Manufacturing plant fire threatens worldwide vinyl record supply - <AUTHOR> https://pitchfork.com/news/devastating-manufacturing-plant-fire-threatens-worldwide-vinyl-record-supply/ <comment><USER2> Apparently, there were two companies in the US that produced the lacquer but then consolidation happened and Apollo bought out the competitor and shut it down. [1]

> _Gil Tamazyan, the owner of Los Angeles record pressing plant Capsule Labs, > said he 's been concerned for the industry since Apollo purchased competitor > Transco in 2007._

> _" The worst case from (the fire) would be if Apollo doesn't plan to return > and doesn't share the intellectual properties with another new willing > company. We all agree there needs to be more than one supplier for these > materials," Tamazyan said. "All my industry colleagues are worried this > might take a long time to figure out and, in the process, major delays may > arise in the vinyl production market."_

So now only the Japanese company, MDC, remains as the sole producer of the lacquer. Lacquer is basically a formulation of nitrocellulose and is highly flammable.

If you've never seen a lacquer master being cut, give this vid a watch [2]. Not surprisingly, the audio engineer uses the Apollo lacquer master in the video.

[1] [https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2020/02/07/apollo- maste...](https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2020/02/07/apollo-masters-fire- vinyl-records/4692215002/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8bhzob0fQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8bhzob0fQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> I haven't found an objective explanation for why some populations prefer vinyl analog over any digital renditions of a sound. Can anyone share some insight?

(I've listened to both, and the description of vinyl or even analog sound as being generally "warmer" never resonated with me.)

<comment><USER4> I do both. Digital music is way more convenient to initiate, continue, store and take with you -- so I use that the most. But, it's almost too convenient in some cases to the point where I often don't appreciate what is really happening and the music just becomes background noise. Although it's obviously possible, I rarely use digital music to sit and listen to an entire album anymore.

On the other hand, when I listen to a record, I sit down and I listen to the record. I mean, you kind of have to do that anyway because you only get a few songs before you have to flip it. I find it makes me more mindful of the music; I feel more in-the-moment; and it reminds me of my youth. That was a time when we couldn't just tell our phone to start playing an AI curated playlist while everyone talks over it anyway. I'm not convinced we would we have wanted to do that either...

People rarely talk about music anymore, compared to what it used to be like. We used to line up when a new album was coming out from a favorite artist. We'd take the tape or cd from our car, into our bedroom, over to our friend's houses, and blast it on our parent's floor speakers before they came home from work. We used to talk about that album for days, sometimes months as we got deeper into it after many replays. I can't remember the last time I had a good conversation about a new album... few seem to care anymore. A lot of people will blame the music, but there is still some great music being made today.

Maybe it's the medium.

<comment><USER5> I think it's more likely your age group. When you were young listening to tapes on your parents' speakers, didn't it seem to you that kids and teens were much more into music than most adults?

I'm 20, I grew up listening to albums on YouTube, never owned a CD, tape, or record. But my experience is and was still exactly what you describe. My friends and I have countdowns on our phones ticking down the days to eagerly- awaited releases, we make plans to listen to it together at a 'premiere' hosted by whoever has the best speakers. If they live up to the excitement they get replayed to death, memorized backwards and forwards, and discussed endlessly. In middle/high school we'd write our own reviews to post online and sometimes get the artist replying to us on Twitter which made our month. The fact that we didn't have to buy a 4"-by-4" piece of plastic and put it into another piece of plastic before hitting play didn't prevent any of that and I can't imagine it making the music more exciting or engaging.

<comment><USER4> > I think it's more likely your age group.

I agree, that's certainly part of it and I'm happy to hear that young people are still obsessed about music. I'm not suggesting you need physical media to do it, but I am saying the medium has changed things to some degree.

Back then, if we wanted a mix tape, we'd have to mix it. Now, spotify generates five new ones each day for each of us, or we can request a new one on the fly for any genre, mood, artist, etc. So, it makes me wonder how these tools have changed the way young people today consume music. For example, how much of your digital listening is to entire albums start to finish vs some kind of mix/random play? What are you doing (if anything) while you listen to a complete album? Are you buying albums specifically or listening to them on a subscription service?

<comment><USER6> When I tried spotify a few years ago, it was exactly this aspect that totally failed my expectations. I wanted a service like Spotify as a replacement for genre radio. I wanted something that somehow figures out my tastes, and generates a mix for me. In my experience, this totally fails unless you happen to like the most commercial pop music available. Whenever I tried to coax it to play some alternative and undergroundy music, it ended up playing the most commercial nonsense after 2 or 3 tracks. I haven't tried a single streaming service since, because I dont feel I want to be poisoned by the most empty and stupid music in existance.

<comment><USER7> I suspect you didn't use it for long enough for it to develop a good profile of your tastes. I've been using it for 5 years and the recommendations are my favourite feature, and on the whole very impressive.

I'd consider myself into quite underground music (electronic/techno, nothing mainstream or commercial at all, I'd wager even most people who consider themselves into electronic music wouldn't have heard of a lot of the artists I listen to) and it usually gets it pretty right, sometimes amazingly so.

I've been introduced to some of my favourite music by Spotify, and the interface makes exploring related artists etc. really easy. Ideally I'd like better cataloguing (e.g. tagging) and metadata (e.g. more emphasis on labels) but I know I'm a niche user and I can work around these limitations.

My tips if you try it again would be:

\- if it recommends something you don't like, press thumbs down (if available) and skip - they use skipping as a signal you don't like something

\- build up a collection of music you do like, using the save button and/or playlists

\- check out the feature which plays related music after you've finished listening to a track or album - this often finds the most interesting music for me

\- check out the "related songs" area under any playlists you've created. If you have focussed playlists (e.g. I have ones for different subgenres), this can help you discover some great stuff.

I'd actually say the stuff Spotify plays after an album/song is the best part of their recommendations for me. The daily mixes it generates aren't bad. Release Radar and Discover Weekly can be a bit hit or miss, sometimes for example it will recommend overly commercial stuff for my tastes, but it's always worth scanning through (and I do thumbs down the really off recommendations).

It's not perfect of course, for example sometimes I find it gets "stuck" in a small subset of artists after a while, but combined with other sources and some input to guide, Spotify is the best service I've found for discovering music, and is way above for example YouTube suggestions

<comment><USER8> Is there a good service that doesn't require FB?

<comment><USER9> How about Spotify? It doesn't require FB.

<comment><USER8> I thought it did and recall the login required a FB account.

<comment><USER9> You can try signing up right now - it offers Facebook as an option, but also to create a fresh account. My account is not connected to Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't forget that some "obscure" music is marginally cheaper/easier to obtain on vinyl. For example space age pop, which is one of things in the sweet spot for collecting (for pleasure, not for money): used to be popular and mass- manufactured, now almost no one cares, so the market has a lot of this relatively cheap. Living in the former communist country, I regret not having easy access to heaps of Western vinyls in Goodwills and such, but at least seller awareness is not that high.

Also, records are psychologically so much nicer to own. They are large and so is the artwork. Pretentious/ridiculous liner notes are great. Having them set up to sound on par with digital (I don't claim to have means or ear to achieve true "audiophile" sound) is a PITA and requires some money or hustling/tinkering (that's me). You have gear maintenance, cleaning etc. But it's a little hobby in itself.

There is also interesting things about the vinyl itself you start to notice. Up to about 1960s the material was thicker, and then starts the progression toward the "floppy" vinyl from 1980s (although some state publishers in my country used the old style even then, great production quality also). Nowadays vinyl is thick and heavy again and probably better produced than ever. But it also became a semi-luxury product so it's almost never worth it, at least for me. I have some new records that they messed up in manufacturing but I'm sure it also happened back in the day.

<comment><USER11> I think a lot of millennials who formed their music taste in the age of Napster, LimeWire, Torrents and Spotify seem to think the internet has everything (given the illusion of limitless choice).

This is of course not the case and there's so much music that's only realistically available on vinyl.

<comment><USER12> The situation is even crazier if you look at fragile shellac 78-RPM records. The Internet Archive teamed up with the George Blood company to preserve as many as they can - and they're up to 165,000 records available for streaming from the Archive! [https://archive.org/details/georgeblood](https://archive.org/details/georgeblood)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a good business to get into.

Only two companies in the world that produce this lacquer, and when one of them burns down it leads to a global shortage?

</comment><comment><USER14> I never understood the hype for vinyl records -- they aren't that much better than CDs when compared to shellac...

<comment><USER15> CD is way overrated. Terrible, even.

Like, if you compare film to digital photography, but film was represented by ISO160 monochromatic Kodak, and all the digital photographic technology was represented by a 640x480 prototype camera from 2001, instead of a RED or even a yesteryear phone, then it'll be immediately obvious that analog far outperforms digital full stop.

That's how vinyl remains "superior". _CD_ is terrible, not digital quantization playback in general, but because it represents "digital" somehow anyway, analog wins.

<comment><USER16> This doesn't make any sense. You haven't explained how CD is "terrible"; you just made some comparison to an obsolete digital camera. You put the CD in, press play, and a nearly perfect representation of the source signal with enormous dynamic range and clarity comes out of your DAC. How is this like a 20 year-old digital camera?

<comment><USER15> Well, at very least, Compact Disc is a 1980 standard... not like 20 years old, more like 40 years old. I don't understand why statement like above is met with a response like yours. It's a shitty '80s format that beat vinyl in affordability, why defend it as if CD is the pinnacle of digital recording technology? It is not, never was. Just say yeah CD sucks you gotta try DSD, and move on.

Anecdotal but I feel some sort of acoustic 'odor' to CD, that no other digital formats have: CD rips and even CD-DSD conversion has distinct tone that tells the data had been on a disc. Something's wrong with the standard and/or its mastering.

<comment><USER17> CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have golden ears.

For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to sound good on iPhone earbuds.

(The usual article cited in these discussions is [https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html), which happens to make this point briefly under "Different media, different master" and "Better masters". Edit: another fun article is [https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill- cd-...](https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-quality- is-still-great-16518/), with the fantastic pull quote, "There is no safe listening level to hear the difference between these files".)

CD doesn't need to be the pinnacle of digital technology, because our ears don't know any different beyond it.

<comment><USER15> Did you know: Nyquist sampling theorem assumes, and only applies to, pure sine waves.

Apparently this is a novice level knowledge in DSP community at StackExchange: [https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable- sampl...](https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable-sampling- rate-for-triangle-wave)

<comment><USER18> The Shannon-Nyquist theorem doesn't assume or apply just to sines (that's a gross mischaracterization of the proof and it's implications). It assumes ideal samplers and reconstruction filters can exist, which they can't.

In the real world, ADCs and DACs' inherent filtering, noise, and distortion characteristics are quantifiably superior to any analog storage media and reproduction system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Somebody should come out with 12 inch analog optical disks. Big, thick, solid things.

<comment><USER20> They did that in the late 70s. They were called LaserDiscs and held about 60 minutes of video per side in the most common encoding format.

<comment><USER21> Some LD trivia:

\- It was the only consumer format that provided standard NTSC/PAL SD video without reformatting. Macrovision didn't work on them either so there's no copy protection.

\- Most LD's have digital sound, which literally _is_ CD audio - not just the bitrate but the analog encoding and digital metadata as well.

\- The disks were expensive to produce (a dual-sided disk in low/moderate quantity was about $20) and if the glue wasn't done Just Right, the disk would degrade/rot over time. (The majority of surviving disks are just fine today... but some of particular interest to people, like the Domesday disks, aren't!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are probably a dozen people looking into it right now - demand > supply = a good business, able to set price.

The vinyl record supply will be back to normal in no time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Vinyl records are perhaps one of the best examples of commodity fetishism; in fact, they perfectly illustrate Mark Fisher's notion of "lost futures" (by way of Derrida's hauntology). Even the discussion and detailed analysis of vinyl (so as to justify its supposed acoustic superiority) is to miss the forest for the trees.

Of course the rabid capitalists on this forum would fall over themselves to exploit this for financial gain. There may even be quite a few who see this sociopathy as a badge of honour.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8ibrfXvpQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8ibrfXvpQ)

<comment><USER24> > Vinyl records are perhaps one of the best examples of commodity fetishism

Could you spell this one out because a vinyl record, in and of itself, wouldn't be an example of commodity fetishism because the fetishism depends upon social relations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Dozens of people will be affected by this, a tragedy</comment>


Where is everyone getting all of this sourdough starter? - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pke4dm/where-is-everyone-getting-all-of-this-sourdough-starter-all-of-a-sudden <comment><USER2> Literally from the yeast in the air?

The article acknowledges you can get it from the air but raises two objections: it takes five days to do so and a new sourdough starter doesn't have the full classic sourdough taste.

Ok? It still makes bread work.

It's a little sad to see a reporter using FUD to obscure one of the ingredient sources that literally can't be hoarded, and pushing people toward visiting their local pizza shops or whatever instead of staying in isolation.

<comment><USER3> > Literally from the yeast in the air?

Exactly, yeast is the original opensource technology.

<comment><USER4> It's more likely that the yeast is on the flour already, as it's going to be more likely to be somewhere where there's a food supply for it.

That's likely why organic flour is better for starting, as it's got less in the way of microorganism inhibitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > You can make your own starter, but it will be weak and basically tasteless > for about 5-7 years. We sell verified OLD starters.

Is there science on this? My March 2nd starter is plenty flavorful and pungent. You throw away (or find another use for) virtually all of it daily, so it seems an odd claim; after a couple days the original starter cells are basically at homeopathic levels of concentration.

<comment><USER4> Old starters are good enough that no one has given up on them because they suck.

Personally, I've tried sourdough a couple of times, never gotten the starters to really work (despite having done tons of other bread). I'm trying it again now, but I'm kickstarting the starter with pickle brine (not vinegar, the actual lactic fermented brine). There's some bacterial activity, but it's too soon to tell if it's going to work.

But in the meantime, I've got a yeast starter going from my last commercial yeast, because I'm out of yeast and so was the store. It's been going a week now, and it's working reasonably well, and even getting a bit sour, with none of the problems of weak rising that you can get from a more pure sourdough culture.

<comment><USER6> My couple tries, the bread hasn't risen well, the starter takes up fridge space, flavor's not great, and the damn thing wastes tons of flour if I'm not using it nearly every day. I've put it in the "maybe when I'm retired" pile and will keep making very decent bread with dry active yeast in the meantime.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if keeping it in the fridge leads to a good starter, at least initially. I'd let it sit on the counter for the first week or so, to give it a chance to develop.

<comment><USER6> This'd be _yet another_ topic on which everyone has very different "definitely the right way" advice, too, which isn't helping. Though I have started them on the counter, it's just after that they have to go in the fridge if you don't want to waste flour on them every single day, apparently, and even then they're still very hungry. Throwing out flour hurts when I know I could have made something good with it. I've tried recipes to use up "waste" starter without having to make bread with it, but it was still more effort than doing the same thing with other ingredients and the flavor was... poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That article has a new anti-reader mode feature I haven't seen before — there's an unrelated article on whiskey stones in the reader mode, while the real article is on sourdough.

<comment><USER8> Don't worry, just open the ("related") article about Dalgona coffee[1] and enable reader mode to get the sourdough article. Obviously!

[1] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvgbk8/people-all-over- th...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvgbk8/people-all-over-the-world- are-making-frothy-dalgona-coffee-thanks-to-quarantine)

<comment><USER4> Ah. That's perfectly user hostile,

<comment><USER9> Why would you even think to blame the site for that? It's almost certainly a problem with the reader mode you are using.

<comment><USER10> if this is the only site that exhibits this bizarre behavior, it seems perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that the site is responsible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't you literally make sourdough starter out of thin air? Why would you get it _from_ somewhere in the age of social distancing?

I would have assumed that the answer is people are leaving flour and water out (and I'm sort of thinking of doing so, myself), so I'm surprised that the conclusion of this article is that they're actually getting it from somewhere. My goal isn't to make the tastiest sourdough, my goal is to have bread at home without leaving the house. (And I don't have any yeast.)

<comment><USER12> Thin air, but I believe also whatever was living in the flour and bran one uses to make the starter mix.

Flour meal naturally contains a lot of yeast and bacteria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are tons of great bread making resources. A beginner is really well served at King Arthur:

Creating a starter: [https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2012/04/05/creating- you...](https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2012/04/05/creating-your-own- sourdough-starter-the-path-to-great-bread)

Maintaining a starter: [https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2012/04/08/maintaining-...](https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2012/04/08/maintaining- your-sourdough-starter-food-water-and-time)

and the remainder of the starter-specific articles under the tag [https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/tag/sourdough- starter](https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/tag/sourdough-starter)

Anyone starting out should also try a no-knead preparation. The NY Times's recipe is famous: [https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead- bread](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread)

If you have a large enough dutch oven with a lid, those trap steam and you don't have to have a tray of water in the oven.

<comment><USER5> I can't recommend the book Flour Water Salt Yeast enough.

It's written in a way that really appeals to my analytical mind, and it took me only a couple tries to wind up with really amazing bread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Heh, my wife has some sourdough starter that she got from her Mom who got it from here Mom etc. It's like pre-civil war sourdough starter. Except that like anything that grows it evolves over time. So I presume it picks up local yeast as it grows and eventually becomes a "local" variant. I find it particularly interesting that different starters make for bread that tastes different.

If you are bored you can do the same thing we did which is to take your ingredients and make loaves from different people's sourdough starter. All the same ingredients except for the starter and experience that for yourself.

<comment><USER15> > I presume it picks up local yeast as it grows and eventually becomes a > "local" variant

I had a funny experience of exactly this recently.

I got a starter from a friend a year ago and have been feeding it and using it regularly since. But recently, my father had some health issues and I had to go live with my parents for a couple weeks to help out, back in the small rural town they live in. I took my starter with me, and made a couple loafs of bread for my parents, feeding while I was living with them.

But when I got home, my starter was _different_. I grows way faster now. It's much more active. It seems to generate a lot more CO2 than before.

I suspect during my visit, my starter picked up a new strain of yeast which has joined the ecosystem in my jar. And it's made for some great bread.

<comment><USER16> I read the book Sourdough by Robin Sloan a few months back. Your anecdote reminds me of it! You might enjoy reading it -- it's a fun/quirky mix of technology and bread, set in SF.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33916024-sourdough](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33916024-sourdough)

<comment><USER17> +1 for the Robin Sloan novel. I really enjoyed it as well and it was actually the first thing I thought of when I saw this story posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My wife created a starter from scratch last year using only water, honey, flour, and raisins. I think the recipe was similar to this ([http://www.bellarminemagazine.com/making-your-own- sourdough-...](http://www.bellarminemagazine.com/making-your-own-sourdough- starter/)). It has since churned out a loaf or two on a weekly basis (and the discard turns into pizza dough.)

My ability to remain in ketosis is apparently indirectly proportional to the availability of delicious fresh sourdough bread.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's a living culture of bacteria and yeast, it grows exponentially when given enough food. So long as you've got flour and water you can make as much as you want.

</comment><comment><USER20> For the curious, here's the simple instructions for growing your own starter.

Everything should be measured in grams for ease of use.

When baking bread, everything is done using the bakers percentage. All this means is that all ingredients are measured in relation to the total amount of flour being used. If you're using 100g of flour, then at 75% hydration you add 75g of water. Note that to be super precise when you get more experienced, you want to include the amount of flour and water in the starter used in the loaf, but when getting started it doesn't matter.

Use bread flour specifically. All purpose flour doesn't seem to have what the yeast and lactobacilli need. It can grow, but the resulting starter is weak and prone to getting mold infections easier.

For a period of a week, each day mix an equal amount of flour and water by weight. I always use 100g of water and 100g of flour. This is considered 50% hydration.

On each day, throw out 90% of the mixture from the previous day. You aren't wasting anything. The flour from the day before has been eaten up.

Weigh the remaining starter (20g in this example). Then weigh out 90g of water and 90g of flour. Mix all of these together.

One thing I'm trying to get across is maintaining a consistent total weight, 200g in this example.

After 5-7 days of repeating this process, you will have a healthy starter culture where the predominant microorganism culture is wild yeast and lactobacilli. These two work together symbiotically. The yeast eat the flour and excrete things the lactobacilli eat. In return, the LB excrete lactic acid which gives the bread the sour taste and works to suppress other bacteria and molds from growing.

Use and maintenance:

Once you have a healthy starter, you change the ratio of water to flour when feeding it.

When baking, you generally want a starter that is 75-80% hydration vs the 50% used during initially growing it. All this means is that after baking for the day or if you're just feeding the starter daily to maintain it, you take the 10% of yesterday's starter and add it to a mix of 100g of flour and 75g of water.

I always bake my sourdough at 75% hydration and maintain the starter at the same ratio. It makes the math easier and the bread comes out fine.

After a lot of experimentation I eventually locked in a recipe that has my specific amounts, so I don't have to do the math every time.

If anyone wants my bread recipe, leave a comment here and I'll add it later. Don't have my book in front of me right now.

<comment><USER21> >If you're using 100g of flour, then at 75% hydration you add 75g of water

>I always use 100g of water and 100g of flour. This is considered 50% hydration.

Well, which is it? :)

<comment><USER20> Gotta read the whole thing

> When baking, you generally want a starter that is 75-80% hydration vs the > 50% used during initially growing it. All this means is that after baking > for the day or if you're just feeding the starter daily to maintain it, you > take the 10% of yesterday's starter and add it to a mix of 100g of flour and > 75g of water.

I'm describing two different parts of the process. 50% hydration is for growing the starter from scratch. 75% is for maintenance and baking.

<comment><USER21> I wasn't referring to the difference in values, but the difference in meaning - though I could be misunderstanding, you appear to be defining "hydration" both as an exclusive percentage (75 water + 100 flour = 75%) and an inclusive percentage (100 water + 100 flour = 50%).

Edit: Nevermind, just saw your correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This didn't seem to be mentioned in the above article, but you can get yeast from fruit - preferably pre-dried:

[https://twitter.com/shoelaces3/status/1244252079041974272](https://twitter.com/shoelaces3/status/1244252079041974272)

> Scour your kitchen for any dried fruit: grapes, raisins, prunes, apricots. > Fresh fruit works too, but it's best to leave it unwashed, and given our > current situation this is probably not a wise thing to do unless you've > grown the fruit yourself and trust it.

> Take your fruit (or, if using fresh fruit skins--please use your judgmenet), > pop it into a jar, and add a little bit of water to it. 2 or 3 tablespoons > (30-40 mL) is more than enough. If you stir the fruit around, you'll notice > the water gets slightly cloudy. That's the yeast!

</comment><comment><USER23> The Pineapple Juice solution: [http://www.thefreshloaf.com/10901/pineapple- juice-solution-p...](http://www.thefreshloaf.com/10901/pineapple-juice- solution-part-2)

</comment><comment><USER24> Some of these starters have interesting names. A bread maker gave me one called "California gold rush". He also had another, rather grimly named, "Black death". It's from those times.

However, I don't think the yeast will remain that old as we feed it with flour which has it's own yeast culture so eventually everything gets mixed up.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if there is going to a misguided arms race of extreme sourdough, just like there was for craft beer (and hot sauce) "Oh your IPA has 120 IBUs? That's cute, mine has 150IBUs. Booyah!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Flour is difficult to buy in some areas. It seems that lots of people have suddenly started making bread. I wonder how long they will keep doing it. What's interesting is how few online stores have the ability to show only things that are in stock. We never thought this would be a useful feature.

<comment><USER25> What I've personally found frustrating: I'm looking for things (yeast and flour) that I know will be back in stock eventually; it would be nice if sites would let me backorder it so I can get into the queue for when they have stock again rather than having to check on it constantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I got natural yeast from my local bakery. People buy less bread and such so they still have a lot of yeast they won't use and the shelf life is only 20-30 days so they started selling the yeast they buy wholesale. Huge 2kg brick. Used a bit but put the rest in the freezer.

</comment><comment><USER27> I started on this last week as well.

Seemed like something you can do with simple ingredients and time, and well I've got lots of time to feed a starter twice a day. It actually is growing well.

We'll have to see if it works well once it is made into bread.

</comment><comment><USER28> I bought 2 pounds of active dry yeast a few weeks back. I just pulled out the bread machine I had for over a decade and made a loaf with my daughter. She had a ton of fun adding the ingredients.

</comment><comment><USER29> If you're in Seattle (ideally near the University District), I'd be happy to share some of my very healthy starter. Leave a window open and I'll huck it in.

</comment><comment><USER30> Has anything tried kickstarting their starter using yogurt? Perhaps a little yeast and yogurt to speed things up??

<comment><USER31> > Has anything tried kickstarting their starter using yogurt?

Why would you kickstart a yeast (fungus) culture by giving it competing organisms (bacterial cultures) from yogurt?

<comment><USER30> That is where the sourness in sourdough comes from. sourdough starter has a balance of yeast and bacteria.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I lack wheat and rye flour, otherwise I'd have made a starter by now.

</comment><comment><USER33> I can relate! I started my SourDough starter SanDy a week and a half ago and have made a couple of great loaves since then. I'm on my way to the store tonight for more flour.</comment>


Elon Musk: we are probably characters in some advanced civilization's video game - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11837608/elon-musk-simulation-argument <comment><USER2> Fermi's paradox is relevant: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi- paradox.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html) Maybe Bostrom's option 1 happens due to the Great Filter...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very intersting link inside the article about the "Simulation Argument": [http://www.simulation-argument.com/](http://www.simulation-argument.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: Powerful laptop and external screen/keyboard or powerful desktop and netbook? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I prefer a powerful laptop + monitor + keyboard for work. Sometimes I like to take my laptop somewhere else and work, like when there's a meeting in a conference room or I want to work from a coffee shop for a little while, etc.

It's a pain to keep to computers in sync with one another, set up exactly how you want, etc.

<comment><USER3> Some software licenses are still bought by the machine vs by the user as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I go with the powerful laptop with externals. I want the power with me, on the go, so this is the best of all possible worlds.

I have two laptops, as well.

2016 MBP w/Touch Bar (full specs)

Dell XPS 9560 (full specs), runs Windows 10

At home I have a Dell UP3216Q (32" 4K display)

and a pair of external keyboards and mice (a separate pair for each laptop)

<comment><USER5> Damn, that's like $10k

<comment><USER4> Yes, it is. Since it's for my business, I don't screw around. I've never _ever_ regretted buying a full-spec machine. I've always regretted skimping and buying something that didn't have the juice when I needed it.

<comment><USER6> It's interesting to read this. I wonder if you would change your mind if $5,000 would make or break your business. The odds of that happening are small, but still possible.

These odds of needing a full spec'd machine are also small but still possible.

Either way I guess I'm saying that an opportunity cost of ~$5,000 is significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> dont even have a netbook. dont work on the move. dont work at home. work only when you're...at work... haha

<comment><USER8> Depends on your job, I guess!

I don't use a laptop a LOT, but it's super nice for when I need it. So I use a laptop as my main PC.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best statistical resources - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in improving my statistical skills. I have a good understanding of basic stats but would like to dive into more advanced statistics (particularly in soccer). Are there any good statistical books/blogs/resources that you would recommend? Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Don't know about soccer, but both of Andrew Gelman's books are bibles for me (economics). Data Analysis Using Regression and Hierarchical/Multilevel Modeling[1] and Bayesian Data Analysis[2]. He uses R. They're approachable, but get into some real hardcore stats.

[1] [http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/) [2] [http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/)

</comment><comment><USER3> There were some suggestions in these previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8491378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8491378)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348769)

I recall a recent discussion where people made some book recommendations, but unfortunately, I can't find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fine. Really appreciate the links - I'll go through them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have yet to go through it, but there is OnlineStatBook: [http://onlinestatbook.com/index.html](http://onlinestatbook.com/index.html)

Chapter 1: [http://onlinestatbook.com/2/introduction/introduction.html](http://onlinestatbook.com/2/introduction/introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> see the post on the world cup and stats/ML/NN on sportsandillumination.com</comment>


Ask HN: All about having/finding partner/cofounder - <AUTHOR>

First, little background about myself. I have been listening to HN community for some time now. I've come to love this community, it's spirit, contribution and great advice from entrepreneurs of all levels. Having 7-8 years of developing mostly enterprise web applications, I have realized that I should combine my drive, my proactive nature with my recent passion to create something of value. I should take risk, work for myself. Greater the risks, greater the rewards (I'm not leaving my day job any sooner, yet). I have a few ideas (I'm constantly thinking about new ones). I'm going to pick one (which I think has great potential in terms of creating value and viable business) and implement it. But I don't have any partner, yet. I have found a few like-minded people, mostly at work. They share my dream about being an entrepreneur and have shown some interest in partnering with me.
So my questions to you is all about having/finding partners/co-founders -
1) Why? - Everyone from Richard White in Entrepreneur's manual to many HN members strongly advice on getting a partner. Why is it so important to have a partner in your opinion? Can we do without having to have a partner at all?
2) Who? - Whom do you prefer to choose as a partner? What traits/characteristics/unique value propositions do you look in prospective partners? Should they be close friends or complete strangers would do? Do they have to bring something unique value to the table or it's ok if they are not much different than you? How do you know a person is a right partner ("your partner shares the same dream as you and likes you idea" is implicit here). In general, all advice about 'finding a right partner' is welcome.
3) How to decide terms of partnership? - How do you decide to split profits (if any, ever) between partners? How to decide the percentage of partnership? Does have to be equally split always? Of course not, but then what is the basis of deciding the percentage? Why would my partner be ready to accept anything less than 50%?
4) Can you please share you personal story about finding partners? I know there is no silver bullet. Each story is unique and cannot be applied to other situation as it is. But I always find personal stories inspirational and insightful, if I keep my eyes open.
Sorry for such a long question. And it demands even longer answers. I know you guys are all very busy. But I guess many budding entrepreneurs may have these questions. I'm hoping, in the good spirit of our HN community, all you experts would shade some light on these questions.
Thanks a lot in advance for your feedback and advice. <comment><USER2> Some initial thoughts and answers:

1) Why: You need and want someone who can at least give thoughtful comments and critiques of ideas, plans, work, strategy, and tactics. Very, very few people do their best work in the lone-genius style, even in highly cerebral realms like academia; even Einstein had a few close friends to bounce ideas off regularly. In business, which always involves other people, a business simply can't scale without others.

2) Who: choose people with ability and ethics, and above all, a strong interest/passion in the venture. I think the essence here is trust, then right up there is ability to create/add value.

3) Terms: see Noam Wasserman's articles, [http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2007/01/topics- covered-i...](http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2007/01/topics-covered-in- this-blog-so-far.html) where he discusses equity splits, founder relationships, compensation, etc. in useful detail. Also use Frank Demmler's Founder's Pie equity calculator, it's here with other relevant content,<http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/articles.htm>

4) Stories: in process, will report on this later. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Read: <http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html> <http://paulgraham.com/mit.html>

Two very good articles that cover some of the importance of having co- founders.

<comment><USER3> Excerpts from the mit.html link above that are especially pertinent:

"Most of the questions people ask Y Combinator we have some kind of answer for, but not the co-founder question. There is no good answer. Co-founders really should be people you already know. And by far the best place to meet them is school."

"If I were you I'd look for the people who are not just smart, but incurable builders. Look for the people who keep starting projects, and finish at least some of them. That's what we look for. Above all else, above academic credentials and even the idea you apply with, we look for people who build things."

"The other place co-founders meet is at work. Fewer do than at school, but there are things you can do to improve the odds. The most important, obviously, is to work somewhere that has a lot of smart, young people. Another is to work for a company located in a startup hub. It will be easier to talk a co-worker into quitting with you in a place where startups are happening all around you."

Sorry for the double comment, but I love this article :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a single founder. A lot of times, I wish it's not just me.

It's hard looking for a cofounder. Instead of waiting to find one, I went ahead with my startup.

I continue to network and hopefully one day, I'll find one.

<comment><USER5> I second dannyr. I too am a solo founder. I believe that the challenges of being solo are a combination of psychological and business.

From a psychological perspective. You'll have ups and downs in business. Good days where you think you're the best, bad days when you wonder why you're doing this at all, and of course, everything in between. A co-founder understands the different stages, and you get to celebrate/commiserate and continually motivate each other.

From a business perspective, I think it's easier to understand. Nobody can know everything. Different angles of how to approach the business (and sometimes but maybe to a lesser degree the technology). Is one an expert in marketing while the other is a product person? If the partnership is a strong symbiotic relationship, then you are clearly more than the sum of the parts.

Plus, two people can get more done in the same amount of time as one (not always, but usually). Two people have 1.23xxx times more network (lots of overlap), etc. etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's an idea, a social networking site for startups founders and people that want to be involve with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not social networking in traditional (read: face book style) sense, but check this out - <http://programmermeetdesigner.com/> , <http://cofoundr.com/blog/show/6> , <https://www.partnerup.com/signup/?return=> , <http://collabfinder.com/></comment></comment>


Dell's latest XPS 13 DE still delivers Linux in a svelte package - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/dells-latest-xps-13-de-still-delivers-linux-now-embraces-svelte-hardware/ <comment><USER2> For anyone who just wants a basic and solid developer machine and wants a good, nice HD display, then you should consider at the Dell Chromebook 13. It is a fraction of the price for the XPS 13, fully compatible with Linux, has an upgradable SSD, and is a little bit more Stallman-friendly. The BIOS can be flashed with a number of open-source BIOSes [1] [2] - this makes it even possible to run Hackintosh on it. The battery lasts a good 10 hours when new, and 6-7 hrs as of one year I used it constantly.

Unfortunately, Dell don't sell the i-version anymore and their website currently only showing the Celeron. I have the i3 version and it has been a wonderful machine.

1: [http://www.reddit.com/r/chrultrabook](http://www.reddit.com/r/chrultrabook) 2: [https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom- download...](https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I miss the "Win" key at Chromebooks. Life without it would be pretty painful at i3 and other desktop environments.

<comment><USER3> Remap the search key to win?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty ugly position :-/

Probably would work if I would never switch to other keyboards.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, but you are also paying 1/3 of the price

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The battery life sounds like the nicest improvement, honestly. I've got the 2015 9343 version with the QHD+ screen running Fedora, and I'm lucky to get six hours out of it.</comment>


Mind's quality control center found in long-ignored brain area - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181025142018.htm <comment><USER2> There are people without cerebellum:

A new case of complete primary cerebellar agenesis: clinical and imaging findings in a living patient [https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/138/6/e353/269537](https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/138/6/e353/269537)

A Man's Incomplete Brain Reveals Cerebellum's Role In Thought And Emotion [https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/03/16/3927897...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/03/16/392789753/a-man-s-incomplete-brain-reveals-cerebellum-s-role- in-thought-and-emotion)

<comment><USER3> The subject of the NPR article was also kind enough to appear for an interview in this Youtube video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5PyKSuPl2g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5PyKSuPl2g)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There exists artificial neural network inspired by cerebellum called CMAC (Cerebellar Model Arithmetic Controller). It's used mainly in robotics.

Fine people at [https://zenrobotics.com](https://zenrobotics.com) did CMAC research before founding the company.

</comment><comment><USER5> Phaedrus would be happy to learn of this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't fully understand the difference between the PFC and cerebellum then.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this really generalize?

</comment><comment><USER8> This sounds exactly like our "growth" team.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my web based twitter command-line interface  - <AUTHOR> http://tsh.ashafa.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Releasing a bit early. Any feedback would be appreciated.</comment>


Show HN: See Kickstarter successes and failures - <AUTHOR> http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/ <comment><USER2> I wish I could upvote this 100 times. I run a website in the tabletop RPG space, and there is an average of 1 new kickstarter _per day_ for someone trying to fund their new game, new module, new idea, new iphone dice roller, new virtual tabletop, etc.

They all point to the massive successes, but very few seem to understand that failure is a definite possibility.

Thanks for putting this together and I'll definitely be talking about it on my podcast: <http://hastepodcast.com> We're always covering new kickstarter projects, and this is an invaluable tool for people who get all starry-eyed at crowdfunding.

<comment><USER3> It seems like 75-80% of the card/board game projects are funded according to kickback.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that was surprising to me as well. Maybe the whole picture is rosier than I thought.

<comment><USER4> Kickback's corpus only goes back to June 2012.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Success" should be more than just getting funded, it should be following through with the project.

I could "kickstart" a trip to the moon with no engineering knowledge, and a budget of $5000, and by this metric I would be "successful". Probably within an hour if I properly attached the ideas of unseating a major tech company, and using android to do it. Also video games.

That doesn't mean I went to the moon. It means I successfully got $5000 out of people.

<comment><USER6> >I could "kickstart" a trip to the moon with no engineering knowledge, and a budget of $5000, and by this metric I would be "successful". Probably within an hour if I properly attached the ideas of unseating a major tech company, and using android to do it. Also video games."

BLHack: Your idea is interesting, but a bit vague. Could you send a brief summary of the project? Please find enclosed $500k just in case you need a seed for you know whatev. Looking forward to more: your new board.

<comment><USER5> Here's a really nice computer render of the moon. Also, we filmed this in a coffee shop and know how to use shallow depth of field to demonstrate to you that we KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING!

<comment><USER6> BLHack:

Thanks - couple of thoughts here. You demonstrate good potential to disrupt some big companies with the coffee shop video. But you need a lot more momentum, so please hold off on coffee shop work until series A.

I would also have loved to share the render with my niece's dog, who's really crazy about the moon, but I couldn't find any social buttons. This takes precedence.

I'd like to introduce you to a social media director who would be a very good fit (cc). Please set up an interview.

Thanks,

Your board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This site answers a lot of questions for a lot of people. It's a really great site that closely mirrors the KS design. Nice work!

Things I'd like to see added:

Length of campaign, also search by launch/end date

Search funding goal with upper/lower constraints, not just a "close to $#"

Search success by % of goal reached or $ pledged (again, with upper/lower bounds).

# of backers

# of updates posted

An API for access to the data, so others can do analytics on it

Having scraping experience myself, I'd be happy to contribute code to accomplish some of these if you're interested in outside contributors.

<comment><USER8> Would love to see an option as well if the campaign included a video

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As soon as I realized how difficult it was to find a comprehensive list of failed Kickstarter projects, I frantically began building a private database of them so that I have the data if I ever need it. Information on failed and cancelled projects is really quite valuable for anyone wanting to launch a successful one.

If I'd gotten around to it, I might have tried to build something like the KickBack Machine, but seeing as it has already been done, I'll leave the job to Dan Misener. (And he's done an excellent job.)

Edit: seems I was wrong about the launch date being hard to find.

<comment><USER7> The launch date is on the page, in a list item, like this:
 Launched: Jun 18, 2012

<comment><USER9> Wow, thanks. Was this always there, or did it come as part of the recent redesign? I remember searching the source of the previous project pages for anything resembling what should have been a launch date, and couldn't find it anywhere. Maybe at the time I was just delirious.

<comment><USER7> Not sure how long it's been there, but I feel like it's not a super-recent addition. I never really paid much attention to the launch dates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love how even simple adjustments can make a twitter-bootstrap site appear more personalized. Maybe it's the black bar, but I tend to groan a little bit whenever I see it on new sites I come across. This design, on the other hand, I really like. Nice work!

<comment><USER11> I agree wholeheartedly. Changing the top banner and buttons (the buttons are the first thing I notice) really personalize the site. Great job on using Bootstrap as its intended to be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Right now the 'Successful' word is glaring at me for each project [0]. I'd like to see the project title instead of whether it was successful or not. Try swapping the word 'Successful' with the project title?

[0]<http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/browse/successful/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Solid suggestion. I suppose that the length and colour of the progress bar is probably enough to signal whether a project was successful or not. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Woah.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/818526066/the- grassroots...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/818526066/the-grassroots- project-jason-biggs-saves-american)

Hollywood Actor Jason Biggs (from American Pie) had his $5,000 goal kickstarter campaign FAIL. F.A.I.L. And he's in Hollywood. People know him. He knows people. Wow.

I guess this goes to show that success is never guarenteed. One cannot predict future success based on past success, or future failure based on past failure. It also makes me feel really good about my own kickstarter campaign failing.

Wow this made my day. Poor guy though, it must have been a huge "wtf" for him.

 _edit: Changed "oh my god" to "woah" to avoid getting any more downvotes. As an atheist I'm curious to know weather it came from offended christians or vengeful atheists._

<comment><USER14> If it's not entertaining it fails. His project is boring. Probably 99.9% of the page's visitors couldn't keep their eyes open to read it to the end.

<comment><USER15> I watched the whole video and I'm _still_ not sure what it's about.

<comment><USER16> Seconded. His Kickstarter video and copy seemed like a stream of thought joke. Why should I give a rich Hollywood actor money when I can give a well planned and spoken individual the same funds.

Further, it seems pretty unlikely that a person ought to make a movie about how to lead a grassroots campaign if they can't even lead one for their own project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a great tool! Along with Kicktraq (<http://kicktraq.com/>) and Kicksaver (<http://www.kicksaver.net/> \- I made this a while ago), there are now third party projects like this for every stage of a potential campaign, from the planning stages to last-minute rescues.

We're all lucky that Kickstarter's pages are so pleasant to scrape.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems like unsuccessful projects get burried. Cancelled ones are quietly swept away. Case in point is glospex. One day the project was there, the next day it was not. No word...maybe kickstarter is too tiny to have a customer service department...maybe they want the unsuccessful projects to remain unseen.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like this. Simple and focussed, and invaluable to anyone willing to learn from what worked and didn't for others.

</comment><comment><USER20> What would be incredibly useful to me is a 'follow-through' indicator for the funded projects. When I read the link I thought 'success' was going to be "funded and delivered on promises".

It would clearly take a lot more work to track, but I could see a Politifact promise-o-meter style 'Delivery Status' with simple indicators like 'In Progress', 'Failed', 'Partial', 'Late', and 'Delivered' or similar.

Also for the funding side, having simple counts on each category and % funded for a given filter would be very informative.

Excellent and clear presentation overall though, very useful as it stands!

<comment><USER21> I replied the same thing to another post, but these stats are already available on KS. <http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats>

<comment><USER20> For the % stats regarding funding it's nice to have Kickstarter's page, but integrating that data with rest of the information on the linked page could help inform your decision making.

For the follow-up, I didn't see anything on Kickstarter about stats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking thru <http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/browse/all/> it appears the projects are overwhelmingly successful. In the first 163 project, just under 75% were successful. Am I interpreting this incorrectly, or are projects funded successfully an overwhelming majority of the time?

        jQuery('h2:contains("Successful")', 'div.caption').length; //successful
        jQuery('h2:contains("Unsuccessful")', 'div.caption').length; //unsuccessful

<comment><AUTHOR> According to my numbers, since mid-June 2012, the overall success rate for all projects in all categories has been ~72%. Much higher than Kickstarter's all- time success rate of ~44%. Successes seem to be increasing.

<comment><USER23> But does this stat of ~72% success rate (28% failure rate) include canceled/removed projects, which happens quite often after a failed attempt?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had a friend who started something similar one night when he was drinking. But this is much cleaner looking. ;)

I find digging into stats and broad psychological trends relating to human behavior kind of exciting on one level and depressing on another. From one perspective you can really increase your likelihood of getting people to do what you want with small tricks and tweaks. But then you realize that we're all just a bunch of manipulate-able sheep. :/

</comment><comment><USER25> For macro-level research, it would be useful if every category and filtered view featured accumulated stats (e.g., # of projects/successes/failures).

</comment><comment><USER3> That is a shockingly high success rate. It seems like 75% when I would have guessed 20%

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an incomplete list. TKBM has only been tracking projects that ended since mid-June 2012.

According to my numbers, since mid-June 2012, the overall success rate for all projects in all categories has been ~72%. Much higher than Kickstarter's all- time success rate of ~44%.

<comment><USER26> I've been suspecting their success rate might go up as more people become comfortable with the idea. A lot of small projects should be very do-able if their community is familiar with kickstarter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very cool...what I would like to see is duration of fundraising, if you were able to collect this?

What I mean is to have that in the current view...seems more useful than how many days ago it ended?

<comment><USER28> That would be really interesting. I'd like to see specific categories that are more successful now than they previously were, for example. Or correlate that success of specific projects based on how long ago they were.

<comment><AUTHOR> As requested: [https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DI...](https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DIOMYdWksR- xbqoGdVxTvkTfPfYwwgNXhJs)

The KickBack Machine dumps _lots_ of data into this Fusion Table on an ongoing basis. Please feel free to slice and dice it however you like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great resource. Would it be possible to have search functionality?

<comment><AUTHOR> Search is on the roadmap, for sure. That said, Kickstarter's existing search function performs very well.

The primary purpose of TKBM is to collect Kickstarter projects together by outcome (success/failure) and goal -- two things that Kickstarter's site doesn't make easy.

<comment><USER30> Am I the only one who finds kickstarter search so frustrating? all I want to find is all the technology products orders by recently added.. am I missing something blatant

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Any chance of kickstarter releasing a dump of this so we can all have a play? Even at just a month of data it'll stop us all scraping the hell out of the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's an ongoing dump of TKBM's data: [https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DI...](https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DIOMYdWksR- xbqoGdVxTvkTfPfYwwgNXhJs)

<comment><USER32> How do you get the pids?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> is there a way to check which of the 'successful' were actually built, not only backed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, it only tracks funding, not follow-through.

<comment><USER34> Follow through would be an amazing feature. It would start giving us real data about the success rate of crowdfunding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is the best thing I have ever seen on hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER36> Hmm, is an "events" category possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what you mean by this? What would be in the "events" category? Currently, the category list mirrors Kickstarter's own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You have a great radio voice.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's kind of you to say. Radio's my day job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My advice: drop the "the".</comment>


Year in Search 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2019/US/ <comment><AUTHOR> That's for US. For Global: [https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2019/GLOBAL/](https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2019/GLOBAL/)</comment>


SPJ Letter Urges President Obama to be More Transparent - <AUTHOR> http://www.spj.org/news.asp?ref=1253

<comment><USER2> IMO, interviews are a very imprecise way of gathering "facts" about a story. I'd be interested to hear some details about these stories where other kinds of research wouldn't have been a better way to obtain the information necessary for the story.

Imagine if US Government's policy was to simply allow any employee to entertain media requests anytime. And let's not leave bloggers out either, because they have rights too. How could we ever expect our government to get anything accomplished if they're constantly barraged by media at all angles all the time.

Though I believe the article is well intended, it seems to be way off base.</comment>


Cheap and easy SSL: Heroku + Cloudflare - <AUTHOR> http://www.impactdialing.com/2012/01/cheap-and-easy-ssl-heroku-cloudflare/

<comment><USER2> Wait, what? Pay Cloudflare $20 a month to avoid a $100/year SSL certificate?

<comment><USER3> In their defense, you're also getting all the other features that cloudflare offers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Keep in mind that you have to pay $20 / month to get host name SSL on Heroku even with your own cert, so from that standpoint this is a "good deal". However, one problem I've noticed with this approach is that in the cert Cloudflare uses you can see the 10 or do other domains that share the cert. I'm sure the average customer won't check, but having my cert also be valid for "cheaptoys.com" just felt wrong. Also, doesn't this mean the data is being unencrypted by CF then rencrypted and sent to Heroku? So CF can potentially see the contents of the transmission?

<comment><USER5> Yes, this allows CloudFlare to man-in-the-middle your SSL connection. Of course, that's exactly what it's designed to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't cheap, it is easy though. SSL certs now days can be found for free from StartSSL and for around 10 bucks a year on places like Namecheap.

</comment><comment><USER7> 20$ a month is not cheap for SSL

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure whether I'm missing something but how can Cloudflare get a certificate issued with my domain?

What stops them from getting a cert for google.com or paypal.com?

<comment><USER9> I believe it's because cloudflare also acts as the root DNS for the domain, so in order for it to work for google and facebook, they would have to deliberately point their nameservers at cloudflare's DNS.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should clarify - it's cheaper than a wildcard cert. It also makes it really easy for us to get private label resellers up and running.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is also interesting for sites which can't acquire their own certificates (i.e., anything at .cu, .ir, .kp, .sd, and .sy).</comment>


Facebook open-sources Detectron - <AUTHOR> https://research.fb.com/facebook-open-sources-detectron/ <comment><USER2> Also noteworthy: the Apache 2 license, which includes a patent grant (unlike the previous Facebook licenses that have caused concern in the past).

<comment><USER3> caffe2 (which this is built on) was switched from bsd+patents to Apache2 a while ago too.

<comment><USER4> I think if either a project that FB uses upstream has Apache 2 or if you are a large organization (for example the Apache Software Foundation) you can use your clout to force Facebook to use Apache.

<comment><USER5> Caffe2 is a Facebook project, so they're not exactly being "forced" to release it or any downstream projects under Apache 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So is this the end of Google captchas asking for where the car/sign/whatever is? Will there be a final battle of AIs, where they will kill each other, and the unfettered access to websites over VPN/tor wins and laughs the last laugh?

<comment><USER7> For the car captchas, I've found actually clicking all the boxes with part of a car will always be a wrong answer (distinct from when it just makes you answer twice). Instead, you have to click on the squares that you know it thinks are cars.

This creates a twisted Turing test situation where, to prove you are a human, you have to pretend to be a machine's idea of what a human is.

<comment><USER8> I have more problems with bridges than with cars. The damn thing forces you to select 3 bridges, except that there are only 2... So you are forced to select what it thinks is a bridge, and confirm his erroneous bias even more.

<comment><USER9> Storefronts are difficult too, I don't think I'm ever good enough at those to satisfy it. The most reasonable one seems to be street signs, but I think it fails me for not flagging the _unpainted back_ of one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> my overall feeling as someone that wants to start getting into visual recognition is that there are a bunch of great libraries/ecosystems to choose from and all of them have pros and cons, but i honestly don't want to make the wrong decision and end up being stuck later on. Anyone here has any advise on what i should use to have a camera(rpi) recognize most common objects and then add a layer where we can teach specific objects, ie (putting a name on a person or a pet), thank you!

<comment><USER11> unless I'm mistaken, this is the very first lesson of the fast.ai course.

<comment><USER12> The first lesson is image classification ("is this a picture of a cat or a dog?"). Given that OP is commenting on an object detection library release, though, I assume they're interested in object recognition/detection/segmentation and rather than just image classification. So, more like: "what things are in this image and where are they?" or even just "where are the dogs in this image?"

That's also covered eventually in fast.ai, but not until the second course if memory serves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks amazing from the computing point of view (and is an achievement of sorts), yet the confidence percentages are lower than what an average human might be able to solve for (like in the case of CAPTCHA tests).

Meanwhile, I wonder about the human costs if systems like these are adopted for purposes where they may be ill suited for, especially cases where their confidence scores are ignored (or mistakenly assumed to be 100% even when they're lower). Anyone have reading material on this?

<comment><USER14> Care to give any examples of scenarios you are concerned about?

<comment><USER13> My primary worry is law enforcement and government surveillance considering these systems as infallible and making judgments or life-changing decisions based on interpretations like this from computers. Computing has improved our lives a lot, but sometimes I feel there's an air of over confidence that clouds our judgment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know an alternative that works on RaspberryPi? This states: "Detectron operators currently do not have CPU implementation; a GPU system is required."

Even low FPS (3-5) would be acceptable.

<comment><USER16> You could try tensorflow object_detection api with tensorflow lite

[https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/ob...](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/object_detection)

google also recently put up their mobilenet v2 paper which handles segmentation [https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04381](https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04381)

<comment><USER17> +1 for the Google object detection API. The trained model is quite huge though. 200 MB based on Resnet faster R-CNN. There are creative ways of chunking this model to keep it small.

<comment><USER16> I think they have a mobilenet SSD model as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Beyond research, a number of Facebook teams use this platform to train > custom models for a variety of applications including augmented reality and > community integrity.

Any idea what they mean by "community integrity"?

<comment><USER19> detecting porn, presumably.

<comment><USER20> I would expect it to work on detecting the mismatching of content for types of communities in general. For example, preventing pictures of cats or giraffes being uploaded as a product photo on Poshmark when it's supposed to be a pair of shoes.

That type of check should become standard in a short amount of time for all communities that accept photos (that isn't meant to be general purpose, eg Imgur).

<comment><USER21> For example marketplace (where you can sell items on Facebook) will suggest a category for the item if you upload a photo.

<comment><USER22> I can't wait for Facebook marketplace to fail. The constant stream of useless ads is obnoxious. I am using Facebook less because there is no way to block that low quality content

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anybody knows a way to run CUDA programs with the open source driver (nouveau)?

<comment><USER24> CUDA needs driver support to talk to the GPU, and since it is proprietary nVidia technology, the open-source driver can't support it. So either you run the nVidia driver or you have to use OpenCL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone with GPUs and love in their hearts, bundle this with trained models in a Docker container?

(serious request... I got a cluster, and something like a million pictures; but no GPUs or time for another side project...)

<comment><USER26> I've started working on this, it seems the current Dockerfile for caffe2 doesn't work out of the box because of a forced push.

Follow me on Twitter, and I'll post it there when it's finished. Same username as here.

* edit: I've put a pull request in that builds the Dockerfile for the GPU for now: [https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron/pull/15](https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron/pull/15)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of this pic from Terminator [https://s3.amazonaws.com/pbblogassets/uploads/2015/08/Termin...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pbblogassets/uploads/2015/08/Terminator- POV.jpg)

<comment><USER28> Accompanied by endless banner ads for your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there a class of math problem humans can solve but computers cannot? Then we could just use these problems as a guaranteed test instead of the current CAPTCHA arms race.

<comment><USER16> There is no arms race. 99.9% of the time Google knows if you're a robot based on your browser state. They make you label the images because it's a free way to get training data.

<comment><USER30> I see this argument a lot and considered it the case to, but I have to wonder if that really is the case. Wouldn't google be empowering people to really mess up their training data?

If I'm trying to automate a system to fool their captcha, I'm probably getting a lot of bad results. Or I could just be intentionally feeding them bad data, the fact that not being allowed through captcha keeps letting me make more and more inputs would enable someone to do that as long as they would like to.

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something.

<comment><USER31> I believe they cross-check between different users. I believe it used to work something like this on the old recaptcha system (the one with the words or house numbers): They show you 2. 1 is known by recaptcha, the other one isn't. If you enter the known one correctly, you can enter. The unknown one is presented to other users and when there is enough consensus amonst users it is promoted to a known one. So it's hard to mess with the system as an individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was just looking into trying out YOLO. Does anyone know how both compare?

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm happy that tech companies are open sourcing basic research all the time, and thinking a lot about what would have happened if large pharmacy companies did the same thing. I'm just hopeful that with new biotech companies the science behind curing people will get faster as well.

<comment><USER34> Unlike the case in tech, pharma basic research is far less important in advancing our knowledge when compared to academia. A good example comes from the last few blockbuster cancer therapies - CAR-T cells and checkpoint blockade all arose in academic labs.

Also, for drugs that do make it to market, efficacy and side effect information is published as a condition of drug approval, at least for new drugs.

Whether basic science research papers should be behind a paywall is a wholly separate issue, but the life science community largely shares its finished products. Indeed, there's even a push to share early stage data, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is relying on proprietary CUDA technology. This doesn't qualify as Free Software to me.

<comment><USER36> Who said it was Free Software?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is great! I do wish this were written in something other than Python. What is the carbon footprint of all this computer vision, compute-intensive code still being run billions of times a day in Python? Someone should calculate...

<comment><USER37> It is funny to see this comment get "-4" already... What's so offensive? After all, Facebook has rocksdb in C++, percona in java, and a PHP->C++ compiler, so they clearly have both the belief and the skill in moving away from interpreted programming languages for performance-sensitive code.

<comment><USER38> For some reason, people are offended by gross misunderstandings. This framework is in Python, but it's a Python binding that sets up code that runs natively (not even sure the details myself; others are writing CUDA). TensorFlow is the same way. It's in Python, but the computations are not in Python. As you point out, that wouldn't make sense.

<comment><USER37> Having written Python -> C bindings before, I am quite aware of how this works... It still has considerable overheads.

<comment><USER38> But these aren't those kind of binding. Here the Python just sets things up, and that's the end of Python. That's my understanding.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>