Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far - <AUTHOR> https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ <comment><USER2> And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed?

To me, bitcoin died sometime in 2013 when mining became hopelessly centralised, breaking the economic and security models Satoshi had set forth. The bitcoin thereafter has been a soulness Frankenstein animated by a mixture of ego, greed, and hubris. I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it.

As for the wider field of blockchain/DLT, it bears an uncanny parallel to the early days of nuclear physics when radioactivity was first discovered by the Curies: The science behind it was be sound, yet any benefit to mankind was overshadowed by the cottage industry selling radioactive snake oil for a long time before the mania died down. And people died when basic precautious were not taken.

It may work down the road and it may not, but right now all I see is woo in every direction.

<comment><USER3> So annoying to see triumphant declarations of victory of bitcoin, based solely on the price increasing.

Speaking as a bitcoin owner and proponent, there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform (which I happen to believe is bitcoin's primary use case). This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput, which has predictably suffered as a result of increased mainstream interest (even with practically no merchant adoption).

The narrative has shifted recently that bitcoin is now a 'settlement layer', only that makes the situation even worse, because there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs.

So yeah, I don't share in the exhilaration over $4000+ bitcoins.

<comment><USER4> There is a sense of victory because millions of people view Bitcoin as a good place to park their money over fiat currency.

Unfortunately no one runs news stories on the growth of unique addresses in the bitcoin network

<comment><USER5> Do they now? I feel people still see Bitcoin mostly as a high-risk/high-reward no-barriers-to-entry alternative to the stock market.

<comment><USER6> I understand buying and selling BTC-backed securities that are backed by a trustworthy bank... but keeping your life savings on your laptop is just cray cray.

<comment><USER7> I read a story of people losing a huge amount to theft: [https://medium.com/@CodyBrown/how-to-lose-8k-worth-of- bitcoi...](https://medium.com/@CodyBrown/how-to-lose-8k-worth-of-bitcoin- in-15-minutes-with-verizon-and-coinbase-com-ba75fb8d0bac)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why does it seem like more and more sites are requesting permissions to send notifications...makes it hard to consider this a "trustworthy" site when the first thing you're trying to do is ask for permissions to send notifications.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I never accept that. Who would?

<comment><USER10> I don't even know what it means for a website to send a notification. Does it mean a flashing tab in firefox?

<comment><USER11> Depends on your OS. For Chrome on macOS, it'll show a chrome-styled square box with an icon and a piece of text in the upper right hand corner, kinda like macOS notifications (but they look nothing like it). In general, web notifications (can) work the same way they do on your smart phone. They can arrive from an active tab as well as from a background service.

Safari (on macOS) will use the native macOS notification system to display notifications AFAIR. I have no idea what IE on Windows does.

<comment> matt-attack But in either case the browser has to be running I'm assuming? Seems kinda flawed.

<comment><USER12> JS service workers allow a JavaScript thread to run in the background while the browser chrome (the window) is closed. So, in theory, the browser doesn't need to be open. Also, notifications can be useful with an open browser too (or, multiple tabs with a tab in the background for example)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No, it didn't die and it won't die anytime soon. But dollars, Euro's and all other physical currencies are about to die(soon). Why? Because just like the change from gold and silver coins to almost worthless nickel, this type of currency creates a whole new universe of possibilities.

With nickel and paper money, banks can create as much cash as they like, it's virtual value, not real. Crypto currency is just like that, but more secure and not (yet) controlled by the banks. And again you see the allegations that crypto would be a pyramid scheme etc.. Do people notice that our actual economy/financial-system is a very proven pyramid scheme? All money flows to the rich. And especially those people in power now, are getting a little nervous seeing they might lose some control.

Crypto currencies can be a boon for humanity, unless governments are going to criminalize it and only allow banks to use the technology.

<comment><USER14> > But dollars, Euro's and all other physical currencies are about to > die(soon).

Are you seriously suggesting that in 10 years there will no longer any physical currencies? Or is soon 50 years? Or 100 years? Can you give a concrete vision for how that would work?

> banks can create as much cash as they like, it's virtual value, not real.

No they can't? The government can, but not arbitrary banks.

> And again you see the allegations that crypto would be a pyramid scheme etc

As I understand it, it's more that it's incredibly unstable, and can be taken over by whomever has the most cpus at any given moment.

I'm sure crypto currencies have lots of uses, especially for more cases around the edge (people in countries with dodgy governments etc), but I can't understand what value it provides outside of that.

I am no expert. At the moment though, if I want to buy a widget online, and I have visa or bitcoin as my options, my choices are either to trust visa, the company that is bound by at least some regulation, has a physical office and PR that can be damaged, or trust a random bitcoin conversion service which is not bound by any regulation, could literally just disappear with my money, could record an internal log of every single transaction and tell it to third parties etc… and then disappear into the night if something went wrong.

Maybe this is all incorrect. But this is the perception that I and others have. So it's either an actual issue, or an issue of bad marketing.

<comment><USER15> >Are you seriously suggesting that in 10 years there will no longer any physical currencies? Or is soon 50 years? Or 100 years? Can you give a concrete vision for how that would work?

Physical currency is already less than 10% of currency.

>As I understand it, it's more that it's incredibly unstable, and can be taken over by whomever has the most cpus at any given moment.

Stability decreases as value stored in it increases. You can't bootstrap a global decentralised currency without some growing pains. The thing about bitcoin is that is constantly crashes _upwards_.

>I'm sure crypto currencies have lots of uses, especially for more cases around the edge (people in countries with dodgy governments etc), but I can't understand what value it provides outside of that.

It prevents fraud from Governments. Instead of allowing them to print money when they want, they can't. It allows for global transactions in minutes, 24 hours a day (every day) for far lower transaction fees. It allows an internet of money.

>or trust a random bitcoin conversion service which is not bound by any regulation

You are mixing up a currency with a payment merchant. There's no reason that Visa wouldn't be able to use Bitcoin and charge you like it currently does.

<comment><USER14> > Physical currency is already less than 10% of currency.

I got my terminology wrong here. I didn't mean physical currency like notes or whatever, I really just meant currencies backed by a government, £/USD etc.

> It prevents fraud from Governments

Doesn't it just replace it with another form of fraud, but this one without any ability to democratically replace it? Specifically, consensus algorithms that fall over if you manage to own enough computing power?

> You are mixing up a currency with a payment merchant.

Sorry, you're right. As someone who has tried to learn about bitcoin et al and never seen the point, the fact that I have to trust another payment provider for no obvious benefit is where I lose interest.

Presumably in the future that won't be the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many people on HN are so negative in bitcoin that it seems that they are focused on the tree instead of the forest. This technology can solve the main problem human society faces and this is corruption. Human greed is what keeps bitcoin alive but this is not a bug, it is a feature.

<comment><USER17> To be honest, Bitcoin in no way does solve corruption. Actually, Bitcoin in current state can only increase corruption in society by giving a sense of anonymity. Political corruption on other hand, might be solved through it, but thats the case we are left to see.

<comment><USER18> Maybe the OP refers to corruption as two political/financial practices: QE and fractional reserve banking.

<comment><USER19> >QE and fractional reserve banking.

Those are features.

<comment><USER18> Nope, those are the main bugs of our current system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think bitcoin is a lot like Snapchat. A lot of people dismiss it because it doesn't make total sense. But those who do, are trying to work with it.

Yes, it may die next week. But next week may also bring another reason to stick with it.

Even if it dies, we already had a taste of it, what are we gonna do? Not try again?

</comment><comment><USER21> The reality is that bitcoin has the first mover advantage. Any other virtual currency has a big mountain to climb to catch up to it.

100 years from now bitcoin will be around since there is no one entity that defines it and control it. What the community has shown is that they are willing to adapt to the situation. Right now bitcoin has problems but as time moves the code will be modified. What's happening now is that bitcoin is being locked into people's mind as a currency with real value. Whether one can justify it or not is irrelevant. As long as one person is willing to trade goods and services for it will survive. No one throws away a stack of money if they can help it. The community will not let bitcoin die.

The mistake people make is that all the current bitcoin constraints are locked forever. I had the same idea but I finally realized that it is not true. The currency is defined by code and code can be changed. It's very hard to change since the majority of the community has to agree but its possible and people will find a way to keep it going.

One way to think about bitcoin's future is to look at what software was like 40 years ago and then look at what it looks like today. There's a big difference. Bitcoin still has a long way to go before it can be defined as a mature technology. I have no doubt that what we call bitcoin now will not be what we call bit coin 40 years from now. It will evolve in to the currency and store of value people are hoping it should be.

No, bitcoin is not dead.

<comment><USER6> > What's happening now is that bitcoin is being locked into people's mind as a > currency with real value.

I'm not certain that's true. Most of the trading in bitcoin is based on speculation that it'll rise in value, and secondly, that'll become more commonplace. Currently, it's not a useful (or usable) form of currency for the vast majority of the planet. So there's no value backing it (yet).

The true test is in X many years, whether BitCoin will be used as actual currency, in which case the value will keep climbing, or whether it'll remain a speculative investment, in which case it'll crash.

I learned about bitcoin when it was less than a dollar, and I'd love to invest, but it's just gambling.

<comment><USER21> Keep in mind that there people growing up now that will think of bitcoin as having true value. Bitcoin will not be a thing that suddenly appeared in the world as it did for us. So they will be more comfortable using it. They will just think of it as another monetary asset. The boom and bust aspect will slowly disappear. One of the problems with it is the lack of things you can buy with it. As more people get used to it as a currency the more goods that will be available for purchase. Then we'll know what the true exchange value of it will be. Right now the value is basically guessing and it's driven by greed and fear. That will change. Chase's CEO might be right that it's a bubble but that does not mean it does not have value. The reality is that we don't know its value as a monetary unit. It might go to a million or crash to 1. No one knows. As the problems with it get ironed out we'll find out.

People forget that the only reason fiat currency has value is because you can always find someone that will exchange it for goods or services. It has no value on its own. It's a believe in people's mind. Bitcoin will have that same trust in time. One big advantage over fiat is that the community is world wide and it's not locked to one country. I can see a country disappearing from the world but by definition bitcoin is a world monetary unit that's slowly embedding itself into the world psychic.

I truthfully believe that in less than 40 years it will as common as the dollar is now. My only fear is that the world's countries will fear it and outlaw it. That doesn't mean it will go away but might slow it down.

BTW, I was a anti bitcoin guy but after a little analysis I've come around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I assume my question will be lost in comments, but I'll ask it anyway here, because it seems to be very interesting side of cryptocoins. My boss is somewhat educated in economy and routinely tries to model the bitcoin economics. He came to the conclusion that the amount of bitcoin turnover is supported not by regular players, but by country-sized economies like China and probably few other states. Most of capitalization comes from really, really huge amount of money, because there is not so much many money even in criminal activities like drugs, trafficking, arms, etc. Bitcoin is alive not because of blockchain mining and not because of human's freedom, but because it enables to move capitals and gray industry volumes across the borders with no usually defined penalty.

If that is true, there is strict confidence that it's not going away in near future. But that also means that it is surely regulated or at least heavily monitored. Or it leads all of us to such economical crashes that world never seen (and can't just deal with). Idk where it goes and how one evaluates it, do you have any ideas on that hypothesis?

The basic idea that regular people use it for freedom and security is parallel to this one, and is of no interest since the volume of it in ordinary currencies is too low to consider.

</comment><comment><USER23> A balanced view is that all the articles hold some substance. But the technology is more at threat through its own community than any external force.

One question that I don't really understand is how can the total supply of BTC serve its own growth.

If the market cap reaches the same value as gold for example - how long before one Satoshi becomes too large a divisible unit to be useful?

Can you divide Satoshi?

<comment><USER24> Isn't the greater problem that the total market cap of bitcoin is always going to be 22 million? In other words, the single bitcoin I own will always be worth 1/22M of the entire market cap, regardless of how much it's used.

And I only own one. There are lost of people out there who owns thousands of bitcoins. 1000 bitcoins is 1/22k of the entire market cap.

How could this be sustainable?

<comment><USER25> Compare this with the global economy. The number of Bitcoin users is still increasing, so the wealth is distributing.

If you compare that with the global economy, the wealth is accumulating at a single point.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Share_of_weal...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Share_of_wealth_globally.png)

I do however agree that's a problem.

I also think that gold and precious metals are doing good, despite being (currently, essentially) limited.

<comment><USER26> You actually can't compare bitcoin to gold and silver. The stock of gold and silver may appear constant,but th supply does actually grow. The supply grows in relation to their demand and current market factors. Bitco8n does have a hard limit. They're not alike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am mostly commenting on a big amount of comments deeming Bitcoin a failure or similar.

The Bitcoin of ~a month ago is not the same as today, that's a big power, to have upgradable decentralized money. Certainly Bitcoin is not perfect, but the good thing is that there are a lot of talented engineers working on the issues and new features, the majority of them even before Bitcoin really was worth much. But having it being valuable at the moment also acts a huge security/bug bounty and an incentive for more people work on it and make it better.

= All about the price

Even if the price crashes horribly, unless there's a unrecoverable catastrophe, it will keep on going because there's an ecosystem around it and clear price-independent advantages. Using Bitwage to be paid in Bitcoins and avoid crazy cross-border/currency fees of banks will be still an advantage no matter the price of bitcoin. Same goes for prepaid/debit cards backed with bitcoin. Doing commerce painlessly without crazy procedures with Africa & Latin America or wherever. Being immune to capital controls and asset seizures.

= Hype

I hate the hype everywhere, but it's not the tech's fault so many cluessless & irrelevant gold-diggers try to ride the wave, just with a lot of things you can just ignore. If you follow the devs, they are pragmatic and don't try to pump-up things like most altcoins do, that's something I greatly respect.

Anyway, there's a long way to go, but just because there are flaws at the moment, it doesn't mean it's dead, it's a live technology. Being pragmatic is key, Bitcoin is not some Utopian perfect invention, but it's good enough for a lot of things at the moment and I see it getting better every year.

Bitcoin offers true permissionless commerce and ownership of wealth and it now might not make any difference in a lot of democratic countries until it begins to do.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've followed digital currencies for many years. As I recall, there were two libertarian threads that culminated in Bitcoin. One focused on evils of fiat currencies and central banking. The other focused on rights to private commerce, without state interference. And the potential to starve states, by making taxation impossible.

Bitcoin handles both pretty well, in my experience. Except for the transaction-scaling problems, anyway. Price fluctuations just reflect its miniscule capitalization, and movements of capricious investors. When Bitcoin, or more likely, one of its descendants, reaches fiat-currency scale, that won't be so problematic.

<comment><USER19> Thing is, with a public ledger bitcoin is only partially private.

<comment><USER28> The ledger is public, to avoid double spending and other stuff. But addresses and wallets can be as unlinked and anonymous as you like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My humble analysis why blockchains (and bitcoins on the blockchain) are like tulips. Like tulips you can always grow more and with blockchains you can always build / start your own blockchains. Building your own blockchain lets say in Ruby is about 20 lines of code. See the point? It's easy (not rocket sience ;-). See the [Awesome Blockchains]([https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome- blockchains](https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains)) for more (about building your own blockchains in Python, JavaScript, Ruby, etc.) in minutes.

<comment><USER30> My humble analysis why paper currencies are like tulips. Like tulips you can always grow more, and with paper currencies you can always print/start your own. Creating a paper currency on say, paper, takes only 1 minute. See the point? It's easy (not rocket science ;).

My humble analysis of why startups are like tulips. Like tulips you can grow more, and with startups you can always build/start your own. Building your own startup is easy, just think of an idea, say Uber for toilet paper, and it takes only 1 minute. See the point? It's easy (not rocket science ;-).

Sorry but I had too, the easiness to _create_ something has no barring on how hard it is to make it a globally used system. Whether you can create a new blockchain in minutes is completely irrelevant and offers nothing to the discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the early obituaries on that list mentions that the finite supply of bitcoins, combined with lost crypto keys and hoarding will eventually lead to a situation where there aren't enough coins for it to be a viable currency.

Clearly, in that situation you can subdivide coins as far as required, so it isn't a risk to bitcoin as such. However, I have often wondered if there is any estimate of the "effective supply", that is to say ("minted coins" \- "coins where the private key is lost")?

<comment><USER32> I bet a lot of people lose their private key, but I bet that if there's anything in your wallet you'll be careful.

So, there are probably a lot of private keys that get lost, but not a lot of bitcoins.

<comment><USER31> Pragmatically, that is probably true, and bitcoin won't last for millenia either (e.g. if sha-256 has a weakness, or quantum computers render ecdsa useless).

Nevertherless, there is >0 probability of multiple harddrive failure, or much greater probability of incompetence, so there must be some rate of loss of bitcoins over time, and i'd be interested to know what that is.

I think it is interesting because once the speculation dies down, the market will set the fiat price of bitcoins according to the actual supply and demand, so this attrition has a real affect. For example, imagine if the coins believed to belong to Satoshi (1 million coins out of the current 16.5 million) were to move. The mere knowledge that they can be moved would increase the effective supply by 6-7% overnight, the effect could be dramatic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In any other world a change of 30-40% _per day_ in any direction would be a cause of concern.

Bitcoin enjoys a reality distortion field that keeps it inflated beyond any reason. It's not _that_ different from any other coin on these lists: [http://deadcoins.com](http://deadcoins.com), [https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain- Graveyard/](https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain-Graveyard/)

<comment><USER34> In what sense this lists, and bitcoin are different from these? [https://trader2trader.co/2012/11/28/list-of-590-dead- currenc...](https://trader2trader.co/2012/11/28/list-of-590-dead-currencies- demonetized-r-i-p/)

<comment><USER35> Well for a start half those dead currencies were replaced with new currencies issued by a different authority and their holders compensated, often at parity.

As for the ones that collapsed, they tended to involve dictators and wars rather than people simply deciding they weren't worth wasting time on because nobody was interested in exchanging them.

<comment><USER36> > Well for a start half those dead currencies were replaced with new > currencies issued by a different authority and their holders compensated, > often at parity.

Indeed, I see on that list the several Brazilian Cruzeiro/Cruzado currencies. The only difference between each of these and their predecessor is that three zeros were cut: if you had 1000 of the old currency, you had 1 of the new currency. The last of these was replaced by the current currency (Real) at a slightly different rate (2750 instead of 1000). That is, it was more like a renaming than the currency actually dying and being replaced. And there was no different authority in these cases, they were all issued by the same central bank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Bitcoin, as it was originally envisioned, IS dead. It's not a replacement for cash. It's prohibitively expensive to use for regular transactions. It's also a colossal waste of energy. It's become similar to stocks/ETFs...something people trade/speculate on/gamble with to try and get rich.

When I had bitcoin first explained to me in ~2011 I was told that it would save us all from the evil that are banks, transaction fees, and the government. Six years later, bitcoin has made a few people very, very wealthy, but us laymen still can't use it as a cash replacement and the people with decision making power in the Bitcoin community are not interested in ever letting that happen.

It was a fun experiment, but it failed its primary goal.

</comment><comment><USER38> There's way too much for me to know it all about Bitcoin but say I want to learn more about building a blockchain, is there a spec for just that from the Bitcoin spec, or is the spec all inclusive? I have to admit I never read the original paper(s) I just mined BTC back in 2009 when I (somehow) heard about it, and have left it alone since. Funnily enough I was ignoring it all, till I realized my mining pool had all my BTC so I transfered it out (nothing significant enough, but just enough to allow me to peek curiosity again). I'm curious if anyone has designed their own Blockchain based tech that is focused on that aspect that has several industries interested in Blockchain technology. Minus any Bitcoin specifics that is.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's almost as if writing about Bitcoin crashing sold newspapers/pageviews...

Weird.

<comment><USER6> Journalists discussing BitCoin is in some ways a form of mining BitCoins.

<comment><USER32> ...and undermining journalism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wish it went down to $80 again so I can invest. really missed the boat.

<comment><USER40> You can still buy $80 worth of BTC and you'd have the same chances you had 3 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The sun has risen at least 166 times already, but it is not proof that the sun will rise tomorrow.

My point is not to confirm or deny the bear or the bull, but to point out this is simply noise.

When are market news reliable indicators of supply and demand?

<comment><USER36> > The sun has risen at least 166 times already, but it is not proof that the > sun will rise tomorrow.

If the sun has risen at least 166 times, the probability that it will rise tomorrow is at least 99.4% according to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Original is behind a paywall on Wall Street Journal:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-wild-ride-shows-the- tr...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-wild-ride-shows-the-truth-it-is- probably-worth-zero-1505760623)

<comment><USER43> and some kind of page bug that hangs my Chrome tab

<comment><USER43> or was that my ad blocker.. ?

<comment><USER44> Yeah, I recently saw anti-adblock script trying to look like a browser error and I totally fell for it. Only i didn't read the message and after few F5 i just closed the tab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That's a great compilation. Definitely worth a bookmark.

</comment><comment><USER45> obviously FUD to keep poor people poor.

</comment><comment><USER46> Most analysts from traditional mindset making the mistake of analyzing bitcoin like they do stocks or fiat currency which can rely on a country's economy or political scenarios or a company's decisions to make profits. But, Bitcoin is like anything they have seen before or learnt in their college. Most volatility corresponds to news of it's survival at the moment and due to the reason the market is failing to agree with a fair value as no one knows it's future but is aware of the nobility of the technology and how it skipped the hands of any one controlling it by being decentralized. As the world keeps adopting to it the demand is getting increased. And there is still a lot of geographical terrain to cover.

When a traditional wall-street analyst sees a peak, he was trained to freak out and sense it as an extreme point of the crowd's greed. And shows off his training by telling the world that it's a bubble and it's going to burst, as the peak is occupied mostly by greedy investors who panic on losing their money and sells off double the speed they entered the trade. But this stands true when the value of the instrument surpasses the intrinsic value of the asset way too high. But with bitcoin no one knows hence majority investors still think it cheap and keep piling up.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some highly sought after tech skills, 2017-2018? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Are you looking for a specific vertical in tech? Mobile, Web, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, I am interested in them too. Usually the hype was for big data, then it moved to IOT, and now in AI. Seemingly seeing where it would go next !!</comment></comment>


Show HN: ZipLocate, a free API for zip code geolocation - <AUTHOR> http://ziplocate.us/ <comment><USER2> This reminded me of a little suggestion by Bret Victor ([http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#reducing_interaction](http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#reducing_interaction)).

 _Imagine honing in on familiar areas simply by typing the first few digits of a zip code—type "9" to immediately zoom into the US west coast, followed by "4" to zoom into the SF bay area and then "5" for the east bay. Because of the immediate feedback, the user can stop typing when she gets close enough, and use relative navigation from there._

I coded up an example a little while ago ([http://andrewcou.ch/zip-to- it/](http://andrewcou.ch/zip-to-it/)).

<comment><USER3> Are you keeping stats on your request? I'm curious how high 90210 stands out.

<comment><USER2> That's a great idea. (Un)fortunately it's all client-side.

<comment><USER4> A Google Analytics tracking of the events would be just fine for this goal.

<comment><USER2> Oh, great idea! I've never dived (dove??) into event tracking. Is something like this what I want?

        ga('send', 'event', 'input', 'search', 'zip', zipCode);

<comment><USER5> That will do the trick!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You should probably mention the caveats when using ZCTA's to get a list of zips... Namely that they don't include all zip codes, don't get updated as quickly, and may not actually represent the same thing as a zip code:

[http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/tiger-line- shapefile-2013-20...](http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/tiger-line- shapefile-2013-2010-nation-u-s-2010-census-5-digit-zip-code-tabulation-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're right. Added to the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a pretty small and mostly importantly, relatively static database. Why not cache it locally rather than access as a web service.

That being said, zip+4 is a bigger DB. Although, I have heard those last four digits are meaningless.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman_%28Seinfeld%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman_%28Seinfeld%29)

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you have any plans to do the other way around? That's important for converting the browser's geolocation data into something usable.

<comment><USER9> We have a free API that includes IP to approximate area code, but not zip code, if that's of use to you.

[https://www.dailycred.com/api/info.json](https://www.dailycred.com/api/info.json)

A few of our clients needed this, so we just made it open to everyone.

It's based on GeoIP and ua-parser.

[http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/](http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/)

[https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser](https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does what it says. Simple, free, & open source. What could be better?

</comment><comment><USER11> This might sound silly but you should actually have a "plus" plan or something that you charge for - free services have a problem of suddenly disappearing without any notice. Paid customers ensure that service will be available in the future too.

<comment><USER12> Or a donate/flattr button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, added.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very nice. Small enough that I can read and understand every line of code, and it still does something useful.

One thing I don't get, is why you're not using the zip code as the primary key (or have any other sort of index on it). The id isn't even used as far as I can tell. Is it just blazingly fast enough as it is?

<comment><AUTHOR> The database is mostly an abstraction layer for other people to get up and running with the API. On ZipLocate.us everything is cached in memory using Varnish, so API calls never even hit the database. When data is updated, updated zip codes are just refreshed in the cache.

Like disdev, I always use an auto-incrementing id, but you're right that the index should be on the zip code instead of the id.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks nathancahill!

Here's a 44 line node script to exercise it with:

$ wget [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnnylambada/commandline-...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnnylambada/commandline- api/v0.0.1/ziplocate)

$ chmod a+x ziplocate

$ ./ziplocate ll -z 90210

latitude : 34.0908301410233

longitude: -118.409045888318

</comment><comment><USER15> Ziptastic is another option that seems to work well. [http://getziptastic.com](http://getziptastic.com) also plays nice with javascript and has a ruby gem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ziptastic is awesome. Part of the inspiration to build ZipLocate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice and free. Thanks a lot. Will suggest you to add Gittip. Might help you in releasing some more similar projects for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This made me remember a cool analogous project

[http://api.zippopotam.us/](http://api.zippopotam.us/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why not use Geonames: [http://www.geonames.org/](http://www.geonames.org/) ?

<comment><USER18> You can also download all the zip-codes for many countries from them: [http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/](http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> really nice thanks! i made a small php class to get work done. [https://github.com/ins0/php-simple-ziplocate](https://github.com/ins0/php- simple-ziplocate)

</comment><comment><USER20> Anything similar to this available for Canada?

</comment><comment><USER21> Is there something similar for UK postcodes?

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately, while the data definitely exists (and UK postal codes are much smaller), it's copyrighted by the Royal Mail.

<comment><USER23> CodePoint Open has been freely available for a number of years. It doesn't include delivery endpoints but for geolocating English, Scottish and Welsh (but, alas, not Northern Irish) postcodes it's fine.

[http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and- government/prod...](http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and- government/products/code-point-open.html)

<comment><USER24> Unfortunately we lost the postcode database as a public asset in 2013 when the UK government sold off Royal Mail[0], despite the database being compiled at huge cost to the tax payer.

This is a real shame as people had to campaign for years before the data was made freely available to begin with.[1]

Hopefully though, as long as the government still holds a large stake, we'll at least have Code Point. The Royal Mail also offer some developer options[2]

[0] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26605375](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26605375)

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/22/free- our-d...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/22/free-our-data)

[2] [http://www.poweredbypaf.com/developer/](http://www.poweredbypaf.com/developer/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks nice, kudos for offering it for free - 5$/month is still not nothing. It would be grand if you included "US" somewhere besides the domain, because the service geolocates US zipcodes, not international zip codes.

<comment><USER26> ZIP codes are the name for US-specific postal codes. International postal codes are not zip codes.

<comment><USER27> Very often ZIP code is used as alias for postal code even in international context. I see "zip code" more often than "postal code" on international address forms.

<comment><USER28> Can you show me an example of an address form for non-US-based organization that exclusively uses the term "zip code"?

I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one.

The US-based organizations using the term "zip code" for non-US addresses are doing so either out of ignorance or expediency, since fitting "zip/postal code" into a space is sometimes not possible.

<comment><USER22> I've seen it quite a bit in especially older e-commerce software, presumably developed for US use, then "internationalized" as a bit of an afterthought. I also think that many non-native-english-speakers assume zip code is the appropriate translation of postal code since it features rather prominently in (exported) US pop culture.

That doesn't make it correct, and I don't believe that some peoples unequivocally wrong usage of a term should oblige other people to qualify their correct and unambiguous usage of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wally - holds your plastic cards - <AUTHOR> http://wally-app.com/ <comment><USER2> is this an early april fools joke? every card in my wallet either needs to be used as a physical object (i.e. swiped, hole-punched) or is there for an emergency situation (health insurance, 2-factor-auth don't-have-my-phone codes). I really don't understand what this is for.

<comment><USER3> I don't carry a wallet. For the past four years I've been carrying just a money clip with cash, ID, and one credit card. You mentioned health insurance cards, and this would be a good way for someone like me to have my insurance info on hand.

<comment><USER4> The useful thing about a physical insurance card is that everybody can read it when you're unresponsive and in need of help. A smartphone app is not going to be able to replicate that.

Only thing you could do is change your lock screen to include this kind of data (and/or a pointer).

<comment><USER5> Do people honestly still believe this trope about the hospital needing your physical insurance card when you're unconscious? That they downgrade your emergency care if you don't have the good insurance? This is not a thing that happens.

The physical card is so you have the info in a difficult-to-lose form when you go to a doctor's appt, check into the ER with a broken bone, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks interesting, but I don't know how useful it would be for me given most of my cards have to be swiped or inserted into some kind of device.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi guys, happy to read all the interesting stuff you write about our app.

We actually launched this app before both Passbook (Apple) and Wallet Hub (Microsoft). I'm not sure when Google Wallet launched, but we found out about it after releasing Wally.

Our intentions were to build a slick, intuitive and really easy to use wallet app without all the registration, cloud sync, offers etc. We developed it, released it...just to read about how all these major actors announced their stuff some weeks later. Also, some Swedish alternatives were released after us, winning awards, getting venture capital etc.

We never aimed for that...our app is really simple, and that has been the plan all along.

After releasing Wally, we have been working on other stuff (apps, open source libs, web services etc.) for the most time except some updates. However, after receiving some interesting feedback, we felt like going back and polishing the app some more. We did so, added iPhone 5 support and just finished retina support for the photos, when...

...a new app that's called Wally was released (yes, that's right)!

A week or so ago, a couple of guys in the middle-east just launched their new brand new, award winning app. It does not do the same thing, but it has the same name, similar icon and a similar logotype.

We'll see where this'll end :)

If you want to get in contact with us, give us feedback etc. - just hook up with us at <http://wally-app.com>. We will release a more informative site soon, but you'll find links to our issue and feedback page, Facebook page etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks handy. Some places allow you to use an image of the card (or just the number of the card without the physical card); and sometimes I'm buying online and I just need the numbers. I'm gently worried about the consequences of storing a credit card number and the cv2 number on a computer.

Isn't this ultimate skeumorphism? Take a real world object, photograph it, and put the photograph in a virtual wallet which is all leather and stitching. :-p

But it does look and easy to use. That bit of photo editing looked good.

</comment><comment><USER9> How does this differ than Passbook (default on iOS)? You may want to answer that on the site, since they look basically the same. And as others mentioned, how is this useful if you can't even use the cards in the real world? It's essentially a nice looking photo library of pictures of your credit cards. I don't see any value in this, I think you need to add some points to the site of how this is could be useful in the real world.

<comment><USER10> AFAIK Passbook does not do this, or at least no company has integrated into Passbook yet. I still don't understand how Passbook works. In the US there is only a handful of apps that use Passbook, and even then, the one I do own (United), I still can't figure out "what it does".

<comment><USER9> " _...or at least no company has integrated into Passbook yet..._ "

Huh? I have tons of apps that use Passbook? I use Passbook daily for rewards cards and loyalty cards? Here is a link to a huge list of apps integrated into Passbook: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passbook_(application)>

I have personally used it tons of times with my Starbucks card, Walgreens card, and for tickets to get into concerts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> <http://lemon.com/> has been working on this for quite a while before this app and Passbook. Actually I'd say Passbook is a total Lemon rip off. It also lets you track your expenses by taking pictures of your receipts and by connecting to your bank accounts.

<comment><USER12> lemon shows on their frontpage someone taking a picture of its VISA and putting it inside his iPhone.

What can possibly go wrong?

: )

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The issue with using this for loyalty cards is that in my experience, many stores have scanners than can't scan a glossy screen very well.

Also, the skeuomorphic design is nice but you could easily fit more cards on the screen by using a simpler list view.

<comment><USER4> It's not only the glossiness, it's also about the original size. Barcodes work because they are at a fixed size, and a picture on screen can seldom reproduce the exact same size.

This is also why QR Codes have reference points (those three corner blocks or the big centre block)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I kinda like it... It's helpful for when I make a purchase online and I need to enter the code of my Visa/Mastercard, since my telephone is on the desk next to me and my wallet usually in my jacket, it could be handy. You could also scan some other cards containing something like a tax number or other information you might sometimes need. Might benefit from an add on feature to scan business cards?? You'd have to offer a search function though, I think?

</comment><comment><USER15> It might be good to add some description to the site. I'm not going to watch a demo video, and I'm unlikely to click the App Store link when I don't really understand what the app actually does.

<comment><USER16> Not that I disagree about adding a description, but why wouldn't you watch a demo video if you want to know what the app does?

<comment><USER17> In my case: I'm reading this on the bus in a loud environment where I pay through the nose for mobile data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is this different from the core functionality of KeyRing?

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice UI. I need something like this for Android... Are there any recommended? I've been meaning to make it myself but just haven't made the time.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, the camera.</comment></comment>


The CIA Campaign to Steal Apple's Secrets (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets/ <comment><USER2> > The security researchers also claimed they had created a modified version of > Apple's proprietary software development tool, Xcode, which could sneak > surveillance backdoors into any apps or programs created using the tool. > Xcode, which is distributed by Apple to hundreds of thousands of developers, > is used to create apps that are sold through Apple's App Store.

> The modified version of Xcode, the researchers claimed, could enable spies > to steal passwords and grab messages on infected devices. Researchers also > claimed the modified Xcode could "force all iOS applications to send > embedded data to a listening post." It remains unclear how intelligence > agencies would get developers to use the poisoned version of Xcode.

Sounds suspiciously like XCodeGhost: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XcodeGhost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XcodeGhost).

This is probably worth a reference to Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing in this article is surprising. I mean, honestly, if you don't think the CIA is actively trying to gain access to your devices, WTF do you think they do all day?

I'd be more concerned if the intelligence agencies of the world WEREN'T doing this. It's their purpose. It's what we pay them for with our taxes.

Of course we should also always root for tech companies to stay one step ahead. But infosec is an arms race, and I sure hope my own country's intelligence agencies (CSIS and the CSE in Canada) are doing their best to stay ahead of, say, North Korea or Russia.

(Please note: I'm not saying violating our privacy is OK, any more than I'm saying it's cool to launch nuclear weapons. But if anyone's going to have the ability to hack my phone or launch a nuke, I want it to be the people on my own team. This seems like basic self-interest and survival strategy.)

<comment><USER4> > _WTF do you think they do all day?_

One would hope that they were trying to gain access to someone else's devices, as opposed to turning the guns towards their own citizens and economy. If a soldier showed up at my door and pointed their gun at me, my reaction wouldn't be "of course you're doing that, your job is to point guns."

<comment><USER5> I'm yet to see a clear explanation for citizens not being as much of a risk as, say, a random foreigner located far away from your country.

If anything, a citizen is more capable of carrying out a terrorist attack, or just doing any action some foreign power wants to perform in that country.

The exception for domestic citizens seems to be just a concession for the masses and their representatives, not a pragmatic choice.

Edit: a pragmatic reasoning could be compartmentalization — keeping citizens under the watch of a separate entity (e.g. FBI) but it doesn't explain why domestic mass surveillance should be ruled out.

<comment><USER6> The American revolution was started because citizens did not want the government in their homes.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's historically accurate. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the battle cry of the revolution "no taxation without representation"? It wasn't about privacy, it was about wanting to be more than just a backwater colony.

<comment><USER7> "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." \-- The 3rd Amendment

The early revolutionary war history overly simplified is something like this. Britain increases taxes on America. America stops paying taxes. Britain increases military presence to force America to pay taxes. America fought against the British military.

During the increased British military presence in America the British goverment did terrible things, including living in civilians homes and eating their food. This is what the parent comment meant when he said "The American revolution was started because citizens did not want the government in their homes." Ultimately, the British goverment was in American homes to help the tax collection effort, so your idea of early Americans caring a lot about taxation is also true.

<comment><USER8> Also, bootleggers who made money by smuggling stuff for cheap and selling it right below the full tariff price and weren't happy about the British _ending_ their tariffs and making them lose money.

Also, the whole _trial by jury of peers_ was really great for those like John Hancock (the guy who signed his name really big on the Constitution) who got in trouble with the British for smuggling and then would be invariably found not guilty _by his employees_. When military trials came into place, Hancock and his distributor buddies started getting jail time.

Also, by the way, Hancock shipping basically had a mob, who were responsible for a bunch of the rioting in Boston and likely the related Tea Party.

Just wanted to point out that America wasn't exactly formed out of _ideology_.

By the way- that big signature? Essentially the largest political middle finger _ever_.

<comment><USER7> I did say my history lesson was oversimplified. The question of _how_ Americans avoided paying taxes is always interesting, not just during this time period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is _pen testing_ of iPhones _stealing_ Apple's secrets? Does Apple know these holes are there and they're keeping them secret?

I'll grant you that if the CIA broke into Apple and stole keys, that would stealing along with breaking and entering or the cybercrime equivalent. But that's not what the article says.

<comment><USER10> >How is pen testing of iPhones stealing Apple's secrets?

Did you read the article? The CIA -- in addition to pentesting -- is trying to exfiltrate GID keys of Apple devices. That is quite literally, trying to steal Apple's secrets -- not checking which systems have vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER9> Thank you, I did read the article. No, that's pen testing.

<comment><USER10> I guess we disagree then. Pen testing to me is: "Can I steal your key? Here, I have a proof that I can steal it." Actually exfiltrating (not necessary to produce a proof that you were able to view it) so that you can produce fraudulent signatures is completely orthogonal to exfiltration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9176538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9176538).

</comment><comment><USER12> ""Apple led the way with secure coprocessors in phones, with fingerprint sensors, with encrypted messages. If you can attack Apple, then you can probably attack anyone.""

They really didn't. There were cryptophones, such as Cryptophone, doing secure messaging and stuff before Apple. Julian Assange used one IIRC. High-assurance security did stuff like Sectera Edge with some side-channel shielding, too. Then, there were companies like OK Labs building minimal, trusted, computing bases into phones with stuff like Android sandboxed in user-mode. Sensitive stuff ran outside. Then, Apple got into the game. They could still copy some of these techniques for improved security on top of what they're doing already.

[https://www.cryptophone.de/](https://www.cryptophone.de/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080408152145/http://www.gdc4s....](https://web.archive.org/web/20080408152145/http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4330-a742-55106fbaff32)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110219075132/http://www.ok- lab...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110219075132/http://www.ok- labs.com/solutions/secure-hypercell-technology)

<comment><USER13> Apple still led the way: Because Apple did it, Android vendors followed suit.

Cryptophone and the other products were a niche market and no one really knows if they are good enough to withstand a nation state attack or if they are just good enough to provide better opsec for companies than regular phones did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Brennan said the CIA reorganization will be modeled after the agency's Counterterrorism Center, which runs the U.S. targeted killing and drone program.

I always like to remind people when this comes up - The CIA is a civilian agency. They are not military. They have no legal right to engage in anything remotely resembling military action. Their only legal behavior is to collect international intelligence, though they seem to be capable only of doing everything outside their mandate and not within it. Why they weren't disbanded after the USSR imploded into bankruptcy 2 weeks after they had delivered a report claiming that the USSR was 'not a paper tiger' and 'growing stronger every day' and that they would continue to present the largest threat to the US on the global stage for the foreseeable future I have no idea. Most amateurs could have told you the USSR was on its last legs after years of scientists and members of their military reporting not being paid for years at a time. But the CIA was absolutely certain that they were doing great. And they should know, they had devoted stupendous resources to their intelligence work there. But, nope, they didn't see it coming at all.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's funny because it appears, looking at the history of data leaks, security breaches etc - our biggest threat appears to be our _insecurity_ Perhaps they should work the other way, assisting people and entities of this country to be MORE secure, not LESS.

</comment><comment><USER16> One thing is sure, is that the Snowden leaks really made me realize that countries won't bother with morals to improve national security and advance its capabilities, but in the end, it's just another debate that Machiavel has answers for.

I think that communication technologies, and high speed internet becoming so widespread, created a big new battlefield which is particular because it's not so violent and ugly.

There aren't clear military laws about the internet like there is for other battlefield like the geneva convention, and that's makes all of this so interesting.

</comment><comment><USER17> Apparently they had no problems with Android devices.

</comment><comment><USER18> Dear CIA:

I have information regarding top secret Apple swipe to unlock technology patent.....

</comment><comment><USER19> I hope the CIA steals Apple's ability to innovate

<comment><USER20> _cough_ A12 _cough_</comment></comment>


Introducing Asana: The Modern Way to Work Together - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asana.com/2011/11/introducing-asana-the-modern-way-to-work-together/ <comment><USER2> Asana is yet another tasklist. Trello is an innovation. I get the feeling that Asana is built for the people who built it, whereas Trello was built for everyone. Despite this, Asana should be praised for utilizing keyboard shortcuts.

I see no feature beyond the basic tasklist features that all PM software has. Not even velocity like Pivotal Tracker.

What is innovative about Asana? The customer doesn't give a shit whether it's done in Luna.

</comment><comment><USER3> My tweet is actually all I have to say about it: <https://twitter.com/#!/davidu/status/131738215227981825>

_"Asana is beautifully designed. Seems too generic for bug, applicant or project tracking but it's going to be my new To-Do list manager."_

But to expand a bit -- I have a hard time seeing this replace specific purpose-driven tools (JIRA, Cerberus, etc.) even though it's gorgeous, functional, and has a cool off-line mode. It's just too generic for me. But for people who aren't _coming_ from one of those products and have nothing today, it's a great way to introduce productivity. I'm surprised they didn't build in an SSO / LDAP kind of integration...

Finally - Salesforce focused on CRM as a use-case before branching out and getting less specific (support, chatter, etc.). Starting out generic requires your users to figure out how to apply it to their life, which I think is the wrong strategy.

<comment><USER4> > Starting out generic requires your users to figure out how to apply it to > their life, which I think is the wrong strategy.

It worked for Trello.

<comment><USER5> How has it worked for Trello? Trello exists. It's free. That's a success?

<comment><USER4> Trello.com has become the new cool product in the (crowded) project management space in less than a month from its release.

It is definitely a success in terms of awareness in our community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been in the Asana beta for a while & while it's a nice product, as far as I can tell, <http://www.getflow.com/> is better in nearly every way. I just logged into Asana again today & it looks like they have started copying some elements from GetFlow, like the tabbed projects/tags/people bar on the left.

Anyone seriously use both tools & have an idea of their comparative strengths and weaknesses?

<comment><USER7> Just Flow, not GetFlow ;-) Appreciate the kind words.

<comment><USER8> The iDevice emphasis is a big turnoff for me. I'd have been more inclined to try it out if it only had a web mode, rather than touting its Mac and iPhone integration.

Hard to explain why. It almost feels like an elitist snub, or something.

<comment><USER7> Hm. We do have an awesome web experience—it's our primary focus—and we're working on a mobile-friendly web version as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I watched both Joel's trello video and the asana video. I came away from Trello's video really understanding what the product was about.

With this one, I didn't really understand what the product does. The repetition of "this is not micromanagement hell; instead you'll have more time to do the really fun stuff" in the video made me suspicious.

But hey, maybe that's just the over-literal cynical nerd in me who wasn't touched by the "emotional" impact of the video.

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks pretty great. Signed up and taking a tour of the internals. However, I don't think I'll be using this unless the following are addressed:

1) doesn't appear to support external users. I can't seem to give a client access so they can comment on tasks, answer my questions or track my progress. All people you invite to a team appear to have unfettered access to all things.

2) no spec/pricing sheet on what's included. blog says "is and will remain free for teams with up to 30 members", but how much will it cost afterwards? Also, for the free plan, how many attachments can I add? What's the max size of an attachment? I don't want to invest my time into a new thing and then hit some invisible limit. (Yes, I've tried to look in the support/help faqs)

3) import/export. will you make it easier for me to move in from my current system? once I'm in the system am I locked in?

I'm currently using Apollohq, and it's been doing pretty well. It has all the features I mentioned above, as well as time tracking. Only thing is it costs money (a bit too much for my small team) and they've been slow to get a phone- friendly version. The interface has also slowed down since the beta, but for the time being I'm overlooking it because I expect growing pains.

</comment><comment><USER11> Now that I've switched to Trello, I can't see trying something new. Looks like the space is getting crowded though.

<comment><USER12> We've been using Fogbugz for a while at my company, but we've been playing with Trello recently. I think Trello is wonderful and I hope that some of the newer UI features get incorporated into Fogbugz (i.e. inline editing).

The problem we're having with Trello is that we can't get a good view across all projects. Trello requires me, as a manager, to constantly hop in and out of projects. I hope they can offer something to get a higher view. I'd love to use Trello more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been enjoying Trello as a collaborative tool for general task management. Where does Asana shine vs Trello?

<comment><USER14> Much better UI, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I much prefer Flow by Metalab (<http://getflow.com>). It's virtually the same product only much more fleshed out including a Mac app, an iOS app and more. I tried Asana several months ago but Flow is just miles ahead of where Asansa is today. Not to mention constant iteration in all of their apps (web, Mac, and iOS). Big A+ for the Metalab team.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really like your proposal. Everyone else should definitely read.

<http://www.asana.com/kittens>

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://www.asana.com/kittens> if anyone missed it

</comment><comment><USER18> Tips:

Take advantage of keyboard shortcuts, it's what makes Asana feel so quick.

Asana lets you do things your own way (ie. it doesn't dictate a project management style), but a little structure is useful. Read their 'Best Practices:' [http://help.asana.com/customer/portal/articles/84980-best- pr...](http://help.asana.com/customer/portal/articles/84980-best-practices- how-to-use-asana-for-project-management)

<comment><USER4> How would you manage the different stages of a development task in Asana: backlog -> in progress -> pending deployment -> deployed

In Trello, changing from one state to another is a matter of drag and dropping to the next list. How would you do that in Asana?

<comment><USER18> 1\. A task can belong to a number of projects. You could have projects for backlog, in progress, etc. and move a task between these (no drag/drop, but can be changed in the task panel)

2\. Use tags instead, and use the tag filtering options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is the business model for this product? Are they counting on organizations needing more than 30 users?

<comment><USER20> If they are able to build something that people like, it's an easy app category to monetize.

<comment><USER21> Is it? That's incredibly hand wavy.

For example I tried remember the milk but it immediately crippled itself with the iPhone sync. Not like they're billionaires either.

And their strategy includes leaving out a massive proportion of users by making IE a no go area.

What are their prices? I can't find the damn things anywhere. Am I going to get a £1000 bill when I reach 30 users?

They've a long way to go.

Product is great BTW, if a little programmer centric with the shortcut obsession, just pointing out great product doesn't mean great profits.

<comment><USER22> I think you're right - on it's own it probably is hard to monetize well.

BUT - there are good options available to them.

Once you have more than 30 people using it, if it jumps to say $5/person/month it is over $10000/year for the next 30 users.

There's the Yammer model: Free to use, until you want things like security controls (think "who sees which task"), customization ("match your company color scheme") and integration ("single sign on, Salesforce integration etc etc")

The truth is though that this is a feature for an enterprise software company. It makes perfect sense for someone like BMC, Citrix, VMWare/EMC, or even Atlassian (if they could afford them?) to buy them out to fill holes in their offerings. Their sales channels can push an enterprise version to existing customers and then is makes sense for everyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very clean product. Love the shortcuts, and key at the bottom. Looks like a great tool for development and business teams. Took a look through the site and didn't see any future integrations (i.e. dropbox, github issues etc.). Does anyone know if there are integrations in the pipeline?

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone have experience using Emacs Org-Mode in a distributed manner?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org- mode#Distributed_issue_trac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org- mode#Distributed_issue_tracking)

</comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone tried it already?

<comment><USER26> NOTE: I don't know anyone who works at Asana, I have no relationship at all with the company, investors, etc. I am purely a happy user.

Our organization (Kiip.me) has been using Asana for a couple months now. We've tried a variety of tools for task management and project planning: Basecamp, GitHub issues, Pivotal. With each of these tools, up until Asana, we didn't find it helped our team very much.

Asana has changed all that. Our whole team, including BD/Sales, have been using Asana to coordinate various tasks. The biggest thing: Asana is _fast_. It doesn't get in your way! You can tab over and add a task in less than the time it takes to even load the tasks page on something like BaseCamp. Some additional features that make it great:

* Followers - You can add followers to a task if you want other people involved. This emails them and notifies them of the task.

* Comments - Comment streams are very nice. They provide a nice timeline of activities happening on a task.

* Keyboard shortcuts - I never touch the mouse in Asana. Ever. And this increases productivity by tons. You can fly around multiple projects, tasks, etc in seconds.

So there is some reasoning behind our use of Asana, here are some reasons we didn't like other options:

* BaseCamp - Had all the features we wanted, but it got in the way too much. No keyboard shortcuts, slow page loads, etc. Taking 30 seconds to add a task == too slow.

* GitHub issues - All the issues are on each separate repo. It is difficult to quickly navigate between them and to get other people in the company to look at them.

* Pivotal - The UI was completely non-intuitive to us and didn't jive with the way we wanted to work. We didn't want a tool that forced us to work with IT, we wanted a tool to work with US.

That being said, I wish there were some other features that Asana would implement:

* Dependent tasks - It is not possible right now to have a hierarchy of tasks towards various goals. This makes it weird to have one big task that is like "Ship the whole product v1" then have a ton of little tasks that are related but not obviously so.

* Multiple assignees - There are some tasks that just make sense to have multiple assignees.

Hope that helps.

Mitchell

<comment><USER27> My team (aestasit.com) has also been using Asana for the last 3 months and, overall, we are satisfied. I'm not going to summarize the good and bad aspects because the previous comment does it egregiously. Asana is fast and it feels like a native application on both my Mac and Win box.

The feature I miss more is the possibility to assign tasks to multiple team members. I'd also love to see a native iOS application. Asana team recently released a mobile-compatible version of the site that works great but I'd still prefer a native app.

I have also tried out Trello but it has a "toysh" feeling to it and Asana just has more features.

<comment><USER28>
      > I'm not going to summarize the good and bad aspects
      > because the previous comment does it egregiously.

I think "egregiously" is probably not the word you're looking for.

<comment><USER29> Technically it is an Antagonym which positive meaning has be obsoleted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very intuitive interface. You might want to help increase speed adding/editing tasks by providing many possible ways of adding due dates. See todoist, they've done it very nicely.

</comment><comment><USER31> Weren't Asana the guys working on Lunascript? I remember being pretty excited about it, and it'd be awesome if you built off of it for this.

What's the status on Lunascript?

<comment><USER32> Asana is indeed built on top of Luna, our sweet in-house programming framework. <http://asana.com/luna>

(Luna _script_ was a DSL we were initially writing for coding against Luna; we ended up deciding that wasn't worth optimizing and going with a JS syntax instead)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone else using <http://www.thymer.com> ? Super easy 2d (team members and projects) task list!

Any feature comparison?

</comment><comment><USER34> Cool product, but a lot of lag on my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo. What is the recommended system requirement? An i7?

</comment><comment><USER35> one of my biggest issues with asana is that it doesn't make it easy to see due dates, weekly to dos etc. for tasks (let alone real prioritization). I really suggest they put in a facebook-notification style section so I can see what I have due in my near future

</comment><comment><USER36> I think Moskovitz has another winner on his hands.

</comment><comment><USER37> I love Asana, and feel it's finally some worthy competition to Basecamp, which has always been way, way too slow for me.

<comment><USER4> Asana is closer to getflow than basecamp in my opinion.

<comment><USER7> Just called Flow ;-)

<comment><USER29> Buy the flow.com domain already :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Did anyone of u guys give workflowy.com a shot...its really awesome.

Very lean. Shortcuts. Mobile Html version.

I really like it a lot.

</comment><comment><USER39> I signed up. Haven't received an email yet.

I'm bored at work and I'm very impatient.</comment>


Reddit, Mozilla to stage Fourth of July protest against NSA spying - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/308931-reddit-mozilla-and-privacy-groups-to-launch-protests-against-nsa-surveillance-programs

<comment><USER2> After reading the article, I am slightly disappointed. This is about banners on homepages, not people carrying signs through the streets. Please don't underestimate what actual protest in the streets can do, especially if it appears in unexpected places or in unexpected social circles.

And don't think that there is no precedent for street protests against internet policies either. Remember that the turning point for ACTA was the moment when the people of Poland took it to the streets. [1]

[1] [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Ftp%2Fblogs%2F8%2F151317)

<comment><USER3> [http://www.restorethefourth.net/](http://www.restorethefourth.net/)

There will be protests on the 4th of July as well in many US cities. Maybe other countries will protest in solidarity as well, like in the occupy protests, but we won't be sure what happens until the 5th of July.

<comment><USER4> All the links on that site 404 for me. Where can I get details on the San Francisco protest?

<comment><USER5> They're in the process of updating the site, so the links will be fixed in the next hour or so. [https://www.facebook.com/events/553989834652790/](https://www.facebook.com/events/553989834652790/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is anyone else still trying to understand the goal here? I know the big lofty goal is to cause NSA to stop spying on people but what will convince people that they have stopped?

Is everyone unaware that the NSA's mission is to collect digital intelligence through clandestine means? It's right on their website. Their mission is to spy on people and has been for decades.

I may be unaware of what people are really upset about. I just can't understand how people are so up in arms by this. I'm legitimately interested in how I'm affected by this as a person who doesn't conduct activity online that the NSA would ever care about. Can someone help me out here?

<comment><USER7> YES the NSA's mission is to spy. We are fine with that but NOT domestically. We are not fine with that.

In the borders of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA according to the 4th Amendment of te UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION domestic spying is not legal.

1: NSA should be subject to accountability like everyone in this country 2: All NSA activities should be restricted to foreign intelligence gathering.

This is the jist of it.

<comment><USER8> So existence of organisation with particular goal is good enough reason to pursue that goal, no matter if its ethical or no?

Seriously Americans, what's wrong with you?

<comment><USER6> I think your comment was intended for me.

Their goal is protect the US. Do you think there are no threats within our borders? Seriously Americans, what's wrong with you?

See? We can all try to make each other look stupid if we want. It doesn't make your opinion correct. Show me how I will be negatively affected by the NSA continuing to do what they've always done. I assure you, I can be convinced if you're right and I'm wrong. I just can't see the down side.

<comment><USER8> Secret services spying on each other is a sad reality, but till now all countries spied on each other spies/politicians/diplomats etc, not on regular people. When you work at embassy you know from the start thay you are under observation. It's like soldier going to a war for money - it was his choice. Spying on everybody is like killing civilians at war. It's worse.

Another analogy - putting everybody from a street in jail just in case. The fact that you can put criminals in jail and every country does this (and sometimes jail innocent people by error) doesn't make putting in jail EVERYBODY and releasing them when they prove they are innocent acceptable.

You may be not affected, but that doesn't make it any less evil. I am not affected by the lack of LGBT rights in Poland, but I still support them, cause it's stupid to revoke rights from people without reason.

Also allowing people to get so much power make it almost impossible to later revoke that power when they switch their goals or abuse it. Who can guarant you that nobody uses PRISM for personal benefit? Like people betting on stock exchange because they read that some company is going to default in private emails, and all other people on stock lose their money to these assholes? That's just the first example that came to my mind. Do you trust every person in NSA that they won't do such stuff? Or are you OK with it?

There is a point after which "to protect my country" is not good enough excuse to revoke people rights.

I have right to not trust officials from foreign country (that I have no way to vote out of office) with my secrets. They already are doing crazy stuff. Are you OK with what USA is doing to Snowden? Cause I'm not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a hard time taking Mozilla serious in this case.

If Mozilla where really against the NSA spying they would all their users to easily remove any Google ( and other third party ) services from Firefox. I understand why they won't, it would mean taking a financial hit, if I understand they business model.

It's not that it is "Googles fault", they are force to work with the NSA. However having services from a company known to work with the NSA so deeply embedded into your product weakness the impact of your resistance to the NSA surveillance program.

<comment><USER10> I do not see how they have made it difficult to remove Google. One setting in about:config does the trick.

<comment><USER9> I think there where 5 or 6 places Google appeared last time I checked. Also about:config isn't really user friendly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Useful info for street protests:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5984651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5984651)

<comment><USER12> Great idea in the comments about switching your phone to airplane mode.

<comment><USER11> This is not necessary. There are numerous cameras in all public spaces. Better to leave phone on for communications. Better yet, install live stream or ustream:

[http://www.ustream.tv/new](http://www.ustream.tv/new)

[http://new.livestream.com/](http://new.livestream.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Exactly how effective will an online protest be on a day that so many people spend outdoors; away from their computers/devices?

<comment><USER14> Exactly how effective will an offline protest be on a day that so many people will spend online, still using their computers and devices?

[http://www.restorethefourth.net/](http://www.restorethefourth.net/)

Do not assume one precludes the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised Wikipedia isn't participating in at least putting a call to action to call your representatives like they did with SOPA last time. I'm not surprised Google isn't doing it, because I expected as much from them this time around, but I'm disappointed. It seems they only participate in these actions when there's immediate gain for them (like not passing SOPA, or ITU's "sender pays" policy). I just hope they realize that we might not be "available" to help _them_ next time they need the public's support for something.

<comment><USER16> Wikipedia has to pass a fine line of trying not to involve itself in politics, unless it's a clear threat to it's ability to it's job, and it's not clear that surveillance (even on such a broad scale) prevents it building an encyclopaedia.

<comment><USER17> Wikipedia could argue that people will self-censor themselves and thus avoid looking up information on Wikipedia related to illnesses, sexual topics and so on. Its the same argument libraries has when claiming peoples library card history is protected.

<comment><USER18> And whappens when those who used to write the articles for anything start censoring themselves too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a non-american I wonder if Mozilla and others are against all spying of NSA or just Spying of American citizens.</comment>


So You Want to Start Your Own Business? Things People Don't Tell You - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@andrilio/so-you-want-to-start-your-own-business-10-invaluable-things-people-never-tell-you-db66fc1862f6 <comment><USER2> Having started a couple myself, I'd say a few of these are industry-specific.

The main thing I learned (and learned to accept) is that at the beginning, nobody cares. Potential customers don't care until you very clearly articulate something that matters to them. Friends and family care about YOU, but unless they're the target user, they also don't care about the business itself. Particularly for high achievers who are used to positive feedback, this lack of engagement can be pretty difficult. It would almost be easier if you had someone out there loudly rooting against you; at least then you'd exist to the world.

Anyway, once I accepted that as a natural part of the process, the ups and downs got a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah I appreciate all this advice, except for the "beer test".

Come on man, I don't like to drink and I am a very nice and professional person.

The beer test for social skills is probably worse than whiteboarding obscure algorithms to test technical skills.

<comment><USER4> not only that, but Paul Graham is the one that came up with the beer test. So for this author to say that nobody tells you these things is wrong.

<comment><USER3> Hahahhaha. Agreed.

To get a job at a startup that has received some funding is a bit of a weird dance.

PG is all about growth and efficiency and hiring people who get shit done technically, because it's grow or die in this business world.

But then the startups spend their time doing beer tests and extended interview cycles and whiteboarding tests?

It seems some of these companies are content to run lifestyle businesses and just enjoy life on the runway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish "7\. THE BEGINNING IS THE MOST DIFFICULT PART" were actually true. In my experience, the beginning is hard, but it can get much, much harder than it was at the beginning. In fact, the very book ("The hard thing about hard things") that he cites in point 7 tells the story of many crazy difficult things Ben Horowitz fought through many years after the beginning of Loudcloud/Opsware.</comment>


Police Assisted Apple Investigators in Search of SF Man's Home - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/09/iphone_5_apple_police.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Discussion when news first broke: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955087>

New information:

 _San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man's home.

...plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio Calderón, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers "did not go inside the house," but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured Calderón's home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5._

</comment><comment><USER2> Ask yourself: would 3-4 SFPD officers show up at the door of a suspected bike thief if someone claimed he had stolen a bike worth $500?

Dear H-N readers from SF: you _can_ effect change by contacting your supervisors and asking them to raise questions with SFPD. You don't have to silently sit there watching bad things happen; you have an option, and that is to speak up. Sending an email to your supervisor is a very easy thing to do, and if enough of us band together and raise our voices, the powers-that-be will have to listen.

<comment><USER3> He granted permission for the Apple employees to enter his residence to search. Nothing in the article indicates any civil liberties were violated.

Ask yourself: would an iPhone 5 would get $500 on the open market? More likely it would be worth $100,000 or more. And if someone stole a $100,000 device of mine with a GPS device that was tracked to a residence, I would hope the SFPD would help me. Anything less would be a miscarriage of justice.

Now onto guilt, this person admitted he was at the bar from which the iPhone was allegedly stolen. Now while this might not be enough to convict someone in a court of law, it's certainly enough to investigate further.

I do not understand why this story is getting any traction except the standard internet hatreds for police and corporations.

<comment><USER4> The main problem, as I see it, is that he didn't know the two men who searched their home were not police officers. Worse, the cops allowed the man to have the impression that they were. And the fact that the cops themselves didn't go inside shows me that they knew what they were doing was questionable.

<comment><USER2> "And the fact that the cops themselves didn't go inside shows me that they knew what they were doing was questionable."

EXACTLY! Have you ever, ever known the cops to back off from doing something, and let a civilian handle it? In my few observations of such situations, I've always seen the cops take charge, and shoo the civilians away. For them to just stand at the boundary line and watch the Apple goons go in and search, to me, is clear evidence that the cops knew fully well what they were doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> iOS 4.3.6: Fixed a bug with Find My iPhone that caused it to randomly show phones as being at Sergio Calderon's house.

</comment><comment><USER6> What legal issues are there with the Apple employees and not the plainclothes police officers carrying out this search ? Are Apple in the clear here seeing as Calderon agreed to the search ?

<comment><USER7> Yes, I would think so. Anyone _basically_ has any right to anything you allow.

<comment><USER8> But this is aggravated by the SFPD's presence. Sounds like things went down like:

1) A group of people show up at his door in plain clothes.

2) Some of them identify as police officers.

3) They ask him about the iPhone 5 and he denies it.

4) They threaten him a bit and then ask him to allow a search of the premises.

5) Since, from his perspective, there are a bunch of police officers threatening the immigration status of his family, he consents.

6) Two people from the group (Apple employees) enter the premises and search for the iPhone. He assumes that they are police because they are all in plain clothes (no way to tell them apart without asking to each each badge).

Seems to me like the police used their muscle to strong-arm the guy, but then stopped short of doing the search themselves (because that would be illegal). Since the guy consented to the search, then there may not be anything illegal about the Apple employees performing the search.

This whole thing stinks:

* Sounds like the ex-police security guy that Apple hired got some of his buddies to use their badges to get him in the door.

* The police performed a search without technically performing a search.

* The Apple security employees impersonated police officers without technically impersonating police officers.

My take:

A bunch of police officers (and an ex-cop) were behaving badly on their off- hours and now the SFPD is going to go into CYA-mode. No charges will be brought. Nothing will happen to anyone. _Maybe_ the Apple security guy will get dressed-down by his superiors for being so heavy-handed and causing bad press.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, it stinks. But I think the real responsibility here lies with the SFPD officers, who deliberately conveyed the false impression that everyone in the group were police. I don't know if there's a law on the books against a police officer representing _another person_ as a police officer, but if not, there damned well should be.

<comment><USER4> You're right. The cops knew what they were doing was wrong or else they would have entered the home as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An official SFPD spokesman said "three or four" SFPD were involved in the actual search? How many SFPD resources were involved in the run-up to the search?

This sounds worse than a poor engineering post-mortem: only "three or four" hours or days went into the work, but that could easily involve another "three or four" that were not included in the estimate, so are not counted for the total effort involved.

I'd hope a publicly-funded department has greater accountability than a random development task, but here we are.

<comment><USER11> > _I'd hope a publicly-funded department has greater accountability than a > random development task_ //

Presumably these police carry GPS devices (that would eg give their location when they call in and such) and so the whereabouts of any officer on duty should be traceable in their database?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In an interview with SF Weekly last night, Calderón told us that six badge- > wearing visitors came to his home in July to inquire about the phone. > Calderón said none of them acknowledged being employed by Apple, and one of > them offered him $300, and a promise that the owner of the phone would not > press charges, if he would return the device.

I wonder if it was the Apple-associated people who spouted this lie (my guess would be yes).

Individuals (e.g. victims) do not have any say in whether or not a prosecutor charges a suspect with a crime. This is a common misunderstanding - there is no such thing as "pressing charges" if you are not a prosecutor.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc>

</comment><comment><USER13> > Reached this afternoon, Calderón confirmed that only two of the six people > who came to his home actually entered the house. He said those two did not > specifically state they were police officers.

> However, he said he was under the impression that they were all police, > since they were part of the group outside that identified themselves as SFPD > officials. The two who entered the house did not disclose that they were > private security officers, according to Calderón.

I wonder if they had the same badges, uniform on? Or did the Apple people have their own security uniform on and Calderón just didn't notice the difference. Maybe Apple's people could have been more explicit that they were not the police, but this reads like a big misunderstanding.

<comment><USER14> The article said they were in plainclothes. No uniforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> He voluntarily let them search his home, right? Does it matter whether they were police or not?

<comment><USER16> Well, nobody broke a law by entering after permission was given. But, they may have broken the law if they impersonated police officers (and how that law is drafted I do not know). They may also have broken the law (or, alternatively, the officers may face some penalty) for misuse of police resources -- I don't really know what kinds of rules there are about getting police to aid in private investigations, but I imagine there are some.

In any case, the person in question certainly didn't have to let these people in, and probably shouldn't have. But, it can be tough to justify refusing entry to the police if you think you haven't done anything wrong.

<comment><USER15> If standing next to a plainclothes officer who identifies himself as police is considered impersonating a police officer something is wrong with the law.

It sounds sketchy but I doubt anyone broke the law here.

<comment><USER2> You probably have never seen this happen, hence your naiveté. When a bunch of cops show up at your door, each of them doesn't identify themselves separately as a cop. The leader will usually announce, "SFPD! We are here to investigate blah blah blah...", and probably show a badge. His other comrades will just stand there. They don't go down the conga line, each swearing an oath that they are cops. It is assumed that the first announcement is enough to establish authority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Horrible, horrible corporatism. That's not the stuff the American dream is made of.

<comment><USER18> I don't mean to be offensive, but George Carlin summed this up pretty decently:

      It's called the American Dream because you have to be
      asleep to believe it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't seem to find any mention regarding how Calderon came to hold the iPhone 5 prototype in his possession. Can anyone shed light on this? The media never seems to report on this aspect of the case.

<comment><USER3> He was at the bar the night it went missing. Likely Calderon pickpocketed the phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If a stolen iPhone phones home that it is at particular house that very instant (or recently), is that probable cause to search the house without a warrant? If the officers think that the phone is likely to stop phoning home imminently, seems like the answer would be "yes," but these devices are so new I wonder if courts have ruled on it.

<comment><USER21> Why would they need a warrant if they are given permission to enter and search the premises?

<comment><USER22> Apparently the _actual_ police involved were well aware of what little legal right they had to be in the building. The "permission" they got would not hold up in court and they knew it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sniff a big lawsuit in the making - sounds like their might be an illegal search and seizure going on here - BIG RIGHTS VIOLATION.

I believe this is a strict liability case - meaning - would the normal guy think that his rights were being violated and he was the victim of an illegal search?

In what capacity were the cops and everyone involved identified at the time of the 'crime'? Should they have gotten a warrant? I definitely want to know what kind of documentation was taken - sounds to me like a good old fashion ILLEGAL police state shake up?

Anyone else?

Take care of these cops - this is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER24> Considering that billions of dollars worth of revenue are at stake here, and that Apple is likely a major target for industrial espionage, I have no problem with the government getting involved. Apple is a major contributor to both the local and national economy, and the government should help to protect their common interests.</comment>


The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf <comment><USER2> The approach described in this paper: having an archeologist implement a virtual machine in an afternoon, and then having that virtual machine run a self-checking program that expanded to a full system, is exactly what contestants/archeologists in ICFP 2006 did.

[http://www.boundvariable.org](http://www.boundvariable.org)

I've been returning to the contest recently. There's a treasure trove of interesting stuff, including the ML compiler that targets the universal machine. It's amazing that such a small group of people created all that for a programming contest.

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked on the Domesday project as a 12-year-old. It enlisted schools, with the help of geography teachers and their classes, to assist with data gathering around the country. I never saw the finished thing, and I'm sad it was never properly preserved. I look forward to the work of archivists!</comment>


Show HN: Text and Sentiment Analysis Add-on for Google Spreadsheets - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-analysis/bhgojekhekigceifapkmgbibgfmdicno

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea and very well done. Just one question; why does it require all these permissions to get started:

        1 - Know who you are on Google
        2 - View your email address
        3 - View and manage your spreadsheets in Google Drive
        4 - View and manage data associated with the application
        5 - Allow this application to run when you are not present
        6 - Connect to an external service

I am specifically concerned about the first and third items.

<comment><AUTHOR> #3: actually that's a good point and a cause for concern, but there's not much we can do about it as far as I know since we write the results directly in your spreadsheets; and the add-on, once installed, is present in all your spreadsheets.

#1: we need your email address in order to manage your credits and verify your credit purchases through Google Wallet.

most other add-ons require the same permissions, so I think the permission titles could use a bit of clarification.

all that said, this is something to have in mind and improve for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This post was penalized by the voting ring detector.

All: getting people to upvote your post in most cases causes penalties to kick in. Please don't do this. Let your work speak for itself.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting tools. Developing plugins for web browsers makes it easier to work with these sort of analysis systems.</comment>


Twitter will finally stop making your images look terrible - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/twitter-will-finally-stop-making-your-images-look-terrible-2ed882dfcd9e <comment><USER2> FINALLY</comment>