Addmired (YC W08) launches super addictive iMob Online on iPhone App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.imobapp.com/ <comment><USER2> One of my friends is not happy right now. [http://www.grabup.com/uploads/7670d4cf3feb6e5f53a469e59935e8...](http://www.grabup.com/uploads/7670d4cf3feb6e5f53a469e59935e8eb.png)

<comment><USER3> Switch the art and call it Earth 2025 or Utopia or Oilwar.

<comment><USER4> Is it sad that I've played two of those games and recognized the names?

<comment><USER3> I think you're much younger than me so it makes me sadder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, fuck me. Why didn't I think of this idea. This game is going to knock the ball out of the park.

Anybody who owned a modem in the 90s knows how dangerously addictive these games are.

<comment><USER6> "Anybody who owned a modem in the 90s knows how dangerously addictive these games are."

As embarrassing as this is to admit, I was actually addicted to Idle RPG at one point. This is the IRC game where you level up based on how long you can go without saying anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Working on stuff that matters? [http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on- stuff-that-matters-...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that- matters-fir.html)

<comment><USER8> Making something people want?

<comment><USER7> Good point. If people make money by selling games, that's awesome.

But personally, I don't respect this kind of game. There are a lot more interesting games to be made for the platform.

That's probably why I posted a dig. I like clean arcade games like iilwy, stories with depth (e.g. oblivion), and things that get me excited like zombies and FPS. For me, most social games on facebook are a whole world of "who gives a fuck?". No offense.

Let me stress that they are fine businesses, just not my kind of game.

<comment><USER9> yeah lets work on something that matters like mailing in twitter posts...

<comment><USER8> Ahahaha. Touche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> imob 10 respect points: $0.99

imob 75 respect points: $4.99

imob 200 respect points: $9.99

imob 400 respect points: $19.99

How delicious.

The only gripe is not discounting those points.

Edit: Oh, yeah, join my mob! 100260987

Edit: 5 minutes in and I'm addicted.

Edit: Typos in the FAQs.

Edit: This burns the battery faster than the Energizer bunny in bed.

<comment><USER9> Typos=features

<comment><USER6> Are you guys updating things on the fly? The minimum bank balance seems to have just changed from 2,000 to 1,000. (And it still says 2,000 in the FAQ.)

Also, how does one gain mobsters? The FAQ seems to suggest it is by inviting friends, but I see some level five characters with dozens of mobsters. I don't even know that many people with iPhones. Are these just NPCs or what?

<comment><USER9> there are issues for sure. the bank seems like something we should look at. the forums are mentioning this too

<comment><USER6> Someone attacked me right as I was putting all my money into the bank, and now I have $-100,000.

Then I turned around and deposited my -$100,000 into the bank, so now my bank balance reads $-184,000.

update: I quit the app and opened it again and now my bank balance is positive. And somehow it has jumped to $171335824. Sweet.

update 2: The fact that you can gain XP by winning a fight on defense seemingly makes the game unbalanced. You can just put all your points into defense and none into attack, and then wait until other people attack you so you can win the fight.

<comment><USER3> I attacked someone and it said I got some $70k and some odd change. But then the connection died and when I logged in I had magically lost $10k of my original :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, that looks very cool.

Most MMOs generate revenue through subscriptions. I see that the iMob game itself and the gameplay are free. Are you selling in-game ads or something?

<comment><USER9> You buy apps that unlock virtual currency so the entire game is open but you have to pay to get ahead quicker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recall hearing somewhere that YC doesn't fund games. I can see why they may have made an exception here though.

<comment><USER12> I recall them saying explicitly that they also consider games. Isn't Draftmix a game, too?

<comment><USER13> Sure, we fund games. We don't understand them as well as other types of apps, but we'll consider them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want to make a real killing make an iphone app that reads lpmud code.... There was a huge following of MUD's in the 90's and I am sure you could find a lot of worlds and items already created... just need an interface to read the code. SeaWolf add me 151020688

</comment><comment><USER15> I think these text-based iPhone games could be a pretty good thing. I have a couple ideas bouncing around right now. I'll be following how much steam this app picks up...though I'm sure if this idea does become popular, the market will get flooded.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't get why you need an iPhone app for this. Wouldn't an iPhone-optimized site be enough? You'll also draw in more players, and it'd be easy to add a desktop frontend.

<comment><USER9> 1\. itunes store distribution 2\. easy way to charge iphone users 3\. it looks and plays way better than a iphone web app could

<comment><USER4> I haven't downloaded this, because I've got an iPod touch and my college has no wireless. Is there anything that I could do WITHOUT wireless, or would I pretty much be screwed when I go back in a few days?

<comment><USER9> the game continues while you are offline so if you go away you might have been beat up a few times but you will be all recharged and ready to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> hi, i think i have found a way how to make alot of cash on imob by doing nothing, all you have to do is wait for it to lag this means all your stats go to - somthing, when it does quit the app then get it again but make sure you turn the ipod off before getting the app back, it has worked for me 3 times and i now have $9012657700 and im a level 8, i have told all my mates and they have done the same and got the extra bit of cash.

<comment><USER18> I found a way by getting a property then on settings go back in time and you will have a lot of negative money I put this in the bank and by some glitch I. Ould buy loads more property with negative money. So when I put the date back to normal I had loads more money from the income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This app is going to explode (in a good way).

<comment><AUTHOR> Seriously, Gabe and the addmired crew understand gameplay and virality in a way that absolutely blows my mind. They're a team to watch in 2009.

<comment><USER20> That's a lot of praise for a knockoff idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> a) They were first to market with a great game of this type on the iPhone. b) The realtime mobile nature of this game transcends knockoff status. Try it.

<comment><USER4> Realtime meaning what? Meaning you can do stuff based on time? Because that's a concept that's been around for a little while, though never on a mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Check out this list of mobsters for lots of invites:

<http://ri.ms/mob>

</comment><comment><USER22> Imob is 1 of the most fun and adicting game I have ever played

</comment><comment><USER9> JOIN MY MOB! 100000288

<comment><USER23> "Invalid redemption code entered."

<comment><USER24> Try "Friend Code" instead of "Redeem". Btw, mine is 100448262.

<comment><USER25> Mines 100358785

I really suck at this game, I'm level 7 but I keep running out of money, and I loose most fights! Very addictive though, checking it every 5 mins now, hopefully I can break away else I'm not going to get anything done!!

<comment><USER26> My friend code: 100577628 =-)

This is fun.

<comment><USER27> My friend code is 100580351

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Enter friend code 117908262 to get a MOB</comment>


Show HN: A Single API to Everything (cloud Services and IoT) - <AUTHOR> http://cloud-rail.de <comment><AUTHOR> We launched CloudRail with a new technology and are looking for feedback :) It is a universal API for Everything. Means a single API / SDK to integrate arbitrary RESTful APIs. The idea: you configure your custom API with the services and functions you need. Example: I want to integrate Dropbox and need a function to upload a file and Philips Hue with a function to switch on the light. CloudRail bundles all that in a custom API which is then exposed to your app via our SDK. We started with some connected services, but the cool thing is, you can add further clouds or smart devices. It is designed to be a community driven tool to easily integrate 3rd party services. From developers for developers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Open for any feedback!</comment>


I'm a young adult. What can I do to start a business? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not here for you to particularly hand hold me. The problem is I'm young and I have no connections. There are opportunities but I don't know that they exist, I don't know that I don't know. I don't even know any entrepreneurs, but I wish I did. I have a fair amount of capital to start with..but I have no skills or ideas that I can think of to make money.
I'd just like to get my foot in a door, or learn a something from someone who owns a business, or perhaps see a successful business and imitate it. I'm not looking for anything amazing, but I just don't know about any opportunities.
How shall I get started? <comment><USER2> > I have no connections.

Well, you're here so that means you are able to contact a lot of people that do have connections, and that's probably almost as good.

> I don't even know any entrepreneurs, but I wish I did.

Lots of those around here.

> I have a fair amount of capital to start with

Hold on to it until you are sure something has legs

> I have no skills

That is a bigger problem. What interests you? Are there skills associated with that that you might want to learn?

> learn a something from someone who owns a business

So go to work for someone that owns a business!

<comment><AUTHOR> First I'd like to thank everyone for their comments. I forgot to mention the most important part.

I'd like to start a middle man business nothing in the service industry like most types of businesses, basically buying something in bulk and distributing to places. I know what I'd chose but I'm sure there are other types of things that I can distribute..I don't know what though.Also need more resources and connections, and I have no access to that. What are some things that I can buy and sell in bulk?

>Well, you're here so that means you are able to contact a lot of people that do have connections, and that's probably almost as good.

This is exactly what I'm here, I know this place is a host to some highly intelligent and successful people. In fact, I'd be glad to help someone for free just to see what they do and how things work. However, I believe most people run software/website type of business, which is something I'm highly interested in. I have no one that is even remotely close to "tech savvy" to own something like this

>What interests you? Are there skills associated with that that you might want to learn? I have skills I think, but I don't know what they're pertinent to because I don't know the opportunities are.

>So go to work for someone that owns a business! I guess I'll just go to those office complexes and ask? Would that be a good idea? Or if anyone here would like to show me what they do I'd be glad to help for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I have a fair amount of capital to start with..

Shhhhh. Don't tell people that. You don't seem to be in a place right now technically or otherwise where that should come up. A naive, inexperienced, yet want-to-be entrepreneur and his money are soon forever parted.

And I say that in the nicest way possible :)

Go buy some books. Take a class on entrepreneurship. Invest your "fair amount of capital" in a business degree.

</comment><comment><USER4> You need to run a SMALL business first

Keep 90% of that capital OFF LIMITS, and make a run at something with the other 10%.

This is a "learn by doing" type of thing.

Build a website, do affiliate marketing, etc, something low investment to start, and read read read read and more reading.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I don't see how you can start a business without skills or ideas. Unless you've got lots of money... I'd suggest getting one or more of those three things as a start.</comment>


"Special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2019/10/how-special-register-groups-invaded.html <comment><USER3> Speaking of registers and CPUs, the PDP-10 was interesting (at least, the KA10 model...not sure if the KI10 or KL10 also did this).

The architecture included 16 general purpose registers, which were addressed using the same address space used for main memory. Word addresses 0-15 referred to registers, and addresses 16+ referred to core.

The interesting part is that the registers were actually optional! If you wanted to save a little money, at the cost of some execution time, you could order your PDP-10 without registers. Because the registers and memory use the same address space, everything still worked with the first 16 words of core taking the place of the registers.

If you ordered your PDP-10 with the registers, they would in effect replace the first 16 words of memory.

Main memory was magnetic core and the optional registers was semiconductor memory, which were much faster than core.

Since the registers and memory shared address space, it turned out that you could execute code from the registers. You could often gain quite a bit of speed in a program by having it copy the code for its inner loops into the registers and running from them.

<comment><USER4> That's actually pretty cool. It seems like you could transparently change the number of registers to whatever would fit in your particular model of chip, 0 to 16 to a kilobyte or more. Is there a reason you wouldn't use such a design for a chip today?

<comment><USER5> Memory mapped registers are still a thing today. Here's arm documentation describing memory mapped debug registers for Cortex-R chips: [http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....](http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.ddi0460d/Cegejeeb.html) Even the intel XAPIC (interrupt controller) has a mode which basically uses memory mapped registers for configuring interrupts. The trick with executing hot loops in registers definitely wouldn't work today, and in some microprocessors the merely reading registers can change the state of external devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I sacrificed a perfect score in an IT test at school in the 90s over this sort of nonsense. Our IT teacher was adamant that a CPU was the base unit of a computer (terminology from the mainframe era) rather than the processor within it (as in the modern era). I refused to kowtow to the nonsense and took the red mark :-D

<comment><USER7> That seems like a rather meaningless choice of a hill to die on. Even in the 90s, many of us called the chips CPU chips.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but it's just a single mark, which is a more than cheap enough price for the principle :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Special register groups sounds like Hyper-Threading Technology. Didn't realize that Honeywell had it in 1959.

<comment><USER9> It's not really similar to hyper-threading. You still just had one thread of execution, you just didn't have the overhead of pushing CPU state to working memory (RAM) on context switch. Hence the CPU could switch contexts on every instruction instead of much more rarely like modern multitasking OSes tend to do.

Reading this I was reminded of the shadow register set on Z80. This CPU has two "special register groups" that could be switched by a single 4-cycle opcode. As far as I remember, the original idea was to have "main" and "interrupt" CPU contexts without the overhead of pushing/poping the stack (which could cost tens of cycles). From what I've seen however, people were mostly ignoring that feature in practice, or using it for various nasty hacks when they ran out of CPU registers.

<comment><USER10> Nah, this is for sure a form symmetric multithreading (or hyper-threading, Intel's trademark on the technique). Unlike the Z80's shadow register set and like hyper-threading this scheme keeps an independent program counter around for each of the register groups. Doing a thread switch each cycle is pretty common in simpler SMT designs like the UltraSPARC T series, the PPE on the Cell, and the shader cores on PowerVR GPUs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most computer dictionaries are mostly just obsolete jargon shovelware... they just copy&paste and don't really understand what they're printing over and over again.

<comment><USER12> Maps do this too, on purpose.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Special register groups" is vague enough that it can stretch fit any number of situations:

\- Ax versus Dx registers in a MC68K.

\- Floating-point versus integer registers.

\- Supervisor versus unprivileged registers.

\- Machine state registers (interrupt masks, etc) versus computational registers, versus I/O registers.

\- Hardware machine contexts similar to those of that Honeywell in numerous other machines.

I don't see the problem with it, except that it's not suitable for a very high level description of a generic CPU.

<comment><USER14> Since any register group is somehow special, "special register groups" are just an ambiguous concept that can be _passively_ misunderstood to "obviously" mean whatever register classification one finds important, not _actively_ "stretched" to take on new meanings.

Other commonplace "special" register groups include special purpose vs general purpose (SP, BP etc. vs AX to DX on early X86), different sizes, mutually exclusive overlays (e.g. FPU and MMX registers on X86).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Such an instrument is the turbo encabulator."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag)

</comment><comment><USER16> That's why a proper terminological database should contain a source and its date, so you can evaluate its currency and relevance.

</comment><comment><USER17> >CPU of a computer system does not contain: (a) Main storage (b) Arithmetic unit (c) Special register group (d) None of the above

Well I would have gotten this question wrong if I hadn't read this article.

<comment><USER18> It has been my experience that outdated, overly specific, or incorrect terminology tends to make its way into computer science and IT-related learning material and its corresponding test question banks.

This learning material often happens to be drafted and paid for by technology companies but it seems as though little effort is spent in revising, verifying, and properly typesetting the material in question, to the chagrin of the students.

<comment><USER19> As a high school student (in the 1990s), I found our computing textbook contained lots of mistakes. I tried to point out the errors to the teachers. I soon realised they knew absolutely nothing about the topic, they were just reading the textbook, so trying to convince them the textbook was wrong wasn't going to get anywhere. But, I think "outdated, overly specific, or incorrect terminology" is due to a lot of people teaching it (at high schools, etc), or even writing the textbooks, don't know what they are talking about.

Specific examples:

Our textbook claimed that TCP/IP used parity bits. If you actually read the relevant RFCs, you will find out that's wrong, it doesn't use parity bits, it uses a one's complement checksum. But, the teacher had never heard of an "RFC", and didn't know why she should care what one said. Obviously, whatever the textbook says must be right, and anything else must be wrong.

The explanation of CRCs in the textbook made absolutely no sense. It said to treat the message as one long number, and then take the last part of the number. That would make the CRC just the last few bytes of the message, making it rather useless. What I eventually worked out – you really can't explain CRCs without polynomials, but the textbook author didn't want to include any mention of polynomials (and multiplication and division operations on them), since possibly not all students would have done that in high school mathematics yet. (The more advanced students may have, but the students doing the most basic levels of maths would not have.) The part about "take the last part of the number" was actually meant as a reference to the remainder of polynomial division. Once you understand the topic independently of the textbook, you can see how the textbook is a horribly garbled and mangled attempt to simplify the truth. The problem was, the teacher (same high school, different computing teacher) had no idea how CRCs are actually defined, all he knew was what the textbook said. If he actually knew what he was talking about he could have explained to me what I eventually worked out for myself.

<comment><USER20> Cf. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to- children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children)

<comment><USER19> A "lie" presumes you know the truth. These teachers weren't consciously simplifying things for the students. If that was what they were doing, they could have explained the missing details if challenged on them. A good teacher really knows their subject, as opposed to just mindlessly repeating whatever the textbook says.

<comment><USER20> That's an excellent point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Storage is not part of the CPU.

It kind of is. People often call the box with the motherboard, etc. the CPU.[1][2] That's how the basic parts of a computer were taught to me too when I was a kid. The basic parts of a computer are a "CPU", a "Monitor", a "Keyboard", and a "Mouse". Some time later, when I was taught the parts of a "CPU", it was a "Processor", a "Hard Drive", a "Case", etc. I suppose not everyone used the same nomenclature everywhere.

It still seems like a standard hasn't been reached. Around where I'm at, people call that thinking box the "CPU", and right now, when looking for diagrams, I see some call it the "Tower", the "Case", the "System Unit", the "Computer", etc.

[1] [https://i2.wp.com/www.informationq.com/wp- content/uploads/20...](https://i2.wp.com/www.informationq.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/Basic-parts-of-a-Computer.jpg?resize=1047%2C559)

[2] [https://ecdn.teacherspayteachers.com/thumbitem/Parts-of-a- Co...](https://ecdn.teacherspayteachers.com/thumbitem/Parts-of-a-Computer- Worksheets-Including-Laptop-Diagram-1740668-1453433324/original-1740668-1.jpg)

EDIT: Are the downvotes because people don't believe this is how parts of the computer were taught in some places before the internet became more popular? It makes sense to me that this is the reason why main storage being inside the CPU made it into dictionaries.

To me, "CPU" is an ambiguous term. It could either mean the whole case with the electronics inside, or it could be the main Processor in the motherboard.

<comment><USER19> Back in the 1950s and 1960s, where a single computer was often composed of multiple big cabinets, the word "CPU" was used to refer to the CPU cabinet. (Often, you'd have the CPU in one cabinet, core memory in another, one or more IO controllers in additional cabinets, yet further cabinets for tape drives and hard disks, etc.) So this usage of calling the main chassis the "CPU" is actually very old. On the one hand, people who use it tend not to be very computer literate (since everyone nowadays who knows anything about computers reserves the term "CPU" for a specific integrated circuit inside that case, not the case itself.) But, their usage I'd argue derives from what used to be the usage of the computer literate, decades ago. It was only in the 1970s that a CPU started being implemented by a single integrated circuit, as opposed to a group of them; back when the CPU was multiple integrated circuits, calling the box that contained them all the "CPU" made more sense, especially when the computer itself was spread across multiple boxes. The computer industry moved on, the terminology of the computer illiterate didn't.

<comment><USER22> I don't see it as about computer literacy, but rather a cultural/technological change over time.

Up until some point probably post-2000, desktop computers were the norm, which had main chassis connected to peripherals such as keyboards, mice, and monitors.

At some point, certainly by 2010, laptops became the majority, which have both input and display integrated. So the referent of CPU, other than the actual chip, no longer existed for most users.

<comment><USER19> I remember in the early-to-mid 1990s, my parents calling the main chassis the "CPU", and I would respond saying "that box isn't the CPU, the CPU is just one of many chips inside that box".

I doubt the desktop-to-laptop transition was a big factor, simply because among more technical people, calling the main chassis a "CPU" was already considered improper back in the 1990s (and probably even much of the 1980s), when laptops were a clear minority.

<comment><USER22> It seems to me that a lot of people of a certain generation have issues with the idea that different meanings of a word can co-exist.

Many words have dictionary entries with multiple definitions. And if you Google a word you are curious about, you will probably find an online page with one or more definition.

But nobody has any motivation to make such an entry complete or accurate - <USER2> only exists like everything else to get clicks.

So for some reason people have become very dogmatic that any definition missing from the current top hit for a word doesn't exist, because the internet is their reality. They don't seem to have any idea how thoroughly their reality is being distorted.

As far as my personal experience goes, in the 80s and 90s, CPU was used to mean the box containing the processor, where the computer was not an "all-in- one" like the original Macintosh, and it was also used to mean the chip. I don't remember using the former meaning, but neither was I ever confused.

I don't think it's reasonable to argue that one or the other definition is illegitimate, because I think they share a common thread. The modern CPU has multiple processors and other things on-die, so it is "processor plus stuff" just like the CPU-as-main-chassis. I think they are both examples of one basic concept.

<comment><USER19> I'm perfectly familiar with the idea that one word can have multiple meanings. I don't see any evidence that "people of a certain generation" have issues with that idea.

One can also talk about the idea of different registers – informal, formal, technical, etc. Meanings which are acceptable in an informal or colloquial register can be viewed as less acceptable in a formal or technical one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In a related topic, Berkely RISC decendents (including SPARC) have the concept of "Register windows"

Basically there are many more registers than can be addressed by the program, instructions are instead addressing a "window" into this much larger register file. A function call shifts the window by some amount, typically with overlap, so parameters and return results go in the overlapped area, and whenever you are about to "wrap around" to the front of the file, the hardware will push to the stack as needed.

Obviously multithreading on such targets becomes complicated because the normal strategy of "Save all registers to the TCB" starts to become inefficient with very large register files.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fortunately nobody that learns about computers gets it from a dictionary.

I think "special register groups" has zero impact on literacy and understanding

fascinating investigation though

People born in the 1950s till now have plenty of other excuses to be technophobic so this definition has no effect

<comment><USER25> Except in this article it's mentioned that a quiz from a 2017 book includes them.

<comment><USER24> Thats not the point I was making and wasnt refuting its prevalence

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > ...the central processing unit was a large physical box, also known as the > "main frame". (A mainframe was not a type of computer yet.)

Does that imply that there were other "frames"? Maybe storage frames, I/O frames...

<comment><USER27> Yes, there were storage frames, power frames, CPU frame, drum frame, electrostatic storage frames, and so forth. (I'm working on a blog post about this, but got sidetracked by the appearance of "special register groups".)

<comment><USER26> Cool, I'll keep an eye out for that post!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is interesting. While I agree that CPUs no longer have the set of registers used the way they were on the Honeywell, they certainly do have special groups of registers that can only be used for some operations and not others. For example, FPU registers don't generally do logical operations. SIMD registers either don't work as general purpose registers, or have to be switched from being general purpose to being SIMD depending on the architecture. So there are still "special register groups" on modern CPUs. It just doesn't mean the same thing as it meant back then. Kind of funny.

</comment><comment><USER29> The textbook with the garbage definition costs $2. I guess you get what you pay for. Hopefully the colleges using that book charge a similar amount.

</comment><comment><USER30> I would have probably assumed that it referred to the L1 cache.

</comment><comment><USER31> This makes me want to shoot myself in the face, weep for humanity, and/or become a con man.

</comment><comment><USER32> Eh, I don't see the problem with this definition. Registers are "special" storage locations by their very nature, as opposed to memory external to the CPU.

The term "special register group(s)" is a bit offbeat, but it's perfectly accurate and perfectly descriptive of almost any real-world CPU architecture. The only problematic bit is the plural 's'.</comment>


Ask HN: First side project, What should he use? - <AUTHOR> Aside from google maps,  are there any other great examples of mapping software that runs right inside a mobile browser?<p>I am helping a friend get started in a side project, and he is looking for the simplest possible way to start making something with maps that will work on the phone browser. <comment><USER2> I've used Leaflet in the past. It is pretty simple to setup and use.</comment>


Ask HN: What's NOT going to change in the next 10 years? - <AUTHOR> Interested in what people think are not going to change in the next 10 years (industry, behavior, etc)
- The need for human interaction (alternatively: loneliness - is that going to increase with social media?)
- The need for clean water
- The need for sleep
Question originally posed by Jeff Bezos. Context here:
I very frequently get the question: "What's going to change in the next 10 years?" And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: "What's not going to change in the next 10 years?" And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.
It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, "Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher." "I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly." Impossible.
And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. <comment><USER2> Personal Opinions:

1)The fact that humans will continue to reproduce and multiply at an ever increasing rate.

2)The need to help the poorest countries/people will always be present.

3)The need for clean water I feel is not going to remain constant, but grow over time as we need water for more people.

4)I think in the next 10 years we still will have the group of 'older' non tech users who are oblivious to tracking/privacy and could use simple to use privacy solutions. Maybe by the time users who grew up with smart phones are 65+ then we don't have to worry as much about the technological illiterate, there will always be a difference is skill/knowledge but I feel the gap will shrink over time.

I'm sure I could think of more but I just came up with these off the top of my head. I do like the question, which is good practice to ask the questions that are the opposite of what everyone is always asking.

<comment><USER3> > Maybe by the time users who grew up with smart phones are 65+ then we don't > have to worry as much about the technological illiterate, there will always > be a difference is skill/knowledge but I feel the gap will shrink over time.

In my experience (which I fully admit is anecdotal and therefore likely wrong), the kids who've grown up using iPads and iPhones know less about how computers work than the kids I grew up around who had PC Towers in their homes. Not suggesting this is anything particularly alarming, but does make me curious if the form factor of computing a user is exposed to has any bearing on the user's desire to understand more fundamental aspects of computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Corporations in bed with state actors to harvest data and spy on every single user despite running marketing campaigns on how they care about privacy so much.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is more of a meta-point but it's always surprising to me when reading about older civilizations like Rome how alike the daily lives and problems were for people thousands of years ago.

Some things that won't change– and probably have never changed:

• People will continue to want to have fun

• People will continue to want more ways to make money

• People will continue to want things to be faster

• People will continue to want great tales of adventure</comment>


Ask HN: Someone is trying to clone my site - what do I do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scriptlance.com/projects/1242498266.shtml

<comment><USER2> Viaweb got copied a lot, and now YC does. I've learned not to worry about it. Clones rarely amount to anything. First of all, anyone who has to copy you is probably not that good. Someone really good wouldn't be able to copy someone else, even if it was to their advantage; they'd be too proud to. Second, people can only copy what's visible. They can't copy the half of the project that's in your head, and that is probably the more valuable half.

</comment><comment><USER3> Be flattered!

If your site can be cloned, launched AND cause a serious dent in your business, you need to think of better ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's the angle we're going to take. It just came as a bit of a shock when I first saw it.

Thanks for the great response!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't be worried. Cloning websites never goes as well as the poster of the RFP. The poster will be playing catchup without differentiation. You have an advantage, just keep innovating and developing it. Even if there is a really good developer that can clone it, it will be hard for them to clone, catch up and surpass.

</comment><comment><USER5> Almost inevitably, shortly after I launch something that proves reasonably popular, I see an ad for someone wanting to clone it on Scriptlance for $200.

</comment><comment><USER6> You bid on the job. Eh? ;)

<comment><USER7> Hey, the OP probably has the actual code as well. If you really want to be sneaky, you could install a little back-door just in case things get serious.

<comment><USER8> That sounds horribly unethical.

If there was future litigation between the two sites, this would look very bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Ever wonder what a Threadless t-shirt sale looks like at the server level? - <AUTHOR> http://gapersblock.com/merge/archives/2010/03/18/threadless-gets-pounded/

<comment><USER2> Direct link ... that sentence is riveting but the title here kind of includes the entire submission.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottvdp/4443360713/></comment>


A 21 Year-Old's Bit on Snapchat - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/c4029acf1696

<comment> dan-g I agree. The other big draw for me is that moments on snapchat are fleeting -- which to some degree mimics in-person experiences. It certainly leads to some je ne sais quoi that other messaging/social networking platforms don't have.

<comment><AUTHOR> And that you feel personally targeted when you're snapped</comment></comment>


It Took 10 Seconds for Instagram to Push Me into an Anti-Vaxx Rabbit Hole - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbwkvm/10-seconds-instagram-recommends-anti-vaxx-vaccine-accounts <comment><USER2> > On Wednesday, I created a fresh Instagram account, and followed 'Beware the > Needle', a user with 34,000 followers which posts a steady stream of anti- > vaccination content.

Whilst I don't doubt that it's possible that Instagram's recommendation system will do this, you can't really complain or say it's the norm if the first account you follow is an prolific anti-vaxxer.</comment>


My Prime Factorization Sweater - <AUTHOR> http://sonderbooks.com/blog/?p=843 <comment><USER2> Do people often walk up to the OP and start trying to identify country flags?

<comment><USER3> No, but when people say, "Nice Sweater," and I ask, with a sparkle in my eye, "Do you want to hear about it?" they often say, "I thought they were flags."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

After just 5 or 6 different colours or so, which happens very soon, it becomes hard to distinguish them without context. But this is not a big problem thanks to order consistency. For instance, check 57 and 58, just next to each other with the tone of 19 (second factor of 57 = 3 _19) looking very similar to the first factor of 58 (2_ 29). The converse is also true: 3 is a similar tone to 29. But thanks to order consistency it's easy to tell which is which. I'd say the only problem with this is not being obvious, and also the ordering being somewhat confusing, as I'd expect normal writing order for numbers.

<comment><USER3> I have spent so much time looking at graphs, I wanted smaller to be on the bottom and to the left, as in Cartesian coordinates. Though I know it's a bit weak. The color differentiation is even worse in the photo than it is with just the yarn. And it's tricky to find a yarn with enough distinct shades.

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, because in CompSci screen coordinates (and vector coordinates when programming graphics) are usually rooted at the top-left, so we have a more "consistent" natural perception of it - those of us using mainly left-to-right language scripts.

Anyway, I really don't see graphs as sequences. I have my perception of cartesian graphs and sequenced lists completely separated.

But the important thing here is the idea :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's an excellent idea for a T-shirt.

<comment><USER6> WAY more geeky/cool to have knitted this yourself than to have just bought it as a T-shirt.

That said, with varying definitions of hacker, I'd bet she's the least hacker-y person to make the HN homepage.

<comment><USER7> Not by a long shot. At least once a week we have people talking about how they "hacked" their focus, or their working hours, or other drivel. This is genuinely neat.

<comment><USER6> 30 year old developer hacks work week, hits HN homepage: common.

50 year old librarian hacks sweater, hits HN homepage: somewhat less common. But yes, the principle is still the same.

<comment><USER3> I am NOT 50!!!! (for a few more years, anyway.)

<comment><USER6> Your age isn't on your website, but my calculation (got Master's degree in 1986 at likely approximate age of 24) couldn't have been TOO far off, right?

I guess age is just one of those topics..... :-)

<comment><USER3> Well, it was farther off two years ago when I posted the picture. And I got my MA in 1986 on my 22nd birthday. (Later got an MLIS on another birthday.) I put a math problem in my follow-up post. You should be able to calculate my age and my son's ages from these clues: <http://sonderbooks.com/blog/?p=10000>

<comment><USER6> My age estimate was from your LinkedIn profile. If I was guessing by pictures, I would have said 39. (Is that the right answer? (I mean in the sense of Right Answer to say to someone of how old they are, not mathematically correct. :-) ))

<comment><USER8> The Right Answer is to have not brought up the age issue because it is rather immaterial to the discussion. Can you really say that the authors age, when considered independently from the article subject, has significant bearing on the voting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I showed this to my 9-year old daughter. After explaining it to her, her first question was 'Can I have one?'. I told her that it was a one-off. She then asked me to bookmark the page for her.

<comment><USER3> I am trying to get the graphics I made for the children's book I wrote with this concept (not yet published, but now it's time to try) uploaded in a decent form onto cafepress. I'll post if it comes out okay and I can sell t-shirts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really wish that I could remember the article/movie/show which I read/watched but it was talking about creating a universal language.

This would be not just for people living on Earth but also life outside of our Solar System. It would make sense that if there was a universal language that it would be based around some mathematical form. At least something which should be constant through the universe.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that such a language may have a mathematical basis but that alone wouldn't be able to convey anything besides mathematics. It can demonstrate intelligence, as used in Carl Sagan's novel _Contact_ by broadcasting a sequence of prime numbers — but that doesn't exactly constitute a language.

<comment><USER12> You could probably move from math to chemistry/physics. Of course all the 'constants' are arbitrary numbers based on the measuring system used, but going from elements to DNA to cloning to emotion should at least in theory be possible if you had enough time and intelligence.

<comment><USER13> This is, in fact, solvable; you can use plank units, which result from setting universal constants to 1. As an example, setting the speed of light to 1 means that time can now be measured in meters.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units>

<comment><USER14> You still have the challenge of choosing a base system. Remember we are base 10 simply because of biology. Our alien friends may be on a different number base because they have 7 fingers.

<comment><USER15> It ought to be possible to deal with that by enumerating each possible digit. And then showing a representation of some kind of fundamental concept like PI/TAU that's easy to make a diagram of. Each side shows their digits and their representation and at that point we can determine conversions between the bases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm wondering. Could this be considered a meta-explanation of what a prime number is?

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd start with zero. Bugs me that the right-hand side is 10 not 9

<comment><USER18> 0 does not admit a prime factorisation.

<comment><USER19> She could've knitted a bit of white noise then :)

<comment><USER3> I thought about putting in zero, but I'm thinking of this in the mathematical group Z sub n, the natural numbers. That ring does not include zero, and it's as if it doesn't exist. One, on the other hand, is the multiplicative identity, so it is the background color, a factor of all the other numbers.

<comment><USER18> Certainly the ring `Z/nZ` has 0, meaning an additive identity (the image under the natural homomorphism `Z \to Z/nZ` of the 'true' `0 \in Z`). Do you mean that the group `(Z/nZ)^\times` of units of `Z/nZ` doesn't contain 0?

(I think that it's also confusing to call `Z/nZ`, or `Z_n` or whatever you like, the group of natural numbers; rather, it is a _quotient_ of the semigroup (or semiring) of natural numbers by a normal subsemigroup (or semiideal).)

<comment><USER3> Okay, you passed me. I knew I should have pulled out my very old Modern Algebra book. I was thinking in terms of modulo groups. You can show lots of number theory with the sweater, granted that the number on the end is the equivalent of zero. I want a group under multiplication. Is that making any sense?

<comment><USER20> If you want a group under multiplication, the easy options are: (1) Integers modulo a prime number, not counting 0 mod p. (2) Integers modulo anything (call it _n_ ), not counting ones that have a common factor with _n_. (3) Rational numbers.

In this case you've got 1..100, and 101 is prime. So the numbers on (the front of) the sweater, mod 101, form a group under multiplication. But of course in that group you lose all the prime-number structure shown on the sweater -- you can't really talk about, say, "multiples of 3 (mod 101)" because 101 isn't a multiple of 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A perfect gift for Sheldon Cooper.

<comment><USER22> Hey look everybody, common ground between HN and Reddit! They both dislike _The Big Bang Theory_ references!</comment></comment>


Wombat poop: Scientists reveal mystery behind cube-shaped droppings - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46258616 <comment><USER2> If you make it to Hobart, Tasmania, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has an amazing art installation which is a faux digestive tract, rigged up on controller logic. Its poop element is _crying out_ to be modded for cubic wombat poop (they feed it daily, the same as whats on offer in the gallery restaurant. Somehow, it smelt cheesy when I was there)

Wombats are in trouble. There is a huge problem with Mange, and the populations are in stress. If you find any charity which supports Wombats, fund them. They need help.

Cubic poo forever!

<comment><USER3> There's a wildlife park just out of Bicheno that raise and release orphaned Wombats.

They also have an insurance colony and breeding program for devils.

<comment><USER2> I went to asbestos n.p. in the late eighties at dusk. The wombats were lik: "wot you starin' at, short arse" everywhere. Loved that visit. They really are very engaging. Watched one blithly re-digging it's warren kicking dirt over another's muzzle "see what I have to put up with? See? see?"

I know we shouldn't anthropomorphise, but sometimes it's hard not to.

<comment><USER3> What is really funny is how as a pup they are super friendly, enjoy cuddles and a good belly scratch. Then at 18 months or so they mature and revert to being completely wild and can be very aggresive.

<comment><USER2> Teenagers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > but then in the final 8% a varied elasticity of the walls meant the poop > would take shape as separated cubes

This explains absolutely nothing! WHY does the varied elasticity of the walls make the poop cubic?

<comment><USER5> front/end is easy, the nuggets just bump in to each other. Sides I guess are done by having more elasticity where the corners shall be. This way the filled tube naturally expands to be square.

I now think I know the how, but why? They stack it? You could stack cylinder shapes...

<comment><USER6> The article also said:

> The shape helps it stop rolling away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> time for Mojang to add the Wombat to Minecraft

</comment><comment><USER8> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18483689](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18483689)

<comment><USER9> It's not a dupe by HN's standard because that submission didn't get significant attention.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20significant%20attention)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So wombats make square poops because they have square butts. Got it.

<comment><USER11> No, they don't

<comment><USER10> > [...] in the final 8% a varied elasticity of the walls meant the poop would > take shape as separated cubes.

Some bits of the colon walls stretch more than others to mould the poop into a square shape as it goes through. Sounds like they were stretching into a square shape to me.</comment></comment></comment>


Serve Videos Instead of GIFs - <AUTHOR> https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/serve-videos-instead-of-gifs/ <comment><USER3> I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images.

The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap.

To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE.

It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user uses it, they don't care how it works. They will use whatever have the same behaviour.

<comment><USER4> I think there's a chance this can happen when AV1 starts to gain adoption. Webp had a chance - you can have well encoded, looping video in a .webp container that operates exactly like an image. The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem. AV1 has support from every major player in tech, and .avif images support gif functionality just fine.

Until that happens though, I just don't see .gifs ever losing traction. I still need to upload gifs to slack if I want autoplaying/looping behavior without user interaction, I still need to embed .gifs in my confluence pages, and when documenting user interactions in github readmes gifs are still king.

FWIW I've made a small user script for encoding gifs in a two pass approach (as most gif encoders I've seen do a pretty shit job). If anyone wants it here's the script: [http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh](http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh)

(to use, just type `./gif.sh -s=SIZE -f=FPS input.mp4 output.gif`)

<comment><USER5> >The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem

It's not just Apple, webp files can't even be opened by Photoshop. You're basically making proprietary Chrome image files if you actually use that format.

<comment><USER6> Ehh... Firefox can open them just fine, as can GIMP, as can (apparently) my OS's image thumbnailer. (Though oddly enough not my OS's image viewer.) Support isn't universal, but it's certainly not a proprietary Chrome format.

<comment><USER5> Almost every computing app in the world supports JPG,PNG and GIF. Together we could only name 3 apps that can open webp and only one of those is an editor.

Shaking my head as to why this format has any support at all.

<comment><USER7> GIMP is supported on every practically usable operating system and can edit animated webp just as well as gifs.

<comment><USER3> But most people use photoshop already

<comment><USER7> Most people? Given how much it costs? I doubt it, or Adobe would be the company with the highest valuation in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use GIFs because I want videos that act like images, not videos. GIFs I can copy & paste, and I know that they'll infinitely loop without ever showing a play/pause button.

Yes, videos are smaller, but I'm unfortunately stuck with GIFs until videos work well in Google Slides and iMessage (which also means I'm also stuck with Google Slides presentations always on the verge of crashing...)

<comment><USER9> Meanwhile, I _really_ wish I could instruct my browser to treat GIFs as videos, and load only the first frame and show controls if I wish to actually play it. Because >99% of GIF usage that I encounter is abuse of the format.

<comment><USER10> Firefox has image.animation_mode on top of which one could probably build an extension that does what you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hold the mic drop. Those that claim videos are superior over GIF's will never understand. The only benefit that a video tag has over a gif is a smaller file size. Animation's and meme's, cinimigraphics and simulations are more than simply video. How about for all other animated graphics? And file size is increasingly becoming less and less of a factor at all. (disclosure: I built [https://gif.com.ai](https://gif.com.ai))

<comment><USER12> >(disclosure: I built [https://gif.com.ai](https://gif.com.ai))

That site completely freezes when opened in Firefox. I can't even select it if I opened it with a middle click, and I need to right click on it and and select close tab to kill it. (Firefox 76.0.1 (64-bit), Windows 10)

<comment><USER9> In Firefox Nightly on Windows, my first visit to that site (with video autoplay disabled and uBlock Origin operating, but probably nothing else out of the ordinary) is just _utterly_ broken. Header mostly visible, but breaking apart as you scroll, and no content below the header ever visible.

<comment><USER11> I'll admit that It's not really that optimized for FireFox (at all) at the moment. It may be because of a browser trick it uses on Firefox to get the bookmarklets to resemble Chrome Extensions. I'll look into Firefox more now that it's relying less on the Chrome Extension and providing more import options browser side. Thanks for the report.

<comment><USER13> Works just fine on firefox on linux.

I even have the privacy settings set to strict, which usually breaks things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The ffmpeg command will default produce one that can only be decoded on Chrome. You should specify a codec supported by most browsers (`-c:v libx264`).

<comment><USER15> Thank you very much for posting that. I've been trying to figure out how to do that for a while.

<comment><USER16> I've also learned that -pix_fmt yuv420p is necessary, changes the colorspace from RGB to YUV

The full git gist (not mine): [https://gist.github.com/ingramchen/e2af352bf8b40bb88890fba4f...](https://gist.github.com/ingramchen/e2af352bf8b40bb88890fba4f47eccd0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not sure why he put this at the end:

> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft "G," > like "jif." That settles the never-ending debate for me.

Now all he's done is make 1/2 of the population immediately discount everything else he said, regardless of its merit.

<comment><USER18> >> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft "G," like "jif."

That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".

<comment><USER19> I've never understood that argument; why would an acronym need to preserve the exact sounds of the letters in the original words? I don't think it's very uncommon for them not to. "UNICEF" is not pronounced "yoo-ni-chef", "POTUS" is not pronounced "po-thuss", "OSHA" is not pronounced "oss-huh", etc.

<comment><USER20> As a Spaniard, that's _exactly_ how I would pronounce those acronyms. Time to learn a bit more about English :)

Funnily enough, in Spanish "gi" is pronounced "ji" as in "Girar" (pronounced Jirar), while "gui" is pronounced like "gi" and "güi" is pronounced "gu-i". But "GIF" in Spanish is still pronounced with a soft "g", contradicting the general rule.

Edit: wait Google Translate says those are pronounced that way? [https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&tl=es&text=UNICEF%2C%0APOTUS%2C%0AOSHA)

<comment><USER19> I've always heard the acronyms I listed as "yoo-nih-sef", "po-tuss", and "oash-a" (the first syllable like "ocean"). It would be genuinely surprising to me to find out that those were not the standard pronunciations, but I guess it's possible that I've been living in a bubble my whole life!

From the limited Spanish experience I have (a few years in middle school and high school), I was aware of the subtleties of how "g" is pronounced with relation to the following vowel, but I didn't know about how "GIF" was pronounced! It fits what I remember about loan words though; I think we had the word "hockey" as a vocab word once during a unit where we had all sports words, and we were taught that it was pronounced the same way as in English, which stuck out to me given that "ho" at the beginning of a word in Spanish would usually not have an "h" sound like in English. Of course, "ck" is basically never found in real Spanish words either; from what I recall, "k" isn't really used much at all besides in loan words!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would be happy if i got 2mb GIFs these days. You click on something that ends with gif or mp4 and you get half a megabyte of tracking javascript instead of the file you expected.

<comment><USER22> exactly. gif is a choice about the _limitations_ of what can happen. A gif will play and repeat with NO SOUND POSSIBLE.

<comment><USER23> Imagine a browser prompt for "This site would like to play audio" alá "This site would like to send you notifications"

Too bad that would break Youtube, so Chrome will never deliver it

<comment><USER24> That sounds awesome. Maybe not as a 'prompt' (those are awful, and don't scale), but some mechanism for requiring the user to confirm their intent to allow it.

Web browsers are the first real application sandbox that most people have experience with. It's a really good one. There's this rectangle on the screen, and there's a label at the top that says who delivered the content, and everything it can do happens inside that rectangle. Any way it wants to escape that box ought to require my approval.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One important thing that was not mentioned in the article: gifs automatically play and are not easily stopped. Videos have more knobs on the client side to tweak whether it plays or not. If I use a gif, I know with great certainty that unless all images on the client are blocked they are going to see my animated content. There are tons of extensions and browser features out there that attempt to stop that feature from videos.

<comment><USER9> 1\. Users have bandwidth limits. (And videos are big.)

2\. Users hate constant motion on the page. (And videos have constant motion.)

3\. So users stop videos from playing automatically.

4\. Publishers want the video to play, so they stop using a proper video format, and use the GIF format, which produces _even bigger_ files, and prevents users from stopping the motion.

Something's horribly broken here. I _really_ want browsers to let me treat GIFs as videos and block autoplay.

Typical usage of GIFs is flatly obnoxious.

<comment><USER25> Producers don't care, they want you to see their content if you go to their site.

<comment><USER26> If they're willing to abuse technology to ruin my day, I don't see why their opinion should have any weight.

<comment><USER25> You're missing the point. Why do you think you get a say in whether their opinion has any weight? As of right now their opinion of how it should work IS how it works until all of their wasteful bytes are rendering and animating in your face.

<comment><USER26> The point is, if they do shit like this they have outed themselves as hostile. I'll do what I can to either avoid them, or if I get tricked into experiencing their wasteful bytes, attempt to prevent them from doing so on my client end. They've done me, and the rest of the world, wrong. Therefore it's no longer productive to have a conversation with them about it and instead I'll apply technological and behavioural changes on my end to mitigate the damage rather than attempt to convince them to change their ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article compares a single img tag with a single gif src url to a video tag with 2 child nodes linking to 2 separate files encoded with 2 different ways, as mp4 and webm.

That's already more than 2x as much work to post an animated image, not to mention limited support for transparency and needing to pay some extra attention for seamless looping.

Video on the web needs to mature quite a bit more.

<comment><USER28> tsk tsk. it's not like someone is going to need to write all of that HTML. some user will be doing this with twitter/IM/FB/etc where some dev will have implemented a node library that will have some method call to do this for you. it's not like anybody cares what the automated HTML in the background looks like.

<comment><USER27> Yes, exactly. All that needs to be built still. I can't just copy and paste a video into my messenger app for instance, which I have been able to do with gifs for ages.

<comment><USER29> True but the story is posted at HN, and there is a good chance one of your messenger app's devs or designers is reading it and saying "maybe we should add that bit of code".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't right click / long tap and copy and paste a video into another app

<comment><USER31> That's really an application issue, but god damn is it an annoying one.

<comment><USER32> Gifs (and videos that people call gifs) wouldn't be what they are today if it weren't for their ease of copying/saving and pasting/uploading to somewhere else, which you could similarly call an application feature. So this application issue with video (as implemented in this article) is almost certainly what will stop gifs from being replaced.

<comment><USER33> But it's being done above the format level entirely.

Every browser that can decode video has a "Copy Video URL" context menu item. It's just that the websites hide it to discourage hotlinking

<comment><USER34> but the thing is, i want to copy the video itself

not copy the url, paste in a terminal for curl or wget to download it, then copy the video..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The OP calls out a thoughtfully-designed, open source, screen recording software, Kap. [0] Even though Kap does not have annotation tools, I think it compares well with software recently featured on the front page of HN. [1]

[0] [https://getkap.co](https://getkap.co)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22815227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22815227)

<comment><USER36> Zappy, an offline screen capture tool requires an online account to use. The CEO's answer is "we wanted to make it available quickly." not sure why that means I need an account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _Each image in a GIF is limited to a color pallete of 256 colors_

Don't let this fool you into thinking that you cannot render a true color image with GIF!

It's 256 colors PER FRAME, each of which allows for... dum-dum-dum... TRANSPARENCY. Do you see the potential or do you see the potential?

Get all your colors, split into 256 groups and then render all pixels of each group as a separate frame, leaving the rest transparent. Set delay to 0 and you will have a true color GIF in no time.

<comment><USER38> Set delay to zero and it will be treated as a tenth of a second. Browsers treat delays of '0' and '1' as mistakes. The fastest a gif will go is 50fps.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160318174811/http://www.humpy....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160318174811/http://www.humpy.demon.co.uk/da/gif_timing/)

In the old days it was even worse. Delays under 3 or 6 or 10 centiseconds were all unreliable in some browsers.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20151031034345/http://humpy77.de...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151031034345/http://humpy77.deviantart.com/journal/Frame- Delay-Times-for-Animated-GIFs-240992090)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Isn't this exactly what animated WebP [1] is supposed to address?

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Animation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Animation)

<comment><USER40> Yes, and would Apple please support WebP in Safari as the only remaining holdout? Before we all just boycott Safari and go ahead and use WebP anyways.

<comment><USER41> boycott iOS? good luck...

<comment><USER40> No, boycott Safari. Just like the successful IE boycott on Windows.

<comment><USER42> There is no other rendering engine on iOS. You can't "boycott Safari" on iOS in any meaningful way. WebKit is used by all browsers on iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> _Serving videos instead of GIFs is easy to do now with the HTML video element, which is supported almost universally_

I respectfully disagree.

 _Loading_ videos instead of GIFs is easy to do now.

 _Serving_ videos is a nightmarish mess of trying to match divergent, incompatible, sometimes patent-encumbered "standards" against an ever-changing range of browser support taking into account the hardware capabilities of a vast range of different devices and the corresponding rendering costs, decoding costs and bandwidth considerations based on incomplete and sometimes contradictory documentation from dozens of different sources that will be out of date by the time you've finished reading this paragraph.

One of these is not like the other, and that's why GIFs are still so prevalent.

<comment><USER44> VP8 in a WebM container is pretty much the lowest bar for most browser support, and comes with no licensing requirements. I'm not disagreeing with the comment about "nightmarish mess". It indeed is one, specially when it comes user-uploaded content.

<comment><USER45> Isn't it mp4? That is pretty universal and displays well in all platforms. Webm isn't that ubiquitous in support.

<comment><USER44> MPEG LA holids patents for mp2/mp4/hevc/h.264. I'm not sure what the licensing terms are, but they are not as liberal as VP8.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> In addition to what @junaru mentioned [0], about copying pasting GIFs, I would also add that I can send GIFs easy in emails and be assured it will be rendered in the email for the recipient. Unlike videos, people don't have to click multiple times to see them.

I've found this very convenient in sending small clips of screen recordings using ScreenToGif [1].

Of course, what would be really nice is if one could play / pause the GIF!

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23207292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23207292) [1]: [https://www.screentogif.com/](https://www.screentogif.com/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Can you embed video in email and have it play by default?

Can you drag and drop videos onto your desktop to save?

Can you upload videos anywhere that accepts an image?

Can you loop and make sure it always plays on a webpage?

If no, I'm not using video. No one gives a crap about your technical specs. Videos suck as a user interface.

<comment><USER48> Gifs suck as a user interface. It's not just the huge file size, they also

\- Must load entirely before playing (whereas video formats can load as they play)

\- Don't show any progress/buffering icon while they load, so it just looks like the page has frozen

\- Lack the ability to skip/scrub through the video (if I miss a part, now I have to wait the entire thing to loop)

\- Don't have audio

Actually, these aren't really issues for short gifs (<5 seconds). But long videos which have been converted into gifs are quite common.

<comment><USER49> > Actually, these aren't really issues for short gifs (<5 seconds). But long > videos which have been converted into gifs are quite common.

Anybody doing the latter is the problem, not really the format's fault it's being used improperly. Any GIF with more than XX frames (for me that's up to around 100 depending on content, but everyone is free to make their own decision) should be a video. GIF is meant to be for short animations, not for showing videos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> No thanks, my "This Site Under Construction" pixel art would look awful as a video. And last I checked, video didn't even support transparency!

<comment><USER51> Transparency is supported now.

[https://codepen.io/pbhj/pen/dyPzwEj](https://codepen.io/pbhj/pen/dyPzwEj)

<comment><USER52> Of course this won't work on iOS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Making small gifs is an art: Dithering, color quantization, sub frames that don't move, etc. However I must agree that for most content shared online, video is more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't know what Twitter does with the gifs but it freezes my old netbook when I try to play them. I can play videos from youtube but I can not play a gif on Twitter!

<comment><USER3> They convert it to video

<comment><USER27> Strongly rebuts the case of the article if truly the cause.

<comment><USER3> In case of twitter, there's an important difference in uploading video vs gif. Although a gif is converted to video, it will autoplay and loop without any user control available, just as it was a gif (sadly, you can't download/drag as a gif). If you upload as a video, if will behave like regular video

<comment><USER54> But It doesn't explain why I don't have the same problem playing videos on Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Auto play blocking in browsers could become an issue in future though - <USER2> will work, while videos will popup a permission dialog (I know muted video will work fine _now_, but who's to say that will last? There are certainly good reasons to block even muted auto playing video)

</comment><comment><USER56> [http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/](http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/) [https://kornel.ski/lossygif](https://kornel.ski/lossygif)

you can also just compress user uploaded gifs serverside. but the top commenter is right, gifs are great because of they're functionality and simplicity.

the better thing would be for the w3c and browsers vendors can get their act together (spoiler: they won't) and do things like make gif20, finish svg2, implement svgfonts, implement complete css3 specs, if you want to preserve functionality and usabilty of graphic assets on the web while reducing their bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER57> Perhaps we could create an RFC for GIF21?

The mistake people make in trying to replace GIF is doing too much, turning it into a wholesale replacement.

Take GIF89, add intra-frame compression, lossy mode for frames, and expanded colors. If you stuffed the new format frames end the end with index numbers old clients could play the sequence at a much lower framerate without too much of a hit to file size. But you accept some further bloat as a temporary measure to push adoption. In 10 years GIF libs can stop encoding the legacy frames by default.

Don't make the mistake of supporting multiple codecs or complicating the format in other ways. That just puts you in the position of APNG or other would-be replacements: mostly ignored.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm still very much in the camp that moving pictures are distinct from video, and am eagerly waiting for a good replacement animated picture format before I move my website over to it.

apng could have been nice, but never took off.

<comment><USER59> >apng could have been nice, but never took off.

There's nothing stopping people from using APNG. All major browsers have been supporting animated PNGs since 2017 (which was the year when Chrome finally added support for them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I had an issue serving videos on my site before and encounter a bug where Mobile Safari won't play the video if there's no `Accept-ranges: bytes` header.

The header is somehow removed when served from Cloudflare [https://community.cloudflare.com/t/mp4-wont-load-in- safari-u...](https://community.cloudflare.com/t/mp4-wont-load-in-safari-using- cloudflare/10587/25)

I had to create a page rule to exclude videos from being served from Cloudflare CDN.

<comment><USER52> I think they fixed this at some point, or at least, I have dealt with the same issue at various points and at the moment my videos work fine on iOS served through Cloudflare.

<comment><USER60> Oh wow you're right. I just tried disabling the page rule, load my site on Mobile Safari private mode, and it works!

Looks like `Accept-Ranges` is not there but there's `Content-Range`. Not sure how this works exactly but really glad this is fixed :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I mean I like GIFs, but when I'm checking specific subreddits or going over Imgur frontpage. Companies are using too many GIFs nowadays in their blogs.

<comment><USER62> I'd really rather not we go down the rabbit hole of "class"ifying websites by their method of serving animated clips. GIFs have trade-offs, but on balance they're the most useful for their purpose.

<comment><USER62> Can't edit, but if this seems non sequitur, parent originally said something along the lines of, "Websites that use GIFs seem to have low-quality content."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The .gif format is widely used due to the simplicity of implementing the specification.

Although the file size is relatively uncompressed, gif's can easily be decoded and rendered on basically any device.

Video formats which save 97% of space have much smarter compression algorithms, which are much harder to implement, which means less device support...less usage...

</comment><comment><USER64> the videos don't play in safari, also there is no way to play them for me. They need a click handler with play().

<comment><USER65> Videos play just fine for me in Safari on MacOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Firefox is working on making gifs respect user selected video autoplay setting and preventing to load whole file to save bandwidth: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1631598](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1631598)

</comment><comment><USER67> I think this is a better post on the subject, and offers more in depth solutions [https://cloudinary.com/blog/evolution_of_img_gif_without_the...](https://cloudinary.com/blog/evolution_of_img_gif_without_the_gif)

</comment><comment><USER68> In addition to the well made points of _client_ software treating videos in the same was as images, _server_ apps need to as well.

Currently there are lots of forums and other similar software that allow embedding of images (including gifs) but don't allow embedding videos.

</comment><comment><USER69> Animated WebP is the answer instead, and now it's supported everywhere [1] except Safari. Or animated AVIF in the future.

[1] [https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp](https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp)

</comment><comment><USER70> Videos are dramatically worse on mobile, especially if you want to save the GIF/image. As far as I can tell, it is impossible to save a video to an iOS device, while saving an animated GIF is easy.

</comment><comment><USER71> 4chan, 9gag, etc. already do this for years with great success.

<comment><USER52> 4chan is barely usable on iOS because none of the videos are supported by Safari

<comment><USER71> Yes, I read that the web story of iOS isn't that great. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Serve videos as videos. Photo data compresses better with Jpeg. But gifs are still a better option for animated illustrated graphics.

<comment><USER21> Why is JPEG the de facto lossy compression format for photos? It always bugs me that video formats get something new every 5 or so years yet photos are in JPEGs for decades.

<comment><USER73> iOS has been slowly making HEIF more common. It's just that it takes a long time for the entire tooling chain to support it.

<comment><USER50> HEIF is patent-encumbered and a non-starter.

<comment><USER49> HEIF is a container format and isn't generally considered "patent-encumbered". HEVC (which is one of several image formats supported inside HEIF) is probably what you're referring too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Maybe if every second application wasn't a skinned Chrome browser we'd have 2MB to spare for a GIF.

</comment><comment><USER75> " A single GIF can be larger than a typical website (over 2 MB)."

Not larger than today's websites, that's for sure.

</comment><comment><USER76> Any replacement for Kap on Windows? I use ScreenToGif, but maybe there's a better option.

</comment><comment><USER77> If videos looped seamlessly I'd happily serve videos. Sadly, they do not.

<comment><USER78> They can, and they do. This article shows you an example at the end. What's the issue?

<comment><USER3> tried to drag and drop and didn't work. Also, if I save to share later, it's not going to work, and I would need to do the same things the author did to make it work. It's not guaranteed that it will work properly (with auto loop) everywhere. And if you consider browsers/extensions might block auto-playing videos in the future...

gif just works. Drag and drop anywhere, any browser, any app, and it works. (Ok, almost anywhere, but still way more accepted than video).

<comment><USER78> Video as a file usually works, it's the presentation/player part that is entirely dependent on whatever application and OS you're using to view it. Most messaging apps now support video pretty easily so there's some progress being made.

<comment><USER3> They support video, but, acting as an image?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Nothing is more infuriating than saving a 'gif' that instead gives me some obscure format none of my programs besides the browser can use. Only serve video if it's in a format as ubiquitous as Gifs.

</comment><comment><USER80> Gifiot: A person who makes animated gifs from videos.

</comment><comment><USER81> No. Not everything is about increasing in efficiency. GIFs are a throwback to the charm and chaos of the early days of the web, and I hope they stay part of the fabric of it long into the future.</comment>


A new self-driving monorail will chop 2-hour commutes down to 10 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/ <comment><USER2> Monorail!! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSoa1b-yBUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSoa1b-yBUY)</comment>


Here's The Only Way To Get Really, Really Rich - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-only-way-to-get-really-rich-2014-4

<comment><USER2> It might be true in America that the downside for employees is unlimited but in France it's not the case : there's a lot of benefits to be had if you loose your job.

It's not the case for entrepreneurs unless they subscribe some really expensive insurances (which you can't afford when you're starting a company).

I still agree on the global point he's making but let's not kid ourselves : we still need more Indians than chiefs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I completely agree with the article</comment>


Amazon Confirms Plans for Store Under New Grocery Brand - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-11/amazon-confirms-plans-for-store-under-new-grocery-brand <comment><USER2> My bet is this will be very similar to Walmart Neighborhood Market. About the size of a drug store, will stock grocery essentials, and will have lower prices than traditional grocery stores (Safeway/VONS, Ralphs, Albertsons, QFC, etc.)

A store like this might allow them to more cost effectively fulfill small items (deodorant, a pack of pens, batteries, aspirin, candy bars, etc.) by shipping from the store to your home.

<comment><USER3> The big innovation of 7/11 Japan that launched the convenience store craze in Japan was keeping as much stock as possible in lots of retail outlets and ready at point of sale instead of in warehouses.

<comment><USER4> for what it's worth I think a lot of the convenience store craze in Japan _also_ comes from Japanese cities being very dense and heavily walked. Most of the states lives in a sparsely built suburban environment, using cars for most or all transportation, making it very easy and often preferable to hit up the nearest big box.

In Japan you're almost guaranteed a konbini between you and your destination, and this makes it easy and pleasant to dip in for a snack, breakfast while walking to the train, etc. This is only economically feasible in a dense environment with a LOT of nearby shoppers, particularly considering land costs in Tokyo.

(I saw a good article at some point how a lot of small-town and rural convenience stores in japan _aren 't_ economically feasible and they struggle to keep the lights on as corporate demands unreasonable amenities like being open 24/7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's what we know:

* Will open in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, 2008 median household income was USD 93,720 [1]. I don't expect a discount-type store.

* The Wall Street Journal says they're working on more stores, but this is the only one that Amazon has confirmed. Personally, I see this as more of an experiment at this point, even if a few more store open with this format.

* Amazon is obsessed with the last-mile(s), in particular on same-day delivery. (Witness their last earnings report.) I'd look at this store as a test-bed for last-mile/same-day... Perhaps they'll double or triple the size of the Amazon Fresh areas over what we see now in Whole Foods, for example.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodland_Hills,_Los_Angeles#Po...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodland_Hills,_Los_Angeles#Population)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is one of their requirements for Grocery Associate

"You are comfortable working in a physical environment. You have the ability to lift up to 49 pounds and be on your feet for a shift, up to 10 hours at a time with or without reasonable accommodation"

They sure don't sugar coat it.

"We are hiring for full-time, part-time, and flex-time positions. Pay starts at $15.35 per hour with benefits available."

At least they have benefits.

<comment><USER7> $15/hr with benefits (before any raises/promotions) across 2 people is higher than the median household income in Broward County, Florida.

[https://embed.datausa.io/profile/geo/broward-county- fl/](https://embed.datausa.io/profile/geo/broward-county-fl/)

<comment><USER8> This store is in LA, not Broward County, Florida.

<comment><USER9> I guess they could commute from there and take advantage of high wages in LA and low cost of living in Florida.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope it's doesn't copy "Amazon Basics". Cus that stuff is worse than no frills brands. It's okay for things where you have to actively sabotage something to make it poorly like wire shelves or something, but anything where cheapness shows up it's like a cheap suit from J.C. Penney's. <<shudder>>

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, buying toilet paper at whole foods sucks.

(maybe that will change - post amazon, I noticed whole foods selling cheerios)

<comment><USER10> Are they carrying proper OTC medicines now? I don't even bother looking because it's mostly herbal and pseudo medicines. I just want some freaking cold medcine but noooo it's gotta be "natural".

<comment><USER12> The one near us has ibuprofen now, and they don't look at you like you're killing the planet for asking for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> duncan-donuts This should be interesting. I'm sure they learned some things from the Whole Foods acquisition that should allow them to be competitive with Walmart and friends. Has amazon ever done well with any sort of B&M?

</comment><comment><USER13> Nothing's going to be left of retail except pet foods, Michael's and services like haircuts clinics.

</comment><comment><USER14> coolo

</comment><comment><USER15> My only question is will these damn stores be out in the open with cameras recording everyone that walks by or will they be inside four walls?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most mind blowing video demo of a recent ML breakthrough? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Maybe this?: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfhxy2w3Qi4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfhxy2w3Qi4)

Using a gram matrix across several layers to hold the style, and more conventional activation optimization for the content. Trained on VGG. It combines the two loss functions of style and content to optimise noise towards a output image. The amazing thing is being able to mathematically separate content from style; in a similar fashion to how the brain can perform this task. See: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576](https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576)

Fwiw, I'm part of a group trying a similar thing on very deep residual net's with recurrent net's to improve upon the temporal sweeps.</comment>


First tax year with Stripe Atlas - <AUTHOR> https://tryhexadecimal.com/journal/business-taxes <comment><USER2> Thanks for providing this insight. I am looking at a C Corp from Stripe instead of the LLC because I think the business will grow in the next two years. I started looking at other online incorporation services and stumbled across a few that seemed like they were unable to scale to meet demands, I know because of the reviews on BBB and saw some complaints (they were state based). I think this is definitely an area I want to spend money on so I'm not wasting time on legal and tax issues. Are you getting E&O insurance through Stripe (or a referral) or did you add that elsewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I am looking at a C Corp from Stripe instead of the LLC because I think the > business will grow in the next two years.

[https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/llc-vs-c- corp](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/llc-vs-c-corp)

I'd say go with a C Corp if you know you're on the investment track. You can convert from an LLC to a C Corp later. The reverse is harder.

Usual disclaimers apply.

> Are you getting E&O insurance through Stripe (or a referral) or did you add > that elsewhere?

Haven't gotten one, so can't speak to that.</comment></comment>


Why you should totally switch to Kotlin - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/why-you-should-totally-switch-to-kotlin-c7bbde9e10d5 <comment><USER2> I don't like when somebody tells me that I _should_ do something, especially with _so weak arguments_ (almost all of them in the article were superficialities about syntax). Not to mention that JVM as a runtime virtually disqualifies the language from use in my environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like I know what my day tomorrow is gonna be :)

playing around with kotlin and spark [http://sparkjava.com/tutorials/kotlin](http://sparkjava.com/tutorials/kotlin)</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any good programming books to listen to? - <AUTHOR> I'm a fairly basic programmer, so looking for conceptual CS ideas that would help me better understand the web/computers.<p>Are there any good titles that don't need me to read code so I can listen to them on audible? <comment><USER2> When I think of a basic programming book, I think of references to a certain language or tool. If that is what you are looking for, then I wouldn't suggest reading or listening to a programming book without a computer open. If you have a certain understanding of the big picture, then there are some really good seminars out there. I love the "Uncle Bob" lectures on Youtube.</comment>


Coderise: Teaching kids how to code in developing nations - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/coderise

<comment><USER2> Looks cool. Hope it works.</comment>


Men are showing up to the Wing and women are pissed - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2019/12/17/men-are-showing-up-to-the-wing-and-women-are-pissed/ <comment><USER2> > The San Francisco location, numerous members tell The Post, "is really bad — > like, filled with tech bros."

Hilarious!

</comment><comment><USER3> "I think they're just losers," she says of the male plus-ones. "Or cucked boyfriends. It's a legal fluke."

I would find the blinding ignorance of hypocrisy amusing if it weren't so sad.</comment>


Google Is Recording Everything You Say. How to Hear and Delete the Recordings - <AUTHOR> https://www.davidwolfe.com/google-recording-you/ <comment><USER2> 1984 mode: They store it forever and now have databases of peoples voices, when used with AI could generate entire speeches.

<comment><AUTHOR> Caveat emptor</comment></comment>


New Analysis Details 'Aggressive' Tax Dodging of Silicon Valley Giants - <AUTHOR> https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/02/new-analysis-details-aggressive-tax-dodging-six-silicon-valley-giants-totaling-over <comment><USER2> Sorry for being pendantic, but

       s/Silicon Valley/Tech/</comment>


Show HN: Hosted CMS, created instantly from your HTML markup - <AUTHOR> http://900dpi.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting approach adding the editable flags in the markup. Seems like a great way to lock down portions of the page for editing.

Looking forward to trying it out!</comment>


Testing The Reverberations Of ECHO Commenting - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/07/31/testing-the-reverberations-of-echo-commenting-on-techcrunch/ <comment><USER2> I admire the fact that people are looking at the problem of decentralized conversations on the web but I don't think this is the solution to it.

First, community has a legitimate purpose. I come to Hacker News because I find the people here are, on average, more likely to produce a thoughtful comments (and thoughtfully respond to my comments) than on other sites. So a solution that mixes all those results with the content from other sources seems counterproductive.

Second, real time has very little legitimate purpose (in this context). If you're watching a news story than there might be some value to real time but in responding to articles on the web you're much better off without it. Because it creates noise and the last thing you want is to drown out the really great comments with noise.

In the end this is a solution that didn't look at the actual problem. The actual problem is getting THE QUALITY comments from around the web and putting them in one place. This solution chooses to pick "real time" over quality and that leaves me with little interest in it.

<comment><USER3> I agree, looking at the thread it's simply a ton of noise. Given so many comment systems have voting mechanisms associated with each comment, I wonder if it could instead be pulling comments that are already deemed "worthy" by the respective communities they've been made in, say all comments receiving at least 5 points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like attempts to publicly aggregate stuff will just result in more clutter. Like TomOfTTB, I come to Hacker News for Hacker News.

I'm not smart enough to think up a good solution, but I think that having the aggregation on the client side (IE I can choose to aggregate for myself, but others only see site-specific conversation) is better than clogging _everyone's_ comments with noise.

</comment><comment><USER5> Had a look at the comments from the article and it looks like the ECHO guys have a lot of room for improvement. Nice idea though, at least in principle. I hope they manage to do a good implementation and sort out the problems.</comment>