Man Arrested At Airport for Unusual Watch - mkr-hn http://depletedcranium.com/man-arrested-at-airport-for-unusual-watch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Some civil liberties group should start specializing in exotic travel apparel, including odd watches, intriguing earrings, suspicious-looking belt-buckles, and so on.

This insanity has to stop. Has anybody seen the progaganda the agency puts out? The idea that TSA is now using little stacks of toe-nail clippers and such as proof of how great a job they are doing should be ringing alarm bells somewhere.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't even have to be an exotic watch to arouse suspicion, something like a Casio F91W will do just fine: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guantanamo_Bay_detainee...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guantanamo_Bay_detainees_accused_of_possessing_Casio_watches)

<comment><USER3> I'd never seen this. That's just... wow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's sad that this isn't terribly surprising at this point.

HN friends, please, please, make sure you opt out of the body scanners. If for nothing else, I can assure you the dude that's feeling your junk is far more embarrassed than you are and if he has to do it often enough, maybe he'll quit.

Last time I flew, I got a new guy. It was his first time and one of the veteran BT's had to coach him through it. He seemed mortified and I think that might have been his last day on the job.

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's just the airport I was flying out of (LGA), but I noticed that the TSA signs explaining the millimeter-wave scanners no longer say that you can opt-out of them. Where it used to say (IIRC) in smaller print at the bottom that you could opt-out and get a manual pat down in a private space if you so chose, there was now boilerplate text about how there were no health and safety risks associate with getting scanned by the machine, and that it wouldn't produce a photo-realistic image of me.

Once I opted-out by walking to the metal detector and (after being told to go into the other line for the L3 ProVision unit) asking for a pat-down, the agents handled it as usual (a bunch of awkward shouts for a "male assist at station 3", an embarrassed guy walking over and asking if I knew how this process worked and had done it before, and then a pretty perfunctory pat-down) - but if I didn't a priori know that I had that right, it wasn't listed on any of the many signs in the security scanning area.

<comment><USER6> I thought it was the backscatter ones that people objected to. The millimeter- wave ones are much less intrusive and there's no concern about health risks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One possibility people seem to be overlooking is that this outcome -- getting arrested and having the case discussed in the press -- is exactly what the artist wanted.

One of the greatest purposes of art is to hold up a mirror to society, and McGann has done that very well here.

If that was his intent, I applaud it, and will be happy to chip in to his defense fund if one of his friends will start a collection.

<comment><USER8> I just commented on this(I didn´t see your comment before), I think you are right and he probably forced the whole matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> BTW Sgt. JD Nelson of the Alameda County Bomb Squad is not some rookie. He is the explosives guy on Mythbusters.

There quite possibly could have been a reason why Sgt Nelson thought this went beyond a piece of art.

<comment><USER10> I'm all for civil liberties, but the info in this case is actually quite thin. I'd keep the pitchforks and torches away till a fuller picture emerges.

The facts of the case so far are:

1) Dude is outfitted in camo, watch that looks like an IED timer, and shoes rigged out like the "shoe bomber".

2) Dude gets pulled aside and claims it's all art.

3) Dude gets arrested.

Getting flagged for questioning because of (1) seems straightforward to me.

How it went from (2) to (3) is less clear, and it might be prudent to hold off the hand-wringing for now.

<comment><USER11> You've got to look at four probabilities: X, probability someone wears a geeky watch with exposed toggles and electronics; Y, probability someone wears military-style clothing; Z, probability someone wears oversized shoes; W, probability someone is a terrorist.

I'm betting X * Y * Z is still much larger than W.

<comment><USER12> You forgot to add investigation; that would be really easy checking his website and seeing that he has been an artist for many years and that he always dress wierd.

And lets not forget that they could have easily break his shoes and see if he was actually hiding something inside those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me a little of the MIT student who was almost shot when she went to the airport wearing some kind of LED circuit board on her shirt <http://boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html>

<comment><USER14> If anyone is interested they dropped the "fake bomb" charge since they couldn't prove intent and she took a deal with "disorderly conduct" because it was hard to defend against (since it just requires other people to be upset by your actions with or without intent). She got 50 hours community service and had to apologise for her "crime."

Based on this interview: <http://boingboing.net/2008/09/22/star-simpson-one- yea.html>

She was in and out of court for a year, nobody was punished, and nothing was altered. This could and maybe will happen again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Odd that he wasnt able to explain his way out of it. That's what makes it such a nightmare. Getting pulled aside and questioned is one thing, actually getting arrested seems like Idiocracy is coming true.

</comment><comment><USER16> +1

I personally ALWAYS put my jacket on top of my items when at the airport. As I go through security, I take off my belt, remove my wallet, cell phone and other devices from my pockets and put them in the trey to go through the x-ray machine. Then I put my jacket on top of them. Is it because I'm a terrorist? No. I just don't want my wallet and cell phone being out in the open as they emerge from the x-ray machine. Like most people, I'm always a little nervous that if I get stuck at the metal detector, someone could grab my wallet and slip away with it. Hence, I don't want it to be so plainly obvious.

</comment><comment><USER17> He also had in his possession the largest component of a suitcase bomb.

<comment><USER18> A suitcase?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone consider that showing up at the airport with a watch that looks like a bomb is a good idea? We all know that in the current climate that the TSA is prone to overreact.

It's not right that this is the case, but like it or not, it is.

</comment><comment><USER20> In case people haven't noticed - the USA has long ago stopped being a free and democratic country. They can put you in prison for any reason, without trial,for any amount of time. This is a country,where journalists writing about some events(latest trial of an alleged "terrorist" - a guy who spent 10 years in Guantanamo without trial and now is fighting to regain freedom) is banned,under the threat of being accused of endangering national security, an accusation that could earn a journalist several years in prison.

How is this different from countries like Russia, which can send anyone to prison for anything?

</comment><comment><USER21> I find it amusing that "but he's an artist" is being said as though it might possibly influence the powers that be. The TSA, police, judges, etc. have little tolerance for anything that doesn't conform to the ordinary and expected - including art. In earlier times in the USA anyone who questioned the political-economic system was accused of being Communist; excuses didn't work then either. With authoritarianism and polarization now on the rise in the USA, things are even worse. "Different"="bad".

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there a photograph of the watch anywhere? (Not that it makes much difference.)

</comment><comment><USER23> Going to side with TSA on this.

Art is art within a specified context. Outside of which, it's usually something else. In this case, a security threat.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely. His intent was to provoke "in the name of art" and it cost him. Idiots like this just help to validate the roles these TSA take up. A slap on the wrist and a 'go away now' wouldn't stop other idiots from attempting the same thing.

At least they caught the guy - imagine how he'd try to paint the TSA as useless if he was allowed on through.

You poke the bear, you get the horns.

<comment><USER25> 1) If he wanted to provoke in the name of art, then it didn't cost him, he managed to achieve his objectives.

2) Being able to smuggle a watch through security at an airport wouldn't be grounds for much celebration.

3) What kind of bears have horns?

4) We don't know the full details (the official story could be wildly exaggerated), but if the TSA over-reacted then it doesn't really matter what the intentions of the artist were. If the artist was just a dude with a strange watch or if he was trying to show us the limits of our freedoms, our freedoms are still limited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really thought about going to the US many times. Stuff like this makes me stay home in Europe or travel to other continents.

</comment><comment><USER27> Very good article. I think that, historically, security overreaction tends to increase as the stakes increase. From what I've read there was a lot of domestic overreaction during WW1 and WW2.

The fact that weapons are so much more effective and disguisable these days leads me to believe that, sadly, this sort of thing is only going to get worse. I can't imagine what the reactions will be when people are as concerned about biological weapons as they are about explosives.

<comment><USER28> > From what I've read there was a lot of domestic overreaction during WW1 and > WW2.

Yes, there was. The unfortunate difference between then and now is that then there was a clear end to the hostilities. The "war on terror" has no such clear end. Doesn't matter that Bin Laden was killed, doesn't matter that there hasn't been a successful terror attack in more than 10 years (and that nearly all the unsuccessful ones probably wouldn't have existed if not for the assistance of undercover FBI agents). When will it end? You can always claim that there are still more "radicals" out there who want to kill us, and that further fear is justified.

<comment><USER29> Another difference is that the government generally tried to keep things orderly and calm. Not to say that government didn't engage in overreaction as well (e.g. internment camps) but the overall theme appeared to be one of reassurance.

Modern government seems to thrive on making people as afraid as possible, perpetuating the cycle instead of damping it.

<comment><USER30> Exactly. We can't promise you dreams, but we can keep you safe from nightmares. Of course, we need some nightmares for that.

For details, see the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares (The Rise of the Politics of Fear)" by Adam Curtis.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGo1DqmfHjY>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn I used the title I did to avoid confusion, assuming someone already submitted a news story on the subject. I wanted to make it clear this was _about_ the story, but not a blogspammy retelling of it.

I don't mind the edit, but I don't know that it was needed.

</comment><comment><USER31> And this is why we can't have nice things... What is it with TSA and their lack of will to cooperate and listen to people? They just act like a bunch of mindless enforcers these days and have zero regard for common sense.

</comment><comment><USER32> I hypothesize that the point of all these obtrusive measures in the name of security is _not_ really to prevent terrorism. Instead it is so that when the inevitable happens, wherever and however, the masses will not riot. They will instead think back to all _conspicuous_ things that the TSA was doing all those years and think, well, I guess they were trying their hardest to stop it.

</comment><comment><USER33> 20.000 dollar! Does anyone here know if there is something like a kickstarter for people that make the news? I always feel so bad for these guys.

<comment><USER9> Maybe something like Chipin.com - no experience with them.

Paypal might not be "dependable" and Kickstarter doesn't really do "funding for a cause" from what I've seen.

I applied to Kickstarter for a project to create a PayPal alternative, soon after Kickstarter launched. They rejected it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Maybe they should hire people who actually know what a bomb is? Instead you have employees that probably can't even solve an algebraic equation despite getting a high school diploma. This isn't meant as a blanket statement about all TSA personnel, but a little expertise in the area wouldn't hurt.

</comment><comment><USER35> It sure is convenient when terrorists gently place the trigger for their bombs in the x-ray bin.

</comment><comment><USER36> If the terrorists goal was to take away your freedom, they apparently have won.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anybody had problems with arduinos and its various shields in airports?

</comment><comment><USER38> Security theater gone mad.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, the guy is an artist. If he wanted to be unusual, he's doing it right.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Comrade, your attire doesn't conform. Don't worry, we have a government authorized uniform in this back room for you. Please follow me"

</comment><comment><USER41> And Mr Packard has a domain name whose letters can be used to create a key ingredient of a dirty bomb.

</comment><comment><USER37> Man in military uniform takes a bomb mockup to airport ...

Idiot

<comment><USER14> Guy on HN doesn't read the article and jumps to wild unfounded conclusions, then makes a glib remark.

Idiot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> You all cry foul when tsa does their job. Out in the civilian world you would never understand why this man was stopped but in the military world i would yave done the exact same thing. You only cry foul when nothing happens but when thousands of people die you point the finger and say why didnt we look at this. This guy had hallowed shoes a watch witch could use as a time bomb and clothes to apply medical treatment if he got shot. Why didnt the tsa stop this guy and arrest him than do a back ground check. The tsa did a good job and found someone oddly suspicious. Get out of your security blanket and realise peiole want you dead and they will disguise themselves in any way possible to kill you. They will also do dry runs to see if tsa is doing their job before they bring in real explosives. Liberties have to be sacrificed at times in order to prevent your children and loved ones from dying it is impossible to protect with pure one hundred percent freedom of movement with zero checks and balances. This guy would red flag every single checkpoint in a military zone and guess what they know military checks this so instead they are making their way into the civilian world coming for your family, friends and loved ones. Eceryone will stop crying foul when their loved ones die

<comment><USER43> > Out in the civilian world you would never understand why this man was > stopped but in the military world i would yave done the exact same thing.

The airlines exist in the civilian world, so there are civilian expectations.

> They will also do dry runs to see if tsa is doing their job before they > bring in real explosives.

What is their job? Security theater?

> Liberties have to be sacrificed at times

You assume we will get our liberties back at some point. If the TSA expires, I would agree with you, but it looks like they've taken our liberties from here forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Whether we like it or not terrorists have shown a deep attraction to use airplanes as instruments of terror. And therefore we're going to have higher levels of security on air travel than we like. And that that security is likely to be managed by people who are newly recruited and poorly to middling in terms of compensation. I'm not sure if this outcome was fair but what is apparent is that he triggered multiple events. Watch, boots, shirt etc. It legitimately has the feeling of a "dry run" - enough at least to warrant being scrutinized. Not sure why he ends up in jail though.

<comment><USER45> > Whether we like it or not terrorists have shown a deep attraction to use > airplanes as instruments of terror.

American society is currently going through a raving paranoia phase. This is not about terrorists, it is about the public getting off on wallowing in fear. Hence the TSA, Department of Homeland Security, Amber Alerts, escalating the War on Drugs, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, zero tolerance everything, transparent backpacks and metal detectors for schoolchildren, hysterical panics about the supposed dangers of _immunizations_ of all things, and so forth.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Bin Laden's genius was to realize this and trick us into defeating ourselves in detail. Fortunately for us he chose something relatively harmless like the 9-11 attacks. Imagine if he had arranged for Al Qaeda to be caught sneaking iodide and omega-3 fats into every major baby food factory. We'd now be defiantly raising a generation of retards to show those ragheads who's boss.

<comment><USER46> _We'd now be defiantly raising a generation of retards to show those ragheads who's boss._

We seem to have that covered without their help.</comment></comment></comment>


The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Also covered by 99% Invisible, which has a nice postscript to the linked story.

[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/structural- integrity/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/structural-integrity/)</comment>


Hyperparameter Optimization 101 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jENocd1bsk <comment><AUTHOR> From a tech talk for SF Bayarea Machine Learning Meetup at Heroku, recorded by Hakka Labs. Second ever tech talk!</comment>


Systematically Improving Espresso: Insights from Mathematical Modeling [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pages.uoregon.edu/chendon/publications/2020/74.%20Matter,%20Espresso%20extraction.pdf <comment><USER2> James Hoffman (self-proclaimed "weird coffee person" with popular youtube channel on coffee) did an interesting walk-through of the results and the suggested process with commentary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoYBLn9hRqs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoYBLn9hRqs)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IKuUgEWAqg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IKuUgEWAqg)

Here is the Engineer Alan Hawse taking about how he "doses" his espresso with his CNC milled equipment.

Utterly alien to me (I'm not a coffee guy)

</comment><comment><USER4> Decent Espresso makes a great machine to control espresso brewing parameters [1]

My favorite feature is the ability to give it different target curves to follow for different parameters during successive phases of the extraction. You can for example ask the machine to pre-infuse for x seconds at a given pressure and then switch to flow profiling and have the machine try to adjust the pressure to follow a pre-set flow curve.

It makes it a powerful platform to isolate experimentally the contributions of several brewing variables.

[1]: [https://decentespresso.com/overview](https://decentespresso.com/overview)

</comment><comment><USER5> And here I thought we were talking about logic minimization for combinational elements. This stuff goes back to the 80's but it wouldn't be surprising if there are new mathematical insights some day.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr for baristi and cafe owners:

You can get away with less coffee on a coarser grind if the shot you pull comes out rather rapidly since the amount of soluble material is similar to a "regular" shot.

This is an opportunity to save money, especially if you only use the shot for a milk based drink like a capuccino or a flat white.

When getting into specialty grade coffee it gets a little shakey, the taste is still rather good but the texture is a little off.

<comment><USER7> Yep, my favorite coffee bar uses only ~15g of grounds per shot, they "tune" for each type of bean. But it's true you don't need to go past 20g for a standard size portafilter. The volume yield is still in the range of a double in the high 30's, so it works just fine even without milk.

I would add that virtually all coffee you get at an independent cafe or even Starbucks is going to be speciality coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do any HN coffee drinkers have any recommendations for precise/scientific resources on coffee? I know a lot about brewing coffee in different ways and a cursory amount about the 'what' of what's happening to the beans/grind but would like to develop a more rigorous understanding.

<comment><USER4> I like the Illy [1] book on the subject. It is mainly about Italian espresso though and less representative of 3rd wave brewing.

[1] [https://www.elsevier.com/books/espresso- coffee/illy/978-0-12...](https://www.elsevier.com/books/espresso- coffee/illy/978-0-12-370371-2)

<comment><USER9> What're the differences between the two?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a second I thought this was about the Android testing framework, [https://developer.android.com/training/testing/espresso](https://developer.android.com/training/testing/espresso).

</comment><comment><USER11> They should be inventing a way to be able to drink coffee all day without negative side effects.

<comment><USER12> That would mean either:

1) removing caffeine from coffee. The problem with this approach is that it changes the taste of coffee. Specialty decaf is not as good as regular specialty

2) somehow prevent caffeine from getting to the adenosine receptors in the body. I don't know how they could do that

<comment><USER13> The reason the decaf isn't as good is because they don't sell as much. These days a good decaf is basically unrecognizable from the real thing.

<comment><USER12> It's true that there isn't much of market and I've had good decafs. However, one issue is that the process that removes caffeine is expensive, so it's really hard to find African decaf for example. I could only find Colombian and I know there's also Mexican. Only one roaster from England had Ethiopian.

Another issue is that decaf tastes like a stronger roast while I like very light roasts. So, yeah, I went back to regular coffee.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb hosts furious company sticking them with cost of letting guests cancel - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-hosts-upset-that-theyre-paying-for-its-cancellation-policy-2020-3 <comment><USER2> Airbnb needs to balance the pain between all three parties: host, guests, and Airbnb. Right now it is passing down all the pain to the hosts as Airbnb probably feels that there are more guests than hosts and the bad publicity from screwing hosts is less than screwing guests.

It will be interesting to see if Airbnb has the clout to force such policies down hosts' throat. Hosts will be upset but if Airbnb is their best way to monetize their property, they will be back on the platform.

Hosts should add a premium to their nightly rates to cover risk of such policies from Airbnb. But I doubt they will be able to do so in the near future as demand for travel goes down.

</comment><comment><USER3> So the hosts that abuse the system are upset they can't keep guests money they don't deserve. Boohoo</comment>


Is It Stupid to Trust Twitter Apps With Your Password? - <AUTHOR> http://www.douganderson.org/post/67979086

<comment><USER2> It's twitter that's stupid for still not having implemented oAuth. What's keeping them from implementing it TODAY? They are putting people's passwords at risk.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, Blaine Cook was one of the founders of the OAuth protocol, _while he was working at Twitter two years ago_ , presumably _for_ Twitter.

So yeah, I'd like to know what happened as well.

<comment><USER4> I dunno if you've tried using and implementing OAuth, but it is a gigantic pain in the ass. A big factor driving the bewilderingly huge number of twitter mashups is how easy it is to use their API. Not implementing OAuth was a great move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, yes, a million times, yes.

It's stupid to give any service any credentials except those created specifically for that service. (This dictum includes the common practice of using the same password for multiple services.) This is not an issue of paranoia. Fraudulent or malicious services are, of course, a concern, but not the only one. You are not only trusting these people to use your credentials appropriately, you're trusting them to store/transmit/manage those data securely.

The problem is that this advice will never sink home with users. So Twitter needs to step up and protect its users by implementing OAuth (or something similar). People will do dumb things like this so long as the risks seem remote (and they always will, until it's too late) and there's even a minor benefit to be had. The point is: Anyone that wants to could steal a bunch of Twitter users' passwords right now with hardly any work.

Twitter should regard this as a gaping security hole. It doesn't matter that it's not technically a vulnerability in any of the code they've written.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ok, So; I posted on monday about mytwitternotebook, an app I made.

Originally, I made it so that you signed up with an openID, and then put in your twitter username, and then got a verification DM, and then verified.

_Nobody_ understood it.

I switched to using twitter username and password, and nearly instantly, my user-base doubled.

I don't store the UN or PW at all, ever; I verify with the twitter server, and forget about it, you don't even need to put your UN or PW into my site to use my service, ever, it can be done completely by Direct Message.

It may be stupid to share your password, but it's stupid to use the same password everywhere. Turns out, it may be stupid, but it's easy, and you get good results.

<comment><USER7> It's not so much a matter of password exposure for people who share passwords with other sites (that is their own fault), it's having to trust all these sites you put your password into to keep it secure (you may claim you're not storing it, but how can I verify that). The risk of your twitter password getting out is impersonation and taking control of your twitter account, with no way to recover it. Remote keys have problems too, but the idea behind remote keys is that you enable third party access to the core functionality but the authentication and control of the account itself is out of reach of the third party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The SitePoint sale seems like a red herring; it's not like you trusted the original app developers any more than the buyers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a random idea:

I wonder if the "one password" paradigm is the problem. What if Twitter (and any other web service) could have _multiple_ passwords per user. Now you can give away a password at will to whatever Twitter service you want. When you don't want it to be used anymore, just delete it.

Much simpler than OAuth!

<comment><USER5> Simpler for whom? The user who has to manage N passwords for N services, instead of one password? I'd rather Twitter's staff suffer a moderate amount of pain once than have every user suffer lesser pains continuously.

Programmers (myself included) too often fail to consider whether "technically simpler" is "actually simpler". It is one of the things that ensures the poor quality of software. We'd do well to understand that our job is, first and foremost, to make life easier for the people using our software. This may require martyrdom from time to time.

Besides, OAuth isn't all that complicated. Distilled, it's similar to your idea but with several additional benefits, not the least of which is that there are existing implementations to help you on your path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to have an alternative to storing usernames and passwords. I wrote a web based twitter/identi.ca client mainly for my own use, but it's public and there are people using it, and I've been thinking about purging the auth data every month or so mainly because if I hadn't written it there's no way I'd just blindly hand over my password to some weirdo who happened to write a handy client for my phone. At least then the users could be assured that their authentication info will be removed at a predictable interval.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's no problem at all. What the fuck is anybody going to do with 5000 twitter passwords? Post something profane pretending to be you? Create link spam, when everything in twitter is rel=nofollow anyway? There's no way to make money by stealing a bunch of twitter accounts.

That's why it's no problem to hand over your twitter credentials. There's no point in stealing your twitter password. _It's not useful for anything._

</comment><comment><USER12> FTA: _but the bigger question is when will Twitter users decide to stop handing over their passwords to unvetted third parties who may abuse those details?_

Won't the service need to gather a significant number of users/passwords and remain secure for sometime before they are vetted? So won't some people then be giving their details before it is officially vetted.

<comment><USER8> With all due respect to the people I like that work on Twitter, it's not like Twitter itself is "vetted". There's no "vetting" to be done here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only alternative is to not use Twitter apps. Until there's a real alternative (OAuth), people will be giving away their passwords.

<comment><USER8> The better alternative is to use random passwords (from a bookmarklet, for instance) so that you'll have no psychological resistance to changing it to ditch a crappy service.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. It should be obvious from Twitter by now that folks like building services. It would take a few days of engineering to create "temporary" logins these services could use.

<comment><USER13> What about a meta-app that handles changing your Twitter password at all these other apps? :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sqlpad.io, Online playground to prepare SQL interviews - <AUTHOR> http://sqlpad.io <comment><AUTHOR> Say goodbye to nerves and anxiety before your next SQL interview, practice 80 SQL interview questions and get your dream data scientist job.</comment>


FundersClub's New "Partnerships" Let You Start a Venture Capital Fund - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/15/fundersclub-partnerships

<comment><USER2> 63 points, submitted 8 hours ago, but no comments? My 2¢: looks interesting but I'm definitely not the target audience (not an accredited investor, for one thing.) Can anyone in that demographic speak to whether or not this looks favorable compared to AngelList's Syndicates [0] (the competitor mentioned in the article) or any other existing alternatives?

[0]: [https://angel.co/syndicates](https://angel.co/syndicates)</comment>


The Physics of a Fighter Jet Rainbow - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/09/the_physics_of_a_fighter_jet_r.php

<comment><USER2> Nice picture and explanation, but probably wrong. I'm with the commenter Steffen here:

 _The shot is probably taken from the ground and during a (relatively) slow maneuver where the aircraft pulls hard up, causing the flow of air to become almost perpendicular to the alignment of the wings, which will cause said large pocket of low pressure which rapidly is equalized causing condensation of the water vapor in the air._

You can see a similar (very) low speed condensation effect here

[http://www.airliners.net/photo/Air- France/Boeing-777-228-ER/...](http://www.airliners.net/photo/Air- France/Boeing-777-228-ER/0981791/&sid=306820fc2c6a8a3183a42afae56afb8f)

here with a fighter jet but also low speed and high angle of attack

[http://www.airliners.net/photo/USA---Air/McDonnell- Douglas-F...](http://www.airliners.net/photo/USA---Air/McDonnell- Douglas-F-15E/1130381/&sid=306820fc2c6a8a3183a42afae56afb8f)

and this is rather extreme example of the same thing

[http://www.airliners.net/photo/Russia---Air/Sukhoi- Su-30.../...](http://www.airliners.net/photo/Russia---Air/Sukhoi- Su-30.../1631566/)

and here is a similar rainbow effect, but behind an A340 which surely isn't supersonic.

[http://www.airliners.net/photo/Virgin-Atlantic- Airways/Airbu...](http://www.airliners.net/photo/Virgin-Atlantic- Airways/Airbus-A340-642/1088680/&sid=306820fc2c6a8a3183a42afae56afb8f)

Another factor which makes super sonic flight unlikely is that the photographer had to wait for the moment when the sun is behind the aircraft which would be very difficult to do if it was flying that fast.

edit: oh and apparently it is called <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl–Glauert_singularity>

<comment><USER3> Hmmmm, you raise some interesting points. That said, I agree with Ethan that the rainbow in question is a Fire Rainbow. I had never seen one in real life until just recently, but I have seen several in the sky over Paris this summer, and they have the same distinctive colour distribution. Having had the opportunity to see a few, I can tell you that although it is true that the sun needs to be behind the aircraft, the definition of behind is very loose indeed - typically the fire rainbows that I have seen are about a quarter of the sky away from the sun itself (I'm starting to wonder if it's actually 46° away, having read Ethan's explanation), so there is a large expanse of sky where this effect could be seen.

I agree that this is a low-speed manoeuvre though, and not an example of a transonic cloud - have a look at this photo from RAAF Amberley earlier this year: [http://www.defence.gov.au/media/download/2010/Jun/20100607/2...](http://www.defence.gov.au/media/download/2010/Jun/20100607/20100603raaf8490713_0040.jpg) \- it has the same cloud structure as the F22 photo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That it's being viewed through a polarized filter is key. If you were to view this unaided, you wouldn't perceive the colours.

My guess is that this caused by internal reflections in a slew of similarly sized water droplets. Much like a rainbow, except that this is backlit.

</comment><comment><USER5> ok people ..can someone tell me what is that circular "thing" that surrounds the aircraft as the plane crosses the sound barrier? is that moisture or something? if yes how does it occur? an explanation on this would would really fulfill my curiosity.

<comment><USER6> Here we go: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl-Glauert_Singularity></comment></comment>


Kicksend + Walmart: Order Prints for Pickup at 3,800+ Walmart Stores - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kicksend.com/kicksend-walmart-now-you-can-order-prints-for-pickup-at-over-3800-walmart-stores/

<comment><USER2> "all 50 states, including Hawaii, Alaska"

As an Alaskan, we like to think we are always included in the 50 states.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes we forget about Hawaii and Alaska but we still love you wonderful people who get to live in those beautiful place :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hint: no one cares about printing from online. This is a lesson we learned the hard way at Eye-Fi. Good luck.

<comment><USER5> Can you clarify what you mean by "printing from online"?

<comment><USER6> Sending pictures from web apps or mobile to be printed and sent to someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heh. Not having any idea what Kicksend does, I read "print" and "pickup" and assumed this was about 3D printing. Being able to order 3D prints and pick them up at Walmart sounded like a major leap, so I was rather disappointed to see the blog entry talk about photo printing.

Reading "Walmart has a wide range of popular print sizes you know and love, including 4×6, 5×7, and 8×10" made me feel somewhat underwhelmed. Maybe I'm jaded, but I'm not very impressed about the fact that they can print photos on different-sized papers (none of which I "love").

</comment><comment><USER8> I couldn't figure out from Kicksend's web site how much the service costs. I expect to be able to find a list of services and prices prominently linked from the home page.

Also, Walmart offers their own digital photo printing service, which currently delivers photos in 3-5 days:

[http://photos.walmart.com/walmart/storepage/storePageId=Prin...](http://photos.walmart.com/walmart/storepage/storePageId=Prints)

If Kicksend catches on, what's to stop Walmart from cutting out the middleman by offering their own phone app and expedited service? And since Walmart already has all the infrastructure for digitally uploading and printing photos, it would probably be a lot cheaper for them to write their own app than to buy Kicksend. So Kicksend seems like a business that could be killed by their own success.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great, print more things on paper and in the process, help Walmart. Awesome hack guys, I look forward to your next project that partners with Exxon.

</comment><comment><USER10> Dealing with Walmart is like making a deal with the devil.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did you do this through the PNI Media API?

[http://developer.pnimedia.com/](http://developer.pnimedia.com/)

<comment><USER5> I find this very odd. Walmart uses the PNI Media API for its own app? [http://developer.pnimedia.com/Blog/TabId/90/PostId/12/walmar...](http://developer.pnimedia.com/Blog/TabId/90/PostId/12/walmart- canada-launches-next-generation-iphone-app.aspx)

Never heard of PNI before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how long until everyone can just afford a $100 dye-sub printer.

</comment><comment><USER13> congratulations kicksend team!</comment>


Ask NH: How would you describe Internet to someone from 19th century? - <AUTHOR>

Some ideas:
1.  "It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
2. Super fast postman that deliver your mail instantly (Probably applies more to e-mail)... Still... <comment><USER2> It's like a telegraph that allows you to stalk friends you knew at school.

</comment><comment><USER3> How to Explain the Internet to a 19th-Century Street Urchin [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662563/infographic-how-do- you-e...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662563/infographic-how-do-you-explain- the-internet-to-a-19th-century-street-urchin)

</comment><comment><USER4> A lens through which any text can be read, any image viewed, any voice heard, and with which one can correspond and converse with any person in any place.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think I'd just let Nikola Tesla do it for me.</comment>


How to evaluate the company culture before joining? - <AUTHOR> I'm moving to a new job mainly because I started to feel marginalized and no fair payment in my current company. I started to lose my interest in what I'm doing. so I decided to move to a new company I want to know more how can I check if the company that I'm moving to if it has a good company culture in term of social, career, tolerance <comment><USER2> When I'm getting interviewed I look for a few indicators of culture. I ask what type of backgrounds people have (are they all university, or some self- taught etc), if they promote people internally, have formal mentorship programs, how they hired the last person (because they are xyz race or random stranger), if they lunch together, what their junior to senior dev ration is, how their code review process works (do they listen to other opinions) and how frequent overtime is.

Interestingly overtime question are pretty easy to read, if they don't look you in the eye when they answer, it is a red flag. If you're lucky, the interviewer will say something like "I have kids I have to pickup, I never do overtime" \- then its clear you've got a good worklife balance.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's a small enough company, I would definitely suggest interviewing the founders from the perspective of an investor. Your line of questioning should be focused on asking them/yourself, "why should I invest my time in your company?"

This should raise all sorts of questions like, what's the value-prop of your product/service, what's your go-to-market plan, what is your experience building and scaling companies, etc.

If you can't personally be interested in the company after speaking to the founders - I think it's likely that it won't be of much interest to you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Glassdoor is often useful. Sort by "low" and read with a grain of salt. If it's large enough, specific issues will bubble up.

</comment><comment><USER5> How are you feeling marginalized?

<comment><AUTHOR> bu paying more attention to other employees opinion than mine, have small talks between other team members using their language (not English), also better payment to them</comment></comment>


Systemic Fear, Modern Finance, and the Future of Capitalism - <AUTHOR> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/systemic-fear-modern-finance-and-the-future-of-capitalism/

<comment><USER2> Read this and then <http://shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money> and then come back and let us know what the future looks like.</comment>


Trolling homework questions - sorting - <AUTHOR> http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/16226/trolling-homework-questions-sorting <comment><USER2> Trolling people looking for easy answers is pointless. Folks like this won't use a single source to send in their work. The problem with this approach is you often penalize people who are truly curious and not trolls.

If you were to allow the masses to determine whether a question is a troll question or not, using an OR, allowing anyone to flip the bit, then almost every question would be considered a troll question. You get a lot of false positives.

Providing a thorough, quality answer to a troll question won't help advance that troll's career, they will pay the price later, for sure, when their intellect is on the line.

Providing a trolly answer, and treating the question asker as insincere will inevitably treat a sincere person like shit, and turn them off entirely from entire genres and disciplines.

Treat resources as sincere, and those who wish to abuse them for temporary short term gain will, and I am very confident about this, end up fucking themselves over.

*If you downvote this, please let me know what you disagree with, I'm open to debate.

<comment><USER3> I didn't downvote you. Two thoughts:

1\. I read the whole thing three times and I still don't really understand what your objective is.... and do you actually know the purpose of the trolling thread or not. The purpose is to have fun and pretend one as a student who is under some stress and is trying to figure out some funny yet creative ways to brain fuck with the TA or professor. Even if it receives F, whatever.

> Treat resources as sincere, and those who wish to abuse them for temporary > short term gain will, and I am very confident about this, end up fucking > themselves over.

Well, most of the questions we ask on the Internet are really for short-term gain anyway. We hope someone could tell us why the fuck the X.so file is not linked and we move on afterward.

Most of the answers are actually not some quick jerky answers. people actually took time to write them. And in the process of writing an answer, the author learns. Ever heard of "one teaches, two learns?"

2\. Why so serious? The Internet is full of shit half of the time. Wasting 100MB in the database for 100 trolling answers isn't going to kill some hungry child in Africa.

<comment><USER2> I'm probably so serious because it seems like so many other people are so dismissive :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sigh, don't have an SO account but if I did, I would suggest this code which I call randsort --

       #include <stdint.h>
       #include <stdio.h>
       #include <stdlib.h>

       int
       main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
           int i, ndx;
           double my_numbers[10];
           double sorted_numbers[10];
           uint16_t picked;

           for (i = 1; i < argc; i++) {
               my_numbers[i-1] = atof(argv[i]);
           }

           while (1) {
               picked = 0;
               ndx = 0;
               /* sort the numbers */
               while (picked != 0x3ff) {
                   i = (rand() / 100) %  10;
                   if ((picked & (1 << i)) == 0) {
                       picked |= (1 << i);
                       sorted_numbers[ndx++] = my_numbers[i];
                   }
               }

               /* verify they sorted correctly */
               for (i = 8; i >= 0; i--) {
                   if (( i == -1) || (sorted_numbers[i] > sorted_numbers[i+1])) {
                       break;
                   }
               }
               if (i == -1) {
                   printf(" Sorted: \n");
                   for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
                       printf(" %d: %f\n", i, sorted_numbers[i]);
                   }
                   exit(0);
               }
           }
       }

<comment><USER5> Nice. Is that O(e^n)?

Out of curiosity, why do you divide the rand() by 100 before applying the mod?

<comment><USER4> No reason on the divide. Just because. That is probably a reasonable guess on the big O value. Clearly O(rand) is cheeky but in accurate. And the PRNG will walk the number space so it will eventually succeed, but computing how long it will take for 'n' numbers eludes my math reasoning skills.

<comment><USER6> > the PRNG will walk the number space

Are you sure? What if there's an infinite amount of tries to get to a certain number? You can of course reason about the average case, but maybe the worst case (when there's an input number which is never found by the PRNG) does never halt.

> O(rand)

For sorting algorithms we usually compare in the number of input elements. You can reason about the average case where the numbers are found in average time so you can consider the number of iterations to find the correct number a constant (a very large constant but a constant nonetheless).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No one suggested sleep sort? That's the ultimate trolling-but-almost- legitimate sorting algorithm. :)

<comment><USER8> And it even has the best time bound you can get for a comparison based sort. Most OS schedulers would use a heap/priority queue internally for timers, which makes sleep sort O(n log n).

<comment><USER9> wouldn't sleep sort be O(k), where k is the largest element to be sorted? (Assuming the clock and scheduler are precise enough to achieve the correct answer the first attempt).

<comment><USER8> I would't really count time passing as an operation, since other programs are able to run during that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow.

[http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/16274](http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/16274)

<comment><USER11> yeah, that's why i don't code in perl

<comment><USER12> Claiming that Perl is a bad language because you can obfuscate it just means that you've never looked for "obfuscated <better language>".

<comment><USER13> I've looked quite hard for obfuscated Python (and there are a couple of other answers to this question using it). It's always been much more readable than that perl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I considered considering this ridiculously over-complicated approximate solution. Train a neural network to sort with a bunch of examples of sorted arrays.

<comment><USER15> I would be interested if you could expand on how you would alter the NN architecture for different sized lists

<comment><USER14> You would have to deal with a maximum size limit, or sort only sections of it at a time.

I mean it might technically be possible if you did some kind of recurrent neural network and gave the inputs through time rather than through space. And you would also have to let it interact with some kind of external memory or workspace.

Perhaps you could train it to just perform operations on the list itself (compare two elements, swap two elements, etc.) That would be the simplest way.

<comment><USER6> A maximum size limit is an obvious troll to get down to O(1) sort!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is brilliant because it encourages thinking a little differently to come up with the wrong answer (which helps you learn to identify wrong code). Nice work OP

<comment><USER16> Well, a lot of them aren't wrong answers, just really inefficient or overly- complicated implementations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The ultimate answer is to ask your young siblings to sort them for you. The price is a little time and some candy. Or since so many people are unemployed, ask them to crowdsource and work for something in return!

Or just ask wolframalpha.

<comment><USER17> Set up a job through the Amazon mechanical Turk API and that might actually be possible to do programmatically.

<comment><USER18> That was my first thought - use a call to the MT api to get the sort done, and then "wait for response". Meets the requirements of the competition perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My favourite way goes like this

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8158332](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8158332)

Basically, each thread sleeps for the time corresponding to the number

<comment><USER20> Haha, fantastic! This is an implementation in go: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8158822](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8158822)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you don't want to answer the question, don't answer the question.

</comment><comment><USER22> "trollsort.c:43:3: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'printf'"

Epic. Epic I say.

</comment><comment><USER23> 1\. Generate all permutations of the input. 2\. Return the permutation that is in order. 3\. Profit!

<comment><USER24>
      1. Output all permutations of the input
      2. There is no step 2.

You've technically outputted the input list in order...somewhere

<comment><AUTHOR> I love this answer and it's probably worth creating an account for you to post it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Even help on the internet is cynical now? Honestly, interesting idea though.

</comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me of learning Git. It was hard. Probably the hardest thing I've ever learned. But it was worth it, because I Did The Work, and now I'm a hacker.</comment>


Language, trees, and geometry in neural networks - <AUTHOR> https://pair-code.github.io/interpretability/bert-tree/ <comment><USER2> This looks to be an interesting piece on a very interesting paper! Somewhat tangentially (I'm afraid) I just wanted to comment on this para from the article's intro:

> Language is made of discrete structures, yet neural networks operate on > continuous data: vectors in high-dimensional space. A successful language- > processing network must translate this symbolic information into some kind > of geometric representation

I was a bit surprised recently by another article linked here recently[1] that discusses "direct speech-to-speech translation without relying on intermediate text representation" which (if I read it correctly) works by taking frequency domain representations of speech as input and producing frequency domain representations of translated speech as output. This is indeed as near as you get to "continuous" input and output data in the digital domain, and brings into question (in my mind, anyhow) the assumption that discrete structures are fundamental to language processing (in humans too, for that matter.)

I don't mean to detract from the paper, which looks highly interesting, it's just that this business of given discrete structures in language is a bugbear of mine for some time now :)

1: [https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/05/introducing- translatotron-...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/05/introducing- translatotron-end-to-end.html)

</comment><comment> jf- I'm impressed by the method of mapping higher dimensional vectors to a consistent tree representation, but I'm not sure what the take home point is after that. The BERT embeddings are (possibly randomly) branching structures? I'm only eyeballing figure 5 here, but the BERT embeddings only approximate the dependency parse tree to the same extent that the random trees do.

<comment><USER3> Figure 5(c) illustrates the shape of the projections for a random branching embedding of the correct tree structure. This roughly matches the ideal Pythagorean embedding, and also the BERT embedding. Keep in mind that BERT only sees word sequences, with no explicit notion of a tree structure. In theory, there are O(N^3) possible parse trees, which are not completely arbitrary graphs, but rather have have a context-free structure. Thus figure 5(d) is too weak, with embeddings are picked completely randomly, with no tree-based constructive process. I wish there were figure 5(e) showing random branching embedding of a random parse tree, to give a sense of how much randomly embedding the right parse tree vs. randomly embedding some random parse tree influences the final result. The hard problem in parsing in finding the right tree...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fantastic!

Can this be generalized to embedding 1: graphs or 2: DAGs ?</comment>


Lord of the Cloud: Gelernter, Markoff, Shirky - <AUTHOR> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter09/gelernter09_index.html

<comment><USER2> Also submitted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577990></comment>


Accelerators - <AUTHOR> http://www.accelerato.rs/

<comment><USER2> With so many incubators seems like a solid idea, will be a huge time saver. There a monetization model?

</comment><comment><USER3> I would add an additional column for the accelerator location (i.e. New York City, Palo Alto, etc.)</comment>


Fifty is the new thirty - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/03/fifty-is-the-new-thirty.html

<comment><USER2> I so agree that people this days are getting 20 years younger mentally because we are more flexible right now and we can easy adapt to our environment these days.</comment>


Hacker News Twitter list - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/tlrobinson/hackernews? <comment><AUTHOR> This includes all Twitter user ids Yahoo BOSS could find in your profile pages.

Let me know if I missed you. Please @reply (or email) me so it's easier to keep track.

<comment><USER2> @tibbon

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great idea if I may say so myself!

One more thought--how about a page that links in reverse--twitter id back to HN profile page? twitter profiles are weak sauce and don't tell you the HN username (of course) or other startup-y details I'd like to know sometimes ...

</comment><comment><USER4> Can you rerun the process? Had my twitter username in there (@dharmesh), but not the full URL like this: <http://twitter.com/dharmesh>

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're on there. I searched profiles for "twitter" then extracted names from both twitter.com/* and @ _

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Missed me: @marascio ... mine is in my profile. How did you match it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, not sure how I missed it, I matched twitter.com/[a-zA-Z0-9_]+ and @[a-zA-Z0-9_]+

Maybe it didn't show up in the search results for some reason ("twitter inurl:user site:news.ycombinator.com")

<comment><USER6> <http://twitter.com/byrneseyeview>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=byrneseyeview>

Strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are there any pre-reqs to being listed? Didn't see myself on it..

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I'm not sure why it missed you (and many others).

I'll manually add anyone who asks (as long as you're not a spammer/bot/"social media guru")

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> missed me ;), I used 'twitter.com/pauladam' which looks like it shouldve matched against the regex you supplied...

</comment><comment><USER9> Missed me: @johnsheehan

</comment><comment><USER10> @chris_smeder thanks

</comment><comment><USER11> @jonursenbach</comment>


Add it up: Azure's Golang problem - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/add-it-up-azures-golang-problem/ <comment><USER2> Weird phrasing about Go, referring to it as "still widely used." I don't think there's many people that see Go in its twilight years.

My contribution to improving Azure's Go code stands at the ready, as it has for two months. :)

[https://github.com/Azure/go-autorest/pull/511](https://github.com/Azure/go- autorest/pull/511)</comment>


Top Ruby blogs by engagement - <AUTHOR>

Hey all, we've launched a big update to postrank.com, looking for feedback! The big new feature is ranking blogs by engagement (week over week). A couple of examples:
My Ruby reading list: http://postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/ruby
Rails: http://postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/rails
Anyone can create list, or just search for global topics. Feedback and ideas much appreciated. ;) <comment><USER2> I was really interested in this. The moment I click on a blog though, I see nothing. I was expecting to see the stories in the feed. Th

en it seems to suggest that I have to create an account and log in (for what?). So you lost my mindshare rigth away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that sounds like a bug. Do you see any content on this page: <http://postrank.com/feed/2720a6fc8fb2e4b346715972c954fe7a>

It should definitely bring up the stories / content!</comment></comment>


The 'UNIX' system in Jurassic Park was, in fact, UNIX - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20070409024417/http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html

<comment><USER2> There's a version for modern Unices: <http://fsv.sourceforge.net/>

Also, this gets posted on HN quite regularly :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I always worry about posting 'repeated' links (as you can tell I'm a bit new to HN). Is there an accepted way to lessen this?

<comment><USER3> Don't worry, someone will tell you.

<comment><AUTHOR> And then what? Does the voting system prevent repeated links from getting noticed much? Right now it sounds like I should fire-and-forget links without bothering to check if they've been posted; I don't want to waste people's time if it's already been around.

<comment><USER4> > And then what?

Repeated posts are not a big problem. They allow newcomers to discuss things that were already discussed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone here know if the Jurassic Park infrastructure was ever documented anywhere, based on the nuggets of information in the books and films?

I realise that wouldn't have much real world value, but it would be fun to read through.

</comment><comment><USER6> I once bought an SGI Indy for $20 just to try to run that one program, but I got bogged down with the complex process required to install IRIX and threw the box out when I moved.</comment>


Metadata is the real data - <AUTHOR> https://standardnotes.org/blog/4/metadata-is-the-data <comment><USER2> You can encrypt all you like. It won't help.

Suppose you encrypt all your SMTP/SUBMIT traffic. If your upstream is a commercial provider, then they will be subject to subpoenas. If you run your own upstream, then watching who it connects to will often be sufficient to gather metadata of interest.

Consider TLS. Before you can use it you must have used DNS. Today all DNS resolution goes in the clear. So game over right there. Eventually your client's DNS communication with a shared recursive resolver will not be in the clear, but the operator of that resolver will be subject to subpoenas, so game still over. Let's say we did deploy DJB's encrypted DNS solution. Well, you can still see which domains people are talking to, roughly, at least as long as they don't share nameservers, and if they do... You can see where this is going. Now let's say you did get DNS resolution securely anyways, well, now you have to connect to some IP address, and if it's not hosting many services, then game over, and if it is hosting many services, then SNI will be game over anyways (TLS 1.3 requires SNI). SNI cannot be encrypted.

The problem really is that metadata can't really be encrypted.

Mind you, criminals are defeated by data encryption -- mostly anyways.

And forcing governments to use subpoenas does mean increasing the cost of metadata gathering. Plus there won't be infinite retention requirements, perhaps. So, encryption does help somewhat, which means we must do it -- it's just not a complete solution.

<comment><USER3> > Today all DNS resolution goes in the clear.

Yes, but I suppose you could decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by doing random DNS searches.

<comment><USER4> Setting up unbound to use dnssec and tor is super-easy too.

And once you set up the router, the cost of configuration is zero.

<comment><USER5> Dnssec still has your data in the clear, it just signs the data. (And is not supported by most domains)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The right to encrypt is the right to privacy.

Communications on the Internet are public by default; this is something that human civilization never experienced before. If you want to make your conversation or your behavior private, you have to encrypt it.

But there were many other things that human civilization never experienced before, and we adapted.

Right to encryption is, indeed, an essential natural right. People who deny it are the same people who think that everybody should have a government-supplied monitoring camera in every room of every home, and fail to understand what's wrong with it.

<comment><USER7> >The right to encrypt is the right to privacy.

Is there no right to encrypt? Because no government can actually prevent you from encrypting anything and the maths behind cryptography are openly taught and researched in all modern states. So are you saying that governments should never have the right to compel you to decrypt what you encrypted (by, for example, a fine or a prison term)?

<comment><USER8> That's relatively recent, though. Until the 90s and PGP, encryption was very much under the government's control, and regular citizens definitely did not have a "right to encrypt". The Clipper Chip launched in 1993.

IMO the battle over privacy and crypto is well documented by Steven Levy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto:_How_the_Code_Rebels_Be...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto:_How_the_Code_Rebels_Beat_the_Government%E2%80%94Saving_Privacy_in_the_Digital_Age)

<comment><USER9> Wow the Clipper Chip is interesting reading, especially in light of the current battles over cellphone encryption. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Correct & important to grow awareness about! Sadly many so-called private email or other services claim just encrypting your content brings you privacy...while ignoring/failing to discuss the metadata.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Descriptive metadata_ \- please, please stop misusing a term thats existed since the 1970's - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0vOg18ncWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0vOg18ncWE)

Conflating the term "metadata" with "descriptive metadata" and "metadata retention" makes it harder for data archives to get people to provide "structural metadata" (aka. the real metadata), that effectively describes the schemas and data structures of academic and open government data.

Yes, descriptive metadata retention is a huge problem, but say that instead of abbreviating terms in a way that obfuscates the issue use the full term.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone using Standard Notes? Might give it a shot if it comes recommended.

<comment><USER13> I've been using the free version for the past several weeks and have been enjoying it. I am an avid Keep user, and StandardNotes has all but replaced that.

I find it refreshing writing in markdown for minimal formatting, and the interface gets out of your way to let you write.

I'd give it a try if you're wondering!

<comment><USER14> Does it support Markdown? I wrote a list with asterisks and it didn't get "rich" formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Markdown is supported through editor extensions: [https://standardnotes.org/extensions](https://standardnotes.org/extensions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Concerning encryption, privacy, and the U.S. Constitution:

Confidentiality - First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments

Integrity - First and Fourth Amendments

Availability - First and Fourth Amendments

</comment><comment><USER16> Are there any companies that sell something like privacy as a service? It seems sorely needed that someone work on this</comment>


Automated AWS AMI creation and deletion for your instances using Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2017/aws-instance-automated-ami-creation-deletion-system/ <comment><AUTHOR> Link to Github repo [https://github.com/webdigi/AWS-AMI-Automated-Creation- Deleti...](https://github.com/webdigi/AWS-AMI-Automated-Creation-Deletion)</comment>


Ask HN: Finding work in another country as Junior Developer - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN, I'm a Junior Developer about to finish my BSc and for various reasons I'm looking to find work in a foreign area.
I'm a Canadian citizen and I am looking towards either working in Germany or California.
I'm fully willing to relocate and I'm primarily looking for positions in Web Development.
I was wondering what sort of hurdles and steps I might need to take in order to achieve this goal beyond simply bolstering my resume. What are the best channels/means of finding companies willing to hire international employees.
I realize this might be an unrealistic goal and I would appreciate peoples perspective on that as well. I could just work in Toronto but I would like to take the opportunity to travel somewhere new and challenging to work while I'm young. Ideally I'd be working in an area where the tech culture is booming. <comment><USER2> For Berlin have a look at [http://itsinberlin.com/jobs-in-berlin- startups/](http://itsinberlin.com/jobs-in-berlin-startups/) and [http://venturevillage.eu/](http://venturevillage.eu/).

You might want to stay away from Praktikum (internship). Those are paid, but for a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_%28European_Union%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_%28European_Union%29) it's better to have a full-time job.

Go for it. In central Berlin it's more likely to be approached in English than German already. The startup scene is quite international.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, these are exactly what I was looking for. Thanks</comment></comment>


Show HN: A 2D Physics Simulator in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/aguaviva/Physics/blob/master/RigidBodyChainVSstack.html <comment><USER2> Why is this upvoted so much? In what way is it better than any of the existing JS physics engines?

Matter.js: [http://brm.io/matter-js/](http://brm.io/matter-js/)

Cannon.js: [http://www.cannonjs.org/](http://www.cannonjs.org/)

PhysicsJS: [http://wellcaffeinated.net/PhysicsJS/](http://wellcaffeinated.net/PhysicsJS/)

Box2DJS: [http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/](http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/) (Emscripten-compiled from flash)

p2: [https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js](https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js)

Ammo.js: [https://github.com/kripken/ammo.js/](https://github.com/kripken/ammo.js/) (Emscripten-compiled from C++)

JPE: [https://github.com/colorhook/JPE](https://github.com/colorhook/JPE)

Oimo.js: [https://github.com/lo-th/Oimo.js/](https://github.com/lo- th/Oimo.js/)

Planck.js: [https://github.com/shakiba/planck.js](https://github.com/shakiba/planck.js)

<comment><AUTHOR> All those are great physics engines. Mine is just very simple and easy to understand, hopefully it inspires other people to get into the world of simulations.

<comment><USER3> Also thanks for the reference to Erin Catto's talk, need to check it out. Maybe physics engines aren't magic after all.

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact that was one of the reasons that compelled me do write my own, because physics engines looked to me like voodoo magic. Thanks for understanding my obsession with learning :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to look at precedence or what other people have done successfully in this space check out [http://brm.io/matter-js/](http://brm.io/matter-js/) matter JS. It's pretty sweet.

<comment><AUTHOR> pretty cool and inspiring!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It features collisions, collisions response and hinges-constraints.

I also wrote a tutorial on how constraints work (probably the the most difficult part)

<comment><USER5> Cool!

Is it deterministic? Does it do destructive updates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! What do you mean by deterministic/destructive updates?

<comment><USER6> No idea what destructive updates are, but determinism is when you can run multiple times in multiple environments and get the same results

<comment><AUTHOR> then yes, it is deterministic :)

<comment><USER7> I don't mean to be rude, but if you don't know the term I'd put money on it not being deterministic. Especially if you're running in JavaScript on multiple browsers.

A single step that isn't consistent in behavior across every setup is enough to make the entire process non-deterministic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this really a simulation if you can't modify any of the objects? For all we know, this could all be pre-calculated or pre-animated. Everything moves exactly the same way every time.

<comment><USER9> It moves differently in different browsers for me. And neither instance seems to actually make physical sense.

In Chrome, the fourth box from the top starts sliding when it hits the floor, pushing the box to the right clear off the floor box. Every box eventually slides along the floor and falls into the pit.

In Firefox, the fourth from the top stays put. It never pushes the box on the right, though all the rest eventually slide into the pit.

<comment><USER10> In Firefox Developer Edition everything happens faster than in regular Firefox, though they seem to end at the same result. I wonder why that is. Animation doesn't seem much faster.

I think the "neither instance seems to actually make physical sense" is due to a lack of friction.

<comment><AUTHOR> The animation speed is determined by a timer, this _should_ make it run the same in all the browsers. Is the simulation nice and smooth all the time?

Friction is a biggie that I need to add ASAP!

<comment><USER11> I suspect you're experiencing the joy of floating-point nondeterminism.

Edit: yup, it's the same every time _per browser_ , but I can have e.g. Edge and Chrome running next to one another doing different things.

<comment><USER12> Hey hey hey, let's not blame floating point here ;).

Floating point is completely deterministic (as you note by getting the same behavior every time you run the simulation in the browser). I'm looking at the js spec, and there shouldn't be any freedom in evaluating floating point expressions (but overly clever browser vendors may have ignored that and reordered them anyhow).

However, I do know for a fact that the implementations of the Math.sin and Math.cos functions are browser specific,

[https://tc39.github.io/ecma262/#sec- math.sin](https://tc39.github.io/ecma262/#sec-math.sin)

so that alone will remove any chance at browser independent reproducibility, without additional controls.

Be interesting to see if replacing Math.cos and Math.sin with your own implementation would remove the cross browser dependency.

Btw, spec conforming implementation of Math.sin

      function sin(x) {
        if (   x === Infinity
            || x === -Infinity
            || x === NaN) {
          return NaN;
        }
        return x;
      }

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I highly recommend reading or watching something about Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA)

<comment><AUTHOR> I knew that one! is fantastic isn't it!? This is one of my favourites: [https://github.com/xibyte/jsketcher](https://github.com/xibyte/jsketcher)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks, good show. Another one I like is [http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/](http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/). See Newton's cannon etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is where I show that I know nothing about physics engines:

... does it have conservation of energy? Can you track total energy somehow?

... does it obey approximately some kind of Liouville theorem?

<comment><USER16> > does it have conservation of energy? Can you track total energy somehow?

You're going to need a geometric integrator for that, probably an energy- momentum integrator. In practice it is often better to conserve the symplectic form instead of energy, though, and you can show that for fixed time-steps you can't get all of energy/momentum/symplecticity at the same time (I haven't looked at this for a while, a student of the school of Marsden jump in if I'm saying anything wrong). Furthermore, these guarantees all require integrability...

<comment><USER15> My (ongoing) thesis is in the field of symplectic integrators.

I was asking about these simplified physics engines (in games, etc.) that are probably not deriving physical laws out of whole conservation- (or Noetherian symmetry-) cloth.

<comment><USER16> Very cool! Game rigid body engines (to my knowledge) usually use symplectic Euler (v^{n+1} = v^n + h M^{-1} F^n, q^{n+1} = q^n + h v^n) with a Moreau/Stewart-Trinkle velocity level discretization of non-penetration constraint (effectively impulses), usually lobbing off the quadratic velocity term (so no precession). These constraints are typically solved in a (projected) Gauss-Seidel fashion to horribly loose tolerances, with liberal post-stabilization thrown in. Outside of rigid bodies, for the most part in games, these days, you don't get 'simulations' that can be derived from a variational principle, but that are instead constraint satisfaction problems with some notion of momentum hacked in the side (see 'Position Based Dynamics', 'Shape Matching').

The movie folks have larger compute time budgets, and I've seen various geometric integrators used there. I know of at least one studio that uses implicit midpoint for thin shell simulation. The Cal-Tech influence has wormed its way into the graphics research world, at least, and you see some papers pop up there frequently looking at geometric integrators. This Danish guy (I'm forgetting his name) at Disney publishes papers every now and then on the topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazing post!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The contact link just says <my_github_account_username>@gmail.com. I'd love to look at some actual code if there's a github link?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is code and there is also some quick tutorials on how constraints work,

[http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/aguaviva/Ph...](http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/aguaviva/Physics/blob/master/ChainSimulation.html)

this one shows how to solve a double/n pendulum, which is something that is not explained in detail anywhere. So if you want to learn how constraints work that should get you up to speed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there friction or non-zero restitution?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no friction so far but I will add it whenever I have a chance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The only part missing? Physics...

Somehow boxes slide along a flat floor with no deceleration until they fall off the screen

<comment><USER19> I think the word you were looking for was "friction". This certainly looks like a simulation that a physics professor would propose on a chalk board: "Ignoring friction for the purpose of this exercise..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Erm, no offense but:

a) physics programs are supposed to offer interactivity. Else whats the point?

b) the physics look unearthly

<comment><USER16> > physics programs are supposed to offer interactivity. Else whats the point?

To solve differential equations for which analytical solutions do not exist?

Edit: Differential inclusions, if inequality constraints are included in the system (as they would here).

<comment><USER20> Of course it depends on what the goal of the program is, but something like this should offer user interactivity. By solving whatever is necessary (or faking it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Out of curiosity: The chrome tab running the engine is using 55% of my CPU, an i7-4770K running at 3.5Ghz...

Box2D with many more objects consumes 22%.

Oimo, with a 3D rendering scene with TONS of objects: 35% CPU..

Matter.js, lots of objects with mouse interaction: 15% CPU.

Plank, lots of objects: 25%

I'm wondering how/why this ended up in the front page...

<comment><AUTHOR> Physics engines are like magic and it is pretty hard understand how the work even if you read the paper many times. Also physics engines are interesting not only because four the dynamics, but also for the way constraints are solved. There are many other problems were you could apply this same techniques. This JavaScript engine it's a couple of pages long, it's easy to understand and potentially could give you a new vision on how to solve problems. The reason why is uses do much CPU time is because the collision detection algorithm compares every single pair of objects, to speed up that part I'd need to add what is called a 'broad phase' but that would complicate the code and the point was to write clear code and leave the low hanging fruit for the reader.</comment></comment>


End of Perl? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/x/humour/funny00001.html

<comment><USER2> ...tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.</comment>


How Long Will the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Last? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-oil-spill-last <comment><USER2> The engineering side of this situation has been underreported. (Maybe I don't follow the right websites) I support people submitting more stories on the tech side of the spill to HN. Considering the entire thing is being done by robots at 5,000 ft deep, there is some real technology getting used here.

<comment><USER3> I've heard one of the biggest risks with global warming is that as the ocean water changes temperatures it has the potential to alter the flow of ocean water currents.

I'm wondering if this oil spill somehow has the potential to do the same thing. Maybe the change in consistency of the water in the gulf. Maybe the layer of oil on the surface will cause water temperatures beneath it. Maybe the lack of oxygen beneath the layer of oil will wreak some unknown consequences.

Any good resources on this topic?

<comment><USER2> It definitely will have some effect, but man is that hard to predict. I think we won't see information on that for a while, we still barely understand the currents of the ocean to begin with.</comment></comment></comment>


Cannabis reverses aging processes in the brain - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-05-cannabis-reverses-aging-brain.html <comment><USER2> > Memory performance decreases with increasing age. Cannabis can reverse these > ageing processes in the brain. This was shown in mice by scientists at the > University of Bonn with their colleagues at The Hebrew University of > Jerusalem (Israel).

Directly contradicts previous reports of memory loss from extended Cannabis use.[1]

Who do you believe? It's starting to sound like those 'studies' and 'research' on coffee, eggs, wine, etc. 1 day it's good for you, another day, it kills you.

[1] Source: See the first few results from reputed sources in this search => [https://www.google.com/search?q=cannabis+memory+loss](https://www.google.com/search?q=cannabis+memory+loss)

<comment> xkcd-sucks Memory is pretty complicated, to the point where recalling memories makes them labile, destroying connections is as important as making connections, there are different processes underlying different types of memory, etc. So it's possible all of these results are replicable in various contexts.

One thing that helps with biology papers is mentally substituting "performance in our mouse model of memory" for memory, they are using some very specific metric for memory in aged mice. It may be that this result doesn't hold true for a different memory metric, in different animals etc.

Also, without reading the full paper it's unclear whether THC harms this type of memory task memory in young mice, which could totally be true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ha! Top notch work on the photo choice there!

<comment><USER4> Yes it is. Photo is hilarious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> __Caution: wildly speculative theory __

I 've had a pet theory that hallucinogens have an effect on the brain analogous to database refactoring. Users commonly report the experience of mental schema breaking down and being reordered. Maybe older minds have database tables with too many columns and need psychedelic experiences to normalize their DB (ie. mental schema)?</comment>


Anthos – Build and manage modern hybrid applications - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/anthos/ <comment><USER2> > Anthos is a subscription-based service, with the list prices starting at > $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block. Enterprise prices then to be up for > negotiation, though, so many customers will likely pay less.

> Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and > deploy workloads across clouds [...] This is Google, after all, managing > your applications for you on AWS and Azure

from: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/googles-anthos-hybrid- clou...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/googles-anthos-hybrid-cloud- platform-is-coming-to-aws-and-azure/)

<comment><USER3> I wonder why they make things so crazy expensive or aren't upfront about enterprise / volume pricing.

<comment><USER4> GCP is scaling up a huge outside sales org (expensive). That means any propsect that's not an enterprise is not worth going after. Easy to weed out the medium and small businesses if you are upfront about a minimum 10k/month commitment.

<comment><USER3> I don't know – AWS has done fine with relatively transparent pricing. Telling folks you must spend $1,200 a year per vCPU for a software management layer seems ill conceived.

<comment><USER4> AWS runs a different sales model. They are much more balanced inside vs outside sales. They have inbound marketing and actively target businesses of all sizes. Inside sales is cheaper and can support smaller customers. I can tell you, AWS is not sending an experienced field rep to visit your one-man basement-built mobile app startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Google Next Keynote (where this was just announced) is emphasizing the multicloud/cloud agnostic/on-prem capabilities, which given the emphasis on cloud lock-in nowadays is not what I expected.

<comment><USER6> It's Google's competitive advantage, and is still ultimately about lock-in.

Buy in to Kubernetes, buy in to Google Anthos, have the appearance of flexibility, but get used to GCP's tooling, quirks, documentation, etc, etc, and before long you're considering GC as the first option for all new development.

It makes perfect sense from where they are in the market.

<comment><USER7> Customers liking your service is not lock in.

<comment><USER8> ...but customers being trained on "GCP's tooling, quirks, documentation" and not your competitors' is. Also it extends beyond training, even cloud storage apis and tools are not drop-in compatible in clients and scripts.

<comment><USER9> You're attempting to weaponise the notion that people are better at things they use vs things they don't use.

<comment><USER10> This can very much be a thing. Azure was originally built to look how many IT orgs deployed and managed their windows based infrastructure. It made it less scary to move into Azure, as opposed to AWS.

You can also see this in healthcare with Epic. They use absolutely bizarre names for everything to the point that it is hard for organizations using Epic to talk to organizations using other EHRs, or for employees to move between them. And since they have an absolute stranglehold on training and documentation, you basically have to go through them to be indoctrinated.

Folks have a real fear of change and learning is viewed as difficult and/or annoying. This can create considerable inertia that you can exploit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone seen any more details on Anthos Migrate?

Google is launching the first beta of Anthos Migrate today. This service will auto-migrate VMs from on-premises or other clouds into containers in the Google Kubernetes Engine. The promise here is that this is essentially an automatic process and once the container is on Google's platform

Edit: They demoed it on stage a few minutes after I asked... should have just waited. >.<

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure what the logic here is compared to AWS Outposts and Azure Stack. AWS Outposts and Azure stack support a very large number of Azure services and Anthos just supports GKE and Istio? So there's no first class story for basic things like queues and blob storage? How many people really use Kubernetes without needing a persistent volume claim?

I like the idea of something you can just install and run on your existing hardware, but that doesn't seem to be the goal of this either as they only support a single router and a single proprietary virtualization platform. That seems even worse than just giving you a box you can plug in like AWS and Azure.

Bigger question is what is it going to take for Google to offer anything more than this? Google has very restrictive source code policies internally, so I'd guess they'd be extremely reluctant to let the binaries for things like BigTable which run all of Google and GCP leave their network. Do they rewrite all their services or let BigTable run outside of firewall and throw an atomic clock in the box?

<comment><USER13> The same limitations apply to the other on prem services. Theres no way the real EBS control and data plane is running on prem, its just some compatible service.

Outposts has a limited feature set if you arent using vsphere, and Azure uses Microsoft's existing private cloud/on prem stack.

Enterprises are scared of one way bad decisions so if GC can convince them containerizing and moving their apps to kubernetes first is worth it over "lift and shift" this could go well. One of the few competitive advantages google has for enterprises is they can point to Amazon and Azure being forced to add managed Kubernetes services, because customers wanted that instead of a proprietary orchestrator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting. Sounds a lot like my OSS project Talos: [https://github.com/talos-systems/talos](https://github.com/talos- systems/talos). Very similar goals too.

<comment><USER15> Did they also steal your logo? Those are pretty close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google has decided to imitate AWS for ridiculously non-obvious service names.

<comment><USER17> They are total legit if you speak Greek. Now engineers get to know Greek words like MDs :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So is Google deciding to use Greek names for all their cloud services now?

<comment><USER17> Hahaha and my last startup was called sfalma (σφάλμα) which stands for error but nobody could pronounce. Unless it became a Google project. Kubernetes is pretty hard core too

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a little confused by their landing page, is this a product/packaging made for on-prem users only, or some general GKE config management that applies to all GKE customers?

</comment><comment><USER20> Response to IBM's strategy re: the Red Hat acquisition?

<comment><USER21> No. IBM is flailing around trying to innovate it's way out of real financial constraints that affect their bottom lines. They've managed to stay relevant only through acquisitions; most smart engineers have a pretty negative view of them, for good reasons: it's not an engineering first company, it's a sales first company, and it won't survive for very long when most people figure out their Watson AI is a hot pile of garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> so this will run on AWS and Azure too.... what is it going to use to provision the cluster, kops?

</comment><comment><USER23> Wait, isn't this what docker is theoretically capable of? (i.e. via docker- compose to manager docker containers)

<comment><USER24> Not even remotely as docker-compose is not Kubernetes, or anything resembling a container scheduler or Kubernetes Management Platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How long until Google cancels this with 6 months notice?

<comment><USER26> Forewarning... I think a lot of people on HN ( _myself included_ ) are a bit tired of this joke now. While I get and understand the frustration/sentiment, I think it's a bit played out, and doesn't add to the discussion anymore.

<comment><USER27> It's true that it's not a funny joke, but it does make a point. Any time Google announces something cool, the first thought most engineers have is, "Do I really want to invest in this given that it could go away with minimal warning?".

It's a huge problem that Google will have to overcome. Say what you will about AWS, but they've only ever cancelled one product as far as I know (SimpleDB) and they gave people multiple years warning and a replacement product.

<comment><USER5> This case is a bit different because it's explicitly an enterprise product (w/ _contracts_ ) than a consumer product like Inbox and Reader.

<comment><USER27> Sure, but that in some sense makes it worse. So now I get locked into a contract for years on a product that maybe they'll just stop working in 1/2 way through my contract. Sure, they'll have to keep it running for me until the end of the contract, but they may not keep it running well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When will it be discontinued?

<comment><USER29> Probably when Reader is brought back.

<comment><USER17> And it will be branded as anagnostes</comment></comment></comment>


Tinyurl question - <AUTHOR>

won't tinyurl, as it increases in popularity, eventually lose functionality as the indicators after the slash become longer and longer? <comment><USER2> tinyurl uses a-z and 0-9, right? So every new digit increases the possible total thirty-six-fold. A ten-digit ending gives you 3,656,158,440,062,976 possible URLs.

So I think we're safe.

<comment><AUTHOR> k thanks</comment></comment>


Startup Hablo - <AUTHOR> HI everyone !!!! I am Mousser Rahmouni cofounder of startup HABLO. I would like to share with you our solution that will be launched on October and i would like to have feedbacks.
HABLO is a device placed near babies that detects crying. It's connected to a mobile application that analyzes, decrypts and alerts parents through an algorithm of AI
What do you think ? Any suggestions ?
Thanx ;) <comment><USER2> I have a one year old baby. I can already know with 100% certainty when she is crying, and most of the time it's quite clear what she wants.

What does this device add to that?

<comment><USER3> Some people are more susceptible than others to feeling bad when accused of bad parenting due to their use/non-use of baby monitors...or any other parenting idea that has two or more alternatives (which is nearly any parenting decision a parent makes in good faith).

For many people, accusations of bad parenting have real world consequences...imagine your social media "admission" of non-use in the context of application for social services, court supervision, or child protective services investigation...or if you or someone you love tweeted about their non-use.

The needs that baby monitors meet are generally not those of the baby. Babies don't have Amazon Prime accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Baby monitors already exist. I don't see how adding this into the mix fulfills a market need.

<comment><USER5> Yes plus the baby cry is perfectly tuned to wake you up, so any alert this does will be inferior. Plus if you recognise types of cry you'd lose that fidelity through this.

I'd consider pivoting this into a sleep study device. Ie collecting stats so that you can reflect on the quality of baby/toddler sleep with recommendations to see a doctor if appropriate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we will be precise for the alerts after we will match the baby with his approriate doctor (teleconsultation ) but now we need to collmect data to improve our deep learning model

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know this is not very constructive but I think if you made the same thing but for dogs or cats it would make a mint.

<comment><AUTHOR> But really it can exist.we can treat any wave and each wave has his own characteristics so we can analyse it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is it needed?

</comment><comment><USER8> What problem does this solve?

<comment><USER3> One possible problem is distribution. It seems likely to me that smartphones and babies are more widely distributed than baby monitors. Due to segmentation of the baby products markets baby monitors appear to be upmarket.

For example, a quick check of Walmart.com for _store available_ baby monitors near my zipcode has the cheapest monitor at ~$35.00 and the rest at $80-100+. Because the $35.00 monitor is not available _in stock_ at all the Walmarts near my zipcode, distribution and segmentation mean new parents not enjoying the benefits of relatively lavish baby showers and other gifts face a substantial consumer purchase...more than 10 hours at minimum wage.

As described, a minimum viable Hablo probably might require <$5.00 of hardware...microphone, power supply, and wireless. So I'd say there might be an underserved market in the US. Outside the US, I'd expect the same.

This is of course a possible problem that might be solved. With the caveat that the shape of the baby monitor market might reflect absolute requirements for profitability...but I think that's more first world economic theory than reality on the ground.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what list you were looking at, but I'm seeing many baby monitors for sale for under 20 dollars. And with 9 months to plan, I suspect that it is OK to get one shipped if it is not in stock locally. I'm just not sure how big the market is for people who cannot afford a monitor, yet live in homes so large that they cannot hear their baby.

I think deaf parents might be a better angle to take with this product, as it could give a non-auditory cue back to those parents.

<comment><USER3> I filtered Walmart.com by _in store availability_ near my zipcode. What a new parent would find on the shelves if they walked into a local store earlier today and probably what they would find on the shelves at 2am tomorrow after deciding a baby monitor solves their problems. The fact that $100 is a normal price for a baby monitor even at Walmart suggests market inefficiencies. The plausibility of the arbitrage described in your comment is premised on market inefficiencies.

Please keep in mind that I described a feasible answer to "what problem does it solve?" That doesn't mean the OP's business is viable or likely to experience hockey stick growth. It's just that after a little reflection, I realized the basis for my initial dismissal was mostly "a $100 baby monitor isn't a big deal for most people I know well." They tend to have bank accounts and Visa cards and internet access.

They tend to be better off than many people I see in Walmart.

<comment><AUTHOR> As i said the production will be in tunisia so we can have control on price .For the distribution we have two channels the first will be through online marketplace Amazon .The second through the babies shops. What do you think ? Now we want to collect data to know how american market react on our product because we're gonna launch firstable in french market and after we look to test the US Market

<comment><USER3> In the US, a lot will depend on the price point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>