Mechanical Turk: The New Face of Behavioral Science? - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/mechanical-turk-new-face-of-behavioral-science/ <comment><USER2> Crowdsourcing marketplaces offer unique advantages to researchers that are simply impossible to achieve with traditional methodologies, here's a few:

1) External Validity: Today, almost all research labs in Universities have to source their participants from their respective undergraduate population. Studies suggest that the results gathered from 'convenience samples' cannot be generalized to the general population. That is, the results from experiments conducted on 19-23 year old Stanford undergraduates may not be representative of the general population ([http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/research/~/media//Files/MSB/Re...](http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/research/~/media//Files/MSB/Research/Recent- Publications/2014Q1/PetersonR)). MTurk offers researchers a more diverse subject pool in age, geography, language, and culture. ([https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jieun5/publications/2012-icmpc-m...](https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jieun5/publications/2012-icmpc- mturk.pdf))

2) Cross-cultural and International Studies: Conducting cross-cultural research though traditional methodologies requires dealing with differing national requirements for protecting human subjects;variation in data collection processes in primary care practices; data transmission among participants; duties and tariffs on necessary instruments; fluctuation in currency exchange rates; incapacitation of coinvestigators; complex administration of funds; financing the additional, legitimate costs of collaboration; sustaining strong personal relationships among coinvestigators; and accepting longer time frames than would otherwise be expected. ([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1466730/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1466730/)). The diversity on Mechanical Turk facilitates cross-cultural and international research at a very low cost (labs.yahoo.com/files/mturkmethods.pdf)

3) Faster Theory/Experiment Loop: One implicit goal in research is to maximize the efficiency with which one can go from generating hypotheses to testing them, analyzing the results, and updating the theory. Ideally, the limiting factor in this process is the time it takes to do careful science, but all too often, research is delayed because of the time it takes to recruit subjects and recover from errors in the methodology. With access to a large pool of subjects online, recruitment is vastly simplified (labs.yahoo.com/files/mturkmethods.pdf)

Traditional researchers have raised questions about the quality associated with the data collected from participants. The empirical evidence strongly suggests that the quality of data collected from mturk participants meets or exceeds the standards associated with published research ([http://www.pomona.edu/Academics/departments/psychology/files...](http://www.pomona.edu/Academics/departments/psychology/files/Buhrmester%20-Crowdsourcing- Amazon-MTurk.pdf)) ([http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0057410)). Evidence that Mechanical Turk is a valid means of collecting data is consistent and continues to accumulate (Mason & Suri, 2012)

Disclaimer: I'm a crowdsourcing technology advisor to the department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, VizCogLab, and UVic Center for Autism Research. I'm also the co-founder and CEO of Cognilab Technologies, an online platform that allows researchers to publish their experiments on mturk.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm doing a Master's thesis in the intersection between Cognitive Science and Machine Learning. The group I work with looooves Mechanical Turk. It's such a cheap way to do small validation studies.

<comment><USER4> I've used it for data gathering, but found it to be a pretty homogenous group of people. What has your experience been?

<comment><USER5> There are various clusters of homogeneous people. You have your classic /r/beermoney students, same as you would get from regular studies on campus. Then you get your bored housewives of US, and oversees workers mostly Indians/Philipinos.

Once you realize these large groups of people exist, you can still get useful work done by accounting for obvious biases.

Disclaimer: I've used MTurk both for surveys as a requester and also used it as a Turker for a month two years ago, whenever I got bored.

I saw so many Kahneman inspired studies it was not even funny at the end. (Monty Hall problems, priming, $1.10 bat+ball problem, etc etc) . I ended up making around $6 an hour.

The best problems were porno classification problems.

I suppose that is standard stuff you do in psychology these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're looking for a discussion of running economics-style experiments on MTurk (as well as some advice on keeping online experiments internally valid): [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591202](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591202)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MT) is fascinating. I really wish Amazon would release more figures on its usage, rather than only the number of registered users[1].

It would be really interesting to see how many people earn their wages through this service. The chart in the article says 16% in Feb '10 [2], but I think it would be really interesting to see 1) how much money they earn, 2) how many hours they work, 3) where they live, 4) how much Amazon pays out in total in MT wages (all anonymized data, of course).

[1] > The only numbers that we share regarding our Worker population are these two -- which reflect our current state: Over 500K registered Workers from over 190 countries worldwide.

[https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58891](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58891)

[2] [http://pix- media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/835/ScreenShot2014-10...](http://pix- media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/835/ScreenShot2014-10-14at4.58.57PM.png)

<comment><USER8> Here is an article [1] trying to estimate that kind of numbers (wage, number of active workers, etc.) from various sources and questionning the ethics of using MTurk for science purposes.

The bottom line is: one third of tasks are achieved by people relying on MTurk (as primary or secondary money input) having working conditions that would not be considered acceptable in any first-world country (hourly wages around $2, working long hours with, obviously, no kind of worker advantage or protection).

[1] [https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/569450/fil...](https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/569450/filename/LastWords_AMT.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Harvard recently published a paper on the mturk demographics, you can find it here: [http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dtingley/files/whoarethesep...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dtingley/files/whoarethesepeople.pdf)

If you're looking for something less academic, try out this great blog: [http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com/](http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you design password storage for a service like Mint.com? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to figure out what best practices would be for a service like Mint.com.
Requirements: Allow users to store cleartext passwords to bank accounts which can be accessed by the service once per day regardless of if the user is logged in.
Usually, you only want to store hashes of passwords on your site but Mint can't do that, they need the cleartext passwords in order to log into banks. What is the safest way to store that customer data? <comment><USER2> This is tangential to the topic, but many banks do not care how secure Mint.com might be, and simply by using them (e.g. providing your password to a 3rd party service), you violate the bank's TOS [0]. This is the main reason why I will not use a service like Mint.com. If my bank account is compromised, for any reason (perhaps completely unrelated to Mint), I don't want the bank absolve itself of liability because I violated the TOS.

[0] [http://www.moneysense.ca/spend/the-banks-take-a-bite-out- of-...](http://www.moneysense.ca/spend/the-banks-take-a-bite-out-of-mint-com)

</comment><comment><USER3> If I had to roll my own crypto, and god help me if I had too. _puts on tin foil hat_

I'd store the clear text passwords encrypted with AES-256 CBC mode (still works right?). Next their would 3 databases, on 3 separate servers (hopefully physical ones). Server 1 passwords + salt, server 2 key 1, server 3 key 2. bcrypt(Diffe-hellman(key1,key2), salt) = AES standard key.

Basically I wouldn't. I couldn't sleep good at night storing financial data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you have a 4th database of your own site's usernames and scrypt(local password) used for logging in?

<comment><USER3> Yes but I figured that went without saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most banks have 3rd party APIs that allow service calls for read only access to a given account. Thus removing the need for a bolt on service to store credentials... Most times the best you get is an XML feed of transactions, balances...

If you're integrating with a financial institution that cant give u this. I'd go with paginated hash of the passwords stored in the data file with keys hashed in filed on the file system. I'd store the hash for the pages in a physical dongle attached to a server, with hardware discovery.

You could paginate the dongles daily too... There are some off the shelf dongles that do this quite nicely.

</comment><comment><USER5> Your best and safest bet is not to need this feature in the first place.

Failing that, what you're probably looking for is something along the lines of a simulated HSM (let's call this an SHSM).

Decompose the system into four distinct services:

\- The front-end application, "Mint" as experienced by normal users.

\- A minimalized subset of "Mint", with Mint's chrome and UX, dedicated to the acceptance of credentials or secrets from users. Ideally, this is running on a separate instance.

\- An SHSM system that exposes nothing but a simple remote API for sealing and unsealing secrets. Seal: secret->token; unseal: token->secret. The SHSM is on separate hardware, unshared by any other service.

\- A backend system, hardened and carefully assessed (but not as hardened as the SHSM) that performs the operations that require the secrets and stores its results where the front-end can get access to them.

This design needs to recognize that:

* The minimalized secret-accepting front-end can be compromised and, if that happens, an attacker can "camp" n the front-end and collect secrets regardless of what else you do. That's why you segment this functionality from the main front-end.

* A serious flaw in the rest of the front-end might transitively give an attacker a pivot to owning up the secret-accepting front-end; this could be direct (for instance, if both share a database) or indirect (if the minimalized front-end renders attacker-controlled content accepted in the front-end).

* There needs to be a diode-like relationship between the secret-acceptor and the SHSM; the SHSM must allow the secret-acceptor to seal a secret in such a way that it can't later unseal it, else it's serving no real purpose (an attacker that compromised the secret-acceptor would be able to unseal all secrets).

* The SHSM itself must be locked down to exactly the minimum set of services required to perform the seal/unseal operation.

* Ideally, the security of the SHSM asymptotically approaches that of a real HSM; for instance, a hardware-augmented root-of-trust might be used to make it difficult for an attacker that (improbably) gains code-execution capability to instantiate their own SHSM process to decrypt secrets.

* The backend service, which might have unlimited access to the secrets stored in the SHSM, is itself a prime target of attack through clientside vulnerabilities (this is why you want to segment it off from the SHSM). Some combination of rate-limiting, anomaly detection, privilege, and user-permissions (a system might be designed to prevent the unsealing of a secret without some action having happened in the front-end within a window of time).

None of these problems are easy. You might plan on spending somewhere between 4x-10x the amount of time designing, building, verifying, and monitoring this system than you would a system doing something similarly complex with non- secret data.

<comment><USER6> It seems to me the best plan to "not need this feature in the first place" is going to involve reaching out to the organizations in question explaining your plans and asking for a way to set up revokable and narrow access. Not saying you're sure to have much success (probably depends partly on industry and possibly country) but it seems like - if successful - it would lead to the safest result for all involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Use a tokenization service like PaymentVault to tokenize vs. storing.

[http://www.auricsystems.com/products/paymentvault- tokenizati...](http://www.auricsystems.com/products/paymentvault- tokenization/)

<comment><USER8> This is an interesting idea. Can you provide any guidance on How would I go about rolling out my own tokenization system? I don't have need of storing credit card info but would like to roll out similar system for other user info.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do seemingly minor features take companies so long to implement? - <AUTHOR>

For example, Tinder just came out with an update today that allows users to limit their matching results within an age range, a feature that people have been asking for since the beginning.  I dont understand how a feature like this couldn't be implemented in under a week, with a solid team. Why do updates like this / new features that don't sound very complicated to a user, take months to implement? Am I missing something about the development process? <comment><USER2> Doing that "minor feature" considerations (in my rough order of importance):

1\. will that feature be used by the target market that will pay money?

2\. what else isn't being done?

3\. security holes

4\. latent bug triggering ( testing and test cases )

5\. UX issues (where to put the checkbox )

6\. Documentation - possible confusion ( harder than you think in many cases - I go through a lot to eliminate things from UI so I don't have to explain them)

7\. possible premium feature

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. those points are great, and I get how those can be factors in a major / delayed / completely new update for a company like dropbox ( because security holes cannot happen whatsoever (3), it already makes money off of its customers, so it should consider (1) and (7), and that it might have other features in the line (2) because they have several products / features already ).

But in tinder's case, the addition of age preferences in matches is similar to their already-existing gender & location search for a couple reasons... 1) they already check a potential match's gender (and location) against the gender preference you chose, so while they're there, how much harder is to check another attribute of that match? his/her age, 2) they already have the matching preferences / UI setup (yes, decisions still have to be made about where to put a slider, but it shouldn't look too different from the distance preference slider, and it's not such a new feature that it would be confusing to the user), and 3) since they don't currently make money off their user base, tinder's main value is derived from # users, # active users, etc. There could be an argument to be made about making it a possible premium feature, but bringing in more users / giving users what they want / making them happy should be the focus.

I guess when it comes down to it, I just don't understand how the development process of similar feature could take so long.

<comment><USER2> If the feature takes any time to implements (i.e. every feature) then every point applies.</comment></comment></comment>


Motorola Launches "Unlock My Device" Site – Bootloader Freedom Has Come At Last  - <AUTHOR> http://www.droid-life.com/2012/08/17/motorola-launches-unlock-my-device-site-bootloader-freedom-has-come-at-last/

<comment><USER2> According to the Motorola website there are only 4 supported devices at the moment:

\- Photon Q 4G LTE Sprint

\- Motorola RAZR developer edition Europe

\- Motorola XOOM Verizon

\- Motorola XOOM Wifi Worldwide

Perhaps a little too early to be taking to the streets singing the praises of Motorola.

</comment><comment><USER3> But watch out people, you can die!

"WARNING: Motorola strongly recommends against unlocking the bootloader and/or modifying or altering a device's software or operating system. Doing so can have unintended, unforeseen, and dangerous consequences, such as rendering the device unusable, violating applicable laws, or causing property damage and/or bodily injury, including death."

<comment><USER4> When a custom ROM breaks your 911 it is very possible. It has been broken in the past with some Samsung devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Add the droid x and ill be happy. You cannot believe how hard it was to install cyanogenmod on this device. If you had a fully updated android os running you must first root the device then revert the device to a previous android verson. Next you had to install a custom cyanogen rom that was designed to work with the gingerbread kernel. A single misstep and your device is bricked thanks to the efuse. Gawh

<comment><USER6> My more than 2 year old DroidX works better than most latest phones. DroidX is one of the best devices of its time. Hope they add DroidX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Until Motorola has unlocked bootloaders by default, they willl always be the bootloader locker company to me.

This is a step in the right direction no doubt, but they hava a long way to go,

</comment><comment><USER8> Unless your one of the unlucky people that bought into Motorola dual-core devices too early. My Droid X2, a solid dual-core Android phone, is stuck on Gingerbread and will never get official ICS or an unlocked bootloader. The community has managed to port ICS, but it's buggy and lacks a fully compatible kernel.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this also a carrier unlock?

<comment><USER10> On Android, whenever you have access to the bootloader, you could install whatever Android version (official or unofficial) you want - So yes.

<comment><USER11> Bootloader and SIM lock are usually not related.

<comment><USER10> You are right, sorry for the false information.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reconciling the 2 Worlds of Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/technology/personaltech/reconciling-the-2-worlds-of-windows-8.html

<comment><USER2> Why not put _Windows_ on _Windows_?

Metro's UI happens to support dynamic layouts. If were allowed to exist within a window, it would coexist a lot more than what they're doing now.

Suddenly there would be no penalty for developing apps that use it, and desktop users would still have the ability to help the tablet market. On top of that, you wouldn't need that 2x taskbar anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, well the big elephant in the room is the Server 2013 interface which uses the same "Tile World" desktop. Hello, it's a server! Not a tablet, not a touch screen PC... That's the one that completely floored me... and not being addressed in all this 8.1 mania.

<comment><USER4> The same argument can be made (by me, and everyone else, many times) for any desktop. I press the windows button and I get... about 200 icons. That's supposed to be usable? Yeesh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately the conclusion leads directly to the problem. Their is no difference between tablets and PCs in Microsoft's long-term vision.

This doesn't mean I agree with their design decisions, but I do agree with their vision.</comment>


Canonical clarifies its H.264 licence - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Canonical-clarifies-its-H-264-licence-993182.html

<comment><USER2> The H.264 problem looks just like the first stages of the LZW patent fiasco all over again. People think it's OK and it gets widely adopted. But at some point lawyers will start sending letters. Given history on the subject, the questions are "when" and "who", not "if."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's dangerous for the web's videos to rely on a format for which royalties are expected to be paid. Hopefully Google will release the VP8 codec as a royalty-free alternative (as rumour has it) and it becomes the standard.

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr Canonical have a H.264 license agreement, but that doesn't mean Ubuntu users are covered by it. You're only covered if you buy some hardware that comes with Ubuntu AND the hardware manufacturer explicitly tells you that they have licensed H.264 (and possibly other codecs) from Canonical.

</comment><comment><USER5> This all goes away when software patents do, right?

Something I haven't heard much about lately is x264. Is a H.264 license required to use x264 in some situations?

<comment><USER6> Isn't that how patents work? You have to pay up no matter who implements it, as long as it is patented? (copyright, on the other hand, depends on whether your implementation is a derivative work of or copies etc. their implemenation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be interesting if Caonincal would release a version of Ubuntu with the proprietary software installed for a low price. I wonder how many people would pay for it?</comment>


Oil prices are plummeting. Here's why that's a big deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/10/7/6934819/oil-prices-falling-russia-OPEC-shale-boom-gasoline-prices

<comment><USER2> What is not clear in my mind is how long the Dakota shale boom will last. I have read somewhere that by 2025 most of oil that can be recovered at $100 will be depleted. So likely the price will increase sharply again. So what is the next frontier ? Arctic shale oil ?</comment>


Swift Language Guide (ePub download, no iBooks needed) - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/l317o8knyb0zwzs/Swift%20Programming%20Language.epub

<comment><USER2>
      > No part of  this publication may be reproduced, stored  in a retrieval
      > system,  or transmitted,  in any  form  or by  any means,  mechanical,
      > electronic,  photocopying,  recording,  or  otherwise,  without  prior
      > written permission  of Apple Inc., with  the following exceptions: Any
      > person  is  hereby  authorized  to store  documentation  on  a  single
      > computer  or  device  for  personal  use  only  and  to  print  copies
      > of  documentation for  personal  use provided  that the  documentation
      > contains Apple's copyright notice.

</comment><comment><USER3> The EPUB won't open in Adobe Digital Editions (on Windows). I opened it as a ZIP file instead, and it seems like it is probably meant for iBooks only.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's possible…downloaded from iBooks, pulled from the depths of its library and shared on Dropbox for everyone's convenience :P Sorry about that

<comment><USER4> Opens fine in Calibre for converting to other formats. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Rejected and planning for next round. - <AUTHOR>

Anybody here who got rejected and planning to apply for next round? I am rejected for this round and already started planning for next round. Few things I noticed which I could do better next time.<p>1. Get ready to move to SV with full team - not just partial team. 2. Get ready with better demo 3. Keep in touch with YC news everyday so that we don't get demotivated for any reason :)

<comment><USER2> 4\. Get a better idea

\-- or --

4\. If you believe in your idea, forget the demo and build the software!

</comment><comment><USER3> It might be better just to plan your product and business and begin executing right away. If the stars line up and you can apply to YC next time, go for it. But I wouldn't go planning my business around YC's schedule. Seems to me like that's backwards. YC should be an enhancer of your business opportunities, not a driver.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd just go ahead, move to SV and build your product.</comment>


Kong 1.0 Announced - <AUTHOR> https://konghq.com/blog/announcing-kong-1-0/ <comment><USER2> Kong 1.0 Release Candidate [https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-1-0-rc1-available-for- down...](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-1-0-rc1-available-for- download/1898)

</comment><comment><USER3> forward proxy support for https?

<comment><USER2> Cooper from Kong here.

No HTTPS support in [https://docs.konghq.com/hub/kong-inc/forward- proxy/](https://docs.konghq.com/hub/kong-inc/forward-proxy/) yet - we hope to add it in the future.</comment></comment>


Github is down (main site, *.github.io opening now) - <AUTHOR> http://robfig.github.io/revel/manual/index.html Well the submitted URL is opening now, but the main site (https://github.com/) is still down <comment><USER2> Not for me! From the looks of the stat page[0], there isn't anything super out of place

[0] [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a Major DDOS attack! <naive>Why attack a open source repository?</naive>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Github Pages with custom domains seem to be working fine, while other *.github.io pages seem down.

<comment><AUTHOR> The submitted URL was down a minute ago. Its working now, while the main page ([https://github.com/](https://github.com/)) is still down

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And? Isn't the magic DVCS supposed to make this a non issue?

</comment><comment><USER5> ...what?</comment>


Perfect Security - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/perfect-security/ <comment><USER2> This article mentions Schuyler Towne at the end.

I've watched Schuyler talk[0][1] at RVASec (a small richmond va security conference) the last couple years.

If you find locks even almost remotely interesting, Schuyler is the guy who will talk until you think they are really interesting. He's super passionate about locks and gives a ton of easily digestable information about them.

[0] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nROJz_UNQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nROJz_UNQY)

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTQWPrl_Tao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTQWPrl_Tao)

<comment><USER3> I concur that Towne is a great speaker on this subject, and would like to add that he's an HN user.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=emhart](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=emhart)

I discovered this by reading this comment, and as soon as I read "security anthropologist", I figured there couldn't be two of those.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156030)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its funny watching the video of the lock being picked. I cant help but feel that if that style of lock was invented today, we would probably complain rather heavily about its insecurities. There is a clear vulnerability in that they produce sound and friction that enables a trained individual to pick the lock, gaining unauthorized access.

It's also interesting to think almost every house in the country has one of those locks, yet no one seems too concerned.

<comment><USER5> Most buildings in the country have:

A) A pickable lock

B) A door that can be kicked in [fire code requirements]

C) Unsecured windows that can be broken to gain entry.

D) Crawl spaces that can be used to force entry from the outside.

You need alot more than a lock to secure a building.

<comment><USER6> Yep, and most apartments have worse versions of those, which the residents are contractually forbidden from doing anything about. I'd love to have a steel door with a solid frame and half-way-decent locks, but since my landlord is good with whatever was on sale at Home Depot, I don't get a say in the matter.

<comment><USER7> How would your landlord notice if you upgraded the door?

Or care if you upgraded the lock and gave them a key?

<comment><USER5> The door he suggests would violate the fire codes in every municipality I've ever lived in.

So given the landlord would be fined by the city and told to change it back is the reason the landlord would care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm guessing that the Chubb that invented that lock is related to Chubb Insurance somehow...

<comment><USER8> Hm, perhaps not [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubb_Corp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubb_Corp). (1882) vs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubb_Security](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubb_Security) (1818)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome article. My take away for the computer world... There's no safe, just safer. Security through obscurity is not as ridiculous as popularly believed. Make your secrets distributed and subtle, and protected in multiple ways for best likelihood!

<comment><USER10> I think defense in depth[1][2] might be the term you're looking for.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%29)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_in_depth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_in_depth)</comment></comment>


Why Artificial Brains Need Sleep - <AUTHOR> https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-artificial-brains-need-sleep <comment><USER2> The authors inject artificial noise in cycles to their Spiking Neural Networks. They call this noise injection as Slow Wave Cycles equivalent to what brain generates during sleep. I do not know what exactly goes during SW sleep in mammalian brain so it's hard to judge if this analogy by the authors makes sense.

However, noise injection on its own has been extensively shown to decorrelate signal from noise so that the networks don't fixate on noise in the input data while training. This is widely used when using CNNs on image data and is known to increase performance of network predictions. So I am not sure how much different this article's findings are from this.

No link to arxiv publication makes it harder to make sense of these findings.

Edit: "Sleep" is not relevant for most ANN architectures used today. Synaptic pruning however is, similar to dropout.

<comment><USER3> This sounds just like dithering.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither)

<comment><USER2> Cool, yes we also add similar random (Gaussian) noise to image data before the networks see it. The decorrelation theory comes originally form signal processing field like your example shows. Old wisdom in new bottle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in no way an expert on this stuff, but I've long wondered if AI is really a hardware problem. That is, the way that conventional computers work is nothing like the way brains work, and if we're trying to model brain-like intelligence, perhaps we need brain-like hardware to do it. It's fascinating stumbling across more and more articles describing neuromorphic hardware like this recently. I guess this idea has occurred to a lot of other people.

<comment><USER5> It's actually the reverse. The hardware we have is _way_ more efficient than our brains. One TPU can simulate billions of neurons a second in a tiny area. Computer hardware has a significant time advantage. Electrical impulses in the brain travel very slowly.

The problem is we don't understand how the brain is architected at anything other than a very coarse level. That architecture is the product of millions of years of evolution so we have some catching up to do.

<comment><USER6> Except that the TPU does not simulate real neurons in any way. It just performs simple arithmetic using an architecture that is suited to the ANNs we use today. If you managed to understand how the brain works and tried to run the model on a cluster of TPUs, you would need way more energy to simulate one second of brain activity than the 20J a real brain uses in a second. Only by some magical coincidence would any of the hardware we use today turn out to be efficient.

<comment><USER7> Are neurons binary in the way they operate, in that they either fire or they don't? Or are they analog in nature, where a signal can be either strong, weak, nonexistent or anywhere in between?

<comment><USER8> For starters, they use a pulse-frequency based signalling system.

And more generally, it's pretty clear that there is a mixture of context- sensitive inhibitory and excitatory signals both deriving from the dendrites (inputs) and from the chemical stew of hormones and so forth they find themselves immersed in.

There are neurobiologists who claim (controversially, I concede) that a _single_ neurone is a fully self-contained 'processor'[1], and not the equivalent of single logic gate.

Those who somehow confuse our "neural network architectures" with the actual biology in our skulls are really misguided. Based on the evidence, one can at best opine that a TPU-based matrix add/multiply unit is approximating a very clunky and un-nuanced neural network. To assert that they are one and the same is... indefensible, when one goes beyond even the coarsest detail. A neural network as we implement it technologically is nothing but a weighted network of threshold units. That is all.

[1] To clarify: some kind of highly context-aware DSP with both long- and short-term storage facilities that allow it to react not only to the inputs that it is being fed, but also to inputs it was fed previously (and possibly outputs it produced previously as well).

<comment><USER9> > Those who somehow confuse our "neural network architectures" with the actual > biology in our skulls are really misguided..

To be fair, many lectures/books/articles/blog posts on ANNs start off by presenting a biological neuron, and saying that ANNs approximate this.

E.g. [https://youtu.be/uXt8qF2Zzfo?t=385](https://youtu.be/uXt8qF2Zzfo?t=385) (MIT 6.034 Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2010. 12a: Neural Nets)

<comment><USER8> I do not exempt those who make such statements just because they have authority. If anything, they should know better.

I started off along much the same path (I bought and read _Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Foundation_ (1994) by Simon Haykin) when I was in high school, read it all and thought I knew everything there was to know on the topic, and then started to read about neurobiology and was stunned to discover I was living a lie. Then I read _The Computational Beauty of Nature_ (1998) by Gary William Flake and decided I was going to dedicate myself to understanding the complexities we brush under the rugs.

I think the Hacker News/Silicon Valley/Machine Learning/Developer crowd really need to look beyond the virtuosismo of their implementations. It's a very introverted and self-referential mindset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The late Dr. Gerald M. Edelman (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) had a fascinating theory he called "Neural Darwinism" that relied upon "reentrant mapping" he insisted was not feedback. He had a lab that formulated his ideas into software and a robot called Darwin 4. Does anyone here know what happened to that software? Is it described in detail anywhere? The following is an unflattering but useful discussion of Edelman's robot [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/my-testy- en...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/my-testy-encounter- with-the-late-great-gerald-edelman/)

<comment><USER2> I have not heard of this one but there's a similar robotics implementation of a network based on the connectome (neural circuit wiring diagram) of C. Elegans brains(the only complete connectome we have so far). Its still in preliminary phase of doing cool stuff though but the idea is interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have always felt that there should exist some analogy of the heat engines (and Carnot cycle) in the information theory. The heat engine increases the entropy between two heat reservoirs, and uses it to do work, decreasing entropy elsewhere.

If the purpose of intelligence is to "convert data to information", then perhaps it is akin to doing some work that decreases information theoretic entropy?

For example, in regression, we express input data as parameters of the model and error, so in the heat engine analogy, the input is the incoming heat, the parameters are the work output, and the error is the waste heat. (The error has higher entropy because there is less to explain, and you typically throw it away.)

So perhaps, if somebody would figure out this analogy correctly, we would see that we always need some cycles to continue the operation, just like in heat engines. So then we could conclude that any agent might require some kind of cycles of information creation and destruction in order to have intelligence.

<comment><USER8> The best definition of intelligence I have ever come across (cannot find the reference sadly, maybe I'm paraphrasing here) is " _that which you do to keep your options open when you have no experience or training or prior information regarding the circumstances you are currently in_ ". This will manifest, paradoxically, as a 'force'.

Thought experiment in order to clarify: how would aliens, staring at our planet for aeons through a telescope, reach the conclusion that there is or is not intelligent life here on Earth? Well... they could observe that on average, historically, about one every hundred million years or so there is a major asteroid impact. They would eventually observe that from some point onwards a larger and larger delay would set in from the last impact and the next, far longer than expected. If they zoomed in they'd notice that somehow asteroids on impact trajectories would be deflected as if by a physical force emanating from the planet.

This would be our descendants, using the amazing technology at their disposal, deflecting asteroids to ensure that the last major extinction level event will be the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (and counting). They'd be using their intelligence to keep their options open and avoid being wiped out. They're exerting a physical force on their environment and clearing the sidereal neighbourhood of dangerous rocks and comets.

Conclusion: intelligence is about perception of data but for the sake of control of the environment. "Data into information", honestly, is too close to being a truism to be of any utility.

<comment><USER12> My working definition is that intelligence is about accurate modelling of the environment, both internal and external.

This includes the ability to make accurate predictions about threats and opportunities within the environment, and the likely outcomes of planned actions.

The more intelligent an entity is, the more successfully it can generalise from past experience and anticipate and influence future events.

This is a completely different definition to plain old IQ test intelligence, which seems to be closer to raw mental agility. I suspect you can score high on mental agility - e.g. figure and number series manipulation - and still have poor applied intelligence. The latter needs the ability to synthesise a range of diverse stimuli, which is not the same as being able to manipulate abstracted symbols with no surrounding context.

<comment><USER8> Our definitions seem entirely compatible: a more accurate and flexible model will enable greater capacity to face circumstances. A deer perceives risks from predators. We have a totemic fear of predators _but also_ things that are less immediate, some innate ( _e.g._ heights) and some acquired culturally ( _e.g._ radiation). Our broadened threat model protects us from demise in a wider set of circumstances: _e.g._ deer flock to to the exclusion zone forests near Chernobyl because there;s few predators (including few humans), humans fled from there because they knew or were told by those who knew of the risks of radiation exposure.

EDIT: Revised preamble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's fascinating to think that my dreams might just be "noise injection". And this is why we do science folks - an explanation for sleep that came from trying to teach silicon to recognise cats. Unabticipated benefits. That's what we like.

</comment><comment><USER14> Philip K Dick answered this in 1968 with _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_.

</comment><comment><USER15> But do they dream of electric sheep..</comment>


Ancient dreams of intelligent machines: 3,000 years of robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05773-y <comment><USER2> The article's final paragraph: >"Every robot rebel has its benevolent counterpart, such as C-3PO in the Star Wars franchise or the android child David in Steven Spielberg's 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Both kinds of stories, the hopeful and the fearful, reveal to us our complex emotional responses to AI. Understanding these and their deep history is crucial to making the most of life with intelligent machines."

The authors interchangeably use robots, automata, AI (meaning AGI, I am guessing) — that makes for a confusing read. If they mean AGI, then _nothing_ about how humans dealt with robots will likely prepare us for how to deal with an exponentially fast learning, super smart, intelligence. I would argue that learning from history would be _anchoring_ ourselves to wrong ideas (ideas of incrementalism). To prepare for AGI, we need to think quite differently and radically, in some sense.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I recommend _Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies_ by Nick Bostrom, which explores this topic in great depth, including the control problem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_control_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_control_problem)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I will read this. I think in general the reasoning I see in this area is very poor. I think, since people have a hard time understanding their own intelligence, let alone sub- or super-intelligence, that they just project all kinds of human foibles onto it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The oldest actual automata mentioned in the article is explored (including mechanics and a demonstration) in this YT video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBlusUD3Kg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBlusUD3Kg)

Note that Hero is credited, and the date is 10-70 AD, but Hero's contribution was to posit the mechanism by which the theatre worked, which was first described by Philon of Byzantium in the late third century BC! [Source: My thesis, submission deadline 28 September 2018 ;)]

</comment><comment><USER6> 3,000 years of imagination and it falls on this generation and our kids to define how it will all play out.

<comment><USER7> Born too late to explore the world

Born too early to explore space

But born just in time to explore the consequences of strong AI!

<comment><USER8> >> But born just in time to explore the consequences of strong AI!

There's nothing to suggest we know how to create strong AI, or that we will have any idea any time soon. It will most probably take several human generations before we can even get close to anything resembling human intelligence implemented in software or hardware.

<comment><USER9> What signals do you expect will be in place in the world five years before the creation of human-level general AI?

Dog-level general AIs barking around?

<comment><USER6> Think there are a few of those around already. Guys at Boston D seem to have a keen interest in creating dog-level general AIs with some pretty impressive robotics HW.

<comment><USER10> The Boston Dynamics robots don't have the computational AI equivalence of even a fruit fly - and not even that by many orders of magnitude. Dogs use their intelligence for an awful lot more than just walking around objects.

Dogs have complex social hierarchies and social behaviour, a wide range of emotional responses, they communicate, participate in group tactical hunting activities requiring planning and executing coordinated attacks, they exhibit sexual behaviour, they can learn to respond to audible and visual commands. They are also vastly more agile than the Boston dynamics robots, able to climb three dimensional environments, jump through gaps and swim, and they can practice and independently choose to learn to do these things entirely autonomously.

<comment><USER6> Not sure I implied that Boston Robotics dogs have dog level intelligence but you have to admit that they are making fascinating progress around HW and robotics. SW/AI side is definitely still at the basic, single function type of intelligent level and will take much longer to achieve. But progress both on HW and SW side and the pace at which the progress is happening is pretty impressive. Clearly, the AI side and the current approaches with the focus on machine learning and neural networks will need to evolve to be much more multifunctional/general. Who knows maybe it will be Machine Learning 2.0... or it might be a completely new approach to AI more aligned to biotech/human brain or maybe something completely else. Time will tell.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fixing Technology "Meetups" (Chicago and Elsewhere) - <AUTHOR> http://hypertextnotes.com/2008/02/22/fixing-technology-meetups/

<comment><USER2> RSVP'ed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, I will keep you updated. Did you end up going to TechCocktail last night?

<comment><USER2> Yep, I commented on your post. EDIT: Um, I mean I didn't comment, I emailed you.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does Google fail to judge whether X is prime - <AUTHOR> If you type "is 1000000007 prime" into google, you'll find that google suggests that 1000000007 is not a prime.
See https://i.imgur.com/ZWyoxLx.png
However, 1000000007 is a well-known prime used in many programming competitions or online judges.
The same thing will happen if you type "is 15485863 prime" into google. (which is the 1000000th prime) See https://i.imgur.com/vrCKqL7.png
Perhaps, starting with 1299709 (the 100000th prime), the answers might be all wrong.
It seems that determining whether an input number is prime should not go wrong easily.
So, why does google fail to do that? <comment><USER2> I think Wolfram Alpha would try to parse the query and turn it into a statement like:

PrimeQ[1000000007]

[https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/PrimeQ.html](https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/PrimeQ.html)

I think Google is not doing that, instead they are scraping the web for spam sites that have automatically generated answers such as

[https://bloodpressureok.com/reading/172-over-67/](https://bloodpressureok.com/reading/172-over-67/)

which is bound to be less reliable.

<comment><USER3> That was a bing marketing thing for awhile. Bing would answer certain questions from authoritative sources.

Google has an inconsistent approach.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here are the screenshots used in the post 1000000007: [https://i.imgur.com/ZWyoxLx.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZWyoxLx.png) 15485863: [https://i.imgur.com/vrCKqL7.png](https://i.imgur.com/vrCKqL7.png)</comment>


How to review code and *not* alienate people - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Maephisto/how-to-review-code-and-not-alienate-people-8425011fba09 <comment><USER2> Sounds like a good idea. Have you actually tried this "in production"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, trialed and proven.</comment></comment>


Stripe Raises $20M From General Catalyst, Sequoia, Thiel - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/sexy-payments-startup-stripe-swipes-20m-from-general-catalyst-sequoia-thiel-and-more/ <comment><USER2> Congrats to the Stripe team - this will hopefully allow them to expand their platform outside of the US. I am one of those "anti-funding" guys, but I also understand cases where capital is needed to take it to the next level. This would be a classic example.

I am spinning off a portion of my business into a new startup this year and Stripe is at the top of our list as our subscription/payment provider. We've been playing in their sandbox and cannot wait to get going to production.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's growing like square? Wouldn't it be better to grow like exponentially?

<comment><USER4> 'Growing exponentially' is an overused phrase, and people actually forget what it means. Exponential growth makes a lot more sense when you're describing the number your user base, where generally speaking each user is worth the same to you. How sustainable is actual exponential monetary growth? I mean, I can't speak for Stripe, but I seriously don't think they're getting exponential growth in transaction.

<comment><USER3> Heh, my comment was just an attempt at humor.

That said, most naturally occurring growth is exponential. In the case of a webservice, whenever a new user increases the chance of another new user signing up by at least some constant factor, no matter how small, you have exponential growth. Things working against that are churn and later, like in the case of Facebook, the saturation in your market. If you discount for those factors (I don't think they hugely affect Stripe right now anyway), EVERY application that has even the tiniest viral co-efficient, even just traditional word of mouth, will grow exponentially.

The specific case of Stripe transactions is particularly interesting. They grow in both the number of companies using Stripe as well as the size of each of those companies. I have no knowledge of Stripe metrics, but I am fairly certain they've seen exponential growth over the past months. Much like Square btw ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Woohoo, Stripe coming to other countries!

Stripe is one of the few companies I know of where people are literally begging them to expand to their country which is a good indicator of their potential.

</comment><comment><USER6> I just implemented Stripe and Paypal into my site. God PayPal's entire API and documentation are beyond terrible. It's hard to put into words how bad the experience was with PayPal. It's like they hate developers or something.

<comment><USER7> Paypal hates everyone, not just developers.

<comment><USER8> You just made me stop and think where this hate is coming from. I am imagining a probable scenario were Paypal employees are hating their job. So their hate is transferred to everything they do for Paypal. End product would be the hate we feel by using their services.

<comment><USER9> Probably not. The reason Paypal appears to hate its customers is because a not-insignificant number of them are trying to steal Paypal's money. A poor developer API, on the other hand, is probably due to bad programmers. I've worked with a lot of bad programmers at other jobs, and one thing I've noticed is that they're not very good at coming up with APIs. (Why does Paypal have bad programmers? I don't know: why don't _you_ work for Paypal?)

Also, much of the complaining about Paypal seems to be in the form "I violated Paypal's ToS, and then they closed my account." Well, maybe you should read all those legal documents before entering into a business agreement?

<comment><USER10> Very true re the not insignificant number trying to steal from them. PayPals business is as much fraud detection and avoidance as it is payment processing and they're very very good at the fraud detection bit.

The payment processing part seems to be great until it goes wrong but when it does they have the minimal resource possible devoted to dealing with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Guess what, second VC round we're seeing today that's going to companies that actual provide customers and the high-tech community with a lot of tangible value. This hopefully gives some gunpowder to those claiming that we're not in a bubble.

<comment><USER12> There's an argument to be made that there's not a macro-economic bubble right now like there was in 1999, but that there IS a "Silicon Valley bubble". That is, there are so many early-stage startups proliferating and getting angel funding that there's a bubble for companies that provide services to other startups.

If this is true, there's a doomsday scenario: if the SV bubble collapses (say, due to some macro-economic change that dries up the glut of angel funding), then a lot of those companies that primarily provide services to other startups will collapse with it. There's more. As the companies go out of business for lack of (other startup) customers, a lot of the remaining startups that depend on those outside API's could go down for lack of infrastructure to stand on. Things could spiral down to a bad place pretty quickly.

<comment><USER13> Many of the companies raising good funding today are innovative and create value in the valley and in the world. I don't understand why people compare that to the dotcom bubble where 6-month old web companies with no significant value would raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Look at stripe for example, they're an excellent company that has proven their product is in demand. It's much more reasonable for a company like this to be allowed to scale versus the likes of pets.com.

<comment><USER14> because... facebook? twitter? colour.com? (what happened to them, anyhow?) Drop.io? I mean, that one is a pretty nifty weekend project, but ten million? come now. that's pretty silly.

I mean, much like drop.io, almost all of those companies have some value. Even facebook is worth something, it's just, well, not worth 60 billion or whatever it's selling for now. I mean, yeah, they do have the userbase (right now) to beyond what google has done to advertising... but damn, that's hard to do. And I don't think that Facebook has the deep understanding that google has that if people start thinking of them as creepy, they are dead. (I mean, I think google has the same problems as an autistic guy at a party; google /understands/ that being creepy is bad... but google doesn't have a good understanding of what creepy is. Facebook is the guy that read some "fast seduction" crap and is now proud of being a total asshole. )

I mean, I think I understand why google can make so much money off advertising and (very related) why people think facebook can make so much more; See, I just bought some advertising in Mountain View Safeway stores. Go to the mountain view safeway and you will see green on black prgmr.com logos on the dividers you place between your food, instead of the usual pictures of real- estate agents. I mean, all the people I know at google have talked to me about it, and they thought it was cool, but I've been talking about this for a while, so I don't know if they noticed it because they know me or what. Figuring out the effectiveness of meatspace advertising is difficult. If i bought ads on google, I'd be able to easily track how many customers I got per dollar, right? Of course, anyone would be willing to pay more for advertising if they knew what they were getting out of it; if you give me customers and I make $10 off each customer, what's wrong with giving you $5? heck, I could give you $9.

Problem is, I don't think that online advertising is as traceable as you think. I mean, sure, I know that guy that just signed up clicked on to my site through a google adwords ad, right? but you don't buy something the first time you hear about it. Maybe that guy saw a blog about me last month? the google adwords link might have just been more convenient for him than the organic search results.

I think that online advertising, in general, is overpriced because of this.

I understand that the value proposition of facebook is that they (potentially) can track buyers better. that blog you read about me last month? probably had a facebook 'like' button. Maybe they could then use that to better measure my actual advertising returns?

The biggest problem I see with that proposition is, well, that's a hard problem to solve at all... and not only do they need to solve it, they need to solve it and simplify the results down to the point where your average MBA can understand them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It may have made sense to try and raise more. There appears to be a land grab going on in that local versions of stripe are popping up in other countries. The quicker they get to other countries, the bigger their business might be as with payment providers there are switching costs.

<comment><USER3> The best practice for dealing with clones seems to be buying up the most promising clones in each of the larger countries. If there really are successful Stripe clones in other markets, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Stripe raised a series C next year and bought some. It's much easier than setting up operations from scratch everywhere.

<comment><USER15> True, the hard problem is the regulations. Clones that are out there would have to jump that hurdle before they got anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been one of the biggest fans of this service since it came out. Hugely disruptive to PayPal, we integrated their service in minutes over PayPal's laborious API, documentation, and error-prone sandbox.

Congrats to the team, much deserved and looking forward to what this product becomes.

Request: quarterly subscriptions. I know they can be handled with hooks but it shouldn't be that way. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Exec's "Justin Khan"?? Spelled wrong in two places?

</comment><comment><USER18> Love Stripe at our business! Best move we've made to date.

</comment><comment><USER19> hope this results in expansion beyond US residents.

<comment><USER20> > He's focused on expanding Stripe outside the US; The company's Canadian beta > just started today and Western Europe is next.

<comment><USER21> I'd love to get a rough idea where australia fits on their timeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Took one month to integrate CyberSource payment infrastructure....Integrated Stripe into our stack in a few hours. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER23> I really like what Stripe is doing and am trying to get my girlfriend to use it instead of PayPal on her ebook.

</comment><comment><USER24> Odd that they would raise only $20m just a year after raising the same amount.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe now they will support Canadian payments.... :)

<comment><USER26> i highly suggest you read the article

<comment><USER27> I can't find any more information anywhere else on the beta... any ideas?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> great service, great support, i am glad my company uses them

</comment><comment><USER29> Keep rocking. I really hope Stripe can speed up the expansion outside the US. Checkouted many different choices and really how it works.

<comment><USER30> mering</comment></comment>


Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating - <AUTHOR> http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/27/chuck-close-on-creativity/ <comment><USER3> (This sounds ranty, but...)

I'm one of the odd developers that doesn't obsess over tools. I worked with four different editors, last year - vico, vim, sublime, and eclipse - and I can't say that I'm attached to any of them. I don't complain when I can't use my favorite vim or sublime shortcuts (I don't even know a lot), and it doesn't phase me when I have to hack some code on my 13" MBP instead of my 24" monitor at work. Contrary to what most think, a developer that obsesses over their tools doesn't necessarily make them a good developer.

"Show up and get to work."

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I've knocked out hundreds of thousands of words of novel on my netbook in vim. Having only low-end hardware actually helped me focus.

<comment><USER5> I'm actually in the market for a typewriter right now, for exactly that reason. I'm setting up a room in my new house with nothing but a desk for a typewriter, a chair, and a sound system.

<comment><USER4> I could see that helping. It seems like transcription will prove a serious pain, though.

More importantly, Linux on an old laptop could still support Dropbox. I would have lost a _lot_ of work to a dead hard drive just last week if not for that. It only takes one leak or one energetic puppy to destroy a paper manuscript.

<comment><USER5> I'm likely going to hire someone to scan/OCR and fix up my pages. It'll likely only cost me a few grand for a whole novel -- a drop in the bucket compared to good editors and all that. But that's assuming I actually manage to write in the first place, which is a pretty big leap!

<comment><USER4> Your laptop can serve as that OCR service and it can cost a few - even several - times less than that estimate. Case in point: I write this reply on a $250 Woot.com netbook, which already saw me through a few novel drafts.

Please watch your costs here. My writing still hasn't covered the costs of the netbook I bought for my first novel, drafted back in 2008, and I paid only $500 for that one. A _hundred_ sales counts as serious success for a brand-new author, and that likely won't bring in a grand on even self-published eBook royalties (70%).

Editorial and other services (layout, etc.) shouldn't cost you anything close to that first estimate, either. Dean Wesley Smith (<http://deanwesleysmith.com>), a 30-year industry veteran, has more to say on these points.

<comment><USER5> I don't disagree at all with what you say, but it assumes that I'm doing it to make money. I see it as a hobby that I'm willing to throw money against; the likelihood of me seeing a dime is incredibly slim, and not at all the goal. Thanks though -- it's always good to have more info!

<comment><USER4> Glad to provide! You're going in with open eyes to your intent, and that makes all the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I learned anything from NaNoWriMo and from Stephen King's "On Writing", the labor counts much more than creativity.

My 400,000 words of novel-writing (and counting) might only contain a few gems, but it contains far more than the empty page of someone still waiting for inspiration to strike.

Sitting down and pounding out _whatever you can_ for an hour or two a day will make you a successful writer faster than anything other than actually writing.

<comment><USER6> Derek Sivers has another good article on this: <http://sivers.org/qlq>

I think the general 10,000 hours theory suggests that for the first ~2,000 hours of a new skill, all practice is deep practice (exact # of hours depends on the skill, of course.) That means that for the first few years, quantity of practice is more important than anything else. You'll eventually hit a plateau and need to practice in a different way to continue improving, but that will only ever apply to a few skills throughout your lifetime.

<comment><USER4> That makes sense. Amusing how it fits so well into the 80/20 rule, too.

One might need those 8,000 additional hours to level-up into the next Tennessee Williams but - as emphasized in _4-Hour Chef_ and elsewhere - <USER2> 2,000 hours puts your far beyond 95% of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit" for one reason: it completely does away with the whole mystification of "creativity" as some gift from a divine source. The plot is simple: creating stuff requires work. Figure out how you work best, then work. End of story.

Anyway, I'm a fan. It cured me of all inspiration-seeking behavior.

* [http://www.amazon.com/The-Creative-Habit-Learn-Life/dp/07432...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Creative-Habit-Learn-Life/dp/0743235274/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357159577&sr=8-1&keywords=twyla+tharp)

</comment><comment><USER8> "Show up and get to work" is a large part of Steven Pressfield's The War of Art [0] as well.

0\. <http://www.stevenpressfield.com/the-war-of-art/>

<comment><USER9> Ugh, I tried reading that a few years ago. Its pretty much a schlocky self- help book with large doses of new age religion in it. I guess whatever works for Steven Pressfield, but that doesn't work for me.

This website has everything that book has, and more, without the awkward self- help spiritualism that's so popular:

<http://gapingvoid.com/2004/07/25/how-to-be-creative/>

Also, if you're "busy" reading /r/getmotivated and books like these you're not actually doing work. You're reading about doing work. These advice guides are traps and time wasters in themselves. Good in small doses, but after a point, they're just as bad as watching TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My neighbor, Nan, is a working painter. She starts about first light. Getting started in the morning is a habit.

I read Vonnegut's biography, _And So It Goes_. He'd been developing his novel about Dresden for nearly two decades before it became _Slaughter House Five_. He wrote most every day, just like any other job.

</comment><comment><USER11> "For inspiration to strike, it has to find you working." -- Author?

<comment><USER12> Picaso:

[http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/30296-inspiration-exists- but...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/30296-inspiration-exists-but-it-has- to-find-you-working)

<comment><USER13> That site isn't reliable for checking quotes. The only one I know of that tries to be comprehensive and accurate is Wikiquote, and according to it this line isn't attributable to Picasso: <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Pablo_Picasso>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Elizabeth Gilbert (authored Eat Pray Love) had some similar thoughts in this fantastic TED talk: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA>

</comment><comment><USER15> Maria Popova's blog is awesome. Somehow, she always finds those little known (or unknown) books, quotes etc

</comment><comment><USER16> Nick Cave's said very similar things about inspiration/creativity as well...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MBqWikfETcM#t=31s)

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a good point, but you should also put it in context with Chuck Close's monastic dedication. Unlike a lot of artists, he seeks out constraints. Often times he starts out by closing off options, and then seeing what scope for creativity is left.

For instance, he's done a zillion self-portraits. He thinks his face is uninteresting, so he can explore pure technique. (Also, I guess he's always available as a model.)

Perhaps this is all part of making creativity a predictable thing - he doesn't get lost in infinite options.

</comment><comment><USER18> Leonardo da Vinci was a chronic procrastinator. Ironic?

<comment><USER19> He was notorious for not finishing projects, or finishing them late; but that's not the same as procrastinating by browsing reddit all day, he got a hell of a lot done.

<comment><USER20> I agree, the idea that Leonardo's works poofed into existence doesn't add up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can see the CEO of startup "X" printing this article and showing to their "whiny" developers so they stop asking for a better work environment where their boss doesn't try to micro-manage them all the time and distract them.

It seems like he doesn't care about when he works, but he has long uninterrupted work times, which is great, and it's what most developers ask for.

<comment><USER22> And then the employees of startup X would tell the CEO that they should be working for 6 hours a day rather than 16.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to decide if feature request is worth implementing? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I'm a developer at an early-stage startup.
One of our users requested a feature and it took about 3 weeks to implement, but later we found out that they don't really use that new feature. It was more of a 'nice to have' to them rather than necessary. So we basically wasted three weeks, which is kinda demoralizing. I thought 'make users happy' makes sense, but in this case it was a waste of time.
When a user requests a feature, how do you decide if it's really worth implementing? <comment><USER2> Bootstrapped startup here. Our default response is that the feature is on our roadmap but lower position. If they're willing to upgrade to a higher plan or pay extra because they need it urgently we can move it up. I think 1 out of 50 ever paid. Some start arguing why they need the feature, that's good, that shows us it's more than 'nice to have' for them. In (very) small companies you need to say 'no' to a lot of requests not to get distracted.</comment>


Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useless - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/bitcoin-and-other-cryptocurrencies-are-useless <comment><USER2> I'm a digital nomad and I travel around a lot. Recently I'd lost my one main debit/ATM card, I was in Budapest and was running out of cash.

I'd never used crypto ATMs before as I never felt the need based in the states but for the first time I looked up a BTC ATM (5 mins walk from my hostel), transferred some BTC over from my Coinbase account, withdrew cash within 20 mins.

No Transferwise/WesternUnion, no calling up friends or family and figuring things out. This was the smoothest way I've ever received cash in a foreign country.

I'm not commenting about price speculation of crypto, etc. But if this experience is possible right now, I bet there's going to be a lot more use- cases within 5 years with actual users.

<comment><USER3> > transferred some BTC over from my Coinbase account, withdrew cash within 20 > mins.

Fascinating. Somehow the ATM network was confident that it had your BTC and was willing to give you actual cash within 20 minutes. That suggests that either they don't care much about security or that what you actually did had very little to do with Bitcoin. Did you perhaps actually just convert Coinbase value to Hungarian Forints without really involving any Bitcoin transactions?

I'm not really trying to be snarky. There may be a genuinely useful economy based on companies like Coinbase that operate under different rules than your usual banks, but it's not clear to me that Bitcoin per se or, for that matter, blockchains, are an important part of this.

<comment><USER2> Here is the ATM that I used - [https://imgur.com/bpwmBLz](https://imgur.com/bpwmBLz)

I'm pretty sure they waited for two-block confirmations instead of the usual 6 because of the risk analysis. The amount was not much and so I think that might have something to do with it.

<comment><USER4> Using your Coinbase account means it didn't involve a private key belonging to you. We don't know if the ATM network and Coinbase transacted on the blockchain.

That's still an occurrence of Bitcoin being a transferable unit of value, though.

We're not yet on the canonical usage of Bitcoin (that would be you using a private key you're in control of), but we're getting there.

<comment><USER2> > Using your Coinbase account means it didn't involve a private key belonging > to you.

True.

> We don't know if the ATM network and Coinbase transacted on the blockchain.

The action on my part on Coinbase was basically transferring / sending BTC to an external BTC address. So the transaction was definitely on the blockchain. But yes, I see your point.

I was also carrying my Ledger wallet but to plug it into my laptop and then initializing the transfer while standing at the ATM was not possible. So yeah, still getting there.

<comment><USER4> > The action on my part on Coinbase was basically transferring / sending BTC > to an external BTC address

Oh, so it did involve a Bitcoin address. You're right, I don't think they tried to find each other through metadata to settle it outside the Blockchain. That would be dumb, plus the inconveniencing 20 minutes is consistent with that.

It's great to see examples like this in the wild. I've been hearing lightning is getting greater usability and traction as well. Interesting times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm no bitcoin maximalist, but boy was that a lazy write-off:

"Economists define a currency as something that can be at once a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. Lack of adoption and loads of volatility mean that cryptocurrencies satisfy none of those criteria... as things stand there is little reason to think that cryptocurrencies will remain more than an overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino."

That bitcoin is a poor medium of exchange and unit of account is hard to argue against at this stage of adoption. But store of value? I'm more confident in the maintained value of Bitcoin than that of a Venezuelan Bolívar. That's not a strong enough reason for me to hold bitcoin, but if I lived in Venezuela it sure as hell would be!

Moving from the realm of currency to usefulness, there's no faster & cheaper way to transfer money across national borders.

Viewed in this light it's just a younger, more easily stored, more fungible, more easily transferable gold.

Now I do hold more gold than bitcoin (in USD, combined about 6% of my portfolio atm) because certainly risks remain. But to say it has no utility is just crazy! I guess precious metals are useless too. What's their market cap again?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but gold is real, it's a real metal here in the physical universe, not only does it look good, it doesn't tarnish or rust ( to any real degree under normal circumstances ) with many niche uses beyond ornamental, just think about how much gold foil goes into something that's going to space... it is also one of the heaviest, most uniquely workable metals that isn't dangerously radioactive.

My point is that it has an INTRINSIC value, not just an arbitrary value we've assigned to it, but a natural value that comes only to things that are actually naturally valuable... that statement may seem to be self referential, i.e. wet because not dry, but I think it makes the point I'm trying to get across, which is: there's a difference between that which IS valuable, and that which has value because WE assign it value.

Like tulips in pre-crash 1637, "bitcon" only has the value we assign to it, in reality it's nothing but numbers and we've plenty of those.

That it can and probably will decrease in value drastically when a majority of people realize it has no INTRINSIC value... well that should be warning enough to those wise enough to think about critically.

It's not like "market cap" really even applies to it here, yes each "coin" is assigned some value and the multiplication applied methodically does seem to come up with a giant number, but there are no REAL assets... it's not like it's a share of stock in a company that makes anything, it's all ethereal, there's absolutely nothing of value except the fact that somebody else is willing to exchange something of REAL value for it... when that's gone, the whole thing will be another story on Wikipedia...

<comment><USER7> There's a reason we call currencies like the dollar fiat currencies, because they only have the value that we give them. Bitcoin is similarly valued. As for gold, Bitcoin is a currency, not a rock. Have you ever tried to buy a sandwich with gold? No, well no shit because it's not a currency and is useless as a means of exchange. Comparing Bitcoin to gold is silly.

<comment><USER8> There's probably quite a few places that would take gold for a sandwich...assuming they knew what you were giving them was real gold. Gold is not as widespread in use as it once was for commerce, but it's still used.

<comment><USER6> Also, the value of gold doesn't go to zero when the electricity stops... if/when that happens the chickens laying eggs in your coop will be worth more than bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> If "the electricity stops" how do you expect to retrieve your gold?

Or do you keep it in a vault in your house along with two years' rations in case the world's electricity stops working?

I don't mean to be rude, but let's try to keep the arguments rational. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise about bitcoin's value. But I need to be _convinced_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The usefulness of cryptocurrency is not abstract: cryptocurrencies are useful for sending value over the internet and over international borders. Doing so without cryptocurrencies is very difficult and costly, requires large banks and multinational law firms.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how you define "very difficult" but plenty of immigrants are transferring money to their families and they don't seem to be using cryptocurrency. Western Union and similar firms seem pretty popular? This appears to be a well-developed industry with a fair amount of competition:

[https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-ways-to-wire- mo...](https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-ways-to-wire-money- internationally/)

<comment><USER11> It's difficult for criminal transactions.

There are tons of banking solutions in every country for transferring money. But they typically have low limits and require appropriate documentation.

<comment><USER9> It's difficult for non-personal transactions in general. If you have a business that delivers some digital product, it is very difficult to serve an international client base without running afoul of anti money laundering compliance issues at banks and such. Cryptocurrencies can get around that. And I'm not saying there isn't good reason for those rules for being there, but that they are stagnant and good candidates for "disruption" provided the attempts are made in good faith.

<comment><USER12> > _very difficult_ How can this be? I've purchased many digital products from > business outside my country of residence.

I usually use PayPal or Visa / MasterCard.

<comment><USER9> But you didn't set up the business. Whatever business was behind the transaction either had or hired a transaction processor with a legal team experienced with international payments like Stripe or PayPal.

And in general, they are doing something that's very difficult.

<comment><USER12> I don't understand what you are saying.

You wrote:

> If you have a business that delivers some digital product, it is very > difficult to serve an international client base without running afoul of > anti money laundering compliance issues at banks and such.

And yet I use a whole bunch of services not based in my country of residence that deliver a digital product to my home. Mostly paid through either PayPal or Via / Mastercard.

How can something be _very difficult_ yet extremely common?

Unless you mean receiving payments of large sums of money, in which case you're going to want to engage a transaction processor and legal team anyway. And for even larger sums of money, on an ongoing basis, it's not uncommon for an organisation to setup a local headquarters.

And anyway, the point of anti-money laundering legislation isn't to run afoul of such legislation, it's to decrease the likelihood a business is used by people who have a need to launder money, and to more easily identify and track laundered money, etc.

Or did you mean to imply that setting up a business like PayPal, Stripe, Visa, or Mastercard isn't easy. That's probably most certainly true. You've got to be really dedicated.

Is there something I've missed?

<comment><USER11> It's difficuly to do outside of the US and some European countries.

Most companies will just incorporate in the US and use a US payment processor and operate as a US company. If, for example, you have a business in Brazil and you want to sell digital goods it's not so easy to accept payments at all, let alone international payments. And incorporating in the US can be a hurdle if you don't live here or have somone who can help you navigate getting set up with things like a US bank account.

<comment><USER12> Right. I meant to encompass this in my sentence _" And for even larger sums of money, on an ongoing basis, it's not uncommon for an organisation to setup a local headquarters._"

PayPal claims¹ to be _available in more than 200 countries /regions and support 25 currencies._ Does PayPal in Brazil not accept payments from PayPal users in The USA?

I'm not saying some people aren't underserved by money services, though.

1\. [https://www.paypal.com/en/webapps/mpp/country- worldwide](https://www.paypal.com/en/webapps/mpp/country-worldwide)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> James Mickens has a pretty good breakdown of why blockchain isn't a good solution for most real-world problems: [https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI](https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI)

<comment><USER14> Wow, that was a rather dumb presentation. Basic arguments are like "anonymous nodes are bad because I can't sue them", "smart contracts are unneeded as we mostly just need to store static data" (supplied by authorities), "too much security is paranoid given real life trust with legal enforcement".

<comment><USER4> I believe all these would be for regular already working uses cases that people are trying to shoehorn blockchains onto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm happy its been added to the list: [https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/](https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/)

<comment><USER16> Really, articles like this are good for Bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm over my article limit with the Economist. If only there was a way I could pay for a subscription without a bank account.

<comment><USER8> Seriously, it would be nice if someone invented a way to make microtransactions on the internet a reality!

<comment><USER4> [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

And btw they're currently having a BAT giveaway on the Desktop version.

I currently have my 15 giveaway BATs in it (3.37 USD), and it is supposed to give them to site I use?

I'd give some of them to open some paywalls, but not to the economist if they continue to write such vacuus articles.

Maybe give them to open the paywall, then be able to relinquish that payment after having consumed it and it was of low quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The real flaws with cryptocoins(partially excluding monero and similar projects that fix some of the flaws).

1.They're not anonymous(IP addresses are exposed). Less private than a bank(where each transaction is not viewed by every other bank user).

2.They're not providing fungibility(unlike gold), each transaction can be traced to source(via blockchain viewer).

3.They're requiring absurd amounts of electricity to generate(esp. Bitcoin which consumes enough electricity to power several countries)

4.They're not fast enough for real-time transaction and real-time finance/trade. Long confirmation times ruin potential to customer-centric interaction.

5.Volatility of value: coins depend on the market trend dictated by big spenders/owners who control vast majority of coins in a cryptocurrency.

6.Concentration of wealth: early adopters and cryptofarming facilities owners hold most of wealth(see point 5).

7.Lack of security: despite being protected by blockchain, most cryptowallets are at risk of being hacked due websites hosting them being far less secure than banks. Lots of cryptocurrency theft doesn't inspire confidence in it.

8.Limited goods market: cryptocurrency is still not adopted enough to be a worthwhile investment, majority of commercial use is for unregulated casinos, illegal goods/services, and donations.

</comment><comment><USER19> They happen to be extremely useful for buying recreational drugs on the internet. The author overlooks that.

<comment><USER20> Exactly - without Bitcoin or alternatives I'm not sure these marketplaces would be feasible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Blockchain advocates have yet to prove that the underlying technology can > live up to the grand claims made for it.

I agree with this sentiment. Since blockchain was introduced I have seen many people building solutions on top of it, but not many people actually using those solutions. Instead, it seems that the most prevalent use of blockchain technology or crypto currency is to boost the speculative wealth of their stakeholders.

<comment><USER22> to me this seems like dismissing the web as a novelty in the 90s. we're in early days yet, and still assembling the ideas and fundamental components for what it makes possible.

<comment><USER23> By 1995, the web had clear and significant business value. Online commerce was rolling, access to information and services was driving a big rounds of investment at all sorts of companies, ordinary people were starting to use things (news, forums, dating, fantasy football, etc.) on a daily basis, etc. That was despite computers and network access being very expensive and horrible by modern standards – remember dialup and navigating at 14.4k?

In contrast, we're a decade into blockchain hype, adoption is far easier than getting online was, and yet the only reason most people know about it is ransomware, drug purchases, or speculation. The number of people who have any need to use it on a daily basis is still a tiny fraction of the population and only the speculators would be inconvenienced if it suddenly stopped working tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Pretty level headed analysis.

I'm still highly skeptical of the applications of blockchain technologies, it seems to me that the costs and incentive structures are all kinds of wacky, but anyone who thinks that BTC is going to become a mass-adopted currency is just deluding themselves at this point.

</comment><comment><USER24> Strong buy signal

<comment><USER25> If I'm reading the article right, the entire claim is that Bitcoin is useless as a day-to-day currency and is only useful for investment/speculation, so "Time to invest" isn't actually contradicting the article at all.

<comment><USER26> However not all cryptocurrencies share the same issues as Bitcoin and the article lumps them all together.

I'm a developer on a cryptocurrency called Nano whose goal is to be usable as day-to-day money. I think we are successful to a large degree.

<comment><USER27> How do you define success?

<comment><USER26> There are two sides to that answer.

One is the software and technical side. The problem was a creating a scarce digital commodity which can be securely transferred without a cooperating central authority. I judge us successful here.

The other is the the ability to change the world. The software and ideas may be successful, but if adoption is infeasable then we cannot succeed overall. The project is relatively new, but the community support leads me to believe that we are successful to a large degree here as well, relative to the ability of any newcomer to enter the market.

<comment><USER12> > day-to-day money ... ... creating a scarce digital commodity

Why would you want day-to-day money to be _scarce_?

Is not one of the benefits of cash the knowledge that you can go to an ATM and withdraw way more than your day-to-day needs.

<comment><USER26> In general, you want money to be scarce so that it does not devalue wildly. Money in Venezuela recently started lacking scarcity, to the detriment of those who tried to use it as money.

An interesting debate that I found recently on which is the better money, cryptocurrencies or gold-backed notes goes into this: [https://youtu.be/q8R71WGO3qU](https://youtu.be/q8R71WGO3qU)

<comment><USER12> The supply of cash notes in Venezuela wasn't / isn't the problem. It's that no-one has faith in the value of those notes.

> which is the better money, cryptocurrencies or gold-backed notes goes into > this

This is a false dichotomy.

<comment><USER26> > This is a false dichotomy.

Nevertheless, it is the subject of the debate and the debate also goes into why you would want scarcity as the basis of a money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love how the subtitle flatly contradicts the actual title. What happened there? Did some editor feel the need to damp the article's criticism but lack the resolve to go farther than the title?

<comment><USER29> No, there's a distinction between cryptocurrency and the underlying blockchain technology. There are a number of applications of blockchain that are promising such as in settling financial contracts that don't require issuing a speculative token to go along with it.

<comment><USER28> I see, I didn't read closely enough. Oops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Useless? Useless like Paypal or Stripe? I forgot to get the memo and I have purchased products with great satisfaction with Bitcoin - oops.

Oh and I found the page hard to read with ads and popups, so:

[https://outline.com/yaRUTm](https://outline.com/yaRUTm)

</comment><comment><USER31> I find them useful. Bitcoin maybe not as much, but Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and many others are great. The easiest way to pay for things without getting screwed on the fees and silly local government controls.

<comment><USER32> >silly local government controls.

Like what?

<comment><USER33> Criminal law.

<comment><USER12> Tax law too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Useless ? The primary function is to protect individual wealth against central banker meddling and corruption. My btc are up 1000x since 2011. It isn't a smooth ride but its definitely working great.

</comment><comment><USER35> By having the contracts transparent there will be much less need for public sector.

Economist in general.

;)

</comment><comment><USER36> Just based on the title, since it's paywalled:

Cryptocurrencies are definitely not useless. Most of them just suffer from pretty shitty negatives, like ridiculous distribution of ownership, ridiculous manipulation, shitty security, infeasible settings, ... This includes pretty much all current cryptocurrencies.

All it would take for a cryptocurrency (yes, a single per market pretty much, crypto-(euro|dollar|...) to take hold is for the central market to push it and be controllable by them (almost fully). The issue against that is that international laws and treaties prevent it.

</comment><comment><USER37> LOL. The establishment Economist magazine says it - it must be so.

</comment><comment><USER38> The Economist used to have more thoughtful and insightful articles. This article is about the quality you would find in a local general newspaper.

</comment><comment><USER8> Dead tree currency's days are numbered. Crypto is a huge innovation, with plenty of benefits over fiat. Articles like this are looking sillier and sillier as Bitcoin et al continue to innovate, improve, scale, and defy all critics.

<comment> grey-area Bitcoin is not competing with paper cash, it is competing with centralized digital currencies backed by states and huge payment networks, offering free confirmed digital transfers in seconds around the globe. Bitcoin solves the wrong problems in a way which guarantees it cannot scale to a global payments system.

All currencies will be digital one day, paper money is certainly going to be phased out, as gold coinage was, but it won't be replaced by blockchains, but by systems which recognize trust is central to financial transactions.

<comment><USER12> All national currencies, in the developed nations anyway, are already digital.

I can hold my Australian dollar as cash money, but I don't need to.</comment></comment></comment>


PATCH Method for HTTP - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5789

<comment><USER2> It's a shame that Patch isn't idempotent.

My preference for updating data across the web is to send only the information that is different, and the service ensures everything else remains the same. Put doesn't quite cut it in this case (technically, it's supposed to completely replace a resource).

Are there any advantages for declaring Patch to be not idempotent? I'm assuming it allows appending to a single resource?

<comment><USER3> HTTP PATCH can only be idempotent if the underlying patch mechanism is idempotent, right?

At the protocol level, there are no guarantees. At the application level, you can fake it (in the non-mathematical sense) by checking sentinels/guids or testing for applicability. This provides safety, but requires code.

But that's not really idempotence. I don't see any way that the IETF could specify a generic idempotent patch mechanism, or declare an arbitrary mechanism to be idempotent.

EDIT: it looks like you want idempotence a la SQL UPDATE. That seems eminently doable in the application layer. Specifying it in an RFC would be inadequately generic for a whole new HTTP verb, I think.

<comment><USER4> By definition, GET, HEAD, PUT and DELETE are idempotent: <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html>

I personally agree with the parent. PATCH _should_ be idempotent; overwriting values with new values is idempotent and that should be written into the spec rather than avoiding it in favour of things like writing logs (which IMHO should be a POST).

<comment><USER3> Yes, but GET, HEAD, PUT, and DELETE do very different things.

You can write an idempotent PATCH mechanism. If that's what you want, you can do it. You control the server, so you can restrict the accepted patch formats to idempotent ones.

Adding an HTTP verb doesn't make patching magically happen. Someone has to write the logic, either you or your framework authors. Obviously there will be different mechanisms and some will be _effectively_ idempotent. Again, not in the mathematical or functional programming sense, but in the colloquial DBA sense, at least.

Limiting HTTP PATCH at the protocol level would be a huge mistake, I think.

None of this should be construed to mean that I see a clear need for a new HTTP verb, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now annoyingly the ELB on AWS just bounces PATCH requests with a 405 Method Not Allowed. Our services are affected by this and I noticed there is a bug open over at Heroku regarding the same issue. It's something Amazon don't document though so you only find out through testing after you already created your planned stack...

<comment><USER4> Indeed, it also affects <http://httpbin.org/> which makes it way harder to test clients. Considering the spec has been out since 2010, you'd think they'd have fixed it by now.

<comment><USER6> It's a Request For Comments and not a standard. It's also at the most immature level on the standards track. Why would they implement something that may change drastically or never be implemented widely enough to justify the engineering effort?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While this is certainly makes the request's intent more clear, I suspect there isn't much gained here over simply POSTing the patch content. Other request methods can be implemented by the HTTP server itself in terms of the filesystem (e.g. PUT "simply" writes the content stream to a local file), but PATCH would require the server itself to have specific knowledge of the patch format and how to apply it in order to be useful. This could be farmed out a plugin or external program, but such a thing could just as easily live as a POST processor in [insert favourite language here] without needing to make any changes to the HTTP server or standards.

</comment><comment><USER8> I gave a short presentation (5 minutes) about the PATCH verb and RESTful APIs at local user group last year. Possibly someone will find the slide useful (or just enjoy the kitten pictures ;p):

<http://almostobsolete.net/talks/http_rest_patch_kittens/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Can somewhere point me to the part of RFC 2616 that says "The PUT method is already defined to overwrite a resource with a complete new body, and cannot be reused to do partial changes."

<comment><USER9> This was the first thing that came to mind to me: can't PUT take a Range header, and would that not be the same as patch?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> PATCH will be supported in Rails [http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/2/25/edge-rails-patch- is-...](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/2/25/edge-rails-patch-is-the-new- primary-http-method-for-updates/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't wait to submit HTML forms with a PATCH method ;-)

<comment><USER12> Could you elaborate on your sarcasm?

Given due care on server side, I'm not sure why that would be so terrible.

<comment><USER11> Because normally with a form you are submitting a full, complete resource from the web server's perspective.</comment></comment></comment>


[Python and HTTP] How many data compress methods at HTTP POST body? - <AUTHOR> I have captured a http package of an App by Charles,  the headers and body of this package is:
```<p><pre><code>    POST /v1/user/message/history?fr=544504935 HTTP/1.1
    X-LV: 1
    X-KV: cf6ccedf
    X-SIGN: J8bMq6EIw7hTZzaekDiIE40Jy+s=
    Connection: Keep-Alive
    Charset: UTF-8
    Expect: 100-continue
    cookie: SESSIONID=30BB3E48-C110-CF95-BBF7-C5B948672125
    Accept-Language: zh-CN
    User-Agent: xxx/8.2.1 Android/1510 (Redmi 4X; Android 7.1.2; Gapps 1; zh_CN; 23; Xiaomi)
    Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
    Content-Length: 109
    Host: api.xxx.com
    Accept-Encoding: gzip

    mzip= AgOrTaf%2BAI1OoQiapEonDg4iF8yxaY2CcUN0xL7cIEV8bP4I%2BrNDSY3AbRR2Xj6EJyT0XGPd5xSkAiuwGvawny7%2BZVmhABw%3D </code></pre> ```
what I am interest in is the body, which is:
```<p><pre><code>    mzip= AgOrTaf%2BAI1OoQiapEonDg4iF8yxaY2CcUN0xL7cIEV8bP4I%2BrNDSY3AbRR2Xj6EJyT0XGPd5xSkAiuwGvawny7%2BZVmhABw%3D </code></pre> ```
surely, it can be decoded by urlencode first and then decoded by base64. After that, you will get a binary data.
According to my experence, some website will use zip to compress the data and then encode the binary data of this zip file by base64.  while other website will use gzip to compress the data and then encode the binary data.
However, this App's http post body use neither of these two methods. And what does the `mzip` mean in the body?
Dear friend, can you suggest me how to decode this http post body ? <comment><USER2> application/x-www-form-urlencoded means this is form data.

mzip is the form field name</comment>