Game-theoretic analysis of Smallest Unique Integer game - <AUTHOR> http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/abs/hastef0671.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> What blew my mind when I played around with this in college was the fact that it had infinite support (easy to prove) but also doubly-exponential in the tail.

I could see the concave/convex behavior when I explored it computationally, but I couldn't figure out the theoretical/equational basis for it. I was working with a fixed number of players. I'm pleasantly surprised to see the variable-player Poisson version is simpler. I definitely wish I knew more stats, because the fixed-number version stumped me when I tried to solve it directly. (I don't know if it's possible, except for N = 3.)</comment>


Rhode Island students who owe lunch money get jelly sandwiches until debt paid - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/students-rhode-island-who-owe-lunch-money-will-only-get-n1002901 <comment><USER2> What is this, _The Handmaid 's Tale?_ Someone under 18 cannot have debt. The people over 18 who thought of this plan should be in jail.</comment>


Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold - <AUTHOR> http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/0055257

<comment><USER2> The best spam filters (like CRM114) have _better_ than human performance, but I'd hardly call what they're doing AI.</comment>


How To Win A Hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://alexstechthoughts.com/post/28836325740/how-to-win-a-hackathon

<comment><USER2> Based on my humble experience (I won at Disrupt SF last year), I'll add this:

\- as the OP said, when presenting, _start with the problem_. But really insist on it so that it becomes painful for the judges. Show the problem you're trying to solve on existing sites/apps. Then show your solution on how you solved it. (See this post by Dave McClure for reinforcement of the idea: [http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/08/your-solution- is...](http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/08/your-solution-is-not-my- problem.html))

\- don't try to do too much: e.g. you don't need a web app + a mobile app to show you've solved the problem. "And we have a mobile version of it" doesn't help you in convincing the jury that there was a problem and that you solved it. Everyone knows that a website that solves a problem can exist in the form of a mobile app. You're wasting your time just mentioning it.

\- don't discuss the technical problems you've had. For you it's interesting that you finally managed to get around that hurdle and it's tempting to quickly brag about it, but jurys don't care.

\- while _focusing_ on an API can work, I'd say to also try to incorporate some APIs if that makes sense and you have time. My hack was about showing movie schedules à la Hipmunk (a slow, uglier-than-it-was-then version is still up: <http://flickmunk.com/>), but I managed to find the time to add some Twilio pieces to it (I was familiar with the API already) and that was enough to win their prize too (a MacBook Air no less) while other hacks were _fully_ focused on Twilio and didn't. E.g. if you need to store files of some kind, use Box or Dropbox if they're there. Don't push it too far though. Pick one or two that make sense. Your hack is not a NASCAR car.

\- while your presentation should be as polished as possible, I was never convinced by people who made videos, flash animations or beautiful slides. I think some judges want to see a minimum viable product/PoC, not a PowerPoint.

\- as far as polish go, I'm sure a nice design does help, but amongst the winners at Disrupt, it wasn't the most polished that won. (mine clearly wasn't) It was the ones who solved a problem and worked. Too much polish might make it look like you had been working on it for some time before. Nowadays, with Bootstrap, you get something decent-looking enough to get started. (though beware: everyone uses it too)

\- finally, and that's important: be persistent. My old MacBook couldn't be connected to the projector at demo time so they told me I couldn't present. I was pissed! But I stayed around, asked for a second chance at the end if there was time, just for _at least_ present. I almost gave up but I'm glad I didn't.

Of course, all this comes with "YMMV", or "your jury may vary". I think most judges look at demos and want to see something authentic, something that was really built during the hackathon and will excuse roughness around the edges. Some jurys can probably be swayed by a nice design and presentation.

<comment><USER3> Twilio evangelist here..

I think Timothee hits most of the points very well. Nice job but I'd like to add a few things:

\- To add to the "don't try to do too much" point, I'd say the _vast_ majority of judges would like to see a few things done really well as opposed to a flock of things sort-of-done. When I mentor a group, I tell them to close their presentation with "Going forward, we'd like to also do A, B, and C. Any questions?"

\- Avoid video if at all possible. Videos take 5-10s to switch into and another 5-10s to get out of. And that's assuming you have the audio set up properly. I saw a group recently spend ~10s switching, started playing the 30s video, had to stop it to adjust the audio, restarted it, and then ~10s to switch. It threw off the pace and ate a minute of their 5 minute presentation.

\- Practice out loud as many times as possible. The demo will be smoother and just feel easier.

My 0.02..

<comment><USER4> > "don't try to do too much"

Yes. This has served me well. I got into a hackathon with the assumption that I'll be the only developer there. With that in mind, I focus on what _I_ can accomplish in a weekend.

I plan for additional things, but I keep focus on what I need to do.

I also try to plan for additional people. For example, if I get another developer, what will they work on? A lot of it is back and forth, but having a plan at least gives you a place to start.

Planning is important, and lets you spend the weekend having fun instead of worrying about whether you will get done or how to manage a larger team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've won a couple of Hackathons recently, and the two keys I found were:

1) Make sure your presentation is flawless 2) Don't take on too big of a challenge.

We saw plenty of people that had great projects, but when they went up to present, they had the worst speaking skills I've ever seen, and failed to get their ideas across to the judges. Similarly, we saw plenty of people who took on too much in one weekend, and their presentation consisted of "Well, we wanted to finish X, but we ran out of time" or "This is cool, but doesn't work yet".

The projects we won with were never very complicated, but they were highly polished and you could instantly wrap your head around them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great advice. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first hackathon I attended was won by some very uninspiring use of the last.fm API and some other simple tools. It was basically a dashboard to listen to music and get information about the artists with some geolocation stuff. It was interesting to see them win first place, because to the 'hackers' at the event, the project was pretty lame, but since they were done with the functional part of the project after just a few hours, they could spend the rest of the day working on making it look nice. They clearly had the best looking product of the day, and they won because of it. Second place went to a twitter bot that responded to tweets with jokes. I think that a lot of hackers (or maybe just me) go into these things, especially if they haven't gone before, expecting to win by way of being innovative and smart, only to find that what counts in a world of non-technical judges (ie, the real world), isn't necessarily new ideas, but aesthetics, humor, and more generally, human appeal.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this advice really depends on each hackathon in particular. I've only gone to hackathons at my university, and I haven't found that good design is enough or even necessary to get first place. In fact, the first-place projects I remember had fairly poor design and won because they were impressive technically. Of course, really beautiful apps that were far less impressive technically _did_ place, but only second or third.

The first-place winners I remember were: a program that synced lyrics to music automatically, a distributed computing framework for JavaScript and a rather accurate face-recognition system. All of these did not have beautiful (or, frankly, even _passable_ ) front-ends, but were nontrivial and rather interesting from a CS standpoint. Moreover, this is not because _nobody_ had good design--there were certainly very polished apps, and they even often placed second or third. They just never won first place at any of the hackathons I've been to.

</comment><comment><USER8> A couple more tips:

Topical ideas are great. The judges can better identify with the problem that your hack solves, and it seems more relevant.

Hardware hacks tend to steal the show, e.g. a touch-enabled chalkboard, hardware "facebook", or a tweeting microwave. At three of the last four hackathons I've been to, a hardware hack has won. But be wary - at some hackathons they'll specifically tell the judges that the winning hacks must balance being awesome with being useful (specifically the facebook hackathon).

Fake it until you make it. This is a lesson I still need to take to heart. If your app doesn't look like it's going to work and you have an hour to go, hack together something that will give a good demo.

</comment><comment><USER9> John Sheehan from Twilio has some great tips too - [http://www.quora.com/Hackathons/What-are-some-useful-tips- wh...](http://www.quora.com/Hackathons/What-are-some-useful-tips-when- competing-in-a-Hackathon)

<comment><USER2> _John Sheehan from Twilio_

Actually, it's now " _formerly_ from Twilio". He works at IFTTT now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ive noticed at a couple hackathons that Ive been to(including Disrupt and AngelHack) that a number of teams came with projects that were either already prepared and they just added a feature on top of them or they were already half-done and were completed at the hackathon.

Furthermore ive seen people communicate with remote teams at Hackathon.

Both of these I see as sort of cheating, not unlike doping in sports, since idea of the Hackathon is to show what can be done in 10-20 hours of hacking.

</comment><comment><USER11> Who cares about the weekend winning? Meet cool interesting new people and learn a wee bit. Hackathons can also be great collaborative community building events!

</comment><comment><USER12> I had a lot of fun at ecommerce hackathon. I've thought about what makes for a great hackathon, and, credit where credit is due, it comes down to the organizer. Alex organizes the best hackathons I've ever been to in NYC, and I've been to them all. Photo hack days last year were several notches above everything else, and now that Alex is at Dwolla, we're seeing the same thing in ecommerce themed hackathons. Great job, Alex!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dude, means alot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone tell me where I could, as a hobbyist, participate in some hackathons?

I have tried searching and most events seem to be specifically for intra- company, or entrepreneurs vying for some piece of a pie.

<comment><USER14> <https://www.hackerleague.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dev + Designer + Keep em laughing = $$$</comment>


Data on Transfer of Military Gear to Police Departments - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/upshot/data-on-transfer-of-military-gear-to-police-departments.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&abt=0002&abg=1&utm_content=buffer24016&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&_r=0

<comment><USER2> My little hometown has a mine-resistant vehicle. Those things are expensive to maintain. Now I know why the libraries and parks in such disrepair!

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does Sweetwater County, Wyoming, population 45k, need 60 assault rifles? Why does any rural police force need any assault rifles?

<comment><USER4> I would say a likely reason is because of budgets: They were given the money if they didn't spend it, they would lose it. Might as well buy guns that can be traded for something else in the law enforcement system than let the money "go to waste".

Another idea could be that they have Rt.80 and have lots of transportation related crime?</comment></comment>


Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/turner06/turner06_index.html <comment><USER2> Now, 50 years out, the influence of counterculture ideas is still strong. Stewart and the cadre of people who were around him were at the center of the counterculture. This excerpt from edge.org by Fred Turner of Stanford is worth a read.

In some ways The Whole Earth Catalog was a defining handbook of the Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. I read and reread it in all the various editions and versions. I went to and bought stuff mentioned in the Catalog at the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, CA. I was a founder of the People's Computer Company, a cousin organization to the Whole Earth Catalog, which published books and magazines about personal computing as it birthed. In later years, when the focus of activity moved to the North Bay, I'd go up and visit the Whole Earth Review and Convolution Quarterly in Sausalito.

The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) just put up a whole bunch of material about Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog just one of his many seminal works.

The Whole Earth Catalog is part of my personal genome. The Internet Archive ([http://www.archive.org](http://www.archive.org)) has done a great service making these historic publications available online.

Readers of Hacker News might want to consider supporting the Archive with a donation. [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/) It's worth an in-person visit as well.</comment>


Wearable Technology UI Inspiration - <AUTHOR> http://wearui.co/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, Android Wear is pretty crippled in this regard. It doesn't even allow custom views in the notifications you send to the device, as normal Android notifications accept. It only allows text and icons.</comment>


Ask YC: Best languages/tools to use for graphics development? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in pursuit of a CS degree and I'd like to go into graphics development after I graduate. Unfortunately my university only offers one graphics class (taught in java, learning openGL) and I get the feeling that I'm not learning as much as I can. What kind of languages, tools, technologies and etc should I be looking at to boost my experience? <comment><USER2> www.gamedev.net - best graphics/game coding site on the net by far imo

Here is an outline of stuff you should know. It is game centric. I assume by graphics development you mean games, but this list applies to both anyways

\- the class is good, the math learned will be important

\+ your school most likely has a graduate graphics class as well. take it even though it might not count on your gpa

\- know c++

\- opengl is fine, make some sample apps in d3d also to get a feel for it

\- Learn about engines. Most game programmers dont deal with the low level stuff anymore. Make a couple demo games using a popular engine. Torque is good.

\- learn about shaders

\- read siggraph papers and try to implement some of the techniques described therein

\- The key thing that game companies want is experience making games. Make your own games and release them or contribute to existing open source games. This is by far the most important</comment>


Britain could become 'data haven' after Brexit - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/07/16/britain-could-become-data-haven-after-brexit-technology-group-sa/ <comment><USER2> Really? With the Investigatory Powers bill passing?

</comment><comment><USER3> this from the same paper that trumpets the government banning end to end encryption. the EU gave us more data protection than the UK government ever did.</comment>


Ask HN: How to launch web app with no technical knowledge? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Same way you would prepare a meal without cooking knowledge. Sure, you can buy prep food and heat it on the microwave, but that's about it.</comment>


We Need a Social Web OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.orianmarx.com/2012/08/02/we-need-a-social-web-os/

<comment><USER2> You know, this thing called OS is a thing that makes your files be actually saved on the hard disk, or when you plug the USB stick there, or that makes for programs possible to use TCP and not program the hardware of your network card, or that makes the letters visible on your screen.

From a point of view of an OS developer, what you talk about are still just applications, and that has nothing to do with an OS.

You're just making a confusion if you're trying to invent the new meaning of the names. Is that your goal?

<comment><USER3> The actual term they are looking for is social web _protocol_.

As others have pointed out, though, an open social protocol would quickly degenerate into a wretched hive of ads and spam. The underlying problem to solve is identity, which the existing social networks attempt to solve through real-name policies, social conventions, and pro-active policing, to various degrees of success.

This is going to be unpopular to say on HN, but there would be upsides to a government-issued internet ID card, that allowed to someone to declare unambiguously which actual human they are (ideally on an opt-in basis).

Would the inevitable abuses of this power be worth the benefits? Probably not. But authenticated identity is the core problem that needs to be solved for an open social protocol to really work; without it, you're trying to craft TCP/IP without IP addresses.

<comment><USER2> What would be the upsides of the government issued internet ID in your opinion please? Compare such an ID with the stuff everybody already has in his wallet.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind, I meant it in an abstract sense; we could just as easily use existing government IDs (state driver's license, SSN, etc) rather than create a new one. Hardware biometrics are an option (in theory), and would also eliminate the terrible security practices inherent to email+password.

What matters is not the unique identifier; the real benefit is the threat of punishment for fraud, and the "single source of truth", whether that's a government, or something else. We have this, for better or worse, in other aspects of communication infrastructure (names, addresses, phone numbers), but there is no equivalent for the web (except perhaps for domains). I'm glad that an anonymous information-sharing network exists, but I think a non-anonymous flavor (AOL : www :: Facebook : ???) would be a societal boon as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like what the Firefox (and Chrome) devs have been busy creating.

<http://socialapi.net/>

<http://jbalogh.me/2012/01/30/push-notifications/>

<http://www.webrtc.org/>

<https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebActivities>

<https://persona.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I'm not trying to usurp this work. I'm trying to support it and also learn more about it. Thanks for the links!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, you want to 'refactor the internet'? Go ahead. I'll make some popcorn.

</comment><comment><USER6> Total jibberish. There is no need for any more social any things let alone a "social web OS", whatever that means. I'm sure the average Internet reader thought this sounded smart with all the fluffy language and big words but in the end it was a lot of words with little substance. The web already is social. So what now? We rebuild the Internet pretty much like it is now but we change the names of the protocols, languages, and frameworks? I have a hard time understanding if this is a call for an open source Facebook created by Tim Berners Lee or if someone's been reading about App.net and wants to get in on some of that action. This kind of came off like someone rehashing Dalton Caldwell's idea except in a really convoluted way.

What's going on with what get on the front page lately?

</comment><comment><USER7> Social this, social that...can this bubble just pop already?

</comment><comment><USER8> My thoughts: <http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2012/08/02/open-for-value/>

</comment><comment><USER9> We really, really do not.

<comment><USER10> Well, all the astroturfers, adspammers and sockpuppets need an OS to play on.

But yes, for everyone else, I agree with you.

PS. If someone does create one, I suggest "Sockpuppet OS" for the name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> No, we don't need any more social. We need less.

</comment><comment><USER12> We are all so eager for adoption before the implementation. Big things on internet were not made wide adoption guaranteed. as @dglassan said, "Refactoring the internet is not the solution". Create something, invite small group, dev friends to take part. Either it is an api, platform or an application. If it is any good, it will get picked up for the wide adoption.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm with you on this. I'm looking for implementation, which is why I'm writing about ideas. Nobody can adopt something that doesn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would frame it as a social vos virtual operating system.. or social dashboard. Its a good idea, monetization may be hard but its a needed product that should generate long page views.

Idea, long page views might make watching a video ad before the dashboard appears acceptable..paid version no ad..

</comment><comment><USER14> Assuming that we could seriously do this, I feel like the Mobile OS's and desktop OS's like Mountain Lion, elementary, and Ubuntu do a fairly good job of integrating with the internet that it would be hard to drive adoption of something else.

</comment><comment><USER15> what if this is being made in this moment?

</comment><comment><USER16> No we don't.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is just vague and way too large an effort. Plus many of these goals are being embodied by current html5 efforts.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a large effort, which is precisely why the post is relatively vague :)</comment></comment>


The Internet is breaking. Here's how to save it - <AUTHOR> https://www.cyberscoop.com/nih-for-cybersecurity-dan-kaminsky/ <comment><AUTHOR> '...Individuals are doing extraordinary engineering work in cybersecurity, but there's more than just one guy working to cure cancer. Too much engineering work depends on the spare time of too few. We need institutions,with good and stable funding — and a bureaucratic firewall against those with other motivations...'</comment>


Facebook Makes API Changes to Be in Sync with OAuth Specs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apievangelist.com/2011/08/06/facebook-makes-change-to-be-in-sync-with-oauth-spec/#.TjyzIw8An8U.hackernews <comment><USER2> That blog post has & in the second code sample that shouldn't be there according to the (much better) original source: <http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/533/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Its been fixed.</comment></comment>


Something Is Happening: Basic Income Create-A-Thons Are Here - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-santens/something-is-happening-ba_b_8635392.html <comment><USER2> While I love the idea of Basic Income, has there been much progress in solving for the issue of market rates for rent, goods, etc. simply rising to consume the extra money?

<comment><USER3> In normal markets where sellers are in competition, the usual expectation from supply/demand interaction would be that an increase in resources available to the group pursuing a particular good or service would be to increase the quantity sold and the market clearing cost. (With knock-on effects of increasing market clearing price and quantity sold of competitively-delivered inputs to those goods, including labor.)

With goods supplied by monopolies, the increase in available resources would be expected just to increase the extractable monopoly rents, but that's a problem with monopolies that applies to lots of situations, not a problem with basic income.

<comment><USER2> So how does that translate to rental markets then for housing? Are you simply saying that more housing would be built to accomodate the new renters at a rate they could afford?

<comment><USER3> > So how does that translate to rental markets then for housing?

Fairly directly; housing usually doesn't have a monopoly supplier.

> Are you simply saying that more housing would be built to accomodate the new > renters at a rate they could afford?

Basically, yes; rental housing competes with other real estate uses; more money chasing rental housing means more situations where those wishing to purchase (perhaps also [re]develop) real estate for that purpose can outbid other uses and/or pay the necessary development fees, etc., to do so.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker double agent - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/10/11/hacker-double-agent <comment><USER2> This is blogspam, original article and discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1890538>.</comment>


History's Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-feet-under-the-sea/603040/ <comment><USER2> It is really disappointing to see companies like De Beers and Nautilus mine ocean beds without a care for all the environmental externalities. These organizations are outrunning regulations, and somehow have also outrun public notice. DeepGreen, mentioned late in the article, seems like a greenwashed version of the same that is anticipating public scrutiny. We need to act fast to put a pause on these activities until we understand their impact more fully.</comment>


The great Pacific garbage patch is largely abandoned fishing gear - <AUTHOR> https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ <comment><USER2> We have been seeing massive fishing net globs come ashore for the past few years on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's getting worse. My boys and I personally dragged a large chunk ashore this past year. They are extremely heavy and take a lot of work to move and dispose of all the netting. Here's the image: [https://imgur.com/12U4FXg](https://imgur.com/12U4FXg)

This is the latest, the largest tangle of net researchers have seen wash ashore. [http://www.fox8live.com/story/37529263/its-huge-40-ton- mass-...](http://www.fox8live.com/story/37529263/its-huge-40-ton-mass-of- fishing-nets-washes-ashore-on-big- island?clienttype=generic&utm_content=buffere2764&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

<comment><USER3> So this is basically a shower drain hairs clog, except made up of fishing nets & lines?

I can believe that's heavy and hard work, hair clogs are already surprisingly difficult to get out & untangle (aside from being disgusting).

The tangle looks surprisingly clean though, are they mostly recent disposals?

<comment><USER4> It could be old. Rope doesnt break down quickly is why.

<comment><USER3> It's more buildup on it I would be expecting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is actually somewhat encouraging.

Plastic pollution clearly is an emergency now, but that this much of it comes from abandoned fishing gear means cutting the pollution at it's source should be a lot less complicated than trying to completely change the whole world's view on plastic production.

Obviously we still need to curb plastic production globally, but it's so commonplace that this will be almost impossible to realistically achieve with the world the way it is. I'd hope that over time we could introduce legislation to move to biodegradeable plastics, but really, we need to change our cultural view of consumption and waste entirely.

It's a task that makes solving climate change look trivial, so I'm struggling to hold out hope - although the one ray of light here is that it _seems_ that the scale of the problem is bi-partisan acknowledged, for example, on the left:

Guardian: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/12/micropla...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/12/microplastic- pollution-in-oceans-is-far-greater-than-thought-say-scientists)

CNN: [http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway- plas...](http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway-plastic- island/)

On the right:

Daily Mail: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5491469/Micro...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5491469/Microplastics- flushed-oceans-far-faster-thought.html)

Fox News: [http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2018/03/16/93-percent- bott...](http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2018/03/16/93-percent-bottled- water-contains-microplastics-study-says.html)

So at least some cause for optimism if the WHO can pressure the UN to take multilateral action, but it'll take pressure on the ground from people the world over.

<comment><USER6> It's conveniently acknowledged, because you can always blame others and it's impossible to take actions because it happens in international waters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if within 1,000 years they don't develop nano robots that actually mine our current trash for the minerals? We toss out gold, silver, rare earth metals, petroleum, every day... the trick is it's so very hard right now to extract those minerals, but perhaps our current landfills and garbage patches will become the "gold mines" of the future. It would be super easy to reach — landfills have trash just feet below the surface. No dangerous digging.

Just thinking optimistically here. I personally do what I can now to keep the earth clean. No sense peeing in your own pool.

<comment><USER8> When I lived in a crappier area of a city I noticed an interesting system: "scrappers" \- poor, probably homeless, people who would dig through your trash looking for recyclables that they could sell.

So there was this totally organic system that had emerged which helped make sure the trash didn't contain things that still had value. Of course it wasn't perfect, not to mention that we really don't want people to have to do that. Interesting non the less.

<comment><USER9> I watched a whole movie about garbage pickers in a Brazilian waste dump: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1268204/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1268204/)

<comment><USER8> If you liked that there is another one about garbage pickers in Cairo called Garbage Dreams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting that (according to this article), while 20% of marine debris globally is fishing gear, 46% of this sample was from fishing sources. There is one source quoted as saying that the study is based on "limited surveys", but the study also apparently took 752 surface trawls (which, to my layman's ear, sounds like a lot). Would the concern be not about the number of samples, but the type of samples? Perhaps fishing gear is more inclined to float to the top where the trawls were taken, or more gear is abandoned in a location that is more likely to float to the patch?

<comment><USER11> > Perhaps fishing gear is more inclined to float to the top where the trawls > were taken

Virtually everything non-living either floats or sinks in water. There isn't a major accumulation of debris with exactly the same density as ocean water that follows this garbage patch 100 metres lower.

<comment><USER12> Have you ever shaken a tube full of sand containing a marble?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> key sentence:

> Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of > plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total > tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, > most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging > drawing headlines today.

" _only_ eight percent of the total tonnage"? We are talking about microplastics, that is still an incredible amount of plastic.

What's more interesting is I think this article shows how journalism about environmental destruction has some significant problems. It works as with most other human communication, we want narratives and images that evokes emotion (a kind of mythic/romantic understanding of things). That's why "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" works so well, we all mentally see an island of trash in our heads that needs "cleaning up" and along comes the hero, a young entreprenour. Other things that work well are pictures of dead birds on a beach with their stomach full of different colored plastics.

The problem is when our "romantic" idea of pollution hides/ignores the more destructive (and more complex) effects. Pictures of flooding being the poster images for climate change is an incredibly shallow view of the problem. And no part of the world is free of plastic, so basically the entire earth is a plastic garbage patch. Even worse, when an image that is built up doesn't fit what it started out as. You have basically made things worse by planting doubt about the problem in general by having an incomplete and shallow image of the problem..

<comment><USER14> Yeah, and the relative harm between microplastics and heavy chunks of garbage is also off the charts. A big chunk of stuff floating around in the open ocean can actually become a habitat for all kinds of creatures, whereas small bits of plastic are basically poison.

<comment><USER15> Don't those large chunks contribute to the micro plastic problem though, as UV rays and water movement break up the particles? Genuine question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Careful: Autoplays a video with sound for me. Muting the video and scrolling the page unmutes the video.

Firefox Nightly, Windows. My coworkers didn't like the music, I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to disable video autoplaying permanently, enter about:config in the URL bar, search for media.autoplay.enable and set it's value to false

<comment><USER5> Thank you kind stranger!

Done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's a video of micro plastic on my local beach.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAojzv8V84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAojzv8V84)

How the hell can you clean this up without a thousand people using tweezers?

You can't get a backhoe down to the beach. Every tide brings more of the stuff in. It's so overwhelming that it seems pointless even attempting to pick it up. There's f-ing miles and miles of it.

<comment><USER18> Definitely a great job for robots that are like beach and water roombas [1]. They can side as mapping the oceans better and report other data. These types of robots still need to be widespread and better but that is probably the only way to tackle this problem.

Other solutions in the water are being worked on that scrape it off with a large line [2] or a boat like Mr Trash Wheel [3]

[1] [https://www.popsci.com/waste-shark-is-garbage-collecting- sea...](https://www.popsci.com/waste-shark-is-garbage-collecting-sea-drone)

[2] [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29631332](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29631332)

[3] [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash- wheels-...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-wheels- professor-trash-wheels-baltimore-harbor-ocean-trash-pickup/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This isn't the title of the article, and the change is not only inaccurate (46% is not 'mostly') but it downplays the significance of the garbage patch.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, when you read the article it's clear they mean it's in the plurality. In a title it's ambiguous without the context, but not overly deceptive.

It's not downplaying it, it's only stating that claims of its being "the size of Texas" and "you can see it from space" are exaggerated.

<comment><USER19> But it's also saying that "the 79,000 tons was four to 16 times larger than has been previously estimated for the patch."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Artificial proteins could reduce the need to trawl.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cleaning it up doesn't fix the problem: we're producing disposable garbage.

We can stop buying disposable stuff -- plastic bags, coffee cups, stupid gifts people use for thirty seconds before throwing it away, etc.

How much stuff within your reach or eyesight will be used for under a month then never again that you could have not bought?

It's a start that will improve your life not to get the stuff. Yes we can do more, but let's at least start with what we immediately control.

<comment><USER23> 1-use plastic bags that don't decompose are already banned in the eu. Would be nice if the US adopted the same approach

<comment><USER5> This is not true.

Here in the UK (EU, for now) single-use plastic bags are still depressingly common.

A levy of 5p per bag was introduced a couple of years back, but nothing that even remotely resembles a proper ban.

<comment><USER23> I stand corrected, how to curb their usage is left to the member states They're banned here in Italy (and in France), I thought the ban was EU wide.

[https://ec.europa.eu/environment/efe/themes/waste/breaking-b...](https://ec.europa.eu/environment/efe/themes/waste/breaking- bag-habits_en)

<comment><USER24> I do not know if plastic bags are banned in France, I can use any amount of PLA bags that I want for free and if I pay one euro per bag, I can buy as many plastic bags that I want.

In France often what the law says and what is reported in media differs widely. It is absolutely out of context but the best example was the 35 hours per week laws that authorised up to 56 hours per week for some kind of workers.

<comment><USER23> PLA bags aren't bad for the environment; they will decompose quickly. Having 1 euro for durable plastic ones looks more than enough to di discourage their use (even if it's not an actual ban).

<comment><USER25> PLA will only decompose quickly in an industrial composting facility. If it gets into the ocean it will decompose at about the same rate as regular plastics.

<comment><USER23> I checked, and in Italy the actual material is this one: [http://materbi.com/en/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2015/12/Sch...](http://materbi.com/en/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2015/12/Scheda-biodegradazione-marina_EN_MR.pdf)

I would be curious how this compares to PLA. If you have any idea about that, let me know.

<comment><USER25> That's quite an interesting looking one, I've not directly heard of it before but as it's been around for a few years is quite possibly used in some products.

It looks to be a PLA base with some other additives, presumably to aid the breakdown. Thanks for the info, I'll look into it more.

<comment><USER23> You're welcome. It's quite used here in Italy, I have no idea if it has the merits they talk about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's worth noting that National Geographic is now owned by the same parent company as Fox News: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/national- geog...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/national-geographic- magazine-shifts-to-for-profit-status-with-fox- partnership/2015/09/09/7c9f034e-56f0-11e5-8bb1-b488d231bba2_story.html?utm_term=.e78c06f034f1)

<comment><USER27> What significance does that have with the content of this article?

<comment><USER26> A few people in the comments have pointed out problems with the reporting, and the general motive of downplaying environmental issues aligns with those of the aforementioned media company.

<comment><USER28> I don't mean to imply anything wrong with the article, but I totally agree that bringing this up is relevant. The potential motivations of who is telling you something is very important. One of the first things I did was google "who owns national geographic". Then I looked through the comments here to see if it'd been mentioned. (I would've made a similar comment, despite the almost inevitable downvoting which I see has so far happened to your comment.)

One might also want to check the linked article and its source, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports) (I also don't mean to imply anything about that.)

<comment><USER26> Agreed. The article itself doesn't seem wildly biased from a cursory glance, and I'm not really qualified to comment on its scientific rigor, but it's worth being aware of potential sources of bias nonetheless.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Twitter: What's Valuation Got to Do With Revenue? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/on_twitter_whats_valuation_got_to_do_with_revenue.php <comment><USER2> Valuing a business is like valuing a house. 1) If you have multiple buyers, you can usually sell for a higher price. 2) There are some features (add that new bathroom) which will increase the price you achieve, and 3) It's possible to overcapitalize on features that have less value than it costs to add them.

Revenue, and particularly the combination of profitability and cashflow positivity, is likely to attract more buyers, therefore increasing value 1).

But a business needs to do something to increase revenue. Twitter and Facebook are both aiming to do 2) ... and running the risk of doing 3).</comment>


Vugu: Experimental library for web UIs written in Go and targeting WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vugu/vugu <comment><AUTHOR> I put this together as a prototype of what it would look like if we had something like .vue files that were converted to Go, built to WebAssembly. So far I don't hate it.

It's basically a go-generate-time tool that parses a .vugu file similar to a vue file but the expressions in it are Go code. It spits out a big function that, when run, produces the resulting virtual DOM - with conditionals, loops, etc.

Some tooling helps with this so you can rebuild automatically on page load and so forth, but the above is the basic idea. Curious what people think.

<comment><USER2> This is cool, it's kind of like Blazor [0] in the .Net world although I bet the resulting code is a lot smaller.

If I can make a suggestion, though, the "root.vugu" code snippet from step 3 on the Getting Started page should be one of the first things in README.md and on the vugu.org page. It gets the core idea across right away, just like the code editor at the top of golang.org quickly shows what the language is like.

[0] [https://blazor.net/](https://blazor.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, I agree. I'm thinking of making a "playground" also, which would help with quickly showing how it works and allowing people to fiddle with it easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think WebAssembly frameworks are the next step in the evolution of web ui. I don't think React / Vue / Angular are likely to be unseated by another JavaScript framework, as everyone is mostly satisfied with at least one of the 3. A new framework needs to offer significant advantages to justify the switch, and WebAssembly can do this with better performance and better languages. It's exciting to watch the first experimental releases of these new frameworks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Not just web. There are a lot of efforts getting WebAssembly to run outside the browser. This could be an alternative to Electron for cross platform desktop applications.

Depending on use case, WebAssembly might even be an alternative to Java on servers. Go already supports cross platform compilations, so the use case for Go on WebAssembly on a server isn't as obvious. At least, not for those of us who value simplicity or performance. On the other hand, most of us didn't see Javascript on servers coming either, so I wouldn't rule it out.

</comment><comment><USER5> > No node_modules folder competing with your music library for disk space.

Love it already

</comment><comment><USER6> This is absolutely fascinating. I think the world has come a full circle! While HTML5 and Javascript are great tools, I remember how back in the day you had a wide choice of which language you wanted to use to build an app. The world would be a much better place if that kind of choice were to become available again and this project gives me hope that we are headed in that direction.

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 I'm intrigued by this as I've been teaching myself some Go recently (to see if I could get over my initial distaste for it).

I've been enjoying the process, so this subject interests me but I'm running into a long series of errors when starting the tutorial dev server.

        email@example.com/env-js.go:23:16: undefined: js.Func
        email@example.com/env-js.go:28:15: undefined: js.FuncOf
        firstname.lastname@example.com/env-js.go:107:34: js.Global().Get("document").Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        firstname.lastname@example.com/env-js.go:152:19: mountParentEl.Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        firstname.lastname@example.com/env-js.go:165:16: mountChild1.Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        firstname.lastname@example.com/env-js.go:309:8: n.Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        email@example.com/env-js.go:680:8: el.Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        email@example.com/env-js.go:759:19: oldKeyJSVal.Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        firstname.lastname@example.com/env-js.go:810:7: v.Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        firstname.lastname@example.com/env-js.go:813:51: firstChild.Truthy undefined (type js.Value has no field or method Truthy)
        firstname.lastname@example.com/env-js.go:813:51: too many errors

Have any insight?

<comment><USER7> What version of Go are you using? It sounds like an older one. Try the latest (1.12.x).

The syscall/js API is still in development and undergoing API changes. It's not stable like the rest of Go's standard library.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I'm on Go 1.11.5. I'll try updating and see if it will work then.

edit: Updatd to 1.12—no dice. Many of the errors did go the way of the buffalo, but a couple remain:

        2019/03/29 11:08:37 Error from compile: exit status 2 (out path="/var/folders/lp/d1rds9q57wqdmgchmzjjrh3hfsm71q/T/main_wasm_237110380"); Output:
        # example.com/test/testapp
        ./root.go:11:13: undefined: RotData
        ./root.go:37:30: data.Toggle undefined (type *RootData has no field or method Toggle)
        ./root.go:47:8: data.Toggle undefined (type *RootData has no field or method Toggle)

<comment><USER8> I'll take a wild guess and say there might be a typo on the word _RotData_

<comment> 52-6F-62 Appears that way. `root.go` is a file generated by the framework. Thought passing the errors along would be of some value...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another option to consider is Blazor:

[https://blazor.net/](https://blazor.net/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RfUPr0KrSM&t=836s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RfUPr0KrSM&t=836s)

I didn't try it yet, but it looks very promising and I hope I will be able to use C# or F# for client side programming, because it's hard to master a new JS framework every 3 months or so and I already have JS fatigue.

<comment><USER10> JS framework battle has been settled from a while. React has won and I dont see that changing soon. Vue and Angular are fighting for second place.

<comment><USER11> That is regional. Here on the office battle takes place between Angular, Vue and vanilla JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Webassembly seems like the solution that could bring all communities together. Imagine i could use a C++ library, to use with a Rust UI library. All in the same runtime environments. This could be the dream.

<comment><USER11> Just like I use a C++ library with a C#, VB, F#, JS, Python, Component Pascal, Eiffel.... UI library....

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some demos would be great

<comment><USER14> It seems their website at [http://www.vugu.org](http://www.vugu.org) is a demo as it contains some of those vg attributes in the source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I still need to write a lot more docs and examples (not to mention implement a lot more feature), but the site does have some useful stuff. I'm also making a "playground" and will link to it prominently from the github readme when it's avail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 13MB [1] for a static site (vugu.org)?

[1]: [http://www.vugu.org/main.wasm](http://www.vugu.org/main.wasm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. That's part of the "experimental" experience. :) (Although that wasm file should be gzipped, will double check what's up with that). More info on the size of Go's wasm binaries here: [https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WebAssembly#reducing- the-s...](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WebAssembly#reducing-the-size-of- wasm-files)

The doc site is a prototype and proof-of-concept using Vugu. First attempt, just wrote it last week. Lots of optimizations still needed for sure.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Email hosting with custom domain support? - <AUTHOR> Requirements:
1) custom domain support
2) wildcard support (i.e. emails sent to an invalid email address will get put into a specified inbox)
3) only 1 user inbox is required; more would be nice
4) support for anti-spam/email verification technologies (i.e. DKIM, SPF, etc.)
5) not self hosted
6) excellent uptime
Does not matter if it's paid, as long as the paid product is reasonably priced.
---
I'm currently using Zoho (free product) which, while meeting all the requirements defined above, isn't great. It's just not bad either. I'm looking to see what HN likes. <comment><USER2> I've been testing migadu[0] since a ShowHN about it a few weeks ago. So far the service is awesome! It maches all of your criteria, plus, for a flat fee (it depends on outbound emails/day actually), you get:

* unlimited domains, mailboxes, storage space

* a very well-thought and honest service and UX ( I encourage you to read their "benefits" and "drawbacks" pages)

* a very responsive and helpful customer support

* hosting in a privacy minded country

0: [https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html](https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Office365 "Business essentials" for wormhole.network

It was surprisingly cheap and it includes other stuff like 1TB OneDrive and OWA is quite cool (even though I use Outlook or Mail, depending if I'm on my main computer or not).

I have only one inbox, but a few aliases, including some for a second custom domain. As far as I can tell I haven't been charged extra apart from what they advertise here: [https://products.office.com/en- gb/business/office-365-busine...](https://products.office.com/en- gb/business/office-365-business-essentials)

</comment><comment><USER4> Have a look at Yandex Mail for Domain (free)

[https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/](https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Rackspace Mail is probably the leader in this space, with over 4 million paying SMB users. It meets all your requirements, including a 100% uptime SLA and 24/7/365 live support.

[https://www.rackspace.com/en-us/email- hosting/webmail](https://www.rackspace.com/en-us/email-hosting/webmail)

</comment><comment><USER6> I just saw a Show HN post about Migadu.com and signed up. I've been very happy.

Pricing is excellent. They let you add unlimited domains, mailboxes, aliases, etc. The only discerning difference between plans is the number of outgoing messages every day across your entire plan.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've used Google Apps (G Suite) for hosting kje.ca email for a long time and it's great. I'm luckily grandfathered under the free plan but I'd pay $5 a month for the service if I had to.

</comment><comment><USER8> Fastmail is awesome and fulfils all of your criteria I believe.

</comment><comment><USER9> FastMail does not offer any type of phone support.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was using the same now switched to G suite</comment>


Dark Patterns: Past, Present, and Future - <AUTHOR> https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3400901 <comment><USER2> A/B testing is the worst. I'm always on the bleeding edge of products I use and _extremely_ tolerant about changes and regressions–to the point the browser I am using crashes every couple of hours, likely due to a longstanding threading issue–but I just cannot stand constant A/B changes. If you change the font of your website even once, I will know. If you tweak the spacing of some elements, I will know. If you change a color slightly, I will know. Even if you pretend like nothing changed at all, I can tell and it drives me out of my mind because something seems "off" and I must find what it is. I spent half an hour once searching for why Hacker News's text area font seemed to have randomly changed from Courier to Menlo before emailing 'dang in desperation to figure out what was different (turns out it was a new lang="en" attribute). Please, don't change things randomly and silently.

<comment><USER3> I understand the frustration, but A/B testing is one of the more objectively tools we have at our disposal.

While there are good arguments against A/B testing UI changes and doing p-hacking, much of the modern web's current UX and UI improvements are in part due to this. How else would we truly know what affects user on a broad scale?

<comment><USER2> In theory, yes, A/B testing sounds great. However, whenever I see it implemented it invariably becomes some sort of annealing process for a metric that doesn't actually make the site more pleasant for end users ("engagement", usually) and you have people shipping apps with seven different UIs in them and users who are accustomed to features moving around and disappearing completely unpredictably. As I was searching for a picture of "Courier" Google gave me a completely different "cards" UI that went back to how it was before when I searched "Menlo". My last couple weeks with Slack on iOS have been a nightmare as it constantly switches between its fairly decent UI and some new abomination depending on which workspace I'm in and the phase of the moon. It seems like nobody really knows how to do A/B testing properly. (Perhaps the companies that do are doing it in such a way that I cannot notice. But there is ample evidence of a lot of products where I _can_.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Much of this could be legislated away.

The cost would be "creativity" but consider the gains.

Think of a database where there are no rules for how data is entered, no formats, no validation, nothing. Sure, it allows maximum creativity for the input but its value as a source of information can actually be less than if strict rules were enforced.

The web is largely unstructured data precisely because there are few if any rules for input. This makes it extremely difficult to manage as an information source. Few companies, let alone individual users, can even attempt to wrangle it into something useful. Every website is potentially "unique" in so many ways.

Even something as simple as a uniform, standard web form for e-commerce could be a vast improvement. No more differences between ordering from Amazon versus everywhere else. With a standard format for collecting payment information that does not vary from merchant to merchant, there could be significant gains. Predictability. Easier to design intercompatibility.

As always, feel free to shoot this idea down. "It will never work because ...." or "That already exists..."

However no one can deny there are huge problems with the haphazard way things are done today. Complaints about such things form a large part of each day's HN commentary.

Sometimes creativity is not the best thing. Certainly it is unrestrained "creativity" that allows many "dark pattern" to exist.

<comment><USER5> I agree with the intention... But!

Such a system would become so inherently complex, because even in things as simple as "e-commerce" there is _so much variation_ in how the whole purchasing experience works.

It would start by supporting only a few "mainstream" business model, then growing more and more complex to handle all the different sorts of shops (bulk discounts? split payment methods? multiple destinations? group buy? subscriptions?) to the point where it would become basically as complex as the Web.

Just look at the Web, becoming more complex as to be basically its own operating system running inside an operating system.

<comment><USER6> There's no need for a law that specifically allows or disallows implementations of things. There just needs to be a legal body that allows someone to refer a website to an adjudicator if they believe it's using a dark pattern, and a significant fine if the adjudicator finds that they are. Let each case be judged on its own merit.

Occasionally the adjudicator could publish a guide for "Things we're always going to say are dark patterns" to make it a bit easier to avoid getting fined.

<comment><USER4> That would be a lot of work for an adjudicator considering how many websites and how many offended users. How many adjudicators would we need?

What if the large companies with lots of cash can just pay the fines without impairment to their business? What if they just keep repeat offending?

In paying the fines would this mean websites would have to have to be more transparent regarding who is behind each website? This is assuming they will be paying in real currency (not cryptocurrency).

Who will bank the money recieved from the fines and how will that money be used?

<comment><USER6> _What if the large companies with lots of cash can just pay the fines without impairment to their business? What if they just keep repeat offending?_

The ban could be a percentage of revenue. For persistent offenders their DNS entries could be banned.

 _Who will bank the money recieved from the fines and how will that money be used?_

The money raised from fines would pay for the service. Anything left over would be paid to me. :)

<comment><USER4> Those adjudicators might try to milk the system. There might not be anything left over!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This stuck out to me the most:

> _The authors seem genuinely surprised by recent developments and have > distanced themselves from dark patterns_

Time and again, people just refuse to accept that there are unintended consequences to their well-intentioned actions. There's a reason knowledge like this is often referred to as a Pandora's box, and it seems like not many people really take those old fables to heart. Like, it had never once entered into these people's minds that these might get warped given the a perverse set of incentives? "They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

<comment><USER8> A related question came up in Andrew Przybylski's 2019 GDC talk about the science of gaming addiction. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVwu4RDChsY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVwu4RDChsY)

Q&A from 49:30 and at 59:30 are relevant. Someone asked about the responsibility of those who looked into these kinds of things; and about "if we have facts about addiction the bad people will use them".

Przybylski argued that it's better to have the facts about how people behave, rather than act based on opinion.

<comment><USER9> I wish people would take it to its natural conclusion, though. That is, if you have facts about how people behave, and then your product creates pathological behavior, then you're fully responsible for it because you've done it on purpose. This particularly applies to all the skinner-box "games" that are so popular in mobile scene these days. They're purposefully optimized to be as addicting as possible, so their authors should be made to face consequences of all the problems caused by the addiction of their players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, this doesn't even point out some of the worst dark patterns. In the US, it's become ubiquitous to no longer even ask to send you spam: if I understand correctly, the legal justification is that they put the email consent in the Terms of Use (which are "conveniently" "consented to" by a non- optional, pre-checked checkbox).

<comment><USER11> When I get subscribed to any mailing list I didn't explicitly opt-in to I just mark them as spam (which it is) on GMail and move on.

Enough of us doing this and I guess they'll get the message.

<comment><USER10> That doesn't work and it really _can 't_ work. If you order from foo.com, you want to receive the receipt, but you don't want to receive "Top ten deals of the summer from foo.com". But these come from the same email address, from the same server, etc. Maybe AI filtering will get good enough to deal with this stuff reliably in the future, but right now, it seems like we're stuck with it.

The reality here is that the free market rewards this awful behavior, so it won't be solved until regulation is applied.

<comment><USER12> It's particularly annoying because the spammers are not only causing trouble in their own right but also motivating an overreaction from major mail services in response.

From the sending side, I have one business right now where our outgoing emails are apparently being blocked or even silently dropped by at least three ISPs spread across two different continents. We have never sent anything even remotely spammy in our entire trading history. We have all the usual shouldn't-be-needed-but-are extras like SPF properly configured. The sending mail server hasn't found its way onto any of the big blacklists as far as we can tell. And the mails being blocked are actually quite important things like password reset requests, emails with copies of documentation that we are legally required to send attached, or even replies to customers contacting us to ask where their password reset emails are when they've been requesting them!

From the receiving side, I'm fed up with helping friends and family who are trying to work out why they aren't getting important messages, and with the ISPs who have screwed up their mail configuration or deliberately set up overly aggressive anti-spam policies but then have front-line support drones who just intone that you should check your junk mail folder as an instinctive reaction to any complaint about missing mail.

I think that with email now effectively being both the effective root password to so many online accounts and the primary means of communication between a lot of people and organisations with genuine reasons to contact them, the medium of email needs the same kinds of legal safeguards that other essential means of communications like postal mail have enjoyed for a long time. I don't think it should be left to big name mail services or some random ISP to decide whether or not their users are going to receive legitimate emails any more. Blocking false positives is far more damaging than missing false negatives when it comes to spam, and the situation is out of control. It's time to regulate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Arvind, Arunesh, Marshini and Mihir - thank you for this article, it's very informative and well researched, as evident from the footnotes.

We do need an open discussion in this matter, and actions must be taken as a result of the discussion. While regulators are likely to be pressed by the business to relax the rules, designers and behavioural researchers ofter don't think about long-term consequences of their choices, so there is a need for a third group there. People who see through the tricks and can recognise dark patterns.

The problem has become so prevalent that even tech-savvy folk sometimes gets tricked into giving up bits of their private data. Where does that leave the average consumer? It's evidently exploiting the fact that physically people just don't have the time and expertise to parse and understand what is being forced upon them.

As for Dark-Patterns-As-A-Service companies, there must be a way to detect and block their software using browser plugins. Isn't this effectively malware?

Email can be fixed only gradually. There is no way the world will stop using it and move overnight to something else, no matter how great. As a related topic, I propose a dedicated footer field to put an end to emails containing two sentences and several meters of logos, badges, ads! and legal notes, which clutter our email threads and JIRAs. There is substantial potential in cutting down mental effort and IT resources necessary to process and store it.

Most malware today is not aimed to destroy local data, but rather to exfiltrate it. Instead of bloated antivirus software a more effective and lightweight solution is curated hosts files. No need to rely on external DNS, which can be hijacked. I'm working on electron-based desktop tool that does just that.

Another dark pattern I discovered on ala.co.uk, a popular GAP insurer in the UK. Their Get A Quote page is silently siphoning data from a complex form which triggers sending the whole form on field change, before you press Send. Beware of auto-filling by the browser!

And there is that: [https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/no-cookie-consent-walls- an...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/no-cookie-consent-walls-and-no- scrolling-isnt-consent-says-eu-data-protection-body/) Legislation vs clear guidelines and enforcement.

I guess the strategy is to wear us down with nagging, nudging and whatnot to make a mistake, and once our data is out, there is no reversing it.

</comment><comment><USER14> One of the recent dark pattern is what current US administration has employed. Taking the issues, however minor, from the fringe, bring those issues to mainstream, turning the fringe believers into supporters.

</comment><comment><USER15> the countdown pattern reminds me of shopping television's "but call within the next fifteen minutes to receive a second FREE product!"

<comment><USER16> The countdown pattern is useful if you consider it a flag to indicate the site is sketchy. Especially you go back to the site later and the countdown has changed... (as in the time that it will elapse has changed)</comment></comment>


Global warming worse than thought due to new info on cloud particles - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/07/clouds-climate-change-analysis-liquid-ice-global-warming <comment><AUTHOR> Record low sea ice levels in the arctic for the first three months of the year in 2016. Maybe we have misunderestimated the unknown unknowns in climate science?</comment>


Unsubsidized Obamacare plans are leading to political tensions - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/health/obamacare-premiums-medicaid.html?emc=edit_th_180220&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=537721150220 <comment><USER2> When healthcare costs per person lead the world it's not just an insurance/coverage problem

$10,345 per person: U.S. health care spending reaches new peak. WASHINGTON — The nation's health care tab this year is expected to surpass $10,000 per person for the first time, the government said Wednesday.Jul 13, 2016

[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/new-peak-us-health- care-...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/new-peak-us-health-care- spending-10345-per-person)

<comment><USER2> Between 2015 and 2016, US median household income rose 3.2% from $57,230 to $59,039, according to a new report released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday.Sep 12, 2017

The 2010 Census enumerated 308.7 million people in the United States, a 9.7 percent increase from 281.4 million in Census 2000. Of the total population in 2010, 300.8 million lived in 116.7 million households for an average of 2.58 people per household.

=(10,300*2.58)/59039

->That's about 46% of median household income.</comment></comment>


Developer First API for Screen Sharing - <AUTHOR> https://www.deadsimplescreensharing.com/screen-sharing-api <comment><USER2> This is cool. Are you guys in the bay area?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We are in Toronto.</comment></comment>


H-1B Models Strut Into U.S. as Programmers Pray for Help - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-20/h-1b-models-strut-into-u-s-as-programmers-pray-for-help.html <comment><USER2> What has been baffling me for some time is that the US doesn't seem to have a visa for professionals doing short-term work for their clients in the US. For example, as a freelance programmer I have clients in the US and sometimes they may want me to pay a visit. I have to turn such requests down since I won't be able to bill them for my time while in the US.

There only seem to be 2 kinds of visas: B1 (business) which does not allow you to bill anybody in the US, and H1B which is an overkill for 1-2 days on-site visits (not to mention that this visa usually implies moving to the US to take a full-time position with a company there).

But there must be some kind of provision for consultants doing short-term work in the US; it's such a common practice all over the world. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Everybody else is using Bwaivers. You're not doing short-term work for your clients, you're working for your company in your home country, and visiting clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Numerically, these are not comparable.

> There were 478 initial applications made for fashion models in 2010 ... U.S. > ... approved 250 ...

> 325,000 H-1B petitions were filed for computer-related occupations ... about > 90,800 visas were distributed to foreign information-technology workers

It is equally true that 90,000 more people were renewed or accepted for the first time for computer work vs for fashion modeling.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article is extremely poorly written. While the conversations around visas (specifically H1Bs) are especially relevant to the HN community, the conversation this article is trying to spark is rote and shortsighted: "Percentage-wise, fashion models get more H1B visas than elite programmer grads." Why should a programmer feel any more entitled to a work visa than a fashion model? There's so many important aspects of the way this country handles immigration worth inspiring conversation about.

A visa lottery? That gets triggered on April Fools' no less. A person who has spent 6 years in America studying, working, starting a company, and contributing to the economy has the same chances as a phantom non-existent consulting seat in a large outsourcing firm.

 _A mildly miffed H1B lottery non-winner who has to leave the country in 6 months_

<comment><USER6> That is frustrating. Don't you have an option for other types of visa, as a workaround until next H1B lottery?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I see an article like this, I try harder to appreciate this country more, despite all my disappointments.

So many people want to come here, even those that could most easily work virtually from elsewhere. And what do you get for your efforts except to get sub-standard wages and treated very badly as "foreigners" in our ever growing xenophobia.

Best wishes and good luck, sorry it has to been under such strange pretenses and politics.

<comment><USER8> US wages for software engineers, even sub-standard ones (wages, not engineers!), are still more, and in many cases much more, than most countries in the world.

I was making more as an intern in the US, that now as an experienced engineeer in southern Europe, and that not considering income taxes (much lower in the US).

<comment><USER7> But doesn't everything cost more here too, which offsets it?

Is income the primary/only motivation?

<comment><USER9> No, it does not cost more. Things you use every day like cars, fuel, clothing, etc usually cost considerably less in the US than in other countries.

And you might be surprised, but in the US "foreigners" are usually treated much better compared to other countries where immigration is not as common, like Germany or UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I want to start a job shop that hires only fashion-model beautiful programmers. They should breeze through the H1-B process...

Russia, Brazil, Colombia? Anyone? Anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget the Scandanavian countries!

<comment><USER11> Or Romania!

The company I used to work at bought a German company that had an office in Romania. When they came and did a QA with the company in the US, they listed a good M:F ratio as one of the upsides of working in the Romanian office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I fail to understand why the US even has quota on desirable migrant workers with a solid job offer.

One the one hand the US still does this "we're an immigrant nation" dog and pony show with shit like the green card lottery, on the other hand, if you're educated, qualified _and_ have the guarantee of a full-time well paid job, it's harder to get into the US than most European countries.

</comment><comment><USER13> Of course, Bloomberg is interested in this as it effects his importation of H1B wage slaves.

<comment><USER14> As an ex-Bloomberg software developer who was on a H1B, I couldn't agree more. What option do you have but be a wage slave when they pay much, much more than what the tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon pay?

<comment><USER15> Did you mean you couldn't "disagree" more with the parent comment? Sorry it is a little unclear to me, but are you saying that Bloomberg pays "much much more" or much less compared to Google/Amazon? Thanks.

<comment><USER16> I believe it's sarcasm bro.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I meant as in a 'they pay so well that you're going to be a slave to your wages' sense. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And so? What makes you think you are inherently better than a Fashion model?

<comment><USER18> I don't think it has anything to do with better/worse. It's just silly to group fashion models into the same category as tech workers. They are more similar to performers/athletes.

<comment><USER17> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this article is horribly written. I get that the main point is to point out the absurdity of grouping fashion models with tech workers under a single visa class, but the whole prayer thing is really stretching it.

There's also this quote that comes from nowhere: '"As a single man, would you prefer to look at a beautiful woman or a high-tech worker?" he asked.' I still don't understand the context.

<comment><USER19> The "whole prayer thing" was the most amusing to me; maybe because I'm a stereotypical atheist hacker, but I fail to understand that people in high- tech fields such as computer science can be sufficiently credulous (of any religion) to... pray to some deity for a visa. This isn't just a mostly- cultural religiosity or spiritual veneer; it's full "long-beard guy in the sky listening and answering to personal wishes" kind of belief...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there _any_ political movement trying to convert H1Bs into green cards? Expanding temporary guest workers harms local workers, by creating a two-class workforce. Giving them green cards, while still causing a decline in wages, at least keeps their status equal, so there's less of a decline.

I guess the models should stay too.

<comment><USER21> Due to a combination of long processing times for green cards, and the legal notion of "immigrant intent", H1-B is commonly used as a bridge to a green card.

Any US visa which isn't a green card (e.g. tourist visas, student visas) is considered a non-immigrant visa. You can only apply for, and enter on a non- immigrant visa if you don't have immigrant intent. If an international student, for example, applies for a green card, this shows immigrant intent and they could find it difficult to renew their student visa or even to re- enter the US after traveling.

Obviously this wouldn't be a problem if the green card itself were quickly approved, but the process is bureaucratic and can take years even for people with advanced degrees.

H1-B visas, on the other hand are one of the few visa classes that allow "dual intent", meaning that while they're non-immigrant visas, H1-B holders are also allowed immigrant intent. Which makes it a good visa to have before starting the green card process, if you want to be able to travel (e.g. to visit family) while your application is pending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a weird old article. Yes, fashion models are getting through on a higher percentage rate than programmers, but there's significantly fewer. Even then, that's weirdly sloppy statistical faff to sell a point.

</comment><comment><USER3> They're suggesting that fashion models get twice as many as devs. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this is a misunderstanding in how the applications work.

The process is that you apply, and then you get it or you don't. If they run out the same week you applied in, then you get put in a lottery. There's no person or process saying the fashion models are more important or get 2x as many visas as devs.

</comment><comment><USER23> wow. this is interesting.</comment>


Show HN: Saving Media Offline - <AUTHOR> http://www.saveitoffline.com

<comment><USER2> I tried 3-4 sites and they all seem to be working well. The only advice I can come with is that you should add some instructions or maybe change the text of the bookmarklet as I first thought it was a button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the quick reply! :)

I'll see if I can add some small text below the button which will make it more clear. Can I also ask which sites you tried it with?

\---

I'm eager to here other people's feedback on this as I'm looking to improve the service. Please leave a comment if there is anything that needs to be improved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Since the last time this was posted (a few months back?), the copy seems to have improved vastly. Kudos for that.

However, does it really offer me any benefit over youtube-dl? (which has a host of other options as well)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! The main benefit is that we have an improvised retriever which at the moment automatically extracts media (Flash/SWF..., Videos/FLV/MP4... and Audio/MP3/M4A...).

Can you please link to a file which youtube-dl supports and SaveItOffline does not? :)</comment></comment>


Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://sec.cs.ucl.ac.uk/users/smurdoch/papers/ndss16doyousee.pdf <comment><USER2> "The utility of anonymous communication is un- dermined by a growing number of websites treating users of such services in a degraded fashion."

Oh no. I see it totally differently: differential treatment of "anonymous, unaccountable" users vs "anonymous" users. The Tor model essentially requires the average admin to trust everyone not to abuse their access unless extra work is done on top of that. It also has about zero incentive for most content producers on the web given the pro-surveillance nature of their operation that _users_ created with their negative response to paid content and access.

So, it makes sense for them to filter out Tor and other anonymity schemes both for reducing their negatives and adding to their positives. This is why high security starts with user and environment requirements before producing a design. Previous experience that didn't do that showed people would ignore or work around resulting systems. This is also an easy work around compared to many. A dumb idea to fight economics and human nature in something that is supposed to get massive, mainstream use. At the least, it will encounter lots of resistance. At worst, it will totally fail.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is this? Proof that Tor users are treated differently.</comment>


Russia's Patriarch Sprays Holy Water on Computers to Fend Off Ransomware - <AUTHOR> https://heatst.com/tech/russias-secret-weapon-against-ransomware-virus-holy-water/ <comment><USER2> This is fake.

From the first comment in [http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/russians- fight-ransom...](http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/russians-fight- ransomware-virus-with-holy-water-27244/)

By Станислав Стремидловский

> _November 1, 2013, his Holiness Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Kirill > consecrated the new building of the Center for special purposes in the field > of ensuring road traffic safety MVD of Russia. Photo from there._

> > [http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/3338529.html](http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/3338529.html)

Autotranslation: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.patriarchia.ru%2Fdb%2Ftext%2F3338529.html)

It would be nice if someone is can find the second image too.</comment>


SideCar: Laptop to Tablet Connector [KickStarter] - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/10239846/sidecar-laptop-to-tablet-connector

<comment><AUTHOR> Not my project, but I wanted something like this a few weeks back. The idea is simple, yet effective. Considering the nature of HN, I figured others might be interested as well.</comment>


Ask HN: Which one do you suggest for graphql api and why? Ruby vs. Go - sahin-boydas <comment><AUTHOR> Node</comment>


I lost all my data stored in DigitalOcean Spaces - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nodegin/i-lose-all-my-data-by-using-digitalocean-spaces-247888cc05ae <comment><USER3> They were chasing me around last week with Google Adwords for a $100 free trial so I thought why not. Set up a droplet easy enough and invested 2-3 days part work in a test project for fun (didn't bother with external backups..).

Then without even bothering sending me an email they disabled my account to the likes of "We need to investigate that you are a real person, please send in docs A, B etc.". Normally you do that at the signup stage and when you approve someone for a trial you honour it. Now I cant even access my files.

Now been waiting 5 days to hear back from their security team after giving them the required docs. The regular support tells me the security team are "very busy at the moment". I guess someone decided to start offering $100 trials without thinking through the effect on the support team. Or maybe the campaign was too successful and this is their way of cost control?

If this is how they treat a big portion of their new trial users customers I doubt this will be a very long-term profitable campaign. I know that I will stick with my Google Cloud account for now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, thanks for your comments. Actually I do have backup in elsewhere so my website is still able to run, but surely this incident taught me never use DO services again.

<comment><USER4> Glad to hear it, I've been a big DO cheerleader and this is definitely making me re-think things, thanks for the write-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I take greater issue with is that the author had to explain how it was impossible for him to accidentally delete the bucket (the files in it had to be deleted first) before DO admitted they had an issue.

I had a similar experience with moving my Ubuntu 16.04 image over to Debian. My Debian reimaging, where it warns me all data will be destroyed for an untouched Debian installation, had it's repos configured to use Ubuntu's, on my Debian reimage, which of course failed. At first they blamed me, suggesting I did something I can not remember, and then I changed the repos as they suggested and demanded an answer when it did not fix it. They admitted their repos have an issue that I can not solve and I have to destroy the machine completely to be able update or install to my Debian machine and lose my IP address that my DNS is set to.

They said this issue only happens when you reimage from Ubuntu 16.04 to Debian. Which I believed at the time since I was tired from this. I do not know if I believe them after the above post.

<comment><USER6> I remember having this same issue trying to do the same thing! Although my setup is different, the base problem was the same. Tried to reimage from Ubuntu to Debian only to realize their hypervisors are not setup to handle this as it came with all the same issues you mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lesson learned? Backups are important.

Unreliability like this should be an expected irritation, not a disaster.

<comment><USER8> Both can be true. He should have had backups, but the service from DO was still very bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They key mistake here was lack of backups and backup procedures.

I wouldn't use DO Spaces or AWS S3 or others without backup, which means it's at minimum a separated account with separated credentials if it must be on the same provider otherwise good procedures to create the backup are sufficient.

Oh and sure, DO and AWS will promise you high and holy that the data will never be lost (99.99999999999999% permanence or whatever they write down). But no promise can prevent the eventual disaster, be it a software error, error by the provider or a meteor strike. At some point you will want your backups to restore.

<comment><USER10> I concur, the author of the post doesn't even talk about their own backups but assumes DO does it for them. I personally love DO but I'm not about to skip over my own security & resiliency measures.

<comment><USER4> Whether OP has backups or not, this is a very poor response from DO - <USER2> screwed up, not OP, and the compensation they've offered is nowhere near commensurate with the size of the screw up. Deleting customers data in an unrecoverable way is breaking the number 1 rule of hosting - it's not like a drive went out, DO specifically sell Spaces as a Backup solution!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, that seems bad. Does Digital Ocean provide any guarantees about data reliability? A 2 month refund seems way too low, maybe a refund of all money paid in the past related to storage would be closer to fair.

</comment><comment><USER12> DigitalOcean spaces certainly has a few bugs and glitches that I have noticed while playing around with it. I don't have the confidence to do any production work with it yet. But it is also a relatively new product even though no excuse for losing data like that.

Btw, offsite backups folks, offsite backups. Always run offsite backups on any system

</comment><comment><USER13> Since this post brought up the issue of backups, what do people use these days? I don't admin any servers at the moment, but when I did have a few side projects running I was a fan of HashBackup.

<comment><USER14> I use MySQLdump, tar, and sftp to store the files I need on another server. I know everyone's needs are different, but I would avoid any type of 3rd party/complex backup system. If you have to install some tool to restore your backup, you run the possibility of that tool becoming unavailable, or incompatible with your backups. Sticking to tools that have been around for a long time, and have multiple implementations mitigates that as a concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To see data being lost in the cloud is truly terrifying. I don't have the insight into DO or cloud management in general to assess whether this is a one-off. My guess is that most providers would go to great lengths to keep incidents such as these under the radar. DO didn't seem to be willing to go the extra mile (buck) and will no doubt pay a much bigger price now. Would be interesting to hear if the HN community has any insights into similar cases, regardless of provider.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have been saying this for quite some time. Apart from two 'targeted' secruity incidents, Linode has been better at bandwidth, CPU perf, Storage Speed, and has had most of the features such as bandwidth pooling, private network for much longer then DO.

I don't understand why mainstream has all moved to DO instead.

<comment><USER17> They are also not VC-funded unlike DO, which makes them much less likely to follow the fate of GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Two is one and one is none. Drives fail, servers fail, keys get lost, accounts get compromised, planned deletions get fat-fingered.

Modern cloud APIs make it trivial to build redundancy into your system. Usage- based pricing and nearline storage makes redundancy relatively cheap in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER19> It sucks that the DO data was lost; it's an awful situation to be in and should never happen given the way that cloud options are sold.

The moral of the story being that you should always diversify your cloud options and keep regular verified backups.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nothing about this surprises me. DO rebooted one of my VPSes and it lost all network connectivity. I can't get any files off of it and can only access it from the console. Its frustrating as hell.

</comment><comment><USER21> No, you lost all your data because you didn't make any backups.

<comment><USER22> Do you backup your S3 buckets? Digital Ocean Spaces is equivalent of that. So one would hope that would be stable enough to treat as a backup. Of course you have too important files, you can duplicate them, we backup our S3 buckets to another region, but another provider would be an option as well if we relied too much on them.

<comment><USER23> > So one would hope that would be stable enough to treat as a backup

Ah, 'Hope' - the most used, and least effective, backup strategy in the world.

<comment><USER24> You need to use paid prayers for better efficiency of this backup strategy. J

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "What are backups?"</comment>


Google Assistant will use more than one device to decipher the voice commands - <AUTHOR> http://www.whatafuture.com/google-assistant-decipher-exact-voice-commands/ <comment><USER2> tl;dr

\- this is not a Google announcement but a Google patent. Not sure if this will be implemented

\- the idea would be to use two devices at same time to improve Google Assistant's understanding of voice commands (reduce transcription mistakes, "hear" the difference between "of" and "off" etc...)

<comment><USER3> Still quite interesting if it becomes a reality.

Let's see what other thinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we update the title to the article's actual title? It is currently quite misleading.

"Google Assistant will use more than one device to decipher the exact voice commands"

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys, I am unable to change that title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think siri already has this feature. I am not sure but Siri can differentiate the devices without telling about a device.

<comment><USER3> Can you give me example. I never noticed this but then again, I haven't used Siri as much.

<comment><USER6> If I have my iPad and iPhone in front of me, both with "Hey Siri" activation turned on, both will register that I asked. But only one of them will respond 'verbally'.

I'm not sure if that's what the OP meant, though.

<comment><USER7> This already exists for Google Assistant devices, but is not what the article is talking about.

The article implies that it will fuse voice data from multiple devices which both only heard part of the query into a single query, which is a lot easier to write down in a patent than to actually make work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Title is misleading. This isn't a new feature of Google Assistant; just a patent. The actual article title is a bit better, but still implies this is a feature we'll be seeing in the near future, which isn't necessarily the case.

<comment><USER9> This has happened previously as well that Google implemented a feature much before filing a patent for it. Google is not a company that waste their money on filing patents that they'll never implement.

I thought mentioning that it is a patent will have little or no effect on whether this feature comes to reality or not.

Edit: Original article title: "Google Assistant will use more than one device to decipher the exact voice commands"

<comment><USER8> > Edit: Original article title: "Google Assistant will use more than one > device to decipher the exact voice commands"

FYI, that's _still_ the article title; it hasn't changed. The HN post title is currently "Google Assistant now can use two devices at same time for a voice command", which is even more misleading to the point of being just flat-out wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish there was simply a wall plug I could put in another room that connected to the main Home unit. So if I'm in a different room yada yada...

<comment><USER11> nVidia announced one of those.

[http://www.pocket-lint.com/review/139949-nvidia-spot- preview...](http://www.pocket-lint.com/review/139949-nvidia-spot-preview-the- google-assistant-mic-and-speaker)

(But works with Shield, not Home, it seems?)

<comment><USER12> But it was never released with no news about when it is coming out.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GlitterAndPoop.com – Shipping Glitter and Poop + Guessing Game - <AUTHOR> http://glitterandpoop.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured since Someone already did this, it could be done better. Platform is built in Laravel + Stripe took 3 days about to build.

Features: Order glitter and get shipped to frenemies. Order multiple quantities -- and have 1 envelope sent per week till order fulfilled. Plans: \- Ship Poop, and other Trolling-snail-mails in the future. \- Tag shipments with "Hints" \-- if user guesses you sent it, they can order/ship a revenge package at a discount. \- Choose colors of glitter - for instance -- if you're a University of Utah fan, you can send your BYU friend an envelope with Red and White Glitter and a note that Byu Sux. \- Etc...</comment>