new proprietary filesystem is limited, since you can't run it on servers (Apple does not make servers anymore). Also, compatibility/porting issues may become a problem if you build your software for it.</comment>


Pattern Analysis of MegaMillions Lottery Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.omninerd.com/articles/Pattern_Analysis_of_MegaMillions_Lottery_Numbers

<comment><USER2> conclusion: "Interesting as these trends may be, they will not assist in making the odds of winning the MegaMillions lottery any better if the system is truly fair and random. However, in the event there is some peculiar factor skewing the ball selection such that any of these trends continue, a player stands a mildly better chance of winning a partial prize through the selection of weighted numbers."</comment>


Using genetic algorithms to find Starcraft 2 build orders - <AUTHOR> http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-find-starcraft-2-build-orders/ <comment><USER2> This echoes the story of Eurisko, a genetic AI written by Stanford's Douglas Lenat to build Traveller "Trillion Credit Fleets." Eurisko destroyed the competition at the national championship 2 years in row.

<http://aliciapatterson.org/APF0704/Johnson/Johnson.html>

In both cases, using the GA allowed a player to more comprehensively search the opportunity space created by the game designers than the designers did during design and play testing.

Really awesome stuff, though it sets up an intriguing arm's race between the game designers who can patch and Nerf elements to eliminate unbalanced strategies and the players who then explore the new rule set.

<comment><USER3> It's sad that they banned him. What kind of logic is this? Do they really think it would stop other players from doing the same?

<comment><USER4> IIRC they didn't ban him - rather, they told him that if he kept competing they'd just cancel the competition. This was not out of spite, but because he was so dominant that it was discouraging the other players from even trying.

<comment><USER5> Create an open 'fight the machine' competition and let them brawl it out. Problem resolved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am a diamond level terran on ladder and have faced this rush build order before. To be honest it is a very strong build but most players will scout this very early.

I would be more interested in searching the space for hard counters to build orders with certain match ups. Certainly it gets way more complex (and starcraft is).

<comment><USER7> Yeah I was going to say, I'm a silver level and this strat does not work that well even in that tier.

<comment><USER8> I just played 17 games using this strat, in the Gold League 1v1 and Bronze league 2v2. And some of the 1v1's where against Diamond league players. 12 wins, 5 losses. Trust me, it works.

1\. Against Toss it's almost _always_ a win, especially if you go all in (attack using queen and half your drones). Unless he's got a closed wall with cannons, he can't stop you. In my experience, no-one does this in just about any league.

2\. Against Terran, it's very succesful, if not quite as succesful as against Protoss. If they put up a bunker with marauders, or they micro 2 or 3 marauders behind a wall, you need to fall back. But in general, it works amazingly.

3\. Against Zerg it works very well, as long as they don't six pool - if they do six pool and you haven't scouted it then you are in trouble. But in general, it worked well.

Bottom line? Although it seems like it's similar to the traditional zerg rushes, it's actually a very impressive rush. I would say that well executed it's got a 90% success rate on maps with short to medium rush distances. So definitely give it a try :)

<comment><USER9> 1\. Wouldn't a sentry forcefield ramp block off do just well? Stalkers have superior micro.

<comment><USER8> Usually when the first three arrive, they don't have a sentry yet (The first three are about 15 to 20 seconds ahead of the next 4). If they do have a sentry, and they block, then you fall back and then attack with all 7. If they don't use it, you can usually use those three to start killing their units, and the next 4 come in and finish the job. If they are rushing an immortal (high level players often do this vs Zerg) then you can usually snipe the pylon. If there is more than one pylon powering the building, then it's tougher.

In 1v1, a variation on this strat is to go all-in - send your queen after you spawn larvae, and then when the second 4 come out send most of your drones. With 7 roaches + drones + queen, it doesn't matter if he gets out the Immortal, or infact what he goes for. Only thing I've seen is a hard cannon wall, which then commits him to a single base Void rush - which is easily countered.

So yes, this strategy is very unbalanced. Played 22 games tonight, 7 losses. 2 of those losses where on 2v2. Last 10 games I played? 9 wins, 1 loss.

I hope Blizzard fixes this soon :( it's going to make Terran and Toss very susceptable early game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty cool to see programs "solving" video games. Although, for the most part I don't think this will affect play much. All-in strategies like this tend to only work if the other player is unprepared. Granted, this is a very fast rush and perhaps still very difficult to scout and notice early enough to counter, but the Starcraft community does tend to go back and forth finding and countering new builds (Perhaps the next step is to use a program to find a counter to this).

The two points about the build that the article mentions as counter-intuitive don't seem that strange to me since it is a rush (all-in) build. The extractor trick is well known and I would believe that it sacrifices economy long term but it gives you an extra drone (= more money) early on which is good for a rush.

The double overlord is there to support the seven roaches that you build almost all at once. At the beginning of the game, you can only afford to build one unit at a time so you can also replenish supply one overlord at a time. As the game progresses and you start pumping out large number of units at a time, you have to also be producing multiple overlords simultaneously to keep up with supply. Although this is very early, the all-in rush to produce 7 roaches requires a fast increase in supply.

To give an idea of how fast this is, the build ends at around 31 supply, about half of which is the attacking roach units. Max supply is 200 and mid-game is probably somewhere around 50-70 supply.

<comment><USER11> I haven't looked into SC2 as much, but in the BW version of the the extractor trick, the cost-benefit tips at some point within the timespan of 'rushes'. That is, it'll be wonderful for very very fast rushes, but more 'patient' rushes are harmed by it. And at least for BW rushes, the trend seemed to be in the last bit before SC2 came out to trend towards more patient rushes. People weren't even looking for the win off the rushes anymore, but rather some sort of fast econ harrass to early map control. That mind set, where fast extractor tricks were optimal probably carried over a bit into the SC2 build making process.

<comment><USER10> Yes, most high level play isn't really looking to do all-in rushes like this. The goal is more to "fast econ harrass to early map control" giving you an early advantage and allowing you to eventually win.

<comment><USER12> I'd have to disagree regarding rushes in high level play. I most enjoy 4v4 random and a key move is decimating one opponent's economy to the point that they become a non-factor in the game. With this build order in a 4v4 one player can neutralize a Protoss or Zerg player and then pivot to mutas or continue with roach/hydra. Since your economy isn't in shambles like a traditional 6 pool zergling rush, even if you fail with the roaches you are still left in acceptable shape to assist your teammates.

I specify this being useful in 4v4 against Protoss/Zerg as Terran traditionally wall and the few seconds it takes to burst through the wall may give their teammates time to mobilize.

Note- I wrote this under the impression that your mentioning "all-in rushes" didn't include sending your drones in to act as meat shields. In a 4v4 that would be suicide and invalidate my point.

<comment><USER13> By 'High-level play' he is most likely referring to tournaments and the e-sports scene, which is almost entirely 1v1 and plays very differently from 4v4.

<comment><USER12> I see. In that case it applies even more. It might be considered a cheese rush but an all-in with your drones would be very hard to counter unless they were able to hold the choke. It would have a good chance of ending the game in under 8 minutes versus drawing it out another 5-7 minutes.

<comment><USER14> It seems like cheese has failed more often than not so far in the GSL. At best it's a 50-50 proposition.

Tester deftly deflected cheese attempts from Hyperdub and NexFreeSaga before crushing the remains of their army in season 1. On the other hand, fan favorite TLO was eliminated by some proxy barracks from the cheese-loving Hyperdub and GSL season 1 winner aFruitDealer showed that he wasn't above a cheese game or two with a ballsy six-pool on a four spawn map against Inca.

Cheese fails every time if it's spotted against a high-level player, which is why it's cheese. These guys have definitely practiced against 6-pool, proxy gate, proxy rax, 7 roach rush a thousand times. There's no way they would take a cheesy loss with $80,000 on the line or give up the easy counter and auto- win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Starcraft has always struck me as a game of compound interest, and the optimal early builds always seem to be just that: maximizing an instantaneous rate-of- production, which will correlate to maximizing your instantaneous rates-of- doing-damage

It's always seemed like more of an economic strategy game than an actual "fronts of battle" kind of strategy.

<comment><USER11> "Amateur's discuss strategy, professionals discuss logistics"

And more specifically, it's not about maximizing your rate of production, its about maximizing the difference between youres and your opponents (this is both RTS and real life war).

That's the basis of rush tactics. You actually stunt your own rate of growth in the hopes of stunting your opponents even more.

<comment><USER15> Totally -- not to mention surviving long enough to let compound interest naturally magnify that difference.

As for the tactics or "logistics" -- if that means clicking 500 times/minute, then i _really_ don't see the appeal :)

<comment><USER16> StarCraft 2 has tastefully upgraded the UI so that you can do lots of things with less clicks than before in SC 1. (Of course, that means at the higher end, people will just do more now than they did. But it's quite a nice feeling on the beginner level, too. E.g. you can get a worker to work right after it's build. And there's also a button for finding idle workers.)

<comment><USER17> They could have done more with automation though, like Rise of Nations has superb automation and controls.

<comment><USER18> Indeed it did, to the point where it wasn't interesting. Which is why RoN didn't pick up on the e-sports (or even multiplayer) scene, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A GA sounds like exactly the wrong way to go about this. I think you could do much better with a heuristic algorithm than a GA in this case, and I think GAs (like neural networks) are very much overused just because they correlate well with natural processes.

That said, I haven't played SC2, and I don't know what sort of complexity the building problem has.

<comment><USER20> I can't quite understand if you're saying GA's are neural networks, or just that both of them are overused. Either way, one of the big problems is that the heuristics for a heuristic algorithm must be designed by with human insights. In this case, and in many other cases where GA's have been applied successfully, a fundamental new insight is discovered by the algorithm.

I do play some SC2. There are a bunch of built-in AIs that use heuristic algorithms, yet they are all easily defeated. The GA in this case is really about searching through an immense space to find good candidates.

To give you a feel for the complexity of the building problem, consider this. There are custom maps where are all you do is practice your initial build order, with absolutely no opponent. It is pretty well accepted within the SC2 community that you should use these practice maps in order to get better. Another way to think about it is that this build order will probably cause Blizzard to tweak the game due to how fast the roaches come out. This game has been in development for 10 years, yet there are interactions of the building process that are not understood by the developers themselves.

<comment><USER19> > I can't quite understand if you're saying GA's are neural networks, or just > that both of them are overused.

I was saying that both are overused.

> one of the big problems is that the heuristics for a heuristic algorithm > must be designed by with human insights

By "heuristics" I don't strictly mean "rule-based", but you can do a good job in reducing the search space by a large amount if you program in some common sense that will discard obviously bad moves.

It would be surprising if the devs _did_ understand all the interactions, as it would mean that the search space is trivial. SC2 is not that much different from chess, and, to my knowledge, the best chess-playing AIs don't use genetics. They get much further with trees and precalculated start- and endgame moves.

<comment><USER16> Indeed. Though the crucial difference is, that chess is a game of complete information, while StarCraft hides your enemy. It's much harder to do tree search without complete information.

As a comparison, look at the recent progress made in computer Go that employs Monte Carlo simulations. (And Genetic Algorithms are closer to Monte Carlo than to tree searches.)

<comment><USER19> I believe it's only harder when you want to optimise for the outcome (winning), since it's hard to know what your opponent will do if you can't see them. However, if you optimise for total offensive/defensive power, I think you can do quite well with trees!

<comment><USER16> Not only trees but also linear or integer programming approaches. (That's where my theoretical background lies, by the way.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _This is the type of non-obvious optimization that genetic algorithms excel at._

This is not true. GA search is a hill climbing algorithm which is prone to finding local maxima. The less obvious a strategy is, the more likely it is that GA will miss it.

<comment><USER22> > GA search is a hill climbing algorithm which is prone to finding local > maxima

GAs are not pure hill climbers. Variation operators introduce new solutions into the population at random. As long as premature convergence is prevented, GAs will probably explore the search space well. There's always a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation.

> The less obvious a strategy is, the more likely it is that GA will miss it.

This is a tautology that states "the harder a problem it is, the harder it is."

<comment><USER21> _GAs are not pure hill climbers. Variation operators introduce new solutions into the population at random._

In searching for non-obvious solutions a GA is no better, probably even worse than an exhaustive search. You are essentially gambling to find the absolute maxima by increasing the mutation rate and population variance. GA is merely a heuristic to speed up searches by assuming the global solution is close to your randomly seeded population, something which is unlikely to be true in non-obvious solutions.

Let's say you increase the mutation rate to the point where you are guaranteed find the "non-obvious solution". Well then you've essentially just created an insanely inefficient exhaustive search.

 _This is a tautology that states "the harder a problem it is, the harder it is._

No. For example in an exhaustive search, the obviousness of a strategy has no bearing on whether or not it would more likely be found.

<comment><USER22> How convenient to ignore the fact that exhaustive search is completely computationally infeasible in most practical situations.

Genetic algorithms are heuristics, yes. There is no guarantee they will work. That doesn't mean they haven't been successfully applied in a very wide variety of domains. The facts of their successes clearly mean nothing to you, though. "Not guaranteed to work" is not the same as "not useful as evidenced by hundreds of papers describing real-world applications."

It takes a special kind of boorish ignorance to respond to a post where the guy comes up with a Starcraft 2 build that is "non-obvious" and pretty strong and whine about how a metaheuristic doesn't work/didn't work when you tried it.

<comment><USER21> I find your tone very disturbing.

The point which keeps going over your head is that GA approaches a exhaustive search in which you randomly select cases to test until you've either tried them all (and wasted many cpu cycles along the way with repeated mutations) or luckily stumbled across the global maximum early (in which case you would never know if it was global).

The reason why people use it instead of exhaustive searches is because they don't care about a global maximum, or in this case "obviousness". But to say that non-obvious solutions are a strong suit of GA is wrong, and that is what I had an issue with. If you knew the solution was non-obvious, you'd have better luck randomly testing solutions without the overhead of cross-over and mutations.

I also doubt that an exhaustive search to find this 7 roach build is infeasible when today's chess engines are able to brute-force 10 steps in a matter of minutes on standard hardware. I also never "whine"d about how GA didn't work for me, so I don't know what to say about that except that it is now obvious you are trolling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm not going to say that this program is useless, but the example shown (7 roach) would have been near trivial to find by a mere human. Tricks like premaking the overlord, using extractor trick, etc. Have been around for over 10 years since the early days of Starcraft 1. Any person could come up with this build, the question is where did the idea to rush for 7 roaches come from? It sounds like that was manually set as the target goal by the creator.

I have yet to see a programs which is better than human at finding optimal builds. But what programs do excel at is simulating a build so you can see how the timings work out, allowing you to find your own build by experimentation and tweaking. Sure a program can help automate some very minor fine tuning details (which would be easy to find but perhaps tedious).

<comment><USER18> Yet nobody found it. The closest thing to a roach rush people found was the 5-roach build [1], which is slower and it suffers a lot economically if the rush fails.

For the record, though, I've played against the 7-roach build a couple of weeks ago, and iirc that was a few days before EvolutionChamber was announced. So some people knew about it, maybe they found out about it from the creator, or played against him, who knows.

[1] [http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/5_Roach_Rush_%28vs._Te...](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/5_Roach_Rush_%28vs._Terran%29)

<comment><USER23> Only because they never looked for it. Did this program decide to look for it on its own (having some idea of strategy, that would be impressive)? Or did the creator tell it to find fastest 7 roach build?

<comment><USER24> I'd imagine you would assign each unit some kind of relative value to each other and then factor in a time weighing making earlier builds more desirable even if there unit score is lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just won 10 games in a row 7 roach rushing. This is awesome :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Another unmentioned aspect of this is Blizzard's involvement.

If this build is truly unstoppable in most cases, then Blizzard's balance team will simply nerf some aspect of Zerg to make it harder to abuse. For example, when the balance team determined that Reapers were too strong in early game, they made the tech required for them take longer to get.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure Blizzard will Nerf this. Early reapers, well executed, had about a 70% success rate. This has a 80% success rate at least, and is much harder to counter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This was a very interesting read in that it gives a solid example on how designing a system can be outperformed by a natural selection approach. Us humans are inclined to design things and it is very easy to dismiss a random trial and error approach to achieve best results.</comment>


The Great search for Analytics services - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coredumped.org/2012/05/great-search-for-analytics-services.html <comment><USER2> Wow quite the mixpanel ad. My own experience started with Google Analytics which turned sour. Their Android API only supports one tracker instance and reporting id so you can't have different components in the app using it simultaneously. While it does support events, it only supports reporting one value with the event. And it only shows the average for numerical values which is spectacularly useless - you want to see the distribution of the values. (They also only have two prices - free and $150k per year.)

Mixpanel was tried next. Thankfully you can supply a JSON object of key values with each event (properties in their terminology) which matches our usage model. Unfortunately the reporting is nowhere near as useful as Google Analytics. For example there are no pre-canned reports, so if you want to find out anything (eg platform, version and country distributions) you have to build new reports. (I have the sneaking suspicion it was all designed by architecture astronauts - after all data is data when abstracted as data.) You can't copy reports across projects. Reports have to start with a particular event name - you can't do them across events (ie any name). Their realtime view doesn't show any properties. When doing a multi-dimensional analysis (eg country then operating system), everything except the last one has to be an expression - you can't say slice by all countries then by all operating systems - the country bit would have to be an expression. They do use geoip to add country information, but won't add region/state or ISP information. That makes it hard to work with US data. Their Android code is visible, but requests for an explicit license have taken over a month and they still can't make their mind up.

Despite all this, Mixpanel do have one redeeming feature. You can get an export of your raw data (comically bad mishandling of timezone issues aside). It isn't real time (generated once a day). However Google Analytics does not let you get the raw data - only queries. We have resorted to building our own analysis tools on the exported data from Mixpanel, but are still stymied by lack of geoip for region and isp. (Yes there have been support requests, no they haven't actually done anything about these and many other issues.)

I had considered trying out Localytics, but thankfully this article saved me that effort.

Some of the other products like Flurry aren't usable because they also do advertising which is a conflict of interest for our use cases.

Some lessons:

* You don't really find out the various gnarly issues with any of the analytics services until you are quite far down the road with integration and getting a variety of data back and need to slice and dice things in various ways

* Don't touch them unless you can get the raw data back out, not just aggregated reports

* Make sure they can coexist in your apps (ie other libraries/components in the app can also use the same service but with a different id)

* Make sure client libraries are open source, read the code and make sure there is an actual license attached so you are on solid ground when you need to make modifications (you will always need to)

* The various services all suck in some way. Hopefully someone will come along that doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've paid for KISSMetrics and really liked it. I know Mixpanel has grown, does anyone have reasons why I should use Mixpanel over KISSMetrics?

Also another good simple analytics service for all the different services you might use is DigMyData (<http://digmydata.com/>). I'm in a trial right now and finding it pretty useful.

<comment><USER4> I pay for and prefer KISSMetrics, and also pay for Mixpanel (a separate project).

KISSMetrics, visually, kicks ass. What sucks about it? It's not real-time. No simple real-time data export/querying API.

The latter is nearly a show stopper. I mean, really? No export/querying API?

<comment><USER5> Just curious, but what makes real time so important to you? What do you do with your data instantly that wouldn't be better served rolling up over a longer period of time to remove any noise-iness and natural variability in your data? I'm genuinely interested in your use case.

Also - KISSmetrics allows for data export to an S3 Amazon bucket in JSON format. <http://support.kissmetrics.com/apis/data/data-export-setup>

~Disclosure: I work at KISSmetrics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really struggling to find a _cheap_ solution to this. So many metrics services seem to be based around conversion to a sale. For ad-supported sites, you need pretty huge numbers to turn revenue, and then you're priced straight out of these kind of products.

<comment><USER2> Note that you don't have to report everything - use a sampling rate. On first deployment I have a sampling rate of 100% (ie all sessions are reported) and then decrease the sampling rate as the user base increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are also some great services out there if your web application is database driven - such as <http://chart.io>. Easy connection, nice dashboard, and really modestly priced.

</comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr - The guy really likes MixPanel.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm partial to Localytics, but that's because we pay for their Enterprise solution which insures a complete copy of your raw data stream on S3 and much better reporting (including custom funnels).

We also run GA in parallel just for the real-time reporting (which the biz folks love).

</comment><comment><USER10> sadly no mention of <http://www.piwik.org> , which is a foss self-hosted solution. maybe it would have been worth a try.</comment>


The Most Innovative Companies of 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2017 <comment><AUTHOR> Is it funny to anyone else that 9 out of the top 10 do tech and 1 does... yogurt?

I guess it's nice to see a little diversity!</comment>


Bitcoin Workings Explained, for Real - <AUTHOR> http://michal.space/ipns/michal.space/ <comment><USER2> I wonder about a vulnerability: what happens if an organization buys so many computers to create so many nodes they will be about 25-50% of the entire network?

Can this organization exploit the network by mining the majority of blocks to invalidate some transactions or in some other way?

<comment><AUTHOR> I describe this in the "Security in numbers" paragraph in the last part (Part Three):

"As pointed out before, giving rewards for creating blocks creates an arms race in computing power. Transaction fees only magnify the effect. This is very healthy for the security of our system — anyone can add blocks, so anyone can do it according to their own agenda, but to have any kind of significant effect on the whole thing they would have to invest a tremendous amount of resources.

Remember, the only way to determine which version of the transaction history is the commonly accepted one to look for the longest one. In theory, someone possessing 51% of the computing power of the network is able to completely control the system, as they can just start their own branch of the blockchain and create new blocks faster than anyone else. The resulting branch will become the longest and therefore accepted one, invalidating any blocks mined on other branches. Performing the 51% attack is however uneconomical even for actors the size of a government or a multinational corporation — it would simply cost too much for the trouble."

To give you some numbers, an Antminer S9 costs $3k and provides 14 TH/s. Current Bitcoin network hashrate is around 7,700,000 TH/s. Assuming a 51% attack is not underway already, an attacker needs to have at least the same hashrate as the rest of the network. This would cost over 1,5 billion dollars in non-reusable single purpose hardware alone. Add to this the ginormous power costs and additional costs of housing, maintenance, cabling etc. and you start to get the idea.

A sizeable entity who doesn't have complete majority can still make life harder for users by censoring specific transactions (simply deliberately choosing not to include them in their blocks), but this is more akin to a DDoS attack than a security breach.

<comment><USER2> So besides bugs in the code, theoretically speaking the 51% computing power is the only real "vulnerability"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct, as far as I know. Breaking the cryptography with quantum computers is often raised as well, but Bitcoin can transition to a quantum-resistant algorithm if that proves to be a real danger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great introduction to the math/comp sci behind it, and I'm not sure if I missed it but I am wondering how nodes get in contact with each other.

As it is decentralized, it isn't obvious how the network knows about itself.

<comment><USER4> Theres a number of DNS seed servers that are hard coded into the Bitcoin core codebase. A Bitcoin client does a nslookup on these seeds to find intial peers to connect to and bootstraps this way.

For a bit more detail and if you're interested in this sort of thing, have a read of my blog article I wrote about the technical side of Bitcoin: [http://www.samlewis.me/2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins- hood/](http://www.samlewis.me/2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/)

<comment><USER3> The original post and yours complement each other very well, thanks for the information!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you log your time? - <AUTHOR> What methodologies and/or tools do you use to track your work and/or personal time?
Looking for long term ideas in the decades range. Is it sustainable to account for every hour of every day for the next 10 years? Is there an automated way to do this without fatigue and/or tool obsolescence?
I've kept a calendar and light journal throughout the last decade but don't feel satisfied with my 'soft' data. Perhaps I'm looking for a categorized log (to graph later). A Console.app for life would be ideal. <comment><USER2> I use Tyme, for both professional and some personal (read side hustle). But I only track what I think is valuable.

I don't believe that tracking every hour would have any real value. I put this in the Lean Startup lens: What do you hope to learn by tracking every second of every day?

I think a more valuable long term tracker might be as simple as percent of days doing stuff like: work-work, side hustle, fun. Then look for trends, but you still need to line this up with milestones.

Perhaps only short term tracking would be of value. I'm going to spend the next 2 weeks working on side hustle dedicating 4 hours a day. Then the same thing with 2 hours a day and compare the impact.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been using [https://www.officetime.net/](https://www.officetime.net/) for years. They have also Windows and iphone versions.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to write documentation? LaTeX? Word? Markdown? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Latex.

Almost all of the source code for Axiom (1.2 million lines of code) lives inside latex documents. They are literate programs. I can explain the most complex ideas along with the code that implements them. And I can illustrate the ideas using images, diagrams, and figures.

</comment><comment><USER3> Org-mode in Emacs. Because it enables to do literate programming.

In this video [0] by Howard Abrahams you can see how to wave the instructions and the execution of them with Emacs.

Another advantage is that you can mix your diagrams (in plantuml or ASCII art) with your code, in the same org-mode file.

Gitub displays .org files the same way it does Markdown.

[0] [https://youtu.be/dljNabciEGg](https://youtu.be/dljNabciEGg)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find myself reaching for LaTeX for complex documents that I also want to look great. Curious to hear what others use.

</comment><comment><USER4> Markdown and LaTeX.</comment>


Canadian Crypto Exchange Has Lost Access to Its Cold Storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/01/31/crypto-exchange-quadrigacx/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if this is true but I read on Reddit that the owner had died, and the cold storage is now lost, the key to it might only have been in his head.</comment>


Show HN: HaC Mini, a Full Featured Mac Mini Hackintosh - <AUTHOR> https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/ <comment><USER2> I've built a few hackintoshes over the years (probably 1 in 5 success rate), and this is among the best documented projects I've seen. Well done indeed!

[Don't think I've come across GitBooks before this -- looks like something we could use on a project so, bonus find! Thanks!]

</comment><comment><USER3> Of all the "this just makes macOS work" guides I've seen this is by far the best. Especially how they get the vega m working; impressive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I really dislike the cargo culting you see in a large chunk of the hackintosh community which is just "try this bootloader option" or "install this random kext". I hope that as I learn more about how these things work that I will continue to document the entire process and give explanations for why certain hacks are needed for things to work.

<comment><USER3> Agreed! And your documentation is exceptional.

I worked on the osx86 acpi stack wayyyy back in the day when the p4 dev kits(that was almost 15 years ago!!!) we're still going out. The sorta stuff that we were doing back then left me thinking that OSX on commodity hardware would always be a pipe dream. To see that transformed into systems that can recieve updates and still function has been really exciting. Good work!</comment></comment></comment>


Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995? - <AUTHOR> http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2012/08/articles/attorney/patent-infringement/apple-v-samsung/

<comment><USER2> The verdict was a monumentally stupid decision and I hope it won't prove to be too harmful in the long run.

One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity. Something which is novel, hard, expensive and rare today must become a cheap and ubiquitous commodity tomorrow. It is this process that allows you to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and easily leverage past technologies to produce newer, better ones.

Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process. None of these parties want touchscreen smartphones to become cheap commodities available to everybody - there's a lot less money to be made this way. Android is Google's attempt to commoditize the smartphone and is probably responsible for erasing tens of billions from the market caps of other companies, the flipside of which is that today tens of millions of people all over the world have access to technology that would otherwise not have.

This is why I think Android is ultimately a force for good and I hope it's simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle and that this verdict won't have a lasting impact.

<comment><AUTHOR> The patent system is supposed to encourage the commoditization of inventions by using a trade-off: if you invent something novel and useful, you can get a patent that gives you a complete monopoly for a limited amount of time, but in return you have to completely disclose how your invention was made, so that, first, others can see if the intention would be useful for them right now (and thus negotiate a license with you) and, second, once you're patent expires society can easily reach for and utilize your invention.

Unfortunately, that process has been turned on its head, so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized or simply don't work patent protection. The iPhone's design is undeniably visually appealing and user-friendly, but it is by no means an "invention." It is a form of user interface, something that has already been held to not be patentable, and it is a form of branding, something that is protected, but through trademark law, not patent law.

I find this situation disturbing for the same reason I find it disturbing that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on research and the belt. Consumer electronics companies should not be investing the bulk of their resources playing legal games with one another over non-disruptive "inventions" like the idea to use asynchronous processing to make sure video and audio lines up. They should be using their resources making phones that are better and more alluring than one another.

<comment><USER3> >so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized

You are confusing utility patents and design patents. They are very different things, and design patents are intended for "designs" and the designs of devices. This is not a perversion, this is just you not understanding what patents _are_!

Secondly you guys constantly claim that these things are not novel, yet you are never able to provide good prior art. Yes, here, 11 years later, this stuff is commoditized. Mostly because android ripped off the work Apple demoed in January 2007 and brought it to market.

That doesn't mean in January 2007 it wasn't novel. I have constantly seen you guys claim that other people did this before, but I've never seen a single instance of genuine prior art. You guys cite movies (not understanding what prior art is, or what patents are) and you cite demos of completely different technologies (like microsoft's surface which uses cameras.)

So, you're projecting a completely false characterization of the situation and then saying its "bad" or has been perverted.

This feels like political propaganda to me. I notice that the anti-Patent movement started with google's lawyers letter and in defense of android which is a blatent ripoff of Apple technology.

So, lets see google donate Pagerank to the public domain, eh? They only have 6 years or so left on it anyway.... why haven't they?

<comment><USER4> There's been ample citation of prior art, everything from prior working and publicly shown prototypes to actually shipping devices. Apple was not the first company to show a capacitive multitouch screen (LG Prada was), they were not the first to show pinch-to-zoom (numerous examples, Jeff Han, Diamond Touch, 20 years of research prototypes), they were not the first with double- tap to zoom (there's 2 decades of ZUIs, zoomable-user-interface work that predates this), they were not the first with software to detect phone numbers in text and make them clickable, they were not the first with an uncluttered rounded corner flat, face-plate design (see disallowed Samsung F700 face), they were not the first with universal search (PalmOS had it first on the original palm pilot) and on and on.

And don't give me that crap about "it's not about the idea, it's about the implementation". Apple's pinch to zoom patent, for example, covers implementations on ANY kind of touch surface. It claims are vague like "That gesture adjusts an image in some way", covering not just zoom, scale, and rotation, but any transform of the image.

When someone makes such an absolute claim, that they've never seen any genuine prior art, even though tens of thousands of engineers in forums are pointing to research and devices that are at least _arguably_ prior art and cast Apple's patents in a grey area, to have such an absolutist assertion indicates to me that that person is not interested in fairness, or truth, but on banging the drums of tribalism.

There are for sure, people in the Android camp that are rooting for Android in this case because they like Android devices. I'm not one of them. For me, the issue is about software programming freedom.

Whether it is SOPA/PIPA, or patents being used against open source, attacks on computing freedom in general are more important than Samsung, Android, or Apple. We should not assign away the future of software or networking by granting monopoly power to the largest corporations in the world.

Not when the whole edifice was started by Homebrew hackers to begin with.

<comment><USER5> I love how people think Apple woke up the day before the iphone demo and threw it all together at the last second anything before that day is ironclad prior art.

The light bulb was invented over 120 years ago and they still hand out patents for light bulbs, imagine that.

<comment><USER4> But people aren't patenting lightbulb interactions, they are patenting specific manufactured implementations.

Look at it this way, there were definitely people doing pinch-to-zoom that looks absolutely identical to the way Apple is doing it from the user's point of view. Jeff Han's demo is a perfect example of it. For years, many people have been doing demos like this, but they've been doing it on big bulky setups like projected-desks, or in Han's example, using total internal reflection.

Apple just made a different implementation, using the same interaction gestures, on a capacitive screen. From a software point of view, the implementations are rather trivial and don't differ much except via how you obtain the input (e.g. capacitive, FTIR, cameras, etc) The main difference is shrinking down the whole thing so it fits on a phone.

The reason why this was possible in 2007 had nothing to do with Apple's software and everything to do with the ability to manufacture a capacitive screen that has the right sensitivity, accuracy, cost, weight, and power to fit into a phone.

Apple deserves engineering props for this. But they do not get credit for inventing pinch-to-zoom nor the capacitive screen. Both of these inventions came prior.

If Apple invents an entirely new kind of touch screen and an entirely new way of manufacturing it, you could argue they deserve a patent.

But taking what existed before, pinch-to-zoom on projection displays, and implementing it on a different screen does not deserve patent protection, anymore than taking an existing business method (e.g. 'selling flower bouquets by phone', adding the text 'via web site' or 'via mobile app') and slightly tweaking the medium in which the business is done to obtain another monopoly.

Should 'internet shopping cart' be allowed a patent when real world shopping carts already existed? It's crazy absurd.

If Apple's patent had even been more specific like "pinch to zoom, but on this particular kind of screen" I'd even have more sympathy for the argument, because at least other people could do the same thing Apple did: _copy_ an existing idea and apply it to a new circumstance. Samsung and others could innovate by creating new types of displays, maybe using microscopic cameras to track your hands like minority report or something.

But granting a patent to Apple for pinch to zoom on any kind of screen? Sorry, it goes too far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These articles are getting a bit tiring.

> On December 14, 2007, Apple laid claim to the supposed novel invention of > "list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch- > screen display," the formal title of United States Patent 7,469,381 B2

For those of you who just joined us, you do not get patents for _ideas_ , you get patents for inventions. The named patent is not for "List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display", which is an obvious idea. It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.

Now, one could well argue that that specific method also is too obvious, non- novel, or trivial to deserve patent protection, but one had better be bringing some evidence to the table for that argument. This whole "your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to anyone else" feels like shaky moral ground to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> But it had occurred to other people, and lots of them. You can even watch Tom Cruise pinch-to-zoom, and scroll by waiving his hands.

Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:

US5844547 May 9, 1995 Dec 1, 1998 Fujitsu Limited Apparatus for manipulating an object displayed on a display device by using a touch screen

US6567102 Nov 25, 2001 May 20, 2003 Compal Electronics Inc. Touch screen using pressure to control the zoom ratio

US20050168488 Jan 31, 2005 Combination tool that zooms in, zooms out, pans, rotates, draws, or manipulates during a drag

All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding into some arguably-new form, and, viola, they had a patent for something everybody was doing.

I doubt you really contend that, in late 2007, Apple invented scrolling and zooming with your fingers, or that you contend that Apple's implementation was substantially different (and both novel and useful) from those prior forms. If you don't contend either of those, then why, exactly, should Apple have a patent over their implementation, which was at best modestly different from prior implementations?

<comment><USER7> Are you honestly contending that if anything depicted in a sci-fi movie cannot qualify as patentable subject matter when actually implemented? E.g., if someone invents a matter transporter as depicted in Star Trek, the inventor cannot patent it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course not, and it bears repeating that this patent doesn't cover _any_ of the underlying technology that makes the iPhone actually work as a phone, it merely covers part of the appearance of the UI, an appearance that any competent programmer can replicate on a whim.

I am contending that you can't patent a user interface you see in a sci-fi movie, which is what Apple did here. What they patented is no different from patenting the way the command module looks on the Enterprise. Do you think that Apple should be able to patent, say, the use of oval icons?

<comment><USER8> You can patent icons and fonts, why would a user interface be different here? We could revoke the ability to patent icons & fonts, but then there would be no financial motivation for companies to design fonts to sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain to me (like I'm 5) exactly what, besides the general concept of list scrolling with bounce-back to indicate end of list reached, it was that Samsung copied from the 7,469,381 patent? The Apple fans here get pissed when someone argues that Apple is trying to patent an obvious "idea" and they claim that the general idea of bounce-back scrolling isn't patented, but instead it's a very specific implementation. And yet I've never heard an explanation of what the technical details are that specifically are patented. I've tried reading the patent, but my head exploded.

So please, for the love of god, can someone explain the non obvious implementation details that were copied?

If I were to see someone use bounce-back scrolling, or if I saw it in a movie, or even if I heard someone explain the idea, I'd go off and code something up. My amateur implementation would use the general principles of inertia and physics. Is there a way to do that without violating this patent? Because I'm tired of people yelling about how the idea of intertial bounce-back scrolling isn't being patented, only a specific implementation is, and yet I have no idea how that's possible. If that's true I should be able to implement the same general idea without violating the patent, right? How?

<comment><USER10> When reading patents, only the claims matter. In this case, anything that matches claim 19, which is anything that does bounce-back scrolling the way iOS does it, is infringing.

<comment><USER9> I get that the claims of patents are supposedly very specific, and what I'm asking is if someone can actually explain why and how this particular patent has anything non-obvious in its claims (without all the ridiculous patent jargon).

I've just read claim 19 about 5 times. I also studied Figure 5, which seems to lay out the process in a way that's a little easier to understand.

I have absolutely no idea how what is described in claim 19 is not the "idea" of inertial/bounce-back scrolling.

As far as I can understand, the layperson's explanation of claim 19 goes something like this: drag some content on a touchscreen at the speed that the dragging finger is moving, once you hit the end of the scrollable range, start slowing down the speed at which the item moves, and show a different background to make it clear you've reached the end of the list, once the finger releases move the list back into place.

I'm trying sentence by sentence to translate the words in the patent claim to english that I can understand. And it sounds to me like this is the general idea of this method of scrolling. There are no specifics, no specific easing algorithms, no specific method of tracking the finger's movement, no method of actually implementing this at all.

<comment><USER11> The first time I ever saw bounce-back scrolling, I was … taken aback. It seemed ugly for an instant [at least], I think because it so often showed the non-content zone so visibly. And maybe also because it was so very odd and unintuitive in relation to how computers tended to "feel" before then. (It seems obviously a great invention now.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _...with a patent application granted after a year-long review by the patent office that apparently didn't include watching this scene from 2002's Minority Report, where Tom Cruise does all of those things and more with a spiffy 3D interface._

This is silly, as is the Gates analogy. I assure you, if anyone manages to develop a practical holodeck, they will be able to patent the hell out of it. _Star Trek_ is not prior art.

 _Practical_ is the key word. Lots of ideas sound great but are difficult or impossible to implement. Patents protect the implementation, not the idea.

<comment><USER13> The depiction of a holodeck would not stop someone from getting a _utility patent_ for a holodeck.

But the appearance of an identical work in fiction should stop a _design patent_. So if you wanted to get a design patent on a duplicate of a PADD, Star Trek would count as prior art.

<comment><USER14> In fact, Paramount has been awarded design patents for Star Trek phasers, uniforms, and starships: <http://en.memory- alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek_design_patents>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The sad fact is that UI patents are even more bullshit than software patents. Does Apple have the legal high ground here? Yes, they have a patent on rubberbanding scrolling (among others). Arguments about 'prior art' and blah blah are pointless because they have been granted a patent on a UI design -- an _idea_ , not an implementation, and not an invention. Yes, that's not what a patent is supposed to be, but that's what they've been given.

Was it a good idea? Yes. Should it be protected by a patent? No. I'm sorry, but _no_ (and I say this as a UX designer).

Patents exist to incentivize effort. I would really like to hear someone argue that, without UI patent protection, Apple would have never bothered to implement rubberbanding scrolling. Even typing it sounds ridiculous.

<comment><USER8> I guess you need to google "design patents". I feel like 95% of the people on HN don't know the difference between the two. FWIW, philip morris patented rounded corners on their cigarette boxes. If you think that's crazy, you should see the ones filed by Gucci. Maybe design patents should be renamed since everyone confuses them with utility patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This may be slightly off-topic, I'm not sure, but I was just reading Apple's patent on pinch-to-zoom[1], and in claim 8 (which is the one the jury were instructed to rule on) it says:

 _"determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation"_

Now, I don't know how patents works, but on my Galaxy Nexus, you can scroll with two fingers, so this part about determining whether its a scroll or "gesture" by the number of touch points seems to work differently to what is described in the patent.

Does that mean the implementation in the Galaxy Nexus is non-infringing? I mean, if patents are supposed to protect the _implementation_ of an idea, and the implementation is actually different then surely its not infringing?

Now admittedly I only tested a Galaxy Nexus, which is stock Android, so maybe Samsung made their version in TouchWiz different. Or maybe the implementation changed in later versions of Android, I'm not sure...

[1]: <http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915>

</comment><comment><USER17> > smartphones in which the objects on the screen roll around and bounce back > like you're spinning the Wheel of Fortune.

What I don't understand about this 'bounce back' feature is that here in Australia we have software based poker machines (Vegas style slot machines to the yanks out there) and they have had this bounce feature for decades.

Edit: To help people visualise, what I mean is the reels of the poker machine spin in one direction and when they finally stop spinning they do a very short bounce back in the other direction.

</comment><comment><USER18> Either Gates foresaw the iPhone or... knew about the Simon:

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

Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.

</comment><comment><USER3> Special effects are not prior art. Demonstrating a feature does not give you prior art neither.

Patents cover implementations. Two people can invent two different methods to do the same thing. It is not the case that the first patent gives them a monopoly on the features.

Just because the internal combustion engine (eg: with pistons) exists, doesn't mean that you can't patent a rotary engine (like Mazda did). Both are internal combustion engines, but the rotary engine uses a novel method.

So long as your position requires pretending that patents are something other than they aren't your arguments are going to be logical fallacies.

This article is thus nonsense.

<comment><USER19> >Special effects are not prior art.

Special effects can be prior art, if they are sufficiently descriptive. Just like drawings, sketches, and textual descriptions can be prior art.</comment></comment>


AI, Decentralization and the Captcha Arms Race - <AUTHOR> https://hive.blog/hive-122108/@condra/ai-decentralization-and-the-captcha-arms-race <comment><USER2> A good primer for anyone interested in using blockchain for democracy and a better world. Thank you :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the future

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, maybe, it is still early to say so but it is possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article !

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this article extremely interesting, AI-resistant captchas might be possible with this, created by humans and not by algorithms.

<comment><USER2> I like your thinking. With a slight twist, what you're suggesting can be done right now with Idena.

Websites can incorporate a sign in with Idena button to protect from bots and prove the user is human. The visitor must be validated on the Idena network (the userbase is growing, it's 2k at the moment)</comment></comment></comment>


Branding Vice - <AUTHOR> https://notvice.com/branding-vice-c967274f352d <comment><USER2> The author of this article has a serious axe to grind with VICE which overshadows the few good points he makes. The photoshopped pictures of VICE executives with consumer brands are embarrassingly bad.

It does bother me that VICE sometimes over-editorializes some of its stories and does some truth stretching. Overall, I think the quality stories are worthwhile and I can just roll my eyes at the misinformative ones, e.g. many on motherboard.vice.com.

I clicked on another entry in this ranty blog and found a hilarious VICE parody done by the Onion: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHvrirXi5Ds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHvrirXi5Ds) .

<comment><AUTHOR> The other Vice parody link in the same article.

[https://vimeo.com/121639159](https://vimeo.com/121639159)

via: [https://notvice.com/everyone-is-laughing-at- vice-a82a33228b0...](https://notvice.com/everyone-is-laughing-at- vice-a82a33228b01)

P.S. I'm the author, will answer questions regarding my adversarial blog after work. (posted at lunch)

<comment><USER2> That was the article, thanks for introducing me to EDGE, it's great!

I'm looking forward for the discussion after you finish lunch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. Got side tracked. Will reply as long as the thread stays open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The rant might be genuine. Post McInnes VICE was not as provocative as it use to be. At present VICE just brings the politically correct news reporting in a provocative format. Clearly one has ignore facts in favor of a good story. Most news media does this I dont think why VICE should be singled out.

The whole zoo is like a fancy dress competition I dont see why VICE should be demonized or singled out.

P.S. Vice also remains probably the only media house to come up with these real off beat stories. They might have taken creative liberties with facts but then who does not ?

Examples:

[https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/life-as-a-member- of-i...](https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/life-as-a-member-of-indias- third-gender-is-a-blessing-and-a-curse) [http://www.vice.com/read/first- person-shooter-building-maint...](http://www.vice.com/read/first-person- shooter-building-maintenance-porter-janitor-guys) [http://www.vice.com/read/why-prisons-should-give-inmates- acc...](http://www.vice.com/read/why-prisons-should-give-inmates-access-to- social-media)

<comment><AUTHOR> Companies that don't take creative liberties in the way you are suggesting:

New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post, NPR, PBS Frontline, BBC, CBC Radio, ProPublica, Associated Press, The Guardian.

Their code of ethics can be found here: [http://www.nytco.com/who-we- are/culture/standards-and-ethics...](http://www.nytco.com/who-we- are/culture/standards-and-ethics/) [http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=A_Brief_Guide_to_Standard...](http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=A_Brief_Guide_to_Standards,_Photoshop_and_Captions) [http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=236&sl=19&contentid=335](http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=236&sl=19&contentid=335) [http://ethics.npr.org/](http://ethics.npr.org/) [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/about- us/journalisti...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/about- us/journalistic-guidelines/) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/](http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/) [http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/reporting-to- canadians/act...](http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/reporting-to- canadians/acts-and-policies/programming/journalism/) [https://www.propublica.org/about/code-of- ethics/](https://www.propublica.org/about/code-of-ethics/) [http://www.apme.com/?page=EthicsStatement](http://www.apme.com/?page=EthicsStatement) [http://www.theguardian.com/guardian/article/0,5814,642387,00...](http://www.theguardian.com/guardian/article/0,5814,642387,00.html)

Vice has editorials for sale if you happen to have $27,850: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cj_1xHMVAAE9FUs.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cj_1xHMVAAE9FUs.jpg:large)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a trashy, incongruent rant of an article.

Regardless, a vast majority of their content doesn't include any reference to marketable brands. If the OP is accusing them of being a PR news agency, I have seen very little evidence of it. Questioning wether they are a business trying to earn a profit is incredibly naive.

However, if I was to criticize anything about their journalistic integrity, it's the tendency for their reporters to inject too much personal opinion. Though they do often succeed at concluding their pieces in a way that leaves the consumer considering multiple perspectives.

We don't have nearly enough (imperfect or not) media companies pursuing the types of stories Vice does. Given their willingness to publish exceptionable stories, it's no wonder there are significant attempts to discredit them.

<comment><USER5> A handful of Vice articles I've read over the years have touched on my personal sphere - people or causes I'm directly involved with. Their fact checking is actually quite poor. They get tons of easily verified stuff wrong. Moreover, I've seen at least two instances where such errors prevented a brand/product/person from being perceived in a negative light. Some of their articles have been wrong to the point of the entire article being incorrect (like their 'first clown escort' story).

I'm sure they do or have done some quality journalism, but the amount of bullshit they do shovel leaves them suspect as a whole to me.

<comment><USER2> Yes their fact-checking is really poor in some articles. Their tech reporting is awful. I love their international stories, such as the North Korea special. Do you know of any inaccuracies in these stories?

<comment><USER6> From what I have read elsewhere most of those stories seem to be in line with what the world at large knows. It is hard to tell if it's just two different parts of the shop lead by by different management with different goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Example: This news article is an advertisement in disguise: [http://www.vice.com/read/david-shapiro-supremacist- supreme-s...](http://www.vice.com/read/david-shapiro-supremacist-supreme- streetwear-book-interview)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there a publication that does edgy, interesting content like Vice but isn't tied up in advertising controversy? This is a multi-layered question so answer however you like, I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER8> 4chan

<comment><USER7> Well played, though I'd wager between trolling and conspiracy theories it's near impossible to pick out legitimate information from the rest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it "injecting" if the content was native-advertising to begin with?

<comment><USER10> If it was it wasn't labeled correctly. That said, it appears that many of the examples even six or seven years old; before even the FTC _suggested_ labeling guidelines came out (and the actual rules only came out in December).

Reading more of this site the author comes not as having a very personal vendetta against Vice (although there's not really a hint as to what has set it off). I'm very skeptical of the underlying agenda here.

<comment><USER9> As a disclaimer, I stopped consuming VICE for this exact reason. I'm more skeptical of the underlying agenda of VICE than some rando blogger with an axe to grind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I call it the "Wired Style".</comment>


Confirming Passwords Is Annoying: Is There a Better Way? - <AUTHOR> http://konigi.com/notebook/confirming-passwords-annoying-there-better-way

<comment><USER2> I simply don't confirm the password (or email). The overwhelming majority of people are going to type it properly, as substantiated by my failed login stats (less than 1%). For the remaining 1%, I'll concentrate on recovering from their error easily rather than depressing conversion among ALL users by making the signup form two fields longer. (And, _ahem_ , if all of them were to get frustrated and abandon their trial, well, _1%_.)

Edited to add: Context for why that number is so low: The vast majority of my trial users are up-or-out within 3 days, and since I default to setting a 2 week "remember me" cookie, typically only my most interested users ever have to type their password ever again.

By the way, you would be _astonished_ how many users I have think they cannot type their school email address from their home computer and vice versa.

<comment><USER3> Combine this with JulianMorrison's suggestion (don't do the ####) & I think this a good approach.

<comment><USER4> Back in the day when I wasn't using keepass and just had 2-4 passwords I regularly used (one for sites I considered safe... and then a couple more for unsafe sites), I found that seeing my password in plain text on the screen was really unsettling. Even if I was home alone and there was no chance of anyone looking over my shoulder, it just felt so... unsafe.

I wonder if other people have a similar reaction.

Might be better to make users type in the password a second time rather than give them a queasy feeling in the pit of their stomach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please post the original article (<http://www.viget.com/advance/password- fields-are-annoying/>) instead of a blog post that does nothing but link to it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't do #######

Don't ask for confirmation.

Solved.

(The ####### protects against someone peeking over their shoulder the exact instant they register, who wants to steal their password. It's not really very plausible and certainly not worth the hassle.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Having to type your password twice is a major cue that the action you're taking is to register a new account, not sign in to an existing one.

Some friction is necessary -- if you make it _too easy_ the user won't be sure of what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER8> If, first, we could rid the world of the many many sites out there that actually make you type your email or username twice, the world would be vastly improved. Not that the article isn't interesting.

<comment><USER5> That's what I thought, but on my site, I'd say about 5% of people make a typo on their email address. Now I am probably going to join the "confirm email" club.

<comment><USER9> But does typing the email address twice, on the same form a mere 20 pixels from where you previously typed in full view of the previous entry, actually bring out corrections? If you mistype it the same way twice, you may not notice that you mistyped it, as both fields will look the same. For password fields, where the input is hidden/obscured, the double entry makes some sense (ignoring the UI issues/possibilities outlined in the OP), but with email addresses, it seems less so. I'd be interesting in hearing stats after you make a change.

Also, are the typos you've seen more often in the LHS or the RHS (of the @) in the email address? The RHS is relatively easy to spot check, by doing an MX and A DNS lookup to see if the domain exists -- you'll check actual delivery later. I've found this to be more robust than regular expressions that attempt to "validate" email addresses (see HN postings from earlier today) and assume a fixed size on the RHS, and are often overly aggressive in trying to detect "illegal" characters on the LHS, like +, which is not actually an illegal character.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ripped shamelessly from the comments on the post, I thought this was pretty neat:

<http://foxxtrot.github.com/Chroma-Hash/>

However, I don't see how it's more effective than a callout or alert noting "these don't match" ... just less annoying and way sexier.

<comment><USER9> This has shades Lotus Notes hieroglyphics logins, but potentially much better.

[http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/02/lotus-notes-aol- corporat...](http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/02/lotus-notes-aol-corporate- world/)

<http://www.encode-sec.com/pdf/esa0101.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One option might be to not ask for a password at all and auto generate it. Most sign ups include some form of confirmation email, perhaps a password could be sent with it? Not appropriate for every app but registration with nothing more than email address is getting as stripped down as possible.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, use 1Password and let it generate a strong password and fill in the forms for you. Can't say it quite changed my life but it's been the most useful piece of software I've bought all year.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't tell you how many times I've tried logging into HN using the signup form (which, of course, doesn't ask for your password confirmation). The password confirmation, I think, has become a necessary input field to let users instantly recognize and know that they're signing up for an account. Qwerty keyboards, for example, aren't the most efficient way to type, but the layout has become so ingrained into our brains that we can't imagine any other way to type.</comment>


Car rental giant Hertz is reportedly preparing for bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/hertz-rental-car-company-prepares-for-possible-bankruptcy-report-2020-4 <comment><USER2> It seemed to me over the years they got really fancy, investing a lot in their fleet (many luxury cars), their garages, and facilities. The company of today feels very different to the more humble car rental service of my youth. Every car that I ever rented or saw seemed nearly new. I was always shocked at how frequently they turned over their inventory and it seemed to me a machine that really needed to be kept in motion lest it crash. It seems to me they had some kind of sophisticated calibrated model whereby they would buy late-model cars, have consumers drive them just under X miles, and then re-sell the cars on the market before they got too low on price again. They got hit on both sides of the funnel — rentals and sales.

<comment><USER3> There's probably some really interesting optimization there around depreciation schedules, maintenance, resale values and the like

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but my guess is that buying them new and then maintaining and driving them for 250k miles or more would calculate out the best.

(Buying used with around 25k miles would be even better, but hard to scale up.)

But you don't see that, I think because the main factor in their calculation is the customer experience of driving a fresh, new car that rarely has any mechanical trouble and that keeps customers coming back which outweighs all the other savings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wan't drop a single tear. Every time I rented from Hertz it put strange additional charges on my tab.

<comment> nm-f Having briefly worked in the industry for one of their competitors, you wouldn't believe how they treat their staff and customers. Also all the cars are leased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where can I find the cars that Hertz is going to sell before the bankruptcy?

<comment><USER7> You don't even need to wait: [https://www.hertzcarsales.com/](https://www.hertzcarsales.com/)

<comment><USER8> >Our apologies, there are no matches within 1000 miles of postal code null.</comment></comment></comment>


New Republic's new look - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I think the redesign is _decent_ , but the pull quotes are outright ghastly.</comment>


JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-05/clapper-denies-trump-wiretap-as-white-house-demands-a-probe <comment><USER2> This link works: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/jp-morgan- so...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/jp-morgan-software- lawyers-coin-contract-intelligence-parsing-financial-deals-seconds-legal- working-a7603256.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> URL: [https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-05/clapp...](https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-05/clapper- denies-trump-wiretap-as-white-house-demands-a-probe)

Title: "JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours"

Smells fishy.</comment>


I'm working on an open source app that will allow checking sports bets for value - <AUTHOR> In order to gain experience of development in Meteor rapidly, I'm building two open source projects related to gambling. The first one will do what the title says. I have a plan mapped out for it and I've done more than 30% of the work. But I need to hear other people out: what checks do you want for your bets? I'm talking about the type of checks that would desconsider a bet in your eyes; I know from my own experience that sometimes it's hard to let go of them. But when you want to bet and the app will tell you "no" and offer valid reasons, maybe you'll actually listen. Here's an example with the two most basic checks I can think about:<p>- First thing, to get it out of the way and not have the user influenced by the subsequent tasks, ask for a percentage based probability on how often will the event occur. For example: do you want to bet that Real Madrid will win instead of drawing or losing in their next match? How often do you think that would happen? 85%. OK, let's go to step 2. - Input the odds, calculate the bookmaker margin, compare it with the averages for that event and so on. The checks will get more complicated as it goes on. I have a certain flow in mind.<p>The interface is beautiful and it allows for events with any number of outcomes and odds expressed in these formats: fractional, decimal and moneyline. For this reason it will also be helpful to people that bet on things like 1x2 and horse races, not just for handicappers. <comment><USER2> A link to the repository or better yet an online demo might elicit more feedback. It might also make for a good "Show HN."

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. After I host it I'll definitely Show HN it.</comment></comment>


BlinkCart Lets You Create An Online Store Plug-In for MySpace - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/07/19/blinkcart/ <comment><USER2> This is the first time I hear about anything like this... maybe I'm behind on it but this is going to be awesome for clothing designers, small shops etc. I'd use it if I was a one man show...</comment>