The forgotten 80s home robot trend - <AUTHOR> https://tedium.co/2018/05/24/80s-home-robot-history/ <comment><USER3> FTA: \-- "Our robot had many features that still haven't been duplicated today," Fowler recalled. "We had an autonomous robot that could self navigate, plug itself in to recharge, speak, sing, play music, recite poetry, recognize commands and a bunch of other features. We programmed it to act as an alarm clock, security guard, entertainer and tutor for the kids. It was very advanced.

But when people asked us 'What can it do?' and we would list its capabilities, they would always scoff. \--

We see this cycle repeat over and over again in almost every area of tech, and so rarely do we learn from it. What Mr. Fowler failed to grasp was that people weren't interested in buying a robot that had 'features', they wanted one that provided utility.

At the end of the day their lack of utility made these robots toys - <USER2> expensive, klunky, difficult to use, and unreliable toys.

Heed me children - when building something, focus on utility over cool features. Solve a problem, and make it easy to use and the world will beat a path to your doorstep.

<comment><USER4> I had some very accurate voice recognition software on my Windows 3.1 Tandy in 1995 or so. I also played VR games around that same time. The tech has been minimally viable for a very long time. It's the user experience that's evolved and frankly it hasn't evolved all that much.

<comment><USER5> This is some revisionist history right here.

Speech recognition has gotten dramatically better since 1995. It now works with cheap mics, without per-speaker training, across the room, in noisy environments, with large vocabularies and low error rates.

The problem with this article is that all of this tech is not a binary yes/no feature, but rather work with varying levels of success in various situations.

It also says ridiculous things like "Unlike today's conversational interfaces, the Gemini took voice commands in an english-like programming language called VOCOL." as if that is a good thing, compared to these interfaces being usable in ambiguous natural language.

<comment><USER4> I was using an early version of Dragon by Nuance which is still active. It used a cheap commodity microphone and hardware that, while expensive at the time, was maybe 10% as powerful as a typical modern phone.

And having built a public-space voice system very recently, I can tell you that it's still really difficult to pull off and definitely requires specialty AV equipment and professional installation.

The problem then as now is that if it's not 100% accurate, you still need to be doing manual correction which is very time-consuming. And typing was never really a broken system that needed help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was in kindergarten in 1990, and my school had robotics books describing some of these home robots, but they were never very realistic about their actual capabilities. Being a young child, my imagination ran wild.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View actually has a number of home robots on display, which was cool because it was the first (and last?) time that I could see them in person.

<comment><USER7> >Being a young child, my imagination ran wild.

This is the source of much of our collective imagination about robots.

And all the dystopian movie plots about robots overthrowing humans and killing them all. I think that is completely projection - somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody." It really says a hell of a lot more about humans than robots.

For robots to take over the world or kill all humans, first they'd have to give a shit. They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. And have some motivations, akin to emotions, driving the behavior. Good luck on coding that up.

<comment><USER8> _somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody."_

Most of these, from the earliest, are various allegories about responses to exploitation and oppression not people thinking how they'd want to kill everybody if they were a robot.

<comment><USER9> IIRC, the word "Robot" itself comes from the Czech play "Rossum's Universal Robots[0]" and translates to slave, so the metaphor of class struggle was always there.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R).

<comment><AUTHOR> It translates to 'worker', & the play came out shortly before the russian revolution, so it's clear that the subtext of the term in its original use is not merely a criticism of slavery but also a marxist criticism of the exploitation of the proletariat under industrial capitalism.

(Important to note that, just like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep & Blade Runner, the 'robots' in R.U.R. are not mechanical devices but instead genetically engineered synthetic humans. That helps the metaphor a great deal: rather than being a pure 'other' whose behavior might be seen as a design error, it's simply a different breed or race of humans with different heredity that makes them convenient for othering, along with some argument about hereditary traits that supposedly make them more suited to hard labor.)

<comment><USER8> _It translates to 'worker'_

It's a made up word. If it translated to 'worker' he'd have just written 'worker' in Czech.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me rephrase:

In all slavic languages, 'robot' is the base of the verb 'to work'. So, by the same means by which some people have decided to translate 'robot' as 'slave', it would be more accurate to translate it as 'worker'.

<comment><USER8> Right, except for the part where that is 'more accurate' because it's not. Oh, and the play came out after the Russian revolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I never forgot the promised robots. They're ingrained as part of my childhood, a dream of mechanical assistants that were a hybrid of the 1950s futurism combined with the promise of a digital tomorrow. Instead we have been sold cheap spying devices that have more in common with the ubiquitous microphones of 1984 sweetened with the droll dialogue of the talking wall screens of Farenheit 451. Ohh well the future still lives in our dreams and those we choose to build with sweat and grime.

</comment><comment><USER11> It was an interesting time to be building robots. And most of them had all of their functions running on the equivalent of an Arduino. (generally an 8080 or Z80 though with more RAM and no FLASH). You can read through the archives of comp.robotics.misc for some of the excitement of the time.

Generally, the inability to have end effectors (hands of some sort) that could do things was a real killer. None of these robots could do anything with vision, few had real localization, and about the best they could do was move from where they were to approximately where you wanted them to be without bumping into too many things or getting stuck.

</comment><comment><USER12> HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAULIE

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncySiTOMAHc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncySiTOMAHc)

</comment><comment><USER13> The real robots of the 80s, that did useful work, and liberated an entire class of people from menial domestic labour were the dishwasher, the washing machine, the dryer, and the vacuum cleaner. But, alas, that is not sexy.

Compared to them, these things, and Alexa are toys.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are also things that became widespread during the 50s.

<comment><USER13> Only in the middle-class parts of the United States.

In 1995, only 18% of UK households had dishwashers. Even today, only ~75% of US households have them. Today, only ~60% of UK households have dryers.

European ownership rates of household appliances resemble those of the late Soviet Union more then they do those of the United States.

<comment><AUTHOR> And the machines mentioned in the article sold thousands of units at most.

The theme of the article is that the creators of these machines made a big bet on the idea that novelty and imagination alone would carry expensive, underpowered machines to market success, and that even when those machines were actually technically impressive, those bets were wrong.

The HERO was able to stay on the market for so long only because Heath was making their real money on electronics kits. The RB5X was able to stay on the market for so long because the overhead was close to zero. Androbot & Arctec folded almost immediately, because the TOPO was a $400 RC car and the Gemini was a $9000 tech demo with no arms.

A business plan that depends upon upper middle class frivolity to the tune of thousands of dollars per family is unlikely to succeed. Everybody in the article learned that the hard way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If 80s era home robots are your thing, here's a bunch of pictures and some information: [http://www.theoldrobots.com/personal.html](http://www.theoldrobots.com/personal.html)

<comment><USER15> Surprising how many of these look like they were taken from the set of Star Wars.

This one looks like R2-D2 with giant Coca-Cola sticker slapped across the front. [http://www.theoldrobots.com/cobol.html](http://www.theoldrobots.com/cobol.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not too surprising. The first of these were produced in the immediate aftermath of Star Wars' success, & the entire personal robot boom occurred during the original theatrical releases of the trilogy. Plus, a trash can on wheels is one of the easiest mobile robot designs to get working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Always wanted a HERO ever since seeing ads in the back of the Radio Electronics magazines. Of course price was prohibitive.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Just thought I'd comment to link this from the article in case anybody misses it:

[http://www.rbrobotics.com/Products/RB5X.htm](http://www.rbrobotics.com/Products/RB5X.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, making a quick correction about the RB5X.

When I wrote the article, I believed it was still produced by the original company. I later learned that while the same company produced the RB5X for about 20 years after its initial release, eventually the name & the remaining stock was sold off, twice.

They kept afloat despite only having produced a handful of bots because the stock of parts was kept in somebody's garage & ever few years when an order came it, the gang got back together to build one.

If you've got an interest in these things & aren't confident about your ability to build one from scratch, the RB5X seems like a good choice: help them clean out their garage. If you _are_ confident in your ability to build one from scratch, I recommend downloading the code, designs, & instructions for the Gemini from Mike Fowler's site -- the Gemini is more capable than even newer robots on the market at a price comparable to what they originally asked for, & the price of components can only have gone down since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember HERO on an episode of Mr. Wizard: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_C0bRgAJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_C0bRgAJw)

<comment><USER18> I remember HERO from my university robotics club, some 10 years ago. Punching in hex codes for machine instructions was so fun, especially since that encouraged us to drop the computers and code on paper.

Nevertheless, someone made an assembler, figured out the code upload interface and future instructions were uploaded using a mini jack and a sound card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of the Rocky 4 Robot, here's an article about it (scroll passed the oversized icons):

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/creed/rocky-iv-robot- butler...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/creed/rocky-iv-robot-butler- stallone/)

</comment><comment><USER20> > Alexa's Interface is treated as revolutionary > ...it had a lot more in > common with an Amazon Echo than a robot in an old sci-fi film

While yeah, these old robots could in theory do more than an echo watch some of the videos of them in operation (eg: [https://youtu.be/oibgyqdXfJM](https://youtu.be/oibgyqdXfJM)).

Just take the voice on that youtube video, while impressive for the 80's is no comparison to Alexa's voice. It is very slow and has a thick robot accent. Alexa has a much more dynamic, fluid voice that is much easier to understand.

And yeah, I'm sure some of these things could be commanded by voice, I imagine that you have to be _extremely_ precise with what you say and how you say it. I imagine the error rate is way higher than Alexa (which in my experience is pretty high itself).

I dunno where I'm going with this comment, but the interface matters. It's easy to claim "they were doing all this shit back in the 80's" and it might be technically true, but how they were doing it didn't have nearly as much polish as modern stuff. When you have a 4mhz processor and 64k of ram, there is only so much polish you can add to an 80's robot. The echo dot has a quad core processor and 4gb of ram -- not to mention wifi, bluetooth and gps ([https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/blogs/2017/amazon-echo- dot-...](https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/blogs/2017/amazon-echo-dot- teardown)). You can add a lot of polish to a hardware stack like that.

Of course, even with all that processing power, I'm still only about 50% successful turning the lights on at home. We still have a long ways to go....

<comment><USER21> > The echo dot has a quad core processor and 4gb of ram

And yet it still farms most of its processing out to the cloud

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> oh, reminds me that the very first programming class per se we ever got as kids was on one of these :

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bigtrack+programmable+rover&atb=v5...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bigtrack+programmable+rover&atb=v59-2__&iar=images&iax=images&ia=image)

basically real life LOGO. I say "per se" because LOGO trying to not feel like programming, teacher didn't say the word IIRC.

<comment><USER23> My love for programming originated with Big Trak, LOGO on the Apple ][, and of course the C64

<comment><USER24> The BigTrak was my first exposure to programming, as well. I was so distressed when my family moved and it was lost/discarded. I used to work out path programs for it to drive from my bedroom, down the hall to my brother's room, and back, ferrying baseball cards or comic books or such.

For those who aren't aware, BigTrak was an electronic toy from the late 1970s, a treaded tank-like toy car with a membrane keyboard on top. The user could program in a path as a series of steps (forward, forward, right turn, forward, make sound, stop.) and I think it had a gripper claw on the front. (memory is a fleeting thing).

A google search shows I was close to accurate (no claw, though): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak)

<comment><USER23> It had a trailer which could be commanded to dump the objects it was carrying

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Whither the Omnibots? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibot)

<comment><USER26> As a kid I thought the whole Tomy line[0] was awesome. I lusted after an Omnibot and Omnibot 2000, but never got one. (I did get a Verbot though.) My imagination still makes me think they'd be awesome, even if I knew they were mostly remote controlled with weak motors, butd damn, seeing a an actual demo of them is heartbreaking.

[0] [http://www.theoldrobots.com/tomybot.html](http://www.theoldrobots.com/tomybot.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The Cardiff Walker poses to amuse the girls at the Turing Institute Robot Olympics. (1990)

[https://i.imgur.com/Mi0mbWb.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Mi0mbWb.jpg)

He won Gold in the Biped Race!

CARDIFF BIPED. Uni. Wales, Cardiff, Wales. Paul Channon, Simon Hopkins & Prof Pham

[http://www.galloimages.co.za/image/biped-robot-in-action- at-...](http://www.galloimages.co.za/image/biped-robot-in-action-at- robot/1005152/1)

>The UWCC Biped robot in action at the 1990 Robot Olympics in Glasgow. This robot is a product of Cardiff University. It consists of a pair of life- size aluminium legs. Pneumatic actuators at the joints enable this robot to walk with a rolling gait. Both feet are equipped with strain guages to measure the rolling motion, with a feedback mechanism to prevent the robot falling over.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER28> For kids of the 80s, the Sears catalog was one of the greatest things to peruse. Here's an example of some of the less expensive "robots" that were being offered up in 1986:

[https://i.pinimg.com/originals/81/89/ba/8189ba22bd7ee70e708b...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/81/89/ba/8189ba22bd7ee70e708b9c2e36b8b6d9.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'll never forget the home robot trend. As a CMU frosh, I worked in the "Household Robotics Lab" and we played around with some of those robots. Nobody really knew what they were doing nor why. But we had a lot of fun and had some cool toys to play with. The Raibert Hopper was in the lab next store. That was a serious robot - and seriously loud.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone remember Verbot, it was an inexpensive voice controlled robot

<comment><USER31> How could I forget? I spent days trying to get it to work and never got it to work right.

<comment><USER26> It could be a very frustrating toy. It was like the future when it worked though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Forgotten? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.

I lived through the 1980's. I pretty sure this trend never registered.

<comment><USER9> I was barely aware of it. I had (and still have, it doesn't work) an Armatron, and read about some of these robots in books in my high school library and I was fascinated by them. Not smart enough to actually _do_ anything with that fascination, but still... robots.

There was one that had six legs and looked like a viral sheath that I thought looked really cool, but I can't find a picture of for reference. I think it actually appeared on a news program or something.

edit: found it![0]

[0][http://www.theoldrobots.com/odex.html](http://www.theoldrobots.com/odex.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> As a nerdy kid, I was exposed to all this personal robot hype (particularly marketing material from Nolan Bushnell's Androbot) via pop-science library books -- all of them somehow staying in circulation 15-20 years after nearly all the companies mentioned went out of business in '85-'86\. Looking for information about the machines in those half-remembered books is what led me to write the article.

I think it would be really easy to miss all of that if you weren't specifically interested in robots growing up, or if you grew out of robot books aimed at children before those books had gotten into the library system. A lot of them were probably published after the machines (aside from the HERO & RB5X) were no longer available, because the publishing pipeline is about 18 months & Androbot went from launch to bankruptcy in about two years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not sure if it was exactly a "home robot", but there were these programmable toy tanks called "Big Trak" of which I had one in the 80s:

[https://bestofthe80s.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/mb- bigtrakg...](https://bestofthe80s.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/mb- bigtrakgrey.jpg)

My sister had an Omnibot:

[http://www.theoldrobots.com/omnibot2.html](http://www.theoldrobots.com/omnibot2.html)

I can't remember if either of us had one, but I also remember the Armatron:

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

<comment><USER34> Big Trak was great! I had one too. Great fun programming it to drive itself around the living room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I still have my functional Omnibot that my Dad bought when I was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER36> As an 80's teen I was pretty obsessed with getting an Omnibot 2000 ([http://omnibot2k.com/omnibot/Omnibot_2000_Information.html](http://omnibot2k.com/omnibot/Omnibot_2000_Information.html)).

My parents failed to fork over the cash for that (but they did get me the very first Mac, which blew up my 12 year old mind so hard that it probably began my career in software dev, so... I think I won anyway)

</comment><comment><USER37> I recall watching a Mr. Rogers episode where he visits a robot factory and being mesmerized.

Found the episode. The link has some pictures. The robots were very R2D2-esque.

[http://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/mrn/episodes/1513/index.h...](http://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/mrn/episodes/1513/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> I have a lot of fond memories with the Radio Shack Robie Junior robot. As a kid, this was a great introduction to robotics.

[https://rctoymemories.com/2014/04/25/tandy-radio-shack- robie...](https://rctoymemories.com/2014/04/25/tandy-radio-shack-robie- junior-1987/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone have the documentation for VOCOL? I'm curious how it worked. Searching didn't turn up anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> The user's manual & technical manual have VOCOL documentation. I've only skimmed it, though.

[http://www.robotu.com/Gemini_files/User_Manual.pdf](http://www.robotu.com/Gemini_files/User_Manual.pdf) starting on page 55

[http://www.robotu.com/Gemini_files/Tech_Reference.pdf](http://www.robotu.com/Gemini_files/Tech_Reference.pdf) starting on page 47

I suspect roms/VOCREM.BIN in the 'software' package is actually the compiled VOCOL code, but I haven't disassembled it to find out yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My first thought was the robot that came with the first Nintendos.

<comment><AUTHOR> R.O.B., mentioned at the conclusion of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What, no RadioShack Robbie the Robot?</comment>


Show HN: Pepbot, disposable email service with a twist - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN! Meet my baby: Pepbot
http://pepbot.com
It's a disposable temp email service (like Mailinator and many others) with the ability to automate the boring email verification task that some services require (check mail -> click the confirmation link -> activate account).
It's a project I've coded during weekends for sharpen my python and sys admin skills.
I am looking for feedback! What do you think? <comment><USER2> The second use case makes me a bit nervous.

Why: many services that require an email confirmation from you typically allow to do the password reset via the same email address. So, unless the user is signing up for a throwaway service, they put their account with that service at risk.

But from the UI point of view the minimalism is awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pepbot it's not intended to be used with services you actually care of exactly for this kind of reasons!

> But from the UI point of view the minimalism is awesome.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Love the minimal look.

Some feedback - It wasn't immediately obvious to me, even after reading the 2 points on the main page, how exactly to use it. Maybe rewording those?

<comment><AUTHOR> Any suggestion is appreciated! I am not a native english speaker so typos and unclear statements are common for me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is super simple and something I would actually use. I like it!

I have one suggestion: make email@example.com look clickable. It took me a few moments to understand that I could / need to click on it. Why? The area is faded out. Whenever I see something faded, I assume it's not clickable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely need to improve the input button, maybe adding an icon or such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should set some accounts to not be useable, like email@example.com or admin, administrator, info, support, etc. that way people can't pretend to be you and scam/cheat/lie, or somehow tarnish the sites reputation. edit: I like your site, simple UI, useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Forging an email is so trivial that I think that there isn't an acceptable solution for this kind of problems. Anyway I have already pointed out in the FAQs that Pepbot cannot send mails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's a great idea! One suggestion I have - It was tough at first glance to tell that the box on the page was an input element. Maybe more of a text box look (no rounded corners) or maybe a button would help.

<comment><USER7> Also, since all addresses are @pepbot.com, this part should be optional.

Right now, if I enter some random address without @pepbot.com I'm landing on the start page.

Apart from that, I really like it! This will definitely become my default service for trash mails.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I haven't tested it but if you point your MX record to mail.pepbot.com you should be able to use your own domain name.

<comment><USER7> Sounds cool. Will definitely try it. Maybe you should put that information somewhere on the site.

However, I think that most people are going to use @pepbot.com. Therefore if you just type <something> without @pepbot.com, it should be assumed that people want check mails in <something>@pepbot.com. It should ad leas be automatically appended if there is no @<whatever>.

<comment><AUTHOR> I made a little change to the input box, let me know if it's more usable now!

(and thanks for the feedback)

<comment><USER7> Just found the time to check your improvements and respond...

It's definitely better with the auto-complete and mail icon. However, it's still confusing to first-time users, as there is no hint that they have to add @pepbot.com. E.g. at <http://trash-mail.com> you only hav to enter a random name and can see the mails.

I showed pepbot to some colleagues earlier today and they all reacted the same: First confused as to why it wasn't working, but as I explained that they had to add @pepbot.com they all got along with it very well.

So, my suggestion is still, to append @pepbot.com automatically if a user enters something without @... or to at least add a hint like "don't forget to add @pepbot.com".

Nevertheless, these are minor improvements and I think it's already very usable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Leave the @pepbot.com part outside of the input so we don't have to type it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fixed it! I've added an auto completion javascript, it should be more usable now (let me know!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clickety: <http://pepbot.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like a useful service.

Wondering: Since the bot clicks every link, are there cases where there may be an 'unsubscribe' link?

Also, a little typo in paragraph two: 'adress'

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it could happen.

Links are parsed with regular expression and clicked in order. There is not some sort of link recognization (like confirmation one vs unsubscribe one), every link is treated the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would save me time, I think its an excellent idea. Any monetization ideas?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually no. It's just a learning excrcise for me.

But if you have some ideas please share!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> love the nice clean design</comment>


Google Introduces Interest-based Adsense - <AUTHOR> http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html <comment><USER2> Everybody and their dog has said they're going to provide this Really Soon Now for the last 15 years, and it still isn't going to happen, because _interest is not intent_.

I'm very _interested_ in saving for retirement. As a working professional, convincing me to use your brokerage/retirement products instead of the next guy is worth Quite A Bit Of Money as long as I stay. However, I have no _intent_ of switching brokerages today, like I would be demonstrating if I had just googled [open roth ira account]. Ditto "wow, he certainly appears interested in computers" vs. "I have my credit card in one hand and my mouse in the other, who wants to sell me a laptop".

This is the big reason Facebook can't monetize my pageviews despite the fact that their algorithms could infer more about my interests than many people who have known me for years.

<comment><USER3> Google has a pretty good ecosystem setup.

If I click on a google ad to buy an xbox, google know I bought an xbox, or am thinking about buying one (If I went through Google checkout, they can be sure, but that's not in the current mix afaik). It's probably a good idea for them to show me offers on xbox games and accessories once in a while after that.

Facebook _can_ monetize your pageviews. They just choose to spend it all on 800 employees, swish offices, etc etc.

<comment><USER4> I don't think Google is that good with integrating all the data they have. For example they still show me Google Chrome ads on pages I open with the Chrome browser.

I also doubt Google AdSense would show me ads based on the contents of the referring page (as a limited form of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_targeting>). Also Facebook could use all the external links you post or click to build a profile of you, but their limited keyword ad targeting indicates they don't.

<comment><USER5> > I don't think Google is that good with integrating all the data they have. > For example they still show me Google Chrome ads on pages I open with the > Chrome browser.

Not to do so would be micromanagement, or rule-based algorithms. It decided, correctly, that you would be interested in Chrome. That's plenty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sucks. Tracking our every move just to give us targeting advertising is a terrible thing. Especially for consumers.

I'm sure someone somewhere will be naively missing the point, happy that the advertising will more targeted and relevant.

<comment><USER5> Well I am happy advertising will be more targeted and relevant, both as a consumer and an occasional advertiser. A transaction implies agreement on both sides, anything which facilitates it is good. Advertisment by itself will never put a hand in your pocket.

As for tracking every move... They're already doing it for some time. This way indeed it will be easier to get to the information - a spouse of a friend may find your Interests page ... interesting. But considering the world now, and most likely the world of the future is filled with social networks whose primary job is to advertise your interests to everybody, I don't think most people will have a problem with this. Especially the young. As for those who do... you can always opt out.

<comment><USER7> Google's strength is ads that you (likely) want to see, instead of flashing banners, stealing your attention. Ads are presently targeted by your google search, and by your gmail content.

Note that google already tracks your searches: <http://www.google.com/history/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. Anything to make advertising more targeted and relevant is a great thing. Both for advertisers and consumers.

I'm sure someone somewhere will be up in arms completely missing the point, complaining that Google is tracking their every move though.

<comment><USER8> well they are tracking their every move!

<comment><USER3> As they have been for years. My point is this isn't any 'extra' threat. If you don't want to be tracked for some reason, install adblock, or block the google domains.

Since adsense appeared on tons of websites they've been able to track people. Just like all the other advertising networks that have been tracking people for the last 10 years+.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Phew. Interest meaning involvement/attention and not interest rates. I read the headline and checked the date to see if it was April 1st already because Adsense revenues based on the Fed prime rate or 30yr fixed mortgage rate would be a funny caricature of the current economic situation. Of course, it would not be funny if they actually did it, which I'm glad they didn't.

</comment><comment><USER10> As long as they are just inferring what type of ads I am interested in, I wish that someone would just ask us what we are interested in. Or at least rule out the things we are NOT interested in. Like, stick a little button on their ads which says "dislike?" and we could click it and not be shown any more of those ads (or ads in that category).

<comment><USER11> That's exactly what Adpinion does: <http://adpinion.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> is this based on cookies or the css history hack?

<comment><USER13> Probably cookies, I think the Google cookie lives for a really long time. And anytime Google sends you something, they can send and check for cookies. That includes Google Analytics, too, I suppose.</comment></comment>


Medium.com sites everywhere with different domains? - <AUTHOR> Question - why does there seem to be so many different websites, which all seem to be part of medium.com?
Time after time I'll click a link to some article, realize I'm on Medium... but it's a different domain? Yet it looks exactly the same, and I'm already logged in?
Is is some kind of spam marketing, or a look-alike platform, or...? <comment><USER2> This is part of the medium business model, if you pay a monthly fee, you can run medium in your own subdomain, as a blogging hosting platform.

This way your readers won't get the whole content blocked with a message and asking for a $5 usd a month subscription.

The content is now getting blocked via a popup not only by following links via the medium newsletter, this is happening in organic search results from google directly.</comment>


That IPO Pop? Majority of 2011 U.S. Listings Are Underwater - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903927204576570714266274044.html

<comment><USER2> (Didn't read the article because of the paywall, just commenting on the headline).

Given that virtually all stocks are down since spring, this is neither surprising nor notable that IPOs from the spring are also down.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now we're starting to see the real reason Facebook is delaying their IPO.

<comment><USER4> Their talent retention is a good enough reason as well; if not an acceptable excuse.</comment></comment>


Why I'm not enthusiastic about Java 10 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@elizarov/why-im-not-enthusiastic-about-java-10-b2d789b6d42a <comment><USER2> I have been using Java extensively since the language was released. I'm tired of it. For every release (since JDK 7, maybe), the new features are either irrelevant to me, or a step in the right direction, but not far enough. I think that the major flaws in the language are as follows:

\- No value types: Coming from C++, I remember my very first reaction to Java was astonishment that it was not possible to physically embed one object in another. This places a real limit on performance. No matter how good optimization and JIT gets, your options for controlling locality of reference in Java are extremely limited. I know there is a proposal for value types, but come on, where is it already?

\- Type erasure: Type erasure is a lame approximation of parameterized types. Reflection can't see the parameters, and of course they are completely missing at runtime. True parameterized types along with value types would correct a lot of problems.

\- No real closures: Non-final state cannot be included in a closure. Still. Ridiculous.

\- Functional programming support: Yeah, streams and lambdas. Not enough. Why do things like "filter" and "map" have to be builtin? Why can't I write my own functional code? And the java.util.function list of Function signature interfaces (e.g. DoublePredicate, IntSupplier) is an abomination. It shouldn't be necessary to explicitly declare these signatures _anywhere_ , let alone enshrine a fixed set of them in a standard library. And the need to provide different versions by type (DoublePredicate, IntPredicate, ...) again points to how broken type parameterization is.

That last item is the worst example of piling up kludge upon kludge that I know of in Java. This is really driven home to me as I play with other languages that do functional programming so much better, (Swift, for example, except for the ARC-related kludges).</comment>


Merrill Lynch "Macs are no good. Go to your library and use a PC" - <AUTHOR> http://www.rograndom.com/2011/04/merrill-lynch-mac/

<comment><USER2> This might be a "knows enough to be dangerous" type of situation. An expert in one field seems like an idiot to an expert in a similar, but different, field.

For instance I swore up and down that my Time Warner cable modem had blown up, and repeatedly called demanding for a replacement. I was a damned computer expert, and I knew the thing bloody well wasn't working.

So the tech comes, and we turn on the lights, and the thing works. It was plugged into a socket that was switched with the lights.

The tech support people are trained for "idiots" and they are not trained for computer experts that have varying opinions that may well be correct. Also, they aren't trained in understanding, or taking reports on, subtle cross- platform browser bugs.

I've been impressed with tech support that connects me with an expert who has both my experience and accent, but at some point I think someone in this mess would've just tried a different browser. It isn't like that was above the skill level of anyone involved.</comment>


Stanisław Leśniewski: rethinking the philosophy of mathematics [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/4443772/file/4443780.pdf <comment><USER2> It's always worth recalling _why_ we bother with set theory. Philosophical objections like Leśneivski's are extremely valuable and good insights which we cannot discard trivially. Maybe sets are not good things to study. The main reason that we study sets today is because they are a place where we could study ordinals and the rest of number theory. We know about two bananas, two apples, two trees, etc. but what is two itself? Set theory provides a capable if unsatisfying answer: Two is anything which is uniquely isomorphic to the second ordinal number, which happens to be a particular finite set, and since sets formally contain nothing but other sets, we can manipulate two as a set without having to know about bananas, apples, trees, etc.

The modern way to talk about this stuff is via categorification; [0] is a good high-level introduction.

[0] [https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/quantization_and_categorifica...](https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/quantization_and_categorification.html)

<comment><USER3> Set theory does not answer the question, "what is two itself?" This is a common misconception. It just provides a way to translate statements about the natural numbers into statements about sets, which then you can use for proofs and formal constructions. It's an encoding, _not_ a definition. In particular, the definition you give of two is not correct and I'd be interested to learn who told you it.

Further, the "modern" way to discuss this is not categorification, despite what Baez says; people who work and publish on the foundations of mathematics almost universally do so in the language of set theory.

<comment><USER2> Since sets are 0-categories, we can't escape set theory when talking about structures like the natural numbers. A natural numbers object is a feature of a topos, preserved by topos functors (geometric morphisms). Nobody told me this definition; it's something I had to absorb for myself when learning topos theory.

Formally, let N be the natural numbers object (in some topos), let z : 1 -> N be the zero arrow, and s : N -> N be the successor arrow. Then z;s;s : 1 -> N is the arrow which chooses 2 as an element of the NNO. Since z and s are unique up to unique isomorphism, so is 2. Moreover, since geometric morphisms between topoi preserve finite limits, the NNO should also be preserved, and that includes 2.

When the topos we choose/define is (equivalent to) Set, then we get the standard ordinal-number definition of 2.

To use a pun, this lets us upgrade from Dedekind-categoricity to a more modern and natural sort of categorical categoricity.

<comment><USER3> Of course we can escape set theory (and categories) when talking about the natural numbers. The concept of "two" predates the concept of a set by at least a thousand years. People were happily manipulating and investigating the natural numbers before set theory ever came along.

As I said previously, it is true that set theory provides a way to _encode_ the natural numbers as sets (or features of a topos, etc.), so that questions about natural numbers can be stated as questions about sets. It is further true that this endeavor can be incredibly fruitful, for instance for studying the foundations of mathematics. But it does not mean that natural numbers "are" sets (or objects in a topos), any more than Quicksort "is" a piece of C++ code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Foundations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Foundations) for another alternative foundation of mathematics.

<comment><USER5> The original philosophical foundation of mathematics would be Pythagoreanism [1].

For instance, that there is a special, transcendent meaning to "oneness" or "twoness" — or more generally, that there is a basic harmony within mathematics that manifests in the harmonies of the cosmos.

Here is a nice article on the sources of his mathematical contributions. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0315086089...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0315086089900207/pdf?md5=f82cfebc9d937472cb2b6a4af44ae195&pid=1-s2.0-0315086089900207-main.pdf)

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

<comment><USER6> Trying to find an axiomization of mathamatics and trying to find the metaphysics of mathamatics seem like two very different projects to me.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, getting to the bottom of axioms feels a lot like metaphysics, but open to why they'd be a different ballpark.

<comment><USER6> In my mind, metaphysics is asking "why", axioms are asking "how"/"what"

<comment><USER5> That's fine. It's just that when you get to the very bottom of axioms, it can get a little weird. Like, is the underlying basis the one, the nothing or the all? Is it being or not being? That is metaphysical -- and has implications for the foundation of any axiom, no?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what it even means for the underlying basis to be one or nothing or everything (basis of what specificly?). That doesn't sound like an axiom thing to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Passive DNS – A tutorial to set up your own passive DNS using D4 project - <AUTHOR> https://www.d4-project.org/2019/05/28/passive-dns-tutorial.html <comment><USER2> I'm much more familiar with the term pdns being used to refer to powerdns so reading this got slightly confusing :)</comment>


I created a little app that visualizes crypto prices across exchanges - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoinmonitor.today/ <comment><AUTHOR> also available for iOS & Android (check prices in a jiffy)</comment>


Just Called Mt. Gox - <AUTHOR> http://dzoba.com/just-called-mt-gox/

<comment><USER2> Blog is loading very slowly for me.

> I just called the support number on Mt Gox's website. After a 15 minute wait > on hold I got through to a very friendly woman who was just barely capable > of speaking English. She took down my name (not sure why). I asked her if I > would get my money back and she said that no one was sure. Then I asked what > is going to happen, like, whats the plan? Whats coming next? She said she > couldn't comment on individual accounts, but that an announcement would be > appearing on MtGox.com in 2 hours. (That would be 9PM Pacific March 2nd).

> I'm a little worried there may have been something lost in translation (at > first I thought she was telling me it takes 2 hours to update MtGox.com's > homepage). However I pushed for clarification and she said it again that > there would be more info on MtGox.com in 2 hours.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mt.Gox Announcement (from mtgox.com) :

 _ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING AN APPLICATION FOR COMMENCEMENT OF A PROCEDURE OF CIVIL REHABILITATION

An overview of the situation should be published here shortly (probably on March 3, 2014 (Japan time)).

Contact information

A call center has been established to respond to all inquiries. The call center is planned to start on March 3, 2014. All inquiries to MtGox Co., Ltd. should be made to the following telephone number:

Telephone number +81 3-4588-3921 Working hours Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm (Japan time)

Please refrain from contacting the office of the supervisor/investigator._

<comment><USER4> Further on down the page it says,

 _Furthermore I would like to kindly ask that people refrain from asking questions to our staff: they have been instructed not to give any response or information. Please visit this page for further announcements and updates._

I am not sure I would I understand what an inquiry is if you can't ask any questions.

<comment><USER5> It might not be clear, but that was posted well before they set up the call center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You...were day trading with money you needed to pay back loans?!

<comment><AUTHOR> More like year trading. I bought in when Bitcoin was selling for $4. Yes, $4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mirror: [http://pastebin.com/QNQduhrL](http://pastebin.com/QNQduhrL)

The blog seems to be down now.

<comment><USER8> why would you feel this need to mirror this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the mirror. It was running slow and I did get a timeout once. My intent with the post was just to get the word out to those who hadn't called - so any way they hear it is great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I called them just now as well. Same outcome. All information would be given through daily updates on the website. No email communication set up yet. My agent was much less specific about when the site would be updated with new information.

<comment><USER10> What's the point in spinning up a call centre if they're just going to tell you to hit the site for the latest update?

Is it just something akin to a close-door button in an elevator that's there to seem useful and not actually do anything?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is a live recording of a customer calling the call center for those that want the true experience.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HJt- MpoTP4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HJt-MpoTP4)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's dial-a-joke, you just don't realize it yet.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is no mention of what time she/he posted that.

EDIT: woops, yes there is (9PM Pacific March 2nd) minus two hours.

<comment><USER14> >> _She said she couldn't comment on individual accounts, but that an announcement would be appearing on MtGox.com in 2 hours. (That would be 9PM Pacific March 2nd)._

besides this quote we can also assume the event occurred sometime today (accurate enough) since the phone line is a new service. there is also a post date (and time on hover) in the sidebar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So what is the point of setting up a Call Centre if they have no information to shared and no help or solution provided?

<comment><USER16> Maybe it's a legal requirement in Japan for companies who've filed for bankruptcy.</comment></comment>


You need to go back to school to relearn English - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161215-you-need-to-go-back-to-school-to-relearn-english <comment><USER2> We need more colorful idioms, not less, lest English subside into some unremarkable beige blandness. The English language has always been about cornering other languages, beating them up, and stealing random pieces of their syntax and vocabulary, usually after corrupting them horribly.</comment>


Mozilla funding $245,000 for Black artists to show how #AI can reinforce/disrupt - <AUTHOR> https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/supporting-black-artists-who-are-examining-ai/ <comment><USER2> Yeah Mozilla really need to make it so you can donate to certain things i.e Firefox or TOR browser development. Until they do my money is going elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> Tor development is separate from mozilla. You can donate to them directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So are we supposed to ignore the fact that Mozilla is now openly racist?

Does no one realize that stuff like this is as racist as it gets? They literally base the competition on a skin color.

<comment><USER5> I've known for a while that Mozilla's focus is not on producing technically excellent software. However, their latest actions and messages have only accelerated my desire to move away from Firefox - they are now just another "socially-aware" activist group, complete with ambitious ladder-climbing upper management, and apparently burdened with maintaining a browswer.

<comment><USER6> _" Get woke. Go broke"_ \--as the Gabsters say.

<comment><USER7> Gabsters? Isn't that just a true statement?

I dont even know what a gabster is, is this the new "alt-right" label to throw around on people you have a mild political disagreeance with?

This post is now at -1 score and I still don't know what a gabster is, can you elaborate?

Ah I think I figured it out. Just like we call twitter users "Twits" we apparently call gab.ai users gabsters.

<comment><USER8> Probably relted to "Gab". Not sure about "alt-right" but from what I know gab was founded as a "censorship-free alternative to Twitter".

[https://gab.com/](https://gab.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, you know.

This might not be the best move, right after they had to let go so many developers.

<comment><USER10> The for-profit Mozilla Corporation laid off developers. The not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation is launching this initiative.

<comment><USER8> Right. The have absolutely nothing to do with each other, because the Moz Foundation has probably no say whatsoever in the Corporation's decision. Especially since the Corporation is not only wholly owned by the Foundation but they also have a common chair.

The first line of "About the Mozilla Corporation" [0]:

>The Mozilla Corporation was established in August 2005 as a wholly owned taxable subsidiary _that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation_ (emphasis mine).

[0] [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/foundation/moco/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/)

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you're being snarky and uncivil. Yes they are related (never said they weren't), but the Foundation cannot transfer $245k to the Corporation to help fund salaries of workers. The Corp exists to be run as a business and the Foundation exists primarily for advocacy.

<comment><USER8> Well, I don't think the Foundation would need to transfer 245k to the Corporation. From what I understand, the Google search deal was done with the Corporation. So the cash transfer is rather Corp -> Found. Instead, it would be enough for the Foundation to give the Corporation a better deal on their various trademarks.

This is published in their financial statement for 2018 [0]. I'm not an accountant nor am I familiar with US Tax law, but from what I understand they received $6M in donations (contributions line) and spent $33M on "programs" (other than software development, which gets its own line). So the difference must have come from somewhere.

Apparently the various trademarks are owned by the Foundation. The Corp has to pay royalties to use them. It's not clear how much, but I don't see why the Foundation wouldn't be allowed to set its own rate and / or give discounts. Internal cash flows are omitted from the consolidated report, though.

What I gather from this is that basically the Foundation is getting most of its money from the Corporation. The Corp. being mainly concerned with Firefox, it could be argued that the Foundation gets money thanks to Firefox.

I can see how people who want to support the browser may take an issue with the Foundation's other, non browser-related activities. Especially when it's clear that they do so to the detriment of the browser (by firing people in order to focus on other pursuits).

[0] [https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla- fdn-201...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla- fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf)

<comment><USER10> I'm not a tax attorney, but I know that there are serious restrictions on how two companies (non profit or otherwise) owned by the same people or entities are allowed to use them to benefit each other. Those restrictions exist for obvious reasons: being able to easily shift around money can lead to all kinds of tax evasion and other corruption.

And I'm also fairly certain that suddenly renegotiating a licensing agreement in which the obvious purpose is to secure more revenue for the Corporation at the expense of the Foundation would be considered self-dealing, and there would be severe penalties, the least of which being the loss of tax-exempt status for the Foundation.

Being controlled by the same entity does not mean that they are allowed to shift assets and money around or spend their own resources resolving each others' financial issues, and doing something sneaky like trying to hide such transfers as part of a trademark licensing renegotiation would not pass a smell test.

> Especially when it's clear that they do so to the detriment of the browser > (by firing people in order to focus on other pursuits)

How disingenuous and trollish to put this at the end of your post. In the reply to an argument explaining that the Foundation is a separate entity with its own charter acting independently, you simply ignore the argument and say the same thing over again instead of addressing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm cynical at heart. Anyone else that thinks that some higher up have done something racist and now the PR/HR machinery is working full time preemptively wash the brand?

<comment><USER12> It's more just likely people at the top are not very passionate about technology but are very passionate about social issues.

I know a lot of people look to Firefox and therefore Mozilla as being a beacon against the big three and browser monoculture but there is evidently a disconnect between what most of us want from Mozilla and what interests the people in charge of Mozilla, judging from the engineers who were let go the other week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's curious to me that you can make race a legal requirement for anything.

<comment><USER14> Ideally you wouldn't, but if there's a long history of discrimination against that race/sex/orientation/identity then you need to do that to correct for the historical bias.

I'd rather it not exist, but there isn't really any other corrective measure you can make.

<comment><USER15> That's simply a false dichotomy. You can very easily tailor social programs to help correct for the effects of historical injustice without resorting to discrimination by simply targetting the effect itself, not the group that was discriminated against. Any group that is disproportionally affected by the effect will be disproportionally helped by the alleviation and remediation of said effect.

The argument that we need more racism because of racism is a vicious cycle. I hate all racism, no matter if it's well intentioned. The road to hell is all too often paved with good intentions.

Groups do not endure injustice, individuals do. The moment we start thinking of people as competing groups rather than individuals, individuals become devalued and get thrown under the bus without regard for their unique personhood. Under a program like this a well to-do black immigrant who is not the product of a history of injustice would receive preferential treatment over a non-black person trapped in generational poverty who may have personally endured injustice.

Why do white leftist think that blacks are dependent on special treatment from whites? Isn't that white supremacist in and of itself? They are still denying us the dignity of succeeding on our own merits on a level playing field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. Tech writers for MDN? Servo team? Or PR stunt?

<comment><USER17> I don't think 245k is the amount it takes to pay the MDN or Servo team for more than one month.

<comment><USER7> It could have payed for maintenance in some way, thats for sure.

<comment><USER17> That's right

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mozilla REALLY needs to focus on firefox.

</comment><comment><USER19> #SaveFirefox #DefundMozilla

<comment><USER5> As I understand it, the build process for Firefox is now so painful it might be beyond saving.

<comment><USER20> What happened that caused that? I remember from about a decade or two ago it was already relatively involved (on par with OpenOffice and the likes), is it worse now?

<comment><USER21> I recently had reason to build both Chromium and Firefox from source and Firefox was considerably simpler, on Windows at least

<comment><USER5> Fair enough, my information might be out of date.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AnyLog: A grand unification of the Internet of Things [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.umd.edu/~abadi/papers/anylogAbadiEtAl.pdf <comment><USER2> Another blockchain snakeoil. Look at one of the excerpts it's no different than today's way of doing things, where publisher needs to take the help of legal enforceable contracts. Not going into technical details where today's distributed systems with immutable records are already very good to handle structured data from multiple sources without the unnecessary complications of blockchain. It's just convoluted way of repackaging how it works now. Hopefully instead of spending time on these things, hope research community can make it better to work with semantic data and build easier tools for managing it.

> Clients must pay for each query they send to AnyLog. Once a client obtains > access to the result of a query, there are few effective technological > mechanisms for preventing or constraining further disclosure. A client may > attempt to resell the data they have access to or disclose it publicly. > Therefore, publishers must take unauthorized disclosures into account when > setting query prices or providing access to decryption keys. In some > settings, relying on more traditional deterrence mechanisms such as legal > contracts may be appropriate

</comment><comment><USER3> This might catch on with people selling bulk passwords from cracked accounts, or stolen personal info, or for mailing lists for spamming. They need a way to not pay for duplicates, and nobody trusts anybody else. The criminal crowd likes blockchains, too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there a market about collecting and selling IoT data like this ?

If we don't think about why one would need such a solution will this blockchain will ever have enough participants to ensure its stability?

</comment><comment><USER5> Explanation and analysis:

[https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/24/anylog/](https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/24/anylog/)

</comment><comment><USER6> why is this better than using, say Kafka? or IOTA? (no points for mentioning the ability to -pause-)

</comment><comment><USER7> Remarkably similar to a previous gig I had except they were focusing on music industry data rather than "generic". Needless to say, that didn't get very far...</comment>


The Australian National Broadband Network board have submitted resignations - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/business/entire-nbn-board-resigns-20130922-2u835.html <comment><USER2> Sad, really sad.

Despite being an Australian, I rarely follow the news there, so if someone closer to the action could confirm and clarify here: the notion was put forward to build fiber to the home across the country (extremely costly), it was passed by a government courageously (for supporting any long term benefit at immediate expense is tantamount to severing a near-term political limb), the government changed, and the new one is likely appointing the current chairman of what used to be the state-owned telecommunications provider (sold off by the incoming government in a prior reign) to 'fix' it.

Does it not appear then, on a macro scale, as if the government gave up its golden goose and wound up redistributing wealth to many private hands whilst reducing its actual capacity to get anything done or maintain a semblence of competitiveness with more successful but similar ventures elsewhere? (China, France and New Zealand come to mind)

After spending much time living in China, I can only conclude that two party democracies are essentially incompetent structures for long term infrastructure.

Perhaps my homeland could fix its NBN project with a pause to enforce transparency, issue public reports and a referendum. Of course, the government wouldn't do that ... the've just stolen the goose.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's the same story across the board really - not even many private hands, just a small handful of them.

Public infrastructure was never particularly invested in, even under Labour, but now that the Liberals are back in (I'm in Victoria, so double Liberal for me) it's "jobs for the boys", more roads, more private health insurance, etc, etc.

<comment><USER4> "Jobs for the boys" is a universal in Australian politics. Scan the resumé of anyone appointed to any board, committee, commission, agency etc etc and you will usually find clear connections to one of the majors.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure why you needed to specify 'Australian' there.

<comment><USER4> Touché. One of my favourite scenes in _Yes, Minister_ is when Sir Humphrey is having lunch with Sir Desmond, a banker he needs a favour from. He offers about a dozen random appointments in the scene -- Potato Board, Wine Marketing Committee etc. It's great.

<comment><USER5> I've just finish rewatching those series. I'd forgotten how much fun they were, and surprised at how little had gone out of date.

<comment><USER4> "In Sydney you think it is a comedy. In Canberra we see it as a documentary".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the point of a FTTN network? You haven't removed the bottleneck which is the copper wire infrastructure. This was one thing that could have made Australia competitive in the years to come, but instead the people who make the decisions know nothing about it let alone able to spell NBN.

IMO it's not all doom and gloom. By putting in the FTTN "backbone", it leaves the door open to rewire it to FTTH down the line when the government realises that commerce is being stiffed because of a slow network.

<comment><USER7> The big issue will be in the sort of contracts they sign with Telstra to rent and maintain the copper infrastructure - which by the figures I have seen published so far may make it _more_ expensive than the FTTH (though no one really knows at this point).

Given that the point of the FTTN as opposed to FTTH is to essentially maintain the status quo for the media (and give established businesses, city areas and the wealthy a competitive advantage - at 2-5G a pop for a connection).. the likelihood is that the libs will try to lock in these contracts as much as possible.

It disappoints me that the article seems to suggest that the board quit due to a lack of faith _from_ the incoming minister, rather than as a gesture which shows a disturbing lack of faith _in_ the incoming minister.

<comment><USER4> Does this conspiracy theory that Turnbull is doing Murdoch's bidding have any ... you know ... _evidence_?

The cui bono is just stupidly thin. Murdoch makes bugger all on his Australian operations. If he divested the lot Wall Street would cheer, holler and stamp its feet.

Edit: "quo vadis" indeed. What's the Latin for malapropism?

<comment><USER7> I never mentioned murdoch. I think FTTN benefits all established media. I was also was having a go at smh reporting, so whatever..

But since you ask, I would say the reason why people think there was a conspiracy is the rabid anti-NBN propaganda by murdoch during the election.

A better explanation perhaps.. [http://theconversation.com/news-corp- australia-vs-the-nbn-is...](http://theconversation.com/news-corp-australia-vs- the-nbn-is-it-really-all-about-foxtel-16768)

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I was reading my own pet peeve about conspiracy theories into your remarks. I've seen all the arguments given before, but honestly, Foxtel just doesn't make very much money for Newscorp.

And given the huge bargaining power Foxtel has to alter content agreements, switching to an NBN-based streaming model just isn't the contractual minefield that it is in the USA (where there are far more cable providers).

I think that most papers came out against Rudd because they were ... against Rudd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This whole fiasco reminds me of a hilarious satire article I read recently on an Australian satire site called The Shovel: [http://theshovel.com.au/2013/08/26/malcolm-turnbull- launches...](http://theshovel.com.au/2013/08/26/malcolm-turnbull-launches-new- logo-for-coalitions-broadband-plan/)

Sadly, we all know this sub-par alternative will be a disaster that will go in the history books. In 40 years I'll tell my grandchildren, "I remember a time when you would have to wait 10 minutes to load a video on the Internet" and they'll laugh and call me crazy. But the sad fact of the matter is, the LNP party have outdated views on not only Internet access but gay marriage, the economy and way things work in the real world.

It's going to be a bumpy 3 years, but LNP won't get another term after all of the crap they've pulled. If I were on the board I'd rather get out before the impending ship of failure sinks (and trust me, it will).

<comment><USER9> Never underestimate the power of the opposition to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

We could be having Labor leadership scuffles for the next three years.

<comment><USER10> I agree. Compare what happened in New Zealand when John Key and the National party ousted the long-term Labor government.

Despite some major missteps from Key/National, Labor's spent the last term and a half fighting amongst themselves about who will lead it. There just wasn't the talent or the public respect for the interim leaders that could compete with Key.

My money's on a few Liberal terms in government, I'm afraid. The scary thing is, the second time they get voted in, they'll treat it was a strengthened mandate to do what they want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Disgraceful, IMO. The last Liberal government over here entrenched Telstra as a monopoly by selling it off in its entirety. They were kicked out of the process last time, due to not taking it seriously, now that their cronies are back in power, they're off the hook.

[http://abbotsinternet.com.au/](http://abbotsinternet.com.au/) gives a good idea of just how bad the offerings over here are. And that doesn't show half of it. My internet drops on a regular basis, and if you call out a technician you will typically get slugged with a callout fee of $100 or so regardless. From... Telstra, because they run all of the phone lines, even though I want to get as far away from them as possible.

<comment><USER11> FTFY [http://abbottsinternet.com.au/](http://abbottsinternet.com.au/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing that always puzzled me about the NBN rollout was why they chose to do the least populated areas first? It seems that it would have helped to allay the cost concerns if they had brought it to more populated areas where the customer uptake would have been greater. By doing places like remote Tasmania (among other small customer base areas), they pretty much guaranteed disappointing numbers up front.

<comment><USER5> Brunswick in Melbourne is a pretty solid medium-density suburb, and the area within it that got the NBN is the most dense of the lot - and was one of the first rollouts. It's also one of the politically safest seats in the country, held by a no-name MP, Kelvin Thompson. Maybe he has a lot of behind-the-scenes power? I've certainly never seen his name outside of local papers. Or maybe someone high up in the NBN planning committee lives there? I never could figure out 'why there?', and simply assumed that the rollout areas were political.

The NBN rollout area missed my house by about two streets...

<comment><USER2> _The NBN rollout area missed my house by about two streets..._

Aha! So maybe _FTTN_ (Fiber To The Neighbour) or _FTTO_ (Fiber To The Others) would be more accurate topology summaries?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Former Telstra boss Ziggy Switkowski is waiting in the wings to be appointed > executive chairman.

That's all that needs to be said, isn't it?

<comment><USER14> Isn't most of NBN Corp made up of ex-telstra... Where else would they get communications engineers?</comment></comment>


Florida jury awards widow $23.6 billion in suit against tobacco company - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/19/us/florida-tobacco-verdict/index.html?c=homepage-t <comment><USER2> Someone born in 1960 started smoking in 1973, died in 1996, and his widow filed suit in 2008. No other discussion on the particulars of the case. Given the patent absurdity that this article presents, it really just ends up seeing more a hatchet job against an easy target, "big tobacco".

And how could anyone be damaged to the tune of billions for anything short of destroying entire industries?

<comment><USER3> They were punitive damages, not compensatory damages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Holy crap. I can't believe I'm siding with tobacco companies, but that's absolutely absurd. First of all, it's been pretty common knowledge that smoking tobacco is unhealthy and addictive since the 60's. No one then or now who is smoking was doing so with ignorance. Secondly, there have been _far_ more egregious instances of wrongful death (companies who didn't tell workers about dangerous chemicals they were exposed to, releasing toxic chemicals into the environment causing birth defects, etc); awarding 26 billion dollars to someone, which would put them in the top 25 richest people in the world, for a death nearly 20 years ago... I just can't see the justification. (Meanwhile, Ethan Couch kills four people drunk driving and goes to summer camp)

<comment><USER5> Considering that the tobacco industry is responsible for 5 millon of deaths every single year, probably all deserve the same punishment, if not life sentence for each of their present and past managers.

Anyway, that amount and just to one... this looked like that was just a move from one of the tobacco companies to get rid of one of their competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "If anyone saw the documents that this jury saw, I believe that person would have awarded a similar or greater verdict amount," he said.

$23.6 billion is a lot. It would take many lifetimes for him to make that much money or even just have a similar affect on the world around him as that much money, so those would have to be some pretty damning documents to award that.

Though I'd be surprised if anywhere near that amount actually gets awarded.

<comment><USER7> There were only $15 million in compensatory damages. I'd say it was $23.6 million in total; i.e. it was a typo.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can any lawyers comment on the likelihood of this amount holding up in an appeal?

</comment><comment><USER8> If we don't have tort reform, how can we ever have legalized MJ or other harder drugs without lawsuits like this?</comment>


Ask HN: What would be a good Android alternative? - <AUTHOR> My Nexus 6p is not supported by Google anymore. I am thinking of flashing the phone with LineageOS, but what other alternatives would be better? <comment><USER2> IMHO, the best alternative to Android that can be used right now is pure AOSP, or an Android distribution that tracks AOSP closely. In the past, that was CopperheadOS. Now, GrapheneOS.

The downside is pretty limited hardware choice. Basically, Pixel (and Nexus for legacy releases). Plus some Sony Xperia (if you can cope with a few non- critical hardware glitches).

The upside is very good security, and not being tracked. F-Droid is, for me, a surprisingly nice ecosystem. Firefox, Termux, Conversations, Signal, OsmAnd, Haven, etc. I don't need much else.

Your needs might be different, but you can always install MicroG and sideload things from Google Play if you ever require propietary applications.

LineageOS is nice, but I don't like excessive hackiness and lack of focus in security. I understand it's partly something given by their goal of supporting a much more broad set of devices.

Thankfully, Project Treble gives the possibility of device-independent ROMs. So things might change soon. For the time being, most devices have glitches, as Treble's HAL has not been well implemented and tested by manufacturers [1].

Other alternatives, aside from iOS, lack tons of functionality. I wish Sailfish/Mer became a serious contender. Their predecessor, Maemo/Meego, as seen in the Nokia 770-N9 saga was amazing.

[1] [https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki](https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki)

</comment><comment><USER3> I heard that Nexus phones are special and have direct support to ubuntu touch. I hear it's a really interesting OS.

There is also sailfish, which is meant for Enterprise and can support Android apps.

Https://sailfishos.org

</comment><comment><USER4> /e/ ?

[https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/devices- list](https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/devices-list)

</comment><comment><USER5> I also have a 6P and strongly recommend LineageOS.</comment>