Selenium IDE alternatives for UI regression testing - <AUTHOR> http://screenster.io/selenium-ide-alternatives-for-ui-regression-testing/ <comment><USER2> I'd recommend coding the tests instead of using the IDE, much less frustrating.

 _Protractor_ ([http://www.protractortest.org](http://www.protractortest.org)) is a good wrapper for Selenium: despite the name, you can totally use it with non-Angular pages (I'm a Preact person myself). It's convenient because it handles installing and updating webdrivers (which was especially handy on Windows), and seems well-maintained. And if you're using only _Chrome_ and _Firefox_ , it even has a direct connection mode to skip having to run a Selenium server (example: [https://github.com/wildpeaks/threejs-examples- screenshots](https://github.com/wildpeaks/threejs-examples-screenshots)).

Otherwise if you just want to run tests in a real browser environment but don't want to test in multiple browsers, you could run them in NW.js, Electron, SlimerJS, or PhantomJS.

<comment><USER3> Do you know of a list of wrappers like Protractor?

<comment><USER4> Nightwatch-Cucumber [https://github.com/mucsi96/nightwatch- cucumber](https://github.com/mucsi96/nightwatch-cucumber) is a killer combo for me.

Lately, I was playing with it. Here is a starter project: [https://github.com/jumasheff/nightwatch- cucumber-e2e-testing...](https://github.com/jumasheff/nightwatch- cucumber-e2e-testing-example)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the more technical side: _does anyone know of a real alternative to Selenium?_ ...cause everything seems to be _based_ on it even if you're not using it directly.

I like my web app acceptance tests to be code, readable and maintainable, not UI/OCR thingies... but I've seen so many bugs like "this element is visible and clickable, but Selenium says it's not, because the 3d-css animation + dom- manipulation voodoo of the tested app got selenium completely confused"... and I'm not even mentioning web code with events-on-SVG-nodes or webgl here...

Any non-standard and animation-heavy web-app/page will utterly confuse Selenium to the point that you end up testing by injecting js into the browser (so now you can have bugs in tests only, or tests that pass despite bugs) mingled with test-runner code and heuristic timeouts everywhere...

(I know the "real solution" is "use a frontend framework and write front-end- unit-tests instead", but usually you're writing the acceptance tests for something that already exists).

<comment><USER6> I do wonder about the accessibility of pages like this. If it confuses Selenium, can screenreaders cope?

<comment><USER5> Ugly and simple truth: no. In real life, in a customer centric approach, you can choose to ignore even 50% of your users anyway, from a marketing pov, if you decide those are not the users you care about (hint: you care about those willing to pay way way more - like when you make an overpriced iOS app but completely ignore Android to give another example). Why care about... less than 1% of users, when you already chose to ignore an even larger percent in your other approaches? Fair? No. Makes sense? Yes.

Expose all data trough a clean and documented API. If screenreader accessibility matters, someone will eventually pay you to develop an alternate interface using same API, or an open-source will be developed at some point...

Solution to accessibility problems is usually: (1) expose your _data_ though an API, (2) wait to be paid to develop a truly accessible alternate "light" UI (if it ever happens), but don't cripple the "main ui" (well, actually more like "have it like the customer wants it" ;) heavy animations and fx are "crippling" in my personal view too...).

<comment><USER6> I'm just saying that ignoring users and ignoring testers has considerable overlap in this regard.

(And apart from general and professional ethics, local laws might disagree with the assumption that you're free to ignore users for that reason.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since this thread hits my expertise... We have developed Usetrace ([https://usetrace.com](https://usetrace.com)) for a few years targeting teams that want non-techies to automate GUI testing. (Disclaimer, I am a founder). So far the feedback has been positive and we're getting healthy revenue. It seems that teams are desperate for faster solutions than coded UI tests. But they will only use a tool that keeps up with frequent UI changes (automatically or semiautomatically) and is really painless and quick to use.

Some lessons learned that we're solving with the product:

      - creating basic tests must be doable in 1 minute
      - testing is a team effort (testers&devs) - must have collaboration tools built-in
      - must be extendable with code (js)
      - sync/timing issues must be handled automatically (when possible)
      - UIs will change - generate locators and algorithms that adds robustness
      - debugging must be speedy: must be able to debug test steps live with the browser context (html5 remote connection to the browser)
      - randomness is needed - need an easy way to introduce random data (like random emails)
      - testing emails must be as easy as testing a web page - inbox must be an integrated feature
      - must handle frames transparently - user does not care if the element is inside a frame or not
      - must be pluggable to CI
      - must have good, clear reports
      - some tests will be flaky - must be a way to keep builds stable & green
      - no installations / plugins, just a browser
      - fast to update tests when UI changes - the system must do global replacements when it sees duplicate stuff
      - duplicate test step/code will cause a major maintenance burden - must have reusable/parameterizable components
      - people will want to reuse functional tests for stress testing and monitoring - allow that too
      - people need to check for dynamic content - must have a quick and codeless way to use variables
      - people want to have quick builds - tool must offer parallel testing
      - people will want to integrate to their own systems - must offer APIs
      - html pages are responsive - must have support for different screen sizes

<comment><USER8> While your premise is indeed sound - and let me say I'm not taking away any credit for what you and your team have built - but we did evaluate Usetrace last year and found several basic issues. The system simply wouldn't record several events and user actions and it fell so far behind in a test case that we concluded it was probably not the right tool for us at the time.

But I'll be happy to re-evaluate the tool.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback. We have come quite far since last year. For example, now you can record html5 drag and drop events. Give it a try, we'd love to hear if there's a webpage with issues, so we can fix Usetrace.

<comment><USER8> Thanks - will certainly have another go at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The product might be good, blog post might be right. But for a vendor locked alternative to say an opensource alternative as "doing more harm than good" makes me rage.

<comment><USER10> Yup, this is obviously marketing. They didnt even go as far as posting it somewhere other than their blog. Funny how they promote 2 competitors in the post and make them look more favorable. This company needs marketing help ( if you are reading this email me and Ill help you improve).

<comment><USER11> I'll think about it, thanks

<comment><USER10> You are welcome. Best of luck with the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everybody interested in web automation should also check out Helium [1]. It's a wrapper around Selenium, thus inherits its stability, speed and browser support. But instead of requiring you to write driver.find_element_by_id("btn356").click() you can just say click("Download"). This alleviates the need for record and playback tools, because scripts are so easy to write. It also avoids the problem that scripts created via R&P are virtually unmaintainable. Helium is commercial and I'm one of the authors.

[1]: [https://heliumhq.com](https://heliumhq.com)

<comment><USER5> I went with CodeceptJS [1] instead (Seleniu in nodejs, with most of the async madness abstracted away) for the last project, but, as thangalin says it best "It is a lot of effort to automate user interface testing with Selenium, especially for web applications with complex user interfaces, concealed options, and so forth.".

Advantage is that testrunner code mingles seamlessly with injected-into- browser-js. Problem is... complexity, and twilight-zone-class bugs in the testing tools themselves: there comes a point where the logic of the acceptance tests is so convoluted, and they are so undebuggable and unmaintainable, that fixing and extending them eats the time of _the best and most expensive developers_ , instead of being a great tasks for juniors...

Eager to try helium next, hope it sucks less :)

[1]: [http://codecept.io/](http://codecept.io/)

Edit+: don't get me wrong, CodeceptJS is amazing compared to the madness of seleniu-webdriver/webdriver.io used "raw", with promises and callbacks, so kudos to its devs. But its far from optimal... though this maybe because selenium itself is far from optimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of companies still use Selenium IDE to create and run tests, even though it's basically been deprecated for a couple of years now in favour of WebDriver.

The reason a lot of people still use it, is because it's very easy to create a test; you basically record the things you want to test and Selenium IDE generates the test for you, without requiring any programming knowledge.

( Source: I work for a company where people upload their Selenium IDE tests to run them on a large grid of browsers in the cloud, [https://testingbot.com](https://testingbot.com) )

</comment><comment><USER14> A Selenium UI recording tool is a good starting point to help people learn. Quickly though it becomes pretty limiting and specialized testers need to switch over to using code.

The Selenium IDE I like using at this point is Oxygen. It's Atom with a Selenium recorder built in. It records and gives you code with details about the XPath and CSS Selectors provided in comments above each recorded action. It's the best tool I've found for quickly getting off of record-playback dependency and into working with code. The Oxygen IDE provides intellisense and real debugging. It strikes the right balance of allowing you to record when you need to, but then getting out of the way and providing you with a real IDE so you can work with the code.

[http://oxygenhq.org](http://oxygenhq.org)

I did a blog post not too long ago about some of it's quirks on Windows... [https://scriptmonkey.wordpress.com/2016/06/03/oxygen-for- sel...](https://scriptmonkey.wordpress.com/2016/06/03/oxygen-for-selenium-on- windows/)

</comment><comment><USER15> > Selenium IDE makes you handle timeouts manually which is a major > inconvenience.

you can set the implicit wait setting. this will work in most cases but will make the tests slow when you need to test negative conditions. the behavior around implicit wait varies by driver implementation which can be annoying. in general it's better to use explicit waits.

> Selenium IDE only works with Firefox and may not work for sites or web apps > that have slightly different DOM structure in Chrome, Safari, and IE.

selenium ide has webdriver playback[1]. if you don't like that you can generate webdriver scripts in c#, java, python, or ruby and run them against selenium server.

[1] [http://blog.reallysimplethoughts.com/2013/02/18/webdriver- pl...](http://blog.reallysimplethoughts.com/2013/02/18/webdriver-playback-in- selenium-ide-is-here/)

<comment><USER16> Screenster support for timeouts is much more extensive. It automatically determines the time it takes for the server to process each user action, it uses the visual baseline to wait for the right state instead of timing out or waiting too long.

Obviously you can do everything with WebDriver, Screenster uses it too. The point is that you can get a lot of benefits out of the box when you are using a highler level platform like Screenster vs hand coding to a low level API like WebDriver.

There's some description of Screenster features here [http://screenster.io/selenium-alternatives-for-testing- autom...](http://screenster.io/selenium-alternatives-for-testing-automation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where I find such IDEs lacking is their inability to control playback timing and animate mouse movement. It is a lot of effort to automate user interface testing with Selenium, especially for web applications with complex user interfaces, concealed options, and so forth. It should be trivial to generate an instructional video showing how to use the application by re-using the efforts involved with writing the web tests.

A while back, I combined Java's Robot class with Selenium and a simple scripting language to create Scripted Selenium.

[https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/scripted- selenium/](https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/scripted-selenium/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvcm0Rlm-0&](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvcm0Rlm-0&)

</comment><comment><USER6> I really don't like pricing levels that aren't just per user, but per test. That encourages thriftiness at a level where you shouldn't be thrifty.

Never mind that I'd be seriously worried that a lot of these small time players are out of business the next year and I'll end up with useless tests (of course this is better if the software itself is just helping recording tests and it all ends up as Selenium scripts in some human-readable language).

</comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone used [Nightmare]([https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare](https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare))? It's built on top of Electron -- the Atom code editor is built on Electron.

<comment><USER19> It's great, but I can't stand the chaining syntax. I'm a bit biased, but I think that some suite with async/await will be the future. Here's something that I've been working on: [https://github.com/KevinGrandon/ghostjs/](https://github.com/KevinGrandon/ghostjs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If the authors are listening, I think the tool you have in mind is called Sahi (not Sachi). Also, you lump it with proprietary solutions unfairly when you say:

> Finally, Sachi, RFT, and UFT are expensive enterprise solutions that require > local installation, certain servers, runtime licenses and lots of config. > Being difficult to learn, hard to maintain, and costly, none of these > solutions beats the open-source and free Selenium. End of story.

Sahi is open source and is hosted on SourceForge: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/sahi/files/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/sahi/files/)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for pointing this out, I should've done my homework better with Sahi pricing. I've fixed the issue

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> if we go with simplicity, then I didn't see anything simple than [http://sikulix.com/](http://sikulix.com/) \- you can automate anything you want there.

<comment><USER16> Sikuli is simple but from what I know about it you can't write maintainable tests with it. Relying on the pictures to be always the same and driving your test is guaranteed to cause false positives.

I think the future lies with platforms like Screenster that have recording, collaboration, built-in browser execution, visual verification and lots of other magic, and not with low-level frameworks like Sikuli.

But both have their place :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Although a recorder makes it easy to record tests with a growing test suite you'll find it frustrating to re-use or re-factor the tests.

Plus all the data that you record is tangled in the generated code making it hard to locate or change.

We created gauge [http://getgauge.io/](http://getgauge.io/) (It's open source) to solve this problem by making it easier to author and write tests in your favorite tool, without a recorder.

The tests can be authored in mark down and wired up to re-usable selenium code.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been out of the QA role for a few years now but there is a nifty, albeit not maintained, tool that I used to use for generating UI objects for Selenium. It's not really an IDE, but it did allow me to quickly generate files needed for using the PageObjects model.

[https://unmesh.me/2013/08/29/pageobject-generator-utility- fo...](https://unmesh.me/2013/08/29/pageobject-generator-utility-for-selenium- webdriver/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe slightly unrelated but what do people use for browser driven stress/load tests? I have been using PhantomJS + phantomherd[1], but boy, PhantomJS sure takes a lot of CPU.

\--

1\. [https://github.com/nmeans/phantomherd](https://github.com/nmeans/phantomherd)

<comment><USER25> Definitely not browser based but I've had good luck with Bees with Machine Guns[0] (Python EC2 load test swarm) for load testing. It's not as scriptable as a PhantomJS test, where you can have every actor follow their own script or anything like that, but it can sure generate a lot of requests a lot cheaper than some of the alternatives.

One thing we've done in the past is to generate a large background load with BWMG and then run a few PhantomJS/Selenium tests in a smaller test rig. It's a lot easier to get the load that way vs. trying to swarm Phantom or Selenium.

0: [https://github.com/newsapps/beeswithmachineguns](https://github.com/newsapps/beeswithmachineguns)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd be curious how these test recorders handle mouseover events (eg: you have a multilevel menu which you hover through). The only way I got this to work was record every mouseover event, which quickly made an enormous brittle test, or just don't test stuff that has mouseover.

<comment><USER7> Having developed a test recorder, I found out that the best solution was to make mousehover an explicit action (the same as in webdriver). Better to have a robust test than try to do something too fancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hmm .. This is kind of pointed towards the host product. At least include links to the competing products if you want to give an impression of objectivity.

</comment><comment><USER28> Have you looked at Applitools for visual testing? [http://applitools.com/](http://applitools.com/)</comment>


Lint for Math - <AUTHOR> https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/lint-for-math/ <comment><USER2> We really need a better way to represent math in documents. TeX/LaTex is all about putting ink on paper in a pretty way; it doesn't know anything about the math.

As with programming languages, the first question is what each variable is, and what its type and definition are. You should be able to mouse over variables in textbooks and see that information. You should be able to see formulas fully parenthesized if you want. (The machine learning people are terrible about inventing new operators and not telling the reader what their precedence is.)

Mathematica notebooks come close to this. But books and papers on math are not usually published that way. MathML was a step in the right direction but didn't catch on.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that there are actually several components needed: the semantic markup language, an input method no less efficient than LaTeX, and the math- lint itself. LaTeX is not semantic. MathML is just too verbose to type in the raw. The syntax used by theorem-proving software tends to be both esoteric and a bit too verbose (in addition to requiring the statements themselves to be extremely verbose).

I'm not sure that _any_ plaintext markup can be sufficiently compact, semantic, and still resemble the handwritten syntax. That means we'll probably have to come up with a more interactive input method that is a bit more WYSIWYG in nature and has some auto-complete and automatic parenthesizing.

<comment><USER4> One of the reasons is surely that different fields of maths/engineering reuse the same symbols to have different meanings.

<comment><USER5> We know how to do type-directed operator overloading in unambiguous cases, eg. static methods in OO, modules and typeclasses in FP. This is often (ab)used to distinguish between alternative definitions. For example, Haskell's Monoid module defines several type synonyms for booleans and numbers, each of which has a different Monoid definition: [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-18.104.22.168/docs/Data-M...](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-184.108.40.206/docs/Data- Monoid.html)

If we trigger an error for ambiguous cases, the path of least resistance is to make things unambiguous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Simple errors like these cover maybe 0.01% of the issues in a common math paper draft. Scrutinizing human review is required to catch "intellectual errors" such as introducing a concept before the reader is mentally prepared for it, or by offering an explanation in too much or little depth. During review, typographical errors (e.g. $10^12$) and "type-checking" errors (e.g. "r ∈ R vs. r ⊆ R") should be obvious to reviewers, so I feel it would be an extremely low priority to develop and apply a tool to fix these trivial issues.

And as much as I value good, clean code and style guides in programming, the TeX source of formulas are never read and usually edited by a single person, even in large collaborative projects.

<comment><USER7> > Simple errors like these cover maybe 0.01% of the issues in a common math > paper draft.

And yet I wasted lots of time trying to make sense of papers containing such errors. So I would appreciate such a tool.

<comment><USER8> Terry Tao has a blog post about these "compilation errors":

        However, when, as a graduate student, one encounters the task of
        reading a technical mathematical paper for the first time, it is
        often the case that one loses much of one's higher reading skills,
        reverting instead to a more formal and tedious line-by-line
        interpretation of the text. As a consequence, a single typo or
        undefined term in the paper can cause one's comprehension of the
        paper to grind to a complete halt, in much the same way that it
        would to a computer.

[https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27/posts/TGjjJPUdJjk](https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27/posts/TGjjJPUdJjk)

There's more context here:

[https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career- advice/there%E2%80%99s...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career- advice/there%E2%80%99s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think this is going to be possible until computers are smart enough to understand high level maths (theorem provers have still a long way to go). A hundred different fields of research have a hundred different notations which are usually assumed to be convention and the reader is expected to know about these. The i in the summation could also refer to the imaginary unit but only if you are talking to physicists/mathematicians. Engineers use a j instead. Or what about conventions such as Einstein summation or infix operators defined by a set of axioms? How do you even recognize what a variable is or that \oplus is likely an operator or that z^*z is not a typo but a superscript indicating complex conjugation followed by an implicit multiplication symbol?

In addition, much of the math out there is described in words, rather than pure formulae. Humans are capable to reason about these things because we are trained to have an abstract understanding of what these things mean in a given context (and we can actually understand text).

A naive implementation of checking correctness of equations would likely return an incomprehensibly long list of cases where your equation might not make sense. A program that could check each and every step of your computation needs to understand your notation and definitions. While this is possible in principle – I assume you could do that for one particular problem with Mathematica – it would take you at least a few orders of magnitude more time to implement your sanity-check program for a particular problem than to check your equations by hand.

</comment><comment><USER10> In the grand scheme of things all the errors he mentioned do not make a difference to the overall direction of the proof. Syntactic errors in programs on the other hand do. Unused variables, equality instead of assignment, declared but uninitialized variables, etc. are almost always bugs. That's not the case with math.

That's not to say this line of reasoning is not worthwhile. PLT Redex already does something similar for programming language semantics: [http://redex.racket-lang.org/](http://redex.racket-lang.org/). Catching bugs in programming language semantics works for the same reason catching bugs in C works. There is a formal grammar with well-defined meaning that doesn't exist in general mathematical discourse. There is work being done in that direction as well: [http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/](http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/). I wouldn't call that linting though.

<comment><USER11> > In the grand scheme of things all the errors he mentioned do not make a > difference to the overall direction of the proof.

They make a huge difference if the reader wants to reuse a certain formula without deriving everything in sight. The time necessary to use a formula is no longer O(1), but O(n) with n being the length of the preceding discussion.

It also means you can't look at two expression and immediately check if they are equivalent as the variables might have different semantics.

Plus, you don't get to correct the mistake in the original, so every time you (or someone else) have to read it, you might need to redo the calculations just to be sure.

<comment><USER10> Then you and I are talking about different things. I don't read a mathematical proof to see what formulas I can copy. I read a mathematical proof to re-use the techniques in some other domain and to understand it I have to follow along and re-create bits and pieces of the proof. Obvious mistakes like the one mentioned in the post do not hinder that process. Less obvious errors would not be caught by a linter.

As for correcting mistakes I usually go to the author's homepage to find the most up to date versions along with errata. These days most papers are put up on the arxiv anyway which is often more up to date than whatever is printed in a journal so fixes for minor errors is again a non-issue.

<comment><USER11> I'm not talking about "reading a proof to see what I can copy", it's about being able to rely on what is written there. Also, there are many papers that serve as references that I want to be able to look up quickly. Rederiving every result any time I want to use it is not the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Coq[0] provides functionality that is an extension of this concept. It checks your proofs for you!

[0]- [https://coq.inria.fr/](https://coq.inria.fr/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool idea. Parsing LaTeX into an AST with awareness of math structure (e.g. taking into account symbolic transformations like x^{1/2}=\sqrt{2}) would be a good start.

Before catching errors, I think an easier target for a tool like this would be to enforce notation, e.g. permutations are always called π not σ, and vectors are always \vec{v} not \mathbf{v}. This would be useful for multi-author texts like wikipedia.

<comment><USER14> Parsing LaTeX would be a heavy task due to LaTeX's innumerable packages.

I would recommend a compiler which translates a subset of a clean math notation (which could be identical to the math subset of LaTeX) to native LaTeX, which includes a lint algorithm, and which also supports special graphics packages (PGF/TikZ for instance).

This approach would keep the compiler small and maintainable while retaining 100% compatibility with LaTeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a word to describe the structure of the notation of mathematics versus programming syntax versus the English language?

<comment><USER16> Most of programming is done in something reminiscent of type theory. Actual languages are more complicated because they either are impure (C, C++ etc) or involve non-total functions (Haskell). Idris, Coq and Agda can be reduced to some sort of type theory.

On the other hand, most of mathematics can be done in first order logic (FOL).

As for English, I'm not much of a linguist but I believe the closest equivalent to the above for English (and other natural languages) would be Categorical Grammar or maybe Montague grammar.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where are the famous black programmers? - <AUTHOR>

When people talk of the skewed population for programmers and CS students it always focuses on the man/woman divide.<p>Why don't we talk about the lack of diversity? <comment><USER2> Wow, the answers here are pretty ignorant of the factors at work. I'm a Black programmer and the first hurdle I ran into was not having access or understanding the concept of a computer until I HAD to use one. For instance, it was in high school where a guidance counselor told us we should send college applications and provide an email address - thing is - I didn't know what an email address was. I learned typing on a typewriter... I'm 26 years old, I was still learning to set margins and tabs while most of my peers were using typing applications on a computer.

My idea of a mouse was the creature that ran to and fro with the roaches in the building we lived in. For the longest, I thought Yahoo.com was the internet lol.

Second, we programmers feed off the community we surround ourselves with - hence this forum, hacker meetups etc. But in my neighborhood - it's non existent with the focus being on sports, programs for at-risk youth and countless other interest - not computers or programming. I say MY neighborhood because I can't speak for all - but the trend is highly prevalent throughout all inner city and rural communities.

The economic hardship is also a factor. Not having access to a computer goes hand in hand with school district funding, family income etc. Also, programming changes so rapidly, the moment you get your foot in - its easy to get discouraged by your lack of understanding because the technique you just learned gets optimized and becomes the new norm before you master the fundamentals.

Saying 1% of this is the same as in the field is ridiculous. Explain the NFL, NBA, FIFA, NASCAR - does those reflect the population? Some states are reaching out to the inner city to teach them to solve the very problems they face using code - other places are still fine with utilizing the tools already made and have no interest in innovating them.

<comment><USER3> Respectfully, I don't think I am ignorant of this. All the problems you mention are linked to lower college graduation rates. As I said, when the college graduation rates improve, more blacks will go to college and the ones who want to will choose CS -- and college graduation rates will improve as some of those problems are fixed. Trying to pull blacks who will graduate college into CS without raising college graduation rates just pulls them out of other degree programs. Maybe you think it's an improvement because you see CS as superior; that's fair, but keep in mind members of every field of study want more racial diversity in their respective fields. I think it's better to focus on pure gains than a zero-sum game. Introducing students to code at an early age, and making it part of people's lives, will certainly increase interest in CS, and it will also increase interest in college and ability to attend it and succeed at it. It's no different than a program to introduce good books to children who normally wouldn't encounter them and who, again, would obviously be unlikely to go to college.

I live in a white rust-belt city where people definitely do not talk about anything I read on Hacker News outside of the few small developer meetups some of us have barely managed to keep going. It's the same kind of problem you have in the inner city -- low rates of education that prevent people who might have been interested in software development from really get a chance to explore it.

P.S. I learned to type on a typewriter too. I happen to count that one as an advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If I recall some reading correctly, black males with college degrees choose CS at least as much as white men. (I don't know about black women, though.) I take this to mean that if we focus on improving education opportunities in general, we will see more black programmers. If we obsess over CS and not college graduation rates, we essentially advocate reducing the number of blacks in other educated fields.

</comment><comment><USER4> ___DISCLAIMER_ __My opinion is based only on my experiences.

I am a black female graduating with my degree in CS in the Spring. I have been fortunate enough to have completed a couple of internships during my time at school. From my experiences, color doesn't matter...knowledge does.

With that being said, I can understand other black student's need to find a mentor or role model of color. They're out there. I met a really cool developer from GaTech that thought me a lot at my last internship. Of that experience, I felt as though he wasn't guiding me because I was also black. He didn't care. It was all about performance.

I also agree with the post before mine that lack of exposure to technology in our youth is the main reason for less black developers.

<comment><USER2> What area of programming are you into?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Assuming we're talking US here)

Because the number of black programmers is roughly in-line with the general population when adjusted for geography and education.

According to the GSS the number of black programmers is roughly 8%.

<comment><USER6> But the question is then: does the makeup of all ethnicities within programming reflect the general population?

<comment><USER5> At a guess I'd say whites would be under-represented and people from asian ethinc backgrounds would be over-represented (probably true across engineering subjects). But nonetheless the difference from the general population is relatively insignificant when compared to the gender gap (where the difference is huge).

<comment><USER7> Saw a TIL Reddit thread recently that stated Indians make up 1% of the population but account for 40% of engineering jobs or something (paraphrasing as I don't remember the exact numbers and didn't read the article linked).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Frankly, I have to agree with another post. I can care less about what the color of your skin is, are you intelligent? That is really all that matters in the end. And with really rare exception this is how I have seen true high tech businesses. The ignorant care about skin color, race etc, the rest of us care about you abilities and that is all.

It is sad to me anyone cares about anything other than your ability to deliver. It is equally as sad that people sue over race when really it is someones inability to do the job. Regardless of your race, religion or color.

</comment><comment> wh-uws As far as famous I can't really recall anyone is particularly famous but you can find a good list of notable folks here

[http://www.quora.com/Who-are-some-notable-African- American-f...](http://www.quora.com/Who-are-some-notable-African-American- founders-entrepreneurs-and-executives-in-Silicon-Valley)

As far as the situation of blacks in tech, I have written at length about it before here

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3170071>

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think the lack of diversity is an issue at all. Programmers provide solutions to problems...computers don't care about your race, age or gender when executing code.

I'm a famous black programmer...you just haven't heard much about me :)

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a huge focus in academia about bringing a more diverse set of students into the computer science spectrum. Check out some of the ACM SIGSCE papers and presentations.

I think in the coming years we will see this change.

</comment><comment><USER11> Honest question.. what are the limits for caring about diversity? Skin colour.. height.. food preferences.. hair colour, eye colours.

tldr: Where are the famous midget programmers?

<comment><USER12> Basically, lets say that 1% of the are midgets, then when there're 1% midgets who are programmers, we can stop caring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> no one cares about your race in technology.</comment>


The most sophisticated crime ever committed - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-is-the-most-sophisticated-crime-ever-committed#ans1263162

<comment><USER2> Link to the wired article with more details:

[http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diamonds...](http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diamonds?currentPage=all)</comment>


Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a timer? - <AUTHOR>

Lookin' for a timer so I can keep track of how long I've been coding for.  I need the timer to run when I start it, stop when I stop it, carry on from the previous time when I start it again and/or keep a record of sessions/total time.
Any ideas?
Cheers! :) <comment><USER2> <http://www.getharvest.com/>

I ude this service. It's mit free but I think it's worth it. You can create clients/projects and set Tour pricing individually. There's an iPhone app to manage it also , I don't know if there's an Android app aswell..

<comment><USER2> My iPhone corrected some words for me, so excuse the spelli g.. :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the replies guys. I don't think they're quite what I'm looking for. I'd like the features of time tracking, just not paying a fee for it since it's not for business.

</comment><comment><USER3> paymo.biz works great</comment>


Geoffrey Hinton: Dark Knowledge [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK61htlw8hY

<comment><USER2> Here are the slides he's using (I think):

[http://www.ttic.edu/dl/dark14.pdf](http://www.ttic.edu/dl/dark14.pdf)

And here is Caruana's 2006 "Model Compression" paper he mentions:

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150464](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150464)

(Note the actual citation is Buciluǎ, Caruana, and Niculescu-Mizil 2006.)

<comment><USER3> Those are indeed the slides from the talk (or very close). Hinton gave this talk at Caltech last month. Very cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish people would properly edit videos like this before uploading them. The complete inaudibility of the host up to 3:14 is rather disconcerting. If you can't fix the sound, cut it!

Here's a link to the point where Geoffrey takes over, which is audible, but you'll probably need to crank up your volume:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK61htlw8hY&t=3m14s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK61htlw8hY&t=3m14s)

Fortunately there doesn't seem to be any problem with background noise, but I can still barely hear it on my MBP with the volume at max. Headphones will most likely help.

<comment><USER5> Audio Hijack Pro is very helpful in these cases. Once you've hijacked the browser audio you can add effects to normalize levels (AudioUnit Effect/Apple/AUMultibandCompressor), remove buzzing (AUFilter), or fix poor balance (4FX Effect/Channel Tweaker or Monomizer).

<comment><USER6> Can you do that live and passthrough the audio?

<comment><USER5> Sorry for the late reply: yes, it is realtime. You may need to restart the target process, but it will ask to do this automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fantastic insights, as usual. Definitely worth putting up with the annoying audio.

</comment><comment><USER8> FYI - Hinton is doing an AMA on r/machinelearning on Monday!</comment>


Sony is launching a PlayStation Classic console in December loaded with 20 games - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17877890/sony-playstation-classic-console-20-games-release-date-pricing <comment><USER2> Waiting for PS2, one title: Original SSX. So damn much fun!

FF VII might get a replay on this one though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm waiting for the Intellivision Classic.

<comment><USER4> That happened already. The Intellevision Flashback console wasn't great but the controllers were reproductions of the original and most were probably bought just for the controllers.</comment></comment>


Tails – simplified installation method - <AUTHOR> https://tails.boum.org/news/test_usb_images/ <comment><USER2> Very cool, love this. My only hope is that this isn't so successful that they neglect the installer because nobody is using it anymore :-)

For users on another Linux (such as Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu) using USB, this will hopefully be a big improvement. The previous process requiring two USB sticks was a PITA

<comment><USER3> > My only hope is that this isn't so successful that they neglect the > installer because nobody is using it anymore :-)

Wouldn't that be a good thing? I mean, you'd have a tough time finding a computer for sale in 2019 that even has a CD drive, why care about it so much?

<comment><USER2> My initial thought was that sometimes you want to install it to your hardware, not just a USB stick. If this is a finished install that lacks the installer, then you wouldn't be able to use it to install to a hard drive. I could be wrong tho.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, but installing Tails onto your hardware is against the spirit of Tails.

[https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/index.en.html#index6h2](https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/index.en.html#index6h2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a difference between CDROM and USB drive images? I write Ubuntu iso images to a USB drive with dd, and it seems to work.

<comment><USER4> There isn't a difference nowadays as far as I know, but used to have a computer that refused to boot off a USB. Also, with USBs, you can have a "persistent" install, which lets you keep things, but you have to be careful, because flash memory will die after a certain number of writes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is 'Etcher'? I wish the docs explained that bit a little better.

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etcher_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etcher_\(software\))

`dd` usually works fine if you're comfortable with the command line.

<comment><USER8> Or, you know, cat.

[https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/blog/?p=479](https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/blog/?p=479)

<comment><USER9> Okay, mark me as one of the lucky 10,000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Getting NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID in Chrome when visiting this url.

<comment><USER11> Mine's OK:

SHA-256 Fingerprint 85 DB 84 70 D7 41 15 0C 30 A0 02 C9 47 DB D8 E8 E5 F6 13 21 5C BE 30 3A 36 3D AB B5 65 9A 86 83

and the creation/expiration dates are not near today. Either they are mistakenly serving different versions from different load-balancing servers, or there's something wrong with your browser's cert store, or TLS is doing its job and telling you that you're getting MITMed.

<comment><USER10> On a corporate network so it's very likely the last option!</comment></comment></comment>


Sweet Krispy Kreme worker surprises man on quest for rejection - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/krispy-kreme-donut-order-rejection-video-153858341.html

<comment><USER2> The guy was exercising his rejection acceptance abilities, but instead his arguably silly request was honored.

The lesson is, don't pre-reject your requests. Make the request, and let the other party decide if they'll reject or not.

</comment><comment><USER2> Olympic Committee copyright shock troops in three ... two ... one ...</comment>


Lazy Partial Evaluation - <AUTHOR> http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/lazy-partial-evaluation/

<comment><USER2> Wow, I love reading stuff like this and realizing there is elegance yet to be discovered for a young "bipolar lisp programmer" such as myself. Humbling and inspiring. It's like lisp with warts, but very tasty and powerful warts.

<comment><USER3> For the lambda calculus and the combinatory logic see Hindley and Seldin's "Lambda Calculus and Combinators", published this year, I think. Hindley and Selding have been doing LC since goodness knows when, and you will see their names all over papers and texts. The book I have in mind is very recent and has orange dark red/orange cover.

For partial evaluation get "Partial Evaluation and Automatic Program Generation." Jones, Gomard and Sestoft. Freely available online somewhere.

If you wanna dip into semantics, there is no better text than Nielson and Nielson "Semantics with Applications", also online on the authors' website. The undergraduate "appetizer" edition is new and I can't vouch for it, but the older one is a gem of a tiny little book. This text introduces all major three semantic theories (axiomatic, operational and denotational; the last one is the one you will brush against the most when you're studying lambda calculus. If you find yourself study Category theory you have gone too far. Operational semantics, specially small-step OS will make you a better virtual machine designer, imo; axiomatic semantics .. just predicate logic, nothing sophisticated, might introduce you to Communicating Sequential Processes if you wanna reason about parallel programs, but generally it's used mostly in 80s algol texts where half-page functions are analyzed to death and reasoned about.)

(there was a great repo of Free programming languages and compiler books but it got shutdown over a year ago after the owner left the university -- if someone is interested in reviving the project, I have a directory listing they can pick and choose texts from.)</comment></comment>


What are some good study sources on Organic Circuits? - <AUTHOR> This is for my study on a fully organic electronic product which uses organic materials like coke, charcoal or carbon to create simple devices replacing the regular silicon PCB board. Any help would be appreciated! Thank you! <comment><USER2> I can't offer any help, but following because the study seems very interesting.</comment>


Lesson Learned:  Coding should be left to professionals - <AUTHOR> http://ozeanmedia.com/ozean_interactive/web-design/lessons-learned-in-mobile-app-development/ Normally, I leave coding to developers.  However…. Playing around in the middle of the night last night when I couldn't sleep, as my first app, I was writing the ultimate Droid Valentines Day App. <comment><USER2> Because I'm lazy, and figure some of you are too ...

        Normally, I leave coding to developers.  However ...

        Playing around in the middle of the night last night when
        I couldn't sleep, as my first app, I was writing the ultimate
        Droid Valentines Day App.

        The app was to run during Valentines day and with random time
        intervals, send texts from an array to my wife such as "I love
        you", "Thought I forgot Valentines, day didn't you?", *etc.*

        Lesson in App development

        In my attempt to write an app & automate my life, I thought
        I would share some things I learned:

        1 Test, and then DAMN IT test some more. Especially, if
          you are writing code in the middle of the night.
        2 You really should put a min wait before looping again –
          random to me is different than random to a computer.
        3 You should put a max time wait before looping again –
          random to me is different than random to a computer.
        4 You should learn the difference between seconds and
          milliseconds <<– !important
        5 In this case, once a variable from an array is used,
          you should eliminate it from being used again.

        If you don't get 1-5 right, it is possible for your app
        to send 75 texts in less than 5 minutes in the middle of
        the night.

        My wife does not appreciate the automation of the expression of love.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can access it via Google cache : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fozeanmedia.com%2Fozean_interactive%2Fweb- design%2Flessons-learned-in-mobile-app- development%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fozeanmedia.com%2Fozean_interactive%2Fweb- design%2Flessons-learned-in-mobile-app- development%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.2603&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER4> Poor guy. I bet he's already getting emails about this but an Android dev out there would do well to help him out by sending some flowers to his wife, help him with his code, and write a blog post about it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://ozeanmedia.com/ozean_media/social-media/if-you- mess-w...](http://ozeanmedia.com/ozean_media/social-media/if-you-mess-with- reddit-or-hackernews/)

I APOLOGIZE!!!! UNCLE!!!!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A new lesson learned: the power of hacker news! The traffic took an entire server down.

Never underestimate the power of making fun of yourself and shining a light on your mistakes!

</comment><comment><USER5> I get an Internal Server Error. This is all very meta.

<comment><USER4> Hah, yes, though having something interesting to say does not correlate with the ability to host a blog (assuming it's his).

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my- own-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-blog- anymore/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "My wife does not appreciate the automation of the expression of love."

</comment><comment><USER7> Your life will be made much easier when the Singularity arrives.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is working on privacy these days? - <AUTHOR> I know Open Whisper Systems is, via the Signal app, and the Signal protocol. Keybase is building user friendly PKI. Tor and I2P are working on the network layer. Who are the other players working to make the web more secure and private for normal users, not just from governments, but from Google, Facebook, Comcast, and other private entities? <comment><USER2> protonmail

people working with some of the alt-coins

there is some work with privacy preserving databases, and privacy preserving data mining/machine learning at the academic level and places like Microsoft Research.

homomorphic encryption research is presently led by IBM.

There are also DARPA's safeware project with Galois and like minded groups for obfuscating compilers</comment>


Buy Or Sell Bitcoin By Connecting Any U.S. Bank Account - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coinbase.com/post/34357253898/you-can-now-buy-and-sell-bitcoin-by-connecting-any-u-s <comment><USER2> Be very, very, very careful about giving any service, _ever_ , information about your actual bank account. This is a much bigger deal than giving a service your credit card information.

(Individual ACH charges may, with some effort, be reversible like a credit card charge, but invalid reversible credit card charges are pretty much all you have to worry about with a stolen credit card, and _not_ all you have to worry about with a stolen bank account).

<comment><USER3> I trust Brian Armstrong / Coinbase more than Paypal, and Paypal also requires your routing / account number.

Full disclosure: I run <http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/> and my wife's cupcake bakery, cupsandcakesbakery.com sells cupcakes for bitcoins in San Francisco (9th/harrison)

<comment><USER4> Why do you think Coinbase is less likely than Paypal to lose your routing / account number?

<comment><USER5> There's a _huge_ difference between supplying an account number and giving a service the login credentials for your bank account.

As far as I can remember, PayPal has never asked me for my bank account login details.

<comment><USER6> Looks like Paypal will also asks for your bank username and password for instant verification and has the same fallback option of 2 Random deposits.

[http://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abblog/blog.pl?/pl/2009/2/12...](http://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abblog/blog.pl?/pl/2009/2/1235839118.html)

PS: That or that blog's part of a great phishing scam.

<comment><USER7> What the hell? Seriously, what. Why? Why not use a token? Oh if only there were already protocols written to handle identity and access auth.

<comment><USER8> On the financial system's technological timeline, those protocols won't happen for another 20-30 years yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't mean to be harsh, but the fact that you're even asking for banking credentials means I want nothing do with your service, and I feel like actually shouting loudly to everyone I know not to use it either.

There have been far too many shady Bitcoin related hacks/frauds/incidents for this to be something that you should even be encouraging. What protection do your customers have if you do get hacked?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a fair point, and I think you're right to be wary of new services.

We debated offering instant account verification for the reasons you mentioned, but we ultimately went with it for the following reasons:

\- we don't store any bank credentials on our servers after the verification completes (or fails), and take care to filter it out of any logs etc

\- it allows someone to verify an account and start buying bitcoin in just a few minutes instead of 2-3 days (lowers the hurdle to getting started)

\- it's the default in the U.S. for services like Paypal so people are somewhat familiar with it

\- for anyone who is uncomfortable with it, the challenge deposit verification is available to them (we make two small deposits to your account and ask you to verify the amounts, which take 2-3 days to arrive)

I think you're right that users should be wary of any site asking for such information, so it's up to each user to make their own decision. We at least wanted to provide it as an option given the above precautions. Anyway, even if you don't agree hopefully this better explains our thought process behind it. We'll continue to evaluate whether to keep it along with help from our lawyers, and I appreciate the feedback - really.

<comment><USER2> I think it's clear why it's convenient to be able to instantly verify a bank account, and that instant verification is the reason you want account information. What's not clear is why that makes giving bank account information to a startup a reasonable risk.

<comment><USER9> What does "reasonable" mean?

<comment><USER2> * Effectively mitigated by countermeasures

* Access scoped narrowly to a simple use case

* Backend by the assets of a very significant stakeholder

* Risk outweighed by benefit

I'm not saying Coinbase is unreasonable. I have no idea how they work under the hood at all. I'm just saying, it is not suddenly O.K. to give bank account information to startups simply because there's a way to use Paypal that also takes that information. Paypal also doesn't have my account information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given the horrible security record of Bitcoin trading platforms, there is no way in hell I will give my bank account details to one. There are so many amateurs in the field that I cannot take any of them seriously.

<comment><USER11> Well, don't use bitcoin then? The reason why there are so many services is because there is demand. Certain people will continue using bitcoin, no matter what (unless better alternative comes along). In the long run the more stable and secure services will survive.

And there has been some bitcoin services which have been pretty stable and solid all the time. They just don't get in to the news...

<comment><USER10> "Well, don't use bitcoin then?"

I don't use it in the first place.

"And there has been some bitcoin services which have been pretty stable and solid all the time. They just don't get in to the news..."

As far as I am concerned, it's just a matter of time before the trading platforms get hacked. Tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, have been stolen in Bitcoin hacks. Online banking is not easy for large banks to defend; I have little confidence that an indie team can perform as well as a major bank.

<comment><USER11> Btw, mtgox for example employs something like 15 people nowadays, and they mostly focus on the security I guess. (At least they are not focusing on new features, since the service has been the same for last year or so...)

Edit: And you are sure that they will all get hacked? You sure have faith in the big organisations...

<comment><USER10> Banks have money. Money goes a long way in hiring engineers and experts with experience who are able to develop secure portals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Give us the password to your bank account? Really?

<comment><AUTHOR> A valid concern - we have a fallback option of verifying two small credits amounts to your account if you are uncomfortable with the first option. It just takes a bit longer (2-3 business days) so we wanted to provide both options. Hope it helps.

<comment><USER13> Your company seems really interesting, and I'm considering setting up a merchant-account, but I'd STRONGLY advise you to drop the bank login feature.

I know it took a lot of code to write. And I know you convinced yourself it's an advantage. But it's not.

It's making people run from your site.

Look at the comments here, and these are from FRIENDLY people. Many many many others will see that in your blog article, and decide not to sign up for an account, and you'll never even know.

They won't write an article, they won't email you, they'll just decide you're skeevy, and abort.

You're already working with one tech that people thing is a bit "iffy". That means you need to do EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to make EVERY other bit of your service seem 10,000% above board.

Asking for bank login credentials, _EVEN AS AN OPTION_ , torpedos that.

You're probably thinking to yourselves - "Maybe we should make the Credit Card primary, and make this secondary?" Just don't.

I know you spent a long time writing this, and I really wish it were a good idea, but I'd really suggest you just comment out the feature.

You can always put it back in a year or three if you really really want, once your service has inertia, and is already more trusted. But even if Square or Stripe asked for that, it'd scare people away, and lose customers. It's just a bad idea right now.

I want you guy to do well. Please kill that feature.

<comment><USER14> It's not like he's blazing new ground here. People have already done this with Mint. When it launched TechCrunch was full of comments exactly like yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What could possibly go wrong. It's not like bitcoin exchanges get hacked every 6 months.

<comment><USER12> No, _this_ is the one that's not going to get hacked. Because YC. Or something.

<comment><USER16> Yhea....no. Because they are in YC doesn't mean nothing. Really it could be the NASA or the FBI or whatever. If there is money in it (specially untraceable money like bitcoin) someone will hack it.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure I like this handwavey security argument. There are lots of services handling money that don't get hacked, at least not in ways that cause a loss of said money. Treating being hacked as a foregone conclusion is rather bad practice.

Its a poor argument to try to excuse the Bitcoin community's abhorrent record with security (sans the actual Bitcoin protocol, which is quite secure).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So if your site gets hacked, the hackers can order a bunch of untraceable bitcoins with my banking funds right?

Thanks, but no thanks..

</comment><comment><USER19> I find it absolutely incredible that they are asking for online banking username, password and PIN number to "instantly verify" an account.

I'm not saying this company is a scam, but if I wanted to create an elaborate phishing scam, this is __exactly __the type of setup I would create.

Hopefully no one is stupid enough to give this key online banking information to this company or anyone else that asks for it.

<comment><USER3> Mint asked for bank passwords, and had 5m registered users as of 2011. They sold for $170 million. I believe Coinbase is copying common UX patterns which have been proven to be palatable with users.

<comment><USER19> Coinbase is neither Mint nor Paypal. We have no idea if they will survive 6 months, and we can't trust they don't store credentials on their servers, even though they say they do. Have they been security audited? Or do we just take a one-line comment on Hacker News as the truth?

If they reach a level of legitimacy, then maybe it might fly with some users. But I personally think it's way too premature to ask for usernames and passwords for banks, especially given how much fraud, hacking, security problems, and monetary loss associated with Bitcoin companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe I'm just being harsh but I'm not quite ready to give my banking credentials to a barely styled bootstrap site.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone working with bitcoin would do well to read this advice from jellicle and forensic daily:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2973803>

</comment><comment><USER22> While CoinBase needs to do this to make it easy for mainstream US customers, it is a dangerous move for them.

They are at a huge risk of the ACH equivalent of chargebacks first and foremost.

Their banking connection will undoubtedly cut the cord as well. I'm surprised they even were able to launch this.

Their 1% transaction fee is way to low to deal with the risk.

See this article on why:

[http://stakeventures.com/articles/2012/03/07/the-may- scale-o...](http://stakeventures.com/articles/2012/03/07/the-may-scale-of- money-hardness-and-bitcoin)

<comment><USER23> Right. They're running WEBs.

On one hand, they're getting pretty good authorization with the credit matching part, not sure of the legal details of the un/pw bit. That's also going to help a bit with the miskeyed account number problem.

On the other hand, return rates on WEBs are bad, and the number of people who will revoke their authorization is pretty high. (Even if they have to make a signed statement under penalty of perjury, it happens.) And they have 60 days to do it. It's going to be hard for them to reverse a return even if they have all their auths in line.

On the gripping had, there's the low daily limit. That limits their risk to any particular account, but it's possible that someone would wind up contesting a bunch of charges all at once, say after they got their bank statement.

edit: I'd love to see their underwriting documentation and just how they're explaining this to their bank. And I'd love to see their bank's comfort level in 60 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wasn't this the company with the extremely questionable not-on-the-advice-of- a-security-firm security practices?

<comment><USER25> Maybe you're thinking of a different company in a bitcoin ecosystem.

<comment><USER24> Nope, this is the one with the usb key scheme that wasn't designed with the consultation of a security firm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From some of the other comments, it sounds like (asking for bank passwords) is a semi-common practise [in the US]. Is that accurate? I'm absolutely stunned that anyone could think that (a) it's a good idea, and that (b) anyone would be so unbelievably stupid to actually provide them!

I can't imagine the banks are thrilled with this either - and if they're not actively blocking this sort of activity, they probably should be. I'd be careful that providing your password doesn't invokes various liability clauses in your banking agreement.

The only way I would _ever_ consider doing this, is if I set up a new bank account, preferably with a different bank from my usual transactions, where I specifically put funds for this purpose. In which case, it's probably not worth the hassle.

</comment><comment><USER27> A while ago I wrote that perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. And later I added that the Bitcoin experiment will also contribute to greater understanding of attack surfaces and online crime. Many of the ideas about how to mine Bitcoins, store Bitcoins, and trade with Bitcoins as a medium of exchange illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of any other medium of exchange in a world full of human beings. Seeing the discussion of Bitcoins here on Hacker News reminds me of early online discussions in the 1990s of online payment systems such as PayPal, and the arguments beforehand that PayPal wouldn't have to invest a lot of time and effort (as it eventually did) building defenses against theft and fraud. If a weakness in a system is attached to a lot of money, the way to bet is to bet that someone will go looking for that weakness, even if you haven't thought of it.

This prompts a question for all the security-knowledgeable persons who participate here on Hacker News, a question once asked of the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). How expensive do you think it would be for the United States National Security Agency (or a comparable organization from another national government) to crack a Bitcoin store, given that we know that some Bitcoin caches have already been cracked? And if the organization storing Bitcoin data held personal bank account data too, how attractive a target might it be to thieves?

</comment><comment><USER28> Lots of people here are right to question the security given the track record of ... well, pretty much everyone involved in BitCoin trading, but I work at a company that has looked into using this type of instant bank account verification and it's not quite as ridiculous as some people are assuming.

To pull money from your account, they are using ACH (Automated Clearing House) sometimes called e-check. The standard way to confirm an ACH relationship is to make two small deposits known as microdeposits into the customers account, and then the customer needs to come back and confirm the amounts.

This requires waiting for what's usually a daily process to send the ACH micro deposits, then waiting until they show up in the customer's account. Thus, the customer needs to wait several days before they can add funds.

Another option is to use a service like By All Accounts which logs in on the users behalf to their their bank account and confirms that they actually have access to the bank account they are trying to draw from and confirms sufficient funds.

Once either of these happens, then the company can pull from your bank account. This is great if you're setting up something like automatic bill pay or hooking up a scheduled deposit into an investment account.

So if you trust this BTC dealer as much as your credit card company or stock broker, this is a reasonable method to get money to them. If you don't trust them, then you probably don't want to give them money anyway.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can you actually buy anything legitimate with BTC yet?

When I was last involved (2 years ago), the entire economy seemed to be an amusing dance between get rich quick miners / speculators and a relative handful of early adopters and pool operators siphoning cash off of the former.

<comment><USER30> Check out <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade> to see a long list of pretty much all the services that allow you to trade in bitcoins.

My personal favorites:

<http://bitmit.net> \- an auction site that allows you to buy and sell goods with bitcoins.

<http://coindl.com> \- Download digtal files, and pay the content creator in bicoins. Many downloads have "pay as much as you want" pricing. These micro- transactions are only really possible with bitcoin.

 __Bitcoin Magazine __\- There is so much drama in the bitcoin world, and they do a great job of summarizing it and making it fun to read about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why is the spread so high on the buy/sell orders? Mt.Gox currently has Ask: $9.99 Bid: $9.92 while Coinbase has Ask: $11.27 Bid: $10.05. This is an effective 12% fee on purchases in addition to the 1% fee you already charge.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why is this whole thread about the instant-verification feature? If it looks scary, use the 2-3 day method!

Anyway, this service looks very cool and I will try it out for future bitcoin purchases.

</comment><comment><USER33> Interestingly, the exchange rate is slumping the last two days:

[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2012-09-01...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2012-09-01zeg2012-10-27ztgSzm1g10zm2g25)

I wonder if an easier disposal method for US customers is letting miners unload en masse?

<comment><USER18> liquidity is a factor in pricing

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Glad to see USD/BTC exchange getting easier again. With mining GPU requirements continuing to rise, it is becoming less feasible for most people to mine for bitcoins, and purchasing them will be the only feasible way of acquiring them, especially if difficulty levels continue to rise.

</comment><comment><USER35> I just went to the comments section to see how many people would be warning about giving away your banking credentials to another shady bitcoin site. Glad to see I wasn't disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER36> Still, you have to wait 1-2 business days for the bitcoin. That's too long with 1/hr bitinstant around.

</comment><comment><USER37> Seems legit. /sarcasm</comment>


Show HN: WeatherTunes — The right tunes for right now - <AUTHOR> http://www.weathertunes.com <comment><AUTHOR> Seems to be happening more and more often with people.

I spent the last few months learning how to code and making weatherTunes. Its an app that takes your surrounding weather conditions and makes a playlist that fits the current mood created by the weather. Check it out, and if your up to it, would love to get feedback!

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weathertunes-weather- based/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weathertunes-weather- based/id1118115469?mt=8)

www.weatherTunes.com

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry but I have to mention it.

The scroll jacking on your webpage is only slightly less annoying than most.

Cool app!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I hate scroll jacking too. It wasn't doing it in safari and I should have checked her browsers. I removed the js that was doing that, should be normal now. Thanks for pointing it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some people listen to music to match their mood while others listen to it to change their mood. Maybe have an option to invert the playlist choices?

<comment><AUTHOR> That was definitely in the plans when I started doing this, but as it started to take a while to complete, I dropped that feature for now. If there's any traction with the app, I still plan on adding that.

I also would like to have a more robust weather forecast, the ability to choose multiple genres, and to have the option to either use the default youtube video player, or choose to use apple music as the source if you subscribe to it.

Thank you for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey that's pretty cool. I just did a similar thing, I started about 3 weeks ago on Donors Choose app [https://appsto.re/us/JVmbab.i](https://appsto.re/us/JVmbab.i) it's not for profit or anything , just figured I would do a small side project in the evening while I hang out with my kids over summer break

<comment><USER4> I'm doing about 10 hours a week on it, I figured I would 'soft launch' it rough instead and polish it up as I get closer to the start of school year .

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Web version would be great.</comment>


Amazing photos of Egypt's massive demonstrations - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/30/amazing-photos-of-egypts-massive-demonstrations/

<comment><USER2> Can America do the same on July 4th?

[http://www.restorethefourth.net/](http://www.restorethefourth.net/)</comment>


Letting them die: parents refuse medical help for children in the name of Christ - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/13/followers-of-christ-idaho-religious-sect-child-mortality-refusing-medical-help <comment><USER2> God-jesus grief, this is why I'm antitheist.</comment>


Taking Notes by Hand May Be Better Than Digitally (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-put-your-laptops-away <comment><USER2> Basically what it comes down to for me - I don't want to be distracted by my laptop and only bring it to meetings if I feel it's necessary:

\- Daily stand ups? My laptop is distracting and I use a paper notepad instead.

\- Long planning sessions or tech meetups? I need my laptop in order to be effective.

Staying focused is a constant struggle. Example: Being on Hacker News "wasting" a few minutes right now when I have a long list of tasks to work through.</comment>


Calendar & contact management - <AUTHOR>

How do you effectively manage your contacts and calendar?  Been using my phone (samsung u740) w/ limited success including can't keep contact info like street address, calendar is hard to see, and not able to sync easily with a desktop app (except bitpim).  Do I just spend the cash/reup my wireless contract and go with a new smart phone, maybe synced to outlook, just use an ultra portable pc, paper????   what do you use and how's it going? <comment><USER2> I used to have a palm 3. I dropped it. I tried lugging my laptop around. Awkward is an understatement. As you pointed out, the mobile phone is limited or expensive or both. Since I don't need to have instant access to all my contacts and schedule/calendar, I use a moleskine address book for my important contacts. Flexible page layout and I don't worry about breaking it and spending Benjamins for a replacement. I have a simple book calendar. For appointments which I need a reminder, I use Google Calendar, but I don't quite like keeping all my personal info in Google office.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know it's un-popular to admit using Microsoft technologies, but I use Exchange/Outlook/iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google Calendar rocks for managing your calendar. I don't know a good solution for the contacts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> feel like a dork for saying it, but I use a freakin spiral notebook on the go. Then, I just sink it up with outlook when I get home.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you scrape data? What do you use it for? - <AUTHOR> I've got a theory that in 2018, most people or companies can use web scraping tools to make some aspect of their lives easier.
For example, I wrote a script a few months back to scrape transit data and send me a text when the subway is delayed for my morning commute. Maybe you're helping your company scrape competitor prices to know when they change?
So - are you scraping data today? As part of a hobby project or for professional purposes? What do you use it for? And if you don't, why not? <comment><USER2> I do scrape. We are making a sort of meta-search engine for long term car rental, so to bootstrap it we are scraping offer from various sites and directing users to the original websites to actually go through with the offer.

If anyone is interested in more detail, I can explain further.

<comment><USER3> Go on

<comment><USER2> Ok, here it goes.

The scrapers are written in python 2, because that's what the guys who started the project were familiar with.

Most of the scraping is done by hand with XPath queries on the pages we fetched, so no beautifulsoup or stuff like that. Again, I think mostly because those who started the project were not familiar with the task. It's not even that bad when I need to modify something (because the page changes etc.), as the code is very well written.

The problems started when the CEO and CTO proposed (mandated?) to use something made by a guy who is supposed to be a web scraping expert in the same domain we're working in (I don't doubt that, but still...). The software it gave us is written in Ruby (which no-one here ever even saw a line of) and Rails, and works with recipes instead of the imperative code + xpath we used at the beginning. It works flawlessly until it doesn't. Mainly because there's a big logical error (if an offer disappears from the original website we should mark it as deleted on our db, but the scrapers tells us it's still there) and I don't have time to learn ruby, rails and the whole system to fix this. And the original dev is not available anymore. So we're phasing that out and going back to our nice land of python :)

Anyway the process goes like this:

1\. Scraper fetches the page, scrapes the data, and generates a JSON file with the info of all the offers it finds

2\. Those JSON files are uploaded on S3

3\. A trigger on S3 calls the "writer" on a EC2 instance, that downloads the JSON file, unpacks the content and writes the data to a postgres database.

Current problem: scraping arbitrary strings representing car options and categorizing them. We have something like 15,000 strings that need to be put inside a category. Manually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ad scraping can be very profitable.

See: [https://adplexity.com/](https://adplexity.com/)

<comment><USER5> I don't understand something. How do they know how many impressions ads get? They are just scraping or they have access to ad networks stats?

<comment><USER4> It's determined based on guesswork.

If you scrap a website, you'll know how what % of times an ad shows up.

Now, if you know the distribution for top N ads. You can skip everything and go straight to the ad network and check their total number of impression volume on particular website/GEO. You can pretend to be an advertiser and easily get access to this info.

Now, you know the distribution and total, can't you work out the impression count for each ad?

<comment><USER5> ty</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Polarized X-ray scattering technique reveals structure of printable electronics - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2012-04-polarized-x-ray-technique-reveals-printable.html

<comment><USER2> Cheaper printable circuitry is going to bring down hardware construction costs. You may even be able to prototype at home or in the office, which is great for makers.

Also given that hardware backdoors are one of the outstanding difficult threats to assess for computer security, I wonder if this technique could be applied there somehow.</comment>


Meat tax 'inevitable' to beat climate and health crises, says report - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax-inevitable-to-beat-climate-and-health-crises-says-report <comment><USER2> Is there any actual science behind the claims that meat is bad from a health perspective? From what I've seen it looks similar to the "science" that told us that eggs were bad, and that we should avoid fat at all costs--in other words, a bunch of loose correlations from studies with poor reproducibility and poor controls.

In the US, red meat consumption per capita has dropped over the last 50 years, suggesting that it is not the major contributor to our current health problems that some claim.

<comment><USER3> You are right, this is junk science. In the US calories from meat are down, calories from plants are up. Red meat consumption is also down.

For some graphs showing that people ate more meat in the 1800s: [https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/927306530600431616](https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/927306530600431616)

Tax or ban corn, not meat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Red meat is down. Chicken however is dramatically higher.

<comment><USER3> Did you see the graph? _Total_ meat is well down from 1800s levels.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is not the same graph that I have seen, sorry. And this study tells an opposite story. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Furthermore, many people already eat far too much meat, seriously damaging > their health and incurring huge costs.

What? I'm getting fat on pasta and breads. I need to actively eat more meat. And given the cost of meat compared to carbs, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the vast majority of people in the middle and lower class face the same problem. Meat is not the health problem here.

<comment><USER5> The fact excessive carbs consumption is bad doesn't invalidate the fact that excessive meat consumption is bad.

Campbell's report is not perfect, but it is serious work, and hints that meat consumption and cancer are linked ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study)). What's more, processed meat is classified as Category 1 carcinogenic to humans by WHO ([http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red- meat/en/](http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/)).

Additionally, animals concentrate any pesticides we put on plant we then feed them. We also give them a lot of additional products with side effects, such as antibiotics. The effect of the mix of all those on the human health is still unknown but raises interesting questions.

Since we also know that meat production has a huge toll on the environment, including soil pollution, green house gaz and water consumption, it's only fair to talk seriously about the issue. Especially now that we are closing on 8 billion souls, and India and China want our lifestyle too.

It's not a moral or religious debate.

It's just an important thing to consider, discuss about, monitor closely and review regularly with honesty, again and again. Like oil usage, walk street speculation or our voting system.

As a specie, we need to ask ourself those questions to evolve.

<comment><USER6> >>> We also give them a lot of additional products with side effects, such antibiotics. The effect of the mix of all those on the human health is still unknown

What is known is the effect on human health of eating diseased meat, and the effects on animals that must live infested with parasites. We certainly do pump too many antibiotics into our cattle, but that doesn't mean all drugs are always bad for us or them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure how you made that classification so narrow with such a strange statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please don't.

A tax will lead to democrat losses in 2018. The sugar tax in philadelphia galvanized republicans across the rest of PA during 2016.

Eating meat is incredibly important to the middle classes. BBQ's are important social quasi-religious family bonding events in the United States. Taxing meat will lead to backlash far bigger than a "tea party".

<comment><USER5> I really wonder if people said to lincoln something like:

"Please don't end slavery. The whole economy depends on it. Hell my brother would be out of a job. We would loose half the states in the next vote if you do. Be reasonable mate. There is probably a middle way that can make everyone happy."

Everytime there is an important question raised, it will be hard on the system, on the habits and traditions, and on the ones implementing the new thing.

This can not be a reason not to do it.

Now there could be very good reasons no to do it. Like discovering the whole specie would degenerate if we did.

But "we always have been doing this" should never be a answer in a civilized debate.

Let's talk about this. What are the fact ? What is the price we are paying now from eating that much meat. What would be the benefit and price of stopping ? Is it worth it ?

Otherwise it's just a Facebook talks.

<comment><USER7> People probably did. Plus it was ultimately decided by a bloody civil war that still has lasting cultural and mental consequences to this current day.

So do you really believe eating meat is at the same level as human slavery , or is it an argument to ridiculousness.

My point was we should not ignore the human cultural consequences in our logical calculus, humans aren't purely rational actors .

<comment><USER5> > So do you really believe eating meat is at the same level as human slavery , > or is it an argument to ridiculousness.

I'm just using humor to state that if an issue is important, there will always be those type of argument. We should not stop at them. Taking them in consideration is obviously the right thing, but those can't be definitive show stoppers.

Otherwise the status quo will always win since by definition all our systems are built around what we are doing right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't really mind people wanting to be vegetarian, vegans, or not eating whatever they want. I do mind when they are trying to impose their habits on others. I don't believe a single second that health or global warming is the real motivation for this tax.

<comment><USER5> First, I know a lot of vegetarians and non veggies, and I never seen one of them "trying to impose their habits on others". It's like saying gays are trying to convert straight people.

Worst case scenario they will tell you what they think is right. But we all do that, it has nothing to do with meat. Hell, try to have a discussion about driving habits and you'll see everybody will tell you what to do.

Second, yeah, taxes are probably just motivated by money, and trying to get veggies to support it.

But even the worst detractors of the theory agree that more than 14% of green house gaz is animal agriculture ([https://www.skepticalscience.com/how-much- meat-contribute-to...](https://www.skepticalscience.com/how-much-meat- contribute-to-gw.html)). Those numbers do not include transportation, wrapping, cow farts, water consumption, soil pollution, and exclude deforestation done for animal agriculture purpose.

So there is something here. There is no need to fight about this. However a sane debate seems in order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can they introduce a meat tax to beat a climate crisis we don't have?

Either there is no crisis and this is a money grab... or there is a crisis.

There seems to be something fishy here... </s>

Edit: Oh wait, The Guardian is a British Newspaper... we agree there _is_ a climate crisis and we don't have anywhere close to the same ridiculous meat consumption rate as Americans.

<comment><USER10> I _thiiiink_ the people denying the climate crisis and the people behind this meat tax idea are not the same people…

<comment><USER9> Quite probably. However you can't really have one arm of Government not on the same page as another arm of Government. The purpose of leadership is to have all arms of Government singing from the same hymn sheet.

It doesn't work if you've got one office doing one thing and another doing something else. That's how you end up with the debacle that is U.S. politics, which the rest of the world looks at as a complete and utter disaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, meat is the biggest reason for climate change, not oil, gas, cfc's. I can't believe what I'm seeing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Note that the article is about forecasts of what is likely going to happen, while the comments are mostly about how much people personally like it, together with their rationalizations why their opinion is important.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Sin taxes"

Is catholic church making a comeback?

<comment><USER8> I actually think that communism & liberalism are the secular grand-children of Catholicism. If you remove the reference to god, they advocate the same asceticism, contempt for trading and ownership, egalitarianism, a culture of self-blaming for anything going wrong in the world, etc.

<comment><USER14> Liberalism values freedom and equality above everything else, it's even in the definition. It was founded in direct opposition to the Church during the Enlightenment. Communism is an economic system, none of these are very relevant to the discussion at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a good goal for a long term, but it didn't dig into the subsidies as much as I would have thought. Ending those is the first step, but it didn't go into how much the industry is currently subsidized (Google suggests meat and dairy are at ~38 million). Discussing an end to those subsidies seems a more realistic step that both parties should be able to get behind. What I don't know is the impact on the already struggling farming community would be (a group which leans more Republican).

</comment><comment><USER16> Cutting down on meat consumption is something I support. But I don't believe in increased taxation – that extra money will just end up being spent on pork barrel legislation and the like by the politicians. When consumption does finally go down, taxes will again need to be raised for other things to make up for the downfall because they will not want to decrease spending.

Why don't we encourage more research into lab grown meat instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe that tax can be used to fund that research or subsidise popular plant- based meats like Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I don't necessarily follow on the health concerns compared to the alternative of eating more grains and carbs, I think taxation is our only (realistic in the short/mid term) way to have the impact on the environment taken into consideration into the price

</comment><comment><USER18> If eating meat is truly something that should be discouraged, it should be done in a way that has equal effect on rich and poor.

<comment><USER19> Then the route is legislation. You're not allowed to eat more than X grams a day. Our technology is not advanced enough to enforce this in a customer friendly way.

The other route is education. That will take a long time. The poorest are often also the ones that are difficult to reach using this route.

<comment><USER20> So, meat rations? Of course there will be a black market trade in them, so you are back to rationing by price again, with the slight advantage that everyone gets a "universal meat income".

I think it's impossible, and undesirable, to ration a commodity that people want, by dictat, perhaps even when there are strong negative health and social impacts, as with alcohol, tobacco, drugs, etc.

The route has to be by some form of economic penalty/redistribution, ie taxation (which people _will_ accept to some degree), and/or through education, persuasion, cultural shift, etc.

<comment><USER19> In the end I think the only answer is technological progress.

If there is artificial meat, with sufficient small footprint, the debate is mute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And where is the money from a "meat tax" supposed to go? And will money actually do anything useful?

<comment><USER22> As if money actually spent on environmental purposes does anything useful for the environment. Recycling programs, as it "turns out" (as if there were people not already aware of this) put most recycled stuff in landfills in China.

So don't worry. Whether the money goes to "something useful" or not. It won't actually be useful.

<comment><USER23> Don't spread conspiracies without proof.

Here is, for example, a nice chart showing recycling quotas of >80% for most types of waste: [https://www.alba.info/fileadmin/alba/pressemappe/kreislaufwi...](https://www.alba.info/fileadmin/alba/pressemappe/kreislaufwirtschaft_deutschland/10_VerwertungHauptabfallstro__me_032017_E.pdf)

Yeah, that's not the US, which you were probably talking about. But it's proof that it's possible.

<comment><USER22> Since "recycled" clearly means "shipped to a landfill in China" rather than "re-used", those recycling quotas only mean that we waste extra oil shipping the waste around, and none of it is actually recycled ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds good. Let's do it.

</comment><comment><USER25> And probably a great idea for improving general health and thus reducing the cost of health care.

<comment> the-dude My insurance is about € 120 / month.

How much difference would it make do you think?

<comment><USER12> It probably isn't. That is only the part the you, personally, pay for it.

<comment><USER14> For states that provide universal healthcare, they can push things like a meat tax as a way to save money on public costs (like they do with cigarettes already). At least they have some gain to show for it. However, European meat is already a lot more expensive than meat in America, meat consumption is probably less in hose countries already.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Braains.io - <AUTHOR> http://www.braains.io <comment><USER2> This is great. I love easy to start playing web games like this. I was playing the game in < 20 seconds and enjoying myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> happy to hear!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is actually pretty fun and a good concept. It needs a bit of work though and it is running kind of laggy on my end.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like it so much, pretty addictive, but get too much laggy after few minutes

<comment><AUTHOR> thx for the feedback! I'm trying to optimize the game

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chrome blocks the nfs port:

game.js:3 Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to construct 'WebSocket': The port 2049 is not allowed.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for that

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> just promoted it in forums

<comment><AUTHOR> nice! where?

<comment><USER6> hkgolden.com :) A very famous website in Hong Kong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No HTTPS? :(</comment>