JustFab.com JustFabulous Class Action Lawsuit (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scambook.com/blog/2011/10/justfab-com-justfabulous-class-action-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> JustFab was founded by Don Ressler and Adam Goldenberg in March 2010. (0, 1)

Series A round of $33 Million was raised in September 2011 (2), led by Matrix Partners' Josh Hannah @jdh (3), Technology Crossover Ventures participated.

A national class action lawsuit was filed against Just Fabulous, Inc. in October 2011 (4).

Series B round of $76 Million was raised in July 2012, investors included Rho Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures, Intelligent Beauty (2)

Series C round of $40 Million was raised in September 2013, investors included Shining Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures, Rho Ventures, Matrix Partners, Intelligent Beauty (2)

(0) [http://www.matrixpartners.com/entrepreneur- stories/adam_gold...](http://www.matrixpartners.com/entrepreneur- stories/adam_goldenberg/)

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

(2) [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/justfabulous](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/justfabulous)

(3) [http://www.matrixpartners.com/team/josh- hannah/](http://www.matrixpartners.com/team/josh-hannah/)

(4) [http://www.scambook.com/blog/2011/10/justfab-com- justfabulou...](http://www.scambook.com/blog/2011/10/justfab-com-justfabulous- class-action-lawsuit/)

<comment><USER3> So how did that class action lawsuit work out?

And isn't this more something for small claims court? You save a lot on lawyer costs that way.

<comment><USER4> That works well for getting just your money back. If you're upset about the whole thing and want to shut it down or get their business practices changed, a class action lawsuit is the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sets such a terrible precedent that a company like this can raise so much money. And that the VC's involved can't admit that there is, at the very least, a "dark pattern" involved in luring unsuspecting people to pay what they do to justfab.com.

On the other hand, the Series B is closed, and no one involved really gives a damn what we think about these dark patterns and scammy activities. However, we CAN publicize it, and expose the investors involved for the unscrupulous and amoral people they apparently are.

<comment><USER6> YC funded and PG defended a company whose entire business model is "let's spread crapware using opt-out checkboxes in installers that most people will not pay enough attention to". This is nothing new, I don't know why people seem to expect VC to be of better virtue than others means of founding a company.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806)

PG's response is here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711)

It's not as strong as I would have liked but it is definitely a _lot_ better than the one by the Matrix partner wrt justfab.com, for instance, PG actually leaned on the company to improve their practices somewhat.

<comment><USER7> It's interesting how that one borderline investment seems to have tainted PGs brand of percieved ethical investment. It's risk profile is no longer bounded by the company door, but affects the Ycombinator brand as a whole for future startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. He could have simply let it go but instead chose to stand up for his investment. This in turn led to a careful parsing of his words and as far as I can see short of divesting or distancing themselves from the investment (which would be unprecedented) still sent a strong message. In for a penny, in for a pound. I am assuming that future YC companies will be looked at a lot better from an ethics perspective and PG's personal and YC's investment involvement with Watsi more than makes up for whatever ethics dent he might have received here.

On a set as large as YC's it should not be surprising there is at least one bad apple either. It's no excuse but it is also not nearly as damning as it could have been, witness that other justfab.com thread for a nice example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmyeah, so Josh Hannah @jdh (A series investor in JustFab) was defending JustFab in this other thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455575) how it's totally not a scam, backed up with a screenshot, clearly showing it to be scammish.

I'd be delighted if we could hear his take on the class action lawsuit.

<comment><USER9> I would hope that his lawyer got involved, for his sake, and told him to shut the hell up.

<comment><USER10> Why would you hope that? This is someone who has made money from this situation, and if it is a scam (which I strongly believe it is), I don't see a lot of value in 'well, for his sake I hope his lawyer told him to be quiet' (because God forbid he demonstrate guilt or complicity in fraud...)

<comment><USER9> It's just a phrase, jesus, ease up on the INTENSITY coffee. I don't actually hope anything. It's like saying "well one would think".

<comment><USER10> I'll give you that - in hindsight it did come across as a little leaping-down- your-throat. Duly noted!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Justfab makes the most scammy pornsite look good.

Not only do they scam you on the way in, they also scam you on the way out, canceling with them is just about impossible.

Credit card companies have pretty strict rules about this sort of thing and I would really like to know if they are burning through merchant accounts, are labeled high risk (with associated fees) or if they are around the industry norm for e-commerce when it comes to chargebacks, refunds and customer satisfaction within the cohort that does not get something delivered to their door each month.

I suspect (but don't have proof) that if the 200K or so silent subscribers (those who don't opt out but also don't get anything delivered) were attended to the fact that there is a silent charge every month that they would cancel en masse and do approximately 1.2 million chargebacks (the costs of those chargebacks alone would take out justfab.com like a pin takes out a balloon).

The bottom comment in that thread about the class action is a nice sample of what this company stands for:

"I have been repeatedly trying to cancel my membership with JustFab.com for 5 months. Every time I call the customer service rep continues to try and diswade my request to the point of 10 full minutes at which point I always tell them "JUST CANCEL MY MEMBERSHIP" and hang up. I believe they are paid commission on every call they take that results in a hang up. I've emailed repeatedly and they just won't cancel and continue to bill me. I am putting a complaint through my credit card and I am hoping this will stop these illegal business practices."

If you're a victim of this scam please realize that:

1) you have consumer protection agencies where you can file complaints

2) you can charge back up to 6 months and every chargeback will cost justfab an additional $25 to $35 per charge on top of the refunded money. In case of 3D secure transactions the initial charge was equivalent to a 'card present' transaction but subsequent rebills _are not_ and you should be able to get those back anyway.

3) if the number of chargebacks goes over certain absolute numbers there will be an investigation and if it goes higher still there might be a cancellation of the merchant account

4) that you can help by telling your friends about the scam, making sure not to turn it into accidental advertising for them

And even if you're not a victim of this scam:

5) you can probably save yourself money if you go over your credit card statement to look for charges like these.

I'm working on a blog post about the venture capital world as seen from the other side to cure some common misconceptions about the type of people that are active in venture capital, this whole story has me wondering if there wouldn't be more good in doing a 'VC's I won't work for' post instead. Yuck.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for saying what I had came here to say. Just for context, here is a part of the check out page on JustFab:

[http://imagesup.net/?di=15138026329215](http://imagesup.net/?di=15138026329215)

This was provided by a Series A investor in JustFab† and was used to help suggest that it's "pretty clear" that you are joining a membership for $39.95 a month.

Compare this to a slightly different crop, where we only include the portion of the page that contains the "Order Summary", the thing you are ordering. Nothing suggests or hints at a $39.95 membership.

I worked for 10 years in the credit card processing industry handling adult sites. Even we never did anything this bad.

I mean, even the investor flat out admits that it's not called out in any way:

"in the same font size as everything else on the page"

Anyways, really just wanted to thank you for posting what you did.

† [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455575)

<comment><USER12> Wait, " _your_ are activating your VIP Membership"?

That's sloppy. You'd think with $40 a month for shoes (wat) they'd be able to hire a proof reader.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good eye! And if they would actually send out shoes every month to all their subscribers I don't think there would be a problem. Instead you get credits that can only be spent with them and that can't be redeemed for cash. The vast majority of those will in the long term simply never be redeemed at all.

<comment><USER13> Just like Audible. Do you get a max number of credits, resulting in paying a monthly fee for no new value, like with Audible?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The best (and it really is the best) is to get the word about. Drive this "website" into the ground. The VC's will lose money. And maybe, just maybe in the future they'll think twice about investing in questionable companies.

</comment><comment><USER15> A good example of this "membership" model done right is Audible.

[https://www.audible.com/](https://www.audible.com/)

 _How it Works_ and _About Membership_ featured prominently at the top of the page. When you're signed in, your membership status is front and centre.

This isn't even difficult.

<comment><USER16> That's how Audible is doing it _now_ , however it wasn't always this way. For reference, see [http://darkpatterns.org/library/forced_continuity/](http://darkpatterns.org/library/forced_continuity/).

<comment><AUTHOR> Audible's response (on that very page) is actually a textbook example of how to deal with a thing like this.

<comment><USER16> It is, and I'm glad they've changed it. Having said that, this happened to me in 2003 or 2004 - so this wasn't a simple UI goof that they fixed a few months later. Additionally, the process for unsubscribing at that time required a phone call. In any case, the experience left me permanently sour on their company.

<comment><USER10> Analogous: LA Fitness. You can become a member online, over the phone, in person.

To cease being a member, you have to send a certified letter to a certain address, and you have to make sure it arrives by a certain time (up to two weeks) before your next renewal date.

I read an interview where one worker said they literally had someone whose job was to throw away all non-certified mail, unread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is analogous to a premium SMS subscription, and free2play mobile games. It took 10 - 12 years for regulation to kill premium SMS scams. I guess the next decade will be spent stamping out these scum.

<comment><USER18> There are still a lot of them. All those "you won iPad" mobile ads are nothing more than premium SMS scams.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This thread and the companion thread about justfab.com have just been flagged straight from the homepage. Too bad, this sort of thing is well worth discussing. Being successful should not translate into 'get money from the customer at any cost'.

</comment><comment><USER19> October 2011 is some time back. Anyone knows what's the status of this lawsuit?

</comment><comment><USER20> Note that this was filed in October 2011.

<comment><USER21> Anyone got updates?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> According to WikiPedia, they reached 10 million members this year. If it's true (I have my doubts) that'd be $400M/month membership revenue. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JustFab#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JustFab#History)

This could be a huge story for some journalist, finding out how they're not getting cut off by the credit card companies, etc. The fact the president is a quasi-celeb (Kimora Simmons) would help sell the story.

</comment><comment><USER23> Beyond everything else it always shocks me as to how many people buy shoes online. I mean I can never find ones that fit well in the store never mind taking a shot in the dark with some no brand cheapa __shoe.

<comment><USER24> All the reputable sites will let you try on and return items for free.

Also if you have a pair of shoes that fit you well, it's likely that other shoes from the same brand will fit similarly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> With all that money raised I guess the founders have taken enough money off the table that they couldn't care less about what might happen now ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Founders of companies raising series-C have not generally taken a lot of money of the table unless they were explicitly permitted to do so by some investor. Given the nature of this business you'd have to wonder about the trust level between the operators of justfab and their investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone run text analysis on the comments of this kind of site? Astro- turfing detection would seem like a fun blog for someone to run.

</comment><comment><USER26> ...just take it to 4chan and the news media. Courts in the US are useless to regulate businesses now... just look at check cashing fee class action lawsuits.

</comment><comment><USER18> Dark patterns are everywhere and a lot of huge companies are using them without any shame. Take ryanair reservation funnel for example.

</comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of BMG Music Club

<comment><AUTHOR> Book clubs and music clubs make it at least fairly clear that they are subscription based. For example:

[https://subscribe.hearstmags.com/subscribe/splits/oprah/opr_...](https://subscribe.hearstmags.com/subscribe/splits/oprah/opr_sweeps_layer)

The text is _very_ clear here. Contrast that with the justfab.com language and lay out, on the Oprah site (I can't believe I'm linking to that anyway) the text with the warning sits right between the button and the body text, interrupting the flow of the reader to draw attention to the text, it is also the item closest to the button.

The 'happy flow' clearly includes the warning.

<comment><USER28> They also deliver a product so at least you know you're being charged...

(Edit: Spelling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are there any YC companies that compete with JustFab?

</comment><comment><USER30> Why enter a subscription to buy clothes? There's thousands of websites to buy clothes from. Without a subscription. Amazing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it isn't obvious that you're entering into a subscription. That's sort of the whole point of this class action lawsuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This link is from the end of 2011. Why is it at the top of the front page?

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391)</comment></comment>


Why Does Shark Tank Lie About Valuation? (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@QJeffR/why-does-shark-tank-lie-about-valuation-a5cc3e72fe9c <comment><AUTHOR> Not being from an investment background, but a maths background. I did feel a bit stupid watching Shark Tank thinking I was missing something about how they valued the companies.

Then after a bit of Googling, I found that indeed they value them incorrectly. Most likely so as not to confuse viewers.

If the investment required is 100k for 10%, the shark would say "you value your company at $1m". Not true though. That's the value of the company after the invested $100k becomes an asset of the company.

Ergo, before the investment, the company is valued at $900k.</comment>


No Sex Please, We're Japanese - <AUTHOR> http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/no-sex-please-were-japanese/

<comment><USER2> Blogspam of an article posted 3 days ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579294)</comment>


The People's Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/08/peoples-code <comment><USER2> Link to PDF of policy[1]

[1] [http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2016/m_16_21.pdf)</comment>


Wasabi – A Sinatra-inspired web framework for Kotlin - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/WebDev/ServerProgramming/wasabi-a-sinatra-nancyfx-inspired <comment><USER2> I see that you're using straight-up Netty as the http server. Why did you choose to take this path rather than use a servlet container (Jetty, Tomcat)? Are there performance advantages?

<comment><USER3> To what the author has said, I will add that in terms of performance, Netty is currently faster than the fastest production Servlet containers [1]. Presently, Undertow (the web server for the upcoming WildFly application server, which will have a Servlet container) is the only platform providing slightly faster request-processing performance. Until WildFly is production- ready, Resin is the highest-performance Servlet container I am aware of.

[1] [http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7&test=plaintext)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote some toy programs in Kotlin, can anyone who used it for serious projects weigh in on how it compares to e.g. Java 8?

<comment><USER5> I wrote about 10kloc in Kotlin for internal testing framework. It is heavily multi-threaded and Kotlin aced here (compared to Scala).

Java8 brings lot of legacy stuff. It feels like authors just wanted to add 'functional' on feature list. No type inference or named arguments.

I think it is better to compare Kotlin to Groovy or Scala. In both cases it is simpler and more elegant language.

I found two problems with Kotlin:

Not mature yet. It is surprisingly stable and bug free (compared to Scala just 4 years ago). But some features are not designed yet and are missing (for example getters handling). Those will be added in some future milestones. Also I had to write some boiler plate code which should be in standard library.

Nullability handling is strictly required. Most of classpath API is already annotated, but I had to annotate external libraries I am using.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, in what ways is Kotlin more elegant that Scala?

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't say it's more _elegant_ than Scala, because, unlike, say, Clojure or Haskell, elegance doesn't seem to be a central design requirement of Kotlin's, but it is far easier to understand, learn and master. I think Scala pays a tremendous cost in complexity for its features. Kotlin gives you all of those features that would interest all but avid Haskellers (and those would be better off with Haskell than with Scala) for a tiny fraction of the cost.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, there's a price to pay for Scala's elegance (long compile times).

If Kotlin can deliver on the promise to compile _at least as fast_ as Java, it will find Java converts for sure.

> Kotlin gives you all of those features that would interest all but avid > Haskellers.

Not so sure about that, Scala runs on the JVM, which is one of the reasons Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Big Companies have adopted the former and not the latter.

Will be interesting to see how things play out. For example, what will Kotlin provide in the way of a concurrency library like Scala's Akka? Are LINQ and F# style Type Providers possible in Kotlin given it's mandate for simplicity and compiler performance?

I suspect Java8 is going to be a thorn in Kotlin's side given that Java8 will likely already have been given a look at by Java world before Kotlin 1.0 comes on the scene.

<comment><USER2> > Not so sure about that, Scala runs on the JVM, which is one of the reasons > Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Big Companies have adopted the former and not the > latter.

If you look at their code, they, like most Scala developers, hardly ever use features not found in Kotlin. None of them use the language for its Haskellesque powers.

> Agreed, there's a price to pay for Scala's elegance (long compile times).

I was referring to mental load and indescribable complexity that makes Haskell look like child play in comparison - not compilation time. This is the price Scala pays for _power_ ; I wouldn't in a million years call it elegant, but some people think it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why was the Issues tab removed? [http://i.imgur.com/9jCrGY8.png](http://i.imgur.com/9jCrGY8.png)

<comment><USER8> We don't use GitHub issue tracker. Issues are tracked with YouTrack here:

[http://hhariri.cloudapp.net:8080/issues/WA](http://hhariri.cloudapp.net:8080/issues/WA)

Support is on Google Groups:

groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wasabifx

<comment><USER7> Ah, I missed that in the description, thanks for reply.</comment></comment></comment>


The Linux audio mess (pic) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/linuxaudio.png

<comment><USER2> Oh Noes! You mean I have _choices_ of how to handle audio on my linux boxes?! Surely we should just pick a monopolistic vendor and let them dictate it for us for simplicity's sake. They could approve the drivers so we'd know they're good. We could call it _driver signing_ and pay them lots of money for the privilege.

</comment><comment><USER3> Actual blog posting: [http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2007/05/welcome_to_the_ju...](http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2007/05/welcome_to_the_jungle.html)

Okay, does anyone even _use_ OSS anymore? I thought it hasn't been included in kernels for a while. (save for the OSS->ALSA compatibility layer)

As for there being a large variety of user-space libraries: are we supposed to believe this to be a bad thing? In the past, we've needed sound servers, which have become pretty much entirely unnecessary as ALSA can do mixing, etc. (except for JACK, but even Windows has a completely different set of kernel audio drivers for professional sound recording)

These choices and the eventual elimination of some of them are a _good_ thing: it means the better technology (as judged by developers & users) wins, not some decree. I don't know what other unix-derived OSes use, (OSS?) but on Linux-only libraries, I suspect OSS support will eventually disappear.

Now, of course Adobe would complain about this, as their plugin has to run on all possibly imaginable systems out of the box; there's no open-source component that interfaces with the hardware drivers so that the community could fix obscure problems themselves.</comment>


After 350,000+ Beta Sign-Ups, ProtonMail Takes $2M to Scale Its Encrypted Email - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/20/protonmail-seed/

<comment><USER2> All of these have the same problems. If the client encrypts, then the client can be subverted. With webmail, the client is downloaded every single time, and thus can be subverted on the server.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are upvotes not applied? - <AUTHOR>

How come upvotes are not taken into account? (Is it only me?)
Bug or feature?
If feature, why does this make sense? (No, I'm not a mass up/downvoter.)
If HN does not want me to vote, why display the up/down arrows? Why not simply hide them? <comment><USER2> If your's is a new account or has been banned then upvotes won't be accountable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but neither is the case (my username is not green anymore, and you could see my post => not banned).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do you know know they are not applied?</comment>


LiveScript 1.0.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://gkz.github.com/LiveScript/blog/livescript-1.0.0.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is a sick language. I've heard of it and coco in passing but never looked into it.

Looks gorgeous, though. And suitable for those like me who enjoy coffeescript but feel it should go further down the functional rabbit hole (underscore as a bolt-on feels like too much like a bandaid).</comment>


Securing Telnet with SSL - <AUTHOR> https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_i5_54/rzaiw/rzaiwscenariossl.htm <comment><USER2> I'm guessing that something about ssh makes it difficult to implement the block oriented (vs stream) comms that protocols like 5250 and 3270 need. Unlike the unix world, they can interact with the terminal without sending things to the host, and there's support for something sort of like html forms, tab traversal, etc. They fill out fields and press a send key. You can't, for example, use a normal telnet client. There's tn3270, tn5250, etc, that layer the extra stuff needed.

You can find "sortof ssh" solutions for AS/400's and z/OS, but they create a tunnel and it's still telnet underneath. Or solutions that are ssh, but are interacting with a linux partition, or posix subsystem, and can't do the 3270/5250 stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a throwaway. Five years ago I worked for a company that was still using telnet for everything.

Despite assurances of using encryption to clients, we were taking no security measures. Connections to servers were possible with UUCP and Telnet over the internet and modem.

We "upgraded" to SCO OpenServer 6 because we were already grandfathered in to it and three servers had died.

We also had a zero password policy. If you could find the port or the phone number and you could guess a username, such as oh I don't know: "root", then you could get in.

And people were. We were regularly getting modem calls after hours. We had medical records, private financial data, social insurance numbers, ...

It was such a painful work environment. I switched us over by claiming that OpenServer 6 did not have a telnet server and that we were going to have to switch to SSH. I also lied and said that passwordless SSH sessions weren't a configurable option.

My point? This sort of half-assed mitigation of people stuck in their ways doesn't accomplish much. Best to just lie to them, if they were educated they would have already made the change of their own volition.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ok so a few people posted about why not ssh? I think I'll try to provide more context to the system they are describing.

You are a brokerage and your Setup with IBM is a mature system that would cost you lots of capital to overhaul to SSH. Your already have a plan to do this and it will take 1 or 2 years to roll out and justify the cost to the board of directors. This answers the question : What do I do now to secure this system.

<comment> irq-1 VPN or SSH (reverse) tunneling. This looks a lot like IBM making things so complex that you need to hire their consultants.

<comment><USER5> That's what they are doing.

They are just doing it within the 5250 emulator instead of setting up a separate tunnel with a VPN or SSH port forwarding scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Call me edgy, but what about ssh, Bob?

<comment><USER7> "Bob" is using some kind of "old iron" possibly emulated on mainframe and communicates to it with a retro terminal client (5250 ?).

So... do brokerages use telnet in the wild?

<comment><USER8> Well, I know of at least one iSeries (AS400) software vendor who does use it in the wild.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Modern" (ha!) Bulletin Board Systems that support SSH simply talk Telnet over a SSH tunnel.

Sometimes you don't want to change... Much. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> This article prompted me read more about the IBM i OS [1], and it sounds actually quite cool. From the self-healing and objects instead of files, to the packaging of an IR to be re-compiled on the fly to new platforms, I'm curious to know why it and its concepts aren't more mainstream? Is it actually the bees knees but just costs a lot?

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

<comment><USER2> You would likely find similar things regarding other midrange and mainframe systems. HP3000/MPE, DEC VAX/VMS, IBM z/OS.

Vax, for example, had functional clusters, versioned filesystems, and other goodies, many years ago.

Just the nature of a proprietary system...controlling everything means some functionality is easier to implement, more elegant, etc. Apple still takes advantage of this.

The hardware and OS licensing costs are high, as you suspect.

<comment><USER11> "VAX had versioned filesystems"

I think that's a stretch. It had file-name;rev where each time you wrote the file it bumped $rev. As an SCM guy, that's not versioning, that's automatic backups. And you have to run purge all the time to free up disk space.

I don't mean to be pedantic but this is the second time I've seen this claim in the last few days.

<comment><USER2> That's what they are called though..."versioning filesystems". I didn't compare it to SCM. It is probably more comparable to snapshots. The number of revisions held is configurable.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, wasn't trying to nitpick, just pointing out that as a file system guy (I did a pile of work on UFS at Sun) and an SCM guy, I don't think that we want people to think of what VMS had as a versioning file system.

To me, a versioning file system has a dag, the OS creates a node everytime you close it with modifications; if two people close at the same time then just like BK or Git you fork the graph, which means the next time someone opens it it has to be merged.

As I said elsewhere, it would be super cool to have such a thing for /etc, if you wack a config, debian wacks it, you upgrade, you then get all the features that an SCM system give you for merging. I dunno what Git gives you but BitKeeper does a kickass job of automerging and has a complicated but pleasant graphical file merge.

<comment><USER12> > As I said elsewhere, it would be super cool to have such a thing for /etc, > if you wack a config, debian wacks it, you upgrade, you then get all the > features that an SCM system give you for merging. I dunno what Git gives you > but BitKeeper does a kickass job of automerging and has a complicated but > pleasant graphical file merge.

Etckeeper [1] does this. There's also etcd, but that seems to be more akin to Puppet and Chef. Disclaimer: I've never used any of the mentioned software.

[1] [https://etckeeper.branchable.com/](https://etckeeper.branchable.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am wondering if they could implement SSH service and use a SSH tunnel to telnet avoiding recode of the telnet end points.</comment>


UK Parliamentary porn consumption laid bare in official figures - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23954447

<comment><AUTHOR> The figures per month vary massively from 15 in February to 114,844 in November 2012. Makes one wonder what sites are classified as pornographic and if the spikes occurring are the result of poor filtering.

</comment><comment><USER2> Well obviously, while debating internet filtering legislation and technology, a lot of research was needed.</comment>


Ask HN: Surviving Open Plan Offices - <AUTHOR>

So I am presently stuck in an open plan office unable to really concentrate or get as much work done as I would like, leaving me feeling pretty down at the end of nearly every day. How do fellow coders in open environments get their work done? Besides headphones, which I already have in 99% of the time, any tips/tricks? <comment><USER2> Get in _early_. Yesterday I got in a 4:30 AM, today 5:30 AM. Get lots of work done before people get in and leave to go kayaking at 3PM... :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't have to "survive" or accept conditions you don't like. Find a job and workplace you can enjoy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok... without revealing too much, let us assume that I do have to "survive".</comment></comment>


California quitters, your future neighbors wish you would stay home - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20181003123617/http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-california-quitters-20181003-story.html <comment><USER2> This article is from _today_ and shouldn't be linked through the Wayback machine.

[http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano- californ...](http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-california- quitters-20181003-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> "You aint no Texan!"</comment>


Venture Voice #46 - Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp.com (Finally a new one!) [podcast] - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturevoice.com/2007/06/vv_show_46_jeremy_stoppelman_o.html <comment><USER2> Great interview. I've always been a fan of Yelp and how they are run. Their unique community and culture really shows how they're doing many things right.</comment>


Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2013/11/26/work-hard-you-ll-get-there-eventually-hint-no-you-won-t.aspx <comment><USER3> Cooperate-Cooperate, Betray-Cooperate, or Betray-Betray.

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

In the golden era we imagine the corporate worker relations was a cooperate cooperate game, producing hard work, good will, and strong meaningful community for everyone.

Then corporations realized they needed workers to cooperate while reserving the right to betray them (layoffs, terminations etc) because as the market grew more cut throat due to everyone's success, a company needed to stay lean and competitive.

Workers are now growing wise to this and we are entering a betray-betray era. Corperations are working to force cooperation while reserving the right to betray (see google/apple/facebook engineering cartel) but workers in high demand fields are becoming savvy as they can use their skills to go anywhere

The problem is the net result of the betray-betray game is assumed to be net lower than the other strategy to play the game, causing the community at large to gain less over multiple games.

To me this is the net result of cynicism: damaging the community in the name of optimization. Capitalism as practiced is a pain-optimization machine and until we choose to risk playing the game as a cooperative endeavor, it will never improve.

<comment><USER4> Not everything is the prisoner's dilemma. There's no reason -- at least not in your post -- that self-motivated individualism can't be efficient; such ideas were advocated by e.g. Hayek and Friedman (to say nothing of real macroeconomics). If my time is better spent somewhere else because they offer me more money, maybe that's because the work I do there will produce more value for the world overall.

In other words your argument is circular: you assume that individualism is bad, and you conclude that capitalism (which starts and ends with individualism) is bad.

Furthermore have workers and corporations always competed cf. unionization in the 1920s and so forth; in general this has been considered an overall benefit (working fewer hours --> quality of life and education).

<comment><USER5> You assume that your wage is proportional to the value you deliver to the world. Bad. Not correct. Try again. There is a positive correlation on the population level, but on the individual level the relationship is tenuous at best.

<comment><USER4> It's not relevant to my argument. The point was that _in some cases, individualism can be efficient_. A didactic example is meant to be recognized as such and not attacked for technicalities in its formulation; rigor was not here the goal. Note, for example, the use of "maybe". But congratulations for irrelevant nitpicking, I guess.

<comment><USER5> Sorry about that. I thought the "maybe" was sarcastic.

Anyway, the parent's point seems to be that individualism is a strategy that is optimal for a single person, but suboptimal for society. The reason is that what activity maximizes your financial return does not generally maximize the return for society as a whole. Individualism is therefore not optimal. A specific example would be a world that had no crime and therefore no need for security, law enforcement etc. Obviously a lot more efficient than a world with crime. However, since stealing would be free of consequence, individualism dictates that you should steal in this hypothetical world. Everything may not be a prisoner's dilemma, but most is. I don't see how that's nitpicking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The new system is not 'better' than the old system, and is probably significantly worse. While it's true that Welch's advice is no longer valid, it's because the legal, financial, and monetary environment has changed so much since the heydays of GE.

My grandfather retired a millionaire after working as a basic GE accountant for his entire postwar life. So as far as he was concerned, GE treated him well, and it treated his family well enough that my mother still remembers the Christmas parties that the company threw in upstate New York for their genuine human warmth.

When I compare how GE treated my grandfather versus how my father was treated by the companies that he worked for (taking the ambitious, go-getter advice), I am struck by how poorly he was served by both that and the overall cultural structure of the United States. My grandfather survived a Nazi prison camp for the US Government, and his weeks of eating grass soup paid off.

So to people saying that Welch's advice was psychopathic bullshit, I say sucks to you. Grandpa worked 9-5 for Jack, was not a particularly ambitious man, and came out way ahead in return for his loyalty. While surely this did not work for everyone, it did for enough of the people for stories like this to be common.

My perspective is entirely different -- because the US no longer rewards loyalty in either the public or private spheres. It is in fact punished, as this writer notes. How exactly can you build a company that lasts for longer than a relative eyeblink when every person is looking out for #1, and expects to be stabbed in the ass by everyone around them?

LinkedIn is a pain in the ass. Propagandizing for yourself to eke out a good living and career hopping all over the country is a pain in the ass. Both activities are tangential to producing profitable work over a long period of time. Every jackass who wants to get a VP position has to be a hot air spewing 'thought leader' now. This is all wasteful activity that defeats the entire economic purpose of firms.

The modern cynicism is corrosive to our long term prospects as a country, even if it is correct individual advice for the current environment. It will not survive, because this country will not survive as a single entity given such broken incentives and cultural mores.

<comment><USER7> > because the US no longer rewards loyalty in either the public or private > spheres

The comfort of 1950s US was an accident of the WW2 windfall resulting from our happy position as the creditor for most of Europe. Pointing to that accident as a model for future progress is childish.

<comment><USER8> That, in combination with the ~50% tax rate on income and capital gains. Turns out, when you redistribute wealth, consumption increases so rapidly that the economy takes off.

That no longer is much of an option, as wealthy individuals have not only managed to reduce capital gains to ridiculously low levels, but also diversified their holdings throughout the globe. This makes taxation a poor tactic, as capital will just flow to tax havens as the rate increases.

Turns out that feudalism is the natural state of man, and reprieves from it are quite temporary anomalies.

For those interested in details, Thomas Piketty's _Capital_ is an excellent reference on the subject. Also, the movie _Inequality for All_ is a far more approachable presentation based on the book.

<comment><USER9> Naaah. The post-war revival in the economy was largely a result of having dismantled the FDR New Deal and its attendant control economy. No, not the Social Security part or anything like that - the part where politicians and regulators thought competition was _bad_ for consumers, and spent the decade propping up their preferred cronies with price controls and selective bailouts and other such nonsense. With the politicians, of course, receiving _ample_ campaign contributions in return. Taxes still damage the economy, it just turns out there are things that can damage an economy more than taxes. :)

Ah, the New Deal, when our leaders thought they could lead us out of famine and into prosperity by burning crops. Birthplace of big-agribusiness! Et cetera.

<comment><USER10> Most of the price control/cartel parts of the New Deal were partly or entirely dismantled before the war. Of course, a new set of price controls were set up during wartime, but those were not New Deal programs.

What survived from the New Deal were the Keynesian stimulus programs, which were generally very successful, lasted through the war and up through the '70s, and some to this day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The reason that successful people tend to give such useless advice about how to be successful is that most of them do not recognize how much of their success is due to luck. There is a tendency of humans to minimize the degree to which luck contributes to their success. The also tend to minimize how various advantages they were born with (social status etc.). Basically successful people want to believe that their success is 100% due to their brilliance and ability and anyone could replicate it if only they worked as hard as they did. When confronted with trying to explain how they became successful, they resort to all sorts of silly sounding platitudes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, after reading about a dozen of these over the years, it's just depressing.

Look at it this way: success in life is 1/3 working hard, 1/3 working smart, and 1/3 being lucky.

You might ditch the first two and get _really_ lucky. Or not. Your best bet is to do all three. Even then, guess what, little snowflake? You're not that special, and you may only have bad luck.

So what? If you're doing something you have passion about, or if you ever grow up enough to learn to create your own passion as you go along, _you 're going to be doing the first two things anyway._ So this isn't about some secret formula to get what you want; this is about just doing something more fulfilling in life than taking up space and seeking to self-stimulate. Might be worthwhile. Who knows?

Yep, the old days of "I'll be loyal to the company and the company will be loyal to me" are gone. But that was just a tiny piece of the big picture. Simply because some of the details shift around doesn't mean the basics have changed that much. Good grief.

ADD: The more I think about this article, the more it bugs me. So the advice is don't try to impress your boss because he won't be around long? How about just trying to be a pleasant, hard-working, reliable person that other people find enjoyable to work with, boss or not? Or do we sulk around wondering why we should do anything at all unless there's something directly in it for us?

</comment><comment><USER13> I found that it is very important to have enough free capital (energy, money) to catch opportunities when they come. If you work constantly at limit of your strength and have no free energy to even explore, it is practically equivalent to being broke.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's no real alternative offered here.

I understand there's a whole 'open' and 'small' world out there and I can learn lessons from my peers, but if I'm not supposed to be 'working hard for my boss' in the modern corporate world, what am I supposed to be doing to 'get there eventually'?

<comment><USER15> This appears to be an older post, but I think what the original author meant was that hard work alone isn't a sufficient condition for success (I'd argue it is a necessary one, though).

The real answer is there probably isn't a sufficient condition for success, but hard work in pursuit of your own goals (rather a manager's) increases the likelihood of a positive outcome.

Still, I'd have gone a step further. 'Career' is such a false construction. Go do fun shit and get really good at it. Maybe I'm naively optimistic, but if you're really good at something, it's pretty easy to get paid (a lot) for it.

<comment><USER16> Hard work is not important, good results are. That's a very different thing.

<comment><USER17> I think hard work is a necessary precursor to good results. Although, that hard work may not be of the kind most people associate with office work of the past.

<comment><USER16> Fair point, hard work is not well-defined. I interpreted and meant it in the sense of throwing a lot of working hours at the problem. And I think this is not necessary for good results and may actually be counterproductive in some cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's how I think of it.

Smashing your shoulder against a heavy metal vault door as hard as you can over and over, hoping someone at the other side will eventually hear you and open the door is a waste of time. It results in burn-out with nearly no hope of progress.

Instead, you should examine the door and try to open it yourself with a very deliberate attempts of sound reasoning based on where the weak points of the door may be. And after awhile, you may even discover that you can walk around it... or maybe that door isn't blocking the path you should be on to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER19> Warning -- this article (while it has some valid points) should trigger your "bullshit radar." Why?

It's very heavy on the "this guy is old so he couldn't possibly know what we need." And the problem is, that's a message that strongly appeals to the _biases_ we on this site are likely to have.

Readers of this site tend to be young, smart, and highly motivated. Anything that smells like "I don't need lessons from the previous generation; I already have the right instincts because of my youth" will automatically appeal to us because it would be very exciting if it were true.

That alone doesn't make it false. But it means your internal "I better check myself for objectivity" flag should get triggered. Beyond that, though, look at how much of the article's content is devoted to this theme.

Probably half or more of the sentences are spent on this idea. When you're writing for public consumption, you have to learn to be terse and efficient. All those words spent on "geez, just look how old this guy is" are expensive. But the author deemed that the most effective use of words, because _he is intentionally trying to play on your biases_.

When someone is intentionally playing on your biases, look out. You might be having smoke blown up your ass (which the Surgeon General does not recommend).

</comment><comment><USER20> I fully agree.

One must seriously consider his or her professional trajectory and major milestones. Companies these days don't allow for upward movement unless you're willing to spend a decade playing nice with the right people and consistently over-delivering. On the other hand, changing jobs from company to company likely benefits the employee much more by allowing him or her to enter in to a new role that they are fully qualified for. The same goes for pay, even if its a similar role. The primary goal of a Company is to pay the employee as little as possible in order to get the most out of them fulfilling their duties in the role that they were hired to fill. Having the boat rocked by folks changing roles (upward movement) or increasing salaries is something that each Company tries hard to avoid.

</comment><comment><USER21> Jack presents good advice that still is an important part of culture in certain sectors and within certain types of businesses if you want to move up the corporate ladder. He says to work hard but also to work smart, I don't think he's saying number of hours worked or level of brown nosing positively correlates to return on efforts or dollars. You must have a career strategy and not just be a hamster running around a wheel. Work hard at that strategy and whether it means being promoted up the ladder every year in the same company or to deliver on something groundbreaking and then exiting within a couple years or less. In other news, I wonder how Jack and Tim Ferriss would get along.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's easier to call out bad and outdated advice (Welch's) than to offer good advice, which the OP doesn't.

The problem with Welch's advice is that it's what successful people _say_ , not what they do. You should pay attention to what unsuccessful people _say_ and _know_ (they're the ones who know the organization's true character) but what the successful people _do_. Take knowledge from the losers, but copy the actions (often unknowingly competent actions) of the winners.

I'm not a VC, haven't completed an exit, nor am I an executive or technical architect at a brand-name company. At age 30 and an IQ over 150, not being in a decision making role is failure. While I'm OK by objective standards, you should count me as unsuccessful, because I should be leading with my talent and I'm not, because I've picked some terrible startups. You should take advice from someone like me in terms of what I _say_. You shouldn't do what I _do_ , because it obviously hasn't worked. Cognitively, I understand how to play politics; in the field, I'm bad at it.

Likewise, you should ignore what Jack Welch says but watch what he does. You should listen to what I say, but not copy my footwork. That's counterintuitive, for sure, but unknowing competence is superior to learned, analytical insight when you're in the field.

Basic point: what successful people _say_ about the career game is the socially acceptable bullshit (work hard, over-deliver, never lie, be a team player) that has nothing to do with how it actually works. If they were the type who'd talk about how the career game actually works, they wouldn't be successful. They'd be pissing too many people off (like I do) by telling too many ugly truths.

Welch says: _Don 't panic. Just get in there and start thinking big. If your boss asks you for a report on the outlook for one of your company's products for the next year, you can be sure she already has a solid sense of the answer. So go beyond being the grunt assigned to confirm her hunch. Do the extra legwork and data-crunching to give her something that really expands her thinking -- an analysis, for instance, of how the entire industry might play out over the next three years._

Terrible fucking idea. Executives don't see a young grunt trying to work on the big picture as "initiative". (I learned this at Google when I pointed to a superior G+ Games strategy.) They see it as a challenge to their turf. They hit back hard, and they have all the power. It doesn't end well.

In reality, overperformance is a lot more dangerous than underperformance. Underperformance gives you about a 30% chance of being fired within 12 months, usually in the context of a layoff that affords severance. If you underperform smartly (and focus on building contacts and skills for your next gig) you'll have plenty of time and energy in reserve to tackle any consequences. Overperformance gives you a 5% chance of being tapped as protege of someone important and a 95% chance of being fired (usually with a dishonest but humiliating "performance" case being manufactured; if you're a star, your job duties will be rearranged so you can't perform) inside of 4 months. Not fucking worth it.

In general, this is even more true of VC-funded startups than large companies, so I don't want to hear the "startups are the antidote" retort. The median VC- funded startup is way more dysfunctional and political than, say, a large investment bank.

<comment><USER23> Somehow you've decided that, despite labeling yourself unsuccessful, people should pay attention to what you say. The only support I see you making for this is citing your IQ, which is meaningless.

You obviously believe you're telling people things that work, and the attempt to help is something I'm sure people appreciate. But based on what you're saying here, either you don't follow that advice, you don't understand it well enough to apply it correctly, or you do apply it correctly it's actually bad advice. So unless you're learning from what successful people have _done_ (not just said), you're offering unproven advice, and even if you are, you're offering advice you don't seem to understand.

<comment><USER22> I've had a lot of terrible luck. Some of it was no one's fault, most of it was not my fault. I'll probably be a lot more successful now that I have my shit together. But when things go bad for you, you learn what people really are in a way that the ones with charmed lives never really do.

I suppose I'm lucky insofar as I had my bad luck in my 20s, when it was easier to recover than in one's 50s.

Much knowledge can only be gained through misery and suffering. Since humans are mostly defective, it's rare that a person who hasn't suffered, been betrayed, etc. knows how people actually work.

Additionally, understanding how human organizations work is no substitute for real-time footwork. Ideally, one wants both. I have a wealth of the first (and, unlike Welch, I'm willing to share what I know) but (unlike your garden variety corporate psychopath) I'm not good enough at reading people to develop that "snake sense" for others' weaknesses. In the field, that's also very valuable, and it's something I never developed.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, your idea of "terrible" luck basically means "having to switch jobs several times and making less than $250,000 as a 30 year old".

I mean, I get it: There are plenty of people who are less deserving than you that have been wildly, disproportionately successful. I can understand why you're envious. But don't kid yourself, most people would kill to have the supposedly miserable failure of a career that you've had.

<comment><USER22> _your idea of "terrible" luck basically means "having to switch jobs several times and making less than $250,000 as a 30 year old"._

Nah, that's not what it's about at all. It's definitely not about the salary. If you're a novelist and you make even a quarter of that number at mid-career, you're a huge success.

It's about autonomy, importance, reputation, etc. Personal financial stress (which I have suffered, although most of that was because I picked a bad startup, thus my fault) is toxic sludge, but the difference between comfortable and rich means zilch. What does matter is control over one's destiny, rather than being blown about by others' political games, and having the resources to implement one's own ideas rather than being a tool in someone else's box.

Software used to have an R&D flavor, but we've let ourselves become a colonized, defeated tribe. As a consequence, we have to deal with closed allocation, project management bullshit ("story points") and constant political intrusions on the ability to do our work properly.

I've realized (perhaps too late) that it's not my fault, because no one really has that authority based on technical ability alone. One really does have to suck it up and play politics. As I get older, I realize that my negative experiences are ridiculously common. Most people hide away in shame when bad things happen to them in their careers. I won't. To protect the good, I come out, throw down and fight.

 _I can understand why you 're envious._

Envy != resentment. I'm not a very envious person, but I take pride in resenting those with undeserved success. They get into power, make bad decisions, and it's almost impossible to flush them out. They're a cancer. I'm the chemo.

Envy is wishing one had another's unfair or undeserved advantage. Resentment is pushing toward fairness. You're not trying to grab that coveted token or advantage for yourself (that would be envy) but you're trying to expose its stupidity and render it meaningless. Envy is an emotion; resentment is an attitude and somewhat of a social strategy.

My emotions toward the Evan Spiegels and Lucas Duplans of the world (I don't feel much either way for them, to be honest) are irrelevant. What is relevant is that they make good anecdotes, and when they embarrass themselves they can be cast in such a way that they take down other, much more important, targets. Does Lucas Duplan deserve to be ridiculed more (or less) than any other young douchebag? Not really. Should we mock him mercilessly if it casts aspersion on the chickenhawks who backed him? Yes, absolutely.

<comment><USER25> _It 's about autonomy, importance, reputation, etc. [..] the difference between comfortable and rich means zilch. What does matter is control over one's destiny, rather than being blown about by others' political games, and having the resources to implement one's own ideas rather than being a tool in someone else's box._

Why is that your definition of success?

"Having the resources to implement my own ideas" is daft; I very likely don't have any (new) ideas worth implementing. How many people have lived since the early days of the industrial revolution? Call it 20 billion[1]. How many genuinely useful not too niche machines have been invented and programs written, not counting the same program reinvented over and over and over. Tens of thousands? A million? There just aren't enough new things for everyone to invent.

So instead of new ideas, maybe I/we could reimplement existing ideas - <USER2> something that someone else has done, in our own way. But how is that significantly different from "being a tool in someone else's box"?

Elon Musk makes cars, he's got control over his own destiny! He's following his dream! He's not a tool in someone else's box, he's not pushed around by others political games! That's success!

Wait, he's not pushed around by others' political games? Tesla cars have to meet all kinds of regulations. Tesla the company does too, for accounting, finance, taxes, advertising, customer interaction, etc.

The cars have to have pedals and a steering wheel or no customer would be able to drive them. They have to fit on a road, and behave in common car-like ways or no customer would have use for them. They have to look like a car or no customer would recognise what they are or wouldn't want to be seen with one. They have to be petrol, diesel or battery powered because there isn't anything else they could be that fits all the lots-of-requirements.

And yet you say "It's not money that makes Elon Musk a success, it's because he has the freeodm to shape the doors _his_ way!".

But he doesn't have the freedom to shape them his way, he has the freedom to shape them like car doors and nothing else.

A false sense of freedom is a strange definition of success.

You could find as much limited freedom while working for someone else.

[1] [http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...](http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx)

<comment><USER26> You're willfully missing the point and your example illustrates it. The Tesla X has an extremely unique door design for the rear passengers. Certainly it has to conform to _some_ requirements. Even if only to satisfy the definition of the word door. That it also has to adhere to regulations and consumer demands is irrelevant. Elon Musk had a relatively large degree of freedom, compared to many engineers at top-down car companies, in deciding how to meet those demands. You can assert that neither Elon Musk nor the engineers are entirely free. You could also observe that they exist on opposing ends of a continuum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Uh, Beavis neoliberalism is cool, huh huh

</comment><comment><USER28> I feel weird reading a piece on career advice by somebody who works at Microsoft.

<comment><USER29> Total ad hominem. MS has some great talent, and MS Research does some awesome things.

<comment><USER28> Good point. I should stop making throwaway remarks on HN.</comment></comment></comment>


Dying grandmother uses Oculus Rift to walk outside again  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/19/5629778/dying-grandmother-uses-oculus-rift-to-walk-outside-again Dying grandmother uses Oculus Rift to walk outside again <comment><USER2> I can't help but think of this scene from Soylent Green: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOV8mBjHHYg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOV8mBjHHYg)</comment>


History of the broken vertical bar, being the ¦ form of | - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/typography/comments/aqcesg/history_of_the_broken_vertical_bar_being_the_form/ <comment><USER3> For anybody who has used a Vt52, H19, or similar terminal, there is no mystery. Before we had bitmap graphics, we had fill-in forms with ASCII graphics. A vertical line made with solid bars looked uneven, but the gap in the bar was the same height as the gap between a bar and the one above or below it, so it made a pleasing vertical dashed line to match the horizontal lines of actual hyphens and equal signs.

Nowadays, of course, if you want a line, you draw a line, so the gap no longer has a purpose.

<comment><USER4> I don't get it. Why did the line look uneven?

<comment><USER5>
        +-----+      +-----+
        |     |      ¦     ¦
        |     |  VS  ¦     ¦
        |     |      ¦     ¦
        +-----+      +-----+

Your font rendering mileage may vary.

<comment> dfeojm-zlib Oh, the days of the ASCII Code page 437

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage-437.png)

<comment><USER6> That was in the 80s and had a large number of box drawing characters.

<comment><USER7> There is a proposal to add some of the old missing box drawing characters to Unicode, in a section called "Graphics for Legacy Computing":

[http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals- prop.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals-prop.pdf)

They have been implemented recently in the Pragmata Pro font I use, which seems to just keep adding glyphs

[https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/](https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always hated the Windows product key font which you'd have to type in to register Windows. The B looked like 8 and the D looked like O.

I'd have to break out a magnifying glass to figure it out.

That font seems to be popular for serial numbers and any other use case where the user has to type in a series of characters.

I call it the IH8USRS font.

<comment><USER9> The Windows product keys are encoded in base24 using the alphabet BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789, no doubt chosen to avoid ambiguities (e.g. 5 and S, 1 and I, O and 0), but unfortunately the B and 8 confusion remains.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I've not thought about this before, but it seems at first glance a rather inconsistent set.

Resolved by removing both: O and 0; I and 1 and L (l); S and 5.

Resolved by removing the letter: Z and 2; A and 4.

Not resolved: B and 8; G and 6.

I wonder if it was just a quick idea someone had, or if there is some research behind it.

<comment><USER11> Why did they remove E? Can't easily be confused with 3, I think.

<comment> kube-system Maybe they removed the vowels so that a randomly generated key doesn't have any unexpected words in it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gotta love how much this write-up refers to the serifs on the lowercase L, but is rendered in a font (on Windows at least) that entirely omits those serifs.

<comment><USER13> Most sans-serif fonts poorly distinguish between "I" and "l", I've found. (This led to my dad thinking that artificial intelligence was called "Al", as in "Albert".)

<comment><USER14> This is why I prefer a fixed width font when it can be ambiguous. They don't typically have the ambiguities between "l" (lower case "L") and "I" (upper case "i") or even the number "1", similarly between the letter "O" and number "0".

Personally, when handwriting, I got in the habit of striking a hyphen through the number "7" to disambuate against a possible number "1". Likewise, I'd strike through the letter "Z" to disambiguate from the number "2", and a diagonal strike through the number "0" to differentiate from the letter "O".

My handwriting is terrible, and it has saved me a lot of grief over the years, but especially in my engineering courses in college.

<comment><USER15> 7 and Z have far less disruptive fixes.

For 7, just make the top long and the slash slanty. Don't do that for 1.

For Z, give the top a very slight curve, and optionally do the same for the bottom. That is, bend the middle of the line in toward the center of the letter. It might be enough to just imagine doing this, so that you don't end up with a curve going the other way. Give the 2 a proper curve instead of a sharp corner, and it will look different.

<comment><USER16> That's fine but the reason I use the extra bits is to try and make a character unambiguous for a reader who does not know my handwriting habits. In the case of Z I do both - your suggestion and put a bar across it. 2 gets a small loop at the bottom left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I never consciously realized, but I actually prefer the broken bar. No reason, just nostalgia, I suppose.

I might hunt for a contemporary programming font that renders the pipe so.

<comment><USER18> I suddenly realized what made reading old Linux books feel so nostalgic - <USER2> at least one of the books I still have, the terminal commands were all printed using broken bars for pipe, etc. You really don't see that nowadays, but I remember it from text-based browsing, horizontal nav bars often used bar/pipe characters to separate links, and still probably do in footers and dusty corners...

<comment><USER19> If you really want to feel oldschool, try writing crosses through your zeroes as well (to distinguish them from O's).

<comment><USER20> Or even older school, use a capitol P for a question mark.

Or if you were fancy, a P with a / through it.

<comment><USER21> Is that a rudimentary typewriter thing?

<comment><USER20> Teletype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In 2008-9 I had a Neo Freerunner, an early (Linux) smartphone. I also used | in my passwords. Some of the soft keyboards included only a ¦, in the | spot—indicating that the programmer/UI-designer believed them interchangeable. (That is, the character I got on a keyboard by pressing shift-backslash was | even though it was rendered as ¦ on the keyboard silkscreen, but on the smartphone it was ¦ on the key and in the typed text.) This made my log-ins fail in many contexts, and took some inspired thinking to figure out the problem. That was how I first learned the two are not just different glyphs for the same character.

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny, I was building a system that needed a way to namespace CSS classes (so I could suck in HTML from different sources and assemble it into one document) and I found that class names can contain most of the ISO-LATIN-1 characters and I chose to use the broken vertical bar to separate namespaces from short names because hardly anyone uses it.

</comment><comment><USER24> From the linked page in the blog of the late Michael Kaplan:

>I'd go look for it but I don't want to move off this page.

The dark days of not having browser tabs...</comment>


Universal problem solving flowchart  - <AUTHOR> http://cvmountain.com/2012/11/universal-problem-solving-flowchart-for-programmers/

<comment><USER2> While I know a lot of people do it, I think this is a terrible, terrible, terrible advice. You inspire people to became copypaste programmers, which is not a very good thing. Googling is fine, but using random code with random tweaks in production code is one of the worst things you can do. "How does this work?" "I don't know I found it on SO and changed some variables!" "So...how do we fix/improve it?"

This sort of behaviour will not only produce bad code but also will limit your mind, being able to solve problems is probably on of the main abilities of a programmer. If your rely on google you will not keep your mind trained! And what if google one day does not have the answer?

Don't get me wrong finding code on google can help but it's far from the universal problem solving! Better googling some documentation!</comment>


Potential impact of the Intel ME vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/49611.html <comment><USER3> >The most common usage of TPMs is to protect disk encryption keys - <USER2> Bitlocker defaults to storing its encryption key in the TPM, automatically unlocking the drive if the boot process is unmodified.

I had to go look this up. Apparently there is mode of full disk encryption that automatically decrypts the disk every time you boot up if some stuff has not been modified. That strikes me as quite pointless.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitLocker#Encryption_modes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitLocker#Encryption_modes)

<comment><USER4> There are basically three options for how to do disk encryption unlocking:

* The way that e.g. macOS FileVault works, where you enter your password in EFI, before the machine boots and before the OS is loaded.

* The way that e.g. iOS works, where there is an unencrypted partition containing the OS (mounted read-only), and an encrypted partition containing the data. The OS boots off the unencrypted partition, then you have to enter your password to unlock the data partition.

* The mode you're describing, where the unlocking happens automatically if and only if nothing has been tampered with (the encrypted hard drive hasn't been swapped into another machine, etc). With this mode you're relying on the fact that when the OS boots it won't let you do anything without entering a password, even though the disk is already unlocked. Assuming there are no bugs in the login screen, no way to physically read the contents of RAM (where the encryption keys are), and no way to access the contents of the TPM, this approach is just as secure.

<comment><USER5> > "Assuming there are no bugs in the login screen, [assuming] no way to > physically read the contents of RAM (where the encryption keys are), and > [assuming] no way to access the contents of the TPM, this approach is just > as secure.

That's a lot of assumptions. Or, as Jayne Cobb might say, "I'm smelling a lot of 'if' coming off this plan."

<comment><USER6> You're hitting a pet peeve of mine, which is the "all or nothing" misunderstanding of security. You should evaluate security against a threat model.

Those assumptions that you criticize hold true for the realistic threat faced by the vast vast majority of people: opportunistic taking of personal data by device thieves, intruders, and others with physical access to the machine. If you are worried about more sophisticated attacks, then you can easily ratchet up BitLocker's security by requiring a boot-time PIN, dongle, or password in addition to the TPM/SecureBoot measurements. You will also want to be more selective about the hardware that you use.

<comment><USER5> I meant only that the default behavior makes a non-trivial set of assumptions about the higher-level layers. Of course there are trade-offs, especially between usability/user expectations and security. Honestly I was just trying to shoe-horn a fun quote into the conversation. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "While AMT gives an authenticated user a great deal of power, it's also designed with some degree of privacy protection in mind - for instance, when the remote console is enabled, an animated warning border is drawn on the user's screen to alert them."

Can someone point me to a picture, or screenshot, of this ?

<comment><USER8> Rebooted one of my AMT machines so I could take a video of what you see on the physical screen during boot while the remote console is active: [https://youtu.be/GDD8os3ZeCI](https://youtu.be/GDD8os3ZeCI)

<comment><USER9> So that's what it was! I saw this at my previous university one day and no amount of Google fu could point me towards what sort of remote access tool it was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The big problem at the moment is that we have no idea what the actual > process of compromise is.

Intel's behavior through this while story has struck me as rather peculiar.

The impression I get (which might be totally wrong - I sure hope that is the case!) is that Intel hardly admits to anything more than is already public knowledge.

I really hope I am just misinformed / judging on incomplete information. But based on what I do know, I find the implications of Intel's behavior rather disturbing. Even more disturbing than the specific security issues people have found with the ME.

</comment><comment><USER11> The $10000000 question... generally speaking, am I safe from a potential drive-by infection if my PC is behind NAT? (Assuming, of course, the router is not infected or vulnerable and my computer is not DMZ)

Or is there some new attack vector that can pierce those machines reliably?

<comment><USER12> It's safest to never consider NAT and security in the same thought, for a few reasons. Two come to mind right away: IPv6 is pushing us toward less NAT, and laptops go other places and interact with other networks than your own.

<comment><USER13> Also (as feikname points out in another comment) because if you're relying on your NAT for security, your security boundary becomes your network, not your machine. If you read post-mortems of security breaches, it's really common for the initial intrusion to be a printer, or webcam, or an intern's/secretary's/nonprivileged user's device, which then pivots using the internal network to gain more access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is quite a common theme on HN that actual infrastructure people speak up against Intel ME. (for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15796392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15796392))

The tone is always along the lines: The advantages of ME for server monitoring are negligible, but the risks are huge, so they wish they could get all their hardware without ME.

I wonder if there is any way for you to unite? Maybe to change Intel's mind. Or to change your manager's mind, to be able to vote with your company's wallet against ME.

Would that be feasible?

<comment><USER15> This petition like a "responsible encryption".

A feasible and easier way is just buy a consumer laptop or shipped with non- AMT ME and make ME boot into the recovery mode.</comment></comment>


Cary Grant's LSD Therapy in the 1950s - <AUTHOR> https://www.vulture.com/2017/06/cary-grants-lsd-therapy-the-inside-story.html <comment><USER2> I think we're approaching the peak of the hype cycle for psychedelics. Articles like this one glorify LSD as a wonder drug without exploring any of the associated risks.

Readers skim over the details of the associated intensive guided therapy sessions. They assume that they can get the same exaggerated results by dosing darknet-sourced LSD at home, alone, without the concomitant therapy sessions used in clinical research studies. The articles are so focused on the drug that the associated therapy sessions feel like a neglected footnote.

Meanwhile, journalists and internet commenters both ignore the very real risks of framing psychedelics as a DIY miracle cure for people with difficult to treat mental health issues. Before this current phase, the universally accepted advice for psychedelic experimenters was to never use psychedelics if you had underlying mental health issues and to always have a sitter present to monitor and guide your trip. The reframing of psychedelics as a miracle cure has triggered a wave of people ignoring that advice, dosing alone at home without any form of supporting therapy to frame their trips.

If you spend some time browsing Reddit, it's not hard to find bizarre stories of people triggering week, month, or even year long episodes of worsened depression, derealization, PTSD-like symptoms, or HPPD from psychedelic experimentation. If "big pharma" produced a drug with possible side effects like that, we'd be hearing a very different story. Yet LSD and other underground treatments get a free pass in the media at this point in the hype cycle.

Psychedelic research is very interesting and potentially promising, but I hope the current wave of one-sided glorification comes to an end soon. If we want to see proper psychedelic research continue and for the field to be taken seriously, it's important that we stay grounded in our reporting of the topic.

<comment><USER3> I think what we're seeing is similar to what we were seeing during the push for legalization of marijuana- a crowdsourced P.R. campaign that highlighted the positives and neglected the negatives in an effort to try and counterbalance the negative inertia that decades of "reefer madness" hysteria had wrought.

<comment> saiya-jin LSD/mushrooms are way more powerful, you can't compare those. What's next, mescalin or ayahuasca?

I've done shrooms couple of times, it was profoundly mind-and-life-changing experience and in many ways the most intense and beautiful event in my life. But I wouldn't recommend it to maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of people I know, simply because I wouldn't be sure it wouldn't mess them up badly, like really badly. At least not under professional supervision and adequate gradual dosing.

You make everybody smoke weed few times, not much bad can happen. You make everybody trippin', and consequences are unpredictable. Show some respect for the stuff, it very well deserves it.

<comment><USER4> Shrooms are not way more powerful. To put shrooms on lsd level is kind of ridiculous. They're all different from each other of course but most are very mild compared to LSD. The very common ones are just serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I've seen some people say they see shimmers of light or visuals but I've taken the same ones and all I get is super happy and motivated. It's great but it's not on lsd level. I'd say it's same level of weed.

I know everyone acts different to everything but I've had trippier experiences with weed where my memory was so short I thought I was just appearing in places and forgot what my arms felt like. So I think the concerns of shrooms are greatly over exaggerated.

<comment> saiya-jin Then you didn't have proper dosage. I did, few times. Full out-of-body experience, complete dissolution of ego and personality, my physical self, losing all the senses. For few hours. Of course I wasn't running around partying, but laying in the bed alone listening to some soft shamanic music. It wasn't a big dose, according to web it was +- 1 full dosage, nothing over.

I mixed dried shrooms with fresh lemon juice, horrible taste but made trip much more intensive, and shorter (which was actually good because I got massive headache afterwards, feeling like keeping my brain in red revs for hours).

And then gradually coming back, composing my mind atom by atom, retrieving my senses, limbs and so on. Very profound experience. You need to know how to do psychedelics.

Even literal overdose on weed from very strong milk brew where all of us ended up vomiting and tripping super high was nothing compared to this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://outline.com/Xu7nwv](https://outline.com/Xu7nwv)

<comment><USER6> [https://archive.md/ZfcTU](https://archive.md/ZfcTU)

<comment><USER7> This and above comment: what is the purpose?

<comment><USER5> I was annoyed that when I swiped left to quickly check something from the previous page and then swiped right again to go back to the article, my scroll position on the page was completely lost, and a bunch of random ads kept loading as they came into view and shifting text around as I scrolled to try to find my spot again. I'm filled with murderous rage when things like this happen so I wanted to spare others from having a similar experience.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a reason that you don't use an adblocker?

<comment><USER9> It's pretty similar to theft of services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Supervision of use of strong psycedelic drugs is possibly about the supervision as much as the drug.

For example the use of drugs for near death terminally ill patients is not just "get stoned and chill" it's an orchestrated experience.

Strip the hype, retain a clinician with a qualification in mental health and clinical psychology, use metered doses. Why not?

Leary is not the story. Or should not be the story

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd probably try LSD recreationally if I could buy it from credible sources. But I can't understand people who buy synthetic drugs from street dealers and take them. How the hell do you know what you are actually ingesting?

<comment><USER12> There's only so much that fits on blotter paper. There are chemical tests you can do at home to explore that state space.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" There's only so much that fits on blotter paper."_

Unfortunately, some of those are the potentially lethal NBOMes.

Yes, you could test, but tests from ecstasydata.org cost $100, and only tests that one sample you send. It also takes a couple of weeks to get results.

That kind of outlay of time and money is only going to be acceptable to a small minority of users, and the unfortunate fact is that most users will not test.

The real solution is to get LSD legalized and then safety and purity could be assured.

Another alternative is to try some other psychedelics, like:

\- _Salvia Divinorum_ , which is legal in many places

\- _MDMA_ , which is likely to be rescheduled next year and then can be used legally under the supervision of a therapist (which can already be done under limited circumstances)

\- _Psilocybin_ , which will probably be rescheduled within the next 5 years, and can then also be used legally under the supervision of a therapist

\- _Ketamine_ , which can be legally prescribed for depression right now (search around for Ketamine clinics)

\- _Peyote_ or _Ayahuasca_ , if you're part of certain religious groups

\- _Psilocybin mushrooms_ , which you could pick (be careful!!!) or grow.

\- _Psychedelic cacti_ , which you could grow. But, unfortunately they take a really long time to grow, and over-harvesting of peyote (for example) is a very serious sustainability problem.

\- _Cannabis_ , which can have psychedelic effects at high doses.

Being part of a legitimate medical research study can also get you access to pure LSD, and a limited amount of such research is now ongoing and planned.

<comment><USER13> You can (and should) test with home test kits for a lot less than $100.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reagent tests that are in those DIY kits aren't as reliable as the Gas Chromatography / Mass Spectrometry tests that ecstacydata runs.

It's easy to misread a reagent test[1], and they won't tell you all the substances that are in a sample, just the particular sample(s) they test for.

GC/MS is much more definitive, in that it'll tell you every known substance that's in your sample (though, unfortunately, ecstasydata is forbidden by the DEA from telling you the amount of each substance they find[2] -- another stupid and harmful result of the War on Drugs).

Still, reagent testing (when done carefully, knowledgeably, and properly) is definitely a whole lot better than no testing at all.

[1] - For example, was that color you saw black or dark brown or dark violet? Did you wait long enough for the color to change? Did you look at the reagent color under the same lighting as the light you looked at the reference under, and was that lighting adequate enough to differentiate between all the different colors properly? It matters!

[2] - [https://www.ecstasydata.org/about_data.php#quant](https://www.ecstasydata.org/about_data.php#quant)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Guided meditation therapy provided me with all the benefits that are attributed to psychedelic therapy. It helped me let down my guard and make true progress. The benefits continue, years later. I'm still alive, and I probably wouldn't be without it.

The psychedelics aren't necessary. It just appeals to people because everyone wants a magic cure.

As an added bonus, it made achieving a meditative state much easier for me.

Society is too preoccupied with the conscious mind. It's not meant to be running and in control all the time. Through meditation I've learned to communicate with my sub/unconscious mind. I can query it and it responds not with words, but more with feelings/emotions. It really kinda scared me the first time. Now, it is how I figure out what is really going on with me, what environmental factors are causing me malaise.

I'm now extremely grateful for the challenges I faced, as I wouldn't have been forced to grow otherwise.

I call it guided meditation therapy, but it is also know as hypnotherapy. I didn't use that name because I thought it would receive an immediate negative response from many here. There are quacks out there, but it doesn't invalidate the entire concept.

A closed mind will ensure no mental health progress is made. I'm so glad mine was forced open.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Guided meditation therapy provided me with all the benefits that are attributed to psychedelic therapy. ... the psychedelics aren't necessary."_

Have you actually ever had a powerful psychedelic experience?</comment></comment>


US is stuck in the worst of all worlds - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/af8e1f30-290c-4181-858e-0bf2f11a0c32 <comment><AUTHOR> Also available at:

[https://www-ft-com.ezproxy.babson.edu/content/af8e1f30-290c-...](https://www- ft-com.ezproxy.babson.edu/content/af8e1f30-290c-4181-858e-0bf2f11a0c32)</comment>


Dear Congress: It's not OK not to know how America works either. - <AUTHOR> http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2008/additional_finding.html

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't editorialize the title.

The article kind of suggest the question: "If the general citizenry is smarter than general elected official, then how come you keep choosing the latter?"

<comment><USER3> Because the "smart" people don't go into politics. They're busy trying to start new Googles or finding the Higgs boson. A republic is only as good as the politicians willing to run for office and the intelligence of the people voting for them.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are dating websites allowed to let search engines index the profiles? - <AUTHOR> I have used a dating app Ok Cupid 2 years back, I stopped using 1 mon after creation. What I didn't do is delete or disable my profile. Fast forward now, when a friend searched for my username on Google, OkCupid profile was being shown as the 4th result which shows my address and age.
I don't remember being explicitly asked to take my permission about making the profile public. After emailing the support today, I got a reply saying 'Google is showing profiles now, we can't take them out' which is ridiculous since all they have to do is don't allow in the robots.txt.
I don't find anything in their privacy policy about public profiles etc. I am not sure if I can send a DMCA to take my link down. <comment><USER2> As soon as you entered your personal information into their site you gave it to them so they could display it on your profile. You can't stop google from indexing their site. Its public period. Don't give away personal information if you dont want it to be public.

<comment><AUTHOR> Realised it now. Won't happen again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> .

<comment><AUTHOR> So after seeing the profile I immediately deleted it. You think Google would reindex and remove it from search results? or the stale link still exist?

<comment><USER3> .

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll do that. Thanks for the answer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's Holding Tech M&A Back? - <AUTHOR> http://a16z.com/2015/04/10/whats-holding-tech-ma-back/ <comment><USER2> It's making me think that we're not in that tech bubble phase yet. We would be in a tech bubble when the incumbents also feel under pressure to be acquiring more aggressively. If this happens, it can cause a fairly significant bubble.</comment>


Spatial Data Models and Query Processing (1994) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/pubs/kim2.pdf <comment><USER2> there should be a mandatory note detailing significance when any academic paper is submitted that is more than 6 months</comment>


Surround 360 is now open source - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/265413023819735/surround-360-is-now-open-source/ <comment><USER2> This is just nerd candy right? I mean facebook is in the same business as google when it comes to what the business model is based on. Get people to pull levers in a virtual casino and sell the resulting statistics to advertisers. The surprising thing is that I think it actually works. New graduates will be lining up to work on projects like this and then end up debugging shitty PHP.

<comment><USER3> I work on similar projects at Google, so I can say with certainty that this is not just about candy. YouTube makes up a sizable portion of Google's business. Providing 360 capture devices like this (ours is called Jump) allows people to create new content for YouTube, which can then be monetized.

Building cool VR hardware and software is not as distant from Google's and Facebook's core businesses as you believe. Watching 360 videos with 3D audio isn't necessarily the height of human experience, but it's a far cry from "pulling levers in a virtual casino".

<comment><USER2> And how many people work on that project? 10? 100? 200 people?

<comment><USER3> Many, and many more on similarly interesting projects. All I can say is that ~nobody writes PHP :)

<comment><USER2> Lucky then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hardware looks very similar to [https://vr.google.com/jump/](https://vr.google.com/jump/) and [https://gopro.com/odyssey](https://gopro.com/odyssey) but with cameras top and bottom.

Really interesting to head about the math and software that went into it though and great that they made it open source!

<comment><USER5> The GoPro cameras are quite different to the cameras that facebook are using... GoPro cameras have rolling shutter on the lens, whilst the facebook cameras are using higher quality cameras which have no rolling shutter.

The google jump is also using go pro cameras.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can a rig like this be used to extract a depth map/point cloud, instead of just visual 3d images? What will be the accuracy of such a point cloud?

<comment><USER7> You want LIDAR for making the point clouds, and a camera for colorizing them. Pure photogrammetry is doable (I think that's what Earthmine did for a while?), but it isn't as pretty or accurate.

<comment><USER8> For single-point-of-view, yes. Otherwise, if you can take images from multiple viewpoints, there are a bunch of solutions for pure photogrammetry, eg. Pix4d, Photoscan, Capturing Reality.

Theoretically, there is enough data in the images to build photorealistic models. Algorithmically, we aren't quite there yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> More open source cameras:

[http://www.elphel.com/](http://www.elphel.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> How about using a dozen Rasperry Pis and camera modules? Perhaps not the same image quality as a $50K system, but is there any technical reason it couldn't work with Surround 360?

</comment><comment><USER11> How much would it cost to make one?

<comment><USER12> Just by breezing through the hardware specs, using the stuff they recommend, I'd estimate around $35k -$40k...

So let's call it $50k, built and ready to use =)

those cameras are $1.5k each...17 of them.

Edit: Actually, those lenses are around $700/each as well. And you would definitely want a professional putting it together for you with that kind of money. So $100k probably. Definitely made for industry/production use, not for someone trying to film a weekend trip in the mountains haha.

<comment><USER13> >not for someone trying to film a weekend trip in the mountains haha.

The GoPro Omni and the NCTECH IRIS360 may be a little bit closer to the indie scene rather than the professional scene, but those solutions are still $2000 - $5000... and are only 4-6 camera solutions.

<comment><USER14> There is also 360heros [1][2] which can use up to 14 GoPro cameras for under 10.000.

[1] [http://www.360heros.com/2014/01/worlds-first-fully- spherical...](http://www.360heros.com/2014/01/worlds-first-fully- spherical-3d-360-video-and-photo-gear/)

[2] [http://shop.360heros.com/3DPRO-360-VIDEO-p/3dpro.htm](http://shop.360heros.com/3DPRO-360-VIDEO-p/3dpro.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What are the differences between this and Samsung's Project Beyond camera? [http://thinktankteam.info/beyond_m/](http://thinktankteam.info/beyond_m/)

</comment><comment><USER16> As an interesting data point, it looks like they designed the hardware using Solidworks 2016:

      https://github.com/facebook/Surround360/blob/master/surround360_design/3d_models/STEP_files/160523_3.STEP#L9-L10

(.STEP files - good for CAD data interchange - often include the name of the creation program)

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice. Has anyone had a look at the stitching source code - how tightly coupled is it to this particular camera/lens combo? You can pick up Xiaomi Yi's for about $70/a piece.

Of course RAW footage from the point gray will give tons more dynamic range but still would be a relatively decent setup for 3D360.

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure its not just the raw footage but the face that the action cameras have rolling shutter... I would assume that the rolling shutter along with the cameras not being in sync would mean that doing optical flow wouldn't work correctly in terms of creating a clean image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lol guys just buy a gear360, light weight and fits in the palm of your hand. Been using it for months, $350-$400 on Amazon works great!

<comment><USER19> Gear 360, Kodak SP360 and Ricoh Theta, GoPro Omni are all low resolution monoscopic 360 capture.

Surround 360, Nokia OZO, Project Beyond, GoPro Odyssey are high resolution stereo 360.</comment></comment>


Something's Odd About the Political Betting Markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/moneybox/2016/07/why_political_betting_markets_are_failing.html <comment><USER2> Amusing that he views something with a predicted chance of occurring at 25% actually occurring as a market failure.

He may be right that prediction markets are currently experiencing an anchoring effect that is slowing their response to changes in the factors that influence the outcome. If you believe this, maybe you should go buy Trump shares in various prediction markets. Personally I think that a long position on AAPL is a better undervalued position than Trump for President.</comment>