Introducing Multi-Step Zaps: An Easier Way to Build Powerful Workflows - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/workflow-automation/ <comment><USER3> Zapier co-founder here.

This is seriously the biggest change to our product since launching the company. We've been working on it for a year (including a beta w/ several thousand users) and are very excited to finally release it. Before, Zapier only supported 1-to-1 integrations which limited it's power. Multi-Step Zaps open up a huge array of new power...

\- transforming data (like dates, string manipulation)

\- executing JS code in between steps (can do manipulation, extra API calls, etc.)

\- looking up data inside other apps

\- if an item isn't found when looking it up, create it

More details in our release notes: [https://zapier.com/blog/workflow- automation/](https://zapier.com/blog/workflow-automation/)

How we built this: [http://blog.invisionapp.com/redesigning-interactive- editor/](http://blog.invisionapp.com/redesigning-interactive-editor/)

I know a ton of folks in the HN community use Zapier. Thank you so much for your support. I can't wait to see what you build now!

<comment><USER4> Likewise - Zapier co-founder/CTO here - really excited about this launch. It represents a complete re-build of our stack to support workflows. Pretty much anyone can build complex workflows from a pretty easy to use UI.

To call this out specifically - I think HN might appreciate the Code steps you can add to your workflow - we support both Python [0] and Javascript [1] today.

I've been using it to replace dozens of crontabs and others are using it to inject custom scripting into workflows around Github, Bitbucket, Trello, Salesforce, etc. I especially like making Slack bots with it (we've made a few game moderator bots, pretty fun).

I'll be around all day - happy to answer any questions. There is some cool tech under the hoods.

[0] [https://zapier.com/help/code-python/#how-does-it- work](https://zapier.com/help/code-python/#how-does-it-work)

[1] [https://zapier.com/help/code/#how-does-it- work](https://zapier.com/help/code/#how-does-it-work)

<comment><USER5> We love Zapier and I'm really excited to start playing around with this. One concern I've always had as an engineer using Zapier was how it accounted for unique trigger events.

1\. Concerning privacy, for API's that don't offer webhooks for instance, does Zapier poll the API and then store some of our data in order to confirm that new records are indeed new? 2\. Concerning robustness, what insurance is there against any failure that the zap will catch up with its triggers?

We don't currently use Zapier for anything mission critical and I'm hesitant to recommend it, but it would be pretty cool if we could use it for making zaps that contain more sensitive data and are more critical.

The privacy policy states: "Your user-facing Task History is stored for the life of your account so that you can monitor Zapier activity and replay failures." [1] I was hoping for a bit more of a technical explanation, though, and could only find pricing FAQ's.

[1] [https://zapier.com/help/data-privacy/](https://zapier.com/help/data- privacy/)

<comment><USER4> A quick primer:

1\. We store a hashed unique id for polling deduplication for as long as your zap is on. We don't store "all" data for all items "seen" in this case.

2\. The nice thing about polling is even if we miss a beat here or there - catching up is crazy easy. This is usually no problem at all.

Reliability is actually a big push for us in 2016 - while we are already pretty good we want to be provably safe for mission critical stuff. Keep an eye for some transparency/service status stuff from us this year.

More details since you linked to data privacy:

The task history stores all the data around a task that fires, we've found it is critical for transparency so users can see what happened when and with what data.

The raw logs (think outbound HTTP API calls) are stored for 7 days max and are absolutely critical for us determining just what an account is doing in the system. We just roll them off after 7 days for security reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is HUGE! So excited to see this. I automate huge swaths of my life with Zapier.

I have been relying on a little self-hosted web app to "fork" some web hooks and this seems to me to eliminate that need entirely.

[https://github.com/deadlyicon/deploy-hook- forker](https://github.com/deadlyicon/deploy-hook-forker)

<comment><USER4> That is pretty clever. We also let you rewrite the "hook" \- or shrink it - <USER2> even augment it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good stuff - I know this has been in the pipeline for sometime. Excited to see it out in the wild. Congrats to the Zapier team on producing an awesome product - look forward to using multi-step zaps.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love Zapier, with one exception. For some reason the webhook zap doesn't provide the whole post body. Strips the root {} meaning it shows up as text without structure. Very odd choice that I wish they'd fix. Besides that am big fan

<comment><USER4> Great suggestion - thanks! I'll look into providing the POST body for inbound webhooks.

<comment><USER8> Thanks dude!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone who uses Zapier for personal workflows - I am curious why use Zapier over IFTTT?

Note: this is NOT a challenge to why something like Zapier exists for business, nor a comment directly on the new multi-step Zaps.

<comment><USER10> Its hard to explain but i dont feel IFTTT and Zapier quite operate in the same space. IFTTT is much more about your relationship with a service that needs some basic interaction with another. Every "recipe" is built around you, your relationship with the primary online service.

Zapier is more like a glue between two building blocks, it doesnt have to include the relationship to you, just between two building blocks. That simple shift in the way zapier is solving automation make it incredibly powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm super excited about this. Well done!

One of my biggest pain points was the lack of ability to determine if a record already exists before choosing to use an Update or Create action. (You'd think a service's API would treat Update the same as Create if no matching record is found, but that's not always the case.) So I've had to err on the side of caution and always use a Create action, thus filling the CRM (or whatever) with many many duplicates.

The search feature looks like it will handle this. Will be implementing shortly.

<comment><USER3> Some APIs do support "upsert" functionality which is basically what you suggested. It's not very popular though and Zapier previously had to support the lowest-common-denominator which is plain creates.

Now that we officially support Search actions, we can do a lot more cool things.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I remember this being something I saw people on hacker news asking about in 2012 :)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you have multiple zaps that could be one multi-step zap - do you have a way to merge them?

<comment><USER4> We don't have any automated tools for combining zaps into multistep zaps right now - unfortunately. Seems like it could be useful though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool, congratulations on the launch.

I'd be curious to read a blog post about if/how you beta tested this feature and ensured "fit" of the final shipped feature. Did you have an early adopter / guinea pig group?

If I wanted to make a Zap DAG, would I just arbitrarily linearize it ? i.e. if my deps were,

        A -> B
        B -> X
        B -> Y
        B -> Z
        X -> C
        Y -> C
        Z -> C
        C -> D

one linearization is A -> B -> X -> Z -> Y -> C -> D

Do you notice implicit dependencies and do actions in parallel where there is no dependency ? Maybe it doesn't matter except for very deep / wide zaps.</comment>


U.S. Has Been Watching Russia's Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missiles Crash and Burn - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18948/u-s-has-been-secretly-watching-russias-nuclear-powered-cruise-missiles-crash-and-burn <comment><USER2> Does anyone else get a sense of de ja vu from the news this week?

\- Nuclear weapons development, specifically targeted at the US

\- Trade Tariffs

\- Improper security classification in the whitehouse

\- Israel, Iran threatening war

\- China becomes a dictatorship

Feels like we're going backward in time for some reason.

<comment><USER3> It's the inflection switch from globalism, back to nationalism. A substantial increase in military conflict is guaranteed to come from it. We'll also see a massive leap forward in new, particularly stunning technologies again as nations begin to aggressively compete through technology to ensure survival. Nothing drives a leap forward quite like that.

<comment><USER4> How long till we reach the point where the only viable strategy against the enemy bot ai is to give full control to our bot ai? Even smallest delay would matter so too dangerous to have human in the loop.

<comment><USER5> You made me think of roko's bassilisk [1] I must say that I, for one, welcome the rule of our robot overlords.

[1] [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko's_basilisk](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko's_basilisk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And that's why we didn't test one ourselves back in the 60s. You need a special kind of attitude to be willing to fly one of these things over your own country.

Or perhaps just ready access to barely-populated Arctic regions where nobody's watching you drop nuclear reactors around.

These things are the most over-the-top method of beating missile defenses. A normal response would be to just deploy more missiles, which are cheaper and faster to build than defense, so it's easy to keep up. But no, apparently they went in this direction.

<comment><USER7> > _These things are the most over-the-top method of beating missile defenses. > A normal response would be to just deploy more missiles_

Deploying more missiles would be visible and would clearly demonstrate aggressive intentions.

<comment><USER6> More aggressive than a radiation-belching nuclear ramjet?

<comment><USER8> We don't know the design used here. There are nuclear thermal designs that do not enit contaminated exhaust.

<comment><USER9> Not according to TFA. Do you have a source for your counterassertion? I doubt Tyler Rogoway would get such a point of fact incorrect - even when I've disagreed with his analysis I've never found him to be dishonest.

<comment><USER8> I have prior training as both aero and nuclear engineer and there are obvious design space solutions? NERVA was an open cycle reactor meaning the propulsive intake air made direct contact with the core, and ablation is what caused radioactive exhaust. Closed cycle designs are more typical in production systems in which a high temperature conventional radiator would transfer heat from the core to the jet reaction chamber. The article is flat out wrong/misinformed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The joke's on Russia. American anti-missile defences couldn't stop their old missiles anyway!

<comment><USER3> It's baffling why either Russia or China would be concerned about US efforts around missile defense. There's no scenario in the next 20 years where any nation can stop 50 or 100 incoming nukes. I've always assumed it's mostly a propaganda battle, as Russia can't be that stupid. They can't afford to spend what the US can to develop missile defenses over the coming decades, so they want to reassure their people that it's not a problem regardless.

<comment><USER11> Have you really thought this through?

Did you realize that China is still in a state of civil war with Taiwan?

The two had a civil war after WW2. The Taiwan side lost the mainland, and fled to Taiwan.

Normally, when you lose a civil war, you don't create a new government. Otherwise, when the United States had their own civil war, then the southern states would have created the Confederate States of America, and slavery would still be alive and legal today.

Do you agree with this premise?

Taiwan is very strategically important to China. But, the United States is now using Taiwan to contain China. And they are using all the excuses like democracy and all that, but it's easy to see through the propaganda. Otherwise, why isn't Saudi Arabia a democracy by now?

If you think through all the angles, then you might actually realize the insane rationality behind China's motives.

That said, the United States is not China's enemy. But with the way geopolitics plays out, the United States is now firmly committed to securing Taiwan. Thus, both nations are now going to head into conflict.

The thing is, any military conflict between the United States and China, will turn nuclear. Once those missiles start flying, then sell your stocks, because the world is going to burn down. This is a pretty grim analysis, so I hope it never happens.

<comment><USER12> The one china policy is retarded. One would hope that the US government would stand with a long-time ally above passing pressure from an authoritarian dictatorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm glad that this story notes the elevated isotope detection levels last year and the possibility that the US detection plane sent up around that time may have been doing some classified investigation of evidence of an engine of this sort. The article sadly (I mean, of course, but still sadly) has nothing conclusive or very new to say on that topic, but it's still interesting to see others are also curious about whether there's a link.

Makes me wonder also, though probably a lot less likely of a link, about the other story run by thedrive recently of the released FAA and ATC conversation regarding the unknown, fast moving, large white airplane-like craft that wandered up the west coast late last year.

I'm not sure if an infinite range nuclear-reactor-containing "cruise missile"'s visible characteristics would necessarily be "missile-like", i.e. a cigar with small fins, or if it could reasonably at that point just be... an airplane. It would be ballsy as hell for a Russian experimental nuclear- missile-plane to fly deep deep into American airspace in a common corridor with civilian commercial airliners, like, that would seem to be way too far into an insane possibility that would demand a war-like response, and it's far likelier to have been a US craft from a base in the region, but... it would really be the _ultimate_ test of the system's penetrative and evasive capabilities, if it were such a thing.

What do other folks think?

<comment><USER14> Running a live test of a nuclear powered aircraft/drone would certainly be an environmental incident (I'm avoiding the use of the word "disaster" until one crashes).

Running such a test in the airspace of a potential 1st tier opponent would be madness - it would absolutely be seen as a warlike act and repercussions would be immediate and widespread.

It's not like having a moving radiation source would be "stealthy" in any way - after 9/11 many US police departments bought portable Geiger counters so tracking one would just be a matter of correlating the readings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone knows of some reading material on how such an engine could technically work? I wonder how a nuclear reactor could create propulsion.

<comment><USER16> IIRC in Feynman' Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, some government folks surveyed the people working on the Manhattan Project for prospective usages of nuclear power to patent and a nuclear powered airplane was one of his first ideas, using the heat from the nuclear plant to heat air for a jet turbine.

<comment><USER17> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc9gwPB78lk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc9gwPB78lk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > At the most basic conceptual level, the weapon could conceivably reach > supersonic speeds, fly at very low altitudes, and have effectively unlimited > range thanks to its nuclear powerplant

If the Ruskies have developed a reactionless rocket engine capable of crashing further down range than experimental error, I would keep silent as well /s

<comment><USER19> Reactionless? Presumably the reaction mass would be... air.

<comment><USER18> Oh my.. Never thought of that. Surely it does not use the atmosphere as the primary circuit coolant?

<comment><USER20> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto)

<comment><USER21> If only there were a good way of heating the air without contaminating it with radioactive emissions. If we could figure that out, such an engine would be useful in many non war related jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The good news is, no one wants a nuclear war anymore... at least I hope.

I think what changed is largely trade. China, usually the USA's enemy, has benefited enormously by trading with the USA and providing a cheap labor pool for manufacturing after Unions made it too expensive to continue manual manufacturing in the United States.

So if my theory is true, it's probably worth allowing vestment in our fellow nuclear superpowers. Seems backwards, but most things in economics and game theory are.

<comment><USER21> Unions didn't make it too expensive to manufacture. China just made it way cheaper (slight difference there). A Union made product doesn't increase the cost of the product much, but employing people at wages that provide a moderate income level does reduce profitability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Usually when you are testing things, they will fail a lot. Like SpaceX, a lot of boosters crashed, that doesn't mean it is less awesome what they developed and it worked in the end once they got kinks out.

This is weird article.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious if the orbital infrared detection satellites we have would see this object. Seems like the theory of operation means it has to be ridiculously hot to work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why would US bother? All the news about new Russian missiles were mostly for interior propaganda consumption anyway.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe but either way the era of USA unilaterally pushing wars just ended. Russia with their hypersonic nukes and proxy wars wins have just made western imperialism via war and culture have very high costs.

<comment><USER3> Nothing has changed at all in fact. For better or worse.

Russia just rattled their sabre because they're desperate. They've recognized an inability to keep up economically with the US and China, and they will fall further and further behind because of that.

Russia's population hasn't expanded in nearly four decades. In that time the US has added 100 million people. China added 400 million people. That population expansion is an economic weapon.

Russia's economy hasn't expanded since 2006-2007. Putin entirely failed to transition the Russian economy off of dependency on energy prices. Without economic growth, they can't keep spending more on their military. Meanwhile the US and China perpetually expand their economies.

The gap between the US and Russia economically has gone from 11 to 1 in 1989, to 15 to 1. And it's worth noting that output gap in 1989 was already extreme, as Russia was effectively a bankrupt nation at that point. That the US has continued to put distance between it and Russia economically, is a massive failure by Putin. Or to put it in another perspective, Canada now has a larger economy than Russia.

And then the China story. Well, that's just a joke of a comparison. In 1989 China had an economy 1/3 smaller than Russia. Today it's 10 times larger. It leaves Russia wilting in contrast, they've become a second tier power.

<comment><USER25> While your logic makes sense, there is far more to war then economics, otherwise the middle east wouldnt be a mess, and then there is the vietnam war.

Something has changed greatly. It is the fall of globalism and the rise of nationalism. Putins reminder he has the will to use MAD is sign of the new times.</comment></comment></comment>


Hawaii "button pusher" refusing to cooperate with FCC, internal investigators - <AUTHOR> http://www.staradvertiser.com/2018/01/24/breaking-news/schatz-to-lead-hearing-on-alert-systems-in-wake-of-hawaii-blunder/ <comment><USER2> Great, this is why we have a constitution and bill of rights - he has no legal obligation to speak to them, and of course, if by accident he said something that was incorrect ("I had tuna for lunch" when he actually had salmon) he would be guilty of breaking a federal law, "lying to a federal officer".

Useful background info: "Don't talk to the police" video from a law school class [https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE](https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE)

<comment><USER3> > Great, this is why we have a constitution and bill of rights - he has no > legal obligation to speak to them

That's not at all true. Now, it may be true that it is not a _crime_ not to speak to them, it almost certainly is a legal obligation attached to his employment and he quite likely will be fired for cause if he continues to stonewall.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like he will be fired anyway. At least stonewalling may prevent any criminal action against him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Weird, but really shouldn't almost the entire focus be on the terrible design and the people responsible for it in the first place? Why does Miyagi still have his job? Unless the "button pusher" was also the developer I don't see what having him cooperate really accomplishes. I think we all generally know what he did. He clicked the wrong thing. This was practically an eventuality.

<comment><USER6> The focus is surely going to be on finding a scapegoat to blame quickly and coming up with a story that the public can understand that makes this all that scapegoat's fault. The scapegoat will not have the word "manager" in his title. The button pusher should be only talking to his union rep and/or lawyer at this point.

<comment><USER7> Everyone "in the know" already knows HI-EMA has incompetent management because such a bad user interface was allowed to be in use. This hunt for a scapegoat just sends a signal that the management also has no intention to improve themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The whole society is getting short-changed by the idiots trying to make a sacrificial goat out of her/him. Anybody who doesn't understand why s/he doesn't talk, should read Sydney Dekker's books (in particular, "Just Culture -- Restoring Trust and Accountability in your Organisation"). We need the NTSB to do the investigation, they are non-blaming and serious professionals concerned about the FUTURE not the PAST -- i.e. making sure it doesn't happen again.

I seriously want to give a hug to the person who mis-clicked. If you have seen that UX design, you know as well as anyone else, that indeed, most would have mis-clicked over time.

The people investigating this are making a huge mistake.

<comment><USER9> If they want a sacrificial goat, take a look at the people who both commissioned and developed that terrible user interface. I saw it on Twitter. It wasn't much better than that Far Side cartoon that put "Wings Fall Off" next to the backrest button on an airplane seat.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but what's easier to lay the blame on - the expensive system that the government commissioned and will have to publicly say isn't good enough (and thus need to commit to spending money on improving it), or the cheap contract employee who can be summarily fired.

I don't blame the guy for not talking any more - he's (rightly) scared of being crucified for misclicking.

<comment><USER11> He's an exempt member of a union, not a contractor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any investigator is going to be on a headhunt.

The smart move is to stfu, call your union representative, and don't talk to the police until your lawyer makes the appropriate arrangements.

<comment><USER13> And what is there to say, really? "I clicked the wrong thing." The reason why that was likely to happen is blatantly obvious to anyone who has seen the screenshots of the interface.

Edit: And STFU is smart advice in any situation where there is even a remote chance you will be charged with something. You can always make a careful statement later on advice of counsel. Nothing is lost by remaining quiet at first.

<comment><USER14> Have we actually seen the real interface? There was the first round, which was a mockup many were told was a 'screenshot', and a follow up that was a second mock up that was closer.

[http://www.civilbeat.org/2018/01/hawaii-distributed-phony- im...](http://www.civilbeat.org/2018/01/hawaii-distributed-phony-image-of- missile-warning-screen/)

It's a common enough UI issue to be immediately clear to a professional how it happened though.

<comment><USER15> "HEMA can't publicize the actual screen because of security concerns — the system could then then be vulnerable to hackers, Rapoza said."

The level of incompetence is astounding!

<comment><USER16> It's unreal.

> "We asked (Hawaii Emergency Management Agency) for a screenshot and that's > what they gave us," Ige [Hawaii Governor] spokeswoman Jodi Leong told Civil > Beat on Tuesday. "At no time did anybody tell me it wasn't a screenshot."

So the governor asked for a screenshot and they sent him a "mockup" instead of the actual interface?

I can only assume the actual interface was somehow _even worse_ than the fake.

<comment><USER17> Given all of the incompetency here, including the awful UI, and the password on a sticky note that got leaked, I wouldn't be surprised if the links themselves leaked info like: "Send missile alert (confirmation password is hawaii1)".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hate to sound like a nut but I still feel like their crappy system got hacked and they don't want to admit it

When I was a teenager I realized you could set of the emergency alert system with a dtmf 4 digit code on some 144mhz with a ham radio.

I never did it, but I pretty much expect that to be still possible.

The reason I say this is because yes, it is possible someone got the wrong button, but shit software like this probably has vnc with no auth/useless auth so someone can activate remotely

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure it was hacking, I get the feeling that these events may be intentional to kind of kick the tires on emergency systems and human reactions, perhaps because the powers that be are expecting stuff to go down in the near future. I mean we had Hawaii, then Japan, and in my neck of the woods our nuclear power plant issued a false alarm as well. It just seems really odd, all these things happening in close proximity.

<comment><USER17> This would make a bit of sense. I think someone on here mentioned how the whole incident really highlighted that the general public has no fucking idea what to do if they receive a message like this.

While it's worryingly similar to crying wolf, I would hope that this does lead to more of the general public (even outside of Hawaii) actually thinking about how they'd handle and react to an imminent threat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of "Don't talk to the cops": [https://thisistrue.com/dont_talk_to_the_cops/](https://thisistrue.com/dont_talk_to_the_cops/)

</comment><comment><USER21> By now pretty much everyone knows the technical reason for mishap and probably excessive resources are assigned to fix it.

Mandatory witch hunt is failing apparently due to good union/legal firewall.

Wish we could see that more often.

Too many good people fallen to that.

</comment><comment><USER22> He's probably doing that on the advice of his lawyer, and I totally agree. Politicians are in witch-hunt mode, and as he stated, he already gave a statement and doesn't want to get goaded into making a statement that might be used against him. I think that's smart.

</comment><comment><USER23> The top comment on the article is screaming for button-pusher blood:

> _So, as it turns out, the culprit who induced panic among over a million > Hawai 'i citizens isn't nearly as contrite about his mistake as his > superiors would have us believe. In spite of legions of supporters who have > urged us to drop demands for his dismissal, he now has the audacity to be > uncooperative in the investigation into the serious event that he alone > triggered? Then TERMINATE him...._

Bloody obvious why cooperation is being withheld.

</comment><comment><USER24> The guy should get a lawyer.

This was a poorly designed software interface.

</comment><comment><USER25> This person in incredibly well advised.

Operators should not be blamed for government-mandated, piss poor alert systems. The government is responsible for this fiasco, not the button pusher.

They have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by complying with an investigation.

<comment><USER26> Not necessarily, they could have just gone into some 'fight or flight' mode of 'freeze'. They could be at home, under the duvet, totally afraid to look at the phone or email. Every day could be the day it is faced up to but the duvet chosen instead. They could also have run off to stay with a friend not seen since a long time ago and able/willing to harbour them.

If they had clicked the wrong button in a moment of distraction then that might not be the end of the world, that could be fessed up to. However, what if they were pissed off with their micro-manager and thought that their 'accidental click' would result in the manager's scalp? A whole lot of things would then need to be looked into and it might not be a simple accident at all, but the visible result of a lot of festering office politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think refusing to cooperate is generally the smartest play. Investigators aren't asking questions to help you exonerate yourself, they're aiming to get you to incriminate yourself as deeply as possible.

An officer asks you, "Do you know why I pulled you over today?"

\- Yes = admission of guilt. You're screwed.

\- No = indication of disregard for law, recklessness, and no situational awareness. You're even more screwed.

\- Good afternoon officer, I'd rather not answer any questions. Would you like to see my license and registration? = Bingo.

</comment><comment><USER28> > The employee has since been reassigned to an unspecified job at HI-EMA but > has not returned to work since the incident, Anthony said.

>The employee has not been disciplined but faces the possibility of punishment, which could include termination, Anthony said.

Is this normal in the US. Govt. that you can not go to work for 2 weeks and there has been zero disciplinary action?

<comment><USER3> > Is this normal in the US. Govt.

HI-EMA is not part of the US Govt.

> that you can not go to work for 2 weeks and there has been zero disciplinary > action?

It's true most places, not just in the US and not just in the public sector. They did not indicate whether he was away with or without leave, and if he was on leave for medical (including psychiatric) reasons, there are privacy considerations which might prevent revealing that.

OTOH, if he is away without leave consequences are near certain, but the disciplinary process in the public sector may be slow (and it may deliberately be deferred in this case to maintain leverage for his cooperation in the investigation, which probably had more critical importance—especially if it's not a hunt for a scapegoat—than an attendance problem.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are we all operating off of a single screenshot, or has there been a public video of what the process looks like, start to finish, including any confirmation steps?

(Bonus points if the video is not of the actual live interface.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Legal advice, most like. Or he could have done it on purpose, mentioned his plan to someone, and is scared as hell now. I mean, we don't know anything.</comment>


Unboxing Data Science - <AUTHOR> http://joaomdmoura.com/articles/unboxing-data-science-chapter-i <comment><USER2> With so many MOOC's about, the question "why should I read YOUR specific blog ?" still remains.

\- Is it your CV (your portfolio to the outside world) ?

\- Did you stumble/are stumbling across something that you didn't find many answers to ?

\- Did you find a better path than the beaten one?

I've not found any of the above reasons, hence I've not blogged. Maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER3> On my own blog, whenever I do a data science writeup, I make sure to do it on a topic _that hasn 't been done before_, with explicit detail and open-sourced code.

...this has had the consequence of getting no pageviews since it removes the mystique of data science. :\

<comment><USER2> I just had a look at your NCAA visualisation. It was great, and just like your description, not something everyone would search for. So what?

It's super interesting, BECAUSE it's the first time I'm seeing those stats in the form of a 'heatmap'.

You're optimising for quality. And I just happen to think that's right.

Cookie cutter data intro's that walk you through installing anaconda....& and end up with some plt.plot(x,y) might gather some views. But they don't add anything to the ambient noise in the room.

They only encourage the (I'm assuming beginner) blogger to publicise their future work, as they've now experienced 'blogging'.

That's the only good outcome I see.

Perhaps I'm wrong.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the compliment on that post! It's true I optimize for quality, but pageviews are good too!

Ideally I'd optimize for a weighted average between the two, but it's tricky without playing a bit dirty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Jus published the send chapter of it, now getting further into the details [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16867424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16867424)</comment>


The failure of the security industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmagazine.com/the-failure-of-the-security-industry/article/403261/ <comment><USER2> The security industry is doing great. Symantec made $6.6 billion last year without actually solving the problem they claim to solve.

Add-on security never really works except inept opponents, but it's a very profitable business.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something along the lines of his first point about platforms has been the bane of my existence for the better part of three years. These security tools we spend so much money on, make interacting with, and analyzing the data they generate almost impossible. They all have their built-in reporting mechanism, but what if I want to see if the vulnerability found in the Tenable Nessus scan relates to the data from our McAfee Endpoint solution? I have to copy and paste the host names, and their associated CVEs, then run a report to dump all of our endpoint data for the entire enterprise, then hit ctrl-F. It's hard to perform actionable security in any way other than in the rearview mirror.

Anyone have any thoughts on how successful I might be if I tried to build a platform that would take data from multiple vendors to perform analysis? Would the vendors be amenable, or would they fight against me?

<comment><USER4> My guess is that for the most part the vendors wouldn't care - which would mean that every update cycle you would have to spend a day patching the platform to cope with whimsical proprietary format changes. Actively hostile vendors could easily make it very difficult to scale out the platform, even if they didn't target you for legal action.

Ultimately what we need here are open standards at all levels, that is the only way you can have a stable interaction of systems and keep the market open and competitive.

<comment><USER5> One effort at a standard, [http://stix.mitre.org](http://stix.mitre.org)

 _" STIX™ is a collaborative community-driven effort to define and develop a standardized language to represent structured cyber threat information. The STIX Language intends to convey the full range of potential cyber threat information and strives to be fully expressive, flexible, extensible, automatable, and as human-readable as possible. All interested parties are welcome to participate in evolving STIX as part of its open, collaborative community."_

[http://stix.mitre.org/language/version1.1.1/samples.html](http://stix.mitre.org/language/version1.1.1/samples.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Check out the unfortunate caption on Alex's [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=secalex](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=secalex) photo.

<comment><USER6> Wow. The editor really doesn't like that dude.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, I must be missing something here. The caption on the photo I see is "Alex Stamos, CISO, Yahoo" \- nothing special there?

<comment><USER4> It used to say something like "Failure of the Security Industry".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/26/how-to-speak-silicon-valley-decoding-tech-bros-from-microdosing-to-privacy <comment><USER2> What happened to "broken"?

</comment><comment><USER3> Spare me the snark and negativity.</comment>


Speech recognition algorithms may also have racial bias - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/speech-recognition-algorithms-may-also-have-racial-bias/ <comment><AUTHOR> Of course they do. Who would have thought otherwise.

But the good news is that it's not an algorithmic problem. It can be fixed rather quickly.</comment>


Feedback Army: website feedback for $7, inspired by HN post - <AUTHOR> http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-11-25-n66.html

<comment><USER2> He designed the site using sleep.

<http://sleep.dashnine.org/>

        * is a multi-paradigm scripting language for the Java Platform
        * easy to learn with Perl and Objective-C inspired syntax
        * executes scripts fast with a small package size (~250KB)
        * excels at data manipulation, component integration, and distributed communication
        * seamlessly uses Java objects and 3rd party libraries

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's great he's quickly turned around a site that lowers the barrier to a specific problem. I'd just worry about the demographic makeup of the respondents.

While Turkers aren't all geeks getting good sensible feedback is a skill in itself. I would worry that most Turkers a) aren't you customers b) aren't demographically vetted.

That said getting independent opinions is surely great food for thought and that's a powerful tool.

<comment><USER4> I was worried about this too. I honestly had no idea what to expect when I first built the software. Then I ran it against my own sites and I started seeing very thoughtful feedback. This is when I felt I had something.

I also posed questions directly to the Turk community about what I could do to make the process better and get results quicker. They spoke, I did what I could, and I'm really proud of the results my customers are getting. I'm not just saying that either.

I'm a researcher by trade and have absolute sales call reluctance. I won't sell something if I don't feel it is worth the persons time to hear me or money to invest into the product.

While this little project may only go so far, I'm not afraid to put my name on it and say I'm giving people something of value for what I'm asking.

<comment><USER3> _I'm a researcher by trade and have absolute sales call reluctance. I won't sell something if I don't feel it is worth the persons time to hear me or money to invest into the product._

Are you planning to introduce anything to help select the right Turkers to comment on a project? That would be worth having.

Heck it might even be worth having as a standalone "selecting applicants for usability testing" application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He's using Mechanical Turk's API to create a "give me feedback on my site" task automatically.

That task on Mechanical Turk usually goes for $.02-.05 a task. And, if you're familiar with MechaTurk, it really only takes about 15 minutes to set that task up.

He's charging $7 because people don't want to mess with Mechanical Turk. It's brilliant, and I hope it takes off. I actually think that he should charge $20-30 and give people 40-50 user comments. It seems like a better value.

<comment><USER4> Typical tasks may go for $.02-$.05. I pay the workers much more than that. I experimented with different levels of payment prior to launch and had to offer more than I expected but my customers are receiving quality results, very quickly. To make this happen required paying up. My goal is to be a requestor the Turkers want to work for. This community outreach is a whole other side of what I'm doing that people don't see on the front end.

<comment><USER6> Have you posted to Turker Nation at all? It might be a good idea to start developing a "brand" for your questions so that you start to have people actively seek you out and prioritize your HITS. As it is, the Amazon search interface lists 1 hit available per website which is getting FeedbackArmied and it might not be obvious to the Turkers that requests for feedback on A, B, C, D, and E are linked so if you had good experience (had an enjoyable task and got paid promptly) on A and C then B, D, and E are right up your alley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This service is a great idea! It's simple and seems to be well implemented. I liked how you ate your own dog food, by using Mechanical Turk to decide if it's worthwhile putting up the service.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just realised this is effectively a dupe [<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373900>]. I should have checked if the direct link had been submitted.

Looks like a lot of people missed it last time around, and it yielded some different comments so seems it worked out ok.

Kinda interesting to think people can get quite different experiences of HN if they're in different time zones or browse at different times of day.

<comment><USER4> It is a dupe but you have no idea how much I love you for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, I don't understand the need for this. If I want feedback on a website, I can simply ask friends, family or Hacker News. Friends and family usually provide honest answers while HN tends to be very critical, both useful feedback. The best part: it's all free.

If it's a product that already has a bit of traffic, I could just use a service such as UserVoice to take care of feedback/suggestions by using their little Feedback tab script. Posting about the site in a blog or a forum can also help in the search for getting feedback.

Basically what I'm getting at is.. why would I pay $7 for Feedback Army when there are so many free alternatives?

<comment><USER4> The initial customers of Feedback Army seem to be folks with niche websites. The kind of stuff HN would probably flag if it were posted here. Also some folks aren't as plugged into an online community and may be uncomfortable posting there. I know I'm this way. I don't blog publicly and HN is the only board I interact on. So I'd use something like Feedback Army over risking my standing on a forum such as this for something off topic. That said, the feedback is paid for and there is nothing stopping someone from going back for multiple rounds in a few days on the same site. I think the free feedback givers might burn out a little quicker.

<comment><USER8> I guess that makes sense.. I wasn't thinking from the perspective of a non- developer or someone not as well connected, in which case I could see them wanting a generic service that offers feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why one can't go to Amazon directly instead of going through Feedback Army ?

<comment><USER4> Hi there, I address this on the site FAQ. I'm delivering value by making the process to post a request simple and making the results easy to get via an RSS feed. I also do this for a low margin. If someone wants to go to Amazon directly and pay workers what I pay, depending on how they value their time, they will be losing money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is really interesting. Is there a way to choose why type of users review the site? Say my website is aimed at 15-30 year olds, then is there a way to do that?

<comment><USER4> Not yet. You're not the first to ask for this feature. The demographics of the reviewers are slightly more women then men, mostly 20-30 year olds, and over half have college degrees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like the idea and will probably use the site from time to time to get some more sanity checks. Good work.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's stopping people from just using mturk itself? I've found it pretty easy to use.

<comment><USER4> The value proposition is ease of use. Feedback Army manages the whole process and makes results available via RSS. For someone who has never used Mechanical Turk, Feedback Army is a low risk way to try things out. I pay the Turkers pretty well to make sure users get good feedback quickly. The overall package is well worth the $7 asking price. -- Raphael, FeedbackArmy developer</comment></comment>


First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit (500 km) by China - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608252/first-object-teleported-from-earth-to-orbit/ <comment><USER2> Oh FFS, who wrote this title? They used quantum teleportation to copy the _state_ of a photon to another photon. No objects were teleported. Ugh.

<comment><USER3> Agree. Just a small comment/remark/nitpick: For theoretical reasons, the copy must be a "destructive" copy, not a "photocopy".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This news has been submitted _31_ times (and those are only the ones that used the word `teleport' in the submission title.) It has sparked near zero chit- chat. People are excited enough to share it, but not excited enough to discuss it.

As a community service, here are some of the links :)

 _Ground-to-satellite quantum teleportation_ [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00934](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00934)

 _MIT Technology Review_ [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608252/first- object-telep...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608252/first-object- teleported-from-earth-to-orbit/)

 _Aunty Beeb_ [http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science- environment-40573621/firs...](http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science- environment-40573621/first-object-teleported-to-earth-s-orbit)

 _The Gizmodo_ [http://gizmodo.com/scientists-teleport-a-particle- hundreds-o...](http://gizmodo.com/scientists-teleport-a-particle-hundreds-of- miles-but-w-1796818859)

 _Fast Company_ [https://news.fastcompany.com/china-teleported-a-photon- from-...](https://news.fastcompany.com/china-teleported-a-photon-from-the- earth-to-outer-space-4043034)

 _Futurism_ [https://futurism.com/scientists-just-teleported-a-photon- fro...](https://futurism.com/scientists-just-teleported-a-photon-from-earth- to-orbit-for-the-first-time/)

 _The Grauniad_ [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/12/scotty- can-y...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/12/scotty-can-you-beam- me-up-scientists-teleport-photons-300-miles-into-space)

Sites such as _The Mirror_ , _The Metro_ , and others are left as an exercise for the reader. Gizmodo whines about my ad blocker.</comment>


VyOS from Scratch – Edition 1 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kroy.io/2020/05/04/vyos-from-scratch-edition-1/ <comment><USER2> This is a really good getting started with Vyos article, thank you!</comment>


LibreCrypt: Transparent on-the-fly disk encryption for Windows. LUKS compatible - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/t-d-k/LibreCrypt

<comment><USER2> _Supports numerous hash (including SHA-512, RIPEMD-320, Tiger) and encryption algorithms (Including AES, Twofish, and Serpent) in several modes (CBC, LRW, and XTS), giving more options than any other disk encryption software._

Why exactly is "more options than any other disk encryption software" a good thing?

<comment><USER3> What mode would you suggest using? XTS isn't exactly a good option but it seems like the best option here.

<comment><USER2> XTS is the best option here, but what kills me is that all three modes have deficits, and they're not the same deficits. Pick your poison! But don't ask us to tell you which is which!

<comment><USER4> Do you know of a good technical write up regarding the pros and cons of these? Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Github source code stats mentions: Pascal 65.2%

The GUI code is in ObjectPascal/Delphi and is likely a fork of the discontinued FreeOTFE: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeOTFE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeOTFE)

<comment><USER6> ObjectPascal/Delphi now that's a name that I have not heard in a long time...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a descendant of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeOTFE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeOTFE)

</comment><comment><USER7> XTS is better than nothing, but to make it secure against key reuse from repeated snapshots we need to have IV / nonce per block, updated with every write - which means we either need to keep them in the same block (thus, no power-of-2 block size for the hosted file system), or in some other way that doesn't kill performance (likely requiring co-operation from the hosted file system).

The latter solution works in ZFS already.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks outstanding! I knew someone would come along with a worthy TrueCrypt successor at some point. Regarding "security tokens": I love my Yubikey. It can act as a gpg smartcard with some configuration. Is it supported?

</comment><comment><USER9> Considering this point :

> LibreCrypt does not support encryption of the operating system partition, > for this we recommend Ubuntu Linux.

What are the benefits of encrypting a partition over using an encrypted file mounted as a partition ?

<comment><USER7> Note they are discussion the OS partition, not just any partition.

If the OS partition is unencrypted, it is easier to trojan a system if you have access to it without the key (just replace some executable that is bound to execute sooner or later). Also, a lot of cruft remains there such as temporary files, registry updates, etc; e.g. even if you work on a Word file inside an encrypted container, you might find enough parts of it in swap space, temporary files, registry etc - all of which are unencrypted.

Other than swap and system partitions, there should be no difference. But some programs will leak info regardless - it's better to have everything encrypted than just some parts.

<comment><USER10> It is entirely possible to trojan a system with an encrypted OS partition, by using a bootkit. For extra security, you should boot off a removable medium. Even this can be attacked if the BIOS is infected.

LibreCrypt is useful against very specific threats. Protecting against attackers that have repeated physical access to your PC, and the technical nous to install keyloggers etc. involves way more than just using a particular Windows program, no matter it's features.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, note I said "easier" and pointed one of the easier ways enabled by lack of OS partition encryption.

I'll go even farther than parent: If your adversary is determined enough, you should assume that any physical access to your machine, for however short a period, means you should never ever use it again - and that you have no practical way to know if said access has indeed compromised your machine. See e.g., Thunderstrike.

corollary: You can never be sure that your machine, which has passed through 10 different hands (factory, tester, packages, store, courier, ...) is not trojaned to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone compare this to the featureset of TrueCrypt?

As far as I see at first glance:

\+ Works on Windows.

\+ Encrypted volumes can be read by Linux.

\- No encryption of system partition.

\- No hidden volumes. (?)

<comment><USER10> > \- No hidden volumes.

Actually it not only supports hidden volumes, but unlimited nested ones, while TrueCrypt supports a maximum of one hidden volume, see: [https://github.com/t-d-k/LibreCrypt/blob/master/docs/plausib...](https://github.com/t-d-k/LibreCrypt/blob/master/docs/plausible_deniability.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Written in Pascal ... really? Really? REALLY ?

<comment><USER13> I work in a pascal shop. We use freepascal, which does the job really really well. Modern pascal, especially Delphi and the likes, are quite nice. Even moderate coders can, with a bit of planning, churn out good pascal code, which isnt my opinion about c++.

New hires whine in the beginning about the language of choice, but the generally don't take more than a week or two to get the basic gist of it. Our code is well structured, easy to extend, easy to understand and compiles fast.

I haven't worked on many other code bases this size, but I really don't see what could be much better.

<comment><USER14> Care to share which company/product you're working at/on?

<comment><USER13> We are a private contractor for a smaller government working with a system for hospital journals. The system is expanding quite rapidly (we got popular), but things are still very much manageable, despite the pascal codebase being well over 1MLOC.

The only thing not pascal is the GUI (which is getting ugly because our home- rolled wrapper to qt, so we are probably going to switch to something else) and the web interface (which was a web interface we inherited for this job. It was perl written by someone who thought himself smart. We rewrote that quickly in mojolicious).

So yeah. I work with pascal and do some (very little, I am not responsible for the web) web dev in perl. Now get off my lawn, your Node.js, go and rust is so shiny it hurts my old dusty eyes :)

We have had some code related security issues. Only one that was borderline severe, and that we discovered ourselves and patched by the end of the day (which was my fault, because I didn't follow the coding standard manual I WROTE MYSELF). No real stability issues, no real security problems.

Sometimes the tools matter. In our case not so much. I would love to rewrite the whole thing in Racket just for fun, though :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler - <AUTHOR> http://austinhenley.com/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html <comment><AUTHOR> I loved this series. I even made a Rust version of it with very little compilers knowledge (this one is written in Python): [http://github.com/sgmarz/ttrust](http://github.com/sgmarz/ttrust)</comment>


How Disruptive Innovation Theory predicted the rise of the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.actven.com/how-disruptive-innovation-theory-predicted-the-rise-of-the-iphone/

<comment><USER2> There is nothing in the article that has anything to do with the title. Article just states that the iPhone was an example of 'New-Market Disruption' - not exactly breakthrough information in 2013 - and that you need to use different performance measures for disruptions. Obviously. The difficulty is in deciding which new performance measures are actually valuable to consumers, and the article or this theory doesn't seem to help there.

ie. iPhone had great multimedia and web browsing performance, but those new rugged phones that came out around the same time had great resistance to knocks and battery performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think "predicted" is the right word...

It may be more accurate to say that "DIT may help explain the iPhone's initial poor reviews and subsequent apparent success."

<comment><USER4> If anything, predictions based on the innovator's dilemma were wrong: [http://daringfireball.net/2012/07/iphone_disruption_five_yea...](http://daringfireball.net/2012/07/iphone_disruption_five_years_in)

I think disruptive innovation is a very useful concept, but this just goes to show how hard it is to apply a priori.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually thought about mentioning that article. I think it is important to point out that someone who outlines a theory as broad as disruptive innovation is not always the best person to apply it in every situation. I think he made a mistake when he chose the competitive frame for the iPhone to be all cell phones. I think the right competitive frame is smart phones. That makes all the difference in the assessment.</comment></comment></comment>


Concertmaster – Classical music front-end for Spotify - <AUTHOR> http://getconcertmaster.com/ <comment><USER2> Hi, Concertmaster developer here.

Thanks for trying the app. Very surprised by the repercussion!

Well, the current version of Concertmaster has a known bug which freezes the app in its first run. (This issue will be solved in a major update January, but I'm seriously thinking of releasing a fix today or tomorrow.)

Please try closing the app and running it again. It may work

<comment><USER3> Tried this with the Linux version, no luck. (I'm using Arch Linux but unpacking the .deb reveals an executable that appears to run, it just gets stuck on Loading as you describe.)

I really look forward to trying this out when that's fixed, or if you can suggest a workaround. It's a subject I'm very interested in both as a listener and a developer. I spent a while thinking about this problem a few years ago, in the hope of making a music player that could tell you things like "what other recordings of this work are there?", "what else can I listen to that is arranged for cello, violin, and piano?", "suggest one recording of each of Carl Nielsen's symphonies", etc. Or even apparently very simple things like "play the symphony from this album, but stop when you reach the end of the work, don't play the overture they stuck on the end to fill up the CD". At the time I was still imagining something based on a mixture of local CD rips, things available on download services (which could be suggested but not necessarily played), etc.

Anyway, I didn't really do anything -- I got only as far as throwing together this messy RDF dataset [http://dbtune.org/classical/](http://dbtune.org/classical/) \-- and I haven't returned seriously to the problem since. It's remained on my mind though, not least because I would still love to be able to use such a thing, and I'll be very interested to see how you're approaching it.

<comment><USER4> I fixed the loading screen bug like this:

        sudo pacman -S asar
        cd Concertmaster/resources
        asar e app.asar app
        rm app.asar
        printf "1018a1019\n>                                 var listul = '';\n" | patch app/js/lib.js

I was able to start playing something, but then it freezes. Currently looking into that...

<comment><USER2> Fun to see other people looking into my code. Great job :)

Concertmaster is built over Electron and, as such, it is 100% JavaScript. In fact, it's not a more convenient website only because of Spotify's limitations.

It would be possible to make Concertmaster open source, but it's far from professional - it's more like a hobby I'm keeping for 3, 4 years.

(Concertmaster is more than the client. It has several server-side functions as well.)

<comment><USER4> Don't worry about code quality, it's perfectly readable. Although I only have very limited javascript knowledge, I would love to contribute if you make this open source. It's really a great project!

After a few seconds, it still freezes for me, so that's one thing I could try to fix :)

<comment><USER2> I use Concertmaster all the time on my Mac, with no problems at all. Which OS are you running?

<comment><USER4> I'm running Arch Linux with spotify version 126.96.36.1992.g19436fa3. It gets stuck at this screen as soon as I start playing something:

[https://i.imgur.com/WJZKiUA.png](https://i.imgur.com/WJZKiUA.png)

After that, the GUI elements just don't respond at all. There is no CPU usage, so it's probably not an infinite loop.

I enabled logging, but don't see anything significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> FIX RELEASED! Please download the new versions at:

Win: [http://getconcertmaster.com/latest/?os=win](http://getconcertmaster.com/latest/?os=win) Mac: [http://getconcertmaster.com/latest/?os=mac](http://getconcertmaster.com/latest/?os=mac) Linux: [http://getconcertmaster.com/latest/?os=linux](http://getconcertmaster.com/latest/?os=linux)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for making this, it's wonderful and will make a _huge_ difference to my listening on Spotify. For example, I've got a thing about Ravel's Piano Concerto in G and I've found a whole load of new recordings I knew nothing about. A few comments and suggestions:

Pieces are sorted strictly alphabetically, which means that lists of "String Quartet number X" are sorted like:

String Quartet no. 1 String Quartet no. 10 String Quartet no. 12 String Quartet no. 13 String Quartet no. 2

Not sure how complicated that is to change, but it would make browsing a little easier if they were listed numerically.

I find the horizontal listing of composers a bit unintuitive, and would prefer a vertical list (probably to do with ubiquity of vertical scrolling in apps and browsers), perhaps between favourites and list of works. Really like the fact that it includes images and isn't just a dry list of names though.

Seems like there are a number of not-so-esoteric composers missing, such as John Luther Adams (a different person from John Adams), Gavin Bryars, Jacques Duphly and Gérard Grisey, despite the presence of composers that I'd never heard of like Orlande de Lassus. I guess this is a limitation of the data sources, but would love to see some more of those included too.

Searching for "Jana" doesn't return Janáček - presumably because of the accents. Would be great to ignore accents for easy typing on British English / American English keyboards.

The small application icon on Mac - for example the installer disk image icon, and the icon in Mac notifications, is a frazzled multicoloured square rather than a proper icon.

Sometimes a message comes up saying "This isn't available on Spotify - bummer!" but doesn't explain why. I didn't think to check when it happened, but I guess it might be that it's not available in my territory (the UK), and I have Spotify set to show tracks that aren't available. If there was a way to have a bit more explanation in that error message somehow that would be helpful - for example, if it's to do with my setting to show tracks that aren't available, a sentence to say that toggling that setting would make that not happen.

A tiny, tiny thing - clicking Apple + A when in the search box doesn't select all text although double-clicking does.

<comment><USER2> Amazing feedback, thank you so much :)

I'll carefully analyze your suggestions for our next releases.

The Spotify message is not related to territorial restrictions. Putting it shortly, Concertmaster database wasn't pre-checked; it checks the availability of each recording in real-time, after user's request. That's why Concertmaster keeps showing recordings that don't exist at all on Spotify.

<comment><USER6> Just jumping on here to give my own feedback.

This is brilliantly implemented so hats off for that. It's something I always had on my backlog of personal projects but never got round to doing, but you've managed it far better than I could ever have hoped to.

One thing that would noticeably improve the experience for me: Being able to sort a given series of works by opus/[equivalent catalogue number] or date. It seems at the moment the only sorting method is alphabetical, which is often not particularly helpful (for example, as someone else noted, when 10 appears before 1).

<comment><USER2> Thanks so much for the feedback :)

I'm studying the sorting thing. Opus/catalogue number: not so easy because the data comes from sources that treat this information as strings. But I can think of a text parser, for example. Year of composition: doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great! I wished something like this existed for Indian classical music, since in it also a composition can be performed by multiple artists differently and multiple performances can be created with with different permutations of the rhythm and melody. This player, as is, doesn't account for compositional units of Indian classical music (obviously because it's designed for Western Classical music).

Language is also something that is missed in mainstream music players.

<comment><USER8> Yes! Where can I find a good source of Indian Classical Music on the web? Do any of these streaming sources have good (and by that I mean deep) catalogues of ICM?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone struggling with the "Loading..." launch screen on Mac:

Try clicking the Concertmaster icon in the menu bar, and click "Open Concertmaster". That solved it for me

</comment><comment><USER2> I'll release a fixed version of Concertmaster tonight. Sorry for that and thanks for your patience, folks!

</comment><comment><USER10> This would be a serious game changer for me if it actually does what it promises. It has been so frustrating as a user that I'd been tempted to join a product team on one of the streaming service providers just to fix this.

</comment><comment><USER11> It looks fantastic from the website! On my mac though, it's stuck at "Loading…" on the launch screen.

It's also a pity it's not open source, it would be great to be able to contribute composers.

<comment><USER12> Same here. I've got the latest Spotify version, but it still can't get past loading.

<comment><USER13> Same. :( I've reached out to the facebook page. I don't know if the project is still active or not.

<comment><USER14> same here ;(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another app that is very nicely done and has excellent classical music support is Roon: [https://roonlabs.com/](https://roonlabs.com/)

I'd be interested to see if there is any feature difference between the two in case anyone has used / does use both.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can get into the app ok but tracks will not play. Linux Mint 18.2. Looks great though, will keep an eye on it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very nice, and will be much nicer when the bugs are worked out. It looks like the catalog Concertmaster is using is rather limited, though. For example, for Thomas Adès only 5 pieces are listed, though Spotify has many more.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is great, I have been waiting for an app like this! Though I've experienced the install hang-up on Win 10 Fall edition. I'll keep an eye on the update build.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, this is something I was just complaining about today, how I had to turn off shuffle because it would mess up the movement order.

</comment><comment><USER20> great idea, I was just thinking today that the Spotify interface is deficient for classical music. Will try it out asap. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER21> Works fine on ubuntu 14.04. Radio is a nice touch. Missing composer is Charles-Valentin Alkan.</comment>


Why you should worry if you have a Chinese smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/26/china-technology-social-management-internet-social-credit-system <comment><USER2> yeah... as if you shouldn't be worried when you have an apple sniffer... ups, sorry, I mean iphone.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best documentaries you've ever seen? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 30 comments in "Ask HN: Mind blowing documentaries?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271167](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271167) last month

</comment><comment><USER3> Senna, it's about a South American formula 1 driver and his rise to success, and battles along the way fighting corruption in the support. Excellent and tragic story all at the same time, although I'm not sure if there's an English translation (I watched with subtitles).

</comment><comment><USER4> "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control", by Errol Morris (and also probably other things by him). 4-way weirdly interleaved story of a lion tamer, a scientist studying the naked mole rat, a topiary gardener, and a roboticist.

</comment><comment><USER5> Earthlings ([http://www.nationearth.com/earthlings/](http://www.nationearth.com/earthlings/))

</comment><comment><USER6> ArchWiki has abundant information volume. [https://wiki.archlinux.org/](https://wiki.archlinux.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> When We Were Kings (about the famous "Rumble in the Jungle" heavyweight championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman)

</comment><comment><USER8> This Is Spinal Tap.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hacking Democracy, Blue Vinyl, & Gasland

</comment><comment><USER10> Sound City

</comment><comment><USER11> Shoah.</comment>