Facebook buys Gowalla - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/02/technology/gowalla_facebook/index.htm?iid=HP_LN <comment><USER2> Definitely a talent acquisition. Gowalla has always been absolutely gorgeous, through all of it's various designs. I could never really use it for a long period of time though, because it was only useful with fellow web-dev like friends. In the real world, I think it's pretty useless. Unlike something like Twitter, which managed to grow some legs and start gaining traction with virtually everyone in the world. I'm excited to see what these guys can do at FB.

Also, does anyone else find it amusing that CNN broke this news and there isn't a single mention of it anywhere on TechCrunch?

<comment><USER3> Does pretty much look like that - and you would not exactly buy the runner-up of the 4square / Gowalla competition at a premium - so might have also been a deal at quite favorable conditions for f-book.

Given the understanding here that Gowalla will bring great engineers and with them a whole bunch of other innovative people to f-book in a time where such teams are one of the sparsest "resources" (anyone remember the story published recently that GOOG is paying their engineers 250k p.a.) it might help to cure some of Zuckerberg's "greatest fears" as voiced by their COO last week in NY at the BI Ignition conference (lack of innovation, lack of people aka "...Google has two times as many job openings as we have employees...")

Being able to acquire whole teams of innovative people is certainly their best chance to catch-up.

<comment><USER4> >Gowalla will bring great engineers and with them a whole bunch of other innovative people to f-book ... "greatest fears" as voiced by their COO last week in NY at the BI Ignition conference (lack of innovation, lack of people

i worked at a big [ultimately failed] SV company and for many its final years the "innovation" was the top word of the CEO and other executives. When company executives start talking innovation it pretty much means that company got enough entrenched products, market position and internal balance of power that any significant internal innovation is killed immediately [by the same executives] to avoid any risk to the above mentioned products, existing revenue streams and internal power, etc... Once internal innovation is squashed and has vanished as a result, the executives start to whine that there is a "lack of innovation, lack of people"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to hear the conversation at foursquare right now. I wonder if they're happy for their competitors, or maybe sad? Perhaps concerned that the check-in novelty is really dying off?

<comment><USER6> It's an irrelevant event for us.

<comment><USER7> Would you care to elaborate on that?

I don't mean this as a dig, but if you think one of your competitors getting bought by the predominant, and deep-pocketed, social media site is "irrelevant" something seems strangely amiss.

My guess is that you might have not seen them as a competitor, which would certainly be understandable. But this would still have ripple effect that is, IMO, somewhat worth more than casual dismissal.

<comment><USER6> A) They haven't really been a competitor for a long time. Once you're beating someone by a factor of over 100:1 you move on to other things.

B) Facebook isn't buying the product (they don't care about the product). They're just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks.

<comment><USER2> I dislike your lack of humility and modesty in this discussion. You may be correct in your A point, but "just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks" remark makes it sound like you guys are some elite squad, and FB is picking up some stragglers to join their team.

I can see why you've taken this attitude though, since commenters here are attacking Foursquare and making you seem like you lost to Gowalla+FB, but there is really no need to say these things in HN.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I think that the team at gowalla is great, and I have mad respect for them. But in terms of facebook's overall hiring this is a relatively small deal. Don't really know how many folks FB hires a year but I'm guessing hundreds?

Sorry if I was curt. Just trying to be clear and concise.

<comment><USER8> Fwiw, you were perfectly clear. Anytime someone says _"Facebook/Google/Awesome-Tech-Company-of-the-decade bought them as a talent acquisition"_ , the obvious implication (and compliment) is that the talent is really _talent_. Don't know where this confusion is coming from.

<comment><USER9> Probably because of this line: 'Once you're beating someone by a factor of over 100:1 you move on to other things.'

which I thought was abrasive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Off topic to the acquisition, however, not being a Gowalla user, I went to gowalla.com and looked what they have to offer.

Naturally, I look at my town, Tel Aviv[1], and was shocked. Tel Aviv has much more to offer than what it is listed in that guide, and in my opinion, it is far more attractive city than it appear at gowalla (for instance, some photos are rotated upside down, others by 90 degrees).

Perhaps it takes more than just "snap a photo, type short description, we will get the location" to make a tourist guide.

[1] <http://gowalla.com/guides/tel-aviv>

<comment><USER11> Wow.. just browsed my hometown, Berlin, and it's really not a good picture. Most of the photos are horribly underexposed and show some boring places..

<comment><USER12> Then again they seem to cover a lot of popular tourist destinations. <http://gowalla.com/guides/berlin>

I am only in Berlin for 3 years and I would not necessarily be able to come up with better recommendations for tourists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hacked together a "recipe" (requires a few steps) to migrate your gowalla checkins to foursquare. I moved 350 of my check-ins this way a couple weeks ago. I wanted to preserve the record of where I'd been, and more of my friends use Foursquare anyway. Unfortunately the 4sq API did not provide a way to back-date the check-in, so they all occurred on the same date (date of the API post). Perhaps that has changed? Take a look, fork/extend/add features etc., hope it is useful for someone else! [https://github.com/webandy/migrate_gowalla_checkins_to_fours...](https://github.com/webandy/migrate_gowalla_checkins_to_foursquare)

<comment><USER6> We're working on the lack of ability to back-date checkins. We want to be a bit careful about how we do it, but should have something soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It was a very elegantly designed product; cleaner, crisper design than Foursquare's was in my opinion. But I always had difficulty checking in. I literally had to be inside a venue to register a check-in; and even then it was finicky. 30 feet away? Forget it.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, this is an interesting topic. Why did Foursquare win? Was it anti- cheating provisions that were too strict in the early days? New York vs. Austin? Better PR? Simpler product? Dodgeball users as jumpstart? Who knows. One thing we do know was that it wasn't money.

<comment><USER16> I think it's pretty clear that Dennis Crowley has been thinking about this problem space for more than a decade, and foursquare is the third (fourth?) iteration on his original vision.

<comment><USER15> Agree, but not sure what that has to do with execution. More passion? More expertise? You think that's why 4sq won?

<comment><USER17> I presume it means that, having seen things from the inside out, his team knows winning and losing things to spend time on.

Nearly every startup ends up with a list a mile long of potential features, ideas, refinements, communities, partners and revenue sources. Being able to pick out the right few to work on (and what to say no to) is maybe the most important skill a startup CEO can have.

A founder who has been around the same space for a long time can use past experience and intuition where a newly-minted CEO knows very little and is actually best off when they recognize that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember an article about how Gowalla was bringing SV talent to Austin. Heh.

<comment><USER19> This is definitely a big loss for Austin. There are still a few interesting startups in the area, but Gowalla was the one that made it a serious contender.

<comment><USER5> Evernote just moved in. We also have Facebook and Google offices.

<comment><USER20> Infochimps, Indeed, HomeAway, Demand Media, and OtherInbox top my list of nationally-known startups in Austin. Am I missing any?

Outside of the startup world: Apple, IBM, Dell and AMD have major campuses in Austin.

I grew up in Austin and live in NYC. I love seeing Austin companies make waves, but I feel like the startup scene there is still in its early stages.

<comment><USER21> BazaarVoice and WhaleShark Media are another two that come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is well-deserved. I could never understand why Gowalla didn't gain as much traction as Foursquare despite their eye for sumptuous design. I often found myself rooting for the company, and I'm glad Google took notice of their talent. I look forward to whatever comes from the team. Congrats, Team Gowalla.

</comment><comment><USER23> Facebook has now the best design team in the valley. Hands down.

Gowalla plus Made by Sofa plus Push Pop Press

<comment><USER5> Facebook does have a solid design team, but I wonder where all that talent is being directed? Visually, their hires in the past year or so haven't made an impact with facebook.com. At least with Google's new design team, you can see what they're doing.

So, one has to ask, what are these people working on? A facebook phone? Facebook X.0?

<comment><USER24> My bet is Facebook OS on top of Android ala Kindle Fire. the UX will be its only differentiator so much care is needed there.

<comment><USER25> I really, really hope Facebook doesn't do that. It makes absolutely no sense for anyone to buy a Facebook tablet, unless they intentionally cripple the capabilities of their apps on other tablet platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> this has to be a talent acquisition. i wonder how long before gowalla product is mothballed? also wonder how little of a return their investors got?

<comment><USER27> Facebook does only talent acquisitions. They never buy products.

<comment><USER28> Facebook used parts of FriendFeed actively after acquiring them: <https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/301/>

<comment><USER29> Do Facebook use Tornado internally, on anything other than FriendFeed.com?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what the purchase price was. And as a side note, Jason Calacanis is one of the angel investors right? Any comment by Jason as to whether he "did ok" or even got his original investment back?

<comment><USER31> it's not a major exit just a talent acquisition but I guess he had his original investment back...

<comment><USER32> Liquidation prefs really help with that. Founders get screwed, but then again at this point Gowalla is effectively a fancy body shop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Gowalla's gorgeous. And right when Google is in process of beautifying all its products, makes sense as a talent buy to me!

</comment><comment><USER34> Gowalla's been doing some interesting things with Cassandra, so this sounds like a great fit. Congrats to all involved!

<comment><USER35> Facebook has pretty much moved everything from Cassandra to HBase at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why did Facebook wait this long? And since they waited this long, it probably means Foursquare rejected whatever offer was made. I wonder what that was.

<comment><USER37> IPO?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> When Facebook goes public, will they be sharing how much this sale was for, or not since it'll be after the fact by the time they have their IPO?

</comment><comment><USER39> Gowalla's team has very good eye for design and user experience, so this is a smart move from facebook if this is a talent acquisition move.

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats Gowalla!

</comment><comment><USER41> Uh oh, what will happen to the Gowalla api?

<comment><USER19> Nobody can say for sure yet, but I doubt it'll be around very much longer.

If you're looking for a check-in API, Foursquare's seems like the best bet at this point. The Venues (ie. places) Platform is especially good, with rate limits starting at 5,000/hr: <https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/venues.html>

<comment><USER42> [Disclosure: I work at Factual]

There are other good APIs to consider as well: Google Places, Factual, Yelp, etc. Each API has its own pros and cons in terms of query limits, terms and restrictions, fees, etc.

This is a good starting place for research: [http://www.quora.com/What-are- the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Plac...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and- cons-of-each-Places-API)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "buy all the brilliant pixel pushers"

</comment><comment><USER44> I thought facebook was moving away from checking-in. Is this a talent or product acquisition?

<comment><USER19> Gowalla's been moving away from the check-in too, but even so, I imagine its mostly a talent acquisition. The source article mentions that the team will be working primarily on Facebook's new Timeline, which fits well with Gowalla's recent focus on "stories".

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "Social travel" is kind of a startup black hole. That was a bad direction for a pivot.

</comment><comment><USER46> What ever happened to Gowalla's first product, the game Alamo Fire?

</comment><comment><USER47> From the outside looking in I would say talent acquisition as well.

</comment><comment><USER48> Ouch. I was sort of hoping they'd make something of it.

</comment><comment><USER49> Are you Gokidding me?</comment>


Hoverbike - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1524806320/hoverbike

<comment><USER2> Curious why such a low target of £30k. They don't allude to it on the Kickstarter page.

</comment><comment><USER3> I want...no I need this thing!!

Seriously, this is an amazing invention. The problem is, like most things like this, regulating it.</comment>


Apple Nearly Worth More Than Microsoft, HP And Dell … Combined - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/13/apple-nearly-worth-more-than-microsoft-hp-and-dell-combined/ <comment><USER2> It seriously bothers me that the article is using market cap.... The value of microsoft is actually roughly equal to the of apple, the value of IBM is equal to microsoft and apple combined...

This is looking at assets and profits per year.

The article is discussing the market cap as if it is a way in which you can determine the value of the company, instead of what it is, the value of its shares. Granted it should be a representation, if lets say microsoft drops 2 Cents on its stocks over a minor scare or something the market cap drops much more than the company value which maintains the same price.

<comment><USER3> I see your point, I'm using market cap as what the market considers the value of the company in question. I also mentioned that it's a good trend barometer first and foremost, looking at equity value and not enterprise value, so I don't see why it would 'bother' you i.e. misleading in some way.</comment></comment>


How these Chicago firms took on spoofing - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151228/NEWS01/151229912/how-these-chicago-firms-took-on-spoofing?utm_source=NEWS01&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=chicagobusiness <comment><USER2> Personally, I'm still not quite sure why this needs to be regulated...

<comment><USER3> Because the wrong people™ are losing money.</comment></comment>


Stuff Costs More Than You Think - <AUTHOR> http://thintz.com/essays/less-stuff <comment><USER2> The author is attempting to find the opportunity costs of his purchases retroactively. It's very important to weight the opportunity cost of something _before_ making the purchase.

The method that he uses to elicit the values is extremely interesting. He locks the items in storage to realize their true value to him.

In the process he discovers a major economic principle. I can't remember that exact term used to describe the situation, but I think it deals with Willingness To Accept (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willingness_to_accept>). In summary, the principle states that one tends to increase the value placed on a good if he owns it. For example, you bargain with a salesman for a hat. He brings the price down to $10. A well-dressed man sees you walking out of the store with your newly purchased hat. He likes it, so he makes you an offer for $10. You will likely not accept because the hat is now worth more to you than just $10.

Overall, the article itself is presented in a motivating fashion shedding some light on these economic issues.

<comment><USER3> You were looking for the Endowment Effect (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect>).

<comment><USER2> Yeap, that's it! Thanks bud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an old William Morris quote that I tend to live by: _Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful._

In the past 2 1/2 years or so I have been slowly paring down my possessions. As a result my living space has decreased from 960 ft2 to 720 ft2, and now to 670 ft2. In 4 months, I could consider downsizing again, probably to 550 ft2 or so. Less space means I can get a nicer space for the same money (though usually less), in a better location. Maybe I'd consider staying put if I had a live-in girlfriend, as there's plenty of closet space for someone else's things.

It's amazing the amount of stuff you tend to haul around with you. What do I miss that I've gotten rid of? Not a thing. I now know where everything is. It's getting increasingly easier to get at everything Cleaning is simple. A smaller space means lower utility bills (i.e. electric going from $80/mo to $35/mo). Fewer clothes (that I never wear) means less laundry to do. I still have some useless things that have sentimental value, and it'll probably take considerably more time before I consider passing those along.

Though most importantly, it leaves more money available for the things you really care about. Money is ultimately a tool, and I'd rather have it available for more worthwhile things.

<comment><USER5> How does fewer clothes that you don't wear mean less laundry?

<comment><USER4> Less closet space being wasted. It's nearly 2AM, so I'm not as coherent as I'd normally be. Though if you have an overly packed closet, it could result in some garments needing to be ironed more from being crammed together all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are three kinds of things that go in the basement, but only 1.5 of them need throwing away.

\- The Junk. Stuff you have but can't bear to throw away; after leaving it in storage for a few years you are willing to part with it.

\- The Memorabilia. Stuff that has memories attached to it- for example, a stuffed animal. Some of this stuff could be thrown away, some is not worth chucking.

\- The Winter Clothing. Stuff you only need occasionally, but cannot do without. I think a lot of people discount or forget about this category when they talk about how little stuff you should have in your life. My mechanic's tools, rain gear and winter clothes are not being used more often than not, but when I have to have them I have to have them.

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing about it: you wouldn't be able to downscale nearly as much without a laptop/tablet/iPad and a smartphone. Those two items, which of course are still stuff, can take over what a dozen different things used to be used for. That's maybe one of the most significant changes of our decade.

</comment><comment><USER8> For those who haven't read pg's realated essay:

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

</comment><comment><USER9> I moved to a new flat recently, and had an intermediary stay at my parents before that.

I, intentionally didnt take my desktop PC, my xbox or TV with me.

I also didnt take any of my suits, smart shoes and a whole host of books.

For the first few months, i didnt miss any of them, but i am starting to miss my TV, xbox and Desktop PC now.

Not particularly missing anything else, but then again, i didnt have that many things to start with.

<comment><USER10> I spent a year and a half living and working overseas. I went from an apartment full of furniture to a single room in a share house. All I owned were the clothes in my cupboard and a laptop. I honestly didn't miss any of my possessions.

In many ways I had less than when I was a starving student, but it felt much different because what I did have was the money to buy things _if_ I needed them. Having the ability to buy things I might need or want was more important to me than actually owning them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> His notebook has massive cost per his definition: massive time-sink. How about ditching it?

</comment><comment><USER12> Similar to a person maxim I've come upon recently: Everything is always more expensive than you think it is. Yes, even more expensive than that.

</comment><comment><USER13> For a website that's espousing the virtues of minimalism, those sure are some tacky mouseover effects in the header.</comment>


Dark Patterns: good for business? - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2010/12/19/dark-patterns-good-for-business <comment><USER2> I remember coming across a scam a couple of months ago. I won't describe it in detail but let's just say that it was an easy way to pick up a $10 recurring charge from an unsuspecting visitor to a web site. It was so sneaky it almost got me, and I'm a web programmer and pretty skeptical guy. I imagine it would get most people.

Once I figured it out I was amazed at the ingenuity.

I would never do that, but hell, I have to admit it was tempting. If you had a 1% conversion rate, and then you used other dark patterns to drive 100K users to the site? It could run into a million or more dollars easily.

I'm not a perfect angel. I just don't want to live with being the type of person that had to do that. I'd rather be poorer and have less emotional baggage. After all, in life you end up doing a lot of stuff you don't like anyway. No point adding to it yourself just for a few bucks. As long as you're able to eat, live, grow, and survive, the extra money isn't worth the guilt.

So yes, I can understand why some folks do this. Hell, I know people that do things like this. I've just decided I'm not one of them.

Ethics, morality, and the law aside, I think this is a personal choice about who you are more than anything else.

Having said all of that, remember that it's easy to _say_ things like I just said. Makes you look good. Makes you feel all moral and superior. Many times it's a lot harder to actually _live_ it. I can say it basically because it's just inaction on my part. If somebody set it all up and asked me to push the big red button and nobody would know it was me? Not as easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree and, for the record, I am not interested in creating anything that I consider a scam. However, this article is not so much about scams and more about slightly shady tactics. Letting people pick up a $10 recurring charge without their knowledge (à la Zynga advertising) is very different from opting them into your mailing list by default.

Zynga makes a perfect example of one of those businesses that really abuse dark patterns, btw. And they are surviving the reputational damage just fine, since most of their users don't seem to care about their reputation, or aren't savvy enough to figure it out.

<comment><USER2> I think it's a slippery slope.

I like to think of it this way: I want to do everything to make a "perfect" site. It loads quickly, it's easy to use, it's clear in its intent, it does one thing and does it well. As I put together the site, I try to keep it as clean and simple as possible. No surprises for the user.

These are just good design principles, dark patterns aside. There's also this huge "don't be evil" new-age kind of feel-good philosophy that folks use, but to me it's much more practical than that: I want as good a site as possible.

Once you start trying to engineer the user, even if it's in their best interests, to me the design suffers. And I'm not sure there is a natural stopping point once you start down this road. At least I can't find one.

My personal feeling is that that there is going to be a huge backlash against sites manipulating users. Not sure what form it will take, but it's coming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It all depends... 'dark' patterns are used a lot by gambling sites for instance, they don't care how they get to the customer, as long as they get to them.

So they'll pay to dollar for really bad stuff such as site take-overs, pop- unders and so on. All the stuff we hate. But it works wonders for them, they have the figures to prove it.

Once you cross over in to things like gambling then the additional penalty of using a 'dark' pattern seems a minor one.

It's a line that you can set for yourself and decide to not cross and play nice, or if you are very money motivated you can explicitly decide to cross it.

But once you do, what's next? The lines between 'nice' and 'not so nice' are pretty vague, but the one between 'legal' and 'not legal' is a much clearer one and I fear that people that no longer distinguish between 'nice' and 'not so nice' will eventually be unable to distinguish between 'legal' and 'illegal'.

It all seems to be related to a sense of entitlement, and the people that I see practicing 'dark' patterns to further their business interests all suffer from this to a greater or lesser extent.

If you look at how people like Bill Gates and others made huge fortunes on the back of business practices that are not exactly ethical are perceived you could easily fall i nto the perception that as long as you make enough money you'll be forgiven, but that should not be the whole story.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of businesses operate at the border of legality. Ryanair is a good example, as you have pointed out on IRC (see <http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/0302/ryanair.html>).

I'm not making a judgement as to whether you personally should build a business that uses dark patterns, my point is that in some lines of business, dark patterns are a critical survival factor, and if you try to be too "good" in those types of business you will get trampled by someone who's willing to squeeze every penny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who cares whether they're good for business?

If you only have one life to live, would you rather go through it being a good person and slightly less rich, or a complete annoying jerk and slightly more rich?

<comment><USER5> While I don't disagree, isn't there some moral value in creating a business that employs folks who can feed their family? Morality is a really tricky thing.

<comment><USER4> Not if you do it by being evil. I'm pretty convinced that "don't be evil" works fine as a strategy for business and life.</comment></comment></comment>


The subculture of Weird Twitter - mkr-hn http://digifesto.com/2012/10/18/weird-twitter-art-experiment-method-notes-and-observations/

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this pretty interesting from an Internet subculture studies viewpoint.

Anyone happen to know any other similar studies/experiments?

<comment><USER2> Could you translate the article from Ramble to English for us?</comment></comment>


HyperTerm – JS/HTML/CSS Terminal - <AUTHOR> https://hyperterm.org <comment><USER3> The folks who make HyperTerm might have something to say about your product naming...

[http://www.hilgraeve.com/hyperterminal/](http://www.hilgraeve.com/hyperterminal/)

Edit: I'm surprised more people in the HN crowd aren't familiar with HyperTerm (Yes that is the name and what everyone called it for many many years) It was bundled with Windows up to 7, and is still used heavily in industrial control areas.

<comment><USER4> That's "HyperTerminal" not "HyperTerm".

<comment><USER5> A very similar name for a product sitting in the same space (terminal emulator). That's generally an unwise decision as it can create confusion for _both_ projects, and the one with the trademark (especially since this new one's name is a substring of the older project) is in a position to make a valid claim against the new project.

If someone created a new project called Steem to deliver video games to end users[, would you] be surprised if Valve took issue with their choice of name?

EDIT: Left out part of a sentence.

<comment><USER6> > if Valve took issue

isn't it true that companies _have_ to take issue, otherwise they lose their trademark? I used to be angry when large corporations would sue a little guy or nonprofit over name squabbles, but then I heard that the big company can lose their trademark if they dont.

<comment><USER7> For an example of this happening, "Aspirin" was originally a Bayer trademark registered in 1897.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was another project that's extremely similar to this posted a week or so ago, and it got a lot of flak for existing; I don't think very many commenters agreed with its existence (except, perhaps, as an educational exercise for the programmer).

That project was posted here: [http://rungoterminal.com/](http://rungoterminal.com/)

This, however, is executed and presented much better than that other project, and catered towards the correct crowd (web developers using Mac OS X). Although I would never use either, I think that it just goes to show that presentation is extremely important: these two terminal emulators could very well be the exact same implementation (or at least very similar), and far less people would use it because they've chosen the wrong demographic.

Also because of the clean presentation, it creates a perception that HyperTerm is executed more cleanly than Rungo Terminal, even if there are no facts to back that belief.

<comment><USER9> Still seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what a terminal is for. I SSH into any number of boxes every day, be it on my RaspberryPi, client machines in AWS, crappy hosting providers, etc. The standard bash terminal is there on all of them, which can not be said of any project like this.

<comment><USER10> _Your_ comment is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a terminal is for. Bash is not a terminal, it is a shell.

You interact with the shell through the terminal.

Old-school terminals were physical devices that had their own keyboard and CRT display, and were connected to the computer via a serial port. Modern "terminals" are actually terminal emulators (software that emulates the older hardware) that display the emulated terminal display on your screen. That might be your kernel's /dev/tty1 which displays the text by directly writing to the graphics card. Or, it might be a user-space application that displays it as a window in a graphics system; such as PuTTY[1], Terminal.app, iTerm, XTerm, gnome-terminal, or one of these projects.

[1] PuTTY is not just a terminal emulator, it is also an SSH client, among other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anybody remember TermKit[0]? This was my first thought when I saw "JS/HTML/CSS Terminal". It was built on WebKit (five years ago, before the everything-in-JS craze really began) and had a lot of really promising features like smart MIME-type support... and then development sort of stopped.

I'd love to see the concept revisited with present-day technologies and platforms.

[0]: [https://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/](https://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/)

<comment><USER12> Heh yes.

There was also a mozilla XUL based terminal many years ago - can't remember the name though.

<comment><USER13> XMLterm

The only article about is that I've ever found or read is this one:

[http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/](http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You guys just can't stop making cool stuff can you? now.sh, now-serve, micro.. I'm not the biggest Node fan, but these are really well done. Execution on these ideas has always been 10/10.

<comment><USER15> I'm a big fan of their markdown semi-renderer. Is that open source?

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I like that too. Just emailed them about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just an idea: The only windowed applications I use are a terminal (st), my text editor (Atom), and a browser (Firefox). Suppose I switched to HyperTerm, Atom, and Chromium. I would have three copies of the Chromium renderer and V8 interpreter loaded in memory. Is there a project that merges these things into a single daemon, to improve individual app startup time, save memory, and reduce the binary size from 42 MB (for HyperTerm) to the size of only its own components?

<comment><USER17> All you have to do is enter a url and it will render web pages. It uses redux and lets extension developers modify any action basically letting them modify anything, so an extension that makes a nice browser is definitely possible. Also I'm sure you could embed Atom into it too. Basically my holy grail , an entire web dev environment in one app/window with tabs..

<comment><USER18> But you can already have this pretty trivially in emacs: [http://puu.sh/q3hpW/2933a20e84.png](http://puu.sh/q3hpW/2933a20e84.png)

<comment><USER19> You can also render full webpages using webkit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_yout...](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_youtube_inside_emacs_25/)

<comment><USER18> Cool, I don't know if I really have a use for that though, I kinda like having the documentation I pull up match the color scheme of my code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks very well executed and really cool, but I'm honestly really tired of all the node/electron terminals. In its favor, this project looks a lot more clean and less opinionated than that 'Black Screen' monstrocity.

<comment><USER21> I'm curious why there's so much node/electron negativity circulating. (Although I guess asking for positivity when it comes to electron is a bit of a stretch :P)

<comment><USER22> Well for instance, Atom and VSCode have ~50ms (or ~49x) more input latency than editors written in C (source: [https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with- pleasure/](https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/) )

But maybe we are willing to accept 50x worse performance and higher memory requirements and slower startup time because the language is nice and guarantees correctness....Well no, it is javascript, not Haskell or Lisp. So, what is the win here? Why have we collectively decided javascript is a good tool for making applications for the desktop?

<comment><USER23> * We've decided to use JavaScript because the community is there. Go ahead and write an IDE in Haskell - have fun rewriting all the libraries that already exist in JavaScript and soliciting for open source contributions when a tiny fraction of all programmers can understand it.

I love Haskell and lisp, but you have to face the facts.

* TypeScript is actually a good language, and gives pretty darn good correctness guarantees.

* Your benchmark does not test against VSCode, which is much faster than Atom.

<comment><USER24> > * TypeScript is actually a good language, and gives pretty darn good > correctness guarantees.

TypeScript's main focus is IDE tooling, not correctness. Here is an example on how generics are unsound in TypeScript: [http://djcordhose.github.io/flow-vs- typescript/2016_hhjs.htm...](http://djcordhose.github.io/flow-vs- typescript/2016_hhjs.html#/21)

If you want to write JavaScript with a type system focused on soundness, you should give [flow]([https://flowtype.org/](https://flowtype.org/)) a try.

<comment><USER23> I don't think that anyone argued TypeScript is 100% sound, nor is that a meaningful goal to hit. I find TS to be a solid language that gives me reasonable confidence in my code. (The tooling is also great!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This makes me want to re-implemented "commando" from AUX/MPW (I've never understood why this idea didn't take off).

If you don't know, when you typed an ellipsis after a command in AUX or MPW a dialog box would be displayed showing the most popular toggles and options for the command (and allowing graphical file-picking). When you clicked "ok" it would type the command for you, so it made the command line both easier to use and easier to learn.

(I just downloaded and tried it out and lost my enthusiasm. There's no attempt to provide a proper GUI.)

<comment><USER26> > I just downloaded and tried it out and lost my enthusiasm. There's no > attempt to provide a proper GUI.

That was always my take on Commando. In theory, there's an idea there. In practice, it's not clear who it was supposed to appeal to. If one has to mouse around, just provide a proper GUI wrapper for the tool.

<comment><USER25> I lost enthusiasm for hyperterm. Commando was awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can anyone comment on how this compares to Black Screen ? [https://github.com/shockone/black-screen](https://github.com/shockone/black- screen)

<comment><USER28> Black Screen is a shell as well as a terminal. This is just a terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How well does it deal with copious amounts of text scrolling across the screen. It's been a while since I've used it, but IIRC Gnome Terminal had big issues with this for a long time (due to the underlying library that they were using).

<comment><USER30> It's really bad. Not as bad as gnome-terminal back in the day (it's been fixed for a while), but it definitely can't keep up with a 'find /usr'.

(I'm running it on linux, ymmv).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is bad ass job, congratulations. Like someone else mention in the comments, execution and idea you get 100/100 points.

</comment><comment><USER32> A while ago I wrote something similar to this as a school project, but instead of being a local terminal, it was for a remote server. There was a sort of virtual file system the user interacted with, with metadata stored in MySQL, as one does for school projects.

The moral of the story is that I hated having a terminal in JavaScript for a remote server, so I have no idea why I would want one for my local computer.

<comment><USER33> I'm curious why you hated the fact that it was in JavaScript? Was it because it ran in the browser? Because this one probably can, but it runs natively by default as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER32> It wasn't really the browser. In fact the fact that it even ran in a browser was pretty cool.

It was just the lack of full terminal support, and how if I wanted to add even the most basic of features, it would take thousands of lines of code (this was before things really took off and there were libraries for everything, not that it makes it too much better).

Instead I can make a terminal that's significantly more efficient and responsive, with a fraction of the amount of code, and without having to write any JavaScript, which is its own achievement.

<comment><USER34> >Instead I can make a terminal that's significantly more efficient and responsive

...and that runs on exactly one OS, and doesn't support the 250k+ Node modules, and that doesn't support standardized plugins, and that can't open web pages locally...

JavaScript hate is so 2010.

<comment><USER35> Hey, I have a few issues with your attitude.

Firstly, if there is one piece of software that I want to be fast, lightweight, and most importantly secure, it's my terminal emulator. The hard part isn't drawing characters to the screen (which is what HTML and CSS would help with), it's the VT100 parsing and logic, which can be written in...well, anything, really.

I would first like to point out that the HyperTerm OSX zip is 43mb, and the unzipped HyperTerm.app is 123mb.

Supporting exactly one OS: again, the OS specific bits aren't the hard part. Blitting characters to the screen is easy, and platform independence certainly isn't worth 123mb of overhead.

250k+ Node modules: The number of packages in a package repository is a poor metric for determining anything except the number of packages in the package repository. npm has tons of redundant or ill-maintained packages, and that's even before we discuss whether having a bunch of available packages makes a terminal better _at all_. In my opinion, it doesn't, and this circles back around to the fact that a terminal needs to be secure. I sure as hell don't want random unaudited code running in the same application that I use to administer systems.

Standardised plugins: what standardised plugins? npm modules? Not sure what you mean here.

Can't open web pages locally: Why should a terminal do that? As a party trick? I don't want to stand in the way of improvement, here, but I also have no problem opening a separate web browser to browse the web.

Javascript hate: It's not hate when people bring up salient points. Just because the web platform is open and everybody is using it right now doesn't mean that it's perfect or above criticism.

<comment><USER34> >Firstly, if there is one piece of software that I want to be fast, lightweight, and most importantly secure, it's my terminal emulator.

So you prefer one written in ... C? Because C is secure by design? <rim shot>

Coding a terminal in Rust or even Go would be awesome, I admit...

>Standardised plugins: what standardised plugins? npm modules? Not sure what you mean here.

See the demo animation for a (silly yet awesome) example.

>250k+ Node modules

Point is to use them to do other cool things client-side. It's a Really Big Toolbox. The CSS/HTML part can potentially provide interesting options as well.

>It's not hate when people bring up salient points.

>>>without having to write any JavaScript, which is its own achievement.

The latter quote is from the comment I was replying to. It is not a "salient point," but simple JavaScript hate. His other points were that, in the past, he had written a JavaScript terminal as a school project that he ended up hating, it took him thousands of lines of code, and he'd done it before Node existed to provide the batteries. What salient points do you actually refer to?

I'm not really disagreeing with you about the terminal: Honestly I will keep my lighter terminal with tabs and good UI for most real uses. But I love to see people innovating; providing extendable architecture is the way we get great new features.

Maybe there's no killer feature in this one to justify the extra weight, but neither do I see the need to pile hate on it because JavaScript; even less because they had a bad experience in school writing a JavaScript project that was similar.

<comment><USER32> > So you prefer one written in ... C? Because C is secure by design? <rim > shot>

You missed the point. A program that is 2,500,000 lines of code of interpreted JavaScript, and was written by some guy in a few weeks who pulled in hundreds of unaudited third party libraries, is _definitely_ less secure than a 100,500 line C application that has been slowly developed, improved, and audited for some 25 years or more.

>See the demo animation for a (silly yet awesome) example.

A plugin is inherently not "standard" if it does not work on terminals other than the one it's designed for. Zsh has _many_ plugins, albeit not "standard", and almost definitely fulfills all of the functionality you could want out of this project.

>Point is to use them to do other cool things client-side. It's a Really Big Toolbox. The CSS/HTML part can potentially provide interesting options as well.

As said before, I don't want to do really cool things with CSS and HTML _in my terminal_. That's what I use a proper browser, IDE, or other functional- specific application for. And even if I did want a program that did absolutely everything, I'd rather use Emacs than some random NodeJS terminal emulator somebody wrote.

> The latter quote is from the comment I was replying to. It is not a "salient > point," but simple JavaScript hate.

JavaScript is objectively a bad language, and to simply say "JavaScript hate is so 2010" is a cheap redirect of actual criticisms of the language. (And no, I don't think ES6 makes it that much better, although at the very least it becomes bearable that way.)

<comment><USER34> >JavaScript is objectively a bad language

JavaScript is _not_ objectively bad. I have 30 years experience programming in probably 15 languages and both formal and informal education in language theory to back that assertion up.

It's objectively not perfect, but then most languages have problems. There are a few regretful mistakes in the design, but they can be worked around by using programming style decisions enforced by a linter.

JavaScript has some of the most advanced features of languages available today, including lambdas, closures, and asynchronous coding patterns that make it faster at dealing with IO than naive C implementations.

Most of what sucks about using JavaScript is dealing with the DOM and browser differences in DOM implementations, but that's not _JavaScript_ , that's just dealing with multiple browser platforms. Which you don't have to do in Node or Electron.

>"JavaScript hate is so 2010" is a cheap redirect of actual criticisms

No, it was a cheap comeback at substance-free hate directed at the language. If you want to argue details, read JavaScript, The Good Parts (or watch the YouTube video of the same name), and get back to me with what parts of JavaScript are actually, objectively _bad_. And in order to meet the "objectively" threshold, be sure to cite studies, because otherwise it's just your opinion.

<comment><USER32> I really don't feel like carrying on another JavaScript argument, so we'll just have to agree to disagree.

> I have 30 years experience programming in probably 15 languages and both > formal and informal education in language theory to back that assertion up.

Although please come back when this becomes a true statement.

<comment><USER34> >Although please come back when this becomes a true statement.

That sir is uncalled for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> As an Acme user, I find the extensibility feature very interesting: Once you are used to Acme's contextual (and programmable) handling of text, it's hard to go back to a normal terminal.

<comment><USER37> Never heard of Acme -- can you elaborate?

<comment><USER38> It was an editor for Plan9.

Here you go: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_\(text_editor\))

<comment><USER37> Thanks...followed the Wikipedia link to the Rob Cox demo video. Mind blowing to have an editor as an OS filesystem that can intercept OS events. If I hadn't spent the last 20 years learning vi I would grab a copy and give it a try.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, plan 9 did a lot of cool things and fixed many of Unix fundamental warts. Taking the "everything is a file" much further, and namespaces as a fundamental primitive rather than something bolted on afterwards, for starters.

Alas, too little too late, it seems.

<comment><USER40> Inferno and Limbo improved upon it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I tried to use this but got stuck when i opened up vim with NERDTree, it wouldn't expand folders...

</comment><comment><USER42> I think it would be great if we could go beyond text in terminal applications. Think Jupyter notebooks but inside terminal. It would be great if terminal window was just an OpenGL surface that one could draw on, with good API for doing just text. Something as simple as "put this interactive plot in this 20x20 area there" would make a big difference for a lot of programs and scripts I'm writing. At the moment if I want something like that I pipe the data through websocket to the browser and that's OK but I'd rather stay in the terminal.

<comment><USER43> That is the goal of the DomTerm [http://domterm.org](http://domterm.org) project. I see little point in a JS-based terminal emulator unless you can "print out" graphics, images, or general HTML. DomTerm's goal is "full" xterm compatibility _and_ embeddable graphics, rich(er) text, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> imgcat[1] is one of my favorite terminal innovations as of late. I thought I'd take a long shot and see if it worked since that functionality seems like it would be simple for a browser-engine-based terminal to handle, but sadly no- go. I smell pull request.

[1][https://www.iterm2.com/documentation- images.html](https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-images.html)

<comment><USER45> Gate One (web-based terminal) has had this functionality for years:

[https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne/](https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne/)

Just 'cat someimage.jpeg' or 'cat someimage.png' and it'll display it right there in the terminal. Works great if I do say so myself (I wrote it =).

<comment><USER44> I think I've come across this before. So it's a browser/web server solution, right? Seems like there could be some performance/security issues. Seems pretty full featured, though. Nice work!

<comment><USER45> Hundreds of thousands of users for three years now and there's yet to be any reports of a security issue. The closest thing was a very mild information disclosure issue with the bundled ssh_connect.py script... Because it imported readline you could hit ESC twice and see a listing of the files in the same directory as the script (one other file). Couldn't do anything with that info though, haha. Regardless, I fixed that years ago and there's been nothing since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It definitely looks cool, but may I ask what's the problem that is being solved here? Does it support tmux or at least window splits?

Which problems does this solve that the regular Terminal didn't solve? I'm kind of lost here, "I need some fireworks while I type in my terminal" is not a problem that I have often to be honest.

<comment><USER47> my guess is "a terminal that a person who is more comfortable with html, js and css than bash will like"

I must say, using basically a css stylesheet to control how your terminal looks and behaves does feel a lot more user friendly than a PS variable.

<comment><USER48> I just tried it, and yes, tmux works.

Also, it seems really fast. Liking it so far. Especially after iTerm versioning jumped the shark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Would you recommend this to a beginner? Hilariously I'm actually asking for a friend, I don't have a Mac.

<comment><USER50> OS X comes with a built-in terminal (that's actually pretty good). There's no reason for a beginner to reach for any third-party terminal software.

<comment><USER14> Besides iTerm2 maybe. Default config is very similar to the built-in OS X terminal.

<comment><USER50> I would not recommend iTerm2 to a beginner. The iTerm developers believe in the kitchen sink approach to preferences, which is not very beginner-friendly. And there's not much reason to use iTerm2 in general anyway now that Terminal.app has mouse support, I'm only aware of a few relatively esoteric features that iTerm2 has that Terminal doesn't (support for colors outside of the 256-color palette, and built-in support for showing tmux panes as iTerm window splits).

<comment><USER27> pretty sure that iTerm2 for a beginner is pretty much identical to Terminal. At that stage don't know enough to leverage it's fancy capabilities so they don't get in the way and confuse you. When you're ready for them, they're there for you. In Terminal you have something that looks and works almost identical but when you want more you can't have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> "Builds for Windows and Linux are coming very soon"

I can't wait. Anyone knows how I could build this on windows?

<comment><USER52> Follow the instructions from the GitHub page [1] the ones under the "Contribute" title, that will be enough for you. If you don't know how to work with a Node.JS project then wait for their official Windows release.

[1] [https://github.com/zeit/hyperterm#contribute](https://github.com/zeit/hyperterm#contribute)

<comment><USER53> Their installation notes involve executing a bash script.

Also, the node package `child_pty` is part of the dependency tree - <USER2> doesn't support Windows. This is all totally fine but now I'm genuinely curious about how this builds on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Initial commit 15 days ago?? I think I'll hold off on any sudo commands or special permissions requested by the OS.

Looks super cool though. Seems like a no-brainer with Electron.

Edit: I take that back, since it largely leverages hterm by the Chromium team, looks like the real first commit was in 2011 or so.

</comment><comment><USER54> My first reaction is: "This could be the VS Code of terminals". For those stuck on Windows, where the choice in terminals is pretty bad AND more and more Windows dev is done from the command line (hello 'dotnet'), this could be very welcome.

<comment><USER55> Microsoft announced support for Linux/Unix tools in Windows 10 awhile back. You can get bash if you want.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/commandline/wsl/about](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/commandline/wsl/about)

<comment><USER56> bash might be there, but the terminal emulation is still pretty bad. (I'm a week or two behind on preview builds, but I still couldn't run a bunch of ncurses/tmux/mosh type apps).

conhost.exe is a shame and it's kind of indicative how much joy it was just to get some basics (like QuickEdit by default, etc).

<comment><USER57> For windows, conemu ( [http://conemu.github.io](http://conemu.github.io) ) is a bit more annoying to configure than terminal.app, but works just as well, and even has the more powerful built in features like tmux. Of course you have to run something like msys2 (or maybe the bash for windows, but I haven't tried it yet) to get the "unix" environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Awesome. However there is just no way someone developing a terminal, hasn't heard of HyperTerminal. It was bundled with every Windows OS. Good luck with that naming cease and desist :/

</comment><comment><USER59> [http://www.trademarkia.com/trademarks- search.aspx?tn=hyperte...](http://www.trademarkia.com/trademarks- search.aspx?tn=hyperterm)

hyperterm Search Apply Now! This name is not found in our database of U.S. trademarks, so Apply for it Now. Check off countries you wish to trademark your name/slogan in.

</comment><comment><USER60> Another JS terminal emulator, [https://chromium.googlesource.com/apps/libapps/+/master/hter...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/apps/libapps/+/master/hterm)

<comment><USER61> HyperTerm uses hterm underneath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Rendering a webpage in the shell is neat. The concept of a terminal wrapped in a browser has a lot of potential.

It also seems like iTerm is moving in the direction of richer media integration with recent features like inline image rendering.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm trying it and it feels great. The ability to easily extend it is huge!

</comment><comment><USER63> Looks really cool, but honestly the input lag is noticeable when compared to something like iTerm. Not sure that's something I could get used to. Is that just a limitation of Electron?

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm excited to see if a community arises to build and share themes for HyperTerm. I switched from iTerm, and will reply back to this comment if I switch back.

</comment><comment><USER65> See also: [https://github.com/shockone/black- screen](https://github.com/shockone/black-screen)

</comment><comment><USER66> tiny nitpick for a really cool thing: it's not based on JS/HTML/CSS, it's written in or build on JS/HTML/CSS.

</comment><comment><USER67> If that has the iTerm speed it will be my new terminal app. It looks awesome! Can't wait to see the ecosystem around it.

</comment><comment><USER68> CodePicnic [https://codepicnic.com/](https://codepicnic.com/)

<comment><USER69> I think HyperTerm is free. _And_ open-source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Ctrl-a seems to be selecting all, how am I suppose to get out of a screen if I can't Ctrl-a d?

This seems like a oversight.

</comment><comment><USER71> For anybody with Firefox/Autoplay disabled, you need to right click and select play to see the demo...

</comment><comment><USER72> Is there any way to use HyperTerm as an embeddable terminal emulator in your own web apps?

<comment><USER73> That's gonna be one staggeringly heavyweight web app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> oh wow. This is awesome! Now I desperately need a Clojurescript plugin for this.

</comment><comment><USER75> Finally, I've always wanted a terminal with particle effects!

</comment><comment><USER76> It assumes I have npm installed. Probably shouldn't:

[https://github.com/zeit/hyperterm/issues/134](https://github.com/zeit/hyperterm/issues/134)

</comment><comment><USER77> Would be interesting to see a Hypermedia API explorer.

</comment><comment><USER78> Personally, I dislike the march of the web technologies towards the desktop. I think, we forgot what they're intended to be used for.

</comment><comment><USER79> This would work so well with Atom

</comment><comment><USER80> Why not just call it JSTerminal?

</comment><comment><USER81> How is this different from crosh / hterm?

</comment><comment><USER82> Yet another "thin" client...

</comment><comment><USER83> Cool

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra As a long Konsole user, I wonder if it supports unlimited logging, how it will react to 500M of console backlog, what's up with scrolling/overflow at all?

In my experience, terminal is one of the trickest to get right under extreme conditions.

What's with tabs also? :)

</comment><comment><USER84> Bored at first, then was forced to smile with glee. Now I must download it, even though I was originally poo-pooing "another terminal" in my head. Well done, well done.

</comment><comment><USER85> Hopefully this inspires someone to make a Lua/Python scriptable terminal. I'm not a big fan of the web stack. This is a pretty cool concept though.

<comment><USER86> ES6 fixes most of my biggest problems with JavaScript as a language, and adds a few things I didn't think of, but are nice. Generators, destructuring assignment, nicer class syntax, etc. I found this series of blog posts helpful: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/es6-in- depth/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/es6-in-depth/)

Sure, there's still a lot of old code out there to read, but I would guess this project is using mostly modern patterns. Most Node projects do.

<comment><USER85> Yeah I'm sure JS is better than before but I just don't like the web stack in general. I don't like using CSS/HTML/DOM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> -_- another node.js term

<comment><USER88> you're my hero

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> the video is a bit silly in the end

<comment><USER90> It is outrageously silly but maybe that's the point - it carries a message that you can do whatever you want with it (and implies - without much effort, if you can do silly things like this).

There is unexplored area sitting just right there.

Imagine having easy access to ncurses replacement, jupyter kernels like output from any of your "console" tools - that would be awesome.

<comment><USER89> > It is outrageously silly but maybe that's the point

exactly, I don't understand the downvotes. The parts I saw however, didn't show what you wish for.

The video doesn't seem to have a slider, but click to skip or some. A visual indicator would be nice.</comment></comment></comment>


Pros and Cons of Designers That Code - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/designers-that-code/

<comment><AUTHOR> Which is better? coders who designs or designers who code??</comment>


Justin.tv Is Turning Porn Queries Into Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/16/justintv-is-redirecting-porn-queries-into-cash/ <comment><USER2> Techcrunch didn't include the comment on the story we sent them, but here it is:

Justin.tv uses a variety of common tools to effectively reduce the amount of inappropriate content on the site including: community-based reporting, community admins, chat moderation and redirecting sex-related search queries.

Lets be clear, this isn't the magical solution for monetizing Web 2.0, these tools exclusively help us to improve the community experience on the site.

</comment><comment><USER3> "the site should really include a page confirming that the user is over 18 before redirecting them"

Yes, because 16 year old boys who searched for porn are going to click no when asked if they're over 18.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't such a confirmation be needed purely for legal reasons?

<comment><USER3> I'm not a lawyer, but my guess would be no since it's merely a link to a third party. I'd guess the third party has the responsibility to ask that question.

On the other hand, I'm not a lawyer.

<comment><USER4> On the third-party point, I think that's the reason they say:

" _(there seems to be no such confirmation found on at least some of the redirected porn sites)._ "

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome.

People who want porn get porn. People who want money (ie Justin.tv) get money.

Unfortunately, there are definitely issues.

Some 8-year-old kid is going to search for the awesome new channel about secant that everyone in 3rd grade is talking about. Since the c is next to the x, he's going to accidentally type "sex" instead of "sec". 5 seconds later, he says "mommy, what is that?", and 10 seconds later Justin.tv has a very, very angry parent on their hands.

Ok, maybe that's a little unrealistic. But people are going to complain about it.

<comment><USER2> You'd think they would, but we've been running this for a long time already and other than this silly kerfluffle, there haven't really been complaints. And believe me, our users love to complain (that's why we love our users!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> From another post here, I am absolutely amazed that a search for xxx or sex on Google takes you to flash video based full length hardcore porn. I didn't realize it was that easy these days. What Justin.tv is doing is no different or worse than Google. I would expect Justin.tv is banned by every parental filter anyways.

<comment><USER5> They don't need to be banned.

It's a redirect. So as long as the actual porn site is blocked, Justin.tv doesn't need to be. Normal Justin.tv is fine, and if someone does get redirected to porn, the filter should grab it there when it tries to load hot- porn.com or whatever.

<comment><USER7> Something tells me that the people who run porn censoring groups won't follow your logic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While it's cool to see them trying out some unconventional ways of monetization, I have a feeling this won't last for very long.

<comment><USER9> There will probably be some complaints from parents or some being redirected to porn sites, but what do you expect? If parents are so offended they should talk to their child about searching for porn on the internet rather than complaining.

If some kid turns 'safe search' off in google and types in 'porn' - will the parents get mad at google?

<comment><USER10> When was the last time a parent actually talked to their child instead of complaining about it being someonelse's problem?

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure we only get to hear the ones that complain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The fact that this story is so controversial (read the comments on TechCrunch) really shows that Justin.TV will probably stop doing this soon.

Interesting idea to give the adult searchers what they really want. The problem is that adult content is still too taboo for many folks.

<comment><USER13> I would barely call some TechCrunch comments "controversy". That site has some serious youtube-style lowest-denominator-of-society commenting going on. The troll to constructive comment ratio is like 9:1.

<comment><USER12> In my view and in my experience, many of the comments on this particular article do represent the general public out there.

The roughly same comments are found in this thread on Hacker News.

We are unfortunately still living in a time when many people are not open minded.

-Larry

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does JTV really feel comfortable directing kids to porn? I am a fan of porn, but I'd feel uncomfortable having a hand in making porn so easily accessible to kids.

<comment><USER15> If someone is searching for porn or xxx or whatever is flagged, then they _certainly_ can get it elsewhere on the internet. Justin.tv is not directing them to it, they would have already found out how to find it.

<comment><USER14> [http://www.justin.tv/search?q=porn&commit=Search&sec...](http://www.justin.tv/search?q=porn&commit=Search&section=)

Justin.tv directs me to a porn site.

It's wrong to just blindly forward people to porn when most of them are younger kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really don't see any issue with this quite honestly.

If a parent has an issue then either talk to your kid about NOT searching for porn or simply block the site.

<comment><USER17> Seriously I read somewhere that someone complained about the word "Sexy" turning up a porn result.

Is that over the top? Maybe. But think about who looks up the word "Sexy" on a live video stream... I think they're on the right track in some way. Well, I don't necessarily think they're doing the _right_ thing like this, but certainly if you have moral qualms with it, feel free to not use their service. I'm not sure this is a reason to stop using their service. Still, I think it might be better if maybe they had a button that said "Yes, redirect me" instead of only waiting five (only five?) seconds. Or, if Justin.tv is really using this to keep bad content off their site, why don't they block those terms completely? It's not like redirecting users to a porn site is the best alternative...not to mention all this bad press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It just screams of desperation. It may make sense, but do you think they'll be able to keep their community this way?

<comment><USER19> Yes, because we only redirect people who are searching for porn, and those people aren't actually part of the community.

<comment><USER18> Okay, here's how I see it, Justin:

You have forever tied the reputation and business of Justin.tv to porn. It doesn't matter if you host it or not, it doesn't matter if you warn users, you are forever associated with a market that millions of advertisers, investors, and users are adverse to. The TechCrunch porn article is already beginning to appear in search results - how long until any search for your website has articles about you and porn on it? And how long will casual users watch until they bounce?

It screams desperation because it isn't a business model, it's a stop-gap. The streaming video websites, including you, have yet to prove that you can make sustainable revenues that trump costs, which is the point of every business on the planet.

Once you realize that you've tarnished the reputation of Justin.tv forever and that it will create an artificial barrier to growth, it will be too late.

At least, that's how I see it.

<comment><USER19> Over 30 million people come to the site or view JTV embeds every month. I don't think the community will disappear because of any one news story. We've had our fair share of bad press, but I'll be the first to say it's not the end of the world and that today's sensational news will be forgotten when the next story hits.

Lots of people inside the tech industry don't get it, but Justin.tv is bigger than Techcrunch, gets more pageviews than Digg, does about as many video streams per month as Hulu, and is largely used by people outside the tech sector who neither know nor care about the politics of Silicon Valley. Those people are gamers, music fans, and social networkers from all around the world; they like the site for what it is and for the service it provides, not for how it is portrayed in the media.

Lastly, this isn't a monetization method. If it was, we'd remove it from the site because it doesn't really make any money. What it does do is serve as a tarpit for users searching for content that doesn't have a place on our site. And ultimately we've found that in conjunction with our other community moderation tools, we've significantly reduced abuse incidences on the site. Which is a win for our community.

<comment><USER20> I think it is a fine strategy. WW.com does much the same thing, has been doing that for years and we think it is one of our better gimmicks, to get our 'abusers' to fund the site for your 'users'.

It functions as an escape valve for an element that you will attract anyway, no matter how much work you put into keeping things clean.

Your observation about the news is spot on, we once had a guy hang himself on camera before we caught on to what was happening, lots of bad press, angry letters from users and so on, within 5 days of the event things were back to normal. Still one of the most shocking experiences in my career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's the natural thing to do but at what cost?

<comment><USER22> The users that search for porn get porn. Justin.tv gets money. I fail to see how this is a poor business model.

Oh yeah, sex is evil. I get it.</comment></comment>


Scroogled Keep Calm Mug - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Scroogled-Keep-Calm-Mug/productID.291428700 <comment><USER3> Is there a large contingent of bitter MS employees on HN? Does it really need to be explained how the whole scroogled campaign is kind of ridiculous and hypocritical?

<comment><USER4> Normally I would think it would be considered a very bad sign when a company is so terrible at convincing you of their own greatness that their only recourse is to attack the competition.

<comment><USER5> Normally, but not surprising, given the source, e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt#Mic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt#Microsoft)

<comment><USER4> > "If an open source software solution breaks, who's gonna fix it?"

Oh my god that is gold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a whole category of products with shirts, hats, posters and more:

[http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Scroogle...](http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Scroogled/categoryID.67575900)

(via [http://marketingland.com/microsoft-web-store-now-selling- scr...](http://marketingland.com/microsoft-web-store-now-selling-scroogled- mugs-65773))

<comment><USER7> How incredibly childish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Keep calm and...wait until we properly encrypt our services - <USER2>

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/encrypt-web-report- who...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/encrypt-web-report-whos-doing- what#crypto-chart)

</comment><comment><USER9> Keep Calm and Focus On Things Other Than The Quality Of Our Own Products.

</comment><comment><USER10> Xbox: Keep calm while we read your biometrics and detect what emotions you're feeling and use that information to do who knows what!

<comment><USER11> [http://mashable.com/2013/11/18/xbox-one- facts/](http://mashable.com/2013/11/18/xbox-one-facts/)

"The Xbox team has stressed that the motion-capturing camera Kinect, which is bundled with every Xbox One, is a much more sophisticated device than its predecessor. The camera can see a lot more of what is happening in the room; it can sense the number of people, see their skeletons, monitor heartbeats and even recognize faces."

At least Google can't see my skeleton...

<comment><USER4> Unless the thing fires x-rays, I'm pretty sure they meant "it uses the data to extrapolate a skeleton".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Keep Calm and Regurgitate Once-Popular Memes

</comment><comment><USER13> _Please_ , can this finally be the nail in the coffin of the "Keep Calm and <x>" meme?

<comment><USER4> I think that meme was all nailed up and buried a long time ago.

Unfortunately "a long time ago" seems to be Microsoft's primary domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "steal your data" seems boldly libelous.

</comment><comment><USER14> Google employees might end up buying these. Last time MSFT did the campaign with the slimy Google Docs salesman guy with a tie with Google logo colors, Google employees got the ties made and started wearing them internally.

The best way to deal with this kind of tasteless campaigning is with humor not anger. My guess is whoever runs these campaigns is separate from the product and engineering people, and Microsoft needs to realize it is doing more damage to its brand than Google.

<comment><USER15> Its kind of not surprising that Microsoft's anti-Google strategy looks like a needlessly desperate negative political campaign since it started when Microsoft brought on Mark Penn[1], whose go-hard-negative strategy was _so successful_ for Democratic then-front-runner Hillary Clinton in 2008, to lead its messaging efforts.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Penn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Penn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They're not stealing my data. I gladly give it to them.

</comment><comment><USER17> As an HTC-Android phone user, I'd buy a mug titled "<MS logo> keep calm while we steal your money". Not if MS is selling it, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> Every time I see this "Scroogled" campaign I think about Microsoft and Google in an elevator: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOSdRMSG_k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOSdRMSG_k)

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one who can no longer intuitively differentiate between these geometrically styled logos in four flat primary colors and so was initially confused by this mug?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's the hypocrisy that irks me the most about this.

I remember a short while back a Microsoft employee was asking on HN 'why the hate?' Well, THIS (Oh, and the patents thing).

<comment><USER21> The whole patent extortion against Android and Linux is incredible. I'd very surprised the tactics they're using are not actually considered real extortion. Signing an NDA before showing you the patents they're threatening you with?</comment></comment>


Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/19/apple-is-flailing-badly-at-the-edges/ <comment><USER2> "I love that damn phone, and it will take a lot more than lost apps and dropped calls to get it out of my hands."

As long as stuff like this (and you can see a lot more of it here on HN) is the prevailing wisdom, Apple has little motivation to actually do anything to fix their problems.

The hype around the iPhone is particularly telling - people put up with developer draconian restrictions, they put up with unstable software and poor reception that most other companies would be ashamed to release.

I've had an iPhone for about 3 weeks now, and I still don't get the hype. Have iPhone owners never used a smartphone before? Did they all trade in their Nokia 5110s before buying the iPhone?

<comment><USER3> Lots of iPhone users never had a smartphone before. You can think of them as the AOL of smartphones. Considering that, maybe the draconian babysitter policies they have over apps make sense.

EDIT - iPhone users I know:

Me - programmer, but no longer an early adopter. Had a Palm V awhile back, but found it annoying to have the additional device. 1st time smartphone user.

Fellow musician - singer, engineering student. 1st time smartphone user.

Veterinarian. Her husband's a Gentoo developer though, and he bought her an iPhone for her birthday.

I also know of two coworkers who are early adopters who also own an iPhone.

So of the 5 people I know, only two are early adopters. Two of them are female, and both of those users prize the iPhone because it's fun to use and it looks nice.

<comment><USER4> > Lots of iPhone users never had a smartphone before.

This statement may be technically true, but I highly doubt it's true among the writers and commentators like Arrington that we hear so much about the iPhone from.

In fact, most of the people I know who have iPhones are early adopter types. People like my mom -- a prototypical AOL user -- wouldn't have a clue as to what to do with an iPhone.

Arrington's willingness to put up with the bugs, flaws, and "draconian" babysitter policies is a less a statement about Apple as it as about the rest of the smartphone marketplace, which frankly stinks.

<comment><USER2> No, its more of a statement to the power of Apple's marketing and trends.

The BB Bold vs. iPhone 3G is pretty telling - the Bold was announced a month before the 3G iphone, but is only to be released a few weeks from now. Meanwhile, Apple went ahead and released their product with piss poor battery life and according to many users, unstable software, often unresponsive UI etc. When the Bold comes out it won't have these problems.

iPhone users have made a pretty clear choice: looks above ALL else.

> "statement about Apple as it as about the rest of the smartphone > marketplace, which frankly stinks."

I'd really love to see you try and back that statement up

<comment><USER5> For people who aren't already using a BlackBerry, the Bold just doesn't even seem like a competitor. I'll be a first-time smartphone buyer shortly, and it's difficult to see why I'd want to buy a handheld computer with such a tiny screen. I'm far more likely to want to browse the web and watch video on my smartphone than type a novel, so a separate keyboard is pretty unimportant, but the screen is one of the most visible and important parts of a first impression, and the iPhone seems to have a bigger screen than anything competing with it. Even with the problems I'm hearing it has, it's hard to justify dropping money on something with a significantly smaller viewing area.

<comment><USER2> In many ways the Bold isn't a competitor to the iPhone. You want one for the same reason I bought one - a large screen for multimedia and web.

Now, if depended on your smartphone to get stuff done, you'd be scratching your head over the iPhone. It may have eye candy, but what about the features, reliability or stability that you'd actually need? I don't think the HN crowd appreciates how many people out there can do 80% of their job with just a BlackBerry. I didn't understand what the big deal around the BB is until I actually used it in such a scenario for a bit, and I know using the iPhone like that would be a no-go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since he doesn't detail the nature of the problems he had with his failing Macs, I can't really say anything definitive. Personally, I've owned 4 Macs over the past few years and the worst failure I've suffered has been a hard drive crash, so maybe he just has bad luck.

I do believe his criticism of MobileMe is warranted though. I'm happy enough to play with it on my free trial but I wouldn't trust its reliability to exclusive use, nor do I want to be locked into an email address at $100/year.

<comment><USER7> I just found it hilarious that to paraphrase he said 'My Macbook Air couldn't stay connected to our office router so we took it apart for another project.'

Wait...what? You realize that there could be many reasons for that - and many solutions.

Follow that up with his 'high end' black Macbook had a problem...wait just because you pay 200$ more for a different colour doesn't make the laptop high end.

Yes, quite an 'expert' able to judge how a company is doing by his folly with devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title's some kind of mixed metaphor about medieval weaponry. It's terrifying.

What's wrong with fraying? It would have worked better anyway.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple is definitely the worst computer company. Except for all the other ones.

<comment><USER10> What's wrong with Lenovo and Dell? They both make millions of solid machines. I suppose that they're not very sexy... but I tend to pay attention to what's on the screen, not whether or not the case won any design contests.

(And FWIW, the Thinkpad has won a lot of design awards. The matte-black box is beautiful and durable. The Macbook feels like a cheap toy in comparison.)

Finally, Asus' eeepc is also a beautiful computer.

<comment><USER11> It's the OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A couple anecdotes of broken machines does not make a trend, or a commercial failure.

<comment><USER13> And to prove that the plural of anecdote is not data, today's news is that Apple has once again topped the PC industry in consumer satisfaction scores [[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10019711-37.html?part=rss&...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10019711-37.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5)] and is the only company in their class whose satisfaction rating actually increased since the last survey.

<comment><USER14> Consumer satisfaction is as much about marketing as it is about sustained product quality. Apple customers may just be happy to be part of the club, even while their iPhone drains in one hour or their Macbooks are in an out of the shop, because it's better than using Windows.

I'd be much more impressed with them leading something comparable to the IQS JD Power does for cars. It's kinda sad that nothing like that exists.

<comment><USER13> Ah yes, the old "they are all stupid sheep" explanation for results which do not support your particular worldview. The study in question is pretty open about its methodology, and includes everything from product quality to customer complaints and perceived value of the products. I guess the difference between real social scientists who build econometric models to rank consumer satisfaction values over tens of thousands of subject interviews and you is that the former can speak from authority and you speak only for your own biases and perceptions.

<comment><USER14> Has nothing to do with stupid sheep or Apple in particular or my world view. It's about sound methodology. The reason the IQS metric is the gold standard in the auto industry is because marketing ensures that quality (from the reliability standpoint) and customer satisfaction are two very different things.

One was being used as a proxy for the other here. Apple products could be somewhat unreliable yet still score high in overall satisfaction, apparently even given the methodology they used.

Also, since it specifically mentions that the 3g iPhone is not included, that probably means that the older version and iPods are. Is it fair to rate Apple against HP when most Apple customers have used only their portable media players? Do HP's printers count in this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _unexceptable_

Is this a new word meaning "unable to make an exception for"?

</comment><comment><USER16> I have owned a number of Apple products; workstations, laptops, iPods etc. I had one super bad incident with Apple which they will never live down. (After 6 months of phone calls, and visits to their 'geniuses'. It ended with them giving me a brand new $2000 workstation in exchange for my $1300 brick.) But that was it. If you are having problems with everything you by from them, you're doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER17> Within corporate only Apple TV is considered a flop. Mac mini had great demand but not important enough for more focus, the same with MacBook Air.

People also tend to forget or don't know this but Apple only has 26,400 or so employees and it caters to consumer, enterprise, and government/school on a _global_ scale. Dell and HP and IBM are running around with hundreds of thousands of employees. And the size of the company is impacted entirely by the managerial abilities of one Steve Jobs. It's a mixed blessing.

<comment><USER18> And more than half of those employees are in retail, not development/business/management/etc.</comment></comment>


Direct access to wave function amplitudes and eigenvalues in TBTK - <AUTHOR> http://second-tech.com/wordpress/index.php/2018/10/27/direct-access-to-wave-function-amplitudes-and-eigenvalues-in-tbtk/ <comment><USER2> Anyone has a mirror/cache link? Might have DDoS'd it, can only see a database error at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the note! It's up again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry for not being on topic, but does anyone else have issues with the GDPR bar not going away? Really disturbs the reading flow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you provide more info. Did you click it?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, clicked on "I agree" but it just doesn't go away, just keeps spinning forever.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's strange. What device, operating system, and browser are you using?

<comment><USER3> Firefox (latest) on Win10, with UBlock Origin and the new Firefox content blocking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I will try to reproduce this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> a little perplexed by the proliferation of non-IT, non-CS scientific posts here lately.

<comment><USER5> Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic.

<comment><USER4> I can tell that a lot of viewers found it interesting, though there are zero comments related to what's in the article. I find it hard to believe that someone collapses wavefunctions "as a curiosity". I m not sure such specialized research topics are appropriate here.</comment></comment></comment>


Fast Levenshtein distance using a Trie - <AUTHOR> http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=114 <comment><USER2> Coincidentally, just today I implemented the greedy packed trie algorithm from Liang's thesis on LaTeX hyphenation [1]. The idea is to store the trie into a big array, overlapping the storage of your child nodes with one another where possible. This reduces the memory footprint of the trie (when compared to using a separate hash table for each node) and increases the lookup speed as you don't need a hash table, you just index directly for each character. You can also collapse common suffixes into the same state, saving a bunch more space. Would be a nice enhancement to this algorithm; probably more so if it were written in C/C++.

[1] <http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/liang-thesis.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER3> The author makes a factual error regarding Norvig's version. He writes:

> Peter Norvig approaches the problem using a different way of thinking. He > first stores his dictionary in a hash-table for fast lookup. Then he goes > through hundreds, or even thousands of combinations of spelling mutations of > the target word and checks if each one is in the dictionary. This system is > clever, but breaks down quickly if you want to find words with an error > greater than 1.

Norvig writes [1]:

> The literature on spelling correction claims that 80 to 95% of spelling > errors are an edit distance of 1 from the target. As we shall see shortly, I > put together a development corpus of 270 spelling errors, and found that > only 76% of them have edit distance 1. Perhaps the examples I found are > harder than typical errors. Anyway, I thought this was not good enough, so > we'll need to consider edit distance 2. That's easy: just apply edits1 to > all the results of edits1:

I wrote some code for this a few months ago and tried tries, which ultimately rejected in favor of a fast Levenshtein implementation. On a side note the author misses one other possible avenue, which is a family of algorithms using bit Vector operations [2] [3] to measure edit distance.

Anyway IIRC my code went the opposite way. It traversed the word then looked in the trie for matches. This quickly broke down as edit distance increased and I suspect this is what the author is observing in the other implementation.

The author's approach of going the other way is uninteresting idea and I might retrofit that to my code to see how it performs.

[1]: <http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html>

[2]: <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=846095>

[3]: [http://www.odinlake.net/papers/onsjo-cudastrmatch- sigal09.pd...](http://www.odinlake.net/papers/onsjo-cudastrmatch-sigal09.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Interesting, thanks.

BTW, do you use speech recognition? I think you typod "an interesting" as "uninteresting" at the end there. :)

<comment><USER3> iPad. I spotted that later, too late to fix. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. For a prepackaged implementation that works with any language with a Sphinx API check out misc/suggest in the sphinx tarball.

<http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/release/>

It also lets you feed in your own dictionary from your index and works great for spelling suggestions. I haven't benchmarked it but it seems extremely fast - as sphinx is with most things.

Here's the suggest text file from the sphinx 0.9.9 source:

0) What's this. This sample shows how to implement simple keyword correction suggestions (ie. "did you mean") using Sphinx.

1) Requirements. You will need Sphinx, MySQL, and PHP CLI.

2) Quickstart. (Skip first indexer command to use bundled sample.)

indexer YOURINDEX --config YOURCONFIG.CONF --buildstops

dict.txt 100000 --buildfreqs

cat dict.txt | php suggest.php --builddict > dict.sql

mysql -u root test < dict.sql

indexer --config suggest.conf --all

searchd --config suggest.conf

php suggest.php --query sphynx

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the upper bound

      O( <number of words> * <max word length> ^2 )

correct ? It seems to me that the upper bound should be

      O(<number of words> * <max word length>) ^2

Looks like a typo.

In fact there is another fairly simple optimization one can make if one is interested only in computing the distance, but not interested in the actual edit sequence. If you look at the algorithm for filling up the table you will see you refer only to the previous row. So one can work with just two consecutive rows, thereby substantially reducing the space complexity, but not the time complexity unfortunately.

The time complexity can however be reduced on average to O(n * d), where n is the length of the longer word and d is the edit distance between the two words, this optimization is by Ukkonen. There have been other optimizations since then. The best I believe gives a time complexity of O(n + d^2)

<comment><USER7> The consecutive row optimisation is an interesting one and in practice, it has a large impact on the runtime, even though the theoretical time complexity does not change.

Having a smaller table => it can fit in the cache => better temporal locality of reference => faster runtime.

<comment><USER6> Very true. Those fast matrix and linear algebra libraries: BLAS, LAPACK are fast not because of using different algorithms but because of optimizing for cache reuse. Its the same reason why sometimes binary search trees performs better than (unoptimized) hash tables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It looks like you get this algorithm almost directly if you just memoise a very simple recursive Levenshtein distance function.

(This insight could be implemented directly in Haskell by using e.g. the MemoTrie package)

The standard imperative Levenshtein algorithm (with dynamic programming) is also basically just a memoised version of that recursive version -- except that the memoisation is cleared immediately after the result you originally asked for is returned.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had a post on HN a while back about an extension of this problem: matching the search term against all substrings of the corpus strings (eg searching for a misquote in a list of books).

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982351>

</comment><comment><USER10> This post impressed me a lot. Steve have improved one famous algorithm for a special but very common case by combining it with one of the coolest datastructures out there. And (applying a pinch of poetic freedom here) yielded results that surpass those of the academics and giants of the field in versatility and power. All with a very terse piece of code that fits within a blog post. Very inspiring!

<comment><USER11> > And (applying a pinch of poetic freedom here) yielded results that surpass > those of the academics and giants of the field in versatility and power.

I (as well as a dozen other students) were taught an IR course where we had to implement a search engine from scratch. We used tries both to provide spelling suggestions and to build inverted indices for text. That was 7 years ago.

Not to discredit Steve, he's done great work and his article is a great resource, but it's not the groundbreaking discovery you make it to be.

PS. Tries are awesome. <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome.

I love Tries, I implemented one last year for a bog standard auto-complete suggestion box. While they may not be the fastest or most efficient data structures in the world, they're simple to write and have very reasonable performance.

</comment><comment><USER13> Did I misunderstand what he said or is he hosting rhymebrain.com on a netbook ??

<comment> brown9-2 Yes <http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=71></comment></comment>


Groupon harmful to businesses? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/groupon-single-worst-decision/

<comment><USER2> Take home point is that merchant satisfaction is not a priority for Groupon. Their strategy is to try and get customers to stick. How is that going to work? Clever ad copy and ridiculous deals aren't going to keep anyone from checking out the competitor's deals. What they need to be doing is maximizing merchant satisfaction at any cost. Its the only way to win.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still believe Goupon style coupon accelerate retailer's business in some cases. But, the current sales style of sales reps in Groupon make both their customers and Groupon itself worse. Even in tech company, telling a lie destroys themselves. Groupon should change their sales style as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some businesses that will do very well with Groupon and others that just are not a fit. That's really up to the business owner to decide whether to do a Groupon or not.

</comment><comment><USER5> The following is a bit strongly stated, but it is my considered opinion after observing (albeit passively) for some time.

Generally speaking, businesses and the business environment thrive on a certain degree of stability and predictability. You compete, but you can count on certain fundamentals holding true enough to justify the risks you take.

Groupon seems, particularly at the small business level, to represent the antithesis of that.

Sell at a loss, because your neighbor will.

Snake oil.

The only "value added" is for Groupon itself. It represents the worst of contemporary culture.

And its founders and principals may be in the process of "checking out", just like the one-time customers they generate.</comment>


The Geek Syndrome: Autism surging among the children of Silicon Valley [2004] - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who gets a fleeting feeling of envy when reading about someone having Asperger's? Like I kinda want it too.

<comment><USER3> Irrational, but you're not the only one.

There are some gay men who deliberately want to infect themselves with HIV.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugchasing>

<comment><USER4> That's _quite_ a bit different, I'd say...

<comment><USER3> How is that different? Either way, we have someone wishing for a handicap. Just because one can actually fulfill his wishes while the other can't is immaterial; in either situation, we have someone brainwashed by media/society/interwebs/himself to think those afflicted are better off than he is.

<comment><USER5> Wait... Did you just compare being HIV positive to a handicap?As in something you get your own parking spot for?

<comment><USER6> no..handicap..as in a deficient immune system that gives you a distinct disadvantage at life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being potentially border line asperger my self, I can confirm that the better ability to systematize and focus long hours is a plus to develop software. It's not so useful to develop a family however (kidding).

<http://simpliwiki.com> \-- beta soon

</comment><comment><USER8> I first found this article via Hacker News: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/sunscreen_lowfat_autism.h...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/sunscreen_lowfat_autism.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how well the McDonalds over there are doing...</comment>