The forgetting curve explains why humans struggle to memorize - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1213768/the-forgetting-curve-explains-why-humans-struggle-to-memorize/ <comment><USER3> If you're interested in improving your learning, I can't recommend the free course "Learning how to learn" enough:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

It includes a section about this. I've also found many of the lessons applicable to other parts of my life.

<comment><USER4> Another free course made by the same team: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindshift](https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindshift)

This course is more focused on how/what to learn to boost your career.

I liked both courses; they take 2-3 hours per week for 4 week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Ebbinghaus' original work, it is simply about memorizing syllables. However, that is only a small percentage of learning harder skills like computer science (learning syntax), language (learning words), or even acting (learning lines). The next steps would be to synthesize (Bloom's taxonomy) the newly acquired knowledge in some way to facilitate higher levels of learning (CS - problem-solving, language - conversational fluency, acting - <USER2> work).

I think this is where Bloom's taxonomy (and the like) can help with decreasing the decay effect. The mental effort requirements for memorizing are considerably lower than those of levels like synthesis. In that case, factual information can be lost (specific API commands), but more important elements are retained (when/why/how to make API calls).

<comment><USER6> The sort of learning and remembering that is a part of understanding something seems even further removed from Ebbinghaus' exercises with syllables. It feels that when I am doing this sort of memorization, I am building some sort of model (which also gets remembered, or perhaps it is more accurate to say the model is the memory), and the model gets used in retrieving relevant facts. It seems much easier for me to remember an arcane fact if it led to an important or surprising insight when I was first presented with it.

<comment><USER5> > seems much easier for me to remember an arcane fact if it led to an > important or surprising insight

That's where I think Bloom's can step in. Memorization is the first step, but then its about recalling and applying the mental model. As you traverse the levels, you eventually reach things like problem-solving and evaluating.

Ebbinghaus discusses spaced repetition, but I wonder if spaced repetition in conjunction with Bloom's taxonomy is a better approach for higher level learning than JUST spaced memorization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best resource I have ever found on the topic is this, which digs really deep in the topic:

\- [https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)

That, combined with Frequency Lists (another really cool topic), is what inspired me to create my own learning webapp:

\- [https://core.cards/](https://core.cards/)

Note: it's for me to learn, so login is a bit broken and you have to try to do it twice for it to work if you want to test it out.

</comment><comment><USER8> The human brain could work the same as memristors. Memristors gets harder to charge as they get full. Ie in the analogy that a young brain can easily learn things but it gets harder to learn things the older the person as the brain is full of information.

One also observes the same in AI that the AI learns more in the first evolutions.

Also the same in Spaced repetition such as Anki and Memrise. Anki and Memrise software must some how know of the forgetting curve. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition)

Memristor [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor) Memristors mimic human brain [https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1264640](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1264640)

<comment><USER9> > the analogy that a young brain can easily learn things but it gets harder to > learn things the older the person as the brain is full of information.

I'm not sure this is true in general. Older people have rich semantic connections that, if they can leverage them, allow them to learn things quickly. But those connections can also work against them (e.g. learning to drive on the other side of the road you get to keep 90% of what you learned, but also battle against a strong, pre-learned bias).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _An unhelpful but common metaphor is that of the brain-as-computer, or > computer-as-brain. The two things are often presented as working the same > way. A brain "stores" memories like files on a hard drive, and software uses > "neural networks" to learn like the human mind does. But the reality of > learning is different. The computer won't forget where the file is, and the > neural network can only learn what it's told to._

So many flaws packed into one paragraph.

> _brain-as-computer, or computer-as-brain_

That would be two different metaphors, not one

> _A brain "stores" memories like files on a hard drive_

Nobody thinks this

> _The computer won't forget where the file is_

Brains don't forget because they can't find the file...

> _neural network can only learn what it's told to_

The power of neural networks is that they discover patterns on their own. Thats the whole f __*ing point of neural networks.

<comment><USER11> ">A brain "stores" memories like files on a hard drive

Nobody thinks this"

If you ask them directly and they bring it up to conscious recognition, no, approx. nobody thinks this.

However, if you witness people's actions when they set out with the deliberate goal of learning something, they clearly act as if they believe they can write something "once" to the "brain's hard drive" and retain it indefinitely by sheer force of will, and that failure to do so is a moral or character failing. Articles like this are important to correct people's implicit, unexamined beliefs.

Of course if you've been on HN for a while, you've had spaced repetition of the importance of spaced repetition (albeit perhaps not on the optimal schedule), so you may feel it's very common knowledge. It isn't. Only a few subcultures have heard of it; the broader culture is ignorant of these ideas.

<comment><USER12> I mean, is this really not common knowledge? I am having trouble coming up with examples from my real life where people aren't aware of it. Sports? Practice. Spelling? Practice. Theater? Rehearse. It's practically an automatic response when people ask how to get better.

I don't think this is a mystical life hack, we do this with babies, children, students, and I have never heard an adult seriously suggest that they can memorize something in one go.

Well, okay, maybe the president and people with photographic memories. But in general? If people decide they want to learn something they definitely are aware it will take work and practice and repetition. Maybe they don't want to do that work, but I doubt they're truly surprised when they don't make progress.

<comment><USER13> @jerf refers to "spaced repetition" which is a specific form of the "practice" you mention. Basic practice is of course ubiquitous. Spaced repetition is less common, but becoming better known.

Incidentally:

You mention sports practice. This is a really fascinating topic, possibly different from mental recall such as spelling and theatre lines.

A beginner in a sport can practice in a very general manner, since anything they do is likely to produce improvement. Someone who has just started learning tennis may benefit from the occasional game of squash or badminton, for example. Put another way, in problem space they are very distant from the target, so any effort has a reasonable chance to take them in a direction which is vaguely towards the target.

An expert athlete, however, must practice very specifically. They are very close to the target: only movement directly toward the target is useful. The tolerance is far less, the number of directions they can take is far fewer.

Additionally, the extremely fine control of the musculoskeletal system necessary for athletes degrades slightly with absence from practice. The specific activity must be regularly practiced to achieve peak performance, and ensure the neurological specialisation is maintained. This is why professionals must "warm up", to ensure the nervous system is tuned to peak performance. (Avoiding injury is a separate and complicated issue.)

Spaced repetition is related to this, since athletes must indeed practice/train. But the time element here is very complex, and unique to the sport, the athlete, and much more. Frequency, rest, intensity, endurance and more are in that mix. Add mood, motivation etc and it becomes almost overwhelmingly complex. Possibly why some of the finest athletes aim to take emotions out of the mix: simplicity and reliability. Perhaps!

A lot of this is still poorly understood, as it is with memory and recall.

<comment><USER12> I see, I see. That makes sense, thanks.

I'm also an athlete (I teach karate) and agree with your assessment. I feel myself get worse at techniques if I don't exercise and reinforce the motions at least weekly. I generally have the class do basically the same core techniques at the beginning, then rebuild any lost reflexes in intermediate drills, and finish with no more than three new (related) techniques per day.

There is never a time when anyone no matter how skilled won't benefit from practicing even the most basic of basics once you're at a high level. They're never quite perfect! In fact the more advanced the student, the more likely they'll benefit from going back to the basics and really re-evaluating how the basics work given their new expertise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I truly believe the learning/memorizing process is different for each person. For example I've been driving my car for more than a year and I still can't remember right away in which side of the car the gas tank is located at. What I do remember is that in every car, there is an arrow on the side of the gauge which indicates where the gas tank is at.

<comment><USER15> Oddly, you may have trouble remembering because you know where to find the answer. Simply put, you remember a more general answer to the same question. It is not that you don't remember at all.

<comment><USER16> That has scary implications now that Google exists.

<comment><USER15> Somewhat. And it isn't just Google. Now that you have a cell phone, you are probably not as good at remembering phone numbers as folks were 20 years ago. I know I used to remember some numbers. Now, I barely remember my own.

So, same goes for how can you tell if it will rain soon? Well, used to folks knew some tricks by looking at the sky. Some folks still know them. By and large, everyone else is more accurate by asking their devices.

Want to know how far away something is? There is an amazing trick you can do with your thumb and line of site. If you really want to know, though, get a range finder. :)

And it isn't just memory. Consider how much weaker most people's arms are today than they used to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _forgetfulness doesn't always occur (Princess Leia's prison cell block > number: AA-23)_

Sure, when it's the start of the Fibonacci sequence.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Thanks, now I'll never be able to unsee or forget that. But you do make a good point about the importance of linking/patterns in memory.

<comment><USER15> And naming them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised this didn't hit on relational memory. In the latest edition of stupid human tricks, people are often surprised when strong chess players, or myself, can easily repeat the moves of a game, from scratch, after playing - even substantial amounts of time later.

It's all about the relational aspect. Chess games are easy because they tell a story in a strong player's head, and so to repeat the game you just tell the story in your head again. That's why if you do forget a game, just being told what the first move or two was is often enough to recall the rest of the game - kind of like being told the first sound of a word you're trying to remember.

This is also why chess players can see a position and remember 'Ooo, that's from Reti-Alekhine' or whatever. You see games and the people playing become part of the story. It's like reading a page from a book and being able to say what book it was. On top of that it's also quite often an extremely important page, making such a demonstration even more trivial.

There have also been a lot of studies testing this stuff. For instance, one briefly showed strong players a position that might actually occur in a regular game and asked them to recreate the position. And they did extremely well, whereas casual players did awfully. However, the interesting thing is that when asked to do this for positions with the pieces on random squares, strong players did not do substantially better than casual players. This has been attributed to pattern recognition, but in my opinion it's more about the story being told even on a single move - the ideas and possibilities. Again the difference between trying to repeat the words from a page of book as opposed to trying to repeat random words.

</comment><comment><USER19> Our memory is a cache and each timed repetition increasingly delays the purge date of a particular memory.

<comment><USER20> citation?

<comment><USER21> I don't know about the brain acting like a cache, but synaptic pathway weighting is thought to be modified by how often neurons on either side of it fire near the same time. This is called spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). The seminal paper for this is: [http://www.jneurosci.org/content/18/24/10464.long](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/18/24/10464.long)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I worked on an app based on this timeline like flashcards, it reset when you get a card wrong. Https://www.studysauce.com

<comment><USER23> What's the difference between this app and something like Anki or Tinycards?

<comment><USER24> I've been looking for an (optionally OCR enabled) spaced repetition software package that allows me to take pictures of flashcards, and then load those into a standard spaced repetition algorithm, then render those either in a browser or an ios app. Anki supposedly does this but in my experience it's been hard to get up and running. Maybe something that just works with something like evernote or onenote would do the trick.</comment></comment></comment>


Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ <comment><USER2> _" You might think that increasing investment in public transit could ease this mess. Many railway and bus projects are sold on this basis, with politicians promising that traffic will decrease once ridership grows. But the data showed that even in cities that expanded public transit, road congestion stayed exactly the same. Add a new subway line and some drivers will switch to transit. But new drivers replace them. It's the same effect as adding a new lane to the highway: congestion remains constant. (That's not to say that public transit doesn't do good, it also allows more people to move around. These projects just shouldn't be hyped up as traffic decongestants, say Turner and Duranton.)"_

Interesting!

Am I the only one who thought this would be something to do with Braess' paradox?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exactly what's happened here in Boston after the Big Dig was finished --traffic is still bad. Now, there were some advantages--no one misses the elevated southeast expressway--but the roads around here are often still jammed.

A similar process happens with housing too--as more is made available, people want more of it, which contributes to there never being enough, no matter how much you build.</comment>


Langton's ant - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant <comment><USER2> I've been obsessed with Langton's ant for a good solid decade now. My latest creation is a few years old now, but occasionally I go back and add new commands. It's inspired by Langton's ant, but it operates in 45 degree increments, has the ability to fork, conditionally execute instructions, has colors, and a bunch of other interesting things. You can see it in action at [http://demoseen.com/langton/#.FP$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!~](http://demoseen.com/langton/#.FP$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!~) and there's a simple instruction listing at the bottom of the page.

It's quite a departure from the original, but you can make absolutely gorgeous images with some simple instructions.

<comment><USER3> This is awesome - lot of fun to play with.

This is the best pattern I've been able to come up with so far:

[http://demoseen.com/langton/#..rr@<>@!!@@](http://demoseen.com/langton/#..rr@<>@!!@@)

<comment><USER2> That's really cool -- I love 'lattice' type patterns. This is my current favorite, because it seems to terminate (stabilize) and then does one last little bit. Runs for a good while before it 'terminates', as well. [http://demoseen.com/langton/#.$!~PF!!!!](http://demoseen.com/langton/#.$!~PF!!!!).

<comment><USER3> After playing with this a good bit, here's my favorite:

[http://demoseen.com/langton/#@@1o..+..-1o..+..-<>..$.^](http://demoseen.com/langton/#@@1o..+..-1o..+..-<>..$.^)

It makes a cloth/napkin, and then slowly absorbs blood from the four corners.

<comment><USER2> That's really, really cool. I want to make a gallery system for these, where people can submit theirs and others can modify from there. Btw, I just added a polar mode (the grid is treated as polar coordinates, and converted from there); the & instruction switches to polar and _ brings it back to cartesian, so you can actually blend the two. [http://demoseen.com/langton/#&m.$!~PFP!!.](http://demoseen.com/langton/#&m.$!~PFP!!.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> But what happened to Langton himself? After leaving SFI and the Swarm corp he seems to have disappeared. I met him once - about 12 years ago - and he was the most charming, kind guy who spent three hours and a lunch with me just because I said I don't understand something he said. Then he warned me not to become too much of a generalist and specialise more. He was right, but I didn't listen to him, I was in my 20s and thought I can be a polymath :)

<comment><USER5> I spoke to Glen Ropella of Swarm about him in 2009 when I was writing a paper and Glen said this: "Most of the people I know related to Swarm refer people to me when they're looking for Chris. It's no mystery, though. He decided awhile back to leave the Swarm/SFI community for personal reasons. So, he's out there. He just doesn't want to work on that stuff anymore, at least as of the last time I talked to him. ... He may well want to interact. I don't know. All I know is I haven't heard from him in awhile."

Chris, if you're out there: Hi!

<comment><USER6> I looked for Langton myself years ago when I was very into artificial life and evolutionary computing. IMHO he's one of the greatest unsung geniuses of the past 25 years.

Here's what I consider his greatest work:

[http://wiki-app2.tudelft.nl/pub/Education/SPM955xABMofCAS/Le...](http://wiki- app2.tudelft.nl/pub/Education/SPM955xABMofCAS/LectureIntroductionToComplexity/Computation_at_the_edge_of_chaos__Langton.pdf)

To give you one example: that paper is why I think Titan is the most likely world in the solar system where we might find present-day complex life. (Other than Earth of course.)

Why? There's no liquid water on the surface, and it's too cold!

Answer: phase boundaries everywhere. See Fig. 3 from paper.

Titan has a hydrocarbon-based "water cycle" with solid, liquid, and gas all existing at the same time, along with what appear to be seasons. Universal computation occurs in the vicinity of phase boundaries, so I would not be terribly surprised if we found "cryolife" there. It would be radically different from our own, but not really... I agree with people like Langton that life should be considered primarily an informatics phenomenon rather than a conventional chemical reaction or physical state.

If Titan life were intelligent, they'd regard us as hell-beasts with blood of molten water. :) We could never physically touch, as we would vaporize them and they would freeze us solid.

There's a contemporary scientist named Dr. Christoph Adami at Michigan State's new BEACON center who's probably the closest to following in Langton's footsteps.

[http://www.mmg.msu.edu/adami.html](http://www.mmg.msu.edu/adami.html)

Adami expounded upon these ideas by defining life as "a phase of matter in which the dynamics of information processing overcome those of ordinary matter and energy." I am paraphrasing, and possibly butchering it a little... can't find the original quote, but that's the basic idea. Life is a phase of matter -- one whose behavior is dominated by universal Turing-complete computation. You might call living matter "Turium" or something.

The fact that this whole line of reasoning hasn't been taken up more broadly is IMHO some kind of failure of the academic and scientific system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Made a jsfiddle where you can see the ant move and die (crash) after building the highway for a while.

[http://jsfiddle.net/zuu7bd2e/](http://jsfiddle.net/zuu7bd2e/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks! It was hard to get the point of how cool this is from the animation/description in the Wikipedia article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Langton's ant colony eBook cover generator: each word in the eBook title seeds the initial parameters (location, direction) of an ant and the simulation is run for a large, constant number of steps, producing an interesting and reproducible generated cover.

<comment><USER10> Top Ten Signs You've Been Reading Too Much Hacker News

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting "art" can be generated by running the algorithm against a random initial map.

Edit: adjusting the density of the initial map seems to result in different patterns appearing in the output

[http://jsfiddle.net/2yxyno52/4/](http://jsfiddle.net/2yxyno52/4/)

</comment><comment><USER12> How can it be Turing-complete with only two colors and one state? I thought you needed at least two colors and three states to be Turing-complete. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol_T...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol_Turing_machine)

<comment><USER13> In a sense it really has four "states", since the ant remembers which direction it had previously moved. That's implicit in the clockwise/counterclockwise rule.

<comment><USER14> I would say there are 10 states. Any square can be empty or have an ant, and if the ant is there its direction is known. That gives 5 states of ant presence and direction, and since a square has 2 color states, that's 10 total states.

<comment><USER13> I'm counting "states" as the term's used in (tape) Turing machines, where you distinguish the internal states of the finite automaton (tape head) from the memory states of the unbounded tape (symbols or colors). So this ant would be analogous to a 4-state, 2-color Turing machine. The ant has four possible states; each cell of the grid has two.

<comment><USER15> What about when the ant reaches the edge of his grid? (this part I couldn't find an explanation for on the wiki)

<comment><USER13> The grid has no edges, it's infinite in all directions!

<comment><USER15> I see. It would be interesting to see this on a finite universe - a curved universe where opposite edges join

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > All finite initial configurations tested eventually converge to the same > repetitive pattern, suggesting that the "highway" is an attractor of > Langton's ant, but no one has been able to prove that this is true for all > such initial configurations

If Langton's ant is capable of universal computation, wouldn't non-halting programs be a counterexample to this convergence?

<comment><USER17> I'd have to agree. From my understanding of that sentence, all programs would "halt" eventually because they all end up doing the highway. So unless your computation somehow ended with the highway then you couldn't run infinitely long computations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the first programs I wrote was a simulator of Turmites in Visual Basic. There is an endless variety of configurations producing crazy abstract "art". I didn't know about Langton's ant back then, but I definitely noticed those "highways" that occured quite often from random experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm looking for an algorithm that is as simple as Langton's ant but with X amount of ants that all compete in some way. Any pointers?

<comment><USER20> The Wikipedia article contains several variations, including that one. Check the external links for videos and programs.

Interestingly, multiple ants don't need conflict resolution, as two ants sharing the same cell will want to leave it at the same state.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton's_ant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton's_ant)

<comment><USER19> Thanks. I am actually looking for one with conflicting resolutions though and can't seem to find that in the links. Basically I want to make a game where you put out ants that compete somehow. Either the one with most converted tiles wins or if they can kill each other. It doesn't have to be Langton's ant specifically, just an algorithm that is as easy to understand.

<comment><USER21> I haven't thought this through, but I think a simple extension which would generate conflict would be to incorporate the ant's last movement in determining the end state of the cell it's currently on. That way, two ants arriving in the same cell from different directions would want different results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Order in chaos. Love it. I have few different patterns for ants on my homepage (implemented in ugly ClojueScript).

</comment><comment> V-2 How about 3D Langton's (or Langtonish) ants? Or more dimensions? :)

<comment><USER23> Need at least one new rule and a new color.

<comment><USER24> You could still do it with two colors if it remembered the previous color as well, and if you didn't allow "keep going straight" or "move back in the direction you came from" as options.

(Imagine the ant as a space-ship, and every time it turns, it also changes its pitch/yaw, so the directions are based on its direction of travel.)

        Current | Previous | Action
        white   | white    | go starboard
        white   | black    | go port
        black   | white    | go down
        black   | black    | go up</comment></comment></comment>


Philz Coffee Raises $15M to Expand Nationwide - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/philz-coffee-funding/

<comment><USER2> I moved from Seattle to San Francisco a couple years ago, asked Yelp for the best coffee and was sent to Philz.

I experienced some culture shock learning that San Francisco's top coffee shop didn't serve espresso. The idea of a coffee shop without an espresso machine had never crossed my mind. I left confused, with a scalding hot pour over, and moved back to Seattle soon afterward.

Blue Bottle and Four Barrel Coffee were both excellent.

<comment><USER3> It's funny you say 'scalding'. Part of why I love Philz is they serve it the perfect temperature every single time. I get a cup in my hand and can start drinking immediately. At Starbucks I need to ask for ice to cool it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised that I haven't seen this opinion expressed in the comments so far, so I'll just say it - I think Philz coffee tastes bad. They can't keep that many different kind of beans all fresh. They tend to overextract the coffee, making it bitter. Their claim-to-fame is coffee-based drinks, like mojitos, which don't really showcase quality coffee.

They get the brand right, but the beans are just not up-to-par. I hesitate to call them third-wave coffee because they don't push whole bean sales (at least here in SF), they don't have multiple brewing methods, and their brewing seems inconsistent.

I think that Blue Bottle is much better positioned to be a Starbucks competitor because of their excellent roasting, quality products besides coffee (e.g. Tcho chocolate, foods), and high-end feel that justifies the higher cost.

<comment><USER5> have you sampled a variety of branches?

<comment><USER4> Yes, four of them

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely HN newsworthy, especially since YC has backed coffee startups.

I personally think Philz is going to give third-wave coffee a run for their money. Definitely as approachable as Starbucks and easily replicable. The problem with third-wave is that the total applicable clientele for a company like Blue Bottle is far and few between. Even after saturating every corner of SF, NYC, LA, Chicago, it's going to be hard for BB to come up with hundreds of millions of revenue and retain quality (Blue Bottle raised $100M in cash). Blue Bottle has a "luxury good" perception.

Philz is unpretentious, reliable, and love in a 600-calorie cup of coffee, cream, and sugar. It's a formula that so far has proven to work in America. Third-wave coffee is excellent, but isn't as accessible as Starbucks. Philz, on the other hand, doesn't attempt to sell the virtues of high-brow single- origin coffee. They, however, make a really good cup of coffee, and reliably do at each location. I definitely believe it is repeatable even at scale because many Philz drinks rely on mint leaves, cream, and sugar--flavors that are the "MSG" of coffee.

User experience is inclusive and welcoming--although some locations are more fun than others (visit the 24th if you haven't and it will become abundantly clear why there are Philz phanatics). I love coffee shops like Four Barrel, the Mill, Saint Frank's--but those shops exude refinement and appear a little out of reach, even if priced similarly to Starbucks. I would hypothesize you could put a Philz in the Midwest and it would do well.

As of right now, every coffee shop compared to Starbucks pales in comparison. Starbucks boasts $70B in market cap. If anyone has a good shot of picking a fight with Starbucks, it just might be Philz.

<comment><USER7> > 600-calorie cup of coffee, cream, and sugar

Yikes you're not selling me on the company with that statement. I don't know, I think third wave coffee houses are doing a pretty good job of training people that sugary, creamy coffees are crap.

In the long run I think that people are trending toward healthy, high quality, authentic experiences in many areas, but especially food. I'm not sure where 600 calorie coffees fit into that.

<comment><USER6> I was just being blunt about the caloric intake :) Starbucks and Philz probably won't advertise their calories. In fact, the barista that I attempted to prod for calorie count pointed to his belly and exclaimed jokingly, "Do I look like I count my calories?" They might not sell to you, but they'll sell to the rest of America that just want something over the top to make a Monday morning better. #fatmeansflavor

Starbucks creamy drinks are also roughly the same amount. And the reason Philz will do well in America is that Americans gravitate towards the creamy and sugary and carby (Anheuser Busch, Nestle, Hershey). They even got sustainable San Franciscans on board! While some Americans care about eating and drinking healthy, most Americans will happily continue ordering a 600-calorie cup of morning joe, contributing to Starbucks' $15B revenue.

American dollars always go to the fat and sugary flavors. While a lot of fine dining artist-chefs will disagree with the data, burgers and fries sell.

<comment><USER7> Ok I'm sold on the idea that Philz has the means to compete against Starbucks in malls across America, but I'm less convinced that third-wave coffee is going to be impacted in its core urban market.

When you said that Philz would give "third-wave coffee a run for their money" did you more mean that you're skeptical that Blue Bottle will be able to take their brand national? I agree with that, that that could be hard. I think their best bet for non-urban areas would probably be to closely follow areas where Whole Foods has made inroads. Regarding expansion to urban areas, I wonder if too much good real estate for third wave coffee places is already taken up by local independents.

From what I've seen SF has surprisingly few third wave coffee shops. In Vancouver there are often several Blue Bottle quality independent coffee shops in each neighbourhood. When I saw that Blue Bottle got funding I wondered how successful they'd be in expanding to areas with well established locals. There's really not that much that they do different from others.

<comment><USER6> Yeah--I think it'll be hard for third-wave coffee shops to scale. The last number I heard about Blue Bottle was that they were making about $20M. That's a drop in the bucket compared to Starbucks' $15B, and Blue Bottle is very well known.

Truth be told, Blue Bottle's coffee and espresso quality has suffered from expansion.

I think big cities contribute to plenty of revenue, but Starbucks has built itself as common as a convenience store. That's really hard to compete, even with third-wave and Philz types. Even Tim Horton's revenue is $3B!

Hit me up next time you're in San Francisco--I don't think you got a very good tour of coffee here :) Aron Tzimas documents latte art around SF on his Instagram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love Philz coffee to death, but I don't understand why this is treated like Silicon Valley start-up news. It's simply a great story of a good coffee shop succeeding and expanding its brand and locations.

<comment><USER9> It's a better business story than the vast majority of startups that come out of the Valley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Its funny how things we taken for granted in third world countries like India are becoming startups here:

In India, you can call up some neighbourhood grocer and he will deliver goods in 5 min. The best approximation for it in US is Instacart In India, you can go to a tailor, give him cloth, ask him to measure you. He will make a custom made shirt in 24 hours to 3 days. Here, its a YC startup Again in India, you go to ANY restaurant, they will give you coffee mixed with milk. Here, it has become a startup. Almost no one in India I know drinks coffee or tea without milk.

Different economics I guess

<comment><USER11> Yes that's mainly possible because there's a massive imbalance between the poor and the rich i.e. there's barely a middle class unlike what we have in the US (for now). I'm also going to guess that manufacturing is almost non- existent as well for that to happen

I'm not totally sure what this has to do with Philz Coffee though

<comment><USER12> The Indian middle class was estimated to be 250 million people in 2007, by McKinsey & Company.

Source: [http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/In_the_news/Next_big_sp...](http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/In_the_news/Next_big_spenders_Indian_middle_class)

<comment><USER11> What's your point? That's only 22% of the population. In the US the middle class forms about 60% of the population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They have bunch of blends to choose from, and serve carefully-made single-drip "Third-wave" coffees. The order process is a bit chaotic, which makes the whole thing seem nice and quaint. Plus, they do little things like aerate the coffee and leave the right room for milk and sugar.

Personally, I'd prefer a nice single-origin coffee to their blends, but it definitely beats a Starbucks.

This isn't the first time Philz has received VC; according to Wikipedia, Summit invested in 2013.

</comment><comment><USER14> Philz is the only shop to offer Turkish coffee. This is one of the oldest and most delicious coffee traditions completely ignored by mainstream US coffee drinkers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Philz is my defacto office as well. I would invest in Philz and have been wondering about their growth plans (now we know!). Philz found a formula that creates high quality coffee in a repeatable way. Been expecting them to grow quite a bit over the next few years.

<comment><USER16> Well, they do make a decent cup of coffee, but I would wager that what made them special (for me) will be tougher to pull off at scale. Every time I walked into the Philz on the way to the office, the (same) guy behind the counter (a) remembered me, and (b) asked me what I didn't like about my last coffee.

And then, using some sort of caffeine-science, he managed to figure out the right combination of blend, milk, and sugar to produce something truly wonderful.

Doing that at scale will be tough. Do-able with technology to be sure, but the human element made it very special.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the coffee at philz, but the pour over coffee is too damn strong! they need to grind it more coursely or at least have the option to

<comment><USER18> you could always go for a darker roast, which generally has less caffeine :)

<comment><USER8> Unless he's talking about flavor, in which case a lighter roast would be better, albeit more caffeinated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cringe, is my only thought

</comment><comment><USER20> A bit odd to see a coffee shop's funding on TC. I guess because its a valley company? A tech scene favorite? Based on the article it seems the draw is that they add milk and sugar for you? Is the coffee that bad that you have to drowned out the taste with fluff.

<comment><USER21> A couple years ago, Dunkin Donuts switched to their... barista? adding the cream/sugar for you. You just said either yes or no, and they've figured out the apparently right amount for the general populace (which is a little sweet for me but not as sweet as you'd expect from a donut shop).

They figured that replacing the station with all the add-ins was a faster and better experience for customer and employee. Can't disagree, since I went to Dunkin for the convenience. I don't know how big the market is for coffee with personal attention (the taste snobs seem to just make their own), but perhaps Philz is laying down the tracks for all sorts of motherly-service-as-a-product to bank the SF zeitgeist.

Hey, whatever happened to that grilled cheese startup?

<comment><USER22> Grilled cheese startup? Now I'm interested.

<comment><USER23> melt

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> it's on HN because Philz is basically a math problem: mint mojito = worldwide domination. QED.</comment>


Asus drops quad-core Tegra 3 in favor of dual-core S4 in new Transformer tablet - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/119947-asus-drops-quad-core-tegra-3-in-favor-of-dual-core-s4-in-new-transformer-tablet

<comment><USER2> I understand very well that my feeling is not (completely) rational - but for me this has another benefit:

Having a Tegra2 based phone and being interested in the latest and greatest Android experience is a .. pain. Counting on NVidia was already annoying for my desktop and Linux, but - well - I kind of am stuck there between a rock and a hard place if I want to play the occasional game.

On a phone? Or tablet? Thank god for alternatives and I'll vote with my wallet. No Tegra* for me until NVidia understands that a driver/documentation for their piece of silicone cannot be treated as secret sauce - and neglected

<comment><USER3> Qualcomm is the same as Nvidia. If you want documented chip, there is only TI OMAP or Samsung Exynos (partially documented).

Snapdragon or Tegra are both the same way.

Also I'm wondering, why people expect anything open based on ARM platform. For ARM, even the platform programmer's manuals are not freely available. On the other hand, Intel for example, was always publishing documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We will remember this day as we tell over to our children about innovation in this peirod. The latest and greatest technology becomes obsolete the same day it is announced.

To further prove my point. Yesterday, HTC announced a phone running the latest and greatest Tegra 3. Later that afternoon S4 was announced.

<comment><USER5> That phone (the One X) will ship in a S4-powered model here in the US; the official reason seems to be compatibility with Qualcomm's LTE baseband. The move perplexes me a bit, traditionally HTC has been very loyal to Qualcomm. Unless they felt the need to claim the quad-core bullet point, I'm not sure why they would bother with a totally different SoC vs. the rest of their product line.

<comment><USER6> > Unless they felt the need to claim the quad-core bullet point

There you go.

<comment><USER5> Didn't seem to matter to them when nVidia beat Qualcomm out the door with a dual-core chip last year. Plus, they only get to claim the bullet point for Europe; presuming AT&T is requiring LTE, their choices are:

a) Wait for a quad-core Krait. Given HTC's close relationship with Qualcomm, they likely know it won't be for a while

b) Wait for a Tegra-compatible LTE chip, which hasn't been proven in the market yet. Still late to market, and with parts of questionable integrity.

c) Fall back on the dual-core chip and ship now. Lose a bullet point in the US market, but actually be on the market.

<comment><USER6> > Didn't seem to matter to them when nVidia beat Qualcomm out the door with a > dual-core chip last year.

When the Tegra 2 showed up, it was not generally considered suitable for phones; the one found in a few phones is a slightly different model to the original. Also, the Tegra 2 was quite flawed; it lacked NEON, in particular, hurting software compatibility.

It's also possible that supplies of the S4 are restricted; it's a 28nm part, and TSMC's rollout of their 28nm process hasn't gone as smoothly as they might like. The Tegra 3 is 40nm, which is now a mainstream process.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An analysis of the airfare prediction app Hopper - <AUTHOR> https://www.underglass.io/read/Hopper <comment><USER2> I've used Hopper for a while, including booking tickets through the app when the price was advantageous.

A memorable failure was when I was trying to book travel to Charleston, SC for the eclipse last year. Ticket prices were very high, and Hopper kept telling me to hold out, they would soon drop. They never did, of course--and I didn't really expect them to.

It was a good illustration of the shortcomings of machine learning. If a situation is not in the training data, the system is clueless. Hopper had no idea there was a rare external factor distorting the market, and apparently there was no way to tell it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cheap fare hacks are a game of walls and ladders. If a hack is really good, it spreads wide and fast, and airlines block it.</comment>


Groovy – An Open Source Success Story - <AUTHOR> https://www.sitepoint.com/groovy-open-source-success-story/ <comment><USER2> I have had the opportunity to work with Groovy quite a bit and I will share a few of my thoughts on things that work well with the language and things that are a bit questionable.

Works well:

Extensible type checking. Groovy can do quite a bit of things with type checking and you can turn it into "pretty much Java" if you need to and even take it a step further and enforce even stricter typing than Java with relative ease

Closures. The Groovy built in closures are quite extensive and allow you to build some really beautifully expressive pieces of code that would be 5 to 10 times longer in Java. The implementation lends itself well to a functional approach.

Questionable:

Not defining a variable with a type or the def keyword creates a variable in the global scope, just like JavaScript. This creates problems, as you can imagine. One of the more infamous bugs we ran into was when someone had named a variable "id" in the global scope of a script and the identifier of its parent, the script runner, was modified. Brought the whole runner down.

Groovy doesn't respect privacy. You can literally declare something as private variable in a Java or Groovy class and Groovy will happily access it with no qualms. The only thing that private helps you for is preventing the variable from showing up in a decent IDE's autocomplete alongside your getters and setters

<comment><USER3> > code that would be 5 to 10 times longer in Java

I wonder if that's Java 8 with its lambdas? Most sites just use Apache Groovy for the scripty dynamically-typed stuff only (e.g. testing, build config, grails MOP) and leave the statically-typed stuff for Java or some other JVM language. Of course, those variables in global scope will still be a problem.

<comment><USER2> I was speaking specifically to Java 7 but can offer the Java 8 perspective as well. Java 8 with lambdas makes it better - but you still have to bake your own on top of the system in a lot of cases. The real joy of Groovy is having the powerful manipulation functions just there for you without any external library.

A good analogy would be anonymous functions in Vanilla JS being like Java 8 lambdas vs the expressive power the baked in goodness Lodash offers being like what Groovy closures supplement to the JVM environment. You don't always need it, but the general purpose tooling makes your life a lot easier in certain specific cases.

With that being said in our use case Groovy was very pointed - serving a specific, directed purpose in a monitored environment. When developers were left to their own devices to design general scripting and tooling that they were comfortable with, nearly everyone chose Python and to a lesser extent Ruby.

I think Groovy is great to create some JVM specific glue and support for an enterprise system - but as a general purpose language it still has a long way to go. As an example, try and make a tool in Groovy for interacting with a REST API and compare your effort for doing so to Python - One of these is significantly less painful than the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> it probably has the open source success as the only thing going for it, probably the ugliest non-intuitive language I've ever come across</comment>


Convert a Ripe.net probe into an OpenWRT router - <AUTHOR> https://vox.space/blog/69/from-a-ripenet-probe-to-openwrt-router <comment><USER2> I don't get it. Author downloadeds package and installs on hardware. Author saved $20 by using ripe atlas probe. The end.

I'm going to write a database or a CMS.</comment>


Super smart "Gen-Y"/HR webapp: Rypple - <AUTHOR> http://www.rypple.com/index.shtml

<comment><USER2> Why are you posting this when I can't even sign up to try it out? It looks good, but "We will send you an email when the beta program starts." = FAIL.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Cuz it's worth looking at!

It's a "scoop", man! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> didn't try it out, but great idea and your video demo is really good. Site is well laid out. Well explained,well done. Best of luck you get a star!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but it's not my company. I found it via this blog post: cussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/12/how_to_be_a_21st_century_capit.html</comment></comment>


Mint.com for mobile phones: Chill.ly - <AUTHOR> http://chill.ly/

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no such thing as a good wireless provider - we can only choose the best of many terrible options.

This fact is clearly evidenced by the structure of cell phone plans and billing systems. The truth is that they're both designed to confuse us. We either end up paying penalties that we don't know how to avoid, or we over- spend on plans we don't need.

It's time for this madness to stop.

We're building an app that will stop the penalties, help you understand your bill, and get you a plan that actually makes sense. Using the magic of technology, you will be equipped to engage the wireless providers on equal footing. The cartelco will tremble before you, because you will be empowered with the insight you need to be treated fairly.

There are two ways you can help us right now, and I hope you will because we need all the help we can get.

First of all, we're interested in hearing from you so that we can learn about your horror stories. What frustrates you the most about your bills, your plan, or your provider? Contact us at @chilllyapp if you'd like to talk.

Also, if you know anyone getting screwed by their cell phone bills, let them know about us.

Stay strong, friends. We are hard at work so you never get burned again.

Best,

The Chill.ly Team @chilllyapp</comment>


How I launched a profitable minimally viable product in 3 hours - <AUTHOR> http://blog.amirkhella.com/2010/09/21/the-story-of-keynotopia-how-i-launched-a-profitable-product-in-3-hours/ <comment><USER2> I was really looking forward to learning how the product was built, how the payment processor was set up so quickly, the tools used, and how he was able to build the product so fast.

Most of the post was actually about dealing with the uncertainties of launching a product before you're comfortable with it and being pleasantly surprised by the results.

There's very little information on the process of how Amir launched it in three hours except using paypal and buying a $35 theme from themeforest - I'd like to hear more about this in a feature post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. If enough folks want to dig into this much detail, I'd be happy to put together an in-depth write-up.

<comment><USER3> You'd be surprised how often nuts&bolts issues stop people from starting. I was mildly mystified by "Set up website, collect money, deliver software" prior to starting, too. Turns out it is trivial, but that was not obvious prior to doing it. (Relatedly: taxes, bookkeeping, accounting, and government regulation were all walks in the park. Marketing is hard. Who knew?)

<comment><USER4> This has always been my impression. But when I've actually looked for resources on how to get those nuts & bolts set up, for someone who knows nothing about them, it's been non-obvious.

You wouldn't by any chance know of some resources related to getting over the initial hump of getting paid for software/services, would you?

<comment><USER5> Actually, I've been trying to write a little bit about this here: [http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/category/back-office- expo...](http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/category/back-office-exposed/)

HTH!

<comment><USER4> Thanks! That is indeed useful...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds more like "How I built, refined, and publicized a free trial of my product for months, then released the paid version in 3 hours."

<comment><USER7> Which is also a pretty effective business model!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks pretty similar to the Four Hour Work Week muse model touted by Tim Ferris and co. Attractive product page (Wordpress theme), informational product (software templates), outsourced commerce pipeline (e-junkie). Only thing is that he didn't need to use paid ads to drive traffic, since he led with a blog post that led to subscriptions, which meant he already had a customer base. Cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> You seem to be referring to the web site as the "minimally viable product" not including the actual product that you're selling on the site.

You don't mention how long it took to actually build the templates that you're selling.

Three hours is still impressive and inspiring, but I imagine there was a lot more work leading up to that point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct- The product itself has been created over time, as a byproduct of my day job. But it wasn't a product until I put together that MVP website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> but did it only last for 30 minutes? Error 500 - Internal server error

An internal server error has occured! Please try again later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that - 1and1 is totally unreliable as a host, and is collapsing under the HN effect.

Reload it a couple of times and it should work.

<comment><USER11> If a server cannot handle the "HN effect", you should probably host nothing there. Unless of course it's not only the server's fault ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's probably another lesson I should add to the post: Never use 1and1 as your host.

<comment><USER12> WP SuperCache?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just got it installed and activated, and deactivated most plug-ins on the blog and website. Hopefully that will solve it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The blog post says nothing about _how_ you launched your product in 3 hours.

Slightly misleading, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER14> You have an error on your link building website:

 _We never buy links or use links farms. We find relevant, diverse links and build them nauturally._

nauturally -> naturally

</comment><comment><USER15> How much time was spent working on the project afterwards though? I built an app "in a week" (<http://oneweekapp.com/>) which went on to generate a decent passive income for me, but since then I've spent far far more than a week on it.

I'd be really curious to know more details, specifically on the payment end (doesn't that take more than 3 hours by itself to set up?).

<comment><USER16> The app looks cool. Looks like you deserve more than 3 stars (as of 2010-09-21)

<comment><USER15> Thanks, it's mainly cause it crashes a lot. The update I just submitted should fix a lot of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Can someone post a text summary or the post in its entirety? I found the site url on google, but couldn't cache it from before the site went down.

<comment><USER17> Coral cache is working: [http://blog.amirkhella.com.nyud.net/2010/09/21/the- story-of-...](http://blog.amirkhella.com.nyud.net/2010/09/21/the-story-of- keynotopia-how-i-launched-a-profitable-product-in-3-hours/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Working on creating a static HTML file for the post

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can you comment on the impact the affiliate program has had on your sales?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Help me put together a useful in-depth follow-up post by leaving a reply to this comment with a couple of questions that you'd like me to answer.

<comment><USER5> I'd love to write a blog post about this, but you don't have any contact info on your profile or site. You can contact via me email (it's on my profile) if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> have you tried pricing variations ? You might be leaving money on the table if there's such an incredible demand.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very good point. I had some pricing variations in the beginning and the one I have now is at the sweet spot.

One of the most interesting moves was to add a company license (a friend suggested it and it took less than 10 minutes to add it. It sold several copies to date.

I am planning an update that should position the product at the right value/price point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's a nice looking site for a $35 template. Any chance you're willing to share where it's from?

<comment><AUTHOR> The theme is called inFocus. I purchased it from ThemeForest.net

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> what plugin are you using to handle ejunkie requests inside of wordpress? does ejunkie manage sales through paypal and google checkout? do they provide good tracking?

I am curious how viable ejunkie + wordpress are as a basic and simple ecommerce platform

<comment><AUTHOR> No plugin. Just their HTML script for each shopping cart item that I embed in product pages.

They manage sales through PP and GC, and they even hold delivery on eCheck payments until they are cleared.

I think eJunkie + Wordpress make a great duo for eCommerce platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are you still growing the product and company, and yes, as shazow says, sounds like you put a lot more than 3 hours into it... Don't take this the wrong way but are you baiting us because your traffic to Keynotopia is falling?

</comment><comment><USER23> Any quick SEO tips?

</comment><comment><USER24> Thanks man, I know what this is like</comment>


_why's interview with DHH was 15 years ago this week - <AUTHOR> http://www.pastrubies.com/ <comment><USER2> Whatever happened with _why?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure you know much of this, but essentially:

\- August 2009, he died. (i.e. removed his entire estate and entity from the web after being doxxed) \- He reappeared for one day in 2013, to release a 100 page document on a briefly live printer queue called "CLOSURE" (and a few other potentially unrelated posts such as youtube videos), which can be found here: [https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE](https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE) \- His estate, preserved as much as it can be, is here: [https://viewsourcecode.org/why/](https://viewsourcecode.org/why/) \- A few months after CLOSURE was released, Steve Klabnik gave a talk on it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah - forgot Hackernews formatting. Sorry about that.</comment></comment></comment>


Meetup's great, simple user-test setup  - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2008/12/13/meetups-dead-simple.html

<comment><AUTHOR> And here is the founders presentation of their method at slideshare <http://www.slideshare.net/glusman/lean-usability>

This is the way to test your product. Not 5USD Beer tests or lengthy and expensive usability report.

There is only one test and that is the real test.</comment>


Alarm clocks wake me angry, lightlywake.me - <AUTHOR> http://lightlywake.me/

<comment><USER2> Eh, I seriously wouldn't rely on a website to wake me up. Computer pukes. Power outage. Etc. I'll stick with my trusty cell phone which will stay powered up even through a power outage. BTW, my song is "I got you babe" by Sonny and Cher. +1 for anyone who get's the joke. ;)

<comment><USER3> Whoa, Groundhog Day?

<comment><USER2> +1 ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Waking up angry is exactly what I want.. at least I'll wake up that way.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a solution in search of a problem

\- Get an alarm clock that plays cds

\- Burn/insert cd

\- All set! Plus you aren't wasting power by leaving your computer on all night

PS: I recommend Massive Attack - Future Proof. The slow start is pretty much perfect.

<comment><USER6> my laptops and various other machines are on 24/7 anyway. Why should I buy more hardware and burn...cds?

The idea of burning cds makes me think of my adolescence. Seems rather primitive, unnecessary and inconvenient.

This is pretty much all I want out of an alarm, not that I'd pay for this since I could hack up the js myself.

<comment><USER7> Mine too! I can't fathom burning CDs.

Heck, when you've got 2 4U servers with 16 disks each and ~6 other machines under your desk for a total of ~60 disks, whats the harm of having a desktop machine running this?

<comment><USER5> Are they in your bedroom?

FWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I missing something, or does this just redirect you to your video when it's time for the alarm to go off?

Some people may prefer it to an alarm sound, but it's hardly a new idea.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been using Awaken for OS X, similar... good idea to be web based though

<http://embraceware.com/awaken/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Am I mistaken in assuming this is based on your local servers timezone? I set a test alarm and it didn't go off.

<comment><USER8> No, it's based on your local time, although it does seem to be a bit buggy.

<comment><USER7> You're right. My 3rd attempt at my timezone triggered my video...

<comment><USER8> I was wrong, it's just actually bugged, just _really_ bad UI.

When you click the "Lightly wake me" button it disables the forms, but I didn't actually notice. So I guess the time it didn't work for me I had clicked the button an even number of times, thus un-setting the alarm.

Another nasty bit of UI - you can't use tab to move from hour to minute, minute to AM/PM, or AM/PM to the "Lightly wake me" button.

Overall: a very simple and already-thought of idea, fairly badly implemented. Sorry to be so blunt, whoever created this.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow, now that is embarassing in firefox. all fixed(?) sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't it have to start out lightly to be considered "lightly"wake.me? I was hoping the site would start with a low volume and slowly become louder over time.

</comment><comment><USER11> `echo "DISPLAY=:0 mplayer whatever" | at 8:00`

</comment><comment><USER12> Support for Grooveshark?</comment>


The Chinese Government Likely Borrowed More than the US in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/shock-the-chinese-government-likely-borrowed-more-than-the-us-in-2017/ <comment><USER2> China is still a developing nation.

That means that China can invest in infrastructure (roads, trains, airports, education) which have high real return making the increase in debt much less of a problem. This is also the reason why China has grown persistently 7-10% over the past two decades compared to USA which have grown 2-3% in the same period.

Per person China's GDP is less than a fifth of the US hinting that this still has some way to go.

<comment><USER3> Using per person GDP when discussing China is a cruel joke. Like most usages of per person GDP in any country, it glosses over regional disparities and (more importantly) economic equality measures like Gini coefficient.

Taking Gini coefficient into consideration, China still has a long way to go.

<comment><USER4> The point was that even based on GDP per capita, China still has a long way to go.

<comment><USER5> But the scale of China population is so that if they double their GDP per capita, they will have an upper and middle class population bigger than most if not all individual countries in the world (EDIT: except India).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ITT: Nobody knows what they're talking about.

People need to stop assuming all governments work identically and that numbers are comparable in any way. In China local governments COLLECTS NO TAXES, thus they fund all their expenditures by debt. In 2 years there's going to be widespread tax reform and all this debt will be wiped away.

<comment><USER7> Who lends money to a local government which has no revenue?

<comment><USER8> They make money by selling land, and they also get a smallish cut of the VAT (replacing business taxes they used to get). They also outsource their debt spending to locally controlled SOEs who theoretically should be able to make money by being an state-owned enterprise.

Also, they make the state-owned banks lend to them regardless, at a low interest rate since there is an implicit garauntee they won't default.

It isn't really sustainable. It is only a matter of time before China introduces a property tax to fund local governments.

<comment><USER9> According to Wikipedia local government collects taxes, including property tax:

[https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/地方税](https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/地方税)

<comment><USER8> ATM, property taxes only have limited rollout in Chongqing and Shanghai on second properties. See [https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-03-08/don- t-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-03-08/don-t-bet-your- house-on-china-s-property-tax-just-yet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And this is the deficit we know about. In reality it could be much larger, something like 1000% of GDP.

The situation is the same with China's military budget. In reality it's probably 2x or 3x larger than the official numbers we have.

<comment><USER11> China's GDP is probably 10% of what they reported.

<comment><USER12> No, it seems to be the other way around. China's GDP figures are definitely false but likely to be inflated, not suppressed.

<comment><USER13> Can you explain why that is for the ignorant ones like me?

<comment><USER14> Because the statistics are produced by local apparatchiks, and the local apparatchiks all want their jurisdiction to look like it's breaking records so they can get promoted and become something bigger than a local apparatchik. And the central government wants to look successful too, so nobody there has any interest in pushing back. High numbers mean everybody in the system wins, while low numbers profit nobody, so the numbers come out high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In economic terms, how is this sustainable?

<comment><USER16> Endure the bubble, until you can conquer Australia and relieve the pressure

<comment><USER17> Why conquer when you can invest? They're investing. It's working. We're happy to have chinese investment in all spaces, ag, and mining, we buy the goods and we sell the dairy produce.

The real threat is Tasmania: haven't you seen the wargames maps? We need those US-Chinese troops to fight back against the daemon armies from cradle mountain.

<comment><USER16> Investment doesn't buy you all the 'Living Space' you may want

<comment><USER17> I've taken the train across china from Hangzhou to Beijing and there is no lack of living space, or empty housing from the speculative bubble. The threat of south-irian is basically the classic yellow-peril threat model.

Its a really bad argument. As long as we are happy to export tertiary education and then proffer immigration channels, there is no basis to argue the Chinese polity wants to invade: it can get people here legally, for good benefit both sides.

Pleae, don't feed the racist troll. The chinese are not swamping us and they cannot cause earthquakes by jumping up and down at the same time.

<comment><USER14> _> I've taken the train across china from Hangzhou to Beijing and there is no lack of living space, or empty housing from the speculative bubble._

The point of the parent's reference isn't to a lack of actual space, it's to Germany's complaint in the 1930s of not having enough _Lebensraum_ : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum)

... which was similarly spurious -- the Germans had plenty of room for their population too. _Lebensraum_ wasn't about actual space, it was about imperalism, about the Germans feeling strong enough to grab territory from their neighbors just because they could. One could be forgiven for looking at China's military expansionism in the South China Sea, for instance, and thinking the Chinese polity is feeling the same way.

<comment><USER17> Specious though the south china sea argument feels to us, Its entirely consistent with a long held vision of China and its sphere of influence. What rankles, is the extent to which the opposition to it, the open-seas sailing policy, is being taken by actors (the US, Australia) who chose otherwise to disregard mediation and international law in matters of their own spheres of influence: East Timor for instance. This is not whataboutism, its directly relevant, contradictory behaviour. The Chinese have a long standing stated claim to the spratleys (which btw, I think is entirely bogus) but in no sense simply emerged into a state of claiming them in recent times. The laws being used to push back, are entirely a product of the post-WWII polity, were an attempt to construct a legal mechanism to mediate between states, which is being (forcefully) applied here by some states, who choose to disregard the same legal basis when applied to cases of their own.

Lebensraum was a manufactured need of political expediency and an explicitly expansionist act. The South China Sea is not lebensraum, its open-fishing rights, and over-flight and sailing rights, and mineral rights. It's also a vision of a defensive ring.

You know, that domino theory we used to be sold about chinese expansionist policy in S.E. Asia? its being played in reverse: they _need_ this barrier, because we are trying to re-apply opium war logic to opening chinese capital investment markets, and land in China...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So who's buying all that debt?

<comment><USER19> What makes you think that the debt has to be bought?

<comment><USER20> Government debt, much like large corporate debt, almost always takes the form of bond issues. By definition, to raise debt capital via a bond issue someone needs to buy those bonds. Buying bonds is buying debt. Thus, governments cannot raise money through debt issues if people are unwilling to buy the debt.

<comment><USER21> Exactly.

And this is why credit ratings matter. Because for people to buy the bonds the credit rating needs to be high to keep the yield (interest) low.

If a country receives a less-than-stellar credit rating, the only way they can entice people to buy their bonds is by offering higher yield (interest rate) which means they have to pay back more.

<comment><USER22> In July 2012 the credit rating for many Euro countries was low and the borrowing costs very high.

Mario Draghi, the President of the Central European Bank (who can emit so many Euros as they wish with typing something in a computer) made a statement (1) that he will defend the Euro.

The next day the debt problem was solved.

'The markets' know that governments that emit debt in their own currency, are not depending of ratings or people buying bonds because they control the currency.

The European case is complicated because the Euro is kind of a foreign currency for the Euroarea, but the China case is obvious.

(1). [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9428894/...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9428894/Debt- crisis-Mario-Draghi-pledges-to-do-whatever-it-takes-to-save-euro.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> External debt is just 14% [http://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt- clock.html](http://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html)

<comment><USER24> This is what all the China fear mongers don't get. China has in reality zero external debt when you consider their real, income-producing over seas investment. China's extraordinary growth is not being financed by overseas investors. (Just the opposite, China itself is aggressively investing over seas.) All of this is being financed by the Chinese people themselves. No other country in the world had been able to so successfully boot strap their own economy with so little help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Almost nobody here is interpreting this correctly. Debt gets sold, and buyers are signaling that they believe they will be repaid in an adequate manner (stable government, currency) and that maintaining reserves to the currency of that nation is desirable.

This is exactly what you expect to see happen as China further eclipses the US as the world's largest economy and the renminbi supplants the dollars as the choice of reserve currency.

</comment><comment><USER26> China, like all other indebted nations, will seem very stable and then it will collapse in a fury.

Could happen in a year or 10 years, it's very hard to predict these things.

China's solution has always been to growth itself out of problems.

At some point, that becomes impossible.

<comment><USER27> It is not the case that nations with lots of debt always collapse. EG, since inception the US has always had debt at the Federal level, except when Andrew Jackson paid it off, which was economically disastrous and plunged the country into a 6 year long depression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> US is exporting $500 billion currency to China; And China is investing that money back in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Treasury_securit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Treasury_security) resulting in $1,181 billion debt to USA

<comment><USER8> If you include HK and Taiwan, they own a whopping $1500 billion in US debt via treasuries. But these are just savings instruments for them, a way to deal with excess foreign reserves without messing with their own exchange rates. It isn't like the USA is begging them to buy treasuries, more like treasuries are provided as a service that makes the dollar so useful in trade.

The yuan does not provide the same service to other countries, nor could it since it isn't fully convertible anyways.

<comment><USER28> $1,500 trillion? Did you mean to say $15 trillion, or am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER8> Typo-fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The bigger debt wins, don't you know?

</comment><comment><USER30> China is growing faster than the US, and it is has an economy that is already at the same size, so it is quite natural that they need to borrow more.

</comment><comment><USER31> It it like using LOC towards judging the complexity of a code base :

"God 100K ! your code must be filled with so much boiler plate !"

\- During the Second World War Britain / US went deep in the red to fund their survival, I wonder if anyone

though "We cannot afford to go into debt to defeat the Nazis !".

\- Debt and deficit by itself is neutral - being a creditor is not inherently a good thing just like being

a debtor is not inherently a bad thing.

\- If you look at the list of countries that have the lowest debt / Gdp ratios you will find its mostly low income, low productively countries, the question is not "damn how do they not need credit !" but "why are creditors not willing provide credit to these countries".

\- A country with high deficit is also a country with either high FDI or high rate of internal investment, its

just doesn't sell as good a headline to say that though.

\- For China is makes sense since they are quickly ageing, so the current cohort of working age people will

have high savings to draw down from at old age, same for the US / Japan / EU.

\- The big question is what does the saving and investment get you ? Is it to fund foreign wars like Vietnam during Nixon, real estate speculation, education for the next generation ?

\- The world is awash with credit and savings due to rise in income across all of humanity, driving down interest rate, its a good time to be a debtor and a awful time to a creditor (only generally, if you are a creditor/debtor in the payday loan sector then the inverse applies ).

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't know if this is true anymore, but isn't Chinese private borrowing staggeringly low? And hasn't American private borrowing jumped up again after the crash?

Looking at public numbers by themselves does not tell much of a story.</comment>


Hungary fines Booking.com operator 6.1M pounds for unfair practices - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketscreener.com/BOOKING-HOLDINGS-INC-41613106/news/Booking-Hungary-fines-Booking-com-operator-6-1-million-pounds-for-unfair-practices-30489010/ <comment><USER2> > Everything on our website, including how we display prices and payment > policies as well as the availability and popularity of specific properties, > among other features relevant to the customer booking experience, is > intended to help customers

Is this a joke? The last time I looked at their site I had a dozen different types of modals saying ONE ROOM LEFT!! ALMOST OVER!!!, large-text prices with fees and taxes (30-50%+) hidden, continuous streams of alert boxes on the bottom saying "x just booked the room you were looking at! Only 3 left!"

This has been done for years[0][1][2]

[0] [https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com- manipula...](https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipulation)

[1] [https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com- dece...](https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-deceives- clients-5dc9e9485f32)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152439)

<comment><USER3> I've mentioned this before, but I worked at a competitor to booking.com which had similar kinds of notices.

While I can't speak to booking.com's implementation - the code we were running was actually legitimately implementing these things based on actual data (views/bookings/inventory).

One person got particularly angry that we showed a "last room" tag for a hotel, and then when calling the hotel was told there were plenty of rooms available - and cheaper rooms, too. In that particular case it turns out that hotel was restricting the availability of rooms/rates to us, but not disclosing that.

As for the fees+taxes thing... that's always been a personal annoyance. I forget all the details, but it's very much a market specific things whether it's better to hide/show taxes/fees/etc.

Large portions of people from the US just assume that they are not included in prices, and compare based on that assuming it'll be some percentage higher when actually paying. Showing an all-in price gets you skipped over/ignored for being too expensive.

<comment><USER4> > hotel was restricting the availability of rooms/rates to us, but not > disclosing that.

not disclosing to you, perhaps, but well known practice across all hotels. clearly instigated by one of the first online hotel room marketplace sites. "just feed us 3 rooms at a time ... we'll promote them as running out ... wink wink". as a competitor to booking.com you should have known about this practice.

you're going through some contortions to justify vile practices on behalf of the online booking agents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the anger.

1\. Booking has the best hotel prices. Much better then, lets say google

2\. They always honoured their free cancellation policy when I used it.

3\. With Corona they also accepted a cancellation beyond cancellation date

Which site is better than Booking?

</comment><comment><USER6> Booking.com will have no bookings in Hungary or most of the world for a while. Makes more sense to close shop in Hungary than payout that fine.

Booking.com should be in survival mode like every player in the travel/transportation ecosystem

<comment><USER7> they've already been fined. They are a EU company based in Amsterdam so there's no getting away from it simply by closing shop in the country where they got fined...</comment></comment>


Play along with NSA: The RAFTER unintentional radio emissions how-to - <AUTHOR> http://phasenoise.livejournal.com/4919.html <comment><USER2> Then again, direct sampling SDR don't have an LO to leak, but do have a stable clock. There are some power supplies and digital systems with spread spectrum clocks. No reason one could not use a spread spectrum ADC clock, heavily over sampled of course, then average the samples where needed. There are some ADC they randomize the data bus for EMC.

Do they still have vans in the UK that driving around looking for un-taxed TV?

<comment><USER3> >Do they still have vans in the UK that driving around looking for un-taxed TV?

Yes, well sorta if you say you don't own a TV you'll get an inspection sometime within a period of 1-2 years. The problem in the UK now is that if you have anything with the BBC player on it you have to pay the TV license also. IIRC they also changed the rules regarding TV and now every screen above a certain size is considered a TV because a lot of people were buying flat screens that don't have a tuner installed or removing the tuner to not have to pay the license. For anyone who wonders the cost of the license is 145£ a year that's more than some low cost TV's would go on sales like Boxing Day.

<comment><USER4> You're wrong about when you have to pay the TV license. Currently the law states that you have to pay if you watch any streamed live TV (regardless of whether it is from the BBC, Sky or another TV provider). Having equipment capable of watching live TV does not automatically incur the license fee.

The law is changing in September, such that you will also be required to pay it if you use iPlayer - however, just having a system that can use iPlayer does not mean you have to pay it - it will be payable only if you use it to watch either live or catch-up TV on iPlayer (other catch-up applications such as ITV's or Channel 5's are not included in this). For some reason, the BBC has decided that either adding a login system or monitoring IP addresses that connect to iPlayer is not the way to go and their official line is that they will continue to monitor usage in the same way as they currently do.

There are many long arguments about whether the TV license vans even exist or if they use radio emissions from devices to monitor what you're watching - some contend that flat screen TVs do not produce sufficient emissions, but there is research that says otherwise.

<comment><USER5> > For some reason, the BBC has decided that either adding a login system or > monitoring IP addresses that connect to iPlayer is not the way to go and > their official line is that they will continue to monitor usage in the same > way as they currently do.

Because it is completely impractical.

TV licenses are per property, not per person, so all that would happen is that people would register accounts at a friend's property and keep streaming.

IPs aren't tied to specific subscribers, and giving out a database of IPs to subscriber addresses would be a huge breach of privacy (as advertisers can use it also).

Plus, frankly, the majority of people pay for their TV licenses and this system would just frustrate legal owners. You'd be deploying a system that may impact less than 5% of viewers, doubt it would even pay for itself.

<comment><USER6> Has the snoopers charter gone through yet? Once ISPs are forced to store usage logs it is only a matter of time before TV licensing start attempting to get hold of logs for enforcement purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is a very interesting topic because almost all electronics devices have similar emissions , see [http://www.cvel.clemson.edu/pdf/ED_Detection_2008.pdf](http://www.cvel.clemson.edu/pdf/ED_Detection_2008.pdf)

Someday thieves will use these techniques to locate who in a dark alley has the latest iPhone.

<comment><USER8> Fortunately, someday sooner, iPhones will become effectively useless to thieves.

As a victim of an iPhone theft - it was literally ripped out of my hand on a very public boulevard - I was grateful to be able to remotely wipe it within hours. I am even more grateful now that it will require a passcode within 12 hours if it doesn't get a touchID, and I really look forward to the day that "wipe and make unable to be re-authorized except by taking it to an Apple store, and also mark this phone as stolen" will be built in to "find my iPhone".

Since the phone hardware will only run software signed by Apple's private key, Apple can make a stolen phone effectively unusable. You need to have a key to put it in recovery mode, and even with signed software the hardware ID won't change, so the only signed code could be code that will check the hardware during the authorization process (I think this is already happening for anti- counterfeiting purposes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This cat-and-mouse game has been going on for a long time, even outside of spycraft.

E.g. radar detectors are illegal in several states, so of course there have been devices sold to law enforcement to allow them to detect these illegal radar detectors. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_detector_detector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_detector_detector)

That's all probably moot now. I think law enforcement has moved mostly to using lasers, which are much more difficult to detect.

<comment><USER10> > This form of "electronic warfare" cuts both ways and since detector- > detectors use a similar superheterodyne receiver, many early "stealth" radar > detectors were equipped with a radar-detector-detector-detector circuit, > which shuts down the main radar receiver when the detector-detector's signal > is detected, thus preventing detection by such equipment.

TIL there exist radar detector detector detectors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That Spycatcher book sounds interesting but looks intimidating. Can someone comment on its style and for-leisure readability?

<comment><USER12> It's interesting book and easy to read.

Wright clearly had chip on his shoulder and it shows, but all facts in the book seem to be correct.

It became bestseller trough Streisand effect. UK tried to ban it's publication in Australia and it was forbidden in England. British newspapers were given gag orders.

<comment><USER13> As I recall he was a bit of a conspiracy type as well with his 5th man theory, very Angleton. So yes the book is interesting but bear in mind the agenda as well

<comment><USER12> Right or wrong, his suspicion of Hollis was not crazy.

Was Roger Hollis a British patriot or Soviet spy? IWP panel uses argument mapping to investigate April 21, 2015 [http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/detail/was-roger- hollis...](http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/detail/was-roger-hollis-a- british-patriot-or-soviet-spy)

[http://www.iwp.edu/docLib/20150417_ReportandChronologyHollis...](http://www.iwp.edu/docLib/20150417_ReportandChronologyHollis.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>