Most-streamed track of the day by country - sebastien-lbn https://www.worldspotify.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Something to keep in mind: the top track in the world right now is ROCKSTAR, with about 5 million streams per day. The song lasts about 3 minutes, which means the song was streamed for 250k hours around the world. Spotify streams an average of 234 million hours per day, though, which means the number one song represents about 0.1% of the total. We have an unprecedented level of access to all sorts of different genres of music, so the number one song is barely relevant in determining this generation's taste in music. Consider this idea: if 99.9% of the population is listening to classical music, but are all listening to different pieces it's possible that none of the songs they are listening to would show up as number one, since there are many thousands of classical pieces. The number one song is determined by a small percentage of people (maybe even a fraction of a percent) that care about listening to whatever is most popular at the moment. The rest of the population just listens to music from any generation they like.

<comment><USER2> Interesting took me a bit to get what you were trying to say but of course it makes sense. Basically, 99% of people are listening to "anything besides ROCKSTAR", it's just that that "anything else" doesn't overlap with too many others "anything else"

<comment><USER3> I've referred to this as hyperfragmentation, you see it everywhere. You can find your match on anything -- if you like green boots displayed in a slightly warm light under a palm tree, you can find other people who do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think if I look at this any longer I might slip, fall down and break a hip!

Embarrassing how old I am when pretty much ALL of these songs sound like absolute trash to me. Repetitive auto-tuned, formulaic, mysoginistic, materialistic, mundane, simple-minded steam pile of fermenting dog poo.

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure you'd say that about songs from whatever decade you grew up in, if those could be sorted by "most listened to" as well.

Top40 is already pablum, but it still has some tiny amount of curation (and therefore elitist dictation of taste) driving it. This chart, meanwhile, represents pure populist sentiment—it's "what the people want to hear." And populist sentiment has _always_ been pretty much all of those things you said.

<comment><USER6> Also, just because it's popular doesn't mean that people actually prefer that lifestyle.

It reminds me of the opening scene in Office Space where a white man listens to rap during traffic on his way to a typical 9-to-5.

<comment><USER7> Its not just the lyrical content though (which is objectionable and sad enough), but everything else as well.

Universally auto-tuned and synthesized, short, overly repetitive, mumbling/distorted, and whatever backing track they do have could barely be called musical by any objective standard (i.e. a measure of complexity/interrelated instruments/harmonies/themes/tracks). It doesn't matter whether its an african-american mumbling about being a gansta or a breathy-autotuned tween girl, its the same issue.

Listening around the world, it seems to be universal with slight variations here and there.

It's genuinely depressing...

<comment><USER8> I _knew_ the hipster-elitists on Hacker News would declare popular music as beneath them.

<comment><USER9> Many of these comments are ridiculous, it's hilarious. Feeling "depressed" that popular music doesn't fit your taste? Asserting that these artists have no talent? Let people enjoy what they enjoy, rather than criticize the subjective!

I really like the website. It is interesting how popular music in the US appeared in other countries, for instance Bulgaria, and how other countries most popular song I'd never even heard of the artist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some assorted notes / points of fascination:

\- With the sole exceptions of Brazil and Argentina literally all of the "green" countries in Latin America have top songs with the Same. Exact. Beat. "One and-Three Four, One and-Three Four..." all throughout. And interestingly Spain, Italy, France, and Turkey have a very similar feel, albeit with some deviation. Not that I _mind_ that beat (it's perfect for the club), but it's still interesting how little deviation there is.

\- On that note, Brazil's top song is delightfully weird. Not a single drum except for a ludicrously-overdriven kick. I hate it but love it at the same time.

\- Literally every predominantly-English-speaking country has the same exact top song. I would expect at least _some_ variety, but nope, America's got their musical tastes by the balls, apparently.

\- A surprisingly large amount of Europe has generally embraced American-style rap, though there are some exceptions (e.g. Spain, Italy, France, most of Eastern Europe).

\- Poland's, on that note, has got a neat vaporwave/seapunk vibe to it that's pretty cool. Probably my favorite of the bunch.

\- Japan's top song is exactly what I would expect Japan's top song to sound like, lol

\- Indonesia's top song fuckin' _slaps_. Very close second-favorite.

\- India managed to introduce me to Melanie Martinez, and I gotta say I'm a fan; very similar in theme, style, and catchiness to Lily Allen's "Not Fair", which is another favorite of mine.

<comment><USER11> Brazil never fails to surprise me. I thought I was going to catch up with some new song and talk with friends.

But turns out it was a funk _. And the title "Na raba toma tapão" in Portuguese is hilarious, something like "Slap that arse"?

_ Nothing like the old style funk, but a style that mixes other styles and very popular in the outskirts of Rio and Sao Paulo, and also in the favelas - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_carioca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_carioca)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love complaining about 'kids these days' & their music tastes as much as the next guy, but don't lose sight of the fact that we now have more access to amazing music than ever before. You just have to find it. I thought I would share some cool links that help me find music.

NPR Tiny Desk concerts are one of my favourite ways to discover new music. Their audio team is so great the recording often sound better than the studio versions:

Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ferZnZ0_rSM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ferZnZ0_rSM)

Snarky Puppy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfzu33BfRHE&t=107s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfzu33BfRHE&t=107s)

KEXP has an amazing YouTube channel where they post full performances of an amazingly diverse array of artists. Discovered my currently favourite artist ADHD via them:

ADHD:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSHSpy_Iy_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSHSpy_Iy_g)

Public Service Broadcasting:

[https://youtu.be/mScesON6Kx4?t=41](https://youtu.be/mScesON6Kx4?t=41)

Paste Magazine also has some really great sets:

Kate Tempest:

[https://youtu.be/gM4aPRiZJbk?t=57](https://youtu.be/gM4aPRiZJbk?t=57)

Avishai Cohen:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Bulmk2MzY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Bulmk2MzY)

There is so much going on that doesn't involve Spotify at all, for example funk band Vulfpeck sold out Madison Square Garden without any charting songs, manager or big label, just by having a passionate internet fandom. They recorded it on like a gimballed iphone, It's glorious: [https://youtu.be/rv4wf7bzfFE?t=591](https://youtu.be/rv4wf7bzfFE?t=591)

</comment><comment><USER5> Spotify is one of those services that it never occurred to me wasn't already truly-global (i.e. penetration into all markets.) But so many of the countries on this map are dark. (And aren't available in the raw chart data, either.)

Is there some other more-popular music-streaming service in these other markets, that's keeping Spotify out? What do they use in China? In Russia?

Or is music-streaming as a whole, just not popular in some markets? (I guess that could make sense for sub-Saharan Africa, given low Internet connectivity; but it's surprising that it also holds for the northern parts.)

<comment><USER13> >In Russia?

Yandex seems to provide every service a Russian needs, from email, finding apartments, to taxis. Yandex Music seems to be the preferred streaming app.

<comment><USER14> According to Yandex Music chart ([https://music.yandex.ru/chart](https://music.yandex.ru/chart)), currently the most listened track in Russia is "Плачу на техно" by Cream Soda, Хлеб. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1Snj1Pt- Hs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1Snj1Pt-Hs) Surprisingly, it's not rap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Clicked on four countries in Western Europe and then the United States and they were all the same pop song... not sure what I was expecting I guess

<comment><USER16> Rockstar is a top song on Tiktok — maybe that's the reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Brazil's song could be translated as "Get fucked in the ass with a huge slap". As a Brazilian, I don't know what I was expecting.

<comment><USER11> Same here. For one second I thought I was going to listen to some local rock, or MPB. But forgot it could be a funk, sertanejo, etc. Really funny (funnier in Portuguese) title tho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool page!

As of the top songs, I checked the top songs of Japan, Sweden and English speaking countries. And I see a funny pattern: Both English speaking and Sweden have black/ghetto song as top song, while Japan top song sounds like something I would hear while walking in a shop in Shibuya. (J-Pop for youngsters)

I've had Spotify since closed beta, and in Sweden it was "the cheap option for young folks" (instead of just pirating it), and I assume it was marketed the same in the English countries (since I got my closed beta ticket through a UK site, using VPN)

Now, Spotify is not that popular yet in Japan. It's quite new here but the marketing is _heavily_ focused on young people, meaning places such as Shibuya and Harajuku are filled with ads and commercial for it. Hell, the Japanese commercial about Spotify _on spotify_ is about a young couple trying to have sex and the mood being ruined by surrounding noise (mom downstairs).

</comment><comment><USER19> Regarding general change in music in the US over time, this study looked at ~50 years of US pop songs and found changes. I wonder about the rate of other countries pop song subject change is?

See link: [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03057356177482...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0305735617748205)

"As in 1960, the predominant topic of pop music remains romantic and sexual relationships. However, whereas the proportion of lyrics referring to relationships in romantic terms remained stable, the proportion including reference to sex-related aspects of relationships increased sharply.

"References to lifestyle issues such as dancing, alcohol and drugs, and status/wealth increased substantially, particularly in the 2000s. Other themes were far less frequent: Social/political issues, religion/God, race/ethnicity, personal identity, family, friends showed a modest occurrence in top-40 music throughout the studied period and showed no dramatic changes.

"Violence and death occurred in a small number of songs, and both increased, particularly since the 1990s. References to hate/hostility, suicide, and occult matters were very rare. Results are examined in the context of cultural changes in the social position of adolescents, and more specifically in light of the increased popularity of rap/hip-hop music, which may explain the increases in references to sex, partying, dancing, drug use, and wealth.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow that's some surprisingly bad taste in music, world-wide! Interesting and depressing map.

<comment><USER21> i found most of it horrible. norway's didn't make me feel too sick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I clicked around a bit and I've not heard any of these songs. I guess I'm out of the loop on what's popular since I stopped watching TV or listening to radio.

All I'm getting now are items curated by my own tastes (and to some degree the whims of spotify), and I'm happier for it. I still discover new bands and keep track of new releases, but it's all within my own favourite genres.

</comment><comment><USER23> The democratization of music. Seems like this is what you get when the marketing departments don't determine what's listened to.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is kind of interesting to see because, for today, pretty much 90% of the most-streamed tracks seem to be hip-hop/rap. I guess it's really the most popular genre right now, rock's time has passed by. I'm sure bands like Imagine Dragons or some other radio-friendly arena rock could get the top spot for a week or two, but rap seems to be dominating. Wonder how long this will keep up?

</comment><comment><USER25> Stream count is super low for India. I don't think Spotify is used there. From my limited experience, YouTube and local apps seem to be way more popular.

<comment><USER26> to many competitors for spotify Gaana, Saavn, Youtube, Apple, Amazon, hungama, Jio, Wynk, but it only launched a yearish ago and nearly has all local music + excellent algorithm to find songs, so will not take time to catch up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> To branch out, I tend to pop into the Viral 50 charts to see what's a bit less conventional that's rising in regions.

[https://spotifycharts.com/viral/](https://spotifycharts.com/viral/)

The Top 50 lists at Spotify all suffer from what I assume are cross-cultural advertising campaigns.

</comment><comment><USER28> The mere exposure effect means that merely being exposed to something cause us to prefer it almost automatically.

So if you hear "Rockstar" a bit more than the other songs, then you start to prefer it. It's like the olds saying in radio: If they don't like a song now, just keep playing it till they love it.

</comment><comment><USER29> This has really amazing music that I just don't get exposed to.

Could you add past history too (e.g. charts from days/weeks/months ago)? I'm happy to help build a quick CRUD API if you need to store the data. (email@example.com)

<comment><USER30> The data is entirely available from [https://spotifycharts.com/regional](https://spotifycharts.com/regional) including daily CSV download links since 2017-01-01.

The OP submission just renders it on a map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow ! Also integrates the browser back button a history of the countries I select

</comment><comment><USER32> Privacy Badger has replaced this Spotify Player button.

<comment><USER33> That is probably because you have been on another site that emmbeds Spotify. I have had internal services blocked by Privacy Badger because it was included in two different internal test-sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How do you click on Singapore? This makes small countries with lots of people miss out on being able to see their countries ...

<comment><USER35> Got the same problem with Lichtenstein

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am surprised the volumes of the most streamed song is that low. My favorite YouTube channels get millions of views.

<comment><USER37> There's a huge long tail to music, especially these days with radio stations no longer dictating taste to any great extent. Youtube, probably not so much; the almighty suggestion algorithm takes care of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The map is nice, but usability is a bit lacking since it's very hard to pick out some of the smaller countries.

<comment><USER39> I found that I could zoom in and pick them out pretty easily. If you're on a phone maybe not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> ROCKSTAR is not only crap, it's #1 in like every English-speaking country... JFC /opinion

</comment><comment><USER41> Anyone know how to find all songs between certain number of streams? Say 10 million and 100million?

<comment><USER42> Another comment mentioned the CSV data sources

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's sort of political game but Sporify is blocked by Spotify itself in many countries.

<comment><USER44> Probably a distribution rights / local laws thing. International media distribution is complicated and a lot of authoritarian regimes control it tightly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The India one is definitely not what a majority of Indians would listen.

</comment><comment><USER46> Interesting how many Puerto Rican artists are trending in many countries.

<comment><USER47> Well, summer is comming. Got to have some latin grooves for that beach feeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I cant click singapore.

</comment><comment><USER49> Super cool! Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER50> They all suck lol

</comment><comment><USER51> Somewhat saddening to see countries as diverse as Ireland, the UK, Netherlands, South Africa and Australia all promoting American rap over the output of their own people.

On the flip side, it's fantastic to see so many countries not doing so.

<comment><USER52> Why is that saddening? I'm glad to see that American hip hop is as popular as it is in those countries. Makes me even happier when it's an African American hip hop artist.

<comment><USER53> It's sad because we would expect/hope that the diversity of human cultures would be lead to very different songs being popular in different parts of the world.

It's also sad because the three most common word of the song in question ( Dababy - Rockstar ) are: "Yeah" (21 occurences), "Woo" (15 occurences) and "nigga" (13 occurences). The next one in line are "cop", "pull" and "glock" (6 each). This is probably not the culture the US hopes to export.

<comment><USER52> Just because at the moment there is an American song leading the charts doesn't mean that is always the case. You look at those lyrics on their own and they are just words that don't may not make sense. But if you look at the song as a whole, it's an artist's expression. And it seems to resonate with a lot of people around the world. Criticizing the song contradicts your value for "diversity of human cultures".

<comment><USER53> Nevertheless, my answer explains why some people find a bit sad that today, people in most countries all seem to resonate with the exact same artistic expression. And that this expression which resonates with so many people involve lyrics like :

"My daughter a G, she saw me kill a nigga in front of her before the age of two"

Which to me don't really sound so happy. So if that is really what moves most of the world today, yeah I am a bit sad.

<comment><USER54> Things don't have to be happy to be moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The collect musical taste of the world is garbage. At least everything I played today was written in the 19th century. I'm pretty sure it's been going down hill since then.

</comment><comment><USER56> Agree with many comments. If music were the way to describe society everything went to the hell. The problem is not only the computers usage in the music, is that in terms of composition, lyrics, emotions, everything sucks. Any of these songs are crap that someone with the most basic knowledge on a DAW could make. "Roses" which is the less shity song sounds like a crap version of "Moonlight" from Gaullin. It would be awesome to have a complete musical review something like genres, rhythms, duration, "instruments" you know even if those are drum loops and synths, etc.

<comment><USER57> I'm reminded of when Jazz became a thing and practically everywhere said "it's not classical, it has no soul, etc. and therefore sucks". It's pop music because... well... it's _popular_. You may not like it, but a lot of people do. There's nothing wrong with that.

Adam Neely had a really good video showcasing newspapers and editorials denouncing the Jazz genre when it appeared. It seems to have been taken down, unfortunately.

Basically, as you get older, selection bias regarding music becomes more prevalent, and you forget the bad music you liked and end up only remembering "the classics". Just because a song charts doesn't mean it'll last.

<comment><USER58> Nobody with any sense could look at Jazz musician and say they didn't have talent. Just the opposite: most musicians watching Jazz would just be floored at what's going on, that it's even possible. So while they may or may not like it, it's basically impossible not to respect.

<comment><USER57> You're ignoring the point. The point is that, at that time, people hated it. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who _hates_ jazz; they'll recognize it as instrumental, but they won't like it.

The hatred towards modern pop is the same thing. It's just a fad. In 20 or so years, the younger people who like it will hate the pop of the 2040s or 2050s.

<comment><USER58> "The hatred towards modern pop is the same thing."

No, this is not true at all.

"People hated Jazz" \- agreed.

"People hate pop music now" \- agreed.

'Change is generational thing', ok, yes.

But what you're missing is that 2020 pop music doesn't require any skill, at all.

Jazz - to any musical observer - requires an _immense_ amount of skill.

However much anyone 'hated Jazz' \- if they understood music in the slightest, they had to respect it. This is a big difference.

The proof is the fact that Jazz is still alive and thriving.

Whatever is on the Hot100 right now will be dead next year and never heard from again.

Edit: I should be more specific - pop music doesn't require a lot of skill, because most acts aren't doing anything, they're generally not even behind their music - the producers are behind it. That said - it's definitely hard to be famous. Being a trend on YouTube is a kind of a skill, it just may not be musical.

<comment><USER57> > But what you're missing is that 2020 pop music doesn't require any skill, at > all.

I keep hearing this, but I never see any of its arguers actually attempt to make a pop song. If it's so easy, why do only some people have the knack for pulling it off (not the artist/singer; the composer (the person you never hear of))

> Jazz - to any musical observer - requires an immense amount of skill.

I really wish I could show you the video as Neely argues it better than I could, but basically, at the time, the features of Jazz were what was hated, not the genre.

According to Wikipedia, Jazz is characterized by a heavy emphasis on improvisation. In the 1920s (when Jazz became a thing), the detractors argued that (I'm paraphrasing) improv "lacked musical talent" and that "anyone could throw notes together to make music". I'm not making this up. Those are really the arguments they made. People would argue that the absence of counterpoint meant it was an abomination.

Sure, racism played a part, but for the most part, Jazz was hated for the same reason people hate pop today: "it's easy to make". _Which is just not true._

<comment><USER58> "I keep hearing this, but I never see any of its arguers actually attempt to make a pop song. If it's so easy, why do only some people have the knack for pulling it off (not the artist/singer; the composer (the person you never hear of))"

Because it is so easy to make, _they are_ making massive numbers of garbage tracks - and it just so happens that some garbage tracks are popular. You need 'garage band' and possibly microphone - that's it. Have a look at how 'Chief Keef' had his music produced by 'Little Chop'. Most top tracks are of course somewhat professional produced.

But consider that 'music' is not the name of the game, it's 'video' (i.e. video killed the radio start), Instagram, twitter, Tumblr and highly visual content. You can see this with Lady Gaga (talented) and SixNine (well, creative, but garbage) - they're at least as visual as they are audial, as are most artists these days.

It's about the brand/image/meme. Someone in their basement, with very little skill, can make a loop, mumble over it, and this 'meme' can catch on. With a very little bit of production effort by a nominally professional engineer, it can sound 'produced'. At least as much of their effort goes into the look, the brand, the relationships, the Instagram, the video etc..

And it's worth adding, the 'talent' that is sometimes evident in this kind of production, may have little to do with the music, and more to do with anything else.

I actually respect the 'marketing' ability, if you want to call it that, of many of these acts. Post Malone has somehow worked his way into having his own festival with his 'Posties' followers. Genius marketing.

When P. Diddy started his label, he would ask his talent scouts "How did they _look_ " \- not "How did they sound". Somewhat cynically, P. Diddy was smart enough to know that pop acts are a lot (and ever more) about appearance. A pop artist is like a living brand.

Another feature of 'how modern music is made' is that the _producer_ is now in the creative/driver seat - not the artists. Consider 'TheWeeknd' \- his big hit, 'Can't feel my face' was by Max Martin, famous songmaker for Britney Spears and so many others. Without that hit, TheWeeknd would be nobody - we'd have never heard of him. But once his meme/brand was established, he has a 'following' and can churn out a lot of mediocre stuff.

This has always been the case to some extent: Michael Jackson was backed by Quincey Jones - who was Frank Sinatra's arranger. But Michael Jackson is a genius entertainer and true 'pop artists', and of course Quincey Jones is an off-the-hook musical genius producer.

This evident in 'live' music. I've been to countless shows where their music is just some canned track, the artist comes out and mumbles over it? Seriously? In most cases, this is not impressive.

Anecdote: I went to a show recently, bulleted as Brasilian/French/American rap thing in Montreal, I was so excited. The 'warmup' DJ played ... then the 'act DJ' played, a guy with huge fuzzy hair came out, jumped around like a hype man say 'boyeah' 'oi' and whatever into the mike, getting everyone excited ... we were ... anticipating the main act. _But that was it!!!_ No kidding. Some idiot with a microphone, saying a word or two like 'yeah' 'oh yea' 'go go go' into the microphone not rapping or anything. He was passing himself off as an act! The crowd seemed to appreciate it. I thought I was in the Twilight Zone, it was absurd. To me, it signaled literally the end of music: loud, barely audible weird sounds coming out of a speaker, with a fuzzy-haired Brazillian dude sputtering occasional nonsense into a microphone and waving his hands. It's not even Kareoke. It was just noise and hand-waving. This to me is he audial version of the 'pet rock' or the $1M painting that's just a black dot - people can be induced to like anything.

So there are obviously talented pop artists. Ed Sheerhan, a legit musician who purposely writes for the radio. Bruno Mars & Co, are total geniuses. Lady Gaga. Kenrdick Lamar. Ariana Grande has wicked chops, she's obviously a talented singer/dancer/entertainer. Obviously many others, but the charts are otherwise polluted with irrelevant, unlistenable tracks.

Surely some people thought Jazz was easy to make, but I suspect that many were just jealous because they obviously knew they couldn't do it. Jazz is objectively not easy to make. Literally anyone who has tried knows how hard it is. Also, FYI, there's no counterpoint ... but the chord combinations, the speed of the changes, the variety ... is far more than in most forms of classical music.

Most pop music is very easy to make, and there are mountains of gibberish there for anyone to sort through. Fewer and fewer gems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Collection of Building Blocks for Web Apps – features you don't need to re-write - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/componently-com/awesome-building-blocks-for-web-apps <comment><USER2> Cool list. Although if I had the money, I would be using the premium version of some of these because premium actually _does_ necessarily mean better in most of these cases</comment>


Director NSA talks about recent disclosures [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/afcea/gen-keith-alexander-commander-us-cyber-command-director-national-security-agencychief-central-security-service

<comment><AUTHOR> Discussion of leaks takes up the first 15 minutes of the video.</comment>


TechCrunch Founder's Ex-Girlfriend Claims He Physically Abused Her - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/jennallen.RTist/posts/10151504369260138

<comment><AUTHOR> Response from Arrington <http://uncrunched.com/2013/04/07/response/>

<comment><USER2> What possesses you to post tabloid garbage?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your philosophy on page scraping? - <AUTHOR> Hey guys, I'm curious to hear what you think about page scraping.  Are you happy to page scrape other sites?  Are you happy to have yours scraped?  What's your view on the ethics?
I'm asking because I'm aware my site's started to be scraped (by more than search engines), and I'm trying to figure out how I feel about it.  In this case I'm happy because I know the audience/user base is smallish.  If an app went mainstream that did it, I wouldn't be happy.
Of course the pragmatic answer is simple - 'build an api' - a few more weekends and I might.
But right now I'm interested to hear people's opinions on it. <comment><USER3> I think that if you're generally respectful of the target websites - <USER2> them is ok. For example, I scrape various government websites for my website. I use a random delay between requests and am generally very careful about not requesting the same page multiple times (this is hard 'cause a lot of the pagination happening on these pages is via JS calls).

I am ok if someone decides to scrape my websites in a similar fashion - although if I do see that starting to happen, I'd rather just go ahead and build an API.

</comment><comment><USER4> On the consumer side, I'm happy with the following rules.

I'm happy writing a program to let individual users scrape from their computers. After all, they have a right to visit the site and retrieve their data in whatever format suits them.

I'm not so keen on setting up a server to scrape data, or having a server scrape a huge pile of data for a list of users. After all, whoever is running the service is keeping stuff for all of the users. My taking it all is just stealing.

On the provider side, I think my feelings are about the same. I think you have to be careful that you leverage scraping -- let scrapers come in and get enough stuff that it makes people want to visit, but not so much that they have everything. If executed effectively, you can use scraping to great benefit.

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess it depends on what they're doing with it. I'm not particularly against scraping per se, but I would look askance at some of the more sleazy uses, like just republishing (slightly modified versions of) blog posts on some AdSense-laden blog as if it were their own post. The key issues to me are: 1) transformativity, i.e. it produces something genuinely new and different from the content it scraped; and 2) proper credit to the source of the original content.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm happy to page scrape other sites and not happy to have mine scraped. ;-)

More seriously, if there're bots that you don't want scraping, just robots.txt them away. If they ignore that, _then_ they're being rather rude and you can figure out some way to auto-block them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Depends what it's being scraped for. MFA spam blogs stealing content, or some valid use that could further your own interests.

</comment><comment><USER8> hey can put you on my page</comment>


Mythbusters Takes on the FAA - <AUTHOR> http://techliberation.com/2008/11/02/mythbusters-takes-on-the-faa/

<comment><USER2> They said the same thing about CD players and video games (Penny Arcade: <http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/30/> )

I'm not surprised by this in the least. I always thought the "no cell phones/video games/CD players" was about getting people used to following arbitrary directions for bad or no reasons.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought the current rationale for not allowing cell phones and other wireless devices on planes was the potential for interfering with ground based communications. I didn't think they'd used the avionics argument in a while.</comment>


Insoshi or LovdByLess - <AUTHOR>

For starting a social networking site based on rails these two seem to the options:
LovdByLess(www.lovdbyless) Insoshi(www.insoshi.com)
Has anybody done a comparison(features, code quality, momentum behind the project, etc)? <comment><USER2> You should consider ning. It is being developed by very serious people and is backed by a lot of money.

But, frankly, I would suck it up and code the thing myself. I don't think these shortcuts are mature enough to actually save much time.

Most importantly, I think building the whole application to suit your vision will yield a better product than fitting your vision into those frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm also interested to know more about this. Fwiw, Insoshi has a full-time team behind it, whereas Lovdbyless appears to be more of a side project.</comment>


CNBC "Who Won the Debate: Online Polls" Easily Hacked with Scripts - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/u6kaTrgb <comment><AUTHOR> In case you missed it, check the source on that poll. This script is explicitly voting for trump repeatedly with parallel requests. If you change the script to swap the ResultId with "5806a3da-00fc-4ad4-a801-4a4cf3a6a459" and it will automatically vote for Hillary.</comment>


Talk Deeply, Be Happy? - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/talk-deeply-be-happy/?hp

<comment><USER2> I don't know why the study paints this as being a strange outcome. This outcome makes sense to me intuitively. Perhaps because we confuse momentary happiness (having fun!) with prolonged mental wellbeing. They are somewhat related to each other, but are not a causal or necessarily even a correlative relationship.

I've never really understood the point of smalltalk (beyond social things where you don't really know anyone). If I'm going to be having a conversation, I like it to be about something. I think having a meaningful conversation signifies that you are actually interested in the other person and interested in knowing what they think. If you think about it from that perspective, that you are actually making deep interpersonal relationships with the people around you, of course you will be happier. The person making smalltalk with a hundred people is someone who is still lonely in some aspect of the term.

It also makes sense in that discussing and thinking about 'deep' issues, you are becoming more knowledgeable about yourself. People who know more about themselves are going to be better able to please themselves (fill their lives with things that make them happy), because they actually know what they like (and what they are like).

Substantive conversations make for a substantive lives. And substantive lives are more enjoyable than empty ones.

This study is sort of just be rediscovering the Platonic theory of pleasure. (Sensual, Esthetic, and Ideal pleasures).

Moral of the story, read Plato (talk about it), be happy.</comment>


Sometimes the bug isn't in your code, it's in the CPU - <AUTHOR> http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg00000.html <comment><USER2> As someone who found four compiler bugs in three weeks - in a five-nines fault-tolerant OS, yet! - and who found a PostgreSQL optimizer bug within weeks of learning SQL, I think the key to being "that guy" is playing five- whys with every single bug you encounter.

I work with some very talented developers who, when they try something and it doesn't work, try something else. I am fundamentally incapable of that. If it doesn't work, I MUST KNOW WHY. Even if that requires building a debug version of my entire stack, adding all sorts of traces, and wolf-fence debugging until I have a minimal fail case.

It's a real limitation; if I hit an undebuggable brick wall, I have no ability to attack the problem from a different angle. Luckily, there are few things that are fundamentally undebuggable.

<comment><USER3> I _had_ to google "wolf-fence debugging".

I found I knew of it under a different name: binary search debugging. Git includes built-in support under the bisect command.

<comment><USER4> I also looked this up, and found the original paper that coined the term, which starts:

> The "Wolf Fence" method of debugging time-sharing programs in higher > languages evolved from the "Lions in South Africa" method that I have taught > since the vacuum-tube machine language days. It is a quickly converging > iteration that serves to catch run-time errors.

<http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358695> (if you have access)

Anyone know what the "Lions in South Africa" method is? I couldn't find it via Google, it just kept turning up references to the same paper.

<comment><USER5> After a quick googling I found this explanation of wolf-fence debugging:

[http://coreygoldberg.blogspot.com/2008/12/wolf-fence- debuggi...](http://coreygoldberg.blogspot.com/2008/12/wolf-fence- debugging.html)

It stipulates that the state of Alaska has got exactly one wolf, so you build a fence across the middle of the state to find on which side wolf would howl, then subdivide the problem, etc...

I'm assuming in your case the wolf got replace with a lion and Alaska with South Africa.

<comment><USER6> Personally I always preferred the mathematician's method for catching a lion in the Sahara...

<comment><USER7> First, place a lion in Egypt so you know your algorithm will terminate...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> First off, I would say that is some pretty awesome work by this guy to chase this down. Including his work with the manufacturer to help them reliably recreate the issue.

Second, I would say that over the course of my 10 year career in managing developers, I've heard many, many times that the bug was in the kernel, or in the hardware, or in the complier, or in the other lower level thing the developer had no control over. This has been the correct diagnosis exactly once. If I had to guess, I would say about 5%.

<comment><USER9> I would go as far as to say 'finding' bugs in the Compiler / Optimizer / OS / Hardware is a warning signal of a poor programmer.

Always expect you are doing it wrong. It will so rarely be the case that this expectation is wrong that you can discount it as insignificant.

<comment><USER10> Disagree. In fact, were I to come up with a rule of thumb, I'd say the opposite is true.

Want to find bugs in Sun's Java 6 compiler for X64 Linux , use annotations (yeah, I found one in their V30 release last week). Want to find bugs in MS' C++ compiler, write your own templates (this was a few years ago, maybe it's better?). The best programmers push the limit of their tools because they know what's "supposed to happen".

Poor programmers hit something that doesn't work, and just try something else, cause, well they're just trying shit. I would go so far to say that poor programmers, in fact, are unable to find compiler, optimizer, OS, or hardware bugs because, by definition, they probably don't have a firm handle on what's "supposed to happen".

<comment><USER11> I think what VBprogrammer meant is that _thinking_ you've found a bug in a compiler / OS / CPU is often a warning sign you're a poor programmer. Often times a beginner will have a bug in their code that is too subtle for them to identify, so they end up attributing it to some external factor. _Actually_ finding a bug in a compiler / OS / CPU is as you suggest likely a sign you're doing something advanced or unusual and therefore are perhaps more knowledgeable than most.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. Sorry if the sarcasm didn't quite carry.

I know these things can and do happen. I've come across one or two of these strange ones before, but too often I've seen people jump to the conclusion that someone / something else was to blame. Without any other real evidence other than that they have exhausted their shallow back of talent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Please stop referring to him as "this guy", he's well known in the BSD and Linux worlds. He had commit access to FreeBSD before many things we take for granted today even existed. His name is Matt Dillon and he's one hell of a hardware/OS hacker. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon_%28computer_scienti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon_%28computer_scientist%29)

<comment><USER13> I'm an offender of the 'this guy' thing. I have heard of Matt before, but come on, there is almost no context as to who he is given in the posting, and do you really expect everyone in this community to know every semi-significant kernel hacker of the last 2 decades?

The link is nice for everyones education, but I, for one, would appreciate a little less condescension.

<comment><USER14> Referring to Matt Dillon at "This guy" is akin to referring to Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, Jony Ives, Zed Shaw, John Gruber, etc.. as "This Guy" - particularly in this community - everyone should know who Matt Dillon is.

And, yes, I would expect everyone in this community to recognize who these people are, and roughly what their contributions have been.

<comment><USER15> _Matt Dillon, Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, Jony Ives, Zed Shaw, John Gruber_

One of these guys is not like the others.

<comment><USER16> _All_ of those guys are not like the others!

<comment><USER17> Only two of those people are even on the same order of magnitude of influence.

<comment><USER18> I'd say three, although the work of the third one (which I'd assert is Theo) is more obscure it's pretty darn critical and influential[0]. Unless the two you were thinking of are Linus and Theo?

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

<comment><USER17> Oh true that, I'd forgotten all about how SSH wasn't originally Free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My hat's off to this guy for the work he did, and indeed, finding a CPU is quite the accomplishment.

That said - what is it about the hardware manufacturers that makes them relatively immune to this sort of thing? Is it formal verification and rigid engineering process? Is it that they spend so much money developing these things that they better do them right, god dammit?

Sometimes I think that the whole industry would be much better off if everyone up the stack was held to these kinds of standards. If that were the case though, where would we be? We'd have rock solid systems, but how sophisticated would they be? Would UNIX exist? What about (a more bulletproof and less feature complete) Java?

<comment><USER19> _Is it formal verification and rigid engineering process? Is it that they spend so much money developing these things that they better do them right, god dammit?_

All of the above- with the minor correction that it's not about money spent developing per se. Producing silicon masks is obscenely expensive, so catching a bug before tape-out vs. after tape-out can be a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, think of it as "you better get it right the first time, god dammit"

<comment><USER20> Is there some high level description of the design/production process used by large chip producers? I'd be very interested in reading about it.

(nitpick: "per se" <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per_se>)

<comment><USER21> There's little open development, so there's little incentive to write up public articles. You could try something like Bob Colwell's "The Pentium Chronicles".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great job tracking down a hardware bug! That must be really exciting, and you get your name in the AMD errata I assume?

One of my comp sci professors found a bug in an Intel chip and got his name in the errata. I think that gives you +100 to nerd credibility :)

<comment><USER23> +100 nerd cred indeed. That's something that trumps any normal bug.

<comment><USER24> He already had it. Matt Dillon is the business, and that's not a fake name of his. He quit FreeBSD-core because they chafed at his awesomeness, from which he went to start a FreeBSD fork, Dragonfly BSD, one of whose goals is process and state portability across CPUs and machines. He was also the technical stud behind Best Internet, one of the earliest and largest and highest-performance ISPs of the Mom&Pop era of the Internet (~93-97).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here are some more details about this particular bug: [http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/commits/2011-12/msg...](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/commits/2011-12/msg00259.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Such fun work to be doing on Christmas day...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In order to reliably reproduce the bug, he wrote his own operating system. A small one, but still, an operating system. That's pretty badass..

</comment><comment><USER27> If you're interested in the types of bugs that are present in modern CPUs, AMD makes their errata documentation publicly available. (As far as I know, Intel's errata are not public. Edit: See tedunangst's comment below for a correction.)

The errata documentation for AMD Family 10h Processors (Athlon, Opteron, Phenom, etc.) is here: [http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/41322_10h_Rev_G...](http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/41322_10h_Rev_Gd.pdf)

The errata for AMD Family 12h Processors (A-Series APU, etc.): [http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/44739_12h_Rev_G...](http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/44739_12h_Rev_Gd.pdf)

I found this out when an AMD engineer confirmed an AMD CPU bug for me: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7004728/is-this-should- no...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7004728/is-this-should-not-happen- crash-an-amd-fusion-cpu-bug)

<comment><USER28> Intel includes errata in updated spec sheets for each CPU.

<comment><USER29> "Specification Updates", to be more precise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice catch.

It would be interesting if he has accidentally triggered a backdoor, such as mentioned in this post.

[http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/trusting-h...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/trusting- hardware.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Original thread with all the analysis performed before the bug was attributed to the CPU:

<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.dragonfly-bsd.kernel/14471>

(Check out in particular the section "EFFORTS AT FINDING A KERNEL BUG THAT WASN'T A KERNEL BUG")

</comment><comment><USER32> When a CPU bug is discovered, what options are available for remedying the situation?

<comment><USER33> Patch around it in microcode (applied by the OS or BIOS on every boot; releasable as an OS update), disable the related CPU feature if possible (twiddling bits during OS initialization), or trap any related exception the CPU throws, detect the bug's condition, and patch up the running task's state from the exception handler (again, another OS update).

If all else fails, issue a product recall or downplay the bug's severity.

<comment><USER34> or recall all CPUs and replace them with new repaired ones. That's what they do in Wonderland. :D

On a more serious note, I wonder what auto manufacturers do. (There are many CPUs in modern automobiles, and auto manufacturers are often compelled to do recalls.)

<comment><USER35> Traditional embedded devices (i.e. not smartphones) tend to use very mature and well understood CPUs. Moreso for things holding life and propery like cars. If a bug does occur and cause a crash, normally a watchdog timer will reset the CPU quickly enough to avoid unrecoverable problems.

They're certainly not pushing the bleeding edge at all like the 3 GHz desktop/laptop processors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing. I'm happy his sanity survived!

</comment><comment><USER37> wow! this is quite a rare thing...

</comment><comment><USER38> Next time my code isn't working as expected, I'm going to shout "cpu bug!" and cite this article.</comment>


Our startup Body Boss getting street cred with the NFL's Carolina Panthers - D-Train http://blog.bodybossfitness.com/post/48697659311/hello-carolina-panthers-were-body-boss

<comment><AUTHOR> Why no individual plan?

Can I tell it what equipment I have available (and the exercises it lets me do) and have the software suggest workouts?

<comment> D-Train Right now, we're focused on the B2B market. That is, our target market include sports teams and organizations. So we're working with several high schools, colleges, and now an NFL team! We've also got good traction with training camps and big box retail gyms.

We looked at the consumer-driven apps, and realized that we would rather work with coaches and players or trainers and clients. So for individuals, we may go there, but it's not in immediate strategy.

What are your thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that most people quit going to the gym because they get bored.

So if there were an app that takes several factors into consideration¹ and generates workouts for them, and that would change it up, people would stay interested and gain fitness.

Which works against the business model of many of the chain gyms -- they actually want people signed to yearly contracts that then don't show up.

¹ Perhaps it would consider available equipment, desires of the person (some ratio between speed/endurance/strength/stability), when they last did an exercise, what their feedback was from previously doing it, what muscle group it most effectively works, what the opposing muscles are and when they got worked, and so on.</comment></comment></comment>


The Short-Sighted Campaign against Craigslist - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/harveysilverglate/2010/09/14/the-short-sighted-campaign-against-craigslist/ <comment><USER2> Serious Question: Why does prostitution need to be illegal?

      In the U.S. it is *legal* to:
      Have random, unprotected sex with anyone you want
      Have sex with someone only if they take you out to dinner or give you a nice gift, as long as it's not a direct cash payment
      Pay someone to have sex as long as its videotaped and records are kept (pornography)
      Etc.

But it is _illegal_ for one consenting adult to pay another consenting adult directly for sex?

Why is this illegal? Especially since as the "services" get more expensive there is less and less actual sex happening. Multiple studies have shown that prostitution is less about the sex than about the john paying to have a responsibility and stress free relationship.

I may be missing something and be completely wrong but thats my $.02.

<comment><USER3> One reason for making it illegal - it's one of those things that no one wants in their town. No one wants coal burning power plants in their town but that is easily to regulate. In today's internet area having the transaction be online and the transgression to take place in private would be fine. The question i how do you ensure that.

<comment><USER2> One option is to regulate it. You could make it illegal to pick up someone on the street and regulate it so that most if not all meetups would occur either online or by someone calling a number they found in a phone book. I would think that it could be set up so that finding a prostitute goes similarly to finding a contractor, or anyone else in the home service industry. Other than hiring someone from the parking lot of Home Depot you don't generally see contractors soliciting. Additionally advertising could be regulated so that you don't see it happening unless you look for it. That won't appease the religious extremists but it will help prevent parents from having to deal with kids asking "Mommy, what's an escort?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is shortsighted about this is anybody who believes this has anything to do with sex. Thats about as ridiculous as to think the war on terror has anything to do with terror or that any politician really cares about the mosque in Manhattan.

You are being played.

<comment><USER5> And you're playing the "anyone who disagrees with my excessive cynicism is naive" card.

I'll skip the seriously-trolly war-on-terror thing, and go straight to the other one... really? No politician really cares about the Ground Zero Mosque? Millions of _non_ -politicians care about it, but the political class is all too sophisticated and is only _pretending_ to care? I think you overestimate the sophistication of the political class.

(Not wanting to discuss the mosque itself, merely the question of whether any politician really cares about it.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the record, I disagree with some parts of the analysis. In this case, Craigslist was more than a common carrier: it created a special section just for adult advertisements and charged money only for those advertisements. You could post a couch for sale for free, but you had to pay Craigslist if you wanted to post in the "Adult Services" section. The decision to charge for ads for that category intertwined Craigslist into profiting directly and intentionally from those ads.

<comment><USER6> Craigslist started to charge for the adult ads as result of the previous settlement with AGs. Learn the facts.

<comment><USER5> Was the additional sentence "Learn the facts" really necessary?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Only in America.

Nevada's listings are gone, too. Amsterdam still has the listings, though. Didn't check any other European cities, though.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a witch hunt, simple.

<comment><USER5> I'm always bothered by the term "witch hunt". It doesn't seem like a great metaphor.

If witches existed, hunting them would be rational and sensible (let us assume, for the moment, all witches are evil).

It's only if witches don't exist that witch hunting is silly, so by calling it a witch hunt you're implying that the things of which craigslist is accused are analogous to witchcraft and don't really exist? Except they really _do_ exist, so I'm really not sure what the point of the metaphor is.

<comment><USER9> You are assuming that it is a term that can be understood strictly from first principles. With an idiom, such an assumption is silly, as idioms come to their meaning based on a series of historical events, accidental mis-uses, literary uses (and therefore references) and certain assumed shared views.

So to understand why witch hunt actually makes sense as a term, you must first look at the real witch hunts that happened. These happened at a time and place where witchcraft was "known" to be real. Of course there weren't witches, but everyone then thought there were, so effectively hunting for witches was a valid thing to do.

At the time, they also didn't know lots of other things, so if a person falls sick, or a cow dies, or a house burns down, scientific evidence based explanations were not so easy to come by. However witches were "known" to curse people, and a curse causes misfortune.

So what would happen is a random person would decide to pay back a grudge, or look good to his fellow citizens or whatever, and accuse some 3rd party of witchcraft, for something like giving the evil eye, or dancing, or whatever. This would lead to a burning, and everyone would be happy again. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes, a series of unfortunate events would be construed as a major witch, or a whole coven of witches. Then everyone would go crazy, true beleivers would be terrified, ambitious social climbers would be accusing all their enemies of witchcraft, and so on. There would be attempts by authorities to get to the bottom of it, and many witches would be found. Mass burnings ensued, and eventually everyone would calm down and be happy again.

So, looking back, this whole course of events is ridiculous, the root assumption of witchcraft is just plain silly. The mass panic/hysteria over it downright dangerous, and those taking advantage of the situation were repugnant.

So, now, looking at the above situations, and refactoring a bit, so we can get a more generic algorithm, we see these key components:

1\. A label that classifies someone as bad

2\. A deep underlying fear of what the bad label stands for, but the fear must be non-specific.

3\. A set of actions and vaguely sort-of correlated events (if you squint just right), that looks like: "bad things from #2 are happening to us!".

4\. A set of people willing to manipulate the many for their own gain.

If those conditions are met, you have a prime candidate for a "witch hunt" (keeping the name because it describes the original stuff well, and everyone knows what happened in those cases). Just start sending authorities after anyone labeled as the bad thing.

There are of course some variations, and deeper nuances, but that is the gist of it.

<comment><USER10> This is a case where I want more than one upvote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The argument boils down to "we should let them break the law because then all the criminals are in one place". Which is absurd. Craigslist was profiting from prostitution, which is both illegal and morally repugnant.

<comment><USER7> Legality depends on your location.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada>

Here is some moral ambiguity... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate>

<comment><USER11> You're right, I should have mentioned Nevada as an exception to the legality.

The "sex surrogate" stuff is pseudo-scientific nonsense, and has no relation to what was being offered on craigslist anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


New Work City - Coworking in New York. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nwcny.com/ <comment><USER2> THIS IS A AWESOME IDEA WILL IT BE NATIONWIDE? OR ONLY IN NYC

<comment><AUTHOR> There are various coworking spaces across the country. (Notice that's coworking with a little "c.")

Here ya go: <http://coworking.pbwiki.com/></comment></comment>


GTA clone iPhone game, Payback, makes $400k in 1st 2 months - <AUTHOR> http://www.apex-designs.net/payback_iphone_report2.html <comment><USER2> _The really amazing thing is even the sales we've had so far represent just 0.2% of the total iPhone OS user base - it really is a huge market._

Games are killing it, there is no doubt about that, and it's also a strong reflection of the slant toward a dominant, younger demographic that's downloading and purchasing on iTunes regularly. Our web stats for BreakkUp underline this tremendously.

I would recommend any developer on the fence or working on his first application to READ the conclusion statement twice. It's what I've been bitching about on HN for awhile, as have many others... the volume-driven charts are the real sales challenge to overcome. Get on em, stay on 'em otherwise, bye bye sales.

Once in a blue moon the charts will give opportunity to new entrants to receive 'popular exposure' but currently the system is honestly hurting far more people than it's helping (1 out of every ~8 Top Paid Business apps is a .99 VOICE RECORDER [A]). However, here's the counter-argument: whenever you release a new app or push an update, your app is on Page 1 and listed under New Additions, so I consider the benefits of the charts a moot point... the charts should reflect quality and movements over at least a week, not strictly unit volume over 24 hours (which is a freaking joke).

I feel Apple likes the churn as it compliments the disposable habits of the youth generation dominating the AppStore, and what I feel to be intentional reluctance to switch to a more stable and quality-focused approach for the top apps.

[A] Voice recorder is included as sample code w/ the SDK.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah Apex Designs, I remember when they published this game on the Gameboy Advance. Except they ran into issues with their publisher/distributor. I was living in Europe and was able to buy it via mail order.

Its a really fun game with great replay value. I think it originally started life as an Amiga game. Great to see the developer getting some reward out of it, finally.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really cool to see app developers willing to share some of this information with people. Really helps future devs in how they price, promote, and build their apps.</comment>


A WebGL canvas-based volume viewer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AllenInstitute/volume-viewer <comment><USER2> > This software license is the 2-clause BSD license > plus clause a third > clause that prohibits redistribution for commercial purposes without further > permission.

[https://github.com/AllenInstitute/volume- viewer/blob/master/...](https://github.com/AllenInstitute/volume- viewer/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)

I really like what the allen institute is doing and that they put so many interesting talks onto their YouTube channel, but clauses like this make it proprietary software.

<comment><USER3> No, it most certainly does not. Stop with this nonsense.

This makes this software ineligible to be called "open source" as per OSI definition. That's it.

The world is not binary. Not everything that 100% free and open is proprietary. If it's not an OSI-approved license, but the source is open and avaialble for tinkering, changing and redistribution, even if conditionally, the altruistic spirit is still there and it's still an approach that is welcoming of a typical O/S use.

However this also allows authors to reserve rights for commercializing their work later on and it's an absolutely fair arrangement. No reason to denigrate their work because of that.

<comment><USER4> I suppose this is quite relevant here: [https://words.steveklabnik.com/the- culture-war-at-the-heart-...](https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war- at-the-heart-of-open-source)

> However this also allows authors to reserve rights for commercializing their > work later on and it's an absolutely fair arrangement.

They could've also used AGPL for that. A popular option.

The license says, "For purposes of this license, commercial purposes is the incorporation of the Allen Institute's software into anything for which you will charge fees or other compensation." Does that include ads? It certainly seems to include donations. And I suppose requiring attribution could be seen as "other compensation". It's kinda broad, but even if it was strictly "don't sell this standalone", it still wouldn't be FOSS or open source imo. It's fine for studying the code, but it's not any better than "source available" software, such as UE4. And if do study the code, you'll have the same legal landmines to deal with as when studying "source available" code. I'd even say that UE4's license is _better_ , because at least it doesn't cause confusion over whether it's open source.

> No reason to denigrate their work because of that.

I don't think anyone did. They just said it's not open source, which seems like a fair assessment to me. Saying that Windows isn't open source doesn't denigrate Microsoft's work either. Open source doesn't mean good, and proprietary doesn't mean bad. This volume-viewer just isn't open source, regardless of its quality.

<comment><USER5> > _They could 've also used AGPL for that. A popular option._

That's not even close in intent.

Under A/GPL terms anyone can take a project as is, slap a logo on it, make a binary and start selling it, provided that they make sources available. That's _exactly_ the case that the Commons Clause prohibits, so AGPL does an absolute zilch here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Screenshots and demo videos would help a lot

<comment><USER7> I cloned the code to run the demo... here's a screenshot:

[https://imgur.com/a/1yex4Qy](https://imgur.com/a/1yex4Qy)

It's kind of a cool demo.

</comment></comment><comment> dmt-gfx That code is used in the Allen Institute's online 3d cell image catalog seen here:

[https://www.allencell.org/cell-feature- explorer.html](https://www.allencell.org/cell-feature-explorer.html)

and also in the 3d data explorer contained in this presentation:

[https://imsc.allencell.org/](https://imsc.allencell.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow! It feels fast and looks great. I'm still waiting for someone to make a WebGL viewer for SSVDAGs, but maybe that's wishful thinking.</comment>


'The Power of Facing' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/10/the-power-of-facing/303081/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> This book was my introduction to Hitchens and to Orwell as something more than 1984 and Animal Farm. If all I'd ever got from Hitchens were the desire to read more Orwell, that would have been enough.</comment>


Facebook "Open Compute Project" nothing but hot air - <AUTHOR> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2011/04/09/#20110409-facebook_opencompute_hot_air

<comment><USER2> Anyone share the same perspective? As someone who's only casually seen the project, I'm curious to know what EEs think.

<comment><USER3> I think Facebook does not need to layout, test and contract manufacture motherboard for the servers. Each iteration in hardware cost lots of money. This is not agile. Better make the specs and have ODM companies handle that.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Design_Manufacturer></comment></comment>


100M games played - <AUTHOR> http://en.lichess.org/blog/VgwCfhwAAB8AbzkK/100000000-games-played <comment><USER2> The punch card graph for the Open Source engine behind Lichess that he wrote is... impressive! [https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/punch- card](https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/punch-card)

<comment><USER3> This whole project is impressive! Programming, community managing, marketing, etc, it seems this guy is working full time on that site. But what is the business plan?

<comment><USER4> To quote happy0: "the plan is to avoid business!"

For more info, see [http://lichess.org/blog/U4skkUQAAEAAhIGz/why-is-lichess- free](http://lichess.org/blog/U4skkUQAAEAAhIGz/why-is-lichess-free)

Also note that we suck at marketing, but it doesn't matter, since we don't do it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a tournament Scrabble player and I want to do this for Scrabble. The only choices we have are a very buggy and crappy phone app, made by EA (missing tons of words) that only allows correspondence play, and a client written in something like Java 5 and hosted on some computer in Romania ([http://www.isc.ro](http://www.isc.ro)) to avoid the copyright issue. The latter recently crashed and wiped out about a year of data because presumably the maintainer did not do backups. I can't even use it because I'd have to downgrade Java on my computer.

There are great open source tools out there for analyzing/simulating games that can be hooked up to the proposed site ([http://quackle.org](http://quackle.org) for example). Both of the aforementioned programs (the EA one, and ISC) have very elementary analysis with nothing close to look-ahead.

I've written a study server at aerolith.org using HTML5/new technologies and am going to add multiplayer soon with Websockets. My time is very limited due to my job, but I'd be willing to help with an effort to recreate something like this amazing site for Scrabble. But again the main issue is the copyright/trademark issue, and the fact that EA has the rights to online Scrabble in North America. If anyone has any ideas it would be awesome.

<comment><USER6> Words with friends worked around it by simply using a different name. Also, see this [https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16enap/e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16enap/eli5_why_words_with_friends_is_not_being_sued_by/c7vea2k)

<comment><USER5> The board and tile distribution of WWF are inferior, as is the dictionary. I'd love to use the original game.

<comment><USER7> You might run into copyright / trademark issues if you use the name 'Scrabble' anywhere though, FYI

<comment><USER5> Correct, but I can call it Crossword Game or something like that. The issue is that the word list may or may not be copyrighted ([http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2014/09/major_scra...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2014/09/major_scrabble_brouhaha_can_you_copyright_a_list_of_words.html)), and that if I use the exact same tile distribution and board configuration I can still be sued. Hell, Hasbro could still C&D if they wanted to even if I'm not infringing at all. But there is no body that owns chess.

<comment><USER8> Take the existing list and add a sixteen-character word to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent site! Congratulations!

The only site I ever visit while I work.

Whenever I get stuck on something (multiple times per day), I take a lichess break. If I win, I feel better and get back to work. I never lose because as soon as the computer catches me with a fork or a pin, I angrily close my browser and get back to work. Either way it's good.

<comment><USER4> "The only site I ever visit while I work." \-- edw519

That's the best testimonial I ever read about lichess. Permission to quote requested.

<comment><USER9> _Permission to quote requested._

Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am thoroughly addicted to watching John Bartholomew's lichess bullet tournaments: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIdP7iIsGOU&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIdP7iIsGOU&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6MDiHow7MW8J8E2v16u1etrv)

<comment><USER11> You can't go wrong watching Fins play in those lichess tourneys. Great combo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ha, I remember that some years ago I've found a silly bug that allowed you to take over white's session and play for him by just changing the url token (lichess.org/<token>). I had my fun for a handful of games, then reported it. Unfortunately, I don't know anymore why or how it worked - Maybe the creator can remember and explain it :). Crazy, how the UX changed over the years. Good job!

<comment><USER4> Haha I remember that one! A very, very nasty mistake from me. Lichess was comparing your token to black token, and if it didn't match, it was just assuming that you were the white player. How silly :D

I must mention that it was fixed, indeed, years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, congrats @ornicar!

Is that comment that lichess.org is the second largest chess site on the web true?

I was happy to learn of its existence last year when you mentioned on twitter that you were using Mithril.js, and I never realized how big lichess had become since then.

Great work!

<comment><USER4> According to Alexa, it is. And by far. [http://chess-links.org/](http://chess- links.org/)

<comment><USER14> I don't play as much chess that much anymore, but ICC (chessclub.com) was the king (and I'd guess that it still is).

You don't play via the website though. Same for other chess servers (FICS, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I came across lichess last year, incredible site with a good stack: Scala, Play framework and mithril.js for the client. Now please implement the top 64 chess variants, like 5x6 chess or chess for 4 players, or modern day abstracts like Dvonn, Arimaa (not AI resistant anymore), Hive, Canon, The Duke, Tash- Kalar, Neuroshima Hex or Taj Mahal.

</comment><comment><USER16> I play on Chess.com a lot. I want to move to Lichess - in large part because it doesn't spam me with requests to sign up - but the matchmaking system is much harder to use.

On Chess.com I can log on and click a "find me a 10+0 game" and I just get a game. On Lichess, as far as I can tell, I have to scan the list of games, compare them to my rating (which I can't even see on the main screen, and don't trust at all since it swung +150 points on my first game..), and then pick from the list. It's a huge mental barrier on "playing a quick game of chess".

I also really wish that the chess UI on lichess showed me what pieces each player had captured. It seems to.. sometimes.. but not always, which is confusing. They constantly disappear. Also, the pieces that show up above/below the move list on the right side both appear as black pieces (when they actually show up), rather than of the appropriate color, so the display could be read as both "pieces you have captured" and "pieces you have lost". I'm sure I could get used to this but it's confusing as a new user.

<comment><USER17> "On Lichess, as far as I can tell, I have to scan the list of games, compare them to my rating (which I can't even see on the main screen, and don't trust at all since it swung +150 points on my first game..), and then pick from the list."

Or you can just host a game and wait for someone to find you?

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Lichess also does autopairing, so when someone else creates a 10+10 game, you'll get paired without anyone needing to scan the seek list.

<comment><USER16> I haven't used Lichess much, so I hadn't discovered this. It's not very obvious as far as I can tell. I hope that it would also do matchmaking approximately based on rating?

(Though, as I mentioned, I still don't trust my rating at all since my first ranked win gave me 150 rating points. Chess.com's give closer to 8-20, as I recall, which is much more credible. Specifically, I don't trust that my rating varied by 150 in one game, but the range of ratings I see on the front page is only about 1500-1800.. so it seems as though I just skipped almost the entire range in a single game.)

<comment><USER18> That's because you have a provisional rating for the first few games (it should show up as 1553? or 1250?). Your rating will swing for the first 15-20 games, at which point you'll see the 8-20 fluctuation.

It's likely that you've played quite a few games on Chess.com already.

<comment><USER16> I have played a lot on Chess.com. Perhaps they did the same thing and I forgot - not sure. Nevertheless, I'm calling it because I found it offputting when I tried to switch to Lichess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> God how I love it when there's no login barrier to try. Awesome site!

<comment><USER20> Yes! I haven't played chess in years and for me these training sessions are a perfect way to slowly get back into chess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, this actually looks leaps and bounds better than the UX horror that I find Chess.com to be.

<comment><USER22> Lichess is awesome, and their mobile app (atleast on iOS) is very good as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have not played chess for some years, but just wanted to say congratulations especially for making (and keeping!) the site free without the usual upsells and tiered accounts where you get only X problems a day free and so on, thanks for your effort!

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone know a good site to play chinese chess?

<comment><USER19> Go?

I'm half-joking but hey, that would seriously be awesome. Talking mainly about ease of use.

<comment><USER25> It would be awesome to have a website that's as easy to use as lichess for xiangqi (chinese chess) and weiqi (go). The existing internet servers for them aren't as full-featured or user friendly.

<comment><USER26> I've played at [https://online-go.com](https://online-go.com) and it's a much nicer interface than native clients have.

<comment><USER27> That's a different game than Chinese chess ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi)).

<comment><USER25> The comment user Jach was responding to specifically mentions both xianqi (chinese chess) and weiqi (go).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how these kinda models work. I think that over time, while the userbase / costs increases, the donations won't increase as much / decrease. Is this true?

<comment><USER29> The website exists for more than 3 years, today we are the 7th of October and the donations are already at 100% for the whole month. It's arguably sustainable enough.

<comment><USER19> On a quick glance, I didn't even find a donation button. In fact, I found none, even after clicking through the menus (google sent me here: [http://de.lichess.org/donate](http://de.lichess.org/donate) ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now that you have such a huge dataset, do you have any plans to make use of it in interesting ways? For example an opening popularity browser, or a puzzle generator?

<comment><USER31> This doesn't require a huge database, but as interesting use, the games are used to generate chess-themed CAPTCHAs, example here: [http://en.lichess.org/signup](http://en.lichess.org/signup)

<comment><USER32> Sad to report, that most computers are a lot better at solving that CAPTCHA than I am.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> lichess has a nice clean interface and it is a joy to play on it and also it is nice to have easily exportable games (i am looking at you chess.com!)

The one problem with everything free philosophy and relying on donations is that top players are unlikely to play on the site (see FICS vs ICC battles of early 90s where ICC by paying and giving affiliate sales quickly rose to be the dominant force in early net chess despite the questionable morality of taking over original ICS).

This presents a problem for someone who has problems getting a good game on lichess.

At 2400 on lichess, I either have to play masses of 2100-2200s or computer cheaters. As an FM I've played a few FMs and I think one IM on lichess.

On commercial sites (the top 3 being chess.com, ICC, and Playchess) there are incentives to bring in GM caliber players.

Again, if you just want a good amateur game, then lichess is a fine choice.

</comment><comment><USER34> Please fix your content load priorities, or sub a standard font before the web font is ready. This is how the page looks for the first 8 seconds on mobile: [http://m.imgur.com/rKmzqvJ](http://m.imgur.com/rKmzqvJ)

</comment><comment><USER35> Nice, Just now closed lichess tab and opened HN and found this :) Its one of the addictive sites

</comment><comment><USER36> Thanks a lot for a great service! Did not know it was just a single developer, I'd much rather donate to this than pay for ICC. In fact I just did.

</comment><comment><USER37> Amazing achievement to have everything running so smooth. Obviously not the site for me as I have no idea how to complete chess captcha!

</comment><comment><USER38> How is lichess different/better from other chess websites? (I had not heard of the site, I play chess so very rarely).

<comment><USER31> 1) The UI+UX is superior, 2) it evolves very quickly, often as a response to user requests, 3) it is entirely free/follows a libre philosophy. The importance of point 3) varies between individuals. Where the competition shines is in the presence of top/titled players, but even there lichess is progressing quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is such a great websites. Very impressed as a chess amateur/medium skills that how well the site fits the purpose.

Very well done!

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats on all of your progress! I remember being one of the first masters to use Lichess and I absolutely loved it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Love lichess! Hope to see it grow even bigger soon :) probably 500M games played by new year or so >:P

</comment><comment><USER42> Nice work! Consider it as 100,000,001 games played now on my account. :)

</comment><comment><USER43> Congrats buddy on your achievement!</comment>