Microsoft loves Linux so much, its OneDrive web app runs like a dog on rivals - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/microsoft_onedrive_linux_slow/ <comment><USER2> Per comments from the article earlier today/yesterday, it was because a feature wasn't supported in safari/mac, and didn't have the regression in the fallback methods for caching, so they let it be for non-windows. They've since updated the method, and the next release should have it in place.

Also, not everything is detectable via feature detection, there are bugs specific to browser classes/oses/versions that require useragent parsing/sniffing to target.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title makes no sense... Dogs are pretty damn fast</comment>


ArcaBoard - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcaspace.com/en/arcaboard.htm <comment><USER2> One thing that kept coming to my mind while watching the video: "Why the hell does this guy try so hard to balance himself on that huge thing?" Hoverboards in back to the future are are small like skateboards so that's why they have to stand on it, but this one is more like a magic carpet than a hoverboard, and if you watch Aladdin, this is how they ride a magic carpet: [http://www.animationsensations.com/media/catalog/product/cac...](http://www.animationsensations.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/a/magic_carpet_ride_icon_1.jpg) Instead of half-assing the skateboard metaphor they should just own that magic carpet direction and go all out.

<comment><USER3> I imagine sitting down might choke off air flow to some of the fans. They could widen it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $20,000 for a device (with a $4500 dock) that lets you hover a few inches off the ground for _6 minutes_ at a time.

Oh and it lets you move about a foot per minute if you try really hard to keep it stable.

<comment> xkcd-sucks It's worth that much if you want reverse-engineer it

<comment><USER4> Reverse-engineer 36 fans strapped to a box with batteries?

The only thing that could have been worth reverse engineering is the stabilization system but its clear from the video that it is _not_ stable and its hard for even the "CEO" to balance on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't take that video seriously. It's like a parody of itself...

<comment><USER6> It feels like they put a lot of efforts to make the presentation look like an Apple presentation when their product seems clumsy and not-so-usable... The result is meh. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd say it's more of a levitating mattress than a hoverboard. :) The guy from the videos looks like he's tightrope walking when he's trying to balance himself atop of this thing. Quite obvious that the product isn't ready for prime time and I don't understand how they can sell this yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> That has to be loud as hell.

</comment><comment><USER9> Assuming this is real, are there any other hoverboard prototypes yet or is this the first? A bit of miniaturization of fans and batteries and better active stabilization, and this could start looking like the hoverboard concept from science fiction! Although, I don't think the problem of noise level can be resolved.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow it hurts to read that site. Even highly compensated nerds are going to be hard pressed to shell out $24K for that thing and its charging dock. I could see getting one and then renting it to trade shows where you ride it around and the vendor gets all the foot traffic, but actually using it for anything?

</comment><comment><USER11> ArcaBoard, the hoverboard nobody wants™

<comment><USER12> I feel that this is more of an ad for their company than a real product that brings in money. Even in the video the guy says that ``this will prove that we can engineer the future''.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The board looks restarted but the company's other products look interesting. Thoughts?

<comment><USER14> the fact that the control interface only exist as 3d renders raises a red flag

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> this looks extremely slow and hard to ride

<comment><USER16> It wouldn't be slow if you rode it going down a hill ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is obviously a parody (actually funny one : maybe a little over the top). Is no one picking this up?

<comment><USER4> A parody with a working $25000, Shopify-powered order page?

[http://thumbsnap.com/i/7aninkHz.png?1226](http://thumbsnap.com/i/7aninkHz.png?1226)

Some next-level "parody" work there.

<comment> w-ll Setting up a Shopify store takes little to no effort. Not saying this is a scam, but something something about a fool and his money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm. No steering...

</comment><comment><USER19> This costs more than my car.

<comment><USER20> and my car can drive faster and gives me much more functionality than this... I hope this happens to be improved we need some back to the future hover boards...

<comment><USER19> Those seem to be what everyone wants. Maybe someday.</comment></comment></comment>


A look inside Facebook's source code - <AUTHOR> http://sintheticlabs.com/blog/a-look-inside-facebooks-source-code.html

<comment><USER3> Interesting.

It's also interesting that Facebook developers are using Pastebin for things such as this. I would assume that they'd have an internal wiki, or gist-like app.

It's also noteworthy to see how they set up their accounts: first initial, full lastname—same standard as many other companies. But seeing it laid out can help in the guessing of other names (or common name occurances, as you don't even need a full first name).

While some leaks may not even be effective outside Facebook's internal network (things such as database credentials, network shares… hopefully), having actual code that may be in production does pose a risk. The possiblity to see where, for instance, data isn't fully sanitized, or where information being fetched might not require proper authentication[1] is more worrying. Facebook is known for promoting "move fast and break things". Hopefully they have good QA and SDET teams to catch these things.

[2] One code snippet features the following: > // TODO: add privacy checks!

<comment><USER4> I'm not surprised they don't have a gist/pastebin like app. When I interned at Amazon this summer, they were just developing one, and it was still pretty alpha (persistence was buggy and lost me an entire design review of notes). Facebook is younger, so it seems fair that they don't have one.

<comment><USER5> Facebook has been around for a decade at this point. Youth isn't much of an excuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tangentially related, I'd like an opinion on this:

 _> Okay, so it's not the most secure password. But Facebook's database servers are heavily firewalled. Though if you do manage to break in to Facebook's servers, there's the password._

What is the point on even having a database password? The application itself needs access to the database, so the application needs to know the password.

That means that an attacker who gains access to the application can easily just look at the file where the password is stored and then use that to access the database.

Even if you'd go great lengths at keeping asking for the password at server start and only keeping it in memory - once an attacker is on the application server, the password is in memory and can be snooped.

So the question is: Why even use a password for the web application? In my case, I'll just let the application servers connect to the database without password.

<comment><USER7> A password means you can't access the database server from a mail server or file server. Complex environments have more than just a database server and a few web servers.

<comment><USER6> That's why my pg_hba.conf is configured to only allow app servers passwordless access.

<comment><USER8> Bingo. And in the MSSQL world it's common to also have Active Directory and use that for authentication (each server automatically has a unique "account", and SQL login permission can be granted using that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> fascinating stuff. I'm still amazed at how many username/passwords are freely available via github search:

[https://github.com/search?p=96&q=gmail+password&ref=searchre...](https://github.com/search?p=96&q=gmail+password&ref=searchresults&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93)

even if they have 2-step auth setup, people choose "complete the email address" as a form of authentication which you can most likely get from their github profile.

the moral of the story here is - if you do not want someone to find it - <USER2> not publish it online

<comment><USER10> Im not a hacker/cracker or whatever but I am curious would it be illegal to use one of those usernames and passwords to see if it actually worked for an account?

edit: I know that it is not ethical and I am only slightly tempted to do it but is it actually illegal to use open source code in that way?

<comment><USER11> Depends on the jurisdiction, but generally yes it'd be illegal.

You can compare it to opening someone's home because he left his key in a public place unbeknownst to him.

You generally couldn't make the argument that 'he may have wanted people to have the key, that's why he left it in a public/open source place'. Firstly, one can't assume that, so we must hear it explicitly before it's true. And secondly, if universal open-source access was provided, there wouldn't be a key to find as there wouldn't be a lock in the first place to allow specific access. The whole point of a password or key means you do not want fully open access to all, meaning any password or key in an open-source project is likely unintentional, a mistake, and thus you'd be entering without permission which is illegal in most jurisdictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Part 2; [http://sintheticlabs.com/blog/a-look-inside-facebooks- source...](http://sintheticlabs.com/blog/a-look-inside-facebooks-source-code- part-2.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> I found an interesting post from "karthimx" [1] made on Jun 30, 2010.

It too contains the password "e5p0nd4". This user didn't do any hacking or googling but got this error browsing facebook. He says "Suddenly I got this error message in Facebook" (so apparently inside the production environment, wtf?).

[1] [https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/facebook-error- messa...](https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/facebook-error- message.1855399/)

[2] [http://www.zyngaplayerforums.com/archive/index.php/t-545034-...](http://www.zyngaplayerforums.com/archive/index.php/t-545034-p-3.html) \- Another one from 2010!

</comment><comment><USER14> Somewhat ominous for top HN users:

[http://pastebin.com/6GeZnS9b](http://pastebin.com/6GeZnS9b)

<comment><USER15> This was someone's attempt at a bitcoin public challenge: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6765801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6765801) (Get a wallet's passphrase which was the username of someone in the Hacker News top 100, minus 2 characters).

<comment><USER16> Was amused to click through and see it was my username involved.

Mostly as I gave up ever trying to do anything with Bitcoin because I simply can't get my head around any of the practicalities, lol, so it definitely wasn't anything of mine! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me somewhat of this [https://twitter.com/dumpmon](https://twitter.com/dumpmon) which monitors all pastes for email and password dumps. You can use [https://haveibeenpwned.com/](https://haveibeenpwned.com/) to search if your email has ever been leaked/dumped.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pastebin has TONS of stuff lying around, it's pretty fascinating. I've always wanted to spend some time digging around there, but haven't gotten around to it.

<comment><USER9> is there a public api?

EDIT - there is - i had no clue: [http://pastebin.com/api#1](http://pastebin.com/api#1)</comment></comment>


GDPR complaint claims Google and IAB ad category lists leak intimate data - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/27/google-and-iab-ad-category-lists-show-massive-leakage-of-highly-intimate-data-gdpr-complaint-claims/ <comment><USER2> We should also be able to access our marketing categories without a Google account, since sensitive data is collected and a profile is built even if you don't have a Google account.

<comment><USER3> How sure are they that it's one individual person that they are tracking? If you and others use the same computer, then maybe stuff might get mixed up. If "accessing" marketing categories includes read-access then your situation is worse than before.

What about the legal risk for Google if you opted out of the tracking a month ago but now google thinks you are a different person and is tracking you?

<comment><USER4> There's subtle ways to fingerprint someone, even how they move their mouse:

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78k8pz/how-you- mo...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78k8pz/how-you-move-your- mouse-could-help-others-track-youeven-on-tor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These categories apply to the content, not the cookie (when a cookie is even available which it isnt in many places).

This is not personal, it's the contextual targeting everyone wants. These blog posts never understand adtech.

<comment><USER6> The point is that bid requests may (do) contain both an identifier and data about that person. "Is reading a financial news article" being an attribute of the content, sure, but broadcast such that it can be associated with the person.

<comment><USER5> That's just how context works. If you visit another site then there would be different categories involved and has nothing to do with the user.

There's also no personal identity, it's just a cookie if available, used mostly to frequency cap.

<comment><USER7> Can't adtech companies associate that cookie with the category and build a profile over multiple pages? Then they can correlate the data and identifiers Google provides to any that they collect on their own (e.g. their own pixels served in the ads that actually get shown). If they connect their own pixel identifiers to data that they buy, then they are building up a decent profile.

<comment><USER5> Those profiles would quickly become so broad as to be useless. Context in the moment is the most important thing, which is why even Google shows ads targeted to your actual search query.

Cookies are also not an identity and refreshed very often. Their main use is to cap ad frequency and track conversions over the short-term (hours to days).

Google and Facebook do not provide any personal identifiers. That would be a massive breach of their core 1st party dataset. What little data they did provide is now gone with GDPR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm familiar with RTB (real-time bidding protocol) details, so I can assess this from the technical POV.

Most ironical thing here -- IAB categories applied not to user profiles but to URL's.

So, their goal is to facilitate ads targeting not to user profile, but to page content. This is the use case which is often discussed on HN as ethical and "right" way of showing ads -- you get the bid request with "Nature, travel" IAB categories and you show ad about outdoor gear. You don't need to crunch user data to make this simple decision.

However, I have to admit this complaint has it's own merit. Bid request usually contains not just page URL and IAB categories, but user cookie as well. So, by data-mining bidstream, you can theoretically find people (well, at least their unique cookies) who are looking for a cure for impotence, and this is against GDPR, for sure.

</comment><comment><USER9> Key quotes:

> _Lack of transparency makes it impossible for users to exercise their rights > under GDPR. There is no way to verify, correct or delete marketing > categories that have been assigned to us, even though we are talking about > our personal data._

and

> _Under GDPR, processing special category [medical information; political > affiliation; religious or philosophical views; sexuality; and information > revealing racial or ethnic origin] data generally requires explicit consent > from users — with only very narrow exceptions, such as for protecting the > vital interests of the data subjects_

The last quote is particularly troublesome, as Article 9 GDPR [1] is explicit about this: processing this data is prohibited by default, and none of the exemptions seem to apply even by a stretch of imagination.

Assigning such labels may be the norm from the Ad industry's point of view, but that is simply no longer possible under the GDPR.

[1] [https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I am curious, if you ask for a dump of your data from Google, where do you have to look to find your ad category ? As far I know, this is not directly accessible from your profile or privacy settings.

Looking at the data selection to export, I am not even sure this is included somewhere.

<comment><USER11> Maybe Google doesn't store it, and just uses these categories in the process of auctioning advertisements, sending them as context?

The problem with that being, of course, that any company participating in the bidding process can decide to store that information and build a profile that does have this information.

<comment><USER12> I think you mean "participating"

<comment><USER11> tnx, updated

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Advertising and marketing is a trillion dollar industry that employs millions of people across the globe and I want nothing to do with it.

Advertising atheism and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if in the future people will be prosecuted for it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Google is the elephant, but it is very rare to see compliant services/sites. The interesting question is when/if EU is going to flex its GDPR muscles.

<comment><USER15> Never. This is used as another tool to selectively target companies the EU doesn't like while maintaining appearances.

<comment><USER16> Germany (well, German states actually) alone has handed out fines to 41 companies, and has hundreds of proceedings in flight (i.e. one German state is currently investigating 50 local companies), the vast majority against locals. The average cases just don't make headlines, especially not in english- speaking media, because who cares?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Here's a few more highly sensitive labels that are being attached to web users' identities and shared with potentially thousands of bidding ad companies — in this case the labels are ones which the IAB uses: Special needs kids, endocrine and metabolic diseases, birth control, infertility, diabetes, Islam, Judaism, disabled sports, bankruptcy._

I'm jealous that at least Europeans can complain legally.

In the U.S., we believe that the free market knows best and that's freedom and such. Meanwhile, we're being profiled by these vile companies (FB, Google) and our data resold. Aside from individual rights being violated (hint, individual rights aren't just rights against government intervention), there's a huge societal threat here: what happens when this data is used to pit us against one another? Are we still free, then?

In the U.S. it will take a cataclysmic event to reach a GDPR-like desire by the population. The sad reality is that the EU has its citizens' interests generally in mind (consumer protections, GDPR), while in the U.S. Big Brother has the interests of large corporations at heart (namely by allowing them to run roughshod over our rights).

</comment><comment><USER18> Setting aside penalties for a moment, what is the minimum set of changes to programmatic advertising practices that would bring it into compliance with GDPR? Would removing the targeting categories that relate to intimate data be sufficient? Or is something deeper, more structural in the crosshairs?

<comment><USER19> I by no means and expert on the subject, but I believe that the "simplest" change would be to target based on content, rather than the individual user.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but that's also a torpedo to the way programmatic ads are currently bought and sold. (FWIW I am in favor of such a change, but there are a lot of very large tech companies selling data management platforms whose core value prop is being able to stitch together audiences from this sort of data and precisely target them everywhere their browser cookie or device ID goes.)

<comment><USER20> Agree. GDPR and programmatic ads are totally incompatible.

I believe this is intentional on part of the EU.

<comment><USER15> Basically anything that hurts American tech companies is intentional on the part of the EU. That's why they're keeping both eyes shut on the plethora of violations many European companies are doing.

<comment><USER19> You have to report the violating companies. There are no government organizations actively looking for violations.

The American companies are simply bigger target and have the attention of more people, so their reported more quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not just Google though, is it?

<comment><USER22> And your point is what exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think Google and FB have met their match, EU! Not only penalties but crippling changes to their existing, everything goes, business model. Penalties they can afford...

</comment><comment><USER24> It just gets creepier and creepier and to think there are hundreds of thousands of people involved in this sordid endeavour who think nothing of and stalking, profiling and dehumanizing others for personal gain.

More evidence there is zero moral compass in SV and given enough money people are willing to do whatever away from public view and posture and pretend to care about niceties like ethics in public. And these are educated folks who are not starving and desperate.

Discussions should move from a default human base ethical position to any discussion about ethics is posturing and empty, its only by actions that any sense of ethics can be gleaned.

But people who behave unethically cannot then expect an ethical society or ethical behavior from others. These others too have a right to exchange their values for money and attempt to normalize, redefine or hand wave away their actions.</comment>


30 lessons learned in computing over the last ten years - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/10/30-lessons-learned-in-computing-over.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for turning me on to an interesting blogger.

EDIT: Doh! I see you're promoting yourself. Well done!</comment>


Would you use our Facebook bot? - <AUTHOR> http://www.brucely.co/hackernews2 <comment></comment>


Announcing The Next Hacker News Kansai Meetup (#4)  - <AUTHOR> http://hnkansai.doorkeeper.jp/events/2094

<comment><AUTHOR> This time the event will be more on the Kobe side (not far from Ashiya for those familiar with the area) but still very easily accessible from Osaka or Kyoto.

By the way, you can find more info about HN Kansai events on the official website : <http://hnkansai.org/> as well as videos from the previous presentations, in case you could not join last time: [http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbxKJC9zZJ9C7YDYuZ3m59Q/vide...](http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbxKJC9zZJ9C7YDYuZ3m59Q/videos?flow=grid&view=0)

<comment><USER2> thanks great. Any info if/when there is also a meetup in December/January? Would love to finally drop by. Yet, so far, I'm always traveling (first Kyushu, now Germany on the 30th ... :S )

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have there been meetups elsewhere? I know the tech startup scene in Calgary isn't so hot, but I've seen the city name-dropped quite a few times on here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I compiled a map of the locations I could find a little while ago. Maybe this is helpful for you: <http://goo.gl/maps/sxJ8d></comment></comment>


How to Stop Doing Things, According to Marcus Aurelius - <AUTHOR> https://forge.medium.com/the-stoic-way-to-find-more-time-in-your-day-91b5439019d7 <comment><USER2> _aquila muscas non capit_</comment>


review my site/concept - <AUTHOR> http://goodwillbank.markan.net

<comment><USER2> How does this differ from <http://www.timebanks.org/> ?

Also, at the risk of sounding rude, this is highly unlikely to work. If it makes you feel better, I spent the last two years working on a semi-similar barter system product. Perhaps my frustration and my product's lack of traction is tinging my response...

<comment><AUTHOR> My impression is that time banks are local. Is there some sort of central website you can use for time banking? Besides that, Goodwillbank is set up for exchanging time in ratios other than 1:1.

What went wrong with your barter system? Is it online?

<comment><USER2> <http://dibspace.com>. It is a for a little while longer.

What went wrong with it:

1\. Lackluster, non-technical co-founder.

2\. Value prop not lined up with our market's needs (cf #1)

3\. Poor outreach to our market (cf #1)

4\. Not enough hours in the day to build and maintain the product while trying to correct 1-3.

And so forth.

Best of luck with your effort, still. If you're still involved with MathZoom, try pitching it to the people who run it to see if they might be able to find a way to use it. That might be one of your best bets for uptake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting enough concept, but awful interface. Even though I'm sure this is just proof of concept, the form and function should be better integrated from the start.</comment>


Airbnb Swings to a Loss as Costs Climb Ahead of IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-swings-to-a-loss-as-costs-climb-ahead-of-ipo-11581443123 <comment><USER2> Seems like the market economics is finally catching up with the silicon valley formula. Good for the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER3> Airbnb is pretty shady. Basically hosts can lie and Airbnb won't really help you out. Plus you have to give them a picture. I don't think I will be using them again.

<comment><USER4> Ditto. I cancelled a reservation because the "house rules" (which you can only see after reserving) were super shady and basically stopped short of admitting to being an illegal rental. I cancelled the reservation weeks before the stay, but because it was after the initial 48 hours of booking, I got screwed out of half the cost. Their support didn't give a damn either, despite me having used the site many times over the past half decade with no problems. They lost their way and I hope they crash and burn.

<comment><USER5> House rules, check in, check out, and cancellation policy are all available upfront on the listing.

Even if what you said is true, and it isn't, you still had time to review and cancel inside the cancellation window. The fact that you chose not to is your own fault.

<comment><USER4> Maybe the section was called something else, but the publicly available info on the listing certainly didn't ask me to lie to neighbors, authorities, etc. Whatever section it was could only be seen after booking. It's true I should have inspected those details more closely after the initial booking, but it was something that AirBnB shouldn't have been facilitating in the first place. Shortly after I complained, the listing was deleted and recreated, and later deleted again (whether on the host's part or AirBnBs, I do not know)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We already see Airbnb using dark, anxiety-inducing UX patterns (e.g. 5 other people are looking...).

With them needing more revenue, this tactic will likely escalate.

<comment><USER7> > _e.g. 5 other people are looking..._

And "Only $199 a night!" (Plus 100% in fees you see at check out).

AirBnB had a great opportunity to be a small platform to provide people a way to rent their empty homes for a bit of extra cash every once in a while.

Instead, the VCs sniff it out and it turned into a multi-billion dollar platform for real estate speculators, harming neighbourhoods and circumventing laws, because "disruption".

Does anyone consider AirBnB a "good brand" anymore?

<comment><USER8> Are you two using a different Airbnb than I am? Fees are included in the search when you have dates, and I've never seen the "other people are looking" ever. Are you sure you're not thinking of Booking?

<comment><USER6> The domain name says airbnb.com and there's an Airbnb logo.

<comment><USER8> Can you share a screenshot of Airbnb saying "there are x other people looking"?

<comment><USER6> Eh just look it up on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://archive.md/6llX5](https://archive.md/6llX5)

<comment> 2-to-15 Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is doom porn against air bnb. It's a massively profitable website with very low capital requirements.

<comment><USER5> Those facts also make it a risky bet because it is easier for competitors to enter the market. Airbnb is only massively profitable because they have a dominant position but what will happen if that position starts to slip and they have to compete for listings? The surcharge is inevitably going to fall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my part of the world the same properties are available through Airbnb and booking.com. But booking also lists hotels so guess which one I use to book?</comment>


Toyota RAV4 Prime Is a 302-HP Plug-In Hybrid That Changes the Crossover Game - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/36199/the-2021-toyota-rav4-prime-is-a-302-hp-plug-in-hybrid-that-changes-the-crossover-game <comment><USER2> > a plug-in hybrid compact CUV that offers 40 mpg and can—somehow—outrun a > Subaru WRX in the quarter mile.

Tesla shown that 0-60 mph and 1/4-mile time for cars with electric motors(EV, Battery EV or Hybrid EV or FCV/FCEV) are just a configuration item arbitrarily set by designer so no surprises there. Hybrids being goofy is Toyota being an ass as always, not technology.</comment>


Show HN: Selffify – Take funny selfies expressing suggested emotions - <AUTHOR> http://selffify.com <comment><AUTHOR> It's a simple and funny app to take 9 selfies, each one expressing a random suggested emotion and in the end the app will combine all selfies in a single photo to download or share it in the social networks.</comment>


Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M - <AUTHOR> https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/alibaba-acquires-berlin-based-data-artisans-for-103m-report-116452/ <comment><USER2> Great product. It should have happened last week, then we truly could have said that all Enterprise Apache Open Software products died of the AWS plague in 2018: Hadoop is gone with Cloudera/Hortonworks merging, Kafka with Confluent's new license covering their ecosystem of tooling. Databricks now have their own Spark runtime, which will get more TLC than Apache Spark. On top of Apache, Mongo, Neo4J, Redis Labs abandoning open-source. Wow, just wow.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, but that is not correct.

We clearly say in all announcements that this is about doubling down on open source. In contrast to all current the efforts everywhere that restrict open use, we plan to do even more work openly.

This is best thing that could have happened to any open source project. And to any founder whose heart beats for technology and open source...

<comment><USER2> Aha, i see why you downvoted me. You were actually serious. I literally thought this was a generic tongue-in-cheek ironic comment made for the purpose of comedy. That's why it made me smile. That it's not ironic is even funnier.

<comment><USER4> You can't downvote people who respond to you on HN, at least at his karma level. In fact, he couldn't have downvoted you because he has too little karma.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> What is it about European Enterprise Data software companies that they never make it past this stage without either being bought up or moving to the States?

MySQL, JBoss, Elastic. The list is much longer.

<comment><USER5> EU capital markets are underdeveloped compared to those in the US. European banks are too small, and mostly national. More importantly, the marketplaces are too small and too national. European stock exchanges are a joke compared to NASDAQ and NYSE.

There's also the small detail of pension funds generally being forbidden from investing in stocks. That's the money that's fuelling SV, if my impression is correct. This policy comes from a general risk-aversion that's also evident in all other areas.

<comment><USER6> None of this seems correct.

Europe has more than a few multi-national, global banks.

Also, my own pension is invested in the stock market. That's the norm for employer-provided pensions.

<comment><USER7> This article from The Economist touches on this topic.

"Banks cannot use deposits in one country to lend in another, because national regulators do not want to be on the hook for loans to improvident foreigners. An eu-wide deposit-guarantee scheme would allay that fear, but has yet to be agreed."

[https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/05/the-euro- enter...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/05/the-euro-enters-its- third-decade-in-need-of-reform)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what it would take to create the set of conditions for another "Silicon Valley / SF Bay Area" to appear in Europe. It seems like inevitably, any tech companies that are successful always end up getting bought out and leave to the U.S. instead of staying.

What are the primary issues? Lack of VC funding, culture, government policy? On the surface, it doesn't seem like there's anything particularly lacking, at least from my superficial understanding as an American viewing in from the outside.

<comment><USER9> It's attitude and sheer luck. People in the US seem to take more risk, this leads to huge rewards (start-ups) but also leads to an insane amount of inequality in wealth. I have never seen more in-your-face wealth inequality than in America (and yes, I've been to China and Asia in general quite often). Then a second component is the sheer amount of people trying their luck. Imagine that winning in a startup is like tossing a coin with a p=1e-7 probability of landing on "win". The Netherlands has 2.000.000 people aged 20-30 and the US has 40.000.000 people aged 20-30. Imagine that all these people start a startup we have a probability of P(X>0) with n=2.000.000, p=1e-7 is given by 0.18 and the probability for P(X>0) with n=40.000.000, p=1e-7 is 0.98. The point I'm trying to make is that a lot or more people in the US try to start something, this leads to many more failures, but also to some singular huge successes.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't the European Union have around 500 million people though in it's population? America is only like 325 million people I think.

<comment><USER10> Those 500 million are on average quite a bit poorer than the average American (regarding disposable income and therefore the willingness to risk a long period of 0 income to start a business). Especially in the Eastern part. Mississippi (!) has higher GDP per capita than most EU countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been following data Artisans for a while and love their tech! It seemed that being not from silicon valley made it more difficult for them to gain traction.

One part of the acquisition is the integration of Alibaba's in-house modifications called Blink. It will be interesting to see what is behind that. To me it looks like this could be a very health collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why did they make this acquisition? It looks like data Artisans provides tools for managing Apache Fink deployments. Is it more than that?

<comment><USER2> It's an aqui-hire, i guess. Not great for Data Artisans customers. Alibaba are flexing their muscles. Google have their own data platform. We want to show we have our own too - they see it as competitive advantage. Alibaba are not an enterprise software company, like Data Artisans were.

<comment><USER13> Doesn't Alibaba offer services similar to AWS?

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

Unless I misunderstand what is meant by _enterprise software_? I'm just a tradesman, mostly, so that's quite possible.

<comment><USER2> An enterprise vendor would have been oracle or red hat who kept flink available and for sale on a clouds and on-premise. I can only buy assume flink will become an alibaba only managed service. Why else would they buy it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Software Engineering Radio has recently (Nov.2018) released an 1 hour long interview with Stephan Ewen, CTO of data Artisans: [http://www.se- radio.net/2018/11/se-radio-episode-346-stephan...](http://www.se- radio.net/2018/11/se-radio-episode-346-stephan-ewen-on-streaming- architecture/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Europeans will become a cheap labor in the next 50 years for Chinese and American conglomerates.

<comment><USER16> They already are for American, and Chinese entering the market might actually introduce some fresh air to the stuffy atmosphere created by being at the absolute bottom of the American corporate outsourcing chain. Except in Germany and France - there they are cheap labour for domestic conglomerates.</comment></comment>


Microsoft Bans Slack After Slack's IPO Success - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/futuresin/microsoft-teams-has-lost-to-slack-a02dd93e66a3 <comment><USER2> This is a bit of a surprise, as the new Microsoft seemed to move past prettiness, and embrace customer centricity.

Curious how Microsoft Teams can rip-off Slack's features without access to, ahem, Slack. And I don't just head the devs on Teams, but real users who could provide valuable inputs to improve Teams</comment>


Business School, Disrupted - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/business-school-disrupted.html <comment><USER2> Harvard Business School student here. I find this article fascinating, specifically because it highlights the challenge of transferring the case based method to the virtual world. Unlike regular lectures where you can sit and absorb, the case based method requires you to actively participate and defend your argument in front of 90 peers. You have to prepare, think on your feet and be ready to challenge and build upon what others have said. Each one brings his own experience to the table, and you find yourself learning a lot more than in regular lectures.

For example, in an average HBS finance class you will get input from former PE guys on how to actually valuate a company, the potential pitfalls and what is important to remember. In a global economy class (BGIE) you can hear from bankers who worked in Europe on how they faced the global economic crisis.

This creates high barriers to replicate the HBS model online. I'm not sure what the UX will be for replicating this discussion setting, and invoking individuals to share from their experience. How do you validate the quality of the comments? how do you highlight the takeaways in a situation where there is no one right answer? These are all though issues to solve, and I'm glad HBS is actively tackling it. I'm looking forward to seeing if they succeed.

<comment><USER3> I'll go ahead and say what you tiptoed around. You cannot recreate the experience of a top-tier MBA program online. You cannot drink online. You cannot travel the world online. You cannot play rugby online. There are hundreds of things that make B school what it is that you just cannot do online.

<comment><USER4> Funny post validating that ⅔ * HBS = BS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the most important point of the article is that an unbundling of professors from universities might happen.

Some online education platform could very well buy out some great professors or better yet...identify the newcomers and get them on board.

Research and teaching is still somewhat tightly coupled so I'm curious to see when/if some of the online course providers will opt to sponsor or create their own open access type journals.

For business and IT, I think the market for continued learning is currently more attractive than the typical university market. I'd like to rent a Porter for my company to update them on interesting topics 3x a year.

<comment><USER6> Sort of like Netflix getting into original content a la Kevin Spacey and House of Cards. Brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The ultimate mission of a great university is to impart high quality education to as many students as it can. If the reason HBS is not offering online courses is to keep profits up, then there is some serious rethinking the leadership needs to do - they've got the mission mixed up. If the new model means reduced profits initially, figure out a model to still make money, because as long as you're creating real value, there is always a way to monetize it.

Even if the case based methodology cannot be brought online, just recording the lectures and putting it up will benefit millions online. This won't really take away from the "value" of a HBS stamp because it is not certified and because you don't have access to the network and the classroom experience that students who attend the traditional program have.

This way you are accomplishing your mission of making the best education accessible to anyone in the world, which is what defines a truly great university. In my book, Stanford and MIT are the real rockstars because of the approach they've taken in this area.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting this debate is trying to answer some of the questions posed in this article, also on the front page right now:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826976)

If the value of universities for most people is vocational training, that will be far more efficiently accomplished through online courses.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to analyze pagespeed? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Especially in terms of SEO and its effect on rankings.</comment>


Show HN: TypeScript to Google Closure - <AUTHOR> http://bolinfest.com/typescript/

<comment><AUTHOR> More on the background behind this project: [http://blog.bolinfest.com/2013/01/generating-google- closure-...](http://blog.bolinfest.com/2013/01/generating-google-closure- javascript.html)</comment>


Sleazy countries are best at breaking New York City's parking rules  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/7281145

<comment><USER2> The NBER working paper is from 2006, but it was published as a journal article in 2007:

      @article{Fisman2007,
        author = {Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel},
        title = {Corruption, Norms and Legal Enforcement:
            Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets},
        journal = {Journal of Political Economy},
        volume = 115,
        number = 6,
        year = 2007,
        pages = {1020--48},
      }</comment>


Bravatar - <AUTHOR> http://www.bravatar.me <comment><USER2> My inner-grunge-teenager-anarchist dislikes people basing their identity on their possesions.

Actually, my currently-thirty-year-old-married-with-kids-and-a-mortgage dislikes, too.

Beautiful site, though.</comment>


Investors Are in Denial About China - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-28/investors-are-in-denial-about-china <comment><USER3> I think this is a reasonable article about China.

When people think about China they tent to assume that China is somewhat similar to a western country going thru the afterwards of some sort of overheated boom. Say the US from 2002 to 2007 and the big recession of 2008-2010.

But China is not mature and developed like the west.

Sure the east coast has nice modern cities which look like the cities of any Western country. But large parts of the country are still poor, rural and remote. When construction goes on here, a modern road is built where there was nothing before cutting the transport time between two cities from 5-10 hours to 1 hour. Houses are built for people to work in the city doing high- productive factory jobs where they before were doing small-time farming in the country side.

This is a massive lift in real economic activity which can finance a lot of debt.

Completely incomparable to the expansion of credit to low-income families to finance housing that gave the boom in the US and other western countries from 2002 to 2007.

Secondly there is a now huge upper middle class who are travelling the world, sending their kids to Australia or US for study and still buying Apple products. They are not going away. And ultimately they will change China into something more driven-by-internal-demand, civic, modern ... even democratic.

<comment><USER4> I think the tinder that fuels China "bears" is the pretty obvious capital flight from China to basically any hard asset. In the backwater city where I live, Chinese investment funds are buying mid rise, 80% vacant mid-rise office towers with cash in small cities.

We've seen this movie before... Back in the 80s it was called "Japan". Everyone was making money, Japanese investors were spending billions on real estate, brands, etc. The ending didn't go so well.

<comment><USER5> When the 80s ended I was 2. What happened when that ended with Japan?

I'm genuinely not being sarcastic, I wouldn't have the faintest idea where to start looking for an answer to that question otherwise.

<comment><USER6> This is a good start:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_\(Japan\))

It's also interesting to review old films and media from the late eighties (Gung Ho, and Die Hard). It's hard to comprehend if you didn't live through it, but there was a massive level of anxiety in the US that Japanese business culture and management prowess was going to be impossible for the US to overcome, and that th US was in decline.

The Asset bubble in Japan was so insane that at one point the nominal value of the Imperial Palace was equal to the value of all property in the state of California. Aother good Wikipedia article to read is this one:

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

<comment><USER7> I think we can say that the "lost decade" has extended itself to a "lost 25 years"

<comment><USER8> If the "lost" decade refers to the sluggish growth of Japan starting beginning of the century, let's not forget that Japanese population growth has been negative for a while. The per capita economic performance of the country is much less lost in that regard.

<comment><USER7> fwiw it started in the 90's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/the-fall-of- china...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/the-fall-of-chinas-hedge- fund-king.html)

Another illustrative story of the forces at work in a semi-translucent economy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Author is an associate professor at Peking University HSBC Business school. [1]

[1] [http://english.phbs.pku.edu.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a...](http://english.phbs.pku.edu.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=627&id=1)

</comment><comment><USER11> This has been the consensus view for at least a few years now. Consequently, there has been a large fall in prices for companies benefiting from China, from miners to European tailors. I don't know if economists are in denial, but if anything asset markets still reflect a deep worry about China.

I would rather worry about the flipside scenario, that China is in better shape than most Western analysts fear.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like a good time for Western governments to invest in infrastructure then. Every cloud...

</comment><comment><USER13> There's obvious buildup in China with bubble-like properties. But on the other hand, continuing the policy of relaxing Hukou might offset that.

</comment><comment><USER14> The article talks about investors needing to know that

1.) China's construction boom is over

2.) Need to understand China better

3.) Take off the rose-tinted glass

I would add a few more here:

4.) With all the capital controls currently in place, once you invest, you might not get your money out, ever.

5.) With president Xi becoming more dictator-like, and encouraging anti- foreign behaviors, once you get in to China, you might easily get in trouble. Jailed without trial. Or disappeared.

6.) With the great firewall becoming more restrictive, and VPN working less and less, you might not be able to hit any foreign websites from China. No communications with your family or loved ones. No search for foreign customers.

7.) With the impending yuan devaluation (20%-50%), it might not be worth it with a low growth environment in China.

<comment><USER15> Points 4-6 (financial freedom, rule of law and freedom of communication) are all long-standing problems in China, and personally I believe that, if not fixed, they will prevent China from becoming, in the long run, a developed economy. However I don't have evidence that the situation is now getting worse in relation to these specific 3 points. I would be interested in reading reliable sources related to the above.

<comment><USER16> 5: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/is- china-h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/is-china- heading-in-the-wrong-direction-for-once-the-west-calls-beijing- out/2016/03/22/c4cad76e-eacb-11e5-a9ce-681055c7a05f_story.html?tid=a_inl)

5: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pursuing-c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pursuing- critics-china-reaches-across-borders-and-nobody-is-stopping- it/2016/01/26/cd4959dc-6793-473f-8b74-6cbac3f46422_story.html)

6: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-seeks-more-legal-muscle- to...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-seeks-more-legal-muscle-to-block- foreign-websites-1459230128)

<comment><USER15> Thanks. I'd like to add this one, which came out with today's edition of The Economist.The Economist | Chinese politics: Beware the cult of Xi [http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21695881-xi-jinping- st...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21695881-xi-jinping-stronger-his- predecessors-his-power-damaging-country-beware-cult?frsc=dg%7Cd)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > This is a massive lift in real economic activity which can finance a lot of > debt.

China's already hit its limit. "Also, the Chinese economy is over-indebted. The total social debt is now 300%. Together with external debt, this figure rises to about 350%." [http://marketrealist.com/2016/01/george-soros-sees- crisis-re...](http://marketrealist.com/2016/01/george-soros-sees-crisis- reminiscent-2008-time-china/)

> Secondly there is a now huge upper middle class who are travelling the > world, sending their kids to Australia or US for study and still buying > Apple products. They are not going away

"their buying power doesn't compare with that of their US counterparts. Between 2010 and 2014, only 12% of these people reported a household income of more than $3,200 a year, or $8.50 a day." [http://www.businessinsider.com/demand-report-on-chinas- middl...](http://www.businessinsider.com/demand-report-on-chinas-middle- class-2015-11)

<comment><USER3> > China's already hit its limit. "Also, the Chinese economy is over-indebted. > The total social debt is now 300%. Together with external debt, this figure > rises to about 350%." [http://marketrealist.com/2016/01/george-soros-sees- > crisis-re...](http://marketrealist.com/2016/01/george-soros-sees-crisis- > re..).

There is good and there is bad debt/investment.

If debt is used to finance productive investments then a high debt to GDP multiple is not a problem, it is in fact a sign of health.

Secondly if GDP growth is high and interest rates are lower then debt is much less of a problem in general.

> "their buying power doesn't compare with that of their US counterparts. > Between 2010 and 2014, only 12% of these people reported a household income > of more than $3,200 a year, or $8.50 a day." > [http://www.businessinsider.com/demand-report-on-chinas- > middl...](http://www.businessinsider.com/demand-report-on-chinas-middl..).

These numbers are off by a factor of 10.

\---

Of course the future is anyone's guess. Personally I think China is going to continue growing at a high pace until its GDP pr. capita matches Taiwan, South Korea or Japan.

<comment><USER17> > There is good and there is bad debt/investment. If debt is used to finance > productive investments then a high debt to GDP multiple is not a problem, it > is in fact a sign of health.

We already have the answer on that one, and have for a long time. The return on debt - the growth derived from taking on increasing amounts of debt - <USER2> China has plunged the last ten years. At this point, taking on more debt accomplishes absolutely nothing in regards to growth. They've saturated their ability to grow using those methods.

Their GDP per capita can never match the equivalent of Japan today. That's implying a Chinese economy that is nearly the size of the entire global economy today. That's the same kind of hype and absurdity the article is talking about. Where is the next $40 trillion in GDP going to come from? They're struggling to grow their economy at all today (and yes, the 6.x% figure is pure fiction), while taking on tens of trillions in new debt. If they can't grow their economy today, with that much debt financing, when will they be able to? The answer is: the party is long over, the only thing left now are consequences to all the bad choices that led to China becoming the world's most indebted nation in record time.

> These numbers are off by a factor of 10.

Support your position then.

<comment><USER3> > That's implying a Chinese economy that is nearly the size of the entire > global economy today.

Yes.

> Support your position then.

The Business Insider article mistankenly says pr. year where it should have said pr. month.

Sharetea must have somehow stumbled on this as he introduces a "." in the quote so 85 USD becomes 8.50 USD.

The correct numbers are in the report:

[http://demandinstitute.org/demandwp/wp- content/uploads/2015/...](http://demandinstitute.org/demandwp/wp- content/uploads/2015/11/TDI-No-More-Tiers.pdf)

"Only 12% reported monthly household income of more than 20,000 yuan ($3,200), or $85 a day."

Where group that is referred to is the group of "connected consumers". The group is 368 mio. Chinese pt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Investing in China? Sounds on-topic for HN to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> Capital flees because capital is a perfectly rational meta-being. If capital is fleeing, it is for good and rational reasons. "Irrational exuberance" \- sorry, there's no such thing. Capital works with the information it has at the time it makes decisions. "Risk of a correction" \- sorry, but I see no mention of risk when I lookup "correction" in the dictionary. When capital updates its model with new information, there will be losers and winners. Finance is about having a better model and better information.

<comment><USER20> "Irrational exuberance" was coined, or at least popularized, by free market true believer Alan Greenspan in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

<comment><USER19> Yes. And it's sad that he is mostly remembered for a term which is effectively anti-market

<comment><USER20> That is certainly not what he is "mostly remembered" for, and I suspect the popularity of the term is precisely because that is not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Of course, the Keynesian policies that have failed China will also fail the US and the EU.

I do wonder how many times the Austrian school will be proved right before the public start to notice.

<comment><USER22> It would help if it was proved right at least once :P

<comment><USER21> The failures occurring in China right now, as noted by Bloomberg, are exactly the failures that the Austrian school predicts will occur in the US and EU.</comment></comment></comment>


Google CEO says looking to buy smaller firms - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN0939634620090609?rpc=44

<comment><USER2> I think Ulocate will be purchased by google... They seem to have a great niche in the mobile space. Random, but thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Not sure why your comment got voted down, while the digg/reddit style supermodel comment got voted up.

I think a better target for them might be a company like loopt or whrrl. More users and a stronger growth curve.

<comment><USER4> Because dodgeball, with its user base growth story, was not enough.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/18/dodgeballcom- officially...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/18/dodgeballcom-officially- googled/) <http://gigaom.com/2007/04/15/dodgeball-founder-quits-google/>

Or Jaiku.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Like a super model announcing she's single and looking.

<comment><USER6> It's not like he held a press conference announcing that Google is looking for small companies to buy. He simply responded to a question in an interview:

"We have been (looking to acquire)," Schmidt said. "We have been wandering around looking at all of the different companies. With the big ones we haven't come across anything we've particularly liked. We are definitely talking to a number of smaller companies but we've done that routinely."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also, they're interested in profits and search.

<comment><USER8> ...news at 11</comment></comment>


Tracking Planes with RTL-SDR and Dump1090 - <AUTHOR> http://www.satsignal.eu/raspberry-pi/dump1090.html <comment><USER2> Dump1090 is a clear example of a weekend project that can escape the abandonware route. I wrote it in ~2 weeks during xmas of two years ago, and almost never touched it again if not for a couple of hours more, for lack of time. However the OSS miracle happened, and people continued to use it, fork it, modify it, and have fun. It does not turn like that very often.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been running a similar setup for a few months, feeding data to [http://www.flightradar24.com/](http://www.flightradar24.com/). If you upload data to them like this then you get premium access to their site and app which is nice. In fact I found that using the site was easier than accessing my own data on the pi so I haven't really used planeplotter etc.

I found that I can pick up a lot of planes even with the stubby antenna that came with the DVB stick. But I'm pretty close to the Heathrow flight path which gives me a slight advantage!

The dump1090 process uses 30-40% CPU on my pi so I start it up with nice -n+19. And it does seem to crash quite often so I've got something to check and restart it.

<comment><USER4> Cut the stubby antenna down to 68 millimeters and it will do even better. Set it on a cookie sheet for more effectiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> antirez, i recall you from the good old days, and i was pleasantly surprised that you hadnt given up on hacking around. this is great stuff, it opened up an entire cottage industry, and i am personally grateful. i had always been a radio guy with tons of heavy gear, using clunky serial interfaces to interact with my radios. now its all practically portable and multitudes more affordable. thank you for all your work, and for transforming an entire industry. i use dump1090 when i am not tuning pirates or -trying- to capture medical pocsag/flex.

</comment><comment><USER6> The RTL-SDR is a ton of fun!

I built a small ADS-B Antenna out of Coaxial cable and even inside my Seattle apartment, I can track planes ~150 miles away.

You can also tap into trunking systems and decode NOAA weather satellite images.

</comment><comment><USER7> An awesome, comprehensive writeup. I really would like to see more people setting up ADS-B receivers at home and expand the coverage.

Personally, I run dump1090 on a cheap TP-Link WR703N at home [1]

[1] - [http://blog.y3xz.com/blog/2014/04/24/feeding-data-to- flightr...](http://blog.y3xz.com/blog/2014/04/24/feeding-data-to- flightradar24-dot-com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> A somewhat unrelated question. It seems like beacons broadcasting their GPS location at 978 MHz (30cm) from altitude could be used to measure parameters of the atmosphere. Take 3 frequency-locked receivers, separated by a few meters, and it seems like, one can get the wind vector along the line of the airplane/receiver. Feasible?

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://balus.info/](http://balus.info/)

^this guy gets about 500km coverage with the setup of antenna he has

</comment><comment><USER10> For the uninitiated, could someone briefly go over this? I find it extremely interesting and would like to pick it up as a hobby.

What kind of hardware you need to get started? How does it track the planes, do the planes broadcast their info periodically? Hooking this up to a web frontend using Google Maps or Google Earth sounds like a very fun weekend project.

<comment><USER6> You need an [RTL-SDR USB device ($8)]([http://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-DVB-T- Stick-RTL2832U-R820T/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-DVB-T-Stick- RTL2832U-R820T/dp/B00C37AZXK/)) and an [ADS-B antenna (Homemade from Coaxial: $5)]([http://www.balarad.net/](http://www.balarad.net/)).

Oh, and a computer.

It's a pretty cheap way to get started with amateur radio!

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the links. I looked into doing something like this a while back (I already have my own stratum 1 NTP servers at home and work and this is kinda similar) but I only found commercial receivers that were a bit more than what I wanted to spend. This is quite affordable.</comment></comment></comment>


Peter Thiel's Heroic Political Fantasies - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/magazine/peter-thiels-heroic-political-fantasies.html <comment><USER2> I get it, the author was very irritated that Thiel spoke for trump, so he wrote a really bad article full of personal attacks, misinformation, belittling comparisons etc. Why did the NYtimes publish this garbage ?

<comment><USER3> > _he wrote a really bad article full of personal attacks, misinformation, > belittling comparisons_

Calm your sensibilities, it's nothing of the sort. It's an op-ed piece that has a negative bias against Thiel (who has also said dumb things). Why does this site criticize any piece that speculates are conveys opinion?

<comment><USER4> I'm generally one who ignores bias in the Opinion section of the paper, but one thing that made an impression on me was that this was published in the "Magazine", not the Opinion section. It reads more like a hit piece against someone for having the "wrong" politics than a thoughtful essay, IMO. (This, coming from someone who dislikes Thiel, Trump, and the GOP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the narrative in the article may be a bit of a stretch (Thiel is not against creating restaurants because he thinks they are worthless, he just says they aren't profitable), but I think the conclusion is pretty much correct: the question that Thiel's arguments raise revolve around the question of "What Matters?"

Personally when I listen to talks by Thiel or Musk I almost wonder, do I really need to drop everything and go build rockets? But to be honest, I find working on digital products pretty fulfilling. I think it's a real craft. The deeper question of fulfilment then goes to what you're building with that craft (I've found marketing campaigns are less fulfilling than user-facing products, for example), and then the even-deeper question goes to what you want to do with your life, and then there's the yet-deeper question of how you want to interact with, and have your life experienced by, other people. At that point the question of whether you're going from Zero-to-One (what Thiel calls technology) or One-to-Many (what he calls globalization) starts to recede in importance when making personal choices.

<comment><USER6> > Personally when I listen to talks by Thiel or Musk I almost wonder, do I > really need to drop everything and go build rockets?

You need to drop everything and make them rich.

<comment><USER7> That is _really_ not Musk's message, not even implied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Trying to quote Nietzsche in German is not an advisable strategy if you don't know German, dear hacks everywhere ("das Mann" does not exist).

<comment><USER9> >"das Mann"

that's a bit of jargon from a different German philosopher (Heidegger). IMO, that sentence is trying to smear Theil as a Nazi, since Heidegger was one and some of Nietzsche's concepts were reappropriated by them.

<comment><USER8> I've thought about that too, but if it was referencing Heidegger it should be "das Man" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#.27Th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#.27The_One.27_.2F_.27the_They.27)), not "das Mann".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This very non-charitable reading of Zero to One makes it a hit piece. The reasoning is plausible and it's well written. But anyone that's in tech, has followed Peter and read the book knows it was never meant as a general philosophy/political book. Though admittedly it has gotten so popular that a lot of people read it as such so perhaps there was no ill intention in the interpretation (tho the bathroom comment got interpreted rather maliciously).

Personally I think Peter talking at the RNC and [hopefully for me] exerting some kind of influence on Trump is the best thing to happen. I still see Trump as a blank slate. With his presidency [IMO] inevitable I think it's super important that people like Peter start steering him in the right direction.

<comment><USER11> Trump isn't a blank slate, he's first and foremost a self-serving businessman. Sure, he says outrageous things that people want to hear with no intention of ever doing them, but that doesn't make him a blank slate. It makes him a sycophantic liar.

Don't delude yourself that he's neutral. He has a clear agenda of promoting racism, violence, and religious intolerance because that's what his future Trump Network customer base wants to hear. If he is elected he'll most likely resign on day 2 because he can make much more money licensing his brand than actually having to deal with complex problems that can't be solved by simply building a wall, deporting all muslims, etc. for 4 years.

<comment><USER12> Put another way:

1\. Get elected. 2\. Resign in favor of Pence. 3\. Get a general pardon in the Federal investigations against him. 4\. Profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I identify with "liberal" politics and parts of Thiel's RNC speech resonated with me, but I'm wondering if those parts were lost on the RNC's target demographic. For example: he says we should have gone to Mars instead of starting a war in Iraq (paraphrasing). I feel like the Republican demographic wouldn't care about going to Mars, and not to mention a bunch of people got rich off the war (at tax payer's expense of course).

Then there's the part where he said the party shouldn't focus on fake "culture wars" like which bathrooms transgender people use. How were those parts received by the RNC's target audience?

<comment><USER14> I took him to be somehow blaming the democrats for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't follow american politics that much, but hats off to Peter Thiel for having the courage to support Trump!

Even if a person seems horrible as a human being, if some of his/her ideas make sense and align with your ideas, than _it 's OK to support them._ I happen to like Trump because he happens to think that America's problems are internal and should be solved internally - no need to make any issue into a "global issue" and solve it through an international trade agreement or through a war _that affects everyone in the world_ even if it's not their f problem!

<comment><USER16> > Even if a person seems horrible as a human being, if some of his/her ideas > make sense and align with your ideas, than it's OK to support them.

No, it's not. Not when that person has other horrific ideas that should not be supported by any sensible human being. Not if that person is a pathological liar that jumps from one idea to the contrary on a whims notice. Not if that person uses racism and violence as a platform. Not if that person openly calls for committing war crimes and invading other countries. It's - and I'm deliberately choosing the godwin route here - akin to saying "It was ok to support Hitler because I support the construction of the Autobahn."

Citations can be found en masse here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughTrumpSpam/comments/4teoxl/](https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughTrumpSpam/comments/4teoxl/)

<comment><USER2> I 'm pretty convinced that most people people do not support trump for what he claims he will do. He seems so unpredictable that nobody can believe what he says. What seems to resonate more is his confidence, and his risk-taking ability vs the very predictable, but very unlikeable Hillary. No amount of quote-listing or fact-checking is going to change their minds.

<comment><USER16> I agree that there is a large chunk of Trump supporters that will not be swayed by fact-checking. However that's still a vastly important thing to do because they goal is not to sway those that are unreachable already but rather to sway the chunk that still can be reached.

On a larger picture: I regard the fact that a large chunk of people by now seem oblivious to facts and unreachable for civilized dialogue as the threatening streak in the last major votes, see brexit, see the rise of the AFD in germany. The crucial question for the next coming years will in my opinion be how we can enter a reasonable discourse with people that see every statement as a bipartisan issue that must be decided on principle, regard all measured statements as lies and political correctness and are unwilling to compromise on anything. We live in interesting times indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is just a gutter hit-piece on Peter Thiel because he isn't falling in line like the rest of SV.

There is zero actual substance here, the author takes a single anecdote from his book, interprets it to mean that Thiel thinks running a small business is not worthwhile and then proceeds to end with this:

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

Silicon Valley, too, is of two minds. There are those who recognize that their uniquely innovative culture is a precipitate of a lot of expensive long-term institutional investment on the part of governments, universities and corporations, and that to function in a democracy you need to worry about stuff you personally don't think is important. And there are those who believe only in charisma and prowess, the blinding insight and iron will that get you from zero to one.

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

Silicon Valley isn't of two minds, it is of many; and no, the uniquely innovative culture isn't the sole result of expensive long-term institutional investment on the part of governments.

<comment><USER3> > _no, the uniquely innovative culture isn 't the sole result of expensive > long-term institutional investment on the part of governments_

What's the reason then? Are the people just better and smarter there?

<comment><USER18> I'd say a few smarter/innovative individuals can imprint a culture to a place that is self-sustaining.

For example, William Shockley's transistor company brought a bunch of smart PhDs to what was at the time a rural area (Mountain View). A few of these PhDs - called the "traitorous eight" \- left to work on their own. Over 65 companies in the area over the next 20 years came from there, including Intel and AMD. You know why William Shockley chose SV? Because his mother lived in Palo Alto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Somewhat related: Any ideas why NYT blocks my ability to "Add to Read it Later" on Safari for OS X? What motivations are there to do that (if they are doing it on purpose)?

<comment><USER20> Works fine for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's funny that the left attacks Trump for 'fear-mongering' when their anti- Trump platform is 'He's literally Hitler!'

<comment><USER21> Facts are facts. If Trump talks like Mussolini, perhaps deliberately, then he deserves the comparison.

Sure, all the fascism in his speeches and platform _could_ be some grand act just to rile people up, but he's giving no reliable indication that the terrifying things he says aren't what he really believes.

But I am, of course, biased. As a Jew, I can't stomach anyone who brings white supremacism and open antisemitism into the mainstream. It's just bad for me, you know?

<comment><USER22> And not just bad for you. Trump will bring misery to a large chunk of the world if he gets to act on just a small percentage of what he has to date said he will do.

<comment><USER17> Yes Donald Drumpf is evil!

It's time we had a woman in office! Hillary has done nothing wrong!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Darth Thiel is one of the most frightening characters on the modern scene.... a man with virtually infinite resources and proven willingness to covertly carry out long term secret revenge plots against those he feels deserve it.

Princess Leia and Nick Denton would have had much in common.</comment>


Quandl – Find, Use and Share Numerical Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.quandl.com/ <comment><USER2> Been following Quandl for a while and really love where they are going with Premium dataset. I've been looking for a while for good fundamental stocks data via an API. There's xignite but they are overly complicated and expensive. Much better solution then scrapping all morningstar website for 10years fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quandl makes it really easy to get hold of the underlying data. Definitely one to keep bookmarked for 'I wonder what...' situations.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's real breadth in their data sources and that's the real unique thing here: the technology itself is not the important thing, it's the data and the agreements they've established with the data providers.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a London startup building a similar thing: [https://ketch.io/](https://ketch.io/)

They allow people to define the source of some metric, and then will keep the value up to date, plot it over time, allow the rules (how to fetch the metric) to be re-used by others (share a single "Fetch currency rate" rule and it can be used for all currencies).

Ketch haven't managed to solve the marketing problem yet. I'm also sure that there are others in this space too.

What I find with all of these things though is that there are a few key questions:

1\. How recent is the data? (Not just pulled from source, but what is the total lag of all parts of the chain)

2\. How powerful are the built-in tools for extracting insight from the data?

You either have _now_ problems and need speed and accuracy, or you have _insight_ problems and need the ability to slice and dice, by time and comparing to other metrics.

<comment><USER3> Not sure 2) is a real issue. There's a huge range of data and even more questions that could be asked of it. I doubt any pre-baked settings are going to be useful.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with team members ego/emotions and still make progress? - <AUTHOR>

I know it's kind fo vague.
What I really want to guage is how much reponsibility one feels as a founder/leader to deal with team members melting down over criticism or other factors vs how much responsibility one has to driving progress on the product.
Any thoughts would be greaty appreciated. <comment><USER2> A good team that absolutely has to work with an egotistical prick (who might be good at his job, but not nearly as good as he thinks he is) will eventually marginalize that entity as much as they theoretically can.

Anyone whose feelings are easily hurt through criticism will never be good at what they do. I write good code a lot of the time. Sometimes I write bad code when the situation calls for it. Sometimes I write bad code because my head is up my ass (but I almost see light!)

With that said, sometimes you need to just shut up and keep your head down, even if you're in charge. In the short term, it can be not only an effective strategy but the only way to do business.

In the long term, obviously you need to correct the problem. Whether that's through helping to grow the sour team member or culling them from the flock is of course a case-by-case decision.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Never bully or allow bullying - ever.

2\. make it clear code criticism is a collective learning process and is never personal (we all write terrible code).

3\. Make sure everyone is clear about objectives both short and long term.

4\. Encourage everyone to have fun doing what they are doing.

<edit> 4a. If you are the manager/team leader - make sure you spot when things are going right and give praise and encouragement. Try catching people doing things right instead of wrong. </edit>

5\. If someone is consistently failing or getting in the way of the others then it is time for them to part - quickly.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another approach is to ignore problem people. Tell everyone else to ignore their problems and focus on their strengths.

Read this: <http://strengths.gallup.com/110242/About-Book.aspx>

You're there to get things done, not make each other feel happy and have neat lunches. If you're more interested in going to fun parties and having fun lunches, go work at Google or Facebook or another dying company.

If you want to get things done, focus on the strengths needed to get things done.</comment>


A Gentle Introduction to Backpropagation - <AUTHOR> http://numericinsight.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-gentle-introduction-to-backpropagation.html

<comment><USER2> I took a Machine Learning course this past winter and this article in particular would have been really helpful since I struggled most with this concept in particular (and gradient descent in general). While most resources show you the mechanics of neural networks, none I found were very good at explaining (to me) the purpose and meaning behind them. Sure, I could follow along and eventually figure out how to write my own neural network, and I did, but I honestly never completely understood what was going on. The problem with most ML texts/resources for people like me without a strong math background is that a lot of high-level math is presented without an explanation of what mathematical concepts are being used. I admit that the onus is on me, the math dummy, to go out and learn the concepts involved, but it's difficult to look at a confusing algorithm chock full of unfamiliar concepts and know where to start. This article explains things nicely and I hope to see more like this in ML.

<comment><USER3> If you want a nice, visual, explanation of _what_ a neural network is actually doing, I found this blog post to be particularly helpful. [1] Although there is some math, the rest of the post gives a good intuitive understanding of what's going on without it.

[1] [http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds- Topology/](http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-Topology/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a very welcome read but it hypes neural networks a bit. I've been working with in JavaScript using IndexedDB and while researching I was disappointed to find that some smart people seem to think they are much more limited than made out to be here and elsewhere [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M#t=242](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M#t=242)

To summarize, people generally abandoned backpropigation trained neural networks for Support Vector Machines because neural nets require labeled and limited datasets, and work slowly and especially so when dealing with multiple layers which is sort of the whole point.

In my work in JavaScript, I was able to pull off only a single layer perceptron and it is neat but limited in what it can model.

<comment><USER3> It's true that the beginning of the talk is about how people abandoned backprop trained neural networks because they often underperformed SVMs, but the rest of the talk is about deep learning, which introduced a new generation of neural nets (since 2006) that are the current state of the art for a lot of problems.

In fact, deep neural networks are trained in an unsupervised manner at first, but then back propagation is used to "fine tune" and improve the results. Because they require unlabeled data sets, and can perform so well, research into neural networks has experienced a recent resurgence.

By the way, any talk by Geoff Hinton is fantastic. If you are interested in neural networks and their capabilities, and you haven't already seen it, his Coursera course [1] builds from a simple linear perceptron to the current deep learning methods.

[1] [https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001](https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001) (You'll have to sign in to see it)

<comment><USER5> I want to add to this, that there's a lot of work that doesn't require pretraining. I recently implemented the more advanced hessian free optimization methods that don't require pretraining in my deep learning framework. The results are amazing. I'm hoping to demonstrate a lot of the tradeoffs of the different methods in a more comprehensive manner here shortly. This was an updated extension by some of hinton's students. The paper I implemented was:

[http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rkiros/papers/shf13.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rkiros/papers/shf13.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the extra resources. Any more are very welcome. Neural nets sometimes feel like quite the black box, despite their ease of implementation and apparent power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best text I've read about backpropagation is in "Neural Networks: A Systematic Introduction" by Raul Rojas [1]

He uses a nice graphical approach that is easily understandable yet formal. It's been many years since I've read it to learn for an exam at university but I remember it was an enjoyable read and I wished I had more time to spend on the book.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Neural-Networks-A-Systematic- Introduct...](http://www.amazon.com/Neural-Networks-A-Systematic- Introduction/dp/3540605053/)

<comment><USER3> Not having read Rojas' book, I think the best text I've ever read on the subject is Michael Nielsens (in progress) "Neural Networks and Deep Learning." [1] Chapter 2 covers back propagation.

It has a similarly approachable yet formal style, and I have recommended it to people with no ML experience in the past who have found it very intuitive.

[1] [http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com)

<comment><USER7> I agree; I am just getting into machine learning currently, and chapter 2 of this book is what made back propagation "click" for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The backprop idea is one instance of a general idea called reverse accumulation (which you can use in other contexts): [http://www.win- vector.com/blog/2010/07/gradients-via-reverse...](http://www.win- vector.com/blog/2010/07/gradients-via-reverse-accumulation/)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Neural networks, a beautiful biologically-inspired programming paradigm which enables a computer to learn from observational data"

In the context of CS what's the difference between "learning" and optimizing?

<comment><USER5> Optimization in the context of machine learning is a search function that searches a param space by repeated calculations of gradients (derivatives: eg, calculate the derivative and test the objective function) to arrive at some optimal function.

Learning in this case generally means the creation of models. Optimization is the process by which this happens.

A few examples:

Unsupervised learning - typically clustering and grouping things

Supervised Learning - Example based learning where you're trying to label something. This could be sentiment, spam classification, object recognition over pixels, even extending to sequence labeling.

Prediction/Regression - Predicting values based on a learned function.

Learning is more about the goal trying to be achieved. Optimization is more of numerically solving relative to an objective function (also called an error function)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 5-second flashing gifs :(</comment>


Show HN: Packetriot – Expose Local Services to the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://packetriot.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, this is the author, thanks for checking out my project and any feedback. As I built this I found alternatives, here are some differentiators:

* access logs & metrics - these types of systems obscure this info (src IPs, etc...)

* system health checks - probes if the destination (upstream service) is available, if not, we'll email you

* self-hosted - want to host the edge server software on your own, you can do that

* specification - the plan is to publish the protocol and spec so others can write clients or integrations

Glad to help with questions, cheers.

</comment><comment><USER2> So I can use this to run servers at home without my provider throttling or detecting them? How does traffic from this appear to them?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's built exactly for that. The tunnel is established in reverse over a websocket, so outgoing traffic from your PC is TCP:443 which looks like normal TLS traffic.

I've been using this for almost 6 months and haven't seen any throttling. Your Netflix, YouTube or any other streaming traffic will dwarf what bandwidth you consume, unless we're talking terabytes...

<comment><USER2> awesome!</comment></comment></comment>