Google accuses Uber of creating a fake company in order to steal its tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/waymo-versus-uber-court-hearing-2017-5 <comment><AUTHOR> Some quality journalists are live tweeting the proceedings from inside the courtroom. Getting some great updates in real time:

[https://twitter.com/CSaid](https://twitter.com/CSaid)

[https://twitter.com/Priyasideas](https://twitter.com/Priyasideas)

[https://twitter.com/inafried](https://twitter.com/inafried)

[https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac](https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Court has moved to a private session now -- attorneys only, no public allowed. So live tweets are over for the day.

But there's a lot of detailed back & forth between the attorneys and judge in those links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This made me wonder what HN thought of the acquisition at the time.

Well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205)

Top comment noted how the company looked like a "quick flip".

<comment><USER4> And then it diverted to a discussion about a bbq that was held in 2002:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150709120858/http://ot.to/](https://web.archive.org/web/20150709120858/http://ot.to/)

I think this is the place:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-73.7132536,3a,75y,1...](https://email@example.com,-73.7132536,3a,75y,115.45h,82.63t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s9yOLxD7rg4Xx8fdc4bmQ1A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Here's the thing," [Judge William Alsup] said. "You didn't sue him. You sued Uber. So what if it turns out that Uber is totally innocent?"_

This is going to be a very interesting case.

<comment><USER6> > So what if it turns out that Uber is totally innocent?

I honestly can't see this as an outcome; either Uber's wrong in they completely and miserably failed due dilligence, or they're wrong in that they actively coerced [him] to create a shell company with Google assets so it could "launder" them into Uber.

We can't say for certain which it is at this point. All we know is that Uber's trying their level best _not_ to say which by refusing discovery and worming around the issue. That alone signals to me that the preponderance of evidence bar is going to be a fairly easy one for Google to clear here. There's just too many dots that even when left unconnected draw a pretty clear picture of what happened.

<comment><USER7> > Uber's wrong in they completely and miserably failed due dilligence

Being stupid and/or incompetent isn't illegal. Yet.

<comment><USER8> It is if you happen to buy stolen property. You might not be held responsible for stealing, but you'll have to return the property and say good buy to the money, I think.

<comment><USER9> If the thieves are caught, they owe you the purchase price as restitution.

This is only if you unknowingly purchased stolen goods.

<comment><USER8> IANAL, but... They owe you and it is a question if they can get it back to you, but the rightful owner has precedence in many (most?) cases. That's the setup for many kinds of scam. The scammed party buys something, but the transaction of the property is in some way faulty, while the money quickly disappears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What does it take to get a business license revoked these days? If an individual carried on the way Uber does s/he's be looking at a long stretch in prison. While I championed Uber's disruption of the taxi monopoly when it got started, and did a lot of free advocacy here on HN against taxi industry shills, the firm has turned out to be as corrupt or worse than the market it set out to disrupt.

Should the various allegations made against the firm prove true, and and it seems like there's a good chance of that, a good number of people need to face criminal charges, the company needs to be shut down and its assets auctioned off, and the investors need to end up with nothing because they abrogated their corporate governance responsibilities.

<comment><USER11> There's an important personal lesson here, don't mindlessly support stuff that is hyped up.

<comment><USER12> A better lesson is to learn to think critically.

Do taxi companies leverage cozy relationships with taxi regulators to restrict competition so they can overcharges customers and increase their profits? The answer to that is almost certainly yes, and provably yes in certain markets.

Does that mean every business that is trying to break the taxi monopoly is automatically one of the good guys, and run ethically? The answer to that is almost certainly no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Uber seems to be the logical extreme of 'easier to beg forgiveness' mentality; there are no rules (explicit or implicit) or ethical boundaries that are not subject to be broken in pursuit of their goals.

<comment><USER14> I dunno man, I think Uber is just in the HN wheelhouse and has been stealing our focus lately. Wells Fargo illegally signed people up for countless credit lines they didn't ask for. HSBC got a slap on the wrist for laundering billions in drug money. People in power routinely break the rules and there's basically no penalty.

<comment><USER15> Google actively assisted in selling illegal pharmaceuticals due to the lucrative ad revenue. It was coordinated and driven by the chief executives.

<comment><USER16> I haven't followed it, but weren't they the _same_ pharmaceuticals (aka not fake, same manufacturer, just cheaper), from across the border?

<comment><USER17> The media wrote good aricles about the conman who informed on Google, who claimed to be selling vials of nothing but water and labeling them "HGH" etc.

However, frankly, there are still scams being advertised on Adwords and I would argue that we should separate the scam category from the illegal pharma category.

The truth is that the vast majority of the half billion dollars they were penalized for earning was payments from companies who were advertising and fulfilling generic drugs from cheaper countries such as India (or even New Zealand!). The people running these companies may be 'criminals' \-- you could make that case -- but I have an easier time making the case that they are running an ethical business that helps lower and middle class americans get the medicine they need at a fraction of the cost (and sometimes simply without explaining to a third-party that their dick doesn't work).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Based on this live tweets ([https://twitter.com/CSaid](https://twitter.com/CSaid)) it doesn't sound like Waymo/Google is making much headway. They want to pin this on Uber, but haven't presented evidence of wrongdoing by Uber:

        Judge to Waymo: U have no proof that shows a chain
        of Levandowski saying to anybody here's the
        trade secrets.

Unless Waymo presents something like this, I don't see how this trial benefits them. Sure they can make a big fuss an get Levandowski kicked off self driving cars / Lidars, but that won't stop Uber from moving forward with their program.

<comment><USER19> A couple of benefits in no particular order:

It casts doubt/worry/issues on the legal legitimacy of Uber's tech. Employees/Researchers won't want to become embroiled in this, if they ever want to license the tech I'm sure "what about google?" will come up and need to be mitigated.

It gets Alphabet and the newly founded Waymo a lot of "free" publicity, helping to form their public image as a car company. (Wronged by the evil uber)

Maybe a little vindictive, but I'm sure their lawyers would rather his compensation burn than be used against them.

<comment><USER20> _> It casts doubt/worry/issues on the legal legitimacy of Uber's tech. Employees/Researchers won't want to become embroiled in this, if they ever want to license the tech I'm sure "what about google?" will come up and need to be mitigated._

Why would an employee ever fear another entity personally suing them? Was there a mass exodus from Google or Samsung after Apple's successful infringement suit in 2012?

Why would an employee performing genuinely novel work worry about her work being discredited?

I would expect a culpable employee to divest before his organization got caught. Some members of the Enron C-suite sold their stock before the debt hiding scandal broke. Maybe this is happening in Uber's Otto division; has anyone seen anything like this?

<comment><USER21> You wouldn't want to be the employee or manager who made an IP decision that landed your company on the wrong end of an Alphabet lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Levandowski is probably going to come out of this really well. Uber, not so much. Google's LIDAR technology is obsolete spinning-scanner gear, mostly from Velodyne. It's something you'd use on an experimental vehicle, not a production one. The production LIDAR systems are coming, they're all solid state, and they come from big auto parts makers like Delphi and Continental. So by the time the Uber case gets to trial, it will be moot.

Levandowski already got his money. Waymo could sue him, but what are the damages? Google isn't selling anything, so they can't show impact on their sales volume. (Neither is Uber. Uber's venture into self-driving is probably more to pump up the valuation than to provide a real service, anyway.)

I'm beginning to think that self-driving will be a feature that comes from auto parts companies. You need sensors and actuators, which come from auto parts companies. You need dashboard units, which come from auto parts companies. You need a compute unit, which is just a ruggedized computer packaged for automotive conditions, something that comes from auto parts companies. You need software, which may come from a number of sources. This may not be all that disruptive a technology.

<comment><USER23> > Google's LIDAR technology is obsolete spinning-scanner gear, mostly from > Velodyne. It's something you'd use on an experimental vehicle, not a > production one.

Given that (1) Google is spending a whole lot of money to protect their LIDAR technology in court, (2) Uber spent nearly half a billion dollars apparently to copy it and (3) Google (with their proprietary LIDAR) is the only company -- publicity and press releases aside -- that seems to be actively operating an autonomous fleet in the wild with reasonably few overrides, disengagements or accidents, I'm willing to bet that good LIDAR is actually more important than you're giving it credit for here.

<comment><USER12> So a good LIDAR steers a car all by itself?

I'm willing to bet that there is a ton more of technology involved in self driving vehicles than you are giving it credit for here.

Not sure why the down votes. There is a lot more technology here than one type of sensor, there ia a huge software stack. Uber clearly paid $500M because they wanted to get access to someone who had been doing it for a decade and had built that stack more than once. Whether Uber thought they were getting Google technology in the deal is the big question of the lawsuit, but it's very possible they just wanted to jumpstart their own effort by buying a team that was already up to speed.

<comment> angry-hacker And the other question is why would auto makers want to sell or sacrifice their production capacity so they Google can kill them?

Also, there are soy many regulations and safety rules in the industry, if they can't abolish them (with perfect tech/lobbying) old automakers will win.

<comment><USER24> > And the other question is why would auto makers want to sell or sacrifice > their production capacity so they Google can kill them?

Good point, but I think there are many ways to make this work. Two ideas:

1\. Contract with a small/failing auto manufacturer who has little to lose (e.g. Mitsubishi).

2\. Work with a manufacturer to build vehicles and also license them tech (Chrysler and Honda are interested [0]).

[0]: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2017/01/10/alphabet...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2017/01/10/alphabets- waymo-envisions-production-alliance-to-cut-automated-car-tech- cost/#799c00fc455b)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Judge Alsup, to Waymo Lawyer: "You have one of the strongest records I've seen of somebody doing something bad. Good for you!"

<comment><USER26> What's the context, what'd the Waymo lawyer do?

<comment><USER27> I assume they mean details of actions the employee took on their computer (putting in flash drive, copying data off, etc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Original HN discussion from the time - several on here, including myself thought acquisition looked like quick flip from the outset:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205)

</comment><comment><USER29> If this turns out to be true, this does not bold well for a bright UBer future. I feel like I only hear bad things about them lately.

Anyone have any speculation as to what might happen to Uber if this turns out to be true?

<comment><USER30> If it turns out to be a huge case ($$$$$) then I can forsee Google owning part of Uber if not outright.

<comment><USER31> Nobody cares about damages; the real meat is whether or not there will be an injunction. Damages could foreseeably go into the $1 billion range; an injunction would cost uber at least an order of magnitude more than that.

<comment><USER12> An injunction against what? Designing and building autonomous cars? An injunction like that might save Uber billions of dollars. I've never bought the idea they needed their own autonomous cars. Someday someone (very likely multiple someones unless our crazy patent system interferes) will build viable autonomous cars and Uber can just buy from them.

Their ultimate success will always be based on their brand and how well they provide their service. Until the last 6 months they did an amazing job at both, they had their apps on many times more phones than any competitor, and their app works amazingly well. Now they've tarnished their brand and might be losing market share, well before the market is completely built out. that's what they should be focusing on.

<comment><USER32> Some commenter on Reddit/here said that Uber doesn't have a way to profitability, self-driving is just to keep the investor money flowing in.

But the future of cars is really like servers, not ownership, but as a service, you'll just use an app to hail a self-driving car to take you anywhere. Whoever can sell their self-driving tech to car manufacturers will win, Uber probably wants to be the infrastructure that the car companies use to manage their CaaS, and if they win the self-driving first-to-market race, they can bundle their existing fleet management service as a bundle with the tech.

But if someone else wins the self-driving tech, a car manufacturer can buy that, and either self-develop their own fleet management or buy from someone else (it's a lot simpler than self-driving tech, obviously).

<comment><USER12> I struggle to understand how a service that costs pennies to deliver that earns Uber dollars from each fare can't find a path to profitability. I think people are too hung up on the awful financials they have now, and ignore the massive buildout they are doing.

And Boeing could easily compete with United and American right now, the extra costs of hiring pilots and crews are minute for them. But it doesn't make sense on many levels. I'm pretty sure car makers will focus on making the self driving tech, and sell it to customers like Uber. Uber will have to win like car rental companies do today, brand and location. If it is installed on the most phones that will winin the near term, at least until how we use our devices entirely changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is Ubers fault for leaving themselves open, but this will play out like a hostile takeover w/ Google upping their 6percent stake to controlling or wholly owning Uber

<comment><USER34> I assume the biggest motivation for Google is not hurting or controlling Uber but preventing this kind of thing from happening again.

I assume there are a lot of people working for Google who are experts in the tech they helped create but no longer owners of that tech. By that token, Google would really try hard to keep this sort of person from leaving with their tech.

<comment><USER33> There are a lot of people at Uber who are experts in Google tech. Why retrain engineers when another company already did it for you-- on a highly complex niche platform

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The entire point of Uber is to evade laws on technicalities, so the fact that they are doing this here should be a surprise to no one.

That is their core competency, in fact.

<comment><USER12> A technicality is they are "regulations" not laws. And probably unconstitutional.

<comment><USER36> Regulations are to laws as sort algorithms are to source code, and you should take their constitutionality up the the courts.

(The regulations', not the search algorithms'. We all know insertion sort violates the 4th amendment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Google just accused Uber of creating a fake, shell company with its former engineer to steal its tech"

They don't seem to be backing that clickbait title do they?

I think the backdated form makes sense, more sense they doing something obvious like creating a fake company the 'day' after someone leaves Google.

</comment><comment><USER38> Considering Uber's past unethical behavior, I am sure they stole tech. The problem is that it is very difficult to prove it.

If it is proved, there should be actual consequence to the executives, including jail

</comment><comment><USER39> Is this Otto the same as www.ottomotors.com? That site seems slightly fake, like the kind of site Hooli in Silicon Valley would have.

<comment><USER40> No, ottomotors.com is a real division of Clearpath: [https://www.clearpathrobotics.com/](https://www.clearpathrobotics.com/)

I'm assured by somebody who works in assembly line / factory stuff that ottomotors.com has real and good products. Definitely not fake or Hooli.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> If this is true, it's kind of a brilliant scheme, you know, in an evil "I'm going to take over the world" sorta way.

<comment><USER42> Hah, yeah, although they're in court so it's not _that_ brilliant

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> So if Uber stole Google's designs but are not using them in their present self driving stuff can Google do much?

</comment><comment><USER44> Since parts of this are public information, when is the next bit of information expected to come out?

</comment><comment><USER45> This page loads a 2400x1800 *.jpg into a (on my screen) 372x279 image element.

I believe no further comment is necessary.</comment>


The Fixing-JSON Conversation - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/08/22/Fixing-JSON-Redux <comment><USER2> SDLang !!!! : [https://sdlang.org/](https://sdlang.org/)

Full example : [https://github.com/Abscissa/SDLang-D/wiki/Language- Guide#exa...](https://github.com/Abscissa/SDLang-D/wiki/Language- Guide#example-sdl-file)

Examples:

Creating a Tree

        plants {
            trees {
                deciduous {
                    elm
                    oak
                }
            }
        }

Creating a Matrix

        myMatrix {
           4  2  5
           2  8  2
           4  2  1
        }

A Tree of Nodes with Values and Attributes

        folder "myFiles" color="yellow" protection=on {
            folder "my images" {
                file "myHouse.jpg" color=true date=2005/11/05
                file "myCar.jpg" color=false date=2002/01/05
            }
            folder "my documents" {
                document "resume.pdf"
            }
        }

Date and Date/Time Literals (and comments!)

        # create a tag called "date" with a date value of Dec 5, 2005
        date 2005/12/05

        # a date time literal without a timezone
        here 2005/12/05 14:12:23.345

        # a date time literal with a timezone
        in_japan 2005/12/05 14:12:23.345-JST

<comment><USER3> That's beautiful!

<comment><USER4> For simple data exchange? Way over-engineered is what it is, TFA specifically noted that they want to stay in the overall conceptual complexity of JSON:

> "Just use X" […] Nah, most of them are way, way richer than JSON, often > with fully-worked-out type systems and Conceptual Tutorials and so > on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think now is a good time to re-quote the man himself... Douglas Crockford..

[https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/RK8qyGVaG...](https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/RK8qyGVaGSr)

      I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability.  I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't.

      Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.

<comment><USER6> > _I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold > parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability._

I call BS. If people want to have custom parsing directives they can send them out of band, encode them in the filename, or whatever. But they don't. And I've not seen this happening with most other serialisation formats either, so why would JSON be a particular target? After all it's value comes from being trivially parsable across languages, and that would be killed by custom parsing directives. Those wanting those would also implement their own parsers etc.

Addition: Besides, reading comments to decide how to parse, implies either "comments on top of the file" or a "2 stage parsing".

With 2 stage parsing, you could implement comments and whetever else yourself, even in pure JSON anyway.

As for "comments on top of the file", well, just disallow them (only allow comments after the first JSON object starts), and no issue with "parsing directives" anymore...

<comment><USER7> If people really wanted parsing directives, they could just say that keys starting with # and their values are parsing directives - e.g:

        {
            "#if": "parserversion > 1.5",
            "key": "somevalue",
            "#else": "",
            "key": "othervalue"
        }

Thought I also don't really see any reason to include parsing directivesin JSON.

<comment><USER8> If you're going to design something like that, it's wise to make sure it can be represented as valid JSON.

Since JSON objects don't support order or repeated keys, that syntax can't be represented, edited or processed by the rich ecosystem of JSON tools. Most decent JSON editors will show that text with squigly red underlines. It's not worth giving up interoperability, and having to make yet another new set of tools for an incompatible syntax.

That was the mistake that the Angular 2 template syntax made.

But XML-based templating languages like Genshi [1] show how you can obey the rules of XML, use namespaces correctly, support element, attribute and text based expressions, looping, logic and macros, and it works just fine and interoperates perfectly with existing tools.

Genshi was based on another Python based XML templating system called Kid [2], which itself was influenced by Zope's page templates, TAL template attribute language, TALES expressions [3] and METAL templates [4]. Genshi and Kid templates are simple and easy to use compared to the conglomeration of Zope stuff.

Here is the essential trick, described in the Zope manual, which all those languages share, that makes it possible to sidestep the fact that attributes are not ordered:

When there is only one TAL statement per element, the order in which they are executed is simple. Starting with the root element, each element's statements are executed, then each of its child elements is visited, in order, to do the same.

Any combination of statements may appear on the same elements, except that the content and replace statements may not appear together.

Due to the fact that TAL sees statements as XML attributes, even in HTML documents, it cannot use the order in which statements are written in the tag to determine the order in which they are executed. TAL must also forbid multiples of the same kind of statement on a single element, so it is sufficient to arrange the kinds of statement in a precedence list.

When an element has multiple statements, they are executed in this order:

        1) define
        2) condition
        3) repeat
        4) content or replace
        5) attributes
        6) omit-tag

It would be great to have a Genshi-like templating language for JSON, tightly integrated with JavaScript the same way Genshi is integrated with Python.

[1] [https://genshi.edgewall.org/](https://genshi.edgewall.org/)

[2] [http://turbogears.org/1.0/docs/GettingStarted/Kid.html](http://turbogears.org/1.0/docs/GettingStarted/Kid.html)

[3] [https://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/AppendixC.html](https://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/AppendixC.html)

[4] [https://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/AppendixC.html#metal-o...](https://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/AppendixC.html#metal- overview)

<comment><USER4> > It would be great to have a Genshi-like templating language for JSON, > tightly integrated with JavaScript the same way Genshi is integrated with > Python.

But… that already exists. It's called "Python". Just define your data structure using bog-standard Python and serialise it.

<comment><USER8> What I mean is using JSON as the syntax, and JavaScript as the expression and scripting language.

Zope has this supposedly "restricted subset" of Python that you're allowed to use as expressions and scripts, but it's missing important features and isn't meaningfully safe from a paranoid security perspective, and you end up having to drop down to lower level Zope external methods to write real Python code, which is very inconvenient.

If you trust someone enough to give them access to editing templates with "restricted python expressions", then you can probably trust them enough to use real Python expressions. You'd be unwise to give somebody you don't actually trust access to even a "restricted subset" of Python running on your server. That's just asking for trouble.

<comment><USER4> > What I mean is using JSON as the syntax, and JavaScript as the expression > and scripting language.

… it's the exact same process except with Javascript as the language? Generate your JS datastructure then JSON.stringify it? I don't understand what the issue is or why you'd want a templating language when much of JSON's point is that it matches directly to common standard datastructures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Timestamps are so complicated once you factor in timezones and daylight savings that it doesn't belong in JSON. Time zones are not static. They can change from country to country, or even states within countries. Ditto for when daylight savings is enacted during the year - even changing over the years. There is no rhyme or reason to any of this. The data for this has to be stored in tables and time zone meanings can change retroactively. The only reliable time stamp is UTC without leap seconds. (Speaking of leap seconds, who thought seconds going from 0 - 60 rather than 0 - 59 was a good idea?)

Accurate time is one of the most difficult things to model in computer science.

<comment><USER10> Time is actually quite simple if you have a good mental model of what you're trying to represent and don't try to mix different concepts into a single value.

This talk explains it VERY nicely: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rnIHsqABfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rnIHsqABfM)

Basically just decide whether you're trying to store an absolute time (a timestamp will do) or a civil time (year, month, day, etc.) and treat them as two separate data types.

(If you just use "civil time + offset from UTC" like RFC 3339 does, then you can convert it to an absolute time, but you can convert _only that one specific value_ using that offset, and not any other - i.e. that offset is _not_ a substitute for an actual timezone identifier.)

<comment><USER6> > _Time is actually quite simple if you have a good mental model of what you > 're trying to represent and don't try to mix different concepts into a > single value._

Not even close.

[http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods- progra...](http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods-programmers- date-time-zones.html)

<comment><USER10> If you watch the video I linked above, he explicitly mentions that 99% of the time you _should not_ be dealing with any of those things manually - that if you find yourself working with offsets and DST values, it's a sign that you're most likely doing something wrong.

<comment><USER6> > _that if you find yourself working with offsets and DST values, it 's a sign > that you're most likely doing something wrong._

The video is wrong then.

If you're writing an application that deals with times (e.g. stores and queries events with specific timestamps) and you don't take offsets and DST values into account, you get all kinds of weird edge cases.

<comment><USER10> No, the point is that you should not be doing those thing _manually_ , i.e. you should never be adding integer offsets to something or doing similar operations. Instead, all the rules for conversions between times are already stored in the timezone database, so all you should do is something like

        ToAbsolute(CivilTime, TimeZone)

and the reverse. He also mentions (at 26:50) proper ways of dealing with repeating and non-existent civil times close to DST transitions (and sane default ways if you just don't want to bother).

When talking about JSON or serialization formats specifically, none of the complexities need to ever leak into the representation.

<comment><USER4> > Instead, all the rules for conversions between times are already stored in > the timezone database, so all you should do is something like

That only works if you're completely detached from the user and don't care for them. Example:

On January 1st 2011, a Samoan user living in Samoa (timezone Pacific/Apia) records an event for January 1st 2012. You convert January 1st 2012 09:00:00 to UTC, storing 2011-01-01T20:00:00.

On January 2nd 2012 at 10AM, you remind your user that they had an event set.

Because in May 2011 Samoa announced they were going to skip a local day and move across the international date line. So 2011-12-30T09:00:00 UTC was 2011-12-29T23:00:00 Pacific/Apia, but 2011-12-30T10:00:00 UTC was 2011-12-31T00:00:00 Pacific/Apia.

And as far as your user is concerned, they told you to ping them on January 1st at 9AM and you pinged a day late. Just because you store absolute datetimes doesn't mean you won't fuck up, and when the data is user-provided, chances are as good that _that decision_ will be the one fuckup.

<comment><USER10> That still doesn't mean that you should do any of those operations by hand (which is what the previous comment was about).

But sure, if you do scheduling for future times, you do need to be aware of such possibilities and store the future times as civil times (and have some sane way of handling non-existing/repeating times - but again, most of the time the system/library will do this for you).

Then even if the user is flying across the world, they can still get the alert at the right time wherever they are (assuming the device updates local timezone based on location).

I never said that you should only store absolute times - only that they are a separate data type and you shouldn't mix them or try to convert them by hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the idea about removing whitespace is kinda hilarious, because that would mean one could write:

        ["a" "b" "c"]

or:

        {"a": "foo" "b": "bar" "c": "baz"}

The advantage over:

        (a b c)

or:

        (a foo b bar c baz)

or:

        ((a foo) (b bar) (c baz))

or:

        ((a . foo) (b . bar) (c . baz))

seems … non-existent.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think # or // for comments is a very good idea as it would also make newline characters significant. I find it useful to be able store a JSON object per-line.

</comment><comment><USER13> Personally, I would really like to see integer object keys (as opposed to only string keys). For simple numeric transformations, strings feel really heavy and require annoying conversion in languages. E.g. {"10": 60, "42": 2}.

<comment><USER14> The flipside is that an integer-keyed map is similar in meaning to an array, which associates by virtue of placement, an integer with the value sitting at that index.

While it's possible to spec it to forbid this interpretation, Lua has made this interpretation a language feature, and it'd become impossible to construct an unambigous parser/printer in Lua for this new format.

<comment><USER15> > it'd become impossible to construct an unambigous parser/printer in Lua for > this new format

How so? JSON is just text; you can parse it however you like. For example, I can write a parser that produces the byte sequence "It checks out." for any valid JSON input. A Lua JSON parser that represents objects with integer keys as maps with string keys, and a Lua JSON parser that represents objects with integer keys as sparse arrays, are both unambiguous and both correct (as to a hypothetical JSON which allowed integer keys). JSON is a format, not a Lua structure.

Even if your JSON data is

        { 10: 10, "10": "ten" }

there's no problem being _able_ to write an unambiguous parser. Define what your parser does in that situation, and it's unambiguous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This guy is an idiot anyway. There's no way to "fix JSON". All you can do is create a new language, it doesn't matter if you call it JSON 2.0, it will still be incompatible with all the JSON parsers of today. I don't get why he is so mad at people suggesting him to use one of the JSON supersets that exist today.

</comment><comment><USER17> If // and /* are used as comments, then most of this new extended-JSON will still be valid Javascript.

If # is used as comments, then this breaks documents being Javascript.

The post says that "don't eval() JSON ever", but that's like Crockford leaving out comments originally in order to stop them being abused as processor directives...

<comment><USER18> Like the post says, JSON is already not guaranteed to be valid JS so this isn't really a problem. The fact that 99% of the time it works to just eval it is great and granted, the "feature" that triggers this is incompatibility is a bit obscure.

But if you just do the right thing from the start you'll never have a thing to worry about in the first place, # comments or not.

<comment><USER19> This is a bit of a strawman argument though. JSON is rarely used in a generic form - but instead as a format between endpoints (servers, clients, whathaveyou). When you control the server, you control the API - so random UTF-8 magic crap? Wasn't valid in the first place.

Just because you can express things that aren't javascript with it doesn't mean that ever actually turns up in practice -- more importantly 95% of the time, you control both the producer and consumer of JSON because it's consumed internally anyhow - at which point - you're not _going_ to write illegal json to yourself.

This is a true statement, but virtually nothing in practice cares.

<comment><USER20> I'm jealous. I've had it show up in production. I think we were using script tags with sanitized JSON to re-hydrate an isomorphically rendered page.

Of course, a user entered one of the valid json, invalid JS characters in a field, which made its way into our database. Once there we started having weird errors show up between the frontend and client. That little gem took us _days_ to track down.

JSON should be either a subset of javascript, or obviously not a subset of javascript. 99% compatible systems are dangerous landmines. That you haven't been blown up yet doesn't make it ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> JSON (for the most part) is a nice format to work with, aside from loosely defined datetimes as mention.

The two areas where I believe the format can greatly be improved; 1# having a standard to define the structure (sometimes schemas can be handy!); 2# a stranded binary format, yes right now with have UBJSON (which doesn't have a date format, this is worse in binary) and BSON (which contains some MongoDB specific stuff).

I'm not saying they don't have their place, but.. Protocol Buffers are more akeen to .net or Java serialization, in the they're quite fragile if used with different versions and/ or with different vendors.

<comment><USER9> MessagePack is better supported than UBJSON and has far more implementations in almost every language.

[http://msgpack.org/index.html](http://msgpack.org/index.html)

JSON Schema draft 4 is the defacto schema standard for JSON.

[http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-core.html](http://json- schema.org/latest/json-schema-core.html)

Having used both XML schema and this one, I much prefer using JSON schema.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
        "Just use X" · For values of X including Hjson, Amazon Ion, edn, Transit, YAML, and TOML. ¶
        Nah, most of them are way, way richer than JSON, often with fully-worked-out type systems and Conceptual Tutorials and so on.

What? MOST OF THEM? YAML is not, Hjson is not, TOML is not.

<comment><USER22> YAML... really? Looking at the examples in the Wikipedia article ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML)) gives me a headache. Fortunately, most actual YAML files I've seen are not that complicated.

<comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#YAML_sample](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#YAML_sample)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He summarized the most upvoted posts from the last thread [1] really well.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328088)

Regarding datetimes, it's worth pointing out the conversation that TOML had about it. It's a pretty long read [2][3][4][5] with lots of points raised for and against, but it also shows some of the process of how consensus was eventually forged: through trial-and-error, some enlightening realizations, expert opinions, and a willingness to leave _some_ aspects of the behavior it up to parser, to avoid requiring all other languages to reimplement half of Java 8 Time.

[2] [https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/pull/414](https://github.com/toml- lang/toml/pull/414)

[3] [https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/pull/362](https://github.com/toml- lang/toml/pull/362)

[4] [https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/issues/412](https://github.com/toml- lang/toml/issues/412)

[5] [https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/issues/263](https://github.com/toml- lang/toml/issues/263)

The salient point being that RFC 3339 does _not_ in truth describe _exactly one_ datatype, so you can't just reference the spec and hope everyone reads it the same way. EDIT: Specifically, RFC 3339 says:

"Date and time expressions indicate an instant in time. Description of time periods, or intervals, is not covered here.", but then goes on to define [6] a number of different syntaxes in ABNF, to indicate the subsets of ISO 8601 that "SHOULD be used in new protocols on the Internet." It essentially never defines what a 'valid' RFC 3339 object looks like, it doesn't explicitly say which ones are considered complete representations, so it's not clear if, say, '2016' is a valid RFC 3339 object... but the ones towards the bottom contain more than one discrete term, and can be presumed to be 'complete' representations. These are:

[A] partial-time: HH:MM:SS(.SSS)

[B] full-date: YYYY-MM-DD

[C] full-time: 'partial-time' +/\- offsetFromUTC(HH:MM)

[D] date-time: 'full-date' "T" 'full-time'

Out of these, [D] is _clearly_ a timestamp of an absolute instant in time, but the rest are debatable.

[6] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339#section-5.6](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339#section-5.6)

<comment><USER23> > He summarized the most upvoted posts from the last thread [1] really well.

I feel like he glossed right past the objections to the biggest and (to my mind) most destructive proposed change, the commas-to-whitespace thing; in fact doubles down on it (let's just declare that commas _are_ whitespace! _That_ surely won't confuse anyone!)

<comment><USER9> I've written a few JSON parsers over the years that treat commas as whitespace. The grammar is simpler and the parser is faster as result. As long as one always emits standards-compliant JSON there's no problem.

Had the JSON standard supported ECMAScript array holes [1,,,2,,3] this grammar shortcut would not have been possible. But luckily that's not the case.

<comment><USER23> Well, that's the thing, though: sure, for machine parsing it really doesn't matter what you use as a delimiter.

But the only reason to get rid of commas is to eliminate the trailing comma problem, which only occurs when hand-editing JSON. Replacing that with whitespace, or worse both whitespace and commas, would be a lot more prone to hand-editing errors, I think, than would the much less drastic change of allowing trailing commas. Or better still of just leaving JSON as is and letting people use a more robust protocol, if that fits their needs, or pre- parsing whatever special snowflake variations they want into standards- compliant JSON.

I'm more or less in agreement with the commenter on his site who said

> this entire proposal pretty much comes down to "I like JSON, but need more > and am too lazy to write the extra 3 line wrapper to process type 'x'." I'd > say no thanks. [https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/08/20/Fixing- > JS...](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/08/20/Fixing- > JSON#c1471881712.859312)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LG G3 review: A great phone with too many pixels  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/lg-g3-review-a-great-phone-with-way-too-many-pixels/ <comment><USER2> That's kind of crazy. The thing that gets me with all these things is the energy density in your pocket. 3Ah is a lot of energy. When a LiPoly goes off, it goes off in style. Even the 2Ah one in my Moto G is scary.

And in this 3Ah behemoth, the battery life sucks!?!?

<comment><USER3> It's pretty scary what that amount of power can do when released quickly. On the other hand realize that a watt hour is slightly less than a single food calorie. That battery has 10 calories. A bar of chocolate has 150-250.

<comment><USER4> For that reason alone it's a small wonder that we haven't seen miniature fuel cell technology take off in recent years. If only those membranes wouldn't foul up.

It keeps getting close to being accepted and then vanishes again, for instance:

[http://www.iec.ch/etech/2013/etech_0113/tech-1.htm](http://www.iec.ch/etech/2013/etech_0113/tech-1.htm)

<comment><USER5> Hopefully the fuel cells won't run on chocolate bars, I prefer to use them as my own fuel :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Running a game on this thing means that the gpu has to work that much harder to render those extra pixels. I'd rather have a higher framerate than more pixels.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Android OEMs have shown time and time again that they design, not for a > great user experience, but for the showroom, spec sheet, and marketability.

You see this with a lot of their ardent fans, they talk up the specs, as if we are back in the old days.

<comment><USER8> > You see this with a lot of their ardent fans, they talk up the specs, as if > we are back in the old days.

Depends upon which fans. Ardent Android fans are, well, fragmented into at least two groups:

Those who are all about the specs of the latest flagship phone from the various high-end phone manufacturers (Samsung, HTC, LG, etc) and those who wouldn't touch a non-Nexus Android phone with a ten foot pole. The second group generally doesn't care about specs as long as they are reasonably decent for a modern phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very high resolution panels will be needed for Virtual Reality headsets to reach human eye level fidelity. When looking at even this LCD panel from just an inch away from your eyes and through lenses, it's actually quite a low effective resolution per eye. We still have to go A LONG way to go with respect to screen technology.

Also unfortunately this technology is LCD (not OLED), so not suitable for VR applications due to lack of low-persistance.

<comment><USER10> Can't any LCD be made into a low-persistence display just by pulsing the backlight? I don't see how OLED is necessarily any better.

<comment><USER11> The persistence is just 1 factor... LCD response time is very slow compared to OLED (~5ms vs ~0.01ms). Every millisecond is important when it comes to VR.

<comment><USER10> So, the persistence isn't really a factor at all, just the response time.

<comment><USER11> Well persistence is a factor too. Say your display is updating at 120hz without low persistence... the image stays on screen for 8ms, so you have, say, 1ms of accurate image plus 7ms displaying an inaccurate image. For whatever reason our brains prefer to have no image rather than an inaccurate image, so it helps to turn off the display for that 7/8 of a frame.

While you can do that with LCD, you have to wait 5ms for the pixels to change before you can strobe, so your frame is an extra 5ms out of date. That's my understanding at least, I'm not an expert by any means.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't describe that as persistence being a problem, since obviously the LCD can be illuminated for arbitrarily short periods of time. The response time penalty applies regardless of whether you're trying to run the LCD in a low-persistence mode. An OLED's response time advantage over LCDs is across- the-board and completely orthogonal to persistence (where some kinds of backlights could enable LCDs to strobe even faster than OLEDs), and the impact of 5ms extra lag for VR applications will be about the same with or without strobing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My reasoning is this: if 4K is a new standard resolution for media (TVs, desktop monitors, laptop screens), phones should not be excluded, so there wouldn't have to be any upscaling/downscaling/converting which increases energy consumption and results it lower quality. LG is taking the right path and this screen should be just a test run for an upcoming 4K one.

<comment><USER13> Most "4K" is really 3840x2160 which is exactly twice 1920x1080. So scaling 4K resolution to a 1080p screen is easy, just average every four pixels into one. This screen though has 1/3 more pixels in both dimensions so scaling is actually harder.

Since a Nexus 5 is already at 445PPI with a 1080p screen I don't see any advantage of going 4K on this form factor. On a large tablet perhaps, but not on a phone.

<comment><USER12> Maybe I was just assuming a similar point of view and I realize this maybe far fetched, but in my opinion and in very rough terms - the natural progression of the screen concept should be to shrink the pixel to the size of a molecule which would then produce an image indistinguishable from the real matter. Such arguments as "human eye can't make a difference" don't really apply here, wouldn't you agree?

<comment><USER13> >Such arguments as "human eye can't make a difference" don't really apply here, wouldn't you agree?

"Can you see a difference?" is literally the only thing to care about in a screen. If you can't see a difference it's useless to go any further.

<comment><USER14> Generally, yes. But even just in resolution choice, you have mainstream vs edge use cases that affect the "can you see it" test, and other technical factors (e.g., try to find a panel with an odd-number width or height)

Then there are other factors like power consumption, durability, thickness, weight, cost to manufacture, environmental impact of life cycle, cost of supporting chipsets, ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks cool except for the customized android part with a 1-2 year half-life. I'm baffled at how companies can't figure out that less software customization mixed with long-term OS upgrades is consistently more valuable to consumers.

</comment><comment><USER16> He is criticizing the phone maker for making the wrong tradeoff, but really, that's for the consumer to decide. Some people may value the (possibly) marginal improvement in sharpness. Why resist technological improvements?

<comment><USER17> You realize this is a review right? He's not proposing we ban the phone, or prevent its sale, or in any way interfere with the market. How is he resisting technological improvements, and how is he preventing consumers from deciding?

He is _a_ consumer who has decided the tradeoff being made is wrong, and expressed his opinion publicly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How long does the battery last on average for their typical usage?

I carry around an external battery in my pocket along with my phone. You can buy one for pretty much any phone. Whenever I'm low on battery, I just plug in the external and continue using it, even if I'm walking. It's really convenient.

I think I'd prefer the big screen size even if the battery dies after only a few hours.

<comment><USER19> 7 hours 20 minutes browsing on Wifi.

Not bad at all.

<comment><USER20> If the battery will last long enough for me to get from my 3 metre charge cable in the kitchen to the charger in the car to the charger at work, it'll do.

<comment><USER21> Meanwhile, those of us who _" get out more"_ would appreciate any improvements that can be made.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uber Extends an Olive Branch to Local Governments: Its Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/technology/uber-movement-traffic-data.html <comment><AUTHOR> Follow-up coverage from yesterday's announcement, discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13352155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13352155)</comment>


We've hit "peak oil"; now comes permanent price volatility - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/01/weve-hit-peak-oil-now-comes-permanent-price-volatility.ars

<comment><USER2> If pricing stays volatile it will force people to innovate away from oil.

If oil prices stay consistently high it will lead to increased production of expensive sources like ultra deep water and oil sands.

In either event world economic growth will hickup and continue on.

<comment><USER3> If oil prices stay high, alternative energy sources will become cost competitive, but that energy costs will still be expensive.

<comment><USER2> Maybe, but alternatives include everything including long term trends like people moving to cities to avoid fuel expense.</comment></comment></comment>


An Open Letter to the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/30/an_open_letter_to_the_nsa

<comment><USER2> 1) "including the indelible and truthful message that unless you're in bed with foreign spies or terrorists the NSA has less than zero interest in you" -> patently false unless Angela Merkel has a very dark side unknown to the public.

2) His recommendations re beefing up counter intelligence appear utterly useless as Snowdens actions clearly does not fall within any reasonable definition of an intelligence operation directed against the NSA.</comment>


Hacksplaining: Security Training for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.hacksplaining.com/ <comment><USER2> How does this compare to something like Security Innovation?</comment>


BlaBlaMeter detects how much bullshit is in your text - <AUTHOR> http://www.blablameter.com/ <comment><USER2> Derrida, Chapter 2 'Of Grammatology'

>Bullshit Index :0.26 Your text shows some indications of 'bullshit'

 _some indications_ ... I'd say this thing is broken.

<comment><USER3> I agree.

I tried some Hegel, who scored 0.18. Clearly broken.

Schopenhauer got it right, where BlaBlaMeter gets it wrong:

"If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus ... scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right."

<comment><USER4> That snippet scores 0.26

<comment><USER5> I copied that text into the meter, got the .26 you saw. I then listened in to a conversation at the cube next to mine and wrote that in. "Using software as a service we can replicate and evergreen in the cloud." One simple sentence jumped it to a .35.

<comment><USER6> YES. Someone needs to make a voice-to-text app that has a "bullshit meter" needle, and that beeps rapidly (a la PKE meter) when a threshold is exceeded.

<http://www.gbfans.com/equipment/pke-meter/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The main reason I posted was in the hope of triggering discussion over the method used to analyse the text.

I've seen users getting a lower score simply by separating out a block of text into numbered paragraphs which would seem to point to quite a simplistic method.

[http://ipdraughts.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/cutting-down- on-t...](http://ipdraughts.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/cutting-down-on-the-bla- bla/)

<comment><USER7> I'll withstand my statement: model based on a corpus of PR, scholar, licenses and the like texts. If they are into real statistical NLP.

Or just esthetic rules + word dictionary.

<comment><USER8> If I were to make the software, the corpus of PR, licenses, etc. would be the way I go. But "they did it statistically" doesn't answer the question "what is the model?" There are many different statistical models one could use. My other post has a few things we've figured out.

But I'm starting to think a rule-based lexicon isn't out of the question, given these >1 scores on some texts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I got an astonishing 1.13 from <http://www.oracle.com/uk/corporate/pricing/index.html> :D

<comment><USER10> I tried the german version of it and pasted a SAP article, which got a score of 1.34. They mostly talk bullshit, but the article wasn't bad to understand imho, so I think the algorithm needs some work.

The text was:

"Möchten Sie SAP-Software vor Ort installieren oder über die Cloud darauf zugreifen? Wir bieten in jedem Fall umfassende Services, zugeschnitten auf Ihre individuellen Anforderungen. Wir verfügen über eines der größten Expertenteams weltweit. Unsere qualifizierten Mitarbeiter beraten Sie gern bei der Konzeptionierung, Implementierung und Optimierung Ihrer Systemlandschaft. Profitieren Sie innerhalb kürzester Zeit von Ihrer SAP-Lösung."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great idea, but show me _what_ in my text is triggering it, and have some "example" buttons.

<comment><USER11> You might like <http://nbartlomiej.github.com/lisense/> then.

It my old pet project; like BlaBlaMeter, but for licenses.

I still hope to experiment with the idea of improving licenses in future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I tried it on the front page of Time Cube.

      Bullshit Index :0.12
      Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English.

I get the feeling this tool is only testing for a very narrow definition of bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just pasted some text from a random TechCrunch article relating to Spotify and got this:

Your text: 847 characters, 145 words Bullshit Index :0.56 Something's fishy. Obviously you want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. Are you sure that you have a real message, and if so: who would understand it?

<comment><USER14> Apparently you're not the only one to try TechCrunch first - I did exactly the same thing after clicking the link.

It appears our internal bullshit meters work just fine as well :)

<comment><USER13> After that, I pasted in an excerpt from PandoDaily and it got a marginally higher score on the BS meter.

<comment><USER14> while I read TechCrunch from time to time, I never visit PandoDaily. Stopped after I saw Sarah Lacy's charade with Zuck on YouTube.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Barack Obama's Inaugural: 0.18 Ryan's RNC Speech: 0.14

Lincoln (Gettysburg): 0.09 Lincoln (Second Inaugural): 0.09 MLK (I Have A Dream): 0.08 (Lowest of any Political text I tried) Someone else said Churchill got a 0.08, but I didn't actually try the unaltered text for myself.

BUT

John Donne: 0

</comment><comment><USER16> Any chance of an overview of the algorithm you're using to filter out the text?

My thinking is you are measuring word count versus commonly used marketing or political jargon count, but that's probably _too_ simple.

<comment><USER17> It is that simple. Looks like they assign a BS level to words, and then take some sort of average bullshit level amongst all words. Word order doesn't matter as slashcom says.

For example, if you take the score from the Oracle Pricing blurb posted by BitMistro, and change 'strategies' to 'goals', you drop down to 0.8 or so. If you add an extra random 'strategy' somewhere, it bumps up to 1.4 or something.

I actually suspect a bug on their pair for strategies... probably a decimal error when building to BS level tables.

But similar things happen with other 'bullshity' words, just to a lesser degree.

<comment><USER8> It should also be noted that on about 400 short texts (~300 words each), it did not correlate with the Flesh-Kinaid readability measure at all. So it's not measuring something like average word length or syllable counts.

But it's not QUITE a true lexicon, as it handles Out-Of-Vocabulary words quite strangely. If you use as input text:

"PR-Experts, politicians, ad writers or scientists need to be strong here! BlaBlaMeter unmasks without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text. A useful tool for everyone involved in writing! Simply copy your text into the white field and check your writing style. It works with english text up to 15.000 characters (overhead will be cut off). For a meaningful result we recommend a minimum length of 5 sentences."

Then you get 0.16. If you replace the last word 'sentences' with 'strategy' you go up to 0.44. However, if you change the last word to 'sentstrategyences' you get 0.47. Try it: you can basically insert 'strategy' inside ANY word and really raise your score. Actually, if you just insert "strateg" anywhere inside the text, it goes up massively.

So I actually think it's just doing string search counts over a lexicon.

<comment><USER17> As yes, you're right. If you insert random 'izations' into your text, your BS meter goes up as well. It also has a hardon for 'activity'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Obamas AMA answers came out between 0.10 and 0.30! <http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama>

<comment><USER19> Holy Cr*p - The President actually did an AMA. I cannot imagine our Prime Minister replying to an email.

Edit: oh its happening today - I thought it was old news and no-one had told me. Apologies for the exclamation marks now gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice, the abstract to my thesis gets a 0.5[1]

The actual content parts hover around 0.16 (although I only tried segments without any equations). It makes me wonder what sort of results you'd get if you plotted this BS metric vs. page in a full length book.

      1. "You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to
         impress somebody.  It still may be an acceptable result
         for a scientific text."

</comment><comment><USER21> President's Obama's AMA answers score 0.21 (Your text shows some indications of 'bullshit'-English, but is still within an acceptable range.)

<comment><USER22> I tried that too, along with Paul Ryan's speech (which got 0.14 - Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'). Then, I tried the copy on my landing page and got a 0.25. It's shameful to realize that I'm a bigger bullshitter than two politicians.

<comment><USER23> If you brazenly lie using strong phrases without any weasel words, it'll come across as not being 'bullshit' grammatically. I don't think the software has a fact checker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used the Potsmodernism Generator (<http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/> )

And got scores of 0.35-0.45

</comment><comment><USER25> It would be much better if it could highlight bullshit sections.

<comment><USER26> It would be even better if it replaced the bullshit sections with "bla bla".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Random articles:

      TechCrunch: 0.42 ("Amazon Wants Everyone To Know The Kindle Fire Is Sold Out")
      Paul Ryan's RNC speech: 0.14
      NYTimes: 0.11 ("Storm's Winds Slow as It Exits Southern Louisiana")

Obviously its an apples and oranges comparison here but interesting (to me anyway) nonetheless

</comment><comment><USER28> My longest FAQ for HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768>

got

"Your text: 8044 characters, 1160 words Bullshit Index :0.17 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English."

I too would like to know what the model is for the online ratings. Has there been a validation study of the model?

AFTER EDIT: Paul Graham's essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"

<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

(which is the first writing of his that I ever read) appears to reach the maximum length (by character count) that the program will evaluate, and comes out like this:

"Your text: 15000 characters, 2698 words Bullshit Index :0.09 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English."

Maybe Paul's procedure of having friends look over his essays and give suggestions helps cut out the bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER29> Just for fun I ran quite a few Martin Fowler's articles through the BlaBlaMeter. On some of them, the "Bullshit Index" is unexpectedly large:

<http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html>

 _> Bullshit Index: 0.31 – Your text shows indications of 'bullshit'-English. It's still ok for PR or advertising purposes, but more critical audiences may be skeptical._

<http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PhoenixServer.html>

 _> Bullshit Index: 0.4 – Something's getting a bit fishy. You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text._

</comment><comment><USER30> I pasted in the Time Cube website and only got a 0.12.

<comment><USER31> It doesn't detect crazy; maybe it scores higher in one of the other corners of the cube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "I am a beautiful flower. I sway in the breeze of my meadow, drinking in the sunshine. I love the little bees who come to visit me."

\---

Your text: 130 characters, 28 words Bullshit Index :0.05 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English.

<comment><USER33> "I am a beautiful flower. I sway in the breeze of my meadow. I drink in the sunshine. I love the little bees who come to visit me."

\---

Your text: 129 characters, 29 words Bullshit Index :0 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English.

BlaBlaMeter prefers an extra word over a comma. Makes sense given the goal here.

<comment><USER34> Maybe this plays a role:

> For a meaningful result we recommend a minimum length of 5 sentences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It would be nice, if <http://www.blablameter.de/fragen_und_antworten.html> is also available in English.

The result is that non-German speakers are standing in the dark, wondering what methodology is behind that software.

It might be even difficult to translate the concept to English, as some terms and ideas like <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalstil> are missing in the (restricted) English language. German is so much more elaborated, its a language of philosophers ;-)

<comment><USER36> * What's a good BlaBla Meter result?

High-quality journalistic texts are usually in the range of 0.1 and 0.3

* Are there any texts with an indexof 0.0?

This is rare, but occurs. Too low of an index is rather suspicious though, and might also indicate stilistical deficits.

* What is the highest index value?

Thile the BlaBla Meter was designed for index values between 0 and 1, but in rare cases the scale can be exceeded. The highest measured values so far have been over 2.0 even.

* Does Google use a similar algorithm?

We don't know, but if we were Google, we'd probably try! Our samples for highly competitive search terms show that highly ranked sites often show good index values.

* How does BlaBla Meter work?

BlaBla meter checks texts for various linguistic traits, e.g. it checks for exceeding use of Nominalstil[1]. In addition, the text is checked for various phrases [buzzwords] with a certain weighting. We don't want to reveal the secrets though ;)

[1] Heavy use of "nominal style" is a German particularity. You can replace most verbs by nouns, adding suffixes like '-ion' or '-age', and transform the sentence into passive. This is often found in legal texts, where the author doesn't want to appear as a suject.

* Why does my scientific text have such a high index?

Nominalstil has crept into scientific language at large. This often serves to 'beat around the bush' - in this regard, there are analogies to typical PR tongue.

* My mindless text gets a good score, why?

BlaBla Meter can't really understand the topic, it looks after linguistic traits. While rainbow press can be attributed all kinds of substantial weaknesses, their language is usually short and concise.

* My text is wrongly devalued!

As every computer algorithm, BlaBla Meter might be at fault - in doubt, human beings must decide of course. Generally the hit rate is quite large, so you should usually tweak the wording upon receiving high indices.

* But humans read texts completely differently ...

When BlaBla Meter crys havoc, one can usually assume that a human reader is alerted too. People are trained every day to tell authentic messages from artifical advertising messages - it'd be naive to belive they couldn't!

* What happens with entered texts?

Texts are private matter of course, and are neither saved nor processed in any way or shape.

<comment><USER37> One of my blog posts got a .16 so you have my seal of approval ;-)

<comment><USER36> I am not involved with them by any means.

Yeah, personally I also score around .16 to .18 on my internet texts. Long papers get around 0.2, so I'm probably losing momentum after the fourth page :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "We use innovative cloud-based patent-pending technologies to leverage synergies between verticals. In order to facilitate the maximum return on investment, we hyperfocus on execution and delivery. We find our clients often fail to think outside the box, but with our proprietary technologies we help to identify action items that directly impact the bottom line."

Bullshit Index: 0.46 Something's getting a bit fishy. You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text.

Pretty good figuring it's under the 5 sentence recommendation.

</comment><comment><USER39> It would be nice if they gave even the smallest hint of what they're measuring.

</comment><comment><USER40> The text of the site itself scores a surprisingly low 0.14: "Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English."

This is not a useful tool because it does not define or point to the problems in the text.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if it's possible to get it to higher than 0.5. I just tried it with some patent gibberish and it only made that score. \--

"This project is a blue sky implementation of a cloud based virtual paradigm which really shifts the boundries of our connected world.

Using patent pending technology to accelerate your business, we use full-stack web-scale systems built on noSQL databases to drive clicks.

And your security is safe with us. We use military grade encryption to protect all your data at rest."

<comment><USER42> Top story 'Amit on Grids' as I write this scored a .69 on the first paragraph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I tried past cover letters for jobs and they all scored in the 0.5-0.6 range. This makes sense since I AM trying to sell myself in an honest but tailored way. Does this reveal a flaw in my writing style or in the purpose of cover letters in the hiring process? Is it even possible for a cover letter to score low on a bullshit scale?

<comment><USER44> Just tried to same with a recent cover letter, scoring 0.44. I wouldn't worry, although you (and me) can always try to bring it to a more down-to-earth level, making text easier and more pleasant to read. Unfortunately, a job application isn't the right domain for some scientific analysis on correlation between bullshit-measurements and interview invitations, if you're really interested in the job :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Hilarious! I plugged in some paragraphs from press releases and it was spot on. I also appreciated the "or Scientist" part ... simply awesome!

"Bullshit Index :0.64 This reeks. I bet you're a PR-Expert, Politician, Consultant or Scientist. If there is a message, it's unlikely it will reach anyone."

<comment><USER46> _Scientist_?

I put in a page or so from a scientific paper I recently wrote and got 0.19.

<comment><USER45> Heh .. try putting in the first para from a scientific paper. I bet 10 karma points that this will have higher BS content than the rest. Similarly, the last para of the intro is also almost always content free.

Note: I'm a scientist too ... good to poke fun at ourselves, eh? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Joel on Software's "Software Inventory"[1] gets a 0.22 rating. I'm a big fan of Joel on Software and am curious as to how this model evaluates "bullshit".

1\. <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html>

</comment><comment><USER48> Tried Churchill's "we shall fight them on the beaches" speech; got 0.08 BS index; I think it works :)

</comment><comment><USER49> I just tried some text from one of our corporate announcements. Seems accurate.

0.8 This reeks. We bet you're a PR-Expert, Politician, Consultant or Scientist. If there is a message, it's unlikely it will reach anyone. Maybe you should spend less effort on trying to impress somebody.

</comment><comment><USER50> I copied in a Daily Mail article and it only gave me 0.12. I think your algorithm needs work...

</comment><comment><USER14> Tried PG's _Writing and speaking_ article. 0.1 bullshit index, which is almost zero :)

</comment><comment><USER51> How did Reddit's AMA do? NOT BAD!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451328> \- full text <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451586> \- summary text

      4. Small-Business tax breaks - [major bullshit] 0.5 [a]
      1. Space Race - [PR level bullshit] 0.33
      7. Money in Politics - [Some bullshit] 0.28
      2. Internet Freedom - [some bullshit] 0.23
      10. Work/Life Balance - [little bullshit] 0.16
      9. Jobs / recent grads - [little bullshit] 0.16
      6. Most Difficult Decision/afghanistan - [No Bullshit] 0.07

      [Un-analyzable]

      3. Favorite Basketball Player - too short
      8. White House Beer Recipe - too short
      5. First Activity on Nov 7 - too short

     [a]"Are you sure that you have a real message, and if so:
         who would understand it?"

</comment><comment><USER52> I tried this on Paul Ryan's RNC address from last night, Barack Obama's innaugarel address, and a recent IEEE TKDE journal article. It gave bullshit measures of 0.15, 0.13 and 0.25, respectively. :-(

</comment><comment><USER53> My blog posts (<http://sveder.com/blog>) are between .18-.22 so I feel relieved. Great idea, and like everyone else I'd like to know where I fail too.

</comment><comment><USER54> I tried with Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC. Here's what it said:

Your text: 15000 characters, 2645 words Bullshit Index :0.13 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English.

Does that mean the algorithms work?

</comment><comment><USER55> Just thought I'd share:

        Your text: 2418 characters, 451 words
        Bullshit Index :0.05
        Your text shows no or marginal indications of
            'bullshit'-English.

</comment><comment><USER56> I got 1.24 from Vmware: <http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud- computing/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER57> Best use case to test it with: <http://startupista.com/corporate-bullshit- generator/>

</comment><comment><USER58> Good companion to Paul Ford's Passivator: <http://www.ftrain.com/ThePassivator.html>

</comment><comment><USER59> I think that this works by calculating something called the Gunning Fog index , ie the no. Of words in a sentence with more Syllables than usual .

</comment><comment><USER60> Interesting to look at Privacy Policies in here. Google's policy had a slightly more bullshit leaning side than the average document.

</comment><comment><USER61> Whatever algorithm it uses thinks George W Bush and Sarah Palin lace their speeches with less bullshit than Winston Churchill.

</comment><comment><USER62> "english text up to 15.000 characters (overhead will be cut off)", did I read it as 15 characters ? Bullshit

</comment><comment><USER63> Meta index: the page itself has 0.14 bulshit index...

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm writing a story; its a 0.12, acceptable.</comment>


Ask HN: I will work on your Django Project (completely free) - <AUTHOR> hey I am learning Django and looking for some cool projects to build if you have anything in mind share your email with me i will work on your project for free <comment><USER2> I have been working on my free time for the past 2 years on a django project[1], everything Open Source of course. It also started as a learning exercise, so there's automatic tests, comments, i18n, a REST API, etc. There's always something to do and obviously I'd help you get started.

[1] [https://github.com/rolandgeider/wger](https://github.com/rolandgeider/wger)

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to work on project for fun, its called Tapps. It stands for temporary apps. All these malls and amusement parks have their own apps but people dont download it. I started this project on the side. I can share my frame workd and algorithm if you would like. These days I focus on hardware, this is more interesting for me. Shoot me a line and we can talk!</comment>


Show HN: Retro Patents – Tech patents turned into art - <AUTHOR> https://www.retropatents.com <comment><USER2> I'd love these with one change: drop the text at the bottom! It would be so much more fun to just have the schematic and make my guests have to guess what the patent is for. More of a conversation piece that way.

<comment><USER3> Completely agreed. The schematics look great, and the text totally throws it off as an art piece.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback.

We actually split test this at the very start and the name variant won out. Seems like the majority of customers have a loyalty to the brand/product and preferred having the name.

I guess art is subjective and I can understand why you'd prefer it the other way. Cheers for the comments anyway!

<comment><USER5> So, maybe offer both styles?

<comment><USER6> Sounds like a reasonable thing to do - and it's just an additional checkbox on the website, so it's easy too!

<comment><USER7> Also potentially stocking twice as many items and increasing design work load.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As far as I am aware Patent Documents are public domain, and not subject to copyright, so if someone wanted a printed patent poster they could grab the document and take it to any large format printer and have it printed there cheaper than it would cost to order from retropatents.com, and they could do this for any patent they were interested in, not just the limited selection available at your store.

Does Retro Patents add anything unique? Or in other words, why should I order from Retro Patents instead of doing what I mentioned in the first paragraph?

<comment><USER9> Our society encourages most people to be lazy & unimaginative, who then would rather pay a bit more money to get something readymade than go through all the steps you outlined. Same reason why all those recurring subscription cooking ingredient boxes are so popular.

This is wonderful, because if it weren't the case it'd be much harder to start a business. So congrats to the founders of that website on capturing money by firing up Photoshop and copy pasting some patent diagrams.

<comment><USER10> Do you drive all the way to the farm to get your groceries? Or do you get them at a grocery store?

Convenience adds value.

<comment><USER9> I grow them in my yard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Happy Friday!

I'm the co-founder of Retro Patents and we're super proud to bring the site to the HN community.

Last year, we were travelling in Europe and we came across a boutique print shop that had a Harley Davidson motorcycle patent in the window. We really liked the minimalist look to it and remembered how we'd used early product prototypes for motivation in the past. There's nothing more inspiring than seeing a world beating product stripped down to its core.

So we started the website you see today to help inspire others to go out and create magic. The prints also look really good as wall art ;)

There's a 15% discount for the HN community if you use the code (HACKER).

P.s. Max Levchin (PayPal founder) bought his own print and shared it on Twitter earlier this week - it was a great moment !

<comment><USER11> Why not the "classics" like the Edsison light bulb or the Wright flyer patent? I consider the old ones to be beautiful

<comment><USER12> +1, the idea in itself is nice, maybe - ideally - you could make some sort of "public" submission form ending up in a list , and then make into production the most voted/asked for, and - say - send a free print to the person submitting the most voted one weekly or monthly.

BTW, and as a side note, not all Patent images are reproducible free of charge, so the above list might need to have an additional field for it being public domain or otherwise, see:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_US_patent...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_US_patents)

Another thing, I concur with the people that see the large print of the _whatever_ commercial name as being a spoiler of some sort, the original title might be better, as an example the "Gameboy" patent title is(was):

[http://www.google.com/patents/US5184830](http://www.google.com/patents/US5184830)

"Compact hand-held video game system" and the iPhone is "Electronic device": [https://www.google.com/patents/USD615083S1](https://www.google.com/patents/USD615083S1) which sound (at least to me) a lot better.

Just as an idea, you could then have the "Gameboy" printed on the back and an extract of the patent text, like the "Field of Invention" or however the summary.

Just for your information, there is _something wrong_ in the iPhone one, is it May 4,2010 or June 5, 2008? (i.e. publishing date vs. filing date) And the patent number is either USD615083 S1 or US D615083 S1, not just S.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> aurora- These look awesome - I just ordered the Google PageRank patent! I literally want to hang every one of these in the office. My second favourite has to be the Microchip patent filed by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. A close third would be the IBM patent filed by Arthur Dickinson. Really great job with these overall - I'll be ordering some more for birthday presents

<comment><USER4> glad you like them and good choice :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These are great, and something I had wanted to do for my office but didn't get around to yet. May I suggest some actual game patents in your games section along with the hardware?

I don't recall which game off the top of my head, but I've seen some that resemble the gmail/pagerank ones with a sample outlined screenshot or flowchart.

<comment><USER4> Great idea - we'll look into this, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love the minimalist look.

Suggestion: Perhaps you could add a section for fictional patents from sci-fi universes

\- Warp Drive from Star Trek

\- Proton pack from Ghostbusters

\- Memory erasing device from MiB

\- Iron Man's arc reactor

\- Batmobile

<comment><USER4> Awesome suggestion! Sounds like a fun summer project.

<comment><USER15> Two things -

1) I highly recommend Intentio, [http://www.intentioipi.com](http://www.intentioipi.com), if you decide to pursue creation of patent drawings for fictional devices.

2) Be careful you don't tread on copyrights and/or trademarks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looking forward to some Lodsys or Intellectual Ventures pieces, patents are great

</comment><comment><USER17> I've seen a lot of similar "patents as art" sites - anything that sets you apart?

<comment><USER4> AFAIK we're the first to focus on the startup world. As flagged in the intro, we took our inspiration from a print of a motorcycle but wanted to flesh out the idea in the tech and gaming world which we love.

We've also filed patents ourselves so know the space pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I opened this page in a new tab along with a few other articles I meant to read. After a few seconds, the page title started flashing "Don't forget this" at me. Is this a new way to avoid tab abandonment? I'm not normally one of those people who immediately closes a page that annoys me, but holy shit that was jarring. [https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4i3yhsg9jpobhj/Screenshot%202017-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4i3yhsg9jpobhj/Screenshot%202017-05-26%2010.15.30.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER19> I thought it was clever. Hadn't seen it done before but I'm sure they weren't the first. I definitely agree this will get annoying very quickly if this catches on.

I also hadn't seen the "Someone from $location recently ordered #item" as a popup. Interesting twist on social validation. Saw it on this page [https://www.retropatents.com/collections/all](https://www.retropatents.com/collections/all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I saw this idea way back on amazon:

[https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Patent-Wall-Art- Prints/dp/B0...](https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Patent-Wall-Art- Prints/dp/B01CD3X2BA/ref=pd_sbs_201_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01CD3X2BA&pd_rd_r=KSHR53D25MWJBHP0MNZ5&pd_rd_w=deDdf&pd_rd_wg=cyghX&psc=1&refRID=KSHR53D25MWJBHP0MNZ5)

</comment><comment><USER21> Unrelated to the site, but about the patents: How can a specific games console, like the Nintendo 64, be patented?

The name of the product, and maybe some brand-specific design elements, is a registered brand, sure. But a patent is for an invention, and it's not like a specific games console is a new invention - just a variant on the existing invention "games console"?

<comment><USER22> Most of these are design patents. They cover the physical form of the console -- not its function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Found out about this a couple months ago via the Lazy Game Reviews channel, have the PS 4 Controller one on my wall I love it.

<comment><USER4> Great to hear. Thanks for the support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very smart idea..and nice execution. Great job.

What techie wouldn't love one (or four as a nice matrix) of these?

<comment><USER4> Thanking you kindly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd buy one of the Selectric typewriter for my dad if it were available!

<comment><USER4> There's a contact us section on the site where we collect all patent requests - please feel free to submit some!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Previous post of an identical project:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990160)

</comment><comment><USER26> I learned that Elon's middle name is Reeve.

<comment><USER4> That was also a surprise to us too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very cool!</comment>


Computer Science graduates - over educated and under qualified? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth/archive/2010/07/21/over-educated-yet-under-qualified.aspx

<comment><USER2> It depends on which school you're talking about. Some programs prepare students for jobs in software development better than others. I agree with the author that coop programs help a lot; the university I attended had mandatory coops as a degree requirement, so I ended up working at Microsoft, DuPont and WebCT for half a year each before graduating. Plenty of experience and a great resume for the job market.</comment>


Knowing when an email is opened might alter how you interact with email forever? - <AUTHOR> http://www.johnlarkin.me/signals.html

<comment><USER2> I worked on this tool at HubSpot. They acquired us (Chime - chimeapp.com) to help build this.

I think it may change the way we interact through email (starting with sales first, that's the target right now). I do think this will help salespeople to approach their leads without requiring a context change.

I recently left the team. As neat as a "read-receipt" is, I think tools like this encourage the fact that the consumer doesn't know everything. It didn't align with my vision for being fully transparent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hubspot released a freemium tool to the world today called Signals. It is a chrome extension that essentially pops up a notification on your desktop when your email is read.

Is this a good thing? If this gets widely adopted it could potentially change how we treat email. Dynamics might shift with information like this. 'I know you know etc'

Discuss :)

</comment><comment><USER3> How does it know when someone has read the email?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think they include a one pixel transparent image that is stored on their server. When your email loads that image, they know. Something like that anyways!

<comment><USER3> That is pretty interesting!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga - <AUTHOR> http://mathfood.com

<comment><USER2> Nice job! However I don't clearly understand the Results section. I mean, I _can_ work it out, but it should be _obvious_.

With your supplied example, here was my train of thought when I hit solve: I get "Egg whites: 239.05". Am I supposed to eat 239 eggs? Probably not -- that's a lot for one meal. So there must be a unit; grams? well I don't know how much an egg weighs, plus I don't know the proportion of the white within a full egg. I certainly won't open Wikipedia right now to solve it!

That said, I love the design, especially the top illustration, so my point was just: if you can make the results more human-readable, that would help.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get the final result. It's in grams? I then have to figure out how many eggs or chickens make up 300 grams? Weighing everything gets annoying. I'd rather eyeball.

For me it's clearer to work by pictures of the food, like [http://office-k- chiro.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/office-...](http://office-k-chiro.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/02/office-k-chiro-protein-food.jpg) that's what I'm dealing with IRL and it's easier to memorize 5 jumbo eggs vs 300 grams.

And by that logic, I'd rather drag and drop pictures to build up the meal, get the nutritional information after than the other way around.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is in grams.

Watch the video demo from around right here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irTdDJ6fu-c#t=97](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irTdDJ6fu-c#t=97)

When I'm doing the same problem in the actual tool, there's a "details" button which pops up a screen telling you the meal's details and how much of each food to eat.

You can click on the foods in this area and it'll tell you how many eggs 300g egg whites requires (I actually click on cheese in the video, but you get the idea).

<comment><USER3> Yea that's pretty well hidden in the UI. My attention span didn't last to the end of the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is generally quite nice. To add to some of the other feedback, I felt it could do with more verbose help text and more importantly for my brief play with it, more focus bringing basic staples to the top of results for food search.

I tried to add just bacon and it took rewatching the demo video and some guesswork to figure out searching for 'bacon raw' would get to basic bacon. Trying just 'bacon' or 'pork' only gets lots of babyfood and soup related answers in the generated dropdown.

<comment><AUTHOR> The search definitely needs work. The food database is from the USDA so the descriptions are wordy. For what its worth, when you're searching you can use an exclamation mark to negate a term. For instance "!baby !cere banana" gets me all banana related foods that don't have "baby" or "cere" in them (which for some reason is a lot).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand the minimum amount for protein while building muscle and the maximum amount of carbs for keto, but shouldn't the general use-case be to keep the amount of calories in check per meal?

Making a meal consist of 1400 grams of carrots because there was an automatic ceiling on chicken due to protein seems silly.

Seems like its a good app, but it needs sane defaults.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I tried showing it in the video (maybe needs more explanation) but you can set a max and a min on a diet item. Say you want to eat Egg whites, cheese, potatoes, and ketchup. Because ketchup and potatoes are both carbs the tool will probably choose one or the other; not both. What you could do is set a max on the amount of ketchup @ say 28 grams. That way all of your carbs aren't coming from ketchup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks really cool but... Carbs, protein, fat and... cheese?

<comment><AUTHOR> :D Was trying to demonstrate that its possible to set boundaries on the food items you pick. If I set the cheese requirement @ 0 (technically min=0, max=0), I can double the amount of bacon I get. It allows you to decide which is more important: Cheese or Bacon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks nice, but I am not sure as to what new things it brings over, for example, eatthismuch.com (who generates menus from an already populated food database).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I hadn't seen eatthismuch.com before. Very clever.

Eatthismuch (from what I've just now looked at) appears to approach the problem like this: "What are your diet goals? What kinds of foods do you like to eat? Ok. Here's a menu telling you what to eat."

There's a thing (that's starting to die down now) with nutrition called "if it fits your macros" meaning that you can eat anything that you want to eat (pizza, hot-dogs, hamburgers, tacos, etc) as long as your ratios are kept sturdy. Mathfood helps you do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only thing I didn't like was, the text over the graph paper. It was a little hard for me to read. But its a cool idea, I like it.

</comment><comment><USER9> This thing rocks! I always thought about building something similar - didn't know it's called linear programming though.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks interesting... How is this different than MyFitnessPal + a Macros calc? is open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Open source? The LP engine is, but the site probably has a bit of code stink in it @ the moment. Once I get some time to clean it up, I might open source it. Benefits to open sourcing?

Not super familiar with MyFitnessPal, but MathFood allows you to say "I want waffles, eggs, and bacon for breakfast but I want to keep to my super strict diet ratios. How do I build this meal to hit those ratios?".

<comment><USER11> What's the LP engine please? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't promise its pretty but: [https://github.com/JWally/jsLPSolver](https://github.com/JWally/jsLPSolver)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would love some feed back on my first web-app. Thanks!

<comment><USER12> Technically, I should be really interested in this app as I've been spending the last few months trying to hack my diet. However, I tuned out after a few minutes. Specifically: * There is a huge wall of text. Most users (or at least me) want to learn what the product is by playing with it, not by reading. * Lots of form fields before you get value. I looked at the start point and immediately walked away. A large form scares away users. * It's weird that your height input only takes total inches instead of the normal feet + inches (users don't want to do math) * Not sure what the value is here - if I'm a consumer and I actually know the % calories across carbs, protein, and fat then why would I need this app? people who have a metric for that (like I do) probably fall into a really small niche of health obsessed people who already know how to make their diet hit their targets. I use myFitnesspal and I know exactly how to hit my targets.

Basically my summarized feedback is focus on the UX and a broader demographic. This is an awesome problem to tackle and I like your approach but I don't think many people could benefit with it the way its currently setup.

FYI this is awesome first web app - the amount of functionality you've provided is awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome points. Thanks for the feedback. You're right, target audience is pretty niche. Bodybuilders, figure athletes, gym rats, etc.

I probably didn't communicate it well but the value of the tool is this: How do you build a meal that meets your diet goals (fat, protein, carbs) given that foods have a mix of each type.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very nice, but it's missing units in Results.</comment>


Stephen Hawking: If you could talk to Albert Einstein, what would you say?   - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2029483,00.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting excerpts, although I found this a little funny:

"I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women."

<comment><USER3> It's just a little joke. There's no unwritten law that says smart people aren't allowed to crack jokes in serious discourse.

In case you need an explanation, the joke is based on the commonly held notion that men have trouble understanding women. A few people might consider that sexist, but it reflects more poorly on men than on women, and as a man I don't find it offensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would say "Al, old chap, I've got bad news and worse news, the bad news is there is no God, the worse news is the Universe plays dice with itself"

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is the date 15th November?

<http://imgur.com/vtbR1.png>

<comment><USER6> My guess would be that it's from the November 15 issue of the paper Time magazine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man that was a great read. Amazing man.</comment>


Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? (Good Will Hunting) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw

<comment><USER2> FUCK enough already.</comment>


Millennials are half as wealthy as those now in their 40s were at the same age - <AUTHOR> https://dailyinequality.com/2017/03/27/millennials-are-half-as-wealthy-as-those-now-in-their-40s-were-at-the-same-age/ <comment><USER2> What discretionary income is left for the financiers to attached themselves to after mortgage and school loans? Then the American dream (for them) will be complete. As I have said for almost 2 decades, most citizens live under virtual economic slavery and don't even recognize it. But let's keep inflating debt away.</comment>


Y Combinator Dataset Of Users Version 1.1 - <AUTHOR>

A 0.7MB archive of Y Combinator user profiles is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news-profile20080507.tar.gz<p>More to follow in the next day or so. <comment><USER2> I see you have interest in search, I do too. Why don't we get in touch we may share stuff.

edit: please ping me at okeumeni (at) intelliverb (dot) com

</comment><comment><USER3> start publishing the same data for other sites and you'd have a pretty good business going ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> how did you extract them all?

<comment><USER5> Uh, yeah. So, you've wondered why the site is slow sometimes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> how complete is this dataset? i count 7,164 users. is that all there is?

<comment><AUTHOR> It includes all users who posted before Wed 7 May 2008. It doesn't have lurkers. Some profiles may be two weeks old. It is a more complete version of the previous version ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045> ), which mostly excludes accounts which had only been used to post one or two items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> thank you.</comment>


CommonJS - anand-s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CommonJS

<comment><AUTHOR> > What I'm describing here is not a technical problem. It's a matter of people > getting together and making a decision to step forward and start building up > something bigger and cooler together.

I've always liked that.</comment>