Tell HN: Startup School acceptances have been emailed - <AUTHOR>

Go check your email! <comment><USER2> I bet understanding the acceptance process here would be fascinating.

YC is, by all accounts, is an organization tirelessly focused on making decisions based on the merit and potential of the founders. They have clear opinions of what is a good indicator of merit, but have shown a willingness to test their opinions and refine.

If anyone involved would be willing to shed light, I'd love to know how you've refined the process of identifying good Startup School participants over the years.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got in and I am not not even a active contributer to HN (read everyday, just don't comment or post). Pretty excited to hear PG, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Should be a good time.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in! I even had a dream last night that I wasn't accepted. I feel rather ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> A lot of people who graduate college claim that they have a dream wherein they fail college, years after they graduate.

Maybe this is something similar to that.

<comment><USER4> I'm also about to submit my YC app, so I think I'm especially worried about failing anything to do with YC. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few hours ago, I was getting ready to post a question on HN that would have been phrased something like this: "Ask HN: I got rejected from Startup School. How can I improve myself to get accepted next year?"

Fortunately, I didn't have to ask this question because, to my surprise, I got accepted. I guess pg+co. saw the hacker spirit in my application.

I'm humbled and incredibly excited to attend this event, meet all of the other hackers there, and learn from people much smarter than me. I can't wait!

<comment><USER7> Congrats! I wish you much success on your endeavors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not in. Oh well. Sounds like an overwhelming response and bigger venue again next year. Looking forward to watching some of it on justin.tv though.

Have a productive day everyone who made it in. :)

<comment><USER9> Likewise denied. A bit of justin.tv and hackin' away on a current project will occur in its place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Made it! Man, it's only been a couple months living in the US and I love it. Now, how to get from USC to Stanford with no car or driver's license.

Anyone from or near to USC going?

<comment><USER11> I think there are pretty cheap flights from LAX->SFO. You could also look into Amtrak (which I think only goes to Oakland, which is ~2 hours away from Stanford by BART and Caltrain), but often Amtrak's just about as expensive as flying. If you're really looking for cheap, there's buses like Greyhound, but they're slow and you'll encounter some sketchy people. But I think they've gotten better, and some buses even have WiFi.

<comment><USER12> Amtrak goes to San Jose, but the timing from LA is inconvenient...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Afterparties?

<comment><USER14> Good question. I'm flying in from LA. I would definitely stick around for a party or two afterwards if I knew about 'em in advance.

<comment><USER15> I'll be flying from LA too. Maybe we should cab-pool or something?

<comment><USER14> If we are on the same flight, happy to share a cab. Once you figure out your flight schedule, email me.

<comment><USER16> Yo, I'm coming from LA too (and am renting a car). Email me and we can all figure this out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was planning on being in the area that week, and this would've been the icing and cherry on top. Unfortunately, didn't get in. I figured my #gov20 work would count for something, but it seems it doesn't (which is fine, perhaps I'm just not that interesting of a hacker!) - any pointers for how to frame the pitch so it seems more appealing to the YC crew?

Are there any meetups/after parties/etc in the area that one could attend? Half of the value of being in that auditorium would be meeting other hackers/entrepreneurs, I would hope not to lose out on that completely while i'm in the valley.

</comment><comment><USER18> I got in.

I figured if I got in everyone got in, but seeing this post, I guess not.

Now, I have to schedule a flight (from Oklahoma), find a place to stay and schedule PTO at work.

Also, I guess I can't do this and Rails Rumble... if anyone wants a spot in Rails Rumble who was unable to get in, they can have mine if I can give it out. Or, is it possible to do this and Rails Rumble? Perhaps that is pushing it.

P.S. Wow, hipmunk.com is awesome!

<comment><USER19> Congrats! And I'm glad to hear hipmunk is working out so well for you. Don't ever hesitate to send feedback our way! firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> rejected...le sigh

what is the criteria to get in anyways?

<comment><USER21> I wonder what the age distribution is between applicants and those accepted. Rejected as well. But I'm "old" in YC-years so I didn't expect to get an invite.

<comment><USER22> I got accepted and I'm in high school so the range must be pretty big. I'm still debating over whether I should go cause I'm on the east coast.

<comment><USER23> This would make for an excellent college entrance essay :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Flying in from Toronto. The person I was planning to go with didn't get accepted, so any founders who want to grab a drink Friday in SF, my emails in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER25> Rejected! Guess that means I can do rails rumble now.

<comment><USER26> Thats exactly what I was thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm guessing the best area to stay is San Fransisco, is that right? Or is Palo Alto better? I haven't been to the Bay Area in years, so I'm really not sure which area of either place would be best, any suggestions.

From San Fransisco, what's the best way to get to Palo Alto, is there good public transportation, or should I rent a car? If anybody else is going to be around, and is interested in exploring, drop me a line, we can probably figure something out.

<comment><USER28> Try to stay in Palo Alto - the commute from the city is long enough (45-60m) to make it worth it.

Plus Palo Alto is awesome (but pricy).

<comment><USER29> Or you can stay in nearby cities like Menlo Park or Redwood City. I used to live in Menlo Park and I went to Palo Alto all the time. You may want to get a bike, though ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I applied but did not receive an email. Does that mean I was not accepted or did something else happen?

<comment><USER31> Same here. I applied, but no email on way or the other. Is there a way to check acceptance status on the web?

<comment><USER31> Nevermind, turns out I did get accepted, but the email got eaten by my spam folder. This is the first time I've lost an important email to the spam folder - kinda scary, particularly when you realize there's 1500 threads of spam in there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I setup a saved Twitter search to make sure I didn't miss anything. That said, see you guys there!

</comment><comment><USER33> wow,i saw the acceptance email today and am super excited! after watching similar videos on youtube over the years, i am looking forward to being there in person and meeting some of you folks there! thanks pg and ycombinator!

</comment><comment><USER34> how many of you were personally interviewed or received follow up questions before acceptance or rejection?

Also, did anyone get accepted who didnt receive any follow up for the YC staff?

</comment><comment><USER35> selected. now rushing for visas. can you assist?

</comment><comment><USER36> How many people got in? How many applied?

</comment><comment><USER37> Is anybody flying in from Boston?

</comment><comment><USER38> Berkeley students, whose going?

<comment><USER39> I live in Berkeley and plan on driving to Startup School. I can take up to 4 other people in my car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I refuse to accept that I suck Paul. Seriously. You're 1-5 people trying to judge on what you think is going to work. I personally think reddit gave you a bit of an ego trip. I think your vision of the future is clouded by visions of the past. The future is strange and you're going to miss it. Enjoy your 15 minutes.

<comment><USER41> Don't get worked up replying. This appears to be a troll. He didn't apply.

<comment><USER26> I applied and got rejected and was wondering if I was rejected on the quality of my application or on the quality of my product. I guess in the grand scheme of things rejection is rejection and it dosent matter but I was still wondering.

<comment><USER41> I wouldn't read much into it. We got so many more good applications than we had room for this time that we might as well have been flipping coins.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UK's secret, ongoing mass surveillance rigorously frisked by watchdog - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/07/uk-secret-ongoing-mass-surveillance-iocco-report-section-94-telecommunications-act/ <comment><USER2> Carte Blanche collection of data with no oversight, no ability to appeal, no ability to even discuss that they've been forced to comply at the direction of a political appointee.

Remind me how we are a free country again /s.

<comment><USER3> And now UK is not even under EU's Fundamental Charter of Rights anymore, which declares privacy a human right. This is one of the reasons why Cameron secretly wanted UK out of the EU, or at least wanted to blackmail the EU into allowing UK to "opt-out" of the Fundamental Charter.

UK is so screwed now, in more ways than one.

<comment><AUTHOR> The human right to privacy enshrined in the Freedoms act of the "Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union" is not a blanket protection against any form of spying on you but it limits the intrusion you can be subjected to (amongst other things). There are many things that we could consider in breach of our privacy that are still allowed within the law. With all the gag ordering going around it's becoming increasingly hard to even know if you're a target.

As also pointed out, just because the UK has had a referendum on leaving the EU and they voted in favour of leaving doesn't mean they've left the EU. In order to do so they need to trigger Article 50. So far none of the UK politicians have done so as they're too busy quitting, backstabbing and running around with their tails between their legs. No one wants to go down in history for this. Even if they had triggered article 50 it is estimated to take anywhere between a year and two for a nation to actually leave the EU (this has never been done before so no one really knows). During that time they are a "silent" member of the EU, bound by all its rules and legislation but with no vote or voice in the decision making progress.

It should also be noted that Cameron did not campaign to leave. He promised the referendum as a way to avoid his party splitting in two and in order to get (re)elected as PM. As a consequence he's now split his country in more than two. One could argue that this is worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Found the comments on Theresa May's efforts to revoke free speech more interesting than the data in the article.

Imagining a world where governments are able to tell people not to speak publicly, or worse, secretly told not to do so, sounds like a horrible idea.

<comment><USER5> Like an FBI gag order?

<comment><USER4> Right, though there are other examples of secrecy orders too, for example: [https://www.wired.com/2013/04/gov-secrecy-orders-on- patents/](https://www.wired.com/2013/04/gov-secrecy-orders-on-patents/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone here believe that online activity isn't being collected? Imho the only sane thing to do is assume that anything that can physically be captured is being captured, regardless of laws. Therefore, the discussion should instead focus on defeating the physical technological limitations, rather than seeking to apply legal controls.

<comment><USER7> Can the technology be defeated? Short of a Butlerian Jihad[1]? (hints of our usernames). Can we unlearn how to make The Bomb?

Perhaps we can defeat, or at least limit the impact of, the technology as individuals Stallman-style.

Of course, laws are a very high latency side-channel of authority and power, so they don't really fix anything either. You can't be un-surveilled by a court order, well maybe to a limited extent, if we trust the courts and law enforcement, which we probably shouldn't when it comes to surveillance. My point being, laws can't undo past actions or relieve a person of the memory of the experiences.

So what should we do? I'm going to posit that we, society collectively, won't do anything, not for a good while longer anyway if at all. Sure, we can use end-to-end encryption, but that does nothing to prevent meta-data being slurped up.

1\. [http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad](http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad)

<comment><USER6> > Can the technology be defeated?

Yes. Tor, and like technologies. There are some mathematical limitations on total surveillance, there is a point at which the technological costs of tracking everyone 24/7 are beyond budgets or even physical possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone tell me, is there actually a reason why both The Pentagon and GCHQ have gardens in the centre of the buildings?

Does this design confer some advantage in the event of a weapons strike, or is it purely architectural?

<comment><USER8> Mostly architectural. The only pragmatic benefit is it allows powerful people to go "outside" without going out in public. Take a break, walk in the semi- private garden.

During the cold war, we used to joke that the flagpole in the center at the Pentagon was the most precisely surveyed pole in the World (by the Soviets).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bonus points for the relevant law responsible having 1984 in its name.

<comment><USER10> Maybe they're also using 1984 as a manual on how it should be done.</comment></comment>


Unsplash 4.0 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/announcing-unsplash-4-0-3421b47d8f88 <comment><USER2> Congrats guys this is pretty exciting. We've used unsplash in a lot of our projects (some pretty heavily) and it's always nice to see that the biggest source for original cc0 photos is alive and growing strongly.

Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great idea, and I'm thrilled to know it exists. Thanks much for your hard work here :)</comment>


Nice Neighbors – A Web Game for Science - <AUTHOR> http://cstaecker.fairfield.edu/~cstaecker/neighbors/

<comment><USER2> On chrome on android, the light blue background does not stay in place, but instead moves with nodes as they are dragged.

</comment><comment><USER3> that would be nice to have a bigger work space on desktop. 800*400 is quite small.</comment>


James, Bitte (German Copycat of Magic) - <AUTHOR> https://jamesbitte.de/

<comment><AUTHOR> You can add the number as a contact, and use WhatsApp to communicate.</comment>


A Preliminary Review of Influential Works in Data-Driven Discovery [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.08776.pdf

<comment><USER2> The submitted url is to the old version of this paper and should be changed.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.08776](http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.08776)

With arxiv.org, it's always best to link to the abstract page rather than the PDF since the abstract page will show all available versions. It also gives people chance to read the abstract before deciding to download the paper.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Time to talk again about data-driven scientific discovery or The Fourth Paradigm: this paper from Palo Alto is very recent, 30 Mar 2015, and provides us with valuable insight: the hottest fields and the most-cited references. What do you think about? Is all this going to be commercial (exponential with entry barriers) or open source (linear with horizontal access)?</comment>


10 Reasons Why you should use chatbots - <AUTHOR> https://chatimize.com/why-chatbots/ <comment><USER2> Never have I ever actually seen a chatbot that works well and is convenient to use. In best-case scenarios it's annoying until it hands the conversation over to a human, in the worst case it just goes around in circles and I leave the site. It's a classic case of choosing cost savings over your customer comfort. I'm not saying you're wrong, you're free to run your business however you like, but personally I will take my money elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely understand what you're saying. This is the result of companies creating bad chatbots. What the chatbot does is telling you "I don't understand you" and that's it. That leaves you with a really bad experience. I always say that you must combine your chatbot with a live chat, so that if the chatbot doesn't understand you, a human can always take over.</comment></comment>


The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. And China Headed for War? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> One thing I think might be interesting is how the history of economic thought affects the war/peace calculus.

For much of history, people thought of wealth as a sort of zero-sum (or near) game. If one country gets richer, another will get poorer. If Athens get rich, Sparta gets poor. If Britain has colonies, France and Germany need colonies. Everyone wants to be an exporter and hoard gold.

The economic thought about this started to change around the time of David Ricardo (comparative advantage overturning mercantilism), but I would not be surprised if mainstream politicians took some time to understand this idea.

These days it's pretty clear the US and China benefit from mutual trade, and anything upsetting that would require quite some compensation.

Aside from economics, there's also the fact that we've seen massive global wars already, and we have weapons that could make the world unliveable for generations. Particularly if you look at Chinese history, there's an enormous amount of bloodshed. The party leadership will understand this.

<comment><USER3> I think that you're right -- the Chinese administration is ruthless, but also pragmatic. I think when they look at the USA, they see a country at war with itself. There's no need to destroy us since we do such a good job of it ourselves.

Also, the USA has a pretty huge advantage geographically over every other country in the world: our borders consist of oceans we can easily defend with our navy and allied countries who are strong both militarily and economically. We also have access to all of the factors of production of an army (steel, oil, etc.) domestically and the industry necessary to process them. Geographically, we're very protected as well: attack from the north and you have 2000 miles of Canadian tundra too extreme to march an army across that can be littered with radar and anti-aircraft stations. Attack from the south and you have to cross rugged, mountainous terrain in Mexico. Even against a weakened USA, victory would be very difficult.

War against the US is therefore pointless from the Chinese perspective: a war of the scale a US-China war would likely just rekindle the machinery of American industry while inflicting heavy losses on China. The Chinese government (and people) have a long-term mindset: war would be an impatient choice because China's dominance is all but assured anyway.

I don't think American politicians are as pragmatic; and I expect our war hawks to turn their attention to China (likely when China eventually tries to retake Taiwan). From a realpolitik point of view, I actually think that a major war with China is probably the best chance the US has to maintain global dominance over the next 50 years. But that war would need to happen soon, while the US still has a clear technological advantage over China -- in 10 years that advantage will be all but gone.

It's looking like the US plans to use Japan as its proxy for fighting China. Japan recently authorized its military to operate in defense of its allies; a first step into removing the post-WWII restrictions placed on the Japanese military. They plan to continue that process; with US support. China sees this as unacceptable -- and is ramping up its military as a result. I think we'll see a China-Japan war in the South China Sea before we see a China-US war. But I think we'll also see China engage in the type of limited incursions / occupations like the Russians did in Georgia and Ukraine, and they won't stop until someone starts fighting back.

<comment><USER4> China's development is already beginning to slow. It is not headed towards global dominance, it was merely catching up with the rest of the developed world. China will likely continue to enjoy a modernizing economy and growing middle class, but in terms of growth it looks to be headed the same way as Japan.

<comment><USER3> I would agree with you except for the fact that the Chinese economy will be large enough to support a military equalling or surpassing that of the US. That's basically what the article is saying: economic ascendancy often results in a military build-up, and when it does, conflict often follows. China is spending heavily on their military to exert their will, and given current trends will be able to overtake the US on military spending in the next decade or two. Whether that results in conflict is largely up to the US, in my mind.

Also, post-WWII Japan was more or less a vassal state of the US, so we kept their military ambitions in check. We don't have any US military bases in China, so we can't do that there.

<comment><USER4> Again, it remains to be seen whether the Chinese economy meets the expectations of earlier forecasts. I think a more realistic view is that the Chinese economy assumes a role in the region comparable to Germany's in Europe.

Military ascendency is not just a simple product of economic ascendency however. Geography plays a large role, as well as military history and institutional knowledge. For example, one does not simply build a blue water navy. China is practically starting from scratch when it comes to naval tradition, and when combined with geography will likely never pose a serious challenge to US naval primacy in the Pacific - regardless of comparative economic might. Even at the height of its power the USSR never posed a serious threat to that primacy. Bounded to its own regional theatre, the Chinese military will likely continue to be structured around anti-area access denial strategies.

However, increasing economic co-dependence is likely to make this entire topic moot. Call me an optimist but I predict the extent of US-China naval engagement 20 years from now to consist of joint security exercises and disaster relief missions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think nuclear weapons are the wildcard here. They make it difficult to extrapolate from wars in the last 500 years to wars in the future.

In 1914-18, although the outcome was quite a lot more terrible than what everyone expected going in, it wasn't as if Europe ended up as a radioactive wasteland for hundreds of years.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if "wildcard" is the right word. Nuclear weapons were developed with the explicit purpose of preventing wars as terrible as the World Wars. With the help of economic sanctions, they've succeeded so far.

<comment><USER7> This is revisionist thinking, applying current knowledge to the motivations of those 75 years ago.

Nuclear weapons were developed because they could be. More specifically, it was feared that Germany was already researching them.

During the Manhattan Project and for the next several years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they were thought of as just another weapon of war, different perhaps in scale but not in essential character (certainly by the US Army brass, anyway). It wasn't until later in the Cold War that the deterrent value of nuclear weapons was emphasised.

<comment><USER8> It did take quite some time for the full power and destructiveness of atomic weapons, let alone the later fusion bombs, to be appreciated. At one point, it was a serious idea to fire atomic shells from the standard 155mm field howitzers. Or, for even greater insanity, from over-sized crew-served bazookas.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_\(nuclear_device\))

<comment><USER9> This wasn't because the power of nukes was unappreciated, it was because Soviet conventional superiority in the European theater was seen as an existential threat to Western Europe for which the cost of using that kind of nukes was acceptable in order to mitigate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest takeaway from their chart is that culture clash leads to war and bigger, more powerful countries have more noticeable wars. In addition, their chart of things that didn't result in war is mostly inaccurate.

Japan vs USSR was never actually a real idea because Japan didn't have an army. USSR knew the actual battle would be against the USA.

USA vs UK never existed because there wasn't a culture clash (and their focus of power was a bit different).

UK, Germany, and France don't clash today because their cultures are closer than they've ever been and because they perceive a shared foreign threat in Asia.

Thus we're left with the only war that never happened being USA vs USSR -- a war that didn't happen due to self-preservation.

It seems most probable that USA vs China fits into the same category as USA vs USSR where self-preservation will keep war from actually happening. I don't think any reasonable person trusts a losing government to NOT use weapons of mass destruction -- especially when the first one to use them wins. It's easier to get forgiveness than permission (that happens when you're the last superpower standing).

<comment><USER7> There certainly _was_ USA/UK friction in the aftermath of WWI. The Washington Naval Treaty was written to stop an incipient naval arms race, in which the USA and UK were two of the major competitors.

<comment> norea-armozel Wasn't there battle plans for invasion of Canada and vice versa around the same time? I thought it was something that could have easily occurred if Germany didn't spark WW2.

<comment><USER8> There are generally battle plans developed for any conceivable conflict. I would not be terribly surprised if the Pentagon has war plans on file for an invasion of Canada today.

That was also in the heyday of the Prussian General Staff school, which emphasized the whole concept of war plans, with things like mobilization timetables, logistics and troop movements choreographed like chess openings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can we deal with the war with Russia first? You know, the one with the Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine and the other one in Syria with the US proxy forces attacking a Russian ally?

The future is probably more of this sort of deniable medium-intensity conflict.

<comment><USER12> I agree this is much more prudent, and China excels at playing a role more confined to the shadows. For now at least.

In some sense, the US and EU has already accepted China's new found dominance - and place - in the international community. Russia has a much bigger problem accepting their current role, and are almost defiantly demanding respect; putting their forces into situations that could (or probably will) escalate into a full scale war. Personal opinion and all, but Russian foreign politics is reminiscent of Lebensraum, and all that it entailed.

<comment><USER13> Well, as always it depends on "who started it".

There are people who say that the current regime in the Ukraine is a US puppet installed via a coup. And up to today several unknowns persist (MH370, the Maidan shootings, the Odessa fire..). Same holds for Syria.

In reality, IMO, there is never only one guilty, neither in politics, nor in marriage, nor in war.

So I will refrain from blaming someone for all of it and I tend to disbelieve people who "know that it's the other one's fault".

<comment><USER12> I wasn't blaming anyone. Merely observations.

(Although, are you seriously insinuating that MH370 were caused by the US?)

<comment><USER13> Well, you were judging Putin's foreign politics which is your absolute right and I have no right whatsoever to tell you that you are wrong and in fact, I can't. I just wanted to point out a flaw in your logic (which is, again, only my opinion and not a fact per se).

Regarding MH370, I just checked an it was MH 17 ;)

Apart from that, there are many actors who could have done it. What I find surprising is that obviously noone is interested in providing supporting material for his side's theory. No satellite images, no radio tower comm, weird versions of the Dutch report on the black boxes (one with a sentence blaming Russia, the other one without that very sentence), it just appears so much politics that it doesn't pass the smell test.

<comment><USER12> Actions speak loader than words.

Also, take a little time to analyze how the Russian media vs. the world reacted to the incident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There were so many proxy wars between the USA and the Soviets I would not class that as a bloodless "no war" conflict.

I don't think there will be a war for the same reason Europe did not go to war with in the past few decades ... it would be like shooting themselves in the foot. there is little incentive for war when economies are so reliant on each other.

<comment><USER15> Niall Ferguson's _The War of the World: History 's Age of Hatred_, which looks at the 20th century, starts by pointing out how comfortable and settled everything looked at the start of the 20th century and as Keynes put it that this state appeared "normal, certain and permanent".

For all we know the historians of the 21st century may look back at our time in similar ways.

<comment><USER16> Let's hope not. For the first time ever we have something we need to protect - our technological civilization, on its way to reshape the fundamentals of human life. Ending aging and death, colonizing other worlds, really learning something about ourselves and the universe - those things are now actually reasonable concepts. It would be a real shame if we lose it over some stupid issue like political bickering leading to a world war. Because if we halt now, if we roll back to before the industrial revolution, we won't likely achieve this level for several more millennia, as we've pretty much used up all easily accessible, low-tech energy sources and materials. I really wish our leaders would realize that for the first time in the whole history, humanity is greater than the sum of its parts. However important your local issues seem to you, they're not worth endangering the future.

<comment><USER17> "For the first time ever we have something we need to protect"

Humanity has always been worth protecting.

<comment><USER16> Yes. I didn't mean to devaluate human life. My point is, for most of the history, societies have been replaceable, fungible. A tribe would die off to be replaced by another one, with different language and maybe culture, but otherwise the same. A civilization would fall, and next one would took the place, replacing the lost works of art with something superficially different, but generally the same. The world didn't change much with the centuries, people had the same illnesses, same problems. Same capabilities and the same perspectives. We were as far from the stars in 2000 BC as we were in 2000 AC. You could restart a civilization any time, and it wouldn't be significantly different.

Not so now. The last three centuries gave us the means and capacity to significantly improve the human condition. We started to ride on a self- amplifying feedback loop and we can't give up or fall off until we stabilize it, or we may never get on it again.

Humanity has always been worth protecting. Human lives has always been worth protecting. But for the first time ever, we now have a civilization worth protecting. All the problems it has, we have to fix. We can't afford to try and start over.

<comment><USER18> You significantly underestimate the last 20 000 years of progress. It's easy, because progress was very slow, but it was still nessesary for the later stages, and there's no reason to think it will take less time the next time around.

Domestication and farming alone took tousands of years, if you restarted the culture in year 0 - we wouldn't have to wait 1600 years for industrial revolution, but more like 10 000 years.

<comment><USER16> It's true that what we have today was built directly on the last 20 000 years of progress, but there is still a significant difference - those previous 20 000 years will live in the memories of survivors of the next great war, as well as in any books that will last. Domestication, farming, basic health care, etc. are things that can fit in one's mind. In the entire known history, we've never really restarted from scratch.

Even from our times, a some of knowledge would probably survive - from the ideas behind industrial revolution or modern medicine that can fit in one's head, to knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology that is stored in books. No matter how hard we try, we won't nuke every single book out of existence.

But then again, not that much knowledge will live, given our increased dependence on volatile storage media. Even if a hard drive would survive a century, we won't have anything to read it with.

The reason last 300 years were special is because our progress started to depend on enormous and ever increasing amounts of power. We've used up most of the sources that could be mined, and most renewables are not viable without high-precision manufacturing. Solar power is out of the question; we could start rebuilding hydro and wind power capacity but it will be a slow and very painful process, without easy coal and petroleum to help build the infrastructure. We simply may not have enough easy fuel left to restart the technological civilization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 'As Xi Jinping himself said during a visit to Seattle on Tuesday, "There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves."'

That's scary. What do you think he means by that, specifically? It seems like a threat to me.

<comment><USER20> It's beautifully layered. In one sense he's saying that war is not inevitable if we make the effort to get along. In another sense he's saying don't prod the panda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps it's irrelevant, but I wonder what effects the single child policy will have in the next few decades to Chinas ascendancy. The ratio of adult males to females is going to be very lopsided. Will the excess males join the military to make up for the family life they cannot have? Will there be vast emigration to search for wives?

It's impossible to say in my opinion, but it's interesting to think about.

<comment><USER22> Asked a Chinese friend of mine about this once, she said the Chinese males with means will either find Chinese wives, or will exploit a (comparatively) strong yuan and "raid" neighboring Asian countries (Vietnam, Thailand, Phillipines, etc) for wives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not sure if I agree with the article, but I'm always fascinated with how the classics can relate to modern times.

I'm also old enough to remember 30 or so years ago when Japan was the rising power that terrified everyone (watch the film Rising Sun). We all know how that played out. I'm a Brit, but in matters like this I would never bet against America.

</comment><comment><USER24> But. If we look at the recent history (the last three wars), then the probability drops (suddenly) to 0% for a new war to happen.

If we look at the last 7 wars, it is 42%. Not 0, but certainly not as high as 75% (12/16).

So maybe things are changing (and I guess they are). War now involves nuclear weapons, which I think they are a great detractor from getting the countries directly involved.

It might be the reason why they are resolving instead to proxy wars on "innocent" countries.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wars are largely for profit and supported by propaganda. To be safe we must fight propaganda and unethical bankers.

Anyone advocating for mass murder forfeits their authority.

Oil and resources in general are still a big issue that could cause conflict. We should conserve and recycle much better. Mandate 1- or 2- passenger lightweight vehicles for individuals. Mandate telecommuting to some degree. Need a massive development push to replace oil-based industrial processes with bio-renewable-based processes.

Also can improve land and energy use. [https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage](https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage)

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like someone's read Ghost Fleet [http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2015/07/15/ghost...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2015/07/15/ghost- fleet-military-geeks-imagine-the-next-world-war/)

</comment><comment><USER27> So, why do people want to fight in the first place? Is any natural inclination all bad? If we level up in perspective from that of personal tragedy, is war an important force of evolution and largely responsible for the place we are at now?

I realize technology changes the equation. And human suffering and destruction are never pleasant. So hopefully we are wise enough to find other ways and I think we will eventually. But I think in order to do this, we have to honestly admit that war has had an important role in human relations and development and the some of the outcomes of war have been for the betterment of humanity.

</comment><comment><USER28> It is interesting to me that 3 of the 4 non-war outcomes were all within the last 50 years.

</comment><comment><USER29> War? Not while we depend on China for rare earth elements. ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dih30mUexrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dih30mUexrA) )

edit: So I guess the people voting this down believe our failure to maintain a local source of rare earths makes war with China _more_ likely? Our military (and GDP) depends on these elements, and China likes the profit they make selling them. These both make war much less likely.

<comment><USER30> One reason is that "rare" earths aren't really that rare, what's rare is First World countries that are willing to tolerate the mess of refining them, which roughly entails boiling the ore in acid a thousand times. What was even rarer was a willingness to sell them at a loss when the PRC was selling them cheaply, before they established export quotas and the world market prices for them reversed.

See e.g. this article from 2011 which looks accurate to me: [http://fortune.com/2011/11/18/molycorps-1-billion-rare- earth...](http://fortune.com/2011/11/18/molycorps-1-billion-rare-earth- gamble/)

As far as I know, the PRC doesn't have a long term monopoly on anything but the largest concentration of Han Chinese in the world, which is of course rather worthwhile.

<comment><USER29> /sigh/ \- I suppose I shouldn't have assumed that I could skip over the details of China's rare earth strategy.

Of course they aren't "rare"; I'm obviously referring to China's cornered market on refinement. I also didn't claim anything about the future trends of the rare earth market. We could (and should) rebuild domestic sources, but that takes time and requires fighting regulation.

I'm simply saying that I find it extremely unlikely that we would go to war with China when they are _de facto_ a necessary part of military and industry supply chains. China wants the profit, and it would be stupid for us to start a war when reopening domestic mining and refinement industries would be cheaper.

<comment><USER30> Except they didn't corner the market, aside from when they're willing to sell them cheaper than anyone else. E.g. the company that _Fortune_ article focused on, Molycorp, stumbled in various ways and for various reasons, including lower prices because the PRC's initial restrictive actions were of course followed by counteractions, including recycling.

On the company's web site, they say they're putting their US facility in maintenance mode, ready to resume if market conditions warrant it, and are fulfilling customer demand from the PRC and Estonia.

So, no, in terms of rare earths they aren't a necessary part of our military and industrial supply chains. A trade embargo between us would hurt us both, and it would be _devastating_ if they could interdict shipments from Taiwan, Japan and South Korea (one of the reasons we maintain an expensive military, although fab lines have to be exquisitely vulnerable), but otherwise at 0th approximation it's hard to distinguish your argument from those made just prior to The Great War AKA WWI.

I'd also note that if we even had a complete trade embargo between the US and USSR I don't remember/remember reading of it. In 1980 Reagan campaigned on lifting Carter's grotesque grain embargo to the USSR, one of many pinpricks he made after they invaded Afghanistan and mightily embarrassed him.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Give me a big data problem to solve - <AUTHOR>

I am a big data developer and I am looking for real business problem to solve, not hypothetical nor scientific.
You should be able to provide me a sample of your data (assuming you have big data > GB) and the problem you need solved.
I will build a solution and provide you license to use it. <comment><USER2> Hi there, I have a few questions:

* Why are you providing this service? * Is there a fee associated with your solution? * Do you have any particular skills or background that, say, my existing analysts may not have?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to build a product. Yes I have the experience and background in building and designing complex system. There is no fee for the person giving me the genuine problem but then I plan to sell the solutions to others for a license. Of course, it is at my discretion what problem I choose to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [Summoning graycat]</comment>


Parallel C++ on AWS Lambda for CRISPR - <AUTHOR> https://benchling.engineering/powering-crispr-with-aws-lambda-f22c151a1ffc <comment><USER2> We have a similar application (parallelized C++ code operating on large files, for bioinformatics even) and ended up down the reverse path: started on Lambda, moved to our own RPC system. Lambda got super expensive (in part because there was no way to reuse a worker while it was doing async work like an S3 download), couldn't parallelize nearly enough without hitting AWS hard- limit quotas, had significantly lower CPU perf and didn't provide a way to cache files (like a genome in this case). Spot/preemptible instances keep our costs down while letting us keep a few hundred servers up at a time.

<comment><USER3> I feel like serverless is only benefitial for low volume / low traffic workloads.

The only other perk I've found is that the serverless billing model makes it easier to estimate costs.

<comment><USER4> I found it lowered our server cost incredibly for a high volume read heavy site. It allowed us to scale in response to increased traffic (not instantly that's a lie, spikes in the thousands of requests a second are not handled well, but over a few minutes it catches up without issue) and not have to provision and spin up servers. We were constantly over provisioned before and now it's a much lower but moving margin.

<comment><USER3> You can do that today though with K8s and auto-scaling. Not sure how well autoscaling works on AWS, but on GCP its a breeze.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lambda is an exciting platform, but it does require some bending to get it to work for certain use cases. This reminds me of some problems we solved last year [0], which should not have been problems for a fairly straightforward application.

[0]: [https://iplayer.engineering/evaluating-tensorflow-models- in-...](https://iplayer.engineering/evaluating-tensorflow-models-in-aws- lambda-c0e06cf23d87)

<comment><USER6> I read that article before and just reread it now - thanks for writing it up, but I still have the same question I did the first time around. You posit:

> Because we run 200 invocations or so in parallel we'll only need to download > the model once and save it there

From my own reading of the Lambda docs, it seems that a _simultaneous_ request for the same Lambda may or may not spin up a new container, ie while serial requests within the 15 minute timeout will likely reuse the same instance with the same frozen/cached tmp data, parallel requests do not have that assumption.

Was this your finding in practice? If so, were your CloudWatch "keep warm" events a series of just 1 Lambda invocation ~10/15min apart of 200 simultaneous requests serially spaced to keep the instances spun up?

<comment><USER5> The CloudWatch "keep warm" events are just one invocation, yes.

I do not remember having had issues with it, but honestly, I don't think I actually have stats on that anymore.

I've just checked in S3, but it doesn't look like we have request or data transfer metrics enabled on the model bucket. I may enable those next week to monitor the effectiveness of our strategy better.

<comment><USER6> I imagine if the code were properly written to deal with race conditions you wouldn't notice any issues either way besides an increased latency for some requests.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the difference between this CRISPR search problem and DNA sequence alignment? There were extensive development in the latter and is highly optimized. The author seems to be coming up with solution from scratch.

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

<comment><USER8> Original author here.

You're right - conceptually the CRISPR search problem and DNA sequence alignment are related. In both, you're looking for place where two (or more) sequences are very similar. I would say there are two major differences.

The first is in the goal of the search. Typically, alignment tools try to find the _best_ positional alignment for two (or more) sequences. The CRISPR search problem is to find _every possible_ match above some similarity threshold.

There are also a few constraints on the CRISPR search problem that allow us to make this much faster than a general DNA sequence alignment tool:

1) We know that that guide sizes tend to be very small (~20bp) 2) Part of the guide must match exactly (the PAM site), allowing us to restrict our search even further. 3) We don't need to worry about insertions or deletions in our search.

Using those three constraints, we can do this search a lot faster than a more general DNA alignment tool!

<comment><USER9> Honestly you are taking a big risk designing a DNA search algorithm something from scratch. It's akin to the risk people take when they roll their own crypto. There are aspects of this that you may not be considering, and it tends to be best to rest on the extensive work in the field than assume it is a trivial problem.

How do you deal with natural variation in the genome? Can you be sure your gRNA doesn't target an essential locus in some percentage people who carry a particular allele? The data to solve this is out there (1000 Genomes for instance).

Edit: excuse me, I appreciate that you are using a collection of whole genomes as your target. Will this reliably scale to thousands or millions of genomes and likely recombinations between them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Articles like this are why I return to HN everyday. There are 3 terms in the title that I know well, but put them together and they are something completely new to me. And the cost savings here is pretty remarkable.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope Lambda supports C++ natively someday. That would be awesome. Glad to see Go support was added recently too.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't this be easier to do in Fargate?</comment>


China's air pollution is causing at least 1 MILLION premature deaths a Year - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/69852/chinas-air-pollution-is-causing-premature-deaths-and-an-expat-exodus/

<comment><USER2> Fix your headline. It's causing deaths, not killing them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch!

at first I thought I would go with

"is killing 1 million people prematurely" , but then changed it back :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: News geolocation website - <AUTHOR> The idea: The idea is to create a news aggregator that geolocates the news, it analyses the news and displays an article on a street/city/region (location in general) if it is mentioned in that article. The website will later give you notifications about what is mentioned in the news nearby. The current situation of the project:
For now I have a minimum viable product, I have the website up and running that shows how the news will be displayed on a map.
What I am asking:
It will be really very nice of you if you can give me feedback, any feedbacks even negative ones are really more than appreciated. I know there are many bugs, bad design, lack of content but the question I am asking you is would you use such a website/mobile app if it existed? Do you like the idea? Do you think it is worth it if I finish building such a website?
Here is the link to the website:
http://www.toperudite.com/
Here is the link to the newsmap:
https://www.toperudite.com/pages/news/newsmap
Please don't hesitate to fill the following survey (it takes less than 3 minutes)
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe9q_0roqwtipe4KLyR...
Here is a link to a slack channel : https://join.slack.com/t/toperuditebetatesters/shared_invite...
Here is a quick youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrwvY049ipE
Thank you very much for your time :) <comment><USER2> I had a startup that built almost exactly the same thing in 2009 (at the peak of 'hyperlocal' hype), so I have some advice. We ended up creating branded widgets for partners and attempted to monetize with advertising.

1\. Your biggest problem is going to be acquiring audience; 'if you build it, they will come' is probably not going to play out unless you offer something above and beyond a typical aggregation web site.

2\. Consider the utility of granular location-specific news. For many users what you will be showing is either very little content (because there isn't any) or content from a larger geographic region. At that point you have to ask who your audience is and what you provide to them over a bigger regional news source.

3\. Keeping up with available sources will be a big challenge. Remember, if you're just aggregating from the big sources, you're not providing much; the appeal to an aggregator is that it gets and filters everything. If you have to go to another source as a user, there's no point in using this site.

4\. The site looks pretty bare-bones. It could use some design help across the board.

5\. The 'secret sauce' of a site like this is actually _not_ aggregation and automation ... it's curation. If you read 100,000 RSS feeds (if and where you can even find them these days!) you still need to separate the wheat from the chaff. That's why Reddit works - it's effectively a user-curated aggregate site that leverages a scoring algorithm to (ostensibly) bring the best stuff to the top.

Edit: Forgot one of the biggest challenges. I don't know how you're doing your address extraction, but one of the toughest things we ran into were false positives. Articles that reference a location which we geocode but really weren't _about_ that location. So you'll analyze a whole story (which can get very computationally expensive) and find 4 locations:

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C. Washington Zimbabwe

Now this story is about the Zimbabwe ambassador having a meeting with the president. Two of those addresses are where the story is, two probably aren't (Washington would probably not be geocoded to D.C.). So you file the story in:

Washington, D.C. Washington, USA Zimbabwe

Now you've just got noise. NLP can help but it's not enough - you will mis- geolocate this story. When that happens a lot the results are not reliable and, again, your potential audience does not see the utility.

Anyway, best of luck.

<comment><USER3> As somebody coming from geocoding background parsing places from full text will be a huge challenge. Hardly a word that isn't also a location. (There's a state in Turkey called Batman).

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed it's one of the most difficult challenges I am facing, the solution would be to give the power to the users so that they can discard such parsing. But first I have to ensure that there are people who might be interested in using the solution, it's the phase I am in right now (trying to validate the concept), thanks for the feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Many things don't happen at a point, they happen in an area, e.g. if something is relevant to France as a whole, don't show it as happening in Paris, use something to indicate a bounding box or radius which the story is centred on.

If something happens in Paris, show it in Paris, not in some random particular location in the middle of Paris, unless you know that it really happened at that exact location.

See this: [https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch- turn...](https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a- random-kansas-f-1793856052) for the kind of issue you can cause.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point, it's something listed in my list of bugs to fix, for now i am still in an idea validation phase where I want to validate the concept before committing more time to it, but I agree, this should definitely be fixed first :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I built something like this a few years ago. We ultimately did not really succeed but I think this could be potentially still very interesting.

Location is interesting when you combine it with time. News archives contain a lot of valuable content that would be interesting in the context of a location. For example, I live in Berlin and when we started digging around in archives from news papers, we found all these gems about David Bowie visiting certain bars, being on certain streets, etc. This is interesting to people in that area, years after the fact but not necessarily for people outside that area. Just having a historical view on a place via the things that people published about it is interesting.

Our problem at the time was coming up with enough of an MVP to convince users and investors. One thing we explored was using nlp to extract clues about location references from the text. This is surprisingly hard but not impossible. People use a lot of ambiguous language to refer to locations but taken together you can sometimes deduce correctly that people are referring to a street in Prenzlauerberg (a neighborhoud) in Berlin (the capital of germany, not the village near Bremen). This is of course flaky. The good news is some content is actually geotagged, which makes this easier. However, we found a lot of low quality geotagging as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is definitely something I will explore if I continue the project, combining time and location. I agree it is difficult to find locations for text but nowadays the NLP algorithms are more powerful than ever before so it is feasible :)

<comment><USER5> The problem is the references to locations in text are ambiguous. There are many places called paris (most of which outside of France). Many streets called Main street, etc. Also lots of articles mention several locations. Then there are lots of informal names for neighborhoods, people being a bit loose with boundaries, etc. You can usually guess the city but getting from there to e.g. street level or neighborhood level is a lot harder. Anyway, good luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's an interesting idea, but I'm rarely interested in news about a specific location (except when a particular incident / tragedy has happened). For local news, I tend to go read my local newspaper websites, and Google News already aggregates local articles anyway for me in their Local News section.

However - I am looking for a Google News replacement, as it keeps showing me gossip, entertainment and snarky news, no matter how many times I click "fewer stories like this". They used to have a feature where you could block news providers (eg never show me news from TMZ), and also choose my preferred news sources (eg I could choose The Verge & Bloomberg) and it would rank their version of the story highest. That was very useful while it worked. You could also add topics that you were interested in, so if I added "Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor", it would rank news stories about Nine Inch Nails more highly so that I would see them. (I would really like to be able to blacklist topics/keywords too.)

If somebody made a news aggregator like this, I'd love to switch away from Google News.

<comment><USER7> Hey, i'm a little late but i've been working on something that you might find interesting. I've been using RSS readers for quite some time but wanted to have an app that would combine rss feeds and GoogleNews-like news aggregation. So i built [https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io), It's a mix between a RSS reader and a news aggregator, so you can think of it as an all-in-one Google Reader + Google News web app. It's still an early version and doesn't have all the features of Google News (yet) but i would love to have your feedback !

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool idea. I haven't seen it mentioned in here, but the GDELT project is something you might be able to use

[https://www.gdeltproject.org/](https://www.gdeltproject.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about the GDELT project this could be very useful for my project, much appreciated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work. I also started a very very similar news aggregation service a few months ago, which extracts locations from news articles and shows the headlines on a map. [http://mapflare.com](http://mapflare.com)

As other comments already mentioned, there are many false positive locations, such as names of persons, organizations, chemical elements or even normal verbs and nouns. There exist for example places named "Robin Hood".

Took me some time to realize that i should not limit the text extraction to locations, but also focus on the recognition of other entities (persons, organizations,..) in order to filter out the ambiguous names.

</comment><comment><USER10> The idea is a very good one. Thought about it just the other day. The news in Sweden just now are overwhelmed about report about forest fires, but very hard to follow as most of them are in "obscure" locations. People that are concerned about fires in familiar neighbourhoods need to search the locations to see if they are close to the locations they are concerned about etc. I think there is much promise in the idea to provide a map interface to news of this kind. The regular media is in any case not doing a great job about it.

But also many challenges. I noticed in the past days that the accuracy of locations in the news is much lacking. Location names are not unique so an automatic approach is likely to fail.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am yet another person who built something like this some years ago (2006, I think).

The idea is OK, but you're missing something important. People don't care about local news, they care about relevant news. Some news is relevant to me even though it's happening on the other side of the World. Some news is only relevant to me because it affects my next door neighbour (who knew he was into _that_ , huh?).

You're going to need to spend a lot of time fixing up the design as it is right now, and audience building is going to be so, so hard in this climate.

Good luck, but you've a way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't really seem to work. The newsmap doesn't have any content.

Also it's a little strange that you're only able to search for streets, not general areas or cities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I will add the cities/ general areas, it's necessary indeed. And sorry for the inconvenience, there was a problem with the database, everything is back to normal now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think small visual changes in text size and formatting can make a big difference. Like just making the titles of articles bold, and putting them above their sources.

There is a bug for me where if I click the language change to english, then set the location to english, the "hours ago" section still shows french.

This is a really cool project! Hope you post more updates on HN as you go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback, much appreciated :) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great start.

I had a similar MVP in 2010 with the intent on building a curated news aggregator for sales territories. Once you define your geographic area (zipcodes/states/draw etc) and choose keywords and/or topics, your news feed will include any local or AP story that includes these keywords and geotagged within your territory.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very similar idea to what I was developing some time ago:

[http://www.theheretimes.com](http://www.theheretimes.com)

about: [http://www.theheretimes.com/about](http://www.theheretimes.com/about)

<comment><AUTHOR> very similar indeed

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of news sources have a large part of their media already devoted to local news. I don't see this providing much value on top of that. I think your engineering work here is great, but business wise I think you should pivot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > would you use such a website/mobile app if it existed?

Geolocated "news" is used in larger Brazilian cities but it's regarding stay bullets and robberies (eg. Fogo Cruzado, Onde Tem Tiroteio, Onde Fui Roubado). So there are some emergency use cases, but I'm unable to think of another use case where I might want to see the news mapped, as the core idea.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-security- app/brazi...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-security-app/brazil- apps-track-gunfire-as-rio-de-janeiro-violence-spikes-idUSKBN19P2C3)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, it can be very useful in case of an emergency indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related: [http://eventregistry.org/](http://eventregistry.org/) (B2B SaaS)

<comment><AUTHOR> True, thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The idea is interesting. B2B: I think that historical trends, especially on a seasonal basis might be quite useful for news and travel agencies, real estate offices, and general economic analysis.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback, those are very good ideas much appreciated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea. It would be great if a user could help the site improve its results for that user by, say, removing news about local hockey games that I don't and will never be interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, adding personnalisation of the news depending on the profile of the user is in my list of things to do :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like this idea a lot, but not able to check it out due to 502 errors. Would like to see it when it's a bit more built out. What are you using for address extraction?

<comment><AUTHOR> I use machine learning for address extraction. Very sorry for the inconvenience, the website is back online

<comment><USER21> The address extraction piece would make an awesome API that you could charge for if it's effective. I imagine a lot of aggregators would pay for something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, thanks for the feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't see any content, is the backend dead?

[https://imgur.com/a/BWpvBdOq](https://imgur.com/a/BWpvBdOq)

<comment><USER23> I don't see any content either, but just wanted to point out that your link gives me a 404.

<comment><USER22> Meh, probably I didn't save it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm getting a 502.5 process failure. HN death hug?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very sorry for the inconvenience, the website is back online

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hey Zack, Can we talk a little further about this offline? You can reach me via email at Firegarden.

\- Rob

</comment><comment><USER26> > England

Union Jack Flag

</comment><comment><USER27> Sites broken for me

<comment><AUTHOR> Very sorry for the inconvenience, the website is back online

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Rather than news aggregation on a map/location, I'd rather have news aggregation per event across countries/regions/etc.

For example, Trump-Putin meeting is an event. I'd like news aggregation on this event on what every corporate and independent news publication across the world is saying. Currently, I am only able to get US/British news viewpoints or angles and I have to work ridiculous hard ( google search is terrible now ) to find reporting on other nations/viewpoints. I was curious how the chinese, arabs, israelis, indians, south americans, etc were reporting on the story because having been to europe and asia, I know that news is not the same everywhere. One good thing about traveling.

Google news used to do something like this until they were forced to limit it to corporate news and regions.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the original idea, it seemed too complicated to do at the beginning but now after working some months on the idea, I think it's feasible, I will add this feature in my future surveys to see who might be interested, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated :)</comment></comment>


Programming Language Agnostic Backend / Method as a Service (MaaS) provider - <AUTHOR> http://www.nethod.net

<comment><USER2> You can also consider looking into ShepHertz App42 Cloud API (<http://api.shephertz.com>) which comes with vast range of technical and business services and are available in 9 target SDks including iOS/Android/J2ME/JAVA/C#/PHP/RUBY/WP7. ShepHertz provides complete Backened As A Service for your app and gives a better insight of your app data through management console.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome. How much will this cost down the road?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working over four months on it. We have to work a lot more. Now we are in developer preview stage. We want to make the project more fantastic with your feedbacks.</comment></comment>


Move Over WordPress, There's A New CMS In Town - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/07/17/move-over-wordpress-theres-a-new-cms-in-town/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who thinks this is BS? Don't get me wrong, Squarespace is a really strong product and i trust their new version is beautiful et al. But Wordpress is Open Source and even wordpress.com is free. How do they compare at all?

<comment><USER3> Squarespace is quite possibly the most frustrating CMS platform I've ever attempted to configure in my 10 year career. It is not a threat to Wordpress, or even Weebly for that matter.

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, how so? I found the complete opposite to be true when using both Wordpress and Squarespace for small business sites like local businesses, entrepreneurs, blogs, portfolios, etc.

Designing for Squarespace is by far the simplest process I've used. It's way ahead of even Shopify, which has been touted as being incredibly easy to design for. I can take 90-95% of a completed PSD design to Squarespace in under an hour. If the design is already chopped up in HTML, even faster. It cut my site development time in half, and my clients prefer the user interface versus Wordpress.

The "Selective Display" section are comparable to Drupal, yet they are much easier to work with.

My frustration with Squarespace's previous version (Version 5) was that it was getting a bit dated and it was a bit closed off, meaning some designs and project were just not possible. Squarespace 6 is solving a lot of this.

Regardless of whether or not it's a threat to WP or Weebly, it's an awesome platform to work with and has many features that are simply amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't likely to kill WordPress. Maybe WordPress.com, but not everybody wants a hosted, limited control site - some want to host it themselves. That's WordPress's strength (maybe the only one) and why places like Tumblr still haven't overtaken it.

<comment><USER6> From Automattic's perspective, WordPress's strength is that the people who don't want hosted, limited control sites write amazing plugins and themes that the people that _do_ want hosted, limited control site also want.

In short, the OSS ecosystem around WordPress drives Automattic's revenue from WordPress.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't deny that WordPress has a lot going for it, but Automattic's reported $45 million in annual revenue doesn't put it too far ahead of Squarespace.

<comment><USER6> WordPress's annual revenue is 400% Squarespace's last reported revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Squarespace's last reported revenue was 2010. WordPress's $45 million is projected this year - a two year discrepancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> According to Wikipedia, Squarespace predates Wordpress by one month (April 2003). So "new" CMS is er kind of a uh load of total linkbait crap.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about when the company was founded, it's about the release of Squarespace 6, which compares favorably to WordPress.com's current incarnation.

<comment><USER3> Your title is misleading because "Wordpress" as a general brand encompasses the open source Wordpress.org CMS workhorse, which most of us on HN typically associate with the name. Wordpress.com the cloud blog platform has lots of valid competition, notably Tumblr and Blogger.

I enjoy learning the bootstrapped rags to riches story about Squarespace, but your title frames the story as if its about a new competitor to Wordpress the open source CMS, and it is not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


See the front page of any local newspaper in the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/

<comment><USER2> A lot of newspapers, certainly, but not all of them. I'm missing at least 5 national newspapers for my country (strangely all the Francophone ones). Only one newspaper in France too. Still, great fun to look at what the headlines further from home are!

By the way, newspaper sales for the quality newspapers are rising here. I wonder why that is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Missing almost every single local newspaper in England / Scotland.</comment>


How much does it cost to store a VHS tape in a New York City apartment? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cockeyed.com/science/vhs/vhs.html

<comment><USER2> So what is the marginal cost of storing the tape? And does it matter? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost))

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm so glad we use the metric system here; that was hard to follow.

</comment><comment><USER5> He forgot maintenance on the "sell price" per month.</comment>


iBooks DRM has been cracked. - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/02/23/ibooks-drm-has-been-hacked/

<comment><USER2> _I've always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it_

This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip?

But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA".

The downside of this is it lets companies delude themselves (and others) into thinking that their DRM is "secure", when in reality it is simply that nobody cares about them.

<comment><USER3> Now that Netflix has original exclusive content, can we look forward to someone hacking the Netflix stream?

<comment><USER4> I've been told there are torrents of exclusive Netflix content.

<comment><USER5> Are they decrypted from the stream or screencapped and transcoded? If it's the latter, then that's trivial and doesn't require breaking anything, it just causes a good bit of degradation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's one thing about cracking DRM that has me puzzled. Consider DRM on music, for instance. Suppose we have a 4 minute song, stored as an MP3 with DRM.

The ideal crack results in a 4 minute audio file, without DRM, that is the same audio quality as the input MP3, and is about the same size.

If we didn't care about size, there would be an easy way to crack the DRM. Just play back to music and capture the digital audio stream, and store that as a WAV file, or compress it with a lossless compressor. That preserves the audio quality, but the file is bigger.

If we are willing to give up some audio quality, we can do the above, but use an MP3 encoder. That should get is back down to near the original size, but the decoding and re-encoding as MP3 will cause some audio degradation.

Let's think about the MP3 format in an abstract way for a moment. Consider the set of all possible 4 minute audio streams. Define a given stream as being "perfectly representable" as an MP3 of bit rate B if there exists an MP3 encoding at a rate of B that decodes perfectly to that stream.

A general purpose MP3 encoder takes an input stream, and produces an MP3 file that decodes to a perfectly representable stream that is close to the input stream--ideally only differing in ways that people can't hear.

So here's the question--if the input stream to an MP3 encoder is perfectly representable, why is the output usually a file that decodes to a _different_ perfectly representable stream?

It seems to me it should be possible to design an MP3 encoder with the property that under the operation of encoding followed by decoding, the perfectly representable streams are fixed points. I'll call such an encoder "representation preserving".

With such an encoder, removing DRM from an MP3 file consists simply of playing it back using whatever is normally used to play files with that DRM system, capturing the digital output stream, and then re-encoding with a representation preserving MP3 encoder. The result will by a DRM-free MP3 with exactly the same quality as the MP3 you started with, and compressed to about the same file size.

<comment><USER7> The mathematical term you're looking for is Idempotence [1].

I'm speculating that the difficulty of such a feat depends on how many free variables an encoder has to choose from.

For example, in the case of a compressor, there are probably quite a few arbitrary choices that can be made at the compressor side that make little difference to compression quality in general -- but may make reproducing the exact same result difficult. The search-space might be very large.

I'll also speculate, though, that even if perfect reproduction is not possible, a compressor that's designed to work on the digital output of a decompressor of the same algorithm can probably be designed to do a better job on that particular example.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Offical site (requires TOR to be installed): <http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml>

Webified link (doesn't require TOR): <http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion.to/cgi- bin/ssi/index.shtml>

<comment><USER9> Holy crap! I thought Requiem hadn't been updated in years!

Thanks for the links.

*edit

The onion site seems to have a heck of a time serving files. I've been trying for an hour and have yet to get a valid zip. Some kind soul is seeding out a torrent of all three archives (windows, mac, and source)

Try this:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:a8f71c6c1b773a2f43850e4dae9189165a7ba0aa&dn=requiem-3.3.4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%2Fannounce

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can confirm that yes, it has been cracked. Happily it is (as far as I know) not yet illegal for me to remove DRM protection from books I've purchased, although I'm sure that will change soon.

<comment><USER11> I think in the USA, the DMCA has made it illegal to break the copy protection on copyrighted work?

It may or may not be against the iBook EULA, which might make you in breech of contract, or make you guilty of using a computer system without agreement.

<comment><USER10> I am not in the USA, but yes, I think you are correct about the DMCA.

Unfortunately, after looking into things it seems that the law in Sweden also prohibits breaking DRM. There is a provision that if I am unable to otherwise use the content, I am allowed to break the copy protection. However, the law also prohibits making and spreading software that is capable of breaking copy protection, so that sort of contradicts that escape route (since they can just say that the illegal act was figuring out how to break the copy protection, not the actual breakage).

In swedish, from the swedish government: <http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/05/07/29/96c6bfb1.pdf>

It's a sad state of affairs. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great, now I honestly feel safe about buying from the iBookstore!

This can only lead to an increase in sales.

Did they not learn anything from the music industry? Sales have only gone up since they scrapped DRM! (citation needed)

<comment><USER12> I'm interested to see if this will be true for books as well. Taken in a continuum of attention required, you start with music, then to movies,and finally to books. As a result my ability to consume books is one to two orders of magnitude lower than music. That seems like it could impact the economics of discover-then-purchase that music "piracy"/"free marketing" has wrought.

Regardless, I think it will _always_ be good for the long tail authors.

<comment><USER13> According to best-selling author Paulo Coelho, piracy's free marketing has increased his sales: [http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/09/author-paulo-coelho- support...](http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/09/author-paulo-coelho-supports- piracy-share-to-get-revenue/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surprised that websites are barely picking up on this, since the solution has been out for roughly two weeks now. Requiem works great and it takes a matter of seconds to complete, regardless of whether you're removing DRM from a book or TV show.

Glad to see Brahms finally getting some much-deserved recognition.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice. My hope is that the market for eBooks (and Video) end up going the way of digitally distributed music and ends up DRM free.</comment>