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Why ‘Buy’ Buttons Will Pose Challenges for Google, Facebook, Pinterest - prostoalex http://www.recode.net/2015/06/14/why-buy-buttons-will-pose-big-challenges-for-google-facebook-pinterest-and-twitter/? ====== sageabilly I have given the side eye to all of the "Shop right in the app!" functionalities that have rolled out in the past year although I'm the first to admit that I'm not the type of person to randomly want to buy things that are slapped up on my newsfeed. I purchase probably 90-95% of my online stuff from Amazon and cannot see anything changing that, especially when I can go to Amazon, look at tons of reviews (and I read the reviews on everything before buying, whether it's $15 or $1500), buy with 1 click, know it's going to be at my house in less than 48 hours, and know that there's a rock-solid return policy that goes along with it. I don't see the advantage of shopping from Twitter or FB or Pinterest, although again I'm not exactly their target demographic. Are they hoping to prey on teenagers and bored housewives with too much money to burn? ~~~ MichaelGG Yeah that's the big question eh? The obviously "best" solution is integrating with Amazon and calling it a day. But they can't do that, since Amazon's a competitor. It's almost as if they need a Shadow Amazon that isn't competing with them. Then they could integrate all properly. Shopping on 3rd party sites is so horrible. "Oh, wow, free ground shipping... great." And I get to confirm my CC info once more for kicks. And worry they aren't gonna go out of their way to make my one-off $9 purchase right if anything goes wrong. I often pay 2x more to buy something on Amazon than deal with other vendors. ------ rootedbox "Varshavskaya approached multiple big tech companies this year, in part to gauge interest in acquiring her company, multiple sources told Re/code. The company has also been talking to investors about raising new funding, these people said. When asked for comment on the above, Varshavskaya did not directly address any of it. “We’re heads down at the moment with a ton going on, so we’re staying focused on that for the time being,”" translates to.. "Our model doesn't work.. we're heads down trying to see if anyone will buy us or if we can come up with a completely new idea. If someone will fund us during this time; That'll be really cool." ------ psadri 'Buy' buttons can make a big difference, specially on mobile. Most retailer's mobile web experience is horrible, specially their checkout flows. An inline 'Buy' button can increase conversion rates anywhere from 2-5x which is huge and a win-win for everyone involved: User: better experience Publisher: higher revenue (CPA) Retailer: more sales ------ johansch I don't have kids, but I could imagine families that do have kids to expect a whole lot of unexepected shipments of stuff if this pattern gets widely implemented. ~~~ nhebb Can confirm. It's happened to us with Amazon one click. My wife stepped away from the computer and within a few minutes my then 3 year-old had ordered a game. The situation will be comical when kids can order directly via Google searches. ------ digisth "Among the challenges these Goliaths face is integrating inventory and payments systems from retailers big and small that have little experience selling stuff outside of their own storefronts." Seems like there could be an opportunity for a service to act as a broker; they could act as a go-between for inventory related tasks and services between the front-ends (Pinterest, FB) and the backends (retailer APIs.) Provide a standard API on both ends (so retailers can update prices, number in stock, tax and such, and front-ends can push buys and get updates.) If they were front-end agnostic, they could save the retailers a bunch of time, and handle API updates all in one place (preventing mass breakage when APIs change, since a good part of their job will be to keep the interfaces up-to- date.) Retail API broker or something. I wonder if anyone is thinking of doing this already. ~~~ x0x0 I briefly consulted for a ecommerce search company. It stunned me how many online stores selling _millions_ of dollars of goods per month online are essentially incapable of giving you a csv with product id, quantity in stock, and price. Somewhere in the shit-mass of code that is their site there must be some way to determine precisely what items are in stock and what the retailer would charge for them right now, but it's apparently incredibly difficult to export that : rolleyes : Our solution was a combination of a semi-busted daily/hourly catalog export, a site scraper, some machine learning, and some human intervention. It was an enormous pain. ps -- there are definitely ecommerce sites out there where the price you pay depends on your navigation path through the store. I remain unsure if this was intentional or accidental. ~~~ auston Giving you a CSV with quantity that is "in-stock" could mean you need a new one in a few minutes at worst and few days more commonly. Consider a model like Groupon.com or Fab.com - one is dumping large quantities quickly and the other is moving small quantities of well crafted / unique goods. The best attack vector is obviously approaching people like prestashop, 3dcart, tictail, etc and trying to get them all to agree on a format to put pressure on shopify. This would enable pinterest to get tens of thousands of merchants on their site with little friction or data rot. ------ Navarr These aren't new problems. Companies have been solving and dealing with this sort of problem for _years_. It's how a lot of Amazon retailers, and ebay retailers, and NewEgg retailers, and Rakuten.com (Buy.com) retailers, and Google Shopping work. There's a billion different extensions just for Magento for "Product Feeds." If you try to make it even more realtime, may god have mercy on your bandwidth. ------ meesterdude pinterest on buy buttons: > “They’re threaded into every aspect of the experience,” Yuck. I never want to see a buy button. I understand the appeal on both sides, but I myself will react unfavorably and likely close whatever account I have. The web was not always a commercial venture, it used to be purely for information. But, I think the commercialization has lead to a lot of growth and good things, and that's certainly ok. But the "buy" button is too much for me, it's too much commercialization. I want to control when i'm "shopping" or not and this obviously seeks to blur this. They want me spending more money online; I don't want to. It restricts the shopping experience, removing any chance that you might shop around, or read reviews, which just makes it easier to peddle shit. I really just don't want that shit in my face every day. But I don't doubt it'll work to some measure. And in some contexts for some users it will make a lot of sense for sure. But I suppose I am not in that target audience. ~~~ aaronbrethorst What are your alternatives? 1\. Pinterest never makes money, goes out of business. 2\. Pinterest slaps ads up on their website. 3\. Pinterest puts "Buy" buttons on every identified product. 4\. Pinterest charges you $10/month. #3 sounds way more palatable to me than #2. And we both know #4 isn't a realistic option. ~~~ marblar Realistically, #1 and #4 are the same option. ------ VLM 3rd party shopping sites are so awful, and amazon is so good, that there's probably a space in the market for a middleman doing nothing but connecting product to amazon for people who can't politically be seen as connecting to amazon. "Buy from VLM store" and all I do as a middleman is turn around and order it from amazon. ------ oimaz Would it be fair to say that the biggest challenge with the buy button is the lack of last mile fulfillment (like shipping, returns etc) from Google/FB/Pinterest. Amazon on the other does a job at this ~~~ jbandela1 I agree completely. When I shop online, I like going with amazon since I know from experience their return process is so painless if something goes bad. I can't imagine shopping for physical goods from Google. From what I hear, their customer service is pretty bad. I think overall that this is a risky proposition for these companies, in that if they mess something up they will have a lot of bad publicity. ~~~ jon-wood In Google's defense their support for people who are paying money for a service tends to be better - both AdWords and Google Apps have had pretty solid support teams when I've needed them. ------ elevensies I think [http://liketoknow.it](http://liketoknow.it) is pretty smart and is sitting at roughly the right level of coupling to the underlying platforms. When you like the photo on instagram, it emails you about the product, which was set up by the user that posted the photo. Easy and non-invasive. ------ bitcuration The problem is not shopping cart flow, the problem is small retailer needs an alternative than Amazon or eBay to low their selling cost. Google Facebook have the brand name and can help with the name brand, only they also have affiliation program besides buy button. The buy button alone doesn't change a damn thing.

Irrational Games (Bioshock Infinite) is shutting down - piratebroadcast http://irrationalgames.com/ ====== tibbon Maybe its just me, but there is something _deeply_ flawed with the game industry's hiring/firing practices. If a game does well, its time to lay off half (or more) of the team. Same result happens if a game does poorly of course. But it seems the only way to 'win' is to be at the top, or simply not play. I've seen this now with everything from Harmonix to Irrational Games. There seems to be a huge amount of money made with these blockbuster games, but vanishingly few companies seem to be able to manage their game development cycles efficiently as to always need a staff. It always comes off as terrible management/project management. For example, Harmonix's Rock Band was huge. There was around $299 million of bonuses paid to people at the top. Yet, I had friends work there get laid off repeatedly (once right before Christmas), sometimes shortly after the people at the top got the bonuses. Why in the world didn't they think to diversify a bit, run a few concurrent development cycles, etc... The most sane way to do game development seems to be to start your own indie studio and keep your expenses very low. Everything else seems... irrational. ~~~ ender7 The game business is like the movie business in that projects are "seasonal" rather than a constant thing. Unless you are working on a tight little indie game or a recurring blockbuster series (Call of Duty, Madden), the number of people that are required at any one time in development is incredibly variable. "Pre-production" headcounts need to be very small because the devs are still figuring out what the game _is_ and so don't have anything for an army of artists or engineers to do. Programming jobs in the games industry (and the entertainment industry in general) are not like "normal" programming jobs, despite the fact that they require an almost identical skill set. Put another way, they require the skills of a programmer but function on the employment schedule of a Hollywood lightning technician. (It sounds like the company your friend worked at was also mismanaged on top of this cycle, which always makes things worse. Sometimes very much worse.) ~~~ mbell I think part of what tends to get missed is that while AAA game development certainly has software development as part of it, it's a relatively small part of the overall project from a person power and cost perspective. It's not uncommon for a ~200 person game development team to have only ~15 software engineers on board, with the rest being on the game development side (game designers, animators, artists, level builders, game logic creators, testers, community managers, marketing, etc). It's also not uncommon for the internal tooling that gets created to allow the game development folks to build out the game to dwarf the actual game code is size/scope. There tends to be a large upfront effort from the software engineering side to get the engine ready and the supporting internal tooling ready for the game designers to go to town, after that it can be years in the game development process with only bugs, maintenance and smaller feature additions to the engine/tooling for the software dev side of the process. With such a lopsided time investment schedule between disciplines you need to be either a massive company or only work on games with a small scope to achieve smooth employment for all involved. ~~~ BSousa Unless things changed in the last 5 years or so, your numbers are way off base. Last game I worked it was around 100 dev people where 30% was software development, and from those 30% maybe 20% were tooling support. ~~~ Paul_S It depends on the technology model. If the company is using a licensed engine than there's very few coders - 10%-20% would be the number I'd pull out of thin air (probably 5% if you count all the outsourced artists working in sweatshops that never get credited). Some projects don't even need their own coders if they're reskins of other games and just borrow the coders from the original project when needed. Of course there are still companies which invest in their own tools and engine where the ratio is closer to what you propose, but that's rare. Now mostly big companies can afford to have their own core engine division but in those big devs the amount of artists is even more mindboggling because they are likely to in-house their cutscenes, voiceacting etc. All this works on the assumption that scripters are not coders which is debatable. ~~~ BSousa Well, I did leave the industry in 2008, but last 2 projects I worked on we used Unreal Engine and the ratios for software developers vs everything else (except publisher's people) were about those 30% I mentioned. We didn't have many 'scripters', mainly some level designers that used Kismet and maybe a few UnrealScript classes but apart from that, most was done in C++ by software developers. ------ beloch You've had critial success. You've made so much money you could retire, buy an island, and still have enough left over to turn it into a supervillain lair! I get it. You're only in it now for the love of creating, so why not leave the headaches of A titles behind? This is perfectly sensible. Handing off irrational to a protégé, taking your buddies and spinning off a smaller studio would be a great way to do this. Firing half the company that brought you success, however, is a bit of a dick move. ~~~ jimwalsh Not really. Their last game (Infinite) was a flop (AAA game that only sold 4m units). Take Two control the money, and with those kinds of results (huge team of 300 something, that took six plus years to create Infinite) you can imagine they weren't lining up to do another title. So Ken did what he could so that some of the studio would stay alive. ~~~ scott_s I disagree with your characterization of Bioshock Infinite as a "flop." Usually, calling something a "flop" means that it was _wildly_ unsuccessful. Infinite may not have re-couped its investment, but it was not wildly unsuccessful. That would be selling under, say, 100,000 units. (Keep in mind this is a semantic distinction, and not a value judgement of the game itself.) ~~~ kosei The last game that studio published was 6 years ago - Bioshock in 2007; Bioshock 2 was shipped by another studio. If they had 100+ employees (not unreasonable for a AAA game studio), they could have incurred personnel costs of $60M+ for the game's development. Which could definitely be considered a failure in the eyes of a game that only shipped 4MM games. ~~~ antimagic Sure, but just look at the numbers - let's firstly boost the number to 300 employees, not 100, I think that's closer to real, with an everage salary of around $60k. That puts salaries at about $180m. But, they sold 4 million copies at about $60 each, which makes $240m profit. Allowing for a decent ad spend, you're still looking at a back of the envelope break-even. OK, I get that investors might be bummed about that, but it's enough money to mean that they live to fight another day, have another crack at hitting it out of the park. As others have noted, AAA games are hit-based propositions. You pretty much have a few (3-5) titles that make all of the money each year, another 10 or so that hold the line, and everyone else loses. It's the last group that are flops, the second group are the par result. I think we can safely say that Bioshock Infinite was in the second group... ~~~ Shivetya they certainly do not get the full 60 per copy. I am not sure what current publishing deals are set at but I would be surprised if they even see 40 ~~~ kosei Yup. Usually I remember the rubric being about $30 back to the publisher on a $60-$70 title. MS/Sony each take a cut and so does the distributor (Steam, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc). Plus, as pointed out in comments below, there's also the fact that not all copies were sold at full price. So you're looking AT BEST at $120M in revenue, plus Irrational had TV ads and other large costs in addition to their staffing. ------ Argorak Irrational created some of my favorite games, because of the amount of thought and attention to detail they poured into them. I loved most of them. * SWAT 4: How cool is a multiplayer shooter where you actually have to breach a room from multiple sides to pressure the enemy into _not shooting_? And hold your guns until you saw any indication they would? We played that game for nights in one room for better communication. * System Shock 2: Deeply flawed in some regards, but also the first game that creeped me out in a _perfectly well lit and bright environment_. Shodan, as always, was a great enemy. * Freedom Force Series: A comic strategy game. It wasn't that hard (it wasn't easy, either), but had "comic" written all over the place. The description if you hovered the cursor over a mere building was "A proud participant of the Patriot City skyline." Someone put an ironic joke on the patriotic theme of the game in the description of a boring apartment block... How fun is that? BioShock was a culmination of all that. Would you kindly pay them your respect? ~~~ Mithaldu > Would you kindly pay them your respect? No, simply because Bioshock, while being wildly entertaining to many people, was so at the cost of many of the good design choices made in the System Shock games. Just see for example your note about the bright environments and contrast with Bioshock. (It also irks me a little that your post is missing just enough detail to make it seem as if they made SS2, instead of being co-creators under the lead of Looking Glass.) ~~~ Argorak Well, the whole Irrational Games/Looking Glass thing is a messy one, so I decided to skip that for the sake of an eulogy. I see Irrational as a successor to Looking Glass, although I would prefer LG to be still existing. I am split whether Bioshock threw away too much or just enough from System Shock 2. At my first playthrough, I was on the edge about this. The "would you kindly" scene cought me as off-guard as the Shodan reveal in SS2, so I forgive Bioshock a lot in the story department. It was definitely the more polished game in many regards. SS2 is hard to play nowadays and some things (like the ghosts) just really didn't work in hindsight. Also, the crafting and inventory-tetris didn't really add to the game. There is a lot in it that could be removed for good. On the other hand, SS2 stood at a time where those things hadn't been properly tried yet and is a good example of a game that has to be commended for trying out new things. And damn, was it great to actually explore the story. I heard a (german) podcast about old games a while ago where one of the podcasters said that he thinks that gamers in the 90s had more tolerance for games trying something and failing, because it was such a rapidly evolving medium. Perhaps, Bioshock was the System Shock for the 2000s and us old-school gamers wanted it to be something that relentlessly tries out things just as in the old times. Still, Bioshock is light-years ahead in story-telling and world-building than most games of that era. "Would you kindly" is a great example: It shows that the game was built around a narrative and not around a series of set pieces. ~~~ the_af What do you mean the ghosts in SS2 "didn't work"? I thought they were pure genius -- and they scared the crap out of me the first times they appeared. ------ mjn Kind of a strange letter, especially given that Irrational Games is a subsidiary of Take Two. It makes it sound like Irrational is doing great, and Ken Levine just wants to try something different. But if that were the case, demolishing Irrational to try his new thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It'd be more sensible for him to just leave Irrational, starting a new endeavor (either another subsidiary under Take-Two, or his own independent thing), and leaving Irrational intact. Possible explanations include: 1) there is _not_ as much success going on at Irrational as implied; 2) Ken Levine is just really attached to the name, and so wouldn't let it continue in present form while he leaves to do something else under a new name; 3) ...? ~~~ millerc I'd bet on 3) Levine isn't interested in just "more of the same", and his mission (Irrational's) is to create. I'm sure someone else can license the names and characters if what they want is "more of the same". Best of luck to the new team, looking forward to awesome stuff... ~~~ mjn If that's true, then it'd make Ken Levine just an asshole. If he wants to leave and do something different, fine, but why set the building on fire on your way out? It doesn't require firing a successful team for _you_ to go do something different, plenty of people leave successful companies to start something new. My _guess_ , though, is that he didn't actually make that choice and was told by Take-Two to downsize, and this is him pretending it was a voluntary "creative" decision, like politicians who want to spend more time with their family. ~~~ danudey The other possibility is that the 15 people he's taking with him are part of the company's top-tier leadership/talent; creative directors, art directors, etc. Maybe taking those 15 people is cutting off the head of the snake, and there's no one left to steer the ship after they're gone. ------ hawkharris This isn't the end... Irrational Games will enter the waters of baptism, and a new studio will be born. An infinite number of Irrational Games studios are opening and closing at this moment, like lighthouses on an ever-expanding ocean. The only difference between past and present is semantics. If what I'm saying sounds crazy, you owe it to yourself to play Bioshock Infinite. It's without a doubt one of the most beautiful and surreal games ever created. ~~~ vacri And despite the infinite number of Irrational Games studies opening and closing, for some reason they only ever make two games... a strange limitation on 'infinity'. ~~~ einhverfr > And despite the infinite number of Irrational Games studies opening and > closing, for some reason they only ever make two games... a strange > limitation on 'infinity'. Let's call those two games, "pi" and "e" while we are at it. ------ ChuckMcM > we will focus exclusively on content delivered digitally. Another one bites the dust. Sad to see irrational closing up but agree that 17 years is a long time for anything. My hope is that he isn't out to build the next candy crush thing. ~~~ Zikes That doesn't mean they're going mobile, just that they don't want to answer to a publisher. ------ zacinbusiness I truly understand not wanting to do "more of the same" after 17 years (I do something different nearly every day). But I really hate it for their developers and artists. Having only ever played the original Bioshock (which was beyond amazing to me), I know that at least the senior devs and artists have the chops to get hired somewhere new, or to start their own companies. But the jr. guys might have a tough time. ------ venomsnake It was expected. Probably he got fed up with modern publishing and Bioshock Infinite didn't do that great either - the 2 Bioshocks were on the verge of greatness, but it slipped from their hand mostly due to publisher interference (like not releasing modding tools and shipping with encrypted and signed content packs) when all of the community was begging for them. Bioshock has the potential to be the pre skyrim skyrim ... And bioshock infinite was threading on too safe ground. I really hope that his new studio will have bursts of creativity and success and the left out employees find better jobs soon. ~~~ smacktoward _> the 2 Bioshocks were on the verge of greatness, but it slipped from their hand mostly due to publisher interference (like not releasing modding tools and shipping with encrypted and signed content packs)_ I dunno about that -- what always seemed to me to be holding the Bioshocks back from greatness was that they were designed around a gameplay mechanism (FPS running and gunning) that clashed pretty severely with the type of game the designers seemed to want badly to make, namely an interactive story. The result was a sort of schizophrenia: Irrational would build these incredible environments and characters, and then stick them in the exact type of game where players couldn't linger over and savor them. They were just a blur that would flash past your gunsights as you killed people. This problem was so evident in the Bioshock games that they led people smarter than I am to eventually coin a term for it: "ludonarrative dissonance" (see [http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludona...](http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html)). Which basically means a game whose story is trying to do one thing while its mechanics are trying to do something completely different, pulling the player in incompatible directions. That -- and Irrational's seeming lack of interest in reconciling the two elements in their work -- always seemed like a bigger factor holding them back from greatness than their relative lack of moddability, at least to me. ~~~ wilg I agree - the BioShock games are great in theory but have a hugely messy execution. One of my favorite articles about Infinite is this one where it's argued that it's the worst game of the year: [http://tevisthompson.com/on-videogame- reviews/](http://tevisthompson.com/on-videogame-reviews/) ~~~ scott_s Agreed with you and smacktoward. Tevis' analysis gave me a lot to think about after playing the game, but during my play, I was nonplussed regarding the character arcs between Booker and Elizabeth, and the constant, brutal violence. ------ exgamebiz There's a misconception that BioShock Infinite was a massive hit. It had the kind of budget that needed to sell 3+, maybe even 4+, million units to break even. It sold 4 million, but a lot of those were at discounted prices or via Steam sales. Remember, it took five years with a large team and had a premium marketing budget. I'm going to guess about $80-100 million prior to marketing. Also, the crunch time was horrendous for much of the project. The project churned through people who left bitter and burned out. I'm not sayin' BI is a bad game, but this isn't the story of a well-managed studio. ------ dave_sullivan Man, these guys made some great games. > To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable. Candy crush with a story it is... Or less cynically, a totally awesome RPG with procedurally generated storylines so no playthrough is ever the same? ~~~ arrrg I’m really not sure why _anyone_ would be thinking _that_. That way of thinking makes no sense at all in this instance. During the last years there have been many indie games with a strong narrative focus. His mission statement together with his actions (small team, digital distribution) fits more with that than free to play mobile only games. It seems to me as though Ken Levine saw that he was making very narrative focused games (Bioshock Infinite in particular) with a side dish of shooting for that AAA appeal. Maybe he also saw all the indie developers making games with narrative focus who were not afraid of getting rid of such AAA trappings altogether because with digital distribution everyone can reach their niche and make sustainable amounts of money. Ken Levine is obviously not going all the way, but he is going pretty far with the downscaling (and it’s always worth to talk about whether he has gone the right way). AAA development gets you some nice things (God Only Knows sung by a barbershop quartet, for example) but comes with its own set of restrictions (you have to go for mass appeal) and when you want to make something smaller and more focused that doesn’t appeal to everyone then there’s lots to be said for getting smaller. (During the last few years we have seen the middle fall out from game development, with mid-sized developers and publishers going under. It seems that this gap is now filled from the bottom and the top, with former AAA developers scaling down and successful indie developers – Jonathan Blow with The Witness, Mike Bithell with Volume, … – scaling up.) There is whole diverse and crazy world below AAA titles. Some of those games are awful, but some are awesome. There is lots that can be done. And lots of cool things that are done. Why would you think of Candy Crush first? Especially the mention of the narrative focus makes me think of many excellent (and successful!) recent indie titles that also had a strong narrative focus: Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Kentucky Route Zero, … It seems to me that Ken Levine has something like that in mind plus his own game mechanics twist (the highly repayable part, whatever that means), certainly not some free to play mobile only bullshit. ------ minimaxir This is likely correlated with the absurd sales Bioshock Infinite received after release. (Down from $60 to $20 less than 6 months after release). They probably needed money. ~~~ bhouston RE: Quick price drop over 6 months. I think every game does that these days. There usually are fairly official numbers for sales of video games as it is a highly mature market. What are the real sales numbers? Here they are: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock_Infinite#Sales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock_Infinite#Sales) I suspect they budget was insanely high for the game though, so they needed not just a blockbuster, but a massive one. ~~~ officemonkey >I think every game does that these days. Bioshock dropped pretty quick, IIRC. I remember picking it up on special during the Steam Summer Sale for $19.99. It was less than six months after release. ~~~ minimaxir A 66% sale within 6 months for an AAA game is rare. (usually it's 33% max) However, I got Battlefield 4 for $20 in less than a month after release, so it's possible that's the new norm. ~~~ ericdykstra The Last of Us has been out since June, and is still over $40 (down from $60) no matter where you look. I don't think it's the new standard to discount games that heavily. ------ lectrick I don't know if anyone from Irrational Games is watching this, but from an oldish gamer, thank you so much for your creative and entertaining efforts over the years and I wish you all the best in your next adventures. ------ david_otoole I had the privilege of working at IG for a few years back during the SWAT4 / FFV3R / Bioshock 1 days, when the people who made System Shock 2 were largely still there. It's sad to see the name being retired, but it's better than seeing the name ruined by a flop or diluted by endless sequels. The announcement is pretty opaque---I expect the rumor mill to churn for awhile. ------ Eric_WVGG This is great news for fans of Ken Levine. I just finished Bioshock Infinite a couple weeks ago, and I was left feeling weirdly angry. It was a great story, shoehorned into a mediocre shooter. All of the problems with Bioshock were amplified. Which was necessary; in order to justify that kind of budget, they needed to make a game that would sell to the lowest-common-denominator. Hating on Bioshock Infinite is a bit like criticizing a Hollywood blockbuster for being dumbed-down. What did dummies like me expect? “To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable.” This is what fans of System Shock and Bioshock have been clamoring for. Set free of Take Two's blockbuster expectations, Levin will be free to deliver it. ------ mariusmg This is really fishy (the whole situation and the studio closure). First of all Irrational Games is (wholly) owned by Take Two. So only Take Two decides what happens with the studio. From the statement i guess they decided that is "less bad" if Levine steps up and says they "wind down" instead of Take 2 announcing they close the studio. Basically PR damage. Regarding the reason....looking at their output it seems they had it coming. After the original Bioshock (2007) they took 6 (!!) years to release Infinite (and even that was codeveloped with 2K Australia). The financial losses must have been pretty big. ------ uchi For those not in the knowhow, BioShock Infinite was in development for a very long time. Work began on the game in 2008 and the first public announcement of the project was made in 2010. One developer when interviewed at polygon was quoted as saying that they culled enough content to make five or six games. E3 footage of the game over the years (and hell, even tv commercials of the game,) have nothing in common with the final released product with the sole exception of Columbia as a setting and different character versions of Elizabeth and Booker. as soon as I get to a PC I will post sources ------ deletes _my passion has turned to making a different kind of game than we’ve done before. To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers. In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience._ I just read that as; we are gonna make an even more narative based System Shock 2 equivalent. ------ b0rsuk This is why I've backed 9 Kickstarter games already. It may not be perfect, but I'm not a part of the problem anymore. Traditional publishers put the carriage before the horse. They use money earned by Game 11 to fuel Game 12. When you're buying a game you like, you're NOT paying for its production costs. You're paying for its _sequel_ production costs. Kickstarter success is reputation/prototype based. You need either a great reputation or a great prototype. It's essentially a form of grant. Many of the games which succeed will ultimately fail in the "fun" sense. Yet I'm convinced that, as broken as AAA publishers are, throwing dice gives me a better chance. Check out board games. There's big innovation and it's entirely game mechanic based. ------ winslow Well this is sad. I've been thoroughly impressed with Bioshock Infinite's gameplay, plot, story, AI, art, and attention to detail. Hopefully the artists/devs/writers will find another position elsewhere. I wonder what happened. It sounds like Bioshock Infinite didn't bring in the cash they thought it would? Reminds me of Ensemble Studios closing after AoE:III and Halo Wars. ------ troymc Can someone here translate "core gamer" and "core gaming audience" for me? Those phrases mean nothing to me. ~~~ sesqu Wikipedia has a brief section on this[1], but essentially it means "buys on release". It's the people who follow reviewers and industry news, spread word- of-mouth, play for dozens of hours, but don't demand features that would drive other customers away. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamer#Core_gamer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamer#Core_gamer) ------ shrnky Ok, time to call most of you out. Why's this company different? When nameless corporations lay everyone off I usually here how broken capitalism is and how huge companies are evil, etc., but in this case I see more people trying to rationalize it. ------ leonatan Sad to see them go. Their latest games weren't as good as their early ones (too much shooting), but still sad. Hope to see Levine involved in a project soon. ------ grogenaut Surprised at the lack of hate for Ken at this dick move. ------ wnevets I cant forgive them for tribes vengeance. ~~~ floody-berry In their defense, T:V was mostly Thrax' doing and Irrational were just an unfortunate contractor. Even still, they did butcher just about every mechanic in the game. ------ b0rsuk I realize I'm promoting board games to the wrong people - to people who've already been trained to expect the same things from 'games' as from movies - but you should take a closer look at board games. Outside of computer/console 'game' industry, games are rules. You distinguish two games by their rules. "How do you play it ?" is the question you need to ask. In video 'game' world, "game" has become an umbrella term for: \- stories, \- simulations, \- puzzles, \- actual multiplayer games, \- playgrounds/toys (Minecraft, MMO...) Basically any interactive software that is used for entertainment is called a game these days. I guess vlc also meets the criteria, after all you can use it to watch porn. There's a parallel between Test Driven Development and board games. Today, computer games have become so complex and have so many moving parts that they have more in common with simulations than board games they largely came from. This is because you no longer understand all or even most of its RULES. Computer is kind enough to calculate everything for you. You don't know why a fireball deals 23 damage or why your city suffers an epidemic. It could be because it's scripted that way, because something gives it a +20% bonus (added before or after X ? Is it actually +20% or * 1.2 ? Wording is ofter ambiguous). The player is only expected to move around in a world and bump into things. Often the quickest way to learn a game is to try it. Learn the way children learn languages - not by memorizing grammar rules, but by practicing. Why TDD ? It is often claimed that in Test Driven Development, you write tests before you write code. THEN you write minimal code to pass those tests. By definition, you have practically 100% test coverage, which can be nice. By definition, you know all the rules of a board game. The rules tell you how and when move pieces, cards, tokens around. Modding and house rules is rampant in board game world. It happens even accidentally - when you fail to learn rules correctly, and later decide it's more fun that way. It's absolutel fine to play with "wrong" rules if all players agree to do it beforehand. Board game players often make their expansions, variants, prettier game art. \-------------- Fun fact: "Sacrifice" spell in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is widely considered one of worst spells in the game. Sacrifice a unit to resurrect another one ? Load game, I wasted so many resources on level5 guild!! Unless you know the formula, which is NOT specified in the game. Then you can produce a table like this: [http://wstaw.org/m/2012/12/05/imps_1.png](http://wstaw.org/m/2012/12/05/imps_1.png) With a modest investment (3 skill points and growth bonus building), you can sacrifice 1 week worth of imps(level1) to resurrect 2 weeks worth of Archdevils (level7). Assuming you get the guild, it all comes early enough to be relevant in a cutthroat multiplayer game. And it gets better and better as the game progresses, because unlike with most spells the effect doesn't increase in a logarithmic fashion (experience levels), but with troop counts. This is not good. This is devastating. The huge discrepancy between the perceived value of the spell and its actual value is due to bad documentation and hidden rules. It is extremely common for computer games to contain hidden, unexplained rules. ~~~ herokusaki > Today, computer games have become so complex and have so many moving parts > that they have more in common with simulations than board games they largely > came from. > By definition, you know all the rules of a board game. The rules tell you > how and when move pieces, cards, tokens around. Your comment doesn't mention table-top RPGs, and it seems to me that it's them, rather than simulations, that modern computer games are closer to. In a table-top RPG the players are often not expected to know or understand all the rules and "moving parts" of the game. The GM is also free to decide to bend the rules if he or she thinks it would enhance the experience for the players. ------ johnny635 Get out of the gaming industry while you still can. Otherwise, you'll be looking at getting out of the software industry in no time. ~~~ winslow Care to elaborate a little bit? ~~~ Goosey Can not speak for the grandparent post, but sharing my own experience here going from AAA game development to 'serious games' (DARPA contracted training simulators) to web development I've got to agree with them (with a caveat). Each step away from games has lead to more sane company environments and higher proportional incentives. The reality of games is that programmers are underpaid in comparison to other industries. If a web programmer with X years of experience can command a salary of Y you can expect a game programmer with X years of experience to command approximately 2/3 * Y. Exact same geographical region. In return for being underpaid you will encounter far more 'crunch time'. I was fortunate in prioritizing this concern in the companies I chose to work for, but many of my friends in the AAA games industry have become completely used to working 10 hour days, 6 days a week, for 3-6 months straight at a time. Every. Single. Fucking. Year. Around July is when it begins; holiday launch schedules being the driving factor. On top of this, as illustrated in TFA, even if your game is a huge success you have extremely little job security. Saying the industry is entirely hit driven is actually missing the point; the issue is most AAA game studios are essentially huge, expensive, single-focus (and usually single-project) consultancies. Even if you have a success the lions share of the returns is going to go to the publisher and you are immediately back to pitching to the publisher to keep the lights turned on. So why is it this way? IMHO there are two main reasons. The first is because AAA titles are ridiculously expensive now. Internally financing one is completely out of the capabilities of any studio at this point. In the past it was possible to save from a good success and self- finance the next: no way now. In the past it was possible for a rag-tag group of passionate developers to have a AAA breakaway success. Impossible now. The second is because it's something lots of people dream of doing. The only sane reason to work in games is the exact reason most people who work in games continue to work in games: they love it. They love games. They love the tech in games (which, compared to the CRUD factories the vast majority of programming gigs outside of games, is really fucking awesome). They are following the advice of 'do what you love' and paying for it. Because there are TONS of other people that also love it. It's stunning the amount of turnover in the games industry. 5 years of experience is senior. 10 years is old school veteran. Because people burn out and leave. Because there is an endless supply of less experienced cheaper developers to fill in the gaps. The answer 'go indie' is just naive. For every indie success there are ungodly numbers of complete failures and you can no longer twist the knobs of a publisher's titan AAA marketing machine to stack the deck. Going indie is doing a startup which is impossible to fund and which has no hope or aspirations of Facebook level success. It is a giant success in the indie game world is to be successful enough to just support yourselves! It is something to be done by those with the love and passion for doing so for the reason of having the love and passion of doing so. It's never a rational decision from a purely financial point of view. I have the utmost respect and admiration for those who follow this path precisely for this reason. The games industry is an entertainment industry. It's more apt to compare game developers to musicians or actors or writers in the way the economics operate. It's not a business; it never will be. And honestly, I do miss it. ~~~ eliah-lakhin Very clear explanation. Thank you, Goosey! How do you think is it possible that one day Web Development (generally speaking, industry of Internet startups) may fall into the same gap? There are a lot of guys around who enjoy Web programming very much. Fortunately, we have a lot of job opportunities, and work conditions look good. But I fear how long will it be.

Show HN: A website that calculates the % of your commutes that are in darkness - richev http://www.darkmornings.com ====== MichaelDickens The website can't find my location. It would be nice if it would let me manually enter my location. ~~~ richev If you're using a browser that supports geolocation (and you enable this) then it will find your location. Otherwise it uses an IP address-based lookup. The one I'm using at the moment is free though, and patchy. :( Sorry it didn't work for you. Manual location entry is a good idea though so I'll add it to the potential "to do" list. Thanks for the feedback!

Ask HN: What is there any Hackintosh of-the-self laptop? - sahin-boydas I am mac user since I am 6 years old and I really feel good if I use latest.<p>I am really done with Macbook for simple reasons.<p>1) Why do I need to wait 2-3 years and get 1-2 year old hardware for 2500 USD av.<p>2) I want everything to be usb-c fine. I really got it but world or us are not ready for it.<p>3) Why in the world one of best operation company cannot deliver an iphone with usb-c or can&#x27;t have iphone slot in macbook pro. This is a joke!<p>4) I want Mac subscription or upgradable mac.<p>5) I have macbook, apple watch, iphone 7, how in the world is it difficult to have 1 charger (smart enough to detect the device and charge) and simple usb-c for all of it instead of 4 doggles&#x2F;cables&#x2F;adaptors ====<p>For all these reasons, I am asking. Is there any of-the-self laptop Hackintosh ?<p>(I will use for educational purposes so please don&#x27;t remind me about EULA) ====== informatimago The EULA applies to educational purposes too. Education is one of the main markets of Apple. I'd suggest to install Darwin and GNUstep, or better, Linux and GNUstep on a PC laptop. ------ sfrailsdev Off the shelf hackintoshes don't exist afaik. You might be able to get a bespoke one from someone though, if you check relevant forums and post there. ------ stuffaandthings People have had success with macOS on certain Lenovo laptops (t450s) ~~~ sahin-boydas cool, this was helpful.

Open Source Bridge, an awesome conference in Portland, seeks proposals - reidab http://opensourcebridge.org/call-for-proposals/ ====== reidab I'm one of the co-chairs of the conference, so anything I can say is somewhat biased, but I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. We're in our fourth year now and our attendees have consistently praised the feel of the conference, the content, and the setting. Submit a proposal, get accepted, come to Portland and enjoy life for a few days with fellow open source hackers. :)

Show HN: Simple, fast and fun communication over Websockets - macleos https://github.com/penalosa/epsilon ====== macleos A little project I made to make communication over websockets as easy as calling an async local function, using Proxies to "proxy" function calls to a node server.

PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser - rayalez https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/?src=hn ====== littlestymaar This is really cool ! Framasoft is doing a great job with their project to «ungoogle the internet»[1]. I really wish Mozilla tried doing the same thing, with their much bigger manpower and communication impact. [1]: [https://degooglisons-internet.org/liste?l=en](https://degooglisons- internet.org/liste?l=en) ~~~ Feniks Un Google the internet? I hope so but almost every remotely commercial site out there uses Google services. ~~~ littlestymaar People use Google's services (and other privately owned, and «you are the product», ones) because it's the most convenient way they know about. Sometimes it's because it's the most convenient way (lack of credible competition, self-hosting isn't an option for many companies), and sometimes it's because the alternatives are less known (commercial products based on OpenStreetMap are way better than what google maps offer, but few people know about them). An organization like Mozilla could make open-source-based and privacy-aware services for many Google products with ease if they wanted to. (I mean, Framasoft is doing it already and it's a really tiny French non-profit organization !) ------ that_guy1 I think for this to be successful you need to encourage users to server the videos. There are a couple things that might help this: \- Popularity could be based not only on views, but how many total minutes of the video were shared by other people. \- When someone watches a video, they have to keep hosting it until they share as much as they've watched it (so if they watched 10 minutes, they have to share it until they've distributed 10 minutes worth of the video to other people. ~~~ cwkoss Make them share for ~10% longer than they consumed for a more robust network. ~~~ KallDrexx Most people have terrible upload speeds compared to download speeds. In my neighborhood most people (by choice because they aren't tech savy and don't care) have AT&T DSL with 40Mbps download but 2Mbps upload. This means that for a good quality 10 minute video at 720p with a bitrate of 3mbps they would have to seed for significantly longer than viewing just to get a ratio of 1 without degrading downstream performance. ~~~ thenewwazoo Just to add a datapoint to this, my home service is gigabit down... _10 megabit_ up. That's 1000 / 10. ~~~ alexeldeib This makes me want to go test me upload on my gigabit down connection... ------ jstanley It would have been cooler for this to use IPFS instead of its own P2P content distribution. Still cool though. ~~~ progval IPFS does not work in the browser yet. ~~~ mtgx D.tube works just fine: [https://d.tube/](https://d.tube/) ~~~ progval D.tube makes the browser download from a gateway (ipfs.io) using HTTP. ~~~ aaomidi You can set it to connect to your own gateway. ~~~ rakoo Doesn't change the fact that your browser doesn't connect to the ipfs network ------ coolspot Perhaps also needs onion routing to protect users from liabilities. ~~~ nilson it says it works in browser so you just run it from tor browser ~~~ detaro AFAIK Tor browser deactivates WebRTC to avoid leaking real IPs, so at least the P2P aspect wouldn't work. Not sure if seeding from the server works without it. ------ deevolution awesome, except it doesn't look like there are any incentives to running a server. unless i missed something? ~~~ Sir_Cmpwn Like Mastodon et al, this doesn't need to be built on traditional incentives. The incentives are that you want to share cool videos with people. Any one server that gets overloaded with users encourages others to host another server and build a community on it, and the load (and the cost) naturally balances and is distributed across the whole network. ~~~ deevolution Definitely an interesting digital ecosystem experiment. Hopefully it can sustain itself. Will be interesting to see how it plays out and evolves. ------ jacksmith21006 Problem is being able to monetize. ~~~ loup-vaillant Monetise what? For whom? The thing is distributed, it's not like the host has to shoulder most of the bandwidth costs. If one wants to live off their videos, that's another problem, but most videos don't mean to be monetised at all —no ads, no Patreon, no nothing. ~~~ ralusek They can just use Patreon in exactly the same way they do for YouTube.

Change to IT - rjohnk In short: Is there a way to transition to IT without dropping everything and going back to school?<p>Long story: I initially went to college in pursuits of a Comp Sci degree. I had a difficult time and burnt out in one year, switching my major a full 180 to Psychology&#x2F;Social Services.<p>I&#x27;m now at a non-profit, but it&#x27;s not what I want to do.<p>I shouldn&#x27;t have done that 180. I should have done a &quot;30&quot;. But I was young.<p>I have children and a wife, and going back to school, even part-time, is not an option as I&#x27;m already paying off loans. How do I get my foot in the door? I&#x27;m not formally trained, but I always fall back into Tech&#x2F;Computers, and want to do that in my work. ====== xtraclass Maybe you could choose a topic which is interesting to you and where there is a good market. Then learn about it (WEB), practice it at home as much as possible, write about it - ask for a job then. About learning and job: [http://calnewport.com/blog/](http://calnewport.com/blog/) (not every post on that site is great, but some really are...) Wish you good luck!

Tony Abbott hacked after posting boarding pass on Instagram - RyanShook https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54193764 ====== dimtion Existing discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488224) ~~~ RyanShook Thanks. Just thought the original post was very long and interesting that BBC picked it up.

Ask HN: What keeps you from burning out? - kineticac Let's face it, nobody can code every minute of their lives without burning out too fast. What kind of stuff do you promote at the office / home office that keeps you motivated, loose, and happy?<p>We're setting up the office space now, and we're committed to making it as fun as possible from the start, to help offset all the stress that is sure to come. Given a budget and space restraints of course ;)<p>Here's our table / setup so far: http://post.ly/AkcX ====== chrischen Games? Sometimes I take a break with some video game, but then again I'm kind of young so I don't know if this works for older people. Also if the thing I'm working on is mentally stimulating and challenging, it motivates me by itself and keeps me from burning out. So something like a couch to sit on or a place with a great view is good to go to and just think. If you can put in windows, put those in. A TV would work too, and a place for snacks like a fridge. ------ makecheck I think the best thing you can do is focus on results and not the clock. If someone wants to take 2 days off in the middle of nowhere, or work odd hours, they should, as long as they eventually produce as much as they're supposed to. A "fun" workplace may not actually be, since it seeks to turn the office into the new home. People should actually go home in order to feel the most at home. ~~~ kineticac that's definitely a good point. balance between real life and work is a must, rather than trying to keep people only at the office. I like the foosball table because it lets everyone step away from work and do something together that's fun and totally different than what they were just doing before. ------ seven My favourite (home-)office 'things': * big punching bag. (this is a must have!) * place to be alone (toilet does not count!) * working hammock (as homer suggested) probably a big sofa is ok too * a kitchen * my brother works for a company where they have breakfast together every Friday. and since I visited your website, I would like to have a fish-tank. :) ~~~ kineticac Punching bag is cool, helps promote health too! Good suggestion. Glad you took a look at the blog, the fish tank is currently in my house, but if budget permits, I'd like to set one up in the office area too. Saltwater reefs are ridiculously soothing to watch and take care of. breakfast together sounds like a fun idea =) do they go out somewhere? make it there? cater it? ~~~ seven Afer I got my punching bag, I really had a lot more respect for boxers. :) From my understanding, they do not go out, but make breakfast in a conference room. Basic stuff is somehow organized.. and everybody brings small stuff like special marmalade once in a while to spice things up. I guess that they are about 20-30 people. They do talk about business all the time. But as it is not enforced anyhow, it does not feel like work. They seem to have a very nice working culture. To quote from his (german only blog): 'Meetings are very important. Showing up late is strictly forbidden and would result in drastic punishment. Meetings are so important, that we would never ever let the times overlap with our foosball table tournaments.' ------ MichaelTroy Trying to be conscious of feeling like I am burning (out). If I can be conscious of that feeling, I am able to detach to a certain degree. This enables me to go a hell of a lot further. I guess simply being aware that I may be burning out helps me find perspective. ------ CyberFonic Reading Hacker News and not being made feel guilty :-) ------ pasbesoin Environment. When I'm putting more effort into tuning out a noisy, distracting environment than I am into the work product, burnout is on the horizon. Beware of people who claim to like such environments: Some function well in them, but in my anecdotal observation, many crank out substandard work. This accumulates over time into big problems.

Get Tgethr: A Simple Email Collaboration Tool - vaksel http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/16/get-tgethr-a-simple-email-collaboration-tool/ ====== gvb Looks like Mailman <http://www.list.org/> (except Mailman doesn't help with encryption, you have to figure it out yourself). FWIIW, my experience is that Microsoft Outlook and web-based email interfaces have trained users to use incredibly bad habits with email (crappy quoting, top posting (a subset of crappy quoting), 200K Word documents for a 5 line memo, megabyte .BMP screen shots, etc.). This really hurts email list usefulness until and unless the users improve their habits. Unfortunately... a) Outlook use is usually required by The Corporate Overlords. Even if it isn't required, users that don't know better insist on using it because it allows them to paste Mbyte .BMP screen shots into it. :-( b) While Outlook can be configured for usable quoting, nobody bothers to do so. c) Even if configured in the best way it supports, Outlook is still suboptimal. d) Web based email interfaces are generally even less configurable than Outlook and they all aspire to mimic Outlook, including promoting all of the crappy habits. \--- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all." In other words, - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. \-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001). 1st American ed. New York : Harmony Books, 1980, c1979 <http://www.douglasadams.com/> ------ ideamonk I'm not sure if anyone's gonna buy this. I understand from my look at tgethr that its about collaboration, security and email wrapped into new clothes. But then, the popularity of a service hugely depends on the size of its userbase right? How would tgethr ever get a huge userbase by putting restrictions and making people buy to get a feel in the first place. I think the domain togethr.com would've been better, matches the pronounciation ... tgethr sounds like T gethr or something... I keep forgetting the domain for I thought it was togethr when I tried to open it after 20 minutes... I wish tgethr could have a nice favicon, can't see any in chrome. BstOfLck ------ quizbiz I'm not sure I understand the concept of Email Collaboration... ~~~ robryan I'm not sure I understand the concept of all these startups with names warping the English language. ~~~ buro9 Lack of domain names. ------ ardit33 Lame guys. I think the email encryption is probably the biggest feature, and you left it out from the try out. The only way to try it if it works for you is to pay for it. ~~~ yankeeracer73 Actually that's not true - you can try any plan for 30 days for free, then you pay.

Understanding the Elm type system - jaxondu http://www.adamwaselnuk.com/elm/2016/05/27/understanding-the-elm-type-system.html ====== spion > For example, when writing an Elm program I might at some point decide that > users should have an admin flag. I will then try to use that flag in a > function at which point the compiler will tell me that I have failed to add > it to the User model. I will add it to the model at which point the compiler > will tell me that I have failed to account for it in my main update > function. This beautifully explains why types are so useful. I don't know if the number of bugs goes down, but it sure is useful to have an assistant check _all_ the implications of a change I want to make, and does that in a second. ~~~ pjmlp They go down and also allow for doing good AOT code generation to native code in the languages that have such toolchains, whereas dynamic languages really need a JIT. After working on a startup that had a server architecture similar to AOL Server and also seeing some heavy Zope deployments (late 90's), I never got to understand the use of dynamic languages for large codebases. ~~~ klibertp > whereas dynamic languages really need a JIT Dylan? Honestly asking - I used the language a bit but I didn't read anything on its implementation(s). ~~~ pjmlp Lisp also has good AOT compilers, but you need to provide the necessary (optional) type annotations. So in the end you end up with code that looks no different than from static languages. With ML-like type inference and dynamic type support, there is hardly any disadvantage with static type languages and you get the tooling support. Dynamic languages can have very nice tooling, and we are yet to regain what was possible in Xerox and Genera environments, but your environment needs a live image of the code to produce good results, hence JIT. ------ z1mm32m4n It's refreshing to see a piece written by someone who's new to functional programming, discovering the beauty of types and pure functions for the first time. I very much agree with the author; learning functional programming idioms have had a profound impact on my ability to model problems in code, regardless of the language I'm using. I admire Elm so much for putting an emphasis on the user experience, recognizing that it has been one of the biggest blockers to making functional programming mainstream. ------ ghayes At first glance, Elm's type system looks like it borrows heavily from Haskell [0]. Learning Haskell's type system is a great mental exercise, even if you don't even up coding in the language. [0] Basics: [http://learnyouahaskell.com/types-and- typeclasses](http://learnyouahaskell.com/types-and-typeclasses) ~~~ catnaroek Elm's type system is a lot simpler than Haskell's. No higher kinds, no type classes, and certainly no crazy GHC extensions. OTOH, Elm has much nicer records, though Haskell sets the bar very low. ~~~ elcapitan Is Elm actually closer to Haskell or is it rather a typed Javascript in Haskell syntax? The documentation looks very accessible, there's a bit of introduction to the language, and then hands-on, that's nice. edit: by documentation I meant this gitbook: [https://www.gitbook.com/book/evancz/an-introduction-to- elm/d...](https://www.gitbook.com/book/evancz/an-introduction-to-elm/details), but the official documentation looks similar. ~~~ catnaroek Elm has two things in common with JavaScript: strict evaluation and being designed for client-side Web development. In every other respect, Elm is closer to Haskell and diametrically opposite to JavaScript: (0) statically and strongly typed, with type inference (1) algebraic data types with pattern matching and exhaustiveness checking (2) purely functional ~~~ bootload (3) immutability ~ [https://www.google.com/search?q=elm- lang.org+immutabilty](https://www.google.com/search?q=elm- lang.org+immutabilty) ~~~ catnaroek I would've added it to (2), similarly to how (0) and (1) are each a group of related features. ~~~ bootload @catnaroek your right, it's really implied by being a FP language. ------ ralfd > Elm was my introduction to using a static, strong type system. I think I am now officially feeling old. A language I never heard of is the introduction to programmers to static typing?? ~~~ pka Well, he said "strong" :) Probably meaning a ML-derived type system, not C's or Java's. ~~~ catnaroek Why should anyone's first statically typed language be a weakly typed one in 2016? ~~~ steveklabnik As if "strong" and "weak" weren't overridden enough when it comes to type systems, many people will use "stronger" and "weaker" when talking about the relative amount of guarantees a static type system can give you. "C has a fairly weak static type system, and Haskell has a very strong static type system." Since the "strong" vs "weak" axis of type systems is already not extremely useful, as very few languages are truly weakly typed, it's usually fine. ~~~ catnaroek Okay, then let me define a new axis: useful vs. useless type systems. A type system is useful to the extent types rule out implementation errors and/or miscommunication between the implementer and the user of an abstraction: (0) Algebraic data types, pattern matching and exhaustiveness checking rule out forgetting to handle all the qualitatively different possible outcomes of an operation. (1) Statically typed effects rule out sneaking effects into computations without making them knowable to the user. (2) Substructural type systems rule out resource leaks and uses after free. (3) Rust's borrow checker rules out concurrent modifications of the same object in memory. How usefully typed are C and Java? ------ captainmuon > A big gotcha for me was understanding the -> syntax. How can a function that > accepts two arguments possibly have a type annotation like this? connectWords : String -> String -> String This is one of the most maddening things for me about Haskell-like languages. I can never remember if -> is left or right associative. I mean there is only one way that makes sense: # String -> (String -> String) But it could also be # (String -> String) -> String Of course you get used to it after a while, but a nagging feeling remains. I would really prefer a bit of syntactic sugar. ~~~ bo1024 I think when these type annotations are used, at least traditionally in e.g. Haskell, the functions are curried by default. In other words, all functions only take one argument. If all functions only take one argument, then it has to be the first interpretation, not the second. ~~~ Kiro Doesn't String -> String -> String mean it takes two arguments in this case though? > The type annotation for connectWords is telling us that connectWords is a > function that accepts two strings and returns a string. Or maybe I misunderstand this whole thing. I know nothing about Haskell/Elm. ~~~ ncd It's a function that takes a String and returns a new function which takes a String and returns a String. All functions in Haskell/Elm are arity 1. So in order to construct functions that accept more than one argument, you actually return successive functions that apply successive arguments, known as currying. ~~~ Kiro Thanks! Is this the case in Elm as well? This is the example they give: connectWords : String -> String -> String connectWords firstWord secondWord = firstWord ++ secondWord ~~~ elbenshira In this case, you think of `connectWords` as a function that takes two arguments. But since it is curried, you can also do this: let prefix = connectWords "Hello " world = prefix "world" bob = prefix "bob" in ... `world` is "Hello world", and `bob` is "Hello bob". That is the power of currying. A maybe more useful example is specifying the mapping function in `List.map` without supplying the list to map over. This allows you to use the same map with multiple lists. ------ lucio Honest question: How useful is that all functions are curried by default? Does this impose performance penalties? ~~~ dmix Having curry by default allows you to create very readable code using function composition, which is the primary way of transforming data through multiple steps in FP. For example of a typical imperative approach to applying functions: function price(product) { product == 'book' && return 20 product == 'laptop' && return 10 } function addShipping(product, price) { product == 'book' && return price + 10 product == 'laptop' && return price + 5 } function addTax(price) { return price + (x * 0.13) } function total(product) { cost = price(product) subtotal = addShipping(product, cost) total = addTax(subtotal) return total } Compared to a haskell-style JS which combines currying and function composition (. combines functions in Haskell): price :: Product -> (Int) price p = p == 'book' && () => 10 p == 'laptop' && () => 20 shipping :: Product -> (Int -> Int) shipping p = p == 'book' && (x) => x + 10 p == 'laptop' && (x) => x + 25 tax :: Int -> Int tax x = x + (x * 0.13) total :: Product -> Int total p = tax . shipping(p) . price(p) Alternatively, you can easily create object specific total functions: totalBook = tax . shipping('book') . price('book') totalLaptop = tax . shipping('laptop') . price('laptop') Note how in the FP `total` version the data is not held in temporary variables but passed directly to the next function, which could be a performance gain. Another benefit is how it's easier to work with curried functions when using map/reduce and list comprehensions - two other fundamental building blocks of FP programs. For example, you can pass a curried `shipping` function directly to map whereas `addShipping` would required an anonymous function (since it has two arguments). map(shipping('laptop'), [5, 10, 20, 30]) vs map(function(price) { addShipping('laptop', price) }, [5, 10, 20, 30]) The performance question is largely a question of the implementation and compiler optimizations. But considering we're working in a browser environment the "bottle-neck" is going to be DOM interaction not passing around curried functions everywhere. Additionally, you are much more like to create functions in FP with single arguments rather than multiple in order for composition to work cleanly. ------ mrkgnao Does Elm not have typeclasses? (I looked at the pics and saw `List.map` everywhere.) ~~~ ubertaco I've heard that Elm is a little more like an ML that looks like Haskell than it is like Haskell itself. ------ warfangle Any suggestions on where to start with Elm? Learn You an Elm examples don't compile on the try-it-live console. Official examples do, but fail to compile on a local install (after setting up elm package install etc). Any suggestions on where to start troubleshooting? It's failing to find modules that are in the core standard lib. ~~~ mml I found many of the examples in the guides are now out of date since the recent release, which is very unfortunate. ~~~ ocean3 [http://guide.elm-lang.org/](http://guide.elm-lang.org/) \- contains examples that do work. ~~~ warfangle They work in the live editor on elm-lang.org. But not locally. Maybe my environment isn't set up correctly? I tried the first one (the counter). Copy/pasted directly into a dir as 'counter.elm'. Initialized the dir with 'elm package install' to get the core library. $ elm make counter.elm I cannot find module 'Html'. Module 'Main' is trying to import it. Potential problems could be: * Misspelled the module name * Need to add a source directory or new dependency to elm-package.json Edit/update: source-directories is ["."] in elm-package.json. Dependency "elm- lang/core": "4.0.1 <= v < 5.0.0" is in elm-package.json. elm-version is "0.17.0 <= v < 0.18.0". elm-make is elm-make 0.17 (Elm Platform 0.17.0). core is installed in elm-stuff/packages: macbook:core me$ pwd /Users/me/elm-learning/elm-stuff/packages/elm-lang/core additionally, macbook:elm-learning me$ which elm /usr/local/bin/elm Edit2: so, I then guessed that Html wasn't a part of the core lib, and tried to install evancz/html, but apparently that doesn't work with 0.17 (I get an error about version constraints). I'm guessing the elm-lang.org editor doesn't use 0.17? ~~~ dywedir In Elm 0.17 use elm-lang/html ~~~ warfangle Thanks. Kinda amateur hour with leaving that out of the guide. I wonder how many others have gotten as frustrated and stopped trying to learn it! I'll submit a PR to update the docs in a lil bit. ------ lucio the elm debugger seems also impressive [http://debug.elm-lang.org/](http://debug.elm-lang.org/) ~~~ iamcreasy Wow! That's impressive. Is this possible to do in imperative languages? i.e. in C++ or Java? If not, why?

A.P. Moving to Halt Use of Newspaper Articles on Web Sites - senthil_rajasek http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/business/media/07paper.html ====== pg Bizarre. It sounds as if they want to stop appearing in Google search results. Boy do these people not understand the web. ~~~ calambrac They want to stop appearing in Google search results _as long as Google isn't paying them for the right to present those results_ , which I think is an important distinction to make. Playing devil's advocate a bit, from the AP's perspective, how is Google really any different than any other distributor of AP content? It's just another company using their content to hang ads off of and generate revenue (like all of their other customers), except that Google doesn't pay for it. AP makes money from volume, lots of papers subscribing to their feed. Google means that fewer papers are needed (it just needs to index one, doesn't it?), chopping the AP's customer base down and eventually making their current model completely obsolete. Seeing the writing on the wall and trying to prevent it from happening, that's not evidence they don't get it, that's evidence they get it all too well but just have no idea what to do about it. Any thoughts on what to do about it? As far as I can tell, nobody has really figured it out yet, have they? ~~~ jonknee > Playing devil's advocate a bit, from the AP's perspective, how is Google > really any different than any other distributor of AP content? It's just > another company using their content to hang ads off of and generate revenue > (like all of their other customers), except that Google doesn't pay for it. Seriously? Google links out to the original copy. You see a headline and at most a couple sentences. If there's a fulltext copy it is licensed. ~~~ calambrac Yes, of course they do. But before you click through, there are a bunch of ads displayed off to the side. And Google just exposes the one newspaper that they're sending the traffic to, so the one with the best SEO wins while everyone else goes out of business, directly threatening the AP's bottom line. So what's the AP going to do? They can restructure their rates so they capture more from the winners, and/or they can hit the whole ad stack (which Google is the first layer of, now). I mean, really, what else do you expect them to do? Just wither and die? Another way to say it: when the distribution of a pile of money across a group of companies shifts from normal to power law, and you were getting paid by that group, you had better figure out how you're going to get more money out of the winners as the losers start dropping out. ~~~ ja2ke "the one with the best SEO wins while everyone else goes out of business, directly threatening the AP's bottom line." Versus what? The AP is somehow going to benevolently distribute all paid links equally amongst all of its various print client to help them all reach each month's traffic goals? ~~~ calambrac Um, no. What did I say that suggested that? Did you read the article? They're going to try to change their model so that they get paid more by the companies that are shifting to the spiky end of the emerging power law distribution, and capturing revenue from the whole ad stack. ------ peterhi But what would happen if Google just removed them all from the indexes for a month or so. I for one would be giggling hysterically for quite a while :) Then the papers (or what is left of them) will be demanding that Google index them as an issue of national importance. 'Do no evil' does not preclude showing them who's boss does it? Tough love and all that. ~~~ Xichekolas > _But what would happen if Google just removed them all from the indexes for > a month or so. I for one would be giggling hysterically for quite a while > :)_ I, for one, would be taken aback if Google started actively playing King- maker. It's sad enough that one company has the _ability_ to do what you say, but to _actively flaunt_ that ability would cause me to search for another search engine of choice, and hopefully I'm not alone. Besides, playing games with index-censoring would open up space for competitors (competing on the basis of not censoring, while hopefully having comparable result quality), which is not exactly in Google's best interest. ~~~ ja2ke It's effectively what the AP is asking though, or at least what they're insinuating that they're asking. Either to de-list, or to have Google list and index based on their stated (or paid, or bought) priorities. I wouldn't ever expect/want Google to actually just go for it, but if they did just flip the switch on the first bit, the results would be fairly amazing for that month. Google News would become even shittier than it is for that month, too. ~~~ pclark you _can_ block Google via robots.txt though? ------ dschobel _We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories._ Is attacking fair-use now the official go-to play when you can't figure out how to deliver your content to your customers in a way they actually want? I swear I'm having a flash-back to the RIAA five years ago with this press release. ------ idm There is a "share" widget next to the original article on the NY Times - you can repost the article to Facebook, etc, with the click of a button. I am ... confused ... by what the newspaper industry wants us to do with their content. ~~~ carbon8 _I am ... confused ... by what the newspaper industry wants us to do with their content._ They are, too. No one seems to have a good idea about how to deal with the transition. Especially with the NY Times, you can't really blame them. They've been very open about the situation they are in and have been experimenting heavily. The AP, on the other hand, has been pretty aggressive and seems to believe they can fight off progress. ------ billswift I don't even use Google News much. I let somebody else decide if it's worth reading and follow links from other sites and blogs. Most "news" is useless, largely wrong, or at best seriously incomplete. Following the "news" is almost as bad as watching television. ------ josefresco Google's Response: "Hey douchebags at the AP, if you could, oh I dunno get out of your own damn way and actually get your content online and make it more accessible there wouldn't be a need for 'aggregators' like us." And since when is 'free advertising' like the AP is getting all over the net a bad thing? As long as people aren't claiming the content is 'theirs' I see no problem with effective and productive aggregation services like Google News. ------ fallentimes Not surprisingly, the publisher of this article wanted me to register before viewing it. Here's a link to text only: <http://tinypaste.com/pre.php?id=5c678> ~~~ vaksel watch...you'll get sued for copyright infringement or some other BS like that ------ spc476 Before the web, the AP provided a valuable service for newspapers. They provided national/international articles to newspapers who might otherwise be unable to provide national/international news, due to the expense of having reporters in every major city in the US/world. Post web: what value do they provide in selling articles for publication (on the web, specifically)? It's just as easy (if not easier) to just link to an AP article (say, on the AP site itself) and not pay (that is, if a web-based newspaper run by a traditional print newspaper company could grasp that it's okay to lead people off their site) the AP subscription fee? The AP model now falls apart. ~~~ brandnewlow Have you run a content site of your own? What you say is the standard line of thought on the AP that lots of hackers and new media folks take, but it's not based on reality. If you link to an AP article instead of publishing the whole thing, you lose out on Google hits from both organic search and Google News. Even if 100 other people run the same article on their sites, Google's algorithm will reward you more for publishing it for the 101st time than it will if you just link to it on someone else's site. Sending people away is great if it's the only thing you do. But if your strategy includes racking up pageviews with ads on them, then you MUST keep them on your site. So you rewrite other people's stories (Gawker), you quote/steal big chunks of other people's copy (Business Insider) and you make attribution links as small as posisble (Gothamist). As long as you get more hits from running a full article over just linking to someone else's article, there's no incentive for publishers to do the sorts of things that seem so intuitive to us geeks. ------ brandnewlow Where do you draw the line between "unlawfully using" an AP story and linking to it? ------ garply I'm actually very near to launching an automated news aggregator and I'm wondering if this is going to affect me. My suspicion is that sites like Techmeme / HN or smaller will probably be left alone. What do you guys think? ~~~ brandnewlow I think Techmeme is the sort of site they want to shut down. Hacker News and Digg would be much, much harder. The difference is that while Techmeme and Google news are only displaying the headlines and summaries, they are indexing the FULL article and making use of it to power their algorithms. If they determine it that way, I don't see what the big deal is. If you want to use the Twitter API, you have to pay past a certain point. Maybe a year from now, if you want to index full news articles for your aggregator, you have to pay past a certain point as well. That wouldn't be too bad at all and would leave that act of linking safe and untouched. ~~~ garply That's a very interesting way to look at the problem - algorithms like mine and Techmeme's do indeed digest the full article whereas HN does not. I had thought the primary issue would be whether or not the site provided a summary / thumbnail (as I see WindyCitizen does), not whether or not it scanned the source's bits. Having to pay for my algorithm to access this data would be a big deal to me - I'm operating on a shoestring budget and I don't want to do that. ~~~ brandnewlow Sure, it would make things hard for you, but again, if you were using any other sort of data, there'd be usage costs. The news folks are just figuring that part out now, while every tech-first company has that build into their business from the start. ~~~ silentOpen Except for the fact that transmission/distribution costs are almost zero and 'news' is a broadly consumed information resource. It doesn't matter that there would have been usage costs in the past -- they would be silly now. ~~~ brandnewlow If every other API charges for usage, why shouldn't news sites? If you want to index their stories, you can do 500 queries per day for free. After that, you pay, just like any other API. ~~~ silentOpen But the API is HTTP and the news stories are syndicated across a hundred different sites. How do you limit the crawlers under this scheme? It seems like any serious attempt to limit crawling will require major software redeployment, cooperation of crawlers, widespread authentication, or some combination of these. Is there actually a feasible way to do this without breaking the web? ~~~ brandnewlow These are all good points. I don't have answers to any of them. Feasibility is a whole other issue. My point is that if you look at online newspapers as online services, then they should be able to charge people for programmatic access to their service, just like any other tech service does through its API. If I want to build an app on the back of Yahoo BOSS, I have to pay Yahoo. If I want to build an app on the back of the New York Times, maybe I should have to pay the New York Times. ------ senthil_rajasek This move may not be as naive as it may sound. Newspapers have built a user base and loyalty over the years based on and presenting perspectives that suit their readership base. Google and other news aggregators break this ability of newspapers to "present a single perspective" and often present headlines from WSJ and nytimes side by side. Imagine the advantage newspaper sites would have if you HAVE to go to online.wsj.com or nytimes.com to get your news instead of google.com/news or another aggregator. ~~~ dschobel You _do_ have to go to those sites to get your news. All you get from Google News is a two sentence blurb and maybe a thumbnail image. ~~~ senthil_rajasek Not without reading or having been exposed to an alternate view point in the the cluster of headlines presented by aggregators... ~~~ dschobel And what exactly is so pernicious about an alternate view point? ------ njharman "usually headlines and a sentence or two is allowed under the legal doctrine of fair use. News organizations have been reluctant to test that idea in court" Yeah, cause it almost certainly is fair use. "There’s a bigger economic issue at stake here that we’re trying to tackle." Yeah, your business model didn't scale with the Internet and you're too old/tired/scared to try new ones. ------ jleyank Can't they do a robots.txt or some other way of stopping Google from crawling their site? Or, do they want to let it happen so they can whine about it? As others have pointed out, there's multiple sources of news (especially those in other countries). ------ kvh The internet has made media non-excludable and the media aren't willing to accept this, for understandable reasons--a non-rival and non-excludable good doesn't make you much money! Short sell! ------ Tiktaalik The approach of the AP here will be interesting to watch. I think there does need to be some more balance between the content creators and those that do nothing but have popular RSS feeds. ------ biohacker42 Lesson from the soon to be forgotten newspaper industry: If you've dug yourself into a hole... dig faster and deeper, that's the way out! ------ AndrewWarner I think marc andreessen said they need to play more offense and less defense. True here.

Using LaTeX to control a Mars rover (see page 5) - eru http://www.haskell.org/sitewiki/images/8/85/TMR-Issue13.pdf) ====== pasbesoin The posted link has a trailing ")" that needs to be removed. ~~~ eru Oops, you are right.

Trump's fast and loose trade policy endangers American jobs (Bunnie Huang) - swamp40 https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/17/opinions/american-china-tariff-war-fast-loose-bunnie/index.html ====== phendrenad2 Which does the US import more of (from China), in raw dollars spent: raw materials (chips, etc) or finished products (cellphones, toasters, etc.)? I’d be interested to see that data.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 Infographics - uptown http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/14/MH370/index.html ====== danso These are well-done graphics and Reuters Graphics has an excellent stylebook...but just to be a nag...this strikes me as a good example of how custom Web navigation can be counterproductive for the reader. I'm sure most people can figure out that the top three images are meant to be buttons, but I'll admit that I didn't notice, at first, that when you click each subhed-button, a "Next" option pops up in the top right, along with page- boxes to the top left. It's obvious once you've noticed them, _but the trick is noticing them in the first place_ , which you might not because your eyes immediately jump down to the graphic. How many users, after seeing the initial graphic, immediately click on one of the other subhead buttons, thus seeing only a total of 3 graphics? An equally problematic issue is that there's no way to deep-link any of the items. I can't easily discuss a specific graphic (and they're hard to locate via rightclicking, as they're embedded via svg tag) here, or even one of the subnav-topics, without fully describing the actual graphic...which is a real inconvenience. The use of clickable gray boxes as pagination only adds to the inconvenience, because now I have to count which box I'm on. I think this would've been better served by having each sub-topic be a long, scrollable webpage...as it is now, you _already_ have to scroll to read most of these graphics. Once you get done with one graphic, you have to scroll back to the top, click "Next", and then read through...at least have a "Next" at the bottom. The main argument for having this compact nav is to invite quicker comparison between slides...I don't think that's a great argument even in the best of cases, but here, because of the vertically-long slides, it's not even applicable. It'd be far easier to flip back between sequential graphics by simply scrolling. OK, that was a lot of nagging, but I hate to see great work obfuscated by "gee-whiz" navigational design that is user-unfriendly. I would discuss the graphics but like I said, it's kind of a pain to specify and describe each particular slide without deeplinks. ------ nkoren tl;dr: Designers, please think about ordinary-sized screens! This presentation may have good design _within_ it, but it is not actually _presented_ well. It is intended to be a series of slides which appear on single screens. However between its thick header and insanely thick header, there is not enough real estate on the screen to view a full slide on my 13" MacBook Pro. So I have to scroll down to view the bottom of the slide, then scroll up again to click the navigation element, then scroll down again to view the full slide, etc. It's incredibly aggravating. So I've just hacked the CSS to set the header and footer to display:none. Not an auspicious way to begin an interaction! ~~~ kbenson Generally, I just right click on the component, select _inspect element_ , and then press delete (after possibly making sure the root element of the offending feature was actually selected). ~~~ nkoren How is it that I never figured out that was possible?!? Thank you! ------ zhte415 Excellent presentation. On the presentation, it does feel like a stew with all the right ingredients but without seasoning to fully appreciate the taste. Seasoning not meaning editorial content, but a glue to hold the how and why together, and understand the combination of the taste. ------ JazCE I'm not a designer, so i speak as a consumer. I disagree with complements on the look of this. I kind of feel it's misisng something, which i can't quite pin down. perhaps it's the look of the maps, that they don't quite match the rest of the feel. The sources text in FF28 W7x64 doesn't look particuarly good, not very ledgible. maybe it's just an overall static and clinical look that i don't quite like (which is odd as i do like industrial design). I think it possibly needs a bit more art direction. but i'm a consumer so what do i know. ~~~ steven777400 Agreed. The fonts render terribly on Chrome Windows 7 on my machine. Also, I kept expecting to be able to scroll and it took a little while to figure out how to navigate the pages. The nav bar at the top could serve dual- purpose: allow the user to click on a particular box while also allowing scrolling and showing the user's current position in the content. ~~~ samcrawford Identical experience here. The fonts looked so bad in Chrome that I opened FF (which I very rarely do) to see how they compared, and it was far more readable in FF.

Show HN: How I built a trading signal by scraping Nasdaq for short interest - fawce https://www.quantopian.com/posts/ranking-and-trading-on-days-to-cover ====== tokenadult My comment in the last thread opened with a post from this source: _Past performance does not guarantee future results" is still the operative principle here. Data-mining discovers patterns, but it doesn't lead to deep insight into causes, and markets are perturbed by many events that you don't put into your training algorithm. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is still important investment advice._ You can never build a trading signal just by scraping historical data, unless you like losing your shirt. Can you tell I'm reading _Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder_ just now? I'm very sensitive to errors in statistical thinking today. ~~~ fchollet You can do it; you just need to only evaluate your algorithm on data it hasn't been trained on. The same as with any machine learning problem really. Though it is indeed dismaying how many programmers dabbling into ML tend to do so without any scientific rigor... Whether the stockmarket can or cannot be predicted on the short term based on its past is another question... but I've been gathering some convincing evidence that it cannot (as in, its variations have no intrinsic structure; though it can still be predicted based on various external factors). ~~~ Homunculiheaded Cross validation doesn't change the fact that you're trying to predict a non- stationary distribution. Machine learning techniques generally make an assumption that your samples are being drawn from at least a close enough distribution to any future data that may enter the system. With problems like text classification in NLP you can generally make a safe assumption that, though language does change, it changes slowly enough that you don't have to worry. In other cases a model may simply need to be retrained after a certain period of time. Even in text classification real world systems will often incorporate an unsupervised novelty detector as well to indicate when the models may need to be retrained. Additionally normal cross validation (random or stratified sampling) does not work on time series data since you are in effect cheating by training on events in the future, which your model will not be able to predict. In order to test your model on time series data you would need to hold out a significant chunk of data at the end of the time series. If you're interested in the general case of predicting the stock market you might enjoy reading up on the Efficient Market Hypothesis[0] which deals quite well with just that question. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis> ~~~ fchollet Indeed. One reason why ML is quite powerless when looking at the stockmarket (from the point of view of past stock values) is that, even if you assume there _is_ a latent model to be learned, it would seem reasonable that this model evolves as fast as the economic landscape and that is to say, quite fast. To such an extent that the valid data points available (the past few years of price variations) would not suffice to train even a very low- dimensional latent model. ------ ikea_meatballs Back testing is a real bitch. I've been building my own app for back testing recently, my specific interest being how published insider buys (SEC Form 4 transactions) affect the prices of stocks in the short near and long term. You can get dividend data and stock splits easily enough from some public feeds. But where do you get a database of ticker changes, bankruptcy events, and spin-offs, especially on the OTC markets? You can't unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money. Back testing properly is probably out of the cost range of the individual investor. Some examples: * Lehhman's ticker changes on the way down * GM going bankrupt and then coming back from the dead! * Skye International used to trade under SKYY (at 0.35c/share), but now SKYY tracks a cloud SaaS ETF 20.60/share). Think you got a big win using that strategy that including buying SKYY? Think again! ~~~ kal00ma I've been working on a similar strategy after having read Nejat's book: [http://www.amazon.com/Investment-Intelligence-Insider- Tradin...](http://www.amazon.com/Investment-Intelligence-Insider-Trading- Seyhun/dp/0262692341) The plan is to derive trading signals from insider purchase data while taking into account the insider's relative risk-aversion (estimated from age, salary, sex). At this point I'm just trying to recreate Nejat's results. Data-quality seems to be an issue (stock splits aren't recorded in the yahoo data). If you would like to collaborate or trade ideas message kal00ma on reddit. ------ dkhenry I have for two years now been playing around with Algorithmic trading as a hobby and I am amazed by people who think wave riders or simple mathmatical transforms will get them profits in the market. I have found that the best method is still a good mix of modeling and trader input. I don't think a model exists that you can just turn on and have it print you money. So attempts like this to make one of those really are a waste of time. Your systems should be tuned to listen to you and then take what input you have and do what you cannot ( make decision in sub-second windows ) ~~~ vecter I don't know where you're getting your data from, but I know of at least one high frequency algorithmic trading firm that make ~$1B a year using mathematical models. The models aren't simple, but they're entirely automated and they behave exactly the opposite of how you describe them: you turn them on and they print unbelievable gobs of money. ~~~ aortega Anybody else think this is like, inherently bad? I mean making money from nothing, producing nothing, doing no service to anybody. The only way you could possible get that billion without doing nothing is to take it from other people, essentially stealing it. Why is this legal? ~~~ NkVczPkybiXICG They create a more efficient market. Ensuring, for example, that the future price of a commodity matches the spot price when the future expires. They provide an anonymous financial service. ~~~ aortega To a financial-impaired mind like mine those looks like great explanations, thanks you all that responded me, now it does seems a little more fair. ------ stevewilhelm When the broad market is rising by over 10% annually, it is very difficult to come up with a trading strategy that looses money. For example, buying SPY and holding it for the same period would have outperformed your algorithm. ~~~ steven2012 Sorry, but saying that "it is very difficult to come up with a trading strategy that loses money" means you really have no credible experience with running trading algorithms that use real money. ~~~ hyperbovine Do your care to address his point? If the S&P 500 genuinely outperforms "your" (his? someone's) algorithm, said algorithm is a priori unimpressive. ------ chatmasta Can somebody explain to me why, if this really works, you would publish it in a blogpost? Shouldn't you be hunting down investments of $X to turn $1.093X? ~~~ jhowell IMHO, when developing a trading strategy it helps to document and share your strategy with others as you'll come to better understand it from the questions and observations others make. No one strategy can or will be successful forever. Many algorithms stop performing when market conditions (lasting hours, days, weeks, months) change. Having a deep understanding of your algorithm and what makes it successful for any given period of time can better help you make adjustments when needed. Lastly, this may be where the algo started but not necessarily what they will run in production. It's much more likely to no longer be discussed at this point. Perhaps similar to ideas are worthless, execution is everything for startups. edit: typo ~~~ codex If an algorithm stops performing after hours or days, it's likely you haven't discovered anything, but are simply seeing the effects of random noise on your hundreds, thousands, or millions of signal possibilities. ~~~ jhowell One example that comes to my mind could be an algo closely related to the price of another security or index of what have you. At times, this algo could be highly correlative and at other times less so. I agree with you about random noise. Ultimately I'm just looking for something to make me feel like I'm taking an "informed position." You never really know what's going to happen. ------ polskibus Serious question: does this meet "Show HN" criteria? I mean I value sharing the algorithm, but I thought that Show HN is reserved for entire projects (ie. sites, saas platforms, etc.), not using ones platform to put up a description of algorithm and some numeric data. I'm not trying to troll, just wanted to know how the community understands "Show HNs"? In this case it can be seen as more of a Quantopian show off (which is interesting service, but had already been showcased) than the algorithm or project itself? ~~~ polskibus Why the downvotes? I explicitly said I just want an answer about how the community sees "Show HNs", not attacking anyone. Is that really that offensive and unconstructive? How are we suppose to improve on quality of this environment if one cannot ask about community guidelines? ------ jstauth While I'd love to take all the credit (blame?), the reformed academic in my feels compelled to admit that the idea to look for predictive value in stock loan data is not original to me. The finance literature has some fascinating articles on this dating back as far as the late 80s (look for Desai 2002, J of Finance, Asquith 2005 J Fin Econ, or most recently <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1570451>). The intuition behind this signal as a market inefficiency, or 'anomaly' is that the market sees short sellers as informed investors, the so called 'smart money', and there is a herding effect to follow their trades which generates abnormal returns. The same logic can be applied to disclosed insider trades or institutional holdings filings made public via the SEC's EDGAR database. Fawce's slick implementation of a 'Days to Cover' signal is a great way to highlight the power of aiming new tools like Quantopian at freely available public data stores (which exist expressly to increase market transparency). And sure, it doesn't go the whole way for you on execution details like borrow costs, liquidity etc. but those aspects tend to be unique to each trader. ------ vellum You should put in some kind of protection for a max drawdown loss, like if you lose x%, you exit. Sometimes your algorithm messes up, or market conditions are bad. [http://www.businessinsider.com/hedge-funds-smashed-worst- qua...](http://www.businessinsider.com/hedge-funds-smashed-worst-quarter- since-2008-collapse-2011-10) Long short equity funds did poorly in 2008 financial crisis, and also in 2011, when there was high volatility. ~~~ fawce It would be cool to do that with this signal, if the algo was buying/selling on another signal. Maybe use the short interest signal as a gate on momentum investing for example. ------ ad Very interesting stuff. "The Benchmark" is the SP500 I'm guessing? I couldn't find the answer after clicking around for a bit, sorry if I'm dumb. You might list the reference security in the chart, or do something like "SPY (benchmark)" in the key. ------ niggler Did anyone actually try this with real money? Does the model include transaction costs and market impact effect? ~~~ fawce If you click on the code and search for commissions, you'll see how those costs are taken into account. The big missing thing is the market for borrowing the stock to do the short side of the trade. No money has traded on my version no. But, I understand that asset management firms have licensed the more sophisticated one Jess wrote at TR, so I would think they use it with real money. From what I understand, firms look at numerous signals like this, and then make investments based on a combination of the signals.

Eric Brewer on Why Banks are BASE, Not ACID – Availability Is Revenue - abhijitr http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/5/1/myth-eric-brewer-on-why-banks-are-base-not-acid-availability.html ====== jeremyjh >If an ATM is disconnected from the network and when the partition eventually heals, the ATM sends sends a list of operations to the bank and the end balance will still be correct. I don't think so. I support ATM client software for a large bank in the US and we certainly don't do this. This may be true for "remote" ATMs that are installed in convenience stores on POTS. I can't say I've ever actually heard of it though - the main problem with this idea is that cards cannot be authenticated without network access, and just spewing out money to every piece of plastic calling itself a card when your network connection has been dropped isn't really a recipe for success. Fraud is a real problem. The ATM client software I support cannot do any transactions without a connection with its authorization system. That authorization system though, can stand-in for the various accounting systems and external networks up to pre-defined limits. So for example if for some reason we can't reach the checking account system we'll authorize up to $xxx total for the day on a stand-in basis. The transaction with the authorization system is definitely ACID; the ATM will not get a response code authorizing a withdrawal unless the transaction has been recorded in the authorization system. The account system may well be caught up later. The funny thing is, ACID is a property of individual database systems and it has absolutely nothing to with a question of whether two separate ledgers are guaranteed to be changed together or not at all. That would be the job of a distributed transaction coordinator - and those really are not used very much in banking. Instead there is a protocol of credits and debits and a settlement process to work out the exceptions. Maybe this is what the article was trying to say up to a point but they sort of confused the issue between the point of view of the ATM and the accounting systems of record. ~~~ Maxious > just spewing out money to every piece of plastic calling itself a card when > your network connection has been dropped isn't really a recipe for success. Well they do this in Australia... [http://www.news.com.au/money/banking/computer-glitch-hits- cb...](http://www.news.com.au/money/banking/computer-glitch-hits-cba- customers/story-e6frfmcr-1226014261756) > "People were running past me screaming 'Free money! Free money!'," Punchbowl > Pharmacy manager Feriale Zakhia said of the people using a nearby ATM. > "Everyone was so happy. They were running around with huge smiles." > [A technical problem] forced the bank to put all of their ATM machines into > offline mode. Customers had no access to their account balance but were > still able to withdraw money - more than their accounts held. > Those withdrawal limits are up to $2000 a day for holders of keycards and > debit Mastercards. > "No one has received free cash," Mr Fitzgerald said. "What they've done is > overdrawn their accounts. We will be following those people up and > recovering that money." ~~~ timv Leaving aside the fact that I wouldn't trust a newspaper to for the technical details of something like this, nothing in the article contradicts what _jeremyjh_ said. In that case, the ATM was disconnected from the accounting system and allowed withdrawals up to a set limit ($2000), but it (probably, the article is unclear) was still connected to the authorization system. It (probably) still checked your PIN, and checked whether your card had been cancelled, etc. It just didn't connect through to check your balance. As Jeremy said _if for some reason we can't reach the checking account system we'll authorize up to $xxx total for the day on a stand-in basis_ In this case _some reason_ == "[A technical problem]" and _xxx_ == $2000 ~~~ diroussel Which in turn agrees with the point of the original article. ATMS use BASE not ACID as it's more profitable to be available. ~~~ GFischer Those humungous overdraft fees will definitely be profitable :) BTW I've been scammed out of money by ATMs before - money was withdrawn from my account but some system jammed and I didn't get the money - and the bank was awfully uncooperative. So far I've had more luck with the "money under the mattress" method than with banks - and I wasn't trapped in the "Corralito" or other bank-aided money- stealing schemes <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito> ~~~ gbaygon I see that you are from Uruguay, where you in Argentina at Corralito's time? ITT Uruguay is more trustworthy in banking terms. ~~~ GFischer Uruguay had a smaller Corralito (and I was just starting out at the time, so I had no money in the bank). Ecuador and Brazil also had their own versions. In the Uruguayan version, they didn't forcibly exchange the money, but they froze all bank assets for 3 years (losing out on interest, investment opportunities, exchange rates, etc...). Uruguay is more trustworthy (especially with foreign investment) but it's not above such things. Currently there's a big scare due to the huge exchange rate disparity with Argentina - which has an "official" exchange rate and a "real" exchange rate which is almost double the official one, and makes Uruguay non-competitive. Edit: you're from Argentina, that's obviously not news for you :) ------ exabrial Sorry, but Eric Brewer is wrong. He seems to be implying that there was some sort of intelligent design behind the software at banks that lead them to choose BASE. This couldn't be further from the truth. Banks are one software kludge after another in attempt to not rewrite something new or offer the consumer anything of value... while paying out the butthole to whatever vendor has his arm shoved so far up your ass you can't ever migrate from their platform without colon replacement surgery. So while it's a nice thought "Hey look Banks/ATMs are BASE" this was by complete accident through years of incompetence and corporate bureaucracy, not by any sort of engineering choice. ~~~ felipesoc That's not true. I've worked for a company that makes banking software and we did tons of migrations. The company itself changed its own software from RPG in as400 to windows forms and now it's all web with servers in Java and .Net (they use a middleware language which generates in every new platform). They even made a transitional install for one branch of one of the most important banks. The branch used my former company's solution for a few years until they could use their own software, which had to be adapted for the new market. Banks used to work on paper an did fine, software migration, although can take some years, is no problem for them. ~~~ natermer Each bank is different. Some banks have shitty IT and other ones have dynamic IT that can adjust to fit changing realities. The reality is that you and Eric are right. Banks depend on techniques based on double book keeping accounting to reconcile accounts at end of day. Different data about transactions are stored in different places by different organizations and they compare books to make sure that balances are correct. You cannot depend on every transaction to be recorded perfectly. You must have the ability to compare books and reconcile accounts. This is simply how the world works. Trying to make every perfect and depending on storing data in a central place with the assumption that it's always going to be consistent is too much of a liability. It doesn't work because the systems required by modern financial systems are incredibly complex and availability during markets is the highest priority. You ARE going to have faults and you ARE going to have problems. The ability to take hits gracefully and give yourself time later on to fix stuff after the fact must be built into your systems. ------ aneth4 This is a little misleading. Transactions are used primarily to prevent inconsistent data, not global data consistency. The ATM network is distributed and eventually consistent, and financial transactions in general are not real time. Within an ATM or within a bank you can be damn sure transactions are used widely to prevent inconsistent data. ------ jacques_chester This is one of those cases where deciding on whether the system is ACID or not depends entirely on where you draw the system boundaries. If you draw it at the boundary of the central general ledger, it's going to be ACID. If you look at the way transactions pass through several intermediate systems (each of which is ACID) en route, I guess it could be called BASE. ~~~ SoftwareMaven I think the point is that people who say it is impossible to build a banking system without full transaction support for every action are ignoring the reality that transactions are not guaranteed to occur, but the actions themselves are. If, at a level of abstraction, the system can be said to be a BASE, then it is probably true that the underlying data stores are not required to be ACIDic. Whereas everything I've read has always said "you can't do banking without ACID". Whether that is true or not is a much deeper discussion that three or four paragraphs on a blog. ~~~ jacques_chester > _If, at a level of abstraction, the system can be said to be a BASE, then it > is probably true that the underlying data stores are not required to be > ACIDic._ I don't think this follows. While the system as a whole might be eventually consistent (where consistency is defined as: what's in the General Ledger), it doesn't follow that you relax constraints on the parts. The individual components are generally ACID and the steps to move data are ACID as well. The only thing that prevents the whole system from being ACID is that transactions don't go immediately from POS/ATMs/card clearance/cheque clearance into the General Ledger, but instead must go through a series of intermediate transactions. But those intermediate transactions must, themselves, be ACID. That's why I talked about how the boundaries matter. The final central accounts are ACID, the subsystems are ACID and the data transfers are ACID. edit: though to contradict myself, I expect that there will be counterexamples in different banks where some stores or steps will not be strictly ACID, but will have been "good enough" or with sufficiently-acceptable workarounds that they haven't been upgraded. I don't think this fatally breaks my argument, but YMMV. ~~~ dllthomas I think "if the system as a whole doesn't require ACID, maybe the pieces don't" is correct and useful, but it still requires looking at the pieces and seeing if that's the case. In this case, I think that the system is relying on the ACIDity of some components to ensure Eventual consistency - it's conceivable that an alternate method might not, but one would have to be proposed and evaluated. ~~~ jacques_chester I think this is reasonable; but then the problem becomes that while consistency may be _eventual_ there are nevertheless fixed deadlines to meet. Soft realtime consistency isn't good enough when the annual report has to be printed. Personally, I feel that ACID is an abstraction achievable only within single, non-distributed systems. Not a very compelling insight, I hear you say. Well no, but ACID is a tremendously advantageous state of affairs and I feel it should be surrendered only begrudgingly. I think it is better to repair it than to abandon it wholesale at the first sign of mild inconvenience. Even though it is, in a physical sense, untrue, it is a _useful_ untruth. Newtonian physics is wrong. It's also what we use to build bridges. ------ ryanobjc I'd tend to agree on a general sense - yeah when faced with failure in a WAN environment, it makes sense to attempt to continue when at all possible. However, banks are one of the biggest purchasers of ACID systems... They still bet heavily on oracle, and when they want their accounting systems to run, and balance transactions, they dont rely on "BASE" systems. Banks are also heavily dependent on business cycle and batch processing. Daily batches are common in credit card processing (end of business day settlement for example), and also in general bank systems. Also eventual consistency means different thing. Some systems have a "eventually inconsistent" property to them (eg: Cassandra/Dynamo), and I'm pretty sure banks would NOT be ok with that. I respect Brewer, he is a smart guy, but he is extrapolating too much from a small fact that is ATMs will sometimes dispense cash (of what amounts? $200? $1000? or maybe just $20?) when remote communications are interrupted or broken. ~~~ seanmcdirmid I don't think Brewer is stating an opinion, rather a fact. Nor is it very surprising. I'm sure banks have huge IT operations where parts rely on ACID or BASE depending on need. But any massive distributed system can't really expect ACID to work very well. I'm pretty sure "eventual consistency" doesn't mean "eventual inconsistency" under any reasonable interpretation. ~~~ ryanobjc I dont think anyone would claim a massively distributed system should be fully consistent or ACID. As for the eventual inconsistency remark, this is from the original authors of Cassandra at Facebook. They did not extend the use of Cassandra because node flaps and packet losses caused nodes to be inconsistent and have old data. Bringing that data back up to date was very difficult, since the anti-entropy algorithms were too expensive to run frequently. They also found that the R=W=2 was too costly in terms of performance, and well you know the rest :-) ~~~ standel Do you have the reference? ------ Aloisius Citation needed. I've never heard of financial systems being eventually consistent, certain not ATMs which need to know your exact balance and how much money you've taken out already today. ~~~ artsrc [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-03-01/cash-spews-out-of- comm...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-03-01/cash-spews-out-of-commonwealth- atms/1962848) I studied ATM's at Uni, and they have been like that for over 26 years. As someone else on the thread pointed out, they do authenticate you, and record the transaction in a aci(Durable!) database before they give you money. But the system clearly has a degraded mode when the exact balance is unavailable. Also why do you need a balance to process a deposit? ------ stephen A nit, but the remark of "auditing == everything is written down twice == double-entry accounting" is cute, but doesn't seem applicable to availability. Double-entry is more of an internal (financial) system implementation detail, and so an orthogonal concern to intra-system audits. (It's not like one side of the entry is in one bank's IT system, and the other side of the entry is in the other bank's IT system.) (...speculating further, I really doubt the OLTP systems of banks are double- entry anyway.) ~~~ PeterisP Funny, but "It's not like one side of the entry is in one bank's IT system, and the other side of the entry is in the other bank's IT system." is actually false in interbank deals such as correspondent accounts, money market or forex deals. If a deal involves two banks, then the authoritative "other side" of the entry will be in the other bank's IT system. Of course, you'll maintain some records of what the entry should be in your opinion, but they won't always match as you don't have full info and you'll reconcile with data you get from the other bank's IT system by (for example) SWIFT network. And I've seen only double-entry OLTP's for the core system that includes general ledger. Maybe no all of them are built that way, but I haven't seen such examples. ------ ExpiredLink The article is not entirely wrong but misleading. The two important aspects are authorization and limits. Authorization: An ATM does not issue money without authorization which is done by some 'central authority', not the ATM. Limits: In some corner cases you may be able to exceed your (daily, weekly, monthly) limits. But, as the article points out, this doesn't imply financial inconsistency. ------ jasomill As someone who's had to dispute NSF charges for reordered transactions, I question the author's claim that ATM operations commute. Specifically, assume a $0 beginning balance. Then "withdraw $20 then deposit $200" might yield an error, $0 cash, and a $200 balance where "deposit $200 then withdraw $20" would net $20 cash and a $180 balance. Or, as in my disputed case, $20 cash and a $140 balance, because the deposited check hadn't actually cleared by close-of-business, so end-of-day processing assessed a $40 negative balance fee despite the fact that the deposit "eventually" cleared. The first manager I discussed this with had the audacity to claim it was _my fault_ for not somehow recognizing that the portion of the deposited funds the ATM made available for immediate withdrawal _by design_ were not, in fact, available for immediate withdrawal. ------ trotsky This seems like a pretty bad strategy to sell nosql etc. What are we supposed to believe, that every ATM downloads account numbers, pin hashes and balances for every account in their network? Banks have chosen consistency over availability regularly as they've been able to rebuild their systems over the decades. 40 years ago, if you had a credit card the place just took it, copied it down and trusted you and the bank were good for it. Try to get anyone to take your credit card if the network is down now. IMO banking culture and standards probably were direct motivators of many of the ways traditional systems were designed. They were some of the earliest adopters of IT. It may not be accurate to say banks or ACID. It may be more accurate to say ACID is banking. ------ rjempson This is an example of why analogies should never be used (except perhaps if trying to explain a concept, not something tangible). ATM software has nothing to do with the backend storage of the data. My point is that I bet when the data is actually written to durable storage in the backend, the set of data being written will be wrapped in an ACID transaction. ------ chiph I think it's funny that the photo in the article is of two guys _stealing_ an ATM (note the pantyhose masks). ------ EGreg Banks can have availability over consistency because we have enough laws and protections in place to reverse any fraudulent transactions. With BitCoin, such an architecture could be abused rather badly.

Java update kills most online games/emulators. Few still work, like Javatari - gkarness http://javatari.com ====== ppeccin Yes... New security requirements. Only software that is still maintained with new releases to implement the restricted protocols will work. ~~~ cintiapersona Also, only projects that can afford the certification process.

WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam - bjonathan http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/woome-techcrunch40-finalist-20-million-in-funding-and-one-huge-scam/ ====== elliottcarlson There is a huge industry going on on these kinds of sites - not necessarily done by the site owners... Generally there are two monitizations for a third party; first of all being an affiliate and sending traffic can be big bucks (I paid for my wedding as a referrer for SexSearch and AdultFriendFinder - I'm not ashamed because I didn't use necessarily shady practices to accomplished this). With big bucks, I mean an easy $45 (at the time) per signup, more if it were a female registering. Having a day making $2k wasn't unheard of. The second, shadier method, is that there will be "service providers" posing or automating profiles on these sites. The "service providers" (escorts, phone sex, porn sites, rival "dating" sites or plain our scammers) attempt to get the people to use their service by enticing the end-user and making them believe they are a real person. This is generally overlooked because for these new unpaid accounts, their curiosity gets the best of them when they can't read these private messages they are getting, and they end up paying for an account. (It was even beneficial to me, even though I wasn't luring anyone in to paying for an account, these service providers would convert them for me). The thing that backfires is that so many of these service providers will hurt the quality of a site by making users instantly see that something is wrong - just like in the parent article. It's in WooMe's interest (if they are indeed not doing it themselves) to take control over this kind of misuse, and not let it get out of control - they will just lose real users, and in the end money. ~~~ minouye I'm not really understanding the second method. I don't see how a rival "dating" site would have any incentive to get a customer to pay for a rival service. Are you saying that once affiliates drove a user sign-up, they would engage the user via messages to get them to sign up for a paid plan so they would get a greater payout? If so, how did they find the specific users that signed up via their affiliate links? Just trying to understand who other than WooMe would have an incentive to spam on their site. ~~~ elliottcarlson It wouldn't be rival dating sites; it would be affiliates to rival sites. I guess the best way to see it is; once you have identified a sucker, take them for all they are worth. Possible scenario: 1) User signs up for free on WooMe 2) User is enticed by fake account to signup because the picture alone suckered them in, and the unknown of their message just made it too much. 3) Fake account tells user to check out their profile on fake account's website 4) Fake accounts website is a redirect with affiliate code to rival site 5) User signs up for rival site, thus giving the commission to the fake account's holder. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's all automated and easy to pull off. _Edited for formatting_ ~~~ minouye So the user signs up for paid accounts on two different sites? Sounds lucrative and very shady. ~~~ elliottcarlson If the user is gullible enough - or at least that is the hopes of some of these fake accounts. It pays off even if you convert 10 people a day - and most likely that is a very easy target number to hit. Keep in mind this is all playing on human emotions; sex or the desire to be wanted being a huge one; and for some lonely souls out there, it makes them easier prey. My history with doing affiliate programs with that industry has proven that if marketed correctly, it can be a very rewarding business, and even with some seriously scary a/b tests (let's just throw the term farm sex out there) you can still get good conversions. People's desires and curiosity gets to them - and in to their wallet. ~~~ minouye I'm not judging you, but an activity where you view your "customers" as prey seems really depressing. I certainly couldn't sleep at night knowing I was taking advantage of people yearning for some happiness in their lives. ~~~ elliottcarlson Oh, I never took part in these practices, sorry if I lead you to believe this. I did work as an affiliate for these type of sites, however it was via a blog that would review the sites. I will admit, I was deceptive in the fact that I never really used the sites - I was working an angle to make money, but I never tricked users in to thinking I was someone else, or lured them in to a situation where they were forced to register. My reviews simply talked about the features of the site, then provided a link with my affiliate code. The actual luring tactics do seem predatory and that's why I worded it like that - simply because I have witnessed how others were going about things. ------ JacobAldridge TC / Crunchbase might want to change their WooMe's company profile on their pages as well, in light of this article. Kind of funny that the article calls it "bait-and-switch, from the horrible kind" while linking to an internal-ish overview that says "best of all it’s free". <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/woome> ~~~ nikcub 150k+ records in Crunchbase so it is difficult to keep it up-to-date. The good news is that anybody can edit any record. ~~~ whyleyc I just edited the company bio - how long do I have to wait to see the update ? ~~~ nikcub The mods usually go through the moderation queue once a day. If you create an account, after a few edits are approved you get permission to insta-edit. ------ iloveyouocean I launched an online dating site FlowMingle.com in 2008 (since closed down). When we were building the site on '07 and looking for investment, over and over we heard 'Your site isn't viral/social enough. Look at WooMe, look at Zoosk, etc. They will eat your lunch!' and with regards to OKCupid "It's at best a niche site for geeks and freaks, it's growing too slowly, it's not viral enough." Although this TC article is hardly news for anyone who has examined the WooMes of the world for even 15sec., I find the fact that WooMe is outed as a scam and that OKCupid is acquired by Match.com to be hugely vindicating. By providing users an honest, transparent service that legitimately helps them achieve their aims, you CAN and eventually WILL profit and grow. The damage in investors betting on companies like WooMe is that 1) they scam bunches of online daters and turn them off from the whole industry, they disappoint and lie to people 2) other entrepreneurs see big investment and media coverage for a company like WooMe and think they should chase after that model and mold their businesses to what investors want rather than what users want. 3) ultimately, investing in WooMe doesn't create any long term value and is a waste of time/money and starves other legitimate businesses of opportunity. Just because a company is getting investment $$, press, meteoric growth, etc does NOT mean it is actually delivering anything of value and/or helping its users achieve their goals. There is always opportunity to win against ANY competitor by doing those simple things. ------ jonursenbach It's this kind of stuff that always gets me fired up about one of my previous employers and the cadre of clones that they run. What WooMe is doing is nothing different than any other adult "dating" website in that they send messages to users with the hopes of getting them to sign up with a recurring charge (that the company hopes they forget about) and then immediately cut off almost all of this instant contact that the paid user just received. Then about a week later they'll send out a mass mailer to a set of demographics with more fake messages just to string that person and get them to continue forgetting about that recurring $24.99 charge. Don't even get me started on upselling. ------ getsat It's really unfortunate that this is the norm and not an exception. That said, users of these kind of sites are probably most susceptible to this kind of trick as love, lust and infatuation are probably the strongest emotions. I know of a few people who scrape profiles off of dating site A, create new profiles using that data on dating site B then message users on site B asking them out. A requirement for going out on a date with them (they're obviously posing as an attractive female and messaging males) is signing up to a service that does a background check to verify that they're not dangerous. Affiliate network payout per conversion on background check = $20+ USD Doing that at scale = you are making $2,000+ USD/day ~~~ DevX101 You want to call them out here? Maybe with an anonymous handle if they know you? ~~~ getsat They're all way outside US jurisdiction (where all these sites operate), so there's really no point. These aren't people I know personally, merely acquaintances from various black hat communities. Honour among thieves, and all that. ------ yaakov34 Here's a suggestion for WooMe, if it wants to cling to some credibility or at least plausible deniability: upgrade the journo's account for free, so that he can contact the senders of those messages. If the messages are offering dates, and insisting on upgraded levels of membership - case closed. If the messages are promoting some unrelated service - the site has a raging spam problem. And if the messages are real, I'll be a monkey's uncle. ~~~ notahacker Really, this is too easy to game to worry the cynics - the site owners could log in and continue a few conversations for a bit to make the bad publicity go away. If I was running this kind of operation I'd probably ensure some conversations continued for a couple of messages after users paid up, just to make sure they didn't cancel or file chargebacks. If I assume men preferred their hot women to pass the Turing test I could probably outsource the flirting to someone in the Philippines at $5 per hundred messages. ------ kirbman89 Wow. That is a horrible. Can't believe any VC would invest money in such a misleading, annoying startup. Are these messages coming from WooMe internally or are they SPAM submitted from "Russian bride scams"? Either way, I'm staying away and warning others! ~~~ plusbryan WooMe probably didn't start out this way. Desperation can do bad things to good intentions. ------ vaksel That's like the oldest scam that pretty much every single dating site uses. I'm surprised how TC is shocked...shocked to find that on a dating site. Reddit did the same thing starting out...the only difference is that they didn't try to trick you into paying. ~~~ DevX101 The value reddit users get is from viewing new and interesting content and comments. The value a user of a dating site gets is the PROSPECT of going on a face to face meeting with another person. If reddit engineers were good enough to make an AI to post great new great content everyday along with insightful comments and analysis, I'd still go. Hell, that might make me want to go even more often. If I found out a dating site users were doing the same with messaging, that completely precludes me from getting the value I really want from the site, thus its useless. ------ staunch When WooMe launched they got a lot of attention. They thought they were going to take the world by storm. Unfortunately their product is a novelty. They took $17.4 million dollars of VC with no real hope of showing a return to their investors. They got desperate and this is the result. ------ meterplech This is particularly poignant and frustrating given OKCupids recent acquisition. I'm happy for those guys- but I am sad that the one good dating site will probably be discontinued. It's tough when you know the shady tactics of practically all the others. ~~~ regularfry Match.com would have to be utter idiots to close down OkCupid. If they keep it running, it's a serious asset, for a bunch of reasons, and one hopes that they'd be mature enough not to care if one brand they own is cannibalising another. If they close it down, yes, their main brand will be protected, but _so will everyone else's_. There's no competitive advantage whatsoever in doing it. ------ edw519 The only thing more frustrating than an ethically challenged business is the investment that came its way instead of going to legitimate start-ups that may die on the vine for lack of capital. ~~~ zoomzoom Who is to say that ethically challenged businesses cannot be legitimate targets for investors? I hate these sites, but my bet is that they pay off for investors as well as your average YC company...Investors are in the business of making money, not making judgements about ethics. Legal challenges are the ones that matter to a business, not ethical ones. ~~~ pavel_lishin Maybe we should change that. ~~~ zoomzoom The question is: how? The sentiment (in the US, at least) still seems to be towards less regulation at the moment. Enforcing ethics as well as laws would seem to require even more regulation, unless you have a magic potion that will convince all business directors to self-regulate all at once! ~~~ watchandwait Regulations are only as ethical as the regulator -- just ask Bernie Madoff's victims how well that worked. Indeed, more regulation leads to a false sense of security, and certainly stifles innovation. Better to have the market, and market players like TechCrunch, sort out this type of low-level malfeasance. ~~~ pavel_lishin But then you'd have to have a financial reward system in place that rewards ethical firms. I don't know how you would do that. ~~~ dantheman It's called refusing to do business with people who are ethically challenged. ------ ig1 I'm not sure what the law is in the US, but I'm pretty sure that would be illegal in the UK both under sales legislation and under anti-fraud laws. ------ anon2345 Hey don't knock the horse face. I did fine at Burning Man wearing a Horse Head mask. Maybe there are a lot of playa princesses on WooMe. ~~~ JabavuAdams Wow. It's 2011 and I still haven't gone to Burning Man. Been meaning to go since 1995. _looks at blizzard outside_ ------ unreal37 I realize I'll probably spend some karma here, but after reading TC and checking out the site (and the blog post by the site), I see what's happening. And there is a LOT of misunderstanding in the TC article and in the comments of HN. One of the services WooMe offers is to automatically introduce people they think will get along. They do NOT make it clear its the system doing the introduction, nor that its automated. But what is clear is these are all real people on the site, no fake accounts. So yes, no person sent a hello to a horse in the middle of the night. But that doesn't make the whole thing fake. It mimics a scam, but is not. Imagine if after signing up for Facebook for the first time, FB sent you 10 friend requests within minutes of people they thought you knew - one step further than what they already do with suggested friends. Is that a scam? Or is that a ham-fisted attempt at helping you get started using the site? It's clearly not a scam. It's just really really borderline on the ethical side. I've never used a dating site of any kind, so I have no idea what is normal in that industry. ~~~ mthoms Except that the screenshots clearly say "(so and so) has sent you a message", which is plainly false. I'm not sure how you could see it any other way. ------ 20110202 Here is what the site does (or at least did two-three months ago, when I tried it). After you pay for your account, it immediately asks you "do you want the site to introduce you to people who may be of interest" or something like that. A little later, I looked at my Sent folder and saw that I had said "hi" or "what's up" to dozens of people, many who are not local or I otherwise would not be interested in. ------ moomba This site may be dishonest, but its certainly nothing new. Most dating sites you go to employ some of the same tactics. They will try to lure you in and then put up a paywall. I guess the thing that is bad here is that they lie about having automated messages when they obviously do. That is really kind of slimy, they might as well admit to the obvious at this point. ------ cloug I'm kinda disappointed, I just signed up (with what I thought was a engaging picture: [http://www.illusionking.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/09/horse...](http://www.illusionking.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/09/horse_head.jpg)) and I've only got three messages from VIP members. Thank you Anita, Yanisa and Shawna ! ------ galactus I don't understand, how does he know it is actually WooMe behind the bots? Couldn't it be some scammer who has nothing to do with WooMe? ------ jasonmcalacanis No one remembers how you got that--just that you got there. ------ fedd where is the analogous website for scamming women with pics of hot boys? "pay 50% OFF to chat with Ivan!" what a chauvinism!.. ------ nicferrier for the record, robin wauters didn't approach us to verify anything in the story and the accusations are untrue and misleading. we focus very hard on getting people to talk to each other and interact and we have a number of features on the site, driven by users, that make that happen. Ironically, the user featured in the pic is one of the longest standing and most active on WooMe. ~~~ dolinsky You, sir, sound like a snake oil salesman of the worst kind. Either that or you have no clue how your site operates. _edit_ but apparently 'Jen' does. Screencast here -> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtBmqqKVcc> (Thanks to my Appsumo purchase of Screenflow which saved me 50%!) ~~~ nicferrier right. I'm the CTO. I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil. I don't sell snake oil. I help people meet each other. If you really WANT snake oil I guess I could find some and get it to you. ~~~ dolinsky You're right, that was totally unprofessional of me to lay such an ad hominem attack and run away...so let me expand upon my thought some more. Your site either uses fake accounts to trick legitimate users into paying to view messages from these supposed hot women looking for dates with horses and guys who have just signed up yet haven't provided any personal details...or you have a very serious spam problem where bots are running rampant across your site with hordes of fake accounts trolling for new profiles to scam (or a combination therein). As evidence, I just logged in to my woome account, which I haven't logged into in maybe 3 years, and immediately I got a request for a video chat from <http://www.woome.com/sallyl3462/> . Who wants to get laid tonight? Sally does! ~~~ nicferrier I can't say there aren't spammers using our site. that problem waxes and wanes and we try to deal with it as best we can. The user quoted is most definitely a spammer and I'll look into why we haven't caught that. I don't think that's what robin is trying to say tho. We are simply trying to make introductions happen as much as possible because that's what people use woome for. To meet new people. It seems to work, to my knowledge our users are generally happy we have good time on site, repeat vistits and viping. ~~~ tptacek They appear to be spamming for the express purpose of converting free woome users to paid ones. Come on. ------ Tichy The evidence does not seem overwhelming to me. It is well known that girls _love_ horses, so it doesn't seem that surprising that he is flooded with messages if he uses a horse avatar. ------ sharescribe The Complete Idiot's Guide To Frauds, Scams, and Cons [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0028644158/thepolitic...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0028644158/thepoliticalg-20) ------ diziet How is this an article so thoroughly under-researched? Why not go a little bit further and investigate if actual people are posting? Hi $name, thank you for messaging me. I'm new to this site, so can you please tell me the process on how you send me that message, where did you have to click, etc? I am still trying to figure this out, so if you could tell me what buttons you had to press to send the message to me, I'd appreciate it, it would help me get started. Thank you ahead of time, $name. P.S. Have you read any good books lately? And then, to be even more sure, create a couple more accounts through proxies and see what kind of messages they get. Do deactivate them after. See, while it does look like some sort of bait-and-switch, at least try to verify it. Maybe at the very least they've got a very persuasive feature where new members do get popped up, and there's a user initiated "Poke" like feature (that appears as a message on your end), so that would put them somewhere in grey-hat tactics out of the black-hat area. ~~~ yaakov34 Oh come on, COME ON, I'm all for research too, but 15 messages from women in the middle of the night who want to date a horse is not something that requires going deep undercover before you decide that it's fake. And he said that it would cost him $60 just to contact anyone or do anything on that site. ~~~ noodle i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story. are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works. ~~~ robinwauters It's not just the messages from users, it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details, pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails, the corny live chat box and pop- up message when you try to close it, and so on. ~~~ noodle > it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit > details this is how a lot of dating sites work. no contact unless you pay, no receiving messages unless you pay. its also how classmates.com works, not just dating sites. and one of the reasons they were sued recently is due to business practices similar to this. > pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously > not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails again, this is probably true, but there's no _proof_ of it unless the dude signed up and found out for sure. more data required. > the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it shady indeed, but they're not the only place who makes use of this. ~~~ robinwauters There seems to be a notion that I shouldn't call out WooMe because other sites are doing it too. I don't know where that is coming from. ~~~ diziet My notion is that you should call out WooMe. Go for it. However, as an author it is your responsibility to try to research as much as possible. It does seem, from the surface level that you described, that those messages are spam/automatically generated. However one could come up with a semi-plausible bordering on the edge of legitimacy rationale why you had received those messages. Maybe WooMe discovered a novel way of nudging users towards communication with each other, maybe they get Achievement Points for sending messages to new users? Likely? Not really, However, chatting with a very cleverly disguised CTA does not constitute thorough research.

Computación cuántica, circuitos cuánticos - neomatrix https://medium.com/@josueacevedo/computaci%C3%B3n-cu%C3%A1ntica-compuertas-o-circuitos-cu%C3%A1nticos-27910f5338c8 ====== gus_massa [Hi from Argentina!] I think this is on topic, but this is an English speaking forum, and posts in other languages are usually ignored or flagged (unless there is no alternative in English and it is very very interesting). (In this case, there is a lot of material in English, some is better, some is worse, ..., but there is a lot.) I suggest to write two versions of the post, one in Spanish and other in English, and post the English version here. I do something like this, and the English version usually gets x10 more traffic than the Spanish version.

Three students build $100 device that blinds attacker and takes picture - fraqed http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/29/three-students-built-a-100-device-to-blind-you-and-take-your-picture-before-you-can-get-away/ ====== kombinatorics that's useless.

Scala.js, the Scala to JavaScript compiler, has been optimized - eranation https://plus.google.com/103744906976128830230/posts/9CyznVM9ULT ====== eranation The original Github comment by the way: [https://github.com/lampepfl/scala- js/issues/4#issuecomment-2...](https://github.com/lampepfl/scala- js/issues/4#issuecomment-20937230)

Gitlab 13.2 Released with Planning Iterations and Load Performance Testing - doener https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/07/22/gitlab-13-2-released/ ====== samanthalee233 Just want to take a second to point out the highlight post I added to the story about the release yesterday, for anyone who missed it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23917493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23917493) ------ doener Via [https://www.golem.de/news/versionsverwaltung- gitlab-13-2-mit...](https://www.golem.de/news/versionsverwaltung- gitlab-13-2-mit-optimierungen-fuer-scrum-und-jira-2007-149846.html)

Announcing SSH Access Through Cloudflare - webmonkeyuk https://blog.cloudflare.com/releasing-the-cloudflare-access-feature-that-let-us-smash-a-vpn-on-stage/ ====== devereaux > When you attempt to reach a web application behind Access, we instead > redirect you to your identity provider. Once you login, we generate a JSON > Web Token and store that token as a cookie in your browser. SSH connections > require a slightly different flow for your end users, but one that is just > as convenient. > First, you need to install cloudflared. cloudflared is a lightweight command > line tool published by Cloudflare that will proxy traffic from your device > to the server over SSH. You can remove the need for any unique commands by > adding two lines to your SSH config file that will always use cloudflared to > proxy traffic for a particular hostname. > Once set-up, you can attempt to reach the resource over SSH from your > command line or code editor IDK but it seems a bit more complicated than just using public keys on a public port.

CyberChef – Cyber Swiss Army Knife - onion2k https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ ====== octosphere It's funny looking at some of the contributors to this. Some of the accounts seem to be vague, single-duty accounts made for the express purpose of contributing code to CyberChef and nothing else. I admire their OPSEC (From: [https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/graphs/contributors)) [https://github.com/n1474335](https://github.com/n1474335) [https://github.com/j433866](https://github.com/j433866) [https://github.com/d98762625](https://github.com/d98762625) [https://github.com/s2224834](https://github.com/s2224834) [https://github.com/GCHQ77703](https://github.com/GCHQ77703) ~~~ Fnoord Makes me wonder what GitHub can see (e-mail addresses, IP addresses). I also wonder if it is possible to use code analysis to figure out who these people are. Not that it is relevant for me, just curious... ~~~ TAForObvReasons GitHub can see what you send it. If you're concerned about leaking IP data, use a VPN and a remote box for git operations. ~~~ justanotherhn Perhaps OP is referring to traking based on the coding? I.E. if you had all the code repos from an individual and ran some sort of pattern reconition software to cross refrence thigs like folder structure, layout of the code, frequency and time of uploads, function & variable naming techniques, etc. This reminds me of a technique called eBiomentrics[0] [0] [https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/keystroke-dynamics- wha...](https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/keystroke-dynamics-what-is-it- be396a263bf2) ~~~ Fnoord Yes that is what I was referring to. I forgot the exact name for it. It is akin to (hand)writing analysis, but for code. ~~~ justanotherhn Certainly an interesting idea, I suppose most of the things I listed can in fact be mitigated quite easily. Compilers and obfuscators exist even now that would totally destroy most distinguishable patterns. If anyone knows any case studies on this, please drop a link here. ~~~ aspenmayer [https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo- Anonymouth](https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth) Edit: The main page of above site has a lot more publications referenced. Worth a look. [https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/Main_Page](https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/Main_Page) [https://evllabs.com/](https://evllabs.com/) ------ boarnoah Its a brilliant tool, has replaced visiting 3 or 4 different mini sites to do some basic conversions etc.. EDIT: Other thing to note, is you can define, a set of operations, ex: [https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=ROT13(true,true,13)](https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=ROT13\(true,true,13\)) and get a shareable link ------ motohagiography So much fun! At first glance, only feature requests I might have added when I did this sort of work would be in for audio spectrographs in the multimedia section. Useful for finding stego, embedded thumbnails, hidden channels etc, and a generalized malicious ZIP parser that deals with the myriad of nasties packers can use. The demand to scale this capability within an agency like that makes it worth while to build tools like this, wonder whatother easter eggs are in there beyond alert msgs. Brits, so cheeky. ------ nyxxie Wow I actually thought of building a tool similar to this for CTFs, specifically this feature: [https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/wiki/Automatic- detection-o...](https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/wiki/Automatic-detection-of- encoded-data-using-CyberChef-Magic) This is REALLY cool. Basically given an unknown string or file from something CTF-y you can run this tool on it to look for low-hanging fruit like it being e.g. base64 encoded. ~~~ tptacek This is a really old reversing trick, for what it's worth; for instance, pulling gzips out of firmware images, or spotting zipped Java images. You can also often identify cryptography primitives from their ASN.1 OID strings. There are a bunch of tools that do stuff like this. ~~~ virtualmic Yes, I use this one regularly: [https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk](https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk) (Binwalk is a fast, easy to use tool for analyzing, reverse engineering, and extracting firmware images) ------ downtown_ [https://github.com/usdAG/cstc](https://github.com/usdAG/cstc) this implements This as a burp plugin. A few Colleagues developed this and released it two weeks ago at defcon ------ integricho It reminds me of SnD Reverser Tool[1], although compared to this, SnD RT has a bit more constrained scope in what it does, but it's also a standalone exe of just ~150KB. such a shame it's no longer being developed... [1] [https://tuts4you.com/download/1923/](https://tuts4you.com/download/1923/) ------ weinzierl Cryptool is similar and I think older. At least I remember that I have used the desktop version in the 90s. While I appreciate that they made a web version I think they scattered their efforts to create different versions too much so that the project suffered regarding features and quality. [1] [https://www.cryptool.org/en](https://www.cryptool.org/en) ------ xwdv What’s the CLI version of this? It’s too cumbersome to click around in a GUI. ~~~ ken It's fascinating to me (as someone who has written a similar system) that everybody, almost without exception, makes this leap. If the problem is that clicking is too cumbersome, then add better keyboard support. That's the solution to the problem as stated. You don't need to throw out the whole UI for that, and there's lots of things a GUI can do that a CLI can't. I haven't been able to determine if this is the common reaction because people simply assume a GUI can't have good keyboard support, or because they're making an excuse for some unstated other reason. ~~~ stjohnswarts a lot of people want to make things scriptable. ~~~ ken That's an interesting point (and a possible hidden agenda), but again, the scriptability of something is orthogonal to whether it's graphical or not. Web browsers are as GUI as they come, and arguably have far better scripting support than any CLI program. ------ ken This looks kind of neat (and not too dissimilar to my own software -- see bio), though I can't seem to make it work (or "Bake"?). It also reminds me of OpenRefine, another very cool online data processing tool with a slightly different focus. ~~~ kim031 You need to drag specific operation(s) from Operations and drop them into Recipe. And then supply input(s) in Input tab. You can also check the Auto Bake icon in the bottom. ~~~ ken Ah, that's it! I discovered that I could add operations by double-clicking them, but I was so intent on trying to find a "type some raw input" operation that I completely missed the "Input tab". ------ jdrosenthal Some great operations in there. Especially [Other > XKCD Random Number] [https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=XKCD_Random_Number(...](https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=XKCD_Random_Number\(\)&input=SW5wdXQ) "RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number." ~~~ flixic There’s also Numberwang function. ------ anewguy9000 nice! so is any of the input feeding back to GCHQ? ~~~ rtempaccount1 shouldn't be it's purely client-side. And of course, if you don't trust them, just stick a proxy in-line and watch for traffic. ~~~ Fnoord If you don't trust it you can use it in a VM without network access, or something like Qubes (essentially the same). Personally, I use Opensnitch (a personal firewall like Little Snitch) on Kali Linux, but it isn't foolproof. ------ rtempaccount1 I use this a lot for basic things like base64 decoding. Of course, nothing you can't do with A.N. programming language, but handy for quick checks. ------ NikolaeVarius This tool is great. Very useful for CTFs ------ lukifer This is just about the greatest thing ever, thanks for sharing. ------ sdinsn Really nice, thanks for sharing ------ ixtli Extremely cool. ------ yeahdef great site, been using it for years ------ rglover This is awesome! Not sure if OP put this together, but thank you. ------ marctrem This has been posted many times to HN [0]. Is there something making it newsworthy this time? [0] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cyberchef&sort=byPopularity&pr...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cyberchef&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story) ~~~ myroon5 [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/) ~~~ marctrem It's definitely not about making fun of people – It's about expecting novelty and not finding any. After all, `news` is in the url! I am wondering why people don't do the due diligence of searching if a tool/article has not already been posted before submitting a duplicate item. I am sorry if you did interpret this as `trying to make fun of people` – This is not my intention. I still would like to know why duplicate entries are welcomed/accepted on a news aggregator (honest question)! ~~~ PhasmaFelis In this particular case, it's been posted only three times this year, and the first two had only 2 or 3 points, meaning that hardly anyone saw them--I know I didn't. I wouldn't have learned about this if not for the repost. I don't see anything wrong with reposting perennially useful stuff at reasonable intervals. Maybe twice in as many months is too much in general, but it seems to have worked out all right. ------ floki999 Why would anyone use a third-party web service to carry out cyber analysis? These tasks are easy enough to do/code. ~~~ invokestatic I may be just naive, but I trust and regularly use both Cyberchef and NSA’s Ghidra. I think it’s very unlikely that these tools are backdoored (and Cyberchef runs completely in-browser). ~~~ buildzr If you've ever looked at the way the NSA treats exploits, remote access software and such, they're very careful about deploying them against people who may be able to detect and analyze them themselves. Putting such things in public code like that which would both directly point the finger at them and possibly turning secrets into widespread knowledge in the security community would be... incredibly stupid.

Facebook's unethical experiment manipulated users' emotions - cmrivers http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/facebook_unethical_experiment_it_made_news_feeds_happier_or_sadder_to_manipulate.html ====== mabbo 155,000 users for each treatment of the experiment, says the paper. Let's presume random selection, and that the occurrence rate of mental disorders is the same for Facebook users as the general public (probably not too far off). Then Facebook intentionally downgraded the emotional state of: 10,000 sufferers of Major Depressive Disorder 5,000 people with PTSD 4,000 bipolar disorder sufferers 1,700 schizophrenics and a plethora of others with various mental disorders. 11/100,000 people commit suicide each year in America. How many were part of that treatment of the experiment, without consent or knowledge? As a scientist, I'm fascinated by the research. As a human being, I'm horrified it was ever done. [http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers- coun...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental- disorders-in-america/index.shtml) ~~~ walterbell > How many were part of that treatment of the experiment, without consent or > knowledge? How would this be determined in offline experiments where people volunteered? ~~~ Blahah All subjects would have the potential consequences explained to them so they could make an informed decision about whether to take part. Informed consent is a very important ethical principle in human-subject experiments. ------ ajays I'm puzzled about the outrage. FB _already_ filters out updates based on some blackbox algorithm. So they tweaked the parameters of that algorithm to filter out the "happier" updates, and observed what happens. How is this unethical? The updates were posted by the users' friends! FB didn't manufacture the news items; they were always there. I detest FB as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous. ~~~ LoganCale They altered people's feeds for a psychological experiment with the specific intent of manipulating their mood. That is _highly_ unethical. ~~~ TeMPOraL But why if it's done for science it's unethical, but when done by news stations, politicians, advertising agencies, motivational speakers, salesmen, etc. it's suddenly ok? ~~~ scintill76 Users of Facebook see it as a neutral platform for communicating with people they know. Consumers of the things you listed know it's top-down messaging coming from people they don't know or necessarily trust. So, there is a difference. It's still a complex question, though -- is filtering or prioritizing based on emotional sentiment really different from what they are already doing with inserting ads and such? ~~~ TeMPOraL I see it this way: they did a study, so it's fair. Were they to filter posts by emotional sentiment as a part of their normal operations, I'd find it unethical, or at least something I might not want. But I'm totally fine with them subjecting users (including myself) to random research studies, as those are temporary situations, and with Facebook's data sets, they can have great benefits for humanity. Perhaps Facebook should provide an opt-in option to for user to be a subject of various sociological experiments at unspecified times. I'd happily select it. ------ TeMPOraL I strongly hope that they won't care about any of this "outrage" and continue to do more and more experiments. Maybe even open it up as a platform for scientists to conduct studies. Facebook is in the unique position of possessing data that can be orders of magnitude more useful for social studies than surveys of randomly picked college students that happened to pass through your hallway. There's lot of good to be made from it. But the bigger issue I see here is why it's unethical to "manipulate user emotions" for research, when every salesman, every ad agency, every news portal and every politician does this to the much bigger extent and it's considered fair? It doesn't make much sense for me (OTOH I have this attitude, constantly backed by experience, that everything a salesmen says is a malicious lie until proven otherwise). ~~~ DanAndersen It's an interesting question. I have the same averse reaction to this story that a lot of people here have, but I admit I also thought, "If Facebook hadn't published this as research, but just had it as a business decision to drive more usage or positive associations with the website, no one would care." My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical. I don't know how to quantify what "over the line" is, but it all feels like brain-hacking. Things like "The Century of the Self" suggest that in the past century or so we've become extremely good at finding the little tricks and failings of human cognition and taking advantage of vulnerabilities of our reasoning to inject the equivalent of malicious code. The problem is that when I say "we" I don't mean the average person, and there's an every-growing asymmetry. Like malware developers adapting faster than anti-malware developers, most people have the same level of defense that they always have had, while the "attackers" have gotten better and better at breaking through defenses. Sometimes I'll see discussions about "what will people centuries from now think was crazy about our era?" and there's a part of me that keeps coming back to the idea that the act of asymmetrically exploiting the faults of human thinking is considered normal and "just the way things are." ~~~ TeMPOraL > _My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it 's not a mainstream view -- > is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as > unethical._ I agree with that, or probably think even more strongly - that advertisements/sales are more unethical than research. It's difficult to put limits though, because even if many salesmen clearly act maliciously, pretty much everything you do or say influences people this way or another; it's how we communicate. What I'd love to see is Facebook creating an opt-in option for an user to be a part of further sociological research. I'd gladly turn it on and be happy that I'm helping humanity, while Facebook could limit their studies to people who explicitly consented (there's an issue with selection bias though). They have too good data to be not used for the betterment of mankind. ~~~ DanAndersen Good point. I guess my concern -- recognizing this makes me sound like a Luddite or someone going on about "humans were never meant to know about this" \-- is that the results of research like this aren't going to be used for the betterment of mankind. Rather, it'll be all about how to use a new mental vulnerability to get more eyeballs on someone's content or to increase the dopamine hits from browsing the site. What I would love -- and what I would eagerly opt-in to -- would be a system where Facebook could educate users on irrational behaviors. "We noticed that 60% of users like you spent an average of 30 seconds more looking at this kind of content... this is because your brain etc etc etc". Creepy, perhaps, but if there were a way to help people be more aware of and defend against advertisement that would be neat. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _Rather, it 'll be all about how to use a new mental vulnerability to get > more eyeballs on someone's content or to increase the dopamine hits from > browsing the site._ Sadly, you've made a great point here. It's very likely that the end results of research will be used exactly for that - as it already happens with most of psychology. I hope though that some of that research will be used to create better policies and help the society. > _What I would love -- and what I would eagerly opt-in to -- would be a > system where Facebook could educate users on irrational behaviors._ I'd happily opt-in to that as well (and opt-in all my relatives too ;)). I don't expect Facebook to ever do that, as it'd exactly opposite to their goal to be able to a/ influence their users, and b/ cater for advertisers, but there already are websites doing exactly that (e.g. LessWrong). They're niche places though; I'd love to see something popular enough to reach general audience. ------ espeed _Facebook’s Unethical Experiment: It intentionally manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge._ I'm not defending Facebook or the experiment, but if you're going to call them out for "manipulating users' emotions without their knowledge", then you need to call out every advertising, marketing, and PR firm on the planet, along with every political talkshow, campaign, sales letter, and half-time speech... ~~~ pain With that in mind, I'd find it important if our social media analytics publicly accounted for such emotional manipulations. It could be wise to begin to share such emotional-information influences to equally let users and admins be so sensitive (and acknowledge its a real part of our systems). ~~~ espeed Users aren't fed every post by every one of their friends -- users would be overwhelmed with posts flying by so fast they couldn't keep up -- so it's no secret FB tweaks its feed algorithm to keep users engaged. And experimenting with network effects is what social networks do. Every time you see a picture of someone you like it's like a little shot of dopamine goes off in your head. Facebook wants to optimize those dopamine shots to continually bump engagement and create an experience where everyone is habitually checking their feed every 10 mins. This type of behavior design/economics research is done by Dan Ariely at MIT ("Predictably Irrational" [http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html)) and the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab ([http://captology.stanford.edu/](http://captology.stanford.edu/)). ~~~ pain Exactly why I'm trying to articulate importance of giving public facing language to such persuasive technologies, by actually having formal public markers for emotions being manipulated. (e.g. Apple ad with astericks linking to emotional signaling research and analytics, to help users determine deeper interests [this ad attracts people who feel X, Y, Z based on...]). ------ kyro To say this response is unnecessary and unfounded is disingenuous. Marc Andreessen (whom I respect) tweeted _" Run a web site, measure anything, make any changes based on measurements? Congratulations, you're running a psychology experiment!"_ I could not disagree more. This isn't simply a matter of looking at metrics and making changes to increase conversion rates. The problem is that the whole of users have come to expect Facebook to be a place where they can see any and all of their friends' updates. When I look at an ad, I know I am being manipulated. I know I'm being sold something. There is no such expectation of manipulative intent of Facebook, or that they're curating your social feed beyond "most recent" and "most popular", which seemingly have little to do with post content and are filters they let you toggle. What FB has done is misrepresent people and the lives they've chosen to portray, having a hand in shaping their online image. I want to see the good _and_ the bad that my friends post. I want to know that whatever my mom or brother or friend posts, I'll be able to see. Someone's having a bad day? I want to see it and support that person. That's what's so great about social media, that whatever I post can reach everyone in my circle, the way I posted it, unedited, unfiltered. To me this is a disagreement between what people perceive FB to be and how FB views itself. What if Twitter started filtering out tweets that were negative or critical of others? ~~~ doctorpangloss There are better ways to question the ethics of the experiment. Here's a simple approach: Would anyone want their emotions manipulated to be unhappy or unhealthy? The corollary in a medical experiment would be, would a healthy person want to undergo an experiment that could make them sick? Some people mentioned advertising as a counterpoint, that what Facebook does is not at all different from advertising's psychological manipulation. Well maybe some forms of advertising ought to be regulated too. Would a child voluntarily want their emotions manipulated by a Doritos ad to make the sicker or fatter? Even if it's not known what the outcome is, the two points are: (1) Facebook's various policies specify you will randomly participate in their studies, but (2) It matters if an experimental outcome can harm you. So even though you agreed to participate in experiments, you weren't told the experiments could hurt you. That is a classic medical ethics violation, and it ought to be a universal scientific ethics violation. ~~~ DanBC > The corollary in a medical experiment would be, would a healthy person want > to undergo an experiment that could make them sick? Yes, many people would willingly volunteer to take experimental drugs that i) might not work ii) might uave severe side effects because those people are dying and want some months more life. ~~~ notduncansmith Note the parent comment said "healthy". Last I checked, healthy != dying. ------ masnick I just wrote a blog post about the ethical/professional obligations of the researchers associated with this study: [http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/](http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/) When you publish a paper, you are supposed to write in the body of the manuscript if it's been approved by an IRB and what their ruling was. I'm surprised it was published without this, even though it apparently was? It's also appropriate to address ethical issues head-on in a paper about a study that may be controversial from an ethical perspective. If it really was approved by an IRB, then the researchers are ethically in the clear but totally botched the PR. If not, then I think the study was not ethical. ~~~ chmullig It was approved by an IRB. ------ mryall The difference between this experiment and advertising or A/B testing is _intent_. With A/B testing and advertising, the publisher is attempting to sway user behaviour toward purchasing or some other goal which is usually obvious to the user. With this experiment, Facebook are modifying the news feeds of their users specifically to affect their emotions, and then measure impact of that emotional change. The intention is to modify the feelings of users on the system, some negatively, some positively. Intentional messing with human moods like this purely for experimentation is the reason why ethics committees exist at research organisations, and why informed consent is required from participants in experiments. Informed consent in this case could have involved popping up a dialog to all users who were to be involved in the experiment, informing them that the presentation of information in Facebook would be changed in a way that might affect their emotions or mood. That is what you would expect of doctors and researchers when dealing with substances or activities that could adversely affects people's moods. We should expect no less from pervasive social networks like Facebook. ------ azakai Oh, please. Every single time Facebook changes anything on their site it "manipulates users' emotions". Show more content from their friends? Show less? Show more from some friends? Show one type of content more, another less? Change the font? Enlarge/shrink thumbnail images? All these things affect users on all levels, including emotionally, and Facebook does such changes every day. Talking about "informed consent" in the context of a "psychological experiment" here is bizarre. The "subjects" of the "experiment" here are users of Facebook. They decided to use Facebook, and Facebook tweaks the content it shows them every single day. They expect that. That is how Facebook and every other site on the web (that is sophisticated enough to do studies on user behavior) works. If this is "immoral", then an website outage - which frustrates users hugely - should be outright evil. And shutting down a service would be an atrocity. Of course all of these are ludicrous. The only reason we are talking about this is because it was published, so all of a sudden it's "psychological research", which is a context rife with ethical limitations. But make no mistake - Facebook and all other sophisticated websites do such "psychological research" ALL THE TIME. It's how they optimize their content to get people to spend more time on their sites, or spend more money, or whatever they want. If anyone objects to this, they object to basically the entire modern web. ~~~ TeMPOraL Exactly. I find this situation to be an example of ridiculous pattern matching. Is it published? Then it's a psychological experiment, and needs to be evaluated by an ethics board. Is it just A/B testing? Then it's not "science", so no need for ethics board. ~~~ dragonwriter So as long as you aren't publishing the results of your experimentation, none of the ethics that apply to experimenting on humans apply? That's an...interesting...theory. ~~~ azakai Any A/B test is "experimentation on humans". Facebook and all other web giants constantly do such behavioral studies. The only difference is that this one was published. In other words, if someone argues that this was unethical experimentation on humans, then there are 1,000 other studies we never heard of that are far, far worse. But we know they exist. It doesn't make sense to argue that. Websites have to experiment with different ways of doing things, and seeing how that affects their users. This isn't just a web thing either, of course - businesses need to try different things in order to optimize themselves. And to measure which is the best to get people to spend more. ------ ameza I'm torn about this. In some ways, I can see how mental health issues can be detected which can hopefully help us avoid these horrifying events (mass shootings off the top of my head). But then again, I can see how the Army or the government in general can control any type of popular uprisings. FB, Twitter, etc have given us tools to connect and join in efforts to fix what is wrong (I'm thinking the Middle East though that can be said about the Tea Party or even Occupy movement). If the price is right, FB can hand over that power (i.e. NSA) or through these secret courts, the Army/government can have direct control of FB. It's crazy to think that this only occurs in countries like Russia and China but wake up America! This is happening here as well! ------ ianstallings You know why I think they are doing this? Because there have been studies showing that people are miserable on facebook (see below) and I think people are starting to pick up on it. So FB feels some pressure to lighten the mood a bit. But as usual they do it with the subtlety of a drunken fool. Also, the comparison to an A/B test is a false one. This is specifically to alter the moods of the user and test the results in a study, not to improve the users experience or determine which app version works better. Regarding the study mentioned above: [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/the-r...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/the- real-reason-facebook-makes-us-unhappy.html) ------ resdirector > Facebook intentionally made thousands upon thousands of people sad. Hang on. Wasn't the experiment to see _whether_ users would post gloomier or happier messages respectively? This very different from _intentionally_ making people sad. ~~~ staunch "I only silently removed happiness from your life because I was curious what your reaction would be!" ~~~ csallen Silently removed happiness from _my web application_ that you visit on a voluntary basis. If you think my web app is too gloomy, feel free to stop coming. ~~~ staunch What if Gmail started silently removing happy emails from your Inbox by auto- archiving them? ~~~ TeMPOraL You expect GMail to show you every non-spam message sent to you in your inbox. On Facebook, on the other hand, you expect a curated list of recent posts - otherwise you wouldn't be able to keep up with what your 500+ friends and 1500+ liked pages post every day. So comparing GMail to Facebook makes no sense at all. ~~~ staunch Gmail users have an expectation that Google won't start silently diverting their legitimate email as an experiment on them. That's the comparison if you didn't quite grasp that. You're claiming that users would "expect" Facebook to do something like filter out all the happy posts from their friends and family without telling them? I don't think many would agree with you. ~~~ csallen I think he's merely claiming that you expect Facebook to curate the news feed. _How_ they do so (and for what purpose) is ever-changing and has never been fully transparent, thus your expectations for those particular factors is irrelevant. ~~~ staunch Yes. He's saying that their lack of transparency justifies their abuse. I'm trying to explain that I disagree. ~~~ TeMPOraL I don't see any abuse here, and I believe that their lack of transparency wrt. filtering algorithms is justified. First off all, the shortest description of what they do wouldn't probably be far from publishing the algorithm iteslf. An algorithm that's ever changing and probably different depending on where you live or to what group you were randomly assigned. 99% of people wouldn't care anyway, and being transparent about the algorithm would likely make them less happy - right now they accept Facebook as is and don't think twice about it; give them the description of how things work and suddenly everyone will start saying that Facebook filtering sucks because random-reason-511. Moreover, the only people that stand to benefit from knowing Facebook's algorithm are advertisers, who will game the hell out of the system for their own short-term benefit, just like they do with Google. It's something neither Facebook users, nor Facebook itself want. ~~~ staunch Sorry, you failed to comprehend what I said and I even made it really short. Maybe try reading it a few more times. ------ mullingitover This study really makes me feel vindicated for unfollowing all of my friends along with every brand on facebook. I could've been part of the study but I'd never know, since the only way I see my friends' posts is to visit their pages directly where I can see them all unfiltered. I've been doing this for the past six months and it has dramatically improved the way I interact with the site. I can still get party invites and keep in touch with people, but I'm immune to the groupthink. ------ mullingitover I have a feeling a lot of college courses on research methods are going to use this as an example of a grave ethics breach for years to come. With an experiment group as large as they used, statistically it's almost inevitable that someone in that group will commit suicide in the near future. If that person is in the group that was targeted for negative messages, even a rookie lawyer could make a sound case before a jury that Facebook's researchers have blood on their hands. ~~~ MarkPNeyer surely people have committed sucide after using facebook even without this study. is facebook guilty of that, too? you may argue that facebook was "trying to make people depressed" but that simply isn't true. what if showing more of my friends negative status updates actually _helps_ them? depressed people are shunned in our society; facebook gave a voice to the voiceless. that's wonderful! ~~~ mullingitover > you may argue that facebook was "trying to make people depressed" but that > simply isn't true. Legal culpability issues aside: did facebook manipulate people's emotions intentionally? Did they inform them that they were going to do this, and of the risks involved? Did they get their consent? If the answers to the last two questions aren't unequivocally yes, then facebook is in deep trouble. Edit: this also misses the problem that the subjects were never screened for their basical ability to give informed consent. Merely clicking through the ToS does not mean that you're not suffering from a mental illness that nullifies their agreement to the ToS. Lastly, this experiment clearly involved deception, since the test subjects weren't informed up-front that they were being manipulated. This is problematic[1] if the subjects weren't debriefed after the study: >It is stated in the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct set by the American Psychological Association, that psychologists may not conduct research that includes a deceptive compartment unless the act is justified by the value and the importance of the results of such study, provided that this could not be obtained in an alternative way. Moreover, the research should bear no potential harm to the subject as an outcome of deception, be it physical pain or emotional distress. _Finally, a debriefing session is required in which the experimenter discloses to the subject the use of deception in the research he /she was part of and provides the subject with the option of withdrawing his/her data._ [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent#Deception](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent#Deception) ------ danso FWIW, the HN discussion on the study published on PNAS here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470) ~~~ dang Yes, and today's wave of media controversy about it hasn't added significant new information, so I think this post counts as a dupe. ~~~ staunch Heavens forbid the fluff piece on a Google executive gets pushed down the page. I'm dumbfounded that you would kill this story. Hacker News is changing. ~~~ dang Well, it was a borderline call, so I've restored the thread. Perhaps I should explain our thought process. There were at least half a dozen major web publications today putting out variants of this indignant post about "Facebook's unethical experiment". Did all these authors suddenly develop a passion for science ethics? Of course not. It is simply the internet controversy du jour. Those have never made for good HN stories, and the policy has always been to penalize them, because otherwise they would dominate the site. In cases of pile-on controversy like this one, when the original story has already been discussed on HN—which is pretty common, because HN users tend not to miss a day in posting these things—we usually mark the follow-up posts as dupes unless they add important new information, or at least something of substance. Does this article add anything of substance? It didn't strike me that way, but arguably it does. As for the PR fluff piece you think is on the front page, why haven't you flagged it? It's impossible for us to catch (or even see) all such things. We rely on users to point them out. ~~~ staunch The idea that this story is "controversy du jour" is wrong in my view. I think it's an incredibly important story and the underlying issue may be the biggest in technology. At the very least it is not spam, gossip, or other obvious junk. The explicit HN policy used to be to allow controversies like this to wash over the site. We all remember seeing the home page covered in many submissions on the same topic. The fear that this would cause a topic to "dominate the site" has been proven false numerous times. I'm not sure why that would be a consideration. I wasn't objecting to the puff piece on the home page. I don't think lightweight stuff like that can dominate the site either. ~~~ tptacek Complaints about stories taking over the entire front page of the site are as old as the site itself. This comment might be the first one I've ever read suggesting that the phenomenon was a good thing that we should preserve. ~~~ staunch Who is going to decide how many stories on a topic we get to have? Should there have been one Mt.Gox related submission? One Snowden related submission? Up to one submission per day per topic? I'm not suggesting it's "good" I'm suggesting it's better than the alternative. Killing dupes when there is more than one active discussion is one thing. This submission was the only active discussion on this topic. Removing it is just editorial curation that is of no benefit to anyone at all. ~~~ dang Those are good questions and I'd be happy to discuss them, but you seem to be under the impression that HN didn't use to be intensively moderated. That model is wrong. HN was always intensively moderated, curated, or whatever one calls it. That's the only reason why you are able to write something like this: _The fear that this would cause a topic to "dominate the site" has been proven false numerous times._ That didn't prove itself false, nor did the community make it false; it was PG who made it false. He poured countless hours into managing the site and countless more into writing code to help manage it. That model hasn't changed. It's more transparent now, because users asked for it to be. Transparency has the side-effect of making it seem to some people like we've fundamentally altered HN when it doesn't work like they assumed it did. ~~~ staunch Few people know better what PG, yourself, and others have done for this site or appreciate it more than me. I've seen lots of threads get penalized or killed and reversed. I know it hasn't been perfect in the past either. I regret saying anything and I won't comment in the future. Thanks. ~~~ dang Please don't regret saying anything and for heaven's sake please don't stop commenting! This stuff is messy, unobvious, and unsatisfying. I'm painfully aware that there's no way to make HN consistent, to satisfy everybody any of the time, or anybody all of the time. The least bad job is all we can strive for, and we can't do that without feedback. Also, sorry for the snippiness in my tone above. I don't always succeed in responding the way I want to. ------ ispolin So does this mean that people can increase their happiness by using plugins that hide negative posts from their social media? ~~~ zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC Possibly, but only in the short run, as skewed perception of reality tends to have long-term negative consequences. Which is precisely one of the reasons why this kind of stuff is evil. ------ deepsun Author falsely assumes that people changes their sharing behavior due to changes in their mood. More likely they just feel like "everyone's posting cats on Facebook, so that's a place for sharing cats, let me do too", or otherwise. ------ nichodges Before and/or after the fact, research participants are made aware that they were part of a psychology experiment. I wonder if Facebook plans on alerting subjects of this experiment to their participation? ------ jevgeni Isn't Slate in the business of exactly that: manipulating their readers emotions? ~~~ reality_czech Yes, but they're better at it than Facebook. They've got a bunch of gullible illogical peasants about to ban A/B testing... or at least drive it underground. For the children. ------ falconfunction I just use Facebook to bookmark youporn at this point ------ onewaystreet Been kind of surprised there hasn't been more of a reaction to this. I guess the Internet has reached peak Facebook outrage. ------ pvdm Another nail in the FB coffin. Edit: for me at least. ~~~ jqm And only 90,000 more nails to go before your average non-tech user who has Facebook as their homepage drops them. Until a replacement comes about and a large number of contacts move, it has become such a large part of these peoples lives it isn't going anywhere. Arguments and reasons don't sway them. Sadly. I've never even been on facebook. But my girlfriend and extended family use it religiously. My dad and a couple of other members finally dropped it as the result of my rants but the rest (the vast majority) just think I'm suspicious and nutty and go right on posting their entire lives. So, facebook can pretty much do as they please. And apparently they do. ------ xyclos people still use facebook? ------ dreamfactory2 > "If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in > psychological status, that’s experimentation" Or art, or journalism, or advertising, or football etc. ------ hawkice Every business that makes sense will try to make its customers happier. Showing people bad news to get more engagement has roughly the same moral standing as the evening news. I guess I don't get it. [It must be wrong because they learned something from it, I guess?] ~~~ walterbell What's your position on creating fake news to get more engagement? Some lines are defended because the slippery slope on the other side is infinite. ~~~ cwyers The thing about the slippery slope is that it is far more often a logical fallacy than it is a real danger. ~~~ walterbell [http://pando.com/2014/06/28/facebooks-science-experiment- on-...](http://pando.com/2014/06/28/facebooks-science-experiment-on-users- shows-the-company-is-more-even-powerful-and-unethical-than-we-thought/) "Facebook itself could target certain users, whether they be corporate rivals or current/former employees. Having such strong psychological control over your workforce would certainly have its benefits. And if Facebook ever gets caught? Why, the company could claim it’s all part of a social experiment, one that users tacitly agreed to when they signed up. With over one-tenth of the world’s population signing into Facebook every day, and now with evidence to back the emotional power of the company’s algorithmic manipulation, the possibilities for widespread social engineering are staggering and unlike anything the world has seen. Granted, Facebook’s motives probably are simply to convince people to buy more stuff in order to please advertisers, but the potential uses of that power to impact elections or global trade could be enticing to all sorts of powerful interest groups."

Why I Don't Use PowerPoint For Teaching - neilc http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-i-dont-use-powerpoint-for-teaching.html ====== xirium From the article "One person (the presenter) is presenting information to other people (the audience). The flow of information is one way, from the presenter to the audience. Because the flow of information is one way, the presenter can and does script out the entire presentation ahead of time, much like a movie or a novel. Like those forms, a PowerPoint presentation is highly linear. It is meant to be experienced in a particular order. Deviating from the expected order is possible, but awkward." It takes way too much effort to create a linear presentation for a class, especially while pre-requisites are missing. I've had this situation while teaching mathematics. Two people in the class didn't understand negative numbers. When you're using a pen and a whiteboard, you have the freedom to draw a number line, spend one minute explaining negative numbers and then continue.

Announcing .NET Foundation Open Membership - MikusR https://dotnetfoundation.org/blog/2018/12/04/announcing-net-foundation-open-membership ====== jongalloway2 Hi, .NET Foundation Executive Director here, happy to answer any questions. Also, check out Miguel de Icaza's post here for details and background: [https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2018/Dec-04.html](https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2018/Dec-04.html) ~~~ redwards510 Can you point me (regular joe c# programmer) to some resources that show how to contribute to .NET and start the path to membership? I'm guessing the simple answer is "go to github, check out the latest branch of aspnetcore, start fixing bugs in the Issues list and pray to god someone accepts your PR" but somehow I imagine the barrier to entry is a bit higher than that. Thanks! ~~~ ocdtrekkie I just want to point out that you will not need to pray to God to get a PR accepted in a Microsoft repo if their docs team is any indication. They are nearly aggressively professional at handling GitHub issues. Minor mentions of confusions I've had on docs.microsoft.com were zealously assigned, pursued, and fixed, and the PRs I submitted to the code samples there were approved within a day or two. ~~~ GordonS I've had the same experience with docs, but the polar opposite with .NET Core FX and ASP.NET Core - seems any new features need to be discussed by committee, and can take several months or even years before they will then say "OK, send a PR", even for features that there is demand for. Even for bugfixes, I've been really dissapointed in their responses - they call _any_ change in behaviour a 'regression', and won't accept fixes, even if the behaviour they want to preserve only exists as a side effect of the bug, and nobody could possibly want in any case! I write this as a .NET fanboi, but my negative experience of trying to contribute to Microsoft's OSS projects has been left me dissolutioned. ------ oblio Pretty cool! Considering the moves being made by Oracle, it would be awesome if we get a super high quality, high speed, true FOSS platform from Microsoft, originally, of all places :)) ~~~ int_19h The problem with .NET Core compared to Java is that it's still less portable at the moment - it doesn't work on any of the BSDs, for example. Someone's working on it, though. [https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/18067](https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/18067) ~~~ setquk The irony of this is the original CLR worked on FreeBSD at MSR before it worked on Windows from what I heard. The original build toolchain was perl. ------ dgudkov Paid members that can vote and elect the board is a very good model for online communities in general. If it was adopted by Facebook or Google+ we could've seen entirely different plot of story than what we have now. ------ setquk I still can’t get over the mental anguish caused by using Telerik’s ASP.Net control suite over ten years ago. ------ johnwilkinson Hey Jon, Why not move .net to Linux Foundation in a similar deal to Node.js? I think .NET is really interesting technology but let's be honest most innovation happen over JVM. Moving to Linux Foundation would create a lot of trust for people who are not fond of Microsoft. ~~~ Zedronar Actually most of the features that Java released over the last few years where first implemented in C# (e.g.: Lambdas). ~~~ johnwilkinson Well that's true. But, I am talking about interesting projects like Apache Kafka, Spark or many other Big Data tools. Also many languages born in JVM like Clojure, Kotlin or Scala. None of them came from oracle but in .NET all the successful languages came from Microsoft. Mostly happens because many people don't like Microsoft. That's why you don't see lots of startups using .NET ~~~ wvenable All the successful .NET languages come from Microsoft because they have some of the best language designers and create some of the best languages. There is no need for something like Kotlin on .NET because C# is already far ahead of Java and F# is a great language. ~~~ jsmith45 I see two main reasons for all the JVM languages. 1\. People trying to make programming in the java ecosystem less painful. (Java-the-language was stagnant for so long that this was the main way improvements could be made). 2\. People who wanted to design a language, but not need to create a complete runtime, need to make the runtime cross platform, and need to encourage a large library ecosystem. (They could just leverage the existing java libraries. The first reason was never super applicable to .Net. The second would have been applicable in the past except for "cross-platform". So .net never saw the huge nnumber of languages. With .NET Core I suspect we will see more reason #2 languages.

systemd-networkd DHCP performance - tbrock https://plus.google.com/114015603831160344127/posts/eztZWbwmxM8 ====== dsr_ The most interesting bit, to me, is actually in the comments. You don't have to recognize Ted Lemon's name, or know of his work, in order to read the tag that G+ put next to his query. But even if you completely ignore that and treat him as a random person, the LMGTFY response was rather rude. Is this endemic to the systemd project? Because I keep seeing similar rudeness whenever I look at their mailing lists. ~~~ scrollaway It's endemic to a lot of open source projects. But yes, it's very present around systemd/gnome. I'm not a huge gnome fan but I love systemd and I hugely respect both projects in many respects. I've met several of the people in both projects as well and I like some of them (not all, but that's not to be expected). The attitude though, oh god the attitude. In those very comments, Ted Lemon put it extremely well into words: "I've worked with people who respond to questions this way. It makes for a stressful work environment—you're always wondering whether they're going to try to score points off you when you ask a question." I don't know how to qualify this attitude as. I'd say "holier than thou" but that kind of lost its meaning along the way. At their core, most of the people working on these projects expect near-perfection from others and are not willing to assist those they demand perfection from. Anyone who fails to achieve their demands simply gets dismissed. Very few of the people who are interested in the project end up contributing because of the toxic attitude... it's all some sort of project-wide social filter bubble. This seemingly has the effect of getting brilliant people interested in those projects, but just as many fall through the cracks. I've not thought about all of this long enough to talk about the long term consequences but what I do see is that while GNOME may be a great feat of desktop engineering, it's meaningless if everyone despises the developers (and consequentially, the name). Funny, too, UX people don't really fit into this monoculture. This really breaks my heart. I see it as a form of bullying... You either help, or you don't help (don't reply). You don't go around making people feel like they are lesser men because they don't have the knowledge you nurtured over years or even decades. I bet Mozart sucked with computers, too. PS: I apologise for going off-topic. This work on dhcp performance is really damn awesome and those issues have nothing to do with the topic at hand. ~~~ catern I think you're inverting the direction of causation here. GNOME and systemd get a lot of criticism and hate on largely non-technical grounds. I think any project could develop a dismissive attitude if they were hearing constantly about how their project was destroying everything beautiful and true. It's unfortunate, and bad for them in the long term, but totally understandable. ------ wmf Related classic blog post: how do Macs get on the network so fast? [http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do](http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do) ------ zokier It is bit odd that network management is one of those things that gets iterated on fairly often. What makes this something that has difficulties converging? It seems like almost every distro has it's own solution, or several of them. ~~~ asabjorn Fortunately this network management solution is now part of systemd, and systemd has been adopted as default by all major distributions except gentoo. ~~~ simula67 For those who missed it, Ubuntu is also moving to systemd as default : [http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316) ~~~ dredmorbius I was really hoping Shuttleworth would hold out on this. I've got serious concerns about systemd still. Ted Ts'o's recent G+ post, while generally supportive, gets into many of the issues involved: _A realization that I recently came to while discussing the whole systemd controversy with some friends at the Collab Summit is that a lot of the fear and uncertainty over systemd may not be so much about systemd, but the fear and loathing over radical changes that have been coming down the pike over the past few years, many of which have been not well documented, and worse, had some truly catastrophic design flaws that were extremely hard to fix._ Quite. [https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/4W6rrMMv...](https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU) ------ JoshTriplett It's nice to see this specifically treated as an optimization goal. This is one of those cases (much like git for version control) where sufficiently good performance enables new uses that would not otherwise be possible. For instance, consider getting a decent network connection over an intermittent link. ------ dscrd Piece by piece, Linux is becoming an OS that we don't constantly have to defend for its small deficiencies. Loving it. ------ Fasebook thankfully we have systemd to manage these kinds of module dependency startup problems in linux now.

Autodesk's Idea to Knit the Hyperloop Out of Carbon Fiber - bcn http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/autodesks-idea-to-knit-the-hyperloop-out-of-carbon-fiber ====== pudquick I think one thing they missed here is pointed out by this statement in the article: _" [...] in less than two years, and, says Brandt, require fewer support pylons. “Elon’s estimate calls for about $2.6 billion for concrete, but we’d get that down to more like $1.5 billion,” he says."_ The pylons aren't purely for lifting the steel, they're also for distributing the weight of the Hyperloop cars. If anything, an equal length of carbon fiber tube would be more flexible (not less) than the same length as steel and would potentially require the same number _or more_ of pylons. The air that these cars float over does not negate gravity or the effect of their weight on the tunnel that they travel through. All that being said, it looks like our current carbon fiber pre-preg ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-preg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre- preg)) production is currently able to handle a construction project like this. According to Wolfram Alpha, a cylinder 9 feet in diameter from Los Angeles to San Francisco would have a surface area of approximately 52 million square feet. According to the book "Boeing 787 Dreamliner" by Mark Wagner and Guy Norris, in 2007 Boeing actually expanded the capacity of carbon fiber plants they had access to in France, Japan, and the US from 125 million square feet per year to 363 million square feet per year. I would hope that 6 years later we would be able to produce 52 million square feet. ~~~ bradleyland I have a few questions stemming from ignorance. These aren't meant to me rhetorical in any way. I'm just curious how my understanding is incorrect. I was under the impression that carbon fiber was "stronger" than steel. I understand that stronger doesn't always mean more rigid, but I was also under the impression that carbon fiber could be woven in different ways to offer greater rigidity on a desired axis. Is it possible to construct carbon fiber in a way that is more rigid than steel? Couldn't they also increase the amount of material used, or does that not increase rigidity? I'm thinking something like 8-ply vs 6-ply, or something like that. I'm speaking entirely from a layman's view, so I'm curious why increasing the number of plies wouldn't work. ------ MechSkep This is interesting because they could potentially avoid the thermal expansion problem that would otherwise sink the hyperloop. Carbon fiber has a negative coefficient of thermal expansion in its axial direction, and you can pair it with a metal to get a net zero expansion structure. ------ Maarten88 That is a really good idea. But I wonder if carbon fiber wouldn't be very expensive for a static structure like that. Why not use much less expensive glass fiber? Compared to steel it would still be much stronger, lighter and be manufactured in one piece, without welds. ~~~ tinco Perhaps glass fiber is not rigid enough? Also, I think the only reason carbon fiber is so expensive is the manufacturing cost, if you're paying for the machines anyway, perhaps the cost isn't that much higher. ------ clebio >> There are machines that can churn out limited qualities of the braided carbon fiber. I'm guessing that's a typo and they meant limited _quantities_, but I'm honestly not sure (not snark). ------ bkev Reminds me of the carbon fiber loom Toyota came up with for making the Lexus LFA. [http://youtu.be/AScfESzQzIQ](http://youtu.be/AScfESzQzIQ) ------ Swannie [http://www.buzzfeed.com/autodesk/a-new-look-at-the-high- spee...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/autodesk/a-new-look-at-the-high-speed- hyperloop-b3y4) From Aug 30th with some cool images and a like to the YouTube CGI: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV7lbDcaCo4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV7lbDcaCo4) ------ ericcumbee I'm not sure there is that much production capability for Carbon Fiber. Back in 2011 Audi attributed the delay in the Debut of the Audi R18 LMP as being due to the global shortage of Carbon Fiber caused by the 787 Dreamliner program(Not to be confused with the Mazda 787B). ------ brei This makes the Hyperloop concept feel vastly more feasible. And manufacturing carbon fiber at those scales will open up all kinds of new infrastructure/architecture possibilities. The biggest question on my mind is: how does one continuously infuse/cure epoxy? ------ crazytony Hmmm. I'd have to see this run through an earthquake model. It seems to me that having them stacked/connected vertically would cause problems during an earthquake. Think about those coffee stirrer straws that look like a figure 8 (it's a single straw pinched in the middle): if you hold one between your fingers the range of movement left/right is easy but an up/down movement is quite difficult (and if you push hard enough the straw buckles). There's usually significant vertical and horizontal displacement during an earthquake. My thinking is that Elon's original design would fare better. ------ brianbreslin How easy is it to repair? ------ ye Building the structure is the least of the Hyperloop's problem. How about supporting near-vacuum on such a large scale? How about dealing with earthquakes, erosion, landshifts, where even a small shift in a section of a tunnel would mean instant death for the travelers. How about obtaining the land rights to build it between SF and LA? ~~~ plam Regarding ground changes, we can look to current bullet-train rail systems. Nobody has ever died on a bullet train in Japan due to earthquakes. I saw on a documentary that Japan feed seismic sensor data into train control centers where any dangerous seismic event would trigger automatic stopping of the trains. ~~~ ye I never said it's impossible, I think it's a much bigger problem than building a machine to build the tunnel walls. ~~~ ricardobeat How is it a bigger problem if it has already been solved today? The original paper attempts to deal with all of these problems, pressure, safety, land rights, it's a very interesting read. ~~~ ye First of all, it hasn't been solved in the US, and not for these speeds, which are at least double of the fastest bullet train in the world. ------ berntb How are the safety aspects with steel or carbon fibers, considering that it will be close to roads and lots of people will have close access? Could the (near) vacuum be compromised by any idiot with a hunting rifle and bullets optimized for piercing body armour? (At a minimum repairs and off time for a day or more.) Can a kg of explosives put shrapnel through it and create a big crash? What is the safety distance for one of those Iranian self-fusing penetrators used in Iraq? ~~~ nawitus A bullet hole probably doesn't matter much. Air will be leaking inside anywhere and air has to be pumped out all the time in any case. I think you can create a big train crash with a kg of explosives, so that scenario is already possible. ~~~ timmy-turner Also, railways are not really meant to be safe against attackers with physical access to it (so basically anyone). For example, the sensors/switches on a railway that cause a train to perform an emergency halt if the train driver misses a stop signal can be modified by anyone near it - no encryption, no locks (source: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwaKYZfgY8k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwaKYZfgY8k) \- only in German though). You don't even need explosives, a simple wedge welded on a rail would be enough. In the end, I don't think it is economically feasible to secure a railway against that (as well as any other kind of track). You have to make sure that nobody does stupid things like these.

What Happens When Judges Pull the Plug on Rural America - mirandak4 https://backchannel.com/when-judges-pull-the-plug-on-rural-america-304533928fd#.rq6xtbons ====== jenkstom "What U.S. president will make sure we make a national upgrade to competitive, last-mile-fiber-plus-advanced-wireless connections?" Al Gore. :-(

Show HN: Upstart.me – Promote your startup in other people's newsletters - pixelfeeder http://upstart.me/?tb ====== bob_theslob646 What is the ROI on something like this? I could be wrong but it just seems like another form of advertising. ------ danschumann This is great, thank you! It this a new service? ~~~ wingerlang It was posted to HN at least 1 year ago.

Wake – A Modern Programming Language - rspivak http://www.wakelang.com/index.html ====== nikolay The Hello.wk is missing an opening brace!

Silly Rabbits: Google is for Spam not for Search - atularora http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/silly-rabbits-google-is-for-spam-not-for-search/ ====== gamble Spot-on. Google used to talk a good game about combatting search spam, but once Demand Media and the ilk called their bluff Google chose to fold and opened the doors to an industrial-scale search spam industry. They may have stumbled into it, but now they're in a bind because taking on the spammers would have an immediate and noticeable hit on their revenue - but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation. ~~~ jacquesm > but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their > reputation. That's already happened. I am pretty sure that this is not intentional though. What would sway me is if say 'bing' would have zero spam and google would have a whole pile of it. Is there any research confirming or denying that? ~~~ gamble Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO. ~~~ parfe Yahoo is powered by Bing. What do you mean that DDG is basically yahoo? ~~~ gamble DDG is built on Yahoo BOSS, (Build Your Own Search Service) Yahoo's white- label search engine API. DDG adds spam filtering and some custom indexing on top, but the bulk of their data comes from Yahoo's index. AFAIK BOSS is still Yahoo technology, not bing. There may be a plan to migrate BOSS to bing. ------ spiffworks Does anybody really believe that Google engineers are stupid enough to think that it is good for them to serve spam to their users? This cockamamie conspiracy theory is getting really old. ~~~ larrik Perhaps it isn't up to the engineers. If Google's outward appearances seem to be deteriorating so profoundly, then it may be a reflection of something happening internally. Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet? ~~~ spiffworks Okay, then do you think that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are stupid enough? > Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet? Matt Cutts and moultano are here all the time, saying that they're working on a solution. But for some reason, it is better to make up shit and then believe it than to actually listen to the people who talk. ~~~ rorrr The problem has been out for a long time. Mahalo.com is a good example. Google will lose a lot of money if they remove them from the search results. If their engineers have been working, as you say, it's the slowest fucking project ever. What you don't realize is that since Google went IPO, it's not all about building an amazing search engine. It's a lot about revenues and net profits. There are lots of businessmen in charge who want to make lots of money quickly, and couldn't care less about the quality of the search results. ~~~ spiffworks >What you don't realize is that since Google went IPO, it's not all about building an amazing search engine. It's a lot about revenues and net profits. There are lots of businessmen in charge who want to make lots of money quickly, and couldn't care less about the quality of the search results. First of all, Google went public in 2004. I would like you to point me to a study showing the steady decline in quality since that time. Who are these 'lots of businessmen' you talk about? One of the complaints about Google has actually been that they prefer to have engineers in all sorts of roles including management. Now, since you've gone all conspiracy theorist, I have a theory of my own, I hope you will excuse it. My theory is that the pro-Apple blogging community has gone ape-shit over a perceived threat to iOS from Google, and are now looking at them as 'The enemy', and this whole rash of blog posts maligning Google is part of a larger 'Death by a thousand paper cuts' strategy to make Google seem uncool, and therefore, as we all concur, dead. I also believe that said bloggers are in fact undercover employees of Apple who get paid by the number of times they mention Apple products in reviews of their competitors' products, but that's just me being nuts. ~~~ rorrr You seriously believe financial and strategical decisions are made by tech people at Google? That's just silly. Look at glassdoor. They have finance people, directors and executives of all kinds. They also have shareholders. Those are the people who make important decisions. And then you call me a conspiracy theorist, immediately followed by a pretty insane conspiracy theory about Apple community. I'm not even an Apple fan. ~~~ spiffworks First, let me just say sorry for the previous comment. Clearly, my attempt at humour fell flat. I never intended to imply that you were an apple fan or anything of the sort. What I meant to say was that I've seen many reports which show a large percentage of executives at Google to be engineers and programmers, although I can't find a link right now. However, I seriously doubt that Google engineers would have gone along without revolt down a slippery slope as the one implied in the original article. ~~~ rorrr It doesn't matter whether our theories are right or not. The facts are 1) Google search results are full of spam. 2) Many of the spam sites have been reported (I reported a few myself) and blogged/written about for years. What can one conclude from that? I think there are 2 possible explanations 1) It's not in Google's financial interests 2) Google is failing at filtering spam I doubt it's true, because simply banning the top 1000 spammy domains would cut more than 99% of the search spam. It's something that an intern can do. If Google wants a pure algorithmic solution instead, well, good luck to them. I think until AI is smarter than humans, such solution doesn't exist. Spammers can always find loopholes in algorithms. ~~~ TeHCrAzY I doubt they are failing at spam, at least not in the common sense. My gmail account received 1000's of spam emails a week, and it's a rare for one to pass the filter, and even rarer for a genuine email to not. It most likely a much simpler explanation: web results with content explicitly generated for a specific target search string is simply getting closer and closer to being actual genuine content, and thus harder and harder to differentiate and filter. ------ navyrain The adage "cock-up over consipiracy" comes to mind when reading this. What the author implies is that Google is knowingly keeping spam sites in their results so as to profit from them. Google is still the largest player in search by a good margin, so I suspect it is more the case that spammers are targeting their SEO spammy skills to Google's algorithm, and google just fails to withstand the onslaught. ~~~ codeup Google may be experimenting to find the right balance between spam and search quality. "Right" meaning the most profitable. ~~~ brudgers Not doing so would a breech of their fiduciary responsibility to their share holders. ~~~ jarrett Their duty to the stockholders is to do what's in the best interest of the company. It's not a breach of duty for a company to forego short-term profits if, in the management's judgement, those short-term profits can only be had by damaging the company's long-term prospects. Google stands to make the most money in the long run by being the preferred search engine for the most people. Right now, they are. But that could change if another search engine can convince people they deliver results with less spam. ~~~ brudgers You are assuming that balancing "ad spam" with utility is something new. One only needs to consider how long Google's search results have been tailored to the local from which they originate to get a sense of how long Google may have been adjusting results. ------ codeup Google profits more from spammy search results than from quality search results? I don't think so. _Definitely not in the long run_. ~~~ samatman I believe the point was more that Google profits both from spammy search results AND from quality search results. That's a conflict of interest, one well spelled-out in the original post: When removing all spam (let's pretend it's possible) will negatively impact revenue, even short-term, there's less motivation to do it. ~~~ Andrew_Quentin why would it impact revenue if spam was removed, even temporarily? Wouldn't the people who went to spamy sites go to the "good" sites and still click on these sites thus still make google money? Unless you are suggesting that the spamy sites are the only ones available and if they disappeared searchers would not be shown results, I do not quite see why removing spam would hit the bottom line. ~~~ gojomo There are several mechanisms where marginal increases in spam could increase Google's profits, as long as the effect isn't so bad people leave for another alternative entirely. (1) If the natural search result landing pages are slightly lower quality – awful writing created via lowest-bidder/freelancer content mills – but the AdWords landing pages remain higher-quality, due to more investment and ability-topay filtering, then AdWords results become more attractive to users. That's more clickthroughs and more revenues. (2) If the first page of results reviewed by a user doesn't resolve their intent, so they reformulate a more specific query, Google gets to display a second, perhaps better-targeted set of ads on the second query – a second chance at satisfying the user goal via a paid placement rather than an unpaid result. (3) If there are good natural results sites for a topic that lack ads, but others can be created with roughly the same info that have AdSense, unless Google specifically punishes sites for containing AdSense, the relative number of AdSense sites with duplicate info will multiply over time. Even if they are ever-so-lightly better (or 'as good' to low-literacy readers), and thus appear 'good' in some of Google's algorithms, they wind up wasting time in aggregate with duplication, and dilute the traffic/community of original ad-free source sites. More likely, though, they are just-enough-better in the cynical 'SEO' dimensions to display other less profit-maximized sites, and thus may be worse in the (not directly measurable) value-to-readers dimensions. Still, in the short- and medium-term, the multiplication of such sites, and replacement of AdSense-free sites with Adsence-drenched sites, makes Google money. ~~~ Andrew_Quentin low-literacy readers? 11159 karma points does not give you the card to play mr arrogant gojo. But thank you for your explanation. I think the first point is quite clever and does make sense, but it has to be balanced with the number of visitors that google may loose by allowing the index to become spamy. The second point seems to be what everyone is thinking of and perhaps the strongest argument to suggest that google might not want to tackle spam. For that argument to gain any credibility however it needs to be shown that other search engines, i.e. bing, which perhaps do not have a conflict of interest are doing better at showing quality results. Otherwise, I think it makes it more likely that there are other reasons than conflict of interest. As to the third point, the cases that it would apply to I would think are miniscule in the grand scheme of search, not least because a very tiny minority of websites does not use ads, excluding e-commerce. Finally, I think a strong argument for google to tackle spam, and against the proposition that google does not want to, is that google would make much more money by converting more clicking visitors into customers for the adword landing page. If spamy sites have a much lower conversion of clickers for the adword customers, then cutting off these spammers would increase the conversion rate, leading to higher payments for clicks to google by adword users. ~~~ gojomo <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050314.html> Pretending these low-literacy users — 43% of the US adult population! — don't exist, or can't be discussed frankly, is less respectful than seeking to understand them. It's quite likely that these people are late adopters of web search, and thus their proportion of Google users is still rising. Consider, also, that there is evidence that lower-income, lower-education users are more likely to click on ads. I've been perplexed when discussing content mills with Googlers how they quickly assert (often in similar phrasing, suggesting a party line passed along in internal or official communications) that reasonable arguments (or very subtly, internal studies) imply many users appreciate the content mills' writing. Perhaps it's the low-literacy users who are happy to land on a mill site. Either they can't tell the difference from a quality, authoritative treatment — or maybe even the plodding, keyword-stuffed, repetitive writeups are actually reassuring for slower readers. There has to be a logical reason, other than Google venality, that such awful spamglish writing decked in AdSense ranks so highly. ~~~ gamble It ranks highly because the content farms target long-tail searches where it's easy for marginal content to dominate the results. They are in a sense arbitrageurs. They use software to located search terms where the revenue from ads outweighs the cost of commissioning and ranking a low-quality page. ------ rit This is Mutually Assured Destruction though. There's a delicate balance between Google profiting from spammers running google ads and the profits dropping as users trust google less and search elsewhere. In the long run, it's a losing prospect for Google: short term profits at the cost of long term reputation and trust doesn't make sense for a company as large and as public as they are. ------ toddmorey Google's service to me, the customer, is fast, useful search results. There is no way they've confused their real customers for spam sites... that's just too short-sighted and there are zero barriers to people switching if a competitor with better results came along. But here's what I don't get: Lots of companies implement customer feedback to improve their services. I can't decide why Google hasn't done some sort of browser plugin (or other approach) that allows you very simply thumbs down a site when it's a not useful result. Enough negative feedback from real users and a site could be demoted in organic search. Is that just too hard to build in a way that couldn't be easily gamed? Edit: I know they experimented with voting arrows on the results page and I'm curious why some variant of that hasn't been deployed more widely. ~~~ nzmsv There's a Chrome extension for reporting spam: [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhjafeidhfbojhnfiepj) No idea how seriously these reports are taken, and whether or not something like the fake Mastercam blog would be considered spam. ------ Andrew_Quentin Would have been interesting to learn if the "decent" websites converted better into buying than the "spam" sites. ------ OmarIsmail There's one thing that I really don't understand with this recent trend of Google-bashing. The lack of distinction between the scraper spammers and content farms like Demand Media. The author here lists some examples of searches that have scraper results, but then goes and talks about Demand Media without any specific DM examples. Why is that? I'm not going to say that Demand Media content is world class, or even good, but it's a far cry from scraper-spam and I don't think it's honest to group the two. ~~~ gamble I'm not sure there's any moral distinction between paying a human being to rewrite Wikipedia or using a scraper to copy it. The key difference is that the later is a copyright violation, which a company like Demand Media can't do so long as they have ambitions toward legitimacy. If they could generate the content algorithmically, they would. ~~~ OmarIsmail I think this kind of thinking is quite dangerous. Again, you're trying to lump in Demand Media/Content Farms with these scrapers and that can have dangerous consequences, because where do you draw the line? Even in an automated scraper scenario, things aren't clear cut. How much processing needs to be done on source data before it goes from illegitimate copying to value-add? Fundamentally Google is just a really really amazing scraper system. Same thing with content farms. At what point does original content go from "paraphrasing Wikipedia" to providing useful summary information? Should Wikipedia now hold a defacto monopoly on summary-style encyclopedic information? ------ jeffreyrusso I agree that it's important to distinguish between the different types of content everyone is registering grievances against... Scraped content and empty directory pages (that washing machine reviews page that has nothing more than an H1 and some crummy auto-generated sentences) vs... Mediocre human written content from sites like e-How and other Demand media properties. The first kind of content is pretty clearly spam, and doesn't deserve a place in the index. Everyone can agree on that, and I'm perplexed as to why Google hasn't taken more action against these types of sites. I have a hard time believing they can't do it algorithmically. The second type isn't as clear cut. Most of the readers here and on the cited tech/search blogs know what this content is and where it comes from, and are probably a bit more critical of it than the average user for that very reason. I agree that these article directory pages are usually painfully mediocre, but I wonder if they aren't "good enough" from the point of view of someone who doesn't know better. After all, I havent seen much of an outcry about search quality coming from the mainstream; it seems limited to HN and other tech circles. ------ lysium Wouldn't people that click on the ad links of the spam sites also click on the ad links of the non-spam sites? So what's Google's benefit to annoy everybody with non-quality search results? I'd guess, the SEO is currently just too good. ~~~ Yzupnick I think (as in I am making this up, but it makes sense to me) that spam sites bring in more revenue to Google as they are specifically designed so that people click on the adds. While non-spam sites are generally designed to deliver content. ~~~ uxp I am no SEO expert, or even amateur. I understand the concept of pagerank, but I really don't care much for it, yet. I agree with your hunch; however, bounce rate is a relatively bad thing. If, using analytics, you see that most users navigate away from your page within 30 seconds, you probably don't have engaging content. How is that different than the user clicking on an AdSense ad because the content on a spam site isn't connecting emotionally or intellectually with the users? If anything, Google should be giving a negative score to sites that have a huge percentage of their users that actually click on ads to continue the search for what they were originally looking for... though that is basically the opposite of their business model, to have users click on ads. ------ shawnee_ Silly _robots_ , Google _Instant_ promotes spam, not relevant search results. . . ~~~ lukev Instant delivers the same results as with Instant turned off...

Apple Has Acquired Lala - novicecoder http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/04/apple-acquires-lala/ ====== psranga I'll be out $5 (and I was expecting to spend more this weekend) if they cease the streaming service. Just today, Etherpad abandoned their product. If Lala follows suit, I'll probably never pay money or commit seriously to a small startup's "cloud service". ~~~ bumblebird I don't think they're the norm. Several startups are in it for the long haul rather than selling out+shutting down. ~~~ dagw But how can you tell one from the other? I'm sure many an entrepreneur has sworn up and down that they are in this for long haul and will never sell out, right up until the point where someone shows up with a large bag of cash. Giving money to a small startup is always a gamble, and if all you've bought is access to a web app then you have to take into consideration that they can take that away from you at any time. ~~~ bumblebird I'd say you can tell if the startup has been around for a year or 2. If so, they're probably going to stay around for a while. ~~~ llimllib lala's been around for a long time. (About a year (?) in the current incarnation, much longer in a CD-swapping incarnation. I used both) ------ cmelbye I really hope that Apple realizes how good Lala is and doesn't shut it down. I'm listening to it right now, in fact, and it is incredibly nice to stream music from the cloud to my netbook. This might even be a good thing, perhaps now their iPhone app will be accepted more quickly and they'll have the funds to further invest in a desktop client like Spotify's. ~~~ manvsmachine I too was listening to Lala when I heard about this, and I was _instantly_ concerned. The current model that they have going is really good imo, and I feel like it's inevitable that Apple will cannibalize it and merge the functionality into iTunes, so as to exclude its use by non-iTunes users. I'd love for it to remain in a semi-independent kind of position, kind of like where Hulu is (was?). Not to be a hater (I actually like Apple products, even though I don't use them), but has Apple acquired _any_ technology recently that they haven't locked down into their little ecosystem? ~~~ pmorici To be fair Apple doesn't normally acquire products they usually build their own. The only other two acquisitions in recent memory were PA-semi and that maps company neither of which had a directly consumer facing product that I can recall. ~~~ cubicle67 and also, somewhat ironically in this case, iTunes ------ jsz0 It doesn't make sense for Apple to buy Lala just to offer their own streaming service via iTunes. Apple could have done that in house. I think they wanted the social networking pieces. Not only for discovery of new music but as a legitimate social networking site for like minded individuals. A Twitter for music sharing, discussion, official band pages, tour information, merchandise advertising, etc. The difference is Apple has a business model. Free streaming via the web, paid subscription service to sync the music offline to your iPod/iPhone, and classic iTunes purchasing for music & video. Might as well expand it to the iTunes App Store too. Peer recommendation of apps, more options for promoting your apps via social networking, maybe one-click purchases/installs via the web. Multi-player iPhone gaming with your iTunes Friend List (ala Xbox Live) Tons of possibilities for Apple. All this fits nicely into iTunes LP, Genius, maybe even MobileMe. ------ pmorici Is everything that doesn't run on the local machine called a "cloud" application these days? The use of the word seems to have gotten out of hand to the point where saying something runs "in the cloud" is just synonymous with the term remote sever. ~~~ manvsmachine Being nitpicky for a second: There is a different between something being "in the cloud" and "on a server", the difference being that if your stuff is just on a remote server, you _could_ go to wherever it is, point to it, and say "that's where my stuff is". With cloud apps, your data / service is always available by the same means, but its physical location / method of distribution may have changed an indefinite number of times without you ever noticing. It's just like shared hosting, where your server state is continuously preserved, even though you're not actually hitting the same box. That, said the term "cloud" is beaten to death, not because it's inaccurate, but because grid / distributed computing is now the norm rather than the exception when dealing with web apps. ~~~ pmorici Exactly which is why I find it dubious that the term is used so readily when in most cases we have no knowledge of a services underlying implementation. It's like the F-word of computing over used and generally unnecessary. ------ trevorturk Maybe Lala has a really good deal set up with Google for those new music search results and Apple wanted in on that...? [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/making-search-more- mu...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/making-search-more-musical.html) [http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=coldplay&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8) ------ milestinsley This is probably pie in the sky thinking, but I hope this prompts Apple to launch a browser based version of iTunes, using the technology/expertise acquired from Lala. ~~~ htsh I don't know if its pie-in-the-sky as much as its an inevitable reality? Everything is moving to the web. And they are building a big server farm. Now that things have shaken down a bit following the mp3.com legal debacle, it seems clear that Apple can let people access their own iTunes library via a browser without upsetting too many people. ~~~ milestinsley Yes. I didn't want to jump the gun, but this is certainly the ways things are going. I really hope you are right! :P ------ Semiapies <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977632> for more info.

Node-os - fauria https://node-os.com/ ====== dang [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8299523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8299523) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061338) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275426) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7877777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7877777) ~~~ andrewstuart2 And don't forget: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=node%20os](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=node%20os) ------ randall Lots of people are going to hate on this, but clearly it's a tinkerer trying to do something fun. Yes: JavaScript isn't necessarily the best tool for the job, but so what? Fun hack. I'm not sure it's the future, but maybe it could be? Why not. Good luck! ------ ifrit I can't imagine an idea that is worse than this. Yes, let's take a community approach to OS, fine. But relying on a language that is neither efficient nor designed with the core needs of an operating system is self defeating at best. ~~~ RadioactiveMan While I'd agree that it's not a good idea for a lot of purposes, that doesn't mean it's simply not a good idea. People will either be interested in playing with it or they wont, in which case it will simply cease to be developed, and the code will float around the Internet as an example of a cool little experiment. Either way, Node OS is not going to hurt anyone. ------ larme I saw the best minds of my generation wasted by coding everything in javascript ~~~ andrewstuart2 It's unfortunate that you see javascript, or that any engineer would see any language, that way. JavaScript is an incredibly expressive language and has a very real and beneficial place alongside strongly-typed and compiled languages. We ought to recognize the use cases, as much as humanly possible, for all languages or frameworks or platforms (etc.) and simply use the best tools for any given job. ~~~ lojack > We ought to recognize the use cases, as much as humanly possible, for all > languages or frameworks or platforms I wouldn't exactly consider Operating Systems to be one of those use cases for Javascript. The flip side of knowing the use cases is knowing the limitations and understanding that "everything" isn't exactly a valid use case, which I believe is what larme was trying to say. ~~~ andrewstuart2 I do see your point, and agree there. I initially (perhaps mistakenly) read larme's comment as "everything coded in javascript is a waste." I will say, though, that exploring the possibilities for a language is _not_ a waste of time or mind. From stretching both mind and tool to do new things, new insight can be gained or patterns formed that might never have been considered. Additionally, nobody ever said an OS has to be the best at everything either. It could be that a javascript-based OS, while perhaps not as efficient at generating machine code, may end up being much more efficient for humans. This would certainly be a win for many tasks such as management that should be optimized for human use. ~~~ lojack I agree. Didn't mean to say that this project wasn't interesting or a waste of time or anything like that -- it definitely has its own merits. ------ oscargrouch So, sincere question (but a little bit rethoric, i confess): Why someone would want this instead of a Linux box with node.js + npm? i mean, it would be understandable if this was a docker image with a javascript toolbox builtin, to make the life of js devs easier, but a OS distribution? With this you would be able to install, say, haskell or a rust dev environment, and if it does, whats the difference from a ubuntu linux with node/npm with haskell and rust? I dont get the use-case here.. is there really a niche for this? "Node-os is the first operating system powered by npm" And? why is it good? why do i need it? sell me the idea! is npm something a need badly? is enough reason for a OS dist? ------ sheldonk This thing pops up on HN every other month ------ drvortex If node-js is based on Chrome's Javascript engine. Did you just make a alternative Chrome-OS?

Facebook Messenger builds in Uber integration - reagan83 http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/16/facebook-messenger-transportation/ ====== fluxquanta >alerts those in your chat thread that you have indeed grabbed a ride…instead of you lying that you have whilst still in your pajamas Is this actually an issue for anyone? ~~~ carb Yeah I think I will find it incredibly useful. Coordinating large groups of friends to meet up is a hassle and I think those alerts will be very helpful. "Oh man, Matt grabbed an Uber. I'll call mine now.", etc. Of course, we'll see in practice how useful the alerts turn out to be.

Ask HN: How many of C. E. Shannon's papers are still classified? - Kinnard How many of C. E. Shannon&#x27;s papers are still classified? ====== balazsdavid987 Though I'm not familiar with the workings of classification, that question sounds paradoxical to me. Isn't that equivalent to something like, "How many secrets are there in the world?"? ~~~ idoh Maybe the existence of a paper isn't classified, but the contents are, or heavily redacted.

Sanos Operating System Kernel - HighTraffic http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/index.htm Sanos is a minimalistic 32-bit x86 operating system kernel for network server appliances running on standard PC hardware. The kernel implements basic operating system services like booting, memory management, thread scheduling, local and remote file systems, TCP&#x2F;IP networking and DLL loading and linking. You can use Sanos as a small kernel for embedded server applications written in C or as a JeOS (Just enough Operating System). Sanos has a fairly standard POSIX based API and an ANSI Standard C library.<p>The kernel was developed as part of an experiment on investigating the feasibility of running java server applications without a traditional operating system only using a simple kernel. A win32 layer allowed the Windows version of a standard HotSpot JVM to run under Sanos, essentially providing a JavaOS platform for server applications.<p>While Sanos is self-contained in the sense that it can build itself, it can be cross-compiled under either Windows using Microsoft Visual C, or under Linux using GCC. Sanos applications can either be built under Windows using MSVC or under Sanos itself using the Sanos SDK.<p>WWW: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jbox.dk&#x2F;sanos&#x2F;index.htm Source: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ringgaard&#x2F;sanos ====== mg794613 [quote] Last, I need to address a controversial question: Was it a good idea implementing my own operating system? Short answer: Probably not! While I managed to prove my initial hypothesis that complex operating systems are not needed to run Java server applications, I could probably have done this without having to implement my own operating system. From a practical point of view, I could just have made a bare bone Linux installation, which is what I would recommend to most people who want to try this, and this is what we are doing where I work now. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun making Sanos, and I learned a lot doing it, also many things that are useful even if your job is not implementing operating systems. [/quote] And it hasn't had a update since Mar 8, 2012? Or is it continuing on Github? ------ barronli Thanks for the awesome work! If the purpose is to run specific apps with minimal OS, can buildroot or some container-based approach achieve the same goal? ~~~ HighTraffic I'm just the messenger, I like the project too. >>container-based Just create a boot image. Qemu works out of the box. On the Homepage exist Emails exchangedwith the creator. It was a brian fart to move on to a exokernel 5 years ago. Exokernel are on Ring 0. For any hardware virtualization, this is the perfect optimization in large cloud installations. Exokernel are easy to manage from ring -1 VM software. And can boot in < 100 ms. So a application node can be add to cloud setup or reboot after a crash. Btw the author is working at a big search engine since over 10 year. ~~~ nickpsecurity Alternatively, unikernels like Erlang on Xen. ------ laythea I find this a very good idea, but since the latest news update was 2012, how has Sanos kept up with security vulnerabilities?

Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences - andreyk https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrating ====== lostmsu Dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755) Also a copy-paste of [https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans- who-are...](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not- concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/) ~~~ andreyk For some context, as noted at top of article we re-posted it with permission since the release of the larger GPT2 model led to a new slate of fearful articles on the topic and this has remained one of the best takes on it. Was not aware it was already upvoted a bunch on HN before though, cool to see. ~~~ lostmsu The guideline on HN is to use original link whenever possible. The link should be changed. ~~~ andreyk ah, whoops, was not aware. Seems I can't change the link, maybe mods can or can just delete. ------ JackFr Makes me think of "Hook" by Blues Traveler: It doesn't matter what I say So long as I sing with inflection That makes you feel I'll convey Some inner truth or vast reflection But I've said nothing so far And I can keep it up for as long as it takes And it don't matter who you are If I'm doing my job then it's your resolve that breaks ------ xtiansimon Now if GPT-2 could write yet another beginner Python lists and tuples blog post, I prolly wouldn’t notice. If it could write a description which helped me to get my head around my client’s Swagger API I would be thrilled. No one really has the time nor patience to explain it to me in a way that clicks. ------ EchoAce > “I’ve taught public school teachers, who were incredibly bad at formal > mathematical reasoning (I know, because I graded their tests), to the point > that I had not realized humans could be that bad at math” Is it just me or does this come off as incredibly rude? It’s one thing to say people are bad at math but the phrasing of this seems insulting without reason, in my opinion. ~~~ Chlorus It just reeks of the same lazy garbage of that whole "separating the programming goats from the sheep" meme that went around a few years back. "It's not that my pedagogy has faults, people are just inherently bad and there's no point trying to teach them" ~~~ Sniffnoy She doesn't claim that she couldn't teach them. She claimed that they were bad at formal reasoning. ------ Geee I've certainly noticed that most people speak on auto-pilot, basically just repeating what they've heard or read. I wonder if just a few % of people are actually generally intelligent and everyone else is following along. Or is it just a random process, in which we are just repeating each other and making mistakes leads to new ideas. ~~~ GaryNumanVevo It's an energy problem. Take the average mental energy level and divide it up among all the facets of daily life. Most of that is probably going to go into working, eating, relaxing. Developing original opinions in every single field isn't realistic, so we'll find someone with authority and repeat what they said. ------ bitL I am thinking about using GPT-2 or better to write homeworks for my MBA... Nobody would spot a difference (I am worried/relieved). ~~~ julienreszka Do it ------ Fnoord Can someone explain the title? It doesn't make sense to me. ~~~ visarga I think an even stronger version applies. Humans are not general intelligences. We are just good at keeping ourselves alive and making more of us on this planet (and in this ecosystem). All the rest - language, science, culture, economy - are just our current solution to solving the constraints of life. In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to be effective in all situations. Humans only perceive the world through our five limited senses and then filters it through the coloured glass of our concepts. We can't escape the limitations of our senses and mental models taken together. Humans can't even keep in the working memory more than 7 objects at once, some people can handle a few more but not on the order of hundreds or thousands. What if the real ultimate theory of physics required a working memory of 1000 objects? We'd be forever blocked from grasping it like an ant vs. the stock- market. Programmers live at the edge of this grasping power and know the horror of not being able to take it all in at once, and it's so easy to get into such a situation. It is possible that there is no general intelligence anywhere. It's always an intelligence of a specific environment, solving specific types of problems. A general intelligence would need a much more varied and challenging environment in order to reach that level of intelligence. The more complex the environment, the higher the intelligence of its agents. So there is always going to be an upper limit to intelligence, and the environment has a lot to do with it. No intelligence is truly general. ~~~ coldtea > _In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to > be effective in all situations._ So, basically, the author made a contrived definition of their own, and hand- waved about how humans don't meet it... ------ jerf If you'd like to innoculate yourself, and have a bit of fun in the meantime, consider reading [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/) . It's not just for fun, you can get a good sense of the algorithm. One of the things it is somewhat prone to is some weird looping, like this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1nwdg/if...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1nwdg/if_the_president_of_the_united_states_was_your/ezo3sce/) in which the algorithm generates the sentence "Toss some leeches around and wait 'til we get there." (no, it does not make any more sense in context), and then repeats that sentence nearly (but not quite!) exactly 23 more times. (I expect this is a consequence of the way it is tracking some internal state; I assume these sentences are strange attractors in some sort of state that is getting iteratively modified.) You can also see that while it picks up some deep structure, a check of anything trained on /r/jokes ([https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d055mt/a_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d055mt/a_guy_is_having_a_hard_time_with_his_wifes/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x) ) or /r/math ([https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1yz1e/ho...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1yz1e/how_exactly_does_the_number_1_not_equal_2/) ) the algorithm is definitely unable to deal with deeper structure right now. The /r/jokes bot is humorous in its complete lack of humor, I mean, well beyond any sarcastic snark about how unfunny /r/jokes may be. It has the structure of jokes. There was one recent one that even asked "What's a pirate's favorite letter?", and the bot had noticed the answer was being given in the form of letters, but I don't think a single instance of the bot proposed "r". But it does not understand humor in the _slightest_. Of the several dozen attempts at jokes I've at least skimmed, I believe it only achieved something that was at least recognizable as an attempt at humor once, and it still wasn't that funny. Likewise math. It's got a good idea there's these "prime number" things and they're pretty important, but I've seen at least half-a-dozen wrong definitions of what one is. It's a very interesting algorithm. It's a great babbler. But on its own, it's not a great solution to generating text. Although it may very well be able to generate text that can pass a casual skim text, as the article suggests. Still, it takes human curation to get that far. Any human that can read is going to guess something's inhuman about repeating "Toss some leeches around and wait 'til we get there." 24 times in a row. ~~~ outworlder > If you'd like to innoculate yourself, Dude, my malady got worse, not better. The comments there are up to a better standard than most Youtube or Facebook comments. ~~~ whatshisface Reading that sub was a surreal experience. The most interesting part for me was how it (completely subconsciously) changed the "voice in my head" reading voice into something very dull and stilted, like a second grader reading a terrible essay out loud. ------ fallingfrog I’ve definitely had the experience of reading a human written paper, and just skimming it because it didn’t really seem to have a point. Then I sighed and decided to really give it my attention and quickly realized that the reason it was hard to read was because it was chock full of lazy thinking, bad analogies, unexamined assumptions, and non sequiturs to begin with. ------ Shorel Now, make an hybrid system merging this text generator with the classic symbolic AI called CYC from Doug Lenat. It could be able to generate all our news articles in whatever style we prefer. Bye bye freelancer writers.

IndexedDB: Indexing Problems - jorangreef http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2011JanMar/0762.html ====== jorangreef IndexedDB provides inadequate indexing and querying features: 1\. It cannot index JSON objects with array values or support compound indexes. 2\. There is no way to intersect or union indexes when querying. 3\. There is no way for an application to pass in indexes to be modified when putting an object. 4\. Indexes must be created or deleted in a special setVersion transaction. IndexedDB takes on too much responsibility for trying to keep up with application state (when this is not needed, see point 3) and not enough responsibility for data storage, indexing, and querying (which is needed).

Matias Click Switches: Tactile mechanical keyswitches - arm http://matias.ca/switches/click/ ====== tylerjwilk00 This article is lying or perhaps I am misunderstanding. The article states: "Cherry switches are linear — by definition, not tactile. They lack a click leaf, which is required for tactile feedback." I have used and built several mechanical keyboards with Cherry MX Blue switches. They _are_ non-linear and _do_ include a click leaf which gives the Cherry MX Blue [1] its characteristic "bump" feel and click. [1] [https://ergodox-ez.com/pages/keyswitches](https://ergodox- ez.com/pages/keyswitches) ~~~ kw71 They are also not very honest about "Cherry copied our backlighting idea" \- all the MX I ever saw have a hole for a 3mm LED, and I'm sure I saw other vendors selling backlit keyboards with MX switches even if Cherry itself was late to this game. I think it's all retarded, and it's not very innovative by itself to replace blue diodes or whatever with multicolor diodes. Whatever will sell to kids eh? ~~~ orev Cherry has been around for decades, far longer than the idea of backlit keyboards existed. Obviously at some point that became a thing so they would have added the hole. ~~~ kw71 Before the backlit keyboards became a thing, the hole was meant for a lamp to shine through a window in the keycap, like caps lock. The first Alps keyboard (Zenith SuperSport) I had actually had a lamp and window on the caps lock key! ------ sz4kerto I have a Matias Ergo Pro. It's a brilliant split keyboard. Great quiet but tactile switches, tenting, etc. But the QC is terrible. The interconnect cable had connection issues, keys are often 'stuck' (not physically, just keeps repeating until I press it again), etc. And the internet is full with complaints. It's a pity, but I would not recommend them right now. (I've sent it back then got a new one with exactly the same issues, then I didn't bother in the end even though I paid more than 200 Euros for it.) ~~~ tuananh for me, the problem is the key (pressing 1 time resulting in 2 chars, not sure what's the proper term for that) ~~~ tincholio key chatter is the term you're looking for. You can usually fix it in your OS keyboard settings (increasing a bit the repeat delay) ~~~ tuananh but it just happens to a single key. i think it's defect rather than os settings ~~~ swampangel It is a physical problem with the key. You can fix it by disassembling the key and cleaning the contacts: Original guide - [https://imgur.com/a/elAFF#0](https://imgur.com/a/elAFF#0) Thread with context - [https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/2hjct6...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/2hjct6/help_opening_a_matias_switch/) However, this is really Matias's problem to resolve. Supposedly the switch or the assembly process has been redesigned to prevent this problem in the newest batch, but I don't know if it's a proven success. ~~~ tuananh thanks for the tip but i have moved on to other boards. this was a few years back. ------ rlonstein I've gone through a lot of keyboards. IBM, Unicomp, Sun Type 4 and 5, Apple ALPS with ADB converter, a bunch with various Cherry switches including Filco, Leupold, etc. I had two Matias keyboards, the tactile pro (I think original) and the 2, and while the switches are okay neither held up to daily use with keys that wobbled, cracked plastic, and both suffered from keybounce and had poor NKRO (enough that I noticed it in Emacs). No thanks. I settled on a KUL tenkeyless board with Cherry Green key switches[1] which feel similar to buckling spring and it takes up less deskspace. The caps have worn slick and the printing nearly gone but the feel is still good. [1] [https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX_Green](https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX_Green) ~~~ yla92 Did you manage to try HHKB Topre ? ~~~ rlonstein > Did you manage to try HHKB Topre ? I used a colleague's for part of a day. I didn't like it-- key feel or layout-- which saved me a few hundred dollars. As a bit of a collector, I'll probably get a Realforce eventually. ~~~ yla92 The layout is a bit awkward at first, mainly due to no arrow keys. I switched to HHKB from Poker 3 (another keyboard with 40% layout). Even then I had a brief amount of hard times adjusting to HHKB. Nowadays, I use both of them at home and office and love them. I heard Realforce are pretty good too! ------ jmull I loved my Matias keyboards, but they just did not last. After a while I’d start getting dead keys and double-characters. Pulling the key caps, blowing some air, and putting them back on helps... for a while. Ultimately, it was too frustrating and now I’m back to an un-clacky keyboard :( oh, well. ~~~ sleepybrett Yeah the Matias Alps clone switches are notorious for accumulating crap inside the switch causing them to need to be cleaned to maintain working order. ------ tuananh I love matias switches, however my experience with them is terrible. i got replacement twice (3 boards), however, none of them work properly. ~~~ mseidl I have a keyboard with a mathias silent switches, but I'm replacing it with a Pok3r with browns. I like the browns better. ------ bovermyer I have two mechanical keyboards. One is a Corsair K70 with Cherry reds that I use for gaming at home. The other is a Velocifire T11 with brown (non-Cherry) switches that I bought for $37 on Amazon, which I use at work. The K70 I've had for at least 5 years now, and it still works flawlessly. The T11 I've had for about a year and a half, and it also works flawlessly. ~~~ ssebastianj My first (and current) mechanical keyboard was a Corsair K70 non-RGB with Cherry MX Browns. I don't game so I use it mostly for work-related tasks: programming, writing docs, books. I'm quite happy with it so far. ------ Pingk I have a Matias Quiet Pro Mini (2016) and it's by far the most comfortable mech I've tried (Cherry brown, red, blue and black. Would like to try clear and green). From what I've heard their QC has improved over the past couple of years, and I've not had any problems with mine. They're also working on PBT keycaps which should arrive in a few months. The dream would be a Planck or Preonic with Matias switches... ~~~ zaarn I do recommend trying Clears. I have a natural heavy typing, I do hammer keys with extreme force if they have any more way than cheap rubberdome keyboards. The clears are very nice to type on though I wish I would have had a chance to try the superblacks. I'm looking into ways to increase the force on the switches for a while now, springs have been suggested at some point. ------ amelius Halfbaked idea: somebody should start a service where you upload a 3d design of a keyboard, including a mapping of keys to keycodes, and they will build the keyboard for you. ~~~ nicwest so while it's not exactly the all in one service you describe, you can do something similar already: [http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/](http://www.keyboard-layout- editor.com/) to design your layout, then [http://builder.swillkb.com/](http://builder.swillkb.com/) to design a layer case, files go to a laser cutting service, then you would need a controller of some sort (commonly something like a [https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/](https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/)), switches, diodes, usb ports, etc. then hand wire everything together. tmk/qmk is more or less a defacto standard in custom keyboard firmware: [https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware](https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware) here are some examples of people generating firmware with webtools, I don't know what they use on the backend. [https://www.massdrop.com/configurator/ergodox](https://www.massdrop.com/configurator/ergodox) [http://qmk.thevankeyboards.com/](http://qmk.thevankeyboards.com/) ------ sleepybrett Matias switches are knockoffs of the classic Alps switches you might find in an older apple, dell or SGI board. However their tacticle is nowhere near as good as classic brown alps. They also have a reputation for collecting dirt, causing them to need to be cleaned to stay in good working order. My suggestion, just go with cherry or their knockoffs unless you really really want to use a classic set of alps keycaps. ------ jonloldrup Having tendon issues in my wrists, I would love a linear keyboard with gentle push down force. Or at least just gentle push down force. Any suggestions? ~~~ jdietrich The Gateron Clear switch is the lightest linear switch currently available, with an actuation force of about 30g - half that of a typical membrane key switch and 50% less than the Cherry MX Red linear switch. It's not a particularly popular switch, because it's so light that the weight of your fingers tends to cause accidental keypresses on the home row. Nonetheless, you can buy a KBParadise V60 keyboard with Gateron clears. The Qisan Magicforce 68 is occasionally available with Gateron clear switches. Alternatively, you could buy the keyswitches and build a keyboard to your own specifications using a bare keyboard PCB. [http://www.mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_...](http://www.mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_list&c=248) [https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gateron-Clear-switch-3-pin-for- mech...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gateron-Clear-switch-3-pin-for-mechanical- keyboard-65-90-110-200-pcs-/253338042226) [https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_det...](https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=536) ~~~ cjbprime Seconded Gateron Clears (though I've heard the activation force is more like 35g than 30g). I use them on a Noppoo Choc Mini. I'm a fast typist (around 130wpm) and use these switches just to try to improve speed, rather than anything relating to health. They're also great for gaming for me, playing Starcraft 2. Another option around 35g is non-mechanical electro capacitive switches in the style of Topre, e.g. [https://www.nizkeyboard.com/product/plum-84-ec- mechanical-ke...](https://www.nizkeyboard.com/product/plum-84-ec-mechanical- keyboard-rgb-or-non-rgb/) ------ tuananh anyone participated in their 60% groupbuy? it's been 4 years but nothing is concrete yet :( [https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=65528.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=65528.0) [http://matias.ca/60/pc/](http://matias.ca/60/pc/)

Solar Industry's Future Lies in Lightweight Technology - vaultcool https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-industrys-future-lies-in-lightweight-technology/ ====== jpm_sd Odd choice to feature Project Loon in the banner image. I designed the solar array for Loon, it's built from plain old mono crystalline silicon cells. Sure, they're high efficiency cells, in a lightweight plastic stack up (no glass), but there's no exotic thin film cell technology in there. The options (so far) are either too expensive, or too inefficient. ~~~ yazr Are these the space-grade multi-junction panels? Are the Loon panels size- constrained or cost-constrained ? The article itself is odd - most PV will go to utility and commercial scale. Even on rooftop, aesthetics are possibly down the list after durability, reliability, efficiency and cost. ~~~ walrus01 From the photos I've seen, no, they are not using triple junction GaAs cells. Boeing/spectrolab cells are incredibly expensive. They used high efficiency 156mm monocrystalline silicon cells. Just not in a glass + aluminum frame like you'd see on a roof. edit: at least in 2013 they were using thin film amorphous silicon, or what appears to be CdTe thin film flexible, not rigid cells encapsulated in clear lightweight membrane. [https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/business/2013/06/20130609...](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/business/2013/06/20130609-3B6B2491-660x439.jpg) ------ spenrose This appears to be the source paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-018-0258-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-018-0258-1) ... and NREL press release: [https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2018/nrel- identifies-where-n...](https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2018/nrel-identifies- where-new-solar-technologies-can-be-flexible.html) ~~~ agumonkey nrel is full of super interesting reports, such as EV efficiency and projections ------ walrus01 This article seems to make the point that lightweight thin film photovoltaics are the future. I'll offer a counterpoint: Massive economies of scale and automation are the future for PV. Using standard 60 and 72 cell polycrystalline and monocrystalline silicon cells. It's already not uncommon to see 5 to 10 megawatt sized ground mount PV systems. Getting the $ per STC watt lower for panels is key. Having quick to build, low cost and efficient ground mount systems is an important part of it. Things will be very different economically when a 360W, 72 cell panel I can buy now at $0.58/W is more like $0.22/W. Battery storage is the other important part. The technological problem of generating enough watthours in one day is SOLVED. Storing and using it consistently 24x7 is now the hard part. ~~~ llukas > Storing and using it consistently 24x7 is now the hard part. Is it really? [https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy- stora...](https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy- storage-80-percent-wind-solar/) edit: added quote from parent ~~~ walrus01 It's not so much that it's hard technologically, as the Tesla massive battery system in Australia has recently proven, but to do on a REALLY huge scale at an economical $ per kWh cost, and the lifecycle cost of the batteries. When compared to current non-carbon-producing energy sources like big hydroelectric dams, big pumped-storage hydroelectric. [https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-turns-one- cele...](https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-turns-one- celebrates-50-million-in-grid-savings-95920/) Every few months I see some big press release and tech press media hype about liquid metal batteries and flow batteries, I've yet to see something useful that has a market price beyond "contact us for more details". It seems to mostly be all test and evaluation installs on a small scale so far. [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/pullman-project- te...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/pullman-project-testing-huge- batteries-to-store-energy-2/) ------ sys_64738 If you look at homes in America the solar panels are these big heavy lumbersome things. They're unsightly to look at and devalues the leafy suburb view. These panels are really v1 of the solar panels for homes. You need solar shingles as the true means to maximize solar in homes. Hopefully those will come within the next decade. For now I will avoid solar power. ~~~ loueed Tesla is already manufacturing solar shingles, they use tempered glass and are more than three times stronger than standard roofing tiles [https://www.tesla.com/solarroof](https://www.tesla.com/solarroof) ~~~ heimatau Wiring up their solar shingles isn't cost effective due to labor. Their solar roofs is a negative income stream for Tesla. When is the last time you heard the Solar Roof grow into 'record breaking growth'? It hasn't and it won't because Tesla is still trying to make the labor expense cheaper. Look into the labor it takes to install an entire Solar Roof vs installing a new roof plus traditional solar installation. On a dollar for dollar basis, it may look competitive but Tesla is selling their Solar Roof's at a loss. Tesla is selling their Solar Roof at a loss. Not at a profit. It's labor intensive and they aren't growing at a fast rate because of that hidden expense. Disclosure: I installed around 200kw of solar panels and did a decent amount of research into Tesla's Solar Roof since it seemed so novel and innovative. The wiring of the Solar Roof is much more complicated than what is publicly understood. Tesla's good at PR because most of the public are superficial in their understanding. Tesla most likely saves a lot of money in the manufacturing process of the solar shingles but they lose money due to their complicated wire installation process. How are those shingles connected on the underside? How are those wires protected from the elements, without affecting the plywood on the roof? Etc. These are simple questions that are often overlooked. ~~~ NeedMoreTea There's plenty of companies other than Tesla offering solar roof tiles who aren't selling at a loss. Wiring seems to be a simple case of plugging them in. How do Tesla manage to make this complex or labour intensive? First one that cropped up in search: [http://www.reuk.co.uk/wordpress/solar/solar-roof- tiles/](http://www.reuk.co.uk/wordpress/solar/solar-roof-tiles/) In the UK, mounting solar on top of the tiles is far more common as roofs are rarely replaced. ~~~ heimatau Wow. The UK link you provide is running at about ~$7.65 per watt. That's extreme/exorbitant plus their tiles look ugly and I doubt the resell value on the home will be as high as a Tesla Solar Roof (since aesthetics are king on homes). Currently, even in Cali a solar system ranges at about $4-5 per watt. The cost to redo a roof depends on the size but almost certainly it would be cheaper than the extra $2.65-3.65 watt left over on using a conventional system and less long-term liability to homeowner to replace a roof and do conventional solar. ~~~ heimatau Also, let me further point out this system was a 2kw system which isn't enough to fully be energy independent as a home owner. Sizes range in the 5kw to 8kw, at least in the USA. So, that would add additional money into the equation and only further emphasize my statement on 'that's exorbitant'. ~~~ NeedMoreTea UK homes use far less electric than the US, and air conditioning is almost unheard of. Commonest UK size for solar is currently 3-4kWp, which is plenty for household independence, and above 5 or 6 rare. Earlier systems were smaller as panels were costly. I think somewhere around 5 is the point an installation is considered commercial rather than domestic making larger even less attractive. Exorbitant or not it pays based on UK electric prices and feed in tariffs.

Startups at Scale: Make the abstract actionable - ksowocki http://owocki.com/2011/10/09/startups-scale-make-the-abstract-actionable/ ====== brendn You might want to check out Logstash (<http://logstash.net/>). It's an open source log aggregator, parser, and search tool. I haven't implemented it myself yet, but it was one of my favorite software introductions at OSCON this past summer. ~~~ ksowocki Thanks!

Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men - cwan http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0009042 ====== waterlesscloud Translation of title - "Babes with curves are hot!!!" ~~~ gcb tl;dr there's no pics. ------ radu_floricica This is just a confirmation/refinement of something known for a very long time. I just finished reading [http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Desire- Revised-4/dp/04650080...](http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Desire- Revised-4/dp/046500802X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266311756&sr=8-1) , if you're interested in such stuff it's a really good book. Most of human "mating behaviour" is understood to a pretty amazing degree if you read the right things. Doesn't make actual mating any easier :p but it puts a lot of perspective into it. ------ jff Didn't Sir Mix-a-Lot already formulate this as "My anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns, hon"? ------ Groxx At the risk of sounding snobbish, brains turn me on _way_ more than bodies. Brains last, bodies go pretty quickly. Maybe I'm just poorly reward-motivated, though. My wife and I effectively lived together for 3 years before getting married, and we both waited until marriage for sex. ~~~ csytan Brains last, bodies go pretty quickly. Neither last without constant care & maintenance. ~~~ Groxx Granted, but the stereotypical "ideal" body simply doesn't last through a lifetime, no matter how it's maintained, though a mind can last through even the longest life. ------ metamemetics news: Scientists Discover That People Think That Things That They Think Are Good Are Good. ------ swernli Interestingly enough, Waist-to-Hip Ratio (WHR) has come up here before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908868> ------ fibonacci I kinda' prefer the golden ratio, myself. NSFW: [http://www.reddit.com/r/nsfw/comments/9v6zt/curvy_in_all_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/nsfw/comments/9v6zt/curvy_in_all_the_right_places_follows_the_golden/) ------ gcb Wonder why there's tons of those articles and they talk about fertility cues but never deliver any solid data on this. it's always 'women prefer this mans face because of fertility cues', 'man prefers this ass because of fertility cues'. ~~~ Groxx This is relatively solid data, actually. They used a fMRI to watch the blood flow (indicative of activity) in the "reward center(s)" of the brain with a higher incidence than without that 0.7 ratio. * shrug * more proof that the super-thin look is horrible for both women AND men. ~~~ Tichy I'd like to see the data on the hip-waist ratio indicating higher fertility. Seems to me most women are capable of bearing children. ~~~ pyre The baby has to fit through the hole in the middle of the pelvis. If a women's hips are narrower I would suspect that there is a higher likelihood of her birth canal being narrower meaning less chance of a successful natural birth. You really have to discount c-sections and such when thinking about 'fertility' since it would stand to reason that a lot of reactions are instinctual. > _I'd like to see the data on the hip-waist ratio indicating higher > fertility_ You might have trouble with that if you follow my advice and ignore medical 'intervention' like C-sections since in previous years doctors would do a C-section at the drop of a hat (IIRC, the rate used to be 80% whereas now it's around 60%). [edit] further investigation makes my claims to be a bit 'pie in the sky:' <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-section#Incidence> Here is another relevant tidbit I found while investigating: A previously unexplored reason for the increasing section rate is the evolution of birth weight and maternal pelvis size. Since the advent of successful Caesarean birth over the last 150 years, mothers with a small pelvis and babies with a large birth weight have survived and contributed to these traits increasing in the population. Even without fears of malpractice, without maternal obesity and diabetes, and without other widely quoted factors, the C-section rate will continue to rise simply due to slow changes in population genetics. ~~~ Tichy Good point about the c-sections, but still, I am not entirely convinced. For one thing, that wouldn't explain waist/hip, or would it? It would then all be hip, and women would get increasingly larger hips? Also, thinking about Asia, I think women are very tiny there, and they still get children. Their babies are probably smaller, too. But making bigger and bigger babies does not seem to be a "goal" of evolution, either. Otherwise a woman's height would be attractive, which I don't think is the case.

Login.gov - mooreds https://login.gov/ ====== jlgaddis I'm a little confused. First, they say: > _login.gov implements the latest National Institute of Standards and > Technology (NIST) standards for secure authentication and verification._ Then: > _Two factor authentication requires that you login with your password and a > code that we send to your phone._ I assume they're referring to SMS (I see references to Twilio)... but didn't NIST just recently say that SMS wasn't acceptable for 2FA? Quite pleased to read this, though: > _We welcome external review of our privacy-protection measures. All of our > code is available for public inspection in an open-source repository._ \-- [https://login.gov/security/](https://login.gov/security/) ~~~ Eridrus SMS isn't great for security, but it's better than nothing and it scales well. ------ tradersam Woah! Cool idea. Never thought we'd get something so 2010 from the U.S. government so early. ~~~ yellowapple To be fair, 2010 technology in use by the U.S. government in 2017 is actually pretty impressive. The expectation is usually 2000 technology in use by 2017 (and that's, like, bleeding-edge). ~~~ tradersam > To be fair, 2010 technology in use by the U.S. government in 2017 is > actually pretty impressive. That was the joke. :) ------ mooreds Here's the blog post announcing the effort if you want to see behind the scenes: [https://18f.gsa.gov/2017/08/22/government-launches-login- gov...](https://18f.gsa.gov/2017/08/22/government-launches-login-gov/) ------ pzone I like it. Very happy to see the US Government's digitization efforts continue. At least we can can see SOME aspects of our government improving. ------ trengrj Australia has MyGov and I have to say it works really well [https://my.gov.au](https://my.gov.au). Linking accounts is fairly painless and I assume it also functions as a pseudo MDM (Master Data Management) tool in that Government departments have a unique key to link people across different services. ------ kennydude It sounds like a much simpler idea than GOV.UK Verify although the integration (SAML) seems quite similar. Shame a lot of the SAML integration libraries don't seem that great ------ cbanek I'd like to bid on the United Nations login system. ~~~ DKnoll I don't believe there is any one unified system for end users (obviously they have no citizens, only employees/agents/representatives), just AD for each council/mission/etc. But I do believe you're joking and I'm a pedant.

The Native-American Origins of Gumbo - DoreenMichele https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/native-american-gumbo ====== rmason There are few dishes that bring so much pleasure than gumbo. The best gumbo (and best Cajun music) is from Lafayette in the SW part of the state. Only found one chef in Michigan who could make a really good gumbo and he's a Louisiana native. Sadly he's gone back down there. Just aren't enough people in Central Michigan area who like Cajun food enough to make a successful business. ~~~ 7thaccount Anywhere Lafayette (wife's family owns a famous Cajun restaurant there) or further South is fine as you'll essentially be in Cajun Country. If they sell cracklings or Boudin by the side of the road instead of snowcone stands, you're in the right place. Lafayette, Baton Rouge, New Orleans are all great. The middle of the state (Alexandria region called Cenla for Central Louisiana) is a mixture of south Louisiana influence and the more Northern influences, so the Cajun influences are there, but watered down. Northern Louisiana is nothing like the rest of the state. With the exception of Shreveport and Monroe (maybe Ruston) it is mostly small towns and has a very Bible belt feel to it. Some call it "South Arkansas" as it has more in common with that region. I've had gumbo and jambalaya made by Cajun family and the best places in the South and it's much better than anywhere else in the US when it is made properly. I've had plenty of what's called gumbo/jambalaya in other southern states and it is good, but doesn't quite taste right. ~~~ neverartful Lafayette is indeed the heart of Cajun Country (Acadiana). Although it spills over in various degrees to other parts of the state, Acadiana itself is a well-defined, specific area that includes Lafayette, Carencro, Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville, New Iberia, Abbeville, and Crowley (this list is not exclusive, but just to give the idea). Baton Rouge and New Orleans are most definitely not Cajun. Sure, you'll find pockets of authenticity, but generally speaking they're not. New Orleans is Creole, a mixture of various influences but primarily French, Spanish, and Native American. There are other parts of the state that have a fairly pure French heritage that are not Cajun nor Creole (towns in the central part of the state like New Roads and Ville Platte). 'Cajun' is the one that is most well known, but Creole and non-Acadian French (ancestors came directly from France, not exiled from Nova Scotia) also have outstanding cuisine. Some of this may feel like splitting hairs, but the distinctions are important for some of the Louisiana natives. ~~~ 7thaccount There's a large Cajun influence in both places. You're of course correct that I didn't cover the creole part. I was mainly using the term "Cajun" in a general sense which although not super correct is how people generally use it. ------ 29athrowaway Many Native American tribes do not sell food. They prepare it and share it with their community. This is why it is hard to find authentic Native American restaurants. ------ 082349872349872 some gumbo-adjacent tracks: Water Song: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SobKHw72aBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SobKHw72aBo) Mardi Gras Indians: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkBEpSNXGuw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkBEpSNXGuw) Hank Sr.: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnKOVPXhlnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnKOVPXhlnE) ------ fiblye Sassafras leaves also make a great tea. Plenty of online mentions of sassafras tea involve using the root, but using leaves seems to be less known. It’s much easier to make (just pick a few leaves) and the taste is much better than the root, especially with a spoonful of sugar added. ------ bitwize Finally, a Hackernews article I can share with my girlfriend, who is from Louisiana and very in touch with their culinary (and other cultural) traditions! ------ JulianMorrison I remember reading that a lot of "soul food" and Southern poor-people / great depression food, like succotash, is native in origin. ~~~ jasonwatkinspdx Foodways can be really complex an interesting. In the case of the culinary traditions you're talking about, it was a collision between native, african, and european flavors and techniques. ------ zackkatz Do be aware: sassafras has mild carcinogenic properties. > Sassafras is classified as a carcinogenic substance. It caused liver cancer > in laboratory animals. The risk of developing cancer increases with the > amount consumed and duration of consumption. [https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative- medicine/herbs...](https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative- medicine/herbs/sassafras) ~~~ afranchuk We can never be too certain of anything, but I believe that the carcinogenic claims are based on a faulty study from the 60s that was later largely disproven in the late 70s, but the FDA never changed their guidance. I don't have the drive to find the studies in question right now (sorry :( ), but I think it came down to the mice they tested having particular metabolizers that humans do not. That, and they gave them very high concentrated doses, because for some reason they were all about that method. I certainly don't ingest things that way :) ------ xenihn Anyone have recs for a good place for gumbo that I can get through DoorDash in SF? There was a place in Los Angeles that I went to once many years ago. It was great, but I don't remember the name. ------ madengr Here is my recipe. I don’t use any oil in the roux. Stock is from the shrimp heads, with file’ at the end. [https://youtu.be/hzzZJwKz5W0](https://youtu.be/hzzZJwKz5W0) ~~~ PTOB File at the end is the best. It just gets lost otherwise.

What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets - wqfeng http://kunststube.net/encoding/ ====== mike See also: Joel Spolsky's "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html> ------ alexdf Just recently our company started developing WEB version of our product and our testers keep writing tests to verify that UI controls can correctly display unicode characters. Does it make much sense to do that if all our control if they are all HTML/JavaScript based? ~~~ deceze You should ideally channel all character/encoding handling through one channel which can be tested and validated once. If there's a chance that every single page and widget may behave differently with regards to encodings, you have a bigger problem. You want to nail encodings once, then concentrate on other problems. Having said that, more tests are hardly ever bad. Only if you start obsessing about and testing the same thing over and over I'd start to worry about some root causes. ------ pav3l For python people, I found this 30 min talk by Ned Batchelder extremely helpful: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHbC6udIqc> ------ Cbasedlifeform Excellent and at times amusing review. Thanks for this.

AC/DC release recordings on iTunes - ghshephard http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20392390 ====== chrislaco Great. Now about Def Leppard...

Ask HN: What makes Firefox OS better than webOS? - justinreeves I don&#x27;t understand why Mozilla chose to create Firefox OS, rather than pick up development of Palm&#x2F;HP&#x27;s webOS?<p>It seems like a lot of what Mozilla wants to do could be done easily with webOS, since webOS has been open-sourced, it would run <i>great</i> on the hardware Mozilla is targeting, apps are developed with HTML+CSS+Javascript… what am I missing?<p>If webOS couldn&#x27;t make it as a platform, why will Firefox OS? ====== fabrice_d From a very practical point of view, webOS is/was webkit based, while we obviously wanted to leverage our own rendering engine (gecko). webOS also is not 100% web technologies (the "window manager" is native code iirc), and overall we had different ideas on how to improve the web platform to build an OS. I don't know much about Enyo, but one important thing is that we think that no framework should be needed to build apps for firefoxOS. But I'd like to know if enyo apps can run on fxos. The UI of the phone itself (called gaia, [https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/](https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/)) is pretty much framework-less. webOS didn't make it as a platform for various reasons: lack of devices, no strong community for instance. Mozilla is in a way better position here. ~~~ hajile From a practical perspective, it doesn't matter if the window manager is native to the web (and gecko's proprietary iframe solutions are not). Also important is that webOS allows native development (a problem that would go away if w3c would agree to standardize something like LLVM bytecode). Applications in webOS were not limited to Enyo. You only needed to access the proprietary API appropriately which is the same as with phone gap or the FF API (which isn't an approved standard). Enyo 2.4 works on IE8+, FF4+ (actually 3+, but not tested), Chrome 10+ (once again, works on earlier, but not tested), opera, Android browser, Safari 5+, etc You can check out the Enyo project at enyojs.com (it's apache 2 licensed). It currently has both a mobile theme (onyx) and a LG TV theme (moonstone -- for LG smart TVs). The partially finished Mochi theme (see the specs at [https://github.com/enyojs/mochi/wiki/Mochi- Designs](https://github.com/enyojs/mochi/wiki/Mochi-Designs) ) also has a lot of potential. My personal issue with FF OS is that the UI sucks. With webOS being released under the Apache 2 license (which grants patent use), there was no reason to use a crappy design (except for "not invented here" syndrome). Even today, the core UI and features of webOS are better than iOS, WP, and Android (despite Matias Duarte's best effort to transform Android into webOS). Only webOS is easy to use on a phone, but still feels natural on a tablet with almost no changes (and Enyo enables this app transition from the ground up which is why developers chose to use it instead of something else). In fact, webOS could even scale up to full-sized desktops with some modifications (as 10GUI shows). Finally, webOS has a very large community for an OS that was discontinued a couple of years ago. The Preware community continues to release updates and new apps still make the occasional appearance. ~~~ fabrice_d The difference is that Mozilla is actively working on standardizing the pieces of fxOS that we consider mature enough and for which there is interest from other browser vendors. That's not a fast process, but calling all our apis "proprietary" is unfair. If you find that our UI sucks, please contribute to improve it! ------ viraptor Probably the company behind it. HP dropped the tablets instead of investing in developing some software for it (you could review the whole catalog in an hour or so). WebOS itself was great (still is as Enyo framework) in my opinion. I'd really like it if Mozilla just picked up that project instead. ~~~ e15ctr0n LG bought parts of webOS from HP[0] in 2013 and showcased a smart TV running on webOS[1] at CES this year[2]. HP continues to be involved in the development of Enyo[3]. [0] [http://www.lg.com/us/press-release/webos- release](http://www.lg.com/us/press-release/webos-release) [1] [http://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-55LB7200-led- tv](http://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-55LB7200-led-tv) [2] [http://lgusblog.com/product-news/lg- wins-35-awards-2014-inte...](http://lgusblog.com/product-news/lg- wins-35-awards-2014-international-ces/) [3] [http://www.webosnation.com/lg-committed-open-source-webos- de...](http://www.webosnation.com/lg-committed-open-source-webos-development- hp-pivot-cloud-services-towards-enterprise) ~~~ viraptor I know they're trying to continue, but neither HP nor Palm when they owned the brand did anything amazing with it. Palm pre was really cool and WebOS on Touchpad was great to use... it just really missed useful apps. I get a feeling that if they invested in getting even a 100 of good apps either written for or ported to WebOS at the time of the first tablet, it could turn out completely differently... ~~~ e15ctr0n The Verge has a great article on the decay of Palm once HP bought it. [http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp- insid...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-inside-story- pre-postmortem) So, coming back to the point of contrast with Firefox OS, one has to acknowledge that Mozilla is pushing Firefox OS very hard. There is a dedicated app store which has more than a thousand apps now. Mozilla also has a passionate community behind it.

Foam cap on beer is actually good - unlearned what I learned in college - jingsong http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/lifestyle/columnists.nsf/adamjadhav/story/3F32B9542B478F90862575D600649043?OpenDocument ====== JimmyL >> we filled our red plastic cups to the brim with Bud or Miller Lite or Icehouse... I would say that if that's the caliber of beer you're drinking - which makes up a significant portion of most people's college beer - then screw the head, and just fill that red cup up all the way. No one drinks Icehouse or Bud for the flavor; they drink it to get drunk. You could pour some Bud perfectly into a freshly cleaned glass, and it would still taste bad. Once you've moved on to better-quality beer, then yes - bring on the head.

Radio 4 Interview with Adrian Bowyer, RepRap inventor (at ~20:00) - timthorn http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b015bqbr ====== JonnieCache On the subject of radio four - any opportunity to post the In Our Time archives: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/podcasts/> Like a warm bath in university juice. (Hope the links work outisde the UK) ------ icefox Speaking of RepRap does anyone have a list of things that are either impossible or incredibly expensive/difficult to manufacture in traditional ways, but with a 3d printer are easy? ~~~ nickpinkston As a 3D printing dude - right now the main emphasis is either hobbyists can DIY print stuff at home (since they couldn't do that before) or you can use 3D printers to make really crazy geometries that aren't possible - think of nuts lattice-work. Here's group that have amazing algorithmic 3DP art: <http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com> Other practical uses are like InvisAlign mouthpieces that are each 3D printed to your specific teeth. It would've been possible using CNC, but would have been very hard to do. ~~~ burgerbrain (you've got an extra <http://> on your URL.) ~~~ nickpinkston Thanks - fixed it!

The power of doing nothing at all - thecosas https://medium.com/swlh/the-power-of-doing-nothing-at-all-73eeea488b8b ====== sharemywin Not discounting focus. And if doing nothing is working for you by all means go for it. But, there's another old say that goes continue to do what you've always done and you continue to get what you've always got. The unsaid truths from that story is the young crocodile probably couldn't pull down a wild beast. Also, sitting at the best water spot around has it's perks as well. So, coping can work but make sure you've figured out why their strategy is working.

Rubinius wants to help you make Ruby better - raju http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/rubinius-wants-to-help-you-make-ruby-better/ ====== ubernostrum Once again reminding people to be careful about how they interpret the LSP: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7zy40/writing_u...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7zy40/writing_unit_tests_is_reinventing_functional/c07w5bx) ------ kingkilr IMO the authors understanding of the LSP is incorrect. The way he uses it ANY change would be invalid, for example adding a new method would change the property of "raises AttributeError when attempting to access XYZ" (in Python parlance). ~~~ btilly What you are criticizing isn't the author's understanding of the Liskov Substitution Principle. It is Barbara Liskov's attempt to formalize the Liskov Substitution Principle. I dare say that she knows her own intent better than you do. It is also unsurprising if her formulation is imperfect. In a practical world what the LSP means is that you should be able to replace an object of a given type with another object of any subtype and it should still work. If it doesn't, then that wasn't really a subtype. As you correctly pointed out, the challenge in dynamic languages with exception handling is that it is possible to write code that depends on a particular method not existing. Similar code in C++ would give a compilation error. Therefore no subtype can quite be perfect in some languages. Still even though perfection is impossible, it is good to be aware of the principle, and adhere to it as closely as is practical. Meaning make your changes be one that will break the smallest amount of code that your code change is likely to encounter at any point in the future.

Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf] - jakewalker http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-398_8njq.pdf ====== rvkennedy Does this mean that someone born with synthetic DNA is guilty of infringement if they have children? Do they need to buy a licence to keep living? Perhaps as a compromise, the court can decide that they count as three fifths of a person. ~~~ eldude A historical correction to the misplaced tone of your 3/5ths reference, the 3/5ths compromise was by the anti-slavery republican north to prevent the southern democratic slavers from dominating the House of Representatives and the electoral college.[1] [1] [http://www.redstate.com/jeffdunetz/2010/07/18/were-our- found...](http://www.redstate.com/jeffdunetz/2010/07/18/were-our-founding- fathers-racist-the-slaves-are-35ths-of-a-person-debate/) ~~~ michael_miller I know you meant well with your comment, but in general, it's best to avoid well-actually comments. This is one of Hacker School's core rules; they elaborate on why it's a good idea to avoid these types of comments at [https://www.hackerschool.com/manual](https://www.hackerschool.com/manual). ~~~ joshmlewis What you linked to wasn't the HN 'manual'? In the actual guidelines found here: [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) it doesn't say anything about well actually comments. It says be smart in your discussions and don't just get opinionated, it says to present facts and actually address the thing that you're arguing over. I believe having proper arguments and discussions is one of the core things HN is about. It lets people learn and see other points of view. If you don't like a comment just downvote it. ~~~ rickhanlonii Furthermore, the character of 'well-actually' comments are that the orignal comment was close to, or intended to be close to, a certain fact, and the well-actualer is pedantically correcting the original without adding any substantial value to the conversation. This is not what happened here. rvkennedy did not make a statement of fact, he made an off-the-cuff remark. eldude challenged the substance and tone of that remark in order to prevent further misrepresentation of the point. He corrected and clarified the remark in a clear and substal way, thus falling well outside of the 'well-actually' category. Oh dear. I've spent way too much time reading SCOTUS rulings/blogs today. ------ acqq [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/the-supreme- court-s...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/the-supreme-court-s-bad- science-on-gene-patents.html) _it is not the scientists who removed the introns from the officially unpatentable original DNA sequence to make the new, patentable cDNA sequence. It is nature itself, through the magic by which pre-RNA, which includes the introns, becomes messenger RNA, which does not. The Supreme Court described this process by saying, “the pre-RNA is then naturally ‘spliced’ by the physical removal of the introns” -- that is, the introns are removed as part of the ordinary process by which messenger RNA is created. The role scientists then subsequently play is to take the messenger RNA and use it to synthesize the intron-free cDNA. To put it much more simply, there is nothing that a 6-year-old would consider “invented” about the patentable cDNA. It is nothing more than the messenger RNA flipped into a DNA sequence that omits unnecessary elements that nature already excluded. The sequence that codes the proteins is just as naturally occurring as the original DNA itself, which the court held couldn’t be patented because it was naturally occurring. The distinction is, to put it bluntly, a lawyer’s distinction, not a scientist’s._ (by Noah Feldman, a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard) ~~~ daughart From what I understand, Myriad's test involved synthesis of cDNA (which we scientists refer to as "complementary DNA", not "composite DNA" as SCOTUS does). This is still covered by the patent. However, any test based on sequencing the genomic DNA, for example, would not violate Myriad's patent. Genomic sequencing of these genes was previously a violation of the patent. This is definitely a step forward. In the long run, Myriad is hosed because they no longer own the sequence, including analysis. Any diagnostic not using reverse transcription of the mRNA does not violate Myriad's patent. This includes synthesis of any non-cDNA polymer, such as XNA. ~~~ alsocasey The issue is that a hypothetical diagnostic attempting to sequence this region would likely be pre-processed with a PCR to facilitate sequencing of only the region of interest... this necessarily involves a cDNA step. You could sequence the whole genome at higher depth, but this would be more expensive. Edit: My mistake, the patent covers the reverse transcription step exclusively, not the act of transcription in general - which means PCR from genomic DNA is fine, but rtPCR or cDNA library construction is not... no scientific consistency there, but looks like cheaper BCRA tests in the near future. ~~~ daughart PCR is not covered by the patent, only reverse transcription of the processed RNA molecule to cDNA. There are many flavors of genomic PCR that are fine under this interpretation, including a rapid SNP-detecting digital qPCR. ------ mpyne Unanimous judgment, though Scalia concurred in part and filed a separate opinion. Myriad kind of still wins as their cDNA synthesis technique is affirmed patentable, which would presumably be used in conjunction with a patient's own BRCA genes to determine their cancer risk. So the precise test itself appears patented still, but now other companies can make use of the BRCA genes themselves, perhaps to develop other treatments that don't use the cDNA synthesis technique. ~~~ unmei But they surely don't have a patent on _all_ cDNA synthesis techniques, especially given that that is a highly generic technique (it should fall under the "obvious from previous art" criteria). So other companies should be able to utilize a cDNA as well so long as they don't simply follow the Myriad protocol? ~~~ jweese I believe they just have a patent on these _particular_ cDNA types, namely cDNA created from BRCA1 or BRCA2, and not on the well-known lab techniques for creating them. ~~~ daughart I believe you are correct here. ------ ChuckMcM While its not a complete win I think this is an ok compromise. Clearly Myriad is going to be impacted as other people come up with ways to test for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes without infringing on their process, and it will make screening for these genes _much_ less expensive. But it leaves open the question of "infringement" on cDNA when you aren't party to the creation. Specifically the guys who have GMO Wheat growing in their field in Oregon, if they didn't put it there, they didn't know it had become GMO, and it was only discovered when Japan tested it, then what is their liability? And what is Monsanto's? (GMO Wheat isn't approved) I suspect these "escapes" of cDNA will become more common and the "factories" producing them, things like e.coli and algae, won't really respect the owner's rights here. :-) ~~~ carbocation I do not see how there is any cDNA involved in a plant that has modified genes. Are you assuming that the plant is infected with a retrovirus? A genome with a modified gene is not cDNA, and I'm not sure how to parse your comment so I'm basically trying to see if there was an error in your comment or an error in my reading of it. ~~~ ChuckMcM If you read the opinion that this thread links, you will see that Supreme court defines 'cDNA' as 'not naturally occurring'. In Monsanto's case, they inserted genes into crops to make them resistant to one of their own herbicides. That crosses the threshold of 'not naturally occurring' and then becomes cDNA in the context of this ruling. ------ JosephBrown An mRNA strand that is about to be translated into a protein has the introns removed, so how is the cDNA different enough from the naturally occurring mRNA other than it is a mirror image? Also, when did cDNA come to mean composite DNA instead of complementary DNA? This seems made up to imply some kind of invention instead of it just being the mirror image of the DNA molecule. ~~~ rcthompson It doesn't matter that cDNA is similar to something found in nature. The fact is that DNA complementary to the mature spliced mRNA sequences of the BRCA1/2 genes does not exist in nature. ~~~ mokus This really sounds like hair splitting to me. Along the lines of saying "well, your software patent is for a program that is stored on a GMR disk platter. Mine's stored in NAND flash, and that's never been done before!" If the sequence is logically equivalent but stored on a different medium, how is that novel? The invention of the new medium or new techniques for transcribing between media may be, but the sequence itself isn't. ~~~ rcthompson Not exactly. DNA and RNA are structurally only slightly different, but functionally, in the context of a biological system, they are very different. A technical analogy might be RAM vs disk. ------ dnautics I'm generally opposed to patents, but I think this decision is crazy. For starters, the patentability of a gene now depends on whether or not there's an intron in that gene? The isolated sequence doesn't exist as a molecule in nature, and the patent was a patent on that molecule. Should have been a straightforward "gene patents (the way they were done by myriad) are allowed". Keeping in mind, there are a ton of very facile ways of breaking such a gene patent. EDIT: Actually I'm completely opposed to patents. EDIT2: Here is a more detailed analysis - I didn't post it earlier since dreamhost was down. [http://www.indysci.org/mission/onpatenting.html](http://www.indysci.org/mission/onpatenting.html) ~~~ daughart This decision affirms a previous decision that synthetic modifications to DNA sequences are patented - regardless of whether they have introns. You see, the ruling suggests that the act of creating a new synthetic, modified DNA molecule (in this case without introns) is patent-able. (Not a comment on your opinion about patents, only the part about patentability relying on introns.) ~~~ dnautics can you link to this previous decision? ~~~ daughart "In Chakrabarty, scientists added four plasmids to a bacte- rium, which enabled it to break down various components of crude oil. 447 U. S., at 305, and n. 1. The Court held that the modified bacterium was patentable." Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U. S. 303, 309 (1980), If I am reading this correctly. EDIT: Sorry I re-read my original comment - I meant "synthetic modifications", not necessarily only to DNA, but to natural products in general. ~~~ dnautics I think I was confused because you meant "patentable", not "patented". But is not isolation by PCR a synthetic modification? If I made a useful machine out of a single piece of wood using a six-axis subtractive tooling device, would you argue that the machine is unpatentable because "it was already there" _? _ PCR actually goes even further - conceptually it's subtractive procedure but it actually does so by creating copies within the specific boundaries. These boundaries don't exist in nature, the act of specifying the boundaries is creative, and without the prior research, non-obvious. ~~~ daughart Yes, sorry I meant patentable. This ruling specifically says that merely identifying the location of a gene and isolating it is not a patentable transformation. PCR is not transformative because the dsDNA molecule exists in nature. I think in this context isolation is similar in nature to discovery, which is not a patentable activity. ~~~ dnautics well, no, the supreme court has decided that effectively breaking four covalent bonds is not transformative (your words). I think it's a wrong decision. Even so, if you actually understand it, the act of PCR is an act of creation, not transformation. That dsDNA molecule doesn't exist in nature. For example, there is a molecule thiostrepton which is an antibiotic compound, that's really quite poor. They have recently discovered that only the core of the molecule is necessary for antibiosis, and removal of the rest of the molecule improves its pharmacological properties. It's a distinct molecule, created by the scission of 3 covalent bonds. Should it be unpatentable? Almost certainly, somewhere in nature, there has a thiostrepton molecule that by accident happened to have been cleaved at exactly the right places to render the molecule. does that change your opinion? I am not trying to defend the practice - I abhor patents - but a lot of people are letting their emotional reaction to "patenting genes" get in the way of a dispassionate and informed analysis of what actually is going on here. ~~~ daughart Your perspective is confusing. You say that a modified form of thiostrepton should not be patentable, even though the patent protects the molecule as well as the process of chemical synthesis or purification, which often requires significant innovation, and in this case the natural molecule is also significantly modified. On the other hand, when you PCR something you are generating a dsDNA molecule that is identical to the original molecule. I understand PCR quite well, and doing PCR is not innovative or transformative. You are creating something, sure, but it's an exact copy of something that exists in nature. The Supreme Court clearly states here that merely finding out where a genetic sequence is and isolating it is not patentable. The process of PCR itself is an invention, and is patented (Cetus, Mullis). It seems preposterous to say that you are strongly against patents, and then say you think the patent should be much more restrictive. I have no emotional reaction to patenting genes. I think patenting a significant modification of a naturally occurring substance is completely reasonable as it protects the investments involved in inventing and applying the modifications, while at the same time allowing others to use and understand the development. Without patents biotech would become full of trade secrets, holding back progress in the field. ~~~ dnautics Yeah, i'm against patents, but i think if we have them they should be applied fairly and according to a clear set of rules instead. It's like saying, I'm opposed to government being involved in marriage, but if we are going to have it then homosexuals should be allowed to be married. The only reason why the perspective seems confusing is because you're conflating process with molecules. In general any given claim of a patent can protect the molecule or the process. Myriad did not choose to claim the process, because the process is obvious. But having a process that is obvious does not necessarily make the molecule obvious. Doing PCR is not innovative. But the process DOES transform one molecule into another, unless your primers are exactly flush with the end of the dsDNA - in which case it is merely a straight copying operation. OK? The molecule that comes out at the end has a different covalent structure than the molecule that you start with. Is that not true? if you don't believe that, then you would make the claim that octane 'is the same as' dodecane, because it's just a truncated version. Also, it is not an exact copy of something in nature, unless that 'thing' is a data fragment. It is an original molecule, that copies the data, but the molecule is distinct. That is an important point. Molecule patents don't care about the abstract qualities of something (beyond proving that it's useful). Molecule patents only care about the structure of the molecule. ~~~ dnautics addendum: I am happy with the SCOTUS decision though from a pragmatic point of view, because there is a prokaryotic gene I'd like to "steal", that's under patent application right now of course prokaryotic genes have no introns, so I just got a field day on it. ------ craigyk While the second part is a bit disappointing. Does that mean if you manage to successfully isolate a natural version of a patented cDNA, then that patent becomes effectively invalid? In practice this might not be the hardest thing to do. Do you like someone's engineered version of a gene? Then transform some randomized libraries into cell cultures (or add mutagens) and keep fishing until you extract a "natural" copy that is the same as the patented cDNA. ------ abitsios There's a new TV series that touches upon this - Orphan Black. \---- Spoilers, obviously ---- So they're clones, and they have a "special repeating marker" of some sorts. One of the clones is a biochemist, and she manages to decode it. Turns out, it is a copyright message covering those organisms _and their biological offspring_ as property of X corporation. \-------- Spooky, but wouldn't the message get diluted after reproduction? ~~~ sageikosa From what I understand, the likelihood of any cistron in the genetic code getting diluted is dependent on the sequence length compared to the overall length of the chromosome on which it can be found. However, since this is sci-fi, it may be possible that some of the genetic sequence is setup to actually alter the meiosis process and not perform any "crossing over" events in egg cell construction. ------ akiselev Can anyone with experience clarify this ruling? Is the SCOTUS saying that just because the specific cDNA strand doesn't exist in nature (as far as I know), then it is patentable? Correct me if I misunderstood the ruling, but it seems to be absolutely ridiculous. You could just automate the process of isolating genes, sequencing them and statistically identifying their mRNA strands, isolating them, and creating cDNA strands. I know this isn't technically "nonobvious" but if you can automate the process to the point where you have robots spitting out gene patents, then it's a pretty low bar. ~~~ dnautics The process of making cDNA libraries (with and without robots) has long been solved. Usually in order to get a patent you need to prove "usefulness" which is not really automatable. And if you want to read my writeup (which is slightly geared toward explaining the biology from simple first principles, [http://www.indysci.org/mission/onpatenting.html](http://www.indysci.org/mission/onpatenting.html)) ------ quux Darn, well there goes my plan to patent myself and require that my wife buy a license before she can bear my children. ~~~ cwp Copyright would be more appropriate there. Children could be considered derivative works, but I don't see how they could be patent infringement. ~~~ lsiebert You are a transformative work based on your dna anyway. ------ tocomment Does this mean we'll soon see 1000s more SNPs available from 23andme? What are the biggest new SNP's they can test for? ~~~ daughart It absolutely should mean this. Maybe 23andme can be something more than a toy. ~~~ tocomment What are some examples of exciting new SNPs they could test for? Besides BRCA. ~~~ daughart A quick Google search for "patented disease alleles" suggests Crohn's disease, some forms of kidney disease, diabetes, and many more! ------ benjamincburns At one point I heard that some farmers, who were unaware that their crops contained patented genetic modifications as a result of uncontrolled natural reproduction with other GM crops, were being sued by patent holders. Does this ruling weigh in on this scenario? It seems that inventions which copy themselves and masquerade in difficult/expensive to detect ways (see plant reproduction, airborne pollen) wasn't something foreseen by those who wrote our patent laws. ~~~ jadyoyster This seems to be a myth: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top- fi...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths- of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted) ------ RabbitAngstrom A co-worker in my lab pointed out that Myriad's stock is actually _rising_ [1] after the decision.The best guess is that Myriad's competitive advantage is shifting to the enormous amounts of BRCA sequences they have obtained -- this would increase the cancer-vs-normal mutation prediction power considerably. [1] - [http://www.google.com/finance?cid=658315](http://www.google.com/finance?cid=658315) ~~~ jfb Also, they now have legal certainty whereas before the decision there was a chance the whole kit and kaboodle would have been tossed out. ------ eldude Michael Crichton's novel "Next"[1] was a fantastic exploration of the implications of such issues being brought up here like: liability when the infringing patents are in you, in animals, in human-animal hybrids capable of human-level intelligence, and how the world deals with life when Man plays god. Another excellent book on the ethics of bio-engineering and patentability is the true story, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."[2] [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(novel)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_\(novel\)) [2] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta- Lacks/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta- Lacks/dp/1400052181/) ------ daughart This sets the stage for a simple way to overturn any cDNA patent. Somewhere in the body of any person infected with a retrovirus such as HIV exists a completely natural molecule of BRCA1 cDNA. ~~~ dnautics I'm pretty sure prior art doesn't work that way. ~~~ daughart Isn't the standard here whether or not these molecules exist in nature? Honest question. ~~~ dnautics You can't just assert that it exists. You'd have to show that it exists. ~~~ daughart That should be trivial, if you had a large sample and money for sequencing. The consensus in the listservs I'm on is that cDNA patentability will fall next because of these and other inconsistencies (cDNA existing in nature, being a non-natural transformation). ~~~ dnautics That hinges on the definition of non-natural. Is a nuclear reactor non- natural? Are you sure? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor) Just because you're using components that exist in nature that may come together and occasionally produce the result you want - when a human hand enters the picture to do it deliberately and get a controlled result, to gain a certain end, that's qualifies it as non-natural. ------ snowwrestler This is the right result. Great news. ------ niels_olson What if your life is saved from the debilitating effects of an enzyme deficiency by a virally-delivered sequence which also infects your spermatocytes (1)? And that sequence is passed to your child? (1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicular_immunology#The_effec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicular_immunology#The_effects_of_infections_and_immune_responses_on_the_testis) ------ niels_olson > The nucleotides that code for amino acids are “exons,” and those that do not > are “introns.” Should read "the nucleotide _sequences_ ". If they can't get the definitions right, why is the rest of the opinion valid? Is it time for a "Court of Science" at the district or appellate level? ------ alok-g Do they allow patenting a DNA sequence specified by a regular expression or a grammar? Also, what happens if the synthetic DNA is later found to exist naturally? ------ caycep Kind of wondering, did Clarence Thomas actually write this, or did it fall to some young law clerk that had to take a crash course on molecular genetics? ------ albertzeyer Isn't all synthetic DNA based on natural DNA? ~~~ bdg No. Natural DNA occurs in nature, much like a the alignment of magnetic fields may occur in some metals. Synthetic DNA has been designed by someone who sat down and said "Okay, today we're going to write DNA, it's sequence will be ACGTTTGACGTACGTTCAGTG....." and we're going to mix our newly designed gene into a larger natural DNA strand and this synthetic gene inside of the DNA will make this tree glow a very slight yellow-tinge, then we're going to sell that on kickstarter. [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing- plan...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants- natural-lighting-with-no-electricit) (the only reason they're using a larger DNA strand is a full strand might cost in the range of $100b-$1t presently) This is not the same as what's been done more frequently for the last long while which was dissecting existing genes from other DNA strands (lets say gene XYZ from a starfish) and introducing it into a bacteria. Also, this doesn't mean I agree with the new law. I think this motion is even _more_ nonsensical than software patents we face today, and has already handed off all the wonderful innovations that the synthetic biology revolution has to offer to a nation who's pumping loads of cash into this sector: China. ------ shmerl Idiotic decision. DNA should not be patentable. ~~~ daughart What if you engineer a completely novel protein, with novel regulatory sequences, for a novel function? Should you be unable to patent such an invention? ~~~ Kliment Honestly, no, it should not be patentable. This is entirely equivalent to a software patent. ~~~ daughart Really? Say goodbye to the promise of synthetic biology then! ~~~ shmerl You can say goodbye to it if that will be patentable. Someone will patent all combinations - and goodbye. ~~~ daughart I suspect you are a troll, but I will respond anyway... Sequence space is very large. There are only a total of 8 million US patents. There are 16 million 12-base-pair nucleotide sequences. To patent the sequence space of a functional product and regulatory region would require more patents than there are molecules in the universe. Also to patent something you have to show use. ~~~ shmerl I was showing sarcasm. Patenting a molecule is a ridiculous idea, but you insist that it's about the process of making it. I'm pointing out that the result is not about the process, but about the molecule. ~~~ daughart I genuinely don't understand your point. If a group of people synthesize and test many synthetic DNA sequences and then patent the useful ones, that seems fine to me. You might even call them "synthetic biologists". They have invented new things, which are not found in nature, by the process of their own skills, knowledge, and labor, and which are useful to other people. It seems perfectly reasonable that those inventions should be protected by the patent system. ~~~ shmerl I find the concept of patenting new biological entities rather scary and dangerous. They should not be patentable. Patent system is easily abused for many things unrelated to encouraging innovation. Therefore there is nothing reasonable in allowing these patents just because it takes time and effort to come up with synthesis method. ~~~ daughart Unjustified fear is not a rational basis for policy. It's not the synthesis method that is at stake here, it is the engineered biological system itself (system referring to a gene, regulatory sequence, genetic pathway, or organism). The kind of innovation involved in this kind of engineering is precisely what the patent system is designed to protect, so that it can be monetized while also disseminated. Without patents these innovations will remain trade secrets and hold back the progress of synthetic biology. Without patents private companies may not be able to justify investment required for innovation. Without patents inability to monetize inventions reduces the overall economic impact (return on investment) for public financing of life sciences, which in turn removes a powerful incentive for government financing of research. For instance, a company finds a compound that fights cancer. The company invents a way to synthesize or purify this compound and sell it. The patent protects the inventor and allows them to recoup the investment. This is widely accepted. Now consider that company engineers an organism that can produce the compound in large bio-reactors. The modified organism - and in particular the engineered DNA sequences - are completely analogous to the chemical manufacturing process, and should be similarly protected. Moreover, consider that the second process may remove a need to use the organic carbon precursors necessary for chemical synthesis (fossil fuels), or eliminates a toxic by-product of chemical synthesis, or is much cheaper and therefore reduces the cost of the compound, benefiting the public. These are real world consequences of synthetic biology protected by the patent system. They don't seem so scary to me. ~~~ shmerl In general I find the patentability of medicines a very abused practice. Pharma industry is one of the most corrupted, and especially when it comes to patents. So your example serves do disprove your point. ~~~ daughart At least I have provided clear arguments. You have continued to make assertions (such as pharma being corrupted with respect to patents) without any kind of proof or even a clear argument as to why this is the case. I suggest you consider not taking any drug developed under or protected by US patent law in protest. ~~~ shmerl Well, many don't just consider - but simply can't take them. Because of the price, controlled by those who acquired the patent. When life saving medicine becomes a business for the sake of money - that's already bad. ------ frozenport I can live with this: As a general rule of thumb nature isolated is not patentable, Synthetic is. ------ chris_wot You can make synthetic DNA?!? ~~~ archgoon Yes. This has been around for several decades. Furthermore, you can request companies on the internet to synthesize sequences for you and mail you the results. (First result from google) [http://www.invitrogen.com/](http://www.invitrogen.com/) Wikipedia Article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis) ------ dnautics interesting side effect - prokaryotic genes are basically unpatentable!! ------ Fuxy Yes! Finally some forward progress. Still needs work though. ------ gridmaths sweeeet... sanity prevails! ------ furconit Patents are silly !

Show HN: Authian – Open Source 2-Factor Authentication Using Instant Messengers - authian https://www.authian.org/ ====== AdmiralAsshat One of the key features of something like Signal is not just security, but authentication: if I'm talking to my girlfriend over Signal and it tells me that her key suddenly changed, I stop talking to her, call her, and ask her what's up (and, to be fair, it's happened twice so far due to changing phones). It's supposed to stop a MITM attack, so that someone cannot pretend to be her and continue the conversation. What will your authian bot do, however, if the key changes? Will it happily continue communicating with the new, possibly malevolent recipient? ~~~ subway Does signal even allow bots? They have pretty draconian terms on allowing 3rd party clients to connect to their service. ------ dschep Where is said source? The Github & Gitlab orgs are empty. Seems like this post is a bit premature. ~~~ elijahwright I came to ask just this question. :) ------ alien2003 What about ethical messengers like XMPP, Matrix, Signal, Wire? ~~~ authian What vesak has said is partly correct. We are integrating IMs that have the most reach firstly. We also investigated IMs where users are not registered to a particular number and we deduced that most companies would not want clients to authenticate themselves with accounts that are not attached to a number (when they already have such numbers available). We stand to be corrected and would gladly integrate with other IMs where demand/interest exists. ------ stephenr So this basically is OTP over encrypted IM instead of OTP over SMS. Im not sure why you'd use this over TOTP? ~~~ authian Good question! My answers (in point form) are: 1) We plan on integrating TOTP into the Authian server so that TOTP can be used as an alternate option where no other IMs are supported by the end-user 2) Using OTP over encrypted IM has less friction. Many other options require people to install "yet another app". TOTP is also not that well understood by the average person, whereas most people are already familiar with SMS-based authentication (which also has low friction, but is comparatively expensive) 3) TOTP can't do notifications of successful login attempts to the TOTP app. Whereas OTP over IM offers this, as well as baking in other security enhancements as required by vendors (eg. account recovery options) With that said though, I would consider TOTP and OTP over IM to be complementary products. ~~~ equalunique Not sure if this is relevant, but TOTP via phone app doesn't work when a phone is experiencing NTP sync issues. At least, this is a problem which I experienced. ------ Xeoncross > It will be released when the code is a bit more stable (and provides better > performance) Can you provide more details? I am not ready to use this until there is something on github/gitlab to look at. I can understand needing another month or two, but I would like some assurance this isn't going to be another minecraft. ~~~ authian Part of our assurance that the product is good/reliable/secure is releasing the source code for people to determine that themselves. We have no plans to rescind on this, although we would like people to join our newsletter so that we can reach them. By having a point of contact, we hope to build a product and form a community based on the needs of end-users (eg. how the product is being used and how we can improve upon it) If you joined the newsletter, we will be reaching you shortly.

Google Analytics doesn’t show you 51% of website traffic - dazbradbury http://www.incapsula.com/the-incapsula-blog/blog-2012/114-what-google-doesnt-show-you-31-of-website-traffic-can-harm-your-business ====== toddkaufmann Shouldn't be surprising or news to anyone who has looked directly into an access.log, all servers are constantly being probed by bots, crawled by spiders, etc. The incapsula "article" is some combination of marketing and FUD, even though the title is true. Using a second form of analytics never hurts. If you have a webserver, run analog on your own log files. Understand that GA only counts accesses when a client accessing your server also executes the javascript code on your site and successfully accesses their site. Note that many hosting sites do not give you access to error logs, or only provide a web interface to show some of the most recent error messages. A better title is probably "Google Analytics doesn’t show you 51% of website noise"

Chelsea Manning Asks President for Clemency and 'First Chance at Life' - endswapper http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/14/502026384/chelsea-manning-asks-president-for-clemency-and-first-chance-at-life ====== doe88 Unlikely. I would be very surprised if president Obama granted this request. And that's just one of many reasons why democrats did not have a strong turn- out, they lost touch with their base. As corollary a very good article in WaPo by Glenn Greenwald [https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/11/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/11/glenn- greenwald-trump-will-have-vast-powers-he-can-thank-democrats-for-them/) ~~~ bogomipz I am not all following how you are connecting the Democrats losing touch with their base and the question of whether Obama is likely to pardon this individual. ~~~ toomuchtodo Part of the reason I did not go out to vote for Clinton was because she was a continuation of Obama's policies; civilian collateral damage from extrajudicial drone strikes, no pardon for Edward Snowden, the possibility of a drawn out proxy war in Syria, as well as no stop to the NSA domestic surveillence program. (Neoliberalism = "Republican lite") You might retort "But Trump! (and his threats of killing families of terrorists, etc)". If Clinton was elected it would've been business as usual, everyone would've gone back to their bread and circuses. Not now though. I hope Obama has the fortitude to pardon Manning and Snowden if he's going to jump on the political grenade of pardoning Clinton. [1] Sidenote: Trump has already swung moderate, deciding to stick with NATO [2] and keeping most of the ACA after speaking with Obama [3]. Maybe he doesn't stick to those ideals, but its clear Trump the president may not be as bad as Trump the person. I have hope, but I had hope for Sanders as well. (Excitingly enough, the /r/SandersForPresident subreddit was reactived today, with ~210k active subscribers). [1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-10/giulia...](http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-10/giuliani- says-president-obama-shouldn-t-pardon-hillary-clinton) [2] [http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-14/obama-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-14/obama- says-trump-told-him-he-supports-u-s-commitment-to-nato) [3] [http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-hedges- health-...](http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-hedges-health-care- points-amending-aca) ~~~ cpleppert >>Part of the reason I did not go out to vote for Clinton was because she was a continuation of Obama's policies; civilian collateral damage from extrajudicial drone strikes, no pardon for Edward Snowden, the possibility of a drawn out proxy war in Syria, as well as no stop to the NSA domestic surveillence program. (Neoliberalism = "Republican lite") You might retort "But Trump! (and his threats of killing families of terrorists, etc)". If Clinton was elected it would've been business as usual, everyone would've gone back to their bread and circuses. Not now though. Regardless of what you think of Clinton Trump was a far worse alternative on every measure. Trump will be able to dramatically change the supreme court and US federal legislation as well. Complaining about Clinton/Obama doesn't change the simple fact that he is far to the right on her on almost every issue. >>Sidenote: Trump has already swung moderate, deciding to stick with NATO [2] and keeping most of the ACA after speaking with Obama [3]. Maybe he doesn't stick to those ideals, but its clear Trump the president may not be as bad as Trump the person. I have hope, but I had hope for Sanders as well. (Excitingly enough, the /r/SandersForPresident subreddit was reactived today, with ~210k active subscribers). Trump _CANT_ keep most of ACA even if he wanted to keep the _good parts._ The expansion of coverage is paid and supported by the entirety of the law, it doesn't work without all the provisions. ------ bdcravens Chelsea was sentenced in 2013, well under the influence of the Obama administration. (Ditto for the leaks, in 2010) Typically the presidential pardons we see are the last minute stamp of ideology, not undoing of their legacy. ~~~ marcoperaza Or if you're Bill Clinton, some last minute corruption. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy#Pardons_and_commutations_signed_on_President_Clinton.27s_final_day_in_office) . Though I guess that corruption _is_ the Clinton ideology... ~~~ serge2k > Though I guess that corruption is the Clinton ideology and yet, despite apparently knowing this for 30 years. Investigating it constantly for 30 years. Neither of them have had anything actually stick to them. Amazing. They must be the smartest criminals ever. or not crooks. ~~~ CptJamesCook The Mark Rich pardon was purely wrong, and yet perhaps not illegal. ------ mzw_mzw Maybe should have thought of that before stealing all that classified information and leaking it to hostile nations, huh? It really is bizarre how people demand, not just that they can commit crimes for political reasons, but that crimes committed for political reasons not be punished. ~~~ kafkaesq Maybe this country, as a whole, should have thought about the fact that for as long it insists on committing war crimes against foreign peoples, on massive scales -- inevitably, the boldest and bravest among its citizenry will feel compelled to expose those crimes, and bring those responsible to justice. ~~~ mzw_mzw The boldest and bravest, huh? I thought we were talking about Manning. Incidentally, what are the war crimes that were specifically revealed by this leak? ~~~ kafkaesq [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrik...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike) ~~~ mzw_mzw So, no war crimes at all then. Yeah, figured. ~~~ kafkaesq Given that there's still never been anything like a proper investigation into the matter, that seems to be an odd thing to say. In any case various international experts have stated that there is a viable case for war crimes to be made, based on the video evidence. ~~~ mzw_mzw The article states that the US military investigated it, so it's not an odd thing to say at all. > In any case various international experts have stated that there is a viable > case for war crimes to be made, based on the video evidence. "Various international experts" can be counted on to pronounce any military activity whatsover by the United States as a war crime (while ignoring or even excusing the behavior of non-Western states), so that's of little use. ------ lightbyte Not a chance, she committed actual treason as it's defined in our constitution by grabbing as many classified documents as she could and releasing them to the world with no regard for what they actually contained. She's lucky that she only got 35 years. ~~~ gizmo686 "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." ~~~ mzw_mzw > or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Yep, there we go. Thanks! ------ mrottenkolber :-(

Ask HN: Are there many Australians well known for their open source work? - andrewstuart ====== schoen Yes, for example [https://ozlabs.org/](https://ozlabs.org/) (I've worked with several of these people, and one prominent example is Andrew Tridgell, original developer of Samba and rsync, among other things). ------ blakdawg SSLeay, which was forked and became OpenSSL, was developed by Tim Hudson (AU) and Eric Young (NZ). Also, he's not precisely (primarily?) an open source developer, but Julian Assange is Australian. ------ tonteldoos It's a niche area, but Simon Newton of ola (Open Lighting Architecture) - [https://github.com/nomis52](https://github.com/nomis52)

Ask HN: What are alternatives to Google products? - NinjaX ====== hashr8064 Besides using Apple or MSFT product suites which can get you out of pretty much everything from Google. There are the following 1\. Search: bing, Duck Duck Go. 2\. Android: Lineage OS 3\. Drive: Dropbox 4\. Cloud Services: AWS 5\. Email: yahoo,yandex,gmx, tutanota,protonmail, etc. 6\. Maps: HereMaps, NavMii, OpenStreetMap, Waze ~~~ otras Just wanted to point out that Google bought Waze in 2013. ------ magma17 Microsoft Office Microsoft Edge Hotmail Windows Phone Azure Bing ------ EmbarrassedFuel Which ones? Google has a vast array of products from enterprise grade cloud services all the way to small consumer applications. ------ motyar check [https://nomoregoogle.com](https://nomoregoogle.com)

DikuMUD 3 Is Released - bovermyer https://github.com/Seifert69/DikuMUD3 ====== freediver I am thankful to Diku and it's derivatives for many important lessons in life. The situation when a mob kills you, takes your exp and all your equipment and you are faced with dire reality of starting all over again from nothing - is the one that we are facing in life ever so often. MUDs have taught me to persevere, focus on what is important and keep going. I am thankful for every friend I met via MUD and every friend I will make. As a matter of a fact I am in the middle of MUD renaissance right now - rebuilding the MUD I created in 1995 and playing it with a handful of buddies - all of us now in our forties and we are having the time of our lives chasing down mobs and magic items (and of course playing only after the kids go to sleep). On top of that I get to code in C again. Life is good. Wish the best of luck to DikuMUD 3. ~~~ YZF Luckily I've yet to face mob kills me and takes all I got in real life ;) But then I used to play MUDs at some point in the 90's so maybe that's because of the lessons I learned there! ~~~ astrobe_ When a bug or a mistake wipes irremediably many days of work, you need that kind of perseverance. ------ duskwuff Holy crap. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, _long_ time. To give some perspective, the last public release of DikuMUD was in 1991. ~~~ beobab Weirdly, my initial thought there was "that's only 9 years ago", and then did a quick double take when I realised that it wasn't. ------ philipov Downloading and trying to figure out the code for DikuMUD-based distributions is what drove me to learn C as a kid. ~~~ birdyrooster Same here! I remember making my own port of DikuMUD because I wanted to start my own community but quickly learned how daunting the writing workload is and I sadly never finished my beginning city but it felt magical to have a friend from AlterAeon join me and enter this world I had built. It was all so accessible if you could just put in the time to world build. ~~~ uglygoblin Ditto! Digging through Diku and the derivative Smaug codebase was my gateway to programming and I am forever thankful that such software existed and was available for a young teenager to dive into. ~~~ tmn007 Me too. Learnt a lot about Unix, c, networking and compilers getting it working in 1992. ------ hlieberman Interesting. When I dealt with the problem of wanting to give people access to my MU* through a web-browser, I worked around the problem by building an ANSI- aware bridge between the existing MU* and the browser. [https://gitlab.com/hlieberman/webmu](https://gitlab.com/hlieberman/webmu) ~~~ aurelius12 Check out Iron Realms' MUD client. Nobody else's web client comes even close, I think. [https://nexus.ironrealms.com/Main_Page](https://nexus.ironrealms.com/Main_Page) ~~~ berkeleynerd [https://writtenrealms.com/](https://writtenrealms.com/) client is pretty nice. ~~~ Ataraxy This client is what I think of in my minds eye for a modern day MUD that still stays true to what a MUD is but has an accessible interface. Whoever designed the UI did a nice job. ------ jerrysievert it's nice to see so much of the original DikuMUD surviving this far into version 3, but don't understand why raw html is being generated instead of something to be parsed on the client given that the client is a web browser using web sockets. as an aside, I have a nicely working copy of sillymud hanging out in my GitHub, and local copies of phoenix (the successor to sillymud), and epic (another highly customized mud that ran off of goldman.ai.mit.edu). ~~~ duskwuff > ...don't understand why raw html is being generated instead of something to > be parsed on the client given that the client is a web browser using web > sockets. Looking at the repository, the impression I get is that this codebase had a web interface grafted onto it relatively recently. Most of the code looks like it was written with the expectation that it'd be used over a line-mode interface. (A lot of it also looks like it was converted from C to C++ very late in the development process -- outside of the WebSockets library, there's hardly any code which uses even basic STL features like string or vector.) ~~~ jerrysievert > _Looking at the repository, the impression I get is that this codebase had a > web interface grafted onto it relatively recently. Most of the code looks > like it was written with the expectation that it 'd be used over a line-mode > interface._ yes, if you know the history of muds, and diku specifically, you would know that, but where those changes were made it could more easily have been changed to respond either as text, and styled in the browser without adding all of the html elements, or as json. it was a very weird decision to be made given its history and the new goals of the project. ------ nvarsj DikuMUD is _the_ influential mud code base. So many derivatives came from it - including my favorite, CircleMUD. There were also rumors that Everquest was directly inspired (and perhaps even some code lifted!) from DikuMUD. Millions of hours of gameplay across MUDs and MMORPGs owes its life to this C codebase built by a handful of university students in Denmark. ------ swiftausterity Hey look we interviewed Seifert about this.. months ago :) [https://www.titansoftext.com/28](https://www.titansoftext.com/28) ~~~ freediver You do a fine job with that podcast. ------ hestefisk Is DikuMUD by any chance affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at Uni of Copenhagen (Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet)? FWIW that’s where Peter Naur did most of his work on formal grammars. ~~~ mikkom Yes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD) ~~~ hestefisk Geeky. The owner also wrote Sitecore, a very expensive CMS. ------ bargle0 This brings me back. I wasted so much time on MUDs when I was young. I had _the best_ TinyFugue scripting when everyone else was dragging with zMUD. ~~~ StavrosK MUSHclient represent! I spent so much time on Realms of Despair, it's basically where I learned to program. Being text-based, MUDs were basically made for scripting. I have very fond memories of that entire world and its people. ------ kstenerud I got my start on a DikuMUD running from the pulmonary labs at UBC (AoD, if you're still out there, thank you). I was still a high school student at the time, but fortunately there was an unprotected dialup (604-822-2222) into the NIM system, from which you simply typed in the IP address of the machine you wanted to connect to. This was my gateway into serious programming. I'd already learned some C, but the idea of a networked multiplayer RPG really stoked my interest in network programming as I tried to write my own MUD from scratch, and it's because of this that I chose BCIT to study in the datacomm program. ------ RubberMullet Fond memories of playing my warrior and cleric at the same time using a program called tintin++. An early form of multiboxing only with unix shells instead. The server was Apocalypse which appears to still be running. ~~~ moron4hire Tintin was amazing. I kept a copy on a zip disk so I could use it in the computer labs at college. ------ johnbellone This is extremely cool. I cut my teeth on C by writing code for a DikuMUD derivative, SMAUG, and used it to learn a whole lot: socket programming, parsing files, basic interpreter scripting languages. ------ myself248 Inquiring minds want to know: Are the fidos still beastly? ~~~ duskwuff The beastliest. [https://github.com/Seifert69/DikuMUD3/blob/master/vme/zone/m...](https://github.com/Seifert69/DikuMUD3/blob/master/vme/zone/midgaard.zon#L7483) ------ holtalanm used to play MUDs back in junior high / high school. DartMUD, Seventh Circle MUD, along with a few others (I think there was a Dragonball Z MUD at some point that I played, too). Never played DikuMUD, but I honestly miss those days playing DartMUD for hours on end. I looked up DartMUD a while back, but it doesn't appear to be very active, if it is even online anymore. ~~~ holtalanm Just tried getting on DartMUD. Their character registration process is so hostile with their requirements (no free email providers???) Yup. DartMUD will remain squarely in my memory, and I won't bother trying to play it now. ------ 2snakes I still sometimes log in to a MUD, Diku as well! Fond memories of roleplaying and PK. ~~~ jerrysievert I still relish my time as a darkside member. ------ r0rshrk This can be hosted online right ? ------ armitron C++ is the worst possible choice for something like this. I tried compiling it and got flooded with screens full of incomprehensible errors of the sort: /usr/include/c++/v1/type_traits:1547:38: error: implicit instantiation of undefined template 'std::__1::owner_less<boost::weak_ptr<void> >' : public integral_constant<bool, __is_empty(_Tp)> {}; ~~~ ebg13 > _incomprehensible errors_ Maybe incomprehensible if you don't know C++ or don't bother to read them or carve them entirely out of context (like you've done here). Every error tells you both where the error occurred, how the compiler got to that file location, and what the problem was. Literally what more do you want? But, yeah, everything is incomprehensible if you don't comprehend it. ~~~ sharken I hardly think that an error such as this one points to a solution ../../build//vmc/vmc.o: In function `fix(char _) ': /home/user/DikuMUD3/vme/src/vmc/vmc.cpp:254: undefined reference to `init_lex(char_)' ~~~ moron4hire I don't have a lot of experience with C++ and even I know that the most likely cause of that error is not having the linker configured correctly. It's probably something simple like a common library not being linked in.

High Quality Ruby on Rails Example Applications - fogus http://jetpackweb.com/blog/2009/10/14/high-quality-ruby-on-rails-example-applications/ ====== mhartl I'm the principal author of one of these example apps (Insoshi, a social networking platform developed as part of YC Winter '08). It's a bit out of date (running on Rails 2.2), but still quite decent. I'm currently working on a Rails tutorial book that will include a fully up-to-date and (I hope) high- quality sample Rails app; keep an eye on <http://www.railstutorial.org/> for more details. You should follow the project on Twitter at <http://twitter.com/railstutorial> for all the latest news. _Note:_ some major announcements are coming soon. :-) ------ bryanwoods These are all pretty good examples. That being said, I recently spent some time reading through the source of both Gemcutter.org and RailsDevelopment.com and found both to be very educational to me personally: <http://github.com/engineyard/rails_dev_directory> <http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter/> ~~~ qrush Aww, thanks :) ------ dtf These look great. Anyone know any similar examples for Django? ~~~ percept Maybe EveryBlock (considering the source)? <http://code.google.com/p/ebcode/> ~~~ ubernostrum Depending on the audience, maybe. I've not looked at the code, but I know it has some very specific design assumptions and a number of weird corner cases baked in which might not make it a good general-purpose example. ------ bhrgunatha It's nice to see some more complex examples with a summary of the plugins and related technologies. But mainly I'm commenting to be able to find this easily later. It's a shame HN doesn't have a save link option. ~~~ WALoeIII I believe simply up voting moves it into your Saved list. <http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=WALoeIII> \- mine <http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=bhrgunatha> \- yours ~~~ bhrgunatha Oh - thanks. I never noticed. ------ leeskye Has anyone used spreecommerce?

ProtonMail is Open Source [webmail front-end] - e12e https://blog.protonmail.ch/protonmail-open-source/ ====== e12e Stil waiting for a full stack -- still I think this is great news. Having a look at their github page, it's also nice to see Free software working across "competing" companies, their html-editor si Squire, originally by Fastmail. I'm a little concerned with this comment on the post, though, in response to open sourcing the back-end: "The security risks of open sourcing the back-end code is too high. It would let an attacker know how our infrastructure is set up or let spammers get insight into how to circumvent our anti-spam measures." Right. Which is why exim, postfix, spam assasin, AVG, ssh etc is insecure? Snark aside, more open, free code is always good!

Norway mass murderer Breivik was 'already damaged by the age of two' - teslacar http://www.tv2.no/a/8241631 ====== Waterluvian I've seen this story a thousand times. Someone is abused in some manner, becomes an abuser, and the cycle repeats. I struggle with reconciling these cases because there's two drastically different perspectives you can look at it from: 1\. Brevik is a mass murderer and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. 2\. Brevik is a victim who was never given a fair shot at life to begin with. He was moulded into the horrible person he became. What is the point of transition where we stop treating someone like a victim and begin treating them like a criminal? How many serious offenders have been raised in such a damaging way that you could argue they're not exactly responsible for any of the awful things they ended up doing? It brings doubt to how we handle serious criminals in modern times. ~~~ tinus_hn Does it really matter that much? Even if you were to say he's not responsible, you can't let him out on the streets. One of the goals of the justice system is to protect society from criminals by removing them from it, temporarily or permanently. ~~~ deepsun Agree, but justice systems are different: Some countries (like ex-USSR) also practice _punishing_ for a crime in prison -- further humiliating and abusing convicted person. Don't know if there's a reason (if ever were), but some people argue that it helps to reduce future crimes by other people ("don't do that, or you'll get to prison, you know what they do there"). Can't tell if it's supported by statistics. In other countries, like Norway, justice systems are the other way around -- besides removing criminals from society, they also bear a job to re- socializing criminals -- treating them humane and helping them to find a job after the prison. These other responsibilities affect answer to your question. ------ seagullz "As the trial for Breivik's bomb-and-shooting rampage that killed 77 people entered its second week, the far-right fanatic told a court that he was the victim of a "racist" plot to discredit his ideology. He said no one would have questioned his sanity if he were a "bearded jihadist." " [https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2012/04/23/breivi...](https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2012/04/23/breivik- claims-racist-plot-to-cast-him-as-insane) [http://bridge.georgetown.edu/mental-illness-a-key-factor- in-...](http://bridge.georgetown.edu/mental-illness-a-key-factor-in-terror/) ------ wtbob What worries me about this is the detailed nature of this account. Surely every one of us has had quite a few painful years: imagine if it had all been recorded in dry, bureaucratic detail. I'm reminded of the story about æroplanes and the mythical average pilot: just as no pilot is actually average (and, in the original story, that's why cockpits designed for the average were bad for everyone), might it not be that none of us is statistically normal, and thus _every_ one of us is thus _abnormal_ , and hence dangerous to the bureaucratic state? None of this is meant to minimise Brevik's horrific crime, of course. But I'm worried about this level of detail being available for anyone on the planet. I don't know what the solution is: obviously, it's now possible to record lots of details about anyone, and just as obviously, it's possible for those details to be made available. That implies that those details _will_ be made available, and so we as a society must come to terms with that. Still, it's a bit chilling that a State can track a man down to that level of detail. ------ BadassFractal You eventually realize that it's next to impossible to hate someone when, if you were born into their situation, with their genetics, their environment, their condition, you would very likely have done the same exact thing. There's a tragic amount of predetermination in life. ~~~ adekok Studies show that there is a large correlation between genetics and life outcome. i.e. when treated badly, most people will end up bad, some won't. When treated well, most people will end up good, some won't. There are people who are pre-disposed to do bad things, no matter what. There are people who are pre-disposed to do good things, no matter what. See the stories about Romanian orphans for how a bad system can turn most people into functioning sociopaths: [http://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters- kids-b...](http://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids- brains.html) Yet some still turn out OK. ------ muramira Am I the only one to cry out bullshit! The guy is a terrorist, period. He deserves to pay for what he did. I survived a genocide and you don't see me go around and kill people. ~~~ cooper12 No one is saying his childhood absolves him of any responsibility. The article is merely looking at his upbringing. It's apples and oranges where you compare genocide to child abuse. ------ javajosh It's remarkable there was any awareness of his predicament at all. All too often it seems that society is only sensitive to the more obvious forms of abuse (sexual and physical). Yet I suspect psychological abuse is far, far worse. I bet if you looked deeply into the lives of U.S. school shooters you'd find a similar story. The real lesson here is: _if you 're a borderline woman, do NOT have children_. If you do, give them up for adoption. We as a society should be ready and willing to forcibly separate children from borderline parents. ~~~ brianberns > We as a society should be ready and willing to forcibly separate children > from borderline parents. Who gets to decide if someone is "borderline"? How do we know that the people making this decision are not borderline themselves? Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to impose morality on others that is not vulnerable to the same problems that it's trying to fix. ~~~ mikeash We don't seem to have a problem imposing the morality of "don't kill people" and "don't steal stuff." Is this fundamentally different? ~~~ vacri Have a look at how Australian Aborigines feel about their separation from parents because of contemporary morals. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations) ~~~ mikeash A tragedy, but not an answer to my question. Is there a fundamental difference between this and putting people away for murder, or is it just a matter of making sure we get it right? ------ mgarfias This reads scarily like how my ex is with our boy. I hope that the proper care he gets 1/2 time at my house keeps him from going nuts ------ 4991throwaway Wow reading the account of his childhood was very eye-opening. For starters, I should say I've never hurt anyone willingly, not in any serious way at least, nor for any length of time. Secondly, my parents are happily married as were their parents, my home life was mostly fine. My dad is an emotional black hole but I love him. What I found strikingly similar to Anders was his emotional reaction to people, being distant, few friends, fake smiles that I usually have to try very hard to make them be believable. He obviously got hurt by people in his life and learned to depend on himself to keep his ego intact, and that's my experience as well. I have a deep desire to be normal but I know i'm not. Up until about 9 or 10 I was a pretty normal kid, but then my family moved across the country. I knew nobody in the new town. Before the move I had a best friend, several other friends and I had a pretty happy childhood overall. I'm convinced I had ADD because I was extremely hyper-active and my primary outlet in my new school was to draw, most of my worksheets until about middle school were filled with random doodles. I day-dreamed constantly, I was always behind on work because I could rarely focus on doing any one thing for more than a few minutes. So in my new school, I had an extremely hard time making any friends. I have one I would consider a close friend, though the older we get the more distant we seem to become. So all the ADD-fueled mannerisms that I thrived on before moving, that my old friends accepted me in spite of them, all worked against me at the new school. I didn't fit in anywhere at my new, much larger school. I never really got into fights or was overly picked on, but I always felt rejected just for being me. DUring high school at a job, one of my bosses told me once "You're a really serious guy, you know that", because I seldom showed any emotion. At the time I took it as a compliment. I'm much more emotive these days, but the damage to my personality has been done. I live alone, haven't had a girlfriend in over a year and I generally have very little contact with people outside of work, and only at work. I really seldom desire any, though I do love to be in small company as long as i'm not the center of attention. My old childhood friends really are strangers to me now, I tried to reconnect with most of them but the person I was back then isn't the person I am today. I guess I just wanted some more insight into this. I certainly don't mean anyone harm, but everytime I see a psychological profile of a serial killer, I always see a part of them in me, the desire for time alone and the lack of adherance to most social norms and the general distance with people both physically and emotionally. My neighbors I'm pretty sure are afraid of me simply because I seldom have any guests and I keep to myself for the most part, especially after my last girlfriend moved out over a year ago. I really don't know any of my neighbors very well at all even though I've lived here over 5 years. I want to be a normal, people enjoying person, I have that drive in me, but something stops me. Not sure why I posted, but there are a lot of wise people who post here so I'm curious what input they might have (good or bad). ------ BlytheSchuma This all could have been prevented with a Government regulated IUD program. ------ ggrochow Sucks I can't really read the article because some-custom scrolling or scripts are breaking the vim-fx FF plugin and the normal-scrolling doesn't even move the page. ~~~ nickysielicki Firefox or Chrome? If Chrome, give vimium a try. I have no such issues with Chromium 57.0.2987.98 + vimium + ublock origin + umatrix. The only scripts running are served from '*.tv2.no', but even with blocking those the article loads fine, albiet without images. vimium: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb) umatrix: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf) ublock: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm) ~~~ falsedan > _FF_ FireFox ~~~ jwilk Is Firefox (note that the latter f is lowercase) really such a long word that it needs to be abbreviated? ~~~ falsedan n

Show HN: Intro.js Hints - afshinmeh http://introjs.com/example/hint/index.html ====== sourcd Good similar libs on github : [https://github.com/zurb/joyride](https://github.com/zurb/joyride) [https://github.com/heelhook/chardin.js](https://github.com/heelhook/chardin.js) [https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch](https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch) [https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap- tour](https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap-tour) [https://github.com/HubSpot/shepherd](https://github.com/HubSpot/shepherd) [https://github.com/usablica/intro.js](https://github.com/usablica/intro.js) Once I had a requirement and ended up trying nearly all of them and unfortunately, had to write my own (took about a day and a half) that accomplished the tour exactly the way I wanted. Off the top of my head, I can't recall what each of them missed but primary reason was that often they take off with a great experience and then the lead developer can't devote enough time to meet the diverse requirements of a huge community. The library ends up with a huge user base with lots of open issues, some critical to the user experience on the myriad of mobile devices. ------ foxylion Also a great library for onboarding purposes is Hopscotch [1]. It is allows you to create a interactive tour through the UI. We are using it to introduce new users when launching the webapp the first time (Because having a 100% intuitive UI is a hard thing). We also made a study which showed us that using a onboarding mechansim really helps the user to get started and does not scare them away (which was a concern of some people). [1] [https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch](https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch) ~~~ vangale Hopscotch is one of the few tour libraries that can jump to steps on a different page and (mostly) perform actions on behalf of the user. ~~~ foxylion It's also great that they have a simple, but extensible API to use custom actions to trigger the next step by e.g. a drag of a specific element. ------ nathancahill Cool to see a project using Skeleton. Was disappointed when that project fizzled out once the creator left. It hit the sweet spot in CSS frameworks for me: small, un-opinionated and hard for people to tell you're using a framework (unlike Bootstrap which you can spot a mile away). Haven't found anything to replace it yet. ~~~ dimgl I've used Skeleton in some projects while I was contracting. I've moved on to Milligram. ~~~ degenerate I like how Milligram operates... very 'clean'. Link for everyone else: [https://milligram.github.io/](https://milligram.github.io/) ------ dkopi This is an awesome library, and seems to be very vibrant on Github. If you're looking for something commercial (and paying for something commercial) however, I'd probably recommend one of the step by step tutorial tools that allow you to build the walk through using a visual editor, and without having to add code for each individual walk through and tool tip. This is one of those cases where I just want to add a short JS snippet to my site, and allow product / marketing to customize and fine tune the tutorials and on-boarding without developer involvement. ~~~ leesalminen Can you recommend a commercial product that does this? ~~~ napoleond I'm not the parent, but was curious and did some digging. So far I've found this Quora post with a few options: [https://www.quora.com/What-tools-can-I- use-to-create-a-guide...](https://www.quora.com/What-tools-can-I-use-to- create-a-guided-tour-walkthrough-of-my-website) ------ pdxandi I used Skeleton in the past and loved it for the same reasons. I'm trying out Imperavi Kube for a new project and it's clean, minimalist, and easy to use. I'm on mobile, otherwise I'd find you a link, but I'd recommend you check it out. ------ markherhold This is exactly what I need to quickly explain elements of my dashboards to new users! Alternatively, this could let me explain new elements as they are added over time. Perfect! ~~~ Rafert Be aware of the licensing though. It was MIT but as of March 9 the license file mentions having to purchase a license if used commercial. Seems contradictory with "to deal in the Software without restriction" part of the MIT license text. ~~~ rloc Right, I didn't notice at first. [http://introjs.com/#commercial](http://introjs.com/#commercial) Looks like if you use it as part of a commercial product, you have to pay the license. ~~~ nathancahill Which is only fair IMO, open source developers have to eat too! ~~~ afshinmeh ah thanks God! :-) ------ sdneirf Neat! I was just looking for something like this. Good call out on the MIT license. ------ greenimpala Write an unintuitive UI and then plaster it with 'hints' \- great! ~~~ taf2 UI is hard... takes a lot of iteration to get right and even then... hints help IMO ~~~ afshinmeh indeed.

Luck and Startups - csentropy https://medium.com/@csentropy/luck-and-startups-f93bce58b272 ====== manojdv Can this be done legally? ~~~ csentropy I did write it legally :)

Ask HN: AI Sign Language translators - zunzun Can AI be made to translate between different sign language variants? I would think computerized avatars could easily be trained, and grant money for such projects should be easy to come by. Computerized vision should be able to read sign language - especially in specific, limited visual settings and backgrounds. ====== kopo It's not simple to do. First you need a whole lot of data to train the system which doesn't really exist (unlike the case of speech to text or one language to another(text to text)). You would need to set up a big data collection project. Secondly there are a whole bunch of different things to track. Movement of multiple fingers, +palm, +entire hand, +facial expressions. Current state of the art would be tracking a single thing like a ball or a player for sports and that still requires a number of cameras and a couple people sitting behind the scenes fixing issues. I think Microsoft's Kinect came close to achieving something akin to sign language recognition at a very basic level. But from what I remember reading they spent a whole lot of time and resources training their system just to get there. Maybe 3-4 years away I'd say. ------ laszlokorte I am currently studying sign language in Germany (ie DGS - Deutsche Gebärden Sprache, german sign language). In the long term I can not think of anything why it should not be possible but here a few difficulties that come to mind: 1\. Sign languages are in general not yet as well understood as spoken languages (the grammar, the vocabulary). For example the University of Hamburg is running the "DGS-Korpus" project[1] in order to create the first real dictionary for DGS, currently there is none. i.e. even humans have not a full explicit understanding of the language (DGS) and afaik it's similar for other sign languages 2\. As video recordings are not older than 100 years and the community of native speakers per language is much smaller than for spoken languages the amount of recorded speech is much smaller 3\. Large parts of sign languages are very productive. That means that the speaker/signer is not limited to a fixed vocabulary and a fixed grammar but allowed to reenact a situation he is telling about ("constructed dialogue" and "constructed action"[2]). Eg when retelling a conversation the storyteller can shift her body to the left or the the right in order to embody multiple people. Instead of saying "I drove the car. I had to turn left and then I saw her on the right side" the signer can just move as he was sitting in the car, holding the the steering wheel, moving it to the left and turning is head to the right. I would compare that to making "phewww... ohhhhh, whoaaa" sounds in order to tell how the plane you sit in took of. Additionally the signer is allowed to allocate locations around her upper body to establish references to previously mentions objects and refer back to them via pronouns. 4\. There is no agreed upon notation for writing down signed texts. Sure there are notations for various hand forms and movements directions but especially the productive part of language mentioned above is hard to formalize. E.g. spacial locations that can be used for placing references are not predefined. Some person still learning the language may only be able to use two positions "left to his body" and "right to his body", but a very eloquent signer may be able to establish even 10 references points in front of him and still enable the audience to keep track of them. Such arbitrary reference points can not be written down in a sensible notation. 5\. Various sign languages differ much more from each other than one might initially think. Each sign language has its own grammar and vocabulary. For german sign languages it's not even entirely clear what marks a sentence. 6\. Sign languages are not sequential but simultaneous languages ie it's possible to express one thing with one hand and another thing with the other hand in parallel So some first steps might be: * find a formal grammar for sign languages * find a formal notation to write down arbitrary sentences * collect a large corpus * Train some AI to translate video data into your notation * Train some AI to translate the notation from one sign language to another (and to spoken/written language as well) * Train some AI to translate spoken/written language to your notation for some sign language * Build an avatar that accepts that notation as input and translates it into movement [1] [http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de](http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de) [2] [https://www.signteach.eu/index.php/podcastsall/item/construc...](https://www.signteach.eu/index.php/podcastsall/item/constructedaction- dgs) ~~~ yorwba > find a formal grammar for sign languages Might not be necessary. Modern statistical machine translation techniques use formal grammars as an auxiliary signal at most. > find a formal notation to write down arbitrary sentences Some sign languages might not be representable in SignWriting, but most should be covered. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting) > collect a large corpus Many (all?) European (and other) countries have laws requiring news broadcasts, parliamentary debates etc. to be made available in sign language. Similar to the EUROPARL corpus, that could be used as a starting point for signed <-> spoken translation. Also similar to EUROPARL, colloquial language would be underrepresented. Of course there won't be any SignWriting transcriptions, so the corpus would be essentially unlabeled. > Build an avatar that accepts that notation as input and translates it into > movement I'd do that before/while attempting to create a large number of transcriptions, both to ensure accuracy and to enable unsupervised pattern mining in the later steps. > Train some AI to translate video data into your notation What I mean by unsupervised pattern mining is that the transcription AI would be trained to output a transcription that makes the avatar ouput something like the original video, as well as reconstructing the avatar's input from its movements. > Train some AI to translate the notation from one sign language to another > (and to spoken/written language as well) It'd probably be easiest to start with translating between the signed <-> spoken pairs in the corpus and then leverage that into signed <-> signed translation. ~~~ laszlokorte Yes you can do all that and as I said I do not think it would be impossible. And some of what you describe is already done (eg [1]). I just wanted to point out some difficulties. [1] [http://www.michaelkipp.de/slides/Kippetal11slides.pdf](http://www.michaelkipp.de/slides/Kippetal11slides.pdf)

A letter to my daughter, Augusta, in ruby - pacbard http://jpfuentes2.tumblr.com/post/39935683274/a-letter-to-my-daughter-augusta-in-ruby ====== sutro I once wrote a letter to my son in C++. We don't talk anymore. ~~~ alexkus and you got divorce papers from your wife written in Objective-C ? (Or maybe Go?) ~~~ codygman Ick, comparing Objective-C to Go? ~~~ alexkus No, it was a (poor) pun on the language names... ------ shmerl Reminds me of this obfuscated C classic: <http://www.ioccc.org/1990/westley.c> If you want to compile it, replace each "1s" with "is" in the code and compile for example like this: gcc -Dis=1 westley.c -o westley (or just put is=1; in the beginning with the same substitutions). Normal compilers don't like 1s notation for short. Then run the result with some integer parameter ;) ------ gesman Here's a bit shorter version of this amazing letter: puts 'Augusta, we <3 you!' ~~~ DanWaterworth Here's a shorter version of love.rb: class Augusta; end def a_letter(*args, &blk) puts 'Augusta, we <3 you!' end ~~~ matthuggins Not quite, you'll run into various class/modules/methods not found. ~~~ DanWaterworth Try it. ------ emillon That's cute, but most of the "magic" is hidden behind the require line. That's somewhat breaking the rules I think (compare that to Perl poetry such as the Black Perl). ------ minikomi Nice! Reminds me of judofyr's "On Camping vs Sinatra" <http://timelessrepo.com/on-camping-vs-sinatra> ~~~ judofyr I was about to say that it reminds me of the Haiku's I've been collecting: <http://timelessrepo.com/haiku> Or Tribute (that I wrote): <http://timelessrepo.com/tribute> ------ liberatus Yeah but the maintenance overhead on such complexity... Just wait till the teenage years! Nah, given the design decisions inspiring this codebase, I don't have any reason to believe your daughter will have any challenge extending and reusing its functionality once she's grown up. ;-) ------ kachhalimbu I'm tempted to fork this, change name to my daughter's name and frame it or make a Tee. Not sure if the author would think of it as disrespectful. ~~~ devopstom Hey, it's Open Source, right? LICENSE seems to confirm this. ------ smegel That guy who said Javascript is the new Perl has been proven wrong. ~~~ nwmcsween This has nothing to due with obfuscation but the malleability of ruby itself, read the required file he made a DSL. ------ mattyod A little more flippant but I wrote this version of Goldilocks in JavaScript a little while back: <https://gist.github.com/3755270> ~~~ draegtun Nice. It inspired me to spend some free time I had today doing same thing in perl 5 & 6 - <https://gist.github.com/4542918> ------ cupcake-unicorn Blah, this is not a good way to get back into Ruby. I get that most of it is just fluff, but can anyone break it down a little? Really stretching the syntax. ~~~ jpfuentes2 Are there specific pieces you don't understand? Or would you want a walkthrough? ~~~ cupcake-unicorn Just kind of a walk-through. I think part of it is that I can't fully force myself to read it as code when it's written poetically like that, so even syntax conventions I fully get are causing my eyes to glaze over. ------ Shank I really love how the second to last line rhymes in such a way that, when read with the semicolon out loud, produces a neat sound to it. "Until infinity ends do; Forever end." ------ sethbannon Code as poetry. Are there any other examples of this? ~~~ reaclmbs Black perl - originally by Larry Wall & updated for Perl 5 by Ovid (<http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=17000>) BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time. open spellbook, study, select it, confess, tell, deny; write it, print the hex while each watches, reverse "its length", write again; kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them. unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait), sort the flock (then, warn "the goats". kill "the sheep"); kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities, values aside, each one; die sheep, die, reverse system you accept (reject, respect); next step, kill next sacrifice, each sacrifice, wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased"; do it ("as they say"). do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*). return last victim; package body; exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it, select (quickly) & warn next victim; AFTERWORDS: tell nobody. wait, wait until time; wait until next year, next decade; sleep, sleep, die yourself and rest at last ~~~ draegtun Some extra references: \- Black Perl updated for Perl 5 - <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=237465> \- Black Perl Revisited - <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=578707> \- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl> ------ Skoofoo Very touching :) ------ nicholasspencer This is great! Proof that code is art. ~~~ jpfuentes2 That's what I going for. I tagged it as "Code as Art." I initially dubbed it a poem but decided it read more like a letter, instead. Personally, I think it qualifies as code prose. ------ EGreg The thing is, these things are supposed to be personal. But someone can fork it. ------ xyproto 16 months before finding time for programming again. Sounds about right. ~~~ jpfuentes2 Hahaha. Kids will do that to you. ------ yeison I had to upgrade to ruby 1.9 in order to run it. Very beautiful, btw. ------ kelvin0 Wow it never ceases to amaze me the things that headline in HN. As much as I understand the love for one's child(ren), I am a bit disappointed to go on a site called 'Hacker News' to see this type of irrelevant posting. ~~~ jpfuentes2 You may consider reading up on the Hacker way: A hacker is a person that loves to program, or someone who enjoys playful cleverness, or a combination of the two.[3] The act of engaging in activities (such as programming or other media[4]) in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed hacking. However the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves (e.g. programming), but the manner in which it is done: Hacking entails some form of excellence, for example exploring the limits of what is possible[5], thereby doing something exciting and meaningful. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)> ------ tzaman This is the most emotional script ever I have ever seen :) ------ phodo LoL (Lines of Love) is inversely proportional to LoC ------ so898 Seems like the daughter will become a programmer. ~~~ shellehs at least know how to read ruby source code ------ haven Love it! <3 ------ powerfulninja Beautiful ------ knwang amazing! ------ ragsagar nice

The easiest way to add recommendations to your Rails app: acts_as_edgy - wheels http://blog.directededge.com/2011/03/15/the-easiest-way-to-add-recommendations-to-your-rails-app-announcing-acts_as_edgy/ ====== tomkarlo They really need to port this to Rails 3. At this point, any new app I'm building is Rails 3, and any old app I have, I'm reluctant to add something that will make upgrading harder. ~~~ wheels Assuming there's some uptake on this version we'll almost certainly produce a Rails 3 port. New apps aren't actually a great target for recommendations since they don't have much data around and since there are still far more Rails 2 deployed than Rails 3 apps around it seemed like a better target for the first version. ~~~ tomkarlo Understood, but arguably a lot of those Rails2 apps are not being actively updated, or they would have been rolled over to Rails3 by now. Anyhow, add me to the list of those who would be very interested in a Rail3 version. ~~~ wheels It's interesting that you say that -- and I don't mean this to be contentious -- I've genuinely had the opposite impression. Unfortunately HN's a bad place to get a sense for such things since it tends to be way ahead of the curve. (i.e. things like Node and Scala appear far more mainstream reading HN than they are in practice.) Most of the folks I know working on Rails 2 sites have only started taking Rails 3 seriously in the last month or two and don't seem to be in a hurry to upgrade. It'd be interesting to see a curve of when major rails deployment cut over (if they do). I wonder if there's a tell-tale Rails 3 signature that could be used combined with e.g. an 80legs crawl? ~~~ patio11 Not major, but just anecdotally, all of my Rails apps are 2.x and I have no plans to migrate within 6 months. ------ 3pt14159 I just finished implementing this (albeit way more crudely (runs on CRONs & Rake tasks) and most likely less accurately) for a client. After I was done I was like "hey, this could totally be its own app." One day later... ------ jpallen Services like this significantly reduce the barrier to entry for complicated web apps. I've been mulling over an idea for a while now but it would tricky to implement. With the discovery of Directed Edge and a few other services it's now a minor technical hurdle. I can shift my thinking away from how to build the technology and onto how to execute the idea well, something that hasn't had nearly enough thought yet. I think services like this making innovation much easier. ------ andrewjshults Has anyone used the underlying recommendation service (or another similar service)? This definitely seems like it could be a huge time saver for a number of sites, but it's hard to tell from the site what people's impressions of the recommendation quality is. ~~~ wheels A few links that might be useful: Shopify add-on, using the same engine (with a different face): <http://apps.shopify.com/directed-edge-expressrex> Write-up by one of our customers: [http://www.jonathanbriggs.com/ecommerce/33-of-revenue- expres...](http://www.jonathanbriggs.com/ecommerce/33-of-revenue-expressrex- recommendation-engine-recommended,814,AR.html) Quora answer by an API user (at that time had already integrated, wasn't live yet): <http://www.quora.com/How-good-is-Directed-Edge> ------ kunley Althought interesting product, it just makes me believe that many people are using ORMs simply because they don't have SQL under their belt. The query they describe as 'monstrosity' is actually easy, understandable & typical stuff to do on the relational db. When I was taught CS stuff, you consciously chose relational db just because you could do things like that. If you didn't plan it, you wouldn't use such db in the first place. My point is, why to popularize the approach that you should run away from SQL as much as possible and not tune it to your needs? Because that's what authors propose. SQL is not XX-century obsolescence and is not hard to learn. I always thought people, as me, are using ORMs to utilize some convenient coding pattern, not to be hopefully in a safe distance from all that SQL thingy. Am I so naive? ~~~ adelevie >My point is, why to popularize the approach that you should run away from SQL as much as possible and not tune it to your needs? It's a business decision. More developers will use their product if it's easier to integrate. ActiveRecord acts_as_blank plugins are fairly simple to write and even easier to use. Angry VC: Well why aren't more people using Directed Edge? DE CEO: We could have built this plugin but we want more people to be fluent in raw SQL. It's better for the craft of CS. I understand where you're coming from, but the benefit of using an ORM should be quite obvious in this case. Also, I found that the more I understood about SQL, the more pleasant it was to use ActiveRecord. Sometimes its "magic" can be a pain, but when it works, it really works well. I can't help but smile when I think of all the time it's saved me. ~~~ kunley OK I can see a business plan in it and I can't blame people for choosing one way of earning money over another. Still this is quite sign of the times we live in. If someone's putting most of his service from the pieces hosted elsewhere, what it will be? I can say that it'll be probably sloooow ;) Anyway I share your sentiment towards ORMs, with a little difference that I prefer data mapper (as a pattern) over active record (as a pattern). Active record locks you in the ghetto where the only primary source of the schema information are your artificially crafted ORM-dependent tables, where in data mapper the database itself can give this information to you via reflection of the "real" tables. This is priceless when dealing not only with legacy databases but also with effects of ad-hoc operational fixes, which in turn can save your production sometimes. Data mapper has got also object identities right. ------ metanoize I really would love to have this work with my new RoR3 app! ~~~ anarchitect Ditto! ------ dholowiski Holy crap, recommendation as a service. I had this idea 3 months ago, any chance of me getting a royalty? I was going to suggest having a free 'developer' account, but then I saw it in small writing at the bottom of the page. I'm in - this is freaking awesome! ~~~ getsat <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318849> ~~~ dholowiski Thanks, it was a joke.

Richard Stallman: A Discussion on Freedom, Privacy and Cryptocurrencies - op03 https://cointelegraph.com/news/richard-stallman-a-discussion-on-freedom-privacy-cryptocurrencies ====== suizi If a government is capable of abusing a capability, they can and will. The simple existence of cameras to monitor people is a threat.

Dear Nature - jgrahamc http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/09/dear-nature.html ====== michael_dorfman It was (predatory) pricing policies like this that led Knuth and the entire editorial board of the "Journal of Algorithms" to resign en masse, and start a new journal with the ACM. For those interested, the statement from the board can be found at <http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf>, and Knuth's (long, fascinating) letter to his colleagues can be found at <http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf> ~~~ wheels I consider the ACM just as bad. Their membership pricing is restrictive for casual users and their conferences are worse. I also consider their restrictions on who is able to become a member insulting (though they don't apply to me). Wait, so a physicist who's taken up programming in the last year isn't supposed to be able to read papers on computation? ~~~ arebop RE: restrictions on who is able to become a member: "Membership Qualifications You must satisfy one of the qualifications below: 1\. Bachelor's Degree (in any subject area); or 2\. Equivalent Level of Education; or 3\. Two years full-time employment in the IT field." --- [https://campus.acm.org/public/ProfQJ/qjprof_control.cfm?form...](https://campus.acm.org/public/ProfQJ/qjprof_control.cfm?form_type=Professional) ~~~ jgrahamc Sorry, Michael Faraday you don't have the relevant experience or degree so you can't have access to that information. Huh? You mean you attended _free_ lectures by Sir Humphrey Davy and then went on to become one of the greatest scientists of all time. Wow. Those were the days. ------ robg Furthermore, where else do content creators pay for the privilege of publishing their work (over $1000 usually per paper), then have those outrageous rates for visitors to access that work? ~~~ rglovejoy And even furthermore, most of the research being reported in these journals was paid for with taxpayer money. ~~~ dcurtis Most? Really? Government grants don't fund more than _half_ of scientific research, do they? ~~~ robg The budgets in 2008: NIH = $28B NSF = $6B That's $34B. While surely there's alot of private R&D (and more government), it's rare that I see a paper from industry, but then my field is biased against it. And there are private foundations. Does enough published research come from those private sources to outweigh publically funded studies? I wouldn't bet on it. Remember, there's a perpetual cycle in most public funding with publications. In order to get funded, you have to show a record of publishing. The priorities of private research would seem to be a very different threshold. Still, it's a solid point. You've paid for our research. Why should you have to pay to access our reports? To be fair though, I have yet to hear about complaints from journals regarding researchers who post their reports on their public websites. But that makes it hard to find things. Journals would surely squawk if there were alternative repositories. ~~~ hugh Don't forget the Department of Energy and the various military funding agencies -- they fund an awful lot of external research as well (in addition to any unpublished stuff they might be doing internally). I'm sure the Department of Agriculture etc are also handing out plenty of grants in the relevant fields as well. ~~~ robg Sure - that's what I meant by "more government". Problem is, I don't think you can simply look at their budgets - they do other things besides research - and their research efforts are likely much smaller. It would be interesting to see the research grant lines in their budgets if anyone knows or finds them. ------ jgrahamc I should have added that this sort of thing is why PLoS is so important. <http://plos.org/> ~~~ mechanical_fish I seriously believe that _this_ \-- the fact that you need access to a university library, a research grant, or several thousand dollars worth of discretionary income just to _read_ the primary source materials of the last 70 years of science -- is the reason why so much of the planet is scientifically illiterate. We ask why the hilarious notion that science is just a species of religion -- a collection of essentially arbitrary dogmas handed down by priests in white coats -- has taken such hold among the populace. But, really, what does the public see of modern science but dogma? The state of the art -- the debate, the argument, the statistical calculations, the brilliant conclusions, the idiotic conclusions, even the raw data itself -- is all locked up behind paywalls and private conferences and university tuitions. 99.5% of the world never sees actual science being done. At best, they do toy science in their classrooms and read prepackaged science-flavored PR in their magazines. The best the public can hope for is a bunch of documentaries and popularizations, some of which are great. But nearly all of them are second- hand, many of them contain major omissions, mistakes, or distortions, and they feel constrained by their need to maintain their mass audience of businesspeople on planes -- they tend to not publish graphs or, god help us, equations. Of course, most of the public wouldn't understand _Nature_ even if it became free and open tomorrow. Many of the papers are written in barely- comprehensible jargon. But that's not a coincidence; it's a side effect of allowing journals to evolve into niche publications for a handful of graduate students. Perhaps, in the world where scientific publications are available to anyone to read, journals will slowly evolve toward a standard of writing that allows interested fans to follow along. Or a genre of annotated journal articles might arise. ~~~ DaniFong Alternatively, people will just start publishing online, on blogs or wikis or something else. It's already starting to happen; math is leading the way. Much of my website is somewhere in the space between 'blog entry' and 'paper'. ~~~ jgrahamc Yes. One way around this whole 'who pays' mess would be a Wikipedia like site for papers. Anyone can publish, anyone can review. If you added voting to that and some level of authentication of users it could be very interesting. ------ aswanson Mr. Graham-Cummings, Amen. Kindly forward a similar letter to the IEEE and ACM. Regards, aswanson

Ask HN: What APIs are out there? (node knockout) - joshontheweb I registered a team for the node knockout and just found out that the api we were hoping to use can't be obtained for free. So now I'm looking for new ideas. I was hoping if I could find out what APIs are available out there for free I could come up with a new idea. What free APIs are out there? Any suggestions? ====== sim0n <http://developers.interstateapp.com/> ------ ig1 <http://www.programmableweb.com/> ~~~ joshontheweb good resource, thanks

When founders get overloaded with tasks - jkaljundi http://kaljundi.com/2013/05/22/when-founders-get-overloaded-with-tasks/ ====== onemorepassword Tip for all founders with employees from someone who's worked for start-ups for decades: fucking delegate! And I don't just mean the work, that's the easy part. Delegate parts of the decision-making process you don't have the time for to get into properly. Yes, even if it involves spending money. If I have to report to, talk you through things on multiple occasions, have to keep reminding you of them, and all the while my team is waiting for a decision, that process does not only cost you a lot of time you should be spending doing other things, it actually often costs the whole company more money than we're actually talking about spending! If you don't trust the people you've hired, you're doing it wrong. ~~~ haraball A good advice I got when delegating, was to accept the result of the task given if it was >80% of how you would have done it yourself and acceptable, without picking at the differences. That way the delegatee would feel ownership and responsibility to the result and gain confidence for future tasks. ------ patrickmay I recommend David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I use it with OmniFocus, but there are a number of other tools available. The process is straightforward (collect, process, organize, do, and review) but what I found most helpful was getting everything out of my head so I could stop worrying about forgetting anything. ------ mars I wonder how many of those 'prioritize your tasks' pieces have to get written until it finally stops.

South Korea Legislature passes medical cannabis law, first in East Asia - pizza https://mjbizdaily.com/breaking-south-korea-becomes-first-country-in-east-asia-to-legalize-medical-cannabis/ ====== pizza Note: this was over a week ago but I hadn't heard anything about it until today. It was surprising to me because I heard South Korea has a law that says no citizen may violate its laws while overseas, effectively banning South Koreans from using cannabis quite strictly. ~~~ LegendaryLegend Don't you feel that the scale slowly tipping? Anyway, no flowers or oils will be permitted. Only Epidiolex, Marinol, Sativex, and Cesamet. And unless you have HIV or cancer you’re out of luck.

Jeff Atwood: If I was starting StackOverflow today it would have runnable code - amasad https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1129176888088309760 ====== amasad Incidentally we, at Repl.it, just released this: A Q&A board with runnable and interactive code in both questions and answers: [https://repl.it/talk/ask](https://repl.it/talk/ask) It organically happened, we built a community forum for people to share their programs and we've found that users were asking questions and that people were super helpful to each other -- so naturally, we productized it. More here: [http://repl.it/blog/ask](http://repl.it/blog/ask) ~~~ jstewartmobile Repl.it: Love it.

Tesla owner says Autopilot automatically regained control after slide-video - heshiebee https://electrek.co/2019/01/05/tesla-autopilot-control-sliding-ice-video/ ====== natch I drove a Model 3 AWD to a snowy and icy area this vacation and have to say the traction control is phenomenal. I mean really astounding. I was able to climb steep hills that the car had NO right to climb, with summer tires, that locals (presumably with 4WD or AWD and snow tires, though I can't be sure, but these are people who live in snow covered mountains) were giving up on and backing out of. The trick was going very slow... in the steepest parts, as slow as a fraction of walking speed. Which admittedly won't always work if an aggressive driver relying on momentum is charging up behind you, but I was watching my back. Yeah, I may have just gotten lucky. But I think with snow tires the car would have been a beast on the same hill. Later on a wide, empty, mostly flat road covered with ice I attempted many times to break traction and induce a slide, and the vehicle maintained control at all times. Again, summer tires. I am an experienced snow/ice driver having grown up in a snowy, mountainous area. The car is seriously impressive in winter conditions. It's no coincidence that Tesla's largest sales numbers per capita are in Norway. None of this comment was about autopilot, but I believe autopilot can leverage the same traction control and couple it with autopilot features so I wouldn't be surprised if this video is not just a fluke... time will tell. ~~~ zozbot123 > The trick was going very slow... in the steepest parts, as slow as a > fraction of walking speed. Yup, that's how electric motors work: they deliver full power even at very low speeds, so you can increase torque simply by going slower - no need to "shift to a lower gear" in order to keep the engine in its high-power range! ~~~ natch Yup indeed. Not sure why you are getting downvoted but it’s not by me. ------ CodeWriter23 I’m thinking a real “Auto Pilot” would have sensed the road conditions and slowed the vehicle before it slid out of control. Still cool that it could recover from such a situation however. ------ dzhiurgis I've always had impression that in most cars of past 10 years with ESP/ESC it would be impossible to loose control like that. I've had slipped once on snowy road and ESP/ESC was immediate to regain control. I've slipped maybe 50cm sideways. Mate tried to showcase this on gravel road and it was impossible to loose control of the car (circa year 2000 Opel). How is it possible to swerve so much with Tesla? Has anyone lost control this much with ESP/ESC before? ------ Traster Firstly, if your car goes out of control whilst on cruise control don't do nothing. This driver was reckless. Secondly, do go around advertising that 'Autopilot' will do things like this - it's completely unverified and spreads a dangerous rumour. How long until some idiot tries to recreate this? ~~~ heshiebee I don't think it's impossible. There are proven techniques to recover from slides and regain car control. As human beings we tend to overreact and rarely get it right when correcting loss of control but a computer when using preprogrammed techniques and has access to many more variables can at least perform at the skill level of a pro driver. ~~~ Traster I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying if you don't know that the system is designed for that it's dumb to take the risk, and it working once is not a guarantee it's going to work twice. ------ ganeshkrishnan The first clue that it's dangerous up ahead is the rest of the cars braking and driving slower. That should have been his hint to slow down. Also, even if it's a current generation fully automated self driving car, don't leave it on auto pilot under such conditions. ------ rasz Sceptic in me says this video was trivial to fake.

Sinclair ZX81 1KB Chess vs. Stockfish Chess Engine (2018) [video] - cpeterso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3By_rdwxSg ====== lawrenceyan For a far more interesting matchup, with advanced long term oriented strategic play, consider watching a match between AlphaZero and Stockfish: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=JacRX6cKIaY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JacRX6cKIaY) The video linked here focuses on the ability of AlphaZero in making long-term optimal piece sacrifices against Stockfish, which is largely incapable of understanding these types of moves due to its hard coded bias towards losing pieces defined in its value function, causing AlphaZero to be able to consistently outmaneuver and ultimately handily defeat StockFish in almost every single game it plays against it. ~~~ Twirrim Related to AlphaZero is the Leela Chess Zero project, an independent project people from across the glob contribute CPU/GPU resources to: [https://lczero.org/#tab-elo-estimates](https://lczero.org/#tab-elo- estimates). One of the main developers on LCZero is also one of the Stockfish developers. It's been having an interesting time in various competitions, and much like the match you point out, it makes some decidedly more "human" moves, little stabs to try and get out of a draw situation that Stockfish won't due to its hard-coded biases. Here's an interesting game from TCEC 14 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhI4DKGSjtk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhI4DKGSjtk) Ultimately it came second to Stockfish, but that was the highest placing it has had so far, and they keep refining and improving it all the time. ~~~ ngcc_hk Contribute to the go site of leela zero and play using it with gui. Not sure how to start chess part. But open one is better than closed one as we can have other experiment such Facebook go, darkgo and minigo etc. Not sure there is any similar chess open net engine. ~~~ ganeshkrishnan Both stockfish and LC0 are open source. ------ endgame There were multiple chess-related submissions in SIGBOVIK 2019: [http://www.sigbovik.org/2019/](http://www.sigbovik.org/2019/) In particular, there was one that played a bunch of chess engines against each other, and came up with a better metric than Elo, for when players aren't going to change skill. ------ mynameishere Another classic mismatched match-up: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4N0Ap2rkdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4N0Ap2rkdI) ...but I was more impressed by the Atari 2600 chess game which had castling and _en passant_. Having 256 bytes seems like a good excuse to leave out such nonsense. ~~~ Someone 256 bytes of RAM, plus insane amounts of ROM (a whopping 4kB, acccording to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess)) ~~~ jchw Dang, 4kB... In 32 bit depth, you could encode that with a measily 32x32 image. Think of how many more bytes a smartphone from even several years ago has in it's framebuffer, that it is more than capable of filling 60 or even more times per frame. ------ z-cam Relevant (and mentioned at the end of the video): [https://gist.github.com/ecelis/f2428c38fd7777b20ace](https://gist.github.com/ecelis/f2428c38fd7777b20ace) ------ neilwilson I had those three mags, and I typed it in. A wonderful introduction to what you can do in Z80 machine code. Happy days ------ megablast Would much rather an explanation of what the code does to achieve this miracle. ~~~ egypturnash [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/](http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/) \- use the source, luke? also maybe some previous hn discussion may have some analysis [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151552) ------ zzo38computer I am not interested to watch the video; PGN would be more useful (with comments added), I think. Then you can print out, too, if you want to do.

InVision App launched, design high-fidelity functional prototypes - ericingram http://betacandy.com/invisionapp ====== user9876 I liked it with the exception it doesn't have assets built in, you will need another tool to build the screens and then upload. Doesn't powerpoint, slideshare or similar tools already do this? On the other hand the comments feature and Share capability is a plus which the others don't have. Balsamicq is actually lanching their web based mockup tool which haves the ability to share, comments, import assets to use (edit these), similar pricing structure. ~~~ ericingram It looks ideal for high quality prototypes versus the sketch based prototypes that come out of Balsamiq, I can see the use case for both ------ keenahn I dig it, looks like a no brainer for rapid prototyping and iteration. ------ nickfrost Awesome! I can't wait to redeem the 50% any plan for LIFE! :) ------ ericingram With a killer offer for early adopters via BetaCandy ------ startuplist Sweet deal! Looks sooo awesome!

Ask HN: What is good book about hiring developers and team management? - 8draco8 ====== vladholubiev I highly recommend this one: [https://www.hello-startup.net](https://www.hello-startup.net) > This book will teach you how to build products, technologies, and teams in a > startup environment. It's based on the experiences of the author, Yevgeniy > (Jim) Brikman, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most > successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, > LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many > others. ------ zapperdapper Joel at Joel on Software has written about "hiring developers" on his blog. That could be a good starting point. "Team management" is a very broad area. One skill I wasn't familiar with when I was a manager (I was winging it mostly) was coaching. There are a couple of great books on coaching in the workplace by Julie Starr - I've found her work very useful. You might also find it worth reading "Happy hour is nine to five" by Alexander Kjerulf. It pays to know what makes for a happy workplace as a manager, as many people switch companies due to bad managers, not the work itself! ------ cottsak More "team management" than hiring in particular [https://leanpub.com/agileforleads/](https://leanpub.com/agileforleads/) But the process and team environment that I'm encouraging in the above playbook will attract and keep the best team players. At least, that's been my experience. The book is also Free. ------ tucaz Although this is a very good question it is at the same time one that is very broad. What do you want to know specifically? Hiring processes? How to deal with people? How to handle tough situations? From experience I can tell that most of the time by speaking the truth and respecting people you will be fine and get amazing results, but just like your question this answer is too broad to be useful. ------ mindcrash In regard to management: \- The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford (IT Revolution Press, 2013) \- Manage It! by Johanna Rothman (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2007) \- Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (O' Reilly, 2012) \- Managing Humans by Michael Lopp (Apress, 2012) ------ cottonseed For management: Manager's Path by Camille Fournier: [https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating- Grow...](https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating- Growth/dp/1491973897) ------ black_cat I've got several recommendation about this book "Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers", hope it might help

6 Reasons to Stop Charging by the Hour - davidw http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/07/6-reasons-stop-charging-by-hour.html ====== davidw The suggestion of what to do instead: > "The alternative to billing by the hour is to pick a few things you’re > really good at”and that your customers ask for”and to come up with a > standard formula and a standard price for delivering them. Don’t think it > would work in your business? The practice of law is arguably the most > addicted to billing by the hour, yet a Toronto-based lawyer named Jane > Harvey has a standard set of services for which she charges a flat rate."

Rails 5 Released - haven https://github.com/rails/rails/releases/tag/v5.0.0 ====== okket No blog post yet, but it's on Ruby Gems [https://rubygems.org/gems/rails/versions/5.0.0](https://rubygems.org/gems/rails/versions/5.0.0) Update: Blog post [http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2016/6/30/Rails-5-0-final/](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2016/6/30/Rails-5-0-final/)

YouTube: The Big Copyright Lie - nickb http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000972.html ====== cstejerean Well, it's interesting what YouTube is doing. Their policy is simply there to cover themselves legally and shift the blame to the users. However this opt- out policy allows them to host the videos and continue making money (or at least getting traffic) from them until the copyright owner calls to complain. In YouTube's defense, it's nearly impossible to verify the copyright of user supplied content and since YouTube is simply offering to provide hosting of user supplied content it shouldn't be liable for copyright infringements just as your ISP is not liable if you decide to post illegal material on their servers. They will remove the material (and possibly terminate your account) if someone reports the violation.

What are successful startups that raised a seed round from family and friends? - TheAntiEgo ====== nux1093 HYPR Corp just raised $3M in VC and apparently have some large enterprise customers. Their first round of $800k was entirely friends and family.

Google unveils 'Solve for X' website, hints at TED-like think tank - paulsilver http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/6/2774727/google-solve-for-x-think-tank ====== benologist Why give The Verge the traffic for summarizing Android Police's story? [http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/06/the-secret- google-x-...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/06/the-secret-google-x-lab- may-be-revealed-today-feb-6-as-solve-for-x-website-and-youtube-channel-go- live-video/) ------ timinman If it is Google, why doesn't it look like Google? Why is it 'wesolveforx', and not solveforx.google.com. Why PHP? Why do Whois records say the site belongs to: Registrant: TBA Global, LLC 535 N. Brand Blvd suite 800 Glendale, CA 91203 US Domain Name: THINKBELIEVEACT.COM ~~~ turing The Whois record for wesolveforx.com shows Google as the registrant (<http://www.whois.net/whois/wesolveforx.com>). TBA is a marketing agency that Google is (presumably) working with. ------ WestCoastJustin Site: <http://www.wesolveforx.com/> G+ Post: [https://plus.google.com/115560212683913825996/posts/57dD3pjz...](https://plus.google.com/115560212683913825996/posts/57dD3pjzebA) ------ DrCatbox And here I was thinking that google stepped up its advertising games by offering something like recaptcha but for ads. No paywall, just ad-wall, an ad urging you to type the words "the product X is the best"/"X will grow your...muscles" before you can access the content. ~~~ rachelbythebay Was it HTTP code 402, "payment required"? If so, look out. There may be more ahead. ------ turing <http://www.youtube.com/user/wesolveforx/videos> It looks like the talks are beginning to be made public.

Number of neurons doesn't explain superiority of the human brain - FiReaNG3L http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/06/08/origins.brain ====== niels_olson See, this is a major problem with fee-for-article access to journals. 10 journalists talk to the author (or does the author contact the journalists?), the journalists feel confident enough to write an article, there's a headline, some callouts, and then there's some metaheadline on another site with commentary virtually unrelated to the original details. For the sweet love of . . . did anyone _not_ think that the synaptic structure of a human neuron might be a _smidge_ more complex than that of a fruit fly? What's really sad is that most people here could understand the article perfectly well if they could only access it. If you want to be understood, publish in an open-access journal, like PLoS. Here's the [link to the paper]([http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.213...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2135.html;jsessionid=9FB91A9B67EDC7E9E01952D3603B3BEA)), and the abstract, below >Evolutionary expansion and anatomical specialization of synapse proteome complexity >Richard D Emes1,6, Andrew J Pocklington2,6, Christopher N G Anderson3,6, Alex Bayes3, Mark O Collins3, Catherine A Vickers4,5, Mike D R Croning3, Bilal R Malik2, Jyoti S Choudhary3, J Douglas Armstrong2 & Seth G N Grant3 >Abstract >Understanding the origins and evolution of synapses may provide insight into species diversity and the organization of the brain. Using comparative proteomics and genomics, we examined the evolution of the postsynaptic density (PSD) and membrane-associated guanylate kinase (MAGUK)-associated signaling complexes (MASCs) that underlie learning and memory. PSD and MASC orthologs found in yeast carry out basic cellular functions to regulate protein synthesis and structural plasticity. We observed marked changes in signaling complexity at the yeast-metazoan and invertebrate-vertebrate boundaries, with an expansion of key synaptic components, notably receptors, adhesion/cytoskeletal proteins and scaffold proteins. A proteomic comparison of Drosophila and mouse MASCs revealed species-specific adaptation with greater signaling complexity in mouse. Although synaptic components were conserved amongst diverse vertebrate species, mapping mRNA and protein expression in the mouse brain showed that vertebrate-specific components preferentially contributed to differences between brain regions. We propose that the evolution of synapse complexity around a core proto-synapse has contributed to invertebrate-vertebrate differences and to brain specialization. ~~~ psyklic Actually, the complexity of synaptic structure between species is not obvious (and hence, this is one reason the article made it into Nature Neuroscience, a highly regarded journal). Since the neuron is the fundamental unit of the nervous system in all species, it is a decent prediction that it is of the same "complexity" across all species. I do agree that articles should be published in open-access journals. However, most people here probably could not understand the article well (no offense to HN readers!). You really do need a very good biology background to even understand the experiments or to interpret the conclusions and their reliability. In addition, scientific articles are very dry, and if a journalist did not simplify it for you, you likely (1) would have missed the big ideas (which are often phrased in scientific jargon), and most importantly, (2) would have never read the article in the first place! ~~~ niels_olson I suspect this is in Nature Neuroscience at least as much for it the technical challenge behind the research as anything to do with the big idea. I would also hesitate to make any claim as to whether or not the average HN reader can, today, understand the article. If I was going to identify any shortcoming in their ability, I would focus on our educational systems with their obscene focus on hyper-specialization ("I specialize in the left kidney . . . no, no, I don't do right kidneys.") It has become increasingly my experience, as someone with training in physics, military, medicine, and computers, that one of our major problems as a society is how uninvolved we are with anything, _anything_ , outside our hyperfocused domains, or the spoonfed news we get from the MSM. I like the idea PG expressed about the nature of Boston: you feel like you really _should_ read those <classics | groundbreaking studies | revolutionary opinions>. ------ jackchristopher It's the quantity _and_ quality of connections. We're more intelligent because we have more neurons _and_ those neurons are better organized. Problem is, we don't know what "better organized" looks like. ------ berryg One step closer to The Singularity? Maybe Ray Kurzweil is right with his predictions on the growth of technology and knowledge.

“No handshakes, please”: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus [Feb] - exolymph https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21128209/coronavirus-fears-contagion-how-infection-spreads ====== dekhn I knew a (very, very) prominent VC who hasn't been shaking hands for years (he did fist bumps, kind of funny to fist bump a billionaire).

What are programming languages for? - lisper http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-languages-for.html ====== andreyf Is this not sniping from the sidelines? Paul has proposed program size as a metric for the power of programming languages. Ron criticizes, but doesn't suggest anything better (other than "make creating programs easier", or "have well-organized and easy-to-use libraries") - he seems to argue that there is no perfect metric. Sure. Maybe. But you can't get far with such skepticism. Personally, I think Paul is enticed by too simple a rule-of-thumb when he defines such an easy metric. Instead of settling for something as catchy as "programs should be short", defining the power of languages may be better approached from a psychological perspective. Programming is about bridging the gap between our mental representations and the computer's representations of instructions for (one) interacting with users and (two) manipulating data. A better (albeit more complex/open-ended) metric would be to "maximize the utilization of our mental structures in a formal language". For example, abstraction is an obvious way our minds understand the world, and hence we have all kinds of programming tricks to express abstraction in code. We should be asking questions like "what other ways do our minds comprehend the world?", and writing languages which mold to those ways. How could we express metaphor in a formal language? Now that I think about it, maybe I'm proposing a slight generalization to Paul's metric - a language is powerful if it can express problems using the least number of mental structures. But code trees are easier to count than mental structures, so I guess we should stick to those for now. ~~~ gibsonf1 TIME Since time is the most limited human resource, maybe the best metric for the most powerful language would be that programming language which, overall, saves the most time in creating, maintaining, and improving a program. Using "saving time' as the standard of value, PG's use of fewer nodes and less lengthy names both help in creating programs with less time, so ARC seems to be right on. I intuitively like the lengthier names in CL for readability, but at the end of the day, you still have to not only know them all through memorization, you also have to know the order of parameters and keys, which is not consistent among all functions/macros in CL. So having shorter names to memorize, and more importantly fewer, would definitely save time in the learning stage. The question I don't know the answer to is how fast can ARC be changed, maintained, and improved, but I'm guessing this will also be faster. ~~~ andreyf _TIME_ Agreed. These are all correct ways of defining the same thing (the "power" of languages), and we need to pick whichever is useful depending on what we're trying to do. If we're trying to put a precise measure on the power of a language, PG's treelength seems to do the job perfectly. But how do we design a language which would create programs with the smallest tree length, or which would take the least time to write it? To answer this, it's best to consider how easily our basic mental structures can be expressed in the language. The concept of sets, lists, map, and reduce exist in our lives whether we know program or not. If a language contains or lets us easily express other embodied mental structures such as relations, tags, partitions, etc. easily, it will be more powerful than languages which don't. ~~~ bayareaguy I think the problem with the Power=Work/Time approach for programming languages is you can never get people to agree on how to measure Time. Whose time? What does it include? ------ JesseAldridge Great post indeed. Also, APL is some crazy shit. I found this quote (from its wikipedia page) interesting: "Advocates of APL also claim that they are far more productive with APL than with more conventional computer languages, and that working software can be implemented in far less time and with far fewer programmers than using other technology. APL lets an individual solve harder problems faster. Also, being compact and terse, APL lends itself well to larger scale software development as complexity arising from a large number of lines of code can be dramatically reduced. Many APL advocates and practitioners view programming in standard programming languages, such as COBOL and Java, as comparatively tedious." ~~~ bayareaguy Ken Iverson's Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought" should be interesting to you and others here, particularly those who subscribe to the "implementation as specification" idea. <http://www.jdl.ac.cn/turing/pdf/p444-iverson.pdf> Some of the ancedotes here are good too: <http://keiapl.info/anec/> ~~~ comatose_kid Thanks for the links. I especially liked the following observation: "During the APL75 conference in Pisa Ken visited the Leaning Tower. He pronounced it the first software project -- late and overbudget, and from early on everyone could see that it was going to be a disaster, but by then the project was too far along and there was nothing to do but plow ahead." ------ stcredzero If programming languages are for making programming easier, then it's clearly a mistake to use just one language to write programs. Different languages are optimal for different areas of concern. Rob Pike spent 6 months writing a language optimized for concurrency, then wrote an entire windowing system in just 300 lines. If a programming language is a tool, then people have been advocating doing everything with a hammer. What if we had a way of combining many different languages, so that each area of concern could be written in the language which is optimal for it? I think one of the strengths of Lisp, is that it's its own abstract syntax tree. In some ways it's more like a substrate for implementing other languages than a conventional computer language. What if we had a substrate that let us use multiple languages together? Google Tech Talk on Newsqueak & High level abstractions for concurrency: [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344&#...</a> ------ danteembermage I think I am willing to grant that "making the creation of programs easier" is probably closer to what language design should achieve than "make programs shorter". However, the two are strongly correlated, so by selecting make programs shorter as the axiom you do end up using a less appealing objective, though not by much. However, Make Programs Shorter is vastly superior in another regard; it is explicitly measurable. When faced with a design choice, whether or not it Made Programming Easier might take lots of careful consideration on your part, and users of the language might have very strong opinions about whether Make Programming Easier was achieved. If you're counting characters and tokens, design changes instantly and verifiably achieve the objective or they don't. No fuss, no second guessing. Or, more crudely, selling your map to buy more decimals of latitude and longitude is not going to get you there. ~~~ david927 I've worked a long time in a completely different vein, under the premise that language design should focus on making programs manageable. Making them shorter certainly promotes that in many respects, but destroys it in other respects. And the notion of "making the creation of programs easier" is to me, the completely wrong premise. That ends up being a wonderful derivative of making them manageable, but should never the goal. Programs are easy to create in BASIC, for example. They're just not scalable, which is another way of saying they lack manageability, which is something that only shows itself as the system's complexity expands. To paraphrase Alan Kay, you can build a doghouse with cardboard and plastic, but you couldn't build a house like that. ------ sutro Great post, lisper. ~~~ lisper Thanks!

Ask HN: How to determine company valuation? - mailarchis We are a technology start up in photography domain based out of Europe. Our target customer segment are professional and semi professional photographers.<p>The team comprises of the CEO (Senior Executive with more than 15 years experience in Sales/Marketing) and 3 Software Developers with 3-4 years experience.<p>We launched two months back and have got good response. (However, we are not profitable yet). The seed investment into the company is close to 100K USD and we are trying to raise more funds now.<p>I was hoping to get an idea on different ways in which the valuation of a company can be calculated especially the ones that are in the stage as ours. ====== pg At this stage there's no calculation. Market price is just a reflection of how much confidence investors have in you. ~~~ mailarchis Thanks very much for the answer pg.

Go server starter - AquiGorka https://github.com/AquiGorka/go-server-starter ====== brudgers If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) ~~~ AquiGorka I will definitely share it that way as soon as I fix one issue.

Hows my first site (Studentg homepage for digital design) - fally http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17301683/index.html ====== fally thanks this is a good reference. i guess my page is on the right track then ------ fally i made everything myself, no copy paste! ~~~ aksx i made something similar <http://homepage.ep.io> (no copy paste!!)

Valleywag: Bow down and Worship Xobni's Party Throwing Skills - gaborcselle http://valleywag.com/tech/party-report/bow-down-and-worship-xobnis-party+throwing-skills-291473.php There's no such thing as bad press. ====== staunch Can't miss these two, they're damn funny: Part 1) [http://www.flickr.com/photos/86921622@N00/1162778055/in/set-...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/86921622@N00/1162778055/in/set-72157601527180876/) Part 2) [http://www.flickr.com/photos/86921622@N00/1163633584/in/set-...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/86921622@N00/1163633584/in/set-72157601527180876/) I've been a Xobni-skeptic since I saw the ads for product managers/QA people, office, etc. They appear to be doing a lot of obviously wrong stuff. I know they're smart and I do wish them luck, but it looks to me as if they're mostly interested in enjoying the funded startup ride. ~~~ brezina I found our office on craiglist. It is dirt cheap for SF. Oh, and we negotiated the contract so that we haven't paid a dime for the first 3 months. When you are making another sticky notes web app QA might not matter, but when you are making fundamental business tools, I think it is one of _the_ most important roles in a company. ~~~ mattmaroon Smash ------ pg That _was_ a good party. One of the things they discovered was that anywhere.fm is the perfect stereo for a party, if you put it up on a big monitor. ~~~ gaborcselle Thanks Paul! Sorry for making you endure Windows. ------ augy If that was their "we just got an office" party, imagine what it will be like if they go ipo. Fingers crossed. ~~~ mattmaroon Jessica promised to do keg stands if any of her flock IPOed. I'm hoping we'll be the ones to do it, but if another Y C startup beats us there we're definitely still holding her to her word (and a keg). ~~~ augy I hope you do too. Can I RSVP right now? ------ blored XOBNI IS AMAZING AT GENERATING PRESS. They have an article written about them in valleywag pre-launch. Way to go Matt, Adam and co. You guys are truly a cut above. ------ dawie Good to see that you invited some girls

Ask HN: How do you make your website mobile friendly? - iworkforthem I am working on the css for my new website, one of my consideration is that it has to be mobile friendly, much like posterous.com and avc.com ... Their website look awesome on my iPhone. Here's something I dun quite get.<p>At AVC, they include multiple css to make to make it mobile friendly. &#60;link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /&#62; &#60;link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/touch.css" type="text/css" media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" /&#62; &#60;link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/touch.css" type="text/css" media="only screen and (min-device-width: 481px) and (max-device-width: 1024px)" /&#62; &#60;link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/print.css" type="text/css" media="print" /&#62;<p>Nothing of this sort with posterous.com... I could be wrong here. Not sure if anyone else has got experience making their website mobile friendly, if so, please share. ====== geoffpado Check out the Safari Web Content Guide (<http://cl.ly/2pug>). It's written to specifically target the iPhone/iPod touch, but most of the information applies straight across to the Android platform as well. It has information on conditional CSS, viewport sizes, etc., that will help you optimize your site for mobile devices. ~~~ iworkforthem Nice! Seems like a lot of websites (Smashing Magazine and Abduzeedo to name a couple) are using Mobify -- <http://www.mobify.me/> ... I have yet to try it out. Can't comment on it.

Google OAuth API Is Down - iooi This is the only Google status page I can find and it&#x27;s all green still: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.cloud.google.com ====== Japhy_Ryder Google only hires the best of the best. Looks like all of that algorithm memorizing is working out really well. ------ aaronharnly My go-to sources for crowdsourced "is it just me" while waiting for official status page updates are: * [https://twitter.com/search?q=Google%20login](https://twitter.com/search?q=Google%20login) * [https://downdetector.com/status/google](https://downdetector.com/status/google) ------ mrobins Finally up on Google Cloud status: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/developers- console/...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/developers- console/19008) ------ iooi From the status page: We are currently experiencing an issue with authentication to Google App Engine sites, the Google Cloud Console, Identity Aware Proxy, and Google OAuth 2.0 endpoints. ------ be_erik Yup, seeing 500s on some internal products that use Google as an auth wall. Mostly for users that are logged out. ------ degrews Using an incognito session on Chrome worked for me. ------ malayhm No status on their official status pages yet ------ zackify Seeing the same here ------ cweagans Same here. ------ hrowawayyyyyyy Same here ------ frostyj plus one

Why 37Signals misunderstands 'Fail Early, Fail Fast' - marcamillion http://marcgayle.com/2010/06/03/fail-early-fail-fast-explained/ ====== ecaradec I definitly agree, people disagreing with fail fast are taking it too literaly, ignoring the spirit of it. It's not about failing, it's about confronting to reality.

It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux - yigit http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1 ====== ramy_d Valve Corporation has today rolled out their Steam Mac OS X client to the general public and confirmed something we have been reporting for two years: the Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine are coming to Linux. This news is coming days after we discovered proof in Steam's Mac OS X Client of Linux support and subsequently found more Linux references and even the unreleased Steam Linux client. The day has finally come and Linux gamers around the world have a reason to rejoice, as this is the biggest news for the Linux gaming community that sees very few tier-one titles. Those enthusiasts within the Phoronix community even managed to get the unreleased Steam Linux client running up to a partially drawn UI and other modifications, but now that work can stop as Valve is preparing to officially release the Steam Linux client from where they will start to offer Linux native games available for sale. For all those doubting our reports that Source/Steam would be coming to Linux, you can find confirmation in the UK's Telegraph and other news sites. An announcement from Valve itself is imminent. Found already within the Steam store are Linux-native games like Unreal Tournament 2004, World of Goo, and titles from id Software such as Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Doom 3. Now that the Source Engine is officially supported on Linux, some Source-based games will be coming over too. Will we finally see Unreal Tournament 3 surface on Linux too? Only time will tell, but it is something we speculated back in 2008. Postal III is also being released this year atop the Source Engine and it will be offering up a native client. We have confirmed that Valve's latest and popular titles like Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Team Fortress 2 are among the first of the Steam Linux titles, similar to the Mac OS X support. The released Linux client should be available by the end of summer. Similar to Valve's strategy with Mac OS X, it's expected that they too will be providing Linux game releases on the same day as Windows / Mac OS X for their new titles and that there will be first-rate support across all platforms. Portal II should mark the first of these efforts. This is terrific news considering the last major tier-one game release with a native Linux client was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars back in 2007. There was also supposed to be Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux with claims of it still being worked on, but two years later that has yet to see the light of day, except now it could with the release of the Steam middleware. In the past few years there has just been less-known game releases like Shadowgrounds: Survivor via Linux Game Publishing (LGP) and then the community-spawned open- source games like Alien Arena 2009, Nexuiz, and Sauerbraten, but what Valve has just done should prove to forever revolutionize the Linux gaming scene. Our friends at Unigine Corp though will now face greater competition in the area of developing the best game engine that is supported on Linux. The Unigine developer is quite visually advanced (and at the same time, very demanding on the hardware) while their developers are quite friendly towards Linux, but to this point besides a couple of great OpenGL benchmarks (found in the Phoronix Test Suite), they have yet to really touch any Linux gamers -- but that will change once Primal Carnage and other titles are released. We are so grateful that Valve has finally publicly confirmed via the Telegraph (and another pending announcement is likely) that they are bringing Steam and the Source Engine to Linux as this should provide a huge opportunity for the Linux distributions and other Linux stakeholders to prove their viability against Windows and can begin attracting gamers if successfully leveraged. We have already shown that in terms of OpenGL performance, Ubuntu 10.04 is on par with Windows 7 for ATI/AMD and NVIDIA graphics and that Linux is a faster gaming platform to Mac OS X. Stay tuned for plenty more coverage. Of the six years that Phoronix has been around providing many exclusive news stories and Linux hardware/software coverage, Valve's move with the Steam Linux client / Source engine will likely prove to be the most significant event and opportunity that the Linux desktop has been provided at least since the time of the initial Linux netbook push, if not since the entire time we've been around. Only time will tell though if Linux vendors and stakeholders will fully capitalize upon the opportunity that has the potential of greatly expanding the Linux desktop user-base. ~~~ ramy_d page takes for ever to load, here's the article ~~~ ytilibitapmoc Thank-you from those of us behind brain-dead filtering proxies... :-) ~~~ oomkiller Would you rather the proxy be sentient like GLaDOS? ;) ~~~ jrockway As long as the morality core doesn't fall off. ------ krschultz So now Linux users: BUY BUY BUY. I'll be sure to buy a few things from it once it is available even if I'm not likely to play many games. Passively supporting this isn't very helpful, vote with your wallet. The more money they make the better it is for Linux in the future. ~~~ jws Inside the Steam program: Failed to load web page (unknown error).-324 Failed to load web page (unknown error). Then after much reloading a simply black screen. It seems they did not plan to service the spike. ~~~ TeHCrAzY Unlikey, the load from this is being produced during the low in thier daily performance graphs. You can confirm that by googling 'steam stats' or something similar (ill dig up the link when i'm off my mobile). Steam internally uses webkit, perhaps your os is missing something it needs. ~~~ TeHCrAzY As promised: <http://store.steampowered.com/stats/> ------ wingo I feel like an out-of-touch old man. (Getting there, perhaps?) Both the article and the comments assume a baseline level of understanding ("Steam Mac OS X client"; "Linux support"; suitably vague nouns). Searching helps me resolve these words, to some degree; but I still don't know what this thing is (that is not a quotidian HN topic). I'm sure Lisp implementation articles are similarly opaque to non-initiates. But, um, a little help, please? :) ~~~ johnswamps Steam is sort of like an app-store for games which only ran on Windows for a long time. You buy games on Steam and can then download the games on any computer you install Steam on. There's a bunch of other stuff such as being able to talk to your friends, multiplayer, and keeping track of achievements. Valve (the creators of Steam) are porting it to Mac and Linux. This is not, however, sufficient to play all games on Steam, since games from many companies are on Steam and not all of them are interested in making their games cross-platform. So, in addition, Valve is porting their Source engine, which powers games such as Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal to Mac and Linux so that those players will able to play them. They will of course be able to play any other games on Steam that are class- platform. ------ sirn Phoronix's source seems to be from the Telegraph.co.uk's article[1]. While I don't doubt Valve will release Steam for Linux, I'd wait for the slightly more official statement before declaring it's official. [1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7715209/Steam-for-Mac-goes-live.html ~~~ yangman What's more, the second source cited is basically a copy-n-paste of the Telegraph article. Phoronix can pretend to be a reliable primary source all it wants, but it's questionable stuff like this that makes its reporting a complete joke amongst the X and DRI/Mesa development community. ~~~ _delirium I've had a similar impression. There's more than one time I've read a Phoronix article and thought: "Finally, an article on this subject! Only, this one isn't very good." ------ jerf Any idea how this is going to interact with DRM? Because I might buy games from Steam, but the idea that I'd put DRM on my Linux system is little more than snicker-worthy. (Sure, just let me compile that into my kernel for you, no sweat....) ~~~ windsurfer The DRM is, for the most part, userspace and is mainly an authenticaton scheme to determine if you are authorized to play the game. ~~~ jerf Where is your information from? I can't seem to Google anything up. "For the most part, userspace" doesn't really mean much. It is difficult to imagine the authentication scheme that wouldn't be fairly trivial to crack, given that I have full control over the entire software stack from top to bottom, including not merely the kernel but my choice of hypervisor. ~~~ ptomato Steam is relatively trivial to crack on Windows as well. Certainly nothing has prevented the various Steam games from being cracked wide open and distributed independently. ------ ericz The only reason some of my friends still dual boot Windows is to play games. Cheers for one of the biggest gaming developments in Linux. Now hopefully there will be others that follow! ------ javanix I honestly wasn't sure if this day would ever come. After all, if OS X, with all of Apple's resources, couldn't wrap up much developer support, what hope did Linux have? Absolutely fantastic news! ~~~ mrcharles It's not really news yet. Valve won't officially get behind it until such a point as they can be sure that it will function solidly on the majority of major Linux platforms. Even beyond that, they'll want to make sure there's a market for it, and that's going to be the harder part. I expect any linux stuff done so far is exploratory rather than a guarantee. I mean, the support that's there could be just one or two guys noodling around. At one point in the life of Neverwinter Nights, there was a BeOS port done by a BeOS fanatic in the Bioware office. Sadly, until there's an official announcement, I wouldn't get too excited. ~~~ apakatt Check the image from the Mac Steam announcement: [http://media.steampowered.com/apps/mac/MacSteam_AlfredJasonG...](http://media.steampowered.com/apps/mac/MacSteam_AlfredJasonGabe.jpg) The guy has TWO penguins on his desk! That must count as an official announcement as well, right? ;) ------ k0eselitz Heh. It's "official" - if by "official" you mean "not official at all." ------ rbreve I downloaded Valve for OSX , but there are not many games for mac right now, all the good games are only available for windows ------ papachito There's nothing official yet from Valve. ~~~ timdorr FTA: "An announcement from Valve itself is imminent." So, you found evidence of it, even got it running, but all over unofficial channels. This is about as official as a table is an banana. ~~~ ComputerGuru _a_ banana. Sorry. >.< ~~~ timdorr Whoops. Wrote another analogy (table is an elephant, I believe) and then changed it without updating my grammar. ------ bitwize Huh? Games? On _my_ Linux? ~~~ eru Unix was one of the first operation systems to come with games out of the box. Linux proudly follows that tradition. Some other interesting commercial games for Linux are available at <http://www.wolfire.com/humble> ~~~ ugh That may be true but Linux still sucks as a gaming platform. That’s just how it is and facing up to that reality might help. ~~~ Jach Because of lack of professional quality games, lack of external controller drivers (not sure how common this is), lack of DirectX? Please be more specific with its suckiness, since it seems like you think the problem is some inherent issue with Linux itself, and I'm not aware of anyone denying those few problems I listed. I'm not sure I'll buy the lack of users willing to pay money, but that's not a problem with the platform anyway. ~~~ ugh Because of a lack of professional quality games. That’s not a inherent problem with Linux and I never claimed there to be one (I honestly don’t know whether there is one). ~~~ code_duck There might be issues with sound subsystems across distributions (or um.. within distributions), but games on Linux perform quite well and are indistinguishable from other platforms (I spent a good bit of time playing UT 2003 on Linux, and it works perfectly). ------ swah I don't understand, why is this program valuable to be open-source? What does it do?

Ask HN: Why did I get printed the wrong boarding pass? - passenger09 I took a flight from Montreal to Frankfurt. Today i checked my printed boarding pass (apparently the first time) and noticed it is completely wrong.<p>things which seems to be in common: Flight number: AC 8742 (printed flight) AC 874 (my flight)<p>levenshtein distance of printed name: 12, m = 15, n = 12<p>boarding pass: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;56ZRhOI<p>Seems like the only thing in common is that the boarding passes where probably printed at the same time.<p>Any suggestions what can possibly go wrong when a computer system prints a boarding pass, based on the scanned passport?<p>In case you feel like that could be your lines of code, let us know :) ====== joezydeco You took a flight from Montreal to Frankfurt, but your boarding pass says Montreal to Bathurst, New Brunswick. A handy way to look up flight numbers and destinations is an airline's timetable. Here is the one published by Air Canada: [https://services.aircanada.com/portal/rest/timetable/pdf/ac-...](https://services.aircanada.com/portal/rest/timetable/pdf/ac- timetable-en.pdf) So, flight 8742 is from Montreal to Bathurst. That matches up. The boarding pass confirms that. And flight 874 is indeed a flight from Montreal to Frankfurt, as your post explains. If I had to guess, your flight was a short hop from Montreal to Bathurst to pick up more passengers and possibly fuel/cargo on the way to Frankfurt. Your boarding pass says 8742 since that's the first leg of the trip that you boarded in Montreal. Does any of this match up? Did you change planes in Bathurst? ~~~ quickthrower2 Nice spot. Could be it. It would be unusual not to be given both legs' boarding passes at check in. Unless you have to unboard and board again at the intermediate airport. That happened to me in Singapore airport once (scary as only had < 1hr to do it), but that was 2005. ~~~ joezydeco You won't get a second boarding pass if your itinerary means you sit on the plane during the stopover. YUL-ZBF would be a domestic flight so there's no need to clear the plane with customs and then reboard it. ------ gesman My first reaction thought would be to ask airline. My last reaction would be to ask hacker news. ~~~ passenger09 i already asked the airline but i don't expect technical details :) ------ gregjor The universe does not work perfectly. ~~~ passenger09 how do you know that?

Official Statement Regarding BitGrail Insolvency - dsr12 https://medium.com/@nanocurrency/official-statement-regrading-bitgrail-insolvency-ed4422bf274b ====== rtdaly This is exactly why hardware wallets are so very important when dealing with cryptocurrencies, don't keep funds on an exchange that you can't afford to lose. That being said, intentionally misleading customers for the period and extent that exchange owner Francesco Firano did is beyond unacceptable. I sincerely hope the community will promptly abandon BitGrail as there is no way to trust them ever again.

DeepMind moves to TensorFlow - hektik http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/04/deepmind-moves-to-tensorflow.html ====== aab0 This is great news! One of the most intimidating things about getting started with deep learning if you want to understand and extend cutting-edge work is the Tower of Babel situation: aside from mastering some quite difficult and opaque concepts, you need to learn multiple frameworks in multiple languages, some of which are quite uncommon. (Want to use Torch? You have to learn Lua. Want to use Theano or Caffe? Need to learn Python too. Need to implement optimizations? Hope you've mastered C++.) And DeepMind's research output was a major reason to need to use Torch, and hence have to learn Lua. But by switching over to TensorFlow, this means you now have one language to learn which is supported well by all the major frameworks - Python - and you can benefit from several frameworks (Theano, Keras, TensorFlow). So the language barrier is reduced and you can focus on the framework and actual NN stuff. Further, this will also drive consolidation onto TensorFlow, reducing the framework mental overhead. As long as TF is up to the job, and it reportedly is, this will benefit the deep learning community considerably. I'd been wondering myself what language and framework I should focus on when I start studying NNs, and this settles it for me: Python and TensorFlow. ~~~ argonaut You're overstating things a bit. There has never been a "need to learn multiple frameworks in multiple languages." As a beginner, you pick one and go with that (as evidenced by the fact that... you've picked one!). This announcement doesn't change that situation. Nobody _needs_ to use multiple frameworks unless you're someone (not a beginner) who wants to be able to take the code from research papers or something. ~~~ tedmiston Researchers need multiple frameworks because the feature sets aren't the same in each. I haven't done anything with deep learning, but I worked in a research lab with others who did. On the image processing side, we prototyped code in OpenCV, both with Python and C++, and MATLAB (with toolboxes) regularly because of this. At the end of the day they have a limited amount of time and just want to test their idea the fastest way they can. ~~~ argonaut I don't think this is the reason. You can do pretty much anything in Torch/Theano. But, researchers are lazy and writing code is only a means to an end. They will shamelessly copy/hack as much open source code as possible, so if a framework has some quick module for a desired algorithm, or if a researcher wrote their paper in some framework, and you want to build off that paper, then you'll just copy that. ~~~ tedmiston That's definitely correct. One related unsolved problem in that type of research is getting people to share their actual code. Especially when multiple universities are at the bleeding edge in a field, they often publish just enough [1] to prove their point without giving everyone else the same foundation to build on _easily_. Even in science it gets political... who knew. 1: i.e., just their algorithms, or their code without very useful implementation-level optimizations ~~~ argonaut In ML, you can generally email the authors and very often they will be willing to send you (their really crappy) code. Although it probably helped that I sent these emails from my academic email address. ~~~ pacala > There has never been a "need to learn multiple frameworks in multiple > languages." > you can generally email the authors and very often they will be willing to > send you (their really crappy) code. Code obtained from multiple authors, or even from the same author but different time periods, is code written using multiple frameworks in multiple languages. Standardizing on Python / TensorFlow reduces the risk of cognitive load along one's journey and is likely to speed up the field. If speed is what the field was missing :) ------ fchollet If anyone wants to switch to TensorFlow but misses the Torch interface, you will always have Keras: [https://github.com/fchollet/keras](https://github.com/fchollet/keras) ~~~ Smerity I also recommend reading @fchollet's guide on integrating Keras and TensorFlow, especially for those wanting to implement novel components at a lower level :) [http://blog.keras.io/keras-as-a-simplified-interface-to- tens...](http://blog.keras.io/keras-as-a-simplified-interface-to-tensorflow- tutorial.html) ------ argonaut I like these comments on the Reddit discussion: it's not like DeepMind ever really open sourced anything (other than their Atari code from years ago). Another a Google team switching over to a product maintained by another Google team makes a lot of sense for the team. They get instant development/deployment/infra support and huge control over development roadmap. Hopefully this motivates them to open source much more... ------ vonnik To be clear, TensorFlow is about a lot more than deep learning. It's a distributed math library, a bit like Theano. It's ultimate rivals in the Python ecosystem are Numpy and SciPy and even Sci-kit Learn. You'll see the TF team implement a lot more algorithms on top of their numerical computing eventually. (In the JVM world, I work on ND4J -- [http://ND4J.org](http://ND4J.org) \-- and we see a lot of similarities, which is why I bring this up.) ~~~ IshKebab So is Torch though. Besides, deep learning is mostly just matrix operations anyway, so you're kind of saying "TensorFlow is about a lot more than matrix operations - it's a matrix library too"... ~~~ vonnik Kind of. Deep learning is about more than matrix operations, and matrix operations are useful for applications other than deep learning, so I believe the distinction is worth making. Just like with programming languages, which may all be used for the same application, it's all about what you make easy to do, and what you make difficult. I'm saying the TF's intention is to make many things beyond DL easy, although people think of it chiefly as a DL library atm. ------ SixSigma Stanford's CS224d: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing uses TensorFlow. Although they have only just got up to the part where they are beginning to use it. Here's the "Introduction to TensorFlow" lecture. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8Y2_Cq2X5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8Y2_Cq2X5s) You don't need to watch the previous 6 lectures to make sense of it but it would help if you knew a bit (but not super detail) about neural nets e.g. the terms forward propagation, backward propagation and gradient descent of neural networks mean something to you. [http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html](http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html) ~~~ gamapuna Slightly off topic but for anyone who is taking this course ...are the materials only related to NLP or are the techniques much more broadly applicable to other areas of deep learning (cursory look of the syllabus suggests this but would be great if someone who is actually taking this course can comment) ~~~ SixSigma I've watched all 8 available videos, which is as far as my knowledge goes but it has been background on gradients, calculating derivatives, introduction to word vectors and how they relate to each other, recurrent neural nets and how to push time series through, introduction to tensor flow and finally how to scan backwards and forwards through "time" in a recurrent RNN (each word in a sentence is a time step in NLP). Word vectors are "just" high dimensional entities - 100-300 dimensions, used as input. So the introduction to them was about how you go about building a dataset that is a collection of 50,000 column vectors each of which is 300 rows. And then how to use that to go on and build a neural net to do useful work. The conclusion is that all the work done on syntax, grammar and word classification can effectively be replaced by having a huge corpus (e.g. all of wikipedia is small), 300 dimensions for each word and then a loss function to classify each word. One can imagine how that would be applied to sales data of multiple products or other data. It foes on to suggested how sentiment analysis is performed and how entity recognition would work (entities being places, names of people and companies). The info has been general but described in terms of NLP, the techniques so far are not just for use in NLP. I'm not an NLP person and tbh I've never even made a neural net (although I could if I had a reason) I'm just interested in the subject. ~~~ 21 > The conclusion is that all the work done on syntax, grammar and word > classification can effectively be replaced by having a huge corpus Is that a surprise? You don't teach a child how to speak by telling him about verbs and grammar. He will learn how to use them without having any formal idea about what they are. ~~~ SixSigma Apparently it was a surprise to the AI NLP teams that spent years doing manual classification, suddenly a Deep NN out performed them without any prior knowledge. Just make a 300 dimension vector of the occurrence frequencies of word combinations and out fall the rules of language! ~~~ danieldk _Apparently it was a surprise to the AI NLP teams [...]_ Similar techniques were well known and used for years in NLP. E.g. Brown clustering has been used since the early nineties and have been shown to improve certain NLP tasks by quite an amount. NMF also been used for quite some time to obtain distributed representations of words. Also, many of the techniques used in NLP now (word embeddings, deep nets) have been known for quite a while. However, the lack of training data and computational power has prevented these techniques from taking off earlier. _Just make a 300 dimension vector of the occurrence frequencies of word combinations and out fall the rules of language!_ The 'rules of language' don't just fall out of word vectors. They fall out of embeddings combined with certain network topologies and _supervised_ training. In my experience (working on dependency parsing), you also typically get better results by encoding language-specific knowledge. E.g. if your language is morphologically rich or does a lot of compounding, the coverage of word vectors is going to be pretty bad (compared to e.g. English). You will have to think about morphology and compounds as well. One of our papers that was recently accepted at ACL describes a substantial improvement in parsing German when incorporating/learning explicit information about clausal structure (topological fields). Being able to train extremely good classifiers with a large amount of automatic feature formation does not mean that all the insights that were previously gained in linguistics or computational linguistics is suddenly worthless. (Nonetheless, it's an exciting time to be in NLP.) ~~~ SixSigma I was rather over simplifying a tad and being conversational (and I'm not an expert, not even much beyond beginner). It is indeed an exciting time. ------ Smerity This is a pleasant surprise. The more people that work on TensorFlow the better, especially as the DeepMind team will be more aligned with extending TensorFlow's research potential. I am curious how well TensorFlow fits for many of DeepMind's tasks though. Much of their recent work has been in reinforcement algorithms and hard stochastic decision tasks (think gradient approximation via Monte Carlo simulations rather than exactly computed gradients) which TensorFlow hasn't traditionally been used for. Has anyone seen TensorFlow efficiently used for such tasks? I'm hoping that DeepMind will release models showing me what I've been doing wrong! =] (note: I produce novel models in TensorFlow for research but they're mostly fully differentiable end-to-end backpropagation tasks - I might have just missed how to apply it efficiently to these other domains) ------ eoinmurray92 TensorFlow is the machine learning codebase, but typically how do machine learning research teams manage their training sets, dataset metadata and collaboration on these large datasets? ~~~ barneso Most teams I have seen have either template scripts or boilerplate that generates datasets, and share both the generated data and the scripts via normal ways that people share data and code: disk, S3, github, emailing of notebooks, etc. It requires a fair amount of set-up, but works surprisingly well once there is a core team and problems established. We are building mldb.ai to help bring the data and the algorithms for ML together in a less ad-hoc manner and to help move things out of research and into prod once they are ready. Many of the hosted ML solutions (Azure ML, Amazon ML, Google Data Lab, etc) and other toolkits (eg Graphlab) are working on similar ML workflow and organizational structure problems. ~~~ sysreader2016 Which projects you know use "disk, S3, github,..." to share their datasets? I'm curious what you think because I haven't read about any ML projects actually using hosted ML solutions like Amazon ML+S3. I've only seen Amazon recommend Amazon ML. ~~~ HappyTypist S3 is a good way to share files ------ deepnet NVidia's NVCC has performance & compile time issues with Tensorflow.[1] NVCC vs GPUCC benchmarks 8% - 250% slower compilation & 3.7% - 51% slower runtimes.[2] Google use GPUCC internally so weren't optimising for NVCC. LLVM based GPUCC is the 1st fully open source toolchain for CUDA. Google announced that the guts of GPUCC will make their way into CLANG. [1] [https://plus.google.com/+VincentVanhoucke/posts/6RQmgqcmx2d](https://plus.google.com/+VincentVanhoucke/posts/6RQmgqcmx2d) [2] [http://research.google.com/pubs/pub45226.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub45226.html) ------ tdaltonc This is a very money-where-thier-mouth-is move. Like they said, moving away from Torch is a big deal. I know that google has been criticized for not dog-fooding GCS, does anyone know if that has changed? For example, does DeepMind use it? ~~~ vgt I'll speak for BigQuery, since that's the product I know best. BigQuery itself is used ubiquitously at Google internally. I've offered evidence to the writer who made that argument, but unfortunately he was not willing to change his stance. ------ cft Why is it called _Tensor_ flow? Do the multi-dimensional matrices that exchange data between the nodes transform like tensors? If so, when does the need arise to transform them? ~~~ Chronic51 > Do the multi-dimensional matrices that exchange data between the nodes > transform like tensors? Yes, if you design the moeel/graph that way. > If so, when does the need arise to transform them? The need arises whenever tensors are needed. For deep learning, most people treat them like multidimensional arrays. TensorFlow is an excellent name. Multidimensional arrays are a thing of the past. Now we call them tensors. Get with the program or become an aging, forgotten physicist not involved in deep learning. ~~~ return0 Haha. Hope machine learning students wont be equally annoyed by physicists misusing "their" tensors. ------ sandGorgon Anyone know whether they are primarily working on Python 2 or 3? ~~~ mistobaan the library is compatible with both version of python, but I feel like python2.7 is still the mainstream one ~~~ dgacmu +this. We (the TensorFlow team) use python2.7 by default, but work hard to make sure that we maintain compatibility. Our tests explicitly run on both platforms - [http://ci.tensorflow.org/](http://ci.tensorflow.org/) ------ ya3r I guess this (switching from Torch to other deep learning libraries) will become a trend as deep learning have become more mainstream in tech companies. I say Facebook, Twitter and others who use Torch (I don't know of any others actually), will move away from torch gradually. Unless the Torch community steps its game up. ------ swah I'm a layman but I find it quite interesting that a big release such as TensorFlow doesn't affect more people outside Google - or at least thats my impression. One would think, at least, that online store recommendations would become better or something like that. ~~~ stuartaxelowen TensorFlow doesn't make the algorithms more effective, it just makes them easier to describe, and recently, more quick to train / test. Also, with the kind of predictions Google is making, it's very unlikely that you'd notice improvements, since they would be gradual. ~~~ VikingCoder ...but if you want to make your algorithms more effective, you'd probably benefit if they were easier to describe, quicker to train and test, and you'd want to take advantage of gradual improvements. Right? ~~~ jjawssd Not so, for the same reason that low level languages are more effective computationally but less easy to describe and more difficult for code development. Lua is more low level and has an extremely isolated and fractured community relative to the current Python ecosystem. It is also non-intuitive and has negligible benefits compared to the current scientific Python ecosystem. I find the abstractions offered by Python and its standard library to be very easy to comprehend, write, and maintain relative to Lua. ~~~ VikingCoder ..."easier to describe" makes it sound like it's a HIGHER level language, not a lower level language. ------ jonbarker So when do we get to see the alphago code? ------ bawana I guess they dont want to be under facebook's thumb (didnt they invent torch?) ------ Ferver777 This is huge news for the AI space. May move things forward a couple of years. ------ yarou I think the neat thing about Google is the high degree of crossfertilization between teams. In many organizations, teams rarely share information either due to political reasons or a lack of sharing culture in the company as a whole. That being said, this framework/API change doesn't really surprise me; DeepMind was more a proof-of-concept than an actual battle tested framework, unlike TensorFlow. So in that sense this news isn't surprising at all. ------ mtgx Should we be worried or _glad_ that a potential future Skynet is written in C++?

Nokia and Microsoft: good for Finland, risky for Redmond - yungchin http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/02/nokia-and-microsoft-good-for-finland-risky-for-redmond.ars ====== ZeroGravitas This guy's like a John Gruber for Microsoft. If you believed everything he writes you'd think that Microsoft was selflessly sacrificing itself in all sorts of markets, saving rivals and helping consumers way above and beyond the call of shareholder duty, on its way to corporate Martyrdom.