Still Face experiment: What happens when a mother shows no response to a child? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0 <comment><USER2> Absolutely incredible. Emotional state is even more powerful than logic. The baby knows the mother is right there and could still sense something was wrong.

<comment><USER3> Which leads to the question - had this been repeated daily - can training make logic overcome the emotion at such a young age? Can the same situation be turned in to a "game"?

<comment><USER4> yes, and you may end up with a psychopath child <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy>

Or somebody with full blown npd (narcissistic): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder)

Pick your poison.

That experiment was actually painful to watch.

<comment><USER5> I agree, I found it very uncomfortable. And only 2 minutes!

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it was horrible. Imagine what it would do to a child to be brought up in an environment that cold and unresponsive. :-(

<comment><USER7> There are some horrific examples of just this in the dark past of psychotherapy if you care to take a look. Once was enough for me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kind of reminds me of the surrogate mother experiment which shows the importance of contact to a developing monkey.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Surrogate_mother_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Surrogate_mother_experiment)

</comment><comment><USER9> As a parent of two, that's exactly what I expected to see. The mother shows a lot of control, that had to be hard, even for a short period.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand parents who let their kids (e.g. <2 years) "cry it out" to learn how to self sooth, especially at night w/r/t to sleep. It's totally counter-instinctual and inhuman. Just look at how freaked out this baby gets, and she can still _see_ her mom. Our son woke up about 8 times a night for 1.5 years, and we were always there for him. Luckily he's gone down to 2-4 wake ups a night, finally.

<comment><USER11> Stimulus/response. If crying results in a near instant response, crying becomes the mode of communication. I'd love to find the citation but studies we read months ago indicated to us that allowing a baby to experience a certain level of frustration can help it build coping skills - so we gave it a try (but not full on Ferberization, just 10 minutes here and there for the first few months, mostly during the _day_ \- at night we did the "pick up, put down" technique). My wife found it _very_ hard but she was all for it, and as a bit of a Vulcan-esque personality, I could control the situation.

All babies have different temperaments, of course, but ours has now slept 7am-7am with only one wake up (for food - she goes back to sleep within 5 minutes) between 2-5 months (with only one nightmare week when we tried weaning too early - causes painful gas!). She is a very happy baby. We have teething due next though, I bet.. :-)

Something interesting has arisen from our technique, too. She's had to build a rich vocabulary of sounds. We can usually tell when cries are "real" or merely to communicate, and can "ignore" most of the superfluous ones. The result has been that she shouts or laughs for attention, and we respond to that _immediately_ (as we want to encourage it). Over time, nearly all non- essential crying has stopped and been replaced by funny sounding "argh!" and "Wooo!" type shouts and calls.

To any (future) parents reading this who want to try similar techniques, I can't personally recommend it. All kids are different and what we've tried is _very_ against the grain with the current common literature on raising a kid. Take what I say with a big pinch of salt - it just worked for us, is all.

<comment><USER12> "I'd love to find the citation but studies we read months ago indicated to us that allowing a baby to experience a certain level of frustration can help it build coping skills"

I hope that I won't do stuff to my child because I read somewhere that it might be good. Isn't there a chance to simply feel what is right?

The stimulus/response aspect is very interesting, though. Couldn't there other ways to untrain the "cry to get attention" behavior than letting the child cry out? Like responding to other cues than crying?

This just makes me think it might be interesting to program a simulation of such behaviors and look for equilibriums. Because it is not only the child reacting to parents, but also the parents reacting to the child, it's a complex system... Ah, wish the day had 48 hours...

<comment><USER11> _I hope that I won't do stuff to my child because I read somewhere that it might be good. Isn't there a chance to simply feel what is right?_

Sure, different strokes for different folks! I don't think anyone who always goes with their gut is wrong, but I also don't think experimenting within safe boundaries is a bad thing. I think everyone _should_ bring their kids up in different ways - diversity of approaches is a _good_ thing.

One thing I painfully recognize, though, is that I'm often wrong and my gut instincts are based on faulty underlying facts, so I'm quick to use other people's knowledge to either reinforce what I know or to change my direction. "Overcoming" certain parenting instincts in this way could be seen by some (and possibly rightly) to be risky - I just see it as an attempt to improve.

Watching a documentary about child rearing worldwide, we were surprised at how many different (and, to Western eyes, worrying) ways there are to raise and treat kids. As a planet, we do "ok." The nomads on the Russian steppes wrap their babies tightly all day and put them in a cradle on the back of a donkey for 8 hours a day..

 _Couldn't there other ways to untrain the "cry to get attention" behavior than letting the child cry out? Like responding to other cues than crying?_

My reading suggests so, but that it's a lot harder and time demanding. The reason is that instead of giving zero response to undesirable behavior and a lot of response to positive behavior.. instead you're giving positive behavior to everything and need to give _very_ strong and constant responses to the positive behavior to make it stick, as it were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It makes me feel bad for the baby. "Why isn't mommy playing with me? What happened?!"

</comment><comment><USER14> this goes into more things that babies can do: [http://www.cracked.com/article_18404_6-shockingly-evil- thing...](http://www.cracked.com/article_18404_6-shockingly-evil-things- babies-are-capable-of.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> As someone a few days away from having his first child, this is pretty stunning. I don't want to say it's unsurprising, because it makes total logical sense. However, the speed at which the baby went from being in a happy mood to trying to get her mother's attention again was the most interesting point.

It must've been difficult for the mother to not respond, and I can't imagine the parent who doesn't love their child like that. It just makes child abuse that much worse knowing how much children need attention like that.

<comment><USER16> Congratulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not 100% convinced.

Is this really about still-face or lack of interaction with the child?

What if the mother interacts with the kid with a still-face, will the baby react the same way?

<comment><USER18> Father of a 2 year old here. It is really about still-face. Daughter won't allow me to change her nappy still-faced (notice this often when I have something else on my mind and try to do a quick nappy change expressionless). I have to acknowledge her and talk to her otherwise she'll cry.

<comment><USER17> gsk,

Thanks. I don't have a kid so I can't do the experiment. It's just amazing how much intelligence babies have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool to see this, as I did something like this recently with our 4-5 month old and her reactions were almost exactly the same.

<comment><USER19> I doubt doing it once matters, but isn't there something kind of bad about having a baby escalate signals until it cries, and then responding with attention as soon as it does? I guess there's no other way to do the experiment and then calm the kid down but it seems a little weird to watch.

<comment><USER20> It would be bad to do it a lot maybe. But a few times is not going to have any harm.

At worst it will teach the baby to cry right away when the mother does that.

Babies cry a lot, and people don't play with them constantly. A little more isn't going to harm them.

The times where there is a positive reactions far outweigh the negative ones here. Not sure if that was clear. I mean that when there is a positive reaction the baby learns from it. A negative one is mostly ignored as far as long term learning goes.

<comment><USER11> _Babies cry a lot, and people don't play with them constantly. A little more isn't going to harm them._

I wish I could find the citation but my wife and I did a lot of reading of studies in the early weeks we had our baby. There were more than a few references to actually _allowing_ your baby to be frustrated and upset _from time to time_ in order to ensure they developed the skills to deal with a little frustration, rather than growing up to freak out at every tiny thing.

We're no child psychologists, but it's worked for us. Perhaps a few times a week when the baby was inconsolable, we'd let her "cry it out" (but not full on Ferberizing) for 5-10 minutes and then console her when she went into a quieter phase. Now, at five months, she's well adjusted (for her age), sleeps through the night, and deals with frustration pretty well. It could all be BS, of course, but letting her freak out from time to time didn't do any obvious harm, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How is this in any way surprising from a 1-year-old?

This guy gets paid for this research?

<comment><USER22> Experimentally confirming things you think are true is still science, especially if you can quantify the results precisely. And as he says 1 minute in, this experiment was first done 30-odd years ago, when scientists (perhaps obtusely) did not think babies interacted in a socially meaningful way.

<comment><USER21> I understand that. I can see how this piece of experimentation would fit into a greater project. But to produce this video and tell the world about it? Seems crazy to me.

<comment><USER22> Popularizing scientific findings is also a service. I have that conversation a lot with people. :D Maybe it's not "hacker news", I can't say.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Building Android Twitter App Using JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.firstamong.com/create-your-own-twitter-android-application-using-phonegap/

<comment><USER2> FYI, you can do the same with WebMynd (YC08)! Built with the developer in mind, we offer simple cross-platform app development with a less bloated API. <http://www.webmynd.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> But phonegap is free and also supports cross platform</comment></comment>


Pipe Logic – Simulating circuits in the Unix shell (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/pipelogic/ <comment><USER2> On a related note, it took me years of playing with *nix to notice that the notations '&' and '|' were chosen to mimic series and parallel operations. These days we tend to think of '&' as a backgrounding operation, and it's almost always the final token in a command:

      $ some_background_command &

I suspect it was originally intended to run commands in parallel:

      $ command1 & command2

<comment><USER3> The pipe | symbol came in 1972 [1], fork was 1971 [2]

So I doubt it

[1] [http://www.softpanorama.org/Scripting/pipes.shtml](http://www.softpanorama.org/Scripting/pipes.shtml)

[2[ [https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/pdfs/man21.pdf](https://www.bell- labs.com/usr/dmr/www/pdfs/man21.pdf)

<comment><USER2> `fork()` in the kernel is a prerequisite for `&` in the shell, but not the same thing. Another sample point: job control first came to shells in 1981 ([http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.1_BSD](http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.1_BSD)). Perhaps '&' too originated then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is brilliance - epiphany for sure. I will try this.

All the folks out there working with arduinos and the like and having to diagram/proto the pins and their control, particular I2C might find this useful...which is what im going to try use it for.

</comment><comment><USER5> as long as we don't run out of PIDs... spoken like a true hero

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow man that's awesome! Congratulations..</comment>


A recreation of the first level of Super Mario Bros. in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario-Level-1 <comment><USER2> So I created this project (I just found out this morning someone posted it here).

To answer a few questions:

1) DMCA/Copyright: I have no idea the legal grounds for this sort of project. There is an Javascript/HTML5 version of Mario that is much better and more complete than mine and it still exists on Github. If I get a takedown notice, I suppose the only people who lose out are people other than me who want to check it out. I'm not too concerned either way, to be honest.

2) Memory / CPU issues: Anyone concerned about these issues wouldn't make a game in Python and Pygame. I'm just a hobbyist who enjoys the language and the particular library I used.

3) Audio Latency: That is purely from the screen recording. There is no latency when you play it on your machine (to my knowledge).

4) Purpose of this project: I have been programming for 7 months, 2 of which I spent on this project. I never expected this project to get this much attention, but I suppose the cross-over appeal of Python and Mario is quite high. Fundamentally this was a learning activity to create something I thought was cool. Like I explained here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBbzYKMfx5Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBbzYKMfx5Y) , I knew basically nothing about making a platformer before this project. I still have a lot to learn.

<comment><USER3> So my two cents. Awesome job. I wouldn't have been able to approach anything like this five months after I started teaching myself to code.

I don't know how anyone could watch the vid and be so cynical about the choice of game, language or library. It's a clear example of autodidactic exploration.

Have you seen the portal gun mario? [1] (I hadn't until five minutes ago; link stolen from a comment down the page here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7284719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7284719) )

Might be interesting to think of different and/or bizarre ways you could potentially alter the game mechanics as you go along to create a new experience. I like those kinds of exercises because they help me think about structuring things in a decoupled way so I can arbitrarily modify part of the mechanics without having to rewrite everything. Might be a cool/informative exercise if you keep playing with the game.

Either, cool project.

[1] [http://stabyourself.net/mari0/](http://stabyourself.net/mari0/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm impressed! The code is well structured and you're using Python and PyGame, which is awesome! Well done!

For anyone wanting to learn Python and PyGame I'll just leave this here: [http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses/TableOfContents/game...](http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses/TableOfContents/game- programming-python-pygame)

</comment><comment><USER5> So you took a game that used to take a few dozen KB of memory and an 8-bit CPU running at less than 2MHz, and turned it into one requiring many orders of magnitude more memory and CPU speed? I'm impressively disturbed.

<comment><USER6> It's a shame that you're getting voted down for making a very valid and truthful comment.

It really isn't impressive when we see 1980s-era games recreated in JavaScript, for example, and the same should be true when dealing with Python.

That's not to say that this effort lacks value. The author likely enjoyed working on it, and maybe learned something while working on it, too. It could be a useful reference work for those getting started with Python or PyGame, as well. But we surely should not be impressed by it in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I prefer mari0. It's mario with a portal gun.

It's written in Lua using LÖVE, it's really cool.

[http://stabyourself.net/mari0/](http://stabyourself.net/mari0/)

[https://love2d.org/](https://love2d.org/)

<comment><USER3> Whoa. Glad I came in here if for no other reason than to see this. I always get a kick out of people copying quirky new mechanics onto other games to see what happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For anyone having trouble to run this on OS X Mavericks, you need this pygame binary:

[http://www.pygame.org/ftp/pygame-1.9.2pre- py2.7-macosx10.7.m...](http://www.pygame.org/ftp/pygame-1.9.2pre- py2.7-macosx10.7.mpkg.zip)

<comment><USER9> thank you. I was on the way to making a virtual environment and pip installing it

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> DMCA takedown in 3, 2, 1...

Still a cool project anyway.

<comment><USER11> [https://github.com/Diogenesthecynic/FullScreenMario](https://github.com/Diogenesthecynic/FullScreenMario) is still there, even after a legal complaint from Nintendo.

<comment><USER10> But they did have to close the site. And I guess that Nintendo could easily bring them to court and win (not that they will, it's a small non-profit target).

My comment was meant as a "funny" way to say that Nintendo is usually very unforgiven with clones of their games.

<comment><USER12> You're not very funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would have liked to see all the sound and music done with FM synthesis (or whatever the Nintendo used) in Python as well, instead of .ogg files.

<comment><USER13> Also the palette shifting that they used to get different colors out of the same assets.

<comment><USER14> Why do you want to see these things? These are adaptations to the platform that the original game was developed on (and its limitations). What would be the purpose of reproducing those limitations in a new implementation for a completely different platform?

<comment><USER15> I spent a year remaking Pac-Man and many of its peculiarities. (Namco shut it down on github, while a thousand other pacman remakes there remain.)

Games will be considered a form of art someday. And it is the whole form of an art piece that is important (i.e. the medium, inner workings, presentation). In the future, the innards of classic games may become increasingly important, perhaps from an anthropological perspective. When video games become centuries old, I feel they will be artifacts of an emergent art form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would providing alternative art/music and not using the Mario trademark make this legally safe? If the project is serious about continuing, I am sure any number of people would be willing to help out with legally acceptable replacements.

<comment><USER16> Nintendo seems to be pretty lenient about non-profit fangames, actually. Mari0 ([http://stabyourself.net/mari0/](http://stabyourself.net/mari0/)) and Super Mario Bros. Crossover ([http://www.explodingrabbit.com/games/super-mario-bros- crosso...](http://www.explodingrabbit.com/games/super-mario-bros-crossover)) have both gotten a lot of media attention without any legal issues I'm aware of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario- Level-1/blob/master/d...](https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario- Level-1/blob/master/data/tools.py) Line 134 & 135\. Lol?

<comment><USER18> You can highlight multiple lines: [https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario- Level-1/blob/master/d...](https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario- Level-1/blob/master/data/tools.py#L134-L135)

<comment><USER19> Code is still clean, just has the wrong name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario- Level-1/blob/master/d...](https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario- Level-1/blob/master/data/states/level1.py)

Why on Earth would you create the level like this instead of using something like Tiled[1]? Pretty much everything you can make a game with has support for TMX tilemaps, and if not making basic support yourself shouldn't be too hard either, and ultimately way less effort.

[1] [http://www.mapeditor.org/](http://www.mapeditor.org/)

<comment><USER21> He talks about it extensively in the video on the site, and I think he agrees with you that tilemaps would be preferable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> No way. This is awesome. Any plans to do other Mario levels or other classic games?

</comment><comment><USER23> Neat project! You should to tutorials - it's a great learning example

<comment><USER2> I feel like I'm not knowledgeable or experienced enough to write tutorials, but I wrote a list of resources people might use if they want to get into pygame on reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ymn1w/i_recreated_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ymn1w/i_recreated_the_first_level_of_super_mario_bros/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> does that huge lag bother anyone?

it might just be an out of sync screen recording, but it seems to me like there is an input lag.

<comment><USER25> The real Super Mario Bros. feels that way as well. This is due to Mario's very shallow acceleration curve. It's one of the main reasons the game is so challenging to play!

Edit: After having watched the video, it appears to be out of sync and dropping frames.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe spend an afternoon learning up on copyright and trademark law.

Why would you spend so much time on something that clearly violates the intellectual property of Nintendo?

<comment><USER27> for the sake of learning?

EDIT: Also, if you check the commit history, I'm quite sure he didn't spend way much time.

<comment><USER26> 133 commits? And you have to violate copyright or trademark to learn? Please.

<comment><USER28> I'm pretty sure you care more about this than Nintendo ever will. Get off your high horse. As someone who has never used PyGame, this is really cool to look into and learn from.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do fighter pilots typically earn their call signs? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/How-do-fighter-pilots-typically-earn-their-call-signs?share=1 <comment><USER2> It was always Fumbles.</comment>


The DAO as a lesson in decentralized governance - <AUTHOR> https://urbit.org/blog/dao/ <comment><USER2> This is an excellent article. The DAO wanted to eliminate politics. But that is not really possible, due to the nature of human psychology and the human situation. You are always going to get cheaters, errors, unanticipated situations, and honest disagreements, all of which will require real human beings to make decisions and have the power to enforce them. Ethereum contracts can at best considerably reduce the number of situations.

And politics is always imperfect, the only question is how to do it as well as possible, and that takes intelligent judgement and at least occasionally a lot of luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can somebody explain in simple words what urbit is? I just couldn't figure it out from the website.

<comment><USER4> This is a pretty good thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851849)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stopped reading halfway. DAO suffered from a technical bug. But technical bugs happen to centralized and decentralized and whateverize types of entities.</comment>


Enterprise Software Doesn't Have to Suck - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rypple.com/2010/09/3-reasons-enterprise-software-doesnt-have-to-suck/

<comment><USER2> I think some people who write about enterprise software either haven't worked on really big enterprise software or don't realize how it came to be bad. The problem isn't that suddenly your product started sucking -- mostly it's that inefficiencies or poor design decisions made 3 years ago suddenly start biting you in the ass.

In other words, software ages like people -- year to year there's not a huge difference, but 10 years later you look back and say "what the f __k happened?!"

Now, some software just clearly wasn't designed with usability in mind. Much more, however, was probably designed with a limited goal that was forced to quickly adapt to more complex situations. Startups and web companies have it relatively easy -- you can simply change your code on your server and suddenly everyone's up to date. Other companies have to deal with backwards compatibility and standards and shipping and all the pains of large projects in general. The people who come in saying "Well the people in charge are just idiots. If _I_ were in charge we'd have SCRUM and new languages and modern development practices and everything would fix itself immediately!" really don't know what they're talking about.

I think that the article has some good points (not getting involved enough with the actual users is a big one), but they're really too young to say "we have found the Holy Grail!" Removing features, especially, strikes me as something which sounds like a good idea but can really hurt you as a business. When your customer is a 300 person mid-size corporation you can easily say, "well, we had to make some changes here and that feature had to go." When your customer is a retail giant employing 300,000 people all over the country, you think very, very carefully about removing that feature.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment Locke1689. You make some excellent points.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the Head of Marketing for Rypple.)

Rypple itself may be young, but the guys who co-founded it are very experienced in the world of traditional, capital-E, Enterprise software. They were the head of sales and marketing at Workbrain, which they grew to $100m in revenue providing serious Enterprise solutions to the biggest companies in the world. They intimately understand how this world works and so they are well qualified to say that our approach is a much better one.

You're absolutely right about it being easier when you're SaaS. We're confident that this is not a fad, for the very reasons you mention. Salesforce.com is hardly a startup anymore and is a significant player in the Enterprise space with an entirely SaaS-based solution. The next version of Office is rumored to be a Cloud solution. Even consumer-focused products like the AppleTV have gone from client-side storage to the Cloud.

The strongest reaction to this post is around the idea of removing features, with lots of people saying "You can't do that!" and "Your customers will revolt!". We get that. It's the natural reaction after years of building software in the traditional way. Here's the thing though: our customers celebrate when we take features out. We get emails from them thanking us for keeping the app simple and jettisoning the cruft. We sometimes pull something out that we do get a strong reaction to, and then we work closely with the users who felt strongly to make the feature awesome and put it back in.

Keep the comments coming!

Thanks,

Jay

<comment><USER2> Thanks Jay, I love to have open dialog.

 _Rypple itself may be young, but the guys who co-founded it are very experienced in the world of traditional, capital-E, Enterprise software. They were the head of sales and marketing at Workbrain, which they grew to $100m in revenue providing serious Enterprise solutions to the biggest companies in the world. They intimately understand how this world works and so they are well qualified to say that our approach is a much better one._

I didn't mean to insinuate that the companies are somehow unqualified to make those judgements. It's usually the armchair experts that make these kind of comments. When I referred to the young age of the company I was really referring to the company model itself instead of the people inside. I wish you the best of luck but my point was mainly that knowledge and acumen are great, but when it gets down to it the proof is in the pudding. I hope you guys will still be here in 10-15 years and it will be great if you are and the model does scale into the long term, but I think it's premature to say it's definitely succeeded before the eggs have hatched.

 _The strongest reaction to this post is around the idea of removing features, with lots of people saying "You can't do that!" and "Your customers will revolt!". We get that. It's the natural reaction after years of building software in the traditional way. Here's the thing though: our customers celebrate when we take features out. We get emails from them thanking us for keeping the app simple and jettisoning the cruft. We sometimes pull something out that we do get a strong reaction to, and then we work closely with the users who felt strongly to make the feature awesome and put it back in._

I think this really depends. Mainly it depends on what kinds of features you're removing. One thing I'd really caution against is changing your API every couple months. That is the kind of thing that can drive your company into a hole they can't crawl out of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article gets it right in defining the classic problem: buyers are not generally users. And when they are, they're not qualified to make informed decisions about design.

Where the article gets it wrong is the solution. At least in my limited experience, enterprises are slow to change things if they "work", however painful. They also do not always entertain SAAS for a variety of reasons, two of which are probably inertia and a different sales process than they're used to.

Couple that with IT departments that block "productivity" or "personal storage" sites and you can see where alternatives can't even work their way in slowly.

I think the solution described is the best chance we have of getting better enterprise apps, but it's by no means going to be easy. It does seem that over time things will get better. It's already been far, far too long. I hate using broken tools.

<comment><USER5> It's not easy, but in my estimation - it _has_ to be done, or we're going to be stuck with the crap we've had for years and it will just keep going and going.

It's going to hurt; but man - can you imagine if it succeeded?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I completely agree - so much midtier and enterprise software is a complete mess because of these things. People have to be willing to listen to customers, but say no when it serves the greater good. You must kill ruthlessly - but you must have the metrics to know what to kill, and you have to examine those metrics as part of the process.

Feature bloat is especially painful, for the longest time "enterprise" has been synonymous with "a ton of mostly unused features and confusing UI". Don't make your product into something which resembles a pile of tools in the crap- drawer in your kitchen. Say no - kill things, make it clean, organized and usable.

Your users will thank you. On the other hand, the guys who make more money than you every year "consulting" on how to "properly use and setup" you bloated confusing product will hate you.

<comment><USER6> That's the point tho, isn't it?

It isn't about making good software, it's about making good money. Since the people who buy the software are not the people who use it, what you need to optimize isn't the software's ease of use, but ease of selling to the people on top.

If the users are happy or not is comparatively inconsequential, after all - they are not the ones making the decision.

<comment><USER7> Well, the point I guess is that the people who use it are more and more the people who make the decision, b/c the channels of distribution have changed, even for biz software. <http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=092110>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Had me right until the end: "Solution: Kill features. Often."

In most enterprise environments, that's not realistic. Unless you've really screwed your design process, features are in there because clients need them. Even refactoring a feature into something that makes it a better product for 99% of your users will greatly annoy the one user who needs the feature and is used to having it implemented in a certain way.

It's much better to negotiate with the users on the front-end for a better product or avoid overly-demanding users that will hurt your product. Because once the feature is in there, it's there to stay.

<comment><USER7> Hey - I think we disagree on the basic premise. I don't think most features are there because the clients "need them". The point of the post is that many are there because they _think_ they need them, and thus, through a sales process they were "required". Of course, one size does NOT fit all... many specialized apps do require more features... but in general, you can kill features, especially if based on data that shows nobody really uses them.

<comment><USER9> "Killing" a feature before it's rolled out would be great, but it's hard to start talking a potential customer out of a feature request if there's a chance it will put them off your product. Doubly so if it's a salesperson talking to them who doesn't have detailed technical experience.

And killing features _after_ is always a problem. If you've got lots of users then some of them are probably using every single feature, no matter how dumb it is.

<comment><USER7> Totally agree... but again, point of the post was that when you are selling bottom up, and your "customer" is the end user, you are less locked by a singular buyer who think that something is required. No doubt that this approach can cause some friction, and it is way easier before release... but it can be done...if the primary goal is user experience.

<comment><USER6>
        if the primary goal is user experience.

That's a pretty big if :)

<comment><USER7> totally agree... but that's the if the post rides on!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem, as I've seen in a few big organizations, is that everyone thinks they need an "all singing, all dancing" piece of software (like SAP or Siebel, for example), which has 18-quadrillion knobs to adjust. The problem is, nobody has the slightest clue how to adjust those knobs to fit your business, but the sales person convinces the customer that somehow, magically, it will be a perfect fit.

What ends up happening? The customer has to change their business to match the "default" behavior of the infinitely flexible software, because nobody can overcome it's intrinsic infinite complexity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dan (jman73) has posted a follow-up: 4 Steps to Becoming a Killer. Comments and discussion welcome! Post: <http://rypp.ly/9XKdvm> HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744613></comment>


Tech Leading the Way on Paid Family Leave, Rest of the Country Should Catch Up - <AUTHOR> http://apps.tcf.org/tech-companies-paid-leave <comment><USER2> Honest question...what is the chance that tech companies would be doing this if the sector weren't doing so well and there wasn't so much competition for talent?

My gut says no, and I hope I'm wrong come the next economic downturn that has a significant impact on said companies.</comment>


Philae's first touchdown seen by Rosetta - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/14/philaes-first-touchdown-seen-by-rosetta/

<comment><USER2> It looks like you can see the lander, up in the air and casting a shadow on the surface in the 2nd image. If it is, you can get a good estimate of its horizontal velocity from the image timestamp.

[https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13gzxiwdkq2clyew22...](https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13gzxiwdkq2clyew22ddx3p4neqihzjx04)

<comment><USER3> That speck appears to be there in the first image as well, though not as bright...?

I wonder if Philae actually landed exactly where computed (the green square), and if so why the dark dust does not radiate from that spot, but "down-wards". Perhaps Philae hit the surface at an angle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did the lander somehow adjust itself while hovering away from the original landing site? I can't imagine Philae bouncing away, then flying for roughly one hour (?) and then landing on its feet.

<comment><USER5> It would land heavy side down both initially and after a bounce, no?

<comment><USER6> Gravity exerts almost no torque here. Philae has 100 kg of inertia, but it weighs less than a feather.

Even if were in a strong gravity field, that still wouldn't orient it, if there's no force like air resistance to attenuate its tumbling. It can rotate indefinitely in the vertical plane: there's no loss of energy. (In an atmosphere, this rotation is damped by air drag, so gravity can orient things).</comment></comment></comment>


Bill.com S-1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1786352/000119312519293348/d710902ds1.htm <comment><USER2> "We were incorporated in 2006 and have experienced net losses and negative cash flows from operations since inception."

13 years of unprofitability?</comment>


Show HN: We want to make websites places to meet people - <AUTHOR> http://talk-about-jack.com <comment><USER2> 4 Days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10373471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10373471)

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't all of these things just fail because no one uses them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually yes, but we are in talks with companies which will use the software to provide customer support, help desk support, and/or for conversational commerce. Additionally we are working on some single user features integrated into the client. All this will help to lift the project over the problem of having not enough users at first.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Jumpfiles – get more done with fewer keystrokes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hofstadter-io/jumpfiles/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> So I've read through the README and I still have no idea how it works or what it even is. Is this a concept I should've heard of before or is it related to some other project/concept?

<comment><USER3> I get it because I do something similar: I discover I have some command (`annoyingly long but repeatable command `) that I run in a particular repo (`repo\over\there`) frequently. For me, I then alias switching to that repo with a 1-3 letter sequence: `rot` and the command to `alc` (annoyingly long but repeatable command). Often I want these to be semipermanent so the aliases are added to my bashrc.

This project looks like it is streamlining and organizing-per-project this kind of workflow / preference for short aliases, with helpful conventions like "?" that act sort of like a tab-completion hint.

<comment><USER4> You might like ok-bash. ([https://github.com/secretGeek/ok- bash](https://github.com/secretGeek/ok-bash))

In any folder, you put all your favorite One-liners for that folder into a file called ".ok".

Then you can run them command with "ok 1" for the first command, or "ok 2" for the second command, etc. Use "ok" by itself to pretty-print all the available commands in that folder.

I started the project but my friend @doekeman took it waaay further than I ever dreamed.

It's really helpful if you have a bunch of different projects that you work on, and need a way to remember all their different commands and incantations.

There's a Powershell version too (ok-ps).

For there bit where I jump around from one project to another I use a system called markjump. It's great too.

<comment><USER5> Seems pretty useful, but isn't that basically a makefile?

<comment><USER4> Lol. I have heard that from people who haven't used it.

It's lighter-weight. Not as cryptic. Can also hook it up to your makefile targets, make them easier to access.

The other thing people say is "isn't that same as npm scripts?" — it can complement those as well.

I modify "cd" so that on entering any folder it shows me the available .ok commands, if any.

<comment><USER6> _It's lighter-weight. Not as cryptic. Can also hook it up to your makefile targets, make them easier to access._

The only additional "weight" in the Makefile would be the name of the target, where you leave it out and have it default to 1, 2, … n, which I would argue is more cryptic, as "make build" or "make deploy" is always doing that action, whereas "ok 2" could be deploy in one folder, and push in another.

As for easy access, most shells should offer you tab completion for the Makefile's targets, and your development environment may also pick up the existence of the Makefile and offer a way to run the targets.

Additionally Makefiles allow to setup dependencies, for example in your ok file example you have ./build.sh and ./deploy.sh as two actions: Clearly build should be a dependency of deploy, so "make deploy" implies building, rather than having to always do "ok 1 && ok 2".

Lastly there is the ability to do dry-runs with Makefiles, once you start to setup dependencies…

<comment><USER4> You haven't used or experienced .ok files and are seeing them as a competitor to makefiles and being very defensive. They're not a competitor to makefiles.

With ok you can also name the commands. It's optional.

I would suggest using both, in a project that involves building, if you are already comfortable with makefiles. You may also have npm scripts, again I'd suggest both. You'll probably find it quite comfortable and fun.

Makefiles have more features but bring with them more complexity and nuance, for example the dependency features, which are useful for making but a hindrance for a lot of other project tasks. When I show a "getting started with makefiles" guide to my documentation friend they look at me like I'm insane. It is truly cryptic to the uninitiated. But you already understand makefiles, so try using both.

<comment><USER6> _But you already understand makefiles, so try using both_

What is it that ok files can do that Makefiles don't?

I don't buy your complexity argument, a Makefile can be as simple as:

      1:
        ./build.sh

Now you can run "make 1" and you have the same as "ok 1".

Although most people would name this "build" rather than "1", so you "make build".

And the equivalent ok file would be:

      build: ./build.sh

So the only syntactical difference is that make require a newline after the colon.

<comment><USER7> The thing ok can do what make can't, is work on the current shell. With ok, you can:

* navigate to another folder/directory * set an environment variable

I use both make and ok. For me, if I want to "make" stuff, I use make (compile, sign, zip, deploy etc.). The ok-files, I use for ad-hoc stuff, like viewing log files). It's also a good command's I can't seem to remember. A bit less structured.

So I guess it's not only a technical difference, but also a slightly conceptual difference.

I must say I do have a lot of (rather) small git-repo's I work on. And not every day. So when I switch to some kind of project, it helps me work faster. But your situation might differ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > quickly create, refresh, and run terminal "shortcuts" for common commands

      $ alias shortcut='common command'

> jump around the filesystem

      $ r='/long/complicated/dir'
      $ cd $r
      $ pwd
      /long/complicated/dir

> chain them together

      $ a=echo
      $ b=hello
      $ $a $b
      hello

So what exactly is the added value here? Is it a manager for shortcuts? Persistence?

<comment><AUTHOR> Quickly editing, reloading, and refreshing from anywhere. Also the persistence between shells and a dot file loading.

Another nice thing is you environment bar secrets are only exposed during command execution when they are needed. (See how the .jumpfiles.secrets.sh is used) It's also largely an experimentation ground for some upcoming Hof features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Add some usage examples if you really wanna communicate the value of this. I recommend video.

</comment><comment><USER10> Keystrokes aren't slowing me down at work. It's shitty debugging, long build and test times. Keystrokes are negligible.

<comment><AUTHOR> See our Hof project, working on that too.

Jumpfiles got ephemeral VMs and k8s last night, so if you want to enable consistent dev envs and debugging, there are some options. Email me if you'd like to know more about what we are planning and some of the more leading edge capabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use:

\- direnv ([https://direnv.net](https://direnv.net)) for project-specific environment variable management and more

\- fzf ([https://github.com/junegunn/fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)) for rifling through history and finding files quickly.

\- z ([https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z](https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z)) to partial-match on a frequency-weighted directory switch (eg, `z Proj <RET>` will move me to `$HOME/Code/Projects/`.

<comment><USER6> For the last one, worth mentioning CDPATH:

 _CDPATH The search path for the cd command. This is a colon-separated list of directories in which the shell looks for destination directories specified by the cd command. A sample value is ".:~:/usr"._

This works with tab completion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have been using this since last it featured at the frontpage. It's great for jumping to different projects etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just pushed a new version,ales it much easier to plugin your own custom stuff. Still need a good example of this on GitHub...

Take. A look at the Hof leap, there are some examples of jumping to a dir, found something, and then hopping back to where you were. Super useful for building tools you are working on but don't need the extra shell session

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For anyone interested, we added some bounties so you can make money contributing to Jumpfiles and our other open source projects. I personally made my independent start freelancing and would now like to support others.

</comment><comment><USER13> Check out `z`. It manages long paths automatically so you can cd quickly. One of the best tools I've come across.

[https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z)</comment>


Retro Virus - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/694/

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I know. But this struck me as a good snapshot of the _zeitgeist_.

Reminds me of a story title - "When it changed". The desktop PC may not be headed the way of the dodo, but it may become a tool most people have no reason to use.</comment>


App Engine Performance Hacks You'll Probably Never Need, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://bjk5.com/post/11766098283/app-engine-performance-hacks-youll-probably-never

<comment><USER2> Most of these "hacks" involve working around how slow it is to store persistent data on GAE. However, other than the protobuf one, they all seem to rely on undocumented or uncertain semantics.

For example, one very common performance optimization in web applications is batching writes. Why not send the very compact results of a few A/B tests to the database/store once every ten requests, rather than once every request?

However, GAE doesn't really provide a way to do this. You could just store the results in local memory and then persist to the datastore every 10 requests, but there is no guarantee your instance won't get shut down. You could also store to memcache, and do what the author suggests, persisting from memcache to the datastore periodically. But my understanding is that there aren't any guarantees as to what the memcache size or revocation policy is, so it's not really possible to guarantee that all data gets persisted. (Losing random data intended to be persisted may be fine for A/B testing, but probably not for many other things.)

Likewise, it would be nice to delay datastore puts as the author does, or put them in a task queue, but both of those seem to take as long as doing a datastore put in the first place.

Is this analysis wrong? Does Google's memcache implementation provide some guarantees that mean that your data won't get removed as a result of your or someone else's actions without you knowing? Is there some reasonable pattern for storing persistent data on GAE but not having to force the user to wait?

<comment><USER3> No, your analysis is not wrong -- except putting objects in a taskqueue to be persisted later is actually much faster than doing a datastore put in the first place (one reason being that you don't have to write to any indexes).</comment></comment>


How inflation swindles the equity investor (1977) - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2011/06/12/buffett-how-inflation-swindles-the-equity-investor-fortune-classics-1977/ <comment><USER2> The main takeaway for me is that is Buffett encourages investors to invest in companies that reinvest all earnings in resource saving capital investments. He argues that is the proper way to increase standards of living, and not with distributions of earnings to investors or redistribution to the government in printing money. That is, stocks that don't pay dividends, and require the government to have a balanced budget.

My argument against this, and is one he has made in later years, is the greed of modern management discourages investors from long term investments in a company. Specifically, outrageous salaries for subpar results, golden parachutes, or acquisitions of questionable value. Wells Fargo's management either lied or was not doing their job, and yet their CEO was paid compensation of $20 million in 2014 (did a quick google search for a figure). Meyer's spent Yahoo's money on acquisitions that people she knew owned, enriching many friends in her network. I really don't feel like subsidizing a connected person's cash grab.

Dividend stocks are a way to get some control over management that tries to pocket the earnings for themselves. Investors flee a stock that even looks like it could cut it's dividend which avoids some of the wasteful acquisitions and compensation (management is forced to buy in as an investor to get the dividends). If the stock goes down you can reinvest the dividends. If it goes up you can sell the stock and reinvest in one that has a better yield.

<comment><USER3> "Looting" of companies by their management is starting to look like an increasing problem. Usually in failing companies, but one day it will turn a success into a conspicuous failure.

UK examples: Jaguar Land Rover, BHS, Carillion.

<comment><USER2> > "Looting" of companies by their management is starting to look like an > increasing problem.

I think it's been a problem since the 80's. When I look at management pay issues and corporate raiding that was the era Buffett began talking about it if I remember correctly. Futurama even made fun of it indirectly in an episode.

<comment><USER4> My only regret is that i have boneitis

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From Buffet's explanation, it doesn't sound like it's inflation in and of itself that swindles the equity investor, but _rising_ or _falling_ inflation. I.e. if inflation were constant, the market would easily adjust, but when it rises or falls slowly over decades, investors are bound to make decisions that will turn out to be wrong in the future.

It seems to me that exactly the same is the case for interest rates: no rate is "right", but falling or rising rates will force market participants to make wrong decisions:

* In a rising interest rate environment, all bond purchases will prove unwise, since the investor could have earned a higher rate by waiting a bit longer.

* In a falling interest rate environment, all bond _selling_ (issuance) will prove unwise, because the issuer could have paid a lower rate by waiting a bit longer.

<comment><USER6> Real interest rates - those set by banks based on demand for money, and not set by central banks are a price signal. What we have now is straight market manipulation which causes problems.

Interest rates should be a signal about consumption vs investment.

<comment><USER7> Does a "real interest rate" per your definition actually exist? Googling the term returns an inflation-adjusted interest rate.

In theory if we didn't have central banks this might be possible. However, central banks "print" money to adjust short-term interest rates that are a lever for influencing demand for money. It seems unlikely that it is possible to decouple supply from demand in the real world.

<comment><USER8> > Does a "real interest rate" per your definition actually exist? Googling the > term returns an inflation-adjusted interest rate.

> In theory if we didn't have central banks this might be possible. However, > central banks "print" money to adjust short-term interest rates that are a > lever for influencing demand for money. It seems unlikely that it is > possible to decouple supply from demand in the real world.

With gold standard, central banks could not directly print money. It was abandoned by the US about 40 years ago, and by Europe, even earlier (because world wars).

<comment><USER9> You can still manipulate a gold standard it just takes more effort. EX: This coin represents 2% less gold every year.

<comment><USER8> Then prices include the weight, not the nominal value. Also, it's a lot of effort. You can also lower the content of gold in coins, but the process of remaking existing coins would be quite expensive.

Paper money is much easier in this regard.

<comment><USER9> It may sound odd, but gold coins are not on the gold standard. The gold content represented a value floor, but their value should exceed that, or they would have just used bars not coins. If nothing else they where less likely to be fake.

Gold standard only really refers to paper money which was used as a proxy for actual gold. Arguably it's even preferable to physical coins as historicly people would often clip them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is an important aspect which is not well remarked in the article: high fixed-costs businesses are the ones that really suffer inflation.

If every time you want to expand you need to make significant investments (and there will always be a delay before it starts making money), inflation will affect your costs way before it will affect your revenue.

Even worse, because fixed assets need to be replaced due to obsolescence every once in a while, you'll end up increasing your costs way more than you're increasing your revenue just to maintain the current production level.

TL;DR: The more the delay between investment and revenue generation and the more capital intensive it is, the worst.

<comment><USER11> Depends how you fund the investments.

If you fund them by taking on more debt, then higher inflation is a benefit - it reduces the value of your debt compared to your product.

<comment><USER12> The article says just the opposite.

> Cheaper leverage? Not likely. High rates of inflation generally cause > borrowing to become dearer, not cheaper. Galloping rates of inflation create > galloping capital needs; and lenders, as they become increasingly > distrustful of long-term contracts, become more demanding. But even if there > is no further rise in interest rates, leverage will be getting more > expensive because the average cost of the debt now on corporate books is > less than would be the cost of replacing it. And replacement will be > required as the existing debt matures. Overall, then, future changes in the > cost of leverage seem likely to have a mildly depressing effect on the > return on equity.

To be honest my intuiton is like yours. I still haven't managed to reconciliate my intuition with the above quote. I guess it would be something like this: It is true that inflation means that the stream of cash you will pay back is worth less, but the costs of keeping your business running (which in turn is what generate those stream of cash) also goes up. When this happened, lenders become more strict.

You can read further down:

> Nevertheless, given inflationary conditions, many corporations seem sure in > the future to turn to still more leverage as a means of shoring up equity > returns. Their managements will make that move because they will need > enormous amounts of capital — often merely to do the same physical volume of > business

<comment><USER13> In this light, it's interesting as a counterpoint to look at inflation's systemic effects.

After the 2008 real estate loan bust, many economists hoped for _more_ inflation so that the existing pool of loans would be a little more manageable for the debtors. (In Japan, they've been trying to increase inflation for decades). Even today, on financial news feeds and Bloomberg, when economic observers talk about "good news on inflation" they usually mean inflation going up, not down.

I guess, overall, there's a sweet spot for inflation. Or what's good for corporate profits and banks is sort of opposed to what's good for the overall collection of people in the economy.

<comment><USER12> > Even today, on financial news feeds and Bloomberg, when economic observers > talk about "good news on inflation" they usually mean inflation going up, > not down.

Indeed, the sweet spot is believed to be 2%. It's good news because we've been under that for so long, not because the more the better.

> After the 2008 real estate loan bust, many economists hoped for more > inflation so that the existing pool of loans would be a little more > manageable for the debtors.

I'm not an expert, but I'll just point out that debt from a loan that you've put into a house probably doesn't have the same mechanics as debt from a company trying to fund its capital requirements. Not saying I agree or disagree with those economists, just pointing out maybe they're different.

<comment><USER14> Regarding business debt ---- > It is usually floating rate and has a shorter term. You will have to roll the debt more often as you refinance. Thus, you will pay the higher inflation costs. And if inflation costs are unpredictable, then lenders will require a higher risk premium on the inflation piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >Virtually every corporate treasurer in America would recoil at the idea of issuing a "cost-of-living" bond — a noncallable obligation with coupons tied to a price index. But through the private pension system, corporate America has in fact taken on a fantastic amount of debt that is the equivalent of such a bond.

[https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glan...](https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glance.htm)

So do any companies use tips to fund their pension obligations?

<comment><USER16> I assume so these days, but TIPS didn't exist when this article was written. And probably not exclusively TIPS in any case (but perhaps combined with equities, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Inflation is one of the primary justifications for a lower capital gains rate, because getting taxed on inflation is quite the slap in the face.

<comment><USER18> Why are you singling out capital gains? Your argument works equally well for labor-based income, but capital gains are already taxed much less than labor.

<comment><USER19> Labor is taxed year-by-year so inflation does not have much influence on it. Capital gains tax taxes the sales of things (capital) that might have been held for decades. Buy a piece of land and hold it for 20 years. If inflation is 3% then the dollar value will go up by a factor of 1.8 without any real increase in value but if you sell it you will get taxed on that inflation created gain. Some see that is not "fair". That is the spin, anyway.

I think the way to mitigate this problem is to index capital gains to the CPI and then tax gains like income. This cleans up the tax code quite a bit, stops favoring capital over labor, and balances out the pressure on the CPI with having a powerful group of people wanting to have it go up. At the moment CPI is probably under-reported and keeping social security and other inflation adjusted things lower than they would be otherwise.

<comment><USER20> I don't think CPI needs to be used to mitigate the problem of taxing inflation on assets. It would just increase the politicization of CPI, which is already not realistic.

The market can easily adjust prices for assets to factor in the cost of inflation and taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> He certainly has a fair point.

The problem, however, these days, is the way a monetary policy hyper-focused on eliminating inflation swindles the wage-earner.

<comment><USER22> I'm by no means well-educated on finance. However, it seems like inflation has been the boogeyman of every major policy decision in the US for the decades I've been watching. So far, the dire predictions haven't come true, but we've faced growing wage inequality for 30 years.

I've read that the Fed has a dual mission - keep inflation/deflation in check and unemployment at healthy levels, but I only ever hear their concern for inflation risks.

As a result I tend to discount concerns over inflation, assuming that the major problem will be the issue we aren't addressing...is my reaction reasonable?

<comment><USER23> All central banks have been focused on the other issue since 2008. No one has been very worried about inflation until very recently.

<comment><USER22> Banks, perhaps. Everyone else (conservative pundits, fiscal pundits) seem to be declaring imminent crippling inflation on a regular basis, yet it never seems to happen, even when the banks/govt take the action (or don't take the remedy) to this threat.

Qe1 and Qe2 in the US were both accompanied by much hand wringing and doomsaying (for example), but the logic of the fear never made sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A very different time when equity returns were 12% and inflation was in the 5-10% region.

<comment><USER24> we are probably on the verge of at least the inflation part of this - there is no way we are going to be able to do $1T deficits for long.

<comment><USER25> People have been saying that for ten years now.

If inflation ticks up, the Fed will raise rates, which will dampen inflation but increase the interest on new treasuries, which will presumably compel the administration to cut spending and raise taxes, and borrow less.

<comment><USER26> Ten years?

People have been saying that since before Clinton got in office.

Catastrophic inflation from government spending has been just around the corner for 40 years now. The 1970s were an odd time for many reasons, and they won't repeat again. But for some reason too many people base their predictions of the future from what happened between 1974 to 1984.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is it still common to get 12% return on the market?

My layman impression is that with ETFs, ~6% is the current average return.

<comment><USER28> Important to remember that they're averaging over a decade to get that annual return figure. I still hear 10% thrown around as a rough estimate (if you believe anyone is capable of making such a prediction) — though Jack Boggle has been cautioning that we should expect much lower returns over the next twenty years (more like 3-4%).

<comment><USER29> But if that's true, isn't that just keeping, just barely, with inflationary predictions? Especially given the new tax bill increases the deficit wildly, which will lead to a bond glut / money printing exercise?

If so, what's the market going to do, if not reallocate capital from the stock market to a less risky asset?

<comment><USER28> I mean, I honestly have no idea. The concerns about inflation are real; we have high employment, and a relatively strong economy. Stocks (and Real Estate in certain areas) are at high valuations already. The tax bill is stimulus at a time when we don't really need it - and it doesn't address inequality, which economists like Robert Gordon consider one of the major headwinds against lifting productivity.

I think it's the Dutch who have a saying that the point of investing isn't to make money - it's to not lose what you already have.

Buffet has said something like, "I'd rather have a lumpy 12% than a smooth 10%". Higher risk can mean higher reward.

I'm not offering investment advice; but for myself, I still think being invested in stocks for the long haul is smart. As they say, if it isn't, then there are bigger problems to worry about. Doesn't hurt to hedge against some "black swan" events too.

<comment><USER30> Just be wary about advice from buffet. He's rich enough that he can basically buffer swings in the market. For the rest of us, employment might be market- procyclical: We lose the ability to buy in at the bottom of the market because we're at employment risk and maintaining personal cash reserves is critical and it's more likely that we have to sell off to stay afloat.

<comment><USER28> For sure. That's why a safety net is a core of so many strategies. And again, amateur opinions here - not offering investment advice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenTable Acquires FoodSpotting for $10 Million - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130129/opentable-devours-foodspotting-for-10-million-in-cash/?mod=tweet <comment><USER2> Full disclosure: I work for Forkly (<http://forkly.com>), a FoodSpotting competitor.

I think that it was probably an okay exit for the founders (but definitely no homerun), and for most of the early angels. As for BlueRun Ventures (who put in the bulk of the last round), it probably wasn't that good of a return.

Of course, these exits often don't get paid out based on equity, but on some negotiated deal that will make investors at least somewhat happy. As for the founders, I'm pretty sure they got signing bonuses, probably tied to staying at OT for a year or two.

It will be interesting to see what happens to FoodSpotting (apparently it will stay standalone), and how OpenTable will make use of it.

<comment><USER3> How do you feel this impacts the exit opportunities for Forkly?

<comment><USER4> I feel that it puts a fork in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Big congrats to any team that has an exit. Sure, I think early angels and Dave McClure probably got better returns on their money than BlueRun ventures(I'm guessing this). And most employees probably didn't get much. But food being so saturated with so many different players makes this a respectable exit. Nothing is worst than spending our valuable time on this planet on something that goes nowhere, with this exit, Foodspotting is ensured to be around as long opentable is around. Which is something any founder should be proud of.

</comment><comment><USER6> Until opentable can actually get reservations right, it sounds pretty irrelevant to me. EVERY time I've tried to get reservations on opentable, they're either not available for 2+ hours, or not available at all. Then when I call, they invariably have tables for every time slot. Basic functionality is missing here...

<comment><USER7> This is by design. Restaurants will sometimes only give OpenTable a few slots a night as OT often takes a good chunk of margin from the restauranteurs:

'The access fees can be substantial, particularly for restaurants operating on thin margins. One independent study estimates that OpenTable's fees (comprised of startup fees, fixed monthly fees, and per-person reservation fees) translate to a cost of roughly $10.40 for each "incremental" 4-top booked through OpenTable.com. To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time).'

From [http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2010/10/18/is- opentable...](http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2010/10/18/is-opentable- worth-it/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> considering they raised $3.5 or so in funding, what do you guys think of $10M exit. yay or nay? and why?

<comment><USER7> Off the top of my head, let's do some math (keeping it simple, I have no idea of actual #s):

Before fundraising: 84%: 3 Co-founders @ 28% each 16%: option pool

1st round - $750k @ $3.75M post. No liquidation prefs or ratcheting. Now the cap table looks like this:

67.2%: 3 Co-founders @ 22.4% each 12.8%: option pool 20%: Angels

2nd round - $3M @ 10M post. 1x straight preferred liquidation pref (not participating), no ratcheting.

Cap table:

47.04%: 3 co-founders @ 15.68% each 8.96%: option pool 14%: Angels 30%: Blue Run

A $10M exit looks like this: $3M: Blue Run $4.70M: 3 co-founders @ $1.568M each $896k: option pool payout $1.4M: Angels

Not bad, not great, but that assumes no participating preferred preference, which would have everybody but Blue Run doing a heck of a lot worse.

<comment><USER9> Interesting perspective from the comments here.

$1.5M per cofounder over 3 years puts them at $500k/year. Pays more than most jobs I can think of. And you can certainly do a lot with $1.5M in the bank (no mega mansion in SV, but endless traveling, comfort, etc). All relative, I guess. Us Hacker News folk have a skewed vision on the world :)

<comment><USER10> You can't compare a rare successful startup exit to a regular salary. You could, but you need to multiply both by the risk factor.

$1.5M is quite low, in my opinion. Not even close enough to retire in the US.

<comment><USER9> Who said anything about retiring? These people are 30 years old. I don't think the avg 30 year old has $1.5M cash in the bank (and a comfy position at a tech company). All I'm saying is that it's very respectable.

<comment><USER10> It's slightly more respectable than someone winning a lottery. For every success story like that there are hundreds of developers who didn't take regular jobs and ended up in debt and bankruptcy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> All this food services bubble is making me itchy. Allergy?</comment>


Cheap New Book on Amazon about Computer Vision and Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NKT94GV<p>This book implemented six different algorithms to classify images with prediction accuracy as the primary criterion and time consumption as the secondary one. The accuracies varied between about 30% and 90%, while the time consumptions varied from several seconds to more than one hour. Considering both criteria, the Pre-Trained AlexNet Features Representation plus a Classifier, such as the k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and the Support Vector Machines (SVM), was concluded as the best algorithm. <comment><USER2> While it's probably fine to advertise your book on here, it's in slightly poor taste not to mention that it's your book.</comment>


Raspberry Pi Guide for Developers [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idCG0wSi-fk <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all. I have been using Raspberry Pi for many years now and decided to make a guide for fellow developers like me. In the video, I am arguing why Raspberry Pi is a good companion for all developers and how and why I use it. The second part of the video is a guide on how to setup Raspberry Pi from scratch and install Docker on and it and make it ready for some production work.

Full outline is:

• Why Raspberry Pi for Developers

• Why with Docker

• How Do I Use My Raspberry Pi as a Developer?

• What Else Can You Do with a Raspberry Pi as a Developer?

• Raspberry Pi Setup

• Docker Setup

• Sample Docker Node.js Application Setup on Raspberry

I hope this helps people like me. All feedback is welcome so that I can include it in the article version of this video (writing it at the moment).</comment>


Donald Trump will now control drone assassinations and mass surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2016/11/14/donald-trump-will-now-control-drone-assassinations-and-mass-surveillance-still-love-them-democrats/ <comment><USER2> So, Barack Obama's administration has been expanding the drone program, and illegally murdering people from the air, for years.

But… It's the _next_ president that we should worry about, pertaining these same drones.

The kind of opposite-speak that the MSM uses has reached ludicrous levels.

This is much like reading, "Ted Bundy fears that the ideas he created will be used as inspiration by future mass murderers as they kill even more people.", except that analogy doesn't hold up, because Ted Bundy hasn't murdered anywhere near the amount of people that the Obama administration has.

<comment><USER3> Yeah who would have thought that the "wrong person" would ever get their hands on the drone program and huge domestic spying program. It's inconceivable! /s

This is what all the civil liberties peoples feared: you make a big pot of juicy data and unilateral executive powers, and it invites expanding their uses and mis-uses. The misuser may be GWB, Obama, Trump, HRC, or the next guy, but because they exist they will eventually be mis-used.

It may be rank hypocrisy for everyone to freak out about it now, but I welcome people getting freaked out about it.

That said many fewer people seem to trust Trump and he is an unknown quantity, so it's easy to see why the freak-out exists even if in principle it was late in coming.

<comment> o0-0o Trump doesn't want to drone people and spy on Americans. Drone strikes will go down and so will mass surveillance of Americans.

<comment><USER4> Please don't speak for someone else without at least trying to verify what they have said.

"Trump said Tuesday that he would be "fine" with restoring provisions of the Patriot Act to allow for the bulk data collection" [1]

"I think we ought to start [surveillance] up again, and we ought to start it up this morning. We ought to start it up again and get going. And use your head. This is a lot of nonsense that we ended that," [2]

[1]: [http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential- races/26167...](http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential- races/261673-trump-sides-with-rubio-over-cruz-in-nsa-surveillance)

[2]: [http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/donald-trump-muslim- su...](http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/donald-trump-muslim- surveillance-216058)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Look, Democrats are suddenly concerned with civil liberties again, after 8 years of a "change" President who continued the "fascist" policies of his predecessor.

<comment><USER6> I imagine some folks are dusting off Cindy Sheehan at this very moment, now that criticism of the President will be fashionable again.

<comment><USER7> I am sure Code Pink is also planning to protest unjust wars again too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Turns out the tools used by previous administration and the expansion of executive power the predecessors created, doesn't disappear but carries over to the next Administration. Gasp. Shock.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone here even read the article? It's saying exactly what existing comments here are complaining about.

<comment><USER2> It's not saying exactly what the comments are saying.

It is saying, essentially, "The Obama administration opened Pandora's box, and now we have an evil, bigoted, fascist dictator inheriting all of it."

<comment><USER9> Apparently our interpretations of the article are very different.

Most of the paragraphs are criticising obama and democrats that supported his efforts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In this thread so far: "but, but, Obama!"

Yes, if you actually read the article it's _extremely_ critical of his policies with drones & surveillance.

That doesn't mean Trump is somehow the same.

We're dealing with a President-elect who has said he knows better than Generals & intelligence agencies. A man whose lack of temperament for the role has been apparent his entire life, a man who uses threats and intimidation along with poor self control, a man who has a history of using political power to pursue personal vendettas.

... that is - to put it mildly - rather concerning.

(voted down for pointing out the facts of the article, stay classy HN)

</comment><comment><USER11> There is hope that Trump will be appalled by drone strikes and the horrible number of deaths of bystanders they cause. I had the same hope with Obama and he disappointed me bitterly. Let's see how Trump will do.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article is impossible to read on my iphone. Page jumping, continue reading button that keeps moving, ads, turned my music off....

</comment><comment><USER13> I won't be surprised when Bernie runs, there will be a sudden influx of "emails" showing how they are plotting evil things a typical campaign will do

<comment><USER14> Is Bernie going to run at 78 do you think?

<comment><USER15> That's pretty old. Even 45 isn't all that common anymore. It's pretty much all 33 nowadays, isn't it? All hipsters? /s(orry)

<comment><USER14> If it's a quote it's passing me by, sorry :-(

<comment><USER15> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record)

No, it's me who needs to apologize.

<comment><USER14> Aaarggghhh you dooooo!!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The whole article is based on a false premise - that Trump will be able to use a drone program ONLY because Obama developed it for him. Otherwise he would have been sitting in the Oval office, wringing his hands, wondering what to do. Which is patent nonsense - Trump could have (and quite certainly would have) developed his own drone program even if Obama had banned drone strikes. The same as with torture. Of course, Obama's work will give him a head start, but no more than that.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a site to find ppl to work on projects with based on speciality - <AUTHOR>

I'm a back end dev and have a bunch of ideas that I'd like to implement, but my front end skills are really lackluster so am worried that once I do implement the backend code, it's just going to lay there on my computer and never be published. Would like to find a good front end dev looking to collaborate on hobby projects and so thought I'd check here if there was a site that facilitates that. Thanks! <comment><USER2> [http://36in36.com](http://36in36.com) lets you submit ideas, and do as much or little work on a project as you want. If you submit an idea that is developed, you receive 25% (or so...depending on the idea)... but you also get a 1% ownership in the 36in36 project. If your idea doesn't do so well, you at least get to share in the potential of the other 35.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Looks really interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a front-end developer from India. Just tell me your email address.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's ishan2(at)gmail(dot)com. Looking forward to hearing from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is [https://assembly.com/](https://assembly.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome, thanks a bunch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> look for 'Startup jobs', startup or freelancing communities in your region or even abroad. There are plenty of such in Facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Smart CSS viewer  tailored for Designers - <AUTHOR> https://csspeeper.com/ <comment><USER2> It's well designed. It would be nice if the export functionality generated a css file with typography + colors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Home site seems to have CSS layout issues on my Nexus 6p.</comment>


Ask HN: Let's open-source our unused pitch decks - <AUTHOR>

Lots of posts on HN about sharing ideas, sharing unused domains, etc, so why not share our unused decks as well? The idea is one thing, the approach you took is entirely different.
I'll start...
https://speakerdeck.com/chadokruse/10speak-pitch-deck-the-mobile-calendar-public-domain
Idea: The mobile calendar isn't about what's on your calendar, it's about what's NOT on your calendar.
Reason for not continuing: I woke up one day and realized the app I was creating wasn't really making the world a better place. I'm now working on something I'm truly passionate about (fixing philanthropy). Also, ran out of money before validating the right go-to-market strategy.
Background: We never got enough traction to fundraise, but the VC's I talked to really loved the notion of breaking the old Microsoft Outlook time paradigm (which we still use, even in mobile form). I also had a few celebrity-level VCs as users, so there's definitely a pain point there.
Caveat: Since we never got to fundraising, we didn't finish the deck, so prepare for some glaring holes.
NOTE: Let's all assume anything posted here is open for public domain unless otherwise stated <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: [https://speakerdeck.com/chadokruse/10speak-pitch-deck-the- mo...](https://speakerdeck.com/chadokruse/10speak-pitch-deck-the-mobile- calendar-public-domain)

</comment><comment><USER2> Really love this idea, hope some of what we did is useful to someone!

Worked in VC twice, and at two startups...wrote out my pitch deck logic here:

[http://philipcortes.com/philcosblog/2013/6/4/your-first- pitc...](http://philipcortes.com/philcosblog/2013/6/4/your-first-pitch- deck.html)

The original deck (referenced in the post above) can be found here:

[http://www.slideshare.net/philco11/meeteor-pitch- deck-v73](http://www.slideshare.net/philco11/meeteor-pitch-deck-v73)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea, but your copyright note isn't going to work :( Copyright is all-rights-reserved by default, and if you want something else, you'll have to be specific about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the heads up. I'll get in there and make it 100% legit. But yeah, I'm not going to come after anybody for making a calendar app...shame we live in a world where that happens from time to time (opportunistic frivolous lawsuits).

<comment><USER4> Isn't it kind of weird to license a slideshow under the MIT license? I'd use CC0:

[http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the HN frontpage today: [http://assemblymade.com/](http://assemblymade.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.pitchenvy.com/](http://www.pitchenvy.com/)

Not affiliated, just happened to come across it earlier today.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pardon my ignorance if it exists, but has there been an "unused idea" thread lately? I've not been able to find one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, yeah, maybe I was thinking of the "how do I find an idea" threads and one about sharing side projects people were working on. My bad.

I'd love to see a thread by people with budgets for digital products describing pain points they want fixed. Everybody loves the enterprise space these days no?</comment></comment>


This new App delivers trending content on any topic across all social networks - <AUTHOR> Trendis, is a new app from Cornell graduate Swapnil Mengawade that scans social networks looking for the latest trending content of choice and delivers them in one place. Facebook has selected Trendis for its early stage startup mentorship programme, FB Start. The App has already generated huge user interest and looks to redirect the course of social media engagement.
San Francisco, CA-03/31/2017—Each day mountains of online content is uploaded on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Estimates are that 4.75 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook daily) and close to 400 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute. There is so much content that it becomes difficult to find exactly what you want, when you want it or see what other people are looking at and enjoying. The mechanisms of Facebook and YouTube deliver content based on subscriptions and follows, which doesn't often extend to new content that the user might be interested in. Trendis captures the latest trending content across all social networks every hour and delivers only the content that matches users interests in form of a social magazine. This content can be saved and catalogued into named folders, commented on or shared with friends using any channel (mail, whatsapp, message, twitter, facebook, etc.).
"We knew we had a good idea with the app so seeing how many downloads we've gotten early on just confirmed to us that we did something right," says Swapnil. "There is a lot of value in the app, but when asked what do we believe is our best feature we always point to our powerful search engine that gets real time content from multiple social networks in form of videos, photos and articles pertaining to the users search criteria."
Trendis is currently available on Google Play Store and App Store. For more information visit:www.trendis.com. <comment><USER2> Awesome app and concept!</comment>


On the Engineering of SaaS - <AUTHOR> http://omniti.com/seeds/from-making-software-to-running-saas <comment><USER2> Upvoted, but the author cites his own book in his blog post, which I read. I would just have to say, stay away from that book. It is vacuous. It gave a few decent recommendations, but the title was misleading and it was very verbose.

I remember telling Theo's brother my review at an NYPHP post-meeting bar gathering. The look on his face was classic. Like he tasted bitter beer.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Cal's fish book (hah, scaling...) is better - <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102357>

<comment><USER2> I didn't catch that fish scales joke until you pointed it out. Very nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Spot on. We run SaaS and it's been a fascinating learning experience.

This excerpt captures a lot of the tension perfectly:

"As a simple analogy, if you sell a user a diesel generator, they will expect it to need maintenance, needs refueling and have the occasional service issue. Sell them electrical service and watch them come with pitchforks demanding refunds if you have an outage of any sort."</comment>


Ask HN: In light of the PRISM revelations how have you changed? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to ask have you altered since the revelations on PRISM and the NSA?
Have you moved your eMail off Google? Have you deleted your Facebook? Have your political views changed? Have you decided to contribute to a decentralised cryptography project?
Have you just thought of doing something or have you done something different? <comment><USER3> I've started using encrypted partitions on DropBox/GDrive/BTSync (using encfs and BoxCryptor).

I've added JottaCloud - a Norwegian cloud storage provider, to get some storage outside US/NSA jurisdiction (and I'm using encjs encrypted storage on there too).

I've made sure all my published GPG keys are still working and have strong passphrases. I've started using GPG again occasionally just for the LULZ - <USER2> it'll not stand out quite so obviously if/when I need to use it in anger.

I'm considering my email options. I've got encrypting all non-encrypted email on the way into a mail server working as an experiment, but the questions of where to do that remain - my DigitalOcean VPS is no less likely to be under NSA compulsion than gmail, I don't trust my local (Australian) government to not be leaning just as hard on server hosting suppliers in Australia. I'm currently leaning towards hosting my personal mailserver at home strongly encouraging (or perhaps even enforcing) STARTTLS encrypted mail transport, running via a VPN tunnel to an internet connection at an inexpensive VPS with a non-US based provider. Since much of my mail is local (corresponding with other people inside Australia), I'm trying to decide whether an Australia based VPS perhaps under control of the local intelligence services but not requiring the bulk of my inbound (probably unencrypted) mail to hit any trans- ocean/crossing-national-boundaries backbones, would be a lower risk than a Norwgian or Icelandic based VPS which is more jurisdictionally difficult for ASIO and the NSA but which requires my inbound mail to cross those high-value- target-for-firehose-sniffing cross border backbones.

I've been raising cloud data storage legal jurisdiction based on the cloud's physical location and the cloud company's nationality whenever appropriate at meetings (which gets interesting responses with health/financial/childcare clients, and bored dismissiveness from just about everybody else… "Oh, you're storing PII patient data? Does storing that on Amazon S3, even if encrypted, meet your regulatory requirements?" I'm looking forward to the "Ahhh, so you're providing information to pharmaceutical managed mental health patients. Have you considered the privacy leak that Google Analytics represents? WHat disclosures and/or provacy assurances have you made to your users?" discussion next week…)

</comment><comment><USER4> For the last five or so years, I've used an encrypted primary partition, and the occasional TrueCrypt vault when necessary. I also have recently moved most of my personal storage to Dropbox and Google Drive, with no encryption for the usability benefit.

And I've changed almost nothing since the "PRISM revelations". In fact, I've begun to post more under my actual name, without any anxiety over "NSA" activity.

It may have become a cliché, but I always identified with the logic of continuing to fly after 9/11 to not let the "terrorists win". Us vs. them- speak aside, the sentiment holds true that the best means to oppose a new "threat" is to hold course.

If "government overreach" is really as bad as some claim, someone will be jailed for posting some innocuous musings, and will serve as proof and catalyst for meaningful change. But the far worse outcome would be to suppress free expression based on a nebulous fear of government surveillance (the NSA was formed from a WW2 era signals agency that at one point inspected almost all telegraph transmission to and from the US). And yet we still have a tendency to idealize the past as an embodiment of more pure "American values".

</comment><comment><USER5> Nothing really. Ever since I saw something such as [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/437967.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/437967.stm)

I realised that most likely these types of agencies can get access to your data if they really want. If everyone moved from FB , Goog or whatever they will simply start to spy on the new services people have moved to.

If a service is in Europe it really doesn't matter. They will still snoop or ask another agency to snoop for them. The UK have been snooping on Ireland for a long time [http://cryptome.org/jya/gchq- etf.htm](http://cryptome.org/jya/gchq-etf.htm)

I guess one way to avoid these problems is that people become far more understanding of other peoples dirty secrets, that way it cant be used as leverage. That could hopefully devalue the process of snooping.

</comment><comment><USER6> To be honest, I didn't change a single thing about my digital life. Even it didn't make the news before, I have been using the internet for the past 15 years or so and since then, have always been aware that what you do on it is not completely private.

So, I didn't kill my Facebook account as I don't store personal info on it. I didn't kill my Google services as I use encryption to transfer sensitive data (trade secrets and such). Etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> You can't do absolutely nothing, once you upload something(encrypted or not) by default is public, dropbox/gdrive etc.., even if you send an email it is public.

Is really naive thinking that "some storage outside US/NSA jurisdiction (and I'm using encjs encrypted storage" will stop government to reach you, because they really don't care about jurisdiction.

<comment><USER3> I suspect you've made less favourable assumptions about the resilience of OpenSSL and GPG than I have - but while I have _doubts_, I'm aware that I've got nowhere near the expertise required to participate in discussions about whether the NSA has working attacks against them - but that people who I trust _do_ have the expertise mostly seem to be saying that they're both _probably_ safe, and are both _almost certainly safe_ against dragnet "intercept and archive everything" surveillance.

"Is really naive thinking that …"

I think it makes somewhat more sense for me - since I reside outside the US. I'm reasonably sure that SSL transported encfs encrypted files moving between Australia and Norway - even when routed over US based or US company owned backbones - is reasonably safe from dragnet surveillance.

At the same time, I have no doubt that if "government" becomes interested in me specifically - all my privacy precautions will not stand up to nation-state level scrutiny. The right combination of "leaning on" Apple, Dropbox, and Agilebits (the company behind 1Password) would - given expertise the NSA no doubt has, and sufficient time - eventually reveal almost all my keys, passphrases, and passwords. But then so will the $5 wrench, the rubber hose, or the threat of jail time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> \- Deleted my Facebook account.

\- Looking for European alternatives for server locations: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993947)

\- Looking for a good alternative to GMail.

\- Looking for a good alternative to sharing photos with family (currently Google Picasa and Google+)

</comment><comment><USER9> -deleted google account. -abandoned gmail,started using riseup. -trying out duckduckgo.

+already switched to Linux and started encrypting my hard drives long ago.

The only problem I still have is Facebook.I can't leave because of the groups.

</comment><comment><USER10> Truth be told, I haven't changed a thing. Even before PRISM, it was always a good idea to assume that any data uploaded to the net will be public. And as a non-American citizen, being spied on by Americans is nothing new.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any 4g/LTE dumb phones? - <AUTHOR> Are there any 4g/LTE dumb phones?
I've recently gone back from smartphones (Note 7 and iPhone 5) to my Nokia 6310i and have found it to be a very good move.
The only thing I'd like more than my 6310i is a 6310i which I can use as an LTE modem - either via Wifi, Bluetooth or USBnet but not RS232 (115200 is a bit slow).
Does anyone make such a phone?  (Googling for LTE dumbphone does not turn up much.)
Two weeks+ on standby is the essential feature of the 6310i. <comment><USER2> Doesn't appear so. But here is a list of phones with standby > 768h

[http://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nBatCapacityMin=4000&nB...](http://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nBatCapacityMin=4000&nBatStandbyMin=768)

Click refine to tune the parameters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but I'm deliberately looking for something non-Android non-iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just buy a 4G/LTE USB dongle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but I don't want to pay for two SIMs/plans.

Edit: I'd also prefer not to have to remember to carry two devices.

<comment><USER3> Don't know where in the world you are, but here in Europe it's not uncommon for carriers to supply an extra data-only SIM at no (or minimal) charge using the same quota as your primary number.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in the UK, I didn't know that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>