Anonymous R.I.P Note for Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> http://rledev.mit.edu/aaron.html <comment><USER2> _> Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace. _

"read in peace" where we'd expect "rest in peace. I'm guessing that this expression was intentional, given that Aaron was a voracious reader, and considering the eloquence of the postscript[0].

This is the first time I've read any message from Anonymous (and my understanding is that there is no "one" Anonymous organization, but rather a loose collection of fragmented groups), but I am quite impressed by the author's command of the English language.

 _[0] Postscript: We tender apologies to the administrators at MIT for this temporary use of their websites. We understand that it is a time of soul- searching for all those within this great institution as much — perhaps for some involved even more so — than it is for the greater internet community. We do not consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened, but call for all those feel heavy-hearted in their proximity to this awful loss to acknowledge instead the responsibility they have — that we all have — to build and safeguard a future that would make Aaron proud, and honour the ideals and dedication that burnt so brightly within him by embodying them in thought and word and action._

\---

edit: it also seems that the closing line, _"You were the best of us; may you yet bring out the best in us."_ is an original phrase by the author? (a quick google search didn't yield any prominent matches) It is a beautiful line.

<comment><USER3> The "read in peace" line was the final line of the EFF's tribute -> <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know that's it's appropriate to bundle this with #freemanning and #OpFreeAssange. I understand that they're somewhat related from a political standpoint, but the association polarizes Aaron Swartz in a way that Aaron Swartz alone does not.

</comment><comment><USER5> I thought it was interesting how the images used are not hosted anywhere. Instead the source contains a base64 encoded copy of the image.

<comment><USER6> I suppose it's easier to hack into a site and overwrite the file with a big string rather than find a way to write the images to disk or what have you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you are living normal life in your mid-twenties, the idea of spending rest of your life in prison for nothing must feel worse than death. Even without prior mental health issues.

</comment><comment><USER8> Almost any MIT affiliate can get a *.mit.edu domain name and host a website on it. The student in charge of the original probably forgot to protect against a simple SQL injection attack.

They bypassed that student's security and his website, not the "administrators at MIT" and "their website".

<comment><USER9> Both rledev.mit.edu and cogen.mit.edu are MIT departments (one the part of MIT powering much of campus, one a laboratory doing electronics). It wasn't a student's bad security.

<comment><USER10> Oh so it was a department's bad security. Not surprising

Yes, I know how these things work. Even at MIT it's the same apparently

I wouldn't be surprised if this was an old Windows 2000/2003 server box hosting some static pages (and also it's the same computer the secretary uses)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Original Text:

In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz, November 8, 1986 — January 11, 2013, Requiescat in pace.

A brief message from Anonymous.

Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing — an ideal that we should all support.

Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.

Our wishes

We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them. We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few. We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response. We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.

For in the end, we will not be judged according to what we give, but according to what we keep to ourselves.

Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace.

\----

Who was Aaron Swartz? A hero in the SOPA/PIPA campaign, Reddit cofounder, RSS, Demand Progress, Avaaz, etc...:

Aaron Swartz's funeral is on Tuesday. Here are details:

Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of #Aaron Swartz

\----

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

\-----

You were the best of us; may you yet bring out the best in us.

-Anonymous, Jan 13, 2013.

\----

(Postscript: We tender apologies to the administrators at MIT for this temporary use of their websites. We understand that it is a time of soul- searching for all those within this great institution as much — perhaps for some involved even more so — than it is for the greater internet community. We do not consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened, but call for all those feel heavy-hearted in their proximity to this awful loss to acknowledge instead the responsibility they have — that we all have — to build and safeguard a future that would make Aaron proud, and honour the ideals and dedication that burnt so brightly within him by embodying them in thought and word and action. Original frontpage)

</comment><comment><USER12> "Aaron died fighting for ______." Very upsetting to read sentiments like this. When you commit suicide, who do you die fighting for?

<comment><USER13> Suicide as an act of protest of brutality and injustice has a reasonably solid history of resulting in revolutions that toppled governments.

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

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

<comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Younger#Death>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems to be down now.

Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Frledev.mit.edu%2Faaron.html&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Frledev.mit.edu%2Faaron.html&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.3383&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER16> Aaron's death seems to be expediting a lot of political/social change. Do you think he foresaw this coming?

<comment><USER17> Not a whole lot has changed yet. Won't really know that for a few months.

<comment><USER18> It is however generating conversation, which is a start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Also on this domain: <http://cogen.mit.edu/>

</comment><comment><USER20> The harsh punishment and discretion of the prosecutors may have had advantage in prosecuting mafia bosses with tax fraud. It did not work in this case. Sometimes American justice system is ineffective. There is little difference between 25 years and 50 years, 100 year sentence is completely absurd. It does not act as a deterrent. Someone else would have sold his skills for crime, if the punishment is so big for an activist kind of activity.

</comment><comment><USER21> It is time to join a real political force to defend people like Aaron through democratic means: the Pirate Party

</comment><comment><USER22> Surprised they didn't put some of the tasty new Java exploits on the page -- the gift that would keep on giving.

</comment><comment><USER23> A message from your government:

We hope this unfortunate Aaron Swartz incident will be a teaching moment for you all.

1) You are encouraged to cede as much power and treasure as you are able to your government. We're here because we care, and to care FOR you, we need you to care LESS. 2) Our laws are there to protect you. There has been some confusion on this point, so let us repeat: please do not break our laws. All of our laws, crafted by our wisest men and women, apply justice equally and have a basis in nature: the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. As we restrict you, we perfect you! 3) Don't you worms ever step out of line. If you do, or if you get in our way, you and your family will be destroyed. You will be ostracized, beat, and crushed by any and all means. You will not be missed when you are gone.

Have a wonderful day!

</comment><comment><USER9> See cogen.mit.edu for an identical note. It appears cogen was running IIS.

</comment><comment><USER24> Web pages like this are the digital equivalent of a wheatpaste. Anyone can make a political statement as anonymous.</comment>


Show HN: Autonomous Cars with Marc Hoag on Apple Podcasts - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomous-cars-with-marc-hoag/id1353975287 <comment><AUTHOR> My podcast is the only weekly podcast on autonomous cars in the world. Launched in Feb 2018, I've organically grown it to the #1 spot on Google (for searches like "autonomous cars podcasts") with nearly 10K listens per month. I published Episode 74 today -- the Season 2 finale -- and felt it was finally time to share with the HN community. Happy holidays and all the best for 2019!</comment>


The story of how the dinosaurs disappeared is getting more and more complicated - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14698363

<comment><USER2> _Second, they coincided with one of the largest periods of vulcanicity in the past billion years. Third, one of them just happened to strike where these volcanoes were active._

Is it not plausible that impacts that massive _caused_ the volcanic activity? Wouldn't impacts that massive be expected to catalyze that sort of reaction?

</comment><comment><USER3> What's with the articles that start with "EVERYONE knows" ... I used to think that the asteroid hypothesis/theory was just that, one of many others. Or is it considered to be a proven fact?

<comment><USER4> It's certainly considered the most likely explanation in the general public. (This is the Economist, not Paleo-Geologist Daily.)

I've always liked the Nemesis conclusion myself. Very chilling, considering we are due. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not one but 2 large impacts? The coincidence sounds like evidence for the Nemesis theory. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)> for more.

<comment><USER6> how would collisions 300k years apart be, in any way, evidence in favor of a star with a 26 million year oscillation period? if you're going to say something like that, back it up.

<comment><USER5> Ordinarily an impact on the size of either should arrive once every hundred million years or so. That two would independently arrive 300,000 years apart is an extremely unlikely coincidence.

The Nemesis theory says that every 26 million years Nemesis arrives and knocks a bunch of stuff out of the Oort cloud. Most of it is swept up by Jupiter, but the Earth goes through a period where large asteroid impacts are likely. It is a much smaller coincidence to have 2 large impacts in a period where large asteroid impacts should be common.

Therefore this result is more substantially likely under the Nemesis hypothesis than it would be without the Nemesis hypothesis. Which implies that the conditional probability of Nemesis given this observation is higher than it would be without this observation. Which is a fancy way of saying that the observation is evidence for the Nemesis hypothesis.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. This event does not support the Nemesis hypothesis. This might only add evidence to suggest that there is periodicity to Earth impacts. Although, it might not. As I understand it the idea of periodicity for impacts is debated and is not statistically conclusive.

There are other hypothesizes besides Nemesis to explain the supposed periodicity of impacts. Essentially, we need something to cause a gravitational change to the Oort cloud. Other possibilities include Brown dwarfs and black holes or precession in the rotation of the milky way.

<comment><USER5> Correction. This event doesn't _only_ support the Nemesis hypothesis.

More precisely it is evidence that something caused excess asteroid activity 65 million years ago. And therefore is supporting evidence for any theory which could explain that. Nemesis is the best known possibility, but is far from the only candidate.

<comment><USER7> The supposed impact is merely a data point that could be used to interpret Earth impact periodicity. It can only contribute to our to our current collection of data. Defining it as evidence in support or against periodicity is premature.

<comment><USER5> Who said anything about periodicity?

I was saying that it is evidence that the dinosaur asteriod was not just a random asteroid. Some external force disturbed potential asteroids and shoved multiple ones into the inner solar system. That fits with Nemesis. But would fit with other theories as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Abstract from the GSA: [http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2009AM/finalprogram/abstract_16019...](http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2009AM/finalprogram/abstract_160197.htm)

Better article that is more critical of Chatterjee's theory: [http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091018-dinosaur- crater...](http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091018-dinosaur-crater.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Basically, they don't know squat. They had one crater and a theory. Then they found a 2nd crater and a new theory emerges. Presumably there's a 3rd crater somewhere that'll require another theory. I think I'll ignore paleontology for another 20 years and see if the theories settle down.

<comment><USER9> Well, that's what science _is_.

First there's the observation. Then there's a guess. Then there are tests, and sometimes more guesses. Then more observations come along, and everything gets revised.

This is in contrast to faith, where the individual picks the conclusion that they like, and then tries to fit the evidence to it.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but there are questions where we apparently know a lot, so our theories do not change very much, and then there are questions where we don't know shit, so our theories radically change with each new data point. We have much higher confidence in relativity (or in the limited-scope applicability of Newtonian physics) than, for instance, any given theory about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think methane hydrates had a lot to do with it: [http://www.amazon.com/When- Life-Nearly-Died-Extinction/dp/05...](http://www.amazon.com/When-Life-Nearly- Died-Extinction/dp/050028573X)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think it likely that eventually they will find that the evolution of a new, better adapted animal caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.</comment>


What's the Matter with San Francisco? - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/07/whats-the-matter-with-san-francisco/399506/ <comment><USER2> The problem to me is that people want an amazing city with a booming economy and gorgeous landscapes to be "affordable" for the man on the street.

I think our progressive politics IS to blame: for deluding San Franciscans into believing such a thing is possible.

<comment><USER3> _I think our progressive politics IS to blame: for deluding San Franciscans into believing such a thing is possible._

Actually it is possible. But the irony is that the person who came up with best idea that would have fixed/prevented this problem, has now been ostracized as a "fascist" by the left-wing tech community: [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formali...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html)

If circa 2007, San Francisco itself had been turned into a join-stock corporation, with all the existing residents given shares, then all residents would have grown wealthy as the city grew rich. Furthermore, the government would have had an incentive to allow new housing, since that would increase total tax revenues, and thus increased dividends for all residents. Right now, the politically powerful have no incentive to improve new building, since they do not directly benefit.

<comment><USER4> He's been ostracized for more complicated reasons than "fascism" \--- I'm not sure what that word means. I think it's a little misleading to suggest that this is a case of hair-trigger political correctness.

The irony of the "fascism" dig on this thread is that the source you've provided appears to be this person _literally arguing for privatization in order to create a corporatist autocracy._ By that way: _that 's_ the solution to San Francisco's problems you find promising? Or am I misunderstanding you?

I think the author's "practical" political ideas are comical and worthy of ridicule, but that they alone don't make the author problematic. The virulent strain of scientific crypto-racism that seems to run through their writing though; that's a problem for me.

<comment><USER3> " _the source you 've provided appears to be this person literally arguing for privatization in order to create a corporatist autocracy. By that way: that's the solution to San Francisco's problems you find promising_"

The joint-stock form of government works extremely well for companies that make software operating systems, so I would like to see it tried for companies making physical operating systems (a city being an operating system for people). I don't go as far as moldbug's proposal (and I'm not sure if Moldbug goes as far as Moldbug's proposal, he always likes to frame the debate by making the most extreme argument in one direction). I don't want the corporation to operate the courts or to run the army. There should be an independent court system and the city government would have to follow rule-of- law. But in general, I think formalizing ownership over the city would lead to more pareto optimal solutions, and I think that would be good for the existing residents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me one of the biggest problems is rampant NIMBYism.

<comment><USER6> This was voted down and is something of an inflammatory comment but there's truth to it. You see it throughout the Valley and the entire Bay Area. It's why there is little density in the Valley in my opinion, why the public transit isn't very good among other things.

I'm afraid it's hard to change. People who paid so much for their Valley homes certainly do not like the idea of the supply dramatically increasing and their pleasant, small communities becoming drastically urbanized. And I understand that.

But the progressive nature of this area has always seemed face value to me as an outsider who travels to this region often. It's incredibly nice here but I believe it is time to begin building lots of high rises (scaled for quakes) in some city near SF and urbanizing areas while creating mix zoned housing and commercial similar to what you'd see in NYC. It's time for an experiment like that in the Valley somewhere.

<comment><USER7> But a big piece of it is sf getting fucked by the nimbyism elsewhere.

viz Mountain View: they just authorized something like 3.4 million ft2 of office space between LinkedIn, Google, etc while _supposedly_ they're giong to add 1.5k to 5k housing units. In the future. Where are the other, say, 15 to 20 thousand people going to live? Mountain View doesn't give a shit, but a bunch of them are going to have to life in sf, because that's where there's housing.

<comment><USER8> How about just having the state use eminent domain to seize half of Atherton, hook it back up to CalTrain, and build dense urban housing there, with easy commuting to Mountain View and Redwood City?

I jest... partially. Atherton is _horrible_ for the whole area.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, that would be a great place to start. Build lots of streets with high rises with light rail and commercial and residential stacked.

With a location near Palo Alto/Stanford and the region I would bet it becomes unbelievably high in demand.

Obviously this could never happen there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's very difficult to build a city to serve two populations, one rich and one poor (or at least average). I would love to work in SF but have zero desire to live there because it's too expensive for everyone but the IPO crowd.

<comment><USER10> There is another way to look at this. The city serves two populations: people who currently live in a city, and people who would like to immigrate to the city.

As a resident of a growing city, I find it somewhat puzzling and inconvenient that it's taken as an article of faith that large city growth is a good thing. Growth is good, but it's also bad: it brings congestion, filth, and higher housing prices. Even with the development of affordable housing, housing prices still rise. Furthermore, the traffic associated with high-density houses places a strain on the transit system and other public infrastructure and services that the city is usually unequipped to handle. Transit is often upgraded far too late, long after congestion has negatively impacted the lives of residents. It's happening to me right now in my city: coworkers have reported their commute rising considerably over the past year.

So as the resident of a city who is happy with the way that it was, and is increasingly unhappy with the way it's becoming, what I'm wondering is: why should I not vote to block and prevent this growth? A lot of city politics talks as if growth is naturally a good thing that should always be pursued, but talk far less often of quality of life for residents. Growth often comes at the expense of current residents. (Gradual growth is healthy and necessary, but excess growth harms everyone.)

If discouraging high-density housing means higher housing prices, but buys me less congestion and a higher quality of life, then that seems like a good tradeoff to me as a resident. Otherwise, I get higher housing prices _and_ more congestion and a worse quality of life. Cities should serve their current residents first, and prospective future immigrants second.

I suspect that the strategy that San Francisco residents are pursuing is a strategy designed specifically to make it expensive to live there, to discourage further immigration that they do not want.

<comment><USER11> That's all well and good, but you missed the fact that what made SFO the melting pot that it's known for today was a liberal immigration stance and an egalitarian mindset. What you're describing is conservative immigration and a preservation mindset, which is fine, but the opposite of what made San Francisco, San Francisco.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > It invented new models of delivering affordable housing and health care. It > invested deeply in public space, from parks to bike lanes. It adopted a > transit-first policy

Is that really true? San Francisco, as much as I love it, never struck me as a particularly forward-thinking place when it comes to public transportation, bike-friendliness, healthcare, or housing policies. Compare it to any European city (e.g. bike lanes in Amsterdam, transit in London, health care in Switzerland, or Germany in housing policy), and San Francisco looks pretty weak. The only thing it really has going for it is its population density and diversity.

Don't get me wrong, I adore this city. But I feel like it has succeeded _despite_ its policies, not because of them.

<comment><USER8> California has always managed to think of itself as forward-thinking because they've never asked what anyone else thinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just had a discussion about this with a coworker.

I very strongly agree with this article. Diversity does not survive in expensive areas and I strongly believe that is worth preserving in San Francisco. I understand the problems rent-control causes, but if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price then diversity would be completely destroyed. That might not mean anything to a lot of people who work in tech _(the feeling I get when I talk about it with coworkers)_ , but I think it means a lot.

<comment><USER14> > Diversity does not survive in expensive areas

Arguably true.

> I understand the problems rent-control causes, but if it were removed and > all residential areas jump up to market price then diversity would be > completely destroyed.

As a matter of theory, it's hard to see that rent control actually protects diversity. And emperically, it's absolutely not doing that, in San Francisco or in other cities which have tried it.

Here are you choices:

1\. Remove restrictions on building. Housing will be plentiful, diversity will be expanded, but what currently makes the city special will be lost (and maybe it'll end up even better, but it'll certainly change). 2\. Maintain restrictions on building. Housing will be scarce, diversity will be lost, but the city won't change.

Rent control is entirely orthogonal to this. _IF_ you have scarce housing, _then_ you must allocate it among the people who want it. One way to do this is via the market. If you do not like the way the market will allocate it, then you can cap the rents and allocate it in some other fashion. But as a society, we are extremely bad at allocating things fairly (hence why we rely on markets so much; it's not that they're very good, it's that we're really crap).

Which means that the way housing under rent control will inevitably be allocated _isn 't going to preserve diversity._ Rent control makes the lucky few who get to live in the city even luckier, but it doesn't tell you who ends up being one of those lucky few. But we know, from decades of experience, that the lucky few end tend to up being the already privileged.

Notice that San Francisco—with strong rent control laws—is actually not a diverse city. Oakland—with weak ones—is one of the most diverse cities in the US. Similar patterns can be seen across the US. Your assumption that rent control aids diversity is supported neither by theory nor evidence; the fact that rent control _could_ enable the poor to afford to live in a city doesn't mean that it _will_. And it doesn't.

What really helps diversity is having a _lot_ of housing relative to the number of people who want to live there. San Francisco has scarce housing.

<comment><USER15> Rent control is about not increasing rents by too much each year while you are living there. Once you move out, the landlord can agree to a new lease at any amount. The only way to circumvent this is to assign your lease to the next tenant when you move out. Most people just move out after a while and the apartment goes back on the market. You get some very long term tenants, but so what? It's a small percentage of the population.

Given this, I think rent control is fairly ineffective at preserving diversity, but I like it because it means that people can't be forced to move all of a sudden because their landlord puts the rent up by $500 a month. I don't believe that the already astronomical rents in SF would go much higher if rent control was abolished anyway.

That said, building more housing obviously helps. As does making nearby cities nicer places to live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem is that San Francisco is/was at the epicenter of two cultural explosions (the hippies and the hackers, to put it bluntly), and they kind of clash just a little bit.

<comment><USER16> Please don't confuse the frat boys with business degrees with the hackers who have strong roots in hippie culture.

<comment><USER15> Don't worry, I took some discrete math, and I know that A is a subset of C and B is a subset of C does not imply A intersects B.

<comment><USER16> Your response reads like you're saying that the frat boys in tech management are somehow a subset of or descended from hippie culture. I know better than to think you're actually saying that, though, because that is insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are there any good brownfield (old industrial land) sites left in SF that can be rezoned to high density residential? If you build residential in those sites then you'll typically get little to no push back from progressives as you are not evicting existing, low income, residents in order to build more expensive housing.

By extensively rezoning vast swaths of downtown industrial land to residential Vancouver got around these problems SF is currently encountering for a few decades.

<comment><USER18> Presumably this is what will happen to the entirety of the Central Waterfront from Mission Bay to Candlestick point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The city's devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its > famed progressive politics.

Who deems that unlikely? Isn't that the widely-accepted answer?

</comment><comment><USER20> Austin is going through some similar issues. After a generation or two of anti-growth city leaders and crazy growth the last ~10 years, our roads are crowded, the public transport is a mess, and housing is going through the roof. Now they're playing catch up trying to make up for 25 years in the next few.. and it's physically impossible.

* I moved here 5 years ago, so I admit to "being part of the problem."

</comment><comment><USER21> This One Intersection Explains Why Housing Is So Expensive In San Francisco [1]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-housing-is-so- expensiv...](http://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-housing-is-so-expensive-in- san-francisco-2014-4)

</comment><comment><USER22> _the city reveled in its diversity, with groups claiming distinct neighborhoods_

<comment><USER20> So I'm not the only one who thought that was an odd line?

<comment><USER23> The neighborhoods in SF are very distinct. The Marina and the Mission are very different from each other. This makes the city as a whole diverse.

Bikes of San Francisco: [https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4084/5112789301_da50dca4bd_b.j...](https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4084/5112789301_da50dca4bd_b.jpg)

<comment><USER24> I could never figure out why fixies were so popular with the SF hipsters in a city with such steep hills. Or how fixies make hipsters so hip, for that matter. In Amsterdam, where it's flat enough that one-speed bikes are practical, fixies are called "Oma Fiets" for "Granny Bikes". [http://www.workcycles.com/home-products/handmade-city- bicycl...](http://www.workcycles.com/home-products/handmade-city- bicycles/workcycles-omafiets-dutch-granny-bike)

<comment><USER23> I don't bike in the city. But, what I've heard is that fixies are popular because they are so crappy and cheap that they aren't worth stealing. They are also easy to repair.

As hipness goes, a big theme of hipsters is to work really hard at looking like you aren't trying and don't care. Throw on some second-hand-store clothes to ride up the hill on a crappy, completely inappropriate bike to a very expensive dive bar to overpay for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and a dirty well whisky because that's how much you don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _the city reveled in its diversity, with groups claiming distinct neighborhoods as their own in a modern twist on the tradition of ethnic urban enclaves._

I live in a similarly diverse area where people of all backgrounds hang out. The surrounding cities are ethnically homogeneous yet this one is not. Individualism, despite some of the shittier aspects of human behavior it can bring to the table, broke people up from being in ethnicity X and thus area X to being defined by sexuality, political leaning, consumption habits and expressive tendencies, seeking those who had similar traits. Ignoring any narcissistic aspects, defining people by those traits has the benefit of producing better social liquidity.

</comment><comment><USER26> For those who haven't studied economics:

When you restrict the supply of something scarce or the demand for it goes up, the price increases.

In this case the "something" is housing. It's essentially illegal to build anything in the bay area which means the supply isn't changing much. But the demand is skyrocketing. Therefore the price is skyrocketing.

This would all be fixed very quickly if it was legal to buy some land, demolish what's on there, and build a skyscraper instead. San Francisco would look like Manhattan within two years.

If you study the 1906 earthquake, you find that a lot of people suddenly didn't have homes. They were all rehoused within a couple of weeks. Today, being illegal to build anything, and with rent controls on what does exist, we'd have a lot of homeless people for a long time.

We all want everyone to have a nice life, and we intend well with these laws. Economics concerns itself with what actually happens when you incent people though, not what we intend by those incentives.

<comment><USER27> And when a price is artificially lowered below its market rate, there will be a shortage. In this case, rent control. The combination of those two factors is what makes the housing situation so terrible.

<comment><USER28> And building skyscrapers on a 2d surface doesn't scale ... so the only other option doesn't work either.

<comment><USER27> What exactly do you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What's being done to change or reverse the damage these policies have inflicted on San Francisco?

<comment><USER30> Flight to the suburbs and hope that urbanization occurs before one turns 30 (unlikely).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> As a San Franciscan all I can say is... where does one even begin to answer such a question? :-)

</comment><comment><USER32> California: incessantly talks about the need for equality more than anyone else in the world; creates least equal, most economically stratified society in the United States where all except the independently wealthy feel uneasy.

Texas: makes fun of Californians who constantly preach about inequality; creates a pretty equal, egalitarian society that most citizens feel comfortable in.

<comment><USER33> Shame that this has been upvoted, because it's not really true.

The Gini coefficient of CA and TX are extremely similar [1]- CA is ranked #44 in the US, and TX is ranked #43.

However, social mobility of the poorest percentiles is significantly higher in Californian cities [2]. In fact, of the major US metropolises, the top four best cities for social mobility of children in the bottom quintile are: San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego, in order. [2] Social mobility in Texas is significantly lower, and extraordinarily lower throughout the rest of the southern US. (Texas is a nice exception)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing- incom...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income- ladder-location-matters.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER32> It's about quality of life, not relative income. I used these two states as examples because I've spent a lot of time and have a lot of friends in both. In Texas, a middle class income sets you up with a decent house, in a decent hood, with a decent school district, and a fairly low stress life. You mix with others from random walks of life. In California, it feels like you spend every dollar just to survive, and you tend to associate with a narrower spectrum of peers.

<comment><USER34> Is it actually possible to have a "decent school district" in Texas after what the Texas State Board of Education has done to the history textbooks?

McCarthy's blacklists were justified because of widespread Communist infiltration?

Slavery was just a side issue in the Civil War?

No mention of Jim Crow or the Ku Klux Klan?

Four major thinkers who greatly influenced the Founding Fathers were Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and _Moses_?

Science doesn't really fare well with the Texas State Board of Education, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _No one made San Francisco the most expensive place in the country on purpose. That's the tragedy._

I disagree. I've worked for a couple "limousine liberals" in New York. So has my wife and so have many of my friends. Many of the limousine liberals are assholes (not that he's very liberal, nor is he wealthy, and he's also fictional... but think of Frank Underwood). Sure, they vote Democratic, but they're nasty, elitist people who will hurt your career for any reason or no reason at all, and who put a lot more stock into meaningless social prestige (connections, pedigree) than typical conservatives. Their liberalism is mostly an air they put on in order to make themselves socially acceptable since they can't hide their wealth. (That's not to say that all wealthy liberals are like that. The type certainly exists, though.) Frankly, it's at the point that I don't really care about a person's macropolitics. Some of my favorite people are conservative (I think they're wrong, but that's another issue) and some of the worst people are nominally progressive (and probably sincere in their support for left-of-center politics). As with religious belief, some expect a correlation between position and ethical character, but the actual correlation seems to be near zero.

Frankly, I think that this _was_ intentional. It has nothing to do with being "a conservative" or "a liberal". This NIMBYism is about maintaining high house prices; it is _about_ being a selfish piece of shit. It just gets a leftist veneer because these people are good at coming up with an argument that other people will listen to. End of story.

 _I think the progressive anti-growth sentiment is earnest; it's people honestly trying to protect their city from unwanted change._

That's the opposite of "progressive". They're _leftist_ , but that's not the same thing as being progressive. Kim Jong-Un is a leftist. So was Stalin. So are many of the Euro-rednecks

The U.S. is different from Europe in that our mouth-breathers, kooks, racists, regressives, and assholes are more numerous on the right of the economic spectrum... to the point where tropes are made of it. In Europe (and in NYC and San Francisco) the authoritarian nutjobs and the xenophobes and the anti- progress crowd is more evenly split between the left and right.

Some component of the Bay Area housing evil is ill-thought-out liberal politics (see: legacy rent control systems that don't allow rents to rise even with inflation) but much more of this stuff is exclusionary than people will admit to.

</comment><comment><USER36> San Francisco is basically 7 miles by 7 miles. How much of what is there are you going to tear down to accommodate the influx of tech? Since gold rush times San Francisco has seen ebb and flow of populations and boom and bust periods. There is continual change, that said if it allows continual teardown of existing buildings and building of high rises, might as well be in Manhattan.

<comment><USER37> Manhattan island is 33 square miles and its population is 1.6 million. San Fransisco's population is 800k. There's a lot of potential room for growth before it becomes Manhattan.</comment></comment>


Google Pixel 4 Face Unlock works if eyes are shut - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50085630 <comment><USER2> It's weird that they didn't include an option requiring attention. It's very easy to detect eyes open/closed so must have been a deliberate decision.</comment>


Ask HN: Career Path for Technical Recruiters? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN!
I'm a PhD student in CS/ML. I have a number of good internships and a pretty solid background in math, cs, and ml.
I really enjoy tech, but I enjoy the meta aspect more: networking, resume reviews, job searching, applications etc.
Is there a path for me to technical recruiting and sourcing?
I see people regularly complain about bad recruiters who don't understand the tech requirements of a certain job or drop the ball in communication. I feel like there is potentially room for more "high tech" recruiters with some understanding of the job requirements.
Could I start an agency? Do any of you have experience in this domain?
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> You're on a path to getting a PhD in CS/ML and you want to get into recruiting?

Either this idea itself was poorly thought through or your PhD was poorly thought through. Figure out which one it is and the answer will become clear.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi there. I am currently exploring this same idea myself and I'm well on my way. Shoot me an email if you want to chat. Temp email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> you should check user s3nnyy's background and their articles...

>> [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=s3nnyy](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=s3nnyy)</comment>


Feds now oppose Aereo, rejecting cloud apocalypse argument - <AUTHOR> http://betaboston.com/news/2014/03/04/aereo-online-tv-streaming-broadcasters-supreme-court-justice-department/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why the broadcasters care enough to make a big deal about this. Isn't their goal to get as many viewers as they can, so they can make more advertising money?

If Aereo is distributing the content to more people, aren't they getting more viewers? What is the problem here?

<comment><USER3> Cable companies pay them a lot of money to retransmit network TV. If Aereo is legal, that means that cable companies could use same trick destroying a large portion of their revenue.

<comment><USER4> So why transmit OTA at all?

<comment><USER5> Because we pay for it with our taxes.

<comment><USER6> Am I missing something? I thought they pay the FCC to use the spectrum.

<comment><USER5> They pay a license fee for the spectrum, but do not own it. Because no one can own a frequency. So the frequency is licensed by the government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fed argument hinges on this "Under the 1976 Copyright Act, a company that retransmits copyrighted broadcast television programs must obtain a license, though qualifying retransmission services may avail themselves of the detailed statutory licensing schemes established by Congress."

All television broadcasts are copyrighted, and local broadcasters, cable providers, and satellite providers all have attained licenses to retransmit those works. Feds are arguing that Aereo is charging customers for public retransmission of copyrighted works without a licence from the copyright holders. Of course current TV providers welcome this stance because they're also trying to sell DVR services.

<comment><USER8> Aereo isn't retransmitting to the public though, it's allowing you the ability to remotely deploy an antenna in a place where reception is good, and forwarding that signal onto you.

<comment><USER9> It's a stretch to say they're letting me deploy an antenna. It's not like they're just an antenna colocation company where I go install it myself.

<comment><USER10> Suppose that you were filthy rich, owned property that included a hill, and hired people to put an antenna on your hill and run cable back to your house so you could watch TV.

Now suppose you leased a part of your hill to your neighbour so that they could do the same thing.

What's different about Aereo's model, other than the scale?

<comment><USER11> > What's different about Aereo's model, other than the scale?

From a legal perspective the wording of the contract between parties matters an awful lot. A quick look at Areo's site shows they are offering something very different. If your property owner and neighbor entered a similar contract for these services I suspect they would indeed face the same legal risks. Once you become a middle man who is tuning/transcoding/transporting you fit the mold of a cable TV service provider far more than a property owner leasing land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with the argument against Aereo is that (regardless of the Justice Department's statement) it unravels rental services. Where is the line drawn? Can I not rent a hotel room and watch television in it? Can I not rent a hotel room, put a networked camera in it, and watch the television in the room while I am not physically in it? Can I not rent a hotel room that already has such a camera in it? Can I not rent a 1x1x1 hotel room with a miniature television and network camera in it? Can the television and camera not be one device? The "room" of Aereo is much smaller, but does size change legality?

<comment><USER13> Only if you were to redistribute said content.

The argument they're making looks like they're saying that Aereo can't stream copyrighted content over the internet, because the copyright owners (the broadcasters) don't want their content used in the manner. This is weird because broadcasters aren't supposed to have copyrights on material once it's been broadcast. That's been Aereo's edge.

Basically they're trying to close the loophole by saying Aereo isn't consuming the signal, hence they are interfering with the broadcast to the real consumer.

<comment><USER14> Hum, who says the broadcasters aren't supposed to have copyright on the material? That makes no sense, if they didn't everyone could just capture it and rebroadcast to the whole world at will.

I believe Aereo's position is not that the broadcasters don't hold the copyright, it's that they aren't violating it since they just do "location- shifting".

<comment><USER13> >The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the lower court ruling on Monday in a 2-to-1 decision, saying that Aereo's streams of TV shows to individual subscribers did not constitute "public performances," and thus the broadcasters' copyright infringement lawsuits against the service "are not likely to prevail on the merits."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/aereo- wins-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/aereo-wins-in- appeals-court-setting-stage-for-trial-on-streaming-broadcast-tv.html)

<comment><USER14> That doesn't say they don't hold copyright over the material. In fact, it implies that they do, since otherwise, whether Aereo is doing a public performance or not would be irrelevant.

<comment><USER13> It only says they only copyright for those who are doing public performances with the broadcast, and that they don't have copyright on the signal itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone have any knowledge of the particulars of the license that the broadcasters bought for the spectrum they use. Are they perpetual or for a limited time?

Just wondering if with the networks claim that most of their viewership comes from cable if their use of the spectrum would no longer be considered the best use for serving the public interest. Taking it further, would that allow the government to re-purpose the spectrum for other use.

</comment><comment><USER16> The biggest threat of this lawsuit will be to the meanings of arcane technical terms such as "acquire", "playback" and "her".

</comment><comment> mark-r The Obama administration supporting broadcasters? What a shock.

</comment><comment><USER17> This case is going to follow the legal principle of what the government wants the government gets.

For example shopping malls and corporate headquarters are a public use of land, while growing a plant in your closet and consuming it in your home is interstate commerce.

</comment><comment><USER18> If it may seem odd to you that the White House would get involved in this issue, this may uncover the mystery - this is what you get when White House hires former MPAA and RIAA executives in the administration:

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140303/17554626416/us- sol...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140303/17554626416/us-solicitor- generals-office-run-former-top-mpaa-lawyer-shockingly-sides-with-broadcasters- over-aereo.shtml)</comment>


How Bvckup got its name - <AUTHOR> http://bvckup.tumblr.com/post/3283335299/how-bvckup-got-its-name

<comment><USER3> This post seems to miss three important considerations: trademarks, domains & "spellability". With respect to trademarks, it's worth taking a few minutes on uspto.gov to understand the trademark landscape of your potential name. Secondly, with respect to domains, it's worth assessing how much your desired name will cost you. It is very rare to find a half-way decent name that has not been registered, but many are either not being used or in the hands of squatters. For a few thousand you can get a decent name. When your desired name is in the hands of squatters, and you don't have the cash, I suggest using something like "getDESIREDNAME" or "DESIREDNAMEapp".....if the service succeeds you will have the cash to purchase the domain. Again, you want to ensure going in that your desired name is not already being used in the same manner that you intend to use it. On the final point, if someone can't spell your name after hearing it, it's a fail. Flickr is not the exception that disproves this rule.

Looking at Bvckup then w/ these considerations in mind, yes the trademark is available and so was the domain, but on the third count it fails. My 2 cents.

<comment><USER4> First two points - fully agreed. I should've mentioned the domain name availability, it is indeed the first coarse filter for rejecting name candidates.

> if someone can't spell your name after hearing it, it's a fail.

Practically speaking - why is it a fail? Who are the prospective users that I am going to loose over this?

<comment><USER5> Every single person who hears about it on TV or radio.

Or rather, every user who doesn't because the producer can't work out how to pronounce it, so it never goes on the teleprompter.

<comment><USER4> > Every single person who hears about it on TV or radio

That's not "practically speaking". If I ever to get a TV coverage, that'd be of TWiT or similar, and I'm sure Leo can manage to pronounce it and follow-up with the URL on the screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> at the risk of sounding ignorant, how the heck are people supposed to pronounce your product name? in fact, how do you even talk about your product verbally with others?

<comment><USER4> _Bee-vee-cup_ , but here's the thing - in two years of it being in beta this has never come up as a real issue. I guess this _can_ impede a word of (physical) mouth to a degree, but the assumption here is that few people are going to need to actually pronouce the name.

Consider Dribbble, Forrst or even XKCD - having an immediately obvious phonetic form does not appear to be a firm requirement for the name as long as its predominant usage is online.

<comment><USER7> > Consider Dribbble, Forrst or even XKCD - having an immediately obvious > phonetic form does not appear to be a firm requirement for the name as long > as its predominant usage is online.

I'm not sure how your examples there help you at all. Each of them have clear pronunciation: dribble, forest, XKCD each letter spelled out.

bee-vee-cup is not intuitive at all. If you show the logo to me I would have guessed "Backup" with an inverted capital A.

<comment><USER4> Examples don't mean to help, they were meant to illustrate the point that followed. The ease of pronunciation and the ability to spell the name from its audible form are not all that important in the online context. This _is_ a conjecture, not a fact, but based on what I've seen so far it appears to be a valid one.

Moreover that stumble that your brain does when seeing it for the first time, it makes the name memorable. Compare to something like "Super Backup" - fine, easy flowing name, all clear. A week passes, and what do you remember? Was it a "super" or an "ultra backup"? Now imagine it was called "Duper Backup" - <USER2> same thing as with Bvckup, this quirk makes it more memorable and in the end that's what counts.

I have to put a disclaimer here though :) I have rather unconventional views of what makes or breaks the logos and names. I got flamed more than once for these views on Logopond and Typophile, but I still firmly believe that a small quirk in the name goes a long way. See, for example, <http://dribbble.com/shots/92904-Puzzle>

<comment><USER8> The name is alright, although personally I pronounce it _bvvvkup_ in my head rather than bee-vee-ckup, but the point is that it's memorable. Explaining it over the phone to someone might be harder.

The logo is a miss though imho, I honestly thought it was an upside A as well. You could probably rectify it without losing the original concept though, for example: <http://i.imgur.com/u0z2X.jpg>

<comment><USER4> _That_ is the exact change I was thinking of making. Thanks for the nudge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 800 uniques so far, about 50 downloads. I'll post updated counts in a bit for everyone's amusement.

<comment><USER4> 1475 uniques from HN in 8 hours, about 80 downloads. Receeding now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was going to submit this myself, but you beat me to it.

In any case, while mostly in a reading mode, I _am_ on HN. If anyone has any questions or comments, shoot, be happy to talk about my stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER9> This method of creating the name is widely used by professional logo/identity designers. David Airey has a good illustration - <http://www.davidairey.com/berthier-logo-design-process>

The main problem with it that it is still unpredictable. It may lead to a good name or it may not.

<comment><USER4> Certainly, it's a well-known method. My main goal was to illustrate the actual flow from a set of words through associations to the name.

As for its unpredictability - at least it provides certain framework that generally speeds up the convergence, as opposed to just sitting there and brute-forcing the vocabulary:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wondering how long the process took.

And kudos on your site design ... it made me go look at the actual site ... and download the software and now I'm backing up my entire hard drive using bvckup:)

That product name is funny though, I wouldn't know how to direct someone to it verbally other than to say "I'll fb you the link"

</comment><comment><USER11> That entire website is a <table> tag, and I'm OK with that.

<comment><USER12> And so is HN. Are you OK with that too?</comment></comment>


BaseJS: A JavaScript Framework For Mobile Safari - <AUTHOR> http://paularmstrongdesigns.com/weblog/basejs-a-mobile-javascript-framework

<comment><USER2> i wonder what dean edwards thinks about that name.</comment>


Magic: The Gathering – Top 200 Legacy Cards - <AUTHOR> http://tcganalytics.com/?utm_source=hacker+news&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=initial+push

<comment><USER2> Link to [http://leve.rs/blog/using-historical-data-to-rank-the-top- ma...](http://leve.rs/blog/using-historical-data-to-rank-the-top-magic-the- gathering-cards/) would be more appropriate.

<comment><AUTHOR> The blog post was my 1st post. This site updated every week! :)</comment></comment>


Why You Don't Want to Give Financial Information to All of Your Investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/11/09/why-you-dont-want-to-give-financial-information-to-all-of-your-investors/ <comment><USER2> Why You Don't Want To Use The Panini Presses in the Downstairs Cafeteria (bothsidesofthesandwich.com)

We all know the downstairs cafeteria is changing fast. Others have discussed the new panini presses and greater variety of pizza recently added to the cafeteria menu. Most of these developments have benefited diners, although I've previously written about the darker side of things in these blog posts:

* Why I Don't Love Meat-Lovers Pizza

* Ham Is A Sandwich Best Served Cold

Now, you might think that the panini presses to the downstairs cafeteria are an unmitigated good. They only increases the number of things you're able to eat, right? Hot sandwiches in addition to cold?

Wrong.

Let me give you an example from just last week.

I was at the panini machine heating up the Mark Suster Special -- an culinary invention whose ingredients, until recently, were known only to myself -- when a classmate of mine asked if he could put his sandwich into the machine at the same time. Normally I don't let other people use the panini machine at the same time as me, since it takes longer to heat the sandwiches with two in there instead of just one. But sometimes, their sandwich ingredients will infuse the Mark Suster Special with extra aromatic zest, so this time I agreed.

The sandwich turned out fine. Or so I thought at first. What I didn't know was that this individual -- who I will not name, but who sits in the front row of Mr. Boyd's 3rd period English class and the last row of Mr. Lowry's 7th period chemistry class -- would later go around claiming that he invented the Mark Suster Special and its near-perfect ratio of meat to cheese. In fact he divulged this ratio to everyone sitting in the second row of Mr. Vining's 4th period algebra class.

When I found out about this, I was flabbergasted. This classmate was trying to get all his friends to try out a sandwich that wasn't really his -- a clear violation of my intellunchual property rights. I only found out about it because this unnamed individual was bragging about the sandwich while sitting in the second row of Mrs. Roth's 2nd period history class, just to the left of my friend Ken.

I don't know how this will play out, but I've already filed a complaint with the appropriate authorities. The only reason I tell you this story is that it's becoming more and more clear to me that you can get "burned" by panini presses in more ways than one. If you absolutely must use the panini press, it's best to wrap your sandwich in tin foil first, lest unnamed individuals -- who are co-captain of the JV lacrosse team -- try to claim your sandwich idea as their own.

These days, it seems the thieves aren't just in the second-floor study area. They're in the downstairs cafeteria as well.

<comment><USER3> Brilliance.

I'd suggest snagging Bothsidesofthesandwich.com and translating the rest of Mark's content for consumption by the rest of the world. You clearly have a knack for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry to see evidence of a rare bad actor, but that doesn't warrant holding back critical data from the many good actors who want to invest.

Simple P&L statement & balance sheet: Provide it to all investors who ask. That's just basic common sense.

Would YOU invest in a company that wouldn't even tell you these basic financial metrics? Would this author invest without it?

And, I've seen far too many "startups" who don't even know what simple financial things are (balance sheet, P&L, cash-flow, margin), and that illiteracy is NOT going to end well.

So, the pain may be real, but the advice given is not IMO correct.

<comment><USER5> Agreed 100%. Suster is way off base here with his conclusions. Any investor worth his/her salt will need to review basic financial info before putting money down.

If you can't trust an accredited investor with your financial data then don't take their money.

And if that investor inappropriately divulges confidential information, then take it up with a lawyer as it seems the company in question is in the process of doing right now.

<comment><USER6> He's not arguing against disclosing financials during the course of raising money. He's against giving minority shareholders _continued_ access to financials. aka information rights.

Asking up front is one thing, being obligated to provide to a minority shareholder ongoing is another entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it really sucks that there are shady investors out there, but I think the solution should be outing them, not punishing good investors. This blog post by Derek Sivers comes to mind: [http://sivers.org/punish](http://sivers.org/punish)

<comment><USER8> "VC and angles don't sign NDA."

Is it only at the beginning? Would there be some kind confidential agreement in place to guard against these kind of leak at some point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm of the opinion that it's perfectly fine for the author not to name names. While there was a clear message that this VC would never want to work with the "unnamed" name, there are countless examples of people being forced to work together in the future, even after making such claims. Not naming names provides a degree of wiggle room if such a case arises.

I may be offbase here, but I read all the details provided by the author as a sort of trail to be used for an implicit identification. I'm guessing the author is smart enough to know that these details could be used, given all the work displayed for every Satoshi post on the board.

So, I read the post as the author not explicitly naming the investor, but at the same time, providing enough information for someone motivated enough to track them down. It's the mark of a clever investor, having it both ways.

</comment><comment><USER10> Bringing on a VC is such a huge commitment and with capital becoming easier and easier to come by, I'm often baffled by why there's currently no place online to openly talk about investors and others' experiences with them.

It seems terribly one-sided that investors demand company financials, founder profiles, go through the entire due diligence process, while the community is relatively hush-hush about openly discussing bad experiences and shitty investors.

<comment><USER11> > _I 'm often baffled by why there's currently no place online to openly talk > about investors and others' experiences with them._

Defamation laws are, depending on where you are, very powerful and very expensive to defend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The tacit identification in the post is an interesting strategy. Why not just explicitly identify the individual? Are there legal implications here or is he trying to manufacture more drama by getting the reader more involved?

<comment><USER13> i presume he doesn't want to be the one to out the guy, which might be viewed negatively. instead, he gave just enough details to let someone else to do the outing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I surmise that the interest in this post (both the retweets that brought it to my attention as well as the upvotes that propelled it to the top of the front page almost immediately after I submitted it) is largely driven by an expectation that the investor described in the article would be outed.

It's been noted by you and others elsewhere in the thread, but a reading through that lens leaves the impression that the details provided were intended to have exactly that effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> although he didn't out the individual, i'm surprised that Suster made it so easy to figure out who he is speaking about by disclosing so many details.

<comment><USER14> Note that the investment in this startup was made via Upfront Ventures and not Suster himself ("We" vs. "I"). That makes the sample size more complicated: [http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/upfront- ventures/inve...](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/upfront- ventures/investments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it legal to not share 100% of the information with all investors at the same time? Or is this just a requirement of public companies?

I respect the OP, so I assume it has to be legal for private companies, but it would be good to get confirmation.

<comment><USER16> I am not a lawyer. The directors can share "inside" information with specific investors and other parties. Those parties then become "insiders" themselves and may not buy or sell shares.

<comment><USER15> Ahhh - thanks! So it's a matter of not being able to trade on it. This makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What does [flagkilled] mean?

<comment><USER18> It means a story or comment was killed because enough users flagged it.

We added that recently, partly because people like transparency and partly because I got tired of typing "This post was killed by user flags."

<comment><USER17> Cool, thx.

[edit] How is "enough" measured? Is there an absolute number? Or some ratio of evaluating flagged comments/stories?</comment></comment></comment>


There is no agile fixed price - <AUTHOR> http://ralfrottmann.net/there-is-no-agile-fixed-price

<comment><USER2> Fast, cheap, good. Pick two, if you're lucky.</comment>


Salesforce discontinues Do.com - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/10/25/salesforce-shut-social-productivity-app-com-january-31-2014/

<comment><USER2> We've just launched Paymo 3.0 into public beta - if you're looking for a good alternative please check it out: [http://www.paymo.biz/blog/paymo-3-0-beta-is- here/](http://www.paymo.biz/blog/paymo-3-0-beta-is-here/)</comment>


MDMA used in treating PTSD - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mdma-drug-ptsd-trauma-psychedelic&print=true

<comment><USER2> This doesn't surprise me at all, and actually this sort of study has been done before MDMA was made illegal, to similar effect. Used correctly, it's a profoundly effective drug for working through emotions.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I'm not sure why everyone is afraid of drugs that people enjoy taking.

(Is there a stigma to putting cancer patients on morphine? No. But yet there is a stigma when someone wants to give them THC, or when psychologists want to use MDMA or LSD. Considering I can buy highly psychoactive drugs at Starbucks, I don't really understand it...)

<comment><USER4> The interesting thing is that, if people took morphine recreationally, there _would_ be a stigma to putting cancer patients on it.

From an ev-psych standpoint, medicine is considered to be a "gift" from a society to an individual, and yet certain drugs also lower the status of people who consume them, because of their association with "unproductive behavior." We don't want to allow, as a rule, gifts to lower the recipient's status, because we can be on the receiving end of a gift without being aware of it, and we have to act like we like it as part of a certain social dance. Thus, we ban potentially status-lowering gifts.

Note that alcohol, caffeine and other such "consumed as part of eating ritual" drugs, even if they _did_ lower status, aren't part of the gift culture of medicine—that's why relatively few suggest banning them.

<comment><USER5> While I agree that drugs such as cannabis or morphine can be status lowering, others such MDMA or LSD have a powerful one off effect and don't usually lead to addiction. So I am not sure that these drugs fall under the "gift protocol".

Where I am, on one of the many tips of Europe, the argument against drugs seems to revolve around risks, for example the potential long term effects of taking MDMA as it has been linked decreased cognitive performance, Parkinson (this later one has been disproven), etc...

<comment><USER4> Recreational drugs aren't status-lowering because of their _effects_ , they're status-lowering simply because they're mostly used by people of low status. Perhaps the difference in Europe is that recreational drug use is associated with people of _high_ status?

<comment><USER6> It has a lot more to do initially with how children are conditioned at a young age to think that drugs are bad, a message that is repeated throughout our lives.

In the US there is a huge stigma associated with weed, but in Canada people don't really care. The difference there comes from the official US government message that weed makes people insane and murderous, and the subsequent war on drugs. A good documentary to watch is "The History of Marijuana", which covers much of the post World War II period of the US government campaigning against Marijuana.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A list of all current research underway using psychadelics: <http://www.maps.org/research/>

The Psylocibin ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psylocibin> )category is worth expanding, it has had the biggest resurgence in research.

</comment><comment><USER8> Really cute!

"After the therapy, he vacationed in Jamaica, began dating a local woman and bought a house on the island. "I'm happy and well adjusted now," he says. "It's a good fairy-tale ending. As soon as we get some little Bob Marley kids it'll be even better.""</comment>


Show HN: Curated, Pre-trained ML Models for Transfer Learning - <AUTHOR> https://modeldepot.io/ <comment><USER2> Two of my projects, textgenrnn ([https://github.com/minimaxir/textgenrnn](https://github.com/minimaxir/textgenrnn)) and reactionrnn ([https://github.com/minimaxir/reactionrnn](https://github.com/minimaxir/reactionrnn)) are among the pretrained models.

While this is allowed by the MIT License (and there is sufficient attribution to the source repos), it might be helpful to more explicitly state that the curated models are forks/modifications. These models also have a dependency on the source packages, which I can't promise that it won't have breaking changes if I do decide to update the package.

I do like the new accompanying examples for those projects, and it's good to see the projects actually being used! :)

<comment><USER3> Hey, I just installed and played around with reactionRNN; I hate to be negative (especially to people open sourcing models, kudos!), but your model seems to perform quite poorly. It immediately failed my "easy" smell tests: [https://i.imgur.com/FvfuZgy.png](https://i.imgur.com/FvfuZgy.png), and didn't really work on most of my other tests: "This book sucks" is 0% angry, "I'm going to go home and listen to emo music and cry" is 0% sad, "Check out this hilarious youtube video" is only 26% haha. Your example "He was only 41." is 100% sad, but "He was only 42." is 0% sad. These aren't hand-picked, these are literally things I just typed in. From what I can tell it usually gets anything negative wrong, and usually picks "haha" for the positive ones.

Subjective performance is worse than your included examples. I've been building models my whole career, and what I've learned is most people will take claimed performance at face value until it burns them. It's beneficial to no one if someone comes up with an idea based off your repo description, builds it out, then finds it doesn't work adequately. My advice is to update your examples and test cases, and keep finding ways to improve the model.

<comment><USER2> The result is the _reaction_ to a given text; it won't fully be the same as a sentiment analysis, unfortunately.

Additionally, as I put in the README notes, keep in mind that the network is trained on modern (2016-2017) language. As a result, inputting _rhetorical /ironic_ statements will often yield love/wow responses and not sad/angry. That type of systemic bias in text analysis is currently unsolved and there isn't an easy way to account for it.

"I am so angry" and "I'm going to go home and listen to emo music and cry" are phrases that would likely be posted on Facebook ironically, and therefore classifying it tricky.

For the other examples, yes, that result might be overfitting on characters and while setting up the model I had difficulty accounting for that while still getting the model to converge.

I'll admit it's not a perfect model (it was a side project while I was frustrated during a job hunt), but it's a great proof of concept. Unfortunately, since Facebook crippled their /posts endpoint, I can't get more data to improve the model...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great. Thank you for making this.

The aggregation of models like this isn't new, but simple layout of models available is useful. I can imagine being able to filter by model origin (OpenAI/Facebook/Google/etc), origin date (year), compared use case (why should I use VGG vs RNN).

Overall, great for people who are and aren't deeply immersed in ML.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You hit the nail right on the head there, while aggregation is nothing new, we're hoping that the notebooks and tutorials provide an entrypoint into being able to get up and running with the model more quickly.

We're actually hoping to build ModelDepot into a place where anybody can share (well documented) models, and be able to discover the right ones for their needs.

<comment><USER5> Hey, I can't really see the website. The page is blank..

<comment><USER6> Hey! Sorry the site isn't rendering properly :'( Can you let us know what browser/OS version you're on?

<comment><USER5> Tor Browser.

The page just reads "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app."

<comment><USER7> Honestly, laughed pretty hard at this comment.

But seriously, you're gonna need to whitelist the site and enable JS. Or just use a normal non tor browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Definitely a cool project. It's crazy there is no standard model zoo anywhere yet. But, a few thoughts:

-No about page? Not clear at all without cleaning on sign up button that model submission/voting is a thing. And many more details I'd be curious to know seeing this for the first time.

-A few things, like colorization, loaded reallllyyy slowly

-No search/stronger filtering?

-Ideally various project should have weights in ONNX standard, and there should be tabs/selection of different platforms. You'd have five different entries for implementatations of ResNets in each of the major platforms? Quite silly.

-This seems like it should be an open source project , given that it is submission/open source driven

-Although this is aesthetically pleasing, at the end of the day it's just some links to cool Github repos... I feel like it'd make a lot more sense to create this as a CodaLab worksheet ([https://worksheets.codalab.org/worksheets/0x818930127c4d47de...](https://worksheets.codalab.org/worksheets/0x818930127c4d47de84c1ceaadf04d014/)) ; the platform there is just more mature for this sort of thing. Or make this a fork of that with the whole Zoo angle.

</comment><comment><USER9> For those using Wolfram Language or Mathematica, there is an unreleased Neural Net Repository that is worth checking out. A few examples:

Caffe: [https://resources.wolframcloud.com/NeuralNetRepository/resou...](https://resources.wolframcloud.com/NeuralNetRepository/resources/Yahoo- Open-NSFW-Model-V1)

Keras: [https://resources.wolframcloud.com/NeuralNetRepository/resou...](https://resources.wolframcloud.com/NeuralNetRepository/resources/ResNet-50-Trained- on-ImageNet-Competition-Data)

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the looks of [https://openmined.org/](https://openmined.org/) for decentralized sharing of data and models.

</comment><comment><USER11> One day there will be a trained model called "software engineer" and we will be out of a job.

The training data may come from github, extracting requirements from issues, and mapping it to the code that closed the ticket.

<comment><USER6> But then we can _finally_ spend _all_ of our time on HN!

But we really do think ML, even in the near future, will automate some of our jobs away (and that's a good thing!), if you're interested in some of our thoughts on that: [https://medium.com/modeldepot/we-previously-talked-about- how...](https://medium.com/modeldepot/we-previously-talked-about-how-transfer- learning-will-radically-change-ml-c4fed21a65a2)

<comment><USER12> I was about to answer roughly the same.

If someone could step up and "take my job", it would free me up for other things. I would be grad to be able to rely on a good "software engineer" model to build the next generation tooling.

All in all, more performance, more efficiency, improving our tools bottom-up, going for the low hanging fruit first, to free us from the less interesting tasks. Isn't it what we always do and always did?

If a task is repetitive or deterministic, I always feel like I could be spending my time on something more interesting, not on the implementation details. The problem is that I have to take care of it myself, if I want it to be done properly (and that's true as well in other fields than software, of course).

Disclaimer: still a student (although nearly graduated). I won't bite you for having more experience than I do :) And the phrasing here might be a little provocative on purpose, don't take it too hard please.

<comment><USER11> I strongly disagree.

First, you assume that AI will remain less proficient than humans, and therefore suitable only for grunt work. Artificial intelligence has many advantages over us, and this is often overlooked.

\- How much time does it take to train one software engineer? decades worth of time. Once you have one, what does it get another? about the same amount of time and money. In contrast, once you train one AI based engineer, the time to get the second one is about the time of serializing the state of one and deploying it multiple times. You could recruit and discard AI engineers on demand for whatever you need.

\- They won't sleep, take breaks for lunch or coffee, get distracted, waste time talking about their car, vacations, wine tasting and other stupid things. They will just work. 24 hours a day. No breaks.

\- They won't consume information at a rate of 200 to 1000 words per minute, they won't be limited by their visual field, or how fast can they type. They may not even communicate using words, just transfer thoughts directly among them, or even entire trained neural ensembles. Plus, once they learn something that may affect they collectively rather than individually.

\- They will be aggressively supervised, ranked. Then, since their generations are shorter, this will cause them to continuously improve at a much faster pace than humans.

If this happens, the need for having the same amount of human engineers will be lower if not zero.

Some people may argue that the human brain has billions of neurons and synaptic connections. Sure. But which portion of that is actively used in developing software? remove motor functions, autonomous functions like regulating heart rate, respiration and such and you are left with much less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great, I like the inclusion of the notebooks, makes it easy to get started. The download link for the Image Colorization model doesn't seem to work for me though - it gives an Access Denied error.

<comment><USER6> Hey! Sorry, slight typo on our end, the notebook should still work fine, but the manual download didn't work for a bit.

It's fixed now though! Thanks for the heads up and I hope you've found it useful! Happy to hear any other feedback as well :)

<comment><USER13> Yep, works now. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for submitting! Can you tell me how this differs from something like [https://algorithmia.com/](https://algorithmia.com/) ? I am curious to understand the main differences between their approach and yours! Cheers :)

<comment><USER15> Algorithmia is a FaaS platform with strong service discovery and a lot of AI functions. Model Depot is a listing of open-source models.

You could find a network on Model Depot and deploy it on Algorithmia. Then you (And others, if you like) can use the model via RPC using HTTP calls or one of the Algorithmia client libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are there any good models for transfer learning with audio ?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is an awesome question, we haven't found any yet but are actively looking! We'll let you know if we find some good ones :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you unit test? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> yes. it is good. although not religiously...

often its a great strategy for fixing a bug and making sure it never rears its ugly head again... sometimes making the test is too difficult - to the point where test driven development is ruled out, even from the beginning (e.g. real-time interactive game type things) :)</comment>


Web Scraping as a Service - <AUTHOR> http://tubes.io

<comment><USER2> What's the legality behind web scraping? Can you sell access to data that isn't yours?

<comment><USER3> They can be hit with a tort of trespass to chattels. If you have a lot of servers performing scraping of a service they can sue you for depriving them of use of their service. I simply don't see how something like this could ever be launched as a business. However it could exist in another form.

Last year I spent a bunch of time on a "bittorrent for webscraping" project we ended up scrapping at work after we pivoted. The p2p approach with a tit-for- tat strategy and a headless webkit approach to scraping is the only long term way we could see where you can scrape legally or at least semi-legally. Our intent was to simply open source the project and let the rest of the world run with it. All the technology is there to democratize the proprietary data industry as has happened with music and movies. It's only a matter of time before a lot of that data is freed from silos like Twitter and Craigslist.

The strategy was the following:

(1) Tit-for-tat scraping where you intentionally avoid scraping websites likely to be in your jurisdiction by subnet. My machines scrape sites in Europe while your machines scrape sites in the US. You also avoid scraping data from services whose data you want.

(2) Headless webkit with various methods of avoiding browser fingerprinting. The key is to look as much like legitimate traffic as possible, with the goal of making it as likely that attempts to block a client would affect both real users and scrapers. This is the most powerful deterrent to blocking.

(3) 1-1 correspondence between the templates a site uses (handlebars, ejs, server-side templates, etc) and a database of snippets that describe exactly how to convert those templates to JSON data. Any service that provides those template definitions as part of a client-side webapp would be trivial to convert to scraping formula.

(4) All the "recipes" for sites and their templates would probably be handled centrally at first the same way torrents were. When a recipe is broken because a site has been updated, the system would know that recipe broke because it periodically checks for good data against a known corpus of previously scraped data. Once a broken recipe has been identified someone could go fix it (conceivably this could be automated as well since you have a known corpus of data and you could detect how an XPath selector may have changed)

(5) Distributed hash table pointing to caches of previously requested data so that a swarm for a particular service doesn't end up creating a DDoS by accident. Each datum should only be scraped once for a certain interval of time after which the data expires and can be requested again.

AFAIK such a system leaves you open to at most a lawsuit for inducing a third party to breach contract, assuming that third party is even in a jurisdiction where they can be held liable. But such a lawsuit would be tenuous at best. Furthermore, you'd have to prove that the third-party ever visited the site in question through non-automated means because if they never visit the site in question in person, then they can not be held to the terms of service of that site and therefore can't be liable for breaching a contract they never agreed to.

FWIW IANAL but I have talked to a bunch about this and the above is the closest I could come up with for a service that scrapes sites without running afoul of the law.

Anyways, such a system is in the realm of black hat tactics, but to be honest, monopolization of data to extract exorbitant rents and abuse of third party developers is much more despicable. The whole world would be better off if we commoditize access to all sorts of metadata.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the idea; definitely could have used this in several of my projects over the years. It'd be cool if there were more use cases to give a better picture of what all is possible with the scraping service. That's what drew me into IFTTT when I first visited their website. The example of getting the title tag from the website wasn't that exciting :) . And any chances of a trial period?? I'd be more willing to pay after seeing a functioning implementation in my website/app.

<comment><USER5> Basically anything is possible with the scraping service (provided the target pages don't render themselves via javascript).

It will grab the DOM and you can parse through it and return a nice little JSON object.

<comment><USER3> A headless webkit browser like PhantomJS can scrape pages that render themselves via javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i could have a need for this type of service as well, but it's not clear what benefit it provides over PhantomJS. is it just the alternating of the scraping IP?

a free trial would be helpful, but before i sign up, i need to know what i gain from the service. it seems like i still have to write all the same logic, but tubes.io just takes care of making the web request. if that's all, it's not exactly something i'd be willing to pay for.

<comment><USER5> I'm a tubes.io customer (and a happy customer too) and my main use for it is both the alternating IP, and that it allows me to scale up scraping operations without having to deal with too much on my backend.

The alternating IP is actually a bit of a big deal, it's kind of a pain to run your own proxies and have to manage the proxy switching yourself (so painful that I would pay 10 bucks/month for someone else to do it for me)

<comment><USER6> true, alternating IPs are useful, except when you already have agreements to do the scraping with the target site, which we do.

so what would interest me is something that made scraping easier or more robust. so far, it looks like the service still has some growing to do before it gets there.</comment></comment></comment>


Takeaways from KotlinConf 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.vokal.io/blog/vokal-takeaways-from-kotlinconf-2017 <comment><USER2> Kotlin Native is exciting. But there's another way to run JVM languages, including Kotlin, on iOS: the open-source Multi OS Engine ([https://multi-os- engine.org/](https://multi-os-engine.org/)), which basically brings ART (the Android Runtime) to iOS. Note: It doesn't bring the Android UI toolkit, or any cross-platform toolkit, to iOS, so you have to write UI code for iOS. But I think that's as it should be.

Of course, there's a trade-off between Kotlin Native and Multi OS Engine. Kotlin Native is a lighter runtime. BUt with MOE, you can use arbitrary libraries that target the JVM (well, the JVM subset that works on Android). So MOE makes a lot more existing code available for iOS. For Kotlin Native to truly deliver on the promise of cross-platform business logic, a Kotlin library ecosystem independent of the JVM will need to develop.

This space is going to be interesting to watch over the next little while.

<comment><USER3> > For Kotlin Native to truly deliver on the promise of cross-platform business > logic, a Kotlin library ecosystem independent of the JVM will need to > develop.

Or someone writes a bridge between native Kotlin code and AOT'd JVM code. Or someone writes a kind of reverse compiler from JVM bytecode to Kotlin. Not sure how practical either is due to sheer JRE stdlib size.

<comment><USER4> Look at SubstrateVM. It's capable of making fully stripped AOT compiled binaries with a bundled JVM that only use the parts of the JRE library that are needed. Sort of like what Go can do.

<comment><USER3> Yup. There is also jaotc coming along. Regardless, to use a them from Kotlin Native would require bridging between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The organizers developed conference apps for both iOS and Android using > Kotlin. They also built the API in Kotlin using Ktor, a framework for > building server-side business logic with Kotlin.

This is really cool! Excited to dig into their repo: [https://github.com/jetbrains/kotlinconf- app](https://github.com/jetbrains/kotlinconf-app)

</comment><comment><USER6> Looking forward to hearing more about Kotlin/Native. We need a proper solution for this problem.

<comment><USER7> I think Kotlin/Native's approach of sharing business logic while keeping the UI stuff native is probably the right choice. Although something like Flutter which render's all their own widgets is interesting because it allows you to share even more code. The question there is whether they'll be able to truly match the native widgets and have all the accessibility stuff working.

In any case it's good that different projects are approaching this from different angles.

<comment><USER8> History says no.

Any widget toolkit, on any platform ever, that has tried to provide it's own cross-platform widgets, has been completely terrible and ends up being native- nowhere instead of native-everywhere.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious if this will change now that webapps/electron-apps have become so popular. It may be that users have begun non-native apps as the new norm.

<comment><USER10> In five years the Electron craziness will be gone.

<comment><USER11> And, judging from what was going on 5 years ago, whatever replaces it will be even crazier and trendier :)

<comment><USER10> My bet, browser will be reduced to yet another general purpose VM, with the new trend being WebAssembly + Canvas/WebGL.

Or back to pure native.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Org Charts using GraphViz - <AUTHOR> http://whitemagicsoftware.com/software/org-charts/

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if I could just see examples instead of being forced to download a file.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, looks good!</comment></comment></comment>


UK24727: a shortest-possible walking tour through the pubs of the United Kingdom - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/ <comment><USER2> Based on alcohol metabolism rate, how long would the pub crawl take (ignoring liver failure)? What's the optimal rate of inebriaton - equal intervals or concentrated intakes. We need an equally dedicated team of doctors to get on this.

<comment><USER3> As steady as possible. Your liver processes alcohol continuously, so you want to hit your optimal BAC by drinking somewhat faster at first and then maintaining it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks like the whole folder has been deleted. Does anyone have a copy?

<comment><USER4> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FNC1ma...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FNC1maHoZUEJ:www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is something I've been meaning to put together a post on, where NP problems are actually easy to solve. Take the subset sum search problem as an example, there's 2 "regions" of the problem space where total solutions can be done in P. If the values are either relatively small or relatively large, solving it is quite easy:

Find 23 given [1, 2, 2, 3, 1...] Find 40 given [35, 15, 98, ...]

A lot of situations where you might give up on trying to compute an exact solution can turn out to have underlying data that makes it possible.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is very cool, though I was intrigued nowhere in the central Highlands is covered (or the entire Isle of Skye, which is accessible by pedestrians from the mainland) as there are many pubs there, including those listed on the Pubs Galore site used as the dataset, such as [http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubs/51660/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubs/51660/) (or, say, the four listed in Mallaig, also not reached on the route at all).

<comment><USER7> From the data description:

For our data set, we pruned the full list. First, based on names, we removed establishments that seemed more like restaurants than public houses. So TGI Friday's was out and the The Plough and Horses was in. Second, we took only the first location of pubs that had a number of branches in the same town. Third, we removed any pub that was marked as permanently closed by the members of Pubs Galore. Finally, we removed several pubs that could not be reached by foot, such as those located in airport terminals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The little loop near Columbia Road in the very upper-right of this pic is a bit odd: [http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/img/london_zoom.jpg](http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/img/london_zoom.jpg)

It's taking two separate paths to get from the pub in the bottom-left of the loop to the intersection that creates the loop. One of these paths must be shorter, so why isn't that path taken both to and from that pub?

<comment><USER9> They may be using a public transit route which goes in only one direction or can only be boarded at the point on the other side of the loop.

<comment><USER8> "a shortest-possible walking tour"...

<comment><USER9> "You see that we obviously cannot walk several of the indicated routes"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So it turns out that for all the pubs currently listed in the UK, the shortest path is 28,269 miles. That's actually pretty doable: were one independently wealthy and heavily beer-minded, one could do it in 10-15 years of hard (and thirsty) work!

</comment><comment><USER11> Many pubs in Scotland are missing, not only on the islands but also on the mainland. Nairn, Forres and Applecross all appear without pubs on the map, but it is easy to check Google to see that all of these towns have pubs.

<comment><USER12> Well, they did say that they restricted themselves to the 24k pubs in the Pubs Galore guide.

<comment><USER11> Pubs Galore shows pubs in Nairn, Forres and Applecross.

[http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/nairn/highland/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/nairn/highland/) [http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/forres/grampian/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/forres/grampian/) [http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubreviews/51349/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubreviews/51349/)

EDIT: maybe these were added after they snapshotted the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As both a pub-loving UK citizen and someone who has just finished the excellent book 'In Pursuit of the Travelling Salesman' (written I think by the authors of this article), this is a highly timely submission!</comment>