Why We Need the Uber of Energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-we-need-uber-energy-rachel-koch/ <comment><USER2> > contractors driving trucks or vans, picking up Birds from sidewalks, once > picked up they are moved to another location for charging.

> PopWheel converts an electric van into a mobile charging station for micro- > mobility vehicles and electric cars

Wouldn't battery swapping be best for the e-Scooter case? Should greatly increase vehicle utilization (since you don't have a stationary van while the scooters charge), and requires much less labor, van space, and charging facility space than hauling the bikes away to charge.

I can see how it makes good engineering/logistic sense for charging full-size EVs (especially using direct DC charging from the traction battery via a DC-DC converter), but not for e-scooter fleet servicing.

>with PopWheel, [EVs] will serve as the source of electricity with the potential to power everything.

How does PopWheel see this evolving? In what space can "lug-atoms-for-energy" possibly be competitive with HV grid transmission and decentralized solar?

<comment><AUTHOR> Station supports battery swapping as well, initially we are supporting Genze and few other PMV manufacturer's removable battery packs.

Scooters used by Bird, Lime and Spin don't have removable battery packs.

JUMP and LimeBike don't have removable packs for their e-bikes.

FordGoBike and Scoot have removable battery pack fleet, similarly HOPR cylce is also moving towards battery packs.

Station can be stationary or moving (on demand), everything charges inside the station so we don't have to change the location frequently.

Our station technology will also enable other manufacturers to move towards swappable battery packs, as of now there isn't any infrastructure available that enables hassle free battery swapping. PopWheel is building that infrastructure, but the idea is to charge everything not just micro-mobility.

Decentralized Solar is also on our roadmap, we can be the new PG&E that develops application specific infrastructure to deliver energy on demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How is this the 'Uber' of anything? AirBnb was first, then Uber was 'the AirBnb' of transportation which began a pattern, so we say the 'uber of _' in reference to the sharing economy and it rolls off the tongue better.

PopWheel is just creating mobile charging infrastructure. We don't call Zipcar the uber of anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate your feedback, we will be releasing an app that would enable a business to request "Station On Demand", in which the nearest available station is routed to the location.

<comment><USER3> I see. Thinking over a longer term, you might better be described as the 'Netflix of power'. Right now it's mobile charging but the future will evolve, and Uber isn't the best brand affiliation these days.</comment></comment></comment>


Finding Friend and Foe in Multi-Agent Games - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02330 <comment><USER2> > _When people play Avalon, the games are usually rich in "cheap talk," such > as defending oneself, accusing others, or debunking others' claims [10]. In > this work, we do not consider the strategic implications of natural language > communication...

In the 2189 mixed human/agent games we collected, all humans knew which players were human and which were DeepRole. There were no restrictions on chat usage for the human players, but DeepRole did not say anything and did not process sent messages _

I think the fun part about Avalon and other hidden role games really comes from the "cheap talk", where people try to convince each other that their picks / approvals make sense as a member of the good team, as opposed to making the decisions from picks and approvals alone. Though from the results it seems that those concrete actions are already enough to outperform the humans.

There's also the consideration that because the humans know the identity of DeepRole as a bot, they play differently: "That's what I'm gonna pick, because that's what bots do" [1]. I wonder if a combined DeepRole + human-for- chatting-only team would outperform either alone.

[1] From Appendix F of the paper: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RkUFHYTo_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RkUFHYTo_s)

</comment><comment><USER3> > ...The Resistance: Avalon, the most popular hidden role game.

I question this, because it seems more likely to me that the grade-school classics (Mafia/Werewolf) probably have The Resistance or any expansion/variant thereof beat for popularity there.

<comment><USER4> The text of the paper is a little more precise than the abstract, they picked R:A because it's "the most highly rated hidden role game on boardgamegeek.com."

Just as a player of these games, I'm curious how much weight DeepRole gives to the results of the team Proposal Votes. I find they hold a lot of useful, but hard to parse information which depends heavily on the skill/metagame of your opponents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like it would suffer from a lot of the sorts of AI problems in games, where computers are better at memory and ingesting information than people generally are.

Games like Avalon or Secret Hitler tend to be much less fun if people are playing with notes. A lot of it involves seeing what sort of lies/adversarial behavior you can get away with because people aren't paying attention to every single thing in the flood of information.

A tight example of this is if you watch TotalBiscuit's old series of games of Secret Hitler with friends on YouTube, they essentially ended up quitting partially because one of the guys started taking notes on exactly who had voted what way on everything, and counting cards. It turned out this both made him really good at the game at first (patterns in who votes with whom is valuable) and made the game less fun for everyone else, since they now had to play more "perfectly" and more directly do things to tamper with the dataset, instead of relying on no one remembering the exact votes from 15 mins earlier.

In the end, I somewhat question if the computer is actually better at any of the parts of the game that are fun/interesting, as much as just better at pattern recognition. For instance, in a game like Avalon, you'll often not be able to piece together who some of the less-important roles are, mostly because it's not worth the time, but a computer is likely able to overtly or passively track things like that because it has no reason not to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Paper author here: one cool thing about our technique is that our bot doesn't keep "notes" :)

The only thing it maintains for the entire game is this length-60 belief vector - a summary of who it thinks is evil and good. How people act influences this belief vector, but it can't look back at the game history. This leads to awkward play sometimes - it will propose missions that have failed in the past, etc. I think it's cool that we (humans) can summarize the state of the game with such little information, and that the bot does something similar :)

<comment><USER5> Interesting, but surely it has to retain some information about the past to be able to know how to update that belief vector? Outside of directly being on a mission, the only major "good" or "evil" actions are voting for/against missions, once you know if the mission succeeded or failed. Do you just not take that into account?

It's possible this is in the paper - a lot of the more math/modeling parts went a bit over my head, so feel free to point me to a section to specifically read if I missed out.

If it's literally just a representation of the outcomes of the missions and who went on them, then isn't the Belief Vector just the venn diagram of how every mission went with some iterative statistics laid over it? I would have assume any regular/competitive players would be fairly good at keeping that mental model themselves, which makes it seem confusing to me that the Agent would be better than that, unless it's essentially just saying that the game is better if you play purely logically and ignore all context, which defeats the fun of playing it?

<comment><USER6> I think you are exactly right. The algo is simply outmemorizing it's human counterparts. This isn't a very good paper at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think this is true. On ProAvalon, human players can see the full history of the game at all times [1], and use it to make decisions. DeepRole, on the other hand, can only use its internal belief state. This belief state is only a summary of what has happened in the game - DeepRole has no way of knowing who went on previous missions, or how people voted, or who proposed what. See above for more detail.

[1] See this video for an example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKdY4Us0Ci4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKdY4Us0Ci4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very good paper,

I would like to find the right game to do some research with CFR as i think cooperation in incomplete information games is one of the most interesting field in AI.

I would like a game :

\- Turnbased

\- Incomplete information (fog of war)

\- Team based

\- Strong cooperation and coordinations between players is requiered for win.

I started to create a 2D CSGO, but i would like to know if there are any similar game already existing.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like you could adapt Leibo's sequential social dilemma games. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.03037](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.03037)

Instead of a total collective reward being the goal, you'd have team-based scores. You'd need cooperation within the team, and aggressive action against the enemy team.

Here's an implementation of 2 games [https://github.com/eugenevinitsky/sequential_social_dilemma_...](https://github.com/eugenevinitsky/sequential_social_dilemma_games)</comment></comment>


Ottawa Library fines people using unreliable automatic calling system (1994) - <AUTHOR> http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/16.54.html#subj2 <comment><USER3> Since this is oddly on the front page I want to shout out the OPL for being a great place for everybody. I love libraries. There are so few places you can go with no expectation that you will purchase something.

OPL also has a $100k makerspace available at the Centerpointe location with multiple 3D printers,scanners, and laser cutters. All available for free (if you can book a spot!)

<comment><USER4> For real, the OPL is awesome. Great spaces and they even rent out video games.

</comment></comment><comment> red-indian For years my public library charged a $3 fee to get a book sent from another library in the system.

At some point I was chatting with a librarian about this and she revealed they had eliminated the fee so as not to discourage the use of interlibrary loans.

I few weeks later I tried checking out something from another library and was then treated to a 10 minute lecture on how it costs them $20 to process these loans and am I really sure I want it.

No thanks. I'll just get it for a penny plus $3.99 shipping from amazon, less than the cost of gasoline to drive into town to order it, pick it up, and return it (3 round trips).

<comment><USER5> > No thanks. I'll just get it for a penny plus $3.99 shipping from amazon, > less than the cost of gasoline to drive into town to order it, pick it up, > and return it (3 round trips).

Says Mr. Fancy-pants here with a mailbox/street-accessible doorstep that packages can fit in/on.

Us apartment-dwellers often end up with a notice that says that FedEx or whichever last-mile carrier couldn't in good conscience leave your box in the apartment lobby (and, implicitly, couldn't be arsed to come up the elevator and put the box in front of your apartment door) so instead they have driven your package back to the nearest FedEx warehouse half-way across town, where you're welcome to [pay for the gas required to] come get it. After, of course, waiting 30 minutes behind several people each taking 10 minutes to _send_ packages, before you can spend 30 seconds _receiving_ yours.

Oh, and although you could have intercepted the delivery-man like a linebacker to receive your package today, because you didn't, it won't be available at the warehouse until tomorrow afternoon. Or maybe four days from now. And that's if they don't put it back on a truck to attempt to deliver it again, and again, and again (and give you no way to specify in the delivery instructions that they should just _stop trying_.)

And after they _do_ finally give up putting it on the truck, they'll make sure to only wait a few days before they send it back to whoever sent it to you, making the sender eat a huge shipping cost that'll make them unlikely to ever send you anything again.

For me, receiving an Amazon delivery both costs more, and takes more time, than buying the same thing in a brick-and-mortar retail store, let alone going to the library!

<comment><USER6> This may be an obnoxious comment, but if you haven't considered Amazon Locker, you should see if there's one near you. I can say from experience that there are a lot of them around even modestly sized cities and they can make this a _lot_ easier.

<comment><USER5> There are indeed a few Amazon Lockers around my city, but none less than a 15 minute drive away. The closest thing Amazon would consider _treating_ as a locker (i.e. have Amazon Logistics fulfill to) is my own local post office, which 1. is so understaffed that it takes just as long to pick up a package from it as from the FedEx across town, and 2. for some reason triggers "this item has special handling restrictions and cannot be delivered to your location" messages on 90% of Amazon's catalog.

Also, with a Locker, you still have to get the thing home. Often I'm ordering things delivered because they're too big+heavy+awkward to lug home from a store myself (I don't own a car!), so the Locker doesn't really help in those cases. In many of those cases, the thing won't even _fit_ in a Locker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author mentions parking tickets as a possible future automatic fine that could be unreliable. Red light cameras were introduced in Ontario in 1998, which automatically issue fines to the vehicle owner, and automatic speed enforcement is being rolled out now.

I guess the difference is that it improves road safety, which library fines don't, and that you can contest the ticket with a human in traffic court.

<comment><USER8> >> I guess the difference is that it improves road safety

Exactly - just like when I want to change the way my kids are acting:

I pick a random occurrence of a specific behaviour, punish them well after the fact and they inevitably draw the correct cause => effect linkage and never repeat the targeted behaviour again.

</s>

<comment><USER9> While drivers are in many respects indistinguishable from children, they are in fact adults, and can typically figure things out from the explanation that accompanies the punishment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > if you do not pick up the book in three days, you are fined $2.00

Why would a library fine you for _not_ borrowing a book? That is the opposite of how libraries work!

<comment><USER8> Because you can go online and place holds on many books and the library will ship them to your prefered branch once available and then shelve them for pick-up. There's a significant amount of effort and cost, plus most holds are for the same limited supply of popular books; while your hold is sitting there counteless others are waiting.

The fine is to discourage making hold requests and then never claiming them.

<comment><USER11> Maybe it got canned because the pickup dates are not predictable. If I place hold on a book with e.g. two holds on it already by somebody else, the book will be ready in 2 month if each person keeps the book for 1 month. If each person returns it on the spot its basically 2 days. Good luck planning your holidays ard that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Every library I've been to has told me the return date when I checked out the book and stamped on the library card or receipt you get when checking out the book. For decades there was no phone call/ notification, you'd get a letter in the mail after you'd already started racking up late fees.

Regardless of how broken their notification system is, keeping track of the return date has always been the borrower's responsibility.

<comment><USER13> This is about the notification that a book is ready for pickup.

<comment><USER8> yes - Calgary used to fine you $2 if you did not pick up a hold within 7 days, now it just expires. I wonder if it was the same specific motivation or the PITA of collecting fines in general.

<comment><USER14> I worked for the Calgary Public Library when we eliminated it. Partly the PITA for the patron but more importantly was we wanted people to borrow more and not be limited. If you were going to Peru and we had 7 books that looked interesting to you, you could order them in and decide at pickup if you wanted them all. If 6 them were crappy oh well - that was difficult when we charged $2 a hold, you wouldn't risk ordering 7 books to your library. The point of the library is to facilitate your access to the bed information in the form that is best for you. The borrowing limit remains 99 items per person.

<comment><USER15> Nice. The SF public library also eliminated overdue fines recently [1] - <USER2> found that it made going to the library a little less stressful, knowing that if I missed the return deadline by a day or two I wouldn't be fined.

[1] [https://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2001163901](https://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2001163901)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Britney Spears' music used by British navy to scare off Somali pirates - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/29/britney-spears-navy-scare-somali-pirates#start-of-comments <comment><AUTHOR> Comment on the Guardian website: "Britney rules the waves!" :-)

</comment><comment><USER2> i... wat</comment>


Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/arts/design/leonardo-da-vinci-salvator-mundi-christies-auction.html?action=Click&contentCollection=BreakingNews&contentID=66089700&pgtype=Homepage&_r=0 <comment><USER3> Marketing wins everywhere. Paintings, IT, open source projects, startups, everything. It seems to be responsible for 90%+ value in worryingly many cases. It may be getting worse.

I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. We have many user review based solutions but it just doesn't work with most things (not even touching on fake reviews). Even for things where the whole value of the product is about how user feels about it, most users don't have other products to compare. Plus choice-supportive bias.

For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust. Some take them apart and can reason about used components and so on. Not so easy when you are visiting a grocery store or wondering what's the story of the organic food that you are looking at (or maybe it was just mislabled?). Some educated 3rd party could research that for you.

Again, it's different from what we have today because even though it's tempting, sexy and scalable, it can't be just about letting users send opinions and info. It must be expert web of trust. Those companies may end up with a lot of power. But at least in this case if some of them try to misuse it, somebody can stumble upon it and show that they are not trustworthy.

<comment><USER4> You don't seem to understand how the art world works. Buying art at this level has nothing to do with the work itself. It has everything to do with demonstrating power. Whoever bought that will have the best Leonardo work outside of museums. Art is a positional good, it shows that you have class and at this level nothing is as prestigious. Say you put that thing in a house or a museum, you can invite the Pope himself to view it. In terms of networking this is the holy grail.

Just because Christie's went to unprecedented lengths to market the painting it doesn't mean that without that effort the painting wouldn't have sell at this price level. The art market is highly unpredictable.

<comment><USER5> I agree. Paradoxically, buying this work buys you something that money can't buy, even though it actually did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating to watch Rybolovlev move money in the open like this with the help of the art market apparatus. What a time to be alive.

If you're not keeping track this was almost double the price expected for a da Vinci of questioned provenance sold by the fertilizer magnate who bought Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for double the estimated price and then never lived in it.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't he need someone to pay that same amount or more for the painting to effectively have moved money with this apparatus? And if the next buyer is similarly motivated, isn't the valuation akin to a Ponzi?

<comment><USER8> If you have $400 million in funds whose origin you can't account for, you move it into some opaque account to buy the painting for that $400 million. The buyer (you) remains "unknown" but now you have $400 million that you _can_ account for, since it came from selling a painting.

In the art auction world, either or both sides can remain as anonymous as they wish, which makes this whole scheme possible.

<comment><USER9> But how do you explain your acquisition of the $400MM painting when the taxman comes knocking?

<comment><USER10> You don't. Tax man cares not how you bought it, only that tax is fully paid when sold.

<comment><USER11> Is not it cheaper to pull this trick with higher number of no-name artists paintings by moving the money betweent two ofshore companies that belong to you. Therefore I believe this purchasecwas was a status purchase like yachts. It is a show off that a person has so much resources that can spend part of it on a peace of art that nobody can get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For anyone paying attention, the seller of the painting is Dmitry Rybolovlev. How did Rybolovlev amass so much money? Through pollution. His company Uralkali is listed as one of the top polluters in Russia. This is how externalities work: He keeps the profits, you (literally) eat the losses. Perhaps this detail is the biggest story here.

<comment><USER13> Even for a Russian oligarch, context is relevant.

It's not his company. He hasn't owned it since 2010. The roots of Uralkali go back 80 years, he owned it for 15 years.

Uralkali is 20% of the global potash market, without their mining a billion people wouldn't have food - at a minimum - given the present 7.6 billion world population. Russia has become a wheat juggernaut [1], to put it mildly; without their food production, the developing world will not develop given the population growth occuring.

That doesn't defend the pollution, it does however bring some very important context to the situation that you entirely neglected.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe- is...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-is-falling- behind-russia-in-the-global-wheat-market)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> According to another source from BBC, the final bid for the work was $400m, with fees bringing the full price up to $450.3m. [http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment- arts-42000696](http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42000696)

What's interesting from the BBC article is the image "The painting has been cleaned and restored from the image on the left to the one on the right" doesn't even look like the same person?

Another anecdote - In 1958 it was sold at auction in London for $60. By then the painting was generally reckoned to be the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself.

<comment><USER15> That's...kinda weird, right? The before and after are clearly two different paintings. Hair is different, mouth is different...I would assume, as a layman, that restoring a piece of art the goal should keep it looking nearly the same just cleaning it up and removing damage. This looks like they just straight up painted over it.

<comment><USER16> Christie's has more details here: [http://www.christies.com/features/Salvator- Mundi-timeline-86...](http://www.christies.com/features/Salvator-Mundi- timeline-8644-3.aspx)

That BBC quote is a bit misleading. The photo on the left is what the painting looked like before restoration, not what it looked like when it was originally painted. Parts of it had been damaged and repainted over multiple times in the past which is why the restored version looks so different.

<comment><USER17> Bearing in mind here, that Christie's had a vested interest in the painting selling for as high as an amount as possible. So interesting this may be, it's hardly unbiased.

Personally, I'm a believer. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is this a surprise? There's a point at which money no longer makes sense - both to the people without it as well as the people with it.

There are many reasons for spending relatively incomprehensible amounts of money for something. One is to show others that you can; it's a demonstration of just how wealthy you are. Another is to try to make something special of the money that otherwise has reached a level of being useless/pointless.

Think a bit in terms of a normal human lifetime. If you aspire to be rich, what amount of money defines that level? Once you reach a level where you can own and operate more properties, vehicles, and even employees than you can even remember, what does the excess money represent?

Ok, this is an absurd analogy. But as technical people, imagine building a multi-petabyte storage device. Practically no private individual has such a thing. Using your intellect, experience, and perhaps ingenuity you can have such a thing. Then what? You store all the porn you have time to download. You save every movie you ever thought about watching. You take 1000 photos every time you go out. It's thrilling! But how much of it do you ever really go back and enjoy?

Frankly, unless the buyer places it in a public museum, I judge it as a hollow effort to find value in excess (which will last about three months). Humans are great at acclimating to new and better, and soon we need more. What else is there?

<comment><USER3> > What else is there?

Storage of value. If you want to diversify, you may want something easy to move/hide for some scenarios. I'm not saying this painting works great for that purpose, just that that's one of the things that may make people want to buy it.

<comment><USER18> If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't have to struggle to find stable stores of value.

At that stratosphere of wealth, an art piece is not about diversification. It's a bit like buying a 200m yacht to surpass all other private yachts.

What I find amusing is that even the ultra rich people are statistically NEVER the richest people. There are perhaps 5 people in the world who could be debated as one of the richest people in the world. And their individual wealth exceeds the "poor rich" such as this person by a factor of 20+. To people outside their bubble it just looks "sad" (pardon the Trumpism).

<comment><USER19> I agree- I would estimate 95% or more of really rich people are mostly indistinguishable from an upper middle class person from the outside: Sure, they have maids and maybe fly their own plane or have an expensive classic car but there are these 5% of rich people who somehow have a strange compulsion to advertise their wealth as widely as possible and they're the ones who have the 100 mil yachts and go to these sorts of auctions (the exception maybe being Bill Gates' Da Vinci notebook purchase... likely Bill just thought those were super cool)

<comment><USER18> Clearly Bill Gates doesn't need to flaunt his wealth. I'm sure he was just really excited by Da Vinci, and the opportunity to own a real piece of history was totally worth it.

Despite Gates's (very) questionable method of rising to greatness, what he has attempted to do with his wealth is well above what most "rich" people do.

<comment><USER20> And he's done a brilliant PR job. [https://www.liberationnews.org/real-agenda- gates-foundation/](https://www.liberationnews.org/real-agenda-gates- foundation/)

<comment><USER21> Oddly enough I find it easier to believe that Bill Gates wants to change the world for the better than to believe that he is secretly pushing some neocapitalist agenda.

Mainly because he personally has everything to gain from the former and practically nothing from the latter at the wealth level he operates at.

Dude could get a better return on index funds than from his philanthropy. Cynically, plain investing is low status where he is at, less cynically he has a lot of time to think about things and a lot of resources and I believe many (most? hmm) humans would act the same way under those conditions. Maybe I'm just an optimist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty. Seeing the 450 million dollar price tag, i feel an unusual amount of anger, disgust, revulsion at the ostentatiousness, excesses and brazen corruption of the rich and of the fine art world. I feel more disgust at this than i would at the usual gaudy, blingy excesses (like gold-plated cars and mansions) of the tasteless wealthy. I suppose good art can also seek to inspire these feelings, even if the price tag has only cheapened the actual artwork in my eye. I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the world feel about this.

A portrait of Jesus Christ of questionable origin and authenticity being sold by a Russian fertilizer magnate for 450 million usd. Says quite a bit about the times we live in, Doesn't it?

edit: Sorry for my salty tirade; Just sharing a viewpoint.

<comment><USER23> > Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty

These paintings were only painted because exceedingly wealthy families commissioned and collected them. If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people in the first place.

> I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the > world feel about this.

This community wouldn't exist if it weren't for the hierarchy of the art world.

<comment><USER24> > If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people > in the first place. Art would still exist but some master pieces wouldn't > exist. I agree that patronage has allowed artist to produce magnificent art > piece but is not the case for all masterpieces.

<comment><USER23> You only have to casually witness the art world - even just at a local level - to see that speculation by wealthy buyers sustains it, and also, that it costs a lot to produce art as a professional. So maybe without patronage some level of art would exist, but it wouldn't exist as a community without people ultimately paying a lot of money for work.

Furry porn producers would continue to make a mint though.

<comment><USER24> The fact that patronage can be good for the Arts is not in question but if you do a search for great artist that die in poverty and unrecognized during their lifetime you will find plenty of very famous name.

My rapid search brings me El Greco, Claude Monet, Johan Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka, Johannes Vermeer, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Vincent Van Gogh from [http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-now-famous-artists-died- ignomi...](http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-now-famous-artists-died-ignominy.php) ; I think it wouldn't be fair to consider them minor artist.

Art co-exist with society for more that 17,000 years if you consider Lascaux. It doesn't make sense to reduce Art to profitable or bankable Art.

To produce Art can be expensive and can be cheap, without money you will not produce beautiful marble statue or Faberge eggs but Art doesn't do be expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You could buy three F-22 Raptors with that kind of money. Well, Congress would never approve the sale, but this painting went for triple the per-copy price of the F-22, according to Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor)

I might be biased, but I know what I would pick if given the option, and it cruises 1,200 mph.

<comment><USER26> Trying to compare a piece of art, history and culture, with a weapon of destruction.

Great job.

<comment><USER27> An F-22 is, regardless of its function, one of the most complicated devices ever created by man. In that sense it is an example of the combined 'art' of the skills of many thousands of highly-skilled individuals.

In past centuries cathedrals were hailed as the masterpieces of the skills of craftsmen.

<comment><USER5> F-22s are cool, but sadly, probably won't hold their value as well as a DaVinci.

<comment><USER21> Yeah the F-22 really is useless without a military industrial complex behind it. And a defense use. Sort of a parable about modern products really. Self driving cars with no maps, phones with no updates, no app store. Our best products are really infrastructure products, supported by a cast of thousands.

But the painting stands on its own and a decent pair of leather shoes will get you from a to b just as well as they did centuries ago.

If I remember rightly the most universal item of soldier's kit throughout all history was the spoon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ) was the marketing campaign

<comment><USER29> If anyone want's to know the soundtrack, it is 'On the Nature of Daylight' by Max Richter.

If you think you've heard it somewhere, it was in Arrival - [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/)

<comment><USER8> A version of it was also the main theme in Shutter Island.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What is interesting is that if this painting was attributed to someone unknown, its price would have fallen off the cliff even though there would have been zero material change in goods that buyer would be receiving. This says a lot about our hero worship tendencies. People are going to look very hard to see what is so special about this painting.

<comment><USER31> You're implying that a painting has any inherent value (it does not). Just like everything else in the material world, it only has contextual value.

Before the 1900s, aluminum was valued more than gold. Today, it is one of the cheapest metals around. Nothing changed but the _context_ in which we were able to extract it.

In the case of this painting, the context is what makes it valuable - the last known privately owned painting by a name nearly the entire western world recognizes immediately.

<comment><USER32> I would assume an increased availability of aluminum because of better or cheaper production processes makes the price drop?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply"

Can someone familiar with the art market comment on how that works? That seems contrary to what I know about markets. I mean, I understand that the volume is contracting, but the context is that such "[high] price is remarkable".

<comment><USER34> There are never going to be any new old masters and because shit happens the supply is slowly shrinking over time as various works leave the market due to museum acquisition, accident, war, and theft. The demand side of the equation however is growing as various new money entrants to the art market compete for this diminishing supply. The demand side is also boosted by the fact that art like this has now become something of a financial tool for capital flight, corporations, investment funds and criminal interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is it just me that feels like this is rather a symptom of money being devaluated by the day?

This may sound ridiculous, but it reminds me of a private server of Lineage 2 (RPG) when old admins returned to the game as normal players and had almost infinite currency and completely ruined the server economy by simply buying rare stuff, with limited supply, at any price.

I make this analogy for the housing market, art, soccer players, cryptocurrency, and many other markets where you have limited supply - <USER2> is where you actually see how much washed money is starting to show up...

It's scary and no ones talks about this.

Edit: btw the solution for the private server economy disease was to wipe it - real life markets can't be wiped.

</comment><comment><USER36> > The artwork has been the subject of legal disputes and amassed a price > history that ranges from less than $10,000 in 2005, when it was spotted at > an estate auction...

The heirs of that estate are probably not thrilled with this headline.

</comment><comment><USER37> Funny that Da Vinci remains the most bankable 50 years after he first sky- rocketed the perceived value of art.

Basically, In 1962 the Mona Lisa was loaned to Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Louvre. Huge marketing campaign resulted in over a million of Americans going to see it, ushering in the new era of art as mass spectacle/consumption.

Obviously there were other factors involved - but Robert Hughes made an amazing documentary about this subject called the Mona Lisa Curse, which you can watch online [1].

[1] [https://vimeo.com/62973616](https://vimeo.com/62973616)

</comment><comment><USER38> What high art, diamonds, and bitcoin have in common? They all would have a much much much lower value if they weren't so good for money laundering.

</comment><comment><USER39> [http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this- painting-...](http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-painting-is- by-leonardo-i-doubt-it.html)

>Christie's Is Selling This Painting for $100 Million. They Say It's by Leonardo. I Have Doubts. Big Doubts.

tl;dr: The painting is an old-hat style and pose not becoming of a Renaissance artist of Leonardo's caliber.

Me: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the buyer probably had a net worth at least ≥ $4.5 billion (I wouldn't spend more than 10% of my wealth on a single painting.) According to [https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/) there are only ~380 persons that would qualify. Any one knows who is the buyer?

<comment><USER41> You wouldn't spend more than 10% of your wealth on a Da Vinci?

<comment><USER42> Nope. Let's say I'm worth between $10k and $10m, i.e. somewhere in the range of a normal human. I would be crushed by the maintenance costs, even if I kept it in a Swiss vault instead of on my wall where I could actually look at it. The only reason I would spend 10% of my net worth is to immediately sell it to a Russian oligarch for a fat profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> TL;DR - I'm not saying it isn't real, but I'm not saying it's fake either; [http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da- vinc...](http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da-vinci- painting-might-not-even-be-leonardo-da-vinci)

</comment><comment><USER44> In the book "$12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", it describes the insanity of the skyrocketing auction prices with the following analogy (paraphrasing since I do no longer have a copy of the book).

"If you have a $20M painting, you can imagine an equivalently priced apartment where you can display that painting in one of the world's great cities. But $150M? There is no equivalent for that. There are no apartments that expensive."

And now $450.3M?! for the top.

In "China's Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop", you can see the bottom of the economic scale. About $20-$30-$50 for a good copy of a Van Gogh or other masterpiece.

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html](http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER45>
      Some art experts pointed to the painting's damaged condition and its questionable authenticity.

      This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality.

Interesting quote.

</comment><comment><USER46> Store of value comes to mind, a la crypto currency phenomena.

</comment><comment><USER47> Now this is freaky.

I thought I was done with HN for the evening after reading about this painting and a few other things.

So I opened my Kindle to read something else, and the advertising screen showed a book called _Typhoon Fury (The Oregon Files)_.

I grew up in Oregon, so I figured I would take a look.

The blurb began:

> Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half a billion dollars, > Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon soon find themselves in much deeper > waters.

<comment><USER48> That is data mining and advertising networks for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if its a person or a corporation/org that bought the painting. Number of people who may buy such a painting is probably only a handful.

</comment><comment><USER50> This as just reminded me of another news from 2014.

Stolen paintings hung on Italian factory worker's wall for almost 40 years

[https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-...](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen- paintings-italian-works-wall-40-years-gaugain-bonnard)

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder if the painting will end up in Geneva Free Port, "the greatest art collection no-one can see"

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment- arts-38167501](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38167501)

</comment><comment><USER52> lol, I guess there are three or four people in the world willing to pay that price. I'll be interested to see if this ever gets sold again and at what price.

I'm guessing the buyer (if it's a single person) is a royal, oligarch (could even be Putin) or someone in China.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is it too late to ask that how such art is valued? Of course I read about the theory that it depends on art dealers and a lot of things, less to do with quality of art. As quality of art is subjective after a certain point.

Just thought someone could guide me.

<comment><USER54> [https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2017/01/e...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2017/01/economist-explains-3)

> About half of the market is accounted for by sales through dealers, either > directly from the artist's studio (the "primary market") or by reselling a > work that has already been bought once (the "secondary market") and which is > now being sold on, often with several commissions being paid to > intermediaries along the way. The other half of the art market is made up of > sales by auction, a system that claims to be open and competitive, with both > artwork and potential bidders being visible to all. In reality, it can be as > secretive as the dealing world, with complex financial arrangements and > discounted commissions being not uncommon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> the interesting thing to me is how the face completely changed in the restoration(more like repainting)!

Jesus in color is very similar with our 21 century image of him, no mustache, eyes completely changed and ... the painting is relatively new compare to Jesus himself! and his image in the eyes of it followers changed so dramatically!

I am wondering what else could have changed in 2000 years!

</comment><comment><USER56> noob question, I wonder the reasons people are spending 100m+ on paintings.

is it possible that buying art is actually a great way of storing wealth? Like buying real estate but less flashy, easier to store, and easier to transport. I assume there aren't too many ways you can safely store 400m cash?

</comment><comment><USER57> It will look good on the wall of a safe.

</comment><comment><USER58> Why the $0.3M?

<comment><USER59> I didn't see a breakdown in the article, but it could have to do with the fees and or monetary conversion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is an absurdly rich guy (obviously) who is just bored out of his goddamn mind.

</comment><comment><USER61> Bill Gates is a big DaVinci fan. I bet he was the final bidder. He's one of the few that can buy it. Must be nice!

</comment><comment><USER62> To be fair, it's a frigging good painting.</comment>


Facebook security hole allows viewing of private photos - <AUTHOR> http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=140261733 <comment><USER2> This was indeed a bug, and shouldn't work any more. We turned off the system that lets you report content through this flow (and thus made this bug's code inaccessible) as soon as we became aware of the issue.

In the future, if you find a security / privacy bug on Facebook, feel free to report it via our whitehat program, which will get things looked at more quickly than random blog posts. You can get credit for the find and even make money with bug-bounty payouts: <http://www.facebook.com/whitehat/>.

For what it's worth, a few people were alluding to this meaning that we don't check privacy by default. In fact we do have a pretty robust default-deny system for running privacy checks. This was an edge case where it was forced to work in a way that was incorrect.

(I work at Facebook, but not on this system.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Knowing about your special page for reporting privacy holes would not change my decision to post it here. I think more good will come when media picks it up and some Facebook users realize that a company with your record of terrible privacy decisions and incompetence should not be used for posting anything private or even at all. If you were a startup stretched for resources or if this hole could've been exploited to install malware, I'd of course attempt to contact you first. $500 for reporting security holes for a company of your size is also insulting, BTW.

<comment><USER2> Ah, just realized you're the OP. I don't think there's anything particularly irresponsible about posting an already-public disclosure to HN or other aggregators. It's the first person posting it publicly without first privately disclosing that I find irresponsible.

<comment><USER3> May I ask for your opinion on the $500 bounty issue that was mentioned?

<comment><USER2> from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321366>:

> I think having a bug bounty program is actually a lot better than the vast > majority of sites / vendors that don't even have a whitehat [aka > responsible] disclosure program, let alone a bug bounty program. It's worth > noting that this is just the base bounty - I've seen us pay out a lot more > for good discoveries. $500 is also the base that Google and Mozilla offer > for their programs > (<http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/11/rewarding-w...>, > <http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty.html>). What would be a good > price, do you think? I'm not hooked in enough to know what black market > prices are like for bugs like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> General form appears to be as follows:

        http://www.facebook.com/ajax/report/social.php?
         __a=1&
         __d=1&
         attach_additional_photos=1&
         cid=((FBID))&
         content_type=0&
         h=((HASH BASED ON YOUR ACCOUNT))&
         phase=6&
         report_id=1&
         rid=((FBID))

After you get that initial hash then you can swap out the CID and the RID and get everyone else (I tried it for 3)... it's pretty easy.

This issue is probably going to make mainstream news by noon.

<comment><USER5> I tried to follow this url format by using Chrome Developer toolbar after clicking on "report this photo" of a non-private photo to extract my account hash id, rid and cid of the interested person. It's a GET according to Developer tool.

I get this however,

for (;;);{"__ar":1,"error":1357006,"errorSummary":"Don't have Permission","errorDescription":"You don't have sufficient permissions to do that.","payload":null}

Anyone know if it's already patched?

<comment><USER6> Get the same error, guess it is already fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Excellent find. You can even access around 25 photos from Mark Zuckerberg's profile.

<http://imgur.com/a/PrLrB> (ps: what a nice photo of them on halloween. very generous too I can see!)

<comment><USER8> Interesting that those are full-sized. It appeared in the forum post to only be giving access to thumbnail resizes of the original images.

<comment><USER9> Apparently, you can change a char in the thumb URL to get the full size image URL.

<comment><USER8> That seems to be true only of certain URLs. For instance, if it's all one long, encoded string follow by _a or _s then changing a or s to n produces the full-size image. However some thumbnails aren't formatted in this way and as far as I know can't be (easily) resized to full. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: it appears this same char is available in both URI formats I was referring to, so yes, full-size images are exposed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a security hole and nothing more. Developers make mistakes. This is not some vast conspiracy by Facebook to undermine your privacy. Why, of all places, is HackerNews unable to comprehend this?

<comment><USER11> If you see a comment that makes it sound like there's a vast conspiracy, please post in reply to that comment. I don't see any such comment. HN appears to be comprehending just fine.

<comment><USER12> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3319018>

This comment seems to argue that this was intentional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> someone [1] pulled this trick on Zuck's account [2]

1\. <http://twitter.com/#!/flyosity/status/144065873743839233>

2\. <http://imgur.com/a/PrLrB>

<comment><USER14> This is a little too meta... I tweeted that (that's me!) but the link to Zuck's photos was found further down in the comments here on HN. That's where I saw it.

<comment><USER15> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318903>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Funny how something like this is originally posted on a body building forum. I think the first reports of the recent Penn State scandal were posted there too (around a year ago.) Who would have thought that's where you'd first find such things?

<comment><USER17> Bodybuilding.com started as a forum about bodybuilding, but over the years morphed into a large general message board with all sorts of members.

Behold, "misc," the /b/ of bodybuilding.com: <http://forum.bodybuilding.com/forumdisplay.php?f=19>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If that doesn't prove that FB's developers aren't thinking about security, I don't know what would. Nobody who is in a culture of protecting security would even consider building this.

<comment><USER19> Or privacy. The assumption here is that if someone thinks you have an inappropriate photo, you now have no right to privacy?

<comment><USER20> I doubt that's way this happened. More likely, the person who implemented the "inappropriate photo"-feature wasn't fully aware of that the "Report"-functionally was enabled for everyone and not just your friends.

However, someone had to implement the backend for listing out those photos, and they clearly didn't think of access control, so there's at least _something_ fishy here…

<comment><USER21> It's not the first time either. Very similar breach of privacy happened when they implemented "view my profile as ..." functionality. You gained access to the private data of the user you were simulating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This isn't even a security hole, it's a complete security disaster. Did they even think through the process for five minutes before they built that? I mean, there aren't even any hacks involved.

Nice find.

<comment><USER23> > there aren't even any hacks involved

I doubt law enforcement would see it that way. Downloading photos with this method is not much different than guessing somebody's email or voicemail password; you're accessing something you're not supposed to.

See 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C) and § 2701.

<comment><USER24> This is probably closer to guessing someone's phone number than their password.

<comment><USER25> I wouldn't bet jail time that a judge sees it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Facebook is an excellent personal marketing tool. However, I think at this point you'd have to be a fool to put material on it you want to be private. Of course, what PT Barnum said....

<comment><USER27> "Of course, what PT Barnum said..."

Or possibly didn't say:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theres_a_sucker_born_every_minu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theres_a_sucker_born_every_minute)

<comment><USER28> It looks like HN removed the apostrophe so here is a bit.ly version that works.

<http://bit.ly/kyYCxk>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seriously, FB, do you have no QA whatsoever?

I wonder whether this is limited to photos in the profile album, or whatever it is called, these days.

EDIT: I'll add this suggestion that I've made before, since you're going to have a LOT of people wanting to delete photos, if this problem proves to be significant. Delegate someone to spend a few hours writing a routine that will replace a cached photo with an identically sized, all white (or black, blue, whatever), no metadata generated image. So, you don't have to rebuild your image caches in order to ensure that a photo is really gone (well, except for the fact that it once existed, as demonstrated by the working URL and white image).

I've read the excuse made in the past that aggressive, large, integrated image caches made actual photo deletion "not an option". As long as you can overwrite existing bits in place, this should solve that. (Although I don't know about all the tagging you've now since overlaid onto the images.)

<comment><USER30> isn't there another problem with facebook, where none of your photos are ever deleted and can be accessed by the direct url at any time?

<comment><USER29> I haven't kept up, but IIRC that used to be the case. And that's what I'm addressing.

A few years ago, I believe, they explained that they generate these ginormous image caches where, IIRC, individual images are not distinct files.

My point is, regardless, if you can find the image (and its extent), and if the cache data are still write-able, then overlay a generated "blank" image onto the cached image, in place. You still have some data leakage, in that the working URL confirms that there was an image having that URL. But for most cases, I believe this would suffice.

I guess they'd also have to track down and overwrite the various thumbnail versions, but if their systems can already find these in the course of their normal work, this shouldn't be a problem.

As for overlaid tag data and whatnot, I'm not sure what to suggest. At a first pass, I'd suggest just deleting (or "offlining" or whatever, given that FB apparently never really deletes anything) that data. But I don't know what continuing dependencies that might break.)

EDIT: I should add that I don't know whether/how such image caches are replicated. And perpetuating such an overwrite against multiple replications might not be easy / something the existing design supports.

Nonetheless, I think it's something they _should_ support. At a minimum, when a user really wants to delete an image, then overwrite its segment of whatever image cache file with a "blank" equivalent.

Although... then you get into what may be legally required and/or prudent, from FB's perspective, to retain.

I'll stick to the simplistic user perspective: When I say delete, I mean _delete_.

<comment><USER31> Maybe that was true in the past, but today when you delete your data it is gone. Trust me, I wrote it myself. The law enforcement guidelines that have been circulating recently corroborate this.

<comment><USER29> Thank you for the update/clarification.

I deleted a couple of pictures this morning (nothing 'nekkid' ;-) and will have a look to confirm that they are indeed "gone" (inaccessible via direct URL -- albeit the URL of a CDN).

Would you happen to have the identity or URL of a specific guideline that you could point to?

EDIT: I just checked the URL of an image I deleted about an hour and a half ago, and that image is still accessible. It is under akamaihd.net; nonetheless, it is still accessible.

<comment><USER31> Things take a while to fall out of CDN cache, I forget what the TTL is these days but it should be reasonable.

<comment><USER29> Understandable. I'll check again, a bit later.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

<comment><USER29> About 6:20 since deletion, and the images are still accessible at their akamaihd.net addresses. I'll have a look again tomorrow.

<comment><USER31> We are probably talking days, not hours here. But your underlying photo metadata is already gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Seems to be already fixed. The last option described in this tutorial is not there anylonger.

<comment><USER33> Reading the thread, it seems that it doesn't work for all accounts and there is speculation it only works if you have us english locale.

<comment><USER34> Created a throwaway account to test this against my own account, didn't work even with US English set. There's more to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It would seem based on the screenshot ("Message x to ask them to remove the photo...") that they must have specific permissions set to cause this to work as I can't replicate on people that I can't message.

<comment><USER36> I disagree. You can message people that you aren't friends with. See the first screen shot ("add her as a friend or send her a message").

I think the reason it only works on some profiles it that perhaps the profile pictures are the only ones that it will show you. And some people only have one profile photo. (This is an untested theory / guess.)

<comment><USER34> Tested this theory against my account using another throwaway one. My real account has several profile pictures and the exploit didn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Boy, I wonder what the FTC will say about this...

</comment><comment><USER38> This is how many days after the FTC settlement?

</comment><comment><USER39> The more often this happens, maybe the more normal people will understand that anything put online should be considered to be public. The illusion of the walled garden eventually comes down, either through a vulnerability, policy change, or simply user error.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how people discover this

</comment><comment><USER41> still works.

</comment><comment><USER42> mirror to exploit instructions + pictures <http://www.multiupload.com/RC184ELRZ9>

</comment><comment><USER43> This is why I never post private pictures on Facebook

</comment><comment><USER44> Ugh, JW blue

</comment><comment><USER45> Moving fast and breaking things.

</comment><comment><USER46> Don't do it, kids. You'll find photos of that girl you pined for 2 years after you never made your move and she's way more fun and in way better shape than you ever guessed. It's rough to ruin the fantasy, but torture to augment it.</comment>


Ask HN: What project are you currently working on? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> This post right here is my MVP.

I'm working on a startup-life-broadcasting idea. Basically, you follow me through the process of building my company. Hopefully you're building yours too at the same time. Maybe this is much more transparent than anything you've paid attention to before. So, not just blog posts about how things are going down (ala patio11 or Nathan Barry), but videos, audio recording, actual code, bank statements... like, lots of details, very open. Lots of live- broadcasting. Kinda like the way Justin.tv started.

<comment><USER3> Great username.

I've often thought/day-dreamed about such an idea. Not just for a start-up but for a big well established company. If everything was open how would it affect their business dealings etcetera.

I imagine going into negotiations where the opposing party has watched your board of director meetings, looked at your profit margins and ascertained all manner of information pertinent to the negotiations and completely owning the negotiations.

I'd like to think this volatility/risk would occur only in the initial stages and in the long run it would lead to a powerful new business structure. Idealism isn't always reality however.

Given start-ups are fragile taking on this extra risk could be the death pill. How do you propose to deal with these issues if/when they arise?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm working a community to helping startups find good help building out financial projections, revenue and cost drivers, market positioning, etc all things that are needed for raising funding. Building out models correctly can be a huge time suck for a startup without someone with financial background on the fouding team.

<http://www.startupfinancials.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm working on a simple python/flask website for sport bets that only accepts bitcoins.

It's not really a serious project it's just to practice web development. I also wanted to make something that works with "real" money but isn't that complex to implement doesn't require accounts etc, so bitcoin seemed like a good choice.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am working on a school reviews by students website. I deployed it recently and asked people at hacker news to review it and got some valuable feedback. I am doing lots of updates and will be redeploy this weekend. You can get the link from my profile .

</comment><comment><USER7> As part of my senior thesis, I'm working on finding sentence similarity using semantic graphs such as WordNet and ConceptNet. I'm going to use this research to fine-tune some algorithms to use for an intelligent note-taking system I have been working on.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm currently working on adding volume controls (pretty much done) and the ability to use songs already on the device to my Android app StreamClock.

</comment><comment><USER9> Working on a neat way of broadcasting a photo slideshow from your smartphone to any computer screen. No accounts, no cables, no nothing.

<comment><USER10> Solved by uploading to an imgur-like service and producing a link that can be emailed/texted? Or something fancier?

<comment><USER9> Nothing like that. Something fancier.

<comment><USER9> I've set up a landing page and a demo video. You can check them out here: <http://www.screenit.io>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Medrill ( <http://www.medrill.com> ), a (re)search engine about the medical research

</comment><comment><USER12> A small restful web API built on Clojure (with Liberator and Korma) with a client written in ClojureScript, as a proof-of-concept.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm working on a special Windows command line shell aimed for beginners, a trading card game, and an HTML5 game framework/engine.

</comment><comment><USER14> An interactive graphical map application for navigating medical/healthcare processes from a patient perspective.

</comment><comment><USER10> Social web app for elderly in nursing homes, iOS color scheme templates, and a HN reader for iPad and iPhone.

<comment><USER15> social web app for elderly in nursing homes is a great idea, I think that market is really underserved.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I think it's a great project with quite a bit of potential. You can see the progress at www.mykinapp.com if you're curious. It's in kind of rough shape at the moment, but coming along...

<comment><USER15> I'm from kentucky so the name definitely strikes my fancy... I think there's a lot of potential there. I think the HIPPA issues can be a possible minefield. I took care of my grandmother for months before she passed and the two features that we most would have liked would have been: 1) tracking medication dosage. She was taking this shifting cocktail of drugs 4 times a day towards the end. 2) Maintaining some short videos or self reported mood ratings would be very helpful, this data could be provided to health care providers.

<comment><USER10> I'm glad you like the name! It was established like a year and a half ago. Since then someone developed some... not-so-great social app with the same name. We haven't really dealt with that yet.

HIPAA issues are going to be a nightmare, I agree. I think before we truly launch we're going to have to bring someone with thorough domain knowledge in for that. I went over-board with encryption, pretty much everything in the database is encrypted but naturally it's going to be some quirk with legalese that will catch us up. "The patient's mood is technically a medical condition and so cannot be displayed without waiver a-123" or something.

I appreciate your two ideas. Medication is something we're VERY hesitant to approach. God forbid a query gets screwed up (or even user error) and they end up with double dosages. Maybe later on, but for now... they can send messages with reminders or something :)

The mood ratings are a wonderful idea. I will be adding that to our to-do list. :)

<comment><USER15> I think you can opt out of a lot of the legal responsibility with proper terms of service and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm porting a game I wrote in 1981 for the HP 41CV calculator to Android.

</comment><comment><USER17> Gamified Goal Achievement Platform

</comment><comment><USER18>
      A) The save Mz charitable fund.
      B) Some stupid comic that I am creatively stuck on.
      C) A raging fever, which is apparently far more productive than either A or B
      D) Other super secret projects that I can't mention here.
      E) Breaking the rules by cracking jokes on HN.

</comment><comment><USER19> working on creating a complete solution for the age old sales problems

</comment><comment><USER20> Job boards for startups.

</comment><comment><USER21> le meme face generator

</comment><comment><USER22> working on 2 things...redesign and new better features for <http://whatabout.me> and a collaboration and notes exchange platform for students and teachers</comment>


Vintageous: Vim emulation for Sublime Text 3 - <AUTHOR> http://guillermooo.bitbucket.org/Vintageous/ <comment><USER2> For the vim -> Sumblime switchers out there on HN, what caused you to switch?

I use vim exclusively but I'm not a religious zealot about technology. I've noticed all my students are using Sublime these days. Is it just the latest TextMate (i.e., the best GUI option if you don't like command-line editors) or are there truly features that will convert command-line folks to the GUI?

I'm really hoping for an editor like Brackets (Adobe) to take off, which has really good support for cross editor-browser communication for web development.

<comment><USER3> I've tried a few times and just can't do it. The completion isn't actually that great (not that VIm completion plugins are very good either) and Vintage mode is at best a poor-mans VIm emulation. There is no sane way to control splits with the keyboard and block selections just don't work well. Search and replace functionality is also not great compared to my experience with VIm. Too many deal breakers for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> You likely will still not be convinced, but some of those issues (off the top of my head, at least the splits with keyboard) seem to be addressed by Vintageous (and some [plugins][0] for it).

[0]: [https://github.com/rodcloutier/Vintageous- Origami](https://github.com/rodcloutier/Vintageous-Origami) "Vintageous Origami"

<comment><USER3> I've used Origami before, but Sublime's splitting is just fundamentally flawed, simply having some keyboard shortcuts can't fix that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, I love vim mode for Sublime. As the end user, what will be different about this package? Better support for commands?

Additionally, is there a page that lists how much progress has been made? Is the support at least at the same level of Vintage's yet?

<comment><USER5> I'd love to know this too, but the author doesn't seem interested in explaining it: [https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous/issues/267](https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous/issues/267)

I installed it, and it works exactly the same, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER4> Wow, he/she does seem to be quite disinterested. That's disappointing. It would be really useful to know..

<comment><USER6> > disinterested

 _un_ interested. I know we're all supposed to be descriptivists now, but I can't let such a useful distinction fade away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone out there who still want to use Vim but with Sublime features. I've created back then the project Subvim: [https://github.com/fatih/subvim](https://github.com/fatih/subvim)

It's Vim combined with SublimeText features. It has even SublimeText like shortcuts. If you are curious give it a try and see if it fits you :)

</comment><comment> w-m As someone who just started another attempt at picking up vim (actually vintageous in this case) last week: how do I keep myself from forgetting that I'm in a vim editor?

It'll happen every so often that I'm in the middle of something, switch to Sublime and just start typing - as it's second nature. By the time I notice whats going on, I typed half a dozen characters. I'll curse, undo the random commands, get into insert mode and will effectively have lost my train of thought.

It may sound ridiculous, but it's actually the biggest hindrance to adopting vim for me. Am I the only one with this problem?

<comment><USER8> > how do I keep myself from forgetting that I'm in a vim editor

I think actually using vim would help...

Edit: Sorry, that's a bit snarky. All I can say is that vim proficiency comes from muscle memory. Once you adopt vim and feel the "vim flow," it's really quite painful/distracting to use a modeless editor.

It's to the point where I was doing a phone interview recently where they had me code in a live editor. Because I'm so used to vim I had a really hard time just writing the code without a bunch of random-looking keystrokes. Fortunately the person on the other end recognized them as vim commands, but it was still distracting.

<comment> w-m I have no problem with you being frank.

My goal is to become more efficient at editing files, the typing/changing/refactoring part especially. I don't want a new way of opening/saving/handling files, search/replace, version control or debugging - it would just be too much to learn all at once.

So I thought Vintageous would be a great opportunity for me to learn the text editing part of vim without burning down my ecosystem. You're right, it's probably part of what leads to my confusion. Still, I thought I'd ask, maybe someone took the same route and managed it somehow.

<comment><USER8> If you don't mind me being frank, it's really not that much to learn.

Opening? :e [filename]

Saving? :w [filename]

Handling? be more specific?

Search? /term<CR>

Find next: n

Find previous: N

Find word under cursor: *

Replace all instances? :%s/term to find/new term/g

Replace all instances on line: :s/term to find/new term/g

Replace first instance on line: :s/term to find/new term

Version control? Why do you want version control in your editor? Either way, take a look at fugitive if you must, but using the command line is better...

All of that's starting in command mode, of course.

Finally, take a look at the vim videos on [http://destroyallsoftware.com](http://destroyallsoftware.com) \- they're what got me to say "yeah, I need to spend some time on this..."

<comment> w-m For each of these actions there's not much to learn, but it piles up, and my whole development process grinds to a halt if I have to look up yet another thing.

With handling I meant stuff like syntax coloring, tab completion, tabbed views, side-by-side views, line lengths that adapt to the Terminal windows' width - the small things.

Thanks for the list of commands, maybe it'll push me over the edge to do the right thing. Destroy All Software looks interesting, but that's quite a lot of money.

<comment><USER8> Oh wow, he really changed his pricing model. It used to be a $10/mo subscription w/ access to all videos. Sorry about that!

> maybe it'll push me over the edge to do the right thing

Oh, there's no "right thing" here, there's just efficient and inefficient. Don't let some asshole like me tell you "you're doing it wrong!"

I hear you on the frustrating process breakdown during the learning curve. However, if you want to learn it I promise that it's much quicker to go the painful route and just dive in. Start off with just the basics, then every time something feels repetitive, go look it up. When you go to look something up, start with the internal help system, then move on to Google. Do ":help help" to learn how to use the help system.

For me it took about a day before I wasn't stopping every 5-10 minutes to look something up, a week before I wasn't stopping every hour, and I still run into stuff every couple of days where I say to myself "okay, this is too repetitive, what's the magic vim way?"

Something that also helped me - if you want to be fast, remember that the slowest thing you can do is read. So in terms of movements, it's bad to just keep tapping 'j/k' until you see what you want. That's like the O(n) approach. Then there's search with an incomplete key. That's like O(logN). But then there's search with a good key that you know will hit what you want first try - that's O(1). Then there's the command-t plugin and/or the :vim command...

Also, either get used to using ctrl-c instead of ESC, or remap your capslock key to ESC. I prefer the latter. Not sure how to do it on Windows, but on Linux see xmodmap, and on OS X see PCKeyboardHack.

Syntax highlighting/indenting: add the following to ~/.vimrc

      filetype on
      filetype plugin on
      filetype indent on

      syntax on

Tabs - see :help tabpage.txt, though I prefer windows (see below).

Completion's a bit weird in vim, but for starters there's always ctrl-n/ctrl-p in edit mode. For more advanced stuff, see Omni completion: [http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip1591](http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip1591)

For side-by-side split views, check out :help windows. Ctrl-w, n creates a new horizontally-split window; Ctrl-w, v creates a new vertically split window; Ctrl-w, c closes the current window; Ctrl-w, j/k/h/l switches to the next window up/down/left/right; Ctrl-w, J/K/H/L moves window to the extreme.

As a cheat, I've got the following in my .vimrc for nice split screen (window) buffers that automagically resize based on which one is currently in focus (taken from destroy all software):

      set winwidth=84
      " We have to have a winheight bigger than we want to set winminheight. But if
      " we set winheight to be huge before winminheight, the winminheight set will
      " fail.
      set winheight=5
      set winminheight=5
      set winheight=999

Wow, okay... this is a lot longer than I initially intended. Anyway, good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm very much hoping they allow find in Visual mode. I enabled Vintage mode in ST 2 a little while back and love it, but visual find would be very handy.

Edit: it does. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER10> This works a lot better than the included "Vintage" mode.

I've spent the majority of the past 15 years in vi(m), and have recently switched to Sublime for working on projects with many, many files, plus mouse support.

</comment><comment><USER8> Am I missing something here? Sublime's an editor last I checked. So's vim. If you want a vim-flavored editor, why not just, I dunno... use vim?

Wouldn't this be a bit like building a 'vim mode' for emacs?

<comment><USER11> Sublime Text has a much better GUI front-end than gvim or MacVim. So for someone who doesn't want to work in a terminal and wants to use a GUI based editor, they may feel that a fully featured vim mode in Sublime Text would offer the best of both worlds: rich keyboard-controlled text editing and a beautiful front-end GUI.

I just use vim inside tmux, but that's mostly because I have to write a significant amount of code on a remote machine via ssh.

Also, I will say that even as a dedicated vim user I wouldn't be thrilled to use vim without a large number of plugins that more or less just offer features something like Sublime Text can offer natively, like a decent file tree browser. So a vim mode in Sublime Text can make the barrier to entry lower by reducing the need for the modern programmer to load up vim with plugins.

<comment><USER8> The combination of using vim and having to debug stuff in awkward places (on boats in rough seas, 20ft in the air on hydraulic scaffolding, in garages) with text-only interfaces (serial terminals), has totally changed me. I went from having 4 monitors to working on a 13" rMBP.

My personal preference is vim in a quake-style terminal (yakuake on linux or iTerm2's hotkey window in OS X) with a minimal amount of transparency so that I can "read through" the terminal and see whatever's in the browser/document window behind. After getting this set up, it's going to take a lot for me to switch back to an IDE full time.

And yeah - gotta love screen/tmux.

I personally try to use a minimal number of plugins. Command-t is the only one I use daily. I gave eclim a shot for java stuff, but ultimately found I didn't use it very often. It's better to just not fight "the vim way," though I definitely see how that's a barrier.

<comment><USER11> I still love using multiple monitors (I currently dedicate an entire 27" monitor to a single full-screen terminal with tmux as the "window manager"), but it is really nice having the know-how to do the full development cycle from a terminal. I used to be afraid of command-line stuff and I think it really held me back in some ways. Because I used the terminal only when forced to I never could remember how to actually use it beyond the most trivial stuff, which just made it more frustrating when I had to. And I never could find a true tiling window manager on OS X that I liked; tmux works great for that out of the box. I still want to experiment with an xmonad-based workflow on Linux, but I haven't really had a reason to yet.

My job forced me to get over that, and though I can still appreciate a good GUI-based editor I don't feel any need to switch to one anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm stuck on ST version 2 because a plugin I bought and use daily (Sublime FTP) doesn't work with it yet.

What's the point of having a great editor if the ecosystem is this crappy?

Guess that concludes my great closed source editor experiment, Vim here I come.

<comment><USER13> > What's the point of having a great editor if the ecosystem is this crappy?

ST3 hasn't even been officially released yet. I think you're getting ahead of yourself: you could also always fork & update the package yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I don't think you can fork it, since it's a paid plugin and I don't think the source is published.</comment></comment></comment>


PayPal's new refund policy has sellers up in arms – TechSpot - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/news/79545-paypal-new-refund-policy-has-sellers-up-arms.html <comment><USER2> This will hurt individuals who sell at very small volumes the most. It will now be more risky for individuals to sell their used stuff on eBay.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was about to ebay a few thousand in old devices and collectibles. Looks like I am better of selling to a reseller than trying myself. I already have had problems with paypal in their previous incarnations and the bad taste persists.</comment>


Be Professional or Be Edgy: How Context Can Keep Everyone Happy - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/be-professional-or-be-edgy-how-context-can-keep-everyone-happy-1709.html <comment><USER2> I think powerful ideas should speak for themselves, and not rely on the "edginess" (read: trendiness) of the presenter to come across crystal-clear.

If the Rails community were full of powerful ideas they wouldn't have problems attracting and maintaining an audience of like-minded folk (including women). I think, rather, for the most part they are trendoids with MacBooks, seeking ego gratification by demonstrating "projector code" (i.e., code that looks great on a projector and works great when you demo it to your prezo audience but which may have serious issues (maintainability, scalability, composability with other people's code, etc.) in the real world). The result is the current situation: de-evolution into MTV presentation, where the goal is to be as shocking as possible in order to keep the audience's attention.

<comment><AUTHOR> _If the Rails community were full of powerful ideas they wouldn't have problems attracting and maintaining an audience of like-minded folk (including women)._

So I guess the math, computer science, and physics communities are also full of Macbook-toting "trendoids" who lack "powerful ideas."

I don't get why you'd cheapen the point you were making with gratuitous Rails bashing.

<comment><USER2> I don't see math, CS, or physics scholars giving presentations with the kind of obnoxious 'tude that seems endemic to the rails community. For the most part -- if they're any good -- they let the concepts they're presenting speak for themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> The comment I was responding to implied that the reason why Rails doesn't have a lot of women in its community is because it isn't "full of powerful ideas." That is, of course, nonsense.

<comment><USER2> I see more women involved in academic math and CS than I do in Rails (and many other industrial computing communities for that regard). And Rails conferences used to be a lot more female-friendly than now. Women are turned off when your ego exceeds your actual capability, and somewhere along the way the Rails community took the ego path.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Payment issues with Mastercard. 2Checkout unable to fix the issue in 4 weeks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webengage.com/2012/11/19/payment-issues-with-mastercard-2checkout-you-listening/?ref=HN

<comment><AUTHOR> Surprisingly, there's very little uproar about it. Is it working for most of you as merchants?</comment>


To Prevent Climate Catastrophe We Must Learn Cooperation and Solidarity - <AUTHOR> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/to-prevent-climate-catastrophe-we-must-learn-cooperation-and-solidarity <comment><USER2> In other words, we're doomed.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I see comments I've upvoted? - <AUTHOR>

The "Saved Stories" feature shows me stories I've upvoted. How can I do the same for comments? <comment><USER2> There's no way to do that.</comment>


Bing: Microsoft Prepares For War With A Revamped Search Engine (Screenshots) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/bing-microsoft-prepares-for-war-with-a-revamped-search-engine-screenshots/

<comment><USER2> I may be in the minority, but I think this is exciting. We need more competition in search. I'm not sure if Microsoft is the right company for the job, but I'm glad they finally seem to be taking search seriously.

I'm also glad they went with Bing and not Sift, as we bought BingSEO.com recently. ;)

<comment><USER3> I hope they start using it on MSDN. Until they can get their shit together with regard to search on their own properties, I don't have a lot of hope for them indexing the web.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely. There's a real culture problem at Microsoft that is hostile to search. I think its absolutely fair to say that Microsoft has treated search as an afterthought in their products, and it shows.

I recently saw Microsoft's Mike Gannotti speak about building Sharepoint portals for large organizations, and he said "if a user has to search you have failed them." The argument was that if a proper hierarchical navigation was in place a user should never have to search.

To me that's heresy, and I wasn't shy about saying so. The retort was that I saw search as a panacea, or worse as an excuse to be lazy about information architecture. Of course neither is true. I believe great IA begets great search and that both are important and worth getting right.

So I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm hoping Bing can work on both fronts, by applying taxonomy to unstructured information _when it makes sense_ and staying out of the way the rest of the time. With the wealth of talent at Microsoft I think they are capable of building a great search engine, but only if they can really see search as more than an ad platform.

<comment><USER3> It's really unfortunate, because they have a terrible bitrot problem as well. If I try to find documentation on products older than 3 or 4 years old, at some point in the hunt for the correct documents, I'll end up at a 404 error. What makes it terrible is that I'll get that 404 from a page that I've been linked to from inside of MSDN, or from the search. I just use Google to search MSDN now, and it saves me tons of time (and frustration).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Less is more. Microsoft just doesn't seem to get that. This interface looks like a convoluted piece of crap that changes based on what I search on. No thanks.

<comment><USER5> Plus, everyone knows that the first step in great UI development is covering an application's background in stock photos.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. I quite like the background photos on the current Live.com. It's a welcome change from the boring white pages.

I do agree that the results interface looks cluttered. Granted, they are trying to present a lot of information, but they should find a way to simplify it. I suspect they'll change it up in time and after a real world launch.

<comment><USER5> _"I quite like..."_

But that's just a taste preference (though I agree with the sentiment; I personally don't like white backgrounds in general). Plus, all indications are that the images are just a haphazard marketing decision. Good design controls and deliberately influences user behavior patterns. This just tries to look pretty and not be google, disregarding any impact that might have on usability or functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's different and I like the thesis behind it: "decision engine". A good way to understand search is to see how people make the decisions to go about what they're searching for. Keyword they start out with, its variants, the final answer/result, and what form of search they should be using. travel? local? image? etc. It's all going to come down to execution though (Cliche, but relevant here more than ever). If it sucks, then 80 mil in advertising wont work well. BUT if it is something that people have to say "yo, you NEED to try this", then things could get interesting.

<comment><USER8> With something like this, you don't want to overtly advertise. You want word of mouth to develop. I think the advertisement will sometimes work against them. I know I'm wary of ads for search -- most things advertised for search have been a disappointment to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bing, like Wolfram Alpha, includes various web site functionality in the search engine itself.

I don't have much confidence in this approach.

</comment><comment> andrewl-hn I don't know, to me it looks a lot like ask.com

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not wrap these new features into "Live", it seems like they are also going to be competing with themselves.

The tag line is horrible: "When it comes to decisions that matter, Bing & Decide." I prefer the name "Live", since it seems more relevant.

<comment><USER2> Live is tough to use as a verb, and they use Live for a number of other products (e.g. Xbox Live, Windows Live, MSN Live Spaces). As a result they have to describe the search as Live Search, and they don't own LiveSearch.com.

So even though live.com is an awesome domain it wasn't going to work for their search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> looks like a portal type page is generated for each search. could be superior to google for shopping. though amazon already covers that base fairly well.

<comment><USER12> The form for searching out plane tickets and such was the only thing that jumped out at me. It might be a winner if they make it very easy to buy things through the search engine page...eg you search for 'Great New Movie', get a list of cinemas local to your zip, pick the theater+showtime you want, and then get a 'buy' button, all without leaving the search environment.

But things like that have been tried many times before. And I'm sure Google could resurrect Checkout or Wallet or whatever it was called.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone remember Paul and Jamie?

If we reconsider Bing, Bang, and the Boom then this seems to be pretty far away from Boom.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Kumo" is about a billion times better as a name than "Bing".

</comment><comment><USER15> As always, hype followed by failure.

Learn from Apple, hush followed by success.

<comment><USER8> That basically amounts to figuring out how to outsource your hype. (Best way: to your customers!)</comment></comment>


Microsoft gets $11 million from stimulus for campus bridge - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/31/bridge.microsoft/index.html

<comment><USER2> I think ARRA is a giant boondoggle, but this expenditure seems perfectly inkeeping with its intended purpose. Microsoft is the dominant economic force in the area, and this is an investment to allow it to conduct commerce more efficiently. If you support the stimulus package at all (though I don't), I don't see how you can oppose this provision.

<comment><USER3> While I could potentially agree in premise that a bridge may qualify for stimulus money I can't imagine what they've proposed is the most fiscally responsible way to build it. If they truly believe that the bridge qualifies for stimulus money then they should provide the most financially modest plan that would accomplish their goals. I highly doubt that a 36 million dollar bridge is it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have no clue if this is going to be truly good for the local economy, but honestly it looks like spending money for the sake of spending it. Unless building infrastructure has a lasting effect there's no point in building it.

Some of the stimulus money seems to be going towards useless projects, simply to create jobs. Surely there's a lot of places where stimulus money can be spent that will have a long lasting effect on the local economy.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is no way this is going to be truly good for the local economy, that bridge may make it _easier_, but it won't make it _possible_ (meaning, transit was already ver, very possible). Redmond is tiny, if you can't get motivated enough to drive to the next bridge to get Taco Time and bolster the local economy, a closer one isn't going to motivate you.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Our traffic studies show that Microsoft traffic would be about 42 percent of the bridge, yet Microsoft is paying for about 50 percent of the bridge, so we think we are getting fair value."

Politicians...

<comment><USER7> even worse, local politicians.</comment></comment>


Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/fbi-spyware-pro.html <comment><USER2> The spyware itself is boring as it just collects IP addresses and similar info. What is interesting, on the other hand, is that the payload is delivered through a single page view. Either FBI is using 0-day exploits or has other "understandings" with OS/Browser vendors. And some systems are more vulnerable than others apparently:

>>> "In these instances, the CIPAV did not deliver its payload because of system incompatibility."

0-day browser exploits are hard to come by, even for the FBI.

<comment><USER3> Or they're just using any of a hundred older browser vulnerabilities, and targeting people who haven't patched.

Though, for what it's worth, 0-day browser exploits may not be hard to come by for the FBI; government agencies are vulnerability buyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So what's the next step in this cat & mouse security game? Chrome-like sandboxing? OS level virtualization of every process? Is the end in sight?

</comment><comment><USER5> Fun question: Is it illegal for anti-viruses to detect and prevent this?</comment>


IEEE top programming languages (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-2018-top-programming-languages <comment><AUTHOR> Thought it was very interesting that python was considered an embedded language for this list. Has anyone here actually used python in an embdedded environment before?</comment>


Google's Login Chief Would Rather You Use Apple's Sign-In Than Using Passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/12/18662594/google-login-apple-sso-account-security-passwords-mark-risher <comment><USER2> Here's the quote (possibly edited by The Verge):

> Even if they're clicking our competitors button when they're logging into > sites, that's still way better than typing in a bespoke username and > password, or more commonly, a recycled username and password.</comment>