Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second Crash - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/swiss-post-suspends-drone-delivery-service-after-second-crash <comment><AUTHOR> This could have been very ugly:

 _the 10-kg drone suffered an uncontrolled crash "in a wooded area of Zurich's university quarter only 50 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children."_

One of the things that few people are aware about is quadrotor MTBF is very low relative to other common vehicles. For many drones, the expectation for failure dramatically increases just after 100-200 hours of operation[1]. Figuring out points of failures, building systematic fault trees and increasing MTBF by order of magnitude or two would be big part of the drone delivery projects.

[1] [https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST- NSPDAV_...](https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST- NSPDAV_USMA.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Wow, that's shockingly low. The paper doesn't describe why -- do you have any idea what part(s) are failing so quickly? The rotors, the motors, the battery?

For commercial delivery service, it seems quite clear that we'll need either

1) "enterprise-grade" drones (like difference between consumer and enterprise SSD's),

2) reliable sensors to detect imminent failure before a flight,

and/or 3) easy replacement of failing parts.

I mean, for many hobbyists 100-200 hrs seems like a reasonable cost/benefit tradeoff... but not even _close_ for commercial delivery services.

<comment><USER5> > do you have any idea what part(s) are failing so quickly? The rotors, the > motors, the battery?

It doesn't really matter what fails, what matters is that there is no way to do a controlled descent once anything goes wrong on a loaded drone because there is no margin for error. A drone this heavy relies on the whole chain of components functioning perfectly.

I'm surprised it is as good as it is given the number of parts. If it were a winged drone you'd at least have a chance to glide it to a safe spot, but a drone that is kept up by spinning props can only crash uncontrolled. There was a video of downing one in a more controlled way but the only fault it could cover was single rotor failure and even then the amount of control was very limited.

These things have absolutely no business over areas occupied by people.

<comment><USER6>
      If it were a winged drone you'd at
      least have a chance to glide it to
      a safe spot, but a drone

The last time I looked at the retail quadcopter/RC plane market, when faced with a communications failure most of the quadcopters would return to the launch point and safely land. None of the RC planes had such a function - <USER3> seemed to just turn off the propeller and glide in whatever direction they were facing at the time.

Seemed to me the quadcopter response to communication failures was a much safer one. Is this still the case? It was quite some time ago.

<comment><USER7> >The last time I looked at the retail quadcopter/RC plane market, when faced with a communications failure most of the quadcopters would return to the launch point and safely land. None of the RC planes had such a function - <USER3> seemed to just turn off the propeller and glide in whatever direction they were facing at the time.

Once you have a quadcopter you've got enough digital hardware and software that adding "return to base" is basically free since it's just an additional software routeine.

RC planes don't already have the required hardware/software to implement a return to base feature because they don't need it and of course nobody is going to greatly increase the cost and complexity of the product just to add that one feature.

<comment><USER8> A handful of the quad controllers also support planes. I have multiple RC planes with that functionality - it adds a little complexity but not a ton.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an additional potential recovery mode: ETH Zurich's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control [0] has done amazing work on quadcopter recovery after rotor control loss [1] (I believe they are down to controlled flight with only one or two rotors left, but I cannot find the link right now). I've been waiting for this to filter into the real world but have yet to see it.

[0] [https://idsc.ethz.ch/](https://idsc.ethz.ch/) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs)

<comment><USER10> This is really impressive. Are the algos published / open sourced / licensable?

<comment><USER11> Here you go: [https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp- content/publicatio...](https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp- content/publications/2014/mueIEEE14.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazing. I can see my flat in that photo :)

Anyway, I think there are a few things to point out here:

This program was in place to test the efficiency of sending biological samples between hospitals quickly.

I'm not entirely sure why this is a problem we need to solve. Is it really better to use drone delivery of blood samples to central hospitals than to add another testing machine at the remote location? Seems like the answer could be no.

It's really weird to get a letter in the mail telling you that a blood delivery drone crashed in a lake nearby.

This program seems like it's an answer in search of a problem.

<comment><USER13> A lab is not just "a testing machine". Depending on the analysis being performed, you need an array specialist equipment. Then the lab has to be staffed.

I imagine shipping samples to a shared facility is significantly more cost effective, otherwise it wouldn't be being trialled.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > According to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the 10-kg > drone suffered an uncontrolled crash "in a wooded area of Zurich's > university quarter only _50 yards_ away from a group of playing kindergarten > children."

Something tells me that a German newspaper wouldn't be using yards. Sure enough, looking at the source, it's a mistake in Google's translation model

> Dass die mehr als 10 Kilogramm schwere Drohne vom Typ Matternet M2V9 in > einem Waldstück des Zürcher Universitätsviertels nur rund _50 Meter_ > entfernt von einer Gruppe spielender Kindergartenkinder zu Boden krachte, > erwähnte der staatliche Logistikkonzern indes nicht.

Bing translate gets it right though.

<comment><USER15> That's a fine translation, better than "only 54.68 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children."

<comment><USER16> Well, to be fair the original German has "rund" in it that was lost in translation, so that would be "only approximately 50 meters", which would make the 50 yards acceptable.

Probably I would have translated it as "less than 60 yards" ;-).

<comment><USER17> Interestingly, if you remove "rund" it changes from "only 50 yards" to "just 50 meters".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Delivery drones are definitely unnecessary in densely populated areas. It's cool and futuristic, but it's not economical at all, it's very unsafe and also loud. However it's a wonderful thing for rural places with poor infrastructure. For example Zipline in Rwanda, one of the most interesting solutions an engineering perspective too: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c](https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c)

</comment><comment><USER19> Having large numbers of drones in the sky, where any failure has the potential to drop a large weight on a person seems like a show stopper. Or just crashing onto a house or car and causing damage is going to get annoying for the community real fast. I doubt drones can be made as reliable as aeroplanes at anything like a realistic price.

<comment><USER20> This is an emotional answer: "any failure...potential... large weight... person... show stopper". That's emotions speaking, we need probabilities and reason instead (because a delivery truck should trigger the same fear with you but it doesn't).

Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions, like for these urgent hospital deliveries in Switzerland, or in dangerous/isolated settings. And maybe drones will become safer and safer, like with parachutes in the article.

Okay the parachutes will need Dyneema strings instead of simple ones, just like parachutes were used before Dyneema was invented. Oh wait, someone's working on Dyneema parachutes for drones: [https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone- par...](https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-parachute- manufactured-from-dyneema/)

As you can see, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Find how you can save lives and make the world better, not how to use emotions to exert power and kill Freedom. The world needs innovation more than ever, be it electronic cigarettes or self driving cars or drones.

<comment><USER21> This is a fanboy answer: "Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions"

Western airliners are very safe, but the USA averages one GA accident per day:

[https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2...](https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=21274)

Helicopters have much worse failure modes, even in multi-million dollar aircraft. Small drones are the worst of all, and should not be flown over populated areas.

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

The FAA historically has regulated that aircraft fly 500' and above over non sparsely-populated areas for a reason. Or you lose your license.

Drone deliveries fundamentally violate that, as regardless of where your warehouse is located, you're deliberately flying towards a populated area (ie. customers.)

The above is why the FAA has justly been slow on allowing drones into the airspace, and why you have to register them.

A constructive comment I can add is that I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power- off below 10 mph.

Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.

<comment><USER20> 347 lives lost per year, or one per million people. Similar to Prion disease fatalities. Sure, that's 3 times more than lightening strikes... but that's still extremely low AND safer than whatever.

As for the risk of a plane over a populated area, I think it's safe to say that a 4kg drone is a much lesser threat than a Cessna weighing 200 times more, and that's a very small plane. So it's really not fair to compare a drone crash and a plane crash (we're not talking military drones here, I hope you've read the article).

"...I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph": and it seems many people disagree but feel free to prove them wrong and show the world how you can glide a drone to the ground in a dense city to deliver blood at a hospital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really don't get the hacker news algorithms on these posts, I've submitted this interesting article 7 days ago [0] and there was no interest (which is fine, that's not the issue). I guess 7 days is the cut-off then?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123)

</comment><comment><USER11> > This is the first time we had a failure on the vehicle's parachute system.

Doesn't this mean that neither Matternet nor the Swiss Post tested the failure modes of this drone enough? If it never happened before, they didn't test it enough to get any estimate for a MTBF for this particular part.

But this is to be expected from the Swiss Post, they do sloppy work and blame others, just read their dementi:

>As such, we have asked Matternet to implement various urgent measures:

>[...]The shrill whistle, which alerts people near the drone when it is making an emergency landing, will be made louder.

The whistle couldn't be heard in that accident... Sound like somebody didn't test a single emergency landing in that forest and asked the numerous strollers whether they have heard anything

</comment><comment><USER23> This says ~3000 successful flights with 2 crashes - how many road incidents per journey does a standard mail truck encouter?

Is 1500 trips a low / mid / high figure with regards to collisions?

<comment><USER24> The USPS has ~30,000 motor vehicle accidents per year.

The entire USPS fleet travels ~1.28B miles / year, with the LLVs traveling 764M miles.

The LLVs travel about 18 miles per day, 300 days per year, which gives you an estimated 43 million LLV trips per year.

Assuming all 30,000 motor vehicle accidents are LLVs, that amounts to 1 accident every 1433 LLV _trips_.

Of course, on each LLV "trip", it delivers letters and parcels to hundreds of addresses; each drone delivery is presumably one.

(The USPS also averages 1 accident every ~43,000 miles; this is significantly above the US average of 1 accident per 165,000 miles driven. I would assume the increased rate is (1) USPS vehicles drive slow and stop frequently along their routes; I would guess many accidents are other vehicles driving too fast and trying to pass in unsafe areas (2) distracted driving; drivers are performing other tasks eg retrieving the next addresses mail while driving and (3) every USPS accident is likely reported; drivers are responsible for the condition of their vehicle and small fender-benders that we might not report are likely included in USPS statistics.)

<comment><USER25> // 1 accident every 1433 LLV trips.

So an accident once per 1443 llv trips * ~400(average packages per llv trip) -> an accident per ~600k packages -> will need an accident per 600k drone trips * ~ 10mile/trip -> an accident per 6M drone miles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This was posted a few days ago when it was "news":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123)

It's really odd sometimes how duplicate, late posts get more comments and upvotes than the original. Perhaps the time of posting is too important.

</comment><comment><USER27> I agree that this is bad, 2 crashes at relatively low volume is not great. However, I do wonder if reason will prevail in the long run with regards to overall safety and environmental impact. I recall early laws being very unfair to vehicular traffic, such as the apocryphal law that if a car startled a horse the owner should dismantle the car until the horse is no longer perturbed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Zipline seems to be the more like successor in this field. [https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline-...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline- emphasizes-safety-with-its-delivery-drones-in-preparation-for-us-operations)

</comment><comment><USER29> One thing I don't understand is, why are they doing live testing above inhabited areas? Until the tech is proven, the only right thing to do is to implement drones routes that avoid populated areas as much as possible, or at least go thru very sparsely populated areas by default, until all failure modes are well understood.

<comment><USER30> They didn't, it happened over a forest. Many people seem to think it happened near a kindergarten, but that's not the case, it just happened that kindergarten-aged kids were playing in the area.

You can find everything in the report (in German) [https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV- berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pd...](https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV- berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pdf) Just enter the coordinates of the crash in Google map, you can see there's no school around.

<comment><USER29> Thanks, then the article was confusing on that particular point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why has IEEE Spectrum turned their nice HTML blog into a site that requires JS to read?

</comment><comment><USER32> 2 crashes. I didn't see the article mention how many successful deliveries there have been.

</comment><comment><USER33> Sadly, as pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, we respond to spectacle over data.

How many deaths per 1,000,000,000 package delivery happen with trucks? Truck deliver is not a zero death thing. I'd even want to see truck air pollution factored in somehow.

If drones have a lower %, we should view falling death boxes as acceptable. Even though it does have a strangely dystonia aspect to it.

<comment><USER19> I think the difference from a psychological point of view is that getting a drone drop randomly on your head feels, well random. Therefore it does not feel like you can do much of anything to avoid it, unlikely though it would be in practice. Getting killed by a terrorist or mass killer feels equally bad because it is random.

But something like sky divers getting killed does not bother me because I can avoid it, by not sky diving. Just like I can choose not to drive and so avoid almost any chance of being killed by another driver. It is the randomness and the fact you cannot avoid it that, I think, makes to less acceptable.

<comment><USER20> I personally know someone who was killed by a UPS truck on his parking lot. Don't think randomness only happens to others.

<comment><USER34> But the example you use is exactly that: something happening to another person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It seems so cowardly halting progress so fast just because of two harmless crashes. There's never going to be zero risk to anything. Still much safer than cars so far.

<comment><USER36> Progress is not necessarily halted by not having something in production. Perhaps it needs more work in testing. The article says 3000 successes/2 failures. That is too high when you have 10kg things falling out of the sky.

<comment><USER37> 2 packages falling from the sky over 3000.... sounds like a higher failure rate than the current vehicle delivery mechanisms.

I wonder what the score is for postal vehicles (similarly for crashes with other vehicles and the like)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Who could have guessed that falling out of the sky would be the main issue with things carrying things through the sky?

</comment><comment><USER39> Seems strange that Swiss Post would be the first to test out these drones, given the extremely high standard of quality that the Swiss demand. The reality is that any new technology, especially hardware, will need time to mature and work out the bugs. One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad: reality has a lot of edge cases to test for.

<comment><AUTHOR> > One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad

It is actually _very bad_. Amazon ships ~2M packages per day by one estimates. Assume only 10% of these gets drone delivered. This would translate to 66 crashes _each day_. If only 10% of these crashes happen on people, it would be 6 people randomly getting killed each day.

<comment><USER40> If you look at the surface area of the world, a tiny percentage of it is taken up by people's heads. Like, probably <.01%. Unless you'r eat a large gathering (where right now it's illegal to fly drones.)

<comment><USER41> It's not just people's heads that need protection. Roads, traffic lights, cars, power lines, windows... people can die in lots of ways other than having a drone fall directly on their head.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


RIM, "what did you learn from the iPhone?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p014f43k <comment><USER2> Surprisingly, it played for me in the US. BBC usually geo-restricts things. That was like a routine out of Dilbert. RIM would have been better off sending a robot.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hilarious and somewhat disturbing to listen to.

</comment><comment><USER4> i thought it might be a intern doing the interview, its the Managing Director :/</comment>


GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openai/gpt-3 <comment><USER2> Duplicate thread at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379) (with arxiv link)

<comment><USER3> We've moved the comments thither. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Write your app in HTML5, upload it and get back app-store ready apps - <AUTHOR> https://build.phonegap.com/ <comment><USER3> I think PhoneGap is doing great work, they're obviously getting better, and I don't mean to diminish what others have poured so much effort into.

But, are there any successful apps made with PhoneGap? Writing apps in HTML5 is constantly hyped, but there isn't a single HTML app out of the dozens on my iPhone except Netflix. PhoneGap's app gallery doesn't have a single app I've heard of.

(The Netflix app isn't too pleasant, either, unfortunately.)

<comment><USER4> The new LinkedIn and OkCupid apps are primarily HTML5 based. Not quite the same, but every new release of the Facebook app seems to have more of its existing views replaced by HTML5 counterparts.

<comment><USER5> I'm fairly certain that the Facebook iPhone app does not UIWebViews to render anything. Their fast-scrolling tableviews are painstakingly crafted from scratch, natively, and (I believe) still use Joe Hewitt's framework for complex view rendering. I know some guys on the Facebook iPhone app team and they're die-hard Cocoa developers, I can't see them ever saying "screw it" and using a UIWebView with HTML.

<comment><USER6> Some, but not all, table views were replaced with web views a few months ago. News Feed is one example that is now HTML.

<comment><USER7> Hm. How do you handle progressive loading? Do you even bother, or do you just load up the entire news feed and let the WebKit struggle with keeping images in-ram/in-cache etc?

<comment><USER8> Netflix uses an interesting WebKit-based approach for progressive loading.

Basically, they reuse cells like UITableView does.

[http://cdn-0.nflximg.com/us/presentations/htmltvui/oscon-201...](http://cdn-0.nflximg.com/us/presentations/htmltvui/oscon-2011/Netflix%20Webkit- Based%20UI%20for%20TV%20Devices.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Thank you, good sir!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <https://build.phonegap.com/docs/ios-builds>

"Since PhoneGap Build uses Apple's standard development process to build applications, you will need to sign up for their developer program to build iOS applications on PhoneGap Build. _You will also need a Mac_ to configure your certificate and provisioning profile."

:(

<comment><USER10> Check out AppMobi[1], it may be what you need - at least, from my brief glance at it, it looks like it: build iOS and android apps using HTML+JS, no need for a Mac or the iOS developer kit. The core tools are free too, but they charge for services such as compiling your program for iOS and such. They also have something called DirectCanvas which is basically HTML5 canvas without the rest of the browser cruft, for higher performance canvas apps (eg, games - <USER2> have built in support for the Impact JS game engine, for example).

[1] <http://www.appmobi.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm writing really a very large app for the company I work for. We're using PhoneGap with HTML and JavaScript and have many plugins.

What we are not having problems with is the fact that we only really have a single thread to do everything. All I can say is that I'm glad it wasn't my idea to build it this way.

<comment><USER12> This is a surprisingly often ignored limitation of the browsers. You _need_ threads to achieve decent performance given any significant complexity, and mobile CPUs are going multi-core.

<comment><USER11> Yep - Buttons are bad enough, but things like sliders are just the worst things imaginable!!

I thought it might be worth looking into web workers, but everything seems to interact with the DOM so that's not much help either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Speaking as someone writing a fairly major HTML5 iOS app using Jo and PhoneGap: this looks like a very helpful way to take the make-work out of the case where you have an app that uses no native functionality, and is not in any way optimized for best appearance.

That's not a knock - a lot of people have that use case, and spend a lot of time on their own systems for deploying to multiple platforms. Consider internal apps, for example, that don't have to be massively visually slick and polished.

But ... given the very large differences between even similar platforms, and even between versions of platforms, you're not going to be getting much from this if you are building ultra-slick apps in which you really do need consider, say, how hardware acceleration or browser quirks fit into the picture.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice, and I use PhoneGap for Android, but you lose all the niceties like access to hardware buttons (which means you convert limited screen space to menus) and keyboard and intents and whatnot.

I had to write some plugins to get my game working on Android (and there are still compatibility problems around opening intents), so PhoneGap apps definitely lose something in the usability department.

And of course animations are not successful in this environment.

Ads are a pain too, if that's important to you, with the Google Admob/Adwords migration happening and the mobile web vs app ambiguity.

PhoneGap seems helpful as a part of the app's main UI, but native chrome is still important to completing an app's functionality and usability. I don't see how Build solves that use case.

Still, it's a niche.

<comment><USER15> The menu button, back button, and search button all work with Phonegap. What version are you using?

<http://docs.phonegap.com/phonegap_events_events.md.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wasn't there a time when apple rejected phonegap apps? (they did reject one of mine for sure).

<comment><USER14> Yes. Policy changed in 2009.

<https://code.google.com/p/phonegap/downloads/list>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great service - I've used it to build a modest application or two for Android and iOS. One caveat: Phonegap plugins that include native components (for example, the Facebook plugin) can't be included in apps built with Phonegap Build (yet).

<comment><USER18> What plugins have you been using? Last time I look at pg, the plugins I found were alpha quality or just abandoned. I'd love to hear what's current. Thanks.

<comment><USER17> At the moment, just the Facebook plugin for Facebook Connect authentication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I started looking at PhoneGap but wasn't happy with Jquery Mobile for the UI. I am now trying out Titanium which offers a similar promise of ease for web/Javascript developers but with more native UI elements. So far so good but developing in Aptana/Eclipse-based Titanium Studio is a drag.

The more "consumer" your app the more likely it needs to be mobile. But I think there is probably a large class of apps where PhoneGap/Titanium make sense. Definitely in the internal business category where the audience is finite and the look-and-feel is secondary to the functionality and cost/ease of development and maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER20> This site is awesome. To try it out, I made a quick one page app, uploaded it, made signing keys, and got it to the Android Marketplace, all inside of a few hours. My first mobile app ever.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is my favorite example of an expertly-made PhoneGap app: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCtD4GuAqE>

So smooth.

<comment><USER22> Nice. Anyone know how they achieved the transition effect? It's not a simple CSS3 transform. The bottom of the page seems to move first, then the top of the page is dragged over.

<comment><USER23> It could be an artifact of the scanning used in the video capture. The image has moved between the time the top pixels and bottom pixels were recorded. I believe this is known as aliasing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe I'm missing something but given you write the app in HTML/JS it must be difficult to unit test your wrappers for the phonegap functions, as I assume you can't simply pull up your dev site from the phone's browser. I'm thinking particularly about things like the contacts or network status functions.

</comment><comment><USER25> Phone Gap paired with sencha would make one seriously native-feeling iPhone application. And all HTML5? Beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER26> Beta code pretty please?

</comment><comment><USER27> Funny I just released an application using this method yesterday. Too bad the Apple sales reporting site is down. I wanted to see how well HTML5 Apps sell.

<http://defyent.com/#astro-dating>

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there like a demo app with code I can look at? Thanks.

<comment><USER29> $ git clone <http://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start.git>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very curious to see how they implement this tool.

I would think there would have to be some type of "compiler hints" for particular app device builds.

</comment><comment><USER31> QUESTION: Is there a good tutorial about creating PhoneGap apps integrated to Rails apps?

</comment><comment><USER32> how different is this from strobe ?

<comment><USER33> You still need PhoneGap to build an iOS/Android app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> this looks cool!

</comment><comment><USER35> Upload your website, download a native app.

What is wrong with this picture? If you can build your app as a web app and don't require hardware access then I'd think twice whether a native app is required.

<comment><USER36> It's about being found in the app stores. That's where people look for stuff on their phones, that's where you need to come up if you have something you want on someone's phone.

Of course there is a lot of down-side to this, but it is what it is. I wish the App Stores, particularly the Android Market, would create a much more elaborate system of categories allowing people to narrow their browsing down to exactly what they want, then it wouldn't matter so much if there was a lot of useless crap in the app stores, because we would never see it.

<comment><USER37> This brings up an interesting point: is there anecdata regarding appstore presence being a gateway/entry-point for a website? That is, first the app, then the website?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I may be ignorant, but to write a complex app, don't you need HTML5 AND a mobile javascript framework like JQuery Mobile and Sencha? Or does HTML5 handle that too? If it does require a Javascript framework, that's when the quality deteoriates... I think imitating the look and feel of native apps is easy. Making the performance smooth on the other hand is hard.

<comment><USER39> HTML5 _is_ JavaScript. Without JavaScript, HTML5 is just a few semantic HTML tags (like header and section) and a few extra form input attributes (like required and placeholder).

As far as JavaScript frameworks go, you could use Sencha or jQuery Mobile or one of the other few dozen frameworks out there --- or you could roll your own.

I've been doing mobile web development for about a year now. I've done both PhoneGap and over-the-air mobile web/native apps (with embedded webviews that load HTML/CSS/JS from the web when requested). Both types of apps accepted by Apple and in the Appstore as well as in the Android Market. I would recommend rolling your own and not trying to imitate the look of native apps. One of the strengths of using HTML5 is that you can create a custom look and feel that doesn't look like every other app out there.

Since you mentioned Sencha and jQuery Mobile, here's what I think having used both:

Using Sencha is nothing at all like using HTML5. You don't even write HTML or CSS. You write JavaScript that uses Sencha's classes/methods. The look and feel very much tries to mimic native and they do a pretty good job at it...except that most widgets look like they were ripped from an iPhone, which is disorienting for users on Android. That said, you get good performance and a boatload of widgets/ui controls out of the box. The price for this is a large, multi-hundred kb framework and a commercial license.

jQuery Mobile doesn't really try to look native and it really doesn't "feel" native either. jQuery has it's own ui controls that more or less look identical on iPhone or Android. With jQuery Mobile, you do write HTML and have a more transparent view of that as well as of the CSS. But, you have to write HTML the "jQuery Mobile way" to utilize the UI built into the framework. You don't get as many widgets and ui-controls as you do in Sencha and overall, the look and feel is not of the same caliber either. But, it's smaller than Sencha, has your standard MIT license and is more easily modified.

Neither is perfect and both have pluses and minuses. If you know some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you will absolutely get better performance and and a smoother look and feel by rolling your own light JavaScript for your app that does just what it needs to do.

If you'd like to see an example app I built using PhoneGap and handrolled HTML/JavaScript/CSS, you can download Easy Baby from the Android Market. It's free. You'll find a link to it on my website: <http://newbabysleep.com>

<comment><USER40> I can't see why anybody would actually use jQuery Mobile and Sencha for web app development. I've tried them last week and they were impressive on a desktop browser. On a mobile device, not so much. Both jQuery Mobile and Sencha feel slow, very slow. The animations are choppy. Response times on clicks are way too long. Everything flickers like mad. Focus borders are drawn at all the wrong places. I can actually feel that it's a web app trying too hard to be a native app. On my Android phone it's even slower than on my iPad 1.

I'm not blaming jQuery Mobile or Sencha. I think mobile browsers are just not ready for delivering a smooth UI experience that's up to par with native apps.

<comment><USER7> Somehow we ended up with very different experiences. I played with Sencha Mobile Kitchen Sink demo on the iPhone 4 and it was quite impressive. <http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/demos/>

Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of that. My only other complain is that they messed up calculating tap areas for tabbar/toolbar items - Sencha has tap area equal to the visual size of the button, whereas UIKit assigns entire section of the toolbar (44 pixels tall in portrait), which makes a lot of difference in tap detection. But I don't see why they can't fix it, and then it would be pretty good...

To be clear, I am still staying away from UIWebView in favor of UIKit, but I am getting increasingly interested in this.

<comment><USER12> _Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of that._

This is _always_ the reply of web developers -- even on the desktop! "Yes, it's slow now, but it'll be faster with new hardware!".

Meanwhile, the native applications use that additional processor power to _do more stuff_ , and the webapps fall further behind again.

<comment><USER7> So? Desktop HTML/JS was too slow for a while, all the way until the point when it became fast enough to handle maps, email, finance etc. Remember MapPoint? It used o be a desktop map application. No one uses it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is there any way to get an iOS development license using no Apple device?

<comment><USER42> nope

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How much effort needed to convert my single html with few javascript files to be app-store eligible. I think there is more to just using the phonegap <http://www.mockuptiger.com/a/123wireframe.php>

<comment><USER44> cool web app. i think the difficult part of converting it for mobile would be the screen size necessary to work effectively and possibly getting the touch gestures to work properly for moving and resizing the controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Am I back to 2010? Or am I reading Reddit?</comment>


California lawmakers are proposing a tax on water bills - <AUTHOR> http://www.ocregister.com/2017/08/31/sacramento-sets-its-eye-on-taxing-our-drinking-water/ <comment><USER2> Of course they don't bother trying to, you know, lift the giant subsidies on water for agriculture when farmers are still using 10000 year old irrigation practices that result in most of the water evaporating into the air ....

<comment><USER3> More info from WashPo, "Agriculture is 80 percent of water use in California. Why aren't farmers being forced to cut back?":

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/a...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/agriculture- is-80-percent-of-water-use-in-california-why-arent-farmers-being-forced-to- cut-back/)

Lays out some on both sides, but still seems jarring to me that a state that sometimes contends with droughts is fighting to maintain so many water hungry crops.

Good discussion here of what might shift if agricultural water had a price, or some kind of pigouvian tax: [http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows- not-almonds-...](http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds- are-biggest-water-users/)

Like rice, that both consumes a lot of water and doesn't even produce that great of returns.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it always amazes me that we grow rice in a desert. But you might say the same for cotton, but in the case of cotton, long-staple cottons derived from ancient Egyptian cottons make superior cloth because of the longer fibers, but are susceptable to boll rot if it gets rain at the wrong time. It isn't always a simple analysis. If you want to give up growing cotton in California, be prepared for the quality of your shirts to go down.

The bottom line is it isn't the farmers who are the ultimate consumers of the water. We all use ag water when we buy food at the grocery store. We eat the water. You can't make an impact on ag water without impacting the consumer also, and that connection needs to be acknowledged. The farmers use the water, but they don't consume the water. We do.

<comment><USER5> This doesn't have to mean an across-the-board increase in food prices, though. Prices that consumers pay for goods should reflect the cost of the resources consumed in their production. If almonds in particular become more expensive at the grocery store (it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond), and this causes people to buy fewer almonds relative to other foods, and water is conserved as a result, then this seems like the right outcome. (If we did see an across-the-board increase in food prices, that could be fixed with government subsidies, if that were necessary to prevent the change from being a regressive tax.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "California is the fifth largest economy in the world, with a $183 billion > state budget and $125 billion general fund that is intended to fund > essential government services such as education, health and public safety. > The taxpayers of our state have already provided the necessary funding for > our Legislature to solve any challenge that impacts our communities."

Sums it up well. I know new challenges come up but California does/should already have a enough money to cover basic infrastructure.

<comment><USER7> Investment now saves money later in many cases. For example, climate change denying Florida will be halfway under water by the time the people give up on their state government and elect some people who will install pumps, barrier islands, etc. to mitigate the effects. The water is already noticeably higher in coastal areas.

Another good example is trains. They cost a ton upfront but they will shape entire communities for generations.

<comment><USER8> > Another good example is trains. They cost a ton upfront but they will shape > entire communities for generations.

In California? Which entire communities? I lived there for 30 years and know of only a few very, very narrow definitions of community for which that is true. A strip in downtown LA and some of the BART constituency. California does not have the density of NYC or Paris. I do not understand how the trains will affect more than .05% or so of the population.

<comment><USER9> Chicken/Egg conundrum. LA's low-density sprawl exists for three (maybe four/five) reasons: Geological (quake shake = low rise makes sense), availability of land, and lack of suitable transport infrastructure. (Possible forth reason is the overall history of the place, maybe we're just at the apex of that time when various disparate towns come together to form the city and we're not quite done with that process yet). I guess there's a tenuous fifth reason which is LA's road infrastructure is at the extreme end of feasibility, including but not limited to the inhabitant's seemingly infinite patience for rush-hour gridlock.

If you believe the earthquake risk, land area, and roading are reasons enough that urban intensification has not occurred, then adding (more) rail doesn't really make sense. On the other hand, you could regard lack of rail as being the only thing holding back urban intensification, and the lack of it being the very reason for LA's current sprawl. Providing you don't regard the other factors as hard limiters, of course.

So in one school of thought: there's nothing really stopping the rest of LA intensifying in the same way as downtown (and the airport area), other than a lack of suitable transport infrastructure to facilitate it. So assuming intensification is a thing you want, there is the argument to invest and deploy the trains; in a few years you should see a great intensification of the new corridor areas of LA where it previously didn't make sense.

Personally, I'm not on board with the idea - The quake hazard alone is reason enough to keep things flat and wide. I might be somewhat conservative in that regard of course - Continually echoing in my mind is that statement from 'the really big one' article a few years back that said 'everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast', as far as how I judge LA's realism on earthquake risk.

<comment><USER10> Although I wouldn't be surprised if large, expensive buildings held up better to earthquakes than low-density homes people build as cheap as they can and where inspections are more lax. For instance Japan holds up very well to earthquakes.

<comment><USER11> Re: Japan all houses built since 1981 are earthquake safe. Before then houses were built with heavy roof tiles which would not blow off in a typhoon. Tiles falling off or the roof causing the entire building to collapse were responsible for many deaths in the Kobe earthquake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read through the bill. There is a lot of talk on what fees they are imposing and on who. There is not much on what the money will be used for aside from mapping at risk water for contamination. A blurb about infrastructure consulting and potential help. Very light on details. And a section on how farms that discharge a lot of nitrates will be in compliance as long as they pay their fees within 90 days. Sounds like a charge of $1 per month to residents to have a new program around that can raise the fees later to keep the program around. I did not catch much of anything in the text about actually helping communities with unhealthy water.

</comment><comment><USER13> $370B/yr - It seems a bit useless to call out the total tax number of all the bills put forth. What percentage of those typically pass? That would be relevant info to actually evaluate that number, without it, it's kind of meaningless. $183B/yr is the number given below for total budget. So what, they're going to triple the state budget in one year? No, that's insane, so why the hell bother pointing that out?

</comment><comment><USER14> There is something a little intellectually lazy about taking an editorial from a republican representative in the OC Register and then treating it and commenting on it as if it is a news article that is not implicitly biased. Many news articles have been published on this bill. Here is one that the Mercury News did.

[http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/first-ever-tax-on- cali...](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/first-ever-tax-on-california- drinking-water-proposed-for-contaminated-groundwater-clean-up/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Additional taxes on water are sorely needed for safety as well as environmental reasons: [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finding...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finding- the-right-price-for-water/388246).

On average, water rates in the US are about half of what they are in say France. In many cases, not only are rates too low to discourage inefficient water use, they're too low to even adequately maintain the water/sewer infrastructure: [http://www.asce.org/water_and_wastewater_report/](http://www.asce.org/water_and_wastewater_report/)

<comment><USER16> Does that apply to California though? It has some of the highest water rates in the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Honestly why? We have one of the highest tax burdens in the entire USA. We already pay more for water and more for electricity than almost anywhere else.

<comment><USER18> Why? Because of the initiative process. Budgeting in California needlessly complicated and hamstrung due to the people of California. Prop 13 famously underfunds schools and the like. Also, Prop 98 (which is notoriously complex) hamstrings the budget process so that about half of the budget _must_ be spent on education, which in effect can make everything that's not for K-14 twice as expensive.

When I ascend to the throne, I'd make the legislature unicameral (really, what's the point of a state Senate anyway?) and eliminate the initiative process.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't eliminate the initiative process entirely, but there definitely needs to be a higher vote threshold for laws the legislature can't modify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This sounds like they are going to sell the water management, water rights to a for-profit company, once the taxes are in place. Guaranteed income & increases for years to come.

It's sad that most of our resources of necessity are in the hands of for- profit companies.

<comment><USER21> When they are not, you have a real risk of the tragedy of commons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm guessing this doesn't apply to the many companies who take groundwater practically for free and then bottle and sell it.

Regular consumers shouldn't be punished for the misuse of water by companies and farmers.

<comment><USER23> Nope. Modifying pre-1914 water rights in California would constitute a taking, and the state government would have to reimburse that. As for the sweetheart deals that Nestlé gets from the federal government, that's another matter entirely.

<comment><USER24> Can't they just tax the water? Or put a tax on crops which use high amounts of water?

<comment><USER25> they don't even need to tax the water. They could hold proper auctions of the water, and that alone would lead to massive savings and conservation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's an old adage about hammers, a lack of other available tools and nail. Now replace hammer with taxes...

They're tripping over a $20 to pick up a quarter by taxing consumers. As others have mentioned consumers aren't the problem.

</comment><comment><USER27> Public drinking water helps the poor, taxing it would hurt them. Correct? The wealthy drink bottles artisanal water anyhow.

I like the idea of a safe drinking water commission, but perhaps we fund it with taxes on chemical waste, mining, and fossil fuels. Things that contaminate the drinking water. That way the tax itself helps improve the water safety.

This seems as misguided as when we added a sales tax to help homelessness.

</comment><comment><USER28> All these taxes to pay for:

\- $1+ B Side-deals to raise the gas tax $50+ B.

\- $10+ B Mass-incarceration.

\- $80+ B High-Speed Monorail boondoggle orders of magnitude more expensive than Hyperloop.

<comment><USER18> 1) It's not a monorail. It's normal high speed rail system that's been successful deployed the world over.

2) Hyperloop doesn't exist.

<comment><USER29> Also, monorails have been successfully deployed around the world. They've been available since the early 20th century. It isn't fantastical technology to use one gigantic rail instead of two smaller rails.

<comment><USER16> There are, as of yet, no high speed monorails that I'm aware of.

<comment><USER18> 30 kilometers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train)

Then they apparently scrapped the idea of extending it beyond the airport.

<comment><USER16> Is a maglev really a monorail? I've taken it to pudong airport before. It isn't very practical, because of the transfer a taxi is still faster.

<comment><USER18> "'Mono' means 'one', and 'rail' means 'rail'", and to paraphrase Zaphod Beeblebrox, "Count the rails kid." ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> why not raise the price of water...vs adding a tax?

</comment><comment><USER31> Dictators are proposing more dictatorship.</comment>


Leaked Files Reveal Royal Bank of Scotland Harmed British Small Businesses - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/dash-for-cash?utm_term=.pb7Mw80k8o#.id72oDYNDg <comment><USER2> I'd like to see both the RBS executives responsible for this and Clifford Chance, the legal firm RBS called in to do an "independent review" sanctioned in some meaningful way.

Their independent review was clearly a sham even down to the point that RBS denied to MPs that their Global Restructuring Group was being run as a profit centre for the bank. Something we now know was the deliberate intention from the top of the bank down.

As someone running a small business the idea that a bank could deliberately try to destroy its customer's profitable businesses in order to seize their assets at a knocked down rate is terrifying and should be treated as criminal matter.

<comment><USER3> Oh Clifford Chance. They facilitated a competitor sending us groundless* cease and desists which caused a great deal of anxiety. Guess I'm not surprised to see them rubbing shoulders with my favourite bank RBS.

RBS ran a great scam when I was at University, free 3 year railcards for signing up a student account. No one I knew ended up getting one unless they complained.

I forgot about it, and complained 6-12 months later and asked for a 2 year railcard. They denied, and basically said I shouldn't be so entitled and that the bank are doing students a favour and that I should of complained earlier.

RBS is also a bank I phoned up in tears because I couldn't manage my credit card debt when I was younger and in a bad time in my life. Was offered zero breaks. I expressed commitment to repaying the debt, but needed a couple of months breathing space on the repayments. Nope, not an option.

They are one of the shittiest banks in the world, and I'm always more than happy to tell people my experiences of them when they pop up in conversation.

* This is my opinion of the letter. Guess I have to make that explicit in this context.

<comment><USER4> For future reference (or for others..): If you really can't pay in the UK, set out your expenses and income clearly in a letter, demonstrating that you've taken reasonable step to limit your spending, address it to all your creditors, and ask for interest to be frozen and offer what you believe you can afford (proportional to debt) to pay to each creditor on weekly or monthly basis. If they refuse, then pursue a debt management plan.

Most creditors in the UK will play hardball if you talk to first line staff, but will act more reasonable if you demonstrate that you have done your homework in determining what you can actually afford to pay, partly as that implies that you likely is also aware of alternatives like a debt management plan or IVA (Individual Voluntary Arrangement), or ultimately bankruptcy, which may leave them without full repayment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In nl we had the 'NMB' (since merged with the postbank to become ING), which was the abbreviation of 'Nederlandse Middenstands Bank' (Dutch Bank for small and medium Businesses).

With the general public they were known as the 'Nederlandse Meeneem Bank' (Dutch takeaway bank) because one of their strategies was to suddenly ask for the whole principal back in one go (something very few businesses can afford, and as your bank they'll know exactly when you can and when you can't) and if you didn't pay up immediately they'd buy up your assets in the bankruptcy proceedings that would immediately follow.

After selling off enough of the assets to satisfy the principal they'd sell off the remainder to friendly parties in order to make an easy profit.

Very nasty practice.

Don't ever put yourself in a position where you are dependent on a single bank, if you need an 'x' amount try to split 'x' across multiple loan providers if you can (it's not always possible, for instance with mortgages).

For a business to have only a single banking relationship is an un-necessary risk.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand how it is legal / allowable for a bank just to call in a loan (unless the call option is explicitly documented and paid for by the originator / issuer).

If a loan is being serviced then it shouldn't be possible for a bank just to randomly demand repayment, jack up the interest rate, or otherwise change the terms of the loan. That seems grossly unfair.

If this is the standard in the UK, then I think we need legislation.

<comment><USER7> It's not uncommon for businesses to have overdrafts in place of or additional to loans for cashflow.

The bank calls in the overdraft because of the bank's bottom line, rather than for anything related to the business itself or change in profitability. Was quite common in both the 08 and 91 recessions.

<comment><USER8> Depending on a line of credit to fund your business' operations definitely makes you the bank's biyotch. I remember Zappos being encourages/forced to sell for the same reason [1]. Their outcome had a happier ending, but they still had to sell.

[1] [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold- zappos.html](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zappos.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've recently been binging Sopranos. Last night I watched the season two episode in which an old friend of Tony's who owned a sporting goods store borrowed money from Tony.

When the shop owner couldn't pay back the principle, Tony applied massive interest rates and "fines", and when the guy couldn't pay those, took over his business, using it to order stock that the business couldn't pay for — eventually forcing it into bankruptcy.

As Tony is fond of saying, there's really not much difference between the mob loan sharks and "legitimate" banks, except that the banks have the law on their side so there's less need for knee-cappings and the like.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can we please put people in jail for stuff like this? Please? Just once?

<comment><USER11> government owned bank, if it works the same over there as in the US (fannie mae/mac here come to mind) I doubt there is much that can be done but use taxpayer money to make people whole again.

the options versus private entities are much more varied compared to what can be done to a government institution. Sovereign immunity is a means that even horribly negative effects of policy or work can be shielded from restitution. Does that exist in European countries too?

<comment><USER12> It's a slightly different situation to Fannie May, in that RBS was a privately-owned business, and only became government-owned because it ran into so many problems. It's not a 'government institution' as the Bank of England is - the government just took control to stop it collapsing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No wonder why people are voting with the Trumps and Farages of the world. Natural self correcting behaviour in an entrenched and corrupt system. When so many institutions and people are behaving in this manner there must be some kind of correction.

</comment><comment><USER14> Private Eye magazine was covering cases like these when they were actually happening...3 or more years ago.

The targeting they described was frightening. Ome case of a successful business forcibly sold to associates of advisors connected to the bank.

</comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely unconscionable, literally extortion. The individuals involved need to be held to account.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not like this is an novel development. Banks were doing this in the early 90s recession. Little or nothing was done, and Gordon further relaxed banking regulation after the '97 election.

</comment><comment><USER15> What a scoop! Banks engage in unethical business practices? But I thought they were charitable institutions, for heaven's sake.

It's not like their greed has ever caused a global financial crisis.

<comment><USER16> Banks' greed ... not so much. Government pushing banks to do this ... yes. As documented in this case. Think about it: for a bank to risk stuff like this without assurances that the government will be behind it when there is pushback ...

Besides, if you know economics even a little bit you know that there are 2 sets of accounting rules : one for banks, one for everyone else. No bank can satisfy the normal rules for solvency, so they simply don't apply to them. Banks can't exist without government backing, even in individual cases of small banks.

Yes this is the banks' doing. But ... the government is not the solution, sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Extorsion is a great business model.

</comment><comment><USER18> Off topic: Interesting to see how Buzzfeed is moving into the News segment (and will be probably dislodge some entrenched participants)

I've noticed the trend before, but I suspect this is the first time they broke some major news

<comment><USER19> They have been doing this for a while now, I already got used to see their long-form pieces and I can say that every time there is a comment identical to yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bank gives loan, debtor can't pay, bank seizes assets?

OK so the internal incentives and transfer for assets to their property investment wing were set up to make this process probably too aggressive, but fundamentally it's sound, surely?

<comment><USER21> You missed the 'bank calls in entire loan when they think the business is least capable of coming up with money at short notice, eg after major equipment expenditure.'</comment></comment>


Advice for Marketing Techniques for Instagram Bot - <AUTHOR> We are launching SociaBot [https://sociabot.app/] which is an Instagram bot to put your normal actions on autopilot and increase your account engagement<p>What are the suggested techniques or ways to market for it <comment><USER2> My advice? Don't do bots. Someday and somehow, Instagram may develop such things that will detect those kind of features and activity. You could hire someone on this on a cheap price. Plus, it will be a fair trade to everyone and you can engage to your prospective client more efficiently

</comment><comment><USER3> How are you posting images when their API doesn't allow for it?

</comment><comment><USER4> is that ok with the instagram's use policies ? are you a merketing/advertising partner with instagram/Facebook to have access to their (more privileged) APIs ?

</comment><comment><USER5> you should post about it on hacker news

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand you, I'm currently put it on HackerNews</comment></comment>


Show HN: Form I send all recruiters to - <AUTHOR> https://e.l1t3.com/pavelkaroukin

<comment><USER2> I've signed offer letters and hired about 300 people in the last 5 years, and I still consider myself chief recruiter...

Two comments:

1) This is obnoxious in the sense that it's placing a bar that other candidates don't, and it's lacking context I'd prefer to provide over a phone call. For instance, equity at our company is typically quite different than equity at other companies. Not all equity is created equal, and our cap table is very clean.

2) For the right candidate, I'd still make a best effort to fill it out despite the aforementioned comment.

To me the most broken part of recruiting is the third-party recruiting process, and yet, we still use them, because they do occasionally bring in great candidates we would otherwise miss.

<comment><USER3> @davidu: I have friends who apply to companies through the company recruiting Web sites. Even when they are great fits for a position, and it would be better to discuss the matter, they are still forced to fill out numerous fields without any "context." So, if nothing else, maybe forms like this will make companies rethink their own recruiting Web pages.

<comment><USER2> I do not disagree w/ you.

I do 99% of my recruiting with a hand-written email from an email I find on linkedin, github, or a personal webpage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love the idea and I'm interested to see if anyone bothers. As you say, if the recruiter cares and isn't playing the numbers game, it's not a huge task for them to go through for a good enough candidate. You'll likely get few responses but from the recruiters who you want to be in touch with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, and I always hate to simply not respond to email, because it is always a possibility, that this particular email will lead to a better job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I doubt any recruiter will ever take the time to fill this out I love the idea. That said it would take a miracle before I would work with a third party recruiter again and I would never send something like this to recruiters that work for the company in question. In my experience they have been very good at their jobs, third party..... Not so much. I've had third party recruiters make me jump through hoops (tests that prove nothing), try (and fail) to hide the name of the company, harass my references, and be completely useless.

<comment><USER6> I landed 2 solutions (sales) engineering jobs in NYC with the help of 2 different 3rd party recruiters and they were excellent. No hoops, no extra BS. They really helped me zero in on the positions that fit with my goals and experience, so I wasn't wasting time.

Coding positions might be a whole different ballgame, though. I probably wouldn't have much patience for coding tests with a recruiter which undoubtedly makes the process harder for all 3 parties.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure recruiter usefulness does vary on a per-profession basis. As for coding tests, I am fine with problems that prove that you can work with a language and/or prove basic programming/problem solving skills. In fact I love them, I spend a good bit of time on Project Euler and the like (Code kata and stuff like that). My issue is with tests that really are seeing if you can execute code in your head:

Given the following code snippet what is it's output:

//IMAGE OF CODE

A) 1

B) 2

C) false

D) null

These are stupid questions IMHO, in fact the last test I had to take like this I could have typed up each code example and run the code in the time I was given on each question. Test me on my problem solving but don't ask me to boot up an interpreter in my head that skill is NEVER needed in your day to day life as a coder. (I also take issue with tests that ask about boilerplate or stuff handled by the IDE/environment). We live in a world where a massive amount of information (I'd argue even more so when you look at just programming) is just a google away. Don't ask me to memorize docs that I can lookup in seconds, it's just not a skill that's really needed. I prefer "learn as you go" over "memorize this book". Now when it comes to programming concepts I might budge a little but not much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the "Foosball table" item a negative or positive?

<comment><AUTHOR> for me - positive :) i like to foose (although I am not good at it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A good recruiter is worth its weight in gold, I think this is useless against recruiters who are just spamming; because it's a numbers game for them, and they don't have the time to be filling forms when there's money to be made elsewhere.

And a good recruiter might find it a bit pretentious. I'd rather take the spam than risk my career.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I see email from recruiter worth a following up - I never risk it. But this is rarity, more often you get boilerplate emails. But who knows, may be one particular recruiter with boilerplate email is actually care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> this should rather be used by recruiters to generate an email template that will definitely get more attention and higher response rate...

</comment><comment><USER10> Does the form represent the priority of concerns you have about a position?

i.e. does the compensation and perks come before technologies and management?

<comment><AUTHOR> May be slightly, but more importantly, all these fields required - i.e. this information what I consider most important about opportunity and usually takes quite awhile to find out from my experience. So I offload it to recruiter to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like this idea a lot, do you have an auto response set up in your email or manually send it to them?

<comment><AUTHOR> In my form right now - no. But it is possible to configure emails sent to recruiter too. Thanks for idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How many recruiters jump through this particular hoop?

<comment><AUTHOR> So far - 0, but i just started responding with link to this form. But if someone really care about position/company they are working for, it shouldn't be hard to get answers to questions.

I think it is better than just not responding to recruiter email or mark it as spam. There is always a chance.

<comment><USER13> A vast number of recruiters are not in-house recruiters so they will never have most of this information anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> And this is perfectly fine. Better noise-to-signal ratio.

<comment><USER14> Probably great specificity, but close to zero sensitivity. I guess thats fine if you have no intention of changing jobs though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is the green lock at the bottom for?

<comment><AUTHOR> instead of captcha - [https://hashcash.io/](https://hashcash.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well Done!</comment>


China spends $300M to buy lab produced meats from Israel - <AUTHOR> https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2018/02/china-spends-300million-to-buy-lab-produced-meats-from-israel/ <comment><USER2> This title is misleading (no one has spent a dollar as far as I can tell) and the article gets several facts wrong. For instance, it says "Meat The Future" is a clean meat company when in fact it's a sort of marketing and design group. There is no way China could buy meat from them. Poorly researched clickbait.

<comment><USER3> There seems to be a better article from a more reliable source: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-israel- tr...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-israel-trade-deal- lab-grown-meat-veganism-vegetarianism-a7950901.html)

And there is one company: [https://www.supermeat.com/](https://www.supermeat.com/) and two other which seems to be the same org labeled as non-profit or startup: [https://www.futuremeat.org/](https://www.futuremeat.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm thinking they get a way bigger margin with this buy and they do not need to declare that to the consumers, huge win for retailers. You wouldn't be able to pull this off in the US without major buyer bewares.

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember when the first lab meat burger patty was announced it was like $300K to produce.

There aren't long term studies into what lab produced meat means for the human body right? It's pretty new and very niche still - but knowing how China has "very loose rules" on these kind of topixs (I'm no expert in policies but it does feel like that), this looks like a great move to speed up (by injecting a lot of capital in research and operations) the insertion of lab produced meat into the market. Is this good? Well at least no animals will be harmed in the process - other than "human animals" who will be buying it eventually

<comment><USER6> _There aren 't long term studies into what lab produced meat means for the human body right?_

Would that be necessary? It's chemically identical to what's grown in a cow. The only difference is that it's grown in a vat. If anything it's _better_ because farmers give all manner of hormones and antibiotics to cows that you don't need in a vat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that edible insects would be a better protein route than lab-grown meats. It would require a cultural shift in some places, but probably not as large of one as people think. (Lobsters were considered inedible until relatively recently.)

Lab-grown meat seems like an over-engineered solution to a problem that might not be that difficult to solve in simpler, probably-healthier ways.

</comment><comment><USER8> Background: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat)

<comment><USER9> I have little background about the cultured meat, and this link made me curious: wouldn't cancer cells be good candidate cells for creating this type of meat?

<comment><USER10> I also have little background, but I'd imagine the type of meat that cancer cells create is not the same as the type that tastes good.

<comment><USER11> Do you have any evidence why cancer shouldn't taste good?

<comment><USER12> "good" steak, for instance is marbled. i'm not sure how you can get that with uncontrolled growth of one type of tissue. best case scenario you grow a huge chunk of cancerous muscle, and grind it with fat to make ground beef.

<comment><USER13> But suppose I don't care about fat, in fact I want my meat to be as lean as possible.

<comment><USER12> i'm not sure what the point of that is. not sure about everyone else, but the main motivation for eating meat is that it tastes good. without fat, 100% muscle would be very dry/tough. you might as well eat tofu.

<comment><USER13> > you might as well eat tofu.

I guess this is a bad time to say I love tofu?

I'm more concerned whether or not it's technologically possible without health risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That cultured tissue is going to be loaded with antibiotics from the medium.

<comment> Const-me You can sterilize liquids without antibiotics, very cheap: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization)

<comment><USER14> Yes, we know about autoclaves. But aseptic cell culture without antibiotics?

<comment> Const-me Because enclosed environment. Many industrial processes work the same way, e.g. unwanted microflora can destroy a whole batch of beer, yet people don't add antibiotics to beer.

Here's a link that specifically tells the meat (at some other company, but still) is grown without antibiotics: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- science/lab-g...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lab- grown-meat-is-in-your-future-and-it-may-be-healthier-than-the-real- stuff/2016/05/02/aa893f34-e630-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb In Amsterdam - <AUTHOR> http://www.dwarshuis.com/various/airbnb/amsterdam/ <comment><USER2> The original title does not contain "terryfing", so please remove that.

Also, I fail to see wha's so terrifying about that.

In 2015 it looks like 10-15 rentals a day.

<comment><USER3> If you refer to the map, it shows the new rooms-to-let added on that particular day. Rest assured that there were/are hundreds to thousands of transactions per day in Amsterdam. OP used this datasource: [http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html](http://insideairbnb.com/get-the- data.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Correct title is "Airbnb in Amsterdam."

There is an obvious lack of data cleaning here. You can see from the first places drawn on the map that a lot of them are duplicated. I don't think that many people have multiple dwellings in the same area.

<comment><USER5> There's quite a few agencies, which maintain a facade of being a private person or couple renting out a property and listing a dozen or so properties on one account. The presentation of the data could have been a bit more slick & accessible, the labels are huge. For instance, presenting the data as an evolving heatmap with total properties per neighborhood, cumulative listings over time etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is this submission flagged? is it because the OP used the clickbaity title? The data presented in the link is quite interesting

<comment><USER6> Users flagged it. Not sure why; probably because of the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> AirBnB is a plague in Amsterdam where people rent out their house almost full- time on the service. A lot of concern has been voiced by neighbours and public figures (notably Arjen Lubach, a sort of Dutch John Oliver). The critisicm comes from the fact that Airbnb pretends to be a place for short term rentals and family businesses on the side, but is spiralling more and more into professional agencies renting out houses without much supervision in terms of safety or tax.

I guess most major cities around the world face this problem but this is a nice visualization.

</comment><comment><USER8> Travelers are interested in easy, cute, short-term apartment rentals. I fail to see how this is even surprising.

The mega-trends happen whether you like them or not. Adapt or die.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think I missed something. Why is this terrifying?

<comment><USER10> What's terrifying is how effective a click bait title is, even on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why so much fuzz with this thing?

</comment><comment><USER12> How is this terrifying? Each one of those dots represents actual wealth being created.

<comment><USER13> Here's an aspect.

In Berlin, landlords realized they could get three times as much from an apartment by putting it on AirBnB rather than actually renting it to someone. The situation got so bad that it is now illegal to rent an apartment where you don't actually live[1] (with exceptions[2]).

If the situation in Amsterdam is similar to Berlin, this means that every one of those dots[3] is an apartment that locals cannot use. Tourists are, on a way, taking over their city, and those that live there have to reshape their lives to accommodate them. The citizens of Amsterdam, the ones that make it a nice place to visit in the first place, are losing access to their own city.

[1] [https://berlin.airbnbcitizen.com/update-from- berlin/](https://berlin.airbnbcitizen.com/update-from-berlin/) [2] [https://www.thelocal.de/20160809/court-rules-small- victory-a...](https://www.thelocal.de/20160809/court-rules-small-victory- against-berlin-airbnb-ban) [3] Minus the data cleaning issues mentioned somewhere else

<comment><USER14> In my experience hotels in Amsterdam are expensive and low quality. Perhaps if this weren't the case, there wouldn't be such a market for AirBnB. Moreover, tourists bring huge amounts of money to Amsterdam. Without this the city and its citizens would be considerably poorer.</comment></comment></comment>


42Floors (YC W12) Launches Commercial Real Estate Search Tool - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/2012/03/19/42floors-launches-commercial-real-estate-search-tool <comment><USER2> good idea, but I think this is an industry where you don't win with technology...but with connections in the industry...and it doesn't look like the team has that.

and the investors are mostly tech guys, not real estate guys...which means there is no inside track into getting a meeting with heads of "big office corp"

so they'll most likely hit adoption issues outside of the bay area.

plus there are a dozen sites doing that, and besides the fancy UI, there is no real advantage over the other sites. And speaking of UI, that site is too javascript extensive....takes way too long to load

also the $/sqft per year seems a bit useless...at the very least should provide how much it'd actually cost per month.

finally the SEO on the site is terrible...you are trying to rank for "find office space" that gets 170 searches per month, when you should be trying to rank for "office space for rent" which gets 4400 searches per month...also lease should be somewhere in the title, since that's also getting searched for.

don't get me wrong, chances are they'll have some limited success in the Bay Area based on the YC referalls alone. But they'll have to deal with a major chicken and egg problem elsewhere...and as you can see, the search volume is pretty low, so they'll need to go offline to actually reach their target customer.

<comment><USER3> $/sqft per year makes more sense when you take into account that most corporate budgets aren't monthly (this isn't an apartment rental) and that most commercial lease terms are several years long

<comment><USER2> fine then calculate yearly cost...showing 2 completely different spaces with the same price doesn't really make much sense. That'd be in addition to the square foot rate

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If Freedman sees this, I'd like to get his opinion on what they are doing better than the two incumbents: Loopnet.com and CoStar.com

Personally I find both sites irritating, so I'm sure there is an opening here, but I'd love to hear what he thinks it is.

<comment><USER5> Ah yes, I answer this question in my coverage for VentureBeat here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3724343>

Click through to the link, ctrl/cmd+F "loopnet" / "costar" ... see what he thinks.

The article also mentions: this is not for commercial property, just leasable spaces, which is another differentiator between those giants.

<comment><USER6> You can find leasable spaces on loop for sure.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. Of course, not all the listings have good data and photos, and there's a subscription model to list, which 42F doesn't have. But it's also about being a startup for startups (at least at this point), and playing off whatever advantage that affords. Obviously LoopNet can't play that angle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nobody's heard of Rofo.com? They're already doing this pretty well AND have the exclusive LinkedIn real estate app. I used to work there and it IS all about connections in the commercial real estate industry. Commercial brokers are still very entrenched and protective of their listings. The only value they have left is 'inside information' and they know they need to protect it.

Do some keyword research too, like the other dude said, mucho importante.

</comment><comment><USER8> I submitted an eerily similar application to YC in Summer 11' though it was focused on storage as well as office space. Best of luck, its a market thats ripe for some disruption. If you want my domains let me know, I won't be using them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great idea, I have noticed that office space is hard to find though the standard outlets (realtor.com, zillow) however I wanted to see what was available in Mountain View and Palo Alto but it seems it only works in San Francisco at the moment? Keep up the good work guys/gals there is defiantly a market for this.

<comment><USER10> Actually, it's available throughout the Bay Area. Bay Area today, the world tomorrow...

<comment><USER11> Available, maybe, but the East Bay is definitely a bit sparse.

Nice looking site, though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice and simple UI, I like it! Congrats on launching, looks like you're on the road to success.

As a founder of a similar business (residential rather than commercial), and YC interviewee in the same round as you, I would be interested how you plan to tackle the problem you state on your blog:

        I did my best to search myself online and it's almost impossible.
        It is incredible. Craigslist is almost totally filled with spaces
        that are off the market, put up by brokers simply trying to get
        you to call (it's called a flytrap).

We applied with our solution in the same round as you, so just interested how you guys are going to tackle the problem? It appears you're not doing anything at the moment, but I'm sure you have some ideas in the pipeline...

Congrats once again!

</comment><comment><USER13> Overall, I dig the site and like the map-centric interface. I like the sqft cost per year, and recognize that an awesome thing to calculate and filter on.

I'd really like to be able to "click into" the actual Streetview to be able to rotate around on a listing page. It looks like the auto-grabbed images aren't always the most useful representation. Also -- I immediately found the two Google Maps images on the listing page to be kind of an eye sore with each having the Google logo and trademark.

Best of luck to ya'll, the site is off to a pretty awesome start.

</comment><comment><USER14> Been reading his blog for a while and was wondering what he was up to. I'm wondering if they have plans for any social features--couchsurfing for startups. It'd be tricky as hell due to NDAs, but with referrals acting as the vetting it could create a whole new level of startup community.

Not knowing the logistics, maybe that's just too sticky an idea. Either way, it looks damn useful, especially with that in-house photographers part. CL photos are SKETCH.

<comment><USER15> If you are looking for couchsurfing for startups, there are already quite a few people on it... <http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-Airbnb-for-office-space>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I never heard of this site betakit.com before. Does anyone know of any similar sites? I'm trying to break away from TechCrunch

</comment><comment><USER17> As a designer, I LOVE your interface.

The only thing I'd do differently is allow users to zoom in/out on the map using the mouse scroll. I know this is default behavior on most map products, so when I went to zoom and my scroll button did nothing ... it was a little counter-intuitive.

That's a very minor issue however, and this is a great product overall.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats on the launch. This space is definitely seeing a lot of interesting activity. Rofo's in SF, and we just launched in Portland ( <http://www.officespace.com/Portland-OR> ).

Best of luck. You guys definitely have a nice interface.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting to note that they are going for a web-site first strategy. I've been waiting for things like this (basic data entry, search, etc) to move to a mobile first strategy. At least for this use case, we aren't there yet.

</comment><comment><USER20> Curious: why the name 42Floors?

<comment><USER21> Dude, read the article.

<comment><USER22> Skimmed the article 2-3 times and must've missed something obvious or maybe obtuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> ##things = terribly unoriginal name</comment>


Ask HN: How To Use My Great Idea? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
Like many others, I believe I have a really good idea for a start-up. I won't go into detail, but having done some research I've seen there's noone else doing this, and I think it's a product which can be widely used.
The problem is, I don't have the skills to make it. It'd include quite a lot of features, most of which would have to be custom-made, in languages I don't speak. So I have a few options:
-Just doing it, and seeing where it ends. Problem is that I don't have much time, and I'm already trying to get more skills in another language.
-Find a more technical co-founder. I'm just afraid, wouldn't this completely sideline me? I mean, I have clear ideas about what I want and stuff, but as long as the product is being developed all I could do is ask the co-founder how it's going, and giving some of my input. I'm afraid it'd feel like it's not my thing anymore. Also, I feel unsuitable for the business-side of things. No experience, still very young, nowhere near any kind of scene.
-Just throw the idea out there for anyone who wants to use it, and move on to something which suits better. I'd feel like I throw away a great idea, and not only that, it's my idea.
Any idea what I should or shouldn't do? <comment><USER2> You've got nothing right now, treat it as such. Details are good and people will be willing to give you feedback on your thoughts if you give them. I've had a million ideas and most of them seem great until you start talking about them. Have you asked a potential customer, another entrepreneur, or a partner for feedback? If not, that is the first thing you should be doing.

The next thing you can do is to run some tests to validate your target market. There are a plethora of ways to do this from interacting with potential customers to adwords'ing a custom landing page. It really just depends on the idea you want to test.

The way you mention finding a technical cofounder sounds an awful lot like finding someone to do all the work for you. That is a fool's errand. If you don't have time to invest in it yourself, you're not going to own any part of it. Developing an app, and more specifically, a business, takes a HUGE time investment. You've got to be committed.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The way you mention finding a technical cofounder sounds an awful lot like finding someone to do all the work for you._

That's exactly what I'm afraid of: I don't _want_ to have someone doing all the work for me. It's my idea, I want to take ownership of it.

How would I go about talking to people about it? There are few people whom I personally know which would be relevant to talk to. I'd rather not post the whole idea on HN, as there are probably loads of people who can make this in a fraction of the time it would take me. Should I just email random people who I come across on the net who could give me useful advice? Doesn't feel like a great idea either.

<comment><USER2> I can send you an invite to Sparkmuse if you'd like to talk about it there. Hit me up if you'd like, email is in profile.

Ask yourself who you'd sell this product/service to and try to track those people down. This isn't development, this is marketing, and it's not always easy. And yes, sometimes emailing people out of the blue works well too. If you can find someone involved in your market, such as a blogger, they might be able to provide excellent advice (just be sure to be helpful in return).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone can think of a good idea but not many of them can turn it into a successful business. To create a successful business the idea/product should be the last thing you need to worry about because idea changes all the time during stages of a startup. There are many other factors that are more important than your idea i.e ( financing, marketing,legal, team). Many entrepreneurs have the same ideas but why are some more successful than others? For example Gowalla vs Foursquare. An idea is worthless without an execution plan. You can begin by researching your market and form a team who believes in your idea and vision. I give you props for your youth entrepreneur's spirit. Don't wait too long to start because you will mistakes. Just learn how to fix them along the way. Just remember Nike's Slogan "Just Do It". Good Luck

</comment><comment><USER4> Hire an outsourced coding team to make the product. Now, its going to be really crappy , but then you will have the prototype built and can hire on a co-founder or take it in a different direction.

If you think the idea is really that great, don't throw it away, find a way to make it work :)

Just my 2cents.

<comment><USER5> This is a horrible idea generally. It's a really bad idea to outsource your core competency. If your company builds software, you shouldn't outsource software development.

Startups and ideas need time to change or pivot. If you're outsourcing, you're basically saying build this big blue box, and tomorrow (or 3 months later) you'll need to build a small red turtle and be stuck with code you can't use, maintain, or change without paying someone else.</comment></comment>


An introduction to elliptic curve cryptography - <AUTHOR> http://www.embedded.com/print/4396040

<comment><USER2> this is a wonderful explanation

I'm currently implementing ECC for a personal project ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> You might have a look at _seccure_ ( [http://point-at- infinity.org/seccure/](http://point-at-infinity.org/seccure/) ) as well, if you haven't. It's packaged and ready to go in Debian.

<comment><USER2> thanks but not appropriate for my stuff

<comment><USER2> sorry that sounded weird upon reflection, basically different tech stack but thank you for the article and this other link!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ideas for weekend projects? - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any idea pools for weekend projects, or if anyone has any small projects that they haven't implemented yet. I have a lot of down time over the next two weeks, and I would love to put the time to good, creative use. Note, I'm not looking for startup ideas, although the two are obviously not mutually exclusive. <comment><USER2> Try this:

"A home for ideas by people who lack time, money, or skills."

<http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/>

</comment><comment><USER3> What is your goal?

Is it to learn a new technology?

Pick up chicks?

Be featured on RWW, Wired, HN, Reddit, etc, etc?

It seems like a good formula for hit and run success is popular new feature/gimmick from facebook, twitter, google, youtube add your own twist to it and then watch the traffic come in for 2 days and then die off.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've got 2 ideas for you, which I would absolutely do if I had the time to do them.

1) Feedback Loop: Users submit URLs and ask for feedback on them. Each time they provide a feedback for an other submission, they get to view a feedback provided on theirs (hence the loop).

You can fine tune the system by having feedback receivers rate the feedback they've recieved (better feedback = more points for the person who wrote it = they get to see more feedback on their post or their post gets pushed to top).

I think it's a beautiful and self-enforced "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" idea.

2) Graffiti: This is a bookmarklet that allows a user to draw on top of a webpage (probably requires transparent flash). Of course, they can view other people's graffitis as well.

This would be pretty awesome, and has a lot of game aspects to it that would make it extremely addictive. For example, you could notify a user if anybody writes over their graffiti (eg, starting turf wars), and you could keep a record board for "most pages graffiti'd" and "most area covered", etc.

I feel like there's a very real possibility this could go viral and stay popular. And, I've got an awesome domain name for it. E-mail me if you're interested.

<comment><USER5> for (2) you might want to checkout webmarker:

<http://webmarker.me/>

<http://vimeo.com/10427062>

a firefox addon that allows you to draw on top of web pages in a persistant manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Build a better chess rating system and enter your system into the following competition: <http://kaggle.com/chess>.

You may want to use machine learning techniques, which you can learn using the Andrew Ng's Stanford lectures ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&feature=channel)).

</comment><comment><USER7> Reverse Craigslist - Allow a user to enter an anonymous Craigslist email address (that they had previously replied to) and their city, and then return the post that contained the email.

The reason being: When looking for something on Craigslist, I often send similar emails to several potential sellers. But then, when they reply, I have no way of knowing which posting was theirs (and the link to it). (Of course, you could contain the link to the posting you're referring to in each email, but that's a hassle that I'm sure most forget to do.)

<comment><USER8> You can just enter the url of the Craigslist post at the end of your mail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've got lots of little ideas I haven't had time to implement (most of them are pretty goofy). Tell us more about your skills and what you'd like to work on if you have any ideas-games, webapps, open source stuff, whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> My skills are pretty typical: I'm versed in the web technologies, C++, and .NET. Notably I'm not familiar with XNA or Flash, but the underlying technology isn't really important to me.

I just want to do something creative that is "interesting". If there's a novel idea for a game, or a utility, or a visualization, or something else entirely; I'd like to hear it.

<comment><USER10> Visualization for C++ code metrics, specialized for C++, would be interesting. The C++ code metric visualizations I've seen have hooked into visualization front-ends designed for Java code.

P.S. This probably isn't a weekend project, but you might get something useful done in a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sidebar for gmail that recommends quora responses based on email content</comment>


CausalImpact: Open-source package for estimating causal effects in time series - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2014/09/causalimpact-new-open-source-package.html

<comment><USER2> something like this is done comparing monthly sums from a previous year with the current, to qualify the impact a campaign had in numbers. doing the difference you get the tendency for this year, and check if the actual result diverges from the tendency after the event.

<comment><USER2> this tool makes it easier to do this analysis, because we dont have to choose the interval to compare and it is more obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Links to GitHub page ([http://google.github.io/CausalImpact/](http://google.github.io/CausalImpact/)) and the code itself ([https://github.com/google/CausalImpact](https://github.com/google/CausalImpact)).

</comment><comment><USER4> R is underrated.</comment>


New Gmail Inbox tabs and category labels - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3055016?p=inboxtabs&hl=en&rd=1

<comment><USER2> I'm not liking it. We have folders to categorize. :-/</comment>


Ask HN: How do you learn? - <AUTHOR> Every month there is a new technology that is instantly tagged as the "future". It seems that technology taught in a regular CS classroom will probably be outdated by the time the student actually gets out there to apply the knowledge. Python, then Node JS, then Go, React..
This is not a rant, in fact it may be a good thing that there are more options available now than ever when it comes to building things. The fact that we're building good tools to build things is also amazing. But my question is, how do you guys approach learning?
There are two types of learning, for finding employment and just to explore. I do both. My system for learning revolves around reading roughly 20% of a book, going through 20% of an online tutorial or course, giving up because I have a short attention span, and restarting multiple times.
How do you learn new technologies quickly, in a scenario where you may not be in a position to commit +100-200 hours to actually learning it and just want to try something cool over the weekend or so? <comment><USER2> If the tools were good we wouldn't be developing so many of them. Part of the reason for the ferment is that the last generation of tools sucked, so we need another generation of tools, and another, ...

</comment><comment><USER3> If you learn the foundations of something then you pick up the variations based on those foundations more easily.

There are no languages where you start from scratch just iterations on the past.</comment>


Low-income workers who live in RVs are being 'chased out' of SV streets - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/29/low-income-workers-rvs-palo-alto-california-homeless <comment><USER2> That's so sad. I hope that the city can find a solution that works for everyone.

<comment><USER3> There isn't one.

It doesn't work for homeowners to have too many people living in their vicinity.

It doesn't work for the "extra" people to leave.

The policy question will go nowhere until we acknowledge that no matter what, some or all groups are giving up some or all of what they want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > bans vehicles from parking in the same spot for longer than 72 hours

Could they work together and move their vehicles but remain in the same area (like front of line goes to end, and everyone else pulls forward) and be compliant per the letter of the law?</comment>


Evolution of the x86 context switch in Linux (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.maizure.org/projects/evolution_x86_context_switch_linux/index.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18990444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18990444)</comment>