The Final Days of the Bitcoin Foundation? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-30/the-final-days-of-the-bitcoin-foundation- <comment><USER2> Are there any examples of where Bitcoin has needed the Bitcoin foundation, aside from promotion? I don't know much about Bitcoin, but I'm imagining the Bitcoin Foundation as being analogous to the Linux Foundation.

<comment><USER3> With out a foundation, how do you suggest the direction of the Bitcoin project be managed? (Is not only about promoting Bitcoin).

<comment><USER4> Different groups develop competing clients, when one proposes an incompatible feature, the other groups and the users in general choose if they want to implement it or not. Whichever direction the majority chooses is the direction of Bitcoin.

At least to me, it sounds much more in line with the original conception of Bitcoin than a central foundation managing its direction.

<comment><USER5> That's true, but an organization board can help those adoptions occur in a more orderly and/or less acrimonious manner in case there are any serious disputes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And nothing of value was lost.

It's amazing how well Bitcoin works as a system despite the very high percentage of crooks involved. That's a significant technical achievement.

<comment><USER7> > the very high percentage of crooks involved

Is that really quantifiable as such? Based on my limited experiences with cryptocurrencies, the vast majority of its usage is lawful, but people buying hitmen and crack with bitcoin makes for a better story than people buying pizzas and web hosting, so that's what's in the articles that get written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now tell us where all the money went...

<comment><USER9> I've got a pretty good idea..

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1pxiy3/peter_vesse...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1pxiy3/peter_vessenes_biggest_danger_to_bitcoin/)

<comment> at-fates-hands one of the better quotes from the thread:

 _Just think for a minute how amazing Bitcoin is, that it can not only survive but continue to grow despite the huge number of dipshits and saboteurs so intimately associated with it._

<comment><USER10> Isn't this a cognitive bias? How has bitcoin grown?

In 2015, Wordpress dropped support for it because there were too few transactions to warrant it.

<comment><USER11> Retail transactions are through the roof by almost all indicators

<comment><USER10> You mean Overstock?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Bitcoin Foundation was founded and operated by criminals.

Bruce Fenton and others have done huge amounts of work to repair the foundation and I commend them for their efforts.

However I cannot support an organization which continues to support bad actors, to quote myself:

>As a lifetime Foundation member (and a technical contributor to Bitcoin) I think it's within my rights to ask [that Gavin Andresen be removed as chief scientist]

>Consider how frustrating misunderstandings like the below are to me:

>"...[Gavin Andresen is] still bitcoin's official chief scientist, according to the Bitcoin Foundation, the not-for-profit that oversees the project..."

>[http://www.wired.com/2015/08/bitcoin-schism-shows-genius- ope...](http://www.wired.com/2015/08/bitcoin-schism-shows-genius-open-source/)

<comment><USER12> Are you claiming Andresen is a criminal? If so, why?

<comment><USER13> He's not a criminal but he stopped being the lead contributor to Bitcoin Core to join the contentious Bitcoin XT project. The motivation for this project is a debate about whether increasing the Bitcoin blocksize is an acceptable way to address scalability. In general, it showcases dissent in the consensus policy that governs the way Core changes are made.

More background on this: [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/gavin-andresen- i-might-...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/gavin-andresen-i-might-take- over-lead-of-bitcoin-xt-1448486445)

<comment><USER14> I don't think that is an accurate depiction of what happened. In reality a company called Blockstream who has a financial interest in limiting Bitcoin's block size has stacked the core dev team with people on it's payroll and they are doing everything within their power to cripple Bitcoin so that they can insert themselves as a middle man in Bitcoin transactions.

Gavin was not one of the devs who let themselves be bought off by Blockstream and in his frustration over all the other core devs irrationality he has been promoting solutions outside of core.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for offering an alternate perspective on this. Could you clarify how they make themselves a middleman in Bitcoin transactions?

<comment><USER15> Blockstream Liquid makes them a middleman: [https://blockstream.com/2015/10/12/introducing- liquid/](https://blockstream.com/2015/10/12/introducing-liquid/)

They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.

In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.

This is because all Blockstream's products are built on Sidechains: [https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf](https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf) Rather than change bitcoin itself, a sidechain lets you create an alternative set of rules for bitcoin, that re-uses the actual bitcoins from the main chain, so that users can put their bitcoins on either set of rules. Sidechains let users move coins between chains with different rulesets. Thus, Sidechains are useful only if it is difficult to add desired features to Bitcoin itself. All Blockstream products (like Liquid above) are implemented as Sidechains.

Thus, Blockstream's products will have no purpose unless Bitcoin is limited, and difficult to change, creating a need for a Sidechain.

Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin.

At last October's Bitcoin Dev Workshop in San Francisco (ironically run by the Bitcoin Foundation), Blockstream CTO and Bitcoin Core Dev Greg Maxwell, who invented most of the Sidechains tech, said on stage (video recording is online somewhere) he was bummed that so few people use Sidechains, and that his biggest surprise was how much work it takes to get applications in the ecosystem (like wallets, blockchain.info, etc.) to support a Sidechain. He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.

Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.

<comment><USER16> > Blockstream Liquid makes them a middleman

He asked about Bitcoin transaction middlemanship, not alternative ledger consensus systems. It should not be surprising that alternative ledgers exist that provide some features that Bitcoin doesn't.

> They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.

LN transactions are just zero-conf Bitcoin transactions with some extra opcodes and defined behavior around the semantics of when certain transactions can be verified. see [http://lightning.network/](http://lightning.network/)

> In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) > bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. > Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is > difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.

Bitcoin is more useful if it's difficult to be "improved", period. Auto-update mechanisms take away voluntary participation and this is too dangerous for a financial system that is attempting to be decentralized (who's gonna "authorize" the updates, eh?). So yes maybe Blockstream has an incentive to assist with maintaining the current Bitcoin decentralization mechanisms... so what?

> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to > bitcoin.

jtimon? sipa? dude you know these people, wtf.

> He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin > keeps improving, there will be no good reason.

No, he doesn't need a good reason for people to switch. He needs a reason for people to use sidechains, thankfully he and everyone has many. This isn't about switching -_-.

> If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.

That's like saying "if positive changes are made to bitcoin.git, there's no reason to use sidechains"... That's not a reasonable argument.

> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to > bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.

They are opposed to hard-forks for many reasons, but perhaps most important here is because they aren't in control of Bitcoin network hard-forks. And they are unwilling to campaign to add those particular hard-forks into Bitcoin Core. It's wrong to claim that Blockstream is making it hard to improve Bitcoin when it's naturally hard to do so by design in the first place.

<comment><USER15> > jtimon? sipa? dude you know these people, wtf.

First, you're confusing me for my brother. It's a common mistake. He is Jonathan Toomim, and I'm Michael. Together, we are... the Toomim Bros!!! [https://toom.im](https://toom.im)

Now, you've written seven different statements here, but they aren't connected to a main point. Could you put your thoughts together? Are you trying to address whether Blockstream are middlemen?

<comment><USER16> > First, you're confusing me for my brother. It's a common mistake.

I feel sort of cheated because you two use very similar HN usernames. You are not as bad as the Rayhawk brothers, though, which I am convinced are all the same person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can someone educate me upon the use of the BTC foundation besides promotion? I thought no one controls BTC!!! :(

<comment><USER18> The foundation is just a bunch of suits, whose only function is to educate other suits (eg: law makers). No one controls Bitcoin.</comment></comment>


Testing made easier in Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://www.modern.ie/virtualization-tools <comment><USER2> Biggest announcement for me and most people I know is:

'VMs for Mac and Linux coming soon.*'

On this page: <http://www.modern.ie/virtualization-tools>

Ie, no more screwing around with IEVMS and conversion scripts etc when trying to get a working copy of IE.

Alas latency makes Browserstack unusable for a lot of people.

<comment><USER3> If you don't already, try this IE VM automated installation script: <https://github.com/xdissent/ievms>

<comment><USER4> I've deleted it because 50 gigs for testing IE7 - 9 is a bit too much for my 120 gig SSD drive.

<comment><USER5> In case you didn't know, it keeps the original download around after install (and maybe other files - it has been a while since I used it). Deleting those will free up quite a bit of room.

<comment><USER4> This was after I deleted the downloaded files, if I recall correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, Microsoft clearly gained a couple of points back for me.

First, beautifully designed page.

Second, partnering with a cool company rather than staying Microsoft-only- product.

Third, Agreeing that old browsers are a pain to deal with and providing solutions for devs.

Fourth, Agreeing that there are other OS!

<comment><USER7> First, instead of fixing their stupid browser so it works like all the others, they provide "tools" to ask that _you_ make your sites compliant with their stuff

Second, my site uses jQuery UI 1.10 and they suggest I update to 1.9.

Regarding web browsers, Microsoft is still sucking balls, year after year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They offer a 3 month trial of BrowserStack (who also have a free trial, but presumably its less than 3 months?) but it requires Facebook login.

When I tweeted to @ie to ask why this is the case, @browserstack replied saying "Just a way to manage sign-ups especially duplicate".

How is it possible that companies like Microsoft and Browserstack, both of whom have existing "signup" functionality, and one of whom already operates an "online profile" system, require Facebook for a trial like this?

<comment><USER9> Because it's a pain to set up a new Facebook profile. Presumably enough of a pain that people won't be willing to do it every 3 months to avoid paying for BrowserStack.

<comment><USER10> I'd assume that as well. I have collected several Microsoft IDs by way of Hotmail/live.com/outlook.com but I only have one Facebook account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > VMs for Mac and Linux coming soon.

So you don't have to bother visiting that page.

</comment><comment><USER12> Soooo no new tools released. Just a marketing Web Site for IE10. I was so excited for a great application to test with.

<comment><USER13> Yep, all this stuff was already available. We've been using BrowserStack for ages and the VMs have been available from MS for a long time. All they've done here is package it up in a shiny looking website that's basically begging developers not to forget about IE now that everybody writes for webkit & mozilla.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's almost as if microsoft has a 5 year lag on processing developer complaints.

</comment><comment><USER15> Unless something has changed. Don't these VMs expire ... and require a redownload / setup after a few months? Nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER16> OK, maybe someone can explain. Have I been doing it wrong?

I have minimal Windows VMs built on VMWare to test with everything from ie6 to ie9 and a Windows 8 VM to test ie10. Same for Windows Safari and Firefox. With VMWare's workstation software you, effectively, get one browser per tab (well, one vm per tab) and testing is dead simple.

This wasn't so hard to setup at all. I can even remote-desktop into the machine hosting the VM's and test from another machine. The only cost were the Windows licenses, but we use Windows already, so that wasn't too bad.

Why would one want to pay to use these services, particularly when, if I understand it correctly, they offer static images of each browser as opposed to a real-time interaction?

<comment><USER5> Design teams that aren't techy enough for VMs, OSes that don't support emulating X (ie, Windows users wanting to test their mobile site on an iOS device), and testing a large number of variations come to mind.

For instance, how long (and how much HD space!) would it take you to set up emulators for all these? <http://www.browserstack.com/list-of-browsers-and- platforms> (note that these are in-your-browser remote desktop sessions, essentially. some services are static images, like BrowserShots.org, some are not)

For most people, I totally agree, especially with e.g. the IEVMS script. Pretty simple, low cost, and it probably covers all the variety you need, since it's not too hard to install multiple versions of Firefox and Chrome on most OSes. But exceptions exist, and I'd be willing to bet they're relatively large (absolute) numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a designer, I can't really use this. It misses some of the minor design details that I can see in a real IE8 browser. It's like looking at your jpegs at 40% compression in Photoshop.

<comment><USER18> i felt this was a major issue. then i noticed the high quality setting in BrowserStack. with high quality set, sites look great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just took a look at this in my lunch break, sent it to the QA team and we love it!

Expecting it to get passed to the boss to check if it will be a purchase soon.

</comment><comment><USER20> Could someone please edit the title? It seems a bit on the overly redundant side, with the domain two times (three with HN's mention). Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER21> I connected my facebook, put in the URL for my site and hit "Test"... and it took me to another registration page. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER22> Personally I like the IETester: <http://www.my- debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage>

Unfortunately, it runs just under Windows.

</comment><comment><USER23> And now we learn the true reason MS ignored W3C all those years: To make money. Step 1: get people to use obsolete software. Step 2: license support.

</comment><comment><USER24> Let's not forget Mogotest.com

I've used both Browserstack and Mogotest on and off the past few years and I have to admit its invaluable.

<comment><USER25> Does anyone use testling.com? <http://testling.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Never thought I'd say this but thank you Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nope. Nice try, but doesn't work.</comment>


Don't Kill Your Startup With 1,000 Trivial Tasks - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/78988/Founder-Focus-Don-t-Kill-Your-Startup-With-1-000-Trivial-Tasks.aspx

<comment><USER2> So dude meets $100k/day entrepreneur which tells him what he does (to make that 100k).

At which dude says: No, you're doing it wrong here is what you should do: outsource all that menial work and do "meaningful" stuff.

Anybody ventures to guess how much the dude was making per day? That's what I would REALLY like to know.

<comment><USER3> _Anybody ventures to guess how much the dude was making per day? That's what I would REALLY like to know._

Minimum the low millions per year. I think I read Appsumo (the dude's business) had 150000 members last year. They sell software or services to businesses/geeks.

<comment><USER4> AppSumo has grown a lot since. <http://www.appsumo.com/appsumo-growth-action- video/?rf=srch>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it seems reasonable to look at your per-hour rate when deciding whether to do a task yourself or farm it out, it's often not. The cost of farming out a small task is often orders of magnitude higher then completing it yourself. Plus you know it's getting done right.

Naturally once you have recurring tasks, it makes sense to consider outsourcing, but your average founder is earning zero so his premise is doubly flawed.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think one of the core traits of a "hacker" is that she/he will naturally look for ways to automate/outsource tasks that are redundant, trivial or generally unenjoyable–often even before they become a roadblock to "scaling".

But I don't think you can expect _everyone_ who runs a business to adopt this mindset.

</comment><comment><USER7> Rather than a post showing that it makes sense to delegate verifiable & menial tasks, I wish the author would have written "How to know you're big enough that your time should be spent on XYZ instead ABC." That's an art and not a science, but tips from people who make $100k/day would make a more useful article.

<comment><USER8> Definitely. I've been spending a decent amount of mental energy on this and still feeling very fuzzy about it. I especially feel like bootstrapping techies treat their time like it's worth nothing, when it clearly isn't -- they just aren't getting paid in cash for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What if the person enjoys it the 'menial' and 'trivial' tasks? What if it's a way for them to stay connected with what their creation? I personally sometimes enjoy autonomous/repetitive actions once in a while just so my brain can zone out and/or to let my mind wamder.

The title can definitely be better – something along the line of min/maxing your time/profit, instead of 'killing' companies or 'trivial' tasks.

<comment><USER10> _> What if it's a way for them to stay connected with what their creation_

Exactly. In Hackers and Painters [1] pg suggests "saving up" software bugs, because "it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is". I think this transfers pretty well to things like tech support in relation to running a startup, in that menial tasks are quickly rewarding and keep you in the "zone".

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html></comment></comment>


I'm launching a startup in 24 hours - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/patwalls <comment><USER2> without watching this - just the title resonates with me. A buddy and I have been working on a "portfolio of business concepts" along similar lines.

Here's how we're doing it:

1\. we have a bunch of ideas we're nominally interested in.

2\. an idea rises to the top of a sort of "lets do this" sentiment by virtue of us simply getting excited about it enough to have 2 or 3 solid hours of excited discussion about it; else they just fade away

3\. for a idea that converts into a business we want to put out; we spend a short and intense period of time - a solid week maybe - working out the business vision, customer personas, reverse financials, basic financial model and how we want to do sales and marketing.

4\. we quickly develop a "2 pager" website to represent the business and use as a landing zone for marketing.

5\. goto 1

So far I'm both very excited about this - and its proving astonishingly difficult (marketing and lead generation!) - we've put out only one biz out so far, but have 2 more at stage 3.

edit/addition:

Why? The theory is this: together we have a set of skills that we can apply to a variety of tech products and services and we have desire to build and run our own money making business.

That said, any single product service is likely to fail; but knowing if its failing or succeeding will take time - likely many months (or even a couple years?). The hope is that putting several businesses out there quickly will allow us to see momentum in 1 or 2 over that same period and then allow us to put more effort in the right place.

Separately, having several businesses out there provide for great conversation fodder when doing face to face marketing - hopefully increasing the odds in detecting interest and concepts that are permutations of the existing portfolio.</comment>


Confessions of a Necromancer - <AUTHOR> http://hintjens.com/blog:125 <comment><USER2> "The foundation for a good project is: a competent client who knows the business and has power of decision; a full-stack team that can deal with the work, at all technical levels; and a technical platform that is both dependable and tractable."

Very true.

<comment><USER3> My observations very much confirm his. Especially this point:

 _technology is a slave to personality. It doesn 't matter how good the design, when there are unresolved problems in the organization._

Amen. And that's exactly what a lot of the latest project management styles try to fix.

I almost never dread technical challenges (especially in the cookie-cutter LOB apps I build in my day job), but I do fear organizational dysfunction.

<comment><USER4> Can you give some examples of "project management styles" that try to fix this?

<comment><USER3> Well, that's what I read into the Agile manifesto:

[http://agilemanifesto.org/](http://agilemanifesto.org/)

Basically any modern project management style focused on people and needs instead of reams of documentation.

I've unfortunately never worked at a place that does this right, but I had the strong impression some really good companies do it right - I was blown away by Guidewire back when I was in the insurance business, for example, they really seemed to do project management right ( see [https://www.guidewire.com/blog/best- practices](https://www.guidewire.com/blog/best-practices) , and stuff like this - [https://www.guidewire.com/blog/best- practices/implementation...](https://www.guidewire.com/blog/best- practices/implementation-project-best-practices-find-your-protagonist) , Scott Hatland really impressed me as a guy that lived this kind of person-first approach ).

Since it's more of a people and organization thing than a formal "project management style" thing, I don't know if there's one "style" that does this above all - Agile, Scrum, Kanban, can all be twisted by people who don't understand the core concepts.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, in practice, Agile almost always devolves into a cargo cult: perform the ritual of the Standup at the appointed time, etc. and all will be well. Any actual personality management is papered over with appeals to authority.

I think teams that succeed do so despite using Agile (or any other management fad). A cohesive team that communicates well can succeed using Agile, sure, but the process is incidental; they would succeed using most any methodology. Survivorship bias leads people to believe that Agile (or whatever methodology- of-the-week is in play) is causative, when it is actually epiphenomenal.

<comment><USER6> Which brings us to the [http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org](http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org) ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Be nice to people, even those trying to hurt you. "

Perhaps one of the hardest lessons to live by, but of immense value.

<comment><USER8> It's very hard lesson to imbibe, as I've recently learned from interactions with people I'd worked closely with. What do you do when being nice only results in the person getting worse? Some people don't respond to kindness. Some take advantage of the fact that they are physically stronger. What do you do in those situations?

<comment><USER9> Then you leave. If needed there are a host of other techniques to also use, see my psychopaths book. Doesn't require you to become like them.

<comment><USER10> [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4c27ss/im_pieter_hint...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4c27ss/im_pieter_hintjens_and_im_here_to_discuss/)

<comment><USER11> Holy shit I can't believe the amount of venom these guys came up with just because some guy wrote a book!

After reading all these war stories from Pieter I'm definitely going to weigh his book on the subject of psychopaths far higher than any controlled experiment psychology BS (those guys can't even reproduce their results most of the time.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> context: [https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/777462241515962368](https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/777462241515962368)

<comment><USER9> It got better, I had a bad reaction to paracetamol I'd just started taking, it seems.

<comment><USER12> That's a relief! Glad to hear the plan is on hold.

Hey, noted you writing about not being into this "fight this thing" ("neighbor") but curious how this turn of event alters your views. Just purely in the emotional and psychological sense, does this all of a sudden having an extended expected horizon, doesn't [it] seem like future could be anything in the realm of possible. (I apologize if this is too personal.)

<comment><USER9> Well, I'm steadily losing weight, down to about 65kg now from 76kg when I was diagnosed. I'm finding it harder and harder to eat, and I've steadily increased my painkillers from 10mg to 50mg or more per 12h.

So, clearly, things are not getting better. I'm dying and it is just a matter of what bed I die in, and whether it'll be a vital organ like the liver that gives up first, or euthanasia if the breathing gets too hard, and the pain too much.

What the extended horizon does is let me write a little more in that article (there are still stories to tell) and wonder if maybe it'll be enough for a book.

Weirdly the main emotion I feel is a kind of embarrassment at raising a false alarm that gets so many people worried. Also, happiness of course to still be alive and see my family & friends and chat a little more with people on the Internet :-)

<comment><USER13> I love books. I'm finishing for the first time the Foundation Series of Isaac Asimov.

You know what's frighten me? When i read him, i kinda connect with him, his beliefs, fears, opinions, view points ... his soul. Problem is: guy is (physically) dead for over a decade. But when i read his books, it's like if he is alive.

I started reading Confessions of a Necromancer and boy! it's amazing. I'm sure, deep inside, it's a masterpiece and a way for your mind and soul to survive all difficulties you are facing now.

So you are not dying, indeed, you are probably living more then most of your entire life before. Even if your body is in a bad shape, you true self are getting better and better.

Sorry for saying this like that, but keep up the good job!

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it's true, the last five months have been a more intense sensation of living than I've ever known.

<comment><USER14> There's nothing quite like facing one's imminent dissolution to focus the mind.

Some years back, after watching someone very near and close go through and eventually succumb to a situation similar to yours, I used travel as one of my coping and recovery mechanisms.

Came a point on the trip where I found a very high and sheer promintory. I took the opportunity to consider just what it was that made staying alive worthwhile. Few if any religious or philosophical justifications do much for me.

The Talking Heads lyric, "heaven is a place where nothing ever happens" came to mind. And with it the realisation that there's only one sure-fire way to find out what comes next, and that's to be there for it. Regardless of whether that's good, bad, or indifferent.

I've found the argument convincing to date.

I'm also loving your posts and engagement. I've thanked you for them before, but here it is again: thanks.

<comment><USER9> My pleasure... :) I've really enjoyed this trip, the last five months.

<comment><USER14> It's a hell of a ride.

That said, I'm not entirely sure I'd accept your travel recommendations, at least not uncritically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thank you for posting that. Talking about the human process and story about how things happen help other people going forward. Understanding how people build things is crucial.

Legacy isn't just for novel writers and building architects and big name visual artists - it's for anyone who creates things. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" Isaac Newton 1676

</comment><comment><USER16> Every time I see a new post from hintjens I think: "oh, he's still alive!" and I feel a strange mix of happiness (about him being still alive) and sadness (about his very probable demise) at the same time.

<comment><USER17> Yes, he always reminds me that we all must die.

You have to make the best of the time you have and you don't know how much it is, even if you're smarter or richer than most people on earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great read. I've only been in the professional software business for a couple of years, but already many of his insights (especially the ones about terrible people management) hit close to home.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to write this down!

<comment><USER19> This one certainly resonates:

> It took me decades to realize that technology is a slave to personality. It > doesn't matter how good the design, when there are unresolved problems in > the organization.

It's not just that a good technology design needs to fit the needs of the organization; even a design that would be a good fit will be hard to deploy if the organization pushes against it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great read. Reminds me of "Coders at work", but more on the business side of things. We all talk about this stuff, but not many people are bold enough to write it all down and stick it on a webpage or in a book.

I'm most impressed by just how much work ends up flushed down the toilet. Makes me feel so much better about all the dead-ends I have been involved with. Actually my sense of the industry is that the majority of projects tank for one reason or another. I guess that's fine if you are just doing it for the money, but if so, then you are probably not a top-level dev.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just found the book The Psychopath Code thanks this HN post and I am reading it right now on a long bus trip. It brings back a way to much not so old memories.

</comment><comment><USER21> The plot is thickening. I'm here:

> Which was when someone decided to bluff the project, sign it for the budget > the client was willing to pay, force DEC to accept whatever solution we came > up with, and then hire me to make it all work.

</comment><comment><USER22> The start is straight out of Ready Player One for James Halliday.

</comment><comment><USER23> Have been reading and enjoying this for a few days so far, then I came to :

 _> And why pizza with ketchup and mayo is a Good Thing. _

and as an Italian I ought to dissent.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well so far I'm intrigued...

</comment><comment><USER25> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12562163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12562163)

<comment><USER9> This often happens, the previous article didn't get any visibility so people post it again, not realizing. I think the old one is the dupe :-) We need a name for a "dupe that was ahead of its time."

<comment><USER26> I propose "dud"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Doctor Veeeennnnttuuuurrreeeee!!!

\- Necromancer guy</comment>


The greatest vanishing act in prehistoric America - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/the-greatest-vanishing-act-in-prehistoric-america-1.18700/ <comment><USER2> Anyone interested in seeing these ruins up close should look up Keet Seel [1]. You hike out to the site, knock on the door at a small ranger hut, and he gives you a personal tour as you walk through the site and see thinks like broken pottery and houses held together with rope made from chicken feathers made almost 1k years ago. I recommend making it an overnight trip, but the drive up camping area at this national monument was also amazing.

[1] [http://www.nps.gov/nava/planyourvisit/guidedtours.htm](http://www.nps.gov/nava/planyourvisit/guidedtours.htm)</comment>


Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfFGrQLuY8s

<comment><USER2> "the consumer is very mobile and we found this out in the hand calculator market"

I've been spending a bit of time studying pre-Tramiel Atari recently: Racing the Beam, Business if Fun, Antic Podcast, etc.

The Antic podcast in particular has been conducting a series of absolutely amazing interviews with people who worked at Atari during the 8-bit microcomputer era.

It's kind of amazing where Cyan Engineering (and Atari) was in their development. What's kind of interesting to me is not that they predicted future (often they didn't), but the kind of alternate future if they had been able to bring product to market. Atari's notoriously bad management killed all of this off.

One of the most interesting interviews I remember from Antic was with Rich Pasco, who came to Atari from Xerox PARC and wanted to take Atari computers into a direction that ultimately became the modern desktop OS, he was systematically shot down by Atari management until he was put in charge of building an iterative memory management chip for a mild revision of one of their 8-bit machines.

Atari could have been Apple.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another cool article about Cyan and the Stella/2600: [http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/Atari_ca...](http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/Atari_case_history.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was not expecting the touchscreen.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting -- but it seems like it would have been rather lonely to be an engineer out there

<comment><AUTHOR> It was (and still is) fairly quiet, but there were also Litton Engineering Group [1] and The Grass Valley Group [2] in the area. There are still a surprising number of engineers in the area due to the large number of high-end and broadcast video companies still in business. I think AJA is the biggest but there is also Sierra Video and Renegade Labs. Grass Valley is still here as well but it has changed hands a few times over the past few decades.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Litton,_Sr](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Litton,_Sr).

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Valley_%28company%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Valley_%28company%29)</comment></comment>


Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup - <AUTHOR> I've been coding away on my startup for a few months, the end is nearly in sight (for the beta at least) -- my product is a product similar to Techmeme and other news aggregators, but focussing on news recommendation of quality, not speed (ala Newspapers)
Where would you advertise? Would you sponsor a relevant blog, or advertise via Google Adwords / the deck etc?
Or would you put that $1k towards "impressing" blogs and marketing tools? <comment><USER3> You could always look for an abandoned website in a similar sector to yours, that has traffic. Then buy it. There's some great bargains to be had out there.

The best $500 I ever spent was on purchasing ircatwork.com which at the time had a default cgi::irc install on it. It did however have traffic - 100,000 visitors a month. I just emailed the owner, and managed to bag a bargain. Then just directed the traffic at Mibbit.com. Instant, cheap traffic looking for a good web based IRC client. I couldn't have asked for more.

A year on, and it now serves 1.5m visitors a month.

<comment><USER4> Sorry for asking, but how did you go about finding an abandoned website?

<comment><USER3> One fun place to look is Yahoo directory. <http://dir.yahoo.com/>

It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of traffic, but the owners don't care about any more.

Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners and seeing if any bite.

<comment><USER5> sitepoint.com has a marketplace. Lots of crap in there but you may find a blog or site that's relevant with decent traffic or keyword rankings in your niche. Anyone else have a link similar to sitepoint?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gah, you're about a week early for me to show you my article answering this question. Here's the short version.

$1,000 will buy you about one feature worth of magazine quality pillar content plus effort to launch the content (by contacting relevant blogs, news organizations, etc). The ROI on evergreen content over the long term is stupendous -- it brings in links like crazy (which translates into direct SEO benefits), brings in traffic for forever, and is just stupidly cost effective.

Here's a (cheaper) bit of evergreen content which is Pretty Darn Useful for my niche: <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/dolch-sight-words-bingo.htm> . I think that probably took, with its sister page, 2.5 hours to put together, so call that $250. (I have since become _vastly_ more efficient at pumping out the content. You can hear more about that in a week when the article is done.)

Those two pages have, at last count, something like 100 backlinks, including from some fairly high authority pages ("Would you mind if we included your resource in this year's copy of the [American state] reading curricula?" _swoon_ ). Buying links on that scale would cost me thousands of dollars _per month_ (I do not recommend buying links).

That page alone had 30,000 visitors in 2008 alone. Buying 30,000 visitors, _all of whom wanted something very close to what I sell_ , would cost me about $1,800 via AdWords.

Direct revenue as a result of it was only about $1,000 in 2008. (I say "only" because it is one of the most poorly monetized pages on my site. I tried to strike a balance between monetization and linkability, mostly aimed at linkability since that was published before anyone had heard of me.)

So yeah, with $1,000, I'd suggest writing (or commissioning) some pillar content aimed straight at the people who you want to convince to give you money/influence.

<comment><USER7> 100 backlinks? How come google only shows one?

<comment><USER8> Google isn't very good for displaying backlinks. Try yahoo site explorer. Quarkbase (for buzz) & websitegrader are also excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, you have $1k for marketing your current site. That's actually a ton of money.

Here's a couple of ways to stretch $1k marketing budget:

* Hire an Indian/East European company on eLance that specializes in internet marketing. Pay them $3-5 an hour x 10 hours a week x 3 months to do their thing. Or, you can pay them by the task.

* Write a letter to English/Business departments at the three closest colleges. Tell them you have a 3 month marketing internship. It's unpaid, but interns will receive a $200 a month stipend. Have them write blog posts, blog comments, submit to bookmarking sites, write press releases, etc... If college kids are your demographic, be sure to give your interns swag.

* Get a bunch of users at once from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Set up a job called, "evaluate my new news service", and pay $0.02 a hit. 10000 hits x $0.02 = $200 Ask them to write their impressions in a comments form on your HIT description. Give them an option to submit their email address if they want to be updated about future changes to your site.

* User Amazon's Mechanical Turk service command line tools to script a recurring HIT. You can ask 100 people a day to look at your site, register, comment, etc... 100 hits a day x $0.02 = $2 a day.

* Adwords, but depending on your site, your keywords, you're probably looking at $0.05-.50 a hit.

* Depending on your site, you could hold a competition and submit it to whatever forums and BBS's you'd like to. The winner gets a brand new $200 iPod.

* Buy swag and hand it out to your targeted demographic. Or, give it to your first passionate users. People love free stuff, and you might be able to get some word of mouth/buzz from passionate users that just got a t-shirt from your site. Cost of a custom T-shirts in small batches: $10-15 a piece. Custom stickers in batches of 1000: $75. <http://www.stickergiant.com/custom_stickers/>

<comment><USER10> "* Hire an Indian/East European company on eLance that specializes in internet marketing. Pay them $3-5 an hour x 10 hours a week x 3 months to do their thing. Or, you can pay them by the task."

Could you explain what their "thing" is?

<comment><USER11> Their "thing" will be spamming blogs and forums with your links, which, unless done skilfully, will create severe negative backlash and get your site banned from Google. Alternatively, their "thing" will be showing your site as a popunder on spam domains and botnet computers, giving you worthless traffic that only drains your bandwidth. Don't risk it.

<comment><USER12> The better thing they can do is to email all of the websites that link to your competitors and ask those websites for a link. But you can do that yourself.

<comment><USER9> Why do it yourself when you can pay someone $2-5 a hour to do it while you work on building new features on your site?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Keep that $1k to feed yourself. Start a blog, talk about your product, get yourself dugg, slashdotted, reddited, HN'ed, etc... That will bring much more than $1k of attention to your product.

Importantly, without being sleazy about it, always be happy, willing, enthusiastic to talk about your product. You may feel a little bit of shame at the beginning, but it will go away. After all, you're telling people about your product because it will make their life better right?

To start at the beginning: why haven't you mentioned your product name in this post? How about an "Ask HN: Review my news aggregator"? Seems like a missed opportunity already.

<comment><USER14> Submitting yourself to digg, slashdot, and reddit will most likely get you about $0.12 worth of publicity. Can't hurt to try, but 999 out of 1,000 startups get 3 click throughs total that way. HN is much better.

The rest I agree with.

<comment><USER13> Depends how and what you submit.

I can reasonably easily get a few thousand hits out of a combination of these sites, even with a very young blog. Much more with an older blog. All you have to do is write something insightful, bite-size, funny, well written, appealing, with a great headline, and get your friends to upvote you. That works on Reddit. There's no guarantee for any particular article to make it, but over a period of a couple of months any decent writer should be able to make it.

(I'm speaking from experience btw)

<comment><USER14> While I believe that you can do this, most people wouldn't have the slightest clue how. Also, my understanding is that it's highly unlikely someone new to Digg or Reddit will get a submission promoted far. Is that not true?

<comment><USER13> You'll definitely have to work on it to make it happen - i.e. become active on those sites. However, I only have 288 karma points on reddit and I can get a reasonable success rate when I submit stuff there. The longer your account has existed and the more active it is, though, the better, of course.

Digg is a pain in the ass in that respect. The volumes of "diggs" required to even make a blip are so huge that you'll only make it there if either you've totally gamed it (like that guy who posted that article about it recently), or if you've made it through somewhere else and you're dugg as a side effect. I stopped bothering with it because I kept hearing that the quality of the traffic is also very low anyway (very high bounce rates).

Reddit and HN, however, are relatively easy to promote to, and if you get really picked up very well on reddit (which should happen with 1 article every few months if you're good and write reasonably often), it'll spread to other places too. Articles that succeed only on HN don't seem to spread around too much, however.

The best place so far, though, was Slashdot. Get yourself slashdotted (on their main page), and you can expect 100k+ hits from it, and many links from blogs, and probably you'll get reddited, delicious'ed, dugg, etc, soon after. Be sure that your server is ready to handle it... It's a complete lottery - <USER2> actual editor has to decide whether to push your article - but if you win it, it's worth it - so submit there when you have good slashdot content, it's free and might bring you untold amounts of geeky traffic!

Bear in mind also that none of these methods guarantee anything - not even traffic, and definitely no guarantee that people will stick around. But they're not overly hard to achieve if you're a decent writer and have something reasonably interesting to say (those are the hard bits, really).

<comment><USER14> I didn't realize Slashdot still had that kind of traffic. Good to know. You're right about HN users. They don't tend to Digg or Reddit you much. But they do stick pretty well if your product is in the category, so they're worth quite a bit on their own.

Definitely I would recommend just running a blog on Wordpress.com or TypePad or blogspot. Some service that can withstand the heat of any big press releases. Just in case. You can spend a few bucks to make it look like a subdomain of your main site anyway. Blogging can net you some organic search traffic too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Impressing blogs is free. Labor intensive, but not something you can really buy.

$1k is too little to really net you much of anything. I'd hang on to it and just work for the traffic.

If you absolutely must spend it though, I'd try to optimize. Start off with a small amount of ads in various places, see what converts best. Throw $50 each at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace any other self-serve ad network that might just work for you. You can probably get a good idea for just 20% of the overall budget where the other 80% would be most effective.

I'd try to target as much as possible. With a bigger ad budget, you have to get more popular keywords just to spend it, but with $1,000 you could pick obscure, highly-focused keywords relevant to your audience. For instance with my fantasy sports startup we aimed at second rate NFL players who nobody but a fantasy sports player or stats junkie (the two being nearly synonymous) would ever Google. It would have been impossible for us to spend more than $100 a day that way, because there's just not enough volume, but it's pretty efficient.

</comment><comment><USER15> Announce that sometime within the first 10 days of its launch your service will float one fake news story or headline amid the stream of real news. The first reader to email you identifying the fake wins the coveted $1K "User Editor at Large" award. In addition to the money give the winner a temporary featured column on your site. If the contest generates interest, repeat it as often as you can afford to -- perhaps quarterly? Good luck!

<comment><USER5> Sorry, but I can't see that idea equating to links, quality targeted traffic, or interest in his service, only interest in 1000 dollars.

<comment><USER16> It's novel enough it might get some secondary reporting. That it also raises ethical issues -- a news quality site giving out fake news?! -- also helps, by creating potential controversy/arguments/discussion threads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How's your logo? StartupSchwag.com will put you on a sticker (for free) and distribute those stickers to its subscribers (also free). People take pics that wind up on flickr, talk about what's in the bag on their blogs, etc. Good times had by all.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you absolutely want to advertise, don't forget about StumbleUpon.

<comment><USER8> Can you please elaborate/share some stories?

<comment><USER18> I only know that some specialists recommended it as a bargain at a barcamp a while ago. Your site get's thrown into the stumble stream, so people actually stumble upon your site, they don't have to click on an ad first to get to your site.

Apart from advertising, StumbleUpon also tends to bring a lot of visitors, more than the average digg I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't advertise.

Be enthusiastic about your product. Have a twitter account? Talk about your product. Start a company/project blog and pimp that content as much as possible.

Email every single blog that covers what your product is about or have influential writers who would like your product. Simply introduce your product in the email and don't ask for a post, link or anything. Ask them for their opinion.

This is the best marketing.

It's extremely time consuming but I have much more time than I have money, not sure about yourself. You could outsource this but personal emails from the owner/developer will get you further.

</comment><comment><USER20> The most surprising thing here is the number of posts that say "don't spend the money -- don't advertise." I think that this clearly shows that many people on here are techies rather than businessmen ...

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's true. If you just spend $1000 blindly on advertising, you'll get pretty much nothing back. It's not enough to make a difference. It's better to either spend it creatively, for example as I posted, buying old domains that still have traffic, or just keeping it, and using the far more valuable and scalable "word of mouth".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I dunno about the thousand bucks, but one thing you should do is get in touch with Bacon's Mediasource. For a couple thousand bucks a year, they will let you subscribe and make media lists (lists of contact information of reporters). But just get them to let you trial it for a week, make your media list, and start making phone calls.

No thousand dollar ad campaign will be as effective as calling reporters (for free).

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of great ideas on here. Since you are the only one here who really knows your product, you are the one that would have to choose. I work for an ad agency. We are very much into asking questions. Our goal is to interrogate the product or service before we recommend anything. Once you do a soft release to us at hacker news and we know more about the product, you will start to see even better responses to your question about where to spend your thousand dollars.

One word of advice though, find out how you can quickly and easily explain your product to your target market. When you target market understands your product after tagline or sentence, they can easily explain it to their friends. This will help you in all marketing efforts, but particularly on small budgets.

The startups that users understand are going to do better than the ones that users need to spend forever explaining to their friends.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is not related _directly_ to marketing but I have seen a lot people recommend usertesting.com

And one thing I was thinking about doing in this vein is to go to local coffeeshops and offer people coffee or $5 etc. to sign up and try your website while you watch and take notes etc. You know, just say "hey do you have 15 minutes, I'll trade you ___"

Has anyone had good or bad experiences with that? It might even get those people to sign up / stick around for good.

If you don't get people interested, you at least get usability feedback. (obviously if you don't need that feedback simultaneously with marketing, then this would be an unreasonable amount of time and money to spend)

</comment><comment><USER24> Google adwords for a news aggregator kind of product is mostly going to go in vain.

Advertising on relevant blog would get you a better reach.

Beyond that a well chalked out email marketing and as others mentioned heavy social media penetration would work for this.

Additionally adding some kind of a virality into your product to increase word of mouth, some interesting ways where people would find it useful or intuitive to forward it to friend would work.

Finally, a very aggressive seeding from your own team - send it to all friends, repeatedly request them (if they would and if no, why not) send it to their first circle.

<comment><USER25> You can use adwords on the partner network (not search traffic, but targeting other sites) and pay a very low CPC ($0.05). Google will eventually spend it for you and you'll get quite a few visitors from it. Not super-high quality, but may get you started.

<http://FairSoftware.net>: where geeks are their own boss

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think I wouldn't advertise, but maybe buy something useful with the 1000$. For example, pay somebody to write a press release, or pay a web designer to improve the looks of the site or create a cool new logo.

<comment><USER26> I've got to say that sending out a press release if you only have $1000 is just not the best use of funds IMO. Press releases have their place but is it really what you spend your first $1000 on? No way.

Adwords seems the most logical choice. I'd spend $20 and buy Perry Marshall's Adwords book and learn how to do split testing. With a $1000, you shuld be able to generate enough impressions to figure out what keywords work, what your competitors are doing in Adwords, and have a handle on what your landing pages are doing. Once you have that then you can more ably spend the next $1000.

Here's that Perry Marshall book: [http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google- AdWords-Million/...](http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords- Million/dp/1599180308/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231155345&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER18> I have never issued a press release myself, but various people told me that I should. I am just thinking that Adwords are more of a "one time" investment: either somebody buys your product after clicking on the ad or not, but there are no longterm gains (except that you could reinvest the earnings from selling the product). It seems unlikely that somebody would decide to blog about your product after stumbling upon it via an ad, for example.

Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth - like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my site. A google ad does not increase page rank.

Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app (a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break even point.

As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. Actually one can make them for free, but with my app back then I just felt it might be good to pay someone who is more skilled at writing to do it.

<comment><USER26> I think that whether it's a one-time opportunity or not depends on whether you capture that email. If not, then yes - it's a one-time oppty. But if you capture the email, you have many chances to get in front of them - on your terms as well.

And I never thought anyone meant to spend all $1000 on a press release :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like there is some overlap with my startup, NewsCred. Have you taken a look? Get in touch if you want some tips.. will be happy to help.

<comment><USER8> In an advertising sense or?

<comment><USER27> In that we also aggregate news and are focused on quality (hence the name "cred-ibility"). But that is just our consumer facing side and not our revenue generating biz model.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Couldn't FB help out governments with tracing postive covid19 cases? - <AUTHOR> Finally, here would be the chance for social networks to shine. Mass surveillance, but with a positive impact. <comment><USER2> Thats a good idea, for people that haven't opted out using privacy settings.

I think that Social Media should do what it does best and hashtag shame people not heeding the warnings, eg. If you see a person partying at the bar instead of staying home, share and shame them for their selfish actions. Same goes for people at the beaches.

The best sayng I heard today was we should tell the younger crowds "Your Grandparents went to war to protect you, can't you stay home and sit on the couch for while to protect them?"</comment>


Obama Administration Denies Record 77% of FOIA Requests - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SUNSHINE_WEEK_FOIA <comment><USER2> OT, but on public record laws in general and the problems:

[https://twitter.com/JonathanRabbitt/status/71028873888713932...](https://twitter.com/JonathanRabbitt/status/710288738887139328)

[https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/710292317031116800](https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/710292317031116800)

[https://twitter.com/JonathanRabbitt/status/71029285122607104...](https://twitter.com/JonathanRabbitt/status/710292851226071041)

</comment><comment><USER3> Link fail.

<comment><USER4> It looks like this may be the updated version of the article:

 _US gov 't sets record for failures to find files when asked_

[http://bigstory.ap.org/article/697e3523003049cdb0847ecf828af...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/697e3523003049cdb0847ecf828afd62/us- govt-sets-record-failures-find-files-when-asked)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Create dynamic mixes for Apple Music that auto-update with new content - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, I'm Tanmay, the developer of an Apple Music iOS app called Soor (https://soor.app). I'm excited to launch v2.0 today with a couple of major features.
Magic Mix
- Create highly dynamic mixes based on filters and sources.
- A magic mix can be a combination of multiple sources and filters.
- Apple Music sources means the magic mix contents will change as Apple updates their curation.  This is what makes this feature unique, there's no other app out there that does auto updation of both local and Apple Music based sources.
- Integrated with Siri so you can just run any mix via a voice shortcut.
Release Alerts
- Add your favourite artists and the app will automatically notify you of their new releases.
- You can also manually add a release reminder for any upcoming album.
- Artists and release reminders are synced via iCloud. <comment><AUTHOR> Links

Post explaining the features in more details: [https://medium.com/@tanmays/soor-v2-0-introducing-magic- mix-...](https://medium.com/@tanmays/soor-v2-0-introducing-magic-mix-and- release-alerts-c6eea96e2462)

Design thread about the app on Twitter with its various UX and micro interactions: [https://twitter.com/tanmays/status/1070219850201600000?s=21](https://twitter.com/tanmays/status/1070219850201600000?s=21)

Soor is available on the App Store for $4.99 (lifetime license) [https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1439731526?ls=1&mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1439731526?ls=1&mt=8)</comment>


New Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars - <AUTHOR> http://aerique.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-google-ai-challenge-planet-wars.html <comment><USER2> To skip the 3 line interstital blog post: <http://ai-contest.com/>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I don't understand why that link wasn't posted.

My blog post was just meant to get it on Planet Lisp and make the Lispers aware.

<comment><USER2> As someone who writes similar types of post (though usually a bit longer ;-)) I share your pain.

<comment><USER3> This one was indeed exceptionally short. My excuse: I was at work :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the "Advanced Strategy Guide". As of 16:22 UTC all it says is "I got nothin"

<http://ai-contest.com/advanced_strategy_guide.php>

</comment><comment><USER5> Galcon itself used to be mod-able, with several people creating bots for it. Someone rolled them all together in a single mod allowing you to pit different AIs against each other, tournament style. The whole package was an excellent sandbox for teaching AI to budding programmers.

Sadly, that's all gone. Mods are gone, the modding forum is gone. Rather than an engrossing programming game, Galcon is now a mind-numbing clickfest. I am delighted to see Google picking up the concept.

<comment><USER6> Do you know who worked on it, and why it's gone? I might be interested in making a extensible HTML5 version of it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the structure of this game isomorphic to some other real-world problem they're interested in?

<comment><USER8> Of course not Ender. It's just a game. Just a game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Use of multiple processes or threads is prohibited._

How about mimicking them? Can one perform in-process "context switches" to do the same thing?

If no: where do you draw the line? Must each second's decisions be deterministic from the board state?

If yes: what's the difference? Ease of programming seems a poor metric, and you could just nab something that's already written that does this for you, resulting in nothing but increased compilation times.

<comment><USER10> The reason for this restriction is because your process and your opponent's run simultaneously on the same machine, so you only get one CPU. Doing your own userspace threading or whatever is fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's probably still too early on in these non-board-game-like game-AI competitions to do serious comparisons, but one thing that'd be cool to figure out in the future is how many components are resuable between these kinds of problems, versus requiring different strategy or hand tuning / hand feature extraction. For example, could similar bots do well at both Planet Wars and Starcraft (<http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition>)? If not, are there parts that can be shared (e.g. factor out high-level strategy versus low-level unit control)? Etc.

<comment><USER12> Relevant: <http://cs227b.stanford.edu> (General Game Playing)

GGPs can pretty much play any game with no continuous or unbounded variables, i.e. any game with a finite number of states. Popular examples include tic- tac-toe, checkers, and Connect 4; here's a larger list: [http://code.google.com/p/ggp-base/source/browse/trunk/ggp- ba...](http://code.google.com/p/ggp-base/source/browse/trunk/ggp- base/games/rulesheets)

Planet Wars could be played by a GGP, assuming some bound on the number of ships that could be created, but standard approaches like UCT, which don't take into consideration similarity between states [1], would fail hard against a specialized player.

[1] For example, if UCT saw a good move in a given state, it wouldn't apply that knowledge to the adjacent state in which only one ship is in a different location.

<comment><USER11> Ah yeah, I'm quite familiar with GGP. I'm very skeptical of its "generality", though, once you get away from anything that's vaguely similar to chess. For example, try writing Starcraft in GDL (even a discretized version); it's not impossible, but I sure wouldn't want to do it, and the result wouldn't be tractably usable by any GGP engines either. I'm working on a project currently that needs a logical representation of videogames, but I'm not using GDL, because it's just a pain in the ass for videogames (and I want an internal time axis also, not a state-transition system).

But mostly I was thinking on the playing side: I don't think any of the current GGP approaches can even come _close_ to playing strategy-type video games, because they don't typically have any real notion of, as you mention, similarity between situations, or a decomposition into hierarchical or interrelated concerns. A Starcraft bot that treated Dragoon microcontrol as an equivalent-level problem to build order probably isn't going to do well. I think the robotics community might actually have a better starting point: architectures with interrelated components like SLAM, planning, motor control, etc., as opposed to trying to turn the "robotics problem" into one giant state space to be navigated by one giant algorithm. Trying to build an agent that plays two quite different strategy games well (Starcraft and Planet Wars) might be one way of driving the development of those kinds of decompositions.

<comment><USER12> >But mostly I was thinking on the playing side: I don't think any of the current GGP approaches can even come close to playing strategy-type video games, because they don't typically have any real notion of, as you mention, similarity between situations, or a decomposition into hierarchical or interrelated concerns.

The problem is really all about game size, not generality or lack of "strategy". UCT is general (indeed, it converges to minimax in the limit), but with a large branching factor and a long game time it can be intractable to get a statistically significant number of samples. I guess you can think about strategy as a heuristic that drastically lowers the computational cost of planning...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where's the html5/javascript package? :\

<comment><USER14> I don't think <video> is going to help you here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there any place where the game's rules are exactly given? I'm particularly interested in how the growth rate and battles work. The Python package that I've downloaded contains no such info.

<comment><USER16> <http://ai-contest.com/problem_description.php>

<comment><USER15> That's the first place I've looked and it contains no clear information about the questions I'm asking.

A. "the number of ships on non-neutral planets increases according to the growth rate for that planet."

What does "according" mean - simple addition? And what happens to the neutral planets - no growth? In which case, how many fleets do the neutral planets start with?

b. "If the result is less than zero, then your bot gains control of the planet."

And how many losses have you incurred - exactly the number of defenders? If the defenders win, do they suffer losses equal to the number of attackers?

The reason I'm asking is that, if all the game does is simple addition and subtraction (no defense advantage, no Lanchester-type law for combat), then there probably exists a very simple optimal strategy, and it's more a problem of mathematics than AI.

<comment><USER17> 1) "then there probably exists a very simple optimal strategy, and it's more a problem of mathematics than AI."

I don't see how existence of the optimal strategy entails that this is not the problem of AI. After all, all finite state deterministic games can be essentially solved by traversing the game tree, searching for the best strategy. The thing is that in most games, this approach is not acceptable because of time and space issues. That's why we call for AI - to find a strategy which may not be optimal, but is "good enough" and does not take much resources to find.

Besides, I do not understand why do you think that _simple_ optimal strategy exists. The game of Go has equally simple rules, finding good strategy in it is not easy though.

2) The rules are not clear for me either. Last night I wrote a simple engine for planet wars [1], and I had to make some important decisions about things which the game description did not cover - for instance, what is the order of events in game? Is the number of ships on players' planets increased before or after the fleets arrive to them?

[1] - <http://bitbucket.org/dodek/gaclon/src>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is anyone aware of an AI game that has a homeostatic goal? I am thinking along the lines of a SimCity style game where random negative events happen and our AI would have to account and route around these types of issues. It would be interesting to see a simulation of that nature as compared to the normal competitive game (e.g. chess, go, reversi.)

</comment><comment><USER19> I rather wish their forum was open. I'm only receiving a blank grey window when I run ShowGame over a game's text.

Alas.

Edit: I suppose the outage was momentary; the forum is rather hopping.

<comment><USER20> I downloaded the source from Google Code, and found the invocation in a .php file there. (Grep for "ShowGame"). After adjusting for the fact that I had the python starter kit, the invocation worked without problems.

<comment><USER19> I'm not familiar with the Google Code site. Could your provide a link?

I've downloaded my kit from: <http://ai-contest.com/starter_packages.php>

Also, for what it's worth: [http://ai- contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=405&...](http://ai- contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=405&sid=c80b58cba82edd661ebfea3b8238c1cc)

I suspect I'm having a goofy Java issue, but that's likely a personal bias.

<comment><USER20> Check the source out from subversion, as described here:

<http://code.google.com/p/ai-contest/source/checkout>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yet another fun challenge in the form of an AI challenge. I really enjoyed the tron ai contest and I am looking forward to this one.

Good luck Colonizing and coding.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does this teach me how to think with artificial intelligence?

<comment><USER22> If you choose to solve it with artificial intelligence, then yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it just me or is having the navigation on the right hand side of the page really unusual?

<comment><USER2> It's not the "standard" but sidebars are common enough for it to work. Back in the 1998-2002 area, right hand navigation bars had a spurt of popularity because of usability findings in relation to the ease of moving between the scrollbar and the items. With the advent of scroll wheels, though, this hack became less significant and left handed navigation began to rule once again.</comment></comment>


California inmate takes unlikely path to freedom: podcasting - <AUTHOR> http://www.therepublic.com/2019/01/02/us-podcasting-inmate/ <comment><USER2> This is a great podcast, I've been a fan for a while now. Every episode is worth a listen.

Woods' story is just another piece of evidence that "3 strikes" rules have no benefit to society.

<comment><USER3> > another piece of evidence that "3 strikes" rules have no benefit to society.

First, I'm glad Woods is out. It's clear he is a changed man. His release was a fair decision by Gov Brown.

Would he have been equally as changed if he had only served 3 years? Doubtful, if recidivism statistics are accurate.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics report in April 2014. It studied recidivism patterns of 404,638 prisoners released from 2005-2010, from state prisons. Within three years, they were re-arrested at 67.8%, and 76.6% were re-arrested within five-years. 28.6% of inmates were arrested for a violent offense within five-years; 1.7% were for rape or sexual assault and 23.0% for assault.

Since a prior criminal record is a good predictor of future offending, the odds are that Woods would have committed another crime had he not been three- striked. As it is, society had 21 years of no further crimes from Mr. Woods as he was incarcerated. Remember, we aren't talking about a petty drug user or shoplifter -- we're talking about a man willing to put a gun in another person's face -- a violent act.

I'm happy that Mr. Woods has gotten his life together, but his third "strike" was attempted armed robbery. He wasn't shoplifting a candy bar. We have to ask ourselves, if Woods had gotten 3 years for the armed robbery, wouldn't statistics suggest that he would have committed more crimes, probably violent, such as another armed robbery?

3-strikes rules have no benefit to society? Sure they do -- we had 21 years without another violent crime from Mr. Woods.

<comment><USER4> Statistics are bullshit. God help us when we replace judges with ML-powered blackboxes.

Previous history is only a good indicator of future performance because we wrote the rules that way.

When you're taken out of society for a few years and the world moves on without you, the only connections you've made upon release are with other criminals.

And when your record is made public and discreetly used to discriminate against you as a job candidate, is it any wonder so many criminals reoffend? It's all too easy to be tempted back into easy (or illegitimate) money when you're surrounded by people playing that game.

Funny thing is, it's acknowledged to be a real problem-- the parole system tries to discourage you from maintaining associations with criminals as a condition of release-- but it isn't realistic depending on where you're from or what support you have.

<comment> barry-cotter If statistics are bullshit I'm sure you'll never refer to the below evidence. If you refuse to look at or listen to evidence unless it's ideologically congenial you're not a thinker, you're a hack.

[https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/reasonable-doubt- new-l...](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/reasonable-doubt-new-look- whether-prison-growth-cuts-crime)

> I estimate, that at typical policy margins in the United States today, > decarceration has zero net impact on crime outside of prison. That estimate > is uncertain, but at least as much evidence suggests that decarceration > reduces crime as increases it. The crux of the matter is that tougher > sentences hardly deter crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily > stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to > increase their criminality after release. As a result, "tough-on-crime" > initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in > the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any thoughts on a series of better ways to rehabilitate people and get productive members of society instead of marginalized?

<comment><USER6> Restorative justice: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice)

<comment><USER7> > Restorative justice is an approach to justice in which the response to a > crime is to organize a mediation between the victim and the offender

This wouldn't work so well for the large proportion of prisoners who only committed victimless crimes.

On second thoughts, maybe it would work even better for those prisoners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a great story. Good for Woods! I'm going to look that Podcast up, I hadn't heard of it.</comment>


Interactive C++ Metaprogramming Shell based on Clang [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-7oFSIlGr8

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link to the actual project

[http://plc.inf.elte.hu/templight/](http://plc.inf.elte.hu/templight/)</comment>


Show HN: Stoa – Stoic Meditation App and Journal - <AUTHOR> http://stoameditation.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with contemporary CBT and mindfulness.

Use it to build resilience, focus on what matters, and cultivate character.

Stoa contains guided meditations, a private journal, quotes, and conversations with experts like Massimo Pigliucci and Donald Robertson.

I created Stoa, a Stoic meditation app, as a side project because it's something I wanted to exist and use. Over the past few months, I've discovered that I wasn't alone!</comment>


StateOfTheArt.ai - <AUTHOR> https://www.stateoftheart.ai/ <comment><USER2> Really awesome, definitely bookmarking. Couple points:

\- Shouldn't you link to the arxiv page instead of the PDFs in case there's a revision?

\- What about a column for "area" as well? Would be nice to scroll through and see what areas have made progress relative to others lately.

\- Some sort of very brief mini-about/summary at the top of the main page wouldn't hurt. A tagline of some sort.

\- Now I notice there's an About under the hamburger menu -- why not just display HOME and ABOUT instead of hiding them in a menu? You don't have enough menu options to need to hide them in a hamburger menu.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, hamburger menu is weird. Also, it'd be nice to have a column for code (just links to github really).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The point:

 _We are an enthusiastic group of students trying to put in our two cents into the fast developing fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). ... One space we believe is currently not covered is that of an easily consultable repository for state of the art, quantifiable results across tasks. ... The main source of data is the community that can upload the relevant results of their field! We have further aggregated data from reading (a lot) of articles, from scraping the web, and from several existing datasets and websites. A portion of our dataset came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Measuring the Progress of AI Research."_

Kudos for the effort. I wish more areas had something like this.

<comment><USER5> If they would put that at the top of the website page, it would help 1000%.

<comment><USER6> thanks, added a comment

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great to see another one of these resources. I'd highly recommend checking out NLP-progress [1] and Papers with Code [2] which I've found to be excellent resources.

[1] [https://nlpprogress.com/](https://nlpprogress.com/) [2] [https://paperswithcode.com/](https://paperswithcode.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey. One of the creators here. Yes we are still missing several tasks and results, the idea is that this could be maintained by the community by making it easy to upload results. Definitely help is appreciated We are collecting a lot of feedback

<comment><USER8> Hey thanks for this. Please add a finance category. Timeseries has some overlap with finance but there is plenty of finance AI research that is not restricted to time series. Financial data has many distinct characteristics and interesting challenges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Commendable effort, but badly outdated already.

For example, the best result on CIFAR-10 for density models that I know of is 2.85 bits per dim (PixelSNAIL) rather than 3.35 (Glow), and this is a year old. PixelCNN++ is well known, and got 2.92.

For classification on CIFAR-10, current SOTA is much better than the 2015 Fractional-MP result (which also used non-standard augmentation, so perhaps not directly comparable to the rest)

<comment><USER6> Yes. the idea is the community can help maintain it by adding results (and tasks or datasets)

<comment><USER9> I think this kind of resource is in a chicken-and-egg situation: for people to bother to contribute to it, it needs to be seen by others as an authoritative reference, and vice versa.

I agree that it's badly needed. There were other projects like this, that seem abandoned: [http://rodrigob.github.io/are_we_there_yet/build/classificat...](http://rodrigob.github.io/are_we_there_yet/build/classification_datasets_results.html)

This probably belongs on Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the "I'm purposely playing dumb" perspective, I totally don't get that website on first glance. Even a 6 word sentence summary could make it a lot more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks super cool! There is a bit of data clean up to do. Just looking at speech recognition: "WER" and "Word Error Rate" should be the same thing, and sometimes it seems to be on a scale of 0 to 1 and other times a percentage. Also the Switchboard test set is duplicated. Finally, it really should be marked when data is augmented; many of these numbers are trained on outside data, which says more about how much data the researchers have access to as opposed to the ML system design.

</comment><comment><USER11> When I think of the things I would add to this, I realize how amazingly useful it would be to have more data on the tasks themselves. For starters, whether or not there is code and what license under which it is released, and for NLP what languages were used/are available for use. Also, sign language recognition fits somewhere between computer vision and NLP. If picked up by the community, this could become a huge knowledge base.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm seeing duplicates on there. Maybe find a way to group them, then when you click the link you can then choose from a particular source?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm toying with the idea of making an Open Source repository of reproducible papers. How did you get this started? How did you find people to collaborate?

I already bought reproduciblepapers.com

</comment><comment><USER14> For the state of the art for segmentation on the Cityscapes dataset, PSPNet isnt there and to my knowledge at 2017, it was state of the art (SOTA). I dont see it on this site.

<comment><USER6> Yes. There are some missing results and tasks. The idea is the community will help maintain it by adding results, tasks and datasets

</comment></comment><comment> ni-hil Very cool, will definitely keep this in my favorites.

However there is an issue with the pagination/navigation. I can't see the next items if there is more than 20.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was just about to build this! Arghh you beat me to it..

<comment><USER16> I'm sure they'd be happy to accept help!

<comment><USER6> indeeed!

<comment><USER15> what's your email??

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't scroll the list on safari (iPhone) and instead have to use the small are left to the list scroll. Otherwise really cool site!

</comment><comment><USER18> Hey OP! This is really cool. Would there be a way to add a column that explains the uninitiated what each column means?

</comment><comment><USER19> Very cool. I'd have liked a section concerning 3D Medical Image Segmentation/Classification.

<comment><USER6> Its easy to add datasets, results and tasks. the idea is the community can help maintain it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really like that html table you are using! It's featureful and looks great. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> can't connect, doesn't use TLSv1.2

</comment><comment><USER22> For Atari they forgot Rainbow I think</comment>


Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know whether there already exist some publicly available libraries / classifiers, which can be used to determine the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of a text passed to them? The task is not exactly simple, but it would be a great tool for all kind of web services. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is an interesting interview on the topic: [http://social.textanalyticsnews.com/news/%E2%80%9C-challenge...](http://social.textanalyticsnews.com/news/%E2%80%9C-challenge- still-accuracy-sentiment-prediction-and-solving-associated-problems%E2%80%9D)

And this is a presentation on the topic: <http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/liub-sentiment-analysis.ppt></comment>


Cinnamon II an Apple ][ Compatible Wrist Watch - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730981799/cinnamon-ii-the-ultimate-retro-smartwatch

<comment><USER2> Cool, but pricey... you think you can get a thousand backers for this? =) It would be awesome if you do.

We just finished porting our Apple II BASIC interpreter to Go. If we'd known about your project sooner maybe we could have helped each other with that...

Also, 32K? Seems a bit low. There's a lot for the II that needs 64 or even 128K

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess we'll have to see what the internet makes of it all :D. Short production runs are inherently expensive. And I think all too often kickstarter projects fail due to not properly pricing in externalities.

As for contributing/collaborating, the entire source code and interpreter for the watch will be made open source. At the end of the kickstarter. Plenty of opportunities ahead!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Also 160x128? That's 4 pixels per character at 40 columns -- I'm not imagining that's going to be all that usable for text? Sure you can't do a bit better than that?

</comment><comment><USER2> Also, how exactly does the input mechanism work?</comment>


Popular iOS Games That Could Have Been Designed for 8-Bit Systems - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/191.html <comment><USER2> Flappy Bird? Ahh, blog post from February 16, 2014</comment>


GRAIL Plans to Raise in Excess of $1B in Series B Funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170105006393/en/GRAIL-Plans-Raise-Excess-1B-Series-Funding <comment><USER2> This is HUGE news and really interesting.

To recap, GRAIL was created largely by Illumina to help drive sales of their sequencing instruments. Illumina lead (>80% market share) the DNA sequencing market.

However the market is still mostly pretty much research applications, and DNA sequencing has found limited applications in diagnostic settings.

This is their play to start selling into the clinic. Nobody else has really been able to break that market.

1BUSD might finally be enough to make that happen and if it does, that's really exciting. GRAIL are going for screening because that's the largest, most viable market (every adult, every N years).

The problem, is that to be viable it likely has to be cheap. Illumina currently charge about 1000USD per human genome sequenced. Screening costs would probably be similar. Illumina do charge around a 10x markup, so they've got scope to give GRAIL a special deal. But the screening test probably does need to be around 100USD.

If the play works out, Illumina will end up owning clinical diagnostic applications of DNA sequencing. It will kill any other players trying to move into this area.

Really interesting, 1BUSD is a huge bet.</comment>


Longer-Lasting Batteries Are Almost Here - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/batteries-last-longer-arrive-really/?mbid=social_fb <comment><USER2> "The entry-level laptop features a unique battery design that uses "terraced" battery cells to stuff every available centimeter of a device with power. "

Umm, no, it's not unique. It's kind of annoying when techbeat reporters can't even familiarize themselves with recent industry history. Both Motorola and LG were shipping devices with terraced batteries years ago, and they probably weren't the first either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Comparing battery technology with Moore's Law is just ridiculous.

Every year, there are big claims of revolutionary, new battery technology, but they never seem to reach the market. We're going to have to live with incremental improvements on Li-Ion (which companies like Tesla and Apple seem to be making some strides in) until alternative technologies mature, which I suspect will take years.

<comment><USER4> 50% gains every 18 months is beyond extraordinary, it's miraculous and only to believed because it occurs again and again.

Batteries improve something closer to 8% a year which is merely amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dude literally wrote an article criticizing sensationalizing journalists just to sensationalize. Seriously?

<comment><USER6> It's unbelievable. Especially the headline with "(really)" at the end when the entire article has nothing of substance to report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems more likely to me that they will use this technology to create smaller devices with batteries that last the same length.

<comment><USER8> I think it's more likely that more powerful batteries will allow more power- hungry electronics. This is already happening -- just look at the giant/high resolution screens of modern smartphones that would be unthinkable a few years ago due to inferior battery technology.

<comment><USER9> Not at all. It was always possible, it just would have meant larger batteries. They size the battery to the phone, not the phone to the battery.

Have you noticed that once smartphones came out they've never really had much more than a day's worth of battery life, yet they get thinner and thinner?

They could easily make the phone 1mm thicker and probably double the battery life, but they don't. They're not trying to make a maximum battery life, they're trying to make the "sexiest" thing possible and still have what someone, somewhere thinks is probably about OK given the average use.

<comment><USER10> I see you are new here. My first smartphone, a BlackBerry 6210, ran for a week between charges. Its predecessor, a BlackBerry 957, wasn't a smartphone per se, because it didn't contain a phone, but it was a programmable PDA with a 2-way data radio and an i386 CPU and it ran for three weeks before I had to plug it in.

The reason that smartphones now have 1-day battery life is because that's the _minimum_ that the market will tolerate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just want a bigger battery in a physically smaller phone. An iPhone 5 weighs 4 oz. I'd be happy with a slightly thicker and heavier 5 oz phone with much longer battery life.

That's as opposed to an iPhone 6. I now have one because it was "free" with trade in of my old iPhone 5. But I didn't really want the larger size.

I do concede that I'm the minority view. Most people really like the larger screen sizes.

<comment><USER12> Why not just get a battery case? I've got the Lenmar, ~$30 on Amazon. Couldn't be happier

<comment><USER11> The problem is that a battery case may be too heavy for where I carry my phone (in front pants pocket). Here's the math:

4 oz "base" phone with bigger (by 1 or 2 oz) battery == happy

4 oz phone + 5.6 oz battery/case == too heavy?

I actually carried my iPhone 5 w/o a case for quite a while, it's doable. The silicone case that Apple sells for the iPhone 6 is really light and really helps the grip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still waiting for someone on kickstarter to come out with a belt made of lithium ion batteries. Long as it includes some insurance in case it blows off my lower torso I'm in.

</comment><comment><USER14> Right in time to make the next Apple Watch not ridiculously thick.

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems more like a joke article. The batteries aren't going to last longer unless there is physically more battery.

Oook.

<comment><USER16> Not entirely true. For example, Project Ara is considering shipping batteries that have a higher power density but less cycle count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Apparently the first smartphone with a graphene-based battery was released a couple of days ago. It claims 10% increase in charge density and 50% increase in battery life. [http://www.graphene-info.com/first-graphene-phone- reportedly...](http://www.graphene-info.com/first-graphene-phone-reportedly- market)

<comment> TD-Linux That article is completely made up, from what I can tell. I've seen it posted before.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite computer science related podcast? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for great podcasts to listen during bus travelling in the morning? I'm a computer engineering student. What's your suggestions? <comment><USER2> Jupiter Broadcasting's programme ([http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/](http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/)) is not stricly about computer science, but it's my favorite in computer related podcasts/videos.

</comment><comment><USER3> These podcasts Turkish Language; [http://devpod.org/](http://devpod.org/) [http://podcast.apostylee.com/](http://podcast.apostylee.com/)</comment>


Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.benorenstein.com/blog/switching-editors-is-just-as-hard-as-switching-languages/

<comment><USER2> Switching from vim to emacs should be pretty easy if you use evil mode. This article is from 2008 though. Evil mode is pretty recent. The initial commit was in 2011</comment>


Why Google makes it easy to leave Google - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/why-google-makes-it-easy-to-leave-google.ars <comment><USER2> Note: he's talking about users ceasing to use Google's services, not talking about Google's employees moving on to other employment.</comment>


It has never been easier to launch a new brand - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2020/01/23/it-has-never-been-easier-to-launch-a-new-brand <comment><USER2> [https://outline.com/jzzMMg](https://outline.com/jzzMMg)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting subject. Anybody as full text?</comment>


Yi - <AUTHOR> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi

<comment><USER2> It's wonderful to see the Yi editor back in business, there seems to be some new commits in the github repo.

Yi has taken a wonderfully pragmatic approach to implementing a text editor. They were working on an incremental parser framework to power the editor. The framework was inspired by Parsec and aimed at parsing incomplete code while typing. Emacs has similar parsers but in Emacs they're implemented with a messy pile of emacs lisp, while the Haskell parser in Yi tries to do it with an easy to read domain specific language.

I also like how Yi has a very flexible frontend. They ship with Vim- and Emacs-like configurations to get started.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's not a very informative title. I would prefer "Yi is a text editor extensible in Haskell."

<comment><USER4> "Almost discontinued extensible editor". :(

<comment><USER5> Not true. According to the git commit history it is being developed pretty actively. The last commit date is July 21st 2011.

<comment><USER6> As one of the recent contributors I can confirm that development has recently started back up.

Yi is more like an editor construction set than vim or emacs is. Configuration is basically plugging together a key press parser, syntax lexer, and front end with whatever customizations you want. Much like XMonad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be forewarned -- while some of the docs say that there is a Cocoa frontend, it doesn't work. I first started looking at how to replace it a couple months ago but I hadn't chosen a best tactic. After I finish my internship at Google in a couple weeks I'm going to code up my resolution.

</comment><comment><USER8> Finally managed to compile it on Arch Linux, using Cabal. I had to close my browser and IDE as there weren't enough memory to compile it otherwise (it required more than 1000 MB).

</comment><comment><USER9> I saw this a while ago and was interested. But I kept getting errors when trying to build it from source and after several tries, using several methods I found in various places on the internet, I gave up.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like a lot the way Yi maps \ and -> to appropriate extended characters for display but leaves them in ASCII in the underlying file, but I didn't find it to be stable enough for primetime yet.

<comment><USER2> It's an absolutely useless feature but I love it too :)

There's a Vim plugin called Haskell cuteness that does the same for Haskell code but unfortunately it didn't work very well.

<comment><USER11> If you are using Vim >= 7.3, you can use the vim conceal feature which works as described, but without any messy hacks!

For Haskell, here ( <https://github.com/vim-scripts/Haskell-Conceal> ) is a plugin that works quite well, although the lambda symbol does not seem to appear for me, and the resulting glyphs don't flow nicely with the rest of my font. It's still kind of nice!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the tip!</comment></comment></comment></comment>