Ask HN: Bubble 2.0 - what lessons were learnt the first time around? - <AUTHOR>

I'm increasingly reading reports that we're about to enter another period of gross over-valuation and increased speculative investing.
This article [1], describes a possible bid of $6-$8 million, for a web-service that hasn't even reached beta.
Assuming this kind of story is a warning sign, and we are approaching another period of lunacy; is it possible to glean anything from the last bubble?  Were any lessons learnt?  Do any of you have any advice for getting through this kind of scenario with the least amount of trauma?
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/hipster-groupon/ <comment><USER2> I wasn't around during the first bubble, and I don't actually run a company presently. (So take this with a grain of salt.)

But from my perspective, most of the failed sites in bubble 1.0 didn't actually have good products - they didn't actually sell a basic 'X product' to 'Y customer'.

I think the same thing is happening now. Just look at Path, Hipster, etc. being valued at super high numbers. These sites don't actually have a real, solid business model. They're just social networks.

(In my opinion) the startup community needs to stop making social networks and pseudo-businesses and focus on real products and real problems, like the rest of the business world has for centuries.

<comment><USER3> >>most of the failed sites in bubble 1.0 didn't actually have good products - they didn't actually sell a basic X to Y customer.<<

Some counterpoints to ponder:

1\. Y (i.e. Internet user base) then was much smaller, as compared to what it is today

2\. wombs of the WWW were barely pregnant with eCommerce (if it was known by that name) then

>>I think the same thing is happening now.<<

IMHO, there are _major_ differences involved: in addition to 1. and 2. above,

3\. means to monetise eyeballs (traffic) were scarce then (random, untargeted, ROS banner ads - $15/20/25 CPM, anybody?). Heck, (m)AdSense wasn't even around!

I could go on, but let me conclude by saying that (even) non-monetised or barely monetised eyeballs/userbase/traffic has much more commercial/valuation potential today as compared to bubble 1.0 days.

What do you think?

<comment><USER2> 1\. Very true.

2\. Also true, but I think there's somewhat of a distinction between eCommerce and all web businesses (at least what I've been led to believe.) ECommerce is selling offline things online, or rather, selling products through an online channel. Zappos, Amazon, 37 Signals etc. are examples of this.

On the other hand, many of today's startups don't actually sell anything. They have a feature, not a business. Is Path really an eCommerce site? Hipster?

3\. True, but again, ads aren't exactly a "product". They're an extra level above your service, and are notoriously much more difficult to pull off successfully. Also, I think that most people (customers) have a strong disdain for advertisements, on a whole. I wouldn't rely on ads to power a product indefinitely into the future; personally, I tune out almost all all advertisements, and I know many people who do the same. Building a business on a fluctuating ad market doesn't seem like a great business model to me.

Selling products, however, is much more concrete.

<comment><USER4> The entire Television industry is being supported by ad revenue for decades. Why can't the same model work for the web?

<comment><USER2> [http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is- failing-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on- the-internet/)

(Techcrunch, I know. But it's a really good article from an academic.)

From the article: _People don't trust ads. There is a vast literature to support this. Is it all wrong?

People don't want ads. Again, there is a vast literature to support this. Think about your own behavior, you own channel surfing and fast forwarding and the timing of when you leave the TV to get a snack. Is it during the content or the commercials?

People don't need ads. There is a vast amount of trusted content on the net. Again, there is literature on this. But think about how you form your opinion of a product, from online ads or online reviews?

There is no shortage of places to put ads. Competition among them will be brutal. Prices will be driven lower and lower, for everyone but Google._

Also, don't forget that the NYTimes is instituting a paywall, and the Wall Street Journal already has one. These sites obviously couldn't function solely on ads, and they get massive amounts of traffic. Likewise for Hulu: they couldn't get by with ads alone either. Unless your web business has an extremely low overhead (read: simple web functions) I seriously doubt ads will be enough.

<comment><USER3> >> The entire Television industry is being supported by ad revenue for decades. Why can't the same model work for the web? <<

Well-said. As a matter of fact, it can; and it is, today.

(Those who are not convinced, just look at Google's IRS filings for the past 2-3 years.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Trauma? Bubbles are great for founders - while they last. Look at it as an opportunity - there's a reason why "Please God, just one more bubble" was a popular bumper sticker for a while.

The primary takeaway from the first bubble is that there's never a bad time to realize a profit. Don't let it ride - put the money in your pocket whenever you can.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is absurd. I am working on my internet startup as we speak and reading news like this really disappoints me. Why is our country all about a quick buck or fast cash rather. We move from Internet bubble in late 90s to Housing bubble in the '00s back to the Internet bubble... is housing bubble next?

<comment><USER2> My bet is on an educational bubble (although it isn't strictly comparable.)</comment></comment>


LG demos transparent LCD - <AUTHOR> http://justinireland.com/lg-transparent-lcd/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what I'm missing here, but I'm pretty sure transparent LCDs have existed in commercial production for decades. For instance, back in the mid-90s (and possibly still today) they make displays that emulate TI-8x calculators and can be placed on an old-school overhead projector, for classroom use.

<comment><USER3> I thought _all_ LCD's were somewhat transparent. They have backlights _behind_ them, after all, and LCD projectors are clearly transparent.

</comment></comment><comment> T-R I'd like to see this paired with an e-ink screen on the next Kindle. Turn on only the e-ink for reading, only the LCD for UI, or both to show highlighting and notes overlaid onto the text. They could use the touch screen to get rid of all those buttons, too.

<comment><USER4> I think a better scheme would be having embedded OLED dots mingled in around the eInk microcapsules. Then you don't get the degradation you get with layering one thing over another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aren't all LCDs transparent? Are they demoing anything more than an LCD without a backlight?

<comment><USER6> It's hard to tell because this write-up is so poor, but my guess from the pictures is that the lighting is much of the actual invention here. Perhaps they've got a technology for uniformly lighting a color LCD without a typical backlight. The display looks uniformly bright and the colors look good, which makes me suspect that they are not merely relying on the background image to provide the "backlight".

Or maybe it's just a completely normal LCD being demoed in front of a cleverly lit diorama. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you go to a casion, look out for WMS slot machines, specifically this one (Goldfish (the new one, not the old machine)) I played this in Atlantic City at the Trump Taj Mahal downstairs next to the noodle bar and they use a transparent LCD over their spinning reels. Pretty cool stuff.

Demo promotion video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E08IvXQ- rZI&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E08IvXQ- rZI&feature=related)

Edit: A pretty nice in game example of the LCD on the slot in action: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eEyr6y8kNE&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eEyr6y8kNE&feature=related)

It looks really really cool in person.

<comment><USER8> Are those actual physical spinning wheels? On the video you can't really tell that it's not just one giant screen, I bet the effect is cool AFK though.

<comment><USER7> Yes they are actually spinning. If a Wild shows up on the reel, the LCD screen pops a "Wild" animation over it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have I missed something, surely this is entirely pointless? You need to have a blank single colour surface behind it, or the images on the transparent screen get obscured by the colours of whatever is behind it. This is even demonstrable in their demo video!

</comment><comment><USER10> LCDs are supposed to be transparent.

What would be cool is if I could have a sun-powered backlight for my laptop when I want to use it outdoors.

<comment><USER11> They used to use them in PDAs. They're called transreflective LCD [1] displays. They're nowhere near as bright as a backlit LCD though, and only look good when you've got a good light source.

1 - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid_crystal_di...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid_crystal_display)

<comment><USER10> I mean, more like light coming from the back through the LCD screen into your eyes, unlike transreflective LCDs.

One needs a white tent pitched behind the laptop screen, and one needs to sit _facing_ the sun. You'd be looking into the space of the tent, which is much like the display in the OP demonstration except the source of light is the sun coming through diffused through the tent fabric (and there are no buildings). The bottom floor could be a mirror.

SUN

           /\
     fab. /  \  <-- laptop LCD
         /    \
        / tent \
        </comment></comment></comment><comment>--</comment><comment>== <- keyboard
         mirror

where fab == white tent fabric

<comment><USER12> Interesting idea... I don't think I've ever heard of something like that concept before.

I see two problems, though there may be ways to mitigate them: you're facing the sun, therefore it's effectively in your eyes, and you'd probably lose all semblance of color balancing in the screen.

Not that the second is all that important to most people. I've even gotten used to applications like Flux[1] which change the screen's color over the day, and I find it's usually easier on my eyes. Just sayin'.

You could probably do away with the mirror, and just have a white piece of plastic. It'd be diffused by the fabric anyway, there's no need to have something mirror-like to reflect it accurately. You could possibly use the entire back panel of a laptop screen, and fold it up when not in use (brain- farts while looking at my wife's white Macbook).

[1]: <http://stereopsis.com/flux/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What you are 'missing' and the folks who watched minority report or Avatar are lusting after, is a transparent piece of material that they can display stuff on.

True, LCDs are, by their nature, transparent. However their contents are only 'visible' when there is light going through them, and they work by adjusting how much light passes through them using polarization. If you have a full spectrum light behind them, and you have red green and blue dots which you use for color selection, you get a color LCD.

However, these don't _generate_ light. And no, nobody has built one of those yet. To build such a display would no doubt require that you build a pixel out of three (or four) LEDs that are nominally transparent, such that turning them on would cause the pixel to appear.

That would then make for a display which was clear, except for where it had data showing. So far, this technology (outside of using a projector to project the display on to a window where the user sees the reflection as the display) does not exist.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1 point by apbitler 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

So to the person asking about the slot machines.. they technology behind this is called "multi-layer LCD". I was in Vegas for the CES and I saw these slot machines.. and I couldn't believe my eyes! I did some research and found out that it is actually 2 LCD screens, and one of them.. or both are able to go completely transparent.. thats how you get the 3d effect. Check it out for yourself: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/130233/new_slot_machines_prom...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/130233/new_slot_machines_prom..). <http://www.puredepth.com/technologyPlatform_sw.php?l=en>

</comment><comment><USER15> Just a few steps until I can have my holodeck.

<comment><USER16> Hey, I've waited since the 90's for my PADD and its finally here, I have no doubt now that my holodeck is not far behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can envision augmented reality applications for something with a smaller form factor and higher contrast. A camera could track the user's relative position, and overlay data about objects in the actual view for the user. If the device could do iris tracking, it could even react to the region of the screen the person is looking at.

</comment><comment><USER18> The resulting image looked about as unusable as I expected. Besides HUD applications, what is the use case?

<comment><USER19> I think it is just the standard "hey look at this nifty _but completely impractical_ thing we can do".

For me, behind my monitor is a window because I want to be in an area with lots of natural lighting (I've worked in rooms with no windows, and its no fun, after a while it just gets you down). So a see-through LCD would be a total disaster for me.

Apple used to have a Cinema Display monitor with a see through bezel, the see through LCD would look gorgeous in combo with that, if a little impractical.

Maybe the use case is what it looks like not when it is on, but when it is off? I imagine in this scenario it would be something that you wouldn't use as your day to day computer that you spend hours on.

You could build your LCD _into_ the window, then when you're not using it it doesn't impair the view? Or maybe it is useful for HUDs in cars or other vehicles? Build it right into the windscreen?

(But wait - aren't there cars that already have this? Isn't there a merc with nightvision built into it or something like that?)

<comment><USER20> I think almost all passenger vehicle HUDs are displays in the dashboard that are reflected off the windshield - I suspect they also sometimes put a lens on it so that it appears to be further away than it actually is, because it might cause major headaches for people to frequently change focus from the road to the windscreen.

<comment><USER19> I remember test driving a Yaris, which was the first car I'd driven with a digital speedo. _That_ was incredibly distracting, because I kept trying to get _exactly_ on the speed limit. It was actually dangerous.

<comment><USER21> I drove a Renault with one of these. You get used to it. After a few days, it is no longer distracting. Actually, I found the usual analogue gauges distracting when switching back!

Mercedes now uses a high resolution screen that displays an analogue speedo gauge. That is an interesting combination!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm confused. The image behind the LCD is clearly not from the LCD (there is a parallax effect), but the background image still seems artificial. Is this just two screens stacked on top of each other?

<comment><USER20> Pretty sure it's just a little model of buildings in a box right behind the display.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So they've taken a regular screen, added a touch-sensing layer like loads of things have already added, and made it harder to read what's on it. Is this supposed to be good?

If they got it to be self-lit (ie, via the edges), it might be interesting, but it doesn't look to me like that's what it is - it looks like the box behind it is providing all the light. So it is, _very precisely_ , a large, expensive rear-projection display.

Wow. Congrats to the research team, how many DIY LCD hacks did you have to see to realize you could do this?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I suppose I deserve the down-vote, too much snark. Apologies! Especially due to this info alok-g linked: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display_televisi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display_television#Efficiency) Important bit: _3M suggests that, on average, only 8 to 10% of the light being generated at the back of the set reaches the viewer._

I'd always thought they were more transparent than that, given that I've seen LCD screens used as projectors: <http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-LCD- PROJECTOR/> in which case (though there's no way to detect how bright the box behind it is) a highly-transparent screen could indeed be a fairly significant breakthrough.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2267436>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> these products (as other pointed out) exist for year. they have been sold to use with overhead projectors.

i ones has this old tech-hippie show me one and telling me: with this device you can actually watch television together! (he put the frame in between our faces with it showing some picture, and he smiled -- i saw the picture AND his smile)</comment>


Ask HN: Nothing is new in Neuralink! - <AUTHOR> To me, the presentation contains just a bunch of conceptual design of planned experiments which have been introduced in the state-of-art studies in translational neuroengineering. <comment><USER2> which presentation?</comment>


Why discriminate if it doesn't profit? (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://thehathorlegacy.com/why-discriminate-if-it-doesnt-profit/ <comment><USER3>
      To sum up that story, what tipped me off was that whenever
      film students pointed out how movies/shows for, by or about
      women had indeed profited, film professionals wouldn't hear
      it.

The author doesn't understand opportunity cost. There may be plenty of opportunities to profit by making movies that feature women, appeal to women, etc. But Hollywood (that is, the big, well-heeled studies) aren't just interested in any kind of profit; they're interested in huge profits.

Warren Buffet could stand on a street corner selling loosies (individual cigarettes) and turn a profit. But that would be a waste of his time. He could make far more money doing other stuff.

Take into account opportunity cost and you can understand how somebody could turn a profit but still effectively be losing money. And why professional filmmakers would ignore the students' seemingly bullet-proof argument.

And that's ignoring other issues like volatility, consistency, etc.

I'm not saying there's not systemic, irrational discrimination in Hollywood. But the author isn't going to get anywhere with her critiques until she understands the problem better.

And if she and the rest of us don't understand these issues better, if we don't become better adept at untangling our various motives, we're going to continue having a tough time not only addressing discrimination, but having constructive discussions about it.

<comment><USER4> That's it in a nutshell. They know they can make hundreds of millions of dollars with yet another superhero movie. Why bother with something that's going clear at best single-digit millions and has a good chance of losing money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, if ever there was an article contorted by an agenda, it's this one. An application of Hanlon's razor surely wouldn't hurt (and fits well with the hair cutting "example").

She even admits that laziness or inertia is a pretty good explanation for the hair phenomenon - but clearly, "it is a side effect of Western racism"! While there certainly has been issues for minorities because of the dominance of Western beauty ideals, this is a pretty lazy argument in itself. Especially since some ethnic haircuts were a successful, direct response to this.

And, oh yeah, it must be "the industry" colluding against everybody - <USER2> mind that most barbers and hairdressers are just people making a living. Maybe the solution is to stop going to a "stylist" in a city and find a local hairdresser in your neighbourhood - but that, of course, takes effort.

From there on, it just keeps getting worse with the unfounded paranoia, e.g. asserting that "TV advertisers don't seem to want to know [...] what types of ads women respond to" without any facts. I'm going to call BS.

What a terrible article.</comment>


Beware the Alan Turing fetish - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/beware-alan-turing-fetish.html <comment><USER2> Turing was extraordinary, but was he better than Einstein and von Neumann and Claude Shannon and Richard Feynman combined? Because at roughly the same era Turing would have been hatching England's Silicon Valley, Einstein, von Neumann, Shannon, Feynman and others like them were in New Jersey, along all the other smart guys at Princeton, combined with the booming US economy, all the defense spending, with AT&T, joined by Bell Labs, lasers, the transistor...

...And still Silicon Valley ended up in the orchards of California, not the New York suburbs of New Jersey.

Then there's that smelly hippy Steve Jobs, nobody's idea of a brilliant information theorist, who revolutionizes industry after industry. Without Wozniak, he would have done what? Founded Jamba Juice? Had an art gallery in Carmel? Who knows?

Sure, maybe a butterfly in Brazil can produce a hurricane in Florida, but speculating that a _specific_ butterfly, even an unusually large one, might have produced a hurricane eventually is absurd.

<comment><USER3> > Then there's that smelly hippy Steve Jobs

... who was a marketing genius, especially when he had Wozniak's brilliant design to sell. Jobs _was_ great at something, but it _wasn't_ computer technology. It was marketing. NeXT is a prime example: Coolest computers on the block (according to a lot of people), but they went nowhere without the Apple team backing Jobs up.

And, once Jobs went back to Apple and got the Apple engineers behind him, NeXT became OS X and started to succeed.

<comment><USER4> Jobs gift was to be able to think like a consumer clearer than the consumer and at the same time techinicaly minded enough to get the best from the techs who are so obvistacted from the end user mind-set wise that they need that grounding that Jobs gave them.

Not saying all Apple products are stoner friendly, but they wont give you a bad vibe on a acid trip with there sharp edges. Food for thought but nomatter how you think of him, he stood above the crowd at a level he defined.

<comment><USER5> _Jobs gift was to be able to think like a consumer clearer than the consumer and at the same time techinicaly minded enough to get the best from the techs who are so obvistacted from the end user mind-set wise that they need that grounding that Jobs gave them._

What word is "obvistacted" standing in for? A Google (EN_US) search returns two results, both of which are this post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > This brilliant, charming, odd, driven workaholic could have turned the old > industrial heartlands of Lancashire into a British Silicon Valley and > perhaps America's brightest and best would have flooded east across the > Atlantic.

This just another example of the British yearning for bygone days in which their country was the center of the world.

<comment><USER7> Is there anything particularly British about that, though? Harking back to a "better time" in the past seems like it's almost a global trait.

<comment><USER8> Nostalgia is universal, but Britain is in the somewhat unique position of having once been a hyperpower and today being substantially less relevant on the world stage.

<comment><USER9> Not that unique actually. Many (perhaps most) countries in Europe have _some_ period in the past when they were much more powerful than they are now.

<comment><USER10> There's a reason why a huge portion of the population in the western hemisphere speaks Spanish.

<comment><USER11> And why quite a bit of Africa speaks French...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Often in the minds of people who are not involved in an area, that area become epitomized by a person. For science it is Albert Einstein. In the US Civil Rights movement it is Martin Luther King. In computers it is becoming Turing.

Turing is pretty good, I think.

<comment><USER13> You think anyone not involved in computing knows who Alan Turing was? Maybe in the UK he's more of a household name than the US... (?)

<comment><USER14> Most people who are aware of WW2 history know who turing is. In the UK anyway.

<comment><USER15> As a 30 year-old American with a mild interest in WWII history, I had never heard of Alan Turing until I became interested in computer science. While I hadn't heard of him, I did learn about the Enigma machine in high school.

Also, I have only run into one or two people who recognized his name that weren't into computers.

Sadly, there are lots of great men and women who don't get the recognition they deserve. For example, Thomas Paine, a man who played a significant part in America's decision to declare independence. When he published "The Age of Reason" after the war, America responded by pretending he never existed for a couple hundred years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Turing is amazing, but I've often felt the Turing Test had no real scientific or mathematical basis, and if proposed by a far less famous and influential person, would be largely (and rightly) ignored.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure why you were down voted for that. It's obviously just an opinion, but you acknowledged that. It certainly wasn't unrelated, disrespectful or inappropriate.

My only argument against that would be to point out that a great many things have no basis in science or mathematics but are still considered to have value. For example philosophy or art.

While the test might have no logical basis, it does form a base line, in the same way that the a unit of measurement (the kilogram for example) may have no other logical basis, it is something which can can be agreed on and thus compared against.

<comment><USER18> I think the issue is how damienkatz's comment implied that Turing only had the Turing Test to his credit. If anything the Turing Test is a game, or thought experiment, and only the tip of Turing's accomplishments.

<comment><USER19> Agreed, that is why I downvoted him. It is one of Turings greatest known ideas (commonly known of to some degree among the general population) likely because it involves provocative claims and conclusions (particularly so for its time).

But to claim that Turing isn't great because you have an issue with the Turing Test is like claiming Einstein wasn't great because you think his anti-nuclear activism was misplaced. Rather missing the point of why we consider the man important.

<comment><USER15> He never said or implied that Turing isn't great, but he did say "Turing IS Amazing." He just happens to think the Turing Test is overrated.

<comment><USER19> In my experience, when somebody starts a monologue with the pattern _"[assertion], but"_ , what follows is a more honest presentation of their opinions than the initial assertion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I know of Alan Turing after reading the book by Hodges and a theoretical computation course at college. Definitely a brilliant man but I agree with what is said in this article.

Many, many people contributed to the computing world we have today whether it is theoretical or practical and we will never know what might have happened with Turing alive. Why not talk about von Neumann as the father of the modern computer? Simply because even though one man might have had a big influence on a specific field, many more after him would have had a big impact and nobody can predict the different outcomes. Standing on the shoulders of giants and so on..

</comment><comment><USER21> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3260639>

<comment><USER22> ^ previous submission, ~ 1 year ago, plenty of comments.

please include a description or _something_ next time, instead of a bare link. Otherwise it's hard to assess the relevancy without clicking: [http://i0.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/000/681/wha...](http://i0.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/000/681/what-you-did-there-i-see- it.thumbnail.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Notice that neither JGC nor any of the responders here have mentioned Alonzo Church, the inventor of Lambda Calculus, and a man whose contributions to computer science were arguably every bit as fundamental as Turing's.

My prediction is that if Turing ever gains the sort of widespread recognition that JGC wants and that Turing probably deserves, Church will become the Monsieur Curie of their intellectual marriage who for reasons of political correctness will best be left unacknowledged.

</comment><comment><USER24> While we prise Alan Turing, we should not forget the efforts of Rejewski <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski> Różycki <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Różycki> and Zygalski <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Zygalski>

</comment><comment><USER25> A large contributing factor to the current trend of Turing fetishism is the fact that so many people in a range of fields read "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in University as an introduction to the problem of artificial intelligence. It was the first paper assigned in at least 3 of my classes.

For many people, this is the first time that they consider such issues and so Turing is solidified in their mind as: 'old mathematician guy who invented computers and the idea of artificial intelligence'.

Given the authoritative atmosphere of university and an absence of any of the surrounding history, it's easy to imagine that people would get attached to a singular figure. And indeed they have.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hugely interesting, I knew very little about him but after reading this, I am going on a learning spree! Having lived in Britain, I must admit they do yearn for the days when they were the centre of the word and the tone of the article does resemble this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice postscript about ARM, a British company.

</comment><comment><USER28> [2011]...

</comment><comment><USER29> If I was considering computer science in the UK during the 50's, I would have immediately left after Turing's death.

That man could have lead a revolution, could have started one of the most influential and powerful corporations on this planet. He had that potential. To say otherwise is disingenuous.

<comment><USER7> I think it's disingenuous to make assumptions about what anyone may have done in an imagined future.

<comment><USER17> Or to make assumptions about what you may have done in an imagined past.</comment></comment></comment>


From a "Hello World" project to a complex messenger - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/realpaliy/mChat <comment><USER2> You should post this as a Show HN (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)) and add a comment to the thread telling the story of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it. That tends to seed discussion in a good direction, plus it will signal to the community that you understand its conventions, which is more likely to get you a friendly response. If you email us a draft of your comment to firstname.lastname@example.com, we might be able to give you some tips. (Same offer goes for any user!)

Please don't get friends (or other accounts) to upvote or make booster comments, though. That's against the rules here. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

</comment><comment><USER3> how many days/months did you make it?

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice desing</comment>


Xerox Alto Restoration – Ethernet pioneers/founders of 3Com visit [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhIohWr10kU <comment><USER2> When Dave Boggs was digging around in the box of prototype Ethernet gear my heart skipped a little. I sure hope all of that gear ends up in a museum eventually. While my rational mind knows that there's nothing inherently special about the items in that box I'm not able to completely squelch the irrational part of my mind that's screaming "Holy artifacts!"

<comment><USER3> Well your irrationality got me to watch it. I hope you're happy ;)

<comment><USER2> I got a crazy feeling of irrational exuberance when I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I called a friend to tell him "I kid you not-- I am standing here looking at _the_ Utah Teapot." Getting a chance to see these early Ethernet devices would probably evoke similar oddly irrational (albeit pleasant) feelings.

<comment><USER3> Heh, I wonder how I'd react in front of this teapot, I was a CG head for many years. I'm not sure electronics would throw me off like that. Even though I got depressed for missing a Grid Laptop on an auction. I've exhausted that feeling since I think.

But, spirits of times, still does affect me. It's like an invisible book, I'm sure I'd love to walk between big IBM mainframes, and consoles.

I digress, I recently went to a flea market. And I took a time travelling slap in the face. I may be jaded by cult historical electronics, but seeing 18th furnitures, 19th tech of the day, magazines. It did something to me that is above the best VR today.

<comment><USER4> My biggest "miss" was not getting the winning bid for a VPL Dataglove on Ebay (I like to collect "vintage" VR artifacts).

That said, my greatest coup was finding an Altair 8800 at a local electronics salvage yard and only paying $100.00 for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A fascinating moment around 11:55:

      - Did you ever find a program called EDP, Ethernet debugging program?
      - That's it [pointing at the screen].
      - [Looking at the screen] That's the new version. From '79.

</comment><comment><USER6> ... Looking at that early 50 ohm coax ethernet tap, it's amazing... Now we have $200 Intel 10GbE NICs with 1310nm LX SFP+ (the SFP costs $22) in some linux desktops and real world 9000+ Mbps speed tests bidirectional to an internal test server.

Or look at it another way, 1U rackmount 48-port line rate 10GbE SFP+ Arista switches from a few years ago are now available for $1000 from datacenter operators that have upgraded to QSFP/100GbE spine switches.

<comment><USER7> I am tempted to say the world took a step backwards when it moved to thin coax with those BNC connectors and terminators.

And the less i say about fiddling with TP and modular connectors the better.

Being able to lay down a loop of coax, and then just clamp on as needed seems like heaven (though i guess having all those switches allows for much better throughput).

<comment><USER8> I remember being told during CCNA training, back in 2001ish, that there were basically 2 types of network engineer.

Those who had brought down an ethernet network whilst installing a vampire tap ...and those who were going to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is such a badass project. It touches so many things, and the process is going to teach us so much about our history.

There's been a handful of archaeology projects I've read about in the last few years that I thought of as _beautiful_ , and this is one of them (a short list that includes a Baltimore hair stylist who decided to figure out how ancient Roman hairstyles actually worked [1])

1 - [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873249002045782862...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324900204578286272195339456)

</comment><comment><USER10> Funny how the tiny BeagleBone Black they're using to restore the Alto has more computing power in it than the Alto itself.

<comment><USER11> I have a Commodore Pet 8032 which is one of the most powerful pet machines. I found an ethernet adapter for it. I believe the microcontroller on the enthernet adapter has more computing power than the computer it connects it to. Still though it's cool as all heck.

<comment><USER12> In the Atari ST community there's a hard drive / floppy emulator and network interface called CosmosEx that uses a Raspbery Pi board internally. The Pi has _far_ more CPU horsepower than the 8mhz 68000 ST itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If only they can make an emulator out of it. So the rest of us can learn how to use it.

<comment><USER14> [http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html)

<comment><USER15> kens recommends ContrAlto over Salto: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144534)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A little boring to be honest:)

I recommend the YouTube channel jpkwiwigeek

<comment><USER17> I think you meant [https://www.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek/](https://www.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek/)

He doesn't appear to have an Alto though, which is popular here because the Alto in general was pretty prescient, and this particular Alto was given to YC by Alan Kay.</comment></comment>


L.A.'s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/college-admissions-scandal.html <comment><USER3> I'm surprised that this scandal doesn't seem to be causing anyone to think one step further and realize that the entire premise of "elite" colleges with competitive admissions is a device for the perpetuation of inequality. We're devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards.

I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.

As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best- positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.

<comment><USER4> Many of these "elite" colleges are one of the best avenues to eliminate inequality. Many of them have significant (at least double digit) percentages of the student population that are first generation college students. Elite universities often have the greatest degree of racial diversity.

<comment><USER5> You shouldn't be condemned for life for not being elite material when you were 18.

Disclaimer - I was not elite material when I was 18 and feel like I'm condemned for life when I read these posts.

<comment><USER6> What makes you feel "condemned for life"?

<comment><USER5> I know I'll never be able to match the accomplishments of people that got into Duke the year I didn't, for example.

<comment><USER7> Screw that. If you work hard people take notice, that's it. You can go to a CC, grind hard through your classes, transfer into a school with a better network, continue to grind hard, and land the job because anyone who sees your CV will see that you are a fighter who gives a shit.

Some of the richest kids in my high school paid full tuition to ivy league schools, didn't come to play school, and ended up with a scrappy job anyone could have gotten from just about any school. Work hard.

<comment><USER5> I think there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an elite program (SAT score, etc) that I simply don't have. That doesn't help matters at all.

<comment><USER6> > there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an > elite program

Yeah, the ability to be accepted into an elite program. This often has little bearing in real life (honestly, how much do you really care about the ability to get a good SAT score anymore?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school.

If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.

<comment><USER9> Stanford has explicitly said they do not accept donations in return for admission, for what that's worth.

Source: [https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/14/admission-case- info/](https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/14/admission-case-info/)

"A donation does not purchase a place at Stanford, and we work very hard to ensure that prospective donors understand this. Stanford does not accept gifts if it knows a gift is being made with the intention of influencing the admission process."

<comment><USER10> Likely true, at least in a direct sense, but Stanford does give a nearly three-fold preference to legacy applicants. Alumni are more likely to donate to Stanford than non-alumni.

[https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it- takes](https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it-takes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly, I really don't understand the motivations for some of these parents. Take Lori Loughlin. $500,000? For USC? For two daughters, one of whom clearly isn't that interested, isn't particularly academic and isn't particularly athletic? Like... why?

I can understand if someone bribes their kid into, say, Harvard or Yale Law School. There's a career where going to a good school matters. But this? It just makes no sense to me.

Felicity Huffman may end up being sentenced to 10 months in jail (and, let's face it, might serve only 5) but, still, that's a big deal for someone who probably never expected to go to jail. It's also on the lighter end because of her guilty plea and cooperation with the prosecution. What are these parents who have plead not guilty going to get when they're found guilty?

Add to this the children have to live with the stigma of these actions. I don't have a huge amount of sympathy here because at least some of them were complicit. Posing for photos faking crew, that sort of thing. But still... why would you want to risk your children having to live with that... to go to USC?

<comment><USER12> USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast ( _especially_ in Southern California). It's obviously not on the same academic level as UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford/Caltech, but it's still very much an exclusive brand. You don't get it because you don't live here and aren't surrounded by wealthy 16-year olds that yearn to go to USC (often times over UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford).

(Disclaimer: I'm a UCLA alum.)

<comment><USER13> I don't know how common it is, but once a person I knew had referred to USC as University of Spoiled Children.

<comment><USER6> It's a pretty common saying among Californians, AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They're not that elite if they're gonna get ensnared in this one. If you're one of the elite you just donate a building, which is a completely legal way to get your kids into a school of your choice.

<comment><USER15> At least donating a building gives value to the other attending students that far outweighs the cost of their child going

<comment> munk-a I reject this - if we want admission in the US to be entirely wealth based and Oligarchic we should just buy that concept whole-hog. Many of us (I hope?) believe that scholarships that allow smart people coming from bad backgrounds to succeed are worth their cost[1] so clearly the ability to make use of your education is part of our general societal motivation to give someone one.

[1] There are lots of scholarships, grants and other things out there, many go to people who don't need them and there are issues with the system both on that end and with regards to the cost for an education - please ignore those and just focus on the concept of financial aide to an intelligent driven student who genuinely needs it to pay fair value to get an education in terms of reimbursing all expenses given to give this student an education and nothing else.

<comment><USER16> In the US the public universities are the only schools that can't be bought into at any cost.

<comment><USER17> Huh? UCLA is a public university. Or am I missing the joke?

<comment><USER17> You did miss something. The first guilty plea was from a couple who paid to get their eldest daughter into UCLA and their next daughter into USC.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/first- par...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/first-parents- plead-guilty-in-college-admissions-scandal)

<comment><USER18> Noted, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The actual problem here is not the bribery. The problem is that those bribes are being captured by random 3rd parties, rather than by the school itself. The correct way to implement college admissions is this: Charge a sliding scale fee based on application quality, and then use the excess revenue generated to subsidize poor kids tuition. Your kid has a 2.5 GPA and wants to go to Harvard? Great, that'll be a million dollars a year. You'll be funding the tuition of 20-30 kids of lesser means and everybody wins.

<comment><USER20> I'd urge you to think more about this. You can imagine the same thing for murder trials: 10 million per victim or you go to jail. You can use the money to make the world better!

I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law and the guilty will be punished.

I don't think these institutional narratives are superfluous. While it's naive to expect the institutions to live up to the narratives, the narratives end up serving as ideals. And I don't think the institutions can exist without those ideals.

<comment><USER19> > I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For > universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc > do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the > law and the guilty will be punished.

Do they have that narrative though? We already have affirmative action, which is the explicit inclusion of race/gender/class in admissions criteria. We are already a long ways from pure meritocracy.

> I don't think these institutional narratives are superfluous. While it's > naive to expect the institutions to live up to the narratives, the > narratives end up serving as ideals. And I don't think the institutions can > exist without those ideals.

Two things:

1\. I think you're overindexing on the importance of these narratives a bit, but you're right, they're important.

2\. More importantly, this policy wouldn't destroy those narratives. You can make the scale very steep such that you have to pay quite a bit to get your average student in, and the steepness of that curve will be determined by the eliteness of the institution. You have the same meritocratic rules, they're just tempered by money.

<comment><USER20> > Do they have that narrative though? We already have affirmative action, > which is the explicit inclusion of race/gender/class in admissions criteria. > We are already a long ways from pure meritocracy.

I think affirmative action is a bad idea for exactly this reason. It has eroded the narrative. It's trendy for left-wing types to argue things like "Harvard isn't a meritocracy" or to sneer at the idea of a meritocracy altogether (don't get me started on the right-wing types).

> More importantly, this policy wouldn't destroy those narratives. You can > make the scale very steep such that you have to pay quite a bit to get your > average student in, and the steepness of that curve will be determined by > the eliteness of the institution. You have the same meritocratic rules, > they're just tempered by money.

I think doing this in the open would be a disaster. What won't destroy the narratives is implementing your idea in the background. This has already happened to some degree. Most students at Harvard don't pay very much. Their education _is_ subsidized by rich families one way or another.

But I don't think that's a good thing. Somewhere along the line our institutional narratives have become cliched in people's minds. Maybe this will lead us to a wonderful new world where we can be perfectly rational and implement ideas like yours. But I doubt it. I think if we lose the institutional narratives we're going to lose the institutions. Maybe the new institutions will be better, who knows? (I'm not optimistic).

<comment><USER21> > I think doing this in the open would be a disaster.

Thought experiment: What would happen if it were public knowledge how much each student was paying to attend school? If you were far down the sliding scale and you were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to get in, and that was public knowledge, would it hurt the school's reputation as much? Then it would be clear _why_ this particular person got in, and their intelligence (or lack thereof) wouldn't weigh against people who earned their place by merit, which you could tell by seeing that their tuition cost is low or zero.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> munk-a While we're all angry at this bribery program, can we please also be angry at legacy admissions? Far more kids skate in on legacy than bribes and the school doesn't even get a nice bit of cash for those sorts of admissions.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's really fantastic news.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this is a really good opportunity to see just how white-collar fraud falls in line with rational choice theory ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_\(criminology\))).

In the quoted article, Felicity Huffman pleaded guilty to pay a college counselor $15,000 to arrange cheating on an SAT test. Hence, one data point on the market price for cheating, as agreed upon by Ms. Huffman and college counselor, is $15,000. One claim about Ms. Huffman's net worth is that she earns $275,000 per episode of "Desperate Housewives", which airs weekly. This fine is about half a day's work for her, if that. For half a day's worth of work, she can doctor her daughter's SAT scores. This is assuming that the episodes aren't recorded at once and take much less time than one week for filming, freeing up time to invest in other income streams. So cheating in this case is a very rational thing to do, given zero cost for broken morals or ethics.

The only real "hard-power" argument I can think of for children who may inherit great wealth to gain intelligence is to avoid a run-around by the family lawyers after Mom and Dad croak. But even then, that doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence (Donald Trump is smart enough to avoid that fate), and it kind of doesn't make sense for a family lawyer to do that anyways. If the kids are stupid and can't manage their money, just charge more in fees instead of rocking the boat in order to pocket a greater portion of the pie.

Crime does pay, if we don't punish it. That's why people do it. It's especially true in white-collar crime.

</comment><comment><USER24> They should do something on the lines that politicians do in Australia.. property developers slip a property into a trust and slip that trust into the polys superfund as a contribution

</comment><comment><USER25> Affirmative action on one side, cheaters on the other. At least a dozen people cheated on the SAT in my school and had the audacity to brag about it.

Financial aid if you poor, paid for if you rich. Middle class honest kids hurt the most. Had top 1% scores, no ivies or UCLA for me (got UCB at least) and I'm Asian. My little cousin, same scores and rejected from UCSC 10 years later...much worse now than before

<comment><USER26> Two people in my high school told me they cheated on the SAT. They got _perfect_ scores and the high school actually bragged about them during graduation. They also happened to live across the street from each other in a relatively large town.

I've always wondered what they did to cheat, I wonder if they'd be as open about it now since they're both graduating at MIT and Harvard soon.

<comment><USER27> Why haven't you reported them already? They didn't earn that spot and took it from someone that studied their ass off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What is criminal about this? I never heard of someone going to jail for cheating on an SAT test.

And why aren't the admissions boards going to jail for accepting the bribes?

<comment><USER29> Because the proctor was the one who was bribed, not the organization itself.

<comment><USER28> "Charges ranged from cheating on college entrance exams to paying bribe money to university officials, "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You dumb fucks, didn't you know that you could just spend a little more, buy a building, and be assured of your kids getting in forever?

The number of Faheys, Wheelocks, Wheelocks and Fairchilds I went to college with is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER31> Excellent!

</comment><comment><USER32> 2 years in jail for this is absurd. A week would be more than enough.

<comment> munk-a Please familiarize yourself with minimum sentencing guidelines for drug possession. These parents, by preventing other students from being able to get an education they earned, are causing far more harm.

<comment><USER32> Perhaps those sentences are equally or more absurd?

<comment> munk-a I absolutely agree and personally feel that incarceration as vengeance is immoral and incarceration only becomes a moral action when it is a deterrent to future actions. If you were omnipresent and knew that a murderer would never murder again - and that the jailing of that murderer would not prevent any future murders - then I'd consider it to be immoral to jail them.

Unfortunately a lot of America is on the vengeance path when it comes to punishments for crimes. We need a lot more criminal justice reform but, _please_ , let's not start by giving the elites a pass - justice is already inequal enough.

<comment><USER33> So you get one free murder? No, the deterrent had to be there beforehand, so that our hypothetical killer who is certain she only wants to kill one person will be exposed to that deterrence. Even if she is not thereby deterred, the fact that the punishment is applied to her will have a deterrent effect on others contemplating a similar crime. Therefore the punishment has value even if there is no need to prevent the murderer from killing again. (Edit: you did point out that the omniscience allows you to know that there will actually be no deterrent effect but that's asking a lot :)

<comment> munk-a I included omniscience specifically for that reason, I agree that murders must be punished because otherwise people will see fewer downsides to committing murders themselves.

Can I push this to the concept of Botany Bay the far away prison colony - <USER2> murder results in the murderer being shipped off and everyone in society understands how terrible it is there... do you actually need to send people there? Wouldn't the effect on society be the same if you just shipped them somewhere nice and (again lots of omnipotence and omnipresence here) could ensure no one ever learned of your deception?

I'm mostly pushing this out in an effort to clarify what we as a society get out of punishment (in my opinion) we are seeking to reduce these sorts of actions we consider to be bad for society, any punishment that exists solely to inflict pain on someone (even if they're really bad) without any associated benefits to deterrence or a decrease in recidivism ... it's pointless and cruel (again, in my eyes).

And yes, I like philosophy, so this scenario is super removed from the real world.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Private Internet Access VPN has been blocked in Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/09/as-protesters-march-on-private-internet-access-vpn-has-been-blocked-in-hong-kong/ <comment><USER2> As someone who lived in Hong Kong, this is such a big step backwards. Freedom to access information was such a key part of picking HK over China when setting up an APAC office.

</comment><comment><USER3> The headline is slightly deceiving. All "private internet access" isn't blocked, just a single VPN called Private Internet Access VPN.

<comment><USER4> I've emailed the mods.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Updated from "Hong Kong Blocks Private Internet Access".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More reason for people to protest. Now they're deploying the firewall to censor information that people already know? Doesn't make sense... Why are people using a VPN in HK?

<comment><USER7> For the same reasons people use VPNs anywhere, privacy from their FHR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone confirm this? People I know are saying this isn't true and they can access PIA fine from within HK. They say PIA's coverage in China and HK has been spotty from the beginning.</comment>


Serverless Still Runs on Servers - <AUTHOR> https://lightstep.com/blog/serverless-still-runs-servers/ <comment><USER2> I figured most of us knew this by now? Abstracted server infrastructure would be a more appropriate name, imo.

<comment><USER3> At this point it seems like mostly pedants and literalists. I wonder what the overlap is between "serverless still runs on servers" folks and the people that beat the "cloud is just someone else's servers" horse to death for years and years. I totally understand if someone has a hard time with nuance and not taking things literally but that's rare. In my experience it's just fueled by condescension and/or this assumption that people are too stupid to breathe.

<comment><USER4> I've always thought "Serverless still runs on servers" and "The cloud is just someone else's computer" aren't just condescending and pedantic, but also highly dismissive.

Yeah, sure, "serverless" and "cloud" are both buzzwords that reached peak buzz a years ago (serverless being more recent), but they're actually incredibly powerful.

Before cloud services became a thing, if you wanted to run a high capacity service of some sort beyond something a simple shared web host could offer, you had to either run your own data center or pay for colocation services, neither of which were cheap or quick to set up. Scaling up and down to handle peaks during specific times of day simply wasn't a thing. If you were launching something new, you had to take a guess on how much processing power you'd need. If you guessed too low, you potentially lost customers as they got frustrated and left while you worked on scaling up. If you guessed too high, you wasted a lot of money. The ability to quickly scale your infrastructure up and down in minutes or even seconds is HUGE.

The ramifications of serverless are equally large, because now you don't even need to consider your scaling at all, not to mention patching your operating system and other software. All that matters is your code. Throw your static files in S3 and let AWS handle the distribution, rather than having to spin up an EC2 instance and keeping nginx up to date.

Snubbing technology just because you have some pedantic reason to hate the name is just silly and gets in the way of discussion of the merits of the technology.

<comment><USER5> See, I use the "There is no cloud, only another person's computer" comment as a lesson to both my students and less tech-savvy friends - for privacy reasons. It may be an incredibly powerful computer, but the core issue is, it's someone else's. You can't control what they do with it, and you certainly shouldn't trust them to have your best interest in mind. I don't care what buzzword you use. If data is stored remotely, it's not secure because the one storing & hosting it can choose to see it.

Good way to teach kids how to be properly paranoid on the Internet and the Web.

<comment><USER6> It is also someone else's OS, software and hardware and compiler (Thompson,'84) even if you "own" the specific license or a copy . Physical "ownership" is very arbitrary line to draw i if you are paranoid about this kind of thing , Storage does not equate able to see if you control the encryption keys

<comment><USER5> It is, and I wish I was capable of having it otherwise. I merely lack the necessary skills and equipment. There's a much lower skill hurdle to setting up your own server than there is to writing your own OS from binary up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The question really isn't about whether serverless runs on servers or not. It's about whether the workflow still feels like dealing with your own servers or not. In some ways, yes it still feels like that and in other ways, such as scaling up and load balancing, it doesn't as much.

</comment><comment><USER8> Obviously...

<comment><USER9> Are you sure it runs on servers? I thought it runs in the cloud

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> lol!</comment>


Apple's new iPad Pro is not compatible with any external storage devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ipad-pro-not-compatible-with-external-storage-2018-11 <comment><AUTHOR> Two clarifying quotes from Nilay Patel's review[0] on which this shorter article is based:

1\. "Apple says third parties can write apps to talk to external storage, but out of the box, this $1,899 tablet simply won't talk to a flash drive."

2\. "I tried a handful of USB-C hubs with an assortment of USB-A, HDMI, card readers, and Ethernet ports, and everything worked as intended."

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/5/18062612/apple-ipad- pro-r...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/5/18062612/apple-ipad-pro- review-2018-screen-usb-c-pencil-price-features)

<comment><USER2> It's odd not to support them natively when they finally added the Files app in iOS 11 to support a kind of generic file interface. An external drive would fit very easily into that UI.

<comment><USER3> I think that might be true on the surface but, when you actually think about how most people use an iPad, it kinda falls apart. Most applications on the iPad function through the use of some kind of Library system where the app handles its own files and shares them in common pools of apps that use the same filetypes. Throwing external storage into that mix natively would allow for the possibility of situations where multiple libraries exist, one external and one internal, for example, and where libraries could become inaccessible. I think that would complicate things enough for the majority of people who use iPads that it would disrupt the experience. People who really need external storage aren't going to be relying on an iPad until the devices really catch up more with full personal computers.

<comment><USER3> Glad to see the powerful arguments against my statement from those voting me down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why oh why should I drop a cool ~$2000 for Apple to take away some fundamental computing freedoms? How long before the public starts seeing through the "Apple knows best" philosophy of taking away your computing freedom?

Anyone who's owned a general purpose computing device prior to the iPhone should be complaining about these freedoms, or lack thereof:

1\. Full lockdown on app install - only app store blessed apps can run

2\. Purposeful crippling of the browser's W3C compliance to retain control over apps on iDevices (long, long list of web APIs that don't work on iDevices)

3\. Further on #2, devs are forbidden from running their own browser engines on iDevices. Puts to shame the anti-trust suit against Microsoft regarding IE on Windows. Imagine if MSFT policy were to disallow non IE/Edge/Chakra browser engines

4\. All Apple accessories need to go through the Made For Ipod (MFI) certification process, which is why off the shelf storage devices won't work on the iPad. Apple ends up imposing a $7 surcharge on every lightning accessory, because they very fucking well can, to bless _your_ accessory as Apple certified.

5\. Blatant, retroactive policy modifications to stifle competition (Steam was pulled from app store, Android watches aren't allowed the same deep notifications access, ....)

Apple might be the most evil corp. to ever succeed at scale in computing.

<comment><USER3> This is a pretty ignorant take on the whole thing. Most people pay the premium for this specifically because only "blessed" apps and accessories work and they don't have to mess with things. They're paying extra for the interconnectivity and the guarantee that the apps and accessories will work.

You, and others like you, need to realize that you're not the market for this product. If you don't like it, don't buy it. For the majority of people, though, they look at these devices as something simple that they don't have to fuss with to get working. Do you honestly believe that the majority of iPad owners care about sideloading apps or what browser engine is running while they look at Facebook? These are not fundamental computer freedoms (how overly dramatic). These are trade-offs that are important to some and not important to others.

<comment><USER4> > If you don't like it, don't buy it.

No one on HN needs a crash course in market economics, choice, and free will. Un-substantive comments are strongly discouraged.

> Do you honestly believe that the majority of iPad owners care about > sideloading apps or what browser engine is running while they look at > Facebook?

No - but app devs like Facebook, who end up serving the end user, definitely care. At some point, it won't be worth the hassle of submitting to anal-cavity searches by Apple, just to list on the app store. I personally think the time has already arrived, as ZERO new apps [1] get installed. Netflix & co have already started to disallow subscription purchases via the store, the time to bypass it completely is nigh - except for the chronic stymieing of the browser engine on iDevices by Apple to protect it's app store hegemony.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/25/majority-of-u-s- consumers-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/25/majority-of-u-s-consumers- still-download-zero-apps-per-month-says-comscore/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone benchmarked it yet?

Frustration I have with latest iPhones is that they still run on USB2.0 speeds. Sure, USB-C cable supposed to do up to 10Gb/s, yet you are pumping 512GB of data at 20MB/s...</comment>


Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/03/malware-prototype

<comment><USER2> If researchers made a prototype public _now_ , the NSA/FBI etc. have had this capability for years already.</comment>


Ask HN: What do people say the most? - <AUTHOR> Apps are communication tools. They take a specialized subset of a language, and optimize it's creation and consumption. For example, Uber is pretty much the equivalent of saying "I'm right here, and I need to get right there".
Given how popular messaging apps are, I can't help but think that a lot of what people currently communicate with words could be communicated more efficiently through some other UI.
That said, I've been wondering about the most common things people tell each-other in their daily lives. I've not been able to find anything online, so I came here wondering if you knew. <comment><USER2> Interesting angle. It strikes me, however, that the kinds of things people say to each other face to face might differ substantially from the kinds of things they find useful to say over a network. A target that better matches your goal might be "the set of things people say over the telephone". For example, Uber doesn't really replace asking your friend for a ride - it replaces "phoning a taxi".

I'd also like to note that not all apps are about communication (calculators, note-takers), not all communication is synchronous (flyers, newspaper ads), and not all communication is person-to-person (libraries).

All that being said, I think there's a lot of merit to the approach you're taking. I'd like to see a similar approach taken to the design of computer interfaces, particularly programming languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> > All that being said, I think there's a lot of merit to the approach you're > taking. I'd like to see a similar approach taken to the design of computer > interfaces, particularly programming languages.

That's actually what I'm doing. I'm tackling the big picture. It all started with my frustration with the current state of computing, the technology and UI fragmentation. I find the current "application paradigm" very inefficient, and I'm convinced that we can do a lot better.

At first, I approached the issue by trying to build a "database of everything". Then I discovered the semantic web and integrated that to my vision. I then found a lot of problems and limitations to the semantic web, and worked on improving it. I've explored linguistics (especially semantics) and languages like lojban. I've done a lot of research in UX and programming languages. I'm currently working on a new language that will change the way people think and communicate. The language will be mostly computer-assisted, in order to make the limitations of human memory a non-issue. It will be a language like no other (unlike Esperanto or other "natural languages") and will be communicated and consumed through many senses. In most instances, this language will be used like you would use an app (little or no text or vocal input).

To demonstrate and test the flexibility of my solution, I need as many use cases as possible. I started by asking myself what people used technology and computers for, what people used the internet for, what applications are most popular and what applications are used the most. I've now reached the point where I need to understand what people really communicate at any level, either through apps or through face to face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The promo video published by Google mentions people translate 100 billion words everyday with Google Translate.

According to the video[1] the most translated words in the world are

"Thank you", "How are you" and "I love you"

[1] [https://goo.gl/epGctM](https://goo.gl/epGctM)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd say there is a lot of location-based stuff:

"Where are you?"

"How long until you get here?"

"Where should we meet exactly?"

A system that tied into GPS/Google Now/navigation apps/train schedule apps could help giving quick&accurate answers.</comment>


Advantages of Peer Learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hyperlog.club/why-peer-learn/ <comment><USER2> Being that I'm currently taking part in a 6 month peer learning course as an adult I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in continuing learning beyond school.

It tends to be that peoples learning goals are often less academic though and touch on more personal aspects of them selves and the world around them.

Here the organisation I'm participating through: [https://www.enrolyourself.com/](https://www.enrolyourself.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> anyone have a good resource for finding groups interested in studying same stuff as you? meetup.com seems fairly limited on this front in my area (DC)

</comment><comment><USER4> That was a total waste of time. Peer learning has some major flaws which various different systems have been able to overcome. A centralized learning process is always better than decentralized one from my experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> major flaws like?

<comment><USER5> Like the need for someone more advanced in the field than your are. The blind leading the blind doesn't seem to be an effective educational strategy.

<comment><USER6> A blind person will never learn to navigate his environment if he is always lead around by a person who can see, so the blind leading the blind seems like a good education strategy.

<comment><USER5> Playing on words is not a good argument. I bet you can't teach me Elamite right know. And if you learn a bit of it for that purpose, it will still be vastly inferior than a course, book or video made by a specialist of the language, which had time to reflect on his own knowledge.

<comment><USER6> My point is that trying to learn without a teacher serves a purpose, it isn't good to never have a teacher but neither is always having a teacher. Peer learning isn't about cutting out the teacher, it is to let students try to figure out a few things among themselves as a group.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Explorations in Unix - <AUTHOR> http://www.drbunsen.org/explorations-in-unix.html <comment><USER2> I use unix in the same way and for the same purpose as the described in the blog, but I have come to the opinion that once you get into the describe and visualize phase, it's much easier to just drop into R. Reading in the kind of file being worked on here is often as simple as

foo <-read.csv("foo.csv")

Getting summary descriptive statistics, item counts, scatter plots and histograms is often as easy as

summary(foo)

table(foo$col)

plot(foo$xcol, foo$ycol)

hist(foo$col).

I think that is lot simpler than a 4 or 5 command pipeline that can be mistake-prone to edit when you want to change column names or things like that. I still do these kinds of things in the shell sometimes, and I don't know if I can put my finger on when exactly I would drop into R vs write out a pipeline, but there IS a line somewhere...

<comment><USER3> I completely agree - while I love using the command-line for most tasks, R is ideally designed for this... and rightly so, since that's the whole point of the language!

R also supports the use of atomic operations on vectors (it automatically maps the operation over the vector), and other idioms that would be liabilities in other programming languages, but hugely beneficial in this one area.

I still haven't found a language that treats reading (and then processing) a CSV file more easily than R.

Conveniently, R should be really easy to pick up for someone familiar with working with a POSIX shell or Bash. For example, to see all variables defined in the current namespace, just type ls().

R is basically the POSIX mentality applied specifically to data processing, instead of general-purpose work.

<comment><USER4> One exception though. Piping unix command this way allow handling of _very_ large file (stream model), whereas R requires loading the whole content in memory.

<comment><USER5> That depends on the statistical moments you're calculating. For sums and means, yes. For percentiles, standard deviation, and other moments, you'll need to operate on the set as a whole, which either means re-reading the dataset or processing it in memory.

That said, I've got my own univariate statistics generator written in awk that can handle sets with millions of values readily on desktop/laptop hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A quote: "... As if this wasn't enough, he [i.e.Tukey] also _invented_ what is probably the most influential algorithm of all time." (emphasis added)

No, Tukey did not "invent" the FFT. He rediscovered it, as did a number of others over the years since -- who else? -- Gauss first created it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform>

A quote: "This method (and the general idea of an FFT) was popularized by a publication of J. W. Cooley and J. W. Tukey in 1965,[2] but it was later discovered (Heideman & Burrus, 1984) that those two authors had independently re-invented an algorithm known to Carl Friedrich Gauss around 1805 (and subsequently rediscovered several times in limited forms)."

<comment><USER7> It's true the writeup didn't mention Gauss, but the PDF that the author linked _did_ mention that.

But either way wouldn't the importance for the field of computing in this case be more on the _application_ of the algorithm and not who published first? I.e. if no one knows about a computable algorithm used sparingly 150 years earlier then I don't think it's completely unfair to give some credit to one who later rediscovers and popularizes that algorithm.

According to the Wikipedia article the Cooley-Tukey algorithm was an independent re-discovery so it's not as if Tukey had read Gauss and then tried to steal the credit (it wasn't even noted until almost 20 years later that Cooley-Tukey was a rediscovery of a Gaussian algorithm).

It's almost unfair though... I think if we really deeply dove into what mathematicians like Gauss, Euler, Cauchy, etc. came up with that there may be other "CS" algorithms that were innovated hundreds of years before computers were available to really popularize them. Every time I read about Euler and Gauss especially I end up even more impressed.

<comment><USER6> > But either way wouldn't the importance for the field of computing in this > case be more on the application of the algorithm and not who published > first?

Separate issue. My objection was solely to correct the incorrect claim that Tukey invented the FFT. And this is in no way meant to disparage what Tukey did accomplish, only so that the history reads correctly.

> I don't think it's completely unfair to give some credit to one who later > rediscovers and popularizes that algorithm.

Yes, but describing him as the inventor goes too far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I almost skipped because I figured it would be another introductory article to how to use bash and coreutils, but this was actually very good.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hits close to home. I do a lot of data conversion, arrangement and manipulation on the CLI. When some coworker inherits any of those tasks and I explain how to do it, the answer tends to be "Aaaaallright, I'll use Excel".

</comment><comment><USER9> Up for unix and "EDA is the lingua franca of data science". What you can do and discard on the unix CLI takes many times longer on certain GUI based OSes.

</comment><comment><USER10> head -3 data* | cat has the same result as head -3 data*

Pipe sends stdout to stdin of the next process. cat sends stdin back to stdout. Piping to cat is rarely eventful (unless you use a flag like cat -n).

<comment><USER11> Some tools adjust their output based on it going to a terminal or not. Try 'ls' versus 'ls | cat'.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. I often use ps | cat to get the full command line for processes (that's otherwise truncated). All hail Java command lines.

<comment><USER13> Try 'ps auxw' - the w enables wide output.

<comment><USER14> And for really wide commands (like java) you can add another w to get the whole thing: ps auxww

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He writes

        (head -5; tail -5) <data

but that's a bit misleading. These don't work.

        seq 20 | (head -5; tail -5)
        (head -5; tail -5) < <(seq 20)

Both giving just the first five lines.

<comment><USER16> Are you saying his example doesn't work, or that it can't be extended to your two examples? Because when working on a file it works fine -- just not through a pipe (which both your examples are).

        seq 1 20 >file.txt
        (head -5; tail -5) <file.txt

<comment><USER15> I'm complaining his example doesn't work in the more general case and that he should warn of this or give a better more general solution. I'm aware of why it doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> rs and lam look interesting. Are these commands really only available on BSD (i.e. 'proper' Unix derivatives)? Hoping for Linux compilable code.

<comment><USER18> There is a "rs" package in Debian so it must be available on most Linux distributions. Otherwise it should be quite straightforward to port the code since it doesn't do anything complicated.

<comment><USER17> <http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/9.1.0/usr.bin/lam/>

<http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/9.1.0/usr.bin/rs/>

Not finding 'describe' at present (I shall persist). There seem to be few dependencies in these source files...

<comment><USER19> <https://github.com/drbunsen/describe/>

It was a utility written by the author for his analysis work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "describe" is a nice idea. Just knowing the range, the mean, and the second moment can be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd be interested in what Seth's setup/theme/os of choice is .. :)</comment>


Ideal webserver config for cloud based saas - <AUTHOR>

For a line of business cloud based saas app averaging 150 requests per minute, does 2 instances of 3.5GB dual core webrole on azure an overkill?<p>Also 150 rpm sounds like awfully low number to me, and I wanted to know what others running saas apps on cloud average. My userbase is about 1200+ and all are B2B users. Tx <comment><USER2> I don't think there's a good answer to that. It depends on how much compute and bandwidth does every request need :)

As you're using Azure you can easily setup rules to autoscale, so you can just leave it to do the magic for you or you can learn from its behaviour and setup your own desired architecture.

</comment><comment><USER3> 150 rpm is not that many. Assets, html, etc + backend calls - assuming the app won't make "out of the ordinary for a web app" calls (eg: against 1TB database, etc). You should ask about the behaviour of the 1,200 users (do they use it all at different times, all at burst periods, etc). Just throw it behind a load balancer, and I would think you'll be fine. I am used to Linux boxes, so check your RAM if that's enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the 1200 use it at the same time. My webservers are behind the load balancer, but newrelic - the performance monitoring tool has lately started showing app server times taking as long as 1200ms. Rather than add more servers I wanted to hear from others if 2 instances for 1200 users is in the ballpark, or is my application poorly designed.</comment></comment>


Antisocial networking - <AUTHOR> http://daviddahl.blogspot.com/2009/04/antisocial-networking.html <comment><USER2> Here's our take on it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=561403>

</comment><comment><USER3> Too much complaining, too little ideas. Oh, wait...</comment>


How Apple and IBM Marketed the First Personal Computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/clear-the-kitchen-table-how-apple-and-ibm-marketed-the-first-personal-computers/396047/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> I can't help but think this article is practicing a bit of revisionist history. Apple had positioned itself solidly into education, and priced its products too high for the reach of most consumers; ditto with IBM and business. They aren't the two names I think of first when I think "personal computer revolution".

When it came to true "personal computers" (ie, something you would buy to do, well, personal stuff), Commodore, Atari and Tandy / Radio Shack (Sinclair and Acorn in the UK) were the true trailblazers. Arcade conversions got kids interested in using them, parents had word processing and spreadsheets. And unlike the PC and the Apple II, these computers were _cheap_: Tandy's MC-10 was a colour computer for $100, the VIC-20 had more software for $200. The Commodore 64 sold more than anything else.

I have a lot of nostalgic love for the Apple II -- but in the home space it was just one of many, many contenders.

<comment><USER3> In my town, I had choices of the Apple ][+, the TRS-80 Model 1 (with expansion chassis), and the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. The Apple was a few hundred more than the others, but had the 8 card slots and looked good, so that's what we bought. The Tandy just had too many pieces and the casing was too robot- looking. The TI didn't have much software for it.

Later, I looked at the 512K Mac, and at $2400 (even with the military exchange discount), it just wasn't a good value, so I went without a computer for a number of years, until I could buy an Atari 1040ST.</comment></comment>


Update on Tesla Stores and Pricing - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-tesla-stores-and-pricing <comment><USER2> IMO, the bigger issue is the flip-flopping. It shows that not enough thought was put into the initial decision to close stores. How many other, non-visible decisions are being made on a whim?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think I understand the reasoning for closing down most store but I simply don't get the "buy it maybe return it" thing.

I recently was shopping for a new car, Tesla Model S was on my list of potential vehicles. I test drove one and knew within a few minutes it was not the car for me.

If I had bought the car without a quick shakedown I would have certainly returned it but then I'd be stuck without a car for several days or even weeks since my credit/funds would have been tied up.

Why didn't they instead offer the 7 day try out but hold the car on some sort of deposit? This way if I returned it I'd only be out that deposit for the time being and would be free to immediately buy the car I wanted. If I chose to keep the car they would follow up with purchase.

Or for areas that are more dense with available cars to rent. Offer a rental Tesla for a day for some discounted rate to be refunded if you bought a car.

I don't think they thought this through very well.

<comment><USER4> >Why didn't they instead offer the 7 day try out but hold the car on some sort of deposit? This way if I returned it I'd only be out that deposit for the time being and would be free to immediately buy the car I wanted. If I chose to keep the car they would follow up with purchase.

Same car can be used for test drive by a lot of people, while you can only have one buyer of a new car. If they give you a new car and you return it with 200 miles on the clock, is it really new anymore? How many of those returns 'till it's second hand?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One theory I'm seeing floating around is that this whole event was orchestrated to remove sales commissions from the sales staff. Which would reduce margins for sure, but piss off the work force. Work force is still pissed off, but maybe less so, because they aren't getting laid off. Still, this whole even seems very bad for sales morale.

\</comment><comment>

EDIT: "The looks like a duck / quacks like a duck" simple explanation is that leadership expected the retail store leases to be cut out from their expenses. But then those store locations were going to be forced to stay open.

[http://fortune.com/2019/03/08/tesla-close-retail-stores- laws...](http://fortune.com/2019/03/08/tesla-close-retail-stores-lawsuit- retail-landlords/)

In combination with some pretty big loans (Deutsche Bank, China Gigafactory 3, Model Y Deposits), Tesla now has a bit more money than it was expecting, so they can pay their sales staff and such a bit longer than they initially thought.

<comment><USER6> My guess, which isn't based on anything is that Tesla got pushback from potential buyers who didn't like the idea of having to buy outright and then having to return an item for a refund if it wasn't to their liking (that's a pretty big hump).

There is much more peace of mind knowing that there is zero monetary commitment when going for a test drive. That's not to say there aren't other pressures, but that's more psychological than anything else.

<comment><USER5> > There is much more peace of mind knowing that there is zero monetary > commitment when going for a test drive.

Yeah. If I were buying a Tesla (which btw... I don't plan to buy any vehicle for another ~5 years or so...), then I'd be wondering if the return would refund my deposit... or if it'd refund the "delivery charge". Etc. etc.

There is a lot of fine-print there: I have severe doubts that the full price would be refunded. I mean, lets say I test drove the vehicle for 147 miles and then returned it. Who the heck would buy a "new" Tesla with 147 miles on it? So I know the value of the car has dropped significantly. I can't believe that Tesla would accept the car back without taking some cost to recoup the lost value.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>-

On a true test drive, there's no documents to sign. And the test drive is for a very short are (just a couple of miles). Its expected for vehicles to have ~20 to 40 miles on them due to test drives when you get them from a dealership, so the short test drives aren't a big deal at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> Generally, companies evaluate the impact of a potential decision, and then announce the decision publicly. It seems like Tesla likes to announce decisions publicly, and then evaluate the potential impact.

</comment><comment><USER8> On March 8th it was reported they wouldn't be able to exit many of their store leases.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/landlords-to-tesla-youre- still-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/landlords-to-tesla-youre-still-..).

</comment><comment><USER9> What a mess. Wait a week, maybe the price will go up or down another 3%. Who knows!</comment>


Merb gets merged into Rails 3 - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/12/23/merb-gets-merged-into-rails-3

<comment><USER2> I'm a merbist and think this will be good for both the Merb and Rails communities.

That said, I'm a little afraid it will shaft the other Ruby frameworks (Sinatra, Camping). People might make interesting things only compatible with Rails.

When Merb was a pretty big, active minority, it was more compelling to go out of one's way to make interesting libraries (ORMs, gems, etc.) easily compatible with anything ruby.

Rails is gaining modularity, but I fear Ruby overall might lose it. Even after Rails and Merb merge, rails!=ruby.

<comment><USER3> Off topic pet peeve: Can the internet try and avoid using the phrase "that said" from now on? It is really overused and unnecessary. There have been at least three articles linked to on HN in the last week that use it multiple times and it sounds really bad. Delete this if you like.

<comment><USER4> With all due respect, you're doing it wrong. Get a blog FTW.

That said, it's all relative. To be sure, people make mistakes, yadda yadda yadda. But I think we can all agree, everyone is entitled to an opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmmm, HN could use a suggestion engine for related news... there are 4 articles on the homepage about this.

<comment><USER6> They all have good points and perspectives from different individuals involved in the merger.

<comment><USER5> I agree but consolidation of all this information in an easy to follow thread a good thing, hence the few comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hacker News could use a merge too. So we can merge together multiple topics like this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't really understand the point of this.</comment>