Ask HN: User research platform looking for feedback from UX Researchers and PMs - <AUTHOR> Qualitative (https://qualitative.io/) is a user research platform that makes it super easy to invite, schedule, and conduct user research sessions.
Highlights:
- Self-service to send email invitations to research participants
- Calendar events with video conferencing and dial-in are created as you schedule participants
- Sending incentives to participants anywhere in the world is as easy as clicking a button
No cool video yet, but there's a useful diagram of what Qualitative does on the homepage.
Hope you have fun trying it out and giving us feedback! Any and all thoughts are immensely valuable at this point. <comment><USER2> nice. for me the real challenge is organizing what I learned from each user interviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! What about organizing is challenging for you?

1) Thinking through interviews and arriving at insights

2) Tying together insights into a cohesive set of conclusions

3) Keeping insights organized over time and sharing them</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Way to make blog service at www.mydomain.com/blog vs blog.mydomain.com? - <AUTHOR>

I've been looking for a Rails-powered drop in blog for domains so that I can have www.mydomain.com/blog instead of blog.mydomain.com. As I understand it, Google's PageRank algorithm assigns PageRank scores to each subdomain separately. Thus great blog posts on blog.mydomain.com will improve the PageRank score of blog.mydomain.com separate from the PageRank score of www.mydomain.com. For example, according to http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php, blog.twilio.com has a PR of 5 while www.twilio.com has a PR of 6. blog.shopify.com has a PR of 6 while www.shopify.com has a PR of 7. My naive guess is that if all the links to blog.shopify.com instead pointed to www.shopify.com/blog/... then the PR for www.shopify.com would be even higher.
Can anyone recommend a rails plugin that will add standard blog functionality (posts, comments, tags, feeds, etc.) into existing rails apps? Or is there some way to 'symlink' (not the right word but a proxy for the idea) the www.mydomain.com/blog/... to use posterous, wordpress, tumblr, etc. underneath?
Lastly, I'd like to avoid rolling my own. I created a simple posts controller in a pinch for a site I started on Thursday (www.formds.com) which was great in allowing links to my main site, but I'd really like to avoid recreating the wheel. It looks bad and is time I'd rather spend elsewhere. I'd _love_ a symlink'd tumblr/posterous/wordpress running under my domain.
Thanks for thoughts,
Robert <comment><USER2> a) You're right to want to do this.

b) This is not difficult to accomplish via Nginx (or whatever) using reverse- proxying.

<http://www.pastie.org/1071380>

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/22/using-wordpress-and- rail...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/22/using-wordpress-and-rails-on-the- same-domain/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Patrick. Your suggestion is perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have the exact setup for Marrily.com: <http://marrily.com/blog>. The main site runs Rails 3RC, and any requests begin with /blog will get proxied over to the WordPress site running locally.

Basically I have Apache running on port 81 locally, and I setup the WordPress to a "blog" folder underneath the DocumentRoot.

Then within the server { } configure block in nginx, I have

server { # your server settings, like "listen 80;"

      location /blog {
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        #add_header X-Marrily-DEBUG "$Host";    # turn this on to test the header
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:81;
      }

}

You will have to update the WordPress config to tell that it's installed in a sub folder and not at the root. It took me a while to figure out (all other articles online will tell you to update the wp-config.php file to define the different constants, but it's not the right spot for WordPress 3). You'd have to update the wp_options table as well to fix the path. Here's a screenshot: <http://cl.ly/468cab133aca48eea173>

Good luck!

(this post should go to StackOverflow, but since I just went through the exact same experience, I thought I'd share it)

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you sure your motivation is correct, WRT pagerank?

I'd always thought that PR applies to your PAGES only. not domains. So, in your example, it's not that blog.twilio.com has a higher PR than www.twilio.com, it's that the blog.twilio.com INDEX page has a higher PR than the www INDEX page.

Thus, your PR isn't really affected by being on a subdomain, as the juice that flows through the system doesn't care about the sub/domain, only about the page and what points to it.

Please correct me as needed.

</comment><comment><USER5> just note that you can't nicely reverse proxy 3rd-party blogs (tumblr, posterous, hosted wordpress) if they aren't using relative links (which they probably aren't); and even if they are your server will still be bearing the bandwidth load and increasing the page latency, of which the former is undesirable and the latter could reduce your pagerank.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're using Apache, then it should be easy to do with a rewrite rule, or proxy pass.</comment>


For Some, a Recovery from Covid Brings a Greater Sense of Safety - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-some-a-recovery-from-covid-brings-a-greater-sense-of-safety-11596462443 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/rqQnD](https://archive.vn/rqQnD)</comment>


Introduction to liquid organizations - <AUTHOR> http://thinkship.cc/en/introduction-to-liquid-organizations/

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. If you have ideas, proposals or simply criticism, feel free to share it. I will love to discuss about liqorgs proposal.

I hope this will help to unleash the true power of organizations without being hierarchical.</comment>


The Symbolism Survey (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/ <comment><USER2> _, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren't lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery._

 _I recently spoke with Bruce McAllister by phone about his recollections of his literature survey. There is a pleasing symmetry in the fact that the one- time student seeking knowledge has devoted most of his career to teaching. McAllister, [...] —taught literature and writing at the University of Redlands in southern California for nearly twenty-five years._

It's unfortunate the journalist didn't use the opportunity with McAllister to see if still he still disagrees with the "The Death of the Author"[1] and continues to prioritize the "author intent"[2]

(A reader who sides with "The Death of the Author" might find the writers' survey answers to be interesting, but not authoritative.)

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

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent)</comment>


Pinteresting way to surf youtube... - <AUTHOR>

What if pinterest and youtube met and had a trademark violating baby? Built it in 4 hours. Check out http://www.pintube.tv/ <comment><USER2> pretty cool stuff

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :)</comment></comment>


Call Me Maybe: Percona XtraDB Cluster - <AUTHOR> https://aphyr.com/posts/328-call-me-maybe-percona-xtradb-cluster <comment><USER2> For those who want the backstory-

Discussion of Aphyr's MariaDB Galera Cluster post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171942)

Discussion of Percona's response to it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238690)

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent as usual. One question though. When refuting the rebuttal's claim:

>Moreover, if we test the same workload on a simple single instance InnoDB, we will get the same result.

He simply states that he tested it and it didn't happen, so it must be OK. But later on says the x=x+y form perhaps only accidentally works as "I suspect that this only passes because the window of concurrency for the read/write cycle is very short".

Why wouldn't this be true of the single-node scenario? Certainly things are faster on a single node, so unless Jepsen is pre-empting and delaying each thread-instruction combination, a test passing certainly isn't proof of it actually being OK, right? It's possible that the same workload on a heavily overloaded instance, might, somehow, exhibit the same behaviour, eh? I understand that the next sentence goes on to attribute it to a likely problems with Galera's locks. But the test alone shouldn't be conclusive evidence. Not trying to be pedantic or discuss what "proof" means just curious as to if I missed something.

</comment><comment><USER4> Concerning his claims about CAP and that their cluster is neither C nor A, because of P, while Percona claims it is CA,

some days ago a paper was linked here

"A Critique of the CAP Theorem" \- [http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393](http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393)

which I found very englighting about the P in CAP.

<comment><USER5> I think this article from 2012 by Brewer himself is a good read too - a bit shorter and somewhat more comprehensible: [http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap- twelve-years-later-how-the...](http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years- later-how-the-rules-have-changed)

There's a bunch of other articles listed on the wikipedia CAP page [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem)], for example the post by Abadi is worth reading.

The #1 issue is that the "2 out of 3" formulation is utterly misleading, as it sounds as if all the three options are feature of the distributed system. In reality, people don't control "P" \- it's a feature of the network. You may be very careful about designing and operating your network, but one day a partition will happen. So "CA" systems are nonsense.

The other problem is that while CAP uses the same basic terms as ACID, the meaning of those terms is entirely different. This makes discussions about the CAP vs. ACID stuff pretty much impossible, because each group thinks Consistency or Availability means the same thing in both worlds. So RDBMS people will shout "We have availability, just like you!" and NoSQL people will shout "We have consistency, just like you!" Madness ...

<comment><USER6> Re: AVID vs CAP.

You're right about the C(onsistency) bit, but the A in ACID stands for Atomic, not Available.

<comment><USER5> Good point, but I wasn't implying that the "A" in ACID stands for Availability (sorry if that was unclear), but that what people dealing with traditional systems (build on ACID) mean when they speak about "Availability".

For example it may mean a master-slave system with an automatic failover, which is rather different from what Availability means in CAP.

<comment><USER6> Oh, sorry. The phrasing led me to believe that's what you were saying.

As you were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And another one bites the dust. Talked to a Couchbase guy last week, apparently a Jepsen test in is the works - I'm looking forward to it!

</comment><comment><USER8> I had high hopes in Percona guys with the terrific job they are doing in the MySql space. In our experience, Percona server is working great in production and percona toolkit is a life saver for us.

My very personal takeaway from all these aphyr tests: Distributed systems are hard. Out of the box, very few work properly and probably none of them will work as expected because of a faulty deployment. Think twice before deploying one and consider other ways to scale your system.

In our case, we are going with the memcached approach: client-side sharding with some kind of replication in the backend (mysql master-slave, drdb, etc). Far easier to deploy and, what is more important, far easier to recover when something goes wrong.</comment>


Sloppy Reporting on the Self Driving Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/read-this-not-that-the-self-driving-car

<comment><USER2> I really like the ideas behind this "infoveganism", but lord do I hate the name. I think the author chose it because in his mind veganism has to do with health. Nothing wrong with that association (i don't think there's anything wrong with veganism, either), but in most people's minds veganism = restrictions mixed with a sense of superiority. And the thing is, there's nothing about demanding that actual content be present in your media that places a restriction on what content enters your brain. As the author points out, the content you are presently getting is what's restricted by virtue of being so barren of fact.

So if you were to stick with the food metaphor (not that I think that's a good idea), veganism doesn't real work. It's more like adding 13 essential vitamins and minerals to your otherwise toxic fruity pebbles.

<comment><USER3> That does indeed seem to be the sense in which infoveganism is meant: You consume information according to a strict set of ethical standards (which you feel is superior) rather than what is most pleasant or convenient. Just like with veganism, it is mostly defined by what you choose not to consume, but it is also important to replace the "bad" things you discard with enough good things. It isn't just about "actual content being present in your media" any more than veganism is about veggies being present in your meals. It's about only taking in good content and eschewing content which (by the philosophy's standards) is bad.

When I first heard it, I didn't like it because I thought it was based on the popular conception that vegans practically starve themselves. But having read more about it, I think the concepts are indeed similar.

<comment><USER4> Vegans consume food according to what is pleasant within their ethical standards. Yes they refuse more food due to ethical boundaries, but that doesn't mean they've fundamentally changed how they consume food.

Meat-eaters for example mostly refuse to eat _human_ meat, but choose to eat any other kind of meat that is pleasant--cannibalism excluded.

This standard is strict as well, there isn't any leniency allowed for cannibalism in the common day.

<comment><USER3> I think you're using a different definition of "pleasant" than I was. The idea of something being ethically pleasant is odd to me. I basically meant "tasty." Some vegans find, say, fried chicken to be quite tasty, but they refrain from eating it nonetheless. The same cannot be said of human flesh for most people.

As for the suggestion that vegans are no more dedicated to their diet than anyone who does not eat human meat, I find that frankly bizarre. Refraining from cannibalism in a society where cannibalism is illegal is _extremely different_ from avoiding all animal products in a society where animal products are nearly ubiquitous. People who don't eat other people are essentially going with the flow. (This is not to say that they would be cannibals in a different situation, just that few are even presented with the choice, and choice is an important distinction here.)

<comment><USER5> Most Americans eschew insects, dogs, and cats. That seems like a better analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a great article detailing a manifestation of several problems:

\- "News" as entertainment. The primary purpose of many articles isn't to inform, but to entertain. Or otherwise provide utility other than a deep, informed, and/or unbiased/NPoV perspective.

\- "News" as marketing. This is so prevalent in tech (and has been for decades) it's passed from "not funny" to trope. Company launches (itself, product), hires PR team, shops story to various media outlets, breathless hagiography ensues. The real market is usually 1) investors and 2) market shaping (for consumer products), though influencing legislative and regulatory environments (as in the Google car story) may also be a goal.

\- "News" as linkbait / attention generator. Though we think of this as a modern phenomenon, and Web-based concepts of eyeballs and social networking don't help, it's also old as dirt. So you get crap like PC World, Engadget, and even the New York Times with recursive, internal references, and _lacking_ (as Clay Johnson points out) the truly useful references to original sources. HN is a great antidote to this -- the "Ron was wrong, Whit is right" direct link (and discussion of) PKI RNG weaknesses.

And yet ... to a large approximation of "it works", it works -- as a business plan, these are fairly successful market strategies.

Hard information markets are hard.

<comment><USER7> They are only hard to support from advertising.

For any service which requires payment for access to the information, said information tends to be hard. Blomberg news and the Wallstreet Journal, are examples for this in terms of financial news.

<comment><USER6> WSJ is largely a mouthpiece / propaganda arm of Fox and the Murdoch empire these days. Some would say it's always had a strong bias toward, shock, surprise, Wall Street interests. There's a great quote somewhere by Warren Buffet if you can find it about the WSJ's editorial staff believing its own writing.

There are a number of information venues that are member/subscriber based, and which do relatively well: NPR, Mother Jones, the Christian Science Monitor, Consumer's Union. The Economist Newspaper (as it styles itself) has a rather interesting revenue model, roughly one-third each subscriptions, ads, and EIU. The last is the Economist Intelligence Unit, a bespoke research arm, though I suspect much of its work ends up in the public edition at least in the form of background and depth.

There's a great deal which could be written on markets and funding streams for information goods -- not just news, but arts, invention, data, and other works. Over the past several millenia, we've seen patronage, sponsorship, performance, publication, subscription, advertising (both direct and sponsorship), data mining, music sales (sheet, player roll, analogue recording, digital downloads), mechanical royalties, and other methods. Each has a profound influence on the nature, quality, and form of work produced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This obsession with self-promoting links is what makes reading sites like BoyGeniusReport and _everything_ in the Engadget family so frustrating.

Editorial rules seem to be that any in-story link MUST be a self-reference to some keyword match inside the site and the only external link (singular) allowed is the one at the end of the article using text like "Source" or "via XYZ.com".

<comment><USER9> God I hate this on About.com. They're almost always the first result when I search for something, and every link on their page goes to another About.com page. And none of them have the information I'm searching for. I've added them (along with all of gawker media) to my hosts file.

<comment><USER10> One of the neater features I've seen Google implement is that if you click a link and then hit back within a short period, a little link shows up next to that search result that says "hide everything from about.com?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a quick thought, but what we could do is the following: Have a wiki-like site, where the community update source information about news items. On the items pages, they also make links to news articles on the web. Along with this there is an analysis tool, so if you see an article on a news site somewhere, you pass the URL to this site, and it will point you to the relevant wiki page based on the URLs that are set on the wiki page or by guessing the best one for you based on content and similarity to other news reports.

<comment><USER6> You mean, like, say, WikiNews?

Specifically: citing your references: [http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Style_guide#Citing_your...](http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Style_guide#Citing_your_references)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I so wish so called 'journalists' would take this to heart.

Although sometimes they would 'harsh the buzz' as it were. I recall a series that ABC news did on unemployment and they profiled a gal who, in their story, seemed like a sad case of working hard and not getting anywhere. Unfortunately for them there was enough PII in the story that one could do a bit of Googling and figure out who this person was, only to find they were a convicted felon (drug possesion with intent to sell), in and out of rehab, and recently 'laid off' when their Nova job term timed out and the employer elected not to hire full time. That is also a sad story but it would not have 'worked' for what the news producer was going for 'Regular folks, working hard, and unable to find work.'

I agree its quite different to omit facts to make your story more credible, buts another form of this 'info-veganism' which. Generally I've been happy with the Economist (they seem less tempted by this sort of thing than others) and it suggests that there is once again an opportunity to create a news organization. (If you are old enough to remember, Fox News was created on the back of the first Iraq War with the tagline 'we report, you decide' trying to take the editorial spin out of reporting which was so evident in CNN's coverage, of course once it was a going concern that changed.) I believe there is a really disruptive opportunity here which I'm happy to share if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER13> Yeah! What's the disruptive opportunity?

<comment><USER12> So the opportunity is to create a video news network based on a streaming / store model rather than the 24hr model. Lets say you put together such a network, as you cover stories you put them up on your server. Your customers click 'the news' and they get a newscast of all the current news, but once they've seen a story they don't see it again unless there is actually additional information.

Things like sports highlights, weather, and finance have a regular 30 minute update cycle. So push the button and you can watch a 'show' which is probably 30 - 40 minutes long of the current news. If you watched the news this morning and its a slow news day the icon indicates no new updates.

You click news you are interested in and it tailors your broadcast to you're interest. Don't care about entertainment? not there. Don't want to hear about the latest hijinks on the debate circuit, not there. Interested in updates on NASA's budget? there.

You can surface potential stories of interest in the 'crawl', click/press it and that story gets added to your newscast.

Same basic organization as any other news organization, but the transmission is network based.

News transition Nightly -> Morning + Noon + Night -> 24hr

Differentiation Liberal leaning / Conservative / more local / less local / more weather / more sports / etc.

Monetization - advertising.

Disruption - remove transmission costs, pull cable networks out of the middle, move to NetFlix/AmazonPrime/Hulu with a higher revenue share. Product hook is "like a Tivo that watches the 24hr news channel and only records the new/interesting/current bits." Value add - saves time for you, no need to wait around for the top story to repeat, press go and its there. Partnership opportunities with business hotels for additional monetization revenue (they pay for your feed (probably generic version, not customized) and insert hotel specific ads into the video (rev share). The customer value proposition is news now, no repeats.

When it happens it will disrupt the crap out of Fox/Cnn and will add a missing service to the NetFlix/Roku/Amazon/Hulu's of the world.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a good idea. It'd be a lot cheaper to do in text (and wouldn't require any technology that didn't exist in 2000); has anyone done it? If not, why not? If so, what happened? Does making it video greatly change the value proposition?

<comment><USER12> The infrastructure cost of it is a barrier. One has to understand the 'news' is "the highest value video production out there next to porn" [1], you take a producer, a camera person, and a talking head, and you record what you see.

And to the text only question, efforts using text have not been successful, people seem to prefer to consume it as video or audio when doing something else. The goal is to disrupt Fox, not the Chronicle, you need to do it in a way that the average person has very little friction between wanting to know 'what's happening' and getting the news. They have been voting 'video' by their consumption habits to date.

Most of the efforts I've seen that have started along here have chickened out when it came to being _the network_ vs being a repackager. They spend a weekend writing a server that repackages the AP feed and maybe reads it aloud. But the editorial voice is pretty important for this endeavor. You really do need to be the news organization.

The other barrier is that the 'value chain', which is to say the way in which news is monetized is very well understood and so you cannot succeed by being another 'channel' to get to the same stuff someone else has, if you are successful they cut you off from the content. Or if you leverage someone else's network they cut you off from the bandwidth. So you either have to 'go big' here, or not go at all. That means a studio for putting the final product together, a mobile reporting force which can get to places, and partnerships in place for places where you cannot afford to get to yet.

The change which has been occuring which will make this possible today when it wasn't possible before is that enough consumers have the requisite network bandwidth to their home or office to support it, and they are likely to have a device which can stream it (Roku, PS3, Samsung 'smart' TV, etc). The sweet spot of this market is the 22 - 42 year olds who want a better news experience than they are getting and have high comfort with technological solutions. As a 'network' you also already have a business model that can slot you into a relationship with folks like Comcast, DirectTV, or Time Warner. Partner with them and their 'smart set top' on a rev share basis and you give added value add for their customers, and pricing leverage against those networks you are disrupting.

[1] This was a quote from the guy who was the GM or EVP of the KRON TV news group at a talk he gave back in the 90's in Palo Alto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Two people are required to be present in an autonomous vehicle, both holding > a valid driver's license.

Why?

<comment><USER15> It's a pilot program for legalizing on road research projects. Presumably, someone felt that two people paying attention to the autonomous actions was better than one.

<comment><USER16> One paying attention to the research and one paying attention to the traffic situation sounds like the right division of labor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A million dollar bond from the state seems kind of excessive

<comment><USER18> A pile-up could easily cause a million dollars worth of damage. A measure that makes sure that the responsible businesses are serious about safety doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.

<comment><USER17> I guess it makes sense when only large businesses are the ones to own these automobiles. It puts individual ownership out of reach.

<comment><USER19> Well its not about individual ownership its about businesses testing commercial self driving cars right?

Seems to me that a company is going to need to sink many millions in to design, build, and test a truly road safe self driving car no? Even considering it as a hardware and software mod to an existing model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't like the fact that comments require connecting to facebook. Which might explain the lack of comments on the page.</comment>


Will Recommmender Systems Ever be Useful? - <AUTHOR> http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/07/tom-slee-on-dis.html

<comment><USER2> Why do people copy other people's blog postings into their blogs?</comment>


Quick, Draw - <AUTHOR> https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/ <comment><USER3> This is the best "visualization" / "explanation" of the possibilities and limits of AI that I've seen.

I can show this to someone and say:

1\. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what it thinks a feather looks like.

2\. The software can't recognize a feather if it's never seen a feather like that. It's not a sentient being.

This is good, because most examples focus on point #1 and -- if enough marketing is involved -- don't go enough into point #2.

People read news articles like "X can recognize cats in a picture with Y certainty!" and are quick to assume that this "AI" can make sense of a picture and understand it, when all it does is apply certain methods for a certain use case.

This does a much better job by letting people write (or draw) their own test cases and figure out the limits intuitively.

<comment><USER4> > 1\. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to > what it thinks a feather looks like.

I was prompted to draw a hurricane. I drew something that looked like the typical hurricane doodle used on news reports.

The software didn't recognize it.

When the game was over and I was able to look at all of the doodles that were used to train the software to recognize a hurricane ... the majority of them instead looked like tornadoes!

So maybe we should more precisely say:

1\. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what the humans who contributed its training set think a feather looks like.

<comment><USER5> I was asked to draw: brush I drew a hair brush. It was trained to see brush as a bunch of circles or trees.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure that wasn't "bush"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just reminding Google that snakes can eat elephants so please stop confusing them with hats:

[http://imgur.com/lBtGUKr](http://imgur.com/lBtGUKr)

<comment><USER8> Adult neural networks cannot understand that.

<comment><USER9> I don't know how it sounds exactly for a native English speaker, but saying "adult neural networks" seems to give the intelligence trait to some piece of software.

Times are changing...

<comment><USER10> You're missing a cultural reference. [http://www.thelittleprince.com/work/the- story/](http://www.thelittleprince.com/work/the-story/)

<comment><USER11> Chapter 1 of The Little Prince from Wikipedia:

> The narrator explains that, as a young boy, he once drew a picture of a boa > constrictor digesting an elephant in its stomach; however, every adult who > saw the picture would mistakenly interpret it as a drawing of a hat. > Whenever the narrator would try to correct this confusion, he was ultimately > advised to set aside drawing and take up a more practical or mature hobby. > The narrator laments the crass materialism of contemporary society and the > lack of creative understanding displayed by adults. As noted by the > narrator, he could have had a great career as a painter, but this > opportunity was crushed by the misunderstanding of the adults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems the answers are pre-programmed because I drew just a car and it said "I know! It's a police car" even though I'd drawn no siren.

Also with the sweater drawing I'd drawn just a T-shirt accidentally then when drawing a long sleeve it said it knew it was a sweater when it could have been similar things.

So this demonstration isn't about it identifying the drawing correctly, it's just about saying when it's found something considered close enough in an overly-broad range of ambiguous things based on the answer it's been given already.

It did identify some partially drawn things, like a line or a circle or more complex things the partial drawing could have been, but the pre-loaded rigging made me stop the test.

<comment><USER13> It's because it's gathering training data from the things other people are drawing. So if it's just asking for police cars anything car like should just fall into the police car category.

<comment><USER14> It also stops you once it correctly identifies the drawing, even if you're far from done. If it incorporates that into its training, then it'll presumably learn to figure out what you meant earlier and earlier.

It's interesting to consider whether it would end up making guesses that it sometimes gets correct, or whether it would actually learn to discriminate based on very early stages of drawing. It's conceivable to me that people might start out drawing "police car" differently from "car" in some subtle but detectable way, even if it doesn't involve what we humans would consider to be the distinguishing features of a police car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It couldn't guess my aircraft carrier. The reason: Other people draw aircrafts instead.

[http://imgur.com/a/xtdYE](http://imgur.com/a/xtdYE)

For reference, here's my carrier

[http://imgur.com/a/DL7js](http://imgur.com/a/DL7js)

<comment><USER16> People really can't draw hospitals either. Not one of them looks like a real hospital (because what does a hospital look like. You know one if you see one but it's the people not the buildings).

The drawings at best look like churches (a building with a cross on top), but most just have giant crosses on the side.

<comment><USER17> Disagree - I recognize hospitals by the brutalist architecture and the huge ventilation pipes.

[http://www.viewroyal.ca/assets/Discover~View~Royal/Photo~Gal...](http://www.viewroyal.ca/assets/Discover~View~Royal/Photo~Galleries/Scenes~Around~Town/Victoria%20General.jpg)

I guess if I was trying to doodle one, I'd do something like this: [http://med-fom-emerg.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2012/06/surrey.j...](http://med- fom-emerg.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2012/06/surrey.jpg)

A carport with ambulances parked in front.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For first few minutes, I was testing this neural net. After 10 minutes, this starts influencing me on what I should be drawing.

After sometime I start scribbling randomly. Then it says "I see motorbike". And, wow! that was a motorbike. I din't see a motorbike in the drawing until it told me what it resembled. I didn't freak out, but closed the window immediately and told myself - "its a machine, I'm a programmer, I know how NNs work and there's nothing to worry about". The kind of feeling non-techies have when they experience predictive-text for the first time and they they say "it knows what I am thinking"

<comment><USER19> [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I got suspicious when it asked me to draw camouflage. Nope. Not going to help train the neutral net that will be used to find me when the singularity comes

<comment><USER21> And by drawing nothing, you've provided it with the best possible drawing of camouflage.

<comment><USER20> well actually I drew a smiley face and the word "nope" beside it

<comment><USER22> Beside what?

<comment><USER23> Beside the smiley face?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It does a nice job with invariance to scaling and translation (probably normalized in preprocessing) but it's definitely not invariant to rotation :)

[http://imgur.com/a/UeXi1](http://imgur.com/a/UeXi1)

<comment><USER25> Which is understandable. Certain image categories aren't rotation invariant. Turn the letter M upside down and you get W.

<comment><USER24> I agree that some classes (like M) should exhibit only limited invariance, but the examples here are clearly rotation invariant to us since we can readily recognize them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The network guessed some of the "correct" answers far to quickly. For example, with just an L shape (|_) it guessed suitcase. Feels like the model is suffering from overfitting.

Fun though.

<comment><USER27> The premise seems to be a little odd, i.e. I tell you what to draw and then I guess what it is.

I guess it would have been more of an A.I. challenge if the premise was; draw anything and I'll try to guess what it is.

<comment><USER28> It's weird but the computer can choose not to cheat and forget the answer when guessing. Not possible for humans.

<comment><USER29> It's possible, but I'm not entirely convinced that this is honest, or at least not really accurate. It's far too eager to try to match it to something than it is to figure out what it has.

It could figure out most of my drawings but it would get them well in advance of me completing anything substantial (like others, I would be asked to draw a leg and draw just a curved line and it would guess leg before I finished).

Trying to draw what it asked for but with some unusual features (like lines or dot patterns around what it asked for before drawing it) and it gets extremely confused; it doesn't really seem to be good at filtering out any noise: [http://imgur.com/a/oE1j2](http://imgur.com/a/oE1j2) (gallery of results and what it thought it saw.

Drawing things it didn't ask for just to see what it was guessing resulted in some really strange responses and fits. The answer set it has is extremely limited, so something like a hand giving the horns (\m/) was last guess a duck. A moose was a scorpion, then a duck, then a hand. Godzilla (or a bipedal dinosaur if you prefer) was a vase, then a scorpion, then a boat. My loaf of bread was a washing machine, an anvil, then a postcard. The Deathstar was a bandage, a helicopter, and a lighthouse. And a chainsaw was considered an aircraft.

Between the disruptive patterns and drawing things outside of it's vocabulary, the system seems really confused. Looking at the comparison results, I can see how when drawing some things it got it real fast. (Tennis Rackets were mostly defined by a crosshatch pattern, Harps by a series of parallel vertical lines). This makes sense. For other things, not as much.

It might be a more convincing presentation to give the user a list of items the machine knows (the full list) and tell the user to try to draw some, and then the computer could check it off as it gets them. That seems like a better way of presenting this than "Draw a box. hey! you drew a box! Isn't that cool?"

<comment><USER30> I thought your "frying pan" was Roobarb out of Roobarb and Custard ([http://comicvine.gamespot.com/roobarb/4005-86519/](http://comicvine.gamespot.com/roobarb/4005-86519/)). How impressed would I have been if the 'net had guessed that ?!

<comment><USER29> Huh, I had no clue what you meant until I looked at the picture then back at my scribbles and saw the accidental drawing of the face I made.

To me this is another interesting distinction on the NN recognition versus a human recognition - QuickDraw having a limited "vocabulary" to refer to really highlights this, as does my own lack of knowledge of Roobarb. Some of these things can really blindside us, and I suspect that it's going to require a lot of human hand-holding for awhile for the machines to get a strong vocabulary.

For some time I've been pondering how far you could take a machine's tabula rasa learning, for something like language, and how closely it would mimic a child's learning. (Language, color, math, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's the reason for stopping you drawing as soon as it guesses it? I mean, it's great you guessed "swing set" from me making a basic a-frame, but wouldn't it give you more data if you let me actually draw the swings?

<comment><USER32> Yeah it does feel abrupt. My guess is that Google only cares about getting the minimal representation needed to guess at the object, even it's incomplete or missing details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is really fun.

As a designer/amateur artist, the most interesting part about this to me was seeing other people's drawings/most-basic-concepts-of-a- _thing_ drawn out: which lines they draw, which ones they don't, how they express an idea in the most essential way, basically. (the 20s really helps)

It's a great window into how people think about things.

 _As a reference: I couldn 't understand why it didn't recognize my keyboard ([http://imgur.com/fXk6Gg9](http://imgur.com/fXk6Gg9)) but then it hit me hard when I saw other people's drawings ([http://imgur.com/J7Lqodw](http://imgur.com/J7Lqodw))._

<comment><USER34> Caveat: I noticed I quickly started adjusting my drawings to exaggerate the most stereotypical features, and resort to stereotypes overall, because they seemed more likely to get recognised.

So it is not just how people think about things, but at least in part also _how people think other people will have thought about things_ guided by seeing the examples of other drawings.

<comment><USER33> Well, true, but I'm not sure anyone outside the HN crowd would try to _hack_ it that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I drew this... not sure if I should feel disappointed that nobody's done it before, or smug that nobody's done it before.

[http://i.imgur.com/KihrZQD.png](http://i.imgur.com/KihrZQD.png)

I am sorry, my Vs are not very consummate.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can see this soon to be overrun by people trying to mislead it, like what happened to Microsoft's "Tay" on Twitter. Suddenly, ships will be penises and bananas will be Hitler.

<comment><USER37> I guess this highlights the flaws inherent in all intelligent systems based on teaching. Misinformation fed to them at an early stage can screw them up pretty much permanently.

We've been seeing that since forever with human children raised on doctrines etc. that have no basis in reality.

<comment><USER38> Could they not easily avoid this by using their Google Search images database? They already have a filter for "drawings". Combining that with the title of picture/alt attribute, you could pretty much avoid that scenario.

<comment><USER39> Isn't training neural nets for image recognition using Google's image databases (right now Google Street View) the main purpose of reCAPTCHA?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Very cool!

Although I am a bit disappointed by the fact that it did not recognise my amazing whale :( [https://i.imgur.com/K5unmKS.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/K5unmKS.jpg)

Especially if you compare it to what it thought a whale should look like: [https://i.imgur.com/Dxh1F3c.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Dxh1F3c.jpg)

I guess this is like everything in AI: bad data in, bad data out.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, I can't get enough of this. Also, having a touchscreen laptop makes it extra fun.

That said, I'm a bit disappointed that it has a lot of trouble recognizing anything outside of "how people normally draw things" (especially if you go out of your way to do more than "the bare minimum", draw things at a different angle, in 3D, etc).

[1] Umbrella (wheel, binoculars, pizza): [http://i.imgur.com/jr9mexS.png](http://i.imgur.com/jr9mexS.png)

[2] Fork (sword, paintbrush, baseball bat): [http://i.imgur.com/3uLIPkH.png](http://i.imgur.com/3uLIPkH.png)

[3] Envelope (phone, eraser, leaf): [http://i.imgur.com/pemgKpD.png](http://i.imgur.com/pemgKpD.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This creeped me out a little when I first started playing it, not because of its accuracy or anything but because of what it asked me to draw.

There were lots of innocuous things like [house, teapot, dog, zebra, moustache] but there was also a substantial amount of things like [rifle, aircraft carrier, submarine] that are military-related. I sort of got the feeling that I was helping to train an AI that would later be deployed in combat. I played another ten rounds or so to see what else might come up, and aside from one or two repeats nothing did and I realized I was being silly.

<comment><USER43> [marshmallow, hotel, ectoplasm]

omg, I just trained this thing to bust some ghosts

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> As someone who is woefully uninformed about ML and CV: in a case like this, is the computer simply given the bitmap/vector graphic and left to learn how to interpret the data as lines and shapes? Or is there some preprocessing done to transform the data into something more "ML-friendly"?

<comment><USER45> In Deep Learning, you can feed the raw pixels into the network and it will interpret the data as lines and shapes ..

The only preprocessing done is likely size reduction - the QuickDraw canvas is quite high resolution, so it's probably scaled down with (just linear interpolation)

<comment><USER44> Thanks. Come to think of it, I remember seeing a series of deep learning examples that were trained on raw data and were able to create well-formed TeX, XML, and other formats, so it makes sense that the same principle would apply to image data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It seems like you can draw garbage (e.g. faces/text/swastikas) on the picture in the moments after it correctly identifies the object and before it starts the next object, and it seems to "save" it (though I am not sure if it is persisting it in their training data).

</comment><comment><USER47> Well, if there's one thing this has taught me, it's that the trackpad on my ThinkPad is absolutely terrible.

<comment><USER32> It taught me that everyone is a better artist than me. As a consolation, I'm using a Macbook Pro touchpad, touted as the best and even it can't compensate for my lack of artistic skill. Not sure if it would be easier with a mouse or not. It'd be really fun to see a post-mortem done where maybe we could see if any artists used their drawing tablets as well as error rates across different devices like tablets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The tricky bit with this task is context. For example, my 'spider' sucked big time, and I started trying to draw a web right at the end (before running out of time). This is exactly how I would play 'Pictionary', with plenty of big arrows pointing to the part of the drawing representing the word. However, that really isn't appropriate when trying to train a neural net to recognise abstract images.

Similar complexities arise in relation to perspective (should 'bridge' be side-on or top-down?) and even something as obvious as homonyms (I drew 'nail' as the small metal thing you use to hang a picture, but I'm sure others would have drawn the thing at the end of a finger).

I guess my point is that this comes across very much as a game (maybe that's all it really is), which will probably give poor 'neural net training' results, as opposed to if it weren't a game - e.g. by increasingly the ridiculously short time limit. I'm sure the results will still be interesting, but I think they'll end up very abstract rather than very accurate - <USER2> we'll just 'invent' a new set of logograms.

<comment><USER39> >However, that really isn't appropriate when trying to train a neural net to recognise abstract images.

Or is it? Beyond the most simple shapes, humans heavily rely on context for image recognition. Maybe a neural net should do the same to be successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Well this is surprisingly fun. I just worry I'm making a mess of the machine learning with my terrible doodles.

</comment><comment><USER16> Disable privacy badger. Without it the app "works" but says it can't guess anything.

When it couldn't even guess my envelope I was suspicious and disabled pb. Then found out it "live" guesses as you go!

<comment><USER50> Thank you for this, it got 0/6 the first time for me, and I'm literally DaVinci on the doodles...

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This was embarrassing. I'm a terrible artist, I mean, well and truly _incapable_ of drawing, and I think the questions become "easier" to draw the more she gets wrong. So I struggled to convey cello, then church, and finally "circle." Which she almost didn't get.

<comment><USER52> OTOH, you have a great career in Q&A ahead of you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> It's a neat demo, but it would be a lot neater if it recognized something that I chose to draw rather than something I am told to draw.

<comment><USER54> Agree. And the 20sec timer is annoying. I guess it has been introduced to keep the load on their server down.

<comment><USER55> I'm pretty sure the 20 second timer is meant to keep you focused on the essentials of what you're trying to draw. Makes sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Is google using the drawings from the game to train the AI further? I assume so.

<comment><USER57> Yes, they state it on the website as well: "See how well it does with your drawings and help teach it, just by playing."

<comment><USER58> This is interesting, because once it recognizes my drawing, it cuts me off before I finish, which would seem like it's adding incomplete drawings to the training set. Maybe it just wants examples of versions that it can't already recognize.

<comment><USER59> Yea, apparently two disconnected spoked-wheels are a bicycle now, based on the drawing it accepted from me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> this is nothing like Apple QuickDraw

<comment><USER61> Kids these days, probably don't even realize the reference to Quick Draw McGraw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Fun hack to play along with humans:

* In Chrome, open the developer tools, and find the style for "#challengeword-text" (you can hover over the challenge word, hit right-click and then "inspect" to get there).

* Set that style to opacity: 0 or something similar. (Be sure it's the #challengeword-text style and not just the element.style)

* Then, in your console, type "Array.prototype.slice.call(document.getElementById('challengetext-word').getElementsByTagName('span')).map((v)=> v.textContent).join('')". You should see the clue word appear after that.

* On two screens, show the browser window with the game to other humans, and keep the console on a screen only visible to you.

* Keep repeating that JS command in the console to get the word every time the challenge word screen appears (you can just hit up and enter, if you've already typed it.)

* And... bam! Now you can do a human vs computer round.

</comment><comment><USER63> I, for one, am really excited that Google has approached these "experiments" in the manner it has. I'm a designer with a keen eye on new media; so by no means a programmer/developer. For me, it has made machine learning a lot more accessible. Up to this point, I hadn't figured out how to "play" with this technology and now I can.

For Quick, Draw specifically, I'm interested in a "search" functionality where I can input a term such as "computer" and see not only the average representation, but more importantly, the fringe.

The possibilities for creative brainstorming are tremendous.

</comment><comment><USER64> One it gave me was "camouflage". I have no idea how to represent that with a simple line drawing.

<comment><USER36> I guess the best bet would have been drawing some piece of clothing with the most commonly used camo pattern, sth like: [https://www.google.ch/search?q=camouflage+pattern](https://www.google.ch/search?q=camouflage+pattern)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> For me it failed hard... chrome (the browser I use) kept freezing with 100% CPU use :/

The single time it worked without freezing it nailed correctly what I drew though :)

EDIT: tried again

performance still bad... but I saw one interesting, it requested me to draw a Knee, and... failed to recognize it.

Except after it ended and I went to see other people drawings, mine was identical, but flipped! I guess because I am left-handed or something like that...

Still, it is funny that it failed hard to recognize a flipped drawing.

As for the explanation: everyone drew a leg, seen from the side, slightly bent (me included). But I drew like this ">" while everyone else drew like this "<"

EDIT 2: someone asked me why it is not in portuguese :(

also I saw the reply below, I am on a Chrome on OSX right now.

<comment><USER66> I noticed the same thing with regards to orientation. I drew a hammer in a way no human could possible not guess what it was supposed to be but the AI didn't see it. The examples of other people's drawings had hammers all aligned vertically, whereas mine was aligned horizontally. I guess orientation matters to the AI.

<comment><USER67> I drew bread as a loaf from an isometric perspective. It didn't get it. All but one of the other pictures were of a single slice of bread. There was another picture of a loaf of bread, but it was mirrored in relation to mine. Seems like some bit of knowledge should be devoted to whether orientation is important, but the computer doesn't understand that. It seems like this is because most people draw pictures one way initially. It might be helpful to have each person draw a second picture of the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Looking at a closest line match doesn't seem to work well, simply by factor of positioning of the drawings. I suspect they need to rotate the recognition objects around their axis, but even then, you're drawing 3d objects and using 2d recognition to detect them. (an airplane looks differently from its side than from its front). I drew a very clear to see pencil horizontally and it matched it to two horizontally drawn airplanes - one of which was supposed to be an aircraft carrier by the description. The existing pencils in its memory were positioned vertically when drawn, so no chance it would match them.

</comment><comment><USER48> "Draw Animal Migration in 20 seconds"

And I'm done.

</comment><comment><USER69> Couldn't recognize anything I drew with keyboard mouse control. Then again, neither can I.

[http://i.imgur.com/o3LJlPI.png](http://i.imgur.com/o3LJlPI.png)

<comment><USER32> That diving board is pretty good for twenty seconds. Also with my limited experience using keyboard control, acceleration can mess you up easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Initially it couldn't get any of mine, but then I realized that Privacy Badger was blocking something important, causing it to silently fail. After allowing it through it got most of them.

<comment><USER71> That must be what happened to me too. I thought it was just stupid at first, because all of my drawings looked like the examples given at the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Of course it just takes one juvenile prankster to say in a crowded room "You won't believe what it recognises phalluses, poo emoji, and bottoms as" and it's going to be Microsoft Tay all over again.

So nobody do that, right.

Seriously, don't even think about it.

(More seriously, I think I might have been de-trainging it by trying to draw the correct drawing using a touch-pad... rather too many of my phones seem to look like tornados by the time the dang thing's got stuck in draw mode trying to click-and-drag to draw)

</comment><comment><USER73> Apparently a phone and a telephone are two different things [http://i.imgur.com/HujDN5W.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/HujDN5W.jpg)

<comment><USER74> Do you know what year it is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Either Googles AI has very high drawing standards or I am a terrible artist. It didn't guess ANY of my drawings, and they all looked very similar to the other images :(

<comment><USER58> I had the same thing happen, turns out Privacy Badger blocks some important component in the recognition, so switching to a private window fixes it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> > Draw the Mona Lisa in under 20 seconds

Seriously?

<comment><USER77> It's easy. [http://i.imgur.com/NXfxzSh.png](http://i.imgur.com/NXfxzSh.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> This game seems to essentially be win lose or draw the gameshow; the computer is throwing out some random variations like contestants guessing. It makes it easy for the computer to try 'car' the getting a no it tries 'police car'. I wonder how many things it understands...

We are so far from general AI. It's so strange how our brains can refine existance down so easily... how many CPUs is the human brain worth as far as we know?

<comment><USER79> it guessed phone when asked to draw phone but obviously wasn't strong enough a match because it moved on without getting it right before coming back to it twice. Finally stayed on blackberry after doing cellphone. Requires some weighting to get there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is fascinating at looking at how people create abstractions for things. Also funny how sometimes people just give up and write words as that's the best way to label whatever they were given to draw. Lastly I'm surprised at how hard it was for me personally to imagine some of the things given even though I would be able to recognize them in an instant, even from the drawings here.

</comment><comment><USER80> It got all of them for me except "Hexagon" which kind of baffled me. It's a basic shape. (yes, I drew it with the right number of sides)

<comment><USER81> Many of the images it showed for what it thought a hexagon is had the wrong number of sides,when I did it.

It also didn't get my hexagon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Really fun. The algorithm generates new nouns based on my drawing on the fly and add to the original pool. It stops and say 'Oh I know, it is ___', when there exist a guess that is the same as the answer. Might seem like it is really clever, or, it could have like 1000 guesses for every stroke and one of it is the correct answer.

My bathtub looks too ridiculous for it to be able to guess it with confidence.

</comment><comment><USER83> It tends to never guess what I draw. :/

I'm not sure if it's because I'm left handed, but I tend to draw everything backwards from all the examples that the bot has seen.

I also think that the other examples it's seen are horribly drawn in many cases, making me think perhaps a 1 minute time frame would yield better results. I can't draw anything meaningful in 20 seconds haha.

</comment><comment><USER84> Researchers are trying to collect data for training. I wonder how many examples they receive and how many are bogus.

The microsoft chat experiment from a few months ago shows that people can hack these systems to train them into racist slur-spewers.

Similarly, i wonder how this project aims to get accuracy given that many people are going to draw the porno objects no matter what the prompt was to mess with it.

</comment><comment><USER85> I managed to guess Mona Lisa.

[http://i.imgur.com/HjUdIDA.png](http://i.imgur.com/HjUdIDA.png)

<comment><USER86> How...

This must be using a relatively small corpus of terms to guess from.

<comment><USER85> I have no idea. Here's another weird one:

[http://i.imgur.com/tESGAGz.png](http://i.imgur.com/tESGAGz.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> It asked me to draw an helicopter, then a shovel, and guessed right in both cases. But I noticed that the training dataset was of poor quality: "shovel" drawings were full of helicopters.

I also noticed it was very laggy on my phone, making it hard to draw anything before the end of the countdown.

</comment><comment><USER88> My doodles are terrible data points but this was a lot of fun! Guessed a few of them right, although a bit too fast :)

</comment><comment><USER89> Doesn't even recognize a cup.

Amusingly, the one I had drawn looked pretty similar to one of the examples drawn by other people.

<comment><USER90> Cup didn't work for me too. I had the feeling that it's pretty good too.

</comment></comment><comment> nommm-nommm It asked me to draw mug and guessed coffee cup. Then it asked me to draw coffee cup and guessed mug. Frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER91> I can tell you guys one thing, the training data most certainly didn't include any pictures unsafe for work.

</comment><comment><USER92> 2 legs: I see mustache. 4 legs: I see sheep. 6 legs: I see spider. 8 legs: Oh, I see. It's an ant!

</comment><comment><USER93> One major annoyance with this. When I get done drawing, I have no idea if something was detected or not. I can't tell if something is supposed to happen or if it's meant to rush me to the next thing. I'm waiting for some feedback or interaction after the drawing.

</comment><comment><USER94> It reminds me of what google did to improve their search for images: [https://crowdsource.google.com/imagelabeler/category](https://crowdsource.google.com/imagelabeler/category)

The things you draw here is new input for their model.

</comment><comment><USER95> Didn't recognize lollipop that I drew. It was pretty classic but not in direction it expected (from bottom left to upper right). I added more lines, confusing it even further. You'd think image recognition should work independently of rotation.

</comment><comment><USER96> It didn't recognize my phone drawing, but it was interesting to see other's people drawings of phones, I drew what it called a cell phone. Some drawings were smartphones, other were corded phone with a rotary dial and everything in between.

</comment><comment><USER97> This just reminded me how bad I am at Pictionary; I can't blame the AI for more poor doodling skills.

It's interesting how the 20 second time limit forces you to focus on broad shapes as opposed to details, which works well for pattern recognition.

</comment><comment><USER98> It says draw a leg, I draw a straight line and before i even finish drawing the line it guesses "leg". Not rigged. And the "toe" I drew could have easily been a finger or thumb but it seemed to be sure it was a toe.

<comment><USER99> Perhaps it was never trained to see fingers or thumbs. Perhaps it is trained to recognize a couple dozen things. If it never heard of a finger or a thumb, how could it have used it as a guess.

<comment><USER81> I got "finger" as a prompt at least twice, so that's one of the things. It didn't recognize the ones I drew though. It expects it to be flat and pointing up with the nail, not bent.

Perhaps the toes are drawn facing down?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> It would be an interesting exercise to collect these doodles as a dataset and publish them. It could give insight into what are the key identifying features we look for as humans in relation to the world around us.

<comment><USER52> They could also combine it with recaptcha to filter out the trolls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Ha, this was my first college project, except it was first year OOP and we had no clue about NN. Not even prolog (if I had known combinatorial exploration was alright in some cases .. alas). Fun.

</comment><comment><USER102> Funny side note, for some reason, even though the text is in English as it should be it has a distinctly German/Swedish accent to it, really threw me off while drawing haha.

</comment><comment><USER103> Pff, couldn't even recognize bread: [http://i.imgur.com/kSdiWeP.png](http://i.imgur.com/kSdiWeP.png)

</comment><comment><USER104> Tried to draw a bear, got teddy-bear as an answer, failed. :/

</comment><comment><USER105> """Our neural net saw something else in all of your doodles. Select one to see what it saw."""

The ones I remember: bed, apple, spreadsheet, rollercoaster :D

</comment><comment><USER106> This is pulling from a too-small data set.

I was able to get correct detections with too little data: In no world is a circle with a bar coming out of it a "dumbbell".

</comment><comment><USER107> My attempt at "bread" [http://imgur.com/a/SMWm9](http://imgur.com/a/SMWm9)

<comment><USER108> WTF floor lamp?

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> I drew a pretty good approach of Charizard as a dragon and it didn't recognize it (in my opinion way closer than the six best results).

Edit: wrong pokemon name.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is there any way to stop the timer? I don't want to be told what to draw, I want to be able to free form without being interupted every 20sec.

</comment><comment><USER110> Either I can't draw or it doesn't work very well, or probably both

But I guess I just provided some more training data...

</comment><comment><USER111> 20 seconds is far too quick for me to draw anything more substantial than a few simple geometric shapes with a computer mouse.

</comment><comment><USER112> This is really fun. It didn't get my calendar drawing, wondering if it would have understood a box with a 31 in it.

</comment><comment><USER113> Not sure what the training set is like, but it performs poorly on drawings that are clipped at the edge of the screen.

</comment><comment><USER114> I was supposed to draw "phone," the computer guessed "telephone," but I still failed. :-)

Pretty awesome still.

</comment><comment><USER115> Clever. Gave it a test run. Will play again when I get paid. Mostly because I could do this for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER116> I see pride! I see power! I see a badass mother who don't take no crap off of nobody!

</comment><comment><USER117> It's been a while since I laughed so much.. My wife now laughs while doodling in the other room :)

Impressive!

</comment><comment><USER118> I found it somewhat hilarious with the tone of the voice guessing my mundane sketches.

"Oh, I know, it's toe" :-(

LOL

</comment><comment><USER119> It asks me to draw a bird, guesses "duck" and says sorry that it can not guess it.

</comment><comment><USER120> Is there an API that does anything like this?

As in: Converts primitive doodles into a guess of what it is?

</comment><comment><USER121> The best thing about this is drawing out one's most instinctive ideas about an object.

<comment><USER122> I drew a dick, and I was disappointed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> Either I can't draw a bear or the AI can't recognize a bear. Probably both.

</comment><comment><USER124> Just want to point out sharing with twitter popup window is auto blocked by chrome

</comment><comment><USER125> Strange.

Somehow this manages to bypass Chrome's "Mute Tab" and play audio anyway.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nothing like being asked to draw "camouflage" in black and white.

</comment><comment><USER72> Ok, what foolish people made it think "pants" means trousers... :)

</comment><comment><USER126> Whoever taught this thing what an asparagus is really screwed us all.

</comment><comment><USER127> Secretly, Google is just trying to make the best Pictionary player ever.

</comment><comment><USER128> It told me to draw "frog". I drew Kermit. It recognized it.

</comment><comment><USER129> Is it learning from our drawings?

I just drew a bunch of dicks.

<comment><USER130> As did I, for science. One of them was [correctly] recognized as a wine bottle. Note to self: never "Ok google, fetch me a bottle of wine."

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> Quite lousy detection algorithm if you ask me.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcjqwvxdpb455zu/quick_draw.jpg?dl=...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcjqwvxdpb455zu/quick_draw.jpg?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER132> I finally feel justified in getting a laptop with a pen.

</comment><comment><USER133> This is by far the coolest thing, I have seen so far.

</comment><comment><USER134> Immediately crashes the page on Chrome 54.0.2840.99 m...

<comment><USER135> works perfectly fine with my Chrome 54.0.2840.99 m (windows)

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> Computers are going to so user friendly soon...

</comment><comment><USER137> Wow, that was surprisingly fun. It got 6/6.

</comment><comment><USER138> "Draw donut"

"Oh I know. It's doubt".

</comment><comment><USER139> I drew these for like 30 minutes straight.

</comment><comment><USER140> I see a hooker, or knife or fork...

</comment><comment><USER141> 1 out of 6, complete failure.

</comment><comment><USER142> that dud is a hacker

</comment><comment><USER143> ladies and gentlemen, i present you the future of captcha

</comment><comment><USER144> Phew! Zero recognised.

We are safe.

</comment><comment><USER145> 1\. sun

2\. animal migration

that escalated quickly...

</comment><comment><USER146> Good, Interesting !

</comment><comment><USER111> As a non-American, I don't know what half of these objects are..

<comment><USER135> Which ones? The only one that felt 'American' to me was "school bus", but I've watched enough American TV and film to know that that is a thing.

<comment><USER147> I got toilet, so I drew a hole in the ground. I guess I am not their target market..

<comment><USER135> Their 'target market' is whoever uses the site. The program has no preconceived notion of what a "toilet" is so if enough people draw a hole in the ground for a toilet then it will start to recognize that as a toilet.

<comment><USER147> This could use this in the next election. It would be an interesting outcome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER148> So it tells you what to draw, then it tells you what you drew, and that is useful and/or amazing?

<comment><USER149> Who said it was supposed to be useful or amazing?

<comment><USER150> I think GP has raised a fair point. The landing page says: "Can a neural network learn to _recognize_ doodles" but the game doesn't demonstrate that the ANN is able to recognize arbitrary objects.

It merely shows that it's able to pick the correct name from a finite list of possible names that could very well be small (e.g. 10 or 20 object names).

A better way to demonstrate that the ANN is truly able to recognize objects with good accuracy would be to ask a person to draw an unspecified object and guess its name.

If the goal is to acquire training data, they could still ask for a name in case of failure.

<comment><USER150> BTW: this reminds me of detexify[1], the tool that can recognize latex symbols from handwritten drawings. Same problem.

[1] [http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Letting Go of Efficiency Can Accelerate Your Company - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/Responsiveness-New-Efficiency

<comment><USER2> "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." \- Peter Drucker</comment>


How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2 - <AUTHOR> http://supplementsos.com/blog/eat-healthily-for-1-pound-per-day-version-0-2/ <comment><USER2> Lets flag last time's discussion of v0.1 ahead of time, so we can move on and advance rather than rehash.

1) A little too much oil/fat to be politically correct, a bit too little to be nutritionally correct. Canola oil? I wouldn't put that in my car. Eat half as much olive oil if you have to, but don't eat that rot.

2) Carbs about right to be politically correct, WAY too much grains/carbs to be nutritionally correct. Gonna get fat fat fat on this diet and feel miserable.

3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.

4) The point of the article was to set a ridiculously low standard while figuring out how to make it survivable, therefore at least 10% of HN posts will be along the lines of "her diet sounds boring". Well, congrats at missing the whole point. I will admit that around version 1.0 it would be interesting to see how you can improve her diet plan with the delta of $5/person-day to $6/person-day. I spend about $12/person-day but my family eats like kings, we really do enjoy our fancy stuff. I don't think it would be possible to cook at home more expensively without doing ridiculous stuff like upgrading us from organic grass fed beef to imported Kobe, or dumping genuine saffron all over everything. Maybe if we ate morel mushrooms with everything instead of an occasional delicacy, for example.

<comment><USER3> > 3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 > hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the > five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked > meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has > not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent > 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other > task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.

This is low quality, and doesn't add to the discussion.

Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid- twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps. The closest grocery store is 3 miles away and she lives on government checks.

How much time do you believe it would take her to go to the grocery store to get fresh produce? How much time does it take someone with kids AND a car to get to the grocery store and back?

How much time have you devoted towards helping the poor? I mean actually sitting down with someone in the bottom 15% (not your friends-friend who's eating ramen at college or someone you heard of from high school) and how successful were you in training them to spend less money?

These topics are fine for what they are: Affluent people trying to spend less. They lose value when people look at the numbers and say "Gosh, this is so easy, why don't the poor just do this! Why don't they just buy a hybrid and save money on gas? Or maybe order all this stuff online with their macbooks to save time?".

<comment><USER4> > Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid- > twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps.

This is just as disingenuous as the parent and isn't even close to representing the most common situation. The majority of people don't live next to a market that has proper fresh produce, but demand drives supply and there's a reason they don't.

Most upper and middle class families have largely abandoned the concept of fresh produce. When the poor become not so poor, they follow the same pattern. Not because they don't have a choice, but because they choose to.

My parents live a very affluent area. Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Pathmark (large local grocer), Mitsuwa (large Japanese market). Four choices within 1 square mile. All walkable. Not a _single_ one of them has any significant fresh food selection. Not one. Oh, they have a ton of prepared food that you can buy by the pound, but not a whole lot if you want to make it yourself.

I live in a less affluent area (putting it mildly) and there is a farmer's market 5 minutes walking distance from my house that has only fresh produce, absolutely no prepared food. It has more fresh produce than all the the other 4 combined. Why? Because the people who live here can't afford prepared food. It's that simple. They would, if they could.

<comment><USER3> > This is just as disingenuous as the parent and isn't even close to > representing the most common situation.

[http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.a...](http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.aspx?ind=53)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Po...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Poverty_and_family_status)

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social- issues/poor-k...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/poor- kids/by-the-numbers-childhood-poverty-in-the-u-s/)

> 47.6 percent The nation's poorest kids primarily live in households headed > by a single female (pdf). Nearly half of all children with a single mother — > 47.6 percent — live in poverty. Indeed, the children of single mothers > experience poverty at a rate that is more than four times higher than kids > in married-couple families.

Further reading:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=single+mothers+poverty+rates+...](http://www.google.com/search?q=single+mothers+poverty+rates+united+states&oq=single+mothers+poverty+rates+united+states)

<comment><USER4> > 47.6 percent The nation's poorest kids primarily live in households headed > by a single female (pdf).

Exactly how is being _poor_ the most _common_ situation? Are you under the impression that everyone is poor?

What?

Read my post. My point is that you don't have to be poor to lack access to fresh produce and in fact, if you're poor, chances are you have better access to it.

<comment><USER5> I think this may be a little off. In fact a lot of poorer urban areas have relatively little access to fresh produce and have been dubbed "food desserts".

See: [http://newsone.com/1540235/americas-worst-9-urban-food- deser...](http://newsone.com/1540235/americas-worst-9-urban-food-deserts/)

<comment><USER6> What does one do if in a desert, with nigh unto no food available and conditions oppressive? MOVE.

Most of these "food deserts" are that way because harsh socioeconomic conditions (to wit: disinterest in quality products, coupled with prolific theft) made commerce in suitable foods untenable. Complain about "food justice" all you want, but the next meal is just a few hours away as is the next bus ticket. Demanding someone provide a balanced meal is both unproductive and unfair, so figure out a near term solution.

BTW, some of us are trying to help by finding what is viable at low costs in nearby stores. Strange how many deride the attempt to help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I must have been drunk or dyslexic when I read the original article. I could've sworn that the URL was supplementacos.com and throughout the article, I was wondering, "OK, where is the call to action to buy a 1 euro supplement- taco?"

That said, virtually all of the ingredients listed (even oranges, in a citrus salsa) could be combined to make some tasty tacos.

<comment><USER8> I read it as "supple mentos" and was, needless to say, confused how mentos fit into the "Eating Healthily" part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting! I'm currently on a strength training/bulking diet, so I'll need about 3-4 times as much protein, but there are some interesting tidbits in here that I'll probably try and incorporate into my diet. I currently spend probably 10-15 dollars per day on food, so if I can cut that down to something like $5 that would be a huge accomplishment. If successful maybe I'll make a blog post about it ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> An interesting read, and I would still prefer spending an year with this diet than a week on Soylent.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why not do this as a more up-to-date, honest-to-goodness Linear Programming problem? Why all this faffing about with approximate sums by hand?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775071>

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a mildly interesting experiment. I kind of wish a more realistic budget had been allocated.

The author is doing one portion for one person. The upfront costs of herbs would be easier if you do the plan for two people.

</comment><comment><USER13> My own version:

Buy palm oil, raw pork belly, plantains, milk and sugarless chocolate.

Palm oil and pork belly are rich in saturated fat, and they are cheap because of that.

Cut and fry the raw pork belly with a little bit of palm oil, then fry the plantains with the oil that's left.

Make the chocolate with half water-half milk.

Enjoy something really healthy for a keto-style diet. When the currently acknowledged science catches up with keto research, this will not be cheap anymore: remember the shortage of butter in Scandinavia. This food will be really expensive in 15-30 years. Enjoy while it lasts.

</comment><comment><USER14> It'd be interesting to see if anyone could look at this from a more "business" point of view, basically investing money up front for a better quality diet for less cost over the long term. For instance, buying seeds and growing veg, herbs, etc. Even buying 2-3 chickens and keeping them in your garden for eggs and perhaps meat. It'd be interesting to see what kind of investment would be needed, what the running cost would be and how long before you got a 100% ROI back.

<comment><USER2> "basically investing money up front"

She came down pretty hard on that in the article, even to the point of not buying spices because the smallest container is an expensive three months supply. Which is too bad.

On the other hand allowing 80 pound sacks of rice vs the little 1 pound bags that cost 2x as much per pound is going to really distort and mess up her math, so maybe she needs to stick to her very strict budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Buy spices in bulk - save lots of money. The price per kg is the same as per 100g at your supermarket. And then you can get away with eating the same staple foods all the time.

More meat and at least some beef. Obviously you can't eat steak for dinner every day for £1 a day but come on, a little thinly sliced beef stir fried with some teriyaki sauce - I can skip lunch for that.

Why no pasta? It's awesome to use up any leftovers you may have.

Then again you got your budget down to ~30 quid and I'm at more than twice that (though I never get over 80 except when it spikes around every 6 months when I buy spices) so clearly you must be making better choices. My excuse is that I eat meat and bake cakes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> v0.1 discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685812>

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what the "5-a-day" vegetable recommendation is based on - surely it can't be as simple as 5x80 grams of any plant?

<comment><USER17> It's a UK government health recommendation: <http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx>

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I know. But that's just nanny-language telling me to eat my veggies (and I do and that's all fine) - it doesn't tell me the "why".

<comment><USER2> Top down you'll get studies with graphs of veg intake vs "illness" and pretty much the more veg you eat, the better. This is an outcome based "why" not a biochemical based "why".

Bottom up there really are no completely ideal foods, but there are foods that specialize in certain things, and much as animal meat specializes in protein, veg specializes in fiber and the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc). This specialization is not absolute. You could get your vitamin A from a meal of liver once a week or so, but it seems easier just to eat a carrot every day or two. Unless you really like liver. Fruits are almost as good as veg other than having lots of sugar.

The "why" for the hair shirt crowd is its pretty easy to F up vegetables such that they taste horrible, therefore they feel better because you're suffering, because you deserve it. Why? Doesn't matter much. They'd probably be really pissed off that I actually enjoy the taste of a salad of proper proportions, or a snack of eating a carrot or whatever.

You guys in the UK are pretty lucky to have science based guidelines, in the USA our govt enforced guidelines are based solely on who paid politicians election funds, so we're stuck with "eat as much grains as you can" and stuff like that, designed to make us fat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I pick vegetables from a community garden, buy lentils from the grocery store, cook them with spices.. add butter || peanut butter & quinoa for fats & more amino acids. Very healthy, very cheap, tastier than anything I find in restaurants.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is naive diet rationalisation a new hacker's disease? To die for math that is not working in long period, anyway?

Come on, travel to South Africa and settle in savannah, hunting and gathering for free. Anything else will kill you in unnatural and premature way.

<comment><USER20> Whereas hunting and gathering for free in the South African savanna will kill you in a natural [1] and premature way.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_South_Africa#Predat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_South_Africa#Predators)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really want to see some meat on that menu. I hope they do a 1.5£ or 2£ version.

<comment><USER22> for an extra 25p /day you can spend an extra 1.75GPB a week.

so then you can buy these from asda and add it to whatever you want.... why wait for the OP to do the work?

[http://groceries.asda.com/asda- estore/catalog/sectionpagecon...](http://groceries.asda.com/asda- estore/catalog/sectionpagecontainer.jsp?skuId=1000000473493&departmentid=1214921923780&aisleid=1214921924895&startValue=%27%27)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apart from being cheap, this is also very denture-friendly. Chewing is absolutely required only 1/6 of the time (carrots, seeds).</comment>


Pocket Is Now Built into Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://getpocket.com/blog/2015/06/pocket-is-now-built-into-firefox/

<comment><USER2> I find this super disappointing. Why select Pocket out of the plethora of other services? Why even take the stance of endorsing _any_ proprietary, probably-for-profit service in Firefox? Arguably, this is even more visible than Yahoo (and previously, Google's) sponsorship.

Seems like a compromise of ideals, and it worries me that they must be in dire financial straights to accept possible kickbacks like this.

</comment><comment><USER2> The corresponding Mozilla press release: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/06/02/firefox-puts-you- in...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/06/02/firefox-puts-you-in-control- of-your-online-life/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anybody got a giude on how to remove this from FF?

<comment><USER4> Mozilla provides one - [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-pocket- firefox](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-pocket-firefox)

AFAIK, it's not adding an addon, or code-support. It's essentially just a bookmark in a prominent position.</comment></comment>


Cloud server CPU performance comparison - <AUTHOR> https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12 <comment><USER2> Great test!

One thing... The test says "You get hyperthreads..." You don't. Today's virtualization platforms allow for '"cpu shares", the default of which I've seen is 500, meaning that a vcpu can be as little as 1/500th of a core, or of total cpu usage, depending on the virtualization platform.

The big scam with virtualized hosting, IMHO, is that the shares can be automatically tuned down over time, increasing the time your processes take to run and raising your overall costs without you even knowing.

I regularly check aws and google to see how much it would cost me to move my two on-prem racks, and 3 years ago it was $11k (versus $2k, be included), and now it's $18k. (I have 50 16-to-32-core machines in 2 racks with 10gb net and 200TB of storage..)

Cheers</comment>


Knitting site attracts 17,000 without "any marketing to speak of" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/15/lets-get-down-to-some-hard-core-knitting/

<comment><USER2> A while ago some knitting site sold some $100k+ of knitting kits in a few days. Their merchant provider froze their account because they feared it was due to fraud, or whatever. (don't have the link offhand)</comment>


AdBrite will cease operations on Feb 1, 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://view.email.adbrite.com/?j=fec31d7271640c78&m=fe911570706d057a72&ls=fe2912787463037d721670&l=ff001670726501&s=fe5b17707c6d067e771c&jb=ffcf14&ju=fe6315737763007c7217&r=0 <comment><USER2> With all due respect I'm not surprised. My media buying agency had tried buying traffic from them about a year ago and the quality of the traffic we got was shockingly bad. Support was not at all helpful. We were left thinking that they either had no measures to combat click fraud in place, or that they had no problem with selling that kind of traffic.

Common problem unfortunately in the media buying business, but not a foundation to build a long-lasting company on for sure. Word gets around.

<comment><USER3> I'm absolutely amazed that they have stayed in business this long. My media buying agency has also tested their network several times over the years. They have absolutely junk traffic, and I had come to the same conclusion that is has to be largely fraud clicks.

<comment><USER4> 40M in funding makes it easier to stay in business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This thread suggests that it's probably fun to say: good riddance to the fuckers! (And you _might_ say "good riddance, you fucker" if you were on FuckedCompany...)

I've met pud and talked with him in an entrepreneurial setup, and I was truly impressed by his early-stage insight. Seriously, he's smart and savvy, so there, but for the grace of God, go I, etc. Rather than piling-on in a FuckedCompany-like sense, I think it's more interesting to think about the trajectory of a company founded by a bright and very in-tune entrepreneur.

Looking for lessons:

      * What do you think went wrong?
      * What are artifacts of the failure you can enumerate?
      * What would you have done differently?
      * How did their competitors excel?

<comment><USER6> I think the obvious reason is marketshare. Most websites were running Google AdSense, so AdBrite didn't have as large a catalog of websites to advertise on. I remember browsing the websites on there in my niche, and the majority of AdBrite publishers I saw were splogs with scraped content.

Sometimes AdBrite wasn't serving ideal ads to publishers. I remember one site that had acai berry & weight loss ads, on a page specifically about not letting mass media dictate your self-esteem about your appearance. I guess AdBrite didn't have the critical mass of advertisers for better ad selection/targeting.

On the other hand, as an advertiser I liked how AdBrite was setup. I could target a specific website & specify exactly where on the page of that site I wanted my ads to appear. My most successful display ad campaign was on AdBrite (though I'm something of an advertising newbie). For that reason I'll be sad to see AdBrite go.

<comment><USER7> > "I could target a specific website & specify exactly where on the page of > that site I wanted my ads to appear."

You can also do that with Adwords.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After being banned from Google Adsense (I still don't know the reason why) I have used Adbrite as an alternative. It's no surprise they are shutting down. The ads they deliver are borderline suspicious and they don't make publishers any money at all. I have earned $0.07 with Adbrite whereas I could have earned $60 in the same time frame with Google Adsense.

Does anyone know good alternatives?

<comment><USER9> I'm in the same boat (AdSense ban and all). I would be interested to hear if anyone has experience with some alternatives.

<comment><USER10> I haven't been banned, but AdSense is incompatible with my preferred mobile framework (jQuery Mobile) without some ugly (and possibly TOS-violating) hacks. Other mobile frameworks are in the same boat.

I'd also be interested in alternatives (ideally, Google would fix the AdSense code so it works, but people have been asking for that for a while).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've unsubscribed you from their mailing list. You are welcome ;)

<comment><USER12> You can update his profile without signing in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a joke in here about adbrite ending up on fuckedcompany.com

<comment><USER14> what is pud up to these days?

<comment><USER15> He's reading this thread & posting here once it's bonked off the HN front page. Is that bad HN etiquette?

<comment><USER14> not at all, one of the reasons I love HN is because you replied. same reason I love Quora.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They had over $40 million in investment capital according to Crunchbase (<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adbrite>), with $5 million of it within the last 8 months.

</comment><comment><USER17> No regret. I tried out AdBrite once and when I wanted to cash out the $130 I had earned back when I was a student, they told me they couldn't pay me out because they hadn't received the money yet, and that was that. Nothing I could do. This was 6 months after the pageviews in question ran, so it's not like they didn't have time.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why do you guys think they failed? What are the decisions that got them here?

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice as it is to see the advertising industry in trouble, this will put even more control into the hands of google.

<comment><USER20> Why is it nice to see the advertising industry in trouble? Those are people with jobs and families to take care of.

<comment><USER21> You missed the obvious sarcasm as in "even more control into the hands of google" is not a good thing.

<comment><USER22> I think you missed the "Nice as it is to ...," which suggests it's not sarcasm.

<comment><USER21> You're correct. Should've paid more attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Best of luck to the adbrite team. Unfortunately, this happens. Also, if any adbrite developers are interested in coming to Minneapolis, we'll expedite interviews :-)

Contact info in my profile.

<comment><USER24> All 26 of them.

<comment><USER23> Sure. Why not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> AdBrite was a great network. Their payout rates were by far the best of any network I've tried.

Full-page ads were a killer revenue source, I would get 4x the amount I would have gotten on Adsense.

</comment><comment><USER26> I cant believe im the first commentor to call FuckedCompany on this, I am clearly getting old.

</comment><comment><USER27> I tried out Adbrite last year for an ad placement at footer of one of my websites because I couldn't put any more Adsense on the page, it wasn't too bad but it was nothing compared to how much Adsense generated. It was still better than Clicksor and Bidvertiser. The thing I didn't like with Adbrite was that they had too many "spammy" advertisements.

<http://i.imgur.com/ZvN347V.png>

</comment><comment><USER28> I received this email a few minutes back. It is sad to see this happening and that too on such short notice. Used to use it along with Adsense, and it was the only good alternative.

I am certainly going to miss the feature where they automatically swapped their ad-code to any competitors if theirs din't cross the minimum CPC threshold.

If I recall correctly, the CEO/Founder of Adbrite is a member of HN. Maybe he can shed some light.

</comment><comment><USER29> infos: [http://allthingsd.com/20130128/sales-talks-fell-through- so-a...](http://allthingsd.com/20130128/sales-talks-fell-through-so-ad- exchange-adbrite-shuts-down/)

        but sales talks "unfortunately fell through a couple weeks ago."

I wonder how often this happens. Just this week another company (own3d.tv) suffered the same fate.

<comment><USER30> Sometimes things don't pan out as well as all parties hope, and it flows downhill.

I'd much rather see a company close up because they know they are no longer sustainable than to try and extend beyond where they can pay the people that are supporting them. ([http://www.destiny.gg/n/own3d-tv-a-beginners-guide-to- being-...](http://www.destiny.gg/n/own3d-tv-a-beginners-guide-to-being-an- asshole/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I had a top 3 site on adbrite and was making almost six figures per year around 2004. I got banned without any warning. It was fun while it lasted. Their whole system sucked. They banned me because they wanted me to charge more. Their system allowed a huge backlog of ads that I had to display when my site got popular and prevented me charging more.

</comment><comment><USER32> I tried AdBrite once, that was the only time I used them. The traffic they sent was junk and I am almost sure they had no click-fraud detection in place so most of the clicks were fraudulent. Good on them for staying in business this long though, surprised they lasted all this time.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why aren't they selling off the campaigns, users, or other assets? Just a complete shutdown?

<comment><USER34> I always wonder this whenever companies shut down. Somebody would surely be willing to pay for all of their code, users etc. Why not let it live on and see if somebody else could be a better steward?

I know I'd be willing to give it a shot...

<comment><USER35> I assume their liabilities greatly outstrip the value of the code/etc that they could get. Possibly in bankruptcy some of the creditors will sell of parts of the company but its unlikely to be very public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A friend of mine would be receiving $5500 from them in ads by Feb 1. He suspects that he is never going to get it.

What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER37> So I'm assuming their adult ad company, Black Label Ads, is going to go under too?

</comment><comment><USER38> Well, that's something awful to see a fu __ed company go under.

</comment><comment><USER39> C'mon people! Let's give these guys a break. They had a vision for something great and they tried their best to make it happen. Not every business succeeds, in fact almost many fail. They had the guts, the vision and the nerve to be great.</comment>