Robert and Virginia Heinlein's Colorado Springs House - <AUTHOR> http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/pm652-art-hi.html <comment><USER3> I get really intrigued by these designs (went through a folding obsession phase) then try to judge how usable/learnable the design choices are. FWIW, I constantly find myself comparing the current wave of home automation / IoT to the 1958 film Mon Oncle: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60)

This said the heinlein house sounds pretty usability-focused: "There are no rugs or any need for them. All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, comfortable and clean footing. Nor are there any floor lamps or table lamps. The illumination is built into the house. General lighting for the living room comes from cold-cathode tubes concealed behind a box molding. These illuminate the ceiling. Adjustable wall spotlights are located at all work and relaxation areas in the house. All electric convenience outlets are at comfortable hip height. I'm through stooping over to the baseboard."

</comment><comment><USER4> "A house is a machine for living in."

I hold largely to this view, and it is reflected in the design of this house, and indeed the design of my own house.

But it's also important to introduce some elements of style, whimsy, randomness, impracticality. Especially for an engineer, it's important to not let practicality be the sole design value.

The Eames's house and Alvar Aalto's house are some guideposts I've found valuable.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a house so efficiently designed for its purpose that it could never adapt to new needs.

That might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances: if you live near a city, odds are pretty good that when your needs change, someone else will want your house.

On the other hand, I bet every built-in appliance is a non-standard size that is somewhere between painful and ridiculously expensive to repair or replace.

There's probably something deeply philosophical from this that would be applicable to writing programs.

<comment><USER6> Similar to the black suit. I bought one 20 years ago, it still makes me look sharp for any occasion that requires dressing professionally.

If this wasn't the Heinlein's house it would be unsellable today. The cost to tear down the house would probably be subtracted from the value of the empty lot to determine how much it was worth.

I need to buy a house soon in an area with a lot of old houses, some more than 100 years old. Here are my list of house attributes with staying power:

      - high ceilings
      - open floor plan
      - generous dimensions (particularly bathrooms and kitchens)
      - light (and air) from the outside
      - durable water-tight construction
      - no wood on exterior (it rots, maintenance nightmare)
      - a good view
      - <USER2>

These might seem obvious, but apparently not everyone has gotten the memo (I'm looking at you England). It seems to me that commercial properties even from hundreds of years ago are much more likely to have these attributes than residences from 1960 and earlier. If you can't afford brick or stone exteriors, stucco is cheap and seems to last for a long time. A tasteful metal roof is great.

My grandfather was before his time and built his entire house in hot, humid Florida out of steel many decades ago. Steel panels on the outside, steel paneled roof, steel frame. It's been hit by quite a few hurricanes and looks as good as new. The other wood frame houses around his are looking pretty shabby now. Not sure why steel construction didn't catch on.

<comment><USER7> > [air] from the outside

That's probably the only thing from your list that you are likely to find in a 100 yr old house that hasn't been recently renovated. And that is a result of the far less precise building and sealing methods from that time, and not that fresh air was a design goal of the old house.

Those old houses tended to leak water and air like sieves, resulting in very high energy consumption and lower comfort.

On the plus side, the materials they were probably built with (solid wood) were far more tolerant of moisture than today's synthetic building materials (OSB, etc), and with all the air leakage that occurred, they dried out quickly. That's why many of these old houses' structures have lasted, while newer, tightly sealed houses with moisture penetration have failed. Also the air leaks provided fresh air.

> ... water-tight construction

Not only is this not likely to be the case on an old house, without a modern mechanical forced ventilation system installed, a water-tight house (with the windows shut) incompatible with the requirement for "[air] from the outside".

<comment><USER6> Good points, perhaps why the 300 year old house in the woods in New England I have stayed in occasionally has withstood the elements. Foot thick beams helped. And maybe there is some type of preservative in all the bat and mouse crap.

A recent stay in England has shown me you can have plenty of air circulation with no water intrusion, they have these wonderful skylights that you can keep cracked open even during a storm and no water gets in, I was pretty amazed.

I made the list not to condemn old houses, but to consider when building a new house. However, if you go to the downtown areas in old towns, the old commercial properties can tend to hit almost everything on the list. Apparently these things were known, just not applied to residential construction, probably because of cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mirrors in skylights seems like a very obvious improvement to increase the amount of natural sunlight in a space. It seems adaptable to north-facing top- floor suites. Mirrors could be installed such that the sun would reflect into the suite throughout the day. It seems to be such an obvious improvement, but I've not noticed such a system anywhere in my city. Maybe the regular cleaning of the mirrors is enough of a deterrent for building owners to invest in something like this?

<comment><USER9> Not a sunlight but Mitsubishi's new synthetic-light "windows" appear to be pretty spectacular. I want one.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-w...](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi- windows-shine-alarmingly-realistic-fake-sunlight)

<comment><USER10> Doesn't sound like full spectrum light. I'd live to see the CRI on those things.

<comment><USER9> I did a little digging and, it appears that Mitsubishi and CoeLux have partnered on these artificial skylights and, although the CRI isn't listed, the CoeLux site says this:

"CoeLux systems combine LED lighting that reproduces sunlight spectrum, direction and brightness with optical systems and nano-structured materials that reproduce the endless distance of the sky and sun."

If it actually does reproduce the sunlight spectrum it'd have to have a very high CRI, no? Toshiba has their TRI-R LEDs claimed to be capable of 95% of the sunlight spectrum and they are rated at a CRI of Ra97. Yuji has LEDs with claimed CRI of 98, so it seems within the realm of possibility that these fake windows are very convincing.

<comment><USER11> I have a few LED lamps with CRI 95, and they produce very natural-looking light, not noticeably different from sunlight. Not really expensive even.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, clean and comfortable footing"

I bought a second hand home, which had cork. It's warm, yes. And maybe comfortable. But it is not clean. Cork is very porous and once a speck of dust finds its way into the material, it's difficult to pull it out. Drop some one on the floor and you might be able to clean most of it, but some of it will stay there, forever.

Stick to wood. Maybe a bit less warm that cork, but much cleaner and equally comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's "everything to please a housewife in the kitchen including an 'office' with phone and typewriter". There's nothing more amusing than reading print periodicals from the early part of the 20th century to the mid-1980s. The ads are also always a particular highlight.

<comment><USER14> Did you like the bit about the soundproofing and the two shower heads in the bathroom. Or the bit about the extra large beds.

Certainly, these things are for work and efficiency, nothing more.

<comment><USER15> Well, it's a sort of work, isn't it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The house they moved to after this in Santa Cruz is unique (from the outside at least) [http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html](http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is 1776 a special number in this case? The yeah of declaration of independence?

<comment><USER18> Yes. It's an extremely Heinlein choice; he's regarded by the sympathetic as having been highly patriotic, by the unsympathetic as virulently nationalistic.

<comment><USER19> I never thought of Heinlein as especially patriotic or nationalistic; he was, on the other hand, a big fan of revolutions against oppressive regimes.

<comment><USER20> And he had some... interesting... ideas about who makes a good sexual partners. [1]

1; [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600)

<comment><USER19> Full disclosure: I never bothered to read anything of his written after "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", since the universal consensus seems to be that his later books are very, very strange.

<comment><USER21> He had a blocked carotid artery for several years, and I some Heinlein fans blame his crazier stuff on that.

I think his later books are just what happens to many successful creatives. They get so famous that no one else has any editorial control over what they produce, and the quality of their work decreases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like there are photos of the house in it's current form on zillow[1]. It's obviously been remodeled, a lot.

[1] [https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs- CO/13...](https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs- CO/13672320_zpid/4172_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/38.790487,-104.858758,38.78867,-104.861641_rect/18_zm/)

<comment><USER23> They finally gave in and got rid of the flat roof. People eventually find out that they will develop leaks that are impossible to find.

<comment><USER24> Which is pretty evident if you've ever spent time in typical commercial flat- roofed buildings. Who hasn't seen buckets catching drips at some point or other?

<comment><USER25> Ah, I always have fond memories of office buckets. At eShares, we had one in our first office. It dripped when it rained, but inexplicably so: we were on the ground floor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The fancy bed was auctioned off in 2013.

[http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins- second-...](http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-best- bed/)

It went for just over $2K.

[https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins- Bed-/25131783994...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins- Bed-/251317839942)

<comment><USER27> One of the worst "you might also like" algorithms I've ever seen!

[https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Oh well, here goes a few karma points ;-)

Does anyone else _dislike_ Heinlein? I mean, I read hundreds of SF books, followed dozens of authors, and I'm pretty sure Heinlein is the one I ended up giving up on and actively disliking.

I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin- daughter clones and fucking them.

The thing is, it's just pretty much always the same, perhaps that example is 'extreme' (quite frankly I don't know -- nor do I care- if I read it all) but it pretty much always gravitate toward something or other like that.

Now, if the world building was nice, and the other plot lines were great etc etc I'd accept the wierd navel-gazing as part of the entertainment, but in the case of Heinlein, I always felt it was the other way around!

<comment><USER29> I dislike a lot of things about him, despite loving most of his books. It was him and Orson Scott Card who taught me to love and be enriched by an author's work separately from the person themself.

It always seems a shame to me when people can write at length about taking a fundamentally skeptic view of _everything_ in the world and society, down to its core values, and then be so blind as to their own biases and prejudices. At the very least, Heinlein writes in a few places how he'll never be truly free of early childhood conditioning around sex and norms (contrast the author of Ender's extensive reflections on xenocide choosing to give money to anti- gay-rights organizations), but stops there. The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.

A deeply flawed person, who gave us deeply enriching works (IMO).

<comment><USER30> > The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.

I think two things you absolutely _can 't_ defensibly say about Heinlein is that his views about gender roles and relations, or about the relationship of society to it's military in either an institutional or individual sense are "unexamined".

There may have been blind spots nonetheless—I don't think anyone can be free of those—but "unexamined", no.

<comment><USER14> I think they were referring to Card there.

<comment><USER29> Nope, definitely Heinlein. He takes nationalism as a given, as if these abstractions we call countries are something real. The idea of whether or not this is a good thing is never once dragged out into the light.

Additionally, I can only take so many well-meaning Jillian Boardmans. Friday is often held up as a counterexample, but the fact that she _willfully marries her rapist_ seems to pass unnoticed.

Fuck that noise.

<comment><USER14> Ok. I'm going to go with dragonwriter here then. Man wrote a (terrible) book about dealing with becoming a woman, man wrote Stranger, man wrote plenty about dealing with tyranny and assorted nastiness.

He wasn't LeGuin by any means, and he fails by modern standards, but for someone born in 1907, he did a pretty good job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sort of an obituary for the house: [https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652](https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652)

Which apparently was completely remodeled in 1995. Sad, but not entirely unexpected.

</comment><comment><USER32> > Heated air enters the bathroom through a duct beneath the tub, warming the > bathtub and the floor

I can hear the collective yawn of a few million Romans from the afterlife not impressed with this "modern" copy of their tepidaria and hypocausts.

</comment><comment><USER33> Robert Heinlein's nephew Terrance Heinlein (Terry) is a brilliant architect. Bob Muller

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm surprised they seem to have actively rejected the hypercube architecture. ;-)</comment>


Show HN: Chat in a virtual world - Node Knockout entry - <AUTHOR> http://minilife.me/

<comment><USER2> Urgh, sign in with facebook? Pretty cool otherwise.

<comment><USER3> This was my reservation as well. I'm pretty stingy about who I give Facebook access to.

<comment><USER4> Was going to do Twitter also, but didn't have enough time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [f] Sign in with Facebook

 _closes tab_

<comment><USER4> That's kind of the whole point of the app.

<comment><USER5> Ok... but I won't log into these kind of FB-connected sites before seeing a demo of what it does and what it will do w/ my FB account & contacts. Needs a video or a sandbox or something.

<comment><USER4> It actually doesn't get anything but public info, which you can see in the permissions request page on Facebook. All it does is grab your name, profile photo and url. It doesn't even store anything in a database--it's all in- memory at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome idea, had great fun racing other people I finally ended up talking to! Some qualms/suggestions: \- Text wrapping doesn't work properly, the text box doesn't resize with larger messages, the text just gets cut off. \- If you miss a message, i.e. someone says something after the message, there is no way of looking at what they said. Some sort of history would be cool. (Maybe scroll out a list when you click on the user?) \- It would be cool if you could hold down the arrow keys to move, right now the movement is one by one. To be fair, this does make races more fun! (not that big a bother at all, to be honest!)

Cool idea!

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorta similar to an experiment I made a while ago [1]. I do think there's something to spatially-oriented chat, but it doesn't seem to get much traction

[1] <http://openforum.samwarmuth.com/n/newmap> \-- You're a dot. Move using the arrow keys, type+enter to talk. You can click on stuff to build walls. (N.B. doesn't work on firefox)

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the concept, and there's a lot of directions you can take it in if you want to keep working on it.

Our team had a similar theme (<http://psyche.cc>), though we focused on images instead of text.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very similar to <http://yourworldoftext.com/> , but that one was text only.

I love the concept, but I'm more inclined to Your World of Text because of the ASCII drawings and anonymity.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hey, I made almost the exact same thing a few months ago:

<http://nearish.com>

Drop me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com if you'd like to talk, I am interested in your solution to scaling.

</comment><comment><USER11> any screenshots? i don't have a fb account and am not about to set one up to try this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't work.

<comment><USER4> What about it doesn't work?

<comment><USER13> Application Error. Check your logs for details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ascii cocks, yay. >.></comment>


Naked Emperors: where are all the connected people? - <AUTHOR> http://notes.kateva.org/2011/03/naked-emperors-where-are-all-connected.html <comment><USER2> Someone is bashing the facebook numbers and _just_ discovered Linkedin?! Lol.

BUT I think the numbers tend to be correct. A lot of my non tech friends here in germany are now on facebook. I only know 3 guys that are not on it. And they are not on it because of privacy concerns. And I even saw parents organizing their school board meetings through it.

Very scary thought to see that Facebook got so huge, but you can't say the numbers are wrong. At least not as wrong as the poster tries to make them.

<comment><USER3> Right, but it costs nothing to join FaceBook.

Measuring their success by counting membership numbers is the same as measuring the success of a shampoo brand by counting the free samples they've given away.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but you don't turn around and give the shampoo producer intimate details of your life. Instead, you probably forget that you have the sample and end up throwing it out 6 months later.

They're different businesses, I'm not sure that you're comparing apples to apples.

<comment><USER3> We don't know how many people sign up because someone said it was cool or invited them and then forget that they have a Facebook account.

It serves Facebook to publicize a giant number to make them appear unbeatable, but the numbers that count aren't about number of users - they are about _usage_.

I think it's a reasonable analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is also huge "fatigue" in my social network. Posting frequency drops with time, except for those who have put up status rotators.

<comment><USER6> > except for those who have put up status rotators.

Wow, I didn't even know that these existed. Do people just have a set of statuses that they randomly cycle between?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anecdotal evidence.

I live in a fairly low tech central/eastern European country, but I know a lot of people that use Facebook and IM, most of my colleagues use Linkedin, but only some use Twitter. If an event isn't on Facebook it could be invisible.

SMS is common for a decade now.

It depends on a lot of things, exactly why this blog post has little sense.

</comment><comment><USER8> I also live in Minneapolis, and I see a very different thing in the social media realm than the original author. It seems to me that when someone gets a smartphone, the first thing they do is install the facebook app and then start using facebook every moment they get a chance (even on blackberries from work).

The only time I see people really using location based services is when they're looking for directions (Garmin already made the inroads there). Personally, I use a lot of location based services, but I've also been working in the field for awhile.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm in the author's demographic. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, and none of my friends are either, for the most part.

</comment><comment><USER10> According to Men's Health, Minneapolis is the 4th most socially networked city in the US: [http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/social-networking- cities...](http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/social-networking- cities?cm_mmc=MagURL-_-Apr2011-_-metrogrades-_-socialcities)

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe the author is old. Every kid in Minneapolis is on Facebook and sends 8000 text messages per month.

</comment><comment><USER12> I talk to my grandmother via facebook.

<comment><USER13> The plural of anecdote is not "data."

<comment><USER12> Correct, however did you read the article?

Here's a tl;dr: none of my friends use Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm guessing you could make the same argument with a lot of technology, fashion, etc. I think the only edge Minneapolis is known to be on is that of food-on-a-stick.

<comment><USER13> That's a pretty elitist view of the Midwest.

The first popular web browser (Mosaic) came from the Midwest, you know.

<comment><USER14> The exception proves the rule? Note, by the way, that I said Minneapolis. I admit that the entirety of the Midwest houses some great schools and centers of social development, but I don't think that's representative of the norm.

I would genuinely like to know if my impression of Minneapolis is incorrect. In what way is its technology adoption on par with that of San Francisco or New York? Is it at the leading edge of anything?

<comment><USER11> Minneapolis actually has better bandwidth than NYC, and the iPhone actually works there, too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simple way of managing Terms of Service documents - <AUTHOR> http://www.eula.io <comment><USER2> Not loading with NoScript, even if allowing the domain.</comment>


Google ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/08/google-ordered-to-remove-links-to-stories-about-google-removing-links-to-stories/

<comment><USER2> The article is misleading and incorrect, possibly written to inflame smart geeks into noticing a crazy recursive loop.

Those news articles about the right to be forgotten mention some private people by name, who have exercised their "right to be forgotten." The only request is that Google doesn't find a hit when someone searches for those people's names. If your search terms don't include those names, then it's ok to find those articles. Just not if you are specifically searching for info on those particular people by name.

It's sad that a journalist would forget to mention the key point. Then people get justifiably upset, and no one wins.

<comment><USER3> In my mind, this only makes the law itself all the more evidently absurd.

<comment><USER4> Well, the law has one thing in mind: You should be able to stumble upon knowledge, or if you know where to look, but a future employer, or a neighbor, etc should not be able to find out about crimes you did when you were a teen.

<comment><USER5> Using a popular search engine that abides by EU laws is not the only way to find out about things. Killing the messenger does nothing to the message.

<comment><USER6> You can tell this to Europeans until you are blue in the face but they will not listen. They think they can impose their censorship on the world.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, totes weird how Europeans expect companies operating inside Europe to obey European law.

<comment><USER6> It does no good if you can just use google.com and that will never be censored but pretend is good enough for them.

<comment><USER7> it's perfectly reasonable for eu companies to say any google service accessed from within eu borders shall be so regulated

If google doesn't like it, they are free to stop doing business inside the eu.

<comment><USER6> If Europe is foolish enough to try then Google will dump them, just like China.

<comment><USER8> That might be for the best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand why the DMCA exists -- so that people can't post your copyrighted data (that you necessarily own) without your consent.

I understand slander laws -- so that people can't make up stories about you and present them as facts.

I do not understand the Right to be Forgotten -- if something is true and public information, why should Google hide the data from its search results? An article being about you does not mean that the information inside of it "belongs" to you.

>> "the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned."

You can't request the BBC or Telegraph to take down true and legitimate articles (nor should you), so on what basis does the EU think that they can order Google to alter their search results?

<comment><USER10> You can indeed request the BBC or Telegraph to take down articles under similar circumstances. For example in most European countries you can't publish a kind of "where are they now?" article that picks a few random '80s criminal cases, and tracks down the whereabouts of the people 30 years later. That kind of article, showing that a certain person (mentioned by name) now works as a web designer in Aarhus, while another person (also mentioned by name) has moved to Germany and is a welder, etc., would be seen as an invasion of privacy by gratuitously digging up and publishing this kind of 30-year-old information without a current public-interest justification.

It doesn't come up often with respectable media outlets, because they have mostly internalized this norm anyway, and wouldn't run such a story. But I could imagine a tabloid or daytime TV show doing something like that, if it were legal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't see what the disagreement is.

Somebody (e.g. Billybob) does something stupid that winds up on the local news sites. 6yr later the court case is long since closed and he wants it behind him because it was a just a drunken mistake. EU says he has a right to be forgotten which he exercises. Google deference the news articles from Billybob's name. Billybob Google's himself and finds a blog about Google referencing search results that mentions him by name and the nature of the result. Since it mentions him by name it's a primary result (you Goggle Billybob and it comes up) and Google should have to remove it per the law.

Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check services to just crawl every news site imaginable which could create a whole set of different problems but that's beyond this scope...

I think it'll just take time for society to understand that people do stupid shit and ignore it as long as it's irrelevant to the context and "forgetting" events is just a stopgap. Eventually people will realize that racists, political extremists and people with non-violent felonies can still function normally from 9 to 5 and this will be a non issue.

This problem has a lot in common on the technical side with dragnet surveillance and law enforcement. Google needs to determine what is and isn't relevant when returning results for somebody. Some misdemeanor in highschool is of dubious relevance 10yr after the fact and if the person apparently has a lot of results that paint a picture of them having a successful career and generally having moved on. Google could put that on the 3rd or 4th page, after all the "people named $name in $state" public records databases, where it's practically forgotten. Meanwhile the NSA (or whoever) needs to figure out how to filter out and avoid flagging for followup that sound like flags but are actually sarcastic, based on inside jokes, or obvious false positives when considered in context (to avoid wasting their time,wasting our money and violating people's privacy).

<comment><USER12> > Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check > services

Bingo

<comment><USER13> Still sounds like a boon to the people most likely to send out these requests to me.

Scenario 1. HR scans resume, types name into Google, finds Github profile and a couple of headlines in local newspaper about arrest, discards CV

Scenario 2. HR scans resume, types name into Google, finds Github profile and forwards to dev team. Interview arranged as goes well and offer is made pending background check. Company pays $30 to agency who confirms grades and work history and additionally reveals that you were arrested but not charged for a misdemeanour when you were a teenager

In the second case, there's a pretty good chance the candidate will actually get the job.

<comment><USER14> This is a great comment, and it actually highlights some additional problems with it all.

Let's say your name was "Mike Smith." Pretty common name, right? Even if HR took your Hiring Scenario 1, it will be most likely it will take until the offer-pending- _official_ -background-check is made. Why? Because "Mike Smith" brings up hundreds and thousands of results _even with a geolocated search_. Living in a city of several million is a boon to reformed misdemeanor teen Mike Smith. That's not even considering the legitimate criminal Mike Smith's that need to be ignored for our innocent Mike Smith's sake.

Now, if your name was "Quincy Brouwer" (Dutch Surname), its easier for this arrest to pop up.

The reality of the situation, at least from what I've seen, is that there is a hybrid of Scenarios 1 & 2 that actually go on. they _will_ do some rudimental Googling on your name, but it won't be until the offer is about to be made that they'll do the formal, _paid_ , background check and look into your credit history and other things.

Unfortunately on the other side of the coin, for developers in particular, many will go through several rounds of sometimes grueling technical interviews only to find out a silly mistake they made as a youth disbars them from the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Regardless of beliefs on the Right to be Forgotten, this feels wrong.

The way that I had previously interpreted it, a person or entity could ask to have all references to them removed. The request in this article isn't that, though - it's a request to cherry-pick, and have subsets removed.

To me, this feels too exploitable. I'm not sure whether I could agree with a Right to be Forgotten in the first place, but if there were one it should be all-or-nothing.

\---

 __EDIT __: It appears, per @alain94040 's comment, that this is not entirely the case, and that the article was not accurate.

The interpretation that @alain94040 explained, which is that Google would still show the articles in question, just not if the query includes the entity who requested they be forgotten's name (or is it just not weighted by the name? If a name's included, but the rest of the query is sufficiently strong, would it still find the article?) actually seems completely acceptable in the realm of a Right to be Forgotten.

<comment><USER16> I think this demonstrates the problems with restricting information (Note: Not making a moral judgement of any kind, just stating the problem set is HARD)

Information has basically zero copy cost, and can't be removed once given. So to stop people from knowing, you have to stop them from originally learning. Except that the ability to learn is "cheap".

The same problems result whether we're preventing the spread of how to build a bomb, breed a superbug, or remove naked photos. Somewhere in that continuum will be info that you agree is best not to be spread, but the steps required to enforce that can be a lot more expansive.

It's hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised no one has discussed an aspect of this decision that I find particularly troubling: it means that if there is a serious abuse of the right to be forgotten law, the articles discussing that abuse may be delisted because they mention the individual involved.

I'm against the law in general, but I have to admit there are cases that I find innocuous when considered by themselves. If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes. But any law is subject to potential overreach, and to combat it, we have to be able to discuss it. It seems that this decision works to censor criticism of the law as well.

As someone will point out, you can criticize the law and be ok by omitting the relevant facts (is that just the name of the individual involved?) but I think it is bad to put this requirement on any critical discussion of the law.

<comment><USER18> I think the distinction is that it won't de-index the page for all searches. It will de-index the page when people search for Johnny DidBad.

Case 1 User searches for "right to be forgotten abuses" he finds a webpage about how Johnny DidBad did a bad thing and is now abusing the right to be forgotten law. In this case the right to be forgotten isn't doing anything.

Case 2 User searches for "Johnny DidBad" he won't find the webpage about how Johnny DidBad did a bad thing and the right to be forgotten abuses.

I'm not saying I agree with the law but I don't think it limits the ability to discuss the law, and potential abuses of it.

<comment><USER19> If it deindexes it for all searches that involve the user name, then if someone has heard of a particular abuse with the name, and attempts to search for "Johnny DidBad right to be forgotten abuses", presumably the results will be the same as for "right to be forgotten abuses" \-- which might bury the results they are specific searching for, making accessing information related to discussions of the law -- which specific cases held up as examples certainly are -- more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> An ACLU article from The Onion comes to mind.

[http://www.theonion.com/article/aclu-defends-nazis-right- to-...](http://www.theonion.com/article/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down- aclu-headqua-1648)

</comment><comment><USER21> I know it's still quite a controversial topic, and I have not yet come down on whether or not I like the current implementations, but I am a fan of the notion of a Right to be Forgotten.

At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them; the control over what information may be in the public sphere is a little more difficult to talk about. E.g., I deeply dislike that most companies operate on an opt-out system for information collection; I would rather information collection (particularly anything dealing with personally-identifying information) to be universally opt-in with some reasonable attempt ( _not_ an EULA) made to offer the user an informed decision.

Search-engines are tricky because they provide a public service for finding information but are, themselves, a company that often profits from the collection of information both in the usership of their service and in the data they crawl to aid their users in finding content.

My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request).

I am still mulling this whole thing over; but, at the very least, it is obvious that the issue isn't a simple one.

<comment><USER22> I don't see how anything like right to be forgotten can be implemented without essentially internet censorship.

Does a corrupt politician have a right to be forgotten forgotten? Former politician? Bank executive? Hedge fund manager? Barbara Streisand? How about those who donate to political causes? The trend seems to be going the other way on that one, at least in the US.

What is the criteria and who decides? I can't imagine how such subjectivity would not be abused.

<comment><USER23> I believe there should be a framework in place, but that it should be strict yet accessible. An easy example is someone that is arrested but not convicted of a crime. Arrests are public information, and very often people assume that only the guilty are arrested. Combine that with the regular practice of Googling new hires for every job and someone's life could easily be quite literally ruined.

<comment><USER24> If a community cares about this, it seems more appropriate to address this at the community level by not publishing arrest records. Far fewer thorny issues are at stake with that decision that there are in censoring data that has been public at some point.

<comment><USER25> Collectively, we've never really seriously dealt with information that was historically public but which historically also took considerable effort/interest to access--e.g. it was in a dusty file cabinet in the office of some town clerk who only worked for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Furthermore, it took even more effort/interest/even money to link together such information with other information sources.

While there are, in general, a lot of good reasons for transparency in society, there are probably good arguments for keeping certain types of information private now that they're so much easier to access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If anyone's interested in listening to a lengthy debate on the "Right to be Forgotten", check this out --

[http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past- debates/item/1...](http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past- debates/item/1252-the-u-s-should-adopt-the-right-to-be-forgotten-online)

It's a fascinating debate, and a really great listen. For me, I was on the fence at the beginning, but ended up firmly on the side of "No, the 'right to be forgotten' should not be adopted by the United States" by the end of it.

Edit: Oh hey, I listened to the podcast, but turns out there's a video version too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ)

</comment><comment><USER27> There's an author with the same name as me- if I exercise my right to be forgotten, does that mean he's forgotten too? I can imagine he might not like that.

<comment><USER28> You can identify specific search results that are about you and ask for them to be removed. If anything I would expect the author to be in favor of this, because now more of the remaining results will be about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, they should now ask for this link to also be removed...

</comment><comment><USER30> I think in cases like this, especially if it's recursive, the search should redirect to `//censored.google.eu/?q=...` with a big notice at the top noting that the results excludes links that were specifically censored by EU law, with maybe a link to an article, or two about said law at the top of the page.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not done yet: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+ordered+to+remove+lin...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+ordered+to+remove+links+to+stories+about+Google+removing+links+to+stories&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

</comment><comment> d--b I have a feeling that someone is going to order this link removed.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm all for privacy. It just isn't implementable.

</comment><comment><USER33> Sounds like they google Google at Google.

// You guys had a rough week, huh?

</comment><comment><USER34> "We need to go deeper."

</comment><comment><USER35> so now they will need to ask Google to remove links to stories about /(Google being ordered to remove links about stories about)*/ Google removing links to stories.

So nice to see the Kleene star in practice!</comment>


JavaScript object creation: Learning to live without "new" - <AUTHOR> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/javascript-object-creation.html Discusses object creation in JavaScript using prototypal inheritance as an alternative to the new operator. <comment><USER2> I don't understand why this is considered superior to using `new`. I guess it's supposed to be less confusing to those who try to use JavaScript without understanding it (and hey, we've all been there), but I don't see how it really helps. It doesn't magically make the newcomer understand prototypal inheritance.</comment>


Mapping Greater Boston's Neighborhoods - <AUTHOR> http://bostonography.com/hoods/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in seeing the results from the 2012 survey: [http://bostonography.com/2012/crowdsourced-neighborhood- boun...](http://bostonography.com/2012/crowdsourced-neighborhood-boundaries- part-one-consensus/) and [http://bostonography.com/2013/neighborhoods-as-seen- by-the-p...](http://bostonography.com/2013/neighborhoods-as-seen-by-the- people/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just added a "5 minute walk from South Station" neighborhood.

A few notes/observations:

1\. I didn't realize that there were already several other maps for the area I wanted to map (South Station). It would have been cool to see a message like "Looks like you are mapping a previously mapped section of the town. Want to review that map?" I would have commented/loved that map instead of creating a new one and adding to the noise.

2\. I don't see any way to link to my neighborhood map. So, how can I share this with other and get more love?

3\. How is this different from Google's "My Maps" feature[1]? Not being snarky, but the only thing I can think of is the 'discoverability' of bostonography maps.

[1] [https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/](https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/)

<comment><AUTHOR> so Bostonography has been a long running attempt to build crowd-sourced definitions of neighborhoods. I expect the interested difference from my maps will be an aggregated report on the data that will come out as has happened on several previous versions of the survey / site.</comment></comment>


Is imgur.com working for you? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> DownDetector [1] shows a problem. More specific details and comments [2]

[1] - [https://downdetector.com/](https://downdetector.com/)

[2] - [http://downdetector.com/status/imgur](http://downdetector.com/status/imgur) this one strangely redirects from https back to http.

</comment><comment><USER3> The server responds with HTML, but it's all broken.

</comment><comment> java-man no</comment>


Are The Olympics Going To Kill The Internet? We Don't Think So - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/are-the-olympics-going-to-kill-the-internet-we-don-t-think-so <comment><USER2> That all sounds SO ridiculous. Two people in one office breaking the entire internet? _What?_

What is with articles that portray the internet as one computer you can OOPS accidentally break. I thought allyinsider was credible.</comment>


The one sure way to advance software engineering - <AUTHOR> http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/21/the-one-sure-way-to-advance-software-engineering/

<comment><USER2> _But if anyone is looking for one practical, low-tech idea that has an iron- clad guarantee of improving software engineering, here it is: pass a law that requires extensive professional analysis of any large software failure._

This is his conclusion, and it's bullshit. Most software engineering failures result from the violation of known principles; basically, calculated risk- taking in a cost-sensitive industry where lives (usually) aren't at stake. Accumulating more and more engineering knowledge won't change that.

Really, just open your ears on any software engineering project and you'll hear that "accepted principles" are routinely ignored. A month ago I heard someone say, quite upset, "We're supposed to be in testing right now, but we're still in development!" because QA uncovered a bunch of bugs that needed to be fixed by developers. Clearly that person sees testing as a joke, a pious fraud, that isn't actually supposed to catch any bugs. Usually most bugs missed in development are released to production and fixed later. Catching more bugs than usual in QA, thanks to an enthusiastic and zealous QA engineer, was a blow to the schedule and will probably result in the project being perceived less favorably than if QA had done a sloppy job. Bertrand Meyer is kidding himself if he thinks engineering knowledge is the cure for this kind of disease.

EDIT: Stepping back, I guess the cost and embarrassment of a mandatory investigation would serve as a deterrent. But the knowledge gleaned from such investigations would be depressingly mundane.

<comment><USER3> You're right, but apart from health and safety related cases quality is an economic issue, and QA has to be balanced against other economic factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was right there with him until the words 'pass a law'. I'm hardly a libertarian, but it seems pretty clear even to me that any such law would (1) raise serious and legitimate privacy concerns, and (2) be rife with unintended consequences.

I could imagine such a law applying only to software projects funded with public money, though. There are enough of those to advance the state of knowledge a fair amount....

<comment><USER5> The tricky bit is that once you have a law in place for public projects, the people who pushed for that first law will probably try to extend it into the private sector. So even having that first law (which is a good one!) paves the way for more invasive laws later.

<comment><USER6> It does provide something of a "slippery slope" problem, but there are ways of handling that.

One step in a direction does not always lead to the next, especially if there are definite plans at the beginning to avoid it.

<comment><USER7> _One step in a direction does not always lead to the next_

Perhaps, but choreographing 50 million people (plus or minus an arbitrary number, depending on your country) is pretty tough, even on a good day.

<comment><USER6> True, and quite well phrased.

Still, there are ways of dealing with slippery slopes. Knowing that something is a slippery slope means "approach with caution" not "stop".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He's right that the period vs comma is likely wrong. But it is a legend based on a real event.

For details see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1> or <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/5.65.html#subj1> for more details. Here is a summary. The Mariner 1 probe was destroyed because it veered off course shortly after launch on July 22, 1963. By July 28 the NY Times was reporting that the cause was due to a missing hyphen. NASA submitted a report to Congress the next year that confirms this.

The comma vs period version likely arose as a misremembering of which typo caused the problem. Or possibly by confusing it with another incident. (There are anecdotal reports of such a bug being caught in Project Mercury. Whether they are true is a different story.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Planes use software.

After a plane crash, I'm pretty sure that software errors would be investigated along with everything else. How has that worked out for software?

<comment><USER10> I was going to say that. Further, the comparison between physical systems and software is mostly bogus. When software screws up it often _tells you_ what's wrong. Little investigation is ever needed. If the epoxy on an airplane is too weak, it doesn't log heap dumps and stack traces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Consider the Eurofighter Typhoon. The RAF issued the original specs for it in 1972 (probably before anyone who will actually fly one "for real" was born). The RAF is only just now taking delivery of them. Can you even imagine building a web app on those timescales?

<comment><USER12> The lesson from the eurofighter isn't to not to do software engineering. But instead, do not develop web software with a multi-supplier, multi-national bureaucratic bureaucracy.

Even then, the eurofighter turned out to be more capable than both the F-22 and F-35.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There was something I read in the past year about the conflict between recovery and forensics - preserving the evidence for an investigation prevents a quick and smooth recovery, and conversely quickly recovering from a problem destroys evidence. So real world systems that have to keep working either need a complete backup system (ridiculously expensive) or they need to stay down until the investigation is completed (which could be even worse, especially if a gov't agency with a stronger sense of CYA than urgency is doing it). Investigating airplane crashes doesn't have this problem, since the plane isn't going anywhere. I've spent the last ten minutes googling trying to find the source and can't.

</comment><comment><USER14> Will not work the same way with software. The scope is far too large and dynamic. Software is much more diverse and complex and advances much more rapidly.

Airplanes have been solving the same basic problem for decades, getting incrementally better at it year by year. A flight simulator running on a desktop computer is one example of one piece of software that could get incrementally better year by year. Meanwhile new software solving new problems is released all the time. Designing laws to account for that is difficult and very dangerous.

The FAA model might work well for specific software systems but is no silver bullet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The aerospace-IT analogy is an interesting one. I have done programming in aerospace environments and am always amazed that every single screw, nut, and bolt must be redundantly inspected, QA'ed, and certified but "QA" as it applies to software checks source code indenting and not much else. We have a long way to go before application software is as bulletproof as flying.

<comment><USER12> <http://libre.adacore.com/libre/>

Not really that far. The tools are already there, and available to use. We just have to gain a culture of quality.

Which is the real problem. The technology industry has a culture of cowboys and constantly forging ahead rather than sober introspection (masturbatory blog posts aside).

My background in aviation has had a huge effect on my life in technology. Every pilot has been in a "situation" over their flying career, some more than once. When we do our hanger flying we swap stories about how to safely get down every time. This just doesn't happen in technology. It should.

<comment><USER15> A culture of quality has a significant cost. This is justified if lives are at stake, but that's pretty much the only case where it's justified. Grocery stores also don't check each apple 3 times independently if it's not rotten. :)

<comment><USER12> Implicit in what you're saying is that you're willing to suffer the costs if your software fails.

For me, if my banks software decides to munge some data, that's not cool. If my $2K laptop crashes, that's not cool.

More importantly, a culture of quality mainly has initial costs, after that maintaining it is a small marginal cost with significant savings in reduced defects.

<comment><USER16> Some software industries - aviation and healthcare particularly, but also to a lesser extent finance - _are_ regulated. And have strong cultures of culture. And it works - how often are plane crashes due to "pilot error" vs. due to "software error"?

For most things, though, that's just plain unnecessary. If my free web browser crashes - well, I'm a little annoyed, but I suck it up and restart the program. And I'd much rather use that free browser that crashes than wait until they can make it perfect and crash-free.

There's an opportunity cost to everything. Time spent making sure your program _never_ crashes is time not spent on solving new problems, and it's likely those new problems are a lot more pressing than "I need to reboot Firefox every 2-3 days because it has such horrible memory leaks."

<comment><USER12> I am not at all sympathetic to your world view. You're advocating that we make bad software on purpose. Not only that but you're advocating placing the burden of defects as an externality onto users.

This to me is unprofessional. We have the technology and skills to build reliable software, without significant additional cost. To do anything else should be criminal.

I'll use an analogy. You wouldn't date a fat, ugly, dull girl if you knew with even the most trivial effort you could date an attractive girl who's great at conversation and loves to discuss René Magritte and Douglas Hofstadter, would you? No. So why accept the same in software?

EDIT: I should note that here in B.C., Canada Software Engineer is a certified title. You may not legally call yourself a software engineer unless you are licensed.

h<http://www.apeg.bc.ca/>

<comment><USER16> Eh, you don't have to be sympathetic to my worldview. You almost certainly use software I've written anyway. ;-)

I'd strongly disagree that building reliable software can be done without significant additional cost. I spend perhaps 2/3 of my time writing tests, and then development time (on top of that) is probably doubled by code reviews. The benefit of this is that I have enough confidence in my (and others') code that I can freely improve it without worrying too much about breaking things. The downside is that I've spent 6x as long to implement a feature as I otherwise would've. That's a cost. I pay it because a.) I have to and b.) the business importance of the code I write really does justify it.

I would not pay that cost if I were hacking up a startup with zero users and iterating until I had a useful product. And I don't pay the cost when I'm prototyping new ideas within my employer - most of my work later this week has been straight hackety-hack with no tests, because I'm doing a demo for something new.

"You wouldn't date a fat, ugly, dull girl if you knew with even the most trivial effort you could date an attractive girl who's great at conversation and loves to discuss René Magritte and Douglas Hofstadter, would you?"

Haven't you heard of "Smart. Pretty. Nice. Pick two"? You generally _can't_ have everything - not unless you happen to be a debonaire billionaire with Brad Pitt's body. (The fact that such a person doesn't exist might be further evidence that you can't have everything...) Most people date a girl who has the qualities that they care about, and they don't worry so much if she's not perfect in other ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good point; however, the basic construction of airplanes has remained the same since 1967. Software, unfortunately, changes constantly. Software engineers have become very talented at what does stay constant (just as aerospace engineers have) -- e.g. languages -- however, it is likely the always-evolving libraries and paradigms that cause most problems.</comment>


Ask HN: How to incentivate owners to keep availability calendars updated? - <AUTHOR>

In our reservation system a basic requirement is that the availability calendars are update regularly so that search results are fresh and users do not need to wonder if the accommodation is actually available. Owners need to confirm at least each 48 hours that the calendar is ok (just click on refresh). Editing or adding a reservation refreshes them automatically.
Now, some owners complain saying "why shall I refresh? If I did no changes it means nothing has changed". But in many cases it means something has changed and the owner did not update it.
Our ideas: - calendar older than 48 hours disappears from the page - the fresher the calendar the  better ranking in search results - fresh calendar allows Book Now. Not fresh calendar just Contact Us and discussion in ticket. - if the calendar was not reliable (date were free but the owner replies they are not) punish owner with worse search results.
Just wondering if the bright minds at HN have some more, better, ideas! Thank you in advance for any comment. <comment><USER2> You might also consider putting a "reliability" index next to the users name and allowing users to sort by this index. So if a user often fails to have their calendar up to date they would have a low score. This would be an incentive for them to keep their calendars updated.

<comment><USER3> sounds good, maybe something temporally, it can happend that an owner can be offline for some reasons (no adsl for some days or other problems), so it can be a malus for 1 week (or another period) and then back to normal .

<comment><AUTHOR> as it is now, no permanent damage is done when the calendar is not update for a while. But actually it would be nice to have a "last 3 months average update time" which means both no permanent damage but also consider recent behavior.

<comment><USER3> Yes, no permanent damage, but it can be something like every 24 hours after the 48 hours you don't refresh, one point less until you refresh and the malus disappear.

<comment><AUTHOR> this seems overly complicated and does not add any value to the idea. Also note that "every XX hours" requires cronjobs or other ways which add another layer of complications and even possible server overload. All can be done of course, but it needs to be worth it. Maybe I am missing the point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe a reminder on top of control panel's home could help, or an e-mail (but the owner sould have the option to disable such e-mails or to decide frequency).

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, both good ideas.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Yazz Pilot – Self Service Apps Without the IT Department - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zubairq/pilot <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Zubair here, I just posted a project called Pilot that I have been working with on and off for many years now. The tool is supposed to be a Visual basic style drag and drop GUI builder for enterprise apps. the interesting part of the backstory is that this is my 7th attempt to build this!

So the back story is: I first thought about building a web based development tool since I was at University where I built a Hypercard style development tool called OpenPage (using C++ on Solaris) as my Computer Science project which scored as one of the highest projects of the year at Machester University, UK (1994). My beginners confidence didn't carry on into anything concrete though, until 2000, when I wrote the second version in Java, but this didn't go anywhere. For a third version I tried to develop this in Javascript, Ruby and Sintra in 2007, but I didn't realise how difficult a problem this was. Also, in 2008 a fourth attempt was made where I tried again in Erlang, but it didn't go anywhere. So I hung up my boots and then in 2013 after building a startup NemCV with Franco Soldera I tried a fifth time and built a Clojure/Clojurescript based tool called Clojure on Coils, which was pretty cool, but most people thought it was a joke. Eventually after a couple of years I realised that I didn't understand the problem well enough, so for attempt six decided to outsource the problem by investing in a project by Chris Granger and Rob Attori, called LightTable/Eve. They tried to solve the problem of building a usable development system, but by 2018, they too realised that this was a huge task, and very hard to monetise.

So, I took a step back and realised that I now had a lot of knowledge about the subject, but needed to find a way to build something that can be commercially viable as an entry point, as this is a problem that 10,000s of companies have tackled and failed at (since the 1980s - just pick up a 1980s edition of Personal Computer to see many companies attempting the same thing). So I am now taking baby steps with a seventh attempt, by building a tool for enterprise users to build small webapps which can integrate with other systems, based on the look and feel of one of my favorite products of all time, Visual Basic 6. The product is called Pilot, and has a simple VB style editor, and allows you to build GUI apps, and microservices. It uses a simple component model based on 1 Javascript function per component, for both server side and front end components. It uses NodeJS, SQLite, and VueJS. It used to run as an Electron dekstop app but the I decided to dump Electron once I made Pilot container native so that it can run on Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Ubuntu Snap, as Electron would make the container runtimes too large. So the big focus now is to make alot of integrations so that people who work in large enterprises and just want to build a GUI really fast can build an app on top 3Scale, Mulesoft, Kong, Rest APIs, Postgres or other enterprise stuff.

There have been many people involved in this project and I give my thanks to them, since they have written alot of the code. Unfortunately I am the only person who is happy to put my name to the commits as I have a very forward thinking employer, Red Hat, although there have been major contributors from Google and Microsoft as well. Also, I must stress that this project and the views of myself and other team members in no way represents the views of our employers at Red Hat, Google, or Microsoft.

The project is still very rough around the edges, but please feel free to reach out to me for any questions that you may have.

<comment><USER2> I might be doing it wrong but it doesnt seem to take mobile into account at all. The website is all rendered incorrectly. Its not really a good commentary on what youve spent all your time on but first impressions are super important, as you wont have a lot of time to communicate what youre trying to accomplish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you are totally right, Yazz Pilot sucks on mobile right now. Our first priority is to get it working well with Google Chrome on Desktop (most Enterprise users still chained to Laptops). Second priority is to get it working on Firefox well. Third is Tablets, and last is mobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Imitating VB6 might be the wrong direction for a lot of people here. I can see the point for devs, but not "Joe public" who has no desire to actually program.

Most quick app needs for the common person trying to find better ways to do their job, in my experience, tend to be of the "I want to collect or collate some data and output some reports" and for that Access might be the better starting model, maybe taking some UX inspiration from the way people use/abuse Excel in similar contexts.

Cool project though, don't let my thoughts (which could easily be quite wrong) stop you, especially if your target is people who do (or want to) dev a bit rather than people who would prefer not.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was present at two demos Zubair did and it really looks promising.

I've seen some tools like that and the big non-tech problem was always how to sell. Indeed there are a lot of developers that wouldn't use such tool, but there is a _huge_ market that can benefit from it and it's awesome to see Zubair aiming on the right spot and with one of the best approaches: Open Source!

I'm closely looking forward to see Pilot reaching the cloud :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I know who you are dude. Actually the work you did of installing full OpenShift 3.11 (Kubernetes distro from Red Hat) on a standalone cluster which you carry in your backpack was a big inspiration to me to make Pilot portable and to work on Kubernetes ([https://www.backpackcloud.com/episodes/episode-1-a-portable-...](https://www.backpackcloud.com/episodes/episode-1-a-portable- cloud-provider))

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been watching this project for a while, but now i can see the full source code. A very ambitious project as so many of the "low code" products today are basically fixed ecosystems where the components are sourced by the company, and you basically mix and match pie chart drawing modules with line graphs, etc., to make dashboards. This is more like VB6 which i understand was the goal. Many people consider VB6 to be the peak of power * ease of use.

<comment><AUTHOR> The project has always been OpenSource, so full source code was always available. Yes you are right, I would like Yazz Pilot to be a total VB6 clone, but I still can't implement 90% of what VB6 did like Modules and inline stepping through code

Aren't you the Beads guy ([http://beadslang.org/](http://beadslang.org/))? I have seen it before and it looks pretty cool

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks pretty interesting! Is there any auth model today or would this be best deployed behind the DMZ?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment you can only protect an app made in Pilot using Keycloak or Redhat SSO. The option can be found in the top menu of the editor.

In the future we already have plans to support active directory and other security models

<comment><USER6> Perfect. I love Keycloak. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are comparable alternative products and why do your alpha version users think this is better?

<comment><USER8> I see some similarity to Google's Appmaker.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, Google app maker is pretty cool, but I think only available as a cloud option. Maybe in the future we could offer cloud hosting of Pilot like Wordpress does as one possible revenue option

<comment><USER8> Yes, and not only that, but apps you make in Appmaker are only visible to those that have an account in your Gsuite domain. You can't expose the app to customers or partners unless you add them as a Gsuite user. I think that was a mistake on Google's part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does that mean that you can't share appmaker apps with people using their internal company email address if their email is not hosted by google mail?

<comment><USER8> You have to login with your Gsuite credentials. You don't have to use the email.

The downside I'm thinking of is, for example:

You build an app for people to apply for jobs at your company.

AppMaker won't support that unless you pay for a Gsuite license for every job applicant. Or do the external user facing stuff in something else and integrate...but that kills the whole purpose of low code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm, interesting, thanks for this, I will have to think about this, how to do login and security correctly. Any good web links you have on this please share so that I can research it, thanks!

<comment><USER8> Most similar tools like Knack, Quickbase, etc, have separate ideas and pricing for "internal org users" and "external users" that register/log in, as well as "app exposed to the internet with no login required".

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, interesting. Our initial thoughts are to use Red Hat style pricing, so that Yazz Pilot open source version is free for both external and internal users to use the tool, and companies only pay if they want a support contract for help or urgent bugs, pretty much the same model as Red Hat</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Node S2 – A TypeScript Geohashing and Geolocation Library - <AUTHOR> https://radar.io/blog/open-source-node-js-typescript-s2-library <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, I'm one of the engineers at Radar who worked on this library and am happy to answer any questions :)

<comment><USER2> Have you explored yet a web assembly version for use entirely in the browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't yet - for the most part, the S2 Library is pretty standard C++, so it could be worth investigating. The bindings are Node specific, so we'd have to rewrite those.</comment></comment></comment>


September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://jeremyobriant.com/i-just-had-dinner-at-airbnbs-hq-september-15th-is-a-big-day-for-the-sharing-economy/ <comment><USER2> One incorrect statement: "Requiring insurance coverage on the property of at least $150k (Airbnb has this covered)"

From Airbnb directly: "The Host Guarantee is not insurance and should not be considered as a replacement or stand-in for homeowners or renters insurance."

Last I'd checked, it didn't cover anything within the building outside the rented unit. And only things within the unit owned by the renter... so no appliances, fixtures, walls, common areas, doors, hallways, etc. Airbnb's site is now very vague on what the 'guarantee' covers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think one of the biggest advantages of the proposed laws is freeing up rent controlled units that are currently be hoarded for Airbnb and not being used as primary residences.

<comment><USER4> That seems like a dubious benefit to me. So we pass all these regulations (rent control) that end up leading to inadequate market supply. The solution to this is to... pass laws leading to inadequate market supply in temporary lodging?

<comment><USER5> There is not one single 'supply' here. There is a supply of permanent housing, and a supply of temporary lodging. Rent control was passed to ensure an affordable supply of the former, not the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just got back from a week vacation, staying in a house we rented through VRBO.com.

Can anyone explain why VRBO, which has been in operation for 15 years, and explicitly focuses on renting out 2nd homes, has not faced the backlash and scrutiny that AirBnB has? Is it just that they have not done enough volume to get the regulators' attention?

Because reading about the proposed rules in this article, VRBO rentals seem like they would violate at least one of them:

> -Requiring hosts to only rent out their primary residence and setting > guidelines on how many days they must occupy the unit each year (currently > 275 days)

<comment><USER7> I think it has to do with the whole 'explicitly focuses on renting out 2nd homes' deal. To me, it makes more sense to allow people to rent out properties that they own rather than units that they themselves are renting. I'm fine with someone renting their summer cottage on a lake in Vermont - less fine with someone explicitly renting scarce property in SF for the sole purpose of flipping on Airbnb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know how AirBnB works in San Francisco, but in other countries it IS mostly a tax-evading hotel alternative, and renting out primary residences is very, very rare.

I'm looking for rentals in a South American city, and there are quite a few owners with 10+ properties (more the norm than the exception), and I actually prefer those (I've had bad experiences with sloppy hosts, professional hosts haven't let me down yet).

Such regulation in those countries would greatly diminish the appeal of AirBnB to said hosts (they would probably look for an unregulated alternative).

<comment><USER9> In Europe I've seen both. I rented a place in Finland that was a college student's apartment; he'd rent it on some weekends and just stay with his girlfriend those weekends. There are definitely people doing it "as a business" as well, and some of the challenge in using it as a customer is trying to figure out which is which (I prefer to rent from the person who lives there). You can usually tell, from how many properties they have listed, how frequently they have reviews, what their booking schedule looks like, whether they themselves ever stay places or only host, etc., but it takes an extra level of manual filtering.

For renting of rooms or couches (vs. renting whole apartments), a much larger percentage are people renting out parts of their own living space, so you stay with the resident and usually meet them or even hang out with them, kinda "couchsurfing for money". Though there are some such listings (esp. in NYC) where a shared rental is shared with _other_ AirBnB renters, not with the permanent resident, and I definitely avoid those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey op, not a big deal but I found a spell check error in your post. Last paragraph you say I continue to be memorized when I think you mean mesmerized.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey, FYI, blog owner: You're serving some form of terrible dot-matrix font from the 80s ("monserrat") to Chrome/Windows. This was the first time in months I've had to dig in with the inspector and disable a font just so that I could read an article.

Might want to fix that.

<comment><USER12> If I recall correctly, this is the (lackof I think) Direct Write bug.

Take a look in About://flags and toggle the one with Direct Write (I think your turning it on) and it should look far prettier.

<comment><USER11> Are you seriously suggesting that he put a banner on his blog asking his users to monkey around with experimental flags just so they can read text on the page?

While I'm personally technical enough to deal with wackiness like this when I come across it, most people are not. Given that, maybe a better solution would be to choose a font that the most popular browser on the most popular operating system can render out of the box. That's why I pointed it out.

<comment><USER3> No, he is suggesting you jacked up your settings and offered a solution for you. Tested on a half dozen different combos of Chrome/Windows here and no issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sad how many people think its good to abolish property rights. Careful what you ask for.

</comment><comment><USER14> The phrase "[the] sharing economy" continues to grate. It's the "renting economy".

A bunch of entities, through technological means, enable people to efficiently make parts of their capital rentable.

There's no sharing involved, here.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone else look at the seats in the top picture and think "back trouble".

I couldn't imagine sitting in solid wooden chairs for 8 hours a day! The pain would be unbearable.

<comment><USER16> That's their cafeteria.

<comment><USER15> Thank god for that! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _-Limiting those under rent control provisions to not make more from home- > sharing than their rent (some people are not happy about this one)_

Hah. Talk about entitled. Complaining they cant rent for market rates while living at below market rates. Not surprising though coming from people who illegally rent out others property.

<comment><USER18> If they have a rent-controlled apartment, and they're subletting it, where do they live? And if they're getting "market rates" (which I doubt), and still qualify for a rent-controlled apartment, then I say let them keep the money.

<comment><USER19> My understanding is you don't "qualify" for rent control in SF. You automatically get it when you move into a building built before 1979.

Then the landlord can only increase rent (as a general rule) by about 1% per year.

So there are people living in 4 bedroom homes in the middle of the best parts of the Mission paying $1000 a month in rent where market rate would be between $6000-8000.

<comment><USER18> Man, I don't understand anything about SF housing :p At that point, the landlords should be putting all their places on AirBNB themselves! Or arranging for tenants to sublet at market rates and taking a cut under the table, to reduce their chance of being exposed a bit.

<comment><USER20> They can't just kick out the current tenants to do that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Overstock.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/overstock-bitcoin-live/ <comment><USER2> Overstock.com uses Coinbase and Coinbase handles the entire checkout process. It's really no different than checkout with PayPal. Except that it's never in bitcoin at all. Overstock never shows a bitcoin amount due, it's handled entirely at Coinbase's end. And no bitcoins are ever given to Overstock.com, they just get USD from Coinbase directly and the customer is charged the amount in bitcoins that convert to the amount of USD that their order is.

It's a win win for Overstock.com, really, since they don't need to worry about the volatility and instability of bitcoin and only deal in USD but get to look forward-thinking by accepting bitcoin. Yes, they are accepting more risk because Coinbase.com could disappear overnight (FAR more likely than PayPal or Visa disappearing overnight), but they get some advantage for their risk.

<comment><USER3> This is still great news in terms of Bitcoin adoption, however. I can now spend my Bitcoin on more things than I could before this announcement.

The more merchants that follow suit, the better.

Eventually there may be no need for Coinbase if a majority of merchants accepted Bitcoin.

<comment><USER2> Except for the whole "you have no recourse as a consumer since there are no chargebacks" thing. And no, the better business bureau, ratings websites, etc don't count.

<comment><USER4> you've only had this kind of recourse for the past 50 years. before that, for 5-10,000 years, money in all its forms worked just like bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> > you've only had this kind of recourse for the past 50 years. before that, > for 5-10,000 years, money in all its forms worked just like bitcoin.

To the extent its true (and, actually, money in most of its other historical forms doesn't work much like bitcoin, but yes there wasn't a widely used convenient equivalent to modern payment dispute resolution systems before credit cards), like computers and modern dentistry and all kinds of other modern developments, its not one of those things I'd like to give up having to go back to the way things used to work.

<comment><USER6> Can we safely assume you never use physical cash because it doesn't support "charge backs"?

Also, what do you say to the populations of the ~40 countries that credit cards don't work in _because_ charge back requests are too common there? Do you tell them to simply never make online purchases?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a tax guide that would explain the consequences of me using some of the bitcoin I bought in 2013 to buy an item on overstock this month?

As I understand it I would have to record the value I paid for the bitcoin in 2013, calculate the value it appreciated between when I bought it and the amount I am using to buy the item. And then report this as capital gains on my 2014 tax return?

This sucks, this makes using bitcoin a lot more work than just paying with a credit card. Plus, it might mean having to hire an accountant instead of just using turbo tax?

<comment><USER8> I offer no actual reply, only a thought experiment, keeping in mind that the USD is another floating currency that fluctuates in value:

...

" Is there a tax guide that would explain the consequences of me using some of the US Dollars I traded for in 2013 to buy an item on overstock this month?

As I understand it I would have to record the value I paid for the US Dollars in 2013, calculate the value it appreciated between when I bought it and the amount I am using to buy the item. And then report this as capital gains on my 2014 tax return?

This sucks, this makes using US Dollars a lot more work than just paying with a credit card. Plus, it might mean having to hire an accountant instead of just using turbo tax? "

<comment><USER9> Except there are many statutes that give the dollar special tax treatment.

<comment><USER10> This. People keep thinking that bitcoin is a currency. It's not. It's best thought of as a commodity, in the same way that all foreign currencies are essentially commodities, and using them to pay for things is bartering and capital gains laws apply.

<comment><USER11> Sort of. The US tax code provides some special provisions[1] that are meant to make life easier for people making smaller transactions in foreign currency. IANAL, but if I had to hazard a wild guess, for the purposes of the statute in question "foreign currency" is defined as the official currency of a sovereign nation that is not the USA. With BTC not being controlled by any country that would imply that for the purposes of tax law it is just another commodity - but something like the Euro is not.

[1]: See section (e) at [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/988](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/988)

<comment><USER8> Would this change if a small, minimally developed sovereign nation adopted Bitcoin as its official currency, as opposed to the US Dollar or the Euro or a local currency that is not capable of earning much seigniorage per year?

<comment><USER12> Just like how Sealand's hosting of the Pirate Bay made copyright infringement globally palatable? No, probably not.

But thanks for reminding me of the word seigniorage, I'd been looking for it actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just bought a watch using their bitcoin checkout. Since I was already logged in to Coinbase it a single screen to approve the payment. Then back to a page saying my order was complete. Couldn't be easier.

This is a win for bitcoin but its a huge win for Coinbase. Their payment flow works well and I am sure Overstock accepting it will make it an easier sell for other merchants.

<comment><USER14> Here's a potential scenario as some food for thought:

Apparently, the process was so simple for you because both you (the buyer) and Overstock (the seller) operate via Coinbase. Clearly, the process would have been less smooth if you had had to use your own wallet.

Now suppose that for this reason, Coinbase (as a placeholder for any service like it) manages to establish itself as the go-to payment provider via BTC.

Then, one day, they decide that since they always have to convert back to USD for the merchant, maybe it would be interesting to allow their customers to just keep a USD balance with them. It reduces their exchange rate risk, and they could pass some of the savings on to you, making this a tempting offer.

Suddenly, BTC is not in the loop any more, though in the end all parties would still be better off (lower fees than in the current credit card system).

Such scenarios are why I'm doubtful that BTC will "take over the world" in the sense that many proponents think. I doubt it will become a predominant means of payment in any industrial nation, and there won't be a Bitcoin-standard (analogous to a gold standard) either.

Let me explicitly clarify: That does _not_ mean that I believe BTC's value will necessarily drop to zero within the next 100 years. It might, but it might not.

<comment><USER15> That's why I always have to laugh when I hear about such-and-such a company "now accepting bitcoin!". They don't get bitcoin, they get USD, so they don't care. Want to buy something from Overstock? Take your USD, buy some bitcoin, put it into your Coinbase account, Coinbase sends USD to Overstock. It's like buying an Amazon giftcard for yourself--just an extraneous step between your original USD and the USD that go to the merchant's account.

<comment><USER16> Astute observers will note that this is very similar to the credit card situation: Overstock does not accept USD, they accept Visa. (and MasterCard. etc.)

If I go to Europe and buy something with my Visa debit card, my account is denominated in USD, but they do some forex and the merchant gets Euro.

If I go to Overstock and buy something with my Coinbase wallte, my account is denominated in BTC, but they do some trading and the merchant gets USD.

<comment><USER15> Overstock might as well say "We now accept Coinbase!"

<comment><USER17> Except you can use any bitcoin wallet so they accept bitcoin not coinbase. As absurd as it sounds when snapCard (a site that orders from other sites for you) first started they would only work with Coinbase. Enough customers complained that they had to offer a second option to accept bitcoin payments from anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The importance of this news cannot be overstated. Overstock.com is the first "main stream" company (my mom shops there) that accepts bitcoin that I can think of.

Wow. Good job, overstock.com team for getting this done so quickly!

<comment><USER19> I guess I just don't see it. To my cynical eye, it seems mostly like an easy way for Overstock to generate a bunch of positive press and perhaps make a few extra sales from bitcoin boosters.

Sure, it's a nice milestone for bitcoin, but the importance seems, well, kinda overstated. I mean, a decade ago a bunch of big ecommerce sites took Flooz too, right?

But hey, I thought the iPod was too expensive and Twitter was useless when they launched, so what do I know.

<comment><USER20> I was listening to a podcast where the hosts claim that the CEO is a libertarian and loves the idea of BTC as opposed to Federal Reserve Notes. But in addition, it does give them press coverage as well.

<comment><USER21> This is mentioned in the article:

> Like so many others, he believes bitcoin can free the world from the control > of big banks and big government. "It helps us fight the machine," he says.

I cringed reading this, mostly because _normal_ people don't feel quite comfortable with sentiment like "fighting the machine."

<comment><USER22> You might be surprised at what _normal_ people actually think.

Get outside and talk to some folks. Very few are friends of "the machine."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just ordered a mini-helicopter on Overstock using Bitcoins. The checkout process was flawless. I used the Bitcoin client on my phone to send the amount by snapping a shot of the QR code on the website. Went right through, hit confirm, and the deal was done!

Couldn't have been an easier process and can't wait to get my helicopter.

</comment><comment><USER24> As a European, I have never heard of Overstock. Though they actually do ship here and prices can be displayed in Euro's.

How big is this site? What is their angle? Are they just like a smaller amazon.com? Overstock sounds a little like lower priced articles from left over stocks or something...

<comment><USER25> While I know Alexa is far from accurate, it does show overstock.com to be the 621 largest universal site and 160th in the USA. That should show you scale.

In 2010 (Fiscal Year) they has $1.1 billion in revenue with 1600 employees. They are publicly traded with a market cap just under $750 million.

<comment><USER24> That is actually many times bigger than I would have guessed. That they're accepting Bitcoin is pretty huge for the Bitcoin movement then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We recently began accepting it on our typing education websites [http://www.Typing.com](http://www.Typing.com) and [http://www.NitroType.com](http://www.NitroType.com), though to an unfortunately meager response. Hopefully between Zynga and Overstock Bitcoin begins to be accepted as a true medium of exchange.

The initial reaction was simply confusion and a lot of "what the heck is bitcoin??? is it paypal??", so the rollout really was more of a educational session than anything else.

<comment><USER27> Users of Bitcoin are likely to be proficient keyboard users. People that aren't proficient keyboard users are not likely to be users of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER26> Well no, basically our audience is mostly made up of kids in school. That's the main problem.

<comment><USER28> But you see, it's not a problem at all ... at least, in the grand scheme of things. Every person that sees bitcoin in that checkout screen is going to say, "what the heck is bitcoin?"

Then the next time they hear about bitcoin (like say, on the hit TV show Almost Human [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8LqlMzEe-I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8LqlMzEe-I)), they'll say, "oh, I've heard of that before, I wonder what it's about". And so on and so on. You're doing a service :)

<comment><USER26> Ah yes, agreed. I meant purely related to the previous comment implying that keyboard literate users are the only audience for bitcoins. And so I meant that my uses are not knowledge about bitcoin regardless of their keyboarding skills, being that they are for the most part quite young.

But I'm definitely pleased to be educating millions of children about bitcoin. Actually it's all I expected when we began accepting it, but that is my way of showing my support. Just doing my part!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How much volume are they actually going to get though? I'm excited to see more outlets accepting bitcoin, but to this point it still feels more like a marketing gimmick.

<comment><USER30> They are not accepting Bitcoin. Coinbase is selling your bitcoins and giving the dollars to them.

<comment><USER29> Right, which from the consumer perspective is accepting bitcoins. There's no need to be a smart ass.

<comment><USER30> Not really. The price isn't in BTC.

<comment><USER31> But they are accepting payments in bitcoins.

<comment><USER30> You don't get it, do you? One of the rules in e-commerce is to limit the path to the "submit order" button and remove any decisioning in the checkout process - otherwise you may lose the sale. Given Bitcoin rate greatly varies, if it Bitcoin is dropping, I won't buy as then I will have to spend more coins. If it's on the rise, I will wait more to spend less. In general, too much wondering to get the best deal. If price is in BTC and I own BTC, I buy when I need something without having to worry about it. Anyway, they don't accept Bitcoin as they: a) don't have a Bitcoin wallet; b) they don't have stable prices in BTC.

<comment><USER30> @james33 I very well know what they did and how they did it. My point was pretty clear though. Consumers don't use Bitcoin yet and won't - if any consumer is interested in Bitcoin, it's to make money by hoarding, not to spend it.

<comment><USER29> The is the exact point I was making when I said it is just a marketing gimmick to get PR.

<comment><USER30> Ok. Peace!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm impressed they followed through with this so quickly. Great to see the adoption starting to flow in places that non crypto nerds and tech enthusiasts visit.

</comment><comment><USER32> So I wonder if anyone from the US could let me know, i'm from the UK and just tried to make a purchase it bitcoin, but I only get the option for CC, debit cards and paypal, no bitcoin.

So is this US only?

</comment><comment><USER33> So does anyone sell FX forwards (etc.) on Bitcoin yet? It seems everything now prices their items in, say, USD, and then calculates the Bitcoin price at purchase time. This makes the economy very unstable as the prices are never consistent. If Bitcoin prices were stable, then people would start accepting salary in Bitcoins, leading to even more stability, and so on. Or is Bitcoin too young for that?

<comment> w-ll The Internet Archive pays some of its employees in Bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's refreshing that now I can spend my bitcoin on things I want! They got it working much faster than expected. Does anybody have any idea how returns would work? Do they just send the original amount of bitcoin to the payer's wallet? Or are returns even possible at this point in time?

<comment><USER35> From their site:

"Returns and refunds on orders purchased with Bitcoins are eligible only for in-store credit, except in the case of cancelled or unfulfilled orders. Bitcoins can only be used for orders shipped to the United States."

<comment><USER34> Cool. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is pretty huge. I'd be interested to know what overstock's strategy is for converting bitcoins back to fiat. I also wonder if there will be any tax implications here for purchases made in countries such as Norway that don't consider bitcoin real currency.

<comment><USER37> Bitcoin is automatically exchanged to USD for them by coinbase at the time of the transaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Could be interesting that they can tie physical shipping addresses to specific wallets.

<comment><USER39> *addresses

which are free and disposable

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Wish people would stop using the term "bitcoins" as if they're singular metal entities, it seems to be where the perception that they are "too expensive" comes from.

Bitcoin. Divisible to 8 decimal places.

<comment><USER41> Isn't the same as accepting dollars? Or Euros? Or pesos? Plural seems right to me.

<comment><USER42> I think it's a pedantic point, as I believe that language is as language does.... however, there's no reason why it couldn't be like "gold", which is also highly divisible. You need the "s" plural for things that can't be divided (like dollar bills). Thus, we don't get paid in "golds".

That said, semantically, coins aren't usually thought of as divisible things in a modern context-- they are pluralized, so bitcoin will probably be pluralized in the same way.

<comment><USER40> That's my thinking. Bitcoin is an outlier because "coin" is usually indivisible, where as "bitcoin" certainly is. You're never likely to see a price of more than one anyway, making the plural almost completely redundant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Great for publicity value. Not that useful for their business in any other respect (at the moment). This is a great time for ecommerce sites to start accepting Bitcoin to leverage it for publicity.

</comment><comment><USER44> US only, ffs there are countries outside the US

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems like these companies are rushing into this without fully understanding how the technology works or where it's going.

<comment><USER46> And taking such risks impulsively yields big rewards, from time to time.

<comment><USER47> Overstock isn't taking a risk here: they are getting the same exact USD they got before.

<comment><USER48> They're probably getting more USD than they got before, because the merchant fees are lower.

<comment><USER47> Coinbase charges 1%. At overstock's volume they are probably getting a similar deal on CCs, although definitely not quite 1%.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>