The Saddest Moment: Byzantine fault tolerance [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thesaddestmoment.pdf <comment><USER2> This is the second article I have read written by this author and I've found both of them to be mildly informative and wildly entertaining. Sort of like a Dave Berry of computer science writing.

<comment><USER3> There's two more near the bottom of the author (James Mickens)'s Microsoft Research page[1]. The page itself is also funny.

1: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/mickens/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/)

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 A different topic, but [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/mickens/theslowwi...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/mickens/theslowwinter.pdf) is a good read too.

<comment><USER4> Another good one, titled "Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet's Nest of Deception and Chicanery" is at [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/mickens/nestofhor...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/mickens/nestofhornets.pdf).

<comment><USER5> Wow, _somebody_ doesn't like windows phones

but seriously, that article had nothing to do with research. it seemed to be a rant at third-rate smart phones from 3 years ago.

<comment><USER6> Fits my experience with my Nexus 7 pretty well.

\- The web-browsing experience is pretty bad (though web developers are as much to blame for this as the browser devs.) Mobile-optimised sites have text that's too large and advertising dialogs that forcibly redirect me to places I don't want to go. Buggy banner ads trying to stick to the bottom of the page bounce around the page as I scroll, take up too much of the viewport, and never dismiss when I hit the "X".

\- The touchscreen does play up from time to time, sometimes when I'm using it and sometimes when I'm not. Two days ago my tablet opened Facebook and tried to send "monkey with typewriter" messages to old friends...

It doesn't make calls either, but I can forgive it for that... My heirarchy of needs begins with more "real computer" things, not "real phone" things. To type a short comment like this I'll first plug in a keyboard (which will cause all programs to crap themselves....) Anything more involved, though, and I'll consider spinning up an EC2 instance and doing it over SSH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its a sexy read.

James Mickens is AKA "Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence"

[http://microsoftjobsblog.com/viceroy-james- mickens/](http://microsoftjobsblog.com/viceroy-james-mickens/)

<comment><USER8> The LeBron James of Computer Science

[http://www.livescience.com/40023-james-mickens-microsoft- s-l...](http://www.livescience.com/40023-james-mickens-microsoft-s-lebron- james-of-computer-science-waxes-philosophic-video.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> CS background for people who haven't heard of Byzantine Fault Tolerance:

Original Lamport Paper - [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82....](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82.pdf)

'Practical' Byzantine Fault Tolerance -[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82....](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82.pdf)

<comment><USER10> You posted a duplicate, what's the other link?

<comment><USER11> Probably [http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf](http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Yep, that's the one. BTW, didn't know you were on HN, I'm a fan of Bloom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That was far funnier than it had any right to be.

</comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr Rant about complexity of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance) and it's practical uselessness.

<comment><USER14> Your tl;dr does this paper a serious disservice. It is at once more enlightening and more entertaining than most other papers.

It's also accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I chuckled. But, like it or not, lesser trust requirements are CRUCIAL in the immediate future of computing and therefore so is research on Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Funny, but in light of recent events (see [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue-quantum-insert-attack-via-linkedin-slashdot- pages/) for example) things like Byzantine General's problems do not seem quite so far fetched.

</comment><comment><USER17> The OP brings up a very old story in fault tolerance, reliable systems, and systems management: In practice a very significant fraction of all outages are due fairly directly to those famous words of the HAL 9000 "human error" or people in the server farm 'bridge' or the network operations center (NOC) doing the wrong things.

</comment><comment><USER18> I had absolutely no idea what a Byzantine fault was and to be honest I probably still have a very peripheral grasp of what the author is trying to make fun of. What I love about this is that you can sense the buildup of frustration that the author felt which then got released in the form of this paper, hilariously entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very little real info and too much of what author probably believes to be a humor, but it's just pretentious BS...

<comment><USER20> Nah, the author thinks right, it's humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just wondering: what does the [scribd] mean in the title? I thought this was a warning for the poor usability and difficulty to download from site [http://www.scribd.com](http://www.scribd.com). This links directly to a pdf, so wouldn't a [pdf] tag be better? I've noticed this on a bunch of posts recently.

<comment><USER22> It's a HN auto-tag, to promote a Scribd, a YC company.

<comment><USER23> More specifically, it's actually a link to a copy of the same pdf hosted on scribd, the intention being to offer a means of viewing the pdf that's less cumbersome than Adobe Reader.

<comment><USER21> Interesting. I never clicked on it so I never noticed it was an additional link!

I've never liked the scribd interface, but what's more is that Chrome and FF have their own, decent, pdf viewers which are light-years better than either the scribd or adobe viewers.

I wonder how much HN gets to put that link there.

<comment><USER24> HN is owned by YCombinator. Scribd was founded under the YCombinator program. There's really not much to it.

<comment><USER21> I never see any other links like that for YC companies (and there are a lot of YC companies) on HN; that's why I was curious.

Aside: Why can I respond to you and not cmelbye?

<comment><USER25> > Why can I respond to you and not cmelbye?

There is a timer on new posts before anyone can reply. It's to force people to think a little before they post and is pretty effective in rate-limiting flamewars.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Save the pennies. Winter is coming - <AUTHOR> http://cyberomin.github.io/life/2016/03/23/saving-the-pennies.html <comment><USER2> It is such an important lesson in life. Prepare yourself for the future. It doesn't mean you can't have things or do stuff. It just means be frugal, take a time out when you want to buy something. Most times you will forget about it. Watch your Bank/Investment account grow. It will make you much happier than the latest gadget or new car, etc. Invest in things that will protect you from inflation or will help you generate a passive income (rental home, Land, etc).

Wealth buys Freedom and will protect you in times of harm. I always try and tell people that less is more, save your money.

<comment><AUTHOR> You said it best. Apt and succint.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my POC to detect spam accounts on twitter - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I have been complaining a lot lately about spam on twitter and decided to to something.
So far it is just a POC (proof of concept), where you provide the twitter account name and it will give a score from 0 to 10 and let you know if the account is spammer/bot or not.
Link: http://sucuri.net/?page=docs&title=twitter
How it works? We use a point-based system and consider some of the things:
-Account name (looks spam?)
-Profile image (default?)
-Bio (valid, etc?)
-URL (valid, pointing to a valid domain)
-updates (how many)
-How many links per update
-Repeated links
-Spam words
-How many interaction with other users
-Number of followers/following
And a few more... Please report FP if you found them.
Later it can be integrated with other tools (or even search tools) to avoid following spammers (or even to auto-block them).
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I think this is a fantastic idea, but the filter could stand to benefit from better requirements. For example number of direct messages sent to the user (since people don't DM spam bots very often), number of @replies sent to the user.

It could stand to happen that a lot of users who use sites like Brightkite or other sites where they broadcast what they're listening to or where they're at could get caught u p in your spam/bot filter simply for making heavier use of such sites.

I'd revisit your filter to look at how the user interacts with other users, versus just monitoring posting behavior.

<comment><USER3> The problem I think is that DMs are not public information... You can only know yours, not from the others.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, you're right, and I knew that too. Heh. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the direct link:

[http://sucuri.net/?page=docs&title=twitter](http://sucuri.net/?page=docs&title=twitter)

</comment><comment><USER4> Good one.

What about a user driven blacklist?. Maybe you can collect them the way @spam (<http://twitter.com/spam>) does.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea too. Will see how this can be integrated with them.</comment></comment>


What else can you do with an Interplanetary Transport System? - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/09/what-else-can-you-do-with-a-bi.html <comment><USER2> You could construct massive artificial satellites that have permanent human habitation if we could shield ourselves from the radiation. It's fascinating that we could conceivably have people born, spending most of their life, and dying in a completely hostile enviornment and that it will be in space before it will be under water.

I didn't watch all of Elon's presentation and I don't know if he mentioned this. However, I would think that a space elevator of some sort or a massive lunar manufacturing facility would be required to efficiently create all the components of an Interplanetary Transport System.. Upwards of 80% of the mass of going into space is just propellant to escape gravity. Even if the rockets are reusable, we won't truly be an interplanetary civilization until most of the components needed for space travel are actually manufactured in space or in extremely low gravity situations

<comment><USER3> What's the appeal of people living in orbit though? By that I don't mean industries that could happen there, but people actually having kids, growing up, and dying. I don't see the rationale for a permanent population in orbit anymore then we have one in Antarctica or a deep sea oil platform.

<comment><USER4> Once the cost is low enough, the rationale is its cheaper to make new land than to buy land on a crowded planet. If we hit that point, you would expect massive space colonization.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't it be easier to place the living module on an inhospitable part of the planet then launching it into orbit? There are lots of deserts and tundras available.

<comment><USER4> That is the case now, and it's likely to be the case for a long time to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thankfully someone mentioned a Dyson swarm [1] in the comments :)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm)

<comment><USER7> SciShow estimated you'd need to destroy all the planets to get enough raw materials to build a swarm.

[https://youtu.be/GrM3f7Bil5A?t=185](https://youtu.be/GrM3f7Bil5A?t=185)

<comment><USER8> We don't really _need_ a full swarm, at least not until we can use it to compute something useful. Even Mercury, the smallest planet, has enough raw material to build more space stations and power-gathering sats than we know what to do with at present.

If you had a partial Dyson swarm right now, what would you actually use it for?

<comment><USER7> At least the basics of having shelter, food, and water. Maybe at some point we as a civilization could create matter from energy and then create atoms, then finally molecules of whatever we needed.

We would also probably want to live long healthy lives maybe even transfer our minds into other bodies or devices.

We aren't even a Type I civilization yet so there is lots of planning and inventing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So how many sunshades (or square meters of mirror foil) could we get to orbit to regulate global warming?

<comment><USER10> Gold is supposedly the most malleable metal. One ounce - the size of a quarter - can be hammered out to 10 square meters.

I'll let someone else do the math.

<comment><USER11> The radius of Earth (according to Google) is 6371 km

π * 6371^2 ≈1.28e8 km^2 = 1.28e11 m^2 = 1.28e10 oz of gold

So, you would need 800 million pounds of gold, which would cost (at current spot price of 1324.80/oz) almost 18 trillion dollars.

Gold is probably not the best material for this

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the math help :)

That's looks like the size to cover the entire planet and completely remove all sunlight. But to counteract global warming, we'd need a much smaller area. If it's 1%, we're down to a mere $180B.

I'm sure you're right that other materials would be far more economical. My gut says Aluminum.

<comment><USER12> Given that the costs of global warming are talked in the trillions, this means that this silly thought experiment would actually be a _rationally economical solution_.

Which just illustrates how terrible global warning really is, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Regarding fun-in-zero-gee: velvet cargo nets. _Sorted!_

Seriously, doesn't the recent news about higher mortality among lunar astronauts throw all this talk about colonization into doubt?

[http://www.nature.com/articles/srep29901](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep29901)

<comment><USER12> I mean, if that sort of long-term mortality risk is a big factor for the colonists, things are going _really well_. Even if all of Musk's plans work out, living somewhere as inhospitable as Mars (not to mention falling out of the sky at many times the speed of sound) will entail shouldering _substantial near-term risks_ regardless. The hope is that there's enough smart people with a sufficiently weak sense of self-preservation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Airship to Orbit concept [1] caught my attention a while ago. There's something rather elegant about floating one's way to (almost) orbit.

[1] [http://www.jpaerospace.com/](http://www.jpaerospace.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> #7 Lifting Coca Cola LED billboard

</comment><comment><USER16> Railguns that could accelerate and dump pieces of metal anywhere in world from high orbit. Militaries would drool over the idea of controlled falling meteors for strategic bombing

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment)

I think we would all be better off if we didn't develop even more effective ways of killing each other...

<comment><USER18> Ramen. We really need to get into primary schools subjects such as meditation, ethics, moral and "care for humanity" instead of having people get educated to go into military and "drool over weapons to kill more effectively".

<comment><USER17> At least in this case there are treaties that prevent space based weapons platforms.

<comment><USER18> Well, that would work if people/government don't break treaties of all kind on daily basis. Solution must be in roots not a patch on top of pile (of bullshit we created over time)

<comment><AUTHOR> a) it's kind of hard to hide a launch system where the fueled-up booster stack on the pad weighs two and a half times as much as a Saturn V and the launch is visible with the naked eye from a hundred miles away.

b) There is a reason we don't use Trident D-5 SLBMs (or the Russian equivalent) for precision conventional explosive strikes on targets which otherwise require long range bombers with intricate in-flight refuelling arrangements to hit: something about not scaring the other folks with strategic nukes into thinking we've initiated a first strike and hitting the big red end of the world button.

TLDR: even the big guys don't mess with space-based or sub-orbital weaponry. The risk of a misunderstanding is non-trivial and the perceived costs are far too high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> le-mark Assemble an Orion ie nuclear pulse propulsion ship in orbit. These can theoretically acheive .1c, Proxima Centari in 40 years (give or take).

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure there's any time in the near future where we're going to be allowed to loft that much fissile material into orbit, due to the risks of the takeoff exploding and spreading it everywhere. Personally I think the risks are overstated, but that doesn't affect the reality that we're not going to be able to do that any time soon. We're not going to have Orion drives until we can get the fissile material from space.

Also it's not clear to me that an Orion taking off from a very-near-Earth orbit is a good idea, either. I'm not sure how to reconcile apocalyptic- sounding fears about EM pulses from nuclear explosions with an Orion departing from LEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Space Data Centers -- we got tons of power, just need to figure out how to vent all that heat.

<comment><USER21> Turns out space is really cold.

<comment><USER3> But vacuum is a very poor conductor of heat.

<comment><USER22> I think you can have large radiator panels and circulate a cooling fluid or gas. Most (all?) of the cooling effect comes from infrared radiation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dyn Inc. Acquires EveryDNS - <AUTHOR> http://www.besttechie.net/2010/01/12/dyn-inc-acquires-everydns/

<comment><USER2> So it's probably time to start looking for an EveryDNS replacement ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Earlier post and discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047798>

</comment><comment><USER4> "Welcome EveryDNS users to Dyn Inc.": <http://www.dyn.com/dd-welcome-everydns>

</comment><comment><USER5> I read that "EasyDNS" and just about had puppies. Whew. Crises over.</comment>


Donna Strickland won her Nobel prize in Physics before she got a wikipedia page - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Donna_Strickland <comment><USER2> Did anyone else hear her interview on BBC radio? They ended by asking why she hadn't applied to be a full professor yet, and she clearly didn't want to talk about it. Wonder what's going on there.

Edit: this episode [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172w25chfb2c1f](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172w25chfb2c1f) Interview starts at 12:55, awkward question at 16:45

<comment><USER3> I also noticed this -- clearly, not a lot of love in the dept for her. A bit awkward now, and I suspect soon, she will be a full prof, perhaps at a different university....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2018/oct/02/nobel-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2018/oct/02/nobel- prize-in-physics-2018-live)

"Sumner says the fact that Strickland's Wikipedia page has only appeared today is telling.

"It took a Nobel prize for Donna Strickland to be noticed enough to have a (short) Wikipedia page written about her. Another example of how womens' contributions to science go unnoticed and uncelebrated," she says. "It takes the science equivalent of an Oscar for a woman in Stem [science, technology engineering and mathematics] to get noticed!""

<comment><USER5> Scientists don't have TV shows, if they don't win awards, how else am I supposed to hear about them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow that's pretty sad. It looks like Wikipedia has a gender gap task force (GGTF) to counter the gender gap.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Counteri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is one of the main reasons I started [https://theymadethat.com](https://theymadethat.com) (IMDB for everything, not just movies). Not many people have the privilege to have their own Wikipedia entry. The qualifications for getting one also seem very arbitrary.

</comment><comment><USER8> Per the deletion log there was an article on her in '14 that an administrator deleted due to unambiguous copyright infringement. It seems no one ever took interest in taking it up after that.

The speedy deletion process has always made me a bit uncomfortable, I wish there was any kind of public information about that deletion besides the deletion comment which consists of a single template without further info.

</comment><comment><USER9> Jacques Dubochet (2017, Chemistry) got his Wikipedia page on the day he won the Prize, too.

One of the men he shared the prize with, Joachim Frank also got his page in the year he got the prize, although his page came a few months before the prize.

One of the 2016 Chemistry winners, Ben Feringa, didn't get his page until the year before.

Maybe someone got confused at Wikipedia and thought Strickland won in Chemstry!

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a real problem -- "only 18% of biographies are of women" on wikipedia and "between 84 and 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are male".

I also remember reading in the past year about how the male skew in wikipedia editors leads to all sorts of bias. They approve all sorts of wikipedia entries on fictional sci-fi characters and reject entries for female leaders worldwide (in the west but even more so when it comes to developing nations)

Source for the stats: [https://www.wired.com/story/using-artificial- intelligence-to...](https://www.wired.com/story/using-artificial-intelligence- to-fix-wikipedias-gender-problem/)

<comment><USER11> Why is there so much bias? Do these men just hate women? Is it cultural?

I really don't understand this.

<comment><USER10> I'm not saying its malicious or deliberate, but any non-diverse population will tend to exhibit some bias.

I don't think its that surprising that a group of men share different view points about worthy posts than a group of women would. The point is wikipedia doesn't have good coverage in this regard. I'd say the same thing for a group of American editors vs a group of African editors. Or a group of wall st professionals vs blue collar workers.

Wikipedia's editors have a diversity problem in light of their goal to be the "world's encyclopedia".

<comment><USER12> I suspect the underlying bias is, "have I heard of this before?" If not, it's more likely the entry gets rejected. The more homogeneous the population of editors, the more narrow their experience scope. This is amplified by external biases that make women's contributions less visible - it's harder for new awareness to be built.

Just a theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also an indictment of the godawful WP draft process. That article by a new editor sat in the till for two months before getting rejected in a manner that made it unclear that it could be later revised and accepted.

The actual article that went up doesn't look like it went through the useless draft process at all. It was drafted and published directly to the main namespace, ironically enough by copying Gérard Mourou's article and then deleting everything from it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Right now, there are something around 20 article on the front page of Wikipedia, about half of them connected to recent news or anniversaries (birthdays, historic events, etc.) There are about 5.6 million articles in Wikipedia, it says. So how far would a Wikipedia page about Donna Strickland have contributed to her fame among those of us who are not physicists? And would the physicists among us have needed Wikipedia to learn about her?

<comment><USER15> the other two winners, male, had pages [https://twitter.com/clancynewyork/status/1047098079097380864](https://twitter.com/clancynewyork/status/1047098079097380864), there's a broader argument about bias here

<comment><USER16> How can an encyclopedia that _anyone_ can edit be biased?

Anyone could have added her page, no one did, until now.

<comment><USER17> Someone created a wiki page for her back in May, but it was deleted because a Wikipedia editor decided she wasn't "notable". Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but it still has the bias of the most recent editor.

[https://twitter.com/resolvingdust/status/1047135142978801664](https://twitter.com/resolvingdust/status/1047135142978801664)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wikipedia has arbitrary rules for a lot of people, some youtubers have pages but others with bigger reach don't. Some blogs are considered proper critics but youtube critics aren't.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's awesome! Smart AND humble. Hats off to Ms. Strickland.

Edit: I assume a less humble person would have pushed to get their page long before getting a Nobel prize.

</comment><comment><USER20> Good for her!</comment>


34 Must-Have Tools to Launch your Startup from Idea to Exit - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2013/34-tools-launch-startup-idea-exit/

<comment><USER2> Seems like if you haven't exited, you shouldn't be making lists of getting your idea to an exit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Read the article, it's not about exiting it's about what tools we use to make our lives easier as founders. Thanks for the blind comment though!

<comment><USER2> I did read it. I read it before I commented.</comment></comment></comment>


California DMV autonomous vehicle reports for 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disengagement_report_2016 <comment><AUTHOR> The California DMV's required autonomous vehicle disengagement reports are now online. A disengagement is when the human driver had to take over. These provide one of the few neutral assessments of how autonomous vehicle development is progressing.

\- Google/Alphabet/Waymo: disengagements per mile down 75% this year over last year. 124 disengagements over 600,000 miles driven. Zero on interstates and freeways.

\- Cruise/GM: 9768 miles, 231 disengagements. (Dec 2015 to Nov 2016).

\- Tesla: 185 disengagements over 550 miles (not thousands) driven. Almost all the driving was in one month. Most driving was on suburban roads.

\- BMW: 638 miles, 1 disengagement, on a freeway, blamed on poor lane markings.

There are other reports (Delphi, VW, Ford, etc.) but the number of miles driven isn't large and the number of disconnects is high, so they're still in the early stages of R&D. Honda is testing on a test track in Contra Costa County, probably the old Naval Weapons Station. Uber didn't file; they refuse to test in California because they'd have to report like everybody else.

So that's the real state of autonomous driving right now. Google is nearing production level quality, and is probably ready for freeway driving. Cruise is starting to log the miles, but is doing three orders of magnitude worse on disconnects than Google. Tesla is doing even worse. Everybody else is just getting started.

<comment><USER2> This is great data. I'm curious what will happen with all of the talent that recently left Google, including various startups for self-driving cars. That said, Google is doing better than I thought. Kudos to them.

Any idea how to benchmark this against humans quantitatively? Also, any idea how trivial or significant a disengagement is?

Google's "perfect" record on freeways lends credence to my theory that trucks are just a few years away from being fully automated. I actually suspect the laws will trail the technology there.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Pfrpg Web Character Sheet - <AUTHOR> https://krakensheet.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks! I've been working on a character sheet application for a tabletop RPG game I'm playing. I can't name the 3.5e variant since I'm using content licensed by the OGL, but you should be able to deduce it by googling PFRPG. I made it because I was frustrated with how much existing solutions cost (herolab) or how user hostile they were (PCgen).

At some point I decided to expose it as a product offering, though it's still free for now while I develop another core feature or two. I'd love if you could give it a whirl and let me know if you have feedback on anything - <USER2> the landing page to "you don't support my specific flavor of bard".

Let me know if you have any questions!

Steve</comment>


Spatial – Collaborate from anywhere in AR - <AUTHOR> https://spatial.is <comment><USER2> > Join a Spatial meeting from HoloLens, MagicLeap, VR, PC or Phone

I think supporting cross "platform" is a really cool viral feature.

At first it's just going to be one guy leading the meeting with real full body tracking (think meetings with architects or mech engineers where you might want to discuss and move around 3d models)

Anyone else working remotely can facechat in with their phone (w/accelerometer & gyro or ARKit/ARCore) or skype in on desktop.

But every time they want to discuss something that's outside a non-vr/ar user's fixed field of view, the dude leading the meeting will have to rotate the model for them. They will feel left out and eventually will want to buy their own AR/VR setup.

(or more realistically they will preshare their cad files first ... but the above still sounds like a plausible future)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like a serious attempt at an ambitious concept. I love how the video showcases what seems to be an actual working prototype, with its capabilities and imperfections – as opposed to the usual trend of AR 'demo' videos that are actually just mockups, and completely unrealistic ones at that (as seen with Google Glass, Pokemon Go, and Magic Leap, just from memory.)

I'm curious about the hardware. Is there a base station or two hiding in a corner somewhere? If there is, why isn't head tracking accurate enough to prevent "sway" of virtual objects with respect to real-world ones, which seems to be visible in the video? But if not, how does it capture the position and pose of the user's hands? In any case, what kinds of sensors are being used?

Unfortunately, when watching the video, what really stands out is that the 3D "ghosts" of the other participants have juddery, unsmooth motion. Surely it couldn't hurt to add a bit of interpolation? It would increase latency, but not by much, given that a user's view of a different user's body pose is not especially latency sensitive.

Edit: On second look, it seems like the HMD is just a Magic Leap One, though that doesn't answer the question of whether there's other hardware in the room.

<comment><USER4> There's no other hardware required. It's just hololens and magic leap (plus other devices like iPhone, laptop).

Hololens and Magic leap both have hand tracking, so the device knows if you are putting your hand up (and has some sense of its position and orientation), plus head pose.

"Sway" on device is actually more minimal that what you're seeing in the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love that people are investing time and money to make this happen. From my point of view, remote collaboration might make more sense in VR than in AR, though. AR tech is much harder than VR, and with today's AR headsets this kind of thing is not really usable. However with today's VR tech, it's fun!

What is the rationale to make this happen in AR here? Is the physical location important for remote collaboration?

<comment><USER6> We are implementing a similar concept using VR. To us [http://stirlinglabs.com](http://stirlinglabs.com) the choice between AR & VR is simply if the object of the discussion fits into the room or not. For our customers creating massive structures such as ships, hospitals or airports, a tiny scale model sitting on a desk using AR isn't particularly useful or interesting. They are more interested in switching their existing room for a space in their new structure.

<comment><USER5> Checked out your ship demos, that's an amazing use for VR :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'll be interesting to see how this feels for collaboration compared to current video chat. It clearly has the advantage of allowing people to 'interact' with things in the space, but you lose the feedback aspect of people's facial expressions.

With video, especially in a group, you can see if people are following what you say, nodding or shaking heads, have confused looks, or are not engaged (or falling asleep). Compared to voice-only discussions, for example, sometimes people won't ask the question if they're confused, presumably thinking they're the only one and don't want to waste others time and/or embarrass themselves.

Maybe facial expressions can be emulated -- but there's a very big uncanny valley to get over to make that usable.

<comment><USER8> I think the initial use case of this will be with everyone's videos in rectangles floating in space. People are already comfortable with video. It's much more natural to glance at a shared workspace and then up at them, than it is in a current call where their video gets covered by another window on your screen.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't work well if everyone is constantly turning away from the camera, not to mention has an AR headset covering most of their face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a writeup here: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/24/spatial- raises-8-million-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/24/spatial- raises-8-million-to-bring-augmented-reality-to-your-office-life/) (via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292217)).

</comment><comment><USER10> We've been experimenting with using VR for remote meetings and it really does work in making physical presence more relevant. I think Spatial is really onto something but they can simplify the product even more. My main "immediate" use cases are actually

a) meetings while taking notes or dealing with Trello and,

b) pair programming,

So, all I want is to stream my desktop and some aspects of my physical self (face and hand-movements are enough).There is no real need to bring in aspects of individual desktop apps into immersion (as they show with notes or 3D design tools), just stream my desktop and let everyone see. For pair programming, this would need to work seamlessly hours at a time.

P.S: Incidentally AR vs. VR is less of an issue here, however, if it was real MR (i.e. I can see my real laptop screen exactly where it is) and I don't have to stream my own laptop that would be great.

</comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone actually seen this? The only video available is clearly a fake demo. Remember Magic Leap.

<comment><USER4> The video is real. It's a recording of the actual software being used live.

Things that are different irl vs the video:

1: Experience irl is way cooler. We use it internally for meetings. It's amazing to take a photo on your phone and see it show up in the air in front if you. It's awesome to see someone rez in and start walking around. It's fun to put your hands up, start talking, and watch 3d models and images show up. The playfulness and interactivity is much more exciting in person than in the video.

2: The field of view on existing AR hardware is limited. Everyone working in AR hears this to the point of exhaustion, but anyone trying AR for the first time can't help but notice it. So, the experience is different than in the video because you can only see AR through a smallish view. This will, of course, improve soon.

3: The video ui isn't rendered additively and has some added zing that is less performant when using in real life (eg higher antialiasing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A powerful use of low cost AR/VR, which I don't see a lot of people pursuing, would be to 3D render building plans while displaying feeds from smartphone cameras as "viewports" inside the rendered building. This could be used to very quickly get information from people onsite to experts and decision makers, with more easily displayed and digested contextual information. This could also be used in the building of large machines as well.

A lot of the challenge in this sort of technical communication is conveying the Point of View of the person onsite. We have the technology now, so why not just render it?

<comment><USER13> There are companies that have been doing this for a while. I think you are slightly overestimating the capabilities of the technology, but largely overestimating the demand for this stuff over the way things are traditionally designed/built/inspected. It's not a killer use case that is forcing architecture/design/manufacturing firms to adopt the tech or die...it's currently still in gimmick stage, but is getting better slowly but surely

<comment><USER12> _There are companies that have been doing this for a while._

Can you provide links? I'd like to see what they're up to.

 _I think you are slightly overestimating the capabilities of the technology,_

No. I know how janky smartphone GPS is from personal experience, especially inside a structure. Big companies with deep pockets are working on Vernor Vinge's "localizers," however.

 _but largely overestimating the demand for this stuff over the way things are traditionally designed /built/inspected. It's not a killer use case that is forcing architecture/design/manufacturing firms to adopt the tech or die...it's currently still in gimmick stage, but is getting better slowly but surely_

As you are implying, the demand is closely related to the jankyness event horizon. It's just like smartphones and tablets. They existed many years before the iPhone and iPad. However, prior to the iPhone and iPad, only propeller-heads wanted those things. There's a point at which the technology has matured to the point where it doesn't get in the way and it's actually nice to use. At that point, it will explode.

<comment><USER13> Check this out if you're in the boston area, I've been to a few AR-focused meetups and they're pretty good at surfacing what is out there and state of the art: [https://www.meetup.com/BostonAR/events/255921064/](https://www.meetup.com/BostonAR/events/255921064/)

(and/or email the organizer to get slides/company names if you're not in boston)

Here's some AR companies working on architecture: [https://www.archdaily.com/878408/the-top-5-virtual- reality-a...](https://www.archdaily.com/878408/the-top-5-virtual-reality-and- augmented-reality-apps-for-architects)

One of the apps mentioned there, Pair, is run by Andrew Kemendo who is an active participant on HN, started his first AR company in the space in 2011 and is very knowledgeable, check his stuff out: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AndrewKemendo](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AndrewKemendo)

In the engineering space PTC/Microsoft (Vuforia/Hololens) and UpSkill (founded 2010) jump out in my mind as leaders. PTC has been doing CAD modeling and full PML/ALM tooling etc. forever and started to look at AR applications in the 2013/2014 timeframe to build on their modeling, maintenance, and workflow tracking expertise

A common thread is that many of these companies were founded in 2010/2011 and have rebranded around the 2015 timeframe to focus on different business problems and market their solution as "AR"

And yeah I agree, I think the jankiness of the hardware is still a huge sticking point, nobody has nailed the comfortable glasses form factor with enough POV/battery/processing power to really make AR take off

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm having a bit of trouble grokking how this experience works for each participant.

I get the AR piece: People who are physically in a location they see their remote peers magically floating in the room with them while they can interact with virtual objects. That's cool.

But what do the remote people see? They don't have the benefit of AR, so I'd imagine they don't experience the real-world environment as they're sitting at a desk with a headset on, or just simply viewing a 3D world like they're playing The Sims?

<comment><USER3> From what I can tell, both sides are using AR goggles. They just don't show the goggles on avatars of remote peers, which aren't real video but just posed 3D models customized to (somewhat) match the corresponding user's real appearance.

<comment><USER14> Right, so I guess my question is: The remote users don't have the benefit of being in the same room as the rest of the group. The AR people/objects wouldn't likely "fit" into their physical world. Like in the initial demo video (2 guys sitting, 1 woman standing near Kanban board) -- What does she see from her perspective?

It feels to me like the "host" participants can use AR but anyone remote would need to be using VR as the physical environment mapping wouldn't make any sense for them.

<comment><USER15> It's not explained clearly, but I believe the same AR elements are mapped into different environments. One user's wall may not be in the same place as another's, but they would both have the same content.

<comment><USER4> Correct. Walls are mapped to each other, so if you are looking at your wall in location A and putting a shared screen there, it is also on my wall at location B.

There are some gnarly issues around this, of course, but Spatial has a pretty advanced approach that works in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's quite an interesting and ambitious concept, but I really hope they fix the avatar designs. I talked to some people around the room and the general agreement is that it's stuck in a sort of "uncanny valley" where users look like eerie ghosts with only half of a torso and no legs.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anywhere in AR? Will this work in my cabin in Arkansas with no electricity?

<comment><USER15> If you have an Oculus Go and a Wi-Fi hotspot, and can come up with a way to charge them both, and you get 4G signal there... Sure, why not?

<comment><USER18> He was making a joke. AR == Arkansas

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> SecondLife 2 coming soon to a basement near you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Spatial developer here. You too can play with these demos.

[https://spatialsys.github.io/res/shots/webapp/](https://spatialsys.github.io/res/shots/webapp/)

[https://spatialsys.github.io/res/shots/webapp/room_mars_terr...](https://spatialsys.github.io/res/shots/webapp/room_mars_terrain)

<comment><USER21> Hey will ! Were you able to download them, seems to be offline... LMK Best, B</comment></comment>


There is a certain inevitability to life. - <AUTHOR> http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2007/02/020507.html

<comment><USER2> Ze Frank is one of those few and fascinating people online who's able to combine a plethora of interests and create work that's both memorable and touching. He's got the same melancholy whimsy that _why the lucky stiff did.

Dunno why Ze Frank became vogue today on Hacker News, but I do not at all disapprove.

<comment><USER3> Really? I just find it cheesy and over-produced but in a low budget sort of way. The constant camera cuts for no reason are nearly seizure-inducing. The attempt to be sardonic fails lamely.

<comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, _the show_ rarely if ever attempted to be sardonic, but _did_ in fact attempt to be nearly seizure-inducing.

Like or dislike, that trippy feeling you get while watching isn't by accident, it's by design.

<comment><USER3> sportsracers?

<comment><USER2> That's a term he uses right from the beginning, no explanation given. The mystery of what a sports racer was is one of the things he used to build together a community. The speed at which his site grew in that week is remarkable, and the code words he used was a big part of it. If anything, it's the opposite of sardonic. It's childish (but in a good way).

<comment><USER3> I guess I found it sardonic because the intended audience is most definitely not sportsracers. It's sort of like the high school star linebacker calling the 100lb nerd "big guy".

<comment><USER2> It's more whimsical than sardonic. It's too absurd to be taken seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ze Frank is great, but I hope we're not going to see the submission of each individual day of the Show as a story.

<comment><USER6> Though I don't think every show is relevant to HN, I don't see any problem with submitting individual videos. Compared to some of the blog posts we see, Ze Frank videos are full of content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thinking you created the wave is similar to confusing your own efforts with... luck. I've been reviewing the early days of my business, and tremendous luck was involved. Sure, I was _there_ , and did the work, but a big part of it was the wave. I'm not sure that I could do it again, without finding another such wave... so I guess I have to become a surfer, and study the waves... problem is, I'm not much interested in that...

And then he pokes fun at web 2.0 (e.g. copying names like flickr, del.icio.us and 37signals). I'm sure you already got all that - I mainly wrote this for the people complaining about it.

I think ze frank would be great at startup school.

<comment><USER8> "I've been reviewing the early days of my business, and tremendous luck was involved. Sure, I was there, and did the work, but a big part of it was the wave."

Without the luck, the hard work would have had less effect, but without the hard work the luck would have had no effect. So, it was the hard work. Some of that work was recognizing the world that luck presented to you: studying the waves.

<comment><USER7> That's true, and it implies an interesting algebra of causation. Thanks for both!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've never seen Ze Frank before today. When I first followed the link, I saw a site with almost nothing, and a video with no obvious reason to watch. So I didn't watch.

Then I noticed that this post was attracting a fair number of comments. After reading most of the comments I decided there was probably something in the video worth seeing, so I watched it.

It turned out to be well worth it, for entertainment and insight.

The comments also made me look up the word 'sardonic.' Even at this late date, there are mysterious gaps in my vocabulary.

</comment><comment><USER9> I sat next to a girl on the airplane the other day who works with autistic children. She told me that the strange thing is that many of these children are good with computers and frighteningly addicted to YouTube. Apparently there is an entire community of autistic people making videos for other autistic people. The autistic viewers will watch the same minutes of autistic- produced video again and again thousands of times. They do things like read the contents of movie jackets on film, zooming in on each photo one by one. And out there in YouTube-land is an audience for it, obsessed.

I thought of this while I struggled to figure out why the Zefrank video was at the top on Hacker News this evening.

<comment> brown9-2 What are the autistic-community videos of?

<comment><USER10> He described it - an example is reading captions on the jackets of movie DVDs.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Clipserf lets you enjoy the best video moments on the web, hands free! - <AUTHOR> http://www.clipserf.com

<comment><USER2> Really nice, I love it. This will really improve my lunch breaks! Thanks. It just worked so I do not really have any feedback other than great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Am excited to to make it more hassle free to enjoy these great video moments.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looking forward to hear some constructive feedback on my weekend project. Cheers</comment>


Reddit is hiring - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2010/08/reddit-is-hiring.html

<comment><USER2> Let's hope they don't need to do a DNS update or they're going to have to allow multiple 'good' answers.

Very funny way of weeding out the non-coders. I also hope it will stay secret long enough and that the reddit repository can handle the traffic ;)

<comment><USER3> You don't have to check out the repo (I didn't). It takes five minutes or so to solve, so it's not that time-consuming if you are at least a bit technical.

<comment><USER4> I had no idea what the hell the \a character was, I do now, so I just checked out the repo (only 19M).

But I'm glad they gave a way to check if you got it right without applying.

<comment><USER3> I only suspected what it was, but 30 seconds of Googling were enough even if you didn't know it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a fan of Reddit, I think working there could be a smart resume / connection building move, but:

a) You work as a contractor, are not guaranteed to be hired as an employee anytime soon, receive no benefits and no stock.

b) The company has already been acquired.

c) Reddit's corporate overlords seem most interested in pumping the asset vs. expanding, may be a stifling environment.

If it was me I'd do the app but send it instead to Hipmunk (Reddit co- founder's new start-up)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is all true. reddit is a great place to work if you want to learn a lot, get some great experience, and have a really strong influence on the product. But it is not a startup -- there is no big upside.

And I don't think Hipmunk is hiring yet. :)

<comment><USER6> I met the reddit guys for breakfast one day maybe six months ago. I had left my job, been hacking on a website for several months, launched. I was trying to show it to someone new in person everyday. I was trying for all sorts of people.

By the time we finished breakfast, I blurted out, "So, y'all hiring?" They're just that cool.

It doesn't always have to be a startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aww shucks. Thanks!

ps. Still looking for a job? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anybody get a reply from reddit if you sent an email to the solution? I am wondering how long should I wait to be vindicated.

By the way, to get around the problem of slow, asynchronous bounce for the wrong solution address, I connected over SMTP to see if the answer email address(recipient) is valid or not for reddit.com. You can probably use that as a quicker test to validate if you have the right answer.

<comment><USER8> If you made a serious attempt to solve the problem, and got three alpha- numeric characters followed by a null byte, I'd say you're pretty much guaranteed to have the right answer.

If you want to triple-check, I registered an HN user with that name at about the same time jedberg submitted this entry. Don't want to spoil his fun, though, so I'm not going to post anything with that name just yet :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That is one _damn_ cool application process!</comment>


Google Analytics integrates social activities - <AUTHOR> http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/12/invitation-to-social-sites-to-integrate.html

<comment><USER2> This is pretty interesting - there are a large number of 'social media monitoring' products around (I work on one), and it looks like Google intend to provide their own here.

To get around the privacy issues with indexing private user data, it looks like they're going for an 'opt-in' model whereby social networks offer to feed data to Google, though it's not clear to me what the benefit(s) for the social network providers will be.

Google Analytics is already a priceless tool for measuring marketing effectiveness, and it makes a lot of sense for Google to bundle social media effectiveness in there too.</comment>


Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html <comment><USER2> The article informs us that anthocyanins are good against cancer and a slew of other illnesses. However, what little research about the antioxidant properties of anthocyanins exists is based on in vitro studies, and it's well known that anthocyanins are at least for the most part unlikely to survive being digested.

The article informs us that "one species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than [Golden Delicious]." There are thousands of different phytonutrients, and no edible plant has no phytonutrients, so exactly what is this figure telling us? 100 times more of a certain nutrient? 100 times more different varieties? 100 times more by total weight? I guess we need to buy the author's upcoming book to find out, if at all.

This doesn't look like any kind of evidence-based complaint about the deficiencies of modern food; it looks like the kind of pseudoscience used to promote unnecessary supplements and overpriced organic food. And feel-good books about medicating yourself by a judicious choice of the "right" foods.

The author feeds our fears but not our appetite for real, credible information.

<comment><USER3> It's not feeding any fears.

It's telling us the simple fact that our food consists of plants and trees selected for taste and appearance. This article specifically is discussing how this has led to diminishing nutrition in those plants.

This is not controversial. A different article could have talked about the same issue but presented a different effect which is that nearly the entire banana crop in the world is at risk of being wiped out because we've pretty much eliminated any variety in order to get the sweetest and best looking bananas.

<comment><USER4> _This is not controversial_

Maybe it should be - because it certainly is disputed by scientists. Not NY Times-bestselling "scientists", but certainly peer-reviewed scientists.

The intuitive connection between the claim that grocery market food has been selected for "taste and appearance" and the claim that this has led to "diminishing nutrition" is most certainly controversial.

<comment><USER5> Can you cite any peer-reviewed publications disputing the decline of nutrients found in food? I found this evidence to the contrary, for example:

        Historical food composition data and the growing of
        archived seeds suggest that the average content of
        some nutrients in many foods has decreased over the
        last century.

        Although the changes are small in comparison with
        other factors affecting nutritional status, we might
        benefit if agriculture were to place greater focus on
        nutrient content, rather than just yield.

[http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...](http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8837520&fileId=S1446545000000841)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The nutritional value of plants in their raw state is less interesting than what people actually eat. The original plants require a lot more processing and cooking to turn them into food, which destroys many of the nutrients. For example, crabapples are very sour and have to be boiled to make something edible, blue corn must be ground into flour and cooked. Is that better or worse than eating raw Gala apples or raw or steamed sweet corn?

> The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less > advantageous they were for our health.

We don't know that. It's possible that breeding more edible plants reduced the need for nutrient-destroying processing, so the net effect was better, not worse nutrition.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections."

There are two ways to interpret this "growing evidence". One approach, favored by this author, is to say their old wild diet was healthier and therefor those eating in such a fashion were less likely to get degenerative diseases.

The other approach is to say they died too young from injury, starvation, or infections. Had they lived longer they too might have contracted more of our degenerative diseases.

I strongly suspect lifestyle may have played more of a role than diet alone. The modern sedentary lifestyle with enormous quantities of extra calories at our fingertips is quite a recent invention of humanity.

Getting more nutrients back into our food is good. So too would be to increase the variety of foods we eat (monoculture seems to not be healthy for the environment or our bodies). But I suspect the biggest gains in well-being will come from rethinking how we apportion our days and incorporate more physical activity and leisure time into them.

<comment><USER8> I mostly agree, except...

> The other approach is to say they died too young from injury, starvation, or > infections. Had they lived longer they too might have contracted more of our > degenerative diseases.

This is a stretch. Those people who were lucky enough not to die of communicable diseases or predators just happened to be the ones genetically superior in the sense that they didn't suffer as much from degenerative diseases? I doubt it.

The lifestyle (plenty of exercise, and not eating too much, or too much processed/extracted foods like sugar and hydrogenated oils in everything) theory is much stronger.

I don't doubt, though, that some nutrients have been bred out of crops inadvertently while domesticating them (making them easier to grow, breeding variants that produce more food, making the color or taste more appealing). And some less common varieties of crops are probably closer to the pre- domesticated varieties and are therefore healthier.

<comment><USER9> You misunderstood him. You can't die from alzheimer's at 80 if you died from malaria at 72, is what he's saying.

<comment><USER10> Assuming early death was fairly random then the number of people living to 70+ may have been much smaller, but the survivors would probably not differ significantly from the overall population. However, I don't think we can find a lot of actual evidence to support one interpretation over another.

PS: It should be noted that due to low human birth rates disease and accidental death really can't kill over that high a % of the population each year. 90% survival change per year = 28% of people reaching 12 years old which is far from sustainable. 95% survival chance = 54% live to 12 which is at the edge of sustainable. ~.95 ^ 75 = 2% which would suggest 2+% of the population should hit 75 assuming a steady rate of accidental / disease related deaths. (Which is unlikely)

Granted, real world death rates do increase after puberty, but even still a significant portion of preindustrial society was likely over 70. Barring a strong exponential population growth rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are groups working to fix this.

Around the world there are several breeding programs that are doing genetic and trait testing of wild varieties of our food plants and trying to use selective breeding plus dna testing to breed traits back into our proverbially cross-eyed knock-kneed commercial seeds, not unlike how the man who 'saved' the Irish Wolfhound crossbred mastiffs and Danes to strengthen the inbred bloodline.

I know there's a group working with carrots, and another one that's looking at wild rice to breed a more nutrient dense and drought tolerant rice strain, to answer questions like "could we have gotten vitamin A into rice without using transgenic techniques ('golden rice') to do so?"

There are also groups trying to breed biennial and perennial grains, to improve net yields (food minus fuel and labor inputs) and reduce topsoil degradation.

You just have to know where to look and who to cheerlead for.

</comment><comment><USER12> Golden Rice is an excellent case study for one solution to this problem. If the public were more accepting of GMO's we could take the existing best crop lines (bred for looks and supply chain) and insert additional nutrients. My companies technology (www.taxa.com) could easily do this if the regulatory and public acceptance issues weren't so big that we are focusing on non-food applications (glowing plants, blue roses etc).

<comment><USER13> How reliable/discrete is this process? Can I select particular nutrients and decide I want a plant to have them? Can you tell us more/provide some interesting references?

<comment><USER12> We can put new pathways into plants. Currently our tech allows up to ten genes. Most nutrients could be boosted with 1-2 additional genes (typically over expressing genes the plant already has or adding similar genes from other plants, eg Golden Rice add's beta carotene genes from daffodil), so today we could boost 4-6 nutrients. Over time we'll be able to add more and it will get easier (Eg through synthetic chromosomes). This explanation of how they made golden rice is probably helpful: [http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php](http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php)

It's not as simple as just putting the first genes into the plant, there is an optimization process needed. The regulatory costs however are at least 10-20 times greater than the development costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If phytonutrients are so good, why does the article repeatedly recommend cooking the plants? The fastest way to degrade those chemicals is to expose them to heat.

<comment><USER5> That's not true for all plants. For example, cooking can boost the absorption of the phytonutrient beta-carotene in carrots. Artichokes, beets, and onions can also be boiled without losing antioxidants. Microwaved green beans are actually more nutritious than raw green beans.

Source: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009.01091.x/full)

<comment><USER14> Carotenoids I knew, but I thought they were the exception. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical) "The main cause of phytochemical loss from cooking is thermal decomposition."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another thing that has impacted average human life time is _peace_. We have enjoyed 60 years without war on the European main continent, with no destruction or contamination of food sources.

Go back in history and all you'll find is death everywhere. Epidemics (pest, cholera), decades-long wars with despicable tactics as "scorched/salted earth", natural disasters without a way for people to defend themselves (earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions).

Now that we can control most of these factors, it's natural that life expectancy rises.

<comment><USER16> What do you consider to be the European main continent? There were significant wars not long ago in former Yugoslavia. There's a war going on in Ukraine right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could someone please remove the anchor to the comments section?

<comment><USER18> At your service, and have a (2013) as well.

Btw: would it work to just strip query strings and URL anchors out of NYT URLs? It would be nice if it did, but I don't want to break any stories.

<comment><USER19> Afaik, nothing after .html affects the content. It's just for tracking, but it leads to a dozen variants for the same page.

<comment><USER18> Maybe we'll take a random sample of recent NYT posts to HN and see if that's true of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was expecting him to quote the old saw about how a hundred years ago a single bowl of spinach could supply you with ALL the micronutrients you needed, while 20 years ago it took a hundred bowls to have the same nutritive value and today spinach is virtually nutrient free. Naturopaths like to toss that one about, and it comes from extraordinary rendition of various flawed data sets.

</comment><comment><USER21> I can't help be reminded of Jack LaLanne's two rules of nutrition: "If man made it, don't eat it", and "If it tastes good, spit it out."

Of course, he was not exactly a scientist, but he's right that our sense of taste is no longer a good measure of the value of food in the modern world. It seems likely that the way we will overcome this is through education -- but wouldn't it be great if there were some way to fix our sense of taste, so that valuable phytochemicals tasted sweet, or that lead tasted bitter?

</comment><comment><USER22> What we need is a method and implementation of testing selected piece of fruit and vegetable for actual and not averaged from ages ago nutrient content. I hope that one day it will be possible!

<comment><USER5> A simple test for the quality of produce can be done with a refractometer, or a so-called Brix meter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Every bloody vegetable and fruit in the supermarket is selected for appearance and sweetness. The bigger and sweeter, the better.

We'll end up eating sugar on a piece of cardboard, because that's where nutritional values are going.

It's really hard to eat properly, I don't see how it can be done without growing your own.

<comment><USER24> And do you have any research to back up your claim that those vegetables and fruits are less nutritious than ugly ones? That the amount of nutrients differs in a statistically significant way to produce negative health outcomes? Saying it doesn't make it a fact, we need good research to get to that. And, from what I can see, the research just isn't there. If people were just plain better at eating less processed sugars and better at eating more whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and even meats there would be greater improvements in health. What good are the super nutritious vegetables if no one eats them?

<comment><USER25> It is common sense that plants are bred for their ability to sell, not nutritional value. If a commercial grower had to choose between a fruit with a long shelf life and a nutritious one, which one will he pick?

<comment><USER26> False dichotomy. There are many variables at play and nutrition is not necessarily the loser on any particular selection choice.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Search This Formula at Google - <AUTHOR>

sqrt(cos(x))<i>cos(200 x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)</i>(4-x*x)^0.01,sqrt(9-x^2), -sqrt(9-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5 <comment><USER2> Must save that for valentine's day.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=batman+function></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cloud Infrastructure Hosting - to be or not to be? - <AUTHOR>

Say you have a small startup idea in mind - you can't get any help (read, hire) so everything will be made by you. The prototype, the selling, the marketing, administration. No way you can do it all efficiently, so something has to go. Marketing and the legwork can't be outsourced as easily as basic admining, so is it worth it? Do you get "bad" habbits from using services such as Pagoda/Heroku?
I always used to host and configure all my machines (VPS, basic AWS or dedicated). It's fine on a small scale, but maintaining 5-10 small boxes is a time killer, especially when you have a tall technology stack.
Not planning to get alot of traffic at first, but the structure has to be there from the beginning - then I will scale.
So basically, are these infrastructure providers:
- Cost effective compared to VPS/Cloud hosting (Linode, AWS)
- Really do scale as advertised? Being removed from low level optimizations one can do to LAMP setup can be VERY limiting...Does the scaling part is as easy and offsetting? Not knowing the precise my.cnf or httpd.conf settings is enough to give me nightmares.
- Are crack heroin? Will usage of such provider give one terrible coding and architecture decisions? Will the move away to dedicated require large changes to the actual codebase?
Thank you! <comment><USER2> You learn "good" habits from using cloud systems. You shouldn't be spending your time manually configuring your machines, you should be using DevOps to use source code to configure your machines. And building your own hardware is a great way to save money but you're still making capital expenditures when you could shift those expenses to operational expenditures, which is really the biggest benefit of cloud computing.

The systems all scale differently, depending on how their abstraction works. With Heroku yes, it's very easy to throttle up to more "dynos". They deal with the details for you. With Engine Yard, you have more control and so it's a little more involved because you instantiate new app server instances but it's still just as easy.

And using cloud systems also actually improves your architecture too. Instead of using local storage, you'll have to use a CDN like S3/CloudFront, which really is what you should be doing in the first place.</comment>


Would you let your kid use the product your company makes? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious, after watching a former FB creator saying he wouldn't let his kids use social media. How many other people here share this view? No need to share which company you work for, obviously. <comment><USER2> Yes (I work for Uber)</comment>


Ask HN: Distributed Call Center - <AUTHOR> Where can I find a phone forwarding system for cell phones? I was thinking to utilize people working from home for a distributed call center. When a call comes in the forwarding software will call an available person. I don't even know where to look for such a system. Thanks for any suggestions. <comment><USER2> You'll need to build a solution for that because each business has specific requirements. There will be a ring group and someone will pick-up the call from the group that's being ringed. If you have 10 people, 10 people will ring at the sametime, one will pick-up the phone call.

I can help you with that Gmail ramonck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will contact you. But at this point I'm just investigating and trying to understand what needs to be done. When you say you need to build a solution, where is this done? On the phone? On the computer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.live.sipgate.co.uk/](http://www.live.sipgate.co.uk/) for example...

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, sipgati is UK only. I'm in Turkey.</comment></comment>


Joint statement from SAG, AFM, AFTRA, DGA, IATSE and IBT regarding PIPA and SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.aftra.org/F1B6702A13BD47A4AD2F2F0020D929B3.htm

<comment><USER2> It always amuses me to see people whose jobs would NOT exist if NOT for piracy now complain about piracy.

A history lesson: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company#Backlash_and_Decline)

Which needs to never, ever be forgotten.</comment>


A simple, kernel-space, on-disk filesystem from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/psankar/simplefs <comment><USER2> "If you are planning to learn filesystems, start from the scratch. You can look from the first commit in this repository and move the way up."

Slightly off topic - I've always thought this is a very interesting use case for Github and open source in general - especially for understanding such low level concepts and their implementations. Provided the commit history is clear and comprehensive, this might be the best way to learn, other than do the whole thing yourself from scratch. Has somebody actually taken this path? What's your experience?

<comment><USER3> I've had this thought as well. I would love to see Github add support for a previous/next button when viewing a commit to make the experience seamless.

The trouble is, for many projects claiming to start from scratch, the "Initial commit" includes hundreds or thousands of lines of code. The practicality of learning this way is very much dependent on the author/committer making digestible, incremental commits and maintaining a linear history.

<comment><USER4> Previous/Next is a bit complicated if one of the key features of the versioning system you're using is that it's a graph.

Of course, that graph could easily be flattened (e.g. simply sort by date) but that'd cause you to jump all over the graph. It would make for a terrible and confusing user experience as the next commit is suddenly based on a state of the code you saw 20 steps ago.

As it would only work properly for projects with a completely linear history (which most projects don't have) I can understand Github not adding this feature. I'd say this is something a third party app using the Github API could do very well for projects specifically set up for learning through their history (like this one).

<comment><USER3> git is a digraph though, so it's not as complicated as an arbitrary graph. Every commit has a single parent, making a previous button trivial. The next commit is difficult, since that's where branching happens, but that's not so hard to represent: show all options and let the user continue along one path or another.

The implementation probably just involves walking backwards through history until you reach the initial commit, maintaining a bidirectional linked list as you go.

Github already allows users to walk forward and backward though history via the commits page[0]. It seems reasonable to provide the same "Newer", "Older" buttons when viewing an individual commit.

[0]: [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master?page=1](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master?page=1)

<comment><USER4> > Every commit has a single parent, making a previous button trivial.

Until, of course, you hit a merge commit. Which most projects have a lot of regardless of whether that's a good thing. I suppose you could always pick the parent which is on the same branch, but still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And best of all, the implementation is in the public domain (CC0):

[https://github.com/psankar/simplefs/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/psankar/simplefs/blob/master/LICENSE)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not a filesystem. But a simple experimental kv storage from scratch, [https://github.com/t3rm1n4l/lightkv](https://github.com/t3rm1n4l/lightkv)

</comment><comment><USER7> This filesystem seems _absurdly_ simple from all the limitations it has; looking at the amount of code (~1kLOC) I was expecting a bit more functionality than that, maybe closer to FAT level.

I've written a FAT32 driver for an embedded system before (with full read/write support) in ~800 lines of Asm, so to express that in C it could be a lot shorter. I think FAT is one of the simplest filesystems already.

<comment><USER8> 800 lines of assembler code basically means just 800 assembler (CPU) instructions - for a _complete_ FAT32 filesystem driver? I really hardly doubt that unless seen. :-)

Any way to opensource that or anything else to comment on your shockinly few 800 assembler instructions? ;-)

<comment><USER9> Depending on the amount of abstraction involved, it doesn't sound impossible to do. Given sane and direct access to the controller of the underlying device, and a reasonably simple underlying device (e.g. a simple Flash device), raw reads and writes can be written in maybe two dozen instructions each. Assuming userbinator was using a reasonable macro assembler, so that the 800 lines didn't also include string comparisons and all that, 800 lines doesn't look so little. I'm not sufficiently familiar with FAT32 but given a sane enough architecture, it doesn't sound that impossible.

<comment><USER7> Depends what you mean by "complete", but being able to create/read/write/delete files and directories is pretty complete to me. It doesn't take very many instructions to traverse a linked list or index an array, the two primary structures in FAT32.

Sorry I can't opensource it (being for a commercial product) but this is the approximate breakdown of that ~800 lines (I didn't count exactly, there are comments and whitespace included here too):

        70  initialisation
        140 cluster chain operations
        300 directory operations
        240 higher-level module interface
        50  data area (buffers, states, etc.)

_Given sane and direct access to the controller of the underlying device, and a reasonably simple underlying device (e.g. a simple Flash device), raw reads and writes can be written in maybe two dozen instructions each._

It calls into another driver for accessing the block device, so all block read/write operations take the ~6 instructions needed for a call.

 _Assuming userbinator was using a reasonable macro assembler, so that the 800 lines didn 't also include string comparisons and all that, 800 lines doesn't look so little._

I didn't use a macroassembler. It's for an 8-bit MCU; the final firmware image (including all the other functions of the product) is roughly 20KB.

<comment><USER9> Aye, it's an MCU I was thinking of in the first place, where read/write operations are done through a reasonably simple Flash controller and can be abstracted in a separate driver. I have written FS drivers of fairly similar complexity, in pretty much similar space constraints. That's why I wasn't incredulous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of a project I had done earlier: [https://github.com/jyotiska/vfs](https://github.com/jyotiska/vfs)

<comment><USER11> Your project repository contains a lot of backup files that should probably be removed (e.g. src/*.c~)

<comment><USER12> Submit a PR. Teach, help, and fix all in one action.</comment></comment></comment>


Stronger types for Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.acooke.org/pytyp/pytyp.html#strong-types

<comment><AUTHOR> Thought people might find this amusing / interesting (wish I had written it for April 1... although it does work). It's a spin-off from the use of type annotations to guide the interpretation of JSON data (Pytyp will marshal JSON/YAML data into Python classes, which is useful if you're using JSON to talk to some kind of service).

[Edit: Optional, product and sum types are supported, along with simple polymorphism. There's currently no type variables and no dispatch by type - although I think both could be added]

<comment><USER2> It's really cool that optional, product and sum types are supported.

Does it work correctly with abstract base classes as well? (I'm expecting yes, just checking).

Could it work with structural types as well? That would strike me as "more pythonic", and I've always been surprised that no Python type-annotation scheme can handle structural specs (though abcs are a step in the right direction).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I assume it works with ABCs, but haven't actually tried it (I ran out of time and wanted to publish something as a first release this weekend).

Structural types would make more sense for general use, but not for what the larger library was actually intended for (I think) so I never really looked in that direction (and I don't have any ideas on how to extend it to include them, either).

I do have an idea for a kind of type matching across sum types which will be quite neat if it works...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Except these aren't "strong" types. Python has those. These are pretend-static types.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure; in the docs I call them "runtime verification of type annotations".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a university student, and as a thesis project I've been working on a static type-checker for Python. I'm interested to see if people think this would be of practical good (my advisor and I certainly think it could be).

<comment><USER5> I would be extremely excited about a static type checker, and given how favorably Python is seen in this community, plenty of others would be here as well. So please do post when you have a finished product!

I'm sure you've seen these already, but if not, they would be highly relevant:

* GvR did a commentary on some of the challenges that would arise with an optional type system: <http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=85551>

* Python 3 included some syntactic changes precisely to support things like type checking: <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/>

<comment><USER4> I indeed have read Rossum's blog posts, but I haven't been following Python 3 at all, and only found out about annotations after looking at Pytyp, so that's definitely interesting and helpful, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If type annotations are fully respected that programmers code it like a statically-typed language (no type change for a variable in scope), will it be possible to AOT compile it?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could, but it's not really worth it - you'd end up with a pretty boring language. Also, JITs (in particular PyPy) should be able to get decent performance in the near future without asking the programmer to do anything unusual. In simple terms they assume that types are whatever they find and compile for that (occasionally the assumption is wrong, and they have to correct and do something else, but most of the time you get good performance just by pretending the program was written with static types, even though it wasn't). Obviously it's more complex than that, but you get the idea (the hard part is largely reducing the number of times you need to check you're assumptions are still OK)</comment></comment>


The Ellen Pao Trial and Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/the-trial-that-makes-silicon-valley-shudder <comment><USER2> > That said, a Kleiner victory is well within the realm of the possible. Many > women in the tech industry are concerned that Pao's case is weak and that > her accusations might exacerbate bias in the workplace. "I worry that it > will make a lot more men feel that—being nice to and mentoring and trying to > be a good person toward women colleagues—they, too, will be hauled before a > jury," says Melinda Riechert, managing partner in the Silicon Valley office > of law firm Morgan Lewis. For example, a key allegation in the case is that > a Kleiner partner, Randy Komisar, behaved inappropriately when he gave Pao a > volume of Leonard Cohen's poems and drawings (entitled Book of Longing) on > Valentine's Day and asked her out to dinner on a night when his wife was out > of town. Komisar says it was completely friendly and that his wife bought > the book for Pao. Will men now retreat from cordial gestures toward female > colleagues?

Does anyone else not see the immediate disconnect here?

I agree that Pao's case is weak but:

It juxtaposes that with a woman saying something about "being nice and mentoring" while pointing out at the same time a married man is handing out gifts on Valentine's Day.

I mean, come on. Does anyone seriously think that was anything other than hitting on Pao?

Any other day of the year it would have been fine. That specific day out of the 365 options was picked solely for that implication. It just feels weird to me that they'd compose things that way in the article.

"Being nice" \- Doing nice things for a woman on days other than those dedicated to romance.

"Hitting on a woman" \- Doing nice things and inviting her to be alone with you on a day dedicated to romance.

How is this not a clear line?

<comment><USER3> I think the author of this article made it (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous as to when these events took place.

 _he gave Pao a volume of Leonard Cohen's poems and drawings (entitled Book of Longing) on Valentine's Day and asked her out to dinner on a night when his wife was out of town_

These could very well be two completely separate occasions. I suspect the author created this juxtaposition to elicit your precise reaction.

<comment><USER4> This is why I feel it's just better to refrain from any sort of judgment on this case based on what you read in the news. You're right - as it's written, it looks like "Duh, he's hitting on her." But did he give a gift to everyone on Valentine's Day? When he "asked her out to dinner on a night when his wife was out of town", was it a date or a "Let's talk about a potential investment at a popular VC haunt"?

I have no idea which is true, and I don't think I'm going to be able to find out based on summaries in the news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think this trial has much to do with larger women in tech issues. There's a lot of politics at play for ALL employees of VC firms and this doesn't sound any different.

If you've been following all of the coverage of this case, Pao isn't coming off well.

She states that it was discriminatory that she didn't get her review on time. Unprofessional to have a delayed review? Yes. Gender harassment? No. Instead of doing her review, they just gave her a bonus of $150,000 and a $40,000 raise (that she claims not to remember).

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/ellen-pao-was- res...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/ellen-pao-was-resentful- and-dismissive-kleiner-perkins-lawyers-say/)

From this article:

> Pao has also raised an incident in which one of the firm's senior partners, > former Hewlett-Packard Chairman Ray Lane, asked her and a second female > colleague to takes notes at a partners' meeting. "I just froze, I wasn't > sure what to do," Pao testified on the stand.

I'm a man in a managerial position. I've been asked to take notes many times in meetings. Sometimes I do, sometimes I have to talk a lot and so someone else has to.

> Kleiner waited too long to fire a male partner who seemed to be treating the > firm as his own private dating website.

Pao and Nazre were dating and both married at the time. There's a ton of he said she said, but to put it all on Nazre isn't fair.

[EDIT] I was incorrect about this. See Anechoic's comment below.

Pao has stated that she took the Reddit CEO role because she couldn't get a job as an investor. Honestly, Reddit CEO sounds like a much better job than all but the most senior of investment positions.

There's a lot to this story, and it's getting legs because gender issues in tech are a HOT topic right now. I don't see any of this case having larger implications though.

[EDIT] Please don't just downvote me. If you disagree, leave a reply.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how you could possibly not see how it has larger implications. For years we've been told that the reason there's no women in tech is because of all us sexist brogrammers, despite the typical programmer being the opposite of a 'bro', while the VCs very much resemble them, and somehow VCs being 96% male with most top firms having NO women as partners slips by unnoticed. VCs intentionally create frat house cultures at the tech companies they invest in because they assume it saves them money to hire misfit programmers who need a workplace to provide a social life rather than act like processionals and demand professional compensation, and that frat house culture is also antagonistic to people who aren't young males. Finally, I don't see how you could read a case where a VC firm made mis-step after mis-step, and a highly qualified woman suggested they invest in winners like Twitter only to be ignored, and brushed off for invites to the Democrats the VCs are in bed with like Al Gore, and not see how she clearly as an extremely strong case of gender discrimination against a rich and powerful sect of elite VCs who have hidden their sickening behavior in the shadows for far too long.

<comment><USER5> You're throwing a lot of opinion out there that's not backed by evidence or even anecdote.

I currently work for a VC funded company and have worked for several in the past. I would not describe any of them as "frat house cultures". You're making some pretty sweeping generalizations.

The dinner with Al Gore was for senior partners and there WAS women invited, they just couldn't make it. Here's Mary Meeker on the subject:

[http://recode.net/2015/03/16/liveblog-mary-meeker- testifies-...](http://recode.net/2015/03/16/liveblog-mary-meeker-testifies-in- paokleiner-perkins-case/)

> a highly qualified woman suggested they invest in winners like Twitter only > to be ignored

We don't know the fully story here. They had already looked at investing in Twitter and passed. A mistake? Sure. But anti-portfolios are famous. Whether Pao is "highly qualified" or not is debatable. Has she made any successful investments? Was she previously a successful entrepreneur? Those are things that would make you highly qualified to be a VC.

I don't see anything "sickening" here.

<comment><USER6> Wrong, I do have facts on my side, and we do have a big chunk of the story because it's being aired out in a high profile court case for those of us paying attention.

I've been to several VC-funded companies that involved things like excessive drinking, happy hours as part of the interviews, etc. For some bizarre reason involving an algorithm called Future Founders that looks for potential founders, I also got invited to a VC lunch where they talked about these strategies, ways to effectively outsource, etc. I am going to write a tell-all about it eventually but I'm still too mid-career for it to be a good idea.

VCs are throwing around a lot of intangibles and "we just can't know for sure" for why there field is 96% male, and yet the woman who objectively outperforms them doesn't get promoted. You can easily fact check the sexism I'm talking about by just looking up top VC firms and scrolling through their list of partners, and I would also recommend every tech employee look at the gender makeup of their board of directors, and reading more about this case.

Are you joking about saying her qualifications are debatable? She has an engineering degree from Princeton, an MBA and JD from Harvard, and the only thing that prevents her from having a track record of successful investments is the sexism being demonstrated in this case!

96% male, paying yourselevs $3 million a year but running to Democrats like Obama and DeBlasio to spend taxpayer money to fill your "talent shortage", harassing and retaliating against the few female VCs you do have, I do see sickening behavior, and the reason you can't is because you're a corporate shill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stories like this make me feel ambivalent.

Gender inequality being brought to the forefront fairly commonly has definitely forced me to evaluate my own actions and words. It sounds silly (and it is because it's mostly beneficial), but I certainly treat female colleagues differently: I'm much more thoughtful about what I say and do, and try to be as explicit as possible if I think there's any way that my words/actions could be misconstrued. Thoughtful in a way that I'm absolutely not around male colleagues.

And maybe that's totally fine: I really doubt I'll ever regret being _more_ thoughtful. I certainly do this to some extent with people from other cultural backgrounds, so applying it to people from other gender backgrounds (so-to- speak) is probably appropriate.

But it does absolutely setup this "othering" in my mind - I don't see Jennifer as just my coworker, she's my coworker and she's also a woman and I need to be cognizant of how I act and talk around her. I'm careful to think about my words and actions before they materialize, whereas with men I'm much more likely to just act/talk and explain later if necessary. "Asking permission" vs. "Seeking forgiveness".

I don't envy being John Doerr - unless Pao was an absolutely clear frontrunner for becoming a senior partner, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Tracy DiNunzio, chief executive officer of Tradesy, an online fashion site in which Kleiner Perkins has invested, says she was recently told by a male chief executive officer that he doesn't know how to talk to female colleagues any more and that it's become too easy to say the wrong thing. The case "may make it harder for men to feel free to give women the kinds of constructive criticism that men receive regularly and that they benefit from," she says."

I found this paragraph to be the most interesting. We're clearly moving from a sexist world to a less sexist world. The transition involves moving norms of what's acceptable and that's creating a lot of angst for both men and women. The above paragraph (and the one before it in the article) represent one common response "Why can't it just be like it was before?" but there's no going backward. Eventually we'll settle at a new equilibrium but Sandy's book and this trial and some other events will be viewed as pivotal moments when they write the textbooks in 20 to 30 years.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a PR victory for KP that the media generally refers to this as the "Ellen Pao Trial" rather than the "Kleiner Perkins Trial"</comment>


We Asked Marketers What Will Happen to Marketing in 2020 and Here's What They Said - <AUTHOR> http://www.tintup.com/blog/future-of-advertising-and-marketing/ <comment><USER2> Is this satire that I am missing?

"VR ads for your personal thoughts?"

That sounds horrible. Augmented and VR is just more space to plaster ads. They won't be any different than the billboards on the highway or banners on your website. But that assumes people adopt those technologies. But personalization is right. Those billboards and banner ads will be "personalized" to you. That just means shows video games and sports if you are middle age man, and household products if you own a home. It is really hard to get more than that. It's mostly buckets (male/female, age, location, facebook likes), activity (bought something last 15/30/90 days), and recommendations (You and They both bought X, They bought Y also, why don't you by Y?). There are a ton of other knobs to tune, but with limited results.

A major potential now is for TV to start doing that. Switch TV from single broadcast to a stream with customizable ad slots. First gen it will probably just end up the same 15 ads every commercial break like Hulu but worse. If you could do that though, second gen you could charge more per view and decrease total ad time, and still end up with more money. Then turn around and market the reduced ad time as a reason people should watch your channel. Thereby attracting more viewers and increasing ad revenue that way. Fragmentation is still a bottleneck for streaming, a million different apps, sites, platforms. You can still just turn on a TV and flip channels. That will always be hard to compete with.</comment>


SOPA: The End of the Internet as We Know it - <AUTHOR> http://bostinno.com/2011/12/20/sopa-will-kill-the-internet/

<comment><USER2> SOPA is a very bad thing. We've heard it every day for weeks here and everywhere else techies hang out.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having already signed all the petitions, already written to all my representatives, already spread the word to my personal network so other people can do the same.

At this point, what can I do but watch it happen?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish the music and film industries would just die already. They are nothing but a drag on society.

</comment><comment><USER4> Okay I'm not going to attempt to support/defend SOPA but I have some serious questions:

Why do all of these SOPA articles on HN fail to mention that this bill specifically targets "foreign" sites?

They all mention a possible threat against youtube, facebook etc, but since these are "domestic" sites aren't they excluded?

Is there a particular definition or qualification in the bill that I missed that would widen the scope to include these existing sites?

(I do acknowledge that a potential youtube/facebook competitor overseas IS affected by SOPA, so again, I'm not saying SOPA is good, as it should be obvious it isn't. But lets bash it based on facts not conjecture or, worse, emotion)

<comment><USER5> As I understand it, there are at least 3 different ways SOPA can affect a person/company negatively:

1\. If your site gets targeted to be blocked.

2\. If you run an ISP and you have to manage the infrastructure to block websites.

3\. If you develop a program that could be used to route around DNS blocks, which SOPA would make illegal.

So, while targeting the bill at foreign sites lessens its impact for #1, which is still bad, it does nothing to lessen the impact of #2 and #3.

<comment><USER4> Both #2 and #3 are addressed in the bill as well. [http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/HR%203261%20Managers...](http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/HR%203261%20Managers%20Amendment.pdf)

For #2 see: No Duty to Monitor, No Technology Mandates and No Impact on Security or Integrity in Section 2 Savings and Severability Clauses, and then Service Providers in Section 102. My paraphrasing: Service Provider is not required to actively monitor, design their service to "forestall or prevent acts that would actually or potentially create a cause of action".

For #3 see: Enforcement of Orders in Section 102. My paraphrasing: Attorney General may bring an action for "injunctive relief" against any product or service that is designed or marketed for the purpose of enabling a domain name affected by this act. I think MAFIAAfire and DeSOPA both apply here but a general DNS cacher/sharer may not apply since they could be said to have different purposes than just bypassing SOPA/ICE/ProtectIP.

So, yeah, some people can be affected negatively, but I think they have put in some effort to address the issues you bring up while still being able to carry out their mission of targeting foreign sites dedicated to infringing and profiting off of copyrighted works.

I am not a lawyer, this is only my best attempt of explaining the bill which I have read now a few times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A big sincere thank you to the author for giving concrete examples of why this is bad, instead of general fearmongering and ranting.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm no lawyer, by any means but this SOPA bill sounds to me like it's proposed by either very naive or very devious people. Naive in the sense that this whole SOPA thing seems to be wide open to abuse or devious in that this whole SOPA thing seems to be wide open to abuse...</comment>