Ask HN: Where to find socially conscious Startups? - <AUTHOR>

My company helps tech startups reach the prototype phase so they can validate their market and begin iterating. We have worked with a couple "green" startups, but we have no way of generating those leads specifically.
We'd like to focus more on startups that help in some way, like sustainably providing services to the poor, or improving the environment, for example.
If you were looking for these kinds of startups, where would you look? <comment><USER2> Not sure about where to look for them, but you can definitely help them find you.

I would be blogging, twittering, etc. about social entrepreneurship. Check out LinkedIn Q&A as well as Groups. Start your own group on there. Build your own community around this, start a Ning network.

Attend tech conferences that focus on social change. Better yet try and speak at those conferences.

Try writing guest posts on various tech and startup sites.

Get your info out to organizations that first time entrepreneurs might go to for help or advice like the SBA, Chambers, Colleges, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know where you're located, but in the RTP (North Carolina) area, there's a local meet-up group for social entrepreneurs: <http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19139128576>

I'd check out local environmental non-profits and ask them to point you to people who are trying to start something up, or ask to give a presentation @ their location for people considering startups.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd look at social enterprise coworking spaces and see who uses them, and look at social enterprise targeted funds or events (e.g. SIcamp) as well.

</comment><comment> puzzle-out <http://clearlyso.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> If you are having such a hard time, it could be easier to help established companies incubated social programs and maybe spin them out when they become successful.

</comment><comment><USER2> also give crunchbase a try

</comment><comment><USER6> *faircompanies (<http://faircompanies.com>) aims to provide information and tools on sustainability.</comment>


Click on the tile that has a different color - <AUTHOR> http://game.ioxapp.com/color/? <comment><USER2> After running across this game a few days ago, I became curious if playing it would develop any sort of skill, or at least if my scores would improve over time.

Over about a week of casual (and briefly, obsessive) playing, I kept track of my scores in a text file.

Within 30 games or so, my score had climbed from 26 on the first game to normally 42-44, topping at 46. Over probably 50 more games, I did not notice any further increase in average or top score.

During that second block of 50ish games, the novelty of keeping track wore off, and I deleted the file. If I play now (after a few hundred games), I am still hoping for a high 40s score, and feel as though I have made serious mistakes with a score in the low 30s.

Other factors to consider: I have been "watching" television through most of the games (>70%), which is to say listening and occasionally glancing from the game to the show. Also, I noted some games where I spent time speaking out loud to other people in the room, and found that my scores were consistently lower on those (29-33).

From this (pathetic) study, it appears that the skill of playing this game can be developed through casual effort, but only to a limited extent. The structure of the game -- specifically, failing to continue to get harder past score 32 or so -- may contribute to this.

The skill being improved may or may not be colour-difference detection, because mouse accuracy and speed of decision matter a lot in this game as well.

/pretending to run a study

</comment><comment><USER3> I was looking forward to getting told which web sites I visited recently. What a bummer...

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a shame this is blocked at work. I tried it at home on my PC, and I can't seem to get past lv23. This monitor, an Acer, was purchased specifically because it was one of the cheapest 1080's available at the time with favorable reviews. It's calibrated for contrast and gamma, but that doesn't seem to be enough. One of my monitors at work, however, is a calibrated Dell UltraSharp IPS. I managed to score a 7 with it on a color recognition test[1] that was posted here on HN a couple of weeks ago.

[1] [http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test- challenge](http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge)

</comment><comment><USER5> 鑑定結果,你是【色狼lv87】!要不要通知下小伙伴們呢?

also the memory game is nice to train ... well visual memory.

[http://game.ioxapp.com/memtest/](http://game.ioxapp.com/memtest/)

You got 168 , look like 30 years old.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fun game.

setInterval( function(){ $("#box span").click() },1);

</comment><comment><USER7> My message said:

> 鑑定結果,你是【色狼lv31】!要不要通知下小伙伴們呢?

Which Google Translate, translates to:

> Identification results, you are [pervert lv31]! Not to notice little friends > do?

Why am I a pervert?

<comment><USER8> I suppose it uses CSS to steal your browsing history.

<comment><USER9> I thought the same, but apparently it's not the case.

For those that have not seen that post before: simple proof of concept[1] and a game[2] that will try to steal your browsing history. Obvious warning: visiting those sites might lead to your browsing history being stolen.

[1][http://tinsnail.neocities.org/](http://tinsnail.neocities.org/) ( [http://lcamtuf.blogspot.de/2013/05/some-harmless-old- fashion...](http://lcamtuf.blogspot.de/2013/05/some-harmless-old-fashioned- fun-with-css.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can't make out the difference between the purple coloured tiles. Color- blindness?

<comment><USER11> > Can't make out the difference between the purple coloured tiles. Color- > blindness?

If you're actually wondering, here's a pretty good test: [http://enchroma.com/test/instructions/](http://enchroma.com/test/instructions/) That site is trying to sell you something, but my results there are consistent with others, e.g. [http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm](http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 色郎lv22 hooray. I didn't notice the timer until the end.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool. I was able to get to level 29.

<comment><USER14> Level 35 :) Damn this red one was hard..

Cool concept anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 26.

</comment><comment><USER16> suspicious.</comment>


The Performance Cost of Server Side Rendered React on Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://malloc.fi/performance-cost-of-server-side-rendered-react-node-js <comment><USER2> Is anyone using React for server-side rendering of dynamic content without some kind of caching? I've done some server-side React stuff, but only in cases where only a tiny percentage of requests will ever be served uncached content. Is it common to do otherwise?</comment>


Ten arrested in Netherlands over Bitcoin money-laundering allegations - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/20/bitcoin-netherlands-arrests-cars-cash-ecstasy <comment><USER2> It sounds to me that Bitcoin is a lousy medium for money laundering. It's unclear to me whether they laundered money by supposedly buying and selling bitcoins or converted shadowy assets into BTC and then back to physical currency, but in both cases the transactions can be tracked back in the blockchain so you'll not only have to make a good story of where the money came from but also, if and when the authorities get interested, make sure that how the BTC is moved around reflects that story.

But merely converting BTC to cash via ATMs doesn't even sound like laundering to me at all, just conversion. You would still need to explain the cash you've acquired if you intend to buy something with it.

Money laundering itself is not for those in a hurry. To plausibly launder money you need a service business with costs that are rather fixed and customers who can plausibly pay with cash. Then you can have as many "customers" as you like and nobody can really tell how many you really might have had but depending on how you set up the scheme you can report a reasonable income over the months and years, pay the taxes and thus turn the money legally earned.

<comment><USER3> Yeh, sadly enough the Dutch media and government try to totally hide this in their stories. Bitcoin == Money laundering, and TOR == THE DARK WEB. Period. [0]

The article is full of misdirections and word plays.

It starts of with "Bitcoin is used by criminals, because the currency is not controlled by banks and thus there is no supervision". This is the first misdirection, because just because it's not controlled by banks doesn't mean you cannot supervise it. The core idea of bitcoin _is_ supervision. It's a public ledger.

It then continues to support their argument by saying "Bitcoins go back and forth in a _closed_ system of users, so authorities can't see it". Which is just a plain lie. Bitcoin is an _open_ system. Anyone can see any transaction.

The article continues: "As soon as the bitcoins were turned into real cash, the money was turned into cash at banks. They finally stepped to the police, because their warning systems detected large amounts of money being transferred".

So apparently it _was_ really easy to track down? They detected the weird transfers and were able to find the criminals. Seems bitcoin actually saved us here? That totally is the opposite of what they told us two paragraphs back where they said "there is no insight at all in what happens with bitcoin"

The article then continues to mumble about how TOR == Dark web and it's just painful to read. I hate media. Now my mom starts asking me akward questions about hard drugs because I have a TOR and a Bitcoin sticker on my laptop.

[0] [http://nos.nl/artikel/2081531-bitcoins-en-dark-web-een- goed-...](http://nos.nl/artikel/2081531-bitcoins-en-dark-web-een-goed- huwelijk.html)

<comment><USER4> The idea that money laundering can happen in Bitcoin because it's not controlled by banks is particularly good. Maybe we should get a large, trusted bank like HSBC to regulate Bitcoin? Oh, wait: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering)

<comment><USER5> So HSBC were fined $1.9 billion by US regulators and 40 million Swiss francs by Swiss regulators. Who do we fine for money laundering on the blockchain?

<comment><USER4> The people who were arrested, as per the article in discussion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They were arrested for drug traffic, not bitcoin money-laundering.

> The alarm had been raised by banks which had seen "large sums of money" > being deposited before being immediately withdrawn at cashpoints.

Not the smartest individuals here. How did they think they wouldn't get caught? Seems like another anti-bitcoin peace article which ends with the mt gox failure and this gem: "Bitcoin's reputation was also damaged when US authorities seized funds as part of an investigation into the online black market Silk Road.". So that means the dollar and euro's reputation are damaged every day when funds are seized as part of 99.9% of criminal investigations?

</comment><comment><USER7> I've researched BTC laundering, because I'm too curious to live.

The main method of doing it is via "mixers", servicss that distribute your BTC among hundreds of accounts, and then pay you back (minus a small fee) via hundreds of other accounts. Theoretically, it's impossible to track a single payment through such a process, since the BTC paid back isn't the BTC paid in.

Another possible security measure woukd be the use of multiple accounts, allowing legitimate purchases and purchases involving physical locations to be separate from illegitimate buys.

The main weak point is your location; once a physical object is shipped to you, it's real easy to tie that to your illicit BTC wallet, and from there, you're hosed.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands Interesting everybody pointing out that BTC is traced through the public block chain - but what about BTC tumblers/mixers that are designed specifically to anonymize BTC transactions?

I remember one Reddit thread where they chased some huge amount of BTC which were stolen and ended up losing them in one of these:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rvlft/i_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rvlft/i_just_chased_him_through_a_bitcoin_tumbler_and)

As far as I know the thief got away with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there any articles that clarify what these guys were actually doing to make the money?

The fact that they don't mention it makes it sound like they might have been doing something more interesting than just selling drugs, as usually they tend to be fairly public about those cases.

Edit: Guess it was just some drug dealers then,

>All suspects fell into one of two categories – criminal "traders" on the Dark Web and "bitcoin-cashers" who are paid by these traders to exchange bitcoins for cash

</comment><comment><USER9> "Bitcoin's reputation was also damaged when US authorities seized funds as part of an investigation into the online black market Silk Road."

If by "seized" they mean "stole". Notice how they spin the fact that US authorities were charged and prosecuted for STEALING bitcoins while investigating Silk Road into the fiction that it damaged the reputation of Bitcoin, but not US authorities.

<comment><USER10> That's not the fact that was "spun" into the sentence you quoted.

They're clearly talking about the money the government seized from SR publicly, not the money rogue agents took. To claim that they're somehow talking about the second while neglecting the first is itself spin on your part.

You can perhaps criticize them for not mentioning the second at all, but that's different from the critique you made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is a piece of garbage.

</comment><comment><USER12> Should have done it thru London property, then the establishment get a cut.</comment>


"If you're just doing stuff a little better, how can you change the world?" - <AUTHOR> http://gkoberger.net/m/startup-school#mz

<comment><USER2> Your notes are more or less similar to mine, definitely better presented. I see a common thread in almost all the stories by the speakers, product is the king and that's relatively the easy part. Everyone has company/people issues and your really cannot figure it out so the actual "startup" part is going to be a rush anyway.

Get the product right and eventually the rest of the things will fall in place.</comment>


Question for all Riders... - <AUTHOR>

Where do you storage your bicycle at home? <comment><USER2> Now I have a walk in basement, it's leaning against the wall.

In my old place, a second story walk up, it hung from the wall in the hallway, between the bedroom and the bathroom.

In my wife's old place, she had her's chained to the porch railing, and mine joined it when I stayed over.

\--

I'd curious as to why you want to know….

<comment><AUTHOR> I just wanted to recommend a cool gadget I got for the wifey, called the Click-Base. being married to a woman who collects bicycles like stray dogs it really made a difference in our bike storage. (www.bicyclick.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My apartment building has a locked bike room.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet!</comment></comment>


Why Robbing a Bank is a Bad Idea - <AUTHOR> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2012.00570.x/asset/j.1740-9713.2012.00570.x.pdf;jsessionid=22A7802B4157684B747E50F0A63AB295.d04t03?v=1&t=h3lm7nft&s=93a9186167c51f0670aa237892d4971aa91b352f

<comment><USER2>
        Forbidden

        You don't have permission to access
        /store/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2012.00570.x/asset/j.1740-9713.2012.00570.x.pdf
        on this server.</comment>


Firefox Is Going 64-Bit: What You Need To Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/8455/products/firefox-is-going-64-bit-what-you-need-to-know

<comment><USER2> Bad article: _"There are multiple types of 64-bit processors – there are those based on the old x86 architectures (now known synonymously with 32-bit) which are basically 64-bit extensions, rather than native 64-bit processors, and then there are full 64-bit processors."_ \-- [sic].

x86-64 architecture is a full native 64-bit architecture. Non-native would be something like using two DWORDs in software to emulate a 64-bit pointer -- which is not the case at all since x86-64 has native 64-bit pointers.</comment>


Microsoft previews Compiler-as-a-Service software - <AUTHOR> http://www.techworld.com.au/article/401071/microsoft_previews_compiler-as-a-service_software/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, this article conflates two things: the C# REPL, and the C# compiler-as-a-service. Both are part of Roslyn, which is a reimplementation of the C# compiler written in C#. (It was previously written in C++.) The REPL could have been implemented on top of the older C++ compiler.

The C# REPL is something that Mono has had for a few years now. The compiler- as-a-service has some resemblance to what LLVM + Clang enable for a C compiler.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title scared me. My first thought was that they were going to charge per compile.

<comment><USER4> you are giving them ideas... and me nightmares!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have more information on this bit?

 _"It resembles a model developed by Miguel de Icaza's Mono Project, in which the information the compiler generates about a program can be reused as a library."_

Sounds very interesting, but the article unfortunately doesn't go into much detail about the information that is made available.

<comment><USER6> Basically you can just compile and execute arbitrary strings of C# code at runtime. Here's a small tutorial on doing something with Mono's implementation: [http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2011/05/26/dynamic-...](http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2011/05/26/dynamic- asp-net-mvc-3-models-using-mono-s-compiler-as-a-service.aspx)

<comment><USER7> So it's eval, and they skip all the dire warnings from everyone about eval being bad by calling it Compiler as a Service.

<comment><USER8> The main issues with using eval come when eval has access to the scope of whatever is calling it, as it can make unpredictable changes. Just compiling and running code constructed at runtime isn't a bad idea in itself, as long as you use proper techniques to ensure that users can't do code injection.

<comment><USER7> That's a good point, and is an language design/implementation specific condition. PHP doesn't create a new stack frame for eval'ed code, so it runs right in the context of the calling function. In constrast, LambdaMOO does create a separate stack frame, which is subjected to the same scope rules as any other function call. You can control if it does or not in perl (by stuffing some additional syntax into the eval'ed string).

But the usual issue that is bandied about is how it's inefficient because it needs to invoke the code parser. Searching hacker news for eval shows the wide range of positions, a lot (but not a wide majority) just parrot the inefficiency argument. But there are also a few posts with solid reasons to use eval too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here is the link to the Hejlsberg presentation at build:

<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-816T> (the Roslyn part starts at 00:35:45)

</comment><comment><USER10> I found a presentation here (pdf): [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/events/fs2011/ng_codenam...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/events/fs2011/ng_codename_roslyn.pdf)</comment>


SEC, CFTC Report Says Algorithm Trade Set Off May 6 'Flash Crash' - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703859204575525973854203534.html?mod=djemalertMARKET

<comment><USER2> Consider the true implications of the idea that an algorithm "set off" the market crash:

\- Traders were happily trading along at a market price they all had tremendous confidence in.

\- An algorithm decides to liquidate some shares, causing the market price to dip a bit b/c of extra supply.

\- Said traders immediately lose all confidence in the market price they'd been happily trading along at all day and start dumping their own shares.

Conclusions:

If the traders were confident in the initial market price (i.e, if they were "right" then they should have started buying when the price started dipping. This would have held the price up. That they didn't reveals a lot about their own strategies.

If the fact that the order placed by the algoritm is "to blame" implies that a human wouldn't have placed that order.

It sounds to me that the algorithm simply wanted to liquidate and wouldn't have placed such a large market order if it were overly concerned about getting top dollar for every share. This happens with human traders all the time. The bigger the order the more it will move the market. There are large trade desks that help minimize this but they take a big spread for the service.

So ironically it was the algorithm that had a principled, deep view of the market and the human traders who were fickle and skittish... exactly the opposite of the typical impression of each. It's like if Kasparov were playing against Deep Blue and Deep Blue sacrificed a pawn and Kasparov knocked over the board.

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily. That hypothesis rests on the basis that the market is still majority human-traded. Quote the article:

 _High frequency traders, devoid of any real demand from buyers of the futures contract, began to quickly buy and resell contracts "generating a 'hot- potato,'" the report said._

So this is algorithms-against-algorithms. I would wager that in intraday trading, human minds play a relatively small role, because mechanical methods break through the emotional barriers that plague pure discretionary trading. Most good daytraders will develop a signal system to guide them, even if individual trades use manual entries and exits.

<comment><USER2> My understanding is that many algorithms float "test trades" to probe the other market participants (human and machine). It would be very costly for the algorithms to risk too much money on probing at an inaccurate price, so chances are the "hot potato" was not very deep at all.

Nonetheless, your point stands that it could be an artifact of the traders expecting human-like decisions to underly the phenomena they saw.

(it does seem implausible to me, but oh well)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> PDF of the actual report: [http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJ- flashre...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJ- flashreport10012010.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> The title of this post (and the WSJ article) is potentially misleading.

The 'Algorithm Trade' referenced was a Mutual Fund company executing a very large sell order in E-mini Futures. The sell order was executed through a trading algorithm which attempted to participate in 9% of market volume.

Many people associate 'Algorithmic Trading' with 'High-Frequency Trading' but there is no link made by the report.

ETA: An equally correct headline could be "Large Institutional Seller set off May 6 flash crash.

<comment><USER5> Now you have me confused.

Algorithmic Traders are quite a different species than High-Frequency Traders.

How did the article conflate these?

<comment><USER4> It is the popular imagination conflates them...

1\. High-Frequency trading, by definition, done by algorithms.

2\. We hear rumors or storyies of Algorithms gone wild.

3\. This report blames and 'Algorithmic Trade' as the cause.

People are tempted to 'connect-the-dots' and would likely end up with an erroneous conclusion.

<comment><USER6> High-Freq is usually the label used for prop trading. Algo is usually the label used for agency trading.

The differences between the algos used isn't really pertinent.

<comment><USER7> The differences are huge. The motiviations behind each are entirely separate. They are used by different people for different things.

A day trader, slogging it out in front of their computer every day is very different from a floor broker trying to execute customer orders. That is the fundamental difference we're talking about here. Unfortunately, any time the markets are mentioned in connection with algorithm people instantly think "high-frequency trading", and most often they are wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Valerio Proietti of MooTools regarding Sizzle - <AUTHOR> http://mootools.net/blog/2008/12/04/sizzle/#more-115 <comment><AUTHOR> This is another disappointing showing of Valerio making ad hominem attacks to defend his framework.

I like MooTools, and I even agree with much of what his reasoning is for not adopting Sizzle, but the way he voices it is frustrating. First, he addresses a collaborative open source project setting as a short coming of the integration. While I can appreciate his desire to maintain coding style across all of MooTools, this argument is poorly constructed. He then covers himself with this:

 _Or we could fork it, which would negate any proposed benefits, like having all developers of all frameworks work on a common piece of code._

But forking a project hardly negates the collaborative benefits. Perhaps he is unfamiliar with a dvcs workflow?</comment>


My Git Workflow (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.osteele.com/2008/05/my-git-workflow/ <comment><USER2> This is a really well-organized dive into something that, based on the title, I didn't expect to find much value in. I was wrong.

Learning git was painful. It felt like an obstacle that periodically stood between me and getting my work done. Gradually, I fell in love with the tool, but until now I never really stopped to think about how my git workflow has evolved. Turns out, it still has room for improvement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Coming from the simple Subversion way of doing things, instead of using "add" you could use "commit --amend". This gives you the same workflow as described in the article but without the mental overhead of the index.

There is research on this: [https://gitless.com/#research](https://gitless.com/#research)

<comment><USER4> commit --amend is only safe on local commits and should never be used on a commit that has already been pushed, so you can't utilise it as a main part of your workflow.

There really isn't any mental overhead to the index. It's simply the contents of the next future commit. That's all. To understand why you need the index and what it's for you need to understand what a commit is.

Probably the biggest thing that will give you a good intuition on how git works and what it's doing is to understand that git uses content-based addressing. All those funny long ids are SHA1 hashes of the contents of an object in the object database (the stuff in .git/objects). There are only 4 types of objects: blobs (files), trees (directories), commits and tags. In the case of a blob the 'contents' are simply the raw bytes of the file on disk, so it simply SHA1 hashes those. Then a tree is simply an object that effectively contains a list of other items which themselves are either other trees or blobs. They represent a directory on disk that contain files and other directories. So the object id of a tree will be the SHA1 hash of the object ids of all the blobs and trees it contains. Finally you get to the commit. The contents of a commit is just the details of the author/committer, the object id of the tree that represents the root folder of the repo, the object id of the parent commit(s) and then the commit message. So it just SHA1's all that and that gives you the commit hash that you see.

Running git ls-files will show you the contents of the index. As you can see it's simply a list of path/file names. This is what git uses to construct the 'tree' that winds up in the commit.

Do 'git cat-files -p a42f32' where a42f32 is just any commit hash you have lying around. It outputs exactly what the commit is. Notice you see there's a 'tree' object in there.

I feel like once you understand that git becomes quite a lot simpler to reason about.

O'Reilly have a free pocket guide on git gives a phenomenally clear intuition on how git works and allows you to really understand what it's doing under the hood. I highly recommend reading even just the first few chapters. It totally demystifies git and it's a pretty quick read.

[https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/git-pocket- guide/978144...](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/git-pocket- guide/9781449327507/ch01.html)

<comment><USER3> Sure, git is just a Merkle tree of snapshots.

On the other hand, it is easy to get confused. For example, someone might add something to the index and then switch to a different branch. Now he wonders why the index looks weird. Of course the experienced dev understands that the index contains a snapshot instead of a diff.

I still believe that the index is accidental complexity and not necessary at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice explanations and diagrams! I'll be sticking with the first diagram, since I've been using that basic one for several years and haven't found a compelling reason to change it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oldish. I like the gradual adoption of tech instead of trying to find shiny unusual features (e.g. git reflog) and jump immediately on them.

</comment><comment><USER7> (2008)

<comment><USER8> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Milo.com acquired, joins the eBay family - <AUTHOR> http://milo.com/blog/milo-com-joins-the-ebay-family/ <comment><USER2> Multiple sources:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963247> \- milo.com (this one)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963126> \- vator.tv

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963125> \- techcrunch.com

No doubt we'll see more as all the usual suspects pick up the story.</comment>


Show HN: Scrollanim – CSS3 scroll animation - <AUTHOR> http://scrollanim.kissui.io/?hn <comment><USER2> Cool, I'm gonna give it a try. You are being a bit deceptive about the size though claiming 9 KB, your minified css file is 54.6 KB and your minified js file is 3.58 KB, for a grand total of 58.18 KB.</comment>


Do customers pay for your B2B product in a cost center or a profit center? - <AUTHOR> http://matthewpaulmoore.com/post/50662524038/do-customers-pay-for-your-b2b-product-in-a-cost-center

<comment><USER2> This article surprised me; normally you see advice that suggests only building products for profit centers. Thinking of different techniques for the two domains is a great idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks zck :) Happy to continue the discussion here!</comment></comment>


Coolest 2GB ThumbDrive Ever - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/hacked_makermade_usb_cabl.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

<comment><USER2> OK this made me smile, but really not the type of thing I want to see voted to the top of HN.

<comment><USER3> ditto

edit:downmod for agreement?

<comment><USER4> I upmodded you (because you were at -6 and I felt bad), but please learn from this experience.

The only thing worse than a terse, content-free comment is a verbose, content- free comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're feeling frisky, you can make your own :

<http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/usbkey>

</comment><comment><USER6> Potential buyers: criminals who think they can hide their data in a pile of trash. Boyfriends who think they can hide their erotic photo collection.

<comment><USER7> And anyone who wants their USB drive accidentally thrown away...

<comment><USER6> ...instead of the data falling into the wrong hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can almost imagine been questioned by the police as to why I'm using a computer that appears to have been ripped out of/ away from another device.

</comment><comment><USER9> The cord seems a bit too long to make it a useful/comfortable flash drive to keep with me. If it were a bit shorter, I'd almost consider it. :)

<comment><USER5> At the risk of missing the joke, couldn't you just cut it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This will be great until someone throws it away because they think it is junk.</comment>


IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/ibm/ <comment><USER2> This makes me worried for Apple. IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services, and Watson in particular has seemed to be a pretty mediocre product with heavy marketing and gimmicks (Jeopardy and H&R Block come to mind).

Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that's not a good look.

<comment><USER3> > Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services > to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence > in their own internal abilities, and that's not a good look.

I think it's a good move. At the very least, they can learn a bit from someone else on how to run a cloud service.

Let me ask you this -- if you didn't already have the Apple hardware that was integrated with iCloud et al, would you pay money to use any of the Apple internet services? Like if they build Windows clients and you had Windows, would you pay to use any of their services?

I can't think of a single Apple service I would pay for if I wasn't on Apple hardware. And even worse, despite the free services from Apple, I will pay to use competitors that offer a worse integration, just to not use the Apple services.

<comment><USER4> The user experiences of Notes and Contacts are both perfect, and they're an enormous part of what I do with a computing device

<comment><USER5> Agreed, Notes is now fully featured enough that it's the only app I use for any kind of note taking.

<comment><USER6> How do you backup Apple Notes? I reluctantly stopped using Notes because there is no easy way to back up all Notes.

<comment><USER7> They backup to iCloud. Just toggle the sync on in th iCloud preferences on your Mac/iDevice.

<comment><USER6> But the format is opaque. I would like to archive as html, pdf, etc. - and not by saving them one at a time.

<comment><USER8> Backup is not archive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just spent a few minutes playing with the Watson Custom Model for vision flow and let's just say I am totally disappointed is an understatement, few things I noticed: 1\. You first need to register an account, and to my surprise there is no command line tool or REST APIs, the entire interface is written in HTML. Hmmm, are they expecting me to specify the network structure by pressing buttons 2\. Okay next, after choosing the visual model, it leads you directly to a web page with a bunch of widgets where you can add classes and negatives. To a seasoned ML engineers, this whole interface is useless. The classification has to be done at a full image level, no way to define the layers, the loss function, or any knobs to play around with the network. To an amateur, this is also very confusing. What are they expecting us to drag in to the negatives, if it's a logistic classifier, I could understand but for classifying an image, what exactly do you expect us to put? 3\. Btw, to upload images, they expect .zip format, and this is where i stopped. Do they seriously think I will now export this so-called "model" to CoreML and load it to my Xcode?

If they came up with this 5 years ago I might play with it a little longer, but don't the IBM engineers keep up with what's going on at GOOGL, FB or AMZN. I can't possibly imagine anyone using this to develop iPhone apps for the purpose of image recognition, even if it's an offline flow.

<comment><USER10> Of course you can't imagine anyone using it because (a) you are not the target audience and (b) you are being deliberately contemptuous about the product because it was built by IBM.

If you simply re-read all your own points from an objective standpoint, it should be apparent that this is geared towards individuals who have minimal or no machine learning (much less deep learning) experience; but nevertheless feel they need features like custom image recognition in their application. Rather than spending time and money hiring a 'seasoned ML engineer' such as yourself, they can try this and see if it works well enough for their purposes. Everything from the HTML interface, dearth of model customization, no parameter tuning, etc. points to this use case. Yes, it will be tedious, time consuming, and perhaps a bit unintuitive at first but it will be nowhere near as difficult for them than if they were to build an equivalent data pipeline, neural network, and evaluation setup on specialized hardware using Tensorflow. From that perspective, this could be a great product for application developers.

Finally, there are tons of REST APIs that enumerate all the functionality found here. They are all part of the Watson Cloud catalog. This includes loading data, training, and deploying models. Moreover, is it really necessary to insult IBM engineers by insinuating that they haven't kept up with the broader paradigm shifts in the field? They build what they are told to build by management (just like at the Big 4).

<comment><USER9> Perhaps I'm not understanding the intent of this collaboration between Apple and IBM but I would like to think that anyone who can write/publish iOS apps should have the aptitude to spend a couple hours understand the basics of deep learning. Would you honestly use an app that was contains an image- classification model that's trained using this flow. Please enlighten me. Or am I the only person who DD'd on their product? Have you tried other web interface versions of online models trainers like SageMaker, Rekognition? Do you work for IBM?

<comment><USER11> I graduated with honours, did 3D graphics programming in the past, systems programming is one of my favourite areas, worked at few well known names internationally.

Yet I can't get my head around neural networks and related concepts.

Just because it is easy for you, don't assume the same for everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why most of the comment here are negative. On the bright side, being able to train a model in any sort of cloud (doesn't matter if it is Azure, Google, AWS, or IBM) and then directly create CoreML models, and iterate from model feedback, is a pretty special and unique position. It's a hybrid edge + cloud approach to running A.I. for end applications, and I do see it to benefit developers who want to roll their own models and create new applications particularly to computer vision, photography, and videos.

<comment><USER13> Wish competing service providers appear soon. The need is real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if Apple's choice of IBM for AI integration is motivated by the fact that IBM does not compete with them on any level?

Outside of that, IBM/Watson seems like a comparatively bad choice of partners.

<comment><USER15> Tim Cook was with IBM for 12 years before Apple.

<comment><USER16> True, although it was from 1982-1994.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it's probably the worst idea to partner with IBM.

<comment> david-cako Seeking out possible moves to keep Apple on the leading edge of technology and user experience, a determined Tim Cook arrived at page 103 of his Strategic Decision Making in Information Technology textbook, and came across what some may call ancient wisdom -- such wisdom that seemed peculiarly familiar, as though it was encoded into his subconscious from birth. Left alone in center aligned bold text along the top of the page was scribed "NO ONE GETS FIRED FOR PARTNERING WITH IBM".

Tim, being the savvy executive and decision maker he will always be, concluded that the only logical choice is to make the decision which will virtually nullify his chance of getting fired. "Your legacy shall not go to waste, Steve...", he said under his breath as he picked up the phone.

<comment><USER18> That's hilarious. Seriously. If you want to right a longer Tim Cook fan fiction, I'd be the first one to buy your e-book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This FAQ list is actually more informative than the press release which is targeted towards marketing/media.

[https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple- developer/faq](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-developer/faq)

Resources here.

[https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple- developer/resources](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-developer/resources)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is that a printer jam example? If yes, then is Apple using a "printer jam" example to showcase it's ML chops in-collab with the Big Blue?

</comment><comment><USER21> Good marketing for struggling Watson, I wonder what Apple gets—ie, how useful it is to the developer.

It's a shame Watson's been so disappointing (eg MD Anderson Cancer platform), maybe it can start a support group with Stephen Wolfram...

</comment><comment><USER22> Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, I guess... On a more serious note: why??

</comment><comment><USER23> There is no pricing information easily available. Is it free, or are people supposed to invest time into learning, and then find out what it costs to go live?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious what benefit this actually offers to devs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Remember this? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I)

Can you imagine the company that made this getting into bed with IBM!?

<comment><USER26> Yes. I can imagine it because they've already done so repeatedly. The first case I can think of was Apple working with IBM on the Taligent operating system (designed to compete with what became NT and NeXTStep) circa 1988. Then the PowerPC chip at the center of Macs for years was co-developed with Apple, IBM, and Motorola, and in later years IBM supplied the actual chips. Also, the Apple Network Server machines (circa 1996) ran AIX.</comment></comment>


BlackBerry 10: Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/23/bb10_latest_ui/ <comment><USER2> One of the key issues for RIM is that the complete change in the underlying architecture of BB10 means that all existing 3rd party apps are going to have to be rewritten for it.

We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS.

Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.

Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.

<comment><USER3> _Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away._

This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal.

The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely _everything:_ great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.

<comment><USER4> >This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it.

Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps.

On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.

<comment><USER5> BB10 does indeed have an Android Player and in my experience it works pretty well. I played with it earlier in the year and while it did not support apps that made JNI calls at that time, it worked pretty well for vanilla Android applications. I assume JNI support will be added or perhaps has already been added since it's been while since I last looked at it.

I don't see why people would complain about no backwards compatibility with BB7. BB7 is legacy OS and almost a relic of another era compared to Android, iOS and QNX in BB10. If you are going to support apps for one other OS, Android is a much better target due to the sheer amount of apps out there.

<comment><USER2> If you're a corporate who've invested significantly in training, business specific software, support infrastructure and so on for a particular platform to be told you've got to start over is a massive deal and you care a whole load that your massive investment is largely for nothing.

Backward compatibility would have allowed many corporates (a significant market for RIM) to maintain that investment and if they could do that that would be a major reason to stick with RIM. The fact that RIM have cut them loose effectively means they have to start over and makes RIMs incumbency effectively worthless when it comes to business retention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The worst thing I'm seeing in the mobile race is the two winners (iPhone and Android) are not adopting any of the good innovative things from the "losers". For example, WebOS is all but dead, had a ton of innovative things like Cards, Just Type, inductive charging, notifications on the bottom, and as far as I can tell, none of those things are being used (or are being used in a much more muted way) but iPhone and Android.

Instead the two big players are only adopting features from the other. To make matters worse, you can't easily (at all?) choose to install your own OS on a phone, so over time as the "losers" drop off we're going to be left with 2 phone plaforms that are more or less the same and haven't made any major UI changes since they became successful. And there will be no out for us who want something different.

<comment><USER7> What are you talking about? The UI guy behind webOS, Matias Duarte, is now the Android UX Director at Google. There's a good interview with him in the first episode of _On The Verge_ : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K4HImSqR1k>

<comment><USER6> Which specific WebOS features have been fully implemented into Android?

<comment><USER8> \- Swipe to dismiss notifications (Windows Phone also employed this from the get go).

\- WebOS Cards in terms of multitasking is pretty similar to the current ICS/JB task switcher and swiping to close an app.

Edit: I read your intial comment again and I realize my response doesn't address your initial issue.

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

I think Apple / Google will continue to innovate (i.e. Siri vs Google Now) but to expect them to bring forth major fundamental changes to a stable, developed platform with a large user based is asking a bit much.

<comment><USER6> > I think Apple / Google will continue to innovate (i.e. Siri vs Google Now) > but to expect them to bring forth major fundamental changes to a stable, > developed platform with a large user based is asking a bit much.

I don't expect them to. What they are doing is taking only proven successful features from each other, and making very minor tweaks otherwise. This is what incumbents do.

I'm lamenting on the fact that we -- programmers, power users, enthusiasts -- will likely have no where to turn in the near future as the "losers" of this cycle start falling off. We won't have the option to install an open source OS on our phones like we have with PCs.

<comment><USER7> > We won't have the option to install an open source OS on our phones like we > have with PCs.

Except you're conveniently forgetting the fact that Android _is_ open source. Google continues to release a phone each year with an unlocked bootloader, on which you can install versions of Android modified to your heart's content.

<comment><USER9> >>> Google continues to release a phone each year with an unlocked bootloader

Can I buy any phone, and then wipe it out and add any OS on it?

I think that is what the OP was driving at. And that would _be quite something_ , compared to current state of affairs! :)

<comment><USER10> You can add any OS that wants to be added. IIRC you can put early builds of Firefox OS on a Nexus phone.

Of course, you can't put iOS on there, but that's Apple's choice.

<comment><USER6> My point was not that we don't have choice today (we do), it's that we're not going to have choice in the not-so-distant future as these other OSes die off (incluing Firefox OS).

Sure, you can root some Android devices and install Android ROMS like Cyanogen... but those are just Android. We're going to lose the creativity we're currently seeing in Jolla, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Blackberry, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key... Nobody else does this._

Windows Phone has an app for that. I have a tile on my home screen. Tap it and it creates a pre-populated email to my wife asking how her day is going.

<comment><USER12> Nothing says "I love you" like a template email.

<comment><USER11> It started off as an experiment but when she created an auto-response to the email things quickly descended into ridiculousness. The fact that my wife constantly tries to 'out-geek' me is one of the many reasons I married her.

In all seriousness, (this is HN after all), the WP App can automate tons of functions into a one tap process that otherwise would have required multiple steps.

<comment><USER13> > auto-response to the email

Sounds more like your respective phones are married :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe"

Stay classy Register.

<comment><USER15> Took me a re-read but... HAH!

<comment><USER16> I remember in the early 2000's when I told my friend, "I got a RIM-job." He laughed. I didn't get it. I got it.

I really do hope that RIM regains some of the ground they've lost. The playing field is starting to level off. In the next 18 months, I predict (crystal ball is out) that a handful of manufacturers will have nearly equal ( _buzzword_ )ecosystems. For RIM to be successful again, they MUST shock the market; do something to competitors aren't doing. It will no longer be about hardware specs, software features & functions nor ecosystem. They need to revisit Mike L's vision for innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know it's cool to hate on Blackberry now, and I have done it too, simply for the fact that when everyone warned them that Android and iOS will kill them, they refused to believe it - until it was already too late and they were going downhill fast. You don't try to adapt your company for the new market rules when it's going downhill and losing money. You try to see where the market is going years ahead and try to be one of the first to move in the direction, and avoid a collapse.

That being said, I like some of the innovations, especially UI ones, that they've done in BB10, and I hope they remain a strong competitor to Android and iOS.

<comment><USER18> As a note to addlepate, you appear to be hellbanned. I don't see a clear reason for that based on your comment history...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting. Since Qt will be the way to develop apps for BlackBerry 10, I wonder if they can grow a common ecosystem together with Jolla's Sailfish:

<http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/>

<comment><USER20> Qt? BB10 offers support for frameworks like PhoneGap.

<comment><USER19> [https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index...](https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really hope that BlackBerry becomes the 3rd platform for mobile devices, and not Windows, because that will increase the chance that both Windows (on the PC) and BlackBerry (on mobile devices) will use open standards accessible to all.

<comment><USER4> I failed understand your train of thought here. Assuming Windows Phone takes 3rd place, how does that hurt open standards?

Are you talking about IE? IE10 on WP8 seems to be plenty fast if not faster than Safari or Webkit and seems to have decent HTML5 support. On the other hand, if BB10 takes 3rd place, all top three mobile platforms will use Webkit and then web devs will ignore the standards and code to the quirks of Webkit and stop testing on other platforms like Opera,Firefox or IE.(already happening since a few years in the wild). This will hurt open standards on the web and will favor one particular implementation.

Perhaps you're referring to Office on mobile when you say open standards?

<comment><USER21> I think the poster just has the general idea that having the same platform (Windows in this case) on both PCs and phones will make the platform vendor more likely to rely on proprietary integration between them, rather than be forced to use open standards for communication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really hope RIM makes it - their keyboards are beyond compare.

It seems like they've been putting a decent amount of effort into the ecosystem - with incentives for developers and all that. The one thing I haven't seen much about, which is a deal-breaker for me, is apps from Google. I really hope they're putting in enough effort to make sure there's good native Gmail and Maps apps (and Authenticator, though I realize very few people use that).

<comment><USER23> For what it's worth, I use Google Authenticator and Maps on my BlackBerry. Google pulled the Gmail app, but the native mail app supports Gmail quite well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Actually if there will be some key Apps available, this might be of interrest for me. I'd opt for a phone that really works and does those things it is capable of very well.

Have been living with Android now for a while and realized that there are few apps I actually really use on a regular basis. Phone, Calendar (CalDAV please), Mail (IMAP please), Browser (Opera), Maps, Terminal, Compass (yes, I actually use that sometimes when checking outdoor locations).

All the other Apps are optional and I would not miss them. One thing I loathe the most on actual smartphones is the battery life. If RIM manages to get some hardware out that will last a couple of days usage without having to load, then I'm interrested.

</comment><comment><USER25> This isn't the first positive review I've read about BB10, so perhaps it has potential. Here's to hoping it is a success, as the more viable competition we see in mobile, the better. I work across the road from QNX, so it would be nice to see RIM succeed here.

I'm sure that BB popularity varies by geographic region, but for what it's worth I see far more BBs out in public here in Ottawa than I do iPhones. And not just in the hands of government employees, where you'd expect to see them. BBs seem to be extremely popular among high school and college aged people here, primarily due to BBM.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I've seen the same anecdotal evidence in Capetown. BBM was the only thing keeping me on the RIM platform. Eventually I switched, but I think once BB10 comes out and is good, I'll switch back... just because I miss BBM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I use to be a devoted blackberry user. My biggest issue with what I'm seeing is it still looks a lot like the old crap I had to deal with.

I've moved onto bigger and better things.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not surprised the OS is good. The playbook OS is good.

I will be surprised if RIM can overcome being several years late. I will be surprised if they can actually get third parties on board. The playbook couldn't.

</comment><comment><USER29> 46 comments...

...and no one has mentioned the headline? :)

</comment><comment><USER30> BB10 can flag emails! Can Windows Phone do that?

Er, yes.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Gmail sign in POST to accounts.youtube.com? - <AUTHOR> I have noticed for a while that when I login to Gmail via the multi-account selection screen, the sign in posts to accounts.youtube.com, while signing into youtube results in a post to accounts.google.com.
Do any googlers know why this decision has been made?
It makes me wonder GOOG makes any interesting infrastructure/cost decisions based on how it will help their financials. E.g. have YouTube take the costs of providing certain services to the rest of Google, etc. <comment><USER3> This was asked and answered on Web Applications.SE: [https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/30254/why- does-g...](https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/30254/why-does-gmail- login-go-through-youtube-com)

> _When you log into a Google site like GMail, Google also logs you into all > your various accounts Google accounts - such as YouTube. In order to be > logged into a site, Google sets a cookie in your browser._

> _This is fine for most of their properties which are on the google.com > domain (mail.google.com, docs.google.com, etc). However, a website can only > set and read a cookie for its own domain - google.com can 't set a cookie > for youtube.com. To get around this, as part of the login process Google > will redirect you through accounts.youtube.com to log you into YouTube - <USER2> > typically your country specific domain if you are outside the US (e.g. I get > logged into google.com.au as well)._

</comment><comment><USER4> This is used to implement a unified login across Google properties.</comment>


Refactoring via Testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.yusufaytas.com/refactoring-untested-code/ <comment><USER2> I've been there. My manager wanted me to add new features to a completely alien codebase. I've tried to touch it minimally or change it as less as I can but it didn't work out. I've failed and moved to another team.</comment>


McDonald's Touchscreen Menus Are Covered in Poop, Report Finds - sahin-boydas http://mentalfloss.com/article/565564/mcdonalds-touchscreen-menus-are-covered-poop-report-finds <comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555916)

</comment><comment><USER2> Just a note: most of the items that are used by the public are covered with poop. It's part of living in society.</comment>


Breaking into 1Password, KeePass, LastPass and Dashlane - <AUTHOR> https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2017/08/one-password-to-rule-them-all-breaking-into-1password-keepass-lastpass-and-dashlane/ <comment><USER3> The article says the author is basically unable to break into the password- vaults. Please rename the clickbait-title.

</comment><comment><USER4> So what. I use 1Password, which the article says holds to 95,000 passwords per second with one GPU. So if say my password is 10 characters, only alphanumerical (a-zA-Z0-9) without any symbols, it takes this one GPU 62 __10 /95000 = 8834730167035.16 seconds or ~280,000 years to try all combinations. Even with 1000 GPUs and technical progress, easily more than a lifetime.

As my pass phrase is significantly stronger than that, I'm absolutely not worried..

<comment><USER5> Presumably they are using rainbow tables to speed it up considerably, but it's still not a problem if you have a strong password.

<comment><USER6> No; if a password manager wasn't individually salting the hashes, I'm pretty sure it'd be front page news on technical sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty misleading!

They test an old version of Keepass with an old KDF (they recently switched to Argon2 which is much more resistant to GPU/ASIC attacks. Additionally KeepassDroid is intended to use vaults synched to the device via Google Drive, Dropbox or whatever, so having the vault in private storage makes no sense!

<comment><USER8> They didn't 'switch' over. The KDBX 4 format introduces Argon2 as a possible KDF, in addition to AES-KDF which has been the dominant KDF in KeePass and its implementations.

Even the project with most contributors - KeePassXC, doesn't yet support KDBX 4, and work on it doesn't look like its moving either[1]. Most other implementations also don't support KDBX 4 format.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634253)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From this article, it sounds like they have a very specialized GPU-accelerated brute force mechanism for local database backups?

Assuming they have something like rainbow tables for short passwords on all of these managers, it still seems like it would take a _very_ long time to correctly guess longer master passwords (say 20+ characters). No?

<comment><USER10> There are no rainbow tables, all of they should be using salts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Only to put the site into some context, Elcomsoft is a known provider of "password breakers" for several programs, nrmally used for digital forensics.

This does not equate to "attack" or "remote attack".

It is mainly about having (legal) access to a seized storage device and trying to extract from it as much information as possible.

Although using the single NVIDIA GPU of a "normal" desktop is possible, normally some specialized hardware is needed/used (usually arrays of GPU's) to achieve a relatively high brute force attempt rate, something _like_ :

[https://www.shellntel.com/blog/2017/2/8/how-to- build-a-8-gpu...](https://www.shellntel.com/blog/2017/2/8/how-to- build-a-8-gpu-password-cracker)

</comment><comment><USER12> So they're brute forcing the master password for these databases. Why should I be worried if I'm using a non-dictionary multi-word passphrase as my master password?

"Different password managers employ different approaches to security. As an example, LastPass generates the encryption key by hashing the username and master password with 5,000 rounds of PBKDF2-SHA256, while 1Password employs even more rounds of hashing. This is designed to slow down brute-force attacks, and it almost works. Granted, these are still nearly an order of magnitude less secure than, say, Microsoft Office 2016 documents, but even this level of security is much better than nothing." I'm guessing they meant more secure then Office 2016.

<comment><USER6> No, per the included graph, brute forcing Office 2016 allowed them fewer guesses per second. Whatever its hashing algorithm, it's stronger than that being used by the password managers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is nothing but marketing fluff promoting the author's software. It's an offline brute-force attack against encrypted database files that of course works if you have a weak master password, but is otherwise useless.

Nothing to see here, move along.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you want to know how long it will possibly take in actual time, I did all the math for you(with python code): [https://gist.github.com/birlorg/cbde00767403f0ac554ea9d28178...](https://gist.github.com/birlorg/cbde00767403f0ac554ea9d28178b1fb)

For instance: commonChars of 1password of password length 20 will take 255,421,331,666,477,399,723,386 years, 3 months, 18 hours, 38 minutes, 39 seconds time

Well, this is the maximum amount of time, it could take considerably less than this, unless your password happens to be the very last one it tries to crack.

</comment><comment><USER14> The google text cache works. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2017/08/one- password-to-rule-them-all-breaking-into-1password-keepass-lastpass-and- dashlane/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

</comment><comment><USER15> Keepass' security measures, described here:

[http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html](http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html)

A question: does anyone have any idea why is it so much slower to crack Rar5 and Office 2016 than these password databases? What sort of magic sauce are they using to reduce the amount of guesses/second?

<comment><USER16> The idea you can put a number on how many guesses/second you can make on a keepass database at least is silly - that number is _configurable_! There's even a button in the UI which tunes that value to an estimated amount of time on the user's current hardware, so it's hardly an esoteric option.

MS word, by comparison, does not offer this option, and so they simply default to something sanely high.

<comment><USER15> > The idea you can put a number on how many guesses/second you can make on a > keepass database at least is silly - that number is _configurable_!

I understand this.

I was asking because the article says "[lastpass and 1password] are still nearly an order of magnitude less secure than, say, Microsoft Office 2016 documents, but even this level of security is much better than nothing.".

That, to me, implied that Office (and Rar5) were using some different - <USER2> much better! - algorithm that made guesses more expensive.

If indeed it is just a matter of more hashing rounds, then that sentence and the graph are very misleading and borderline FUD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm confused since the article never highlights any of the facts about the strength of the master password used to protect the vault. Of course a weak master password can easily be broken with an offline GPU accelerated attack.

</comment><comment><USER18> You can use keepass to benchmark your CPU in how many iterations should be used. I did the one second delay and divided it by ten so that I can use it on my phone without a huge delay. (2 500 000 iterations)

</comment><comment><USER19> Forgive the naive question, but would 2FA completely mitigate this attack, assuming that the org trying to access a key vault did not have access to the 2FA device?

<comment><USER17> No. This article describes an attack where the user has already gained access to the encrypted database, which assumes they have already subverted 2FA.

<comment><USER19> Ah. Thanks. So the idea is to stop the user before they get that far, I suppose.

Doesn't this hark back to "If the attacker has local access, it's already game over"?

<comment><USER16> Not really, the databases are designed to be effectively public information. The security comes from the encryption, not OS-level file permission controls!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> website broke

<comment><USER13> google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fblog.elcomsoft.com%2F2017%2F08%2Fone%2Dpassword%2Dto%2Drule%2Dthem%2Dall%2Dbreaking%2Dinto%2D1password%2Dkeepass%2Dlastpass%2Dand%2Ddashlane%2F)

<comment><USER21> Also broke.

<comment><USER22> Because Google's cached pages still try to load images, scripts, and CSS from the original domain, meaning they are almost always completely useless unless you wait long enough for the header to switch to text-only view to appear.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Superbowl As An Economic Indicator - <AUTHOR> http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/02/the-superbowl-as-an-economic-indicator/

<comment><USER2> Be careful; the last chart isn't indexed at 0.

<comment><USER3> That adjusted-for-inflation line on the first chart didn't seem right to me so I looked up some official data. The CPI-U price levels for January 2008 and 2009 both read about 211, while for January 1985 the same price level was 105.5, meaning prices doubled between 1985 and 2008 ... to the extent such data is trustworthy.

In the first chart the 1985 blue bar reads about $0.50 and the corresponding black (inflation-adjusted) line reads about $1, which is exactly how you would adjust for a doubling in inflation.

So there's a rough correspondence between the level of inflation and price of ads. Which actually makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's now so much follow-on coverage of the memorable commercials -- making them read-about and viewed elsewhere. Recent years, at least, deserve an adjustment for this extra audience.</comment>


Show HN: Job Mapper – Find jobs spatially - <AUTHOR> http://www.job-mapper.com/

<comment> adam-_- You seem to only have two job postings in the whole world?</comment>


Pardon My French - Projet Collaboratif Incongru - <AUTHOR> http://www.pardon-my-french.fr/ <comment><USER2> Heh. Having some fun browsing around.

Some of the recordings are better than others. I think the Gotye cover (Mademoiselle Igor - Quelqu'un que j'usais de connaître (Gueautiaient)) is the best I've heard so far.

Gotye: [http://www.pardon-my- french.fr/songs/Mademoiselle%20Igor%20-...](http://www.pardon-my- french.fr/songs/Mademoiselle%20Igor%20-%20Quelqu_un%20que%20j_usais%20de%20connaitre%20%28Gueautiaient%29.mp3)</comment>


Show HN: The Silicon C++14 Web Framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/matt-42/silicon <comment><USER2> the requirement for pre-processing makes me a bit suspicious, it's going to be a pain to interact with other parts of the toolchain, so i would hope there's a very good reason for it. i would make this at the top of the README.md.

The same comments apply to a lesser extent to the C++14 requirement- does your framework really benefit from using C++14 features over say C++11 ? Again I would make this clear at the top of the README.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. I'll make it clear in the README. The preprocessing can be easy done by hand for those who want to skip the use of the preprocessor, it is actually pretty simple:

[...]

@test

[...]

is equivalent to:

iod_define_symbol(test, _test)

[...]

s::_test

[...]

Their is 3 reason for implementation of the @ syntax:

      - Not having to pre-declare all the symbols.

      - Replacing s::_ by @

      - Suggesting a new simple but powerful feature to
        the teams writing clang++ and g++.

And yes, silicon needs generic lambda function from C++14 . But this is less a problem since this is already in g++, clang++, and soon in the visual studio c++ compiler.

<comment><USER3> Could it not have been expressed with just a macro?

EDIT: Down votes? lol

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the tranformation done by the preprocessor: [https://gist.github.com/matt-42/a53cc0b0a8d8f1cf673f](https://gist.github.com/matt-42/a53cc0b0a8d8f1cf673f)

It would be really convenient to have it done by the C preprocessor, but it seems impossible to me to get it with macro only. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER4> It seems like you could do something like:

        #define IOD_SYM(name) iod_define_symbol(name, _##name);
        #define S(name) s::_##name;

Then use S(test) instead of @test and any files that need these symbols defined could just have IOD_SYM(test) at the top or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> #define S(name) is a bit dangerous. It would affect any C/C++ function called S.

<comment><USER5> Actually using [ZLang]([https://github.com/pfultz2/ZLang](https://github.com/pfultz2/ZLang)), you could define them like this:

        #define IOD_DEFINE_SYMBOL(name) iod_define_symbol(name, _##name)
        #define IOD_S(name) s::_##name

        #define ZLANG_iod_define (IOD_DEFINE_SYMBOL)
        #define ZLANG_iod_s (IOD_S)

And then compiling with `-DZLANG_NS=iod` you can call it like this:

        // Define symbols
        $(define hello)
        $(define message)

        auto hello_api = make_api(

            // The hello world procedure.
            $(s hello) = [] () { return D($(s message) = "Hello world."); }

        );

Also, ZLang can be supported without a need for a dependency on ZLang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the author has seen Facebook proxygen[1] (another C++ http framework), a comparison to it would be helpful.

At first glance, it looks like the Silicon dependency _microhttpd_ is somewhat analogous to proxygen. Is the Silicon value-added proposition the extra layers on top such as auto gen of client-side code, etc?

[1] [https://github.com/facebook/proxygen](https://github.com/facebook/proxygen)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, Silicon should be seen as a glue between low level http libraries, a message encoding format, others externals resources like databases, and your actual API.

You can use it with microhttpd, or any other network libraries (the current version provides backends to cpp-netlib and mimosa [https://github.com/abique/mimosa](https://github.com/abique/mimosa)). Future integration with websocket library is planned.

Don't know much about proxygen but it seems like the goal of the project are similar: Ease the writing of high performance C++ web APIs. However, when reading proxygen echo sample [1], I would say that silicon has a higher level of abstraction.

[1] [https://github.com/facebook/proxygen/tree/master/proxygen/ht...](https://github.com/facebook/proxygen/tree/master/proxygen/httpserver/samples/echo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the concepts behind this framework, even if the '@' symbol is debatable. I think, combined with something like CodeSynthesis' ODB ORM (which apparently supports migrations now), something like this could be used to create some really efficient, light weight web applications that give frameworks like node.js a run for their money.

I like the idea of running a light C++ application on a crappy $5/month VPS and squeezing out every last drop of performance, built on top of the idea that modern C++ developers can crank out solutions as fast as Ruby or Python developers. From interviewing and talking to people, I don't think the vast majority of developers really understand how far C++ has come in the last 15 years.

The real PITA with web frameworks is how they interact with the database. Now that C++ has some decent ORMs, an improved feature set, and some strong renewed interest, I think we can make C++ a "web language".

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll write more about it later, but silicon actually has a nice way to deal with databases. It currently only support sqlite, but it has:

\- a sqlite middleware: See the example here: [https://github.com/matt-42/silicon#middlewares](https://github.com/matt-42/silicon#middlewares)

\- a sqlite ORM middleware: [https://github.com/matt-42/silicon/blob/master/silicon/sqlit...](https://github.com/matt-42/silicon/blob/master/silicon/sqlite_orm.hh)

\- a generic CRUD implementation (relying on the ORM): [https://github.com/matt-42/silicon/blob/master/tests/crud.cc](https://github.com/matt-42/silicon/blob/master/tests/crud.cc)

The mysql, redis, postgresql equivalents will come soon.

<comment><USER8> That is pretty awesome! Something for postgresql would be great.

My stack heavily relies on pg and the other ORMs performance have been disappointing, I need to use something like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The @ definition is insane, something which would never fly in large scale projects. And who names a library function D? If the authors feels typing full meaningful function names is too much he should stay with Javascript. Good C++ is code which is readable by 3rd parties not just yourself.

This whole library smacks of #define BEGIN { #define END }

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for you feedback. The @ is just a convenient syntaxic sugar. I will explain in the README how to use silicon with plain C++ code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really enjoy the C++ language but am incredibly rusty since I haven't had a job in a very long time that requires the knowledge of use of the language. I was actually thinking about writing my own web framework for fun and learning (a bonus if it became useful but I wasn't holding my breath) but now that I see this I'm going to play around with it and see if it doesn't want I wanted or if I'll still work on one.

Not a huge fan of the preprocessor usage but still very interesting and very cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if it not clear in the readme. The preprocessor is optional. I posted the plain c++ version of the hello_word example here: [https://github.com/matt-42/silicon/issues/2#issuecomment-705...](https://github.com/matt-42/silicon/issues/2#issuecomment-70511982)

I will add a note in the readme about the preprocessor and how to bypass it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have to admit, I have no idea what the @ symbol does. Can anyone clarify?

It can't be a macro, so I assume it's a C++14 feature I'm not aware of.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not part of C++14, it is a small syntaxic sugar that compiles to iod symbols. A compiler convert it to plain C++. In short, their are empty objects holding a unique C++ type. More info here: [https://github.com/matt-42/iod](https://github.com/matt-42/iod)

<comment><USER12> Pretty interesting Matt, would you consider uploading to biicode (a C++ deps manager) so that C++ programmers reuse it in there projects?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice idea. I probably do so after I fix the first batch of issues.

<comment><USER12> This is the getting started guide:

[http://docs.biicode.com/c++/gettingstarted.html](http://docs.biicode.com/c++/gettingstarted.html)

Hope you find it useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is so exciting! I wanna test it out right now and I have so many questions.

are there any more docs than the description on Github readme?

I know this sounds very n00b of me, but can I use this as an Api layer for raw data?

I'd love to see more middlewares built around it. I used the 'Tree frog framework' for a while, I felt my work flow was not too efficient due to different api layers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your enthusiasm, you can post your questions here. The project is still young and not funded so I do not have much time to write a comprehensive doc, but I'll do my best.

What do you mean by Api layer for raw data?

<comment><USER8> you actually answered on my question on another reply. I want to make a postgres adapter and use this to retrieve the data, since my current API is written in ruby and it's a bit too slow.

For the funding part! I'd love to help, perhaps a good start would be using it inside some solution :)! Been there done that. Either way kudos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where are the benchmarks? Seriously, I'd expect this thing to fly.

<comment><AUTHOR> The perf depends on the backend. However the overhead of the framework is almost 0. I'll publish the benchmark but with microhttpd I was able to serve 280k req/second with the hello work example and a 4 cores I5 processor

<comment><USER14> > I was able to serve 280k req/second

Please don't forget to measure latency - both averages and percentiles :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> the point of this kind of thing is that it can allow super fast performance for critical endpoints:

Suppose your app consumes a JSON api and it turns out that one or two endpoints constitute most of the server load.

Rewriting one or two endpoints using a lightweight, fast framework can be a great solution, so long as you are already being smart about caching and there aren't other bottlenecks in your architecture.

</comment><comment><USER16> why not Assembly? it's faster... :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess you meant that C++ is verbose.. But silicon is designed such that you do not write more lines than you would in Go, Nodejs or Ruby frameworks.

<comment><USER17> New features like auto and lambdas reduce C++'s verbosity to manageable levels. In many cases it's less verbose than Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Building on an unused standard ensures failure and is little more than masturbation. The use of preprocessor sugar proves this yet further.

<comment><USER19> That was the useful comment of the day :D Seriously, share your failure with the world so we can understand your point.

<comment><USER18> That c++ grew the way it did by providing a slow moving target for developers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: what makes a good developer? - <AUTHOR> Short version:
What makes a good developer? What can I do to prove that/learn if I'm a good one? (also with regard to hiring decisions)
Longer version:
I've got more than six years of experience working as a software developer now, but through my whole career I had doubts about my skill level. In a couple of places I was the only developer or the most skilled one, even though I was pretty junior then (I come from an industrial town in one of the ex-Eastern bloc countries - not the most advanced place really).
I also worked in a couple of places where there were more skilled guys around, but the level of these companies was still not too high, so I knew some of the things I saw there were not actually the best practices.
Finally I got a job in a place I thought was good - they are in financial industry, can afford to (and do) hire people from across the world, some of their ex-employees joined Google, so I felt pretty confident about their level.
I was fired from that job a few months ago, and the whole process that led up to it was very difficult for me. The official reason was 'not meeting expectations', and it was implied that I'm not a good developer at all.
The whole process was pretty dirty from the other side, with lack of communication, ambiguous statements that were not to be discussed and (at times) directly contradictory input. What makes me think that these problems weren't only mine is the fact that employee turnover was high: a team of ten saw four people joining and five leaving (including all four newcomers) in about a year. I believe a good deal of personal dislike from the manager could also be present in my case, so I'm quite sceptical about the assesment - but I admit I had problems, so my professional self-esteem is still quite damaged.
Now, I'm looking for a way to restore it. There are a couple of details to take into account: I was working in Western Europe, and my visa depended on my job (which made that whole thing way more important and difficult that it normally would); the country I was working in isn't exactly the world center of software development, so I moved back to my home country to recover, but I still want to try emigrating to US/CA/UK/AU a year or two later.
Another thing is that I am also changing my primary language: I was working with the corporate standard language (think C#/Java), didn't really like the community and typical problems/jobs associated with it, and decided to move to a more 'hacker-friendly' language (think Perl/Python/Ruby).
So my goals are as follows: personally - get experience in the new language and prove to myself that I'm a good developer; with regard to the outside world - have something to show that would make me worthy of an employment in a good company and might convince them to go through the immigration process with me.
I could think of several ways to do it:
- join an opensource project;
- start my own project, get it running and attract users;
- have some visible/measurable proof like certifications or a position in TopCoder/Project Euler;
- a classic way of finding a beginner level job, learning at work and getting some recommendations there is also an option.
These are the ways that I can think of, but I don't really see the picture from the manager's side, and I think many people here are more experienced that I am. So I'd like to ask your opinion on these options, and would also love to hear about other ones that I could've missed.
Thanks in advance!
PS There's one more thing that's been haunting me the whole time - I try to look at the situation and figure out who and what was wrong there. Frankly, I can see the situation in two very different ways: either I'm a whiner who just cannot face the reality, or something was really broken in the management system there (and two biggest signs that make me suspect it are high turnover and contradictory managerial input). Could you please share your impression of the situation? <comment><USER2> With any firing, there is the official reason and the real reason. Short of gross misconduct on the part of the employee, they are often quite different.

From your description, there is a good chance that your firing was at least in part due to the organizational and staffing practices at the company (your technical skills may have played some role - but are unlikely to have been the sole reason and may not have even been the primary reason). High turnover is often symptomatic of incompetence in the hiring process, poor management techniques or a poor workplace environment.

On the flip side, corporations will often be concerned with employees who "are just passing through." There's a lot of risk potential in employing a person who is actively seeking another job - particularly if they appear to be dissatisfied and use the term "hacker" and has high level access to financial software.

As for your professional self-esteem, that's all in your head not in the external world. Some things just have to be learned the hard way, and the ability to recognize which sort of organizations are a good fit - and which sorts are not - can be one of those. Certain personality types survive in corporations and banks, and other types don't. Neither group has a monopoly on technical skill or personal character.

Only you can choose to cowboy up and pursue your long term goals, which are ambitious, or not.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great answer, thanks!

I suspected some of this stuff, and it's nice to know that other people also see that and it's not just me being paranoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Such a high turnover is a major red flag. Still, if you want to take a self- evaluation take a look at this programmer competency matrix:

[http://www.indiangeek.net/wp- content/uploads/Programmer%20co...](http://www.indiangeek.net/wp- content/uploads/Programmer%20competency%20matrix.htm)

It is by no means authoritative but it could be a start for you to brush up on weak spots.

<comment><USER4> That is a great skills matrix. I have some set learning goals for myself(outside of work) this year and this matrix just confirms that I am heading in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -Einstein_

That's the quote that's been banging around in my head since I've been trying to clean up the mess left by the programmer I replaced.

When I think of a good programmer, I think that reading/understanding their code should be as simple as possible. If I'm reading through the controller of a basic Rails app, it should be pretty simple. I should be able to easily figure out what's going on. I shouldn't see a 100 line action that mixes view and model code. If I'm reading through the Rails core, I should expect to spend significant time understanding what's going on. Simple as possible, but not simpler.

In my experience, bad programmers take misguided pride in writing complex code (which is _always_ more brittle than clean, clear code). Or they think _you_ are the bad programmer because you don't immediately understand it.

Good programmers are programmers that are fun to work with (code-wise especially) that get things done. At least that's my working definition.

Here's how I judge myself:

1) Do other programmers have good things to say about working with me?

2) Do other programmers have good things to say about my code?

3) Do I get things done/working?

4) When I read my old code, do I understand it quickly (relative to the complexity)?

5) When I read my old code, do I see things that I could have done better (shows personal growth)?

The Dunning-Kruger effect is always on my mind as well.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect>

edit: formatting, typo

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, great answer!

I indeed solved some problems in a more complex way than it was necessary - though I wasn't proud of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I won't pretend to have any answers but if you want someone to discuss ideas/share experiences with, drop me an email. (contact email in profile)

</comment><comment><USER6> _Frankly, I can see the situation in two very different ways: ..._

That's one problem identified!</comment>


Thank HN: for the help getting DigitalOcean into Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigitalOcean

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not even a customer, just a prospective customer, and 8-year wikipedia editor looking for NPOV information, so I was surprised when the article I wrote got deleted for lack of NPOV. I got a fair amount of help in the deletion review, including a pointer to the googlecache of a previous deletion, and additional facts about DO and some insight on how to maneuver through a Wikipedia review.</comment>


ICE Agents Struggle to Substantiate Trump's Lies About Immigrants - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2017/10/04/ice-raids-trump-immigration-deportation/ <comment><USER2> 'The raids — which led to 680 arrests nationwide — were the first in an _ongoing series_ of mass enforcement operations ordered by the _Trump administration_. Last week, more than 450 people were arrested in a similar sweep the agency dubbed "Operation Safe City."'

Then you read the linked memo[1] and find that _eight of the nine_ actions mentioned took place during the _Obama administration_ , and given that the ninth occurred less than 3 weeks into the Trump administration, it had to have been planned and scheduled by Obama appointees.

Note that _The Intercept_ failed to report on _any_ of these ICE operations that went down while Obama was in office.

[1] [https://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/library/factsheets/pdf/facts...](https://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/library/factsheets/pdf/factsheet- fugops.pdf)</comment>


Twitter Third-Party Dev Exodus Inevitable - <AUTHOR> http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2010/04/twitter-third-party-dev-exodus-inevitable/

<comment><USER2> _As the days go by, more and more people come onto the service, and see an ad- free environment. Introducing that sometime in the future is going to be a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of users._

Throughout his whole essay he keeps asserting that advertising will drive users away but I don't think that's necessarily the case. I'm sure a lot of casual Internet users don't care about an ad here and there. And then there's always ways to filter the ads out (think Adblock).

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps twitter plan to inject Twitter for iPhone with IADS.</comment>


Miss Out on Lyft's $530M Series E Funding Round? Maybe Not - <AUTHOR> http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2015/05/67274-miss-out-on-lyfts-530-million-series-e-funding-round-maybe-not/

<comment><USER2> Wow, i thought there was a $10M minimum, nice to see we can all get a piece

<comment><USER3> The $2,500 minimum is neat, but you still need to be an accredited investor, which means you're essentially already a millionaire.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank God for JOBS Act Title III. Title III finally allows "non-accredited crowdfunding" component to the JOBS Act, which allows non-accredited investors to participate & invest into private companies at $1,000 to $5,000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have to love private equity crowdfunding opportunities.</comment>


Is Jobless Growth Inevitable? - <AUTHOR> http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jobless-growth-inevitable-by-sami-mahroum-and-elif-bascavusoglu-moreau-2015-03

<comment><AUTHOR> There were two things that caught my eye in this article:

1\. "The Netherlands seems to be undergoing a sort of industrial revolution in reverse, with jobs moving from factories to homes."

2\. "Almost 70% of Dutch business owners were exclusively self-employed in 2008."

You can really see that this freelance society we live in is very much like what Alvin Toffler was talking about in 1980 with his book The Third Wave:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(Toffler)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_\(Toffler\))</comment>


Coronavirus Revised Stanford estimate Santa Clara County had 54 times more cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/coronavirus-revised-stanford-estimate-says-santa-clara-county-had-54-times-more-cases-than-we-knew-about <comment><USER2> You don't get a gourmet meal by starting with garbage and reprocessing it and adding garnishings.

Most notably

"But there's continued concern about the methodology. Volunteers for the test were recruited from Facebook — so its sampling was neither random nor representative of the community as a whole."

For an expert review of all the problems please see

[https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of- covid-19-antibody...](https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of- covid-19-antibody-seroprevalence-in-santa-clara-county- california-1f6382258c25)

In the midst of a crisis the poor quality work of the scientists suggests that they either don't take the matter sufficiently seriously or don't possess the necessary skills to deserve our trust. It's a dangerous time to take bad advice especially at a time people are so desperate for good news.</comment>


List files in the hitlar mode - <AUTHOR>

was just playing with the shell. it struck to me, just by rearranging the parameters, i was able to remember what they did and in a cool way.
enter the hitlar mode.
$ ls -hitlar
shows all items with inodes, in list view, human readable size, sorted by modification time in reverse,
$ ls -Fhitlar
shows the same with classification info. <comment><AUTHOR> add the hitlar mode alias to your .bashrc.

echo "alias hitlar='ls -Fhitlar'" >> ~/.bashrc

$hitlar

$hitlar filename</comment>


Free idea: why there are no trailers for theater plays? - <AUTHOR>

I believe there are two reasons people don't go to theater more often: higher ticket prices and lack of information. If you only have a written review by some snoby artsy people and no friend to recommend a play, you might as well go see the latest Transformer - at least you know what you going to get for your money.<p>If there was a company that produced nice and professional looking (like holywood) trailers of theater plays I believe it could make good business helping producers and theater companies raise their revenue. <comment><USER2> There are _a lot_ of trailers made for Broadway. Even tours of Broadway shows have trailers advertising when a show is coming to a city near you.

A lot of plays (not musicals) might not have trailers, I don't follow plays as I do musicals.

But I suspect the reason there are fewer commercials available to a wider audience is actually due to the type of audience they want to attract. Neither theater owners nor performers/actors want the typical movie-goer to be the audience screaming, talking on their cell phone, or generally doing anything against the rules. At a Broadway show excessive phone use or talking can get you kicked out. Trying to take a picture often _will_ get you kicked out.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good example of how parallelism sometimes totally breaks down. Theater and film seem quite similar so your trailer idea sounds logical. To see the problem with it, talk to any person involved with theater, they will absolutely hate it, it goes against everything they are trying to do. See, most movies are created for commercial entertainment, while theater productions are rarely so (at least they don't see this in that light). Think about a trailer for a Chekhov play or a recent one, say _Burning_ by Thomas Bradshaw. To many ears the idea is abhorrent.

<comment><USER4> They take pictures and make posters for upcoming shows? Why not trailers? I think because video production of plays is difficult, their time scales are compressed often still tweaking things directly before opening night. You would pretty much have to dedicate 1 or 2 hrs of the entire casts time just for filming enough footage for a 30 second spot. It is interesting but I think difficult. If you can have a small crew, not take much time and get an edit out quickly. You _might_ be able to charge at most maybe 2k for a fully edited trailer. Probably more on the 1k or less scale.

<http://www.broadway.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Probably the trailer, as we think of it in the movies, is too expensive. Trailers are shown to and amortized across a national audience, and I assume are placed in front of movies where the audience will have a positive response.

That said, I see static local ads in the discount theaters. I suppose a theater owner would show any ad that was paid for, but most movie theaters are chains and probably make large deals for the trailers, just like they do for the movies.

Or something.

</comment><comment><USER6> I developed a site called StageGrade (<http://www.stagegrade.com>) that aggregates theatre reviews.

We hope to at least get around the problem of having to overly rely on one or a few professional critics' reviews by aggregating them all and also by allowing users to leave their own reviews which are given equal visibility to the critic reviews.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd prefer no trailers at movies, or really make them _trail_ the film for folks that might want to see them.</comment>