Haiku OS – Fundraising 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://www.haiku-os.org/ <comment><USER2> Before the whole thing collapsed, I was using BeOS for my desktop at home and had a skunkworks project going on at work trying to demonstrate BeOS as platform for our diagnostic devices.

We were transitioning from a 2-line, 32-char LCD display to QVGA colour touch screen and the experience was become painful. I really thought I had found a much better alternative than the RTEMS, VxWorks, and Windows based options we were looking at.

And then it seemed like everything fell apart. I don't actually remember if it was Be Inc, or what I was working on and then where I was working that folded first but for me it was like a very long line of falling dominoes resulting in a lot of interesting and promising tech being abandoned.

Worse, after all the dust settled in my professional career, all that was replaced with stuff with a lot more familiar names but that was more difficult to get right. It pains me to even say it but I worked on four projects over six or seven years that never made it out of R&D.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was on the BeOS team for many years. While we did many interesting things, and especially kernel and driver layers were more modern than the alternatives, Palm threw away those pieces. If I were to build (or fund) a new OS today, I'd drive the state if the art forward.

Especially the GUI layer is too reliant on '80s style implementation inheritance, rather than fast, strict protocols and minimal abstraction costs.

<comment><USER4> Do you work on HaikuOS? If not, why not?

I've been following the project since it's birth and it is amazing what have been created, but it seems there is a far way to go. I bet your knowledge would be valuable to the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have used BeOS 5 & HaikuOS as my no distraction operating systems. It can't do much, but it has a text editor, c compiler, and a web browser that is sufficient for most documentation and Safari.

It always runs quite fast compared to a lightweight Linux distro.

</comment><comment><USER6> As someone who played with BeOS in my younger days; I'm pretty curious about this project, does this use any of BeOS's code or is this a reimplementation of BeOS ideas with it's own codebase?

<comment><USER7> [https://www.haiku-os.org/about/faq#top_6](https://www.haiku- os.org/about/faq#top_6)

"Is Haiku based on BeOS then?

Haiku reimplements both the BeOS technologies as well as the end user experience, but it is far from being based on BeOS from a code base perspective. The only BeOS code that has made it into Haiku are Tracker and the Deskbar (the file manager and the equivalent of the start menu/taskbar, respectively). These were open sourced by Be Inc. back in 2001, later forked under the OpenTracker project, and eventually merged into the Haiku code base. The rest is either homebuilt code or derivatives of existing open source software."

<comment><USER6> Ah I missed that, sorry. Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why? Is Haiku just an exercise in nostalgia or are there reasons why one might actually choose it over other OSs for practical use?

<comment><USER9> [https://www.haiku-os.org/about/faq#top_5](https://www.haiku- os.org/about/faq#top_5)

> # Why not Linux?

> Linux-based distributions stack up software -- the Linux kernel, the X > Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt > -- that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack > of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, > insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your > computer more complicated than it should actually be.

> Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a > unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide > a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better > user experience that is simple and uniform throughout.

After reading this, I full-heartedly support this project.

<comment><USER2> Man, I've been sold on that design concept since the mid '90s.

It's pretty amazing how much power old code and old designs have over us. I don't use Windows, so I can't comment on that but as far as I know every other OS still employs those designs which the BeOS developers identified as making things far more complicated than they should actually be.

To this day, I'm not sure that I've ever met anyone who could produce a credible explanation that, however complicated modern Operating Systems have become, they're as simple as they can be and any reduction in complication (this isn't really complexity) would certainly require a reduction in necessary features, usability, reliability, or security.

The only guys I even hear talking about anything even vaguely related are the Library OS/Rump Kernel/UniKernel crowds and they're focusing on applications running in Data Centers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What was the outcome of the discussion about switching to the Linux kernel?

<comment><USER11> Do you have a link to where this was considered? This seems like it would nuke almost the entire point of Haiku, since the goal isn't just to be a desktop environment.

<comment><USER12> Why would relying on an existing kernel (linux, bsd) 'nuke' the point of Haiku ?

The API's (kits) would not have to change in any way, which is the part that application developers face, and from a user perspective the only difference would be better performance and much better hardware support.

The 'point' of Haiku (and BeOS before it) has (in my opinion) always been to provide an OS that is designed for desktop use with the apps integrated well with the desktop environment, I don't see how that in any way excludes using existing kernels since the 'desktop part' is outside of the kernel anyway.

<comment><USER11> For one I'm pretty sure it would wreck binary compatibility with BeOS without the addition of a compatibility layer. Whether you think that's a worthwhile goal or not, it is a stated goal of the project.

Linux also lacks the pervasive multithreading that BeOS and Haiku have. Again, maybe that approach isn't the best one, but it's a pretty big feature of BeOS/Haiku and switching to something else would make them more ordinary. I think they only have a chance to survive as long as they're novel.

<comment><USER12> >For one I'm pretty sure it would wreck binary compatibility with BeOS without the addition of a compatibility layer.

There's already 64-bit Haiku binaries which can be used alongside the old BeOS binaries so I doubt that this is an issue, it's not as if programs call the Haiku kernel directly, it's done through the Kernel kit.

>Linux also lacks the pervasive multithreading that BeOS and Haiku have. Again, maybe that approach isn't the best one

From what I've read from the guy who is working on improving Haiku scheduling (pawel), the thread scheduling was really bad in Haiku and scaled poorly, he was also positive (despite all his work on the Haiku scheduler) of using a Linux/BSD kernel to improve performance.

It's not as if rendering a tea-pot while opening 3 videos is causing any modern kernel scheduler to choke these days, it was impressive back when people were running windows 95.

In short, I don't think BeOS pervasive multithreading offers any benefits against modern kernel schedulers of today.

>I think they only have a chance to survive as long as they're novel.

I agree, however I don't think Haiku's novelity lies in which kernel it uses as it is such a low level part of the stack, it's in the API's, the desktop environment and the file system, in other words, user/developer facing components.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Swift Serial Port Library for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yeokm1/SwiftLinuxSerial <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Intel closes its New Devices Group, which built the Vaunt smart glasses - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/18/intel-closes-new-devices-group-that-built-vaunt-smart-glasses.html <comment><USER2> This makes me very sad. When I read about Vaunt I was very excited that finally someone was making a wearable that provided a lot of information quickly without needing something as clumsy as looking at your watch. A quick glance and done without the overt signals of looking at the wrist.

I played with Google Glass for a few days and loved having it. The audio I could do without, the camera was not very useful to me... But the heads up display was phenomenal. I was hoping to recapture that in an inexpensive wearable like Vaunt and suddenly it's gone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure someone else will take this up -- the idea is too good to die. I think it's just that Intel has bigger problems on their hands right now (Meltdown/Spectre).</comment></comment>


Spectacular discovery of drawings by Frans Post - <AUTHOR> https://www.rijksmuseum.nl//en/press/press-releases/spectacular-discovery-of-drawings-by-frans-post <comment><USER2> Oreilly Media are probably stoked about this, a new art discovery for us more cover images for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a side note, has anyone here dabbled with practicing drawing/illustration? I have so far found it to be an excellent way of practicing concentration as it require an acute focus to minute details.

<comment><USER4> Are you following any tutorials? How are you learning it?

<comment><USER5> I found [http://drawabox.com/](http://drawabox.com/) super helpful when you're just starting off. You begin with the very basics: lines, ellipses, boxes and then iterate from there drawing boxes and cylinders in space. Followed by plants, animals, everyday object etc. You can also get feedback in the associated subreddit.

On youtube Sycras channel was the most useful for me. He seems to genuinely care about providing helpful content for all levels, not just selling a product. I especially like his multi part series on specific topics e.G. "Foundations of Light and Shadow".

He also runs a quite active forum.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/Sycra/](https://www.youtube.com/user/Sycra/) [http://forum.sycra.net/forum/](http://forum.sycra.net/forum/)</comment></comment></comment>


The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html <comment><USER2> There's a children's book called The Boy Who Loved Math: The improbable life of Paul Erdös [0]. I ordered a copy when looking for some books to get my son interested in math beyond counting and simple arithmetic.

My son is 3 1/2, and he loves this book. He loves that there was a kid who loved numbers so much he spent his whole life studying them. He loves that he gets to see a boy grow into an adult, who grows into an old man. If you want to share your love of math with a kid, Erdös' story is a great one to share. It's also a great conversation starter about how much or how little to focus on any one thing. I love knowing Erdös' story, but I'm not sure I'd like to be him.

[0] - [http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Who-Loved- Math/dp/1596433078/r...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Who-Loved- Math/dp/1596433078/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=boy++who+loved+numbers)

<comment><USER3> Does it cover the cocaine usage?

<comment><USER2> The only substance it mentions is coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anybody notice how beautiful and natural to use the page is? Turns out it's very basic html.

<comment><USER5> I don't have a huge monitor (22 inches) but I found it difficult to read because the lines were so wide. They should set a fixed width for the content and then I'd agree with you.

<comment><USER6> They shouldn't. If you want to make a wide page narrower you can always resize your browser. If I want to make a narrow page wider, there's no way for me to do that.

<comment><USER7> If you want to make a narrow page wider, you can open the Inspector and change the width.

The argument is the same, and they're both invalid. It takes way too much effort. I'm not resizing a window I use for everything just so I can fullscreen it when I switch to another tab and resize it again when I return.

<comment><USER8> > _" If you want to make a narrow page wider, you can open the Inspector and > change the width."_

The difference is that one is accessible to the average user. Outside of Developerland, most people don't even realize that the page they are viewing has a source which can be inspected or changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My High School mathematics teacher introduced me to this book 6-7 years ago. Erdös was a hacker in the Mathematician's world. His throughput for establishing hundreds of conjectures and proofs reminds me of collegiate Hackathons in our programming community. This book might make you fall in love with Mathematics, or at least provide an undeniable appreciation for getting shit done.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a documentary about his life as well:

 _N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős_

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iflQseSSfA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iflQseSSfA)

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh man, I really loved this biography in the 9th grade. It was the first time I was exposed to the concept of mathematics being beautiful. I can't recommend this book enough. Also, I loved Paul Hoffman's biography of the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos Dumont as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> A couple of years after this article a book about Erdős appeared called _My Brain is Open_. If you enjoyed this article I highly recommend the book about this fascinating man and his unique life. It even has some good explanations of some of the problems he worked on.

The information about amphetamines made an impression. His friends at times tried to discourage him, but he claimed that without them, he could create no mathematics. Given his colossal output, this means that a significant part of the landscape of modern mathematics owes it existence to this drug.

How he learned the drug would help him, and how he got his hands on it, and when and how his use of it started, are questions I'm very curious about, but the book doesn't go there.

<comment><USER13> >The information about amphetamines made an impression. His friends at times tried to discourage him, but he claimed that without them, he could create no mathematics. Given his colossal output, this means that a significant part of the landscape of modern mathematics owes it existence to this drug.

Erdős was a heavy user of many other stimulants (like coffee), but only started to use antidepressants and then amphetamines in 1971 when he was 58 after his mother died. He was already established as a first rate mathematician (he should have won the Fields Medal), and using amphetamines to work 19 hours a day was his way of coping with the death of his mother.

See [http://www.untruth.org/~josh/math/Paul%20Erd%F6s%20bio- rev2....](http://www.untruth.org/~josh/math/Paul%20Erd%F6s%20bio-rev2.pdf) for more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it fascinating that, according to this story, he could not be productive without amphetamines.

"I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. "

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind that he didn't start amphetamine use until his late 50's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If someone is interested, here are two further nice articles about the man, written by a close friend and collaborator:

[http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/files/tr_authentic/TR-2001-11.ps](http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/files/tr_authentic/TR-2001-11.ps)

[http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/files/tr_authentic/TR-2001-03.ps](http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/files/tr_authentic/TR-2001-03.ps)

</comment><comment><USER17> The name is most correctly spelled "Paul Erdős", not "Paul Erdös".

<comment><USER18> _More_ correctly, certainly; most correctly might be "Erdős Pál"?

<comment><USER17> I stand most corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I loved this book, and can highly recommend it. Take a look at the bottom right picture on his Wikipedia page [1], where he is talking about math to a 10 year old Terence Tao, who is now one of the great minds of his generation. I think that is Erdos in short. He had an influence on so many people across the world.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s)

</comment><comment><USER20> I love that this story is trending on Hacker News. The author, Paul Hoffman, is a close friend.

It's nice when good work gets rediscovered here.

<comment><USER21> Thank your friend for writing a wonderful biography about a beautiful soul. That book really opened up the world for me by introducing me to a lot of the history and ideas. I'd dropped out of school many years ago and never learned Calculus. After that book, I was inspired to take evening classes and finally learn calculus. As it turned out, I needed to take a few refresher classes before I got to calculus, but I did and I finished up to calc 3. I've been meaning to go back and do some linear algebra and differential equations... Hopefully, I will go back soon.

Tell your friend he's doing the SF's work. Then again, maybe he's doing the devil's work if the SF is bent on keeping all the good theorems to himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> He seemed to also love amphetamines.</comment>


Walter Isaacson knew Steve's illness was terminal, and it's all in the book - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1408703742/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=abiada-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=1408703742

<comment><USER2> WARNING, AFFILIATE LINKBAIT!</comment>


Alphabet to Sell Terra Bella Satellite Unit to Planet, Talked with Climate Corp - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/google-satellite-planet/ <comment><USER2> I'm not smart enough to understand these kind of deals fully, but I always thought the Skybox acquisition made a ton of sense for Google. The Skybox assets could possibly be used to improve consumer facing products like Maps, while also being a self sustaining business providing mapping to enterprise clients.

But what do I know.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you donate to any charities? - <AUTHOR>

If so, which organizations are your favorite and why? <comment><USER2> ASPCA and my local SPCA

Nothing but nets

I want to start with charity:water soon too.

The "why" is that these causes touch my heart and the organizations are responsible. No pet deserves cruelty or starvation. Every child deserves to live with clean water and not die of malaria. But so many causes are worthy so it's more a matter of what problem breaks your heart.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I donate to charity. I also donate to open source projects. I give to bloggers. I buy freemium-service subscriptions even if I don't need the features. I give to buskers.

Why? Because it feels right.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you don't have a lot of money but are interested in doing something you might want to check out Kiva (<http://www.kiva.org>).

They give micro loans to small businesses in countries around the world. You, over the course of months, get your money back and you can then redistribute it back to another person somewhere else.

I've been a member for nearly four years now and in that time I've managed to help with 14 loans.

</comment><comment><USER5> I go out of my way to avoid charities. I'd rather build up wealth and dispense it Bill Gates style than give out a slow trickle over the course of my life. That way I can personally make sure my money is being spent properly and be hands on with it, rather than trust some far away bureaucracy to not waste it.

<comment><USER6> There are problems with thinking like this:

1) You may never be rich enough to have any wealth to dispense. This is arrogance and ignorance.

2) You ignore the plight of those today. Money isn't the only way to be charitable. Time, energy, effort, and passion can be lent to charitable causes.

I have the same thought process as you, "oh I'll be rich one day and I'll be generous and give everything and make happiness, that'll be my contribution. But not now, I've got my own problems.". I think we all have a responsibility to do something for those less fortunate, those without opportunity, those suffering. A lot of my friends in college volunteered, and it really shamed me a bit into how little I do for anyone else.

That said, give now, whatever it is you want to give.

<comment><USER7> Plus, if everyone did it, you'd just multiply bureaucracy: every dot-com millionaire will have a non-profit organization, with its own office, staff, accountants, lawyers, fundraising office, designers, program managers, etc., etc. That's one reason Buffett just gave his money to the Gates Foundation instead of setting up a self-aggrandizing but redundant Buffett Foundation.

<comment><USER5> Well, what I should have said then was I want to give my money away Warren Buffet style: carefully research which is the best nonprofit to donate to, and go all in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the bitcoin forum, I started a thread to donate bitcoins, which is a kind of cryptocurrency, to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This is because the technology and the concept behind bitcoins is probably something that the Electronic Frontier Foundation would probably have to defend in the future.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes. Amnesty International. Because I think of all the things wrong in the world, and I think a good way to start to fix them is to work on the most basic of human rights. From this will flow other benefits. How can we save the planet if we can't even look after each other?

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes.

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS, www.maps.org) is my #1 destination for donations. I think the war on some drugs has done more to damage the US than anything else, and this seems like the most reasonable pathway to fix this -- showing that various "evil" substances are medically useful.

I also donate to: EFF, Gun Owners of America, NRA, Tax Foundation, the National Cryptologic Museum, and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

I'd like to donate to global, national, and local (Seattle or WA/PNW) environmental groups which are responsible and not "Environmentalists"; buying land privately and being responsible with it seems to be a more direct way to accomplish this.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been resolved since I was in college to give away 10% of my income a year. I give to two anti-human trafficking organizations that I know first- hand spend their money wisely and vastly improve the lives of individuals who have been victimized in a way most of us can't imagine: GEMS: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (<http://www.gems-girls.org/>) and Polaris Project (www.polarisproject.org/). I also give some money to NYC arts organizations (NY Philharmonic, etc), but that is mostly because I like the benefits rather than out of any great philanthropic ideal.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am a blood donor, but I never really donated money to any charity. After witnessing a huge ONG meeting (non-governative organizations) and all the businessy-feel that accompanied the whole event and how people managing small/middle tier charities were visibly more interested in their personal wealth rather than the cause they were working for, I came to the conclusion that I'm not in favour of putting my hard-earned cash in their pockets, charity shouldn't be a job. I'm sure not all of them are like that, and maybe one day I'll change my mind, in the meantime I stick with blood donations only.

</comment><comment><USER13> My wife and I give. I think it is one of the most positive things you can do. We give to several faith-connected charities, children's hospitals, etc. My new "favorite" charity is charitywater.org. They have a lot of good things going for it not the least of which is that they are about as close as it comes to a "startup" charity in terms of innovation, marketing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes, mostly local organizations: humane society, anti-poverty programs, etc. And Child's Play, every December.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have frequently volunteered out in Africa with Camara (<http://www.camara.ie>), a charity that sends second hand computers to schools in Africa. They are taking the long view of how to help Africa develop as a region, education is the key.

</comment><comment><USER16> March of Dimes, both my wife's pregnancies almost ended with premature births ( months of bed rest, hospitalization, etc.) We toured the NICU and saw babies born months early. We say the doctors and nurses who work in this area while staying in the hospital for 30 days.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does political stuff count? I give some money to the EFF, because with the amount of money I'm able to spend on those issues, I feel they can spend it more effectively than I could as an individual.

</comment><comment><USER17> Kiva.org and Make A Wish Foundation. Both are pretty self explanatory, seeing helpless kids with horrible circumstances breaks my heart.

</comment><comment><USER18> yes Kiva. It seems to me to be the smartest charity and awesome way to help people.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wikipedia.</comment>


Ask HN: My iOS app got pirated, what to do now? Raging? Nothing? Partying? - <AUTHOR> Hi today I've discovered that my iPad app watchlater (checkout the website here: http://watchlaterapp.com/ - basically it's InstaPaper for Video) got pirated: http://goo.gl/xM05Q<p>What to do now? Raging? Nothing? Partying? Is it an accolade? Would you contact the filehoster to take it down? Can I technically detect within the app that I'm running on a jailbroken device? <comment><USER2> You can't stop people from pirating your app. Not to mention, I'm sure most of us have pirated something, at some point, as well. I'd personally let them keep the files up. As it's been said, another user is another user. He'll show it to his friends who might buy it instead of pirating.

Another option to help fight people pirating would be to offer a free version. Maybe limit how many things they can add to their list, and have it ad supported. The full version you pay for and gets unlimited items in their list.

If you _do_ find a way to detect someone using a pirated version, instead of disabling the application, why not do something fun like create a "pirate theme" that gets applied so they know they've been busted. (The only drawback is if the pirate theme is awesome you might get people pirating it just to see what it looks like).

There's no sense in fighting pirating, it's never worked. As far as I know, no industry has had any real success stopping it. I say embrace it and try to use it to your advantage.

<comment><USER3> That's ok if you application is "standalone", but what happens when your app needs some backend webservice to properly run?

We pay for servers, we can't pirate them. I read articles from developers telling that most of their users are pirates. How could we use this situation to our advantage?

<comment><USER4> You have a couple options there:

* Require simple registration and validate against app purchasers

* Make the app free and charge for premium features that work with the web-based back end

If something is priced reasonably and provides good value, users will pay for it. iOS buyer statistics are a great case study.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think one of my favorite approaches is reaching out to the individuals pirating the software. Post a comment on the page explaining that you are the developer of the program. Explain why you made the application and that, if people download and enjoy it, you would appreciate them supporting future development by purchasing the application through the AppStore.

You really can't stop people from pirating your application, but you might be able to convert a few would-be pirates just by reaching out to them with your story. It's easy to steal a piece of software from a nameless entity, but it's much harder when there is a human element involved.

Going into "legal mode" rarely solves these problems because it just puts people on the defensive (and this is coming from a lawyer).

</comment><comment><USER6> I would say "party". It's one more user to add to your user base. One more user who (if your app doesn't suck) will end up showing it to someone who doesn't want to bother with the immense fuss of pirating and will just purchase it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe... yes that's what I'm thinking too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Celebrate! People like your app enough to pirate it.

Because the alternative was that they wouldn't like it enough. There is no 'wanted it but didn't pirate it' option for bored, unethical hackers.

<comment><USER7> Oh, and you might be able to tell if the device is jailbroken, but that has no relation on whether the person paid for your app or not. Don't confuse that.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think? Should we try to track that in the backend?

<comment><USER7> Tracking data that isn't useful for serving your customers is a bad idea. Heck, even most of it that -is- useful can make the customer upset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want, you can try sending a DMCA notice to the file hosts to try and get the software taken down.

Here's the page for FileSonic: <http://www.filesonic.com/report-abuse>

Wupload: <http://www.wupload.com/dmca>

BitShare: <http://www.bitshare.com/abuse.html>

That won't stop the pirating, but it's something...

</comment><comment><USER9> Whatever you do, don't try to limit your app just if it's running on a jailbroken device. There are many legitimate reasons for Jailbreaking an iOS device. I've done it countless times to my devices (fellow iOS developer here), and I've never done so to pirate apps.

In order to pirate apps, you must jailbreak. But in order to jailbreak, you needn't necessarily pirate apps.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can't stop pirates and converting users of the piratery is not worth the effort. I hope this doesn't drain your revenue, but if you can just push forward and make paying customers happy and find new ones, that's where I'd spend my time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably yes. I'm just curios. I've seen people probing for files outside the sandbox to detect if someone runs on a jailbroken device. Wonder if Apple would reject those because of "hacking".

<comment><USER11> I imagine that if you disable the use of your app by paying customers, the damages you will incur will dwarf the pain you feel from piracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Actually, if you have spare time, you should include those who pirate your apps in whatever usage measurements you already do.

With luck, you can probably discover why people pirate your apps. Maybe due to price, or that your nearest competitor has a better user experience, etc.

You can try to fight it, by making your most used features something which needs App Store authorization, but I suspect that will just piss off your customers who already paid for it and they will start putting 1-star ratings in the App Store.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe some people just want to test your app. I heard of plenty of people who download a pirated copy first, to see if it's worth buying. You could release a test version of the app, so these people don't need to download it illegally. Otherwise, people who pirate software wouldn't buy it otherwise also. So, consider this as an indirect PR for your awesome app.

</comment><comment><USER14> Make the app forever free and provide in-app transactions for some premium content/functionality.

Perhaps paid-for import/sync of bookmarks with some other movie bookmarking service -- with something comparable to MyAnimeList [0]. Or ability to exchange movie bookmarks and comments with friends over FB or G+; if you make it go through your central server, you can collect some fees for such service.

They say you can't beat free (`pirated'), but `pirates' can't beat your free version either.

Compete on quality.

\----

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanimelist>

</comment><comment><USER15> My sympathies. I'm about to launch a PlayBook app and am fervently hoping that piracy is less of an issue with BlackBerry users.

Also - I came across <http://getdenso.com/> a few days ago which appears to do roughly the same thing as your app - have you heard of them? I inquired with them for an API that I might utilize to bring a BlackBerry PlayBook app into existence, and I'd like to extend to you the same offer. If you've got an API I could use, I'd love to bring this functionality to my preferred tablet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, just contact me by email: contact _at_ watchlaterapp.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would suggest get a free app account limitation for 10 videos or so. This way you would get more users too and also some good exposure too as many would download you app being free. :) Free user Conversion is your App magic ;) IMO, app is awesome ;)

Also check this, there might be an udpate on iOS5 and you might be lucky.

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/12/jailbreak- detectio...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/12/jailbreak-detection- api-mysteriously-disappears-in-ios-42.ars)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice idea, thanks for sharing the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Party, mate!

We had our app pirated a few weeks ago, it didn't have any impact on the sales. People who pirate your app wouldn't buy it anyway I imagine. Unless it was really well-known and great - but then there's no chance of it not being pirated.

You can verify if the device is jailbroken, but as @wccrawford said couple of comments below - they might have paid for it. And I know many people using jailbroken devices and not pirating one thing.

Party! Your app was deemed worth pirating.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple introduced an API to check if the device is jailbroken, but after 6 months removed it without any explanation.

However you can still make some check, like to check if the path /private/var/lib/apt/ exists or not. Since many package managers for cracked apps are apt-based, you should be able to get most of jailbroken devices.

Sadly (afaik), no way to understand if your app on a device has been cracked or purchased.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wouldn't worry about it. With iOS apps, it's much easier for people just to buy your app and have it installed and running on their device than it is to try and pirate it, so unless you're seriously overcharging for your app, most people will continue to just legitimately buy and use it.

You could also charge a small recurring service fee for accounts and then give the app away for free.

</comment><comment><USER19> As you already have the link to one site spreading your pirated app, I'd contact them and ask them to remove the link. Sure, this won't stop the pirates (or other folks sharing the file on other platforms), but it's worth a try.

Of cause, it would be interesting to see how many people are using the pirated version of your app, if it can be achieved with little effort.

</comment><comment><USER20> Probably worth a toast, but not worth worrying about. Your target market is and always has been the people who buy apps through the app store.

We have some free and some non-free apps in the store, and we've never given the piracy stuff a second thought. We were actually pretty stoked when we saw the first game pirated. It made us feel legit. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER21> Don't sweat it. This happens to our app, BillMinder, every release. Typically pirates won't use your app long and probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway so there isn't much lost revenue. Annoying but not the end of the world.

</comment><comment><USER22> In this case I wouldn't worry too much. The app itself is only really useful for registered users who have paid through in-App-Purchases.

</comment><comment><USER23> Rage! Hunt 'em down. Consequences will never be the same...

</comment><comment><USER24> OKay,

1 the pirate your app act tells you these things:

        -in their geographical area fro some reason they cannot but it or the price might be too high
        -they love your app

2\. Easier to turn those into paid conversions if paid app gets free updates.

Most of us here can not tell you not take legal action. However, can you turn this into conversions? I think you can.

On the android side I run into when I sell apps through non Google android Market stores as those do not have infrastructure of me checking a license api like Google Android Market does..the things above is my thought process and steps I will be using..

</comment><comment><USER25> damn.

</comment><comment><USER26> open source it, which you should've done at the first place anyway.</comment>


Mind-controlled prosthetic arm from Segway inventor gets FDA approval - <AUTHOR> http://theverge.com/2014/5/10/5703444/deka-mind-controlled-prosthetic-arm-gets-fda-approval

<comment><USER2> This one has some comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726128) (businessweek.com)

Others:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724114) (makezine.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724164) (fda.gov)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724861) (engadget.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727600) (theverge.com)</comment>


Arduino ESLOV IoT Invention Kit (Kickstarter) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iot-invention-kit/eslov-iot-invention-kit <comment><USER2> Really looking forward to this...it's going to be great for little makers as well as some of us older less patient makers ;-)</comment>


Fullerene C60 administration doubles rat lifespan with no toxicity (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/fullerene-c60-administration-doubles-rat-lifespan-with-no-toxicity

<comment><USER2> I have been taking C60 (1,5 mg/day) for 2 months with no noticeable effects. I was hoping for some improvement in my faulty mitochondria, but nada.

For a shitload of info about C60 in humans, go here[1]

[1] [http://www.longecity.org/forum/forum/415-c60health/](http://www.longecity.org/forum/forum/415-c60health/)</comment>


Things I've learned launching a side project - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/things-ive-learned-launching-a-side-project-2968c3becd17

<comment><USER2> Author here. While Geocodio isn't my first side project, it is the first one that's a real product with customers -- and it's a whole different beast. (Other projects were ad-supported.)

Since there's always a lot of talk on here about side projects as an additional income source, I figured people might find it helpful or at least a starting point for sharing their own dos and don'ts.</comment>


Can LinkedIn predict when companies are in trouble? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2010/11/if-facebook-knows-when-people-break-up-and-google-can-predict-flu-does-linkedin-know-when-companies-are-in-trouble/

<comment><USER2> If you watch your LinkedIn profile, you can tell two things, based on my observations:

People only update their profile on LinkedIn when they are looking for a new job, or just lost a job (for the most part). Some keep tweaking it all the time, but you can spot the ones who never have activity and then suddenly have 7 updates...you know something's cooking there.

You can spot general trends about economic activity, assuming your friends are geospatially similar. If, suddenly, you get spikes in activity where none existed a month ago, you can assume that the job market in your area is getting very turbulent. You can decide whether it's positive or negative based on what you see ("Hey I got a new job", or just plain profile updates while someone is looking...)

Very interesting.

<comment><USER3> A guy at work has a 100% prediction rate for when people are about to (voluntarily) leave the company. And it's as simple as "this person never updates their profile, and the last few weeks they're updating everything in it".

It'd be interesting to find out if someone has used this as a negotiation tactic. It would likely only work if you're recognized as a rockstar employee, but a few weeks before you talk to your boss to negotiate a salary increase, be sure to routinely update your LinkedIn profile. At the very least, if your boss gets LinkedIn updates it'll make them think twice before using the "He/she wouldn't quit if I don't give them a raise" line of justification for denying a raise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Already being done. There are dozens of firms out there which specialize in this kind of analysis (data mining sites like linkedin, amazon, twitter, google insight etc. for trading purposes).

<comment><USER5> Please elaborate, this sounds extremely interesting. Which firms are doing that with which data and what are the results one can get from that?

<comment><USER4> Generally prop trading firms but also sector analysts at major investment banks. How they use this data is mostly considered propriety, but you can figure out the obvious uses.

Using Google Insights and Amazon is actually immensely valuable is this space, as you can use product rankings/searches to figure out how products are doing well before any official announcements.

For the social media stuff a lot of financial firms use third-party technology. There's a whole load of firms that do sentiment analysis on social networks. Most of the companies in this space build products for marketing/PR teams, but sector analysts in consumer markets often use them as well.

Ironically the best way to track down the firms doing this stuff is to search Linkedin for people with data mining expertise working in the financial sector :-)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing your insights! Mind another question?

How useful is that data really? I see the point in Amazon revenue #s of specific products etc, but "sentiment analysis".. really? Can one actually get actionable data from mining social networks like Twitter for sentiments? This reminds me of "long on sunny/short on rainy days"-trading patterns.

<comment><USER6> Earlier this year I was at a conference where the keynote talked about "sentiment analysis" of social media. Using real tweets as examples he went on to debunk the current techniques as useless, really, because they can't understand the sentiment. The current techniques he knew of and shared were all keyword based. The OP mentioned the problems with this kind of analysis, and I agree too.

Edit: typo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Definitely interesting. As other commenters have mentioned, a spike in status and experience updates definitely often signifies something is going down. Another one is recommendations. When one person suddenly is getting 2-3 recommendations from colleagues, they are usually on their way out. If a lot of people from the same company is getting recommendations left and right from each other, the company is either going down or there is serious downsizing imminent. Very interesting side effect of sites like LinkedIn.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd have a hard time relying on the data. Even in my own personal linkedin contacts, it's full of out-of-date data. Most people seem to be a bit lazy with keeping their profiles up-to-date.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's more about how LinkedIn users are reactive to possible changes in workplace rather than general housekeeping. Just like most people only update their CV when they are looking for a new job.

When we started to hear rumours of layoffs at Nokia, my activity feed was buzzing with 'xxxx updated experience/profile/education' etc.

Interesting topic

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's all speculation of course, but I suspect they could probably create a "disruption index" for every company based on sudden changes in turnover or profile activity.

What I find interesting is, if they ever did try and do that, how might the financial authorities respond. That data could be worth millions if used to trade shares in those companies. Would it be considered insider trading? I suspect LinkedIn would be put under pressure to publish the index to avoid getting into trouble.

<comment><USER10> probably not: look at how slow / weak the fed has been to react to more blatant forms of insider trading that are already in play

<comment><USER5> I think you mean the SEC and/or the "feds" (FBI), not the federal reserve bank?

The problem with insider trading is that a verdict hinges on proving intent to defraud, which is very difficult to ascertain.

Also, IMHO, insider trading is mostly used as an easy way to generate publicity and give the general public the fuzzy feeling that "something is being done", whilst achieving rarely something of value for the markets and society. There are many things much more worth of pursuing with limited resources than insider trading. Alas, that's what you get when you staff an oversight agency like the SEC with lots of lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is exactly why about 4 months ago I changed my settings so none of my connections are notified when I edit my details.</comment>


Intel Takes Lidar Indoors - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/intels-new-realsense-camera-brings-hi-res-lidar-to-a-small-form-factor/ <comment><USER2> Im done being excited by anything out of Intel that isn't an desktop/laptop CPU.

I've been burned personally and professionally with every single Intel IoT device I've touched.

Remember the Edison platform? Huge promises and possibilities that turned into fatally flawed silicon that took Intel 2 years to admit.

The Compute Stick? The whole Atom ecosystem?

I was so excited by the realsense cameras, we got a bunch of them and thought we must have gotten a bad batch. The hardware was so bad compared to similar cost machine vision cameras, it was astounding.

The SDK was great at first glance, a really easy OOBE for multi camera setup and PCL processing. Then you discover over a few weeks how flaky everything is, how brittle the SDK and drivers are (like every other Intel dev platform it seems) and after spending thousands of dollars on hardware and hundreds of hours of dev time, you finally chuck it all in a bin and say "I will never buy Intel crap again" for the third time.

Hopefully this Lidar device will buck that trend, but I doubt it. They keep making random IOT hardware platforms with seemingly no long term strategy and no path to commerical implementation.

<comment><USER3> My main problem with non "classic" intel products is the shit user experience that come with them: I don't want to use ubuntu 16.04, just package software in a maintainable way, ffs.

<comment><USER4> When Intel touts a device "On Linux!(tm)", I have to lower my already meager expectations. So long as you expect the drivers to be very thin open-source wrappers around very brittle proprietary blobs, you won't be unpleasantly surprised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the Intel RealSense stuff, you get very cutting edge sensor silicon at consumer gear prices with open-source software to go along with it.

The only real problem is that I have no clue why Intel is in this business, and I suspect they won't be for much longer.

<comment><USER4> The Realsense hardware might be great. The software that goes with it is not:

* DKMS kernel module for what should be a plain vanilla USB 3.0 device

* firmware updates require closed-source libraries

* breaking API and ABI changes that do not respect semver or SOVERSION

The worst part of my dayjob is wrangling the Realsense software suite.

<comment><USER6> I've met someone who is constantly asking me "why haven't you tried realsense?" and you just confirmed my suspicions. When the first realsense products came out, they only supported windows. This is madness for a robotics focused product. Finally my friend tells me now they support Linux. But for me the damage has already been done. They have proven that they don't understand me as a robotics engineer. And you've just confirmed that for me. So I stick with trying to use high resolution cameras and structure from motion algorithms to understand the world. No need for a specific proprietary piece of hardware. Since I'm mostly doing research in to what is possible, I prefer this non proprietary approach.

This little lidar looks nice but the last thing I need is another weird kernel module and some closed source library to support my hardware. No thanks.

<comment><USER4> I mean... your friend's not wrong, if by "Linux" she/he means "Ubuntu 16.04 LTS" with the caveats:

* disable Secure Boot xor create your own efi signing key pair, get friendly with `mokutil`, and pray your firmware's UEFI implementation supports that complicated custom KEK

* Ubuntu 18.04 support, but forcibly install at least one 16.04 package they couldn't be bothered to build for the latest stable release of their chosen distro --- or `patchelf` the shared object and, again, pray.

* accept that the debugging symbols they provide still bear the source paths from the Jenkins instance that packaged them

* Oh, yeah; sometimes the device is detected as USB 2.1. That's fun when it happens 2 hours into a calibration run

They're good if all you need is a flakey proof of concept. It sounds to me like you require something better.

<comment><USER6> Damn that sounds awful. Yeah, I don't need another headache. I can imagine times where the hardware is the right tool for the job, but with all those hoops you have to jump through to make it work I'd avoid that at all costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-realsense-lidar- camera...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-realsense-lidar-camera- technology-redefines-computer-vision/#gs.log2df)

Here is the actual press release instead of the zdnet rehash.

[https://www.intelrealsense.com/lidar- camera-l515/](https://www.intelrealsense.com/lidar-camera-l515/)

This is the actual page for this camera.

</comment><comment><USER8> Previously the realsense stereo depth cameras suffered from a lot of depth noise compared to TOF cameras like kinect. I had to use a lot of filtering which limited the usable frame rate. Hopefully this new lidar cam has less noise.

The realsense API is pretty good, I found it much easier to use then the kinect API.

<comment><USER9> Can you use multiple sensors with a spherically overlapping FOV?

Kinect for Azure purports to be able to support overlapping FOV (whereas Kinect 1 for Xbox did not)

<comment><USER8> The stereo realsense cameras like D415 support overlapping FOV. They also have a way to use a sync cable to sync the shutters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There have been lots of little indoor LIDAR units. The SwissRanger, around 2005, was one of the early ones. The Kinect, version 2, is one. The Kinect, version 1, was a random dot pattern projector and two cameras for triangulation. Intel made something similar, the RealSense.

So far, the most popular use for these things is video background removal, allowing "green screen" type effects without needing an actual green screen.

<comment><USER7> Is that actually common? Basing a matte off of the depth map would be extremely noisy and low resolution without some big time filtering.

<comment><USER10> Yes.[1]

[1] [https://youtu.be/RoeXGiWO9dU](https://youtu.be/RoeXGiWO9dU)

<comment><USER11> BubRoss asked if it would be low res. This video shows that it is extremely low res.

Lidar instead of green screen is not for professional grade background removal like you see on TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really wonder how safe lidar really is for humans. Our retina are sensitive enough to detect single photons (when healthy) and lidar is known to damage digital camera sensors.

<comment><USER13> In addition to safety I wonder about interference. Wouldn't lidar become ineffective if there's so much lidar around that all the lidar sources start interfering with each other and effectively blinding all receivers with noise? I really wonder why lidar-based autonomous agents plan to deal with this problem. It seems fundamental.

<comment><USER14> Usually not. They require resilience against ambient light already, so they are either very dim and use coding gains or they use short pulses which only yield a short time window for valid returns. You basically don't get non- malicious interference issues, except for e.g. the dot projector systems.

Real ToF sensors can easily filter any accidental noise. You can often spoof them, however, and there's not much one can do against it considering a blinding DoS is often technically easier (track the LIDAR with a camera to keep the laserpointer on-target)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if multiple sensors can be used with overlapping FOV. The website claims,

>> Can multiple L515 cameras be used simultaneously?

> Multiple cameras can share the same field of view utilizing our hardware > sync feature.

I really want to get accurate 3D spherical volumes in real time. (30fps is sufficient, 60fps would be ideal)

I've thought about using Kinect "for Azure", because I think it satisfies this use case and does hardware clock syncing between devices:

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect- dk/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/)

Edit: It looks like their RealSense cameras can be set up in an inward-facing configuration:

[https://dev.intelrealsense.com/docs/multiple-depth- cameras-c...](https://dev.intelrealsense.com/docs/multiple-depth-cameras- configuration)

<comment><USER15> I'm working on RealSense project at the moment. You won't be able to do it out the box, but their SDK does come with a lot of sample code, one which makes use of the RGB sensor on the D400 series to calibrate the cameras in world space. With just depth data it's a bit trickier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> $349 for pre-order on their store. Shipping next April

</comment><comment><USER17> Am I cynical to expect one of these in every Echo/Home/Portal "assistant" within a decade? You know, strictly for 3D-avatar VR communication purposes only.

</comment><comment><USER18> Direct link to Intel's announcement with a video.

[https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-realsense-lidar- camera...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-realsense-lidar-camera- technology-redefines-computer-vision/)

The camera is the size of a tennis ball.

There are probably lots of industrial uses.

<comment><USER19> ~~Ooh, it's the solid-state LIDAR tech I heard about a couple of years ago! They must have bought the company that invented it.~~

~~The price is also just around where they expected it to be. They talked about going down to 100 eurodollars per unit when they hit mass manufacturing.~~

ED: No this is a MEMS device. The device I'm talking about is actually solid- state, scanning the laser by way of, IIRC, acousto-optic modulation. Car companies were interested in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wish I had the spare time to try hooking some of these into some kind of a machine vision system, for automatically verifying that an object being created (3D printer / CNC) was created as intended.

It'd help with automating production, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the effort.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know why they are in the business, but a cheap Lidar camera is very interesting to me from a computer vision/home robotics standpoint. Here's to hoping for a long life for this product line

<comment><USER15> It's because of the vision processing chip. My understanding is that many of the Windows facial unlock cameras are powered by Intel vision chips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this doing 360 plus Y as well?

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think it has enough resolution to help them find their 10nm design.</comment>


Google to pay $481.5m in major win for Australian Tax Office - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/18/google-to-pay-4815m-in-major-win-for-australian-tax-office <comment><USER2> This is pretty significant. I'm glad to see that big tech can't just cheat their way out of their obvious obligations, when the collect such a huge amount of revenue.</comment>


Hoarding and reuse - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/hoarding-and-reuse <comment><USER2> I think the most important part in removing code is understanding why it was there in the first place.

<comment><USER3> See also "Chesterton's Fence": [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Governments all over the world are adding stimulus package - <AUTHOR> What it means for the layman? What effect it will have on middle class? <comment><USER2> It depends on the implementation country to country. If you follow articles on something like Yahoo finance, you can see there are multiple opinions. There's also the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy. From the fiscal policy perspective, you'll see more government spending and likely debt. This could mean higher taxes in the future, maybe. Monetary policy is a little less straightforward they are trying to keep markets liquid with QE and balance inflation/deflation through various means.</comment>


Jury says Cuban did not commit insider trading - <AUTHOR> http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/10/16/3692385/jury-deliberations-to-begin-in.html <comment><USER2> He got off because it was ultimately a question of his word against the word some other guy. And the other guy had an axe to grind. And Cuban is very popular in Dallas, being the owner of the local basketball team. So the jury decided there is not enough evidence to indict.

But if I were Cuban I would not complain to loudly about being hounded by the SEC. Fact of the matter is his selling right before the PIPE was announced was very lucky and those type of coincidences rarely happen in real life.

<comment><USER3> > the jury decided there is not enough evidence to indict.

I think you mean "convict," not "indict." An indictment, decided by a _grand jury_ in the United States, is basically an accusation, and it happens before a trial. A conviction is what happens with a _trial jury_ or _petit jury_.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indict#United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indict#United_States)

<comment><USER2> You are right. I know the distinction but for some reason I thought this was a grand jury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Glad to see this is over for Mark. Definitely worth noting he spent far more on his lawyers to win this case than what it would have cost him to just pay the fines and have the SEC get a quick win for bullying.

I think he proved a major point today in how the SEC has no transparency and if not for his money, he wouldn't have had any choice but to lay down for them. It's a broken system.

Good for him!

<comment><USER5> How do you figure this was SEC bullying? Looks like a clear cut case of insider trading to me.

<comment><USER6> How do you figure this is _clear cut_ case of insider trading. What's your evidence to reach that verdict, that the jury apparently failed to see?

<comment><USER7> The evidence is the testimony that Cuban was told by the CEO about the offering. The jury needed to believe it beyond reasonable doubt, but we don't need to because as individuals, our tolerance for coincidence is much lower than it is for juries.

<comment><USER8> Actually, since this is civil I think the bar is lower than in a criminal case. They probably only needed to prove that he's guilty based on the "preponderance of the evidence". Essentially that it's _more_ likely he did it than he did not do it.

Just knowing the _timing_ alone would suggest a greater than 50% chance of him being guilty to me. I'd convict him in 5 minutes.

<comment><USER9> How on earth does the timing affect this?

The government's claim: Mark Cuban was on a phone call where he was told information and promised not to trade based on it. He immediately went out and sold his stock.

Mark Cuban's claim: Mark Cuban was on a phone call where he was told information but didn't promise anything. He immediately went out and sold his stock.

Both of these claims would exhibit the same timing, so I don't see how timing can help decide the important question, which was whether he was technically an "insider" for the purpose of the law.

<comment><USER8> Guilty I say. Off with his head!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If insider trading is such a big deal to the government, they can start by banning congressmen and congresswomen from having the ability to do so.

For those that don't know: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act) was passed to prevent insider trading in Congress, but Congressmen have been quietly pushing and scaling back insider trading laws, basically rendering the law useless.

</comment><comment><USER11> In 2007 I was in the midst of uncovering a pump and dump scheme while communicating with the SEC (who were incredibly non-responsive and incompetent).

While trying to learn more about white collar crime, I uncovered a website, sharesleuth.com. The owner was writing stories on stock fraud/white collar crime, and we exchanged a few emails.

A few weeks later I found out Mark Cuban was backing him, and short selling the companies he found to be fraudulent. Cuban was doing this for two reasons: #1 To bring attention to white collar crime and #2 If the SEC wasn't going to shut down the companies, he might as well make money while doing it...inevitably bringing it back to #1. It looks like he was successful in drawing their attention.

A previous Wired article on Sharesleuth: [http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/mf_shares...](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/mf_sharesleuth?currentPage=all)

X-post from HN thread on the pump and dump I uncovered: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5236372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5236372)

</comment><comment><USER12> Methinks he actually committed insider trading. But when you own the City's popular basketball team, bring home a championship and bankroll citywide celebrations no jury will convict you!

<comment><USER13> October 17, 2008 - Mark Cuban announces bailoutsleuth.com November 17, 2008 - SEC charges announced

Connection, coincidence, or a little of both? I don't believe that Cuban is innocent per se, but I also don't believe that his prosecution wasn't politically motivated.

<comment><USER14> Sort of like the Qwest CEO who was the only head of a major telecom to deny access to the phone companies in the illegal tapping scandal, and was shortly thereafter charged with insider trading (I don't know anything about the merits of the case):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's a video of the press conference after the verdict: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F82EHPP3bkM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F82EHPP3bkM)

</comment><comment><USER16> The jury didn't say he "did not commit insider trading"; they said the government _didn 't prove that he committed insider trading_. They didn't say he's _innocent_ of the charges, but that he's _not guilty_ of them.

There's an important difference between the two.

<comment><USER17> Except that in America people are innocent until proven guilty.

In the eyes of the law, he is innocent.

<comment><USER18> No, in the eyes of the law, he is "not guilty." Innocence is a factual finding which has the same burden of proof as guilt because it is a definitive finding that the defendant did not commit the crime charged.

Judges admonish juries that people are "innocent until proven guilty" becaues most jurors aren't sophisticated enough to make the distinction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Insider trading laws should be repealed. People selling shares based on nonpublic information introduces said information to the market more quickly. It's also a victimless act, a willing buyer and a willing seller decide to trade based on the information they know, with shares that were purchased without any agreement to not sell them based on the information the owner knows.

It's just ridiculous that Congress conducts insider trading while other people are persecuted for it.

Insider trading laws are a violation of the first amendment, as restricting what I can communicate to someone else is censorship and abridgement of free speech.

<comment><USER2> It is not a victim-less act. The person that goes into a transaction without knowing insider information usually believes they were cheated. Quite rightfully so.

Your first point is wrong as well. If insider trading were legal there would be a huge incentive for insiders to keep inside information away from the public. This would lead to slower dissemination of inside information. It would also lead to great economic collapse because no-one would trust stocks anymore.

Insider trading laws do not violate the first amendment because they do not restrict speech, but actions (i.e., trading).

<comment><USER19> Cheated of what? Owning a share does not entitle you to profit.

I fail to see what's amoral about trading based on information that other people don't know. There are no two people who know the exact same things. All trade is based on asymmetric information.

<comment><USER20> Should I be allowed to sell you a car that's a lemon just because you cannot see that? If I know the engine is about to die, but you test drive it and it seems fine, is that really right?

<comment><USER19> That is fraud, assuming it was sold under an agreement that it should work and the seller disclosed all knowledge of problems, because the seller would be committing fraud by withholding that information.

How is that comparable to insider trading? There is no fraud involved with insider trading.

<comment><USER9> If the seller of stock fails to disclose all knowledge about problems with the company would that seller be committing fraud by withholding that information? It seems to me that the comparison is quite easy to make.

<comment><USER19> Yes, if the stock is sold under the agreement that part of what is being sold is everything you know about the company. Stocks generally aren't sold under such pretense or agreement and never have been (at least not any stocks I've traded).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And people wonder why the government never brought anyone to trial for the recent financial collapse.

I don't know anything about Mark Cuban, but loosing this case will certainly demoralize them. It's really really hard to convict people and they eventually stop trying.

<comment><USER22> It's substantially different in that some derivatives are equivalent to insurance, but the entities writing those contracts do not meet capital requirements for insurance.

The reason there are capital requirements for insurers is that, without them, you can get "free money" by selling insurance contracts that are backed by nothing. Doing that under another name is just as fraudulent.

Especially in the case of insurers writing such contracts, you don't have to take witness' word for the fact they were evading capital requirements. The contracts and available capital make the whole case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Guess he gave the NSA whatever they wanted after all.

<comment><USER24> For those downvoting the parent comment, read the following to get the joke:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wait what, this guy is 55?</comment>


Android Issue 887: Unable to launch emulator on MacOSX 10.5. - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=887

<comment><USER2> The emulator sucks on all platforms, not just mac. I suspect that at google, most android app development happens on real hardware and the emulator there to tick a box.

I spent about five minutes with it before concluding that productivity was going to require some real hardware. The emulator really only gets fired up when reproducing bugs on old os versions.

The emulator project is probably under-resourced and as such they don't care about minor usability issues with known workarounds. I'm not seeing this as being some kind of jihad against mac users.

</comment><comment><USER3> that title is sensationalistic. They declined one bug that only occurs on os x, under specific situations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm.. I dunno. It seems pretty preposterous to decline a bug with no comment whatsoever and then to have 33 more people confirm the bug after it being declined. This thing is 3 years old now.

If "doesn't give a fuck" doesn't describe google's stance on this, how would you describe it?

<comment><USER4> "Simple workaround exists" maybe? I'm not saying this bug isn't a problem (especially for developers new to Android), just trying to guess what they might have been thinking when they declined it. People still reporting the problem 3 years later should be a pretty good indicator that this bug needs to be fixed though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was under the impression that a lot of Google desktops are Macs, so I doubt that they don't care about Macs. As others have explained it's more like they "don't give a fuck about the emulator".

</comment><comment> the-kenny It's 10.5. Two major versions back. I can _fully_ understand when Google doesn't want to support it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, I still have to disconnect my external speaker in 10.7.1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> comment from the end of the bug:

"To all the apple fanboys: the emulator code is open source. Go ahead and fix it yourselves. Apple doesn't provide a multi platform SDK. If I want to develop an app for iPhone I must own an Apple PC. Now, _that's messed up!_."</comment>


Minnesota authorities are using contact tracing apps to arrest protestors - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/1266758240018276352 <comment><USER2> Are you sure they're using contact tracing _apps_? The original tweet says:

> Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington says they've begun > contact tracing arrestees.

> "Who are they associated with? What platforms are they advocating for? ... > Is this organized crime? ... We are in the process right now of building > that information network."

I interpreted that to mean ordinary detective work. I don't see any indication that they're using data from COVID-19 contact tracing apps on arrestees' smartphones, which is what the Hacker News title seems to imply.

<comment><USER3> Regardless, you should assume that that data can and will be used in a court of law if some bright, tech savvy detective has the brilliant idea to do so. The fact that a certain bunch of id's was encountered by the contact tracing app on your phone (because obviously they have access to the data on other arrestee's phones) will greatly strengthen their eventual case against you.

Frankly, it's an investigator's dream tool. This is why I was never in favor of the measure in the first place. Without an extreme level of discipline from investigators, there is no guarantee they won't use the tool. Furthermore, given what we know of parallel construction as a technique, we're already in waters where we can't even say that there's a good chance it isn't being misused, but having it's misuse covered up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Headline is wrong.

They are just doing detective work to figure out why out of state individuals are engaging in this.

No mention of "apps"</comment>


Ask HN: How to go from Web Developer to Robotics Engineer? - <AUTHOR> I'm 26 and have been designing and building web or mobile apps for a few years now. It has done well for me; however, 5 years from now, I know I'd be unfulfilled and intellectually bored if I'm still doing the same thing.
I want to develop another engineering skill that is more technical in nature and lets me work on a different set of problems. Currently I'm looking at a combination of Robotics, AI, and agricultural/environmental engineering. I'd like to be able to hack around on my own and still make progress without a large team or expensive equipment, but also have the skills to be employable in the space.
How do I go about doing this? I have a bachelor's degree (Electrical Engineering + Computer Science) from a brand school with some data science exposure, but no experience engineering physical products. Preferably I don't want to go back to school, but haven't found MOOCs to be particularly compelling either (open to recommendations). <comment><USER2> Im exactly in the same situation: 27, bachelor in CS/distributed systems, years of deep fullstack experience, multiple languages and many frameworks fluently and ... I'm bored.

I plan to start a masters degree on "information Technology" (technical CS, contains electrical stuff, robotics and AI if you choose), besides my remote job this year. Maybe I do stay in academics afterwards, dunno.

Honestly, I already can see how the bubble of webdev pops in a few years. We can already scaffold whole CRUD apps easily or stick together legoblocks of components, once a computer can translate business usual requirements into standard apps for no costs ... coding gruntwork is easier to automate than other professions.

Since Im living in germany, industrial robotics looks like a good option, alternatively I'll specialize further into AI. I hope this will let me survive comfortably until the UBI finally arrives.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been thinking about this myself.

I even bought an arduino and raspberry pi did a few things with them.

Been thinking about on demand companies that could utilize robotics and/or tele-presense robots.

</comment><comment><USER4> coming from a similar background, I think the biggest difference between "robotics"/mechatronics and CS/EE is physical intuition and hands-on skills.

Making small robots isn't very expensive, I'd just go to a hackspace and start building something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I have no physical intuition or hands on skills. I have played around with an arduino or two a few years back, but that's about it.

Recently I've been thinking about setting up my on solar + wind energy generating systems in my yard just for fun. Mostly off the shelf parts that I just need to assemble together.

Any good hackspaces you know of that's accepting for complete beginners? I'm in the SF/Bay Area

<comment><USER4> I think most hackspaces are pretty beginner friendly. I'm not in the Bay area but noisebridge is pretty well-known.</comment></comment></comment>


The Darker Side of Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://semiengineering.com/darker-side-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> Question for HN people who know better: how generalisable are these attacks on deep learning networks. I know it's trivial to optimise for a class on say the InceptionV3 networks trained on ImageNet; but can I perform the same kind of attack if I don't necessarily know the what the network looks like? What if I don't know the details of the dataset it was trained on?</comment>


Why the screaming hairy armadillo weeps - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02386-x <comment><USER2> The title of this article automatically gets an upvote from me. It will go into my list of sayings and sentences that I am saving for when I write that book someday.</comment>


America's Great Fitness Divide - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/01/americas-great-fitness-divide/414558 <comment><USER2> Years ago, I used to work as a labourer on building sites, before getting a 'proper' job as a programmer.

When I physically worked hard all day, I ate a ton of crap. Burger King for lunch, a loaf of bread a day, hardly any veggies but massive amounts of cheap carbs and meat. I was technically overweight, because I put on so much muscle and I'm not a tall guy. Obviously I did no gym-type exercise. No-one, looking at my diet, body-mass, or lifestyle data would think I was fit, but I was all muscle and in the best shape I've ever been.

The older guys I worked with could lift more than me, for longer, with less visible effort. You'd never look at them and think they were fit, and they ate like pigs too. Again, if you looked at their data they'd be a huge diabetes risk. But they were fitter in their 40's than I was in my 20's, and I was pretty fit back then.

Now, 20 years later, after spending most of those 20 years sitting on my arse pushing little buttons, I'm going to the gym and eating well (diabetes is an effective motivator!). Look at my data now and I'm a bit overweight, but with a good diet and exercise regime.

But compare me with my good diet and exercise regime to those older guys who spent their working lives doing physical labour and eating like crap, and I'm a weak, blubbery mess.

Either the "fitness" they're measuring isn't what we understand to mean by the word "fitness", or they're not measuring actual fitness.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that a lifetime of manual labor often leads to chronic injuries and pain. How many of those old timers had back problems? I grew up working on fishing boats in Alaska, I know the drill pretty well. I don't have a vise- like grip anymore, but I also don't have tendonitis.

Not to say that manual labor won't get you fit, just that if you have the opportunity to sit at a desk and go to the gym and eat a proper diet, it's not really comparable to that kind of fitness (and it's generally far healthier for you).

<comment><USER4> "but I also don't have tendonitis"

How about carpal tunnels? :)

<comment><USER3> Good point! Though I am quite good at resting my hands and haven't developed RSI over the last fifteen years or so. I would still place a heavy bet that workplace injuries are more common amongst labor-heavy jobs ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 90% of the world's in-shape bodies are concentrated among the top 1% of people who exercise. It's fitness inequality, and I won't stand up for it.

<comment><USER6> That's mass media messing with your availability heuristic. Stop reading/watching that crap, you'll feel better!

(Seriously though, the longer I live the more I think our "free media" is a hugely negative force in society. It's not information junk-food, it's information asbestos dipped in benzene, with nuclear waste as a side dish.)

<comment><USER5> I agree. I think morning news shows might be some of the worst of it. I try to stay away from most media as much as possible. It just rots your brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amusingly, they did not bother to measure the actual results of fitness in these populations. Do these areas demonstrate a marked reduction in cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes rates, etc?

<comment><USER8> Any sane medical professional will tell you exercise is good for you. This has been proven time and time again, and could be treated almost as an axiom of health research.

<comment><USER7> No doubt, but that is not what is measured in this study. It is the environmental influences that may result in exercise, but not the actual adoption and expected resulting health improvements.

It is important to measure the actual results rather than the intentions of policies or the accidents of environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article presents a lot of correlations, but it'd be good to see a little more investigation into which are actually explanatory.

Fitness is associated both with income per capita and the share of adults holding a college degree, but income is strongly related to education already. If you control for education, does increased wealth still correlate with fitness? From reading TFA, it doesn't look like the study author tried to figure that out.

<comment><USER10> Yes, exactly. The article seems to want you to believe that fitness is caused by high education levels and high income, but all they've done is point out a correlation. In fact I suspect that all three share some of the same underlying causes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly, what I see is a divide between North and South, more than East and West. The exceptions being Detroit and Columbus in the North and Atlanta and San Diego in the South.

Perhaps this has more to do with urban planning? I just got back from Dallas (Plano, actually) and I've never experienced such relatively dense development be so actively hostile to pedestrians ... sidewalks would just stop for a quarter mile and then start again for no apparent reason.

</comment><comment><USER12> They may need a new index. I've lived all over the country. I'm pretty sure San Diego is healthier than any place else I've lived or even visited.

<comment><USER13> Here's their list:

       1  Minneapolis, MN     77.2
       2  Washington, DC      76.8
       3  Boston, MA          69.1
       4  Portland, OR        67.7
       5  Denver, CO          67.6
       6  San Francisco, CA   66.8
       7  Hartford, CT        66.8
       8  Seattle, WA         66.5
       9  Virginia Beach, VA  65.8
      10  Sacramento, CA      65.3
      11  San Jose, CA        65.2
      12  Richmond, VA        64.2
      13  San Diego, CA       63.3
      ...
      50  Oklahoma City, OK   24.6

_"The AFI reflects a composite of preventive health behaviors, levels of chronic disease conditions, health care access, as well as community resources and policies that support physical activity. In addition, demographic diversity, economic diversity and violent crime levels are included for each metropolitan area to illustrate the unique attributes of each city. Communities with the highest AFI scores are considered to have strong community fitness, a concept analogous to individuals having strong personal fitness."_

[http://www.americanfitnessindex.org/docs/reports/2011_afi_re...](http://www.americanfitnessindex.org/docs/reports/2011_afi_report_final.pdf)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Founderkit Deals – Credits and Discounts for Startup Founders - <AUTHOR> https://founderkit.com/deals <comment><USER2> I am not sure if it is just me but what do you mean by "Sometimes it pays to know the founders"

Are you offering a discount on specific products if I know their founder ? This sounds silly and I am sure is not the case but that is what the tagline says to me.

Or are you offering a discount to founders of other companies ?

I suggest you change this tagline. I could not figure out what you do in 5 seconds. It seems like some kind of a discount coupon offering site for saas products but that line confused the hell out of me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> When Ian and I built Founderkit, we wanted to give founders tools to save time, make fewer mistakes. One of the things in YC that was always helpful was credits for services like Heroku, to help get started. We wanted to give this edge to more founders, so when companies reached out to us after launching, we asked them to help our founders get started by adding a deal. This is just a tiny start, and look out for a Heroku deal shortly, but we'd love feedback and suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with codegeek on the tag line, it's confusing and I'm not really sure what it means.

Also, I think it should be more apparent that some "get started" buttons shoot off an intro email. I know there's a small disclaimer under the button (which I noticed after getting the email), but those types of disclaimers are usually (and easily) ignored.

I was expecting to hit a landing page, or at least get more info on the company, but was instead sent an email which I wasn't even sure I was interested in getting. Even changing the verbiage from "get started" to "request intro" for offers that fire off intro emails.</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't more blog widgets use AJAX? - <AUTHOR>

My startup (http//scribnia.com) is building a widget that bloggers can embed in their sidebar to enable their users to rate them.  We're relying heavily on AJAX to make the rating process more powerful and slick.  Among other benefits, using AJAX allows a widget to have multiple "screens"--when a user does something in the widget, the content of the widget changes appropriately.<p>As per usual, I scoped out all the popular blog widgets as a prelude to the design process in order to see what best practices existed.  I was struck by how few widgets use AJAX, or even Javascript.  Nearly all blog widgets are just static links, text, and images.  Why is this? Am I missing something here? <comment><USER2> Some hosted services prevent users from embedding scripts in their content, for security reasons. At blist we decided to use JS, iframes, and Flash in our widgets anyways [1], but it means they won't work in certain contexts.

1\. <http://www.blist.com/web-publishing>

</comment><comment><USER3> If a task can be done properly and does not need AJAX, it doesn't need AJAX. Simplicity.

For example, a list of related sites on a blog. It's a bunch of static links and there is nothing wrong with keeping it a bunch of static links. Don't need to make every.single.thing AJAX unless it improves the usability or functionality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I totally understand that for many applications AJAX would be overkill. I understand the beauty of simplicity, and the appeal of light widgets.

But with that said, AJAX is almost never used, and there are many widgets that could benefit by being more than a bunch of static links. Blog widgets are usually more interesting when they are interactive. AJAX does that.</comment></comment>


Organic SaaS Growth: The Curiosity Framework - <AUTHOR> https://thoughtlytics.substack.com/p/12-when-people-are-really-curious <comment><USER2> dang (or mods): link should change to [https://thoughtlytics.substack.com/p/12-when-people-are- real...](https://thoughtlytics.substack.com/p/12-when-people-are-really- curious) as current submission link ([https://www.thoughtlytics.com/redirect/curiosity- framework](https://www.thoughtlytics.com/redirect/curiosity-framework)) is just redirecting there.

<comment><USER3> Changed from [https://www.thoughtlytics.com/redirect/curiosity- framework](https://www.thoughtlytics.com/redirect/curiosity-framework). Thanks!</comment></comment>


'Dilbert' Creator on How Trump Is Like the Founding Fathers and Jesus - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/14/dilbert-creator-on-how-trump-is-like-the-founding-fathers-jesus.html <comment><USER2> If it's ok to compare him with Hitler, then why not with Jesus and the Founding Fathers from the other side?

Comparing him with Albert Einstein would be more of a stretch, perhaps.

<comment><USER3> Who can we compare Hillary with? That's the question.

<comment><USER4> Margaret Thatcher?

<comment><USER2> Donald Trump?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that this is from September, and here we are with Trump as the nominee. If nothing else, Adams's analysis is interesting, funny, and (intentionally) provoking. It's still a bit myopic (and don't wade into the comments), but refreshing compared to most political news.

</comment><comment><USER6> Scott Adams has since endorsed Hillary, see: [http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement- for...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for- president-of-the-united-states)

<comment><USER7> This is not your usual endorsement to say the least:

"I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him. And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms. (I'm called an "apologist" on Twitter, or sometimes just Joseph Goebbels).

So I've decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don't have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I'll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I'm taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president."

I came here to say that he must have changed his tune because Trump's luck seems to have turned for the worse based on the latest poll numbers; but he still predicts Trump will win, so I guess maybe it's not that or at least he's changing his tune gradually, hedging his bets.

(For the record, I generally think that Scott Adams is a troll and everything he writes is clickbait, he himself said his traffic increased 5-fold since he started writing about Trump. As to his correct prediction of Trump's rise, I think that's the prediction one would have made based on polls alone (certainly Nate Silver admitted that his abject failure in this instance was due to ignoring polls.) Since Adams apparently doesn't care about the outcome as much as Nate Silver and other professional journalists, he didn't have a bias to cloud his judgement, or rather his ability to parrot polls which is where the actual data comes from. His drivel about his mastery of persuasion skills as the basis of his political analysis seems to me not that convincing, since the supposedly stellar examples of persuasion that he shows outside of the election business look pretty bad to me.)

<comment><USER8> I think Scott Adams has an overly important view of himself if he seriously things anyone is going to go out of his or her way to track him down and cause him some sort of injury. His sarcastic endorsement of Hillary wouldn't deter someone wanting to do that anyway. If he's only writing that to make a point, he's throwing tantrum levels of passive aggressiveness. I say this as someone who has generally liked Scott Adams, but haven't really read anything he's written in the past year.

<comment><USER9> I think you're confused. It's satire. It's a satirical post.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


User analytics in under five minutes - <AUTHOR> http://blog.differential.com/prowd-plus-astronomer/

<comment><USER2> Everyone should blow an afternoon writing a simple analytics collection system for their site. It's an interesting exercise, and makes you appreciate the offerings in the space much more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion, angersock — though it might take a bit more than an afternoon to get it done ;)

<comment><USER2> It's not too bad, honest!

Use an events model for analytics--track page loaded, page left, and maybe a handful of other events (to taste). Spec out that the API (from the client JS) is something like:

      emitAnalyticsEvent( eventType, location, browserTime, optionalData )

Register some event handlers to call this. browserTime and location (from navigator) are done to allow handling of single-page routing properly.

On the server side, on receipt of the request, timestamp it again, and insert wholesale into a database table (in postgres, use the jsonb type to store the unstructured optionalData ). In optionalData, note the userAgent and IP from the headers. Additionally, note the session and user associated with the event.

Congratulations! You've now got a flexible (albeit barebones) setup.

 _Visualizing_ and _analyzing_ the results may take more than an afternoon, but that's outside the collection scope. Even still, it's trivial to show user history, visitor IPs, and high-level traffic patterns.</comment></comment></comment>


Top C++ header file mistakes and how to fix them - <AUTHOR> http://www.acodersjourney.com/2016/05/top-10-c-header-file-mistakes-and-how-to-fix-them/ <comment><USER2> Excellent article. I feel there is a gap of good C++ physical layout guidelines.

You might also want to look at : [https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...](https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think 5.b is mostly applicable when you're packaging DLLs. I don't see much use for it in internal projects (Eg. If I'm building a end user solution and not developer solution).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - it's mostly applicable when you're creating APIs and developer solutions. But even in case of internal tools/ exes, you might need to share functionality with a internal partner team and it's helpful if they don't have to read code they don't need to use.</comment></comment>


RISC-V Boom CPU - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/boom_cpu/status/1032447070928396289 <comment><AUTHOR> "BOOM" is the Berkeley Out-of-Order Machine RISC-V processor [https://ucb- bar.github.io/riscv-boom/](https://ucb-bar.github.io/riscv-boom/) [https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom](https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom)

I believe this particular chip is a research chip, and the first time that BOOM has been taped out in real silicon. Other RISC-V chips are based on the simpler, in-order Rocket design (eg. SiFive's HiFive Unleashed FU540); or are completely custom designs (eg. the Western Digital 32 bit chips that will soon be appearing in a hard drive near you).

Note that most Linux distros would not run on this chip out of the box, since the chip does not support the C-compressed extension. They would need to be recompiled. (Of course the chip being a research project and not generally available makes this rather theoretical)

<comment><USER2> Seems like a waste to tape something out and not make it generally available. Might as well make some money.

<comment><AUTHOR> The economics don't really work like that. These were likely built on a multiproject process similar to TSMC CyberShuttle where you share the wafer with many other projects to share costs. You can see _chris_ below said only a few dozen were made. This keeps costs within the range of reasonable, although I bet it still ended up costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

Doing a run which would be vaguely profitable would require making millions of chips and cost millions of dollars up front, and very few projects could afford such a speculative investment.

SiFive did do a VC funded commercial run, but I bet they are not yet making a profit on their boards even though they cost $1,000 each.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- project_wafer_service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- project_wafer_service) [http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/cyberS...](http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/cyberShuttle.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there anywhere you can buy these chips? Or better yet, a dev board with RAM / SD / USB / networking and bootable Linux?

<comment><USER4> Nope, just a small batch test-chip run. And even out of a few dozen chips, I think we only did packaging for ~5 chips.

It boots Linux, but at 6 mm^2, it's not really big enough to contain an on- chip memory controller, so going out to DRAM is through an FPGA controller and thus is painful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> $ means cache (pun on cash) ?

<comment><USER6> Yes, I$ and D$ are the instruction and data cache respectively.

<comment><USER5> fun</comment></comment></comment>