DIY B&B - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust_2012/features/diy_bb038421.php <comment><USER2> I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the negative reaction to this here. The HN demographic is presumably tilted towards young men.

What those criticisms seem to be neglecting is that those--particularly for apartment buildings--these temporary visitors impact beyond just you.

In Australia, for example, one useful metric used by people when assessing apartment buildings to buy in is to look at the ratio of owner-occupiers vs renters. Generally the more owner-occupiers, the better the building.

Renters don't tend to look after properties, tend to be less mindful of behaviour that impacts the neighbours (parties, etc), etc.

This goes even moreso for really short-term tenants. There have been examples of this already (like the woman who had her house trashed in SF after renting it out on AirBnB). Such extreme examples aside, you are raising the risk of damage or theft to the property of others by bringing a stream of strangers into your home.

Yes most of the time it works out just fine but sometimes it doesn't and your neighbours didn't sign up for you opening a hotel.

Would people feel the same way if someone was operating a brothel in their house or apartment? After all, it's their property and they can do with it as they please right? What about operating a bar or a club?

This is not as one-sided as some suggest.

<comment><USER3> You're forgetting that this problem is already solved by contract law.

Tenants sign agreements not to rent out their units all the time. Home owner's associations often have rules against short-term rentals as well.

If you don't like the idea of short-term rentals in your neighborhood or building, choose one protected by one of these types of contracts. In fact, they're so common, you probably already have such protections, even if you don't know it.

The government making something illegal really should be the last resort for societal problems. I'm not convinced short-term rentals are really so harmful as to meet that threshold.

<comment><USER4> Once you have children (or nieces/nephews), there is a 100% chance that you will feel differently about short-term rentals.

Long-term rentals indicate tenants that are stable enough to at least afford the lease. They are subject to at least some vetting (including background checks) prior to moving in. Short term tenants can be anyone. No background checks are conducted.

<comment><USER5> There's a 100% chance that I won't.

Strangers, even unvetted ones, almost never pose a danger to children. The vast majority of harm done to children is done by friends and family. Having more strangers around makes your kids safer, if anything.

<comment><USER6> This is why, when I need sitting for my middle-school aged kids, I drop them off in the middle of Union Station instead of bringing them to their grandparents.

<comment><USER7> At least they won't get fat! Those grandparents...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just about every year for as long as I can remember, my family has taken a summer vacation at a beach about 300 miles away. We always stay in a hotel.

Over time, the beach has gotten tacky. Big billboards. Lots of nightlife. Amusement park rides. All kinds of things that reek of Las Vegas, but not so much a relaxing family vacation.

So this year we decided to try something different. I got onto VRBO online and picked out a beach house 1000 miles away in Florida. The owner included pictures, and there were lots of references and reviews for me to assess risk beforehand. I sent them a check -- which they could have cashed and absconded with -- and we drove down on the day scheduled.

It was the best beach vacation we've ever had. In addition, it was half or a third as much as our previous vacations.

Vested interests can fight as much as they want, but this is a done deal: people own their stuff and they're damn well liable to do what they want to with it. If I can sell you a 8-passenger airplane without warranty, you can certainly come stay at my house for an night or two. Laws which were used to increase the quality of hotel stays back in 1890 have extremely little applicability today.

I don't know if we're going to use the same house again this year -- the owner was magnificent, and I'm not about to share where it was! -- but I know that we'll be sticking to this model for a good while.

<comment><USER3> > Vested interests can fight as much as they want, but this is a done deal

I think this is absolutely the case. Right now we're seeing what happened in the early days of Napster. The RIAA and governments were shocked _shocked_ at the widespread disregard for the law. Now a decade or so later it's common and widely accepted that breaking copyright is just something that happens.

Airbnb & Homeaway/VRBO & Craigslist are currently the exchanges for a p2p transaction, like Napster or Kazaa were for music. I suspect they will be targeted by existing interests and governments and they might even be taken down in some jurisdictions. But if they do, more will pop up in their place, as always seems to be the case in distributed p2p markets.

<comment><USER9> I expect the endgame to be similar. In some number of years, there will be "legitimate" ways of doing this, that let the governments take taxes easily and provide some sort of baseline regulation/dispute-settling/insurance, like how the Napsters and Kazaas paved the way and eventually led to services that work more inside the system instead of usurping the system. The under-the- table versions will never go away entirely, but if you can give me a basically hassle-free way of doing the same thing in a sanctioned manner (were I looking to rent out some space of my own, I'd greatly prefer a service that took care of the insurance, liability, and legality issues for me), I'm going to choose that. The question I'd love to know the answer to is just how much AirBNB plans on working with governments and insurers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article:

"For more than a year now, New York City has been enforcing a new state law that makes it illegal for homeowners like Hogan to rent out their house or apartment for less than a month. All across the city, police raids have shut down hundreds of similar informal bed-and-breakfast establishments, with nearly 1,900 different violations issued in under twelve months. Often, the fees associated with the citations stretch into tens of thousands of dollars. Hogan was threatened with a $25,000 fine—all for marketing the empty rooms in his house.

. . . .

"The crackdown in New York is similar to ones happening in several major European cities. Paris, for instance, passed a law in 2005 banning the rental of any residential property for less than a year, and began enforcing that law in 2010. London is now engaging in a wave of enforcement in the run-up to the 2012 Summer Olympics."

This is the first journalistic report I have seen of such widespread, persistent enforcement actions. Is this the general experience of HN participants (and, especially, Airbnb participants) in your part of the world? What is your rating of the risk of being cited for a local law violation if you list your place as a short-term rental online?

<comment><USER11> I had to take my couch offline because my HOA threatened to fine me. No more visitors, no more foreign friends. :(

It seems the first wave of enforcement has come from HOAs, I've heard of various people having to remove their listing for that reason. [1]

Now it appears, according to the article above, municipal authorities are pushing back. Could this be a result of lobbying from hotels? Vacation rentals is not a new concept, and couchsurfing has been around for years as well. It seems that just because couchsurfing/vacation rentals are getting a wider audience that it's now suddenly a problem.

I personally don't want my HOA or government telling me who I can or can not have over to stay. Their place is not in my home.

1: [http://betabeat.com/2011/05/airbnb-takes-manhattan- with-2k-b...](http://betabeat.com/2011/05/airbnb-takes-manhattan- with-2k-bookings-a-night-but-many-listings-may-be-illegal/)

<comment><USER12> _... telling me who I can or can not have over to stay._

They aren't telling you who you can or can not have over, they are prohibiting you from having temporary guests that pay.

Why? Well, an establishment that houses temporary guests traditionally has to answer to health & safety codes and regulations. Under-the-radar AirBnB rentals circumvent that system.

You'd probably get similar kickback if you tried running an informal restaurant out of your home. "Who is the government to tell me who I can and can not serve food!" Well, restaurant health codes, that's who.

<comment><USER11> I received an email with my airbnb listing and couchsurfing listing attached saying I can't keep either online otherwise I'll get a fine.

It wasn't my main source of income, and I'm not running a business. In fact, I'd rather not have someone on my couch every day, I like my space. I'm saying it should be my choice to have a kid from Massachusetts, a student from Spain, or a grandmother from South Carolina, or my family stay.

edit: <http://cookitfor.us/>

<comment><USER13> would the loophole here be to just post availability and list an email address then keep all discussions of payment offline?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a classic example of anti-competitive market fixing, masquerading as a "regulation to protect consumers" or somesuch.

There is no legitimate justification to infringe on a contract between a willing buyer and a willing seller, but to actually fight these crackdowns you have to spend lots of $$$ on local political campaigns in every municipality. Easier said than done. Unless that massive lobbying investment (or at least a publicity campaign, like SOPA boycotts) happen the entrenched interests win by default and lots of peer-to-peer transactions will move to gray/black market.

Prohibition always creates speakeasies and the organized crime to protect them.

EDIT: To address "devil advocates", yes, most regulation mandated and enforced by government is a terrible imposition. Self-regulation that preserves consumer choice is a much better idea. You want to pay extra $$$ for a better level of service / protection /etc? Make it an optional line item with explicit cost.

<comment><USER15> _There is no legitimate justification to infringe on a contract between a willing buyer and a willing seller_

Devils advocate: are food standards also a terrible imposition? The government insists on coming around to all the restaurants in the city and _inspecting_ them to make sure that no-one will be poisoned or killed by the food they eat. How _dare_ they stand in between a willing buyer and seller. Right? Right?

Food standards, restaurant inspections, building codes, health and safety codes... the list goes on. Are they all illegitimate attempts to stand between a willing buyer and seller?

<comment><USER16> It has little to do with the reasons for regulating food, and everything to do with the means. In order to keep me from buying soda, you have to forcibly come between the _peaceful and free association_ of me and another person.

You're not going to convince me that I would still buy raw milk, or that pasteurized milk would be unavailable, in the absence of FDA regulation.

<comment><USER15> How would you know if you were buying raw or pasteurized milk if there were no food labelling regulations obligating people to label it accordingly?

<comment><USER16> Just like I do now. I look for milk labeled "pasteurized" and make sure it's from a trusted vendor/brand or has a trusted certification.

There's a competitive advantage to labeling food, and there's no stopping companies from labeling food in the absence of food labeling regulations. The most trusted organic certification is from a for-profit certification company, Quality Assurance International. McDonald's published nutrition information before it was required by any law. Intentionally incorrect labeling is already covered by fraud and tort law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These laws seems to curb an efficient market process, which I don't like if true.

Also I think the government loses out on special taxes from Hotel business, but maybe those taxes could also be collected from these B&B type operations? Hotels have no business using the law to fight a competitive threat, in my opinion anyway. Does not seem to make sense to me.

<comment><USER18> This looks like a classic example of regulatory capture, where the regulator becomes an effective barrier to new entrants to the market.

Factor in the concentrated nature of the hotel industry (fewer of them, more at stake) and you can see why they are motivated and able to put pressure on the bureaucracy.

The whole thing does strike me as morally irresponsible in that a city with a persistent and undealt with homeless problem should not be limiting the availability of housing units until the blatant market failure has been dealt with.

<comment><USER19> _The whole thing does strike me as morally irresponsible in that a city with a persistent and undealt with homeless problem should not be limiting the availability of housing units until the blatant market failure has been dealt with._

Red herring. These people are not inviting the homeless into their homes. They are operating a hotel/B&B without following any registration, safety, health, or tax rules.

<comment><USER18> It is a related question, there are plenty of people with marginal housing arrangements who live in weekly rate motels for more than half of each year; paying more for housing that would cost them less if they had the economic stability to rent those same rooms by the month. So at the margin, the availability and constraints on the supply of housing units do directly affect some people who are homeless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Despite the touching stories about financial ruin, the government has a legitimate interest in making sure B&B's are minimally safe and operate without disturbing neighbors. All of these "It's my property!" arguments are supremely disingenuous.

<comment><USER20> and in any case you are not even legally a owner

you are a TENANT.

before downvoting me, go and look at your deed. find the term "owner" anywhere on it.

yes folks, the county has permitted you to enter into an agreement to make improvements on the land and resell that right to others. the county "owns" the land. most first-time home buyers are surprised to find out that they actually are only considered tenants

<comment><USER21> You still own the improvements (Home or other structures), if any on the land - hence homeowner...

<comment><USER20> yes, you own the improvements, but the point of stipulating you as a TENANT is to permit the county to make and enforce rules, since your improvement is ultimately on their land. not much to argue here, counties have been making and enforcing rules for centuries, there is no loophole to exploit

this is why, for example, foreclosure evictions often involve the sheriff's office - the county is protecting their own property rights. also, mineral rights, right to dispose of hazardous waste, etc etc

<comment><USER21> 'Tenant' is not mentioned anywhere in my deed but perhaps California limits what the government can claim about my property. Were I to own a home on land restricted by a lease then perhaps you would have a legitimate point. I pay property tax and parcel tax on property assigned to me by the deed; the deed assigns ownership to me not the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The startup opportunity here is to streamline the process of registering a legal and proper B&B.

AirBnB should be doing this already to clear the cloud around their business, but doing so would be an admission that their current practices are abetting illegal activity.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. And AirBnB would be wise to get involved politically on that front. There are the armchair ideals of unregulated markets, and then there is the reality of politically connected interests pushing legislation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have rented out my place (which I own) numerous times. I pay my income taxes through the 1099 Airbnb issues. Since I've started renting, I've made numerous friends I keep in touch with, have had invitations to visit Turkey, Singapore... it has helped me pay my bills... and I've never had a disturbance, nor have my neighbors ever had a problem. I realize not all cases are like this, but Airbnb has truly made my life easier, made me a proud host and broadened my horizons. As a guest I have gotten under the skin of neighborhoods in a matter of days (one time I ate at 3 fancy restaurants in a weekend all of which had month long reservation lists because my host is embedded in the local community)

The beauty of Airbnb and other community marketplaces is that I'm incentivized to make sure things go well. If my neighbors complain, it will become hard to host. If my guests complain, it will become hard to host. If I complain at a hotel? No one cares.

I would happily pay a flat yearly tax to register as a short term rental host. I won't however spend 10s of hours working through ridiculous paperwork, spending thousands of $s to get onside of this antiquated system. We should be thankful of companies like Airbnb, like SideCar, Uber, TaskRabbit, Exec, pushing our outdated world forward.

Just my $.02

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been a host since I joined Airbnb as an engineer two years ago. During my interview I had an "AHA!" moment when I saw a letter pinned on the wall. It was from someone affected by the financial crisis who had been able to avoid foreclosure by renting their place on Airbnb. The letter expressed unending gratitude for how Airbnb had helped her through the most difficult time of her life. It completely changed how I thought about the company and ultimately led me to join.

Since then I've realized that the positive impact goes far deeper. For example, as a host I tell every guest about my favorite local establishments. Not only am I exposing my guests to true San Francisco flavor, I'm also helping local businesses that don't traditionally see tourism dollars.

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't hear about how we've helped someone, both travelers and hosts.

<comment><USER26> Well, here's a counterpoint. A bunch of people in my building use AirBnB to rent out units. These transient tenants are often noisy, dirty, and in one recent case, outright frightening, threatening long-term tenants (security had to kick him out of the building). Hotels are zoned differently than residential units for good reasons, it's not just big business squeezing out the small fries.

That's not to say I don't have full respect for you as a company. Just want you to be aware there is a counterpoint, and that people using your service should be following local regulations and leases. When they don't, it creates headaches for neighbors and resentment towards your company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As an Airbnb host I would add that there's more to renting out your home than just the money. You can really see how you're helping people travel or visit their family or company headquarters (we've had all of these and more). We can give them a great home, show them all the great stores, restaurants, cafes, and see the huge appreciation for this kind of experience. It's life in another city as people in that city live it. Also remember that here in San Francisco almost all of the hotels are downtown or around Union Square so we can bring people to all the other neighborhoods of the city. I've also been an Airbnb guest and it's amazing as well. It's wonderful to support local people and get great advice about where to go. The site has fundamentally changed the way I think about travel.

People have been renting out their homes to visitor for a long time but what Airbnb has done by creating a central marketplace is incredible. It feels as important as Amazon reinventing online purchases. Like many of the great internet companies Airbnb is ruffling a lot of feathers from intrenched businesses and changing the way people think about their private space. What other company has been so successful at fostering connections between people who have never met in the real world?

</comment><comment><USER28> The title of this submission is unnecessarily sensational and editorializing. Using your home as an ad hoc bed and breakfast is not the same as renting it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll change the title to be a bit better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is really troubling and sickening. It's your property and you should be able to do as you please with it. What is the value of ownership if what you own is under government and HOA control? Disgusting.

The fact that we allow government to get involved in our personal lives at this level should scare everyone. They are telling some of these people that they can't earn money to make-up for the fact that they fell upon hard times by using the one asset that they work so hard to acquire. You can't even rent your couch? This isn't right.

As for the hotel industry. Well, offer a better product at good prices with exceptional service and you'll keep your customers. In other words: Compete.

<comment><USER4> Try to run a pig farm on your home and see how far you get with that. The law of "nuisance" has existed for hundreds of years. Your right to use your property extends only as far as the limits of your property. If any of the effects spill over to your neighbors, they have the right to limit what you can do with your property (to the extent of the "spill over"). This has been basic American/British property law for centuries.

<comment><USER29> No disagreement with that at all. How does that relate to renting my couch or a room?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> For my friend's wedding, we stayed at such a place. I had a long conversation with the owner, who lived in a side room. It looked like an extension he built on the house.

He told me he was running into issues with the city. Not from hotels or what not, but complaints from neighbors. They did not like the fact that strangers were constantly going in and out. BUT he said that he had heard hotels and motels were not happy about the popularity, especially from other short-term vacation home owners.

It's going to be a two front battle, one side from big business, and the other from neighbors. In the end my guess is that the city will license it, and heavily tax it, in other words the cities win.

<comment><USER7> The point about neighbors is moot.

i hate all of mine. But the hotels have nothing against them. so i will have to live with them. that's life.

If you could choose neighbors... the world would be very empty because everyone would be living alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> While I would be the last one to shed a tear for the hotel industry that's seeing it's too-old business model disrupted by airBnB and the likes, I feel like more regulation of the temporary hosting industry is needed.

What's to stop someone from acquiring a bunch of property in, say, Paris and put it all up on airBnB?

"What's the problem with that?" you ask? Well, this makes housing more expensive (you now have to compete with that industry), further gentrifies residential neighborhoods, and pushes the middle class further away from the desirable spots.

I haven't thought all of this through, but perhaps a rule requiring lodgers to live at least 1mo/year full time in the place for rent would be useful?

</comment><comment><USER32> I remember an article about this problem in the nytimes a while back... here's the link:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/travel/escapes/07backlash....](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/travel/escapes/07backlash.html?pagewanted=all)

There's a wide range of opinions on this topic, and a lot of it probably comes down to personality. I'm sympathetic to people who don't really want their neighborhood to become a revolving door of short term residents, even if those residents are respectful and quiet. Some people would happily give up the right to rent out their own property short term in exchange for a neighborhood with less turnover, where you get to meet, know, and become long term friends with the people around you.

Other people not only disagree, but are appalled, even angered, that anyone would presume to make this decision for someone else - if their tenants are quiet and respectful, what right does someone else have to regulate what they do with their own property?

This is the sort of issue that reminds me of an interesting branch of libertarianism that actually supports highly restrictive laws provided that these laws are kept very local and decentralized. For instance, religious communities would have the right to demand everyone wear certain clothes, as long as people can easily leave and they promise not to try to enforce their dress code on the next township over.

I see some value in that point of view here. I do think neighborhoods, on a very local level, should be allowed to enforce strict laws on vrbos and short term rentals. I wouldn't want to see these laws state-wide (or even city wide), but at the neighborhood level, I don't think I have any objection (and I would prefer to live in a neighborhood with these restrictions).

</comment><comment><USER33> In some vacation places, such as Monterey, it's illegal to rent a house/apartment for less than a month without a hotel license.

These laws predate AirBnB by decades.

<comment><USER21> Doesn't seem too difficult to get a 'free' license and pay the occupancy tax. I've stayed in various beach rentals along the California coast for 2 weeks at a time and have been charged occupancy tax.

<http://www.co.monterey.ca.us/taxcollector/TOT.html>

<comment><USER33> At that link, you'll see "Monterey County Planning and Building Inspection Department requires Homeowners wishing to pursue short term residential rentals (7-30 days) to obtain an Administrative Permit."

In other words, you can't just pay the tax.

On <http://www.mcar.com/montereycounty.html>, we find:

County of Monterey Non-Coastal: Administrative permit required for rentals less than 30 days in R-1 zoning district Minimum rental period 7 days Zoning Ordinance 21.64.280

Coastal: Contact: Planning and Building Inspection Department (831) 883-7500

I'd guess that the county is easier to deal with on this than the various cities (where the hotels and the bulk of the housing are).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Short term _Tourist Homes_ have a historical precedence in this country.

[http://www.arkansaspreservation.com/historic- properties/_sea...](http://www.arkansaspreservation.com/historic- properties/_search_nomination_popup.aspx?id=2607)

</comment><comment><USER34> The original submitted headline was more representative of the article's content.

I used to understand headline corrections on HN, especially when they made changes away from blatantly abusive headlines. Now it seems they're done indiscriminately.

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe AirBnB's solution to this is some kind of timeshare setup for cities with the time-limit laws.

You purchase the joint right to use the house x/365 days a year, but your "lease" is a month/year long.

Might not get around the safety type laws though.

</comment><comment><USER36> I foresee a social-media thingamajig that lets you stay with friends [of friends]*, and the stayovers being arranged similar to how linkedin introductions work.

</comment><comment><USER37> _...the hotel industry took its cause to city officials, who, in turn, lobbied Democrats in the state legislature. In 2010 New York passed a law.._

Wow this is just plain wrong. The laws were meant to be made for citizens not for any one industry. As was the case with SOPA, PIPA and other bills, the law making process in USA is clearly broken and needs to be changed. It is a problem you (Americans) need to fix.

</comment><comment><USER38> Here we go again... Who changed the post title? Two hours into the discussion.

pg, please do something about this. It is getting absolutely out of hand.

</comment><comment><USER39> Im getting

OperationalError at /v1/complete/google-oauth2/ FATAL: too many connections for role "ruwdncbzdkulsh"

Request Method: GET Request URL: [http://api.collections.me/v1/complete/google- oauth2/?code=4/...](http://api.collections.me/v1/complete/google- oauth2/?code=4/jagXxm_UPSk8P9omPYEDRhxFlX2y.Ao-8d6zmaUIbuJJVnL49Cc80GYQEcQI) Django Version: 1.4 Exception Type: OperationalError Exception Value: FATAL: too many connections for role "ruwdncbzdkulsh"

Seems django debug is ON

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me when everyone was driving drunk, and there was already laws that made that illegal, but the limit was something like 3 glasses of beer.

instead of simply enforcing it, they changed the law to be zero limit AND enforced it.

this is the same idiocy.

trashing a place is already illegal. Disturbing the peace is already illegal. Reducing your neighbor property value is already illegal (our intern complains he keep getting citations for not cutting the grass ...a $300 fine)

Name ONE thing this law does that wasn't illegal before. ONE. I challenge you.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thanks for answering the question in the headline! Now I don't need to read the article.</comment>


Visualization of randomness - <AUTHOR> http://codebazaar.blogspot.com/2011/05/visualization-of-randomness.html

<comment><USER2> It's a fun little visualization but it's also worth noting that a chi square test would achieve the same result but in a much more quantitative manner. Using his example, we'll generate N integers ranging from 0-9. Let n(0) denote the number of 0's we get, n(1) the number of 1's, and so on. Then our expected value for n(0) is N/10 and likewise for each of the other n(i). The distribution of n(0) will be Gaussian for sufficiently large N and the standard deviation will be sqrt(N/10). Then if we take the sum over i from 0 to 9 of [(n(i)-N/10)^2]10/N and call this quantity Q then it can be shown that Q will follow a chi-square distribution with k=9 degrees of freedom (one less than ten because the tenth is determined by N and the other 9). If we then take [(Q/k)-1]/sqrt(2k) then this tells us how many standard deviations away from our expected chi-square value we fall. If there's a mistake with the distribution of numbers then the number of standard deviations will tend to drift farther and farther from 0 as N gets bigger, a rule of thumb being that if you're more than two or three sigma out you might want to run a few more times to double check and if you fall five or more sigmas out then there's most probably a mistake in your algorithm.

EDIT: I tried to figure out how to make an asterisk and not just _italics_ but couldn't do it.

<comment><USER3> I compute the standard deviation of n(1) as sqrt(N p (1-p)) where p = 1/10. It's N iid realizations of a biased coin toss.

You left out the 1-p part, I think.

I totally agree with your sentiment that just eyeballing the plot is not the best route here. It's all too easy to convince yourself that the deviation isn't that bad, if you're just looking at the plot without error bars.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, good catch. I'm used to thinking about the limit where you have so many bins that the Binomial distribution can be approximated as a Poisson distribution without thinking twice. 10 is sort of borderline but I probably should have been more explicit. If there are only 10 bins then this will introduce a roughly 5% overestimation of the standard deviation in the distribution of n(i). This in turn would be an 11% overestimation of Q and an 11% overestimation of the number of standard deviations you're off by. The statistical error on your estimation of this sigma is generally going to be significantly larger than the errors introduced by making this approximation so it really doesn't matter all that much. As you make the number of bins larger they matter less and less (mturmon probably knows this, I'm just making it clear to anyone reading our comments).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tiny Products – learn new skills that pay the bills - <AUTHOR> http://tinyproducts.net/

<comment><USER2> Three suggestions that can positively improve this product:

1\. At least on mobile (didn't see it on desktop) the landing page only contains the subscription form with no detailed indication of what is being offered.

Suggestion: given that space is free put at least the last issue alongside te subscription form, this way people can easily decide if they want to receive more of this via email. Also, it can retain people that won't subscribe but will return weekly for the new articles.

2\. Sensational titles like "Become Bad Ass at Sales Without Sounding Like A Douche" may catch the audience but at the same time to push away others looking for a more professional approach.

3\. Avoid articles and summaries like this:

 _Want your content to consistently make the front page of Hacker News? Think about all of the traffic, leads, and customers that will generate. In this book, Justin Jackson teaches you about the inner workings of Hacker News and how to take advantage of them to regularly get your posts to the front page._

It reads a lot like "how to spam HN for profit and get away with it" even if the content is not.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd recommend changing the colors, blue on orange hurts my eyes.</comment>


Ask NH: What is the name of your company's monolithic "Master Control Program"? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Us engineers call it Redmine <http://www.redmine.org/>

Our accountant calls it Quickbooks.

The program managers call it PowerPoint.</comment>


Elon Musk provides new details on his 'mind blowing' mission to Mars - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/10/elon-musk-provides-new-details-on-his-mind-blowing-mission-to-mars/ <comment><USER3> Other than PR, what would a Mars manned mission provide that a moon-base and 'cargo flights to the moon' wouldn't?

If the aim is to perfect human survival off-earth, then surely the moon is a better goal. I know we've been to the moon, but only for a few hours. We're nowhere near the tech/cargo transfer needed to put a manned base on it.

Are we going to put a few people on Mars, lose interest in that right away, wait another 40 years and then aim for Europa?

[edit: Thank you all for the responses.]

<comment><USER4> Musk is very clear that his plan is to establish a self sustaining colony, not another 'footprints' mission, and not a colony that needs to be sustained via continuous resupply.

Mars has several advantages, you can pretty much google this and get better arguments then I'm able to make here. But here are a few key points.

\- Earth like day period, 39 minutes longer versus almost a month longer than earth.

\- More stable day-night temperature

\- More gravity

\- A weak atmosphere (versus none), and the capability to retain a earth like atmosphere.

\- Easy access to Water, and CO2. Important for growing plants and making rocket fuel amongst other things.

<comment><USER5> Are we sure the water's easy to access? From what I've seen, it evaporates really fast and the atmosphere is being stripped from the planet.

<comment><USER4> Well, easy compared to anywhere else we can go.

We aren't really looking for liquid water [0], as you say that evaporates pretty much instantaneously. Rather we are looking for ice, the pheonix lander confirmed the that this exists naturally on mars [1]. In the worst case water bound to the soil that can be baked out [2].

As for the atmosphere being stripped away, that's not really a concern on time scales humans care about. Though I've heard people talk about setting up a artificial magnet field to reduce the amount of radiation you receive, which should also prevent this.

[0] Well we are, but as a scientific curiosity not as a way to sustain a colony.

[1] [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080620.html)

[2] [http://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity- ro...](http://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity-rover.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I keep thinking the colonists should have tunnel boring machines. They can then "build" more living and working space as they need it without more supply missions. Of course there's the job of reinforcing and sealing those new tunnels. Tunnels would offer decent protection and a more consistent thermal environment. Heating could be provided from waste heat off a nuclear reactor, or just spent nuclear fuel encased in concrete or something ;-)

</comment><comment><USER7> In the absence of tea, this colonists will sink a Tesla in the Vale Marinaris to declare independence?

</comment><comment><USER8> Without extreme religious persecution at home or the prospect of being extremely wealthy "abroad", will there be that many people interested in going to Mars?

<comment><USER9> In the end, you just need to be able to find enough people who want to go (there are plenty) and who have the money to pay for the trip (Elon hopes to bring down the cost to such a level that someone selling their home on Earth could afford it in many cases - like $500,000 to move to Mars).

<comment><USER10> $500,000, or even four times that amount is nothing in our current economy.

Remember how crowdfunding raised over 100 million dollars for Star Citizen - <USER2> video game!

I am amazed Musk or even NASA itself has not tried crowdfunding the colonization of Mars..

<comment><USER11> Have you heard about Mars One ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of people don't seem to get what he's on about, but the entire history of humans is one of moving around, exploring and settling new places. It would actually be very weird and novel to _not_ settle Mars. The last major settlement was the Americas after Columbus, and that will likely be what happens here, minus the genocide. Things do improve a bit over the years.

The next question is, why Mars in particular? And the simple answer is, it's the closest thing to Earth in the Solar system. The moon is close by, but it's harsh, desolate and resource-poor. Weak gravity, terrible 'days', no atmosphere etc. Proximity is the only thing it has going for it. Mars, on the other hand, is more like the most extreme places on earth - a combination of Antarctica and Atacama - very hard but doable. Once you have regular, not- super-expensive transport, proximity is not such a problem.

The next question is, how would you get there? And this is where all the fun technical talk is happening. You'll need Big Freaking Rockets to escape the Earth's gravity, but then there's a lot of ways it can go after that, for example, can they make a self-fueling MAV in time for 2024? Or it is easier, though more expensive, to just shoot more BFRs then?

Then the question is where will the money for all this come from? Well, I don't imagine SpaceX will be doing this alone. Space agencies spend a bit of money on this, SpaceX makes a profit from their launch business and Musk has said SpaceX will go public in order to fund their Mars colony. Several hundred billion is a lot of money, but spread out over decades and amongst space agencies and companies is doable.

The final question, and one Musk hasn't answered very well IMO is why would millions of people go to Mars? What are the economics of it? Getting a couple of hundred (or thousand) pioneers is not a problem, you'll find tons of people willing to risk everything for far less, but how would you get million person cities up there? The best answer I have is, people will go there because it will be the only place where new things are possible. I think we're starting to see a backlash against "disruption" and it's somewhat justified. Living peacefully with 10 billion humans on one place is hard enough without some of those people rocking the boat. I'm talking about things like AI, human genetic modification, but also just plain old politics, traditions, power structures, etc. Mars would be new wide-open place where you can set up shop and do anything, whether founding new societies or doing dangerous engineering. This would also work very well economically, as Earth would be able to outsource a lot of experimentation and risky activities and there would be a profitable information (not resource) based planetary trade.</comment>


Art forgeries: The computer says no - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11877571 <comment><USER2> I continue to wonder why having a "real" painting as opposed to a "forgery" matters if even the newest scientific technology is having trouble telling them apart

<comment><USER3> Same with counterfeit currency. If no one can differentiate the two, who are you to say one is fake?

<comment><USER2> They're not the same at all, paintings exist to look good. If they're indistinguishable then they should be worth the same to people, that's all that matters is what they look like, all they do is sit there and look good. Currency is a marker, the look itself is irrelevant, the only reason it has a distinct look is to prevent counterfeiting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nobody is going to comment on the Little Britain reference in an Economist headline? Quite unexpected...</comment>


Attention to Details: A Curious Case of Multiple IDORs - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/attention-to-details-a-curious-case-of-multiple-idors-5a4417ba8848 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! It's my first blogpost this year. It's about how a huge travel portal's customer PII data could've leaked through some remanant functionality. This led me to discover a few IDORs.

Thanks.</comment>


The Internet of Things – A Disaster - <AUTHOR> https://gekk.info/articles/iot.html <comment><USER2> With apologies to the late Mitch Hedberg, always design your device to fail like an escalator, not an elevator. When an escalator fails, it becomes stairs. When an elevator fails, it becomes jail.

Don't design a computer that is a smoke detector, design a smoke detector that happens to also have a computer. A kernel panic or complete loss of computing should leave behind a traditional smoke detector in a fancy looking case.

<comment><USER3> As an exercise of the limits of this advice, how does this apply to designing elevators, short of "never design elevators"?

<comment><USER4> hard brakes that apply when doors are opened manually, and an emergency panel behind which a small ladder is located.

<comment><USER5> The costing difference between an elevator and stairs is substantial. Especially when you have to have stairs when you get an elevator by building code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a battle between the old school people who want to do everything with microcontrollers and who measure RAM in Kilobytes, and the new generation who want to embed a full microprocessor + OS in everything.

When it comes to capabilities, the people arguing for entire OSs generally win. Go with Linux, get an HTTPS stack, get XML parsing, get JSON parsing, don't worry so much about RAM. And heck, the price different between a microprocessor and a microcontroller is minimal now days, a couple bucks in large quantity (especially if you have to outfit the microcontroller with more chips to add functionality).

The microcontroller people are right in one way though. Their products are simpler. Battery life will be better (it is easier to control power usage when you start with nothing and build up, then trying to minimize an entire OS down) and the code will be purpose built with less complexity to it.

The ESP8266, ESP32, and Arduino are one view of things, Raspberry Pi and "Things with Android Running On Them" are another.

Of course against all of this, the analog EEs laugh at us and continue to make things that just /work/.

<comment><USER7> I was hired to design embedded electronics in my last job. Came a project. I would have designed it with one microcontroller in the 50-120 MHz range, or two of those to make it easy to deal with all interfaces, and called it a day (on the electronic side) because almost nothing more was needed. It was basically just a glorified RS485 extender + Web -> RS485 interface. But our boss decided of the design: mandatory Linux and Python scripting, so we ended up with a Big Mama Ubuntu on a 1 GHz dual core processor with 512 MB DDR2 RAM... Because yeah, on the software side, you 'just' have to throw ready-made drivers and link pieces of ready-made software developed for the desktop. Supposedly...

The board ended up with 1500 components, it took 1 extra year to get just half of the features kinda working, the rest of the features was discarded. And the power budget was blown, which probably led to interesting negotiations with other involved bodies, but I had already quit at that time.

Obviously, 'embedded' meant very different things for me and for him.

<comment><USER8> It's fun being on the other end of the scale - the last major commercial project I did used an Atmel Atmega1284. Most other systems in this space go down the route of FGPA which is hell to support. I was actually amazed we got away with an 8-bit micro, but it was a great example of pushing the chip to its limits and comfortably achieving the goal of the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked at Nest. This blog post is full of BS.

For example:

"For the record, I read several stories about the Nest Protect going into permanent alarm, and you know what my hunch is? The same thing I always assume: "Dumb Linux crap." The culprit was probably some shell script that opened /opt/smoked/detect and output 1 to it and then left the file locked so nothing else could touch it or forgot to delete a pid file or whatever. This is what I always assume when I read about Linux integrated devices screwing up, and on the occasions I've actually heard what the cause was I usually end up right."

As I mention in a separate comment, iFixit's teardown identifies the 100Mhz, 128kB RAM MCU which is the Protect's brain. Such a device does not run Linux. Had the author done any research at all, they would have found this.

Instead, they waded into an unfamiliar topic with the knowledge of a novice and the arrogance of an expert - precisely the accusation they level against Nest.

Furthermore:

"The Smart device engineer does not begin by disassembling ten smoke alarms to see how they work. They do not begin by reading papers written by fire chiefs and scientists. They do not look at the statistics on fire-related deaths with and without smoke alarms of different eras (although the marketing department director does)"

All this due diligence and much more was done. The author's lazy speculation insults me and my former co-workers.

This blog post gets lots more important stuff wrong. Suffice it to say that today the Protect is very well-rated by consumers and safety professionals.

The IoT field as a whole is a mess, and deserves much of the author's criticism. Nest, specifically, does not.

<comment><USER10> > All this due diligence and much more was done.

I don't have any connection with Nest Protect and don't own one, but the fact that the Protect does not use an ionisation sensor (they suck because they suck at detecting fires early, it has nothing to do with the harmless radioactivity) and used a dual-wavelength photoelectric sensor gives them high marks in my book.

All the hardcore smoke detection equipment -- both the aspirating kinds ("VESDA") and the open-space beam/imaging kinds -- use dual-wavelength sensing. I cannot speak to all the "smart"/"connected" aspects of the device but the smoke sensor seems far better than that of every other residential smoke detector, and it would be very nice if other residential smoke detectors ditched the ionisation sensor and went to a dual-wavelength design.

<comment><USER11> Most new smoke detectors are photoelectric rather than ionisation-based these days because China can pump basic models out for $2-3 shipped in quantity one. (In fact, the cheapest I've heard of them going for is £1 for a two-pack in a UK discount store recently.) Nest got a bunch of flack because apparently they screwed up their original single-wavelength implementation and had obnoxious problems with false alarms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think a poorly designed and engineered product, that _happens_ to connect to the internet (and to be fair is marketed as "IoT") means that the entire concept of "connecting devices to the internet" is "bullshit."

I agree that there's a lot of marketing Bullshytt (to steal from neal stephenson) regarding IoT, but when we get to the root of what the words really mean (connecting stuff to the internet), I think it's the natural progression of technology. Why _wouldn 't_ you connect your field of oil pumps' valve readings to the internet (as well as having the manual needle- gauge backup) so you don't have to have a dude drive out every day to take readings? Why _wouldn 't_ you connect your thermostat to the internet so you can override the schedule when it turns out you need to stay late at work? Etc.

I don't get why everyone has to lump together the marketing bullshit that obviously is overstated with IoT, and then go "hence, IoT will fail and is crap."

<comment><USER13> The author mentions that he would like IoT for his washing machine, so I think you're misrepresenting his sentiment. Most likely, he's angry with the current engineering standards of IoT, more specifically Nest

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author makes a very valid point about people replacing embedded systems with Linux. I have a home automation system that has been running for over a decade now, and has several generations of technology in it. The order of failure is, from highest to lowest:- 1\. the desktop I receive status updates on; 2\. the Raspberry Pi I added to monitor the remote nodes and email me status updates; 3\. the batteries; 4\. the physical parts: motors, etc; 5\. the embedded systems that read the sensors and control the motors; 6\. the analog circuitry.

<comment><USER15> do you happen to have a writeup of your HA system and how you put it together?

<comment><USER16> Not the parent, but I will probably be writing up mine soon. My choice of hardware is heavily inspired by the notion that devices function independently of the computer, and the computer functions independently of the Internet.

...My home automation software has bugs, and I've had plenty of problems with it. But I've yet to have a problem with my thermostat, lights, or smoke detectors. Despite all of them being linked to it.

<comment><USER15> OK, great. Will look for a reply with a link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I first read about Internet of Things in contexts where it seemed to make a lot of sense: monitoring bridges and pipelines for integrity, "smart grid" coordination to optimize electrical grid services, networked sensors for better preventive maintenance and higher productivity from existing capital equipment (e.g. mining facility trucks, crushers, power plants...)

It's sad that the term has come to be dominated by ill-conceived consumer devices. I still have to remind myself that people are picturing "waffle iron that sends email" rather than "networked strain gages on bridges" when they savage IoT as a concept.

<comment><USER18> I've recently come to believe the same thing, always shrugged off the weird consumer IoT stuff because of the marketing, security issues and uselessness of a lot of the projected visions of the IoT future.

I lose confidence in my rejection of IoT when I think of smart energy grids and cooperating sensor-networks. It's a useful and welcome addition to our future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> An interesting read, a bit more inflammatory than I find informative but the points are pretty solid. Realizing a new device, especially a safety critical device, is something to be done with care (he rants about the Nest smoke detector). And it is "easy" to get irrationally exuberant about adding a computer to things that don't really need them. But I'd diverge a bit on claiming the _practice_ flawed rather than simply the application of it in this case.

<comment><USER20> That's what bothers me about IoT projects - little consideration of failure modes. Nest thermostats have failed in modes that resulted in houses having no heat, and the user couldn't override it locally.[1]

Combine this with active attacks, and it looks really bad. Over three weeks after the attack, Maersk Lines is still struggling. Their big ports didn't achieve close to normal operation until about last Monday. Their big automated port in Rotterdam is running again, after being totally shut down for two weeks, but there's much more manual paperwork than usual, and billing is completely down, so they have zero revenue.[2] LA and Elizabeth NJ are finally back up. Some customer-facing functions were completely re-implemented with simpler web sites. Container tracking is still down. This is the world's largest shipping line, 24 days after the event.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest- thermostat-g...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat- glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html) [2] [http://www.maersk.com/~/media/20170629-operational- update/20...](http://www.maersk.com/~/media/20170629-operational- update/20170714_5pm_nwc_faq.pdf?la=en)

<comment><USER21> The Nerves project ([http://nerves-project.org](http://nerves-project.org)) is an IoT OS which basically boots a device into Elixir, and benefits greatly from the battle-tested Erlang BEAM VM which is extremely fault-tolerant.

Do you have a link to the Maersk story? My dad used to work in shipping.

Also, my original Nests decided out of the blue one day that their power wires were both disconnected (which is impossible); is this bug related?

<comment><USER22> Both Erlang anr Elixir, while safer than C/C++, are still far from ideal for any critical system, since they lack any kind of static typing.

<comment><USER21> Citation needed, especially since 95% of the time your code is just dealing with some combination of lists (arrays in OO langs), maps, strings, ints, and symbols/atoms, and is easily unit-tested

<comment><USER23> It's interesting that you ask for a citation, and then immediately proceed to essentially make stuff up ("95%", "easily unit-tested"). Maybe you could provide a citation for these?

There is a long-running trend in the industrial sector to use statically-typed languages in large and/or critical projects, so there must be reasons for dynamic languages to be quasi non-existent there, and a change would require more than "just easily unit-test it", no? (To be fair Erlang is in fact the one notable exception, although it's -- as far as I know -- only used in the telecom industry)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > I can't buy something that just has a $5 microprocessor with just enough > intelligence to connect to the internet and send me an email or a push > notification if the buzzer on the washer goes off.

1000000 x this.

The only thing I'd ever want a smart device to do is have a way to configure a mqtt or such endpoint that it should connect to to send/receive simple messages.

Just no consumer actually wants this. They want to be sold a box that connects to someone elses mqtt broker so it can work with an app that connects to someone elses server.

It's just another front on the war on general purpose computing.

<comment><USER25> > a $5 microprocessor with just enough intelligence to connect to the internet > and send me an email or a push notification if the buzzer on the washer goes > off

You have essentially described the Protect. Its brain is a cheap little MCU with 128kB RAM. The author, had he read an actual teardown [0], should have realized this. Instead, he made false and confusing claims about Linux.

Certainly other companies put grossly-overspecced hardware in their "Smart" devices, but Nest's Protect isn't one of them.

[https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nest+Protect+Teardown/20057](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nest+Protect+Teardown/20057)

<comment><USER26> Linux specifically is wrong, but according to ifixit, there are two general purpose 32-bit processors, and two radio SoCs also containing 32-bit processors. Which to me still seems like a _heck_ of a lot of CPUs and software for a smoke alarm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "I need to preface this by saying that I have very little faith in the worldliness or general sense of Silicon Valley hardware engineers. I have seen a long history of extremely poor decisions from that part of industry, so I will assume they made all the worst decisions."

Old school engineers designed bridges, dams, nuclear plants, transformers, etc. They took a serious oath and got a license. Software "engineers" \-- and let's be honest, most are closet software engineers, even the "hardware" ones -- are not cut from the same cloth in approaching problem solving, to the major detriment of society. I never trusted them.

<comment><USER28> As one of those engineers, I often wonder. In my line of work, if you don't have a stamp, you're not an Engineer. While NCEES offers a PE in software, how many in software actually take the PE exam? Is Professional Engineer even a thing in Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER25> As a Silicon Valley software developer, I haven't seen many credentialed engineers. The vast majority of my colleagues in software have a degree or two in Computer Science, but no formal engineering certification. The few I've met I would describe as "incidentally" credentialed, meaning they went to a school (commonly Waterloo) where it was a requirement for graduation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A friend of mine likes to say, ___" The S in IoT is for security"_ __.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nest is doubling down on the dumbness too. Their nest cams ship _everything_ up to the cloud for processing!

What happened to computing at the edge? Are Apple (of all people) the only ones to still embrace this philosophy?

<comment><USER31> Processors are cheaper than ever, and there are multi-core multi-gigahertz processors with multiple gigabytes of RAM scattered throughout most homes but yes, as you point out, nobody wants to use them, they want to ship them up to "the cloud" or as we used to call it, "some servers on the Internet".

A charitable soul might say that by keeping local software simple, the end- user's devices don't need to be updated as often, while the software running on the cloud systems can be continually enhanced. A cynic like myself would say they prefer to use the cloud:

1) because it's easier to gather serious data about the users for later use/sale

2) because by tying users to an online service, they have something valuable ("2 million active users!") to offer when the startup inevitably gets bought out

3) because you can get away with less efficient code if you're running on a big timeshared server vs. on a small battery-powered device

4) because "the cloud!" is still an effective marketing gimmick

<comment><USER32> As an ios mobile dev, I get jealous of my fellow android dev's ability to roll out updates incrementally and to publish updates immediately. With a cloud model, you don't have the possibility of bricking your customer's device as a failure mode.

1) You can actually gather more data on the device vs just a remote service

2) SaaS moats are attractive from a business model perspective

3) TBH pushing compute on your customers devices is cheaper for the cloud owner, but harder to manage. On a per user basis most servers are actually VERY efficient. Most peoples smartphones are relative supercomputers, only some things will be very battery draining.

4) 'the cloud' does enable a lot of stuff that people don't want to manage manually themselves

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As much as I like slagging the Internet of Crap, smoke detectors are not a great example because smoke detectors are remarkably complicated.

They have to work. For years. They have to detect disgustingly small signals. Reliably. And, by the way, the chips have to survive in close proximity to a radiation source. And generate an alarm loud enough to wake the dead.

If I remember correctly, Qualcomm nee NXP nee Freescale nee Motorola used to keep an old 2" aluminum gate fab line around because every time somebody tried to make a new smoke detector chip _something failed_. So, they kept the fab open and simply printed money.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Put it on top. Connect the I/O lines on your little PC to the output of the > smoke detector chip. Let it do the heavy lifting, the stuff that you aren't > sure you can do safely and which it has proven it can do for decades.

I worked on a network communications part (the little PC) of a device that controls train signals (the smoke detector chip). This is exactly how it's architected -- the safety-critical components are isolated from the non- safety-critical ones. The busybox linux board does not go in between the sensors and the vital control logic, but rather "on top"

</comment><comment><USER35> Has anyone tried one of the newer revisions of the Protect and had any experiences, positive or negative, with it? I was initially excited when I heard about the product announcement. It seemed like everything I wanted in a smoke detector: remote monitoring, ability to silence, starting with voice before blaring and getting my adrenaline up, and, well, a smoke detector. But Amazon reviews and the infamous video later, I backed quickly away. I've been awoken by a false-positive smoke detector before and the experience is panic inducing on top of outright annoying.

<comment><USER36> I just bought a house that has two 2nd gen protects along with traditional style detectors, So far so good! No false positives so far. I reset both detectors and had them go through their self test when we moved in and they both report being fully operational.

Neither of the protects are near the kitchen or regular smoke producing spaces though. However They are near bathrooms. I hear steam can set these off pretty easily but I have not had that experience.

I might buy more protects to replace the other detectors but I want to wait a bit and see if nest comes out with any other products.

<comment><USER37> I would test them with smoke just to see how each behaved. Try with smoke from a candle just put out, a piece of paper just put out, and a plastic wire just put out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think it also requires a mindset that a lot of young engineers don't have IMHO. Very few of them will ever ship code that will run 24/7 without patching, and be stable out of the box.

<comment><USER16> This really worries me when they start writing critical applications. I did have to reboot an old school program at work today. Very dated piece of software, pretty sure it predates Windows 7.

It had been running, over a (fairly complicated) network connection for 303 days. I can't think of many modern pieces of software that do their job 24/7 for 303 days straight.

And I'm pretty sure the reason it was 303 days, was because I had to move that machine last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> One thing I believe that's not being properly considered is the fact this is really a multilevel problem - if you want to make a smart IoT device you still want a reliable device. "On top of" is absolutely the best concept. Yes, the biggest computational bang for the buck comes from stuffing linux or something similar in, but who doesn't react with a smile when they see a multi year uptime reported - it's not rare, but it's not anywhere near a majority either - Start with the basic circuit, on top of that you add microcontroller logic to mediate between the higher level ARM SoC or whatnot and the base circuit, and just as importantly, you've also got a microcontroller based watch dog that will kick linux if it falls over. My experience in building this [https://hackaday.io/project/21966-quamera](https://hackaday.io/project/21966-quamera) is to never stop asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" (anybody proffering analog solutions will be ignored, analog is hard and I am stupid)

</comment><comment><USER40> > First, begin with a smoke alarm. A tried and true design that you can buy > for $10. Buy the exact parts that are already in use, and put them in your > final product. The smoke sensor, the transistors, the through-hole > resistors, the Fairchild IC, the 9V, the LED. Buy all of that and use it in > your final product.

So... why didn't Nest do it this way?

<comment><USER41> Software people designing hardware.

<comment><USER40> But why not piggy-back atop of the legacy hardware? Doing that would save time and let the software people solve higher-level (and presumably more interesting) problems.

Besides, software people I know are way to lazy to go sticking their fingers in sockets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The mobile-friendly view, recommended on top of the article - is kind of a usability disaster: I really like the authors approach using plain HTML. But using the mobile-friendly view has many usability pitfalls like: No links, no ability to copy text, no ability to search on page and switching to another browser-tab will lose the current position where you were reading at. As said in the article, sometimes its better to keep things which just work and are used by the majority like that. Same goes for using some styles or a blog template to provide a a fully mobile friendly read for the user, not a compromise of two bad options (plain article or mobile-"friendly" view).

</comment><comment><USER43> All of these are excellent arguments against _most_ of the IoT practices, and not even including the security issues. All in all a great read[1].

These are all the reasons for why I'm not interested in IoT/embedded. I just don't have the hardware and low-level firmware knowhow and doing it the other way, starting with an OS and going down, seems (and evidently is) horrible. And I say this as a full-time software developer.

[1]: Even if there might be inaccuracies; the author admitted the possibility and the point stands.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm just wondering, as we shrink our gates for CPUs more and more (the gates are approaching 10nm soon), does it become less reliable? People always want the next fastest and most power efficient device, but surely we must be losing something with the shrink in CPU gate size! If that's the case, are CPUs such as the Intel 286s more reliable?

<comment><USER44> The vast majority of issues will arise from software defects, not hardware defects.

So rather than switching to a 30 year old cpu, increasing the quality control and testing for the software would be the better aproach.

Also, as some peope in this thread have mentioned, a smart smoke detector should be designed in a way where if it fails it becomes a dumb smoke detector, but the actual smoke detection and warning should still work.

<comment><USER45> _The vast majority of issues will arise from software defects, not hardware defects._

Exactly. The last thing I want in my house is a smoke alarm with software written by idiots like me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of the research into redundancy for computer systems has already been done. Check out this article from NASA when they began to implement multiple failsafe computers into their spacecraft.

[https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch4-4.html](https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch4-4.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> The best article I have read in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER47> Tldr; build an analog backup into a mission critical device.

The argument about not reinventing the wheel might be misinformed, because their custom chip could actually be a well known design with a tiny tweek.

</comment><comment><USER48> If you're writing an article, is it really that hard to do a little research? Most of this piece is just "I didn't even bother to look up a teardown photo, but here's how I assume they must have designed it".

<comment><USER49> He explicitly says that while he didn't tear down one himself, the folks at ifixit did and then he included a link to the photos.</comment></comment>


React CountUp - <AUTHOR> https://glennreyes.github.io/react-countup <comment><AUTHOR> Checkout React CountUp at [https://glennreyes.github.io/react- countup/](https://glennreyes.github.io/react-countup/) . This component counts up a number in an animated way. #react #reactjs</comment>


Congress asks if developing slightly fewer medicines is OK if it lowers prices - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2019/10/28/democrats-new-logic-drug-prices-biomedical-innovation/ <comment><USER2> Surprised by the comments in this thread

US drug prices are not because of R&D. This title presents a false dichotomy

Drug companies have enough capital at this point that they don't need old drugs to fund new drugs. They can charge a high price for new drugs to recoup their development costs, & then charge closer to the cost of production once that development has been covered

<comment><USER3> Also surprised by the lack of mention of reformulating existing drugs to extend their patents. The poster child of this practice is insulin, where Americans pay absurdly higher amounts for something where generics are abundant.

<comment><USER4> > Also surprised by the lack of mention of reformulating existing drugs to > extend their patents.

Reformulation does not _extend_ patents, it creates a _new_ patent on the new substance. The substance in the existing patent can be manufactured as a generic after the existing patent expires.

The wrinkle is that the new and existing substances are not equivalent, and thus cannot be substituted for one another. Thus, if a doctor prescribes the new one, that is what needs to be dispensed.

<comment><USER5> Can't a patient ask a doctor to prescribe a generic, when it exists? It seems like that would be an easy fix: a law that requires doctors to give you the alternative name for a generic, and make the sponsored version an optional upgrade.

I'm European and the whole concept of a doctor prescribing a "brand" sounds alien to me.

<comment><USER4> > Can't a patient ask a doctor to prescribe a generic, when it exists.

Yes, but it requires the patient (or their pharmacist) to request such.

> It seems like that would be an easy fix: a law that requires doctors to give > you the alternative name for a generic, and make the sponsored version an > optional upgrade.

> I'm European and the whole concept of a doctor prescribing a "brand" sounds > alien to me.

The issue is that the two drugs are not equivalent, and is not about prescribing a "brand". Occasionally, a doctor insists on the brand for some reason (seems to be most common with Synthroid for some reason), but generally the prescription is treated as a prescription for the compound, even if the doctor uses a brand name.

The trouble with reformulation patents is that there is no generic for the reformulated compound. It is sufficiently different from the previous that it cannot be substituted by the pharmacist (otherwise it wouldn't have been patentable). In that case, the "brand" is the only thing available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, that depends on specifically which drugs you subtract out of the set.

Some new drugs are not that critical to have. Others might be. Given that we don't / can't know which drugs will be developed in the future, it's kind of impossible to answer with certainty.

<comment><USER7> The problem is we don't really know. Drugs that are almost out will probably still come out. However we are most likely to lose ones that are in the here are 100 things we could try at high cost - we know from experience than 1 in 1000 of these ideas is useful. If the cost recovery is high enough you try all 100 ideas to see if they lead anywhere, and then find another list of 100... If cost recovery isn't high enough you don't try any, and we don't really know what we lost because we don't know which of the ideas before actually will turn out to work.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note that I had to trim the lengthy title: I think this issue is an interesting and an important one to discuss, and that the discussion doesn't benefit from the political framing. I certainly did editorialize however and would appreciate a better short title if one is offered.

<comment><USER8> The current title answers a question, it should instead _raise_ a question. [Currently: Developing slightly fewer medicines is OK if it means lower prices]

Suggestion: Congress debates if developing slightly fewer medicines is OK if it means lower prices

<comment><AUTHOR> I both appreciate the pointer and the suggestion. Thank you.

The suggestion was sadly too long by 6. I've gone with "Congress asks if developing slightly fewer medicines is OK if it lowers prices".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The compound effect of lost progress might become more significant over time.

<comment><USER10> The money saved would be used for something else, e.g. education. That effect would also compound over time.

<comment><USER11> That's assuming the alternative thing actually benefits from the money. You mention education, but we've already seen that education spending has a threshold past which spending more money no longer improves outcomes (it just inflates prices), and we're already above that level of education spending.

And even if we weren't, it doesn't follow that _moving_ resources from one place to the other is the right choice. When you have two things that both produce benefits exceeding their costs, you're better off to do both of them.

<comment><USER10> > It doesn't follow that moving resources from one place to the other is the > right choice. When you have two things that both produce benefits exceeding > their costs, you're better off to do both of them.

Yes, in an imaginary world we can invest in all the good things at the same time.

In the real world you have a limited amount of resources, so you can't do everything at the same time without borrowing money. But guess what, borrowing money is moving resources from one place to an other.

<comment><USER11> The world in which you can invest in both drug research and education is not imaginary. We in actual fact already do both of those things at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's a pretty privileged view point. On the other hand I have a family member whose genetic makeup makes it so that they cannot use ~90% of the medications available for their condition. As a result every new medication in that area is of extreme interest to them and their doctors because it might be something they can use.

Given the choice between higher prices or not having treatment at all, I suspect those whose medications would be culled would gladly choose higher prices.

<comment><USER13> And your point of view is also privileged by that standard. For people who can't afford the drugs for their conditions, reducing the price is "of extreme interest to them".

I'm not saying that your position is wrong--medical innovation is really important. I'm saying you're being reductionist. There are really hard questions here, and accusing others of privilege does nothing to make this discussion more productive.

<comment><USER12> Sure, being able to afford medications is also a privileged position. But too often I see these sorts of dismissals of "just a few less new medications a year" without an acknowledgement of the real human costs that will be paid. Further I posit that the problem of "some people cannot afford some medications" should and does have a solution other than "all people will lose access to otherwise viable medications"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm sure it's not ok to the people that need those new medicines

<comment><USER15> But the current system is not okay for people who need medications that exist and are cheap to manufacture (eg insulin) but can't afford rates being charged

<comment><USER16> There is no patent protection on regular insulin, so it's some kind of ordinary monopoly problem, it appears.

I suspect a better set of regulations around generics would solve the problem with ordinary market forces. Probably there are quite a few policies that protect the existing drug companies that don't make any sense for generics.

<comment><USER11> IIRC the issue with insulin is that while "regular" insulin is not under patent, there are better insulin products on the market that are, and those are what everybody prefers.

Then, because most people do actually have insurance, the insurance pays for the more expensive version and so that's the only one anybody makes. The market for "regular" insulin is limited to people without insurance, which isn't a big enough market to justify all the regulatory work needed to manufacture it.

What's really needed there is to make it easier for generics manufacturers to get regulatory approval.

<comment><USER16> "What's really needed there is to make it easier for generics manufacturers to get regulatory approval."

That seems like a sensible solution to the extent the quality/safety itself is not compromised. For instance maybe there is difficulty importing from other countries, but there should be no problem importing regular insulin from Germany, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cde-v NO! This inevitably will end up as slightly fewer medicines with no reduction in price.

<comment><USER15> Why wouldn't it lead to a reduction in price? Removing artificial barriers to competition lowers prices, that's like the whole idea behind supply/demand in economics.

<comment><USER11> The bill is about about "negotiating prices", i.e. price controls. But if you legislate lower prices by fiat and the result is fewer drugs, that's _less_ competition -- which can raise prices.

If there are two drugs available for a condition then not covering one because it's too expensive is more viable. Take one of those companies out of the market and what does that do to your leverage when you're "negotiating" with the other one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Healthcare and medicine is a commodity service, similar to airway transportation and food supply, and the more abundance is there on all levels of it, the lower the prices get across time. Artificial caps on the cost of medicine creates unhealthy bureaucratic incentives like this one instance within NHS in the UK [https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/15/trump- criti...](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/15/trump-criticize-uk- single-payer-health-care-column/1419339001/)

<comment><USER3> Medicine is still a commodity even if another entity collectively bargains for it (ie NHS). Why doesn't the parent just by the medicine directly? Surely the NHS doesn't prevent that from happening. Oh, right, it is too expensive to purchase for most people without collectively bargaining. But I guess even that kind of bureaucracy isn't tolerable to an absolutist.

<comment><USER17> The entity may and should collectively bargain 90% discount, as long as the parents of those who need the unavailable medicine right now can withdraw from contributing their taxes to NHS and use the freed funds for direct purchases of the otherwise unavailable drug. I'm not sure it's possible at the moment.

<comment><USER3> I get that sounds "fair" but when you consider the family can suffer from any number of ailments that is rather cruel to say "your son requires special medicine, to afford that you must withdraw from public health care and you are on your own if you break your arm or back"

<comment><USER17> That's why I mentioned that abundance of options on all levels of the service of "providing healthcare" is crucially important for reducing costs over time. I can imagine different plans for different people of different healthcare needs (young and old, employed and unemployed etc), covered by more than one healthcare provider, in the same manner it is currently done in airway transportation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well this is, in essence, the concern of the "ObamaCare Death Panel"!

Only instead of determining by a board of doctors whether you are entitled to care, a bureaucratic measure to determine whether a company should investigate cures to what ails you. Better for society, worse for you as an individual.

<comment><USER19> Who is "you"? A public policy change along these lines would be better for some individuals and worse for others.

<comment><USER18> With an insurer, you at least have a backstop of changing insurers.

If the government makes this decision, your backstop becomes "move to a new polity."

This is the core of the argument, that the government should not have this power. Say what you will of the sad state of the US health situation, there are potential solutions not involving this level of "We choose who can have what."

I'm not one with exotic health problems, the kind that involve going to a hospital for a week for a batter of tests and analysis, but I know people for whom this is the case. I suppose those people are the ones this is writing off.</comment></comment></comment>


What are some innovative encryption methods? - <AUTHOR> A friend of mine is doing PhD and in-need of some latest and innovative encryption methods for the thesis. Could anyone please recommend something? <comment><USER2> Not exactly "innovative", since it's one of the oldest encryption methods, but the One-Time Pad[0] is considered "perfect encryption" and proven to be unbreakable. The mere possibility of unbreakable encryption could fill up a thesis by itself.

[0] [http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/laws/pad.html](http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/laws/pad.html)

<strike>edit to clarify: "unbreakable" is the wrong word, since it could be brute-forced with enough time and energy, like any encryption method.</strike>

yes it is completely unbreakable.

<comment><USER3> No, one-time pads are really unbreakable. You can't tell if the key you generated, which yielded "ATTACK AT DAWN", decrypted to the real message. It might have been "HN != SLASHDOT" \-- all decrypts are equally likely.

<comment><USER2> edited thanks. he even explicitly said that it was unbreakable in the article I linked :-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your friend is not going to get PhD thesis topics by asking his friend to post on HN.

Regardless, here's what I think are interesting areas in recent crypto:

\- Performance improvements in fully homomorphic encryption, starting with Gentry's work in 2009.

\- Practical applications of secure multiparty computation, e.g. Dyadic Security and Google's SMC work.

\- Non-NIST standards with actual adoption like Curve25519 and Chacha20-Poly1305

\- Functional Encryption: [http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/543](http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/543)

\- Post-quantum crypto like New Hope ([https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1092](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1092)) and Supersingular Isogenies ([http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506](http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506))

\- Candidate functions for Multilinear Maps, e.g. [https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/610](https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/610)

\- Hardware-based secure enclaves like SGX

<comment><USER5> Hellow sweis, actually he is posted for me, due to some technical issues I could not. how can u say that I can't get thesis topic? and thank you for your reference links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Innovative methods of gathering entropy is interesting to me. Because encryption methods are pretty darwinian. The good ones are heavily used and the quirky/bad ones fall into disuse.

But methods of gathering entropy can range from a microphone recording a city street to the classic keyboard/mouse.

Both are valid, but not as practical.

Personally I have the OneRNG, an open source usb-stick that gathers entropy by generating RF noise.

There are other devices like that out today.

</comment><comment><USER7> Zero knowledge proofs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero- knowledge_proof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof)

<comment><USER8> Expanding on that, zk-snarks[0], a kind of non-interactive zero-knowledge proof[1] are really interesting. They're used as the basis for the anonymous cryptocurrency zcash[2], where one can prove they haven't already spent an input without actually revealing which input they are spending.

[0]: [https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks.html](https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks.html)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero- knowledge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero- knowledge_proof)

[2]: [https://z.cash/](https://z.cash/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Post-quantum key exchange using ring learning with errors and hybrid solutions: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/599.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/599.pdf)

<comment><USER10> This is really cool! I know Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman has a patch to build the cipher suite into OpenSSL [0] like the paper you linked. I know that Microsoft Research also has the best known implementation of SIDH [1]. Do you know of any paper studying the performance of those two?

[0] [https://github.com/dconnolly/sidh-for-openssl- patch](https://github.com/dconnolly/sidh-for-openssl-patch)

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/PQCrypto- SIDH](https://github.com/Microsoft/PQCrypto-SIDH)

<comment><USER9> The closest paper I can find comparing performance would be this one (section 3.4 for performance): [https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1017.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1017.pdf)

Check out the Open Quantum Systems implementation, they've got a suite incorporating a number of quantum resistant algorithms: [https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/liboqs](https://github.com/open-quantum- safe/liboqs)

They have the SIDH implementation you mentioned ([https://github.com/open- quantum-safe/liboqs/blob/master/docs...](https://github.com/open-quantum- safe/liboqs/blob/master/docs/Algorithm%20data%20sheets/kex_sidh_cln16.md)), and a test harness for comparing performance.

<comment><USER10> Really great stuff. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Obligatory mention of homomorphic encryption [0].

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

<comment><USER12> I initially read this as "homeopathic encryption", and was prepared to be very amused! Expected something along the lines of "the input is subjected to a random bit flip approximately once per 10kB; amongst practitioners, this is considered more effective than the unnecessarily heavyweight approach taken by Western-style encryption schemes."

<comment><USER13> Oh, I think you're thinking of homeopathic KDFs. Homeopathic encryption users just use the Crystalline cipher, because it helps center our chakras.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Post-Quantum Cryptography using Supersingular Isogenies: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> Cryptography with Cellular Automata:

[http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/cryptogr...](http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/cryptography- cellular-automata.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Nobody uses anything related Wolfram's cellular automata. I don't think there are any robust security proofs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to see more analysis of things like CHAFFINCH.

[https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.html](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thank you. it seems novel. can you please elaborate it, could it be applied for biometric authentication!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Identity based encryption.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID- based_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID-based_encryption)

"Identity-based systems allow any party to generate a public key from a known identity value such as an ASCII string. A trusted third party, called the Private Key Generator (PKG), generates the corresponding private keys...."

I think it's innovative and a bit of "thinking outside the box". You do need to ultimately trust a 3rd party (same as in PKI or WOT I guess?).

</comment><comment><USER17> Shamir Secret Sharing is very cool and fairly old. It introduces a tool that inspires many neat applications.

There is a lot of interesting work in privacy preserving databases as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> functional encryption [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption)

</comment><comment><USER19> i think this is pretty cool ,and getting more relevant now quantum computers are comming closer...

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

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone. I have forward all your ideas and suggestions to my friend.</comment>


The Hacker FAQ (1999) - johnx123-up http://www.seebs.net/faqs/hacker.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of what is spoken of in this document relates to books boasting the benefits of ADHD and Asperger's.

Has anyone had an experience where a boss read a document like this?</comment>


Ask HN: How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? - <AUTHOR>

I am searching for the limits of programming language compactness. (just for fun, although this can be also interesting in genetic programming)
The definition is a bit subjective, but not very much: A programming language is compact, if the program size is small for the typical programs we want to write. (The subjective part is what we call a typical program.)
Currently I think that the programming language Joy is the best candidate to be the base for creating the most compact programming language in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)
I have quickly defined a variant of Joy, and I have defined an efficient coding scheme for it. (This is still on paper, I did not write it down precisely enough to publish). It turned out that the really necessary tokens of joy can be typically encoded in 3-4 or in the worst case in 5 bits. This means that the quicksort algorithm mentioned in the wikipedia articel is approximatley 9 bytes long.
Do you have an idea for an even more compact programming language? Do you think that a cleverly encoded Joy-variant is near some theoretical limit of compactness? <comment><USER3> Guy Steele knows a bit about language design (having co-invented Scheme and Fortress, worked on early implementations of TeX and TECO/Emacs, and helped write the specifications for Java, Common Lisp, ECMAScript, Fortran, and C). In _Coders at Work_ he says,

 _"There's this Huffman encoding problem. If you make something concise, something is going to have to be more verbose as a consequence. So in designing a language, one of the things you think about is, 'What are the things I want to make very easy to say and very easy to get right?' But with the understanding that, having used up characters or symbols for that purpose, you're going to have to make something else a little bit harder to say."_

So it definitely depends on your domain. If you do some of the harder Project Euler problems and then look in the forums, you can see the same problem solved by a hundred different programmers with different approaches. The shortest solutions there are _always_ in APL-family languages like J and K. But it's partly because those languages are so well-suited to the typical problems in Project Euler.

If you want to implement a concurrent server for binary network protocol like memcache, then you'll probably find Erlang a more concise language instead, because its syntax, its libraries, and the primitives of the Erlang VM are all better adapted to that domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you are right, it probably depends on the domain. But still, I have a feeling that there are some languages which are more concise than others generally because of reasons which are very generic: For example imperative languages with local variables contain a lot of unnecessary information, because we always have to reference the local variables we use, while in stack based languages the arguments don't have to be referenced, because they are implicit. In fact, in an extremely concise language there should be only a very few ways to express a program at a certain size. In not so concise languages you can write the same program in lot of ways ('permutations') (having the same size).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kinda related: there are various genomes that encode overlapping genes. This makes them very compact in that they take less physical space to achieve the same end result,

In this analogy, the language is the genome (DNA or RNA) and the program is the set of proteins that make up the virus or whatnot.

As far as I know, there aren't any computer programming languages that do this. Not that I want them to...

A reference: <http://www.bookrags.com/research/overlapping-genes-gen-03/>

</comment><comment><USER5> The language called MUMPS only uses single letter key words as I recall - <USER2> that way lies insanity.

</comment><comment><USER6> APL</comment>


How AdRoll monitors high-performance Erlang deployments with exometer - <AUTHOR> http://tech.adroll.com/blog/erlang/2014/01/22/monitoring-with-exometer-at-adroll.html <comment><USER2> This is a hot topic where I work, however we try to integrate the erlang monitoring into a single interface for all machines and all OSes/apps. From this article it doesn't look like the tool will help observe the VMs from zenoss/zabbix sort of tool etc. Is there a reason someone would prefer to use exometer reports as opposed to managed metric reports from a big monitoring tool? What about watchdog alerts/notifications and formal incident workflows?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, apologies. I point out in the article that we push a lot of our data directly into Datadog, a zenoss/zabbix sort of tool. We get dashboards like the following (this is for a secondary, redundant system and it's not one of the bidders):

[https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/143293e0da](https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/143293e0da)

Datadog provides the alerting and incident tracking as well, though the latter is a bit lacking and is more or less just cross-over integration with PagerDuty. exometer doesn't report as such. It aggregates and facilitates pushing the data around on fixed schedules.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Dorsia – An evergreen travel guidebook powered by ML - <AUTHOR> http://www.dorsia.io <comment><USER2> I guess the name is a reference to American Psycho?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! It's the restaurant he can't get into ha

<comment><USER3> The first time Patrick tries to book a table:

 _I clear my throat. "Um, yes, I know it's a little late but is it possible to reserve a table for two at eight-thirty or nine perhaps?" I'm asking this with both eyes shut tight._

 _There is a pause – the crowd in the background a surging, deafening mass – and with real hope coursing through me I open my eyes, realizing that the maître d', god love him, is probably looking through the reservation book for a cancellation – but then he starts giggling, low at first but it builds to a high-pitched crescendo of laughter which is abruptly cut off when he slams down the receiver._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The web app only supports NYC, DC, Chicago, LA, and SF? No NOLA or other mid- sized US cities?

EDIT: Also, funny to see the Brooklyn Bridge is priced at one dollar sign out of four. It'd be useful to see free attractions, although I suppose parks and libraries rarely get reviewed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we're launching with those cities, but we're ramping up our internal toolchain that gives us the recommendations.

Good point about the one dollar sign! We'll make a note to change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Through careful tracking of influential voices, Dorsia curates a > constantly-updated, searchable list of the best bars, restaurants, cafes, > and sights._

Does this mean that if a given location stops being mentioned, it gradually slides off the list?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't automatically remove anything. We only remove places when they close for now. We track the popularity and mentions internally but the editorial team has the final say in removing spots.

We're not trying to become critics ourselves, so we err on the side of caution when removing places.

<comment><USER5> I worry that over time, data will get stale. If a place stops being talked about because its popularity tanks for a righteous reason, it will still show up on the map as a worthwhile place tovisit.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Quickly calculate and compare income, salary vs. hourly, days/week, etc. - <AUTHOR> http://joeyespo.com/income-comparer

<comment><USER2> Very nice and clean implementation. What might be good is to also include and quantify benefits - a lot of the debate is that you get a higher rate when you're on contract but you'll have to get your own insurance plan, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Just yesterday I was trying to explain to someone how important it is to consider the cost of self-employment taxes on a 1099-MISC position. Would have been helpful, but I did the math by hand!</comment>