Introducing Amazon Coins: A New Virtual Currency for Kindle Fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazonappstoredev.com/2013/02/introducing-amazon-coins.html <comment><USER2> A new form of "money" that you can only spend at, or via, Amazon. It's a great idea... for Amazon!

\--

PS. In response to comments below, this is not at all like gift cards (which Amazon has offered for many years), but truly a digital currency similar to those used in online multi-player games (e.g., Linden Dollars) -- the key difference being that Amazon Coins will be accepted by the world's largest online merchant from day one.

rm999: Gift cards are not fungible (each gift card has its own unique ID that can be used only once) and cannot be subdivided into smaller units (e.g., one can't split a gift card in two and send half of it to someone else), so they cannot be used as a medium of exchange.

<comment><USER3> Since it's a currency conversion instead of a purchase, does this then circumvent sales tax laws when exchanging them for goods? Today it's just apps, but it could feasibly be tangible goods in the future.

<comment><USER4> I think you got something mixed up. Buying coins can be looked at as a currency conversation, sure, but exchanging coins for goods most certainly is not, and will be taxed as per usual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So this is pretty interesting to me. When I left Sun in '95 to do a startup (GolfWeb) one of the things we were planning on doing was a custom currency so that you could "subscribe" to the online magazine, and we'd deduct currency out of your subscription for each article you read, and tag it so that you could go back an re-read it whenever you wanted. Then when you currency got low you could 're-subscribe'. We felt it would be cool because you could make it the Golf Magazine you wanted to read rather than what an Editor-in-Chief decided to put in the issue that month. And by looking what articles were driving traffic we could get a feel for our subscriber base.

I ran smack into a giant wall of patents from Digicash and others. I remember saying "Wow, 20 years from now this is going to be something cool."

And here we are. In 2011 a number of David Chaum's patents expired. Of course there are interesting new patents that Amazon just got like this one: [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=digicash&OS=digicash&RS=digicash)

But Amazon has been aggressive in their patent defense for years.

Creating their system to be one coin == one cent is also interesting as it effectively kills off the remainder grab [1]. Especially true since the balance apparently combines in your account. Basically you 'top up' with coins when ever you want. So really it has utility of shifting the payment processing charges around. It also touches a grey area of taxation, which is when you buy something for "points" how much tax to do you pay and to whom?

[1] Pre paid phone cards that can't be re-filled would not make a call if you had $1.00 or less on the card so they became worthless with up to a $1 of un- spent value on them. In the large, across all cards, this was hundreds of millions of dollars which accrued to the benefit of the card issuers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Putting an intermediary currency in between purchaser and product is always worse for the consumers.

1\. There is the leftover phenomenon where you have currency leftover and you can't spend it anywhere else

2\. Or everytime you need to make a purchase, you switch the exact amount out for your purchase which adds additional step of useless process

<comment><USER7> There's one added benefit, but its not clear who this accreted to: reduced credit card fees. Having one large charge is generally more efficient than many small charges, and if the savings are used to reduce fees or increase developer percentage then this is a good thing.

<comment><USER8> I would prefer the "wallet" method that steam uses. You require people put at least $5 in the wallet tied to their account. It's easy to remove the leftover balance because the first time you buy something over $5 it takes money from the wallet and charges you the rest leaving $0 in wallet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey "visualcsharp", for some reason your post is appearing dead. This is not a real virtual currency, and nothing like Bitcoin. Think of this as store credits, similar to Xbox credits or whatever they use. Its not really a layer of inefficiency because customers will always have a little more Amazon coin than they spend, so this makes Amazon a little more money in the short term and also conditions its customers to use the coins and thus use Amazons services more.

(What I mean about not spending all the coins: you buy $20 worth of coin, and something you buy is worth $18.75, that leftover $1.25 is useless until you top up more. And if your not allowed to combine Amazon coin and USD then it encourages you to purchase more coins)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not familiar with the Amazon Kindle ecosystem. Are credit card fees taken out of the 30% Amazon cut or out of the 70% that the developers receive?

<comment><USER10> credit card fees come out of Amazon's 30%.

<comment><USER11> Is it the same situation in the Apple App Store and Google Play?

Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see the advantage for the customer. Surely Amazon coins will be less useful than actual money, being less liquid and not acceptable anywhere else, and not even valid for all digital transactions made via Amazon (e.g. subscriptions.)

There may be some utility along the lines of a parent issuing a tablet- wielding offspring an "allowance" of Amazon coins, but not having any offspring this doesn't help me.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can they be changed back to real currency? If not, is Amazon interested in gambling?

</comment><comment><USER14> This really rewards Amazon more than anyone else in the ecosystem. Let's see:

1) You have to buy these "Virtual Currencies" and since they can only be used within the ecosystem and cannot be reversed, you will be psychologically attuned to, spend it or lose it all.

2) Amazon now doesn't have to hiccup 50c or so for every small credit card transaction.

3) Amazon could now theoretically avoid paying sales tax because the real currency was only used to buy something intangible which can be bartered for something else.

<comment><USER15> Point 3 is extremely interesting. There is a lot of controversy going on about their sales tax collection[0]. I say that it is interesting because it gives an incentive to the customer to use their virtual money instead of traditional payment methods. Other advantages I see (or that you saw) only benefit Amazon, which only gets mild sympathies from most users. I am not sure this will have such a great impact however, because unless they find a loophole to sell those coins, the first sale would still be subject to any applicable tax.

[0]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If history repeats itself, Amazon will offer virtual currency brokering as a service. A crapload of money to be made if it can pull that off.

</comment><comment><USER17> The MiKandi App Store has been doing this for years. It makes microtransactions a viable source of revenue for developers.

<comment><USER18> So is the point of the coins to reduce the cost of credit card fees per transaction? If I can buy $20 worth of coins with a $0.30 + 3% fee, I can then pay a merchant as much or as little as I want with no additional fee.

The core problem seems to be that credit card fees aren't structured in a way to support small payments (<$5).

<comment><USER17> Micro-transactions are one of the advantages. (Micro-transactions in adult were basically unfeasible before MiKandi, since no adult payment processor would allow a charge below a certain threshold (usually $5-10).)

But virtual currency has other advantages. For example: points can be acquired via offer walls (no credit card at all); it can be bought as prepaid bundles anonymously (via third party stations); they avoid charge back issues (refund points instead of dollars to the credit card); they can be given out easily (had a crap experience? have some extra points); and can be traded for other virtual currencies (just like real currencies and third party exchanges).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Next, AmazonVille! Play with your friends!

This is basically just another version of gift cards - a way to lock money into the system.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's obvious why these can't be used at Amazon's website from launch, but it'll be interesting to see whether they allow that if/when people are actually buying them. Could solve the issue of leftover credit.

</comment><comment><USER21> What?! Is Amazon giving away money to people to spend on apps, to encourage developers? or it is just to kick start people buying the coins for actual money? or I missed the point?

<comment><USER7> The second: promote the coins so that people will continue and pay to use them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope they don't do what facebook did with their free credits and actually pay developers instead of forcing them to accept promo credits free

</comment><comment><USER23> Reading the comments here, I think it's easy to spot the gamers from the non- gamers. Gamers know this type of economy well.

</comment><comment><USER24> In other news: Microsoft Points returns to the Xbox Marketplace!

</comment><comment><USER25> indirectly customer is not required to pay sales tax on purchases made</comment>


Execute millions of SQL statements in the browser, WebAssembly and WebWorkers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mikeptweet/execute-millions-of-sql-statements-in-milliseconds-in-the-browser-with-webassembly-and-web-workers-3e0b25c3f1a6#.rrbvffowf <comment><USER2> I fail to see how getting the date a million times or even inserting it a million times shows how the system of sql in the browser can really scale.

It'd be better to load up some sample data from day adventure works from Microsoft or something similar and run queries more akin to production code for this benchmark.

I guess this article shows the upper bound of sql in the browser so I guess that's helpful.</comment>


Google Wave - First Impressions - <AUTHOR> http://www.solidstategroup.com/page/2804/company/tech-blog/posts/google-wave-first-impressions

<comment><USER2> Having had a Wave account since the week of its demo at Google I/O, I am extremely impressed with its possibilities. I believe that if anything will replace email in the next 20 years, it will be this.

The question is do we really need to replace email? It has obviously served us well for so long. If you think about the "what would email have looked like if invented today?" question that Google was trying to answer, you start realizing that there are so many limitations in the current model.

How? I think Wave will be a win when everyone with a Gmail inbox has a Wave inbox automatically. Then, if you're communicating with other Wave users, you get _tons_ of added benefits (which slowly everyone else is going to want). Otherwise, they can simply interface it to send good old fashioned emails to "old" addresses.

<comment><USER3> Wave isn't email 2.0. That's just the marketing pitch to make it seem like it's not _that_ new, so it can't be that scary. But it is. (new, at least)

Wave is computing 2.0. And I don't say that lightly.

It aims to do no less than gut and replace the core folder, file _and_ application metaphors. It's a Newton-esque data object soup + internet, with the role of applications and workflow largely relegated to anthropomorphic services.

That's why the "wave = a + b + c" metaphors ring so hollow; it's a new conceptual model for computing that does not directly map to the old one.

And _that_ is what makes its future so murky.

I think the browser and intervening decades have changed habits and expectations enough to give Wave a better chance than those who've presented such things before. But I also think the single smartest move Google did, was enable the building of seamless bridges in-to and out-of the Wave model.

Being Google will let them get their foot in the door. But allowing people to make a wave from a simple word document and save a wave off to a PDF or simple email will give them time to make their case.

But it's still an uphill battle.

<comment><USER4> I think you've hit the nail on the head. All of the parts, while impressive, amount to only a part of the story. You've got a better approach to IM & email. You've got an API that provides real-time collaborative editing. You've got an API that leverages Google's front-end tools (Google Web Toolkit) and the scalability of Google's back-end tools (AppEngine). And you've got an API to integrate it all together. Each is nice and useful in its own right. But if they are combined together...

I'll be very interested to see if Google releases some facsimile of Google Docs that are Wave-enabled and allow for full real-time editing/collaboration. Combine that with the email & SMS killer, and I believe Google has a viable alternative to Office + Exchange + Windows. The unifying element of the Wave acts to capture a company's workflow. In the end, business will want to use this instead of the MS solution because it provides more business value that the sum of the parts (IM + email + office suite + workflow), and it does so in a way that MS cannot. Companies can extend the Wave to add further business value to the whole approach with the Wave API. Finally, with the whole thing being open-sourced, companies will be able to run their own servers (something I think is critical to mass acceptance of the technology within corporations).

It is an ambitious project. I hope Google succeeds. I am watching it closely, and look forward to my own invitation. I already can see a number of areas where I would like to build my robots & gadgets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking at the UI screenshots and hearing this person's experience, I imagine this will be used for awhile only by the elite digerati until they really streamline the interface and come up with a better metaphor of what this is. Also, until you can talk about solving someone's problems with it or why it's better than what they have now succinctly, it just seems like another cool toy cooked up "in the lab" and that's not necessarily a recipe for widespread adoption. Even now I've read a fair amount of the Google propaganda and other's posts about this and I'm not sure why I would suggest our team move away from the tools that replicate a lot of this functionality.

<comment><USER6> I have the feeling this will be decried as a failure three months after launch and taken for granted as a part of our lives ten years from now.

<comment><USER7> as google mail is. It sure killed all those nasty email apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've seen Google Wave in action at a BarCamp here in Sydney, and while it seems ripe with technical possibilities, I think the bigger challenges by far with its adoption will be social and cultural.

With email, there already existed norms which could be taken from real life and applied to the new electronic analogue. So the new technology dropped pretty neatly into an existing cultural structure - which then evolved.

But Google Wave knows no such existing cultural structure I can think of - perhaps there are certain etiquette rules that apply to multiple people talking in a group at a party while simultaneously writing on a single piece of paper. But if there are, I don't know them.

So adopters of Google Wave will face social challenges as well as technological ones, and I don't think Google has really thought this through as well as they've structured the protocols and technical infrastructure. Start to consider Google Wave being used in a corporate environment, and you've got legal and commercial challenges on top of that - I shudder to think how a contractual discussion could be conducted over Google Wave. You might answer that it won't be, we'll still rely on email, but if we do, then why add another communication channel?

We shall see - though it speaks of how deeply Wave challenges current paradigms of online communication that no-one - least of all me - is prepared to offer concrete predictions regarding how it will be used.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you that it's a problem -- as the name indicates, there's a strong offline metaphor for e-mail.

But I think the way Wave will get around this is by being used first primarily not as a communications tool, but as a _collaboration_ tool.

When you're a business or other team trying to get a project done, you use the tool that lets you work together most efficiently, and you don't care if it feels more like IM or email or a wiki (wikis, here's something with no offline equivalent and whose mainstream usage took off like a rocketship), and so that's how I think it will get traction.

From that point forward, as people use it as a collaboration tool, they'll seamlessly come to use it as a communication tool, and it might progressively replace email and IM (and social networking?), as I believe it can if it's indeed as good as it sounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Computer agents have been discussed a long time ago. It's a good someone's putting some time into making them a reality.

[http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism....](http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism.php)

 _"Licklider's messages and examples on the screen now involve fill-ins and subroutines and modeling. He shows how he can program his computer to make dinner arrangements when he goes to a certain city: if the first person invited can't have dinner, his computer scans the list of his other friends in the same city and issues dinner invitations to them . All this in a simple conditional language."_

but wait, there's more,

 _"Agents will handle "augmented telephone calls," stacking the calls and pushing them through automatically. Agents will pay your bill, checking them against the appropriate invoices in standard electronic forms. They will sniff out information a friend may have set out: his birthday, gift preferences and sizes, party invitations, information he would like from whoever knows it."_

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree with Dabeeeenster on this one, I just spent the last 20 mins playing with wave and although I had a big spurt of "Wow, this is really cool, real time comms", I was also faced with a usability question of "What is this" and more worryingly, "What can I do now".

It's not obvious what you can do with the system easily. I spent about 10 mins trying to tag up a google map whilst other people did the same, the result being a map dragging fight and trying to type in a description before someone deletes the pin.

In summary... er... It might be useful for small internal groups of people you know, but it's going to need some marketing and training.

<comment><USER12> I have never used it but from what I have read I wonder how much of it could replace Exchange and SharePoint within the corporate environment.

Could you see a company hosting it internally and manage permissions via Active Directory or LDAP groups to allow collaboration on documents or discussion groups?

Does it have potential to help the information overload that plagues corporate email (or maybe it will make it worse).

Calendaring? Does it even exist in the Wave universe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any advice on how to get a sandbox account or how long it takes? I submitted the form a couple of days after I/O saying I wanted to work on Ruby bindings, along with a nice haiku, but nothing yet. I am _dying_ to start hacking on it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think we have to remember that wave, the UI experience, is simply 1 application built using the new platform/protocol. To me it looks like, in large part, a proof of concept that gets the ball rolling for devs, more than a surefire new product for end users. The google wave UI will evolve, and in theory other devs will offer entirely new visions built on top of the platform in more and more exciting ways. Wave's success will be more based on the platform success imho, than whether this early UI is a game changer.

</comment><comment><USER15> The part about SMTP is true. It sucks terribly. I just wished we switched to some more connection-oriented protocol that would say things like message delivered or message not delivered because your professor's mail server is a jerk and thinks the mail is a spam because it is coming from gmail and jerkily decided to throw it away and not send a notice back.

</rant>

<comment><USER7> it's administrators' fault, not the protocols'

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The change the Wave brings the enabling pull push over http, currently pull works well but push (from the server to the client)is more complicated.

</comment><comment><USER17> It looks like a real time forum to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wave is going to change comms. I hope</comment>


Bus Lane Blocked, He Trained His Computer to Catch Scofflaws - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/nyregion/bike-lane-blocked-new-york.html <comment><USER2> Its a simple problem to solve. Buses equipped with traffic cameras and bus drivers that can issue fines

<comment><USER3> The last thing in the world we want is a bus driver getting out to argue with someone for 15 minutes about a fine

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16602151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16602151)</comment>


WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company - <AUTHOR> https://theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine <comment> gator-io Great analysis of study's flaws: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUD_wvkNhnk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUD_wvkNhnk)

If you dig into Surgisphere, you will see they have significant consulting engagements with Johnson and Johnson. Not saying that's necessarily bad, but so much bad science about Covid and HCQ seems geared towards promoting high- priced treatments like Remdesivir, and not low-cost preventative measures like making sure you're not D deficient. All these studies need to be evaluated based on who's funding them or the political agenda behind them.

HCQ seems like it's been targeted for destruction. Every study I've read on it shows you shouldn't use it in late stages of disease. Fair enough, but the theory of its effectiveness (as a Zinc ionophore) hasn't been studied properly, although there is a good amount of anecdotal evidence it works well if taken very early (with Zinc).

These garbage studies are dangerous and should be called out loudly.

</comment><comment><USER2> > The Guardian has since contacted five hospitals in Melbourne and two in > Sydney, whose cooperation would have been essential for the Australian > patient numbers in the database to be reached. All denied any role in such a > database, and said they had never heard of Surgisphere.

This is damming. Did they just make it up or simply extrapolate the results from a small dataset accross the world?

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, [https://www.medicineuncensored.com/a-study-out-of-thin- air](https://www.medicineuncensored.com/a-study-out-of-thin-air)

[https://www.isglobal.org/en/healthisglobal/-/custom-blog- por...](https://www.isglobal.org/en/healthisglobal/-/custom-blog- portlet/ivermectin-and-covid-19-how-a-flawed-database-shaped-the- covid-19-response-of-several-latin-american-countries/2877257/0) (I was going to submit this link some days ago, but I couldn't for some reason)

</comment><comment><USER4> Thankfully, some trial oversight committees had the sense to check if there was any evidence of harm in their primary data.

[https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/recruitment-to-the- recove...](https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/recruitment-to-the-recovery- trial-continues-as-planned)

> 'On Saturday 23 May, the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted an > urgent review of the data that we have collected so far on the effects of > hydroxychloroquine on mortality among patients admitted to hospital with > COVID-19. The Committee concluded that there is "no cogent reason to suspend > recruitment for safety reasons."

> 'The Committee found that the effects of hydroxychloroquine on mortality > reported in the analysis by Mehra were not consistent with those observed in > the RECOVERY Trial. The Committee therefore recommended that the trial > continue recruitment without interruption, a recommendation that was > endorsed on Sunday by the MHRA.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Build NLP+ai Chatbot with 30 Days from Scratch - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
How to build Chatbot in 30 days without using any api? <comment><USER2> Off the top of my head:

You'll need a way to talk to your bot. I think the Telegram bot API is the easiest to use and it has bot-drawn UI buttons to simplify drudgery. Look into a connector for your language of choice.

The bot will need to understand what the user is asking. You could create a few dozen labeled examples of message text and the users intent, such as ('drive time to NYC' -> 'duration', 'thai food in seattle' -> 'recommendation'). You can then train a text classification system to infer the intent of new messages that have some common text.

SpaCy is an excellent natural language processing toolkit that can be used for this, but there are maaany options. [1]

The bot will need to be able to recognize different parts of user text in cases like "address of Eiffel Tower". You could use SpaCy's named entity recognition -- which can be retrained to understand other things -- to get started. [2]

In my experience you'll need a complex system to understand the state of an individual conversation and operate as a "control loop", but that's all on you.

[1] [https://spacy.io/usage/training#textcat](https://spacy.io/usage/training#textcat) [2] [https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#named- entities](https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#named-entities)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why without any APIs?</comment>


Mercedes Is Owning This Formula 1 Season - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/04/mercedes-f1-turbo <comment><USER2> The cool part of this innovation is that it can directly benefit consumers.

Trick engineering in F1 usually just tricks the regulations or the kinds of physics that only apply to racing prototypes. An example of tricking the regulations would be the double-deck and blown diffusers that were just clever interpretations of the rulebook. Tricking physics is a bit more interesting, a good example would be McLaren's F-Duct which used fancy fluid dynamics to turn a driver's leg into an on/off switch for drag on the rear wing. They basically ran a duct from the front of the car all the way to the wing, with a hole cut into it by the driver's leg. Cover the hole and pressure sucked air through to the wing, smoothing it's profile and reducing drag. Very cool, except I don't know many family sedans that need over 1 ton of downforce at 150mph.

The timing of this innovation in turbocharging couldn't be better. Every manufacturer is trying to gain efficiency with small, turbocharged engines. Small displacement engines are efficient but consumers don't want to trade half their horsepower for 5-10mpg. So companies like Ford and VW are slapping turbos onto these engines and cranking boost levels through the roof. The Fiesta ST runs 21 lbs of boost off the showroom floor. That kind of boost means a lot of heat (the same issue Mercedes' F1 engineers were faced with) so engineers are using every trick in the book to keep temperatures in control (direct injection, temporary overboost, expensive aluminum intercoolers).

What Mercedes' has done isn't so much about the innovative layout, it's that they've made it work without turbo lag. Bring whatever technology they've developed to combat the weight of the turbine shaft to the road and you've made it possible to operate on lower octane fuel while making more power from even smaller displacements.

This is what I like to see from motorsport.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to know how they are running the shaft from the turbine to the compressor .. these things spin at something like 100,000RPM if I'm not mistaken. Normally this would be handled by a few bearings with direct oil intake at high pressure with the bearings being only a few centimeters apart if that .. but to span an entire engine is some special kind of precision engineering.

edit: special because any imbalance in the shaft would rip the bearings apart.

<comment><USER2> Some Garrett turbochargers can spin up to 280,000 rpm according to their site: [http://garrettbyhoneywell.com/turbo-fundamentals/how-a- turbo...](http://garrettbyhoneywell.com/turbo-fundamentals/how-a-turbo-works/)

The motor/generator sits in the middle of the two turbines so that can help keep shaft length down but gearing 280,000 rpm down to something that wouldn't blow up the motor creates a whole new world of complexity. All I know is that this is very impressive engineering and that there are tons of unique innovations needed to make it all work together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm loving the direction F1 is going. Sure, for the hardcore fans, the noise just isn't the same, and the cars aren't going as fast anymore, but I love that they are trying to force the manufacturers to improve their lower spec engines. Maybe the next rule change we'll have CVT as a requirement instead of a gear box.

<comment><USER5> As an F1 fan, it isn't the noise, and speed that are making this championship "boring". It's the fact that Mercedes is so superior that you really have to ignore them in order to enjoy the "real" racing / fights behind them. (It's true that the Hamilton-Rosberg fight in Bahrain was also fun to watch)

Mercedes' dominance is ridiculous - and I don't want to take engineering credits away, but there are no fights to watch at the top. Just take a look at the 22 second difference they managed to create in just 11 laps, the laps left after the safety car at Bahrain went in the pit lane. The fun was behind, Force India vs Red Bull vs Williams (vs Ferrari, sigh). Lets hope that other teams can catch up.

<comment><USER6> > there are no fights to watch at the top

Were we watching the same race? The last 11 laps were an epic battle between Rosberg and Hamilton, and the mob contending for points was no less thrilling. I thought it was a great race, at least at the end.

And have you already forgotten 2013? Red Bull won every single race in the second half of the season. Yeah, Mercedes is on top, for now, it's not like a constructor has never been dominant before.

<comment><USER5> Please read my entire comment:

> (It's true that the Hamilton-Rosberg fight in Bahrain was also fun to watch)

My point is: this year looks like the last years' championships with RBR... same dog, different collar.

<comment><USER7> Not exactly. Webber vs Vettel wasn't really close. Rosberg and Hamilton will be a lot closer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Mercedes F1 team appears to be one team that makes cars with engines that they also supply to other teams. However it is not quite like that. The engines part of the business has been going for a long time with McLaren since the mid 90's and before that they were 'Ilmor'.

Then, five years or so, Mercedes bought what was the Honda/Braun constructor team. Both the engine business and the car constructor part of the empire are in the UK albeit geographically separate.

It would be unsporting for Mercedes to supply their on-track rivals with lesser engines, particularly since they pay top money for them. So the official PR story for this is that the separate constructor part of the business came up with this innovation all on their own for packaging reasons, i.e. a more aerodynamic car.

<comment><USER9> They cannot within the rules of the sport supply power trains of different designs to the different teams — all Mercedes power trains are identical.

<comment><USER10> Indeed but McLaren and Williams manufacturer their own gearbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is already dated. Today's race was one of the most thrilling races of all time. "Hamilton defeats Rosberg after epic duel": [http://www.formula1.com/default.html](http://www.formula1.com/default.html)

F1 2014 is more exciting than season 2013 where Red Bull was superior (and '12 & '11) - that was boring.

<comment><USER12> Aw, a spoiler warning would have been appreciated there.

<comment><USER6> The article title might have given it away ...

<comment><USER12> Mercedes has been dominant the past two races as well so it's not necessarily a spoiler to say they have been owning the season. On the other hand today's race ended a few hours ago and I didn't expect to run into race results on HN of all places. Oh well.

<comment><USER13> To be fair to him, a thread all about which team is dominating F1 is the kind of place on HN that I _would_ expect to see races discussed. Not sure that shouldve taken you by surprise! Anyway, sounds like the race was good enough for you to enjoy anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is interesting is that Mercedes came up with the split turbocharger only in the first race - in preseason winter testing, they were running a more traditional turbo charger.

Now that we've seen the split turbocharger with the turbine at the back, the compressor at the front and the motor-generator unit in between on top of the engine block it seems all too obvious. But coming up with this is ingenious, and making it work on such short notice is quite a feat of engineering.

I can't wait to have this in my road car, 40% fuel saving with only a little drop in performance.

<comment><USER15> Didn't the article say they were working on this for 2 years?

<comment><USER14> Yes, the article did say that and I found it a bit odd. While they probably have been working on the power unit for two years, the split turbocharger was first seen at the first race.

Of course, my knowledge is based on media reports, it is possible that none of the media have seen it in Jerez and Bahrain tests but it was first reported by Craig Scarborough during the Australian GP weekend.

<comment><USER16> The split turbocharger was most likely identified by interested journalists at the first race. The power train was homologated for the season at the end of February, so the design was finalised prior to the third pre-season test. It's most likely that the turbo was in this form a while ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > But those teams–McLaren, Williams, and Force India–haven't been testing > these new V6s as long as the official factory team.

Finally Hamilton's choice to leave McLarren paid dues. I remember him saying last year that " _I have the change to run for a team that builds the car piece by piece, from the engine to the tiniest screw, the only other team that can do this is Ferrari_ ". But although the car was fast last year, it was not consistent, too many breaks. This year seems to be the good one.

Also I have to say that I admire Hamilton for not applying any first-second driver policy on Rosberg. After the all he is without doubt the star-driver for Mercedes. I wish him good luck, he deserves another championship, after all the fist one he got was kind of obscured by the McLaren scandal[1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Formula_One_espionage_cont...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Formula_One_espionage_controversy)

</comment><comment><USER18> I have been a fan of F1 since the days of Nigel Mansell and I have got to say I am no fan of the new direction of Formula 1 present day.

To me Formula 1 represents the pinnacle of engine/chassis engineering uninhibited by any green standard of the day. For once just let the creative minds of auto engineering have their day at the track and let the best team win.

There is nothing more sexy to a car guy than hearing a V10 scream down the straights at Fuji Speedway at 21k RPM and nothing more exciting than seeing a V10 engine detonate at 21k RPM. I certainly miss the days of Schumacher and Alonso battling in the final days of the V10 engine.

Mercedes may be currently winning it by the years of preplanning for this day, but the race is already over by using today's standard.

EDIT: In case you never heard a V10 engine [http://youtu.be/MGEqlNU30Tg](http://youtu.be/MGEqlNU30Tg)

</comment><comment><USER19> How much does anyone know about the details of this engine?

I'd like to think some of the immense amount of research and development that went into the Bishop Rotary Valve for Mercedes F1 has not gone to waste.

       http://home.people.net.au/~mrbdesign/PDF/AutoTechBRV.pdf

That innovation was killed by article 5.1.5 of FIA:

       "Only reciprocating poppet valves are permitted"

Seems a bit arbitrary. Though I have heard it the BRV was killed by the limit of certain metals seen as poisonous -- also dubious considering the danger is in the manufacture, not racing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why would it be bad to put hot air into the engine?

For blast furnaces you want to preheat the air going in so that it does not cool down the furnace. Is it just about cooling the engine down, or is it something else?

<comment><USER21> All three of the replies to your comment are true, but they don't cover everything.

Car engines are heat engines, they extract mechanical work from differences in temperature. Heat engine efficiency is n = 1 - sqrt(Tcold/Thot)

If Tcold, the cold end, isn't cold enough, then you lose efficiency, and thus horsepower. A badly overheating engine loses a lot of power. If you can cool the compressed air back down to ambient, then your engine produces more power.

<comment><USER22> This seems orthogonal to me. Tcold for the efficiency is the exhaust temp, not the intake.

For pure efficiency, it is actually beneficial to capture waste heat in the exhaust to heat the intake air. But it destroys your power density, for the reasons already mentioned (hot air has less mass at the same pressure). I believe some automotive engines actually do this under light load conditions, but you wouldn't see it in F1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For those interested - it's not just the engine; you'll find plenty of teams/drivers also struggling with the new brake-by-wire as outlined here: [http://www.racecar- engineering.com/articles/2014-f1-explaine...](http://www.racecar- engineering.com/articles/2014-f1-explained-what-is-brake-by-wire/)

It's among a myriad of new tech introduced this year, and Mercedes just happen to have the most complete package available.

</comment><comment><USER24> Today's race was the first time we got to see just how fast the Mercedes is on low fuel with new tires. This innovation is worth 2 seconds per lap, which is massive in this sport. The championship is theirs to lose this year. Teams don't make up such a time gap over a season, and Mercedes won't stop developing.

</comment><comment><USER25> And now Ecclestone is hinting at mid-season changes that FIA should pursue to _wink_ protect the other teams.

I say tough. They will catch up eventually. But there should be no drastic changes that hurt all the work Mercedes put in.

</comment><comment><USER26> Did anyone else cringe at the grammar of the title? It's the McDonaldsization ("I'm _x_ -ing _object_!") slash subcontinental present continuous affectation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting article. Depressing to see the word 'boffins' still in use.

<comment><USER28> I wasn't aware there was anything wrong with that word. Is it derogatory?

<comment><USER29> It's generally used by non-scientists to refer to scientists. People don't tend to use it to refer to themselves (though a few might, in a humorously self-deprecating fashion).

It might have a dismissive or mocking connotation, depending on the intention of the person using it. I guess in the worst case, its use could be described as 'othering'

[https://google.com/search?q=define%3A+othering](https://google.com/search?q=define%3A+othering)

<comment><USER17> English is not my mother tongue. When I reached the word _boffins_ I stopped and opened the OSX dictionary which gave the right perspective... Because I instantly related _boffins_ with _buffoons_ which has a totally different meaning and didn't make any sense to call F1 engineers buffoons ?! It's okay if it comes from Archimedes, Francis Bacon and another 10-15 fellas I guess because it's kind of _relative_... But if I were an F1 engineer, I would had a hard time accepting such a degradative term from anyone else!

ps. Funny how fast all these vivid thoughts crossed my mind in less the 2 seconds.

<comment><USER30> Hey, the same thing happens with native English speakers. I just heard a radio spot where someone was reprimanded for using the term "pussyfoot" at a meeting.

That's nothing, though, compared to this: [http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1999_02_02_newy...](http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1999_02_02_newyorktimes.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Writing Options Using Open Interest(in Python) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rbhatia46/Option-Writing-Calls-Using-Open-Interest <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer - This is purely for educational and research purposes, I am in no way responsible for any monetary loss/gain you make using this, I highly encourage you to view this as a learning resource and not as an investment/trading advice.</comment>


Sama Asks: Should a Tech Whiz Be in Charge (of the government)? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/us/california-today-sam-altman-y-combinator.html <comment><USER2> I think Sam has the right idea of getting more tech minded individuals in government. I also think getting more experts in various fields would be beneficial too. But given the current system, both societal and political, it seems that this is far away.

</comment><comment><USER3> _we're trying to build general artificial intelligence, a computer that is smarter than people in basically every way, and then make that available to everybody in the world._

And these people have a problem with gun ownership?

</comment><comment><USER3> TLDR;

Sam is 32. Sam is smart. Sam presided over the creation of $85 billion. He's thinking about fixing the world's problems. A columnist says Sam can be trusted. Sam might become a governor. No not really, but Sam is on the lookout for a good governor. Someone like Sam. Sams says that all repetitive human work that does not have an emotional component is going to be done by software. So Sam would like to present to the people of the world a new social contract to work in this new economy. Sam contemplates a generic artificial intelligence program that is a billion times smarter than himself given to every human being on earth. Sams says that this could be scary.</comment>


Ask HN: What's wrong with my launch page? - <AUTHOR>

I've had some success getting people to visit my launch page at http://wellzly.com but my conversion rate for getting them to submit an email address is too low. What needs to be improved? <comment><USER2> A few thoughts:

(1) You might want to stick to a more traditional landing page to help increase your conversion.

The way your page is designed right now doesn't scream out to me to sign up or anything.

There's a reason many landing pages look the same, and it's because they work, so people keep using the same conventions.

If you're trying to break conventions, then you need to have a very good reason why you're doing so and you probably should A/B test it.

(2) Add some social proof, like how many people signed up last week.

(3) What value are you trying to provide? It's not exactly clear. You're saying: "Healthcare needs a better way to find and recruit top talent..."

You're making me think too much.

Honestly, I didn't even bother to read the rest of that paragraph.

Get a nice, big h1 or h2 tag and put something like, "Get a job now in healthcare".

(4) I agree with Uptown in that you should get rid of the poll/question thing on the right hand side.

I know you're trying to make it interesting for the med student or whoever is coming to your site, but I'm not sure if it's serving any purpose.

Do people actually go to your FB page afterwards to discuss the medical case?

Is that questionnaire interfering with your sign up rate?

\--

Anyway, those are some quick thoughts when I landed on your page.

As a future tip, you may want to have added a different landing page to your site so that people from HN don't mess up your analytics. eg. [http://wellzly.com/hn](http://wellzly.com/hn)

Hope that helps

<comment><USER3> Do you suggest any good, succinct resources on best practices in landing page design?

<comment><USER4> Succinct? No. But check out Unbounce, Conversion XL and their collaboration, PageFights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The page layout is kind of all over the place. Simplify it.

1\. Put everything into on column.

2\. Get rid of the poll ... all it's going to do right now is distract from your primary objective of capturing email addresses.

3\. Make the text bigger.

4\. Make your company logo bigger with a stronger stroke weight on the company name.

5\. Make the social links smaller. They're fighting for attention with your site logo.

6\. Consider structuring your page as follows (top to bottom):

[Logo]

[Short text describing what you're going to do for your potential users]

[Input field for an email address and submit button]

[Social links for Facebook and Twitter]

I'd run an A/B test to see whether the Facebook/Twitter is a distraction and remove that if you find it takes away from your conversion rate.

You could also A/B test the text you include describing your service till it converts well.

<comment><USER6> I'll append this with a link to [https://www.hioscar.com/](https://www.hioscar.com/) as a great exaple of how simple it can be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _You_ have to convince _me_ to input my email on your site and there I was _skimming_ to that _short content_ trying to find about _what on earth this site is about_.

And to be honest... I don't get it. Ok the girl has hash and there's a poll on her condition.

Is this about medical training?

Or maybe it's some sort of _social_ health diagnostics? (which sounds like a terrible idea, a _how it works_ in this case would be invaluable to undo this first reaction)

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://i.imgur.com/SLLsFfV.png](http://i.imgur.com/SLLsFfV.png)

I think it should look something like this, it's a quick mock up, but I think it should be distraction free and with a clear path to the desired action.

Maybe a link to the multiple option test, but I think it's too distracting.

Please also note that I took the liberty to change some text, I don't particularly like how the first text reads, a little too long and complex, I'm a little too tired now but I could help you out.

</comment><comment><USER9> People want some social proof that your community is worth joining. In other words, people like to follow the herd. The fact that you haven't launched tells me there really isn't a substantial community yet. Focus on a private launch of your closest friends or people you know are passionate about your topic. Then, allow those members to invite the next group through an invite system before opening it up to the public. This is how I built fotoblur.com to 60K members.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would have no idea what to expect from the site once it launches. What's a "community of health care investigators" in this context?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point, it is really vague. How explicit is too explicit though? Other launch pages seem to keep things mysterious.

<comment><USER11> Your product seems to not be a general fun/social "thing" (which is mostly where you find these mysterious splash pages), but a community aimed towards a very specific demographic. In other words, _most_ people won't be interested in trying your product. For this reason, it's a good idea to be much more explicit about what you're offering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't tell there's even an email field, that could be one thing. It's really hard to see.

However, you may just be seeing the natural result of very, VERY few people having the ability to relate to what you're doing. That's not bad - it's niche but a big important niche - but you can't expect to convert at high numbers from the general population for such a niche. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER13> I literally don't know what you're doing or why I should care.

Otherwise I enjoyed the design and look of the site. The logo was well done.

I really enjoyed the little animation on the radio buttons. So much so that I made heat rash have the most votes (Don't allow me to manipulate your poll so easily!!)

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe people aren't signing up because theres nothing to signup for ?. The only reason I (sort of) understand the product is because I'm familiar with a similar site [0]. There isn't much information on what you do, how you do it and who it would help.

Have a look at the reference for some inspiration.

[0] [https://www.crowdmed.com/how-it- works?category=patient](https://www.crowdmed.com/how-it- works?category=patient)

</comment><comment><USER15> State clearly what you're doing and why this will blow me away.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Wellzly is a community where medical students and professionals can get > updated on the latest medical news, curiosities, developments and > discussions.

> Are you a medical student or professional that can't get enough of all > things health care, medical science, digital health and related? Neither can > we! Come geek out with us and join our community of passionate and > enthusiastic health care investigators. The plan is to be up and running Q4 > of 2015, and you can enter your email below to get alerted when we finally > launch. We promise we won't use your email for anything else!

Just assuming what is happening based on your website, and assuming you will not be farming their emails for targeted spam.

There are a few things that I didn't like with the intro that I attempted to address:

1\. No real introduction to what your website actually is.

2\. Obscure dates ("Fall").

3\. No real assurance that it's not a scam.

</comment><comment><USER17> Explain who you are, and why people should enter their email address – what will you tell them now, and what will you tell them later? How will you use their email address to benefit them?

It's unclear whether this is for recruiters or for talent in the field, or both.

If it's for any of those, explain how your company will help them in terms that are meaningful to them.

Also, since I work for an analytics company, I would ask – why don't you have any analytics code loaded on your site? Even GA could provide some insights, maybe the people visiting aren't even your target audience. If you add analytics, you may also find some other insights about who your visitors are, and why they are bouncing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like a scam website to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> I assume you are trying to convince people to use what you built?

tl;dr _The easiest way to do that is by explaining what's in it for your user, up front, and in the clearest terms possible._

For years I used to make the mistake of thinking that I should describe the features of my projects and let the the user decide if it solved their problem.

Let me show you an example. A friend of mine runs gitwatcher.com

Three major areas of prime real estate used to describe features, a little similar to your landing page.

The reason that features don't make for good geek marketing is 2-fold:

1) People are lazy. Especially geeks. Almost nobody reads anything but the headers from your website.

2) If someone needs to decide whether or not they are interested in a feature, they need to think about all problems they are facing right now and see if the feature would apply to any one of them (e.g. do I really need to categorize by tagging and watch and compare right now?).

It's a mental for-each loop. O(N). Most people are lazy. So they won't.

Instead, talk about the problems that your side projects solve. Make it exceedingly easy for people to know what's in it for them.

For example, if you look at shareasimage.com you will see their headline isn't utilitarian like "we create images with text in them for you."

It's a solution-oriented pitch about the direct value you get for using your their product: "The fastest way to double your social engagement."

Notice also the clear call-to-action. There is only ONE place that it is clear you should click.

To use the gitwatcher.com example, instead of selling features like "Categorizing by tagging," you might try more solution-oriented sentences like:

"The easiest way to keep up with the coolest new open-source projects?"

"Want to get a free weekly email digest with the GitHub projects you should be keeping an eye on?"

Skip the for-each loops and let your readers do a O(1) mental operation. If you tell them the problems you solve, they can instantly know YES or NO. No mental processing necessary

</comment><comment><USER20> 1\. Your sentences are too vague. From what I'm reading, could be anything from a Forum to a Job site.

2\. No HTTPS.

3\. The email field does not look like one.

4\. Instead of creating buzz with things like "coming soon", "almost here", "change is coming", you mention that you would launch in Fall 2015. Nobody wants to sign up for service 3-4 months in advance, especially when it's hard to tell what it is.

5\. Description paragraph is way too long.

I'd also advice you to spend 10 extra minutes and put mixpanel on your page. You would know exactly what's turning people off.

</comment><comment> brown-dragon I would remove the 'etc' and expand the copy. Maybe add some bullet points and images. As it stands, it looks a bit unprofessional, so I would be wary of providing my email. HTH.

</comment><comment><USER21> What's the benefit?

The headline, "Discover Healthcare. Boost Your Career." is way too vague to persuade.

This is off the cuff, but even something like "Find a Better Job in Healthcare" is a clearer benefit that's likelier to convert.

When it comes to your text, as others have mentioned, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Steal from successful landing pages. Use Cialdini's principles, especially social proof.

Last, avoid saying wishy-washy things like "The plan is to be up and running Fall of 2015."

</comment><comment><USER22> 1)Consider another font

2)It's too dense on information: separate it

3)Your modal is terrible(had no content and titled 'Imaged Viewer')

I'd consider taking a Bootstrap template and work on top of it

[https://www.freshdesignweb.com/free-bootstrap- templates.html](https://www.freshdesignweb.com/free-bootstrap-templates.html)

[http://startbootstrap.com/](http://startbootstrap.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I.. don't know what you're doing. That's cool, the girl has a rash. Sure, I love [generic google search terms]! Sign up? Sign up for what?

</comment><comment><USER24> I would add the Get invite textfield on the middle of the botton part, and use the upper part to show a bit of a more graphic explanation of your page purpose. The font is a bit too small IMO, it makes me not want to read anything. It looks great on mobile, desktop needs some tweaks and you are done. Seems like a great idea though :)

</comment><comment><USER25> The page is HTTP. I try to avoid submitting any personally identifying information over the Internet in plaintext.

(Maybe the form submit is HTTPS, but I'm not typically going to bother to check a thing like that. Sites that I want to visit respect my privacy by defaulting to HTTPS.)

<comment><USER26> I doubt that's really something most people are going to consider

<comment><USER25> I didn't say that other people do, just that I do :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There are two actions that a visitor could take upon visiting that page and entering their e-mail is not even the most compelling one.

Like other said, you need to state very clearly what you're promoting and give no other option than signing up without distractions.

</comment><comment><USER28> Your logo is just a reversed codeigniter logo... hope you are aware...

</comment><comment><USER11> What is your product? What will I get from putting in my e-mail?

What's the purpose of the survey? How does it relate to your product?

Unfortunately, it looks a little like a spammy SEO/survey page.

</comment><comment><USER29> You're missing images.

You don't explain why I should want to sign up (actually: no newsletters is a turn-off for me).

Your textbox doesn't look like a textbox.

</comment><comment><USER30> One problem I have with the page is the contrast of the lettering. I think you the light grey characters could be a little bit darker.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why would I input my email? What am I getting? This is incredibly unclear.

health care! medical science! digital health! etc!

Sign me up!

Sorry for being a hater, but this is nooooot good.

<comment><AUTHOR> lol you created a new account for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What is this website? It wants my email address and asks me to have opinions on an 18-year-old girl's rash?

</comment><comment><USER26> Might want a more professional name? These kinds of cutesy names might make people not take it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER33> Some pictures and more color would help

</comment><comment><USER34> Drop the ! in professionals!, and maybe change 'our community' to 'a community'.

</comment><comment><USER35> Where's your traffic coming from? Are you sure it's the right target audience?

</comment><comment><USER36> Difficult to read. Must scroll horizontal from iphone 5. Ios 8 latest

</comment><comment><USER37> Put some photography. That's a quick win.

</comment><comment><USER38> making a bunch of people on hacker news go just lowered your conversion rate by 20% ;)

</comment><comment><USER39> It looks like the tinder app.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wellesley College might complain about the name.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wellzly? Isn't that a woman's college?</comment>


Interview with Docker CEO Scott Johnston: How Docker is getting back to basics - <AUTHOR> https://www.protocol.com/docker-containers-cloud-developers-enterprise <comment><AUTHOR> 'Last November, Docker hit the reset button. It sold its enterprise business to Mirantis for an undisclosed amount, and named Johnston, who held several key product and operational roles over the years, as its fourth CEO in less than three years.

'Now Docker is trying to reinvent itself by once again focusing on helping developers use containers in their applications. At a revamped virtual developer event Thursday, it is announcing a new partnership that allows Microsoft customers to access Azure resources from within Docker Desktop, its flagship user-friendly application for creating containers, and tightens the links between Microsoft's popular Visual Studio Code developer tool and Docker.

'Ahead of Wednesday's event, I chatted with Johnston about the pandemic, Docker's missteps and what comes next.'

Original title lacked context. It was:

How Docker is getting back to basics</comment>


Math and aesthetics: why to love the pretty proof - <AUTHOR> http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/mathex6.html

<comment><USER2> Very nifty.

Proof II does gloss over a few details though; it should note that that prime factorization is unique for each integer.

Another clever proof is the geometric proof of the AM-GM inequality:

Draw a semicircle, and choose an arbitrary point on the diameter. Draw the inscribed right triangle with the diameter as the hypotenuse. Now draw the altitude perpendicular to the hypotenuse, bisecting the hypotenuse into to segments, A and B. Note that the radius is the arithmetic mean of A and B, and the altitude is the gemometric mean of A and B.

Clearly, radius >= altitude.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a nice trick...</comment>


_why's print spool client (OCaml) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iandennismiller/cwales.github.com/blob/master/just_let_this_sit.ml

<comment><AUTHOR> So _why described a nearly-working OCaml program in the file he entitled SPOOL/HOMEWORK. The fact that it was handwritten turned out to be a surprising challenge, proving to be a real barrier to my own experimentation with the code.

I took the time to type it out, and it works. However, I'm actually still not certain I got it right. I would appreciate a second set of eyes.</comment>


A site for nerds who love numbers and watching ads - <AUTHOR> http://truereach.org/

<comment><USER2> And you thought just checking the YouTube counter gave you a comprehensive total of all the views a video had, guess again! It's never that easy!

</comment><comment><USER3> I love having one place to watch all my favorite ads! And see how popular they really are holistically.

</comment><comment><USER4> Finally, tracking video views beyond what agencies and clients pay for

</comment><comment><USER5> youtube view counts don't tell the whole story. this is exactly what we need!

</comment><comment><USER6> another reason why youtube viewcounts aren't everything.

</comment><comment><USER7> a way more holistic view of campaign reach, I like it!

</comment><comment><USER8> data is awesome! keep scraping those view counters!</comment>


Weeblies and Xobni featured in Collegian Article - <AUTHOR> http://www.psucollegian.com/archive/2007/12/11/penn_state_grads_launch_lucrat.aspx Their story has quickly become Penn State lore of the new millennium: An idea that started out as one student's response to a class project has now developed into a potentially multimillion-dollar company. <comment><USER2> Oooooh Oooooh Oooooh Let's Go State!

I'm a current Penn State student and you guys at Xobni and Weebly really are a great inspiration for all of us in Happy Valley. Thanks for blazing the trail for the rest of us. It was great to hear you speak at the I2V conference a few weeks back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Penn State sucks.

(The Pitt fight song was recently rewritten to take out a pause during which "Penn State sucks!" was screamed. It's a one-sided rivalry, because the teams haven't played in a long time. Pitt would be happy to play Penn State again in football, but PSU demands two home games for every one played at Pitt.)

I don't actually hate Penn State, I just think the pseudo-rivalry is hilarious. The best part of football games is when a chant of "Penn State Sucks!" starts for absolutely no reason.

<comment><USER4> the best part about the pitt-pennstate rivalry is that pennstate doesn't really care much about pitt, we care about ohio state, who incidentally also cares mostly about michigan (although OSU probably cares more about us now with our recent history). on the other hand, pitt fans seem to passionately hate pennstate.

we hate pitt about as much as we hate northwestern, which is to say, not very much.

<comment><USER5> Good summary. Pitt has largely been irrelevant since their glory days of the early 80s, and even with a marginally decent record under Walt Harris all you need to say is "Big East" to that. What do they have, Notre Dame and WVU?

<comment><USER3> There's always basketball...

<comment><USER5> Oh, well I thought in your post where you talked about only Pitt/PSU football that's what we were discussing.

I have no comment about our atrocious basketball team...

<comment><USER4> women's basketball!! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Their promo reminded me of a clip from family guy that showed the rap video from M.C. Escher...

"I'm going up the stairs, I'm going up the stairs.."

</comment><comment><USER7> and Xobni WE ARE - PENN STATE</comment>


Record Plunge: Only 12.9% of US population now buys daily newspaper - <AUTHOR> http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/10/record-plunge-newspaper-circ-at-pre_26.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder how many of these are purchased by hotels, restaurants and other commercial outlets that shouldn't even count directly

</comment><comment><USER3> This was covered already: [http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_majority_of_news...](http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_majority_of_newspapers_now)</comment>


Ask HN: Who can host a jboss portlet written from eclipse? - <AUTHOR>

If I make a jboss portlet in my eclipse and it is published to localhost, how can I get it hosted on the web ("the cloud", etc.). What cheap hosting service can I use to zip up my .war file and so forth and send it to them to host on the web? Just any old web hosting company? Or does it have to be specific? Thinking of playing around with portlets as an excercise and wondered whom I could get to host. <comment><USER2> If you haven't already done so, check out Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS. It is free to use, supports JBoss and Java EE apps on AWS. A couple of clicks and your app will be in the cloud with auto-scaling, perf monitoring, log management and versioning built it. Check it out at: <http://openshift.redhat.com/app/flex>

Jimmy G

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thanks. I'll check it out. Does this support building a demo app, i.e., can it have a public url to the jboss app I would deploy so I can send that public url to others to view?

<comment><USER2> Absolutely. OpenShift rides on top of AWS, so the URL is accessible publicly. Check out some of the videos at: <https://www.redhat.com/openshift/videos> to get a feeel for how it all works.

\-- Jimmy</comment></comment></comment>


USA v Lavabit LLC Email Account of Joey006 - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/2013/08/joey006/usa-v-joey006.htm <comment><USER2> posting at the top level for visibility.

this appears to be an earlier, known case where lavabit complied. it does not seem to be the case that caused the shutdown.

see for example [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/lavabit- snowden/](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/lavabit-snowden/) :

 _Court records show that, in June, Lavabit complied with a routine search warrant targeting a child pornography suspect in a federal case in Maryland. That suggests that Levison isn't a privacy absolutist. Whatever compelled him to shut down now must have been exceptional._

<comment><USER3> The timeline doesn't fit, anyway:

 _As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://ia600900.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.246...](http://ia600900.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.246283/gov.uscourts.mdd.246283.3.0.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Thanks! As someone who has a PACER account and uses RECAP to upload case files to the Internet Archive, I'm always appreciative when someone is out there using the IA stored copies.

<comment><USER5> Docket @ the IA: [http://ia800908.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.2362...](http://ia800908.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.236204/gov.uscourts.mdd.236204.docket.html) (has SHA hashes, as well as IA links to the docs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is the significance of this post? It has no context or explanation and I'm at a loss as to what this is about, or why it is significant. It's akin to a magic number in a script; without at least a brief comment it's all but meaningless!

<comment><USER7> "Lavabit abruptly shuts down" [0]

The original poster believes that this case is apparently the reason for Lavabit shutting down. The issue as hand is that a proper search warrant has been issued for the email address in the title. Lavabit appears to have chosen to shut down rather than respond to the search warrant (or has responded to the search warrant, but chosen to shut down rather than have it happen again)

[0] - [http://lavabit.com/](http://lavabit.com/)

<comment><USER8> The warrant shown on Cryptome is from an earlier case in which Lavabit complied. Lavabit has received something much different in this current case, which is what led to the shut down.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. I missed the section where it showed that the warrant was executed, and "One Memorex DVD" was retrieved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone curious why it is entered as "filed 4/11/13" but executed on "3/28/13" (weeks before the filing), it appears as though it was served on 3/28/13 and the clerk filed & entered it to the system on 4/11/13.

Even though this may be clear to some, it sounds a bit misleading to me and at first I thought they were just doing a poor job of backdating stuff they hadn't done properly.

</comment><comment><USER10> Question: If Lavabit was operating in the way they say they did (i.e. zero- knowledge encryption), how could this warrant be complied with? Dump their encrypted maildir to a disc?

<comment><USER3> All the report says they handed over is an unmarked DVD. Maybe all it contains is encrypted data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is the defendant an email account and not a person or party of some kind?

<comment><USER7> "The form of the styling of this case — the defendant being an object, rather than a legal person — is because this is a jurisdiction in rem (power over objects) case, rather than the more familiar in personam (over persons) case. In current US legal practice, in rem is most widely used in the area of asset forfeiture, frequently in relation to controlled substances offenses. In rem forfeiture cases allow property (in this case, $124,700 in cash) to be directly sued by and forfeited to the government, without either just compensation or the possessor (and presumptive owner) being convicted of a crime."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U.S._Currency)

<comment><USER12> A famous one in first-amendment law (and in literature) is _United States v. One Book Called Ulysses_ (1933). Gives it a rather evocative feel, setting up an image of the U.S. government and the book itself battling it out.

There are also some unkind jokes about the state of Kansas derived from the title _Quantity of Books v. Kansas_ (1964).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amidst all the recent fervor surrounding law enforcement and privacy, I think the documents at the linked site are a good reminder that there are people in law enforcement working to protect the innocent.</comment>


How I built a poker-bot - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-poker-bot <comment><USER2> His rules engine doesn't appear to trend other players at all. There are good tools out there that gather data on players and with enough data, you can pinpoint a player fairly well. It also shows his bot playing no-limit tables which seems like a horrible idea for a bot. There is a lot more to take into consideration in no-limit poker and I'm not sure a bot that only takes 3 or 4 things into consideration for every move could ever win at worthwhile stakes.

If your bot can play 14 limit tables at a time with even the slightest % edge, you're going to make money. However, if you added more advanced player profiling algorithms into your bot, you're edge would likely increase and allow you to set it up at higher stakes.

<comment><USER3> I don't think I agree with you on no-limit vs. limit. There's a pretty simple strategy you can use to be a marginal winner at low stakes no-limit (or especially no-limit sit and goes). It' called short stacking, and essentially involves buying in for the minimum and playing mainly all-in or fold (with some preflop calling).

You have to leave the table as soon as you get past 1.5x the minimum buy-in though. It was mainly done on Party Poker, which was the only site dumb enough to let you cash out and then return to the table for the min again. Any other site either made you bring back what you left with or wait an hour.

On a site with enough tables in action, though, even that would not be a limitation. A bot could do fairly well at it.

Also I can tell you from first hand experience that breaking even at low stakes NL sit and goes can be done with an AI consisting of nothing but if/then statments. I did this with WinHoldem back in the days before it was banned from everywhere. I wasn't able to replicate that success with limit. The main problem with WinHoldem was that it didn't join or leave tables on its own (also, it would often bug out when the tournament got heads up), which meant that the time spent managing it made it less profitable than just playing myself.

That's why we tried to build a bot ourselves. Maybe I'll blog about that some time.

<comment><USER4> The reason limit is easier is just that there is less variables to account for much like it's easier to write a bot to play poker with fewer cards.

While I will agree sit and gos are all strategy that strategy is dependent on putting your opponent on reasonable ranges which a bot like this won't do.

Bots and winning bots are possible(stick most casual people up against the UofA bots for example), but I find it hard to believe this one is one of them.

<comment><USER3> That's wrong too. If you think there are fewer variables in limit hold'em to figure when making your decision, you don't understand the game.

If you went to a no-limit tournament and just pushed all of your chips into the middle at every single opportunity, it's been shown that you're only a slight loser. At the WSOP main event, you'd be a better player than at least 1/3 of the field.

This is not true if you were to play in a limit tournament and raise every time. You'd probably be the worst player in the field.

The fact that it's less complicated is why no-limit is the tournament game of choice, but high stakes live poker is generally limit.

<comment><USER4> There are fewer variables when factoring in your opponent modeling. I'm sure being who you are you are very familiar with the UofA research and I'm pretty sure it backs up this statement.

Pushing every hand isn't right, it's pushing every hand with certain cards that Sklansky taught which admittedly is only a slight loser but a loser none the less.

I'm not saying limit holdem isn't a complex deep game, all I'm saying is that when it comes to bots no-limit bots are a lot harder to get right(in opponent modelling primarily which is a big part of bots these days).

I think no-limit is the tournament game of choice because it's seen by the general public as being the more exciting of the two(not that I agree but thats another discussion).

<comment><USER3> I still disagree and think that limit is, in general, a much more complex game. But even if it's not, I think you're thinking of building a bot that's a world class player. That may be harder at no-limit, I'm not really sure.

But if you're building from the standpoint of breaking even at low stakes, it's far easier to do for no-limit, especially sit and goes. It's literally a couple hundred lines of if/then statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting, but to be honest, if you're smart enough to make a successful poker bot, you're probably smart enough to write a program to trade stocks or other liquid instruments like government bonds or commodity futures. The potential winnings are much higher, it's perfectly legal, and due to the depth of the markets such programs are capable of making much more money than poker bots. It's also doable, as funds like Renaissance Technologies (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies>) and D. E. Shaw have demonstrated.

<comment><USER6> _if you're smart enough to make a successful poker bot, you're probably smart enough to write a program to trade stocks or other liquid instruments like government bonds or commodity futures_

I'm not so sure about that. I think the main reason is: there's a lot more "stupid money" at the poker table than there is in the market.

The bot as mentioned doesn't seem to do anything particularly fancy -- it just looks at the cards on the table and figures out your odds of winning based on that. This is information which is easily extracted mathematically, but which most players don't have direct access to. Good players will have a pretty good idea of these probabilities, whereas lousy players won't. If you can find yourself on a table full of lousy players, you're at a huge advantage.

In the market, on the other hand, there's only one poker table, and all the best players in the world are already sitting at it. Any time statistical arbitrage opportunities arise in prices, you can bet that D.E. Shaw and Rennaisance Technologies have already noticed it and moved a few billion dollars that way. If you want to win, you don't just have to be smarter than six guys in their basements doing calculations in their heads, you have to be smarter than thousands of overpaid quants with supercomputers.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. You're probably right. I don't play online poker (and am a poor casual player) so I don't know what the level of skill is on those websites. I was just making an assumption based on how difficult I imagined it would be for a computer to play very good poker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few years ago, I wrote a program that would screen-scrape to read all cards showing and then do a Monte Carlo simulation to randomly complete the hand and compute what % of times my cards would win (along with pot odds). It took a second or so to do the simulation, so I could use it to make decisions in real time. It was a fun project, but I soon stopped using it. Your odds against random cards are not at all your actual odds, because most players fold weaker cards. What matters most is who you're playing against.

Anyway, the article, although it describes well the techniques for programmatically interacting with a poker client, is majorly misleading because _this is not the hard part_ of making a bot. The hard part is figuring out whether, and how much, to bet. He alludes to this as "the million dollar question", but then omits to even mention it under "What skills will I need to write a bot?" Perhaps he'll address this in later articles?

If you look at the last screen shot, it's clear that he built a UI for an end- user to specify the actual logic for poker play. ("Call if it has not been raised, I'm later than 7th", etc.) His "bot" doesn't actually make decisions. It collects rules from an end-user, calls those to decide what to do, and passes the result on to the poker client. In other words, the hard part of the job - writing a program to play poker - has been passed to somebody else. Maybe that somebody else is the author, creating the algorithm through his UI... but then why not just code it?

There are serious researchers who have made credible bots (he links to them), bots which would (and, for all we know, do) make money on poker sites. But when I looked at it, the literature was not nearly detailed enough to code up their algorithms. (Also, they were working with simplified versions of poker, since full no-limit holdem is a hard nut to crack). What they _didn 't_ use were the "extensible rules-based systems" which this author claims "are a lot more powerful than you think". Count me skeptical. Good players eat such systems for snacks. Maybe they make money in low-stakes games against bad players, but I'd like to see evidence.

In short: never mind the dll injection, show us your bankroll over 100,000 hands!

<comment><USER3> "Count me skeptical. Good players eat such systems for snacks."

You're thinking about it wrong. As he mentions, your bot doesn't play against good players. It plays .5/1 or 1/2 nl and makes a shit ton of money if it just breaks even. There aren't good players at those levels, because anyone who was good would win and quickly move up. You only need all of your if/then statements to add up to being better than the worst 5% of poker players, and that's not that hard to do. I know only because I've done it.

Thats why extensible rules based systems are better than you think. They can get you to that with a good amount of work. Especially in short stack nl games. They're clearly not going to win at a $5/$10 nl table or a $215 SNG. But they don't need to to rake in millions per year.

<comment><USER3> Also I should mention, that with the exception of heads up, good players (at least by my definition of the word good) eat even the UofA's AI for snacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was involved in a fairly elaborate pokerbot effort. Believe me, the mechanics of playing the game are the easy part. The hard part is writing the poker logic. Check this out if you want an intro to the "basic" concepts:

Lokibot: <http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/Grad/papp/thesis.html>

The bot described in that paper lost about 8c a hand at the $1 tables. After extensive modifications, we got it to the point where it was losing about 2c a hand. This when Bush made poker illegal in the US, and we killed the project.

</comment><comment><USER9> > none of the online poker sites have really stepped up to the plate and > either a) made bots legal (similar to the way that they're legal on Internet > Chess Club) or b) put effective prevention measures in place.

That's a tough choice for a casino. Allow automation and you create a ghetto which discourages casual users. Disallow automation and you encourage an escalating "arms race".

Regardless, the techniques discussed could be detected using anti-virus techniques. I'm surprised that native clients don't perform integrity checks or is this the state of play in the "arms race"?

It would be fairly simple to disable integrity checks using methods to circumvent software DRM. Then it would be a matter of implementing distributed state to determine and ignore circumvented clients.

<comment><USER10> Interestingly, the casino's financial interest, since it makes its money only on the rake, is to have as many players or bots as possible. In fact, from their perspective, an infinity of bots battling each other should be just fine --bots scale better than humans. From Ultimate bet's perspective, bots are great:

It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until _UltimateBet is rich_.

<comment><USER9> I considered this possibility but a casino which is too open to bots could become marginalised. Real players would be scalped too easily and bot writers would be playing a zero-sum game. Both factors would reduce casino turnover and profit.

So, it is in a casino's interest to leave the whole issue unresolved and with a level of tolerance which is in-step with competitors.

<comment><USER10> I agree to an extent, however, I would be most happy owning a bot battleground, personally. It would dispense with all that time wasted on "thinking" and reduce the speed to a processor/internet lag dependent game. Bots are no more zero sum than people, they are just _faster_. I love the idea of a money making machine that scales with processor cores/mhz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can't wait to read the rest of the series. Promises to have a bit of everything: OCR, screen-scraping, rules engine, WinAPI hooks, DLL injection, and that's just part one!

</comment><comment><USER12> Really Awesome, now I will apply to WoW.

<comment><USER13> Convincing others that your goldfarming bot is actually human seems like a highly challenging variant of the Turing test.

<comment><USER14> Not sure it's so hard, first you introduce some randomness and inefficiencies in the gathering process so that it's more credible that it's a fallible human that's doing it.

And as a second crucial step, you hook groups of bots into a "monitoring computer", at which an actual human sits and responds "No, I'm not a bot lol." when the supposedly fatal question arrives from an admin. You can even outsource this to the third world.

<comment><USER13> You've never played WoW, have you? "Randomness" is a dead giveaway of a bot. Other players will grief you, report you, and you will be banned quickly.

Just the computer vision aspect of it alone would be amazingly hard.

Efficient goldfarming (e.g., with a frost mage that can take on 15-30 monsters at once) involves carefully coordinating a complicated series of actions where timing is critical and reacting quickly and intelligently when things go wrong is the difference between living and dying. It involves making complicated judgments about relative positioning, reasoning about surroundings, cause and effect, and other things that require human-level intelligence.

If you can make a bot that can seek out and kill monsters in a non-trivial manner without dying all the time there's no reason you couldn't program a robot to replace a wide variety of menial real-world jobs. The consequences would be tremendous and using it to make $20/day off the Internet would be retarded because you could license the technology for billions.

<comment><USER15> Bots don't require computer vision or any kind of sensory input; they can extract the native data they need straight out of the application's memory space. Effectively gaming bots have "perfect information". So the bots actually have more timely and accurate information than humans do, they can react quicker than humans do, and they can react as intelligently as your programming skill allows.

Check out <http://www.easyuo.com>. That application allows you to easily automate Ultima Online. Whilst deciphering WoW's application memory would probably be harder, an equivalent program is certainly possible (it probably already partially exists in various forms), and intelligent bots are a simple step after that.

Unfortunately, once the memory accessing has been abstracted away, programming a competent WoW bot is not a difficult task. The WoW bot doesn't have to be as awesome as the best human players, nor need it be ultra-efficient. What it lacks in ability it makes up in working without fatigue indefinitely.

<comment><USER16> _Bots don't require computer vision or any kind of sensory input; they can extract the native data they need straight out of the application's memory space._

I'm pretty sure WoW keeps track of all applications running on your computer. I think the way people do it is by using a hub and packet sniffers on a separate computer, although I imagine WoW traffic could easily be encrypted... so _shrug_.

<comment><USER17> All this hypothetical talk is very nice, but there actually _is_ a wowbot that Blizzard has been unable to effectively use countermeasures against, called MMOGlider. They've decided to simply sue after repeated failure to solve it technically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> awesome article.

I wonder mattmaroon's thoughts on this.</comment>