Spaced Repetition is Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/spaced_repetition_is_awesome.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=feedly&utm_reader=feedly&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> I used to blog about spaced repetition systems five years ago back when it was mostly just language geeks into it: [http://toshuo.com/2009/review-anki- spaced-repetition-learnin...](http://toshuo.com/2009/review-anki-spaced- repetition-learning-system/)

It's undeniable that SRS is great for remembering discrete chunks of information, but making it the primary portion of language learning efforts is generally a mistake since learning a language is not simply a process of memorizing a dictionary, word by word. Unlike an SRS, Extensive Reading will also help solidify a learner's understanding of collocations and semantics. It teaches more of the target language's culture, too.

There are two places in language learning where an SRS is fantastic. It's a great way to speed up learning the very basic scaffold necessary for engaging with graded readers or children's materials. Basic phonics training is particularly low-hanging fruit. Another great use is for memorizing words that one will very rarely hear in daily life and yet are the kinds of words everyone would be expected to know.

I recently tried Duolingo. I like some aspects of it, but it's really too bad that it mixes comprehension and production in all the activities. Far more practice time should be spent on comprehension (both listening and reading) than on production. This is true at every level but even more vital for beginners. Typing out words in a foreign language just isn't the best use of a beginner's study time.

<comment><USER3> I really wish there was a way for Duolingo to test comprehension without translating. Far too often translations are non-intuitive, especially with idioms. I don't know how they could do that, though.

Edit - an example from Duolingo: Ihm gehören viele Zeitungen.

Ihm means he/him

gehören means to be a part of or to belong to, from Duolingo:

(to) be part of

(we/they) belong to

(we/they) are part of

viele Zeitungen is many newspapers.

But the sentence does not translate as "he belongs to many newspapers". What it actually means is "He owns many newspapers". When Duolingo asks you to translate, there's no good way to translate that as a student. That is a complex sentence that, for all intents and purposes, can only be understood in German. You can't translate it without rewording it. Duolingo doesn't mention that gehören can mean "to own" in certain circumstances, because they can't give you the connotation of every situation that arises. Huge unsolved problem in language learning that would be great if it were fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From his examples I wonder if these apps are good for grammar too, given that the two Portuguese sentences he writes have wrong grammar and/or declination.

1) _Mulheres bonitas sao muito motivado._ Literally "Beautiful women are very motivated", though the correct one (for gender and number) should be "Mulheres bonitas são muito motivadAS". Not sure what sense this makes though, I guess he wanted to say beautiful women were a good motivation (for him to learn Portuguese), "Mulheres bonitas são boa motivação".

2) (NSFW) _Sua rabos e bonita_ should better be "seu rabo é bonito", i.e. (literal translation) "your a__ is nice". Wrong gender in "your" and "nice" and wrong number in a __.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. I did those from memory, still learning. Never claimed anki will make you perfect instantly.

<comment><USER6> Is that really on Duolingo? The wording "seu rabo é bonito" would be considered hugely gross regardless of context or location.

<comment><USER7> I think it makes you look like a prude or a child more than gross. There are widely used slang in both european and brazilian variants if you want to make those kinds of remarks. Not to mention all the african variants I'm not really familiar with.

<comment><USER8> As a Brazilian, I agree with ricardobeat. I don't think I ever saw a situation where saying 'rabo' as a slang for ass would be considered even slightly prudish or childish, but always at the very least explicit. The african variations for 'ass' are much more tame (used on TV broadcasts, for example).

<comment><USER7> As a portuguese, that's how it's used here. A sanitized version of slang.

<comment><USER8> Oh, I didn't know that. Well, that's a good reminder that pt and pt-BR have several vocabulary differences. A few more I can remember would be the words "bicha" (pt: queue, pt-BR: male homossexual) and "durex" (pt: condom, pt-BR: a kind of adhesive tape).

<comment><USER7> "bicha" has already picked up your meaning here in the last years.

Endless source of crappy jokes anytime someone says they waited somewhere. :|

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There was a discussion of spaced repetition here two days ago. Does this mean the optimum time for the next spaced repetition discussion is now about 10 days from now?

<comment><USER10> Could be an alternate view of the "saved stories" list. Since it would be repeated only to those who saved the story, it could increase increase ongoing engagement with the story. Would need a way to terminate the repetition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those of you using Emacs and org-mode org-drill is a great option, [http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org- drill.html](http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> After reading all the comments posted here till now, I see that they are almost all about foreign language learning, with few mentioning other applications of spaced repetition systems. I had better apply my own background in foreign language learning (I learned Chinese as a second language beginning at age seventeen well enough to spend most of my twenties working as a language teacher, translator, and interpreter) to letting my friends here on HN know what else is useful to do for learning a human language well.

I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

[http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...](http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm)

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032)

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

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

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

[http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html](http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html)

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

[http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html](http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html)

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese- language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

[http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional- Reference-...](http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference- Grammar/dp/0520066103/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar- Grammars...](http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar- Grammars/dp/0415150329/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English- Language...](http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English- Language/dp/0582517346/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English- Language/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English- Language/dp/0521431468/)

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

<comment><USER13> Learning in context is really an underrated aspect of language learning. Some more tips:

1) Podcasts: you can handpick a theme you like, so you can transfer your knowledge between languages to get all subtleties.

2) Graphic Novels (aka: comics): you see the dialogs with a corresponding image. You mix narrative aspects of a book, where you read whats in the mind of the characters and see with a corresponding image.

3) Movies: you should watch them with subtitles in the spoken language.

4) Kindle Touch/Paperwhite: you will easily click in a word to see its definition.

<comment><USER14> _> 3) Movies: you should watch them with subtitles in the spoken language._

I can't believe I never thought to do this. Great idea, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those looking for SRS built around keyboard shortcuts and programming editors give [https://www.shortcutfoo.com](https://www.shortcutfoo.com) a try. The learn section uses an SRS algorithm and uses timing to determine the rating (vs selecting a number). shameless plug: I built it :)

</comment><comment><USER16> One of the hardest things for spacedrrepetition software is finding/creating decks of words to learn. Does anyone have any recommendations for how to go about that?

<comment><USER17> I've mostly used Anki for learning Japanese, so I'm biased towards that specific language. There are however some awesome free tools floating around that take the pain out of creating flashcards:

-[1] EPWING2Anki creates flashcards from a wordlist and a dictionary in EPWING format

-[2] Sub2srs creates flashcards based on a movie and subtitle files

It's also possible to use e.g. spreadsheets to mass-create cards. Further tools analyze e.g. a selection of ebooks and create word frequency lists of unknown words, Combined those tools have greatly assisted my progress.

[1]: [http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/](http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/)

[2]: [http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475](http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475)

<comment><USER18> User hermanschaaf and I live in Japan and set out to build a fast Japanese dictionary: [http://nihongo.io](http://nihongo.io)

Source is here: [http://github.com/gojp](http://github.com/gojp)

Take a look if you have time, feature requests are very welcome :)

<comment><USER19> Once you study Japanese for any amount of time romaji becomes more of a liability than anything else. The thing I dislike most about most these one search bar dictionaries is there is no way to ignore romaji input. Its one of the main reasons I still use jisho.org so often and I'm very unexcited about their new beta. Adding the ability to turn it off would be a great start

<comment><USER18> I understand what you mean; I've been studying Japanese for five years now and learned hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks of class. I have always told new learners to do that first as you rarely see romaji used in Japan.

Do you mean that on jisho you always use the Japanese search box?

<comment><USER19> When I'm searching Japanese yes. Jisho splits up English and Japanese so that I don't have to filter through completely unrelated results if an English word just happens to be made up letters that could be romaji. I also usually type into both boxes if I have an idea of the word or I want a sentence example of the word used in a specific way

<comment><USER18> Ah, I think I get it. When searching for the term "shin" for example, it would ignore any English definition matches such as shin guard, and only match Japanese terms containing it, like 心配.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sivers on SRS (great info): [http://sivers.org/srs](http://sivers.org/srs)

<comment><USER21> great link

I'd love to see more non-foreign language SRS applications

seems like every college textbook/class (or really any textbook/class) should have a SRS application to go with it

wouldn't it be nice if all those freshman level lessons had gotten implanted in your memory

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since I started SRS (first Anki and now even more successful with memrise) I have to agree that it's the most awesome thing I encountered so far learning languages. To say the truth due to lazyness and being tired after work I haven't found a reasonable alternative to learn thousands of vocabs. So before SRS I really was screwed, only learning very, very slowly.

</comment><comment><USER5> Let me just say this post was mainly to inform my readers that SRS exists. A far better submission for HN would have been gwerns review article, with science and such.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm close to launching a memory trainer for remembering Names and Faces. It uses a spaced repetition algorithm based on Super Memo 2 (Anki does as well, but I'm not sure how far it has evolved from its SM2 roots): [http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm](http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm)

I've also found SRS to be incredibly effective when combined with other mnemonic techniques, while learning French. I wrote about this recently: [http://www.ubermemory.com/blog/understanding- mnemonics](http://www.ubermemory.com/blog/understanding-mnemonics)

</comment><comment><USER24> I wrote a free spaced-repetition app for iOS a while back:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memorize- me!/id578975798?mt=...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memorize- me!/id578975798?mt=8)

My plan was to release packs of things to memorize (e.g. Famous Quotes, Ten Commandments, etc.), but with 0-10 downloads a week, I just gave up on it. If there's some interest, I'll consider releasing an update.

<comment><USER25> So did another HN user :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152267)

<comment><USER24> Nice, haha, there's probably a dozen or so such apps. My motivation was to make an app that pings me when it's time to remember a certain item. So I could be anywhere and all of a sudden I'd get a message, "Propranolol (INN) is a sympatholytic non-selective beta blocker". I was in med school at the time.

<comment><USER26> At Kenhub[0], we built an anatomy learning platform that uses spaced repetition. The algorithm might not be as elaborate, but the basic concept is the same.

In our case, it's a little different from a flashcard system, because anatomy structures are typically grouped and asked together (e.g. choose the right term from the following images, choose the correct term in the picture from the following list etc). There's also more complex topics such as origin, insertion, innervation, function - which covers the way anatomy structures 'interact' (e.g. this muscle flexes the arm...).

[0] [https://www.kenhub.com](https://www.kenhub.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The biggest list of learning apps, many of which do support SRS is [http://www.flashcardapps.info/](http://www.flashcardapps.info/)

It's iOS only but my point is to show how there is a huge variety even for iOS users.

I did my own free SRS flashcards app and focus much on cooperative content creation: [https://fluxcards.de/](https://fluxcards.de/)

My suggestion is to try it out if you never did as it is truly amazing. It can't replace a teacher or actually using what you are trying to learn but it can make sure 100% that you learn faster and never forget facts that you want to make sure you know. Try Anki or any other other SRS app if you don't want to fall for my bold self-advertisement but try it out. It's worth it and should be known by all.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've almost finished building a system for learning language specifically using spaced repetition.

Instead of basic flash cards, reads you the word (audio); then if you don't get it you'll be shown the word (visual); then you'll be read the word in context; then shown the word in context.

The system doesn't just drill you on single words, it tests comprehension on full sentences and documents too.

I'm currently putting the last polishes on to make sure new users can easily start learning. If you're interested, I'll announce the beta launch on my mailing list at www.hotglot.com , or if you're super keen email me at james @ hotglot.com and I'll give access to the alpha version.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can testify to the benefits of SR apps too after using Skritter to improve Chinese reading and writing. Once you get the ball rolling you quickly find yourself easily memorising characters and in some cases even predicting the formation of characters you've never met before. For anyone who wants to learn written Chinese or Japanese I would highly recommend it!

That said though, for learning the spoken language there's no substitute for communicating with native speakers on a regular basis. SR tools simply help as an additional tool to speed up your spoken learning or help with reading/writing.

[http://www.skritter.com/](http://www.skritter.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Spaced repetition is indeed awesome. For a month now I've been working through a deck of hard English vocabulary using Anki, and already my speech and reading comprehension capabilities have increased dramatically.

<comment><USER31> Care to link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can anyone explain how a good SRS system should work? Are there any deficiencies in the current apps? I've got several iOS language apps and I'm looking for features for my next release. I just added about 1000 pictures so it's easier to learn by association, rather than word pairs e.g. gato/cat. Here's my Spanish app.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish- lite/id388918463?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish- lite/id388918463?mt=8)

<comment><USER19> I personally wouldn't use your app because it doesn't look like you can add or modify cards and list and doesn't appear to robust enough to be the main way of studying.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, I've got to find a way to allow for word lists to be imported. iOS doesn't really have a good way to import csv. iOS 8 has some data sharing that I'll look into.

<comment><USER10> Dropbox?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think spaced repetition is over-hyped and under-understood.

In language learning, it can have some benefit, but I think duolingo's approach, which does not obsess over computing repetition times, more effective than flash card software.

I found that in order to use a new word, 6 repetitions isn't enough, you rather need a few hundreds to make it stick. Also waiting a few weeks until the next repetition is just a waste of time...

</comment><comment><USER34> A very cool thing with Anki (with contrast with Duolingo) is that it is free software (as in free speech), and is distributed on F-Droid [https://f-droid.org](https://f-droid.org) for Android users who do not have Google play.

</comment><comment><USER35> Read [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22815528-anki- essentials](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22815528-anki-essentials) (Anki Essentials) to get started.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have used Anki. I really wish they had paid high quality decks to study.

</comment><comment><USER37> 1\. Flash cards are boring as hell

2\. Memorizing a bunch of vocabulary does _not_ help you learn the language. If anything, it might be a hinderance.

Bear with me here.

The main obstacle in learning a language is not the acquisition of vocabulary per se, but getting familiar and acquainted with how ideas are expressed in the language.

The most common mistake that beginners make is they try to form the sentence in their native language, then translate it to the target language. This approach is guaranteed to make you form BAD sentences.

You need to be exposed to not just vocabulary, but phrases, collocations[0], and idioms.

You must train your mind to use the expressions of your target language from the start .. _without_ starting from some expression in your native language.

To get there, you need to be exposed to tons of natural speech/writings/dialogs in the target language.

That's why a vocabulary list on its own is pretty useless.

If you're going to use flashcards, let the entries be phrases and collocations, instead of single words.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation)

<comment><USER38> My experience has been exactly the opposite. When speaking or reading Spanish, German or French, I never think "gee, if only I knew more grammar" but almost every day I think "well, it sure would be nice if I knew the word for ___."

It seems your advice is directed towards language learners who think they might get away with just learning words and not bothering at all with grammar, collocations, expressions and all of the other things you need to truly grasp a foreign language, like practicing listening comprehension. For those people, your advice makes sense. But realistically, even among flash card aficionados, how many people do you figure think learning a language is as easy as just learning words? Do those people even exist?

<comment><USER37> Ah, but the word for X in this context is not necessarily the same word you should use in some other arbitrary context.

<comment><USER38> And many people to add hints to their cards (e.g. to distinguish _prevoir quelqu 'un_ from _prevoir quelque chose_ ) as well as add example sentences – or, as you suggested, have sentence decks in addition to word decks. But even regardless of that, not using flash cards because sometimes contextless learning is not ideal would be throwing away the baby with the bathwater; the increase in speed at which you can learn vocabulary is just immense with SRS.

<comment><USER37> > not using flash cards because sometimes contextless learning is not ideal > would be throwing away the baby with the bathwater

No, that would only be the case if one decided to stop learning the language all together because they think they'll never be fluent.

I'm proposing to learn the language properly: by exposing yourself to as much material as you can, for prolonged periods of time.

<comment><USER38> > I'm proposing to learn the language properly: by exposing yourself to as > much material as you can, for prolonged periods of time.

... which is what you need for mastery, I absolutely agree (it's what I do too!), but it's very, very slow.

<comment><USER37> It's not really very slow. It took me about one year to learn English when I arrived to Canada (I was 16).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Overtime is Morphine - <AUTHOR> http://erniemiller.org/2013/07/16/overtime-is-morphine/ <comment><USER2> Simple solution (from the software engineer's perspective): demand overtime pay. If you are officially expected to work 40h/week for certain amount of money, but in practise you're "expected" to work 50h/week, then your real wage is actually 20% lower than what your contract says. And that is pretty similar to theft.

It's time to start comparing wages instead of absolute income.

<comment><USER3> One should never work for any management that values _hours spent_ rather than _value created._ But then, it also translates to _work visibly._

<comment><USER4> By extension, you should avoid working for companies whose customers pay more attention to hours billed than products delivered.

<comment><USER3> This advise (sentence) is worth its weight in pure gold. Kudos!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately there is a long history of management viewing overtime as equivalent to a person's 'dedication' to the project.

One of my college Computer Science professors, the one I liked and respected the most, worked at Novell for quite a while back in the day. Not sure if his entire 20+ year programming career was spent there before going back to school to get his PhD. In any event, at one point he was a team lead at Novell. He made sure to hire, train and develop the right kind of programmers for his team. The kind that write tests, solid code, and practice good engineering principles.

To my memory, when he was telling us this story, the overtime he and his team worked was somewhere between minimal to non-existant. Their code was clean, well-tested, and worked. So at 5pm they would go home.

There was another team that was always scrambling at the last minute, and clocking lots of overtime.

When it came time for company/management recognition, which team received the accolades? The team that clocked all that overtime, because they MUST have been working harder to get things done than the other team. Right?

</comment><comment><USER3> True story: a CMM Level 5 software organization had precisely the exact same issue. There was a PM, who would literally spend the entire day wasting time and start real work around 5 PM. Then work till late night.

Once he advised me, "Always make sure that you send an e-mail, late at night to anybody in the organization, before you call it day."

"Why?"

To make it short, per his advise, the single most important thing about those e-mails, wasn't the contents, but just the _timestamp._

<comment><USER6> You would think that PM would have learned about the feature that quite a few email systems have to send an email at a particular time! (e.g. Outlook has "Do not deliver before" option).

<comment><USER3> :). The logs at physical security could not be faked: they used to have a pen and paper system; it was a little more than a decade ago.

<comment><USER4> The last place I worked, 18 months ago, that required after-hours logs still used pen and paper. Plus, they left the log books out all the time, so it was easy when you signed in to see who else was coming in after hours, going back weeks sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the article, and would love to apply, as "management" in my own company, effective measures to cure the pain instead of treat it. In fact, I generally try to do just that.

But what this is basically suggesting is "locking out" your employer. While I agree that is absolutely what should happen, doing this without the leadership AND the developer in agreement about why sounds like disaster.

I know it's likely impossible to capture all the work and discussion it takes to reshape a company's process in a blog post, but I feel like if I had a dependence on OT in my company (as the "patient"), and a lockout went into effect, I would be focusing on the lockout, not every other problem in the company that caused it (which as management, it's my job to figure _those_ problems out). What is being suggested is basically arm twisting to get what you want :/

That never works when you cause more pain to the company than it's able to alleviate over time. They'll eventually get tired of the pain and move on to another drug unless you succeed in getting them to understand.

I feel like better advice is to tell developers that they need to discuss this with their direct reports, boss, whomever, and talk about the problem and WHY you'll actually make the company better gains at sustainable pace. And by all means, point out and suggest ways for your boss to improve things.

If after educating your "patient" the issue still persists, of course, twist away. But not everyone in this world needs these sorts of tactics to improve their workplace, and even in those workplaces, there are likely more successful ways to cure the pain, not just treat it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The suggestion isn't to introduce the lockout after the fact. In fact, what you're describing would be the exact thing that would happen in the metaphor -- acute withdrawal symptoms. The suggestion is to institute the lockout before dependency has a chance to develop.

<comment><USER7> Ah, well, I completely agree there :) Forgive me, but I didn't really catch the preventative portion of the essay. Looking back over it, I can certainly see your point above and we're more than likely "violently agreeing", heh.

Seems like we're both saying "an ounce of prevention..." here

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, absolutely. Thanks for the follow-up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consider the industry you are going into before complaining about overtime. I am expected to work long over time hours on a regular (daily) basis during busy seasons without extra compensation and this is what I expected going in. Highly skilled individuals who have extensive training will be 'put to work' in order to derive the benefits of this training by their employer.

You are willing to put up with this behavior because you believe that one day your training and experience will lead you to a very high paying job. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, the professionals, all understand that there is a necessary grind in order to prove your worth.

If you are not cut out for it, there is always work as a desk clerk making above minimum wage working 9-430. Yes, some employers have very relax policies relating to getting work done. But who are the ones producing the highest quality innovative work? The people working hard on a daily basis.

<comment><USER9> What a disgusting post. "Pay your dues just like I did". Just because you chose to be exploited with the hope that you'll some day get compensated for it doesn't mean the model is right. And your quip about where the highest quality innovate work comes from is unproven and probably unprovable.

<comment><USER8> Maybe the issue here is that I know 100% that the effort I put in now will lead me to success in the future.

<comment><USER9> If you "know" that then you're wrong. Success isn't a guarantee even if you work hard. Ask Nikola Tesla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Overtime makes sense from an _employer 's_ point of view. That's why the problem will persist for employees.

<comment><USER11> If it really was a consistent win for the employers, then perhaps it is a non- issue in the larger sense -- employees just need to negotiate hours vs. compensation. Whatever.

I think the deeper insight of TFA is that there may be short term gains for the employer, but the long term results are muddy or outright negative -- management becomes addicted to poor management habits that hurt the company health in myriad ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Your website breaks the back button.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does? I have had no issues with the back button. What are you seeing, exactly?

<comment><USER13> Don't you love problem reports with absolutely no details whatsoever?

I tested your site with Chrome 28.0.1500.72 m. The back button worked fine.

I then tested your site with Internet Explorer 9.0.18 and the back button worked fine.

I then tested your site with Firefox 22 and the back button worked fine.</comment></comment></comment>


My personal story on the unethical behaviors of the TechCode accelerator - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@OmidAminfar/my-personal-story-on-the-unethical-behaviors-of-a-silicon-valley-accelerator-e3818609021#.1a88odxi2 <comment><USER2> A bit of Occam's Razor might be called for before suggesting hidden agendas and IP theft by foreign governments.

It sounds like a new program that overpromised, didn't plan well, and struggled to deliver would have been a similar experience.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps Hanlon's razor too: never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.

<comment><USER4> I like this a lot - always give others the benefit of the doubt!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI two days after writing this article he shut down his startup [https://medium.com/@OmidAminfar/the-end-of-my-rewarding- star...](https://medium.com/@OmidAminfar/the-end-of-my-rewarding-startup- journey-27c2986eb110) so while I am not disputing the accuracy of his statements there may be other factors as work as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you should only call a program an accelerator if they invest at the start in all participants. Otherwise a word like incubator or competition probably makes more sense.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's no barrier-to-entry for a shop to call themselves an "accelerator."

Reputation*3.

YC, 500 and some others. Doing due-diligence, building rapport with key people and managing expectations can help. Also, big names have a lot more to lose (rep) and so tend to be safer bets.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read this earlier today, and I don't remember the author calling out the accelerator by name. Was this a later edit?</comment>


Any advice on choosing what should be the dominant colour(s) for your start up? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am working as a freelance PA for a start-up company that was set up on July 1st and they received a customer after 6 days and they need to have a logo and a professional invoice so that they can get paid properly. The start up is not fully sure on what they are looking for in a logo as they wasn't planning on getting a logo designed for another 1-2 months. In short, does anyone have any good advice or experience in choosing what should be the dominant color(s) for their start up? (The start-up has spent a few hours thinking about it and has come up with 2 alternatives: Red, Black & White or Brown & Yellow. But the company is worried that they don't have any robust reasoning or logic to back up these suggestions). I am hoping somebody else on this forum may have been through a similar experience and can offer some advice. <comment><USER2> Have the start-up write down all the attributes they want their product to have. If you were selling magnificent trained wolves, for instance, you would want the customer to think, upon seeing the wolves: "What proud, mysterious, noble, cunning, ruthless, snow-dappled, and primeval creatures." You would neither want nor expect the customer to generate such adjectives if you were selling, for instance, hamsters.

At that juncture I would repair to a high mountain top, away from the start-up client, one hand lazily petting the head of my fearsome trained wolf, as I mused to myself on the adjectives I had just collected. What colors would they inspire? What noises, what textures, what tastes? I would write all these down in a second list.

Then I would descend back to the company of my human friends and ask people not in the start-up what the second list made them think of, as a cross-check against the first. If you start off with "petwolfco: proud, mysterious, ruthless, loyal", and come back from the mountain with "petwolfco: confetti colors, Comic Sans, merry polka music, Shirley Temples", you had better go back to the top of the mountain to reflect some more.

When my impulses and my third party's impulses at last concurred ("petwolfco: grey, ragged, minimalistic, narrow sans-serif, stunning small highlights in stunning blood red"), I would craft my new logo, working all through the night into the early dawn. As the sun rose pink and gold over the sleeping world, I would deliver that logo into the hands of my start-up client in the form of an extremely high resolution image they could shrink down later if needed. The start-up would gasp in marveling wonder, and clutch the SVG file gratefully to its chest. My pet wolf would nod gravely, and we would stalk wordlessly back into the mountains.

</comment><comment><USER3> Advice from someone who has thought about the problem but doesn't necessarily have any clue what he's talking about:

First, spend some time Googling "color and emotions" and "color and behavior". Think about how you want the customer to react to the brand.

Next, I would consider A/B testing it. :-) I'm guessing that's not a good option in your case, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> Try this page. It has a lot of various color palettes that can maybe give you some inspiration. [http://www.colourlovers.com/](http://www.colourlovers.com/)

<comment><USER5> take a look at this one as well: [http://startupsavant.com/business-logo- colors](http://startupsavant.com/business-logo-colors)

its basic approach to coloring - nothing too deterministic

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMHO, you can't focus-group and statistically analyze _everything_. If your entrepreneurs can't even be allowed to pick their own favorite colors, for fear of making a sub-market-optimal decision, then why bother even going into business for themselves? I'd tell them that you're going to go with hot pink and hunter orange unless they give you other instructions by the end of the day.</comment>


Palo Alto firm sues Yelp trolls for $9.3M - <AUTHOR> https://www.scribd.com/doc/269357564/

<comment><AUTHOR> The link goes to the lawsuit filing. Some background information:

Link Corporation is a building contractor in the South Bay. The owner claims that every single negative review they've ever received is fake. Link has filed suit against 8 "John Doe" reviewers for $1,165,000 each, and is attempting to identify them via subpoenas.

IMHO, some of the negative reviews do look suspicious but this could backfire horribly if any legitimate customers got caught in the net.

Most of the reviews quoted in the suit can be found here:

[http://www.yelp.com/not_recommended_reviews/link- corporation...](http://www.yelp.com/not_recommended_reviews/link-corporation- palo-alto)

The Yelp listing shows an unusual flurry of activity, both positive and negative, in early June.

</comment><comment><USER2> Oh goodey... Annother Amy's Baking Company ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy's_Baking_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy's_Baking_Company)) in the making

 _grabs popcorn_</comment>


How An Apple Star Lost His Luster At JC Penney - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/business/how-an-apple-star-lost-his-luster-at-penneys.html?hp <comment><USER2> Obligatory Warren Buffet quote: "I've said many times that when a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

<comment><USER3> I love that quote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm one of the weirdos who always shopped at JC Penney.

They were always good at stocking good quality stuff at decent prices. I happen to be big & tall guy and have a terrible time finding clothes -- I can't shop at most mall retailers at all.

The problem with the transformation is that they did too much, too fast, and didn't understand the business. Johnson didn't just stay away from HQ, he never went to a store. THe shining halo of Apple conceals a lot of problems at the Apple store as well... The place is packed, but people have no idea how to actually check out. I usually see one or two frustrated shoppers give up whenever I am at the apple store.

They did things that were great ideas, like not stuffing racks into the aisles and getting rid of the cheap gizmos and merchandising. But they did everything overnight and didn't replace the dingy old carpets that were concealed by the racks. Good ideas implemented in a vacuum don't always work out well.

And, since tall guys aren't cool enough, they slashed the inventory of clothes that fit me.

I felt bad when I bought a bunch of shirts for $10 on,ine that are priced at $40 elsewhere in the big fire sale last week.

<comment><USER3> Me too. It was fat (tall) people clothing that was more conservatively styled, which far better suits my personal wants than the chain fat peoples store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _By early fall 2011, Mr. Johnson was tackling Penney's pricing, which he > thought used too many discounts. He ignored a study Penney had just > completed on customer preferences, and gave merchants a one-sheet grid > explaining what prices they could use._

> _"Ron's response at the time was, just like at Apple, customers don't always > know what they want," said an executive who advocated testing. "We're not > going to test it — we're going to roll it out."_

Uh, OK...as others have pointed out, it's a far different game selling top of the line future-thinking tech products and selling affordable clothing...and this difference would be especially pronounced in the context of this "customer doesn't know best" philosophy.

I mean, that's partially true no matter what the price point of the product is...but the difference is that when you're selling expensive products with high profit margins, you have much more runway to deliver that special thing/innovation that customers don't yet know they want. How was that not obvious to Johnson?

<comment><USER6> IIRC, he did have a stint at Target, revamping a lot of their merchandising, so it's not like he had no experience with commodity/dept-store stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Before Jobs agreed to go back to Apple, he made sure he could pretty much do anything he wanted and never get fired. A lot of the changes he made were just as disruptive, if not more so, than the ones Johnson made.

Johnson tried to do that, and ran into two problems.

1 - He's not Steve Jobs, nobody is. He simply didn't have that 6th sense to make business decisions blindly and almost always be right.

2 - He didn't have that much freedom. Jobs would have stayed in power until Apple went bankrupt. They were that desperate and he had that much power.

<comment><USER8> Jobs refined one thing at a time over many, many iterations to an incredibly well thought-out polish of design and functionality. His marketing was also incredibly well thought out, carefully iterated, over a long time.

Johnson just seemed to think he could change stuff he didn't like with no iterations and no need to think it through. Plus he had no special focus, unlike Jobs with one key product at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Martha is the key," he wrote in an October 2011 e-mail to himself.

How did this make it into the article? Was it a company-wide mail headed, "Open Letter To Me"? Is this his personal note-taking strategy, and he let the Times read it?

<comment><USER10> This email was likely unearthed during pre-trial discovery (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)>) when Macy's sued Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) for breach of contract when MSLO decided to start selling its formerly-exclusive-to-Macy's products to JCPenney. It was probably found by searching for the keyword "Martha" in the emails of certain top JCPenney executives. That trial has already revealed many important emails about the Martha/JCPenney deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While Apple Stores was a brand new project, turnover at JCPanny required completely different strategy and most importantly managing expectations of both internal and external stakeholders i.e. customers.

This story again proves that flexibility and desire to learn matters much more than hard skills and experience. Apple approach only works for Apple.

</comment><comment><USER12> How do these CEOs make the noobest mistake? Know your customer base! JC Penney was never an upscale department store. Did he all of the sudden think it would become one with a stagnant economy? Common sense. I think this guy lucky with Apple. He was just at the right place, at the right time.

<comment><USER13> Apologies in advance. You may have a lot of domain knowledge that I don't know about, but...

This sounds like armchair quarterbacking. It's easy on the surface to criticize, but we don't really know all the factors that lead to Johnson's decisions. I don't think it's fair to try to boil it down so much.

It's like someone criticizing a development project without knowing the budgetary or time constraints. Yeah, it would have been better to do it _this_ way, but _that_ way assumed an infinite budget and time.

<comment><USER3> Really?

Have you been in a Pennys? It's about as upscale as Dennys, and as hip as the dentist. On the other hand, it did offer consistent value and a consistent shopping experience. He tried to do in a year, what needed ten years or more to do, and failed. His failure is not unsurprising to any of us who have been in the store. Pennys, was so un-hip it almost became hip, but it rightly so had a image of dowdy women wearing housecoats shopping on a Tuesday.

<comment><USER13> I have been to Penny's many times. I don't necessarily disagree with your observation of the store, the point I was trying to make is that judging the dude on the visual data we have is unfair.

I don't know the guy, but I assume he's not stupid, so if what you believe is so obvious, it must have been obvious to him too. But, for some reason he chose a certain strategy and we don't know exactly why. We don't have all the data.

All I'm trying to say is that it is easy to criticize, but I don't feel comfortable criticizing someone who knows a lot more than me in a certain area.

It's fucking hard to be CEO and I don't feel comfortable being an armchair CEO.

<comment><USER14> What is your point? Only CEOs can criticize CEOs now?

It didn't seem like he knew what he was doing. Most people knew that he was going to land on his ass. He duly did. Criticism fully warranted, armchair or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting personal take, but my impression is that JCP is in a slowly dying industry. Does anyone under 30 shop at department stores anymore?

<comment><USER16> Yes, specially when you have kids. And a lot kidless men and women buy shirts/suits and outfits/dresses at department stores like Macy's.

As far as I can tell, at least.

<comment><USER17> Yup Macy's is a pretty good option for decently priced suits, socks, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _By early fall 2011, Mr. Johnson was tackling Penney's pricing, which he thought used too many discounts. He ignored a study Penney had just completed on customer preferences, and gave merchants a one-sheet grid explaining what prices they could use._

I think that in JC Penney's case, excessive discounting may not have been a merchandising strategy but rather a symptom of allocation mismatches in their supply chain, leaving them with excess inventory (and associated costs). Their mistake was hiring a merchandising guy who didn't get this and tried to eliminate the discounts without fixing the underlying allocation problems.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ouch! It's a bad sign when you starve your team of useful data!

"He revoked access to Penney's sales data for all but the top executives. But that took away valuable information: the buyer for, say, men's big and tall could not see how women's plus size was performing."

<comment><USER20> Yeah, that one really stuck out to me as well. Maybe it's just a matter of perspective, but if I were runny JCP, I'd make sure everybody down to the janitor had access to that stuff. And everybody, including the janitor, would have a channel to make sure their ideas could make it all the way to the top and get heard, if they had merit.

<comment><USER21> Apple is probably one of the most locked-down-as-a-matter-of-course companies on the planet. I guess he took that philosophy with him.

<comment><USER19> I bet that's it. And/or, "hey the sales are falling! Better hide that bad news" Both are bad ideas, blinding them just when they need the data.

I'd rather risk having my competitors occasionally get some of my data, than risk not sharing data freely within my own team.

The competition is likely already getting those signals anyway, and the larger your organization, the more likely that you've got many internal blind spots that you really need to address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "But his Silicon Valley ways — evident from a showy party in early 2012 that he threw to celebrate himself and his plans, replete with a light show, fake snow and flowing liquor — jangled from the start."

SV is all about show and lights? The article is sensationalizing. Most SV companies I know are about knuckling down and delivering. Parties about a CEO? Maybe circa 2000.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's only only place where you can (or could) get the greatest phone, laptops, tablets etc: the Apple store. They had huge margins and great demand so they acted as they didn't want to nickle and dime their customers.

Now let me see where else I can buy some decent clothes, dishes and sheets...

<comment><USER24> > Now let me see where else I can buy some decent clothes, dishes and > sheets...

Actually an interesting question. I remember going to department stores, and malls more often. But thinking about it, I haven't been doing that lately. So where to do people get their clothes, dishes and sheets?

I pick stuff up on Amazon often. That would be tough with clothes having to send them back many times when they don't fit. Maybe I just reached a point when I could afford to get more quality stuff that doesn't need replaced so I just don't shop for it as much.

Is there a website for example that if I send my measurements, they can show me a couple of models dressed in a few styles, and I would pick which ones I like (like Netflix does with movies). It would figure out my style, then the would just filter or sort clothes I would like and would fit me. I would pay for that. It would save me time for example.</comment></comment>


For $185k Brands Can (soon) Apply For Their Own TLD - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-internet-names-idUSTRE75G49W20110617

<comment><USER2> Honestly, who cares?

(From a consumer's standpoint. Apple, microsoft, et al will care _a lot_ , which I'll explain)

I predict that nobody will use this. People like Apple will probably buy .mac and .apple, windows will buy .windows etc., but as a poster pointed out below, they will probably just redirect to the .com

This really feels like a money grab by ICANN; and is in pretty poor form.

Consider non-technical people. They're _just_ figuring out .com. Most of them don't understand subdomains that aren't www.

I'll see people type things like www.images.google.com or www.mail.yahoo.com or www.mail.yahoo.com etc. etc.

Even if it was .apple, you'd still have huge parts of their customer base typing something.apple.com -- getting the .apple accomplishes nothing but increased revenue for ICANN.

.com is a brand name. .ly is cute, .net is geeky, .org is kindof cool, but at the end, .com is what most people understand.

But I'm sure that ICANN will enjoy the $185k ransom that they're going to effectively be holding over everybody's head when this goes live!

"Pay us $185k or .apple is going to go to somebody other than you. Be a shame if that happened, wouldn't it?"

Disgusting.

<comment><USER3> I don't think so...

in any time, you could write "apple" on your navigator, and instead of performing an automatic google search for apple, it will send you to apple website...

the same for a lot of words like google

<comment><USER2> Will the browsers play ball with that, though? Technically, the tld is .apple, so you'd have to type .apple into the browser.

Google isn't a charity; they want you typing "apple" into the address bar, then seeing ads for apple before clicking on apple.com. As it stands now, they could accomplish exactly what you're saying.

Check to see if there is a ".com" associated with the single word you type, and take you there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like such a bad idea and ICANN seems to be far more motivated by revenue than they should be.

The ICANN CEO is getting around $1 million/year in compensation.

I bet there is a line of smart internet people willing to run ICANN who are far more altruistic.

</comment><comment><USER5> From the perspective of brands, this may be a big deal. $185k is a drop in the bucket, and large organizations with marketing budgets held in different divisions often have very different infrastructure (sometimes because those divisions are separate companies that have been acquired, have a separate P&L, etc). New product launches have to deal with domain availability and possible trademark squatters. Some brands have different websites for different segments of their audience. Some brands launch websites just to support a specific marketing effort, such as cause marketing or event support.

This is absolutely a head-scratcher for small orgs, but is pretty convenient (a convenience easily worth $185k) for the big brands. I think their example of .apple is a silly one. A better example might be P&G, J&J, Pfizer, The Pepsi Company, etc.

<comment><USER6> Apple's market cap is 300 billion. Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble are both at 180 billion. Pfizer is 160 billion and Pepsi is 110 billion. So why exactly is Apple a silly example?

<comment><USER7> Notice he's talking about brands - because Apple don't have multiple brands, apple.com is fine.

But for big companies in the food & beverage, homecare sectors etc, they have a _lot_ of sub brands. They want to de-emphasise their company name (because nobody cares about them) and sell the brand.

For example, do you know off the top of your head the brands of P&G?

However, if I told you Old Spice, Gilette, Oral-B, Pantene etc, it starts to make a lot more sense to have .oldspice, .gillette .oralb .pantene and so on.

<comment><USER8> That makes no sense.

<http://apple/> might make sense.

But what would .pantene do? blonde.prov.pantene? They are not going to subdomain them under .pg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I look forward to the day when I'm not sure if something is a URL or not.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have trouble seeing why maps.google is such a meaningful step from maps.google.com.

Less to type... Maybe non-technical users who never understood why the hell everything ended with ".com" will be more comfortable.

Reminds me of when the W3C decided we should be able to do <header> instead of <div id="header">.

</comment><comment><USER11> If large companies have the extra cash to drop extending their online identities in this very small way, then there's really no harm to the broader eco-system of domains.

There will likely be a few "fun" uses of this, say drink.coke, but coke.com will still remain the far more compelling implementation and their own personal TLDs will simply become presences that offer little practical benefits, but were bought simply because they were there -- and the press coverage that the purchase may achieve may in fact just garner equal to or more than the $185,000 they originally spent.

Overall, this will likely just be a small boon for the kind of consultancy firms mentioned in the original article: but it will offer little in the way of actual affects to the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this mean domains like <http://snort.coke> are going to be available? Rock on!

</comment><comment><USER13> Since this is going to effect large brands because you need to pay to play, this is going to make phishing attempts even more effective. Not because the phisher will have the .ebay or .paypal, but it will make the URL even hard to dechiper whether it is legit or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think companies will just register these and re-direct to their .com

More and more adverts as well are now carrying facebook URLs rather than traditional URLs, so it will be interesting to see how marketing departments respond to this and what they do.

</comment><comment><USER14> _scratches head_

This is news to me. Perhaps the author of the post has gotten some basic facts wrong?

<comment><USER15> Nope.

[http://www.cojk.com/icann-issues-a-timeline-for-approval- of-...](http://www.cojk.com/icann-issues-a-timeline-for-approval-of-new-gtld- procedures-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-or-collision-course-for-brand- owners/)

<http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/comments-7-en.htm>

I'm not invested in the domain marketplace, but somehow this gives me a bad feeling about exclusionary access to what is sure to be a land grab. Who is going to get the .music or .law domains, for example? I understand they want someone who is capable of operating a domain registry and can put up $185,000, but there's a rather disheartening 'pay to play' feel to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So if this passed, who would be in control of a TLD like .london? What about .porn?

</comment><comment><USER17> Hopefully this implodes the absurdity that is .com squatting.

<comment><USER18> I suspect the squatting will just continue on the new TLDs.

<comment><USER19> At 185k a pop? Plus I believe you also have to prove a legitimate claim on the name.

<comment><USER20> There are .coms that sell for millions, so $185k for a .whatever domain seems reasonable (well, not really, but it's reasonable to expect people will pay for it). I wonder who can legitimately claim .food, or .cars, though.

Great idea by ICANN, though. They've successfully just turned domains into beanie babies and magic TG cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Enjoy the biggest regexp breakage since Y2K in 3 ... 2 ... 1

</comment><comment><USER22> .yc ?

<comment><USER23> h.ackernews</comment></comment>


The Beginning of Big Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ducu/the-beginning-of-big-twitter-7d8417cd1743

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a related post about a Twitter data mining exercise I did on the Hacker News community.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252252)

And the outcome of this exercise - Top 1000 Most Followed by HNers

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252323)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How do you cope with this problem? How many accounts do you follow? Can you recommend any solution to filter out the noise?</comment>


Shopify turns into an iPad marketplace today by launching "Catalog"  - <AUTHOR> http://www.shopify.com/blog/6845306-a-preview-of-catalog-our-new-ipad-shopping-app

<comment><USER2> What if they went from being a store-builder to being an online mall? I hope that's true! At first glance that sounds like a brilliant idea

<comment><USER3> I'd say it's been a long time coming!

<comment><USER4> Isn't that what Amazon really is?

<comment><USER5> Amazon seems more like a Costco analog in the online shopping space to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like an obvious thing to do with such a huge database of products/shops. As always with Shopify they also mastered the design and UX. Nice!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ...another article about the app. Looks like they're going to try and compete with Etsy, Fab, and Gilt. [http://www.ecommerce- platforms.com/articles/shopify-releases...](http://www.ecommerce- platforms.com/articles/shopify-releases-new-ipad-shopping-app-to-compete-with- etsy-fab-gilt/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks really nice! Now port it to Android.

</comment><comment><USER8> That first screenshot looks almost identical to the new iPad app store UI. Mostly the top 'slider'.</comment>


The search engine manipulation effect and its possible impact on elections [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf <comment><USER2> Robert Epstein has given a couple of talks on the search engine effect at Stanford which have been published to YouTube.

Stanford Seminar - Unethical Algorithms of Massive Scale - YouTube Video for epstein youtube stanford ▶ 1:23:56 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7qT_38iRSc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7qT_38iRSc) Jun 8, 2017 - Uploaded by stanfordonline EE380: Computer Systems Colloquium Seminar Unethical Algorithms of Massive Scale: New Data, a New ...

Stanford Seminar - The Search Engine Manipulation Effect ... - YouTube Video for epstein youtube stanford search engine ▶ 1:14:04 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSN6LE06J54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSN6LE06J54)

Oct 29, 2015 - Uploaded by stanfordonline "The Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) and Its Unparalleled Power To Influence How We Think ...</comment>


Ask HN: What is so cool about Slack? - <AUTHOR> I hear a lot of news and see a lot of third-party apps that connect to Slack. What is so exciting about this Slack tool? <comment><USER2> Personally, I have no idea.

It's a chat client with channels/rooms/whatever. You can't back it up, nor easily export it, you can't organize it like email and thus it's not really clear to me what the advantages are.

I do have to say that I receive about 3 work-related emails per day. So I'm not particularly desparate to look for an email alternative.</comment>


Ask HN: Your goals for 2011 - <AUTHOR>

What are your goals before the end of the world (?) <comment><USER2> While I think new years resolutions are somewhat cliche, I do think there is some value in evaluating your life trends periodically and finding places you've been over and/or under investing. The holidays are a time when a lot of folks do that.

My shortlist:

\- Focus better. Become more efficient and either automate or delegate tasks that do not have the ROI on my time.

\- Make better use of my personal time. I'd love to learn the guitar. Volunteer more. Learn to meditate.

\- Stay in shape and make better food decisions. Of course this is a common one for many people.

\- Spend more time with family.

How about you, OP?

</comment><comment><USER3> Continue to be a part of a great team building a great product.

It's cheesy, sure, but it's very important to me. I love my job and see a great future for the company I work at. However, I can only continue committing 100% if I work with great people doing great things.

As such, my goals for 2011 will be encouraging an even better ambiance within our company, encouraging creativity and encouraging to constantly improve.

PS. Another personal goal is to build a foundation for the future for the cricket team I play in (2nds at VRA Cricket, Amsterdam). We won the league last year, but failed to promote in the play-offs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll actually get my (short) film finished 2011 and hopefully in time to take it to Cannes where I'll eat _so many_ hors d'oeuvres. More film nonsense but that's not too relevant for HN!

I'm also planning on building a few side projects this year and using them to learn python & node which I hope will help me smash the £20k barrier :) I also have an iPhone game idea that I will try and bash out (have held o to this idea since I had my Amiga and its time has come again).

And a holiday. I haven't a real, proper, more-than-2-days holiday in a decade. That _will_ be happening!

</comment><comment><USER5> My main goal will be to Get AT LEAST ONE PAYING CUSTOMERS FOR ALL MY APPS. Secondary goals include;

\- Complete my courses and pass all its exams.

\- Learn Ruby on Rails and build 3 more apps with it.

<comment><USER6> It might make more sense to try and get more paying users for a small amount of apps, than more apps for a small amount of users.

<comment><USER5> @noachc. Ya, that's true. Right now, I only have 2 apps existing, hope to increase the portfolio to 5 apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Get minesweeper.el into Emacs. Whether or not that occurs, start contributing to Emacs.

Given that minesweeper.el is winding down (I'm just working on mature optimization at this point), come up with one decent-sized useful project to hack on. Of course, I've said before that I thought it was almost done.

Learn Haskell and Forth. At least, become somewhat fluent.

Keep coding Lisp every day. My streak continues since July; let's see how long this can go for. How will learning new languages interact with this? I'm not really sure.

</comment><comment><USER8> > While I think new years resolutions are somewhat cliche,

same. having said that, i only have to primary (read: realistic) ones:

\- launch the paid version(s) of my pet project and start spending actual money to acquire users.

\- design a better workout/diet program, one that actually has the ability to degrade gracefully depending on my schedule and travel, and stick to it.

</comment><comment><USER9> My goal is to continue the 23% average monthly revenue growth in 2011 that I had in 2010. Then my side project revenue should match what I earn at my day job.

</comment><comment><USER10> Launch a product every month.

And, if I'm lucky, figure out how to support each one.

</comment><comment><USER11> _What are your goals before the end of the world (?)_

If I thought the world were actually ending, I would have completely different goals than I actually have (and they would sound rather Bacchanalian).</comment>


John C. Reynolds, Eminent Programming Language Researcher, has Died  - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Reynolds

<comment><USER2> A couple of years ago, I read his paper "Definitional Interpreters for Higher Order Languages" [1], because it was suggested to me by a friend. It was a joyful read, and to the best of my knowledge it is the first treatment of how to implement higher-order language constructs in a first-order language. Just recently, I thought of the paper, so it's sad news that the author has died...

[1] [http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/plsemantics/reyn...](http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/plsemantics/reynolds/HOSC-11-4-pp363-397.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.informatik.uni- trier.de/~ley/pers/hd/r/Reynolds:J...](http://www.informatik.uni- trier.de/~ley/pers/hd/r/Reynolds:John_C=.html) Wow - he really didn't stop doing what he loved.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, this is his profile page: <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jcr/>

_(people please use the photo from this link instead of the one currently in Wikipedia where he looks somewhat angry)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone knows who was John C. Reynolds's PhD advisor in Harvard? We have his profile at phdtree:

<http://phdtree.org/scholar/reynolds-john-c/>

But his phd advisor info is missing

<comment><USER6> Judging by his Ph.D. thesis "Surface Properties of Ground-State Nuclear Matter" (accessed via PROLA).

He lists the following people in his acknowledgements:

<http://phdtree.org/scholar/martin-paul-cecil/>

<http://phdtree.org/scholar/martin-paul-cecil-2/>

<http://phdtree.org/scholar/puff-robert-david/>

<http://phdtree.org/scholar/gottfried-kurt/>

You could always try emailing them to ask if they were an advisor of Reynolds?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> LtU thread: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4725>

</comment><comment><USER8> This is one of those threads which makes you feel a bit ill inside for "upvoting" as it were, but nonetheless he deserves to be recognised for his contributions and achievements.

<comment><USER9> Luckily it's called upvote, not like...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any source for this other then the wikipedia page?

<comment><USER11> I go to CMU (where he was professor) and we got an email about this yesterday evening.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for confirming this. It is very sad news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My condolences to his family and friends.

</comment><comment><USER13> David Notkin passed a few days ago also. Bad week.

</comment><comment><USER14> a few small anecdotes about him: [http://semantic- domain.blogspot.fr/2013/04/john-c-reynolds-j...](http://semantic- domain.blogspot.fr/2013/04/john-c-reynolds-june-1-1935-april-28.html)</comment>


Introducing literate dotfiles (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://writepermission.com/introducing-literate-dotfiles.html <comment><USER2> > Because Org mode tangles to another file on disk, I need to make sure > tangling the source file does not overwrite changes made to the output file > directly. But as long as I keep a good habit of only editing the source > file, this is no real issue.

It's a bit of a hack but what I do is commit the tangled output as well. That way I can directly edit the tangled output if I need to and magit will remind me that I've got changes to port to the original source. Or set the file read- only with :tangle-mode[1].

[1] [https://orgmode.org/manual/tangle_002dmode.html#tangle_002dm...](https://orgmode.org/manual/tangle_002dmode.html#tangle_002dmode)</comment>


Ask HN: P2P crypto exchange - possible? - <AUTHOR> 1. There's a huge rise of bitcoin and more people getting into cryptocurrencies.
2. As for now the only(?) way to purchase coins is using an exchange.
3. to purchase your first coin you have to pay with fiat money.
4. Few exchanges accept fiat money and charge crazy fees for it.
My question is - can we skip the middle man and create p2p exchange? the main issue i have so far:
- how to charge fiat money and where to store it (escrow account)? <comment><USER2> It already exists, and has for years, and is called LocalBitcoins. You might be disappointed in how big the spread is at that exchange though.

</comment><comment><USER3> By peer to peer exchange, you mean an exchange built on blockchain?

One exists that I know of (bitshares). I'm sure others are being developed.

Turning fiat into crypto is a separate problem of its own. The problems there are legal and political, not so much technical.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have a look at waves decentralised exchange</comment>


Bash shell simulator in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/anon/pen/wntvi/

<comment><AUTHOR> Good for web browser demos of how to do stuff in a Bash shell.</comment>


Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/ <comment> T-hawk _Or consider Air Strike Patrol, where a shadow is drawn under your aircraft. This is done using mid-scanline raster effects, which are extraordinarily resource intensive to emulate._

So what's really going on here is that the emulator must emulate not only the SNES hardware, but also the _television_. Video game emulators have had to deal with this for a long time, to varying and increasing levels of accuracy. Televisions (especially analog CRTs) have quite a bit of emergent behavior in processing the display input that is not easily captured and replicated by your typical frame buffer. Interlacing is a major such phenomenon; most emulators still simply treat the 60 fields per second as 60 distinct frames rather than interlacing them. (And younger players are used to seeing the games that way, never having played on original console and TV hardware.)

The ultimate example of this effect occurs in emulating games that originally used a vector CRT. An emulator writing to a raster frame buffer simply can't replicate the bright, sharp display of a real Asteroids or Star Castle or Battlezone machine.

TV behavior even goes beyond electronics. Consider the characteristics of the phosphor coating and the persistence time between refreshes. Some games made use of effects where that characteristic mattered, so if you want to emulate that with high fidelity, yes that will take a lot of CPU cycles.

<comment><USER2> That particular problem isn't a case of emulating the television, but rather accurately emulating the console's video hardware and its interactions with the rest of the system. If one were simply interested in emulating the television's behaviour then you could construct a frame buffer based on the visible sprites and postprocess that (possibly in conjunction with several preceding fields).

If the console allowed sneaky things to be done on each raster line (like changing the colours) then constructing that frame buffer becomes considerably more resource intensive, as it must now probably be done line by line with the correct timing wrt. the rest of the emulation.

If you could pull tricks mid scanline (presumably through careful timing after an interrupt) then the problem will be a whole lot worse, though I'd guess it can be reduced by recording changes to the relevant hardware registers along with timestamps in the emulation so that the timing of your scanlines' construction becomes less of an issue.

<comment> T-hawk You're correct, this particular problem can be handled with sufficiently sophisticated frame buffer logic. I was generalizing from that to other concepts where emulating the television or its signal processing would be required.

I'll give you another example. On the Atari 2600 game console, the vertical sync is _software controlled_. The software is responsible for enabling the vertical sync pulse. This can be done 60 times per second as standard -- or you could play tricks with it. Suppose you strobe it at a different or even irregular rate. On an analog TV, the picture starts rolling vertically. That breaks way outside the sandbox of a framebuffer, with signal being displayed in overscan areas, and during the normally-blank retrace interval resulting in ghosting effects. (No commercial game did that, but it's been done in tech demos, and conceivably a horror game could do it intentionally for mood.) To produce that same behavior on framebuffer-based hardware, you need to emulate or at least approximate the workings of a TV's vertical sync logic, none of which appears in the console itself.

(I know this from experience, I wrote an Atari 2600 game: <http://www.dos486.com/atari/> )

<comment><USER3> I recently bought 'Racing the beam' book which goes into Atari 2600 VCS details and programming - [http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11696) I recommend this book to everyone interested in this topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of conversation from when this was posted 9 months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864531>

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps we should start using CardBus and PCI-E based FPGA cards and go for hardware simulation rather than software emulation?

Performance is far easier to achieve there.

The devices aren't exactly expensive either.

<comment><USER6> if you're going to add hardware you might as well just get a real SNES from eBay and use a memory cart.

<comment><USER7> The issue is that buying an SNES becomes decreasingly viable as time goes on while using an FGPA becomes increasingly viable. I don't know if we've reached the point where the balance shifts yet, but presumably we will at some point.

<comment><USER5> Also, the medium on which the software is delivered is not the problem either. It's just information after all. The problem is accurately emulating the software in software which is easier achieved by emulating the harware in hardware :)

<comment><USER8> The SNES is now close to 25 years old, and the older the hardware gets, the more serious the issue of "bit rot" will become. Among NES collectors, it's not rare to find people lamenting not being able to play their original cartridges anymore. Those cartridges don't last forever. Thus, emulation serves an important archival purpose, and without it, those games may be lost forever.

<comment><USER9> Aren't there a bunch of knock-off systems coming out of Asia these days? I thought I saw a box that could be play NES, SNES and Genesis original cartridges down at my local games shop.

<comment><USER10> IIRC these clones may not be able to play all games - especially ones with add-on chips (Super Mario RPG is the only example I can think of right now)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What I find interesting is that most attention is being spent on BSNES when the subject of cycle accuracy and proper emulation of hardware comes up, like this is a new or novel discovery. BSNES is hardly the first to aim for this sort of goal, nor is its efforts as close to complete as the efforts spent by others. The NES scene in particular is now down to the level of breaking out scopes to measure response times on real NES hardware to get the sort of information they need to further push their level of accuracy up. Even 'obscure' systems like the MSX have had this sort of cycle-accurate push in emulation.

It's no longer the 90s and people shouldn't even have to mention NESticle existed in an article unless they're that out of touch with trends of the last decade.

<comment><USER12> > What I find interesting is that most attention is being spent on BSNES when > the subject of cycle accuracy and proper emulation of hardware comes up, > like this is a new or novel discovery.

I never intended to convey that this is a new idea, sorry. I do believe my cooperative threading model is a new concept _in emulation_ , but it's still a ridiculously old one in computer science.

> The NES scene in particular ...

... is not as rosy as it seems. Having recently written an NES emulator, I can tell you that they're far from completion. For just one example, all of those mapper chips are basically a big unknown. Those chips have ways of detecting scanline edges to simulate IRQs and split-screen effects. This is done by monitoring the bus for certain patterns from the cart-side. And the details of this stuff? Completely unknown. Not even Nestopia nor Nintendulator attempt to simulate this: they just have the PPU -tell- the mapper when a scanline edge is hit. I could be wrong, but I believe I'm the first to even attempt to have the mapper detect scanlines by monitoring the bus.

And we're talking chips that are dozens of times less complex in the _worst_ case than some of the SNES coprocessors.

> It's no longer the 90s and people shouldn't even have to mention NESticle > existed in an article unless they're that out of touch with trends of the > last decade.

The important part of that article is that the SNES was (and largely still is) in the NESticle phase of development, which was the purpose of bsnes. Unfortunately, just as we go from NESticle (25-50MHz) to Nestopia (800MHz required); ZSNES (200MHz) to bsnes (2-3GHz) needs a huge jump. But this time, that jump is hitting the wall of where most computer users are at. While people didn't notice Nestopia because everyone has at least a 1GHz processor these days, bsnes was not so fortunate.

So the article was more about explaining what that level of overhead is required for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> source: <http://byuu.org/bsnes/accuracy>

this is also awesome, posted a while back: <http://byuu.org/articles/emulation/snes-coprocessors>

</comment><comment><USER14> There are subtle bugs and issues with timing, but the worst, for me, is that the games are not accurate. I play a lot of 80s games on original hardware, but also (when i'm not at home) on my laptop/ipad/android in emulation. Games I have been playing for almost 30 years are locked solid in my mind; every enemy, path, _timing_ has been set in my brain. I can play those games blindly on original hardware. But not on emulators. For people playing these kind of things for the first time this is not an issue; for me it's not being true to the original. The quirks which were in there are supposed to be in there. Horizontal shooters which had visual/audio issues in the original game because the end boss was actually too big for the poor Z80 + VDP to do fast enough, is now suddenly smooth in the emulator in case you lose the edge of attacking it when the computer is in pain. More fun or not is not the issue here; correct emulation is important to preserve all millions upon millions of carefully crafted assembler instructions on the platform of choice. Until we have this working well, I'll keep buying old computers for peanuts just to make sure.

</comment><comment><USER15> follow up to that story here: [http://www.tested.com/news/44376-16_bit-time- capsule-how-emu...](http://www.tested.com/news/44376-16_bit-time-capsule-how- emulator-bsnes-makes-a-case-for-software-preservation/)

<comment><USER16> That's a great article, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What worries me is if future generations will be able to enjoy the games of today. Will it ever be feasible to emulate a PS3 to the level demanded here? Will my grandchildren in 50 years be able to play GTA 6 on a PS4 emulator? Processing power does not appear to scale to allow this, and there will barely by any of today's consoles still alive by then (also, I doubt 2060s television sets will have HDMI input).

<comment><USER18> Not to mention DRM.. it's a serious problem.

<comment><USER19> Not in the current generation of _console_ optical media. In the future it will be a rotten travesty as no one will ever physically own their games.

Though DLC is locked up as future consoles' content is likely to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hm. The reason synchronization is needed is because the emulator must simulate the chip behaviours over time, and ensure that they act as if they are all behaving in real-time lock step. Might an alternative approach be to simply simulate each chip _independently_ , in parallel, without synchronization, but "somehow" ensure that their behaviour is exactly corresponding to real time, so that time does not need to be "faked" by synchronization?

Yes, this is probably a recipe for disaster, and I have little idea what mechanism could be used to ensure time accuracy, but just a thought. (Perhaps an RTOS?) I also wonder what would be possible with FPGAs, whether programmable logic might provide a better approach to emulating these chips in synchrony.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great find. This is the most in-depth article I've read on this subject. I actually use this as an open-ended interview question at the game company where I work. The PlayStation 2 has a bunch of quirks with floating point numbers because it doesn't follow the IEEE standard - for example, floats don't become infinity when they overflow, they just get clamped to the maximum possible float. Now you can't use your FPU for the tens of thousands of floating point calculations that are happening per frame. Sure, your processor is faster, but it's fighting with one arm tied behind its back.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the author is wrong

It doesn't take a 3000mhz machine to emulate a ricoh 5a22

Look how Nintendo has virtual consoles working on a 730 MHz power PC - the wii

<comment><USER23> I don't think you're understanding the point of the article. Yes, emulators have been around for quite a long time, but none of them are _perfect_ , which is the purpose of this guy's undertaking to create this emulator requiring a 3GHz CPU.

The Wii isn't going to be around forever: those will start to fail in a number of years. In addition, not every single NES game is available on the Wii virtual console, anyway.

<comment><USER24> The emulators on the wii virtual console are not accurate at all, not in the way that byuu is talking about. Also the games get heavily patched for that purpose, as well as the emulator being patched per-game.

<comment><USER23> I think I may have only bought the Donkey Kong Country series of games for the Wii VC. It worked well enough, but I imagine that there were indeed issues with the emulation on the Wii. I didn't do any research on it so I couldn't comment on that either.

The one thing I realized after the last few years is that you can't count on game companies to do backwards compatibility forever. Microsoft (understandably) gave up on patching the 360 over and over again to expand the original Xbox library of playable games on the 360, and Sony stopped selling the PS3 models that had the PS2 hardware directly on-board(not to mention "Other OS" support, but I digress).

<comment><USER25> Back compat is only useful in a business sense in that consumers don't have to decide between new console and no games or old console and lots of games. Once the new console has lots of games, that simply becomes the only option.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Innovative strategies are found in the art of subtraction - <AUTHOR> http://danielodio.com/community/76850

<comment><USER2> I really like

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking)</comment>


These Are the Best of Times - <AUTHOR> http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/05/15/these-are-the-best-of-times/

<comment><USER2> He doesn't even mention why it's the best of times for developers.

With open source tools and cheap hardware, broadband, and hosting, the barriers to entry asymptotically approach zero.

So now the key differentiator is what's between your ears and what's in your heart. For a hacker, what could be better than that?

<comment><USER3> Better than that? Success and fame? ;)

<comment><USER2> True.

I was always too introverted to make lots of friends, too small for sports, too plain looking for girls to notice me, and never had much money or connections. So I had to work my butt off for everything I ever got.

And finally, finally, finally the world has changed just enough so that people like me have a _much easier_ time staking our claim in the world. Don't forget, it hasn't been like this for very long.

For creative hard working people with something between their ears and not much else, it truly is the best of times, no matter how much fame and success you achieve. That's the point I was trying to make.

<comment><USER4> too plain looking for _the wrong_ girls to notice you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good times online indeed, but if you're one of the many Americans caught up in the housing-boom-bust none of that matters when trying to pay your mortgage. Is there a web app that will lower my mortgage payments? Or maybe someone on Twitter that can sell my first home? I keed I keed.</comment>


Crypto weekly: A weekly newsletter  of the best cryptocurrency news and insights - <AUTHOR> https://cryptoweekly.co/?ref=producthunt <comment><USER2> Any example of a previous issue or that's completely new?

<comment><USER3> Hey nnx, you can view our latest edition here: [https://ckarchive.com/b/r8u8hoh3l0rq](https://ckarchive.com/b/r8u8hoh3l0rq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Websites showing supportive quotes of random customers always make me suspicious.

<comment><USER5> funny thing is, AB testing probably shows that overall, they're a net benefit. just like those as seen on [insert list of well known websites that republished their press release word for word]. some hn readers might be able to see right through it, but those people aren't their audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool! Who's the author / editor?

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the Product Hunt, it is the KintuLabs and it's CEO (?): [https://twitter.com/KintuLabs](https://twitter.com/KintuLabs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> insert my email?

...suuuure, what could go wrong</comment>


The homepage of the father of IRC - <AUTHOR> http://www.kumpu.org/

<comment><USER2> He has a very sexist quote at the bottom of his page, "If it is not logic, it's magic. If it is not magic, it is female logic."

<comment><USER3> It was an earlier time. See also "dated" - past participle, past tense of date (Verb)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Will Replace Passwords? - <AUTHOR> Is FIDO Alliance the way of the future or something else? <comment><USER2> Passwords are just access secrets. Access secrets and always have, and always will be around. The implementation changes, not the idea.

With that said I believe the next generation of implementations will involve encrypted biometrics. Face ID sucks in that I have to hold my phone to my face. But it's amazing that I don't need to type a string password.

Biometrics is the future imo

<comment><USER3> Biometrics represent identity and not authority. This misconception will be the cause of many a security fail during the 21st century.

Authority comes from the user's mutable grey matter - not their immutable genetics.

<comment><USER2> Yea my comment is in terms of identity not authorization. I didn't read the FIDO part

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something like this

[https://puri.sm/products/librem-key/](https://puri.sm/products/librem-key/)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm](https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm) was designed for that possibility.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bitcoin's BIP32 (Hierarchical deterministic wallets) could be part of a solution. Currently they're used for bitcoin wallets, but they are more generally applicable for creating hierarchies of private/public key pairs, not necessarily attached to bitcoin addresses. A single private key and chaining key is all that is necessary to rematerialize all of the other keys in the hierarchy - a "master password".

A public key is superior to a password. It has more entropy to begin with, more than enough to resist brute force attempts, and it is sufficient, by itself, to establish an encrypted and authenticated communication with the holder of the corresponding private key. The key holder can sign messages asserting their ownership of the private key without revealing it, or can prove, if somebody already knows they are the owner of a public key, that they've signed a document that nobody else could have generated such signature for without possession of the private key.

For 2FA protocols and such, it may be possible to use threshold signatures to have messages signed by multiple parties which a verifier can verify at least M of N parties contributed to the signature without revealing necessarily who each the M parties are. There's much greater flexibility that can be gained here than simply having 2FA, which is often really just 1FA because it is done by SMS or some other weak form of authentication which can be vulnerable.

In addition, BIP39 (Mnemonic seed phrases) provide a more intuitive way of representing the initial data used to create the master private key. A RNG generates 256 bits of entropy, adds a checksum of 8 bits, and segments it into 24 chunks of 11 bits. The chunks each represent a word in a 2048 word dictionary, and the word phrase is recorded for future. The word phrase, when hashed, generates the master private key and chaining key for use with BIP32. Optional passwords can be used in conjunction with the word phrase to establish multiple disjoint key hierarchies from the same set of words.

This combination is now used in most bitcoin software and is fairly well understood by most bitcoin users. It's supported by several hardware wallets/HSMs, and likely many more will be coming. The burden is on the user to write down and safely store a 24 word phrase, plus optional passwords. There are some products on the market which can preserve this information in the event of natural disasters.

A missing part of the puzzle is to establish the relationship between identities the user cares about and the key paths in the hierarchy. Current conventions use path's such as `m/0'/1'/1` to mean the second child of the second child of the first account in the hierarchy. This doesn't carry around any information about what this specific key is used for - so there would need to be a separate tree stored somewhere (eg, user's device, backed up in cloud) which maps identities to paths. Access to this file would at most, reveal the identities the user has with different services, but would not reveal any private keys which could be used to access those services, as they're stored independently - preferably on a HSM which requires physical access.

</comment><comment><USER6> Face id</comment>


The Truth About Milk - <AUTHOR> http://health.yahoo.net/experts/eatthis/truth-about-milk <comment><USER2> Steve Jobs doesn't like milk.</comment>