Watsi (YC W13) and the Future of Patronage - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/watsi-and-the-future-of-patronage/

<comment><USER2> Watsi is doing great stuff.

One related thing I would recommend, if you're interested in charity & philanthropy, is to check out GiveWell (<http://givewell.org>). They have very well-studied recommendations of charities, and they recommend them on the basis of "most good for your dollar". Some of the most efficient treatments on Watsi are on the order of thousands of dollars per child's life saved. That's pretty damn good as "good for your dollar" goes, but GiveWell's recommendations are often a factor of 2-10 better, and the evidence base to support their recommendations is quite strong.

<comment><USER3> I'm working on a blog post right now about YC-funded charity and philanthropy companies. Watsi is the only official non-profit, but YC has funded at least 5 companies that focus on social good. Charity is giving. Philanthropy is doing.

[http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator- companies?market=charity+a...](http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator- companies?market=charity+and+philanthropy#market)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think there would be nothing but good coming from "lightweight", ad hoc charities, instead of enduring NGOs and other institutions.

The problem with conventional charities is that if they're successful, they put themselves out of business. Even if a funder supports that idea, it's entirely possible the organization will become an "institution" in its own right, and find other problems to solve -- and when you have a huge pool of money looking for problems to solve, there's no incentive for it to be efficient at all.

Charities, especially in Africa and other parts of the developing world, have institutional biases toward ongoing involvement -- the people involved don't want to create dependency, but the pressures on the organization lead it in that direction.

I prefer preventive medicine and economic development to paying for medical treatments (more effective for each dollar invested), but I support Watsi's methods, and if they can use those same methods of transparency and direct, small-dollar donor involvement to solve other problems (or, better, if other organizations copy their methods to solve other problems), they will dwarf the impact of any other YC company to date.

<comment><USER5> (Thanks for this! And thanks for staying around HN after comments have gotten crazy. Gems like this help a lot.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I support Watsi's goals but a cursory overview of their financial statements suggests that they are anything but "lightweight." For their current size (measured in terms of personnel), I would expect _at least 5x_ the charitable activity and _20x_ the fundraising compared to similarly situated NGOs.

Yes, I know that 100% of their "fundraising" will go to their charitable activity. But that is "fundraising" in the Groupon sense--it is a redefinition of a commonly used term that excludes their fundraising activities that actually support their non-charitable operations. Small donors may not care much about that, but for institutional donors (i.e., foundations), operational costs are a significant factor in the grant-making decision process.

<comment><USER7> Could you give some more detail about your first paragraph?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish all the best to the team at Watsi. They have an amazing concept. It's captivating how straightforward it really is. They offer the possibility for anyone to make a difference to the lives of real people, and watch that happen, in almost real time.

I don't know what these kinds of projects will do to the "future of patronage" but it gets people aware of the problems, gets them involved and brings in real results, with little effort. That can't be a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am jealous. Why the fuck didn't i think of this before. Am from Africa. Everyone needs help up in this bitch. Guess what? I got caught up with these 30 under 30 posts and how i made n amount of $$ in n amount of years. Thank you Watsi. I don't i have to make a profit to a make difference. Thank you.

<comment><USER4> There's no reason you couldn't do "Watsi for local entrepreneurship" or something. Essentially Kiva-like.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for pointing me to Kiva. Checking it out and its definitely something i could work on. Thanks again.

<comment><USER4> The weird thing about Kiva is they "lie" as an efficiency optimization -- it's not direct payment from donor to the identified recipient, but to the organization which helped the recipient in the past. This isn't really worse from a moral perspective (and is actually more efficient!), but might make some donors unhappy. A Kiva which operated fully on the Watsi model of identifying/funding specific things in realtime would be popular with at least some existing Kiva donors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Croppola provides automatic suggestions how to crop pictures - <AUTHOR> http://croppola.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't work that good, but I just found the idea interesting. Nice execution of a proof-of-concept, too.</comment>


San Francisco supervisors approve 6-year break on stock-option taxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/05/san-francisco-supervisors-approve-6-year-break-stock-option-taxes

<comment><USER2> Seems like the "exception" is becoming the rule here.

SF revising to the "after $750,000" seems like a fairly reasonable solution to extract a few bucks but not scaring companies away, why not just make it official?

<comment><USER3> This is about control, and corruption. Keeping the policy erratic and temporary gives SF politicos ongoing power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> San Fransisco has always been able to attract startups and businesses in the past without these exceptions, why change now?

<comment><USER5> Because applying the SF payroll tax to stock options is relatively new and prior to this year no one was in danger of actually IPOing so the point was moot.</comment></comment>


Face ID compatible respirator masks - <AUTHOR> https://faceidmasks.com <comment><USER2> The whole point of Apple's Face ID is that doesn't use the image of your face as a form of authentication (like Windows Hello does), but rather uses the shape of your face.

As a result, this would almost certainly prevent authentication using Face ID from being successful.

Also, this is essentially spam.

<comment><USER3> I think the idea is to train Face ID with the mask on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The stated motivation may be silly, but 'more subtle masks that don't immediately or from a distance look like you're wearing one' aren't a bad idea.

At least for use in countries where it's not the norm, but you want to wear one because you're cycling in traffic, or from somewhere where it is the norm but feel self-conscious about wearing one where it isn't. (I don't know if the latter is a common feeling, I'm not from such a place, but I have wondered if it'll increase - ro become one - post-Coronavirus, if 'Asians in masks' are stigmatised, or feel that they might be as a result.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I would pay double for an iPhone 12 Pro with Touch ID.

<comment><USER6> I'd like an iphone SE, with uptodate processor/ram/etc

Phone sized, Touch ID, 3.5mm jack.

<comment><USER5> I can't imagine spending the better part of $1000 on a phone and not having $200 for wireless earbuds or headphones.

I've never once missed the headphone jack. Why do people clamor for it so much?

Pre-C usb on the Macs, I get somewhat. I have a ton of old style USB cords (which I solved by buying two dozen 4" old usb-to-c adapter pigtails).

I've never once wanted to plug any of my wired headphones (I have a bunch, mostly with 1/4" plugs) into my phone. What is the use case here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the most sophisticated joke I've seen in a long time. 10 points!

<comment><USER8> And only $40 to get in on the joke!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And my work firewall blocks it as malware. Nice.</comment>


ICANN approves relaxation of TLD rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/26/internet <comment><USER2> I've seen several negative reactions to this decision which I find to be odd since my reaction was very positive. Here are my reasons why this is awesome:

-It opens up vast new swaths of web territory and makes it easier for the ordinary Joe Hacker to find a memorable web address

-It devalues cyber-squatters current portfolios

-It seems arbitrary to limit TLDs to a certain subset of characters in the first place

Is there something I'm missing? Why all the anguish out there?

edit: Actually, doesn't the existence of TLDs seem arbitrary, too? Why end every URL with .SomeString?

<comment><USER3> \- For companies trying to protect their trademark, the job just got [infinitely] harder.

\- It will be harder to tell you're being phished (apple.computer is a fake?)

\- Companies with half a million dollars to burn will now own TLDs and have an advantage over smaller companies

\- It means you now have to remember two pieces of information, the domain and the TLD

\- It's simply a money grab by ICANN

\- etc

My guess is most traffic will stay at the current TLDs just like the recent ones haven't done much (.biz, .info, .mobi, etc).

<comment><USER4> _My guess is most traffic will stay at the current TLDs_

I think that's right. The mitigating factor here is that Prometheus' observation:

 _Actually, doesn't the existence of TLDs seem arbitrary, too? Why end every URL with .SomeString?_

...is a pretty good description of the _de facto_ situation today. Basically, there is only one important TLD - .com - and both surfers and browsers are happy to pretend that it's unnecessary. If you own a domain with any other TLD, it requires people to remember a meaningless suffix, and/or the placement of a meaningless dot inside your name. ("deli.cious? del.ic.ious? delic.io.us? What the hell was that, again?") The result is marketing poison, and nobody recommends it.

This ICANN decision is bad, but I think the main effect will be to _further_ amplify the value of .com domains (the ones which don't require you to remember a _now entirely arbitrary_ TLD). And/or it will further cement Google's lock on the first five seconds of any web-surfing expedition (as if they needed it).

The only danger is that we will wake up one day and discover that typing "zyzygy" into a browser redirects you somewhere _other_ than zyzygy.com. If that happens than we'll know that ICANN has succeeded in setting off the biggest land-grab stampede in the history of the world, the cybersquatters will die of ecstacy, and I will want to kick something.

<comment><USER5> yes and no...

Remember one of the common ways of getting anywhere is to type www.google.com in the msn homepage that comes up. And then you type www.myspace.com into the google search box...

This "may" be a solvable issue...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is useless, all this will do is line ICANN's pockets with money.

The .com will always be king, so it'll remain THE name for people to get. Look at the current domains, how many do you see going for the .us? .biz? domain extensions?

The whole "Big businesses will use it to make it easier for consumer is pretty dumb too", you can go to toys.ebay.com now, and get where you want to be, all this'll do is make you go to toys.ebay.

Third try typing that out...you'll be halfway to typing out .com before you realize you don't need it.

Its just a way for ICANN to make money. Nothing more, this will do nothing to help the consumer, and is only there so that Google will spend another 5 mil a year Google.paris, Google.France, google.uk, google.hackernews

We might as well go back to AOL Keywords

</comment><comment><USER7> From the BBC article on the topic:

 _"Does Tesco want .supermarket or .groceries?" said Graham Hales, of branding consultancy Interbrand.

"Or maybe it wants .value or .everylittlehelps. The choice is endless."_

While this may address the lack of domain names now available thanks to squatters and collectors, it'll make the web a mess! It's already bad enough with some of the more exotic domain names in use, but with custom TLDs it'd be easier to just memorize the IP address instead!

<comment><USER2> It will be much easier to get a memorable URL. I don't think that makes that web a mess. We might even be spared the future clikkr.o.us's of the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's going to be a lot harder to get yourself a TLD than people think. In addition to the large sum of money, you also have to prove that it isn't offensive and doesn't infringe on anyone's rights and "the business or organization must prove that they are either capable of managing the TLD or can reach a deal with a company that will" [from the ArsTechnica article]. These obviously won't be issues for the eBays and Amazons of the world, but how many squatters will actually be able to prove they can manage a TLD? I'm no expert, but there's gotta be some huge technical and maintenance issues there.

I'm also curious if people who register TLDs will be required to allow the general public to register domain names under them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Among other things this will mark the start of a new era in phishing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone have news on how the registration process is going to work?

<comment><USER11> From the ICANN's perspective:

      1. Announce that URL's can now contain different TLD's
      2. Make sure the people buying them have at least $100,00 to half a million, if so, let 'em register!
      3. Profit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was in favor of this kind of thing and supported AlterNIC in the early 90's, but I'm not so sure about this new change. ICANN wants to charge how much? AlterNIC was free, and so are other alternate DNS roots.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm getting .google

<comment><USER4> Where did you get your law degree? I hope you specialized in trademarks! ;)</comment></comment>


A game when games were new - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-3-video-games/6b10cfbc0ab0#7382 <comment><USER2> If anyone wants to read how Pac-Man works on a very deep level, check out: <http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html>

It's super interesting.

<comment><USER3> ... and the deep meaning of Pac-Man: <http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2736>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"Along the way, I jumped into the rabbit hole of Pac-Man minutiae and came out impressed with some of the clever firsts the game pulled off.

When Halo came out in 2001, it was praised for its dynamic soundtrack, which was more reactive to players' actions than many previous games. Ahead of its time, Pac-Man had a crude version of a dynamic soundtrack in 1980."_

Close. The _Flash_ pinball machine from Williams Electronics (released January 1979) had a background sound that changed dynamically as game play progressed and is considered the first. Pac-Man came slightly later (May 1980 in Japan, October 1980 in the USA).

<comment><USER5> When I saw that quote I was instantly reminded of:

"During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, " _They've invented everything._ "

What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magiclantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the grease lamp—a lump of fat, with a plant wick, placed in a hollow stone—to light their workplace; scaffolds to reach high places; the principles of stencilling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and, more to the point of Picasso's insight, the very concept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas—but not from a void"

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman)

Nothing is new, etc.

<comment><USER6> Even better, it's recently been found that in many of these ancient sites, the paintings cluster at the points in the cave where the human voice resonates best. Apparently it's possible to walk through the caves in darkness, shouting and clapping, and when one hits a peak of resonance, to turn on ones torch and be suddenly surrounded by art.

[http://www.insidescience.org/content/caves-stonehenge- ancien...](http://www.insidescience.org/content/caves-stonehenge-ancient- peoples-painted-sound/571)

<comment><USER7> The BBC Radio four programme _'Noise, a Human History'_ had an episode (the first?) exploring this. They had people clapping in caves. It's fascinating.

The BBC don't seem to have this available on any of their catch-up services. (It's probably around on unofficial places.)

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rglcy>)

<comment><USER8> In fact, they're all available apart (currently) from episode 3 - <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rglcy/episodes/guide>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's fascinating. Congratulations to Tyler for not only sharing this story but also sharing this as a project on GitHub. It's quite a bit of code and a nice peek into the world of Lua game programming for me, since I've had very little contact with this language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Lua is great fun - very similar to javascript. The only weird part for me is that it's 1-indexed, but I see that as a feature for kids learning to program for the first time.

Also, the code for PacPac is not very clean. Just like javascript, globals in Lua are the default, easy to use, and require discipline to avoid :)

<comment><USER10> You might want to look into strict.lua for avoiding unwanted globals: <http://metalua.luaforge.net/src/lib/strict.lua.html>

It's a little script that you can add to your Lua project and will check for usage of globals in functions without prior assignation in the global scope. Quite nifty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had never really been a fan of PacMan before, but for last month's 1GAM [0] I decided to build a clone. Once I started reading into it, I was pretty fascinated by the amount of depth the game has. As said in the article, pretty amazing for something running on a 3 MHz Z80.

[0] <http://www.onegameamonth.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> By the way, Ernest Cline's _Ready Player One_ is great fun, and you should read it.

<comment><USER13> Seconded! Or have Wil Wheaton read the book to you, including his own surprise cameo appearance. It's a fun story and excellently narrated.

<http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B005FRGT44>

<comment><USER14> Well, it _would_ have been a surprise, anyway. (Currently on "page 31" ("location 623 of 7372").

I actually didn't read the article above once I saw the mention of the book to avoid spoilers. Guess I should have boycotted the comments as well....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For anyone interested in PacMan, The PacMan Dossier is a must-read: <http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html>

<comment><USER16> Seconding this - was going to post it as well. Fun reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Namco shut down my Pac-Man project [0] last year on github after it was posted to Hacker News. Good luck :/

In short, it works on mobile devices, uses HTML5 Canvas, has ghost visualizations, and Braid-like rewind.

Read about it and play it here:

[0] <http://pacman.shaunew.com/>

<comment><USER18> What grounds did they give for removing the project? Trademark? Copyright?

<comment><USER17> Infringed on intellectual property rights:

[1] [https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2012-09-25-namco....](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2012-09-25-namco.markdown)

<comment><USER19> Highlights the absurdity of 'intellectual property rights' law. Like being sued for playing Bach or Chopin to an audience in terms of the digital era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In 1980, four of us - myself and three co-workers, attempted to write a pac- man like game. I really haven't had much interest in game programming, but one guy did and wrote a basic display with keyboard moves. The ghosts were in the form of each of our initials, and the plan was each of us would program our own ghost strategy algorithms. It never got too far along. I should also mention that this was written in Pascal for the Texas Instruments 990 (not the POS 99/4a home computer) business computer on 80x24 monocolor text-only screens. Hey, but it was multitasking and multiuser - each of us could be playing our own copy of the game. My Windows 7 PC still gives regular demonstrations of its non-multitasking DOS heritage. In 1982 I bought an Apple II Plus thinking I might develop some games... coming from a mainframe and minicomputer environment, I was more than a little disappointed. I didn't return to PC programming or even own a PC until 1988 when I found out SCO Xenix would run on a 286... for weeks at a time, with multiple users, without crashing. Gaming has come a long way, but some OS fundamentals still haven't, at least not in the PC world.

</comment><comment><USER21> This almost reminds me of the time that i wrote a fully customizable pacman game back in '09 , The AI was not state of the art (because i was new to Computer science). But the Level were completely custom , you just had to edit a text file in which you set the collision color [1], and provide two new images ( one for food locations and the other for the map) and you had a new level.

The code was a mess [2] ( i didn't even know about OOP back then )but i keep it for historical purposes ( like it was the first game i ever wrote).

[1] [https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/Sett...](https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/Settings.ini)

[2] [https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/page...](https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/page%20flipping.cpp)

<comment><USER22> Cool. I recall designing levels for a Pac-Man clone my friends made on the Atari ST back in 1992: [https://www.giantbomb.com/crapman/3030-24791/images/?tag=All...](https://www.giantbomb.com/crapman/3030-24791/images/?tag=All%20Images)

Unfortunately none of the downloadable images seem to be available anymore:

\- Synergy Megademo: <http://www.pouet.scene.org/prod.php?which=752>

\- Crapman standalone: <http://www.pouet.scene.org/prod.php?which=29339>

Fun fact: the musician went on the make music and sound effects for games like Z and Killzone and win an Ivor Novello award: [http://www.screenedmusic.com/news/joris-de-man-wins-ivor- nov...](http://www.screenedmusic.com/news/joris-de-man-wins-ivor-novello- award)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The ghost AI from pacman is a masterpiece in itself

</comment><comment><USER24> If one of his intentions was to inspire tinkering, then it worked. I tweaked the game to include an extra 6 ghosts and speed up pacman. More fun, but still hard. Had to randomize their leave box time to make them not appear as one.

</comment><comment><USER10> LÖVE has a Web player (using WebGL and Lua.js) in the works, would be cool to see if Pac-Pac runs on it: <https://github.com/ghoulsblade/love-webplayer>

<comment><USER10> Well I just spent a while on it but there are quite a few filesystem functions missing in either Lua.js or love web player to make it work out of the box. It's probably doable but I gave up for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Also interesting and related to pacman: patterns to get a rather easy victory <http://www.math.montana.edu/~hyde/pacman/> and also the hidden spot in pacman <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGoiQAzG-I>

</comment><comment><USER26> This was an actual challenge at a hack-a-thon I was at way way back (I'm guessing around '92). The total instructions were pretty much "(best game category) build a pac man variant", the restriction to pac man only mostly there to render quite a bit of the prior-to-the-event design less useful when it was announced. It was over 48h though. There were some pretty creative entries. I built one with more ghosts (increasing per level) with generated mazes, but from a predetermined per-level seed so that level 1 was always level 1, but there were still infinite(ish) levels (I was in a kind of Elite phase again after Elite II). Didn't even end up entering, I'd had a HD crash a few days before so I didn't even have my normal go-to bag-o-tricks in terms of stuff to render, time, do controls, etc and did it from scratch. By deadline it worked "almost some" but not enough to really be playable.

</comment><comment><USER27> I cannot.scroll or.zoom the site on my android :(

<comment><USER28> what version/browser?

<comment><USER27> Dolphin Lite

but also happens on default android browser (Android 2.3)

It happens in a lot of sites, I wonder what it is that people do that cause that.

<comment><USER29> This is the line that does it:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum- scale=1" user-scalable="no">

<comment><USER30> Aka, the <fuckyou> tag, which is the standard for declaring that the designer cares more about how it looks on their own machine than letting readers consume the content

<comment><USER31> Some of it may be explained by early editions of the HTML5 Boilerplate "best practices".

See: [https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/ed906cfb1b429...](https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/ed906cfb1b4299d0a7de1524c9d2ae499f33dac0/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Great post. The only thing I was missing is finding out whether you managed to do it in one day after all (including all the research?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Essentially yes. Day one had all the ghost AI's and power pellets and lives and death. No sound and no score, though. It was completely made possible by the game engine (Löve) and the excellent Pac-Man analysis by other authors like Chad Birch.

You can see the exact state of the game at day one:

git clone firstname.lastname@example.com:tylerneylon/pacpac.git

git checkout 4abf17ca62dffd2ac3245f6ab06cc28fb9021791

You can return to the latest commit later via:

git checkout master

You can get the game engine (required to play) from <http://love2d.org> .

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Games like these are relatively easy to make with modern game engines like Löve. There are many original indie games in early development worth checking out:

<http://love2d.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=5>

</comment><comment><USER33> So what happened to the dare? It seems there are more rabbit holes than would allow one to push out a full PacMan clone in a single day.

</comment><comment><USER34> This makes me want to read Ready Player One all over again and make a retro game, fun post, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh, one byte is fine for the level. No one will ever come close to reaching anything higher!

<comment><USER36> Well, two bytes is quite the challenge then, isn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Okay hack-a-thon man, go program this in z80 assembly, and post THAT to git hub.

<comment><USER38> Did you even read the post, his point was that modern tools and frameworks make it easy today to do what once had to be done at a lower level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> wow! I find this so interesting. What a great opportunity to get into game programming. Now I just need some time to check this out.

</comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone tried to transfer this AI model to FPS?

</comment><comment><USER40> Trying to figure out how to scroll was a great game. Page down? Nope. Down arrow? Nope.</comment>


Canada Creates New Class of Visa to Attract Tech Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/canada-creates-new-class-of-visa-to-attract-tech-entrepreneurs-to-launch-startups-here-2012-09-11

<comment><USER2> Or maybe you could just... open a company in the US (or Canada), release your product. If you need funds, don't have enough and can't get it from people you already know, maybe it's time to reevaluate your model. Sorry, you will never get funded by any investment funds. And I don't understand what those investors expect they will find overseas. It's just a lot more of the same.

But my point is:

I don't understand why people are so obsessed about being in the US/CAN all time. Really, if you want to go there you can get a US B1 (business) visa, that does not requires much. I have a LLC in the US and I'm there every few months. But maybe that is not what we want, am I right? Maybe we want to live the life techcrunch is selling us. We tend to be pathetic sometimes.

Believe me, being there personally and trying to talk to those guys will just make you realize how insignificant we all are to them - no matter how cool you are on twitter, no matter how cool you product is. It will drain the very energy you need to succeed.

<comment><USER3> <http://paulgraham.com/hubs.html>

Location matters, that's why people want to be in the US/Canada.

<comment><USER2> Valid, but see:

"... I said something to a partner at a well known VC firm that gave him the (mistaken) impression I was considering starting another startup. He responded so eagerly that for about half a second I found myself considering doing it."

Those startups get founded, not yours, not mine. We do not have that kind of access. I never talked to a VC partner in my life and I couldn't if I wanted. They are just these mythical creatures you always hear about but never get to see. Maybe accelerators are a way of doing it right, but they do not mean a whole lot, those startups are special cases.

<comment><USER3> Startups that get funded are startups that have a high potential to make money, period. Be building the next Facebook, and nobody cares how old you are, or where you're from.

Connections are nice, but at the end of the day VCs don't invest money to lose it. This visa isn't for early stage entrepreneurs who are shooting in the dark. VC funding usually happens at a stage where risk is much more marginalized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A war is coming :)

"There are never enough brains in a country," Version One Ventures founder Boris Wertz is quoted as saying. "Every country's going to compete for the best brains in the world."

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this going to be a relative downgrade like the TN visa was compared to the old TC visa was for Canadians in the USA? I wasn't of working age when that happened, but from my brief reading, it sounds like it was.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that there is a link back to the HN thread from the post - I've seen it happen a lot on personal blogs, but this is the first time I've seen it done by a company.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great news for me. I am already moving there on international experience Canada program and wanted to work on my ideas and since Canada have similar market as us, I could test my idea if it holds and take it to next level. Location really matters, if you are living in small country with small population speaking unique language and the general population is conservative consumer then you will see why location matters.

</comment><comment><USER8> Giving VC firms the power to dictate visa eligibility creates perverse incentives in the fundraising cycle. If you want to say if you raise $x from accredited investors you can get visa for one or more founders that's one thing...

As a side question what's VC success rate with entrepreneurs-in-residence?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great news. Of course the details will matter e.g. how will the investors choose the startups (and thus the founders). It has being a journey to get here though looking at <http://startupvisa.ca/blog>

</comment><comment><USER10> Flip, I need to get into Canada. Unlike mylittlepony, I do have a family and want the best for them. From October, serious thinking to be done.

</comment><comment><USER11> From an Australian perspective the E3 visa is probably still more attractive for getting a track record first.

They're not directly comparable, but still.

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER13> nice

</comment><comment><USER14> If only there was a visa for IT experts, who speak english and french fluently, but don't have a degree/wife/999 years of comprobable work, mostly due to local problems (like hyperinflation, which makes working pointless)...

Whatever, I'm now moving to one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I will probably have to make a living with a crappy php job, but I won't care.

<comment><USER15> Canada offers a 2 year work visa which is quite easy to obtain. I've been living in Canada for s year now (from Australia)

<comment><USER14> Yes but it's not available anymore (it was 1 year when I read about it, though I wouldn't complain about that). And I don't want to be negative, but it's not the same to do that from a developed country like Australia. I'm from Argentina, and from what I see on TV, tourists, and the Internet, most people think only monkeys live here. Next time I send an application I will try not mentioning it (I will only say that I want to move to Canada or something) and see what happens.

Australia was on my list too, but I'm scared of all the crazy animals/insects that can kill me in my sleep. Canada is too cold, but still I wanna give it a try. Just curious: did you get a job before moving?

<comment><USER15> Canada is great and not too cold at all :). I moved to Canada with the intention of working here. Instead I worked on my startup full time for a year.

It was silly of me to assume that work visa is available for everybody. I think the visa I am on is a special one for Australians. It was pretty easy to get and lets me work in Canada in any profession for 2 years. I can understand your frustration though.

Australian is an awesome place but if you have your own startup (or are thinking of going down that path) then Canada is the way to go. It is close to the US so you can travel there quite easily if you need to.

<comment><USER14> Okay, thanks for sharing your experience. =)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Procedure Calls Are the Assembly Language of Software Interconnection (1994) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://sunset.usc.edu/~neno/teaching/s99/FirstClassConn.pdf <comment><USER2> It is particularly sad that many languages treat foreign function interfaces and remote procedure calls as unwanted, debilitated children. I can easily imagine a utopia in which software would plug together via function/procedure/method calls rather than shared files or web APIs or some other popular but improvised and less thought out alternatives. Why are we not there?

<comment><USER3> Type systems, exception handlers, garbage collectors, allocators, etc from different languages are rarely compatible with each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, another reason why we like to user serialised representations to talk to each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >...formal specifications that provide details beyond type and signature are relatively rare.

I'm not sure what, specifically, they're suggesting the alternative is, since their later argument seems to just be to abstract the procedure calls into components and connectors. Most documentation is _still_ just going to list details about the component and/or connector; which doesn't conquer the problem - as referenced above - that the documentation around the specifications will, themselves, still be relatively limited.

Since I'm most familiar with RPC in Windows, let's reference EcDoConnectEx[0] as an example of their suggested model. You're consuming a component (MAPI/RPC), without having to implement the connector (RPC), yourself. It's still a gauntlet of documentation and there's nothing outside of the specification readily available to demonstrate the actual implementation. (At least, I don't recall seeing it in the MAPI Headers.[1])

While agree that procedure calls - in and of themselves - might be too low- level for every-day implementation and consumption, you can have the inverse problem of sandboxing like occurred with .NET (before it was ported to [l]unix via .NET Core). Even then, you're now completely abstracting the low-level from the high-level and, whilst that is entirely easy to program for, it's not - precisely - the case that it's easy for debugging back down to the native layer - where an exception might be thrown.

I've most famously seen this as a native exception (hResult) being translated into an entirely _different_ exception "reason" in managed code (presumably because either every scenario is almost impossible to program for and/or the native layer was changed and the managed layer wasn't aware of the change and/or never caught up to it).

Take this view/perspective with a grain of salt, however, because I haven't programmed in the [l]unix world - outside of some basic Python; so, my anecdotal comment is very much that and should be treated as such. =]

[0] - [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee200938(v=exchg.80...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee200938\(v=exchg.80\).aspx)

[1] - [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=129...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=12905)</comment>


Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array <comment><USER2> Depends on your sort algorithm. For some algorithms, they perform worse on an array that is already sorted.

Check your local copy of Knuth, volume 3.</comment>


What happened to "Shoot 5 Ducks", "You are the Millionth visitor" kinda ads? - <AUTHOR>

I don't see them at all these days. Thankfully. <comment><USER2> Based on no scientific evidence of my own, I would imagine they just went away because the trend of those kinds of banner ads simply kind of vanished. I haven't seen very many "Lose belly fat with this one secret tip only single moms know" ads in a while (I think they were all pitching Acai or something). There are definite trends of ad types across the various ad networks, but like any other market looking to hawk the-next-big-thing, I would think they dried up because business was elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> evergreen ads still convert, maybe you have adblock turned on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe they were replaced with "One cool trick that will save you thousands...", "President Obama said..." , and "[Insert big industry] hates this!" ads. I see those all the time.

<comment><USER5> Yes. This. If you turn off adblock, you see ads like "How does mom in [Your geolocated city] make $55/hr staying at home? Find out how!" all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> December is usually dominated by brand advertisers and holiday shopping ads which pay a higher CPM than direct response advertisers (like "shoot 5 ducks" and "you are the millionth visitor")will pay. You'll see these ads again come January, when CPM's drop to their normal rates.

</comment><comment><USER7> I Am Not In Web Marketting, but based purely on my observations, they were replaced with Commission Junction, Google, & Amazon driven ad networks which mercilessly target you with ads for consumer products you've recently looked into buying.

</comment><comment><USER8> They are still with us, unfortunately. Maybe you don't see them because you live in a country for which there are enough proper ads. I ... I see them all the time, though admittedly less than I used to.

<comment><USER9> Yep. I moved to the Czech republic 8 years ago, and those ads are still live and kicking out here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've got most of them blocked at this point (Ad/FlashBlock), if I actually do see them I put more mental energy into the actual blocking than consuming the content.</comment>


You're Not Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@psant/youre-not-mark-zuckerberg-87c7b8eecad0

<comment><USER2> _You probably can't just drop out of college right now and make a multi-billon dollar company._

You don't _have_ to make a multi-billion dollar company. An acceptable outcome for many might be to forgo outside investment, and settle for a company that does a few million in revenue, pays the founders a decent salary, and sustains itself for a long period of time, growing organically.

 _... I assure you that a VC will want to fund some guy that worked at Google for three years and knows what he is doing over a kid that just graduated from a state school with a couple of data structures projects on his or her Github_

Again, not a problem if you consciously choose to forgo that route. Also not a problem if you bootstrap long enough to get demonstratable traction, at which point what you have on your Github likely becomes mostly moot.

 _Oh, and don't fool yourself into thinking you can have a "startup on the side." Running a successful business isn't a two-hour-a-day-after-work gig._

No, it's an 8-hour-a-day-after-work-and-every-waking-weekend-hour gig. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can not agree with this post more.

</comment><comment><USER4> yes yes and yes

</comment><comment><USER5> party pooper.</comment>


Brad Feld On Guerilla Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://infochachkie.com/guerilla-marketing-brad-feld-style/

<comment><USER2> _"…companies should… focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial. If you have $hitty products, the marketing is impossible. Instead of focusing on marketing as an activity… integrate it into (your) products."_

I can get behind most of that, except for this bit:

 _"If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial"_.

I don't buy it. This smacks of "if you build it they will come." You still have to get the word out to your customers that you _have_ this amazing product, and/or you still have to get your customers to come looking for you (top of mind awareness, etc). Sure, it's _easier_ to market if your product is awesome, but an awesome product isn't going to market itself (some specific scenarios related to viral marketing aside).

I certainly won't argue against trying to build kick-ass, awesome products (we're doing so at Fogbeam Labs!) but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of marketing strategy and a wide variety of tactical marketing initiatives.

Maybe it's not as simple as "best marketing wins", but we know the best product doesn't always win either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately this just isn't true.

Consumers are drawn to inferior products (just like they are to junk food and lousy music; and in the personal sphere, to bad lovers / toxic bosses) for a whole lot of bizarre and perverse psychological reasons. But also due to the inexorable power of _marketing_ , in its various guises and generalized forms.

I can see where Brad is getting at, and the lessons are quite valid, for those us attempting to engage ourselves in that minority slice of the global economy concerned with creating services and products or services of actual, intrinsic _value_ \-- as opposed to fluff ("experience"), addiction, or outright graft, which are the driving concerns behind the bulk of activity on in modern, post- industrial economies (such as ours) at present.

But if there's one lesson that can be easily drawn from the post-war economic experience -- it's that consumers' decisions are quite often very far from rational or "quality-driven."

They're just as often driven by fear, anxiety, the need to conform. And that's exactly where the magical power of marketing comes in.</comment>


Show HN: Discovered a bug in gmail - <AUTHOR> Zombie messages.
1. Open GMail.
2. Write a mail to yourself. Send it.
3. After it arrives immediately select it and delete it.
4. After that immediately go to trash and empty trash forever.
5. After that immediately close tab.
6. Now open a new tab and go to GMail again. See the message you apparently just deleted in your email box. Creepy zombie message!
Can anyone else reproduce? <comment><USER2> Seems reasonable: Gmail's Javascript makes the message appear immediately because it knows it will appear there. You delete it, but that command has no effect because the real email message is still being relayed to Gmail's mail servers and getting redirected to yourself, but nonetheless the message vanishes from the UI. Then it arrives.

I'll not try to reproduce. This is not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you sure this is a bug or is it just that you are closing stuff before the AJAX/whatever request goes through? Do you have low latency to GMail's servers? Just an idea.</comment>


Show HN: Time.Graphics – flexible timeline - <AUTHOR> https://time.graphics <comment><USER2> [random advice from the internet]

I think the idea is interesting and the execution seems well done. Because, I don't want to log in with Facebook to save, I can't see the end result and ultimately have no idea whether or not it is actually any good. So I will probably never use it, and almost certainly never recommend it (since I have no idea if at the end of the road Time.graphics is actually any good.

From a business standpoint:

      What is the business value of a visitor's Facebook login?

      What is the business value of providing accurate
      knowledge of the *final* product to a visitor?

      What business problem does obtaining a visitor's Facebook
      login directly solve right now, here in the context
      of a 'Show HN'?

Years ago I tried selling software and my strategy was simple. I made a free demo version that showed what could be done and provided a lousy high level functional experience (i.e. it could not be used for actual work) so that people would buy it. I don't think people tend to buy software that leaves them with a bad taste in their mouth. I don't think time spent building tooling that makes the demo lousy is time well spent.

At any size it makes sense to understand potential users. At a certain size it probably makes sense to use Facebook as a tool to aggregate data. When there are only a couple of hundred or ten or one, then it is better view them individually. Ask them, "Am I solving your problem?"

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> There's an email + password login right below the Facebook login.

But yes, a demo seems like a good idea, if it is not too hard.

<comment><USER2> Providing an email address is not part of _my_ 'timeline problem' I am trying to solve. Not providing an email address (or Facebook login) _is_ part of another problem that I have been trying to solve for years.

That's not to say that providing an email address or a Facebook login is always too high a price. But here there is no significant benefit to providing it and a reasonable probability of detriment based on my experience. Going further, there is no _functional_ reason for requiring a login. Because the login sits in front of _all_ the value on my end and there's not really anything good that can come from providing that information, I am inclined to assign a higher probability to their being a bad outcome.

To be clear, I am writing all this in the context of providing "Show HN" feedback. The login seems like clicking a checkbox on the checklist of "startup best practices" sitting in Github repository. Collecting emails and Facebook logins is easier than _listening_ to users. Emails and Facebook provide ways of telling rather than listening.

<comment><USER3> I think I understand what you're saying, but have you considered that user accounts exist not only for putting email addresses in a mailing list?

Anyway, what would you suggest?

<comment><USER2> My suggestion is to ignore login until there is a functional reason. Today, people landing on the page is pure gold. The important functional information is how they use the product.

Sure, user accounts can exist for many reasons. Right now, there is no evidence that

      for this site
      right now

the reasons are for my benefit. That's not to say in the wider world there are not people who would benefit from persistent identity in regard to a timeline making site. It is even possible that I might benefit from establishing a persistent identity, but there's no statement of a value proposition as to why nor do the possible reasons seem more likely than the idea that persistent identity is not for my benefit, and hence Occam's razor.

Perhaps the reason is to use Facebook/email is to build Hacker News for timelines. Great, that's functional..once there is a social space, not now. If the login is to pitch an investor by showing uniques traction, it's non- functional.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can create a timeline without log it but if you want to save it, so..

<comment><USER2> What I am most likely to want is just a gif/png/jpeg/svg that I can use elsewhere. I mean it looks like a great tool for creating timelines, but creating timelines doesn't seem like an end in itself.

<comment><USER3> Go build your own timeline creator.

<comment><USER4> How about we let people leave (friendly phrased) feedback, even if you disagree with it? The project creator is free to think about it what they want and ignore it if it doesn't match their plans, they don't need you telling people to go away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work!

I've been looking for a good timeline script for a project I'm doing. I'm currently using vis.js [1], but this looks good also.

Is the script available for use via an API, or do you only offer iframe embeds?

1\. [http://visjs.org/timeline_examples.html](http://visjs.org/timeline_examples.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of API do you want?

<comment><USER5> Well, instead of embedding an already built timeline in my site via an iframe, I want to be able to add a script to my page and build/modify the timeline dynamically (e.g. creating events from a database).

Different use case. It's cool if it's not what you are interested in building. Visjs does that already so there may not be a market for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not our model. But if you ready pay for this, we will think about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Small issue: On my 27" monitor full-screen the hamburger menu is shown on the top right, thus hiding the links to the excellent [https://time.graphics/popular/](https://time.graphics/popular/) for example. Tested in Firefox and Google Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will check this asap, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It says it downloads stuff (JSON, CSV etc). If I want it to render a chart with some data generated in a server, would that be possible? I don't see how.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You can display any statistic information from you website or database by implementing api: You data should look like (per row):

date, value ... ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have no words for how amazing this is.

Also, "percentage" is written with a C.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Okay, we gonna fix it this week.</comment></comment>


The Upside of Hiring Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2009/01/hiring.html

<comment><USER2> I just love articles like this. The economy's bad, but the upside to hiring is you can screw your new employees for a while.

It's one thing to suggest new hire salaries can be lowered a bit, but only offering internships, usually for little or no pay, or withholding benefits?

The real upside to hiring now (which is one of the benefits mentioned in the article, to be fair) is that a lot of great talent is in play.

But if you're hiring a top prospect, it's presumably for what they bring to the table. If you use the current conditions to push a new employee's compensation well below what you could afford to pay for the value they add, they'll be the first one out the door when things pick up again.</comment>


Show HN: Readbo - Making a better Google Reader - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
I have spend some of my free time of the last year and a half working on a cool project: Readbo ( http://readbo.com ). I loved using Google Reader, but I always thought it wasn't being updated quickly enough, and wanted some new features. So I decided to create something that would be better than Google Reader and at the same time make Google Reader users happy.
Readbo is an RSS reader, but it also has filters to filter out what you don't want to see. You can also aggregate Twitter and Facebook. I personally love this feature. Even if you don't use RSS reader's, having Facebook or Twitter in Readbo can be pretty interesting.
My project is still in beta, and still far from where I want it to be. But I'm sure a lot of you might like it in its current state. Probably a lot of bugs will be found!
Readbo allows you to import your Google Reader subscriptions for thoses who want to try it out.
I'm currently limiting registration with invitation codes, this runs on a single server which could die if too many people register.
You can register using this invitation code : HACKERNEWS ( 500 registrations allowed). I do hope this won't kill my server, currently I have only tried with 5 users, close enought, we will see. GO TO: http://readbo.com
Readbo also has likes for RSS feeds. And trending items are posted here: http://readbo.com/trending
I still have a ton of feature that I would like to create for Readbo:
Sharing/retweeting Add Google+ Better filter management (I'm not a big fan of the current system) Better landing page design Premium accounts Fix bugs More user friendly iPhone/Android app API (this is far away)
I've been working 100% by myself on this app, If a lot of users are interested by it, I will try to monetize it, and create a real startup out of it (paying designers, and developers). Currently I have no where near the money for that.
Known bugs:
wrong count sometimes appears for feeds If you add a feed that is being used by someone else, you'll get a list from all the feeds since 20 days of that feed
Also my privacy policy is ugly, I've used a tool to self generate it, I don't have the money to pay a lawyer for now. Here is a quick resume of what happens to your data:
All feeds, facebook data etc... is kept in the database for caching. It is cleared either if you delete your account, either if you delete the feed or if the data is older than 20 days. If you delete your account, the account is disabled but only for 15 days, and no other data than the account username password email is kept.
Thank you for your time testing the app!
Here is the link: http://readbo.com (CODE: HACKERNEWS) 500 invites <comment><USER2> I had a quick look, but it didn't work on my iphone.

I'd be really stoked if it was basically like google reader but had really nice typography - really that's all i want.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing not working on an iPhone iOS5 I've tried is the popups, I'll try fixing it thanks for the bug report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried to import an OPML file, and got a cloudfare error page.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another rss reader, I'm so happy!

<comment><AUTHOR> Please check out the Facebook/Twitter functionality :).

The idea is not to have another RSS reader, but to have a News Reader, that would fetch all news coming from as most sources as possible. RSS are just part of it.</comment></comment>


Apple donates $500,000 to Silicon Valley anti-poverty group - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/05/05/apple-donates-antipoverty/

<comment><USER2> Apple (et al the total is $10M) is going to get some blowback for giving so little given their cash reserves. But it's a great gesture and a great start. The long term solution is going to require more vision than charitable giving in my opinion. How can tech meaningfully impact regular Americans in their endeavors? Awesome devices, free email and messaging is incredible, don't get me wrong. But, for example, the car companies of the previous century also lifted a middle class and gave them an opportunity to raise a family, send their kids to school and have a stake in the country's future. I don't have the answers, but I do know lots of working class folks need more (and better) job opps.</comment>


Region-aware scrolling triggers - <AUTHOR> http://imakewebthings.com/jquery-waypoints/

<comment><USER2> Nice. I might use it on my blog when the number of posts cross 10 :).</comment>


How Would I improve WhatsApp – A Case Study - <AUTHOR> https://firesofmay.substack.com/p/how-would-i-improve-whatsapp <comment><USER2> I get the feeling that WhatsApp works better as "Less is More" application. Basically, a superior SMS. From my experience, it is mostly used by immigrants as a workaround for international call fees and texts.

I would actually focus more on 1 on 1 interaction and photos. Maybe even integration with mobile payment systems and remittances.</comment>


Has anyone taken any good OCW courses related to startups? - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/index.htm <comment><USER2> MIT's OCW is indeed awesome, but most mba stuff in my opinion is aimed at working in management for already established companies (middle managers), and less for startups.

A stats course might be nice.</comment>


Would you still use Facebook if it started charging its users? - <AUTHOR>

If Facebook started charging a monthly or annual fee, would you still use it? I know some people who get a lot of value out of it, and I know some who use it only because it's free. I wonder how much their user base would decrease? Increase? After speaking with a friend, he said "It depends." If it was like $1 a month, then it would be worth it. Anything more, then it would not. What would be your dollar/currency threshold? <comment><USER2> No for me.

If they started charging I think it wouldn't be too long before another free service came in and started to eat their lunch (read freeloaders would defect). Of course even if they lost hundreds of millions of users to some competitor they would still be a viable business. Look at yahoo.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing you're referencing Google beating out Yahoo? Could you elaborate more? Is Yahoo still a viable business minus their acquisitions?</comment></comment>


Kinect by Microsoft Keeps You Entertained Hands Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/arts/television/04kinect.html?_r=2&hpw

<comment><USER3> I'm a MSFT employee but you guys have to take my word that this is a purely unbiased review. :)

I just played the Kinect all evening for the first time. And I'm still in shock - that thing is magical, like the first time I played with the Wii, flicked on an iPhone or got search results instantly from Google.

Few things blew me away

\- How intuitive the controls (or lack of thereof) are. You just 'do'. The Wii was like this too but this felt more natural

\- Being able to talk to my Xbox. I've never felt voice recognition was ready for mainstream. I was wrong - talking to my TV felt a bit like Star Trek modulo the computer voice.

\- How much fun it was. My wife and I had as fun much goofing off by dancing around and playing around as much as competing.

I can't wait to see more games for it.

<comment><USER4> "How well doeth Xthboxth Kinect'th voith control handle thpeech impedimenth?"

<comment><USER5> There will be a special "Igor" version for that. But yeah, I have bluetooth voice integration in my car and I have a tough time trying to make the voice commands work ("call", "setup", etc.), because I am not a native English speaker and have an accent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I want to see this hacked and be able to connected to my laptop so I can write programs using the Kinect sensor as an input. Think about how wild it would be to write software using a Kinect input as a sensor. For example, you could sit there and wave your hand to move through your email or music or something.

I'm not the only one; Adafruit Industries has a $2,000 bounty for the first Github repo submission that can grab input from the Kinect device and output depth. [http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect- proj...](http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the- ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/)

<comment><USER7> I suspect that Microsoft would love to leverage the Kinect platform as a way to reclaim relevance in mainstream computing. I'm sure that, with enough success, they'll productize it beyond XBox.

I've thought for a long time that a successful Kinect would likely lead to a Kinect-optimized version of Windows.

<comment><USER8> _reclaim relevance in mainstream computing._

For a certain definition of "mainstream computing".

Since when is MS' platform a niche and its tools marginal? We just had two front-page stories about google suing the U.S. government for its explicit demand for MS technologies.

This is like saying "Toyota better work hard on autonomous vehicles to reclaim relevance in mainstream auto-mobile industry."

<comment><USER7> Yea, I knew I'd get stung by this. Should I have gone with "consumer" ? Or "mindshare" instead of "relevance" ?

What I intended to get across was that I think Microsoft would love to use Kinect as a platform to recover some of its losses in the mobile, search, and cloud computing spaces, essentially to establish it as the new Microsoft platform to lock in users.

Not exactly a crystal clear explanation, admittedly.

<comment><USER8> What you wanted to say is that MS is and has been uncool to developers and no one would touch their shite unless coerced by bills or held captive by an employer visa.

(no need to mince words)

Microsoft Sucks(TM) but they have never been good at, or even wanted, consumer lock-in. Microsoft Sucks(TM) but they're not evil, not by a long shot, or at least not good at it.

To us, developers, they're Useful Idiots[1] who do pro-developer things inadvertently, while trying to be evil. Case in point, they made their entire platform COM-enabled in order to ensure Office interop and "invite" people into VB. Really, they had the Web flashing in bright neon and all the dotcoms of the late 90s for omens, and all they thought was "yeah, the future is MS Office, let's just make Windows super accessible" ..

What happened is that the entire MS platform became "callable" from other stacks and people built their own stacks on top of MS'. Flash, Mozilla, Java, Open Office, VMWare, etc. None of them could have existed if MS was "competently evil" at locking down the win32 platform as Apple is at locking down the iThing.

Really, Microsoft sucks at being evil so bad that they're actually benevolent. If I was Roger Corman, shooting a cheap horror flick, I would yell at MS and tell it to get its act together, or get back to Denny's for their shift (most of Corman's lead actors were wait-staff); that's not a way for a proper villain to behave. Truly, the Eric Cartman of bad guys.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot>

<comment><USER9> I see more and more people view Microsoft as a harmless, disoriented giant, just like IBM. Thing is, both were actively evil in their heyday. They killed, raped and pillaged until they become granddads and settled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am hopeful that Kinect is a successful product for Microsoft, but I have some questions.

The Nintendo Wii found success in the market, not solely because of its simple, easy to use controls. In addition to the innovative Wii UI, Nintendo launched a variety of family oriented games that took advantage of the Wii controllers, it had a brand and bevy of characters that it could leverage that resonated with families and kids (e.g., Mario), the Wii console was small and quiet, and the Wii was priced well below the competition.

For Kinect to succeed in the market, Microsoft must introduce a variety of complementary (and compelling) games, it needs to develop a collection of characters and stories that resonate with target customers of the Kinect, and it needs to carefully consider pricing, given that the price of the Xbox 360 plus Kinect (+ additional accessories) could overshoot the comfort level of a majority of consumers, especially in view of the economic recession.

Ultimately, the success of Kinect hinges not only on the Kinect hardware but also on Microsoft's ability to develop a coherent "Kinect strategy" that includes games, characters/stories, branding and marketing, pricing, and so forth. And a key issue is developing a "Kinect strategy" that does not alienate Xbox 360's most important customers, which at present are hardcore gamers. These are the gamers paying for Live and providing the Xbox 360 with the highest (game) attach rate among 7th generation consoles.

<comment><USER11> > For Kinect to succeed in the market, Microsoft must introduce a variety of > complementary (and compelling) games, it needs to develop a collection of > characters and stories that resonate with target customers of the Kinect, > and it needs to carefully consider pricing, given that the price of the Xbox > 360 plus Kinect (+ additional accessories) could overshoot the comfort level > of a majority of consumers, especially in view of the economic recession.

Considering how much people continue to spend on the Rock Band accessories - for _one_ game - I don't know that the Kinect's price tag is that significant.

<comment><USER12> I purchased a Rockband set for 360 from Wal-Mart last Thanksgiving/Christmas sale, brand new, with game, corded drum and mic, and corded guitar for $59.

YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've actually had the chance to play with one of these firsthand, and I must say, I'm quite impressed. The only basis for comparison I have is the wii.

Initially, there is some confusion as to what it is you're supposed to do but after a minute of awkward movement you get the hang of it. This feels much more natural than the wii, and the lack of controller is freeing. The full body movement detection is fun and really encourages you to move around. On the other hand, the sensitivity is not that high. It's okay with the casual games it comes with, but I'd like to see some more examples of, say, shooters.

<comment><USER14> You could always give the player a plastic gun with tracking dots and a trigger. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For dissenting opinions, check out Ars Technica's [1] and Engadget's [2] reviews. Both are less enthusiastic, with Ars complaining that the lack of buttons (compared to the Wiimote or Sony's Move) greatly limits gameplay potential.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house- cl...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house-clean-your- floor-move-your-butt-ars-reviews-kinect.ars)

[2] [http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/04/kinect-for- xbox-360-revie...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/04/kinect-for- xbox-360-review/)

<comment><USER4> More dissent also at Eurogamer:

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-04-kinect- reviewed...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-04-kinect-reviewed- review)

They bring up the point that you need quite a lot of room for the device to work, you need 2,5m of clear space between the TV and the sofa for two players. And if you don't have that much, don't buy the thing because it won't work well for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apparently if you try to create an open-source driver for this, Microsoft thinks that it's a safety hazard....

      > But Microsoft isn't taking kindly to the bounty offer. "Microsoft does not
      > condone the modification of its products," a company spokesperson told
      > CNET. "With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software
      > safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft
      > will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work
      > closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect
      > tamper-resistant."

'product safety groups?'

1: [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/04/2k-bounty-for- freeop.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/04/2k-bounty-for-freeop.html)

2: [http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect- proj...](http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the- ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/)

3: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20021836-52.html>

<comment><USER17> Lawyers. Sooner or later, someone will plug it in while it's open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My roommate bought it and invited a bunch of people over. It's actually a lot of fun. More than I thought it would be. Most people seemed hesitant to play... probably because the majority of the games involve waving your arms around like an idiot. It's not quite as bad as that infamous video suggests, but it's still pretty bad.

The motion detection technology is really good. You walk around the room and your avatar moves along with you. You scratch your cheek with your right hand and the character on the screen makes the same general motion.

Voice recognition was mediocre. Had to repeat ourselves a few times, and background noises seemed to screw it up.

Thumbs up, overall.

<comment><USER19> "Voice recognition was mediocre. Had to repeat ourselves a few times, and background noises seemed to screw it up"

Since you're supposed to recalibrate the microphones if you move the furniture in the room, I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of people moving around the room could cause problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Kinect sounds like some impressive tech, but it doesn't really sound _fun_ to me. Obviously I'm not the target audience, but I wonder how many people out there want to play games in this manner. It might be a cool novelty, but is it a lasting interaction paradigm?

<comment><USER21> I think plenty of people said the same thing about the Wii. It is fun so long as games use the interaction as a constructive part of the game. There are plenty of fun multiplayer games on the Wii that just wouldn't work with traditional controllers.

<comment><USER20> I had a Wii for a while, and the motion control thing was fun at first, but it wore itself out pretty quickly. I think the thing I appreciated most was the ease of aiming when playing Metroid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Kinect suffers from the same problem that all motion controls do: the technology isn't there to make it really precise and low latency, and that's a big problem for people who have been playing games for a long time and who have come to expect that precision, even for casual games.

It doesn't matter if the games are casual or not - the games aren't fun to me if I feel like I have to devote even a modicum of thought to compensating for the control scheme, or if I feel like there's even a little bit of "luck" involved. It's like how people complain that Mario Party isn't fun because you don't really feel like your skill has much of a bearing on what's going on - <USER2> doubt that most people care about being masters of Mario Party, but with even a little bit of luck, it invalidates the experience. It's not about being competitive, it's about the satisfaction of improving and applying a skill. Sure, if I'm drunk and just waving my arms around and my avatar is doing the same, of course it's fun, but without that precision, it's not a "game," it's a "toy." Toys are fine, but I prefer games.

It's crazy to think that we've got these awesome ideas for motion controls and some fairly impressive implementations that were unimaginable even a few years ago, but no way to make them even as close as precise as the control pads, buttons and joysticks that we've had for decades simply by virtue of the fact that they rely on simple digital technology.

EDIT/ADD: What I'm excited for is when the year-long honeymoon period is over and developers start moving beyond the obvious applications. I want to see stuff like two player games where one player has a controller and the other is using their arms to tilt the playfield or control something else, or a game where you have to stand in front of the camera with a controller in your left and and use your body and the stick at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Specs of interest from <http://www.primesense.com/?p=514>

Field of View (Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal): 58° H, 45° V, 70° D

Depth image size: VGA (640x480)

Spatial x/y resolution (@ 2m distance from sensor): 3mm

Depth z resolution (@ 2m distance from sensor): 1cm

Maximum image throughput (frame rate): 60fps

Operation range: 0.8m - 3.5m

Color image size: UXGA (1600x1200)

Data interface: USB 2.0

Power supply: USB 2.0

Power consumption: 2.25W

Dimensions (Width x Height x Depth): 14cm x 3.5cm x 5cm

</comment><comment><USER24> My wife and I got this today and it's lots of fun. The motion sensing is really incredible technology, and there could be lots of uses in the future.

</comment><comment><USER25> So I guess if you combine Kinect with iOS touch/swipe gestures, you can get the Minority Report interface (without the gloves)!

Not to mention that if Kinect can recognize your face well enough to log you into Xbox Live, then those customized interactive wall adverts from Minority Report can't be too far away either.

<comment><USER26> Even though the global idea sounds great, according to the sensors that they have I don't think that such precision is possible. I am based only in guesses, but with a normal camera, and CMOS sensor (for depth sense using a infrared projector) that have not been calibrated, the software can be able to determine different shapes (bodies) that are moving (background subtraction to detect the velocity, for example) but is not able to have enough precision to even distinguish the different fingers of a hand.

As I said I haven't played or used Kinetic, nor I know the software that is running, but it seems to me that they are parameterizing estimated movements and mapping them into the space of allowed movements of your "avatar".

<comment><USER19> I've seen a claim of 2 cm resolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have been playing with one for the past 2-3 hours and one thing I am REALLY impressed with is the level at which they have the voice recog. It may just be lots of data they have analyzed from their car kits, but the voice recognition is amazing (no training, multiple people, etc) and much better than I have been witness to inside other auto systems and with Goog411.. As for the visual component, the sensor is already able to pick up minor movements of the hands, if they can get down to finger movements etc I could see this being a huge helper in their auto realm (small distinct finger movement on the steering wheel for channel changing/navigation, etc) . It is an amazing piece of hardware.

</comment><comment><USER28> Turns out the technology is not developed at Microsoft. They are using the PrimeSense chip, which gives the 3D sense to Xbox. Details here: <http://eceplayground.com/2010/09/18/how-xbox-kinetic-works>

<comment><USER9> The chip is just a sensor to get the earliest stage of scene decomposition quick. There's tremendous algorithmic work to be done beyond that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will they be relaesing 3rd person shooter/rpg games where your character makes whatever movements you do? You could even walk in place to make him move. Actually pick things up etc.

I think that would be amazing.

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately, kinect isn't sensitive enough to detect grasping. You'll notice that kinect navigation, hitting a button relies of hovering your arm in place as a bar fills (there are variations), but there's no 'poke' or 'detect fist' there.

You can dream though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Kinect is definitely disruptive. Which is all the more impressive considering the Wii has been on the market for some time, yet Kinect is not just a Wii motion control imitation (as the Playstation Move is), it's something similar but very different.

It's probably too soon to tell how significant Kinect will end up being, it'll probably be follow-on generations of Kinect games which will prove whether it'll be a game changer or a dud.

</comment><comment><USER32> I almost thought this was going to be about Office 2011.

<comment><USER33> I was hoping it was about <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1871608></comment></comment>


OSI: The Internet That Wasn't - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt <comment><USER2> As usual, /usr/games/fortune provides some insightful commentary:

"On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit' \-- and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works best, write it down and make that the standard.

The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written contributions from a much larger community, you put the contributions in a room of committee people with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all with their own political axes to grind, and four years later you get something out, usually without it ever having been implemented once.

So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well, then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write it down, circulate it a lot and now we'll see if anyone can implement it after it's an international standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it. One of those processes is backwards, and I don't think it takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which."

\-- Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI"

<comment><USER3> This is why every time Mozilla starts whining about Google playing with new things without consulting everybody else first (e.g. Dart, NaCl), I lose more respect for them (actually, at this point, they've pretty well exhausted it all). Basic advancement comes from somebody deciding to try something new, not from getting everybody to agree on what comes next.

<comment><USER4> It's slightly different because Google is in a relatively unique position of being able to unilaterally deploy new technology, as they both serve a large fraction of the traffic on the internet, and have a very popular browser.

Mozilla is understandably wary about new technologies from Google, because it would be very easy for them to make it so that the best youtube experience can only happen in chrome, which would be quite detrimental to Mozilla.

<comment><USER5> Just because they can do large deployments doesn't mean it will be successful. Look at what happened with Buzz and Wave for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think one of the subtleties that is overlooked is that by being the "future" of networking, OSI drew in all the "big guns" who worked hard to control it to their advantage. Whether it was the folks at IBM who were pushing Token Ring/SNA, or Netware, or anything really. Since it was the standard to be, influencing _it_ was the high priority.

That allowed the IETF to continue in relative calm and without serious interference during the 80's. That all changed in the 90's when people started figuring out they were betting on the wrong horse.

In 1993 at the 27th IETF [1] I put forth the proposal that this code we had all been using (RPC/XDR) that was described in various informational RFCs (RFC1057/RFC1014) which everyone treated like a 'standard' actually be blessed as a standard. Pretty much the consensus was that it was a fine idea except that forces at that point that were rather anti "Sun" went out of their way to kill it. It was sad to watch, and folks who had been going to IETF meetings for a decade or more were appalled but damned if it had become impossible for the IETF to bless something as a standard any more. That really soured me on 'standards' for a long time.

[1] Pg: 533 Advances in ONC [http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/27.pdf](http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/27.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> There were also some differences in design tastes. For example OSI went with ASN.1[1] for binary descriptions rather than plain and simple. TCP and IP just use 8/16/32 bit fields in a predefined byte ordering and that is it. That makes TCP/IP considerably easier to eyeball.

In higher level protocols like email, the TCP/IP world tended towards ASCII based protocols which are far more flexible and future proof, while OSI again did ASN.1. I once worked on an X.400 (OSI Email) gateway and was highly amused that they defined a different error code for every possible reason an email could be refused. There were pages of them (including recipient is dead!) while SMTP allowed for arbitrary text and an overal numeric code to indicate the type of error. Again you can see which was easier to eyeball and diagnose.

Practicality tends to be very effective.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One)

<comment><USER8> I've implemented ASN.1 BER from scratch before (don't ask). If "three different string formats" doesn't say designed by committee, I don't know what does.

Sounds like OSI would have been an internet built on what is essentially binary-encoded XML. I'd say we dodged a bullet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The danger of committees is that it's easy for a few members to add tremendous complexity. Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to implement" always a goal of everyone working on tech standards?

Not if you're a big company competing with small companies. Adding 10 man- years of implementation effort is a small thing for IBM- or Cisco-sized companies, but a giant barrier to entry for upstart competitors. Also, vagueness in the spec requires extensive testing to make things interoperate reliably, which favors big incumbents.

These aren't just emergent, subconscious effects. I've been in on discussions about making a spec harder to implement to frustrate competitors. (not with any YC companies)

The dark forces of competitive advantage affect non-committee specs too. Microsoft SMB is an example. The x86 instruction set is another.

<comment><USER10> > Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to implement" > always a goal of everyone working on tech standards?

Patents and "competitive advantage".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> " _Everything was up for debate—even trivial nuances of language, like the difference between 'you will comply' and 'you should comply,' triggered complaints._"

That's not actually a trivial nuance---those are significantly different semantic behaviors. IETF RFC's use "MUST" and "SHOULD" (yes, in caps) for the same distinction.

</comment><comment><USER12> …but we're going to keep asking questions about the 7 layer model in interviews as if it were useful in the real world because that's what we learned about in school.

<comment><USER13> "I hear they're going to 42 layers because it's a sacred number in Bali."

Not from this guy. I might ask you to critique the 7 layer model, or provide me with ideas for speeding things up by skipping layers.

It's all mushed together in real stacks anyway, with dogs down in the cat layer, and mice doing double duty both at the metal and up there in the UI. I swear to god, OSI would have been standardizing finger lengths for keyboard interaction if someone had let them.

<comment><USER12> I counter with the 9-layer model and that causes them to ask a more relevant question. This happens a lot when you're receiving a generic interview from a US Megacorp that has only recently ditched irrelevant (save for "how does this person think") quizzes for cross-functional interviews from people whose function is far removed from what you thought you were going to be interviewing for. (They all seem to have migrated to this strategy, for what that's worth.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can never see the term OSI an not think of this classic. It gave me and friends a good laugh back in the day ;p (original site down but this is a mirror)

[http://pablotron.org/files/7_layer_burrito.html](http://pablotron.org/files/7_layer_burrito.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember reading with great amusement an article written by an X.400 proponent, sometime in the late 80's, asserting that X.400 would start to dominate SMTP once the telecoms got the price of sending an X.400 message under a dollar per e-mail. (And this was back in the 80's, when dollars were bigger back then!)

Thus proving that the OSI folks really didn't have a clue....

</comment><comment><USER16> I had always looked to the OSI model as a _frame_ thought which a communition channel can be analysed. If I intercept my internet cable, I assume I can idealy measure the signal and fit it on the 7 layers of the OSI model. I fail (honestly) to see how that is a failure, as seems to be the starting point. Isn't the OSI model _one_ way to look at a medium?

<comment><USER17> That was not the original intention. That is the story that for some reason network professors continue to tell themselves as a reason to teach this model. The original intent was for there to be 7 clear layers, with various protocols for each.

Why the profs stick so close to this instead of teaching a more realistic model is beyond me. Why use an inaccurate theoretical model when you could use an accurate one instead? It's going to be simplified relative to reality either way, as befits a model, but it might as well be a correct simplification. I mean, it's not like the OSI 7-layer model is a mathematical truth or anything... it's just an artifact produced by a committee a long time ago.

To anyone leaping up to defend it, let me set the frame I'll be judging the defenses by in advance: If the real world was as it is today except there was no such thing as the OSI model, and someone proposed the 7-layer model _today_ as a model for understanding the network for the very first time, would you _really_ consider your defense as a reason to go with it, even despite the fact the model is actively inaccurate? I don't think inertia is an adequate defense to stick with something, when we aren't even using it anyhow... what _real_ inertia does it have?

<comment><USER18> Why do you say the OSI model is unrealistic? Writing the simplest Hello World web service call takes advantage of the OSI model, even though you might not notice it unless you also write network drivers and manufacture network cards. In fact, I've worked at companies where it would be accidentally accurate if you simply labelled the dev teams with the layer of the OSI model their work corresponds with. You practically can't read a network sniffer trace unless you understand the OSI reference model.

<comment><USER13> > You practically can't read a network sniffer trace unless you understand the > OSI reference model

I read these all the time. I can't remember the last time I needed to know what the OSI layers were called; they're utterly irrelevant to networking as near as I can tell.

<comment><USER18> I was referring to the whole concept of the model and the purpose of the layers, not simply reciting from memory the names of the layers.

<comment><USER19> You don't need the OSI model to understand layers of abstraction. Since the OSI model doesn't fit the observed layers very well, it seems pretty useless from that perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting and we can see the outcome of the palace revolt is IPv6 OSI /telecoms guys would have insisted on having a workable inter-operation plan.

EX X.400 hacker here I used to have root on the UK ADMD back in the day :-)

</comment><comment><USER21> Not too impressed with this account, which I will admit starting to skim around halfway. E.g.:

I'm not sure the author realizes TCP is a virtual circuit protocol (then again I'm sure OSI had one or more much heavier weight ones).

The _real_ fatal flaw of OSI, before even getting to the point of finding out if their protocols worked---many of them _did_ get far enough in standardization process---was their going to ISO in the first place. If you just needed to get things done, the difference between spending around $2,000 ($1,000 in 1988 dollars) to buy a shelf of the standards documents, or $0 or thereabouts to get all the RFCs (chicken and egg, you might need to buy a CD or a tape to get them to your systems), made a very big difference.

If you're really interested in all this, I highly recommend Padlipsky's very opinionated " _The Elements of Networking Style: And Other Essays & Animadversions on the Art of Intercomputer Networking_" ([http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Networking-Style- Animadversio...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Networking-Style- Animadversions-Intercomputer/dp/0595088791)), a very colorful work with rhetorical gems like "gilding the ragweed".

<comment><USER22> > spending around $2,000 ($1,000 in 1988 dollars) to buy a shelf of the > standards documents

The ISLISP standardization group did an interesting workaround for this: [http://www.islisp.info/history.html](http://www.islisp.info/history.html)

An ISO committee to standardize the language was constituted but stalled on doing any real work drafting a standard. While they waited around, the community drew up a draft standard, which was published as a public recommendation to the ISO committee, with the draft put into the public domain. The committee then voted to adopt the community's draft as the standard unchanged. So now an official ISO document is available for the usual fee, but you can get a predecessor document that looks surprisingly similar, for free as a PDF.

Of course, this requires everyone on the committee agreeing to not really take the ISO process seriously. You might wonder why one would bother with it at all then, and in this case it seems to have been to reassure clients that ISLISP is stable by getting it an ISO standard.

<comment><USER21> Reminds me of how I always used drafts of the ANSI SCSI standard, or vendor documents.

" _in this case it seems to have been to reassure clients that ISLISP is stable by getting it an ISO standard_ "

Which is a nice hat trick if nobody uses the actual standards document ... although I suppose Franz and perhaps a few others did buy a copy....</comment></comment></comment>


Google now forcing you to use your Google+ profile to rate Android apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.droid-life.com/2012/11/26/full-google-integration-with-google-play-on-the-way/ "Google has made a major change to the way that app reviews are implemented on its Play Store. From now on, users posting reviews on the web store will have to sign in with their Google+ profiles, attaching their real name and associated data to their opinion." <comment><AUTHOR> See also: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/27/3696328/google-plus- play-...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/27/3696328/google-plus-play-store- reviews) & [http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/26/google-play-gets-real- revie...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/26/google-play-gets-real-reviews-will- now-be-posted-with-your-google-name-and-picture/) via [http://www.droid- life.com/2012/11/26/full-google-integration...](http://www.droid- life.com/2012/11/26/full-google-integration-with-google-play-on-the-way/) & [http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/26/google- integration-f...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/26/google-integration- for-play-store-reviews-is-live-all-previous-reviews-say-a-google-user/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Posted elsewhere on HN. See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4837109>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but several hours later than my post on HN. I found and posted it while it was morning in Europe while people were still sleeping in the US.

<comment><USER2> This isn't a who-posts-first contest. The discussion of the other post is much better.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Street View car in 'accident' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24080422

<comment><USER2> If only it had been google's self-driving car so the driver wouldn't have panicked :)

Seriously, though, why is a car accident in Indonesia news?

<comment><USER3> I'm Indonesian. According to the linked Indonesian website, the car hit a pedestrian and tried to escape (before hitting other vehicles). If you run over someone with a car, people around the accident can get very temperamental and can damage your car and harm you. That explains the driver being panicked.

<comment><USER4> That also explains the unusual damage to the windshield. It looks like a small mob took bats to it. I suspect if this rage was directed at teh goog it would have had much more damage. Nothing to see here. Human error followed by a very poor judgement call and some vigilante justice. I hope everyone turned out ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This would have been interesting if it was a self driving car, but it's not. It's just a car with a camera.</comment>


Personal Finance: How do you protect yourself against income eating doodads? - <AUTHOR> http://themoneyleopard.com/2014/11/04/how-do-you-protect-yourself-against-income-eating-doodads/

<comment><USER2> I was just thinking this. Its a good app idea. Something that scans your bank accounts, and then cancels (or alerts) you to any odd small recurring charges.</comment>


How to Hear Like a Champion Birder (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-to-hear-like-a-champion-birder <comment><USER2> We live on the edge of forest and prairie so we have a weird confluence of birds here.

On several nights I have heard an owl hooting in our backyard, and was hoping for a tool like this! Instead I ended up generating a list of several likely species and listening to the sounds of each on YouTube. Finally I was able to ID it as a Barred Owl, and sometimes we see it as a distant wingspan swooping low over the field behind our house.

You could use this app to correlate migrations and habitat ranges. Someday we could even use it to identify individual members of their populations. Imagine!

We are on the cusp of being able to track animal populations and health.

I think it could be cool to have an app that gives you a real idea of what lives around you and where (~15 deer, ~3 coyotes, 2 Cooper's hawks, etc). Maybe one could monetize it to pest control agencies?

<comment><USER3> I wonder if you could do something like FlightRadar for birds. People put microphones outside and run detection software. Some kind of ml runs to extract chirps and calls and sends those to a central location to ID them.</comment></comment>


Would you use this to gather feedback for small projects? - <AUTHOR> http://feedbackster.myinstapage.com

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry I honestly have no idea what the product is... I mean, are you trying to sell <form>?

I'll try to give feedback on what you do have on the page;

1) The colored circles (are they bubbles?) is it supposed to evoke thought bubbles? I don't quite get it. But my eyes just glossed over it, so perhaps not crucial to get the picture right. I recall a comment a few weeks back about always needing a picture, even if it's totally random.

2) The lead;

      Stop gathering feedback from forums and enable every visitor of your web
      site to leave feedback in a simple and user friendly way. Perfect for
      landing pages and smaller projects.

I don't know if you need to lead with a negative "stop gathering feedback from forums", rather jump right into the positive aspects of your offering. "Enable every visitor..."

Gathering feedback on a landing page seems counter-intuitive. I think you would need to justify why I should be collecting feedback on a landing page. Feedback from paying customers, sure. Feedback from customers who are returning for the n-th time but still haven't purchased? Possibly... Feedback from people who are just learning about my product for the first time? I dunno...

3) The details;

What exactly is the product? "Simple integration", "Fully customizable", and "With the visitor in mind" actually don't say anything about what you are offering. The are either vague or low-level details, I think you need a more specific description of your product. In other words, what exactly does your product do, and why is it different / special / better?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, great feedback! I've taken most of it into action and revised. I also built a small demo on the landing page, hopefully it will give a better picture. More feedback is very welcome!</comment></comment>