Logojoy: AI-powered logo creator - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/logojoy-1 <comment><USER4> I'm curious about how the $15k/mo figure is computed.

The story reads as though Logojoy more or less launched on Producthunt, which was 7 days ago. And all posts on the blog are dated Nov 15th. Finally the domain itself seems to have been listed on HugeDomains as of Oct 8th [1].

Now maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the revenue figure is extrapolated from a small window which includes a wave of initial traffic from PH.

I'm hoping that the revenue figure is an actual ongoing sustained amount for Dawson's sake (as it is great looking & functioning product, solves a need that I've faced, and for full disclosure I've been putting together something along these lines on the backburner for awhile), but I can't help but feel this is a bit sensationalized based on what I'm seeing here.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20161008092541/http://logojoy.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161008092541/http://logojoy.com/)

<comment><USER5> That does seem dodgy, so we took the 15k/month bit out of the title. I guess we'll leave "AI-powered" so as not to leave it completely naked. Or should it just say "Logo Creator"?

I noticed that [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=indiehackers.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=indiehackers.com) constantly uses this trick of revenue numbers in titles. That's annoying clickbait in an HN context, but on the other hand, we need more good stories about startups, entrepreneurs, and projects, and dodgy stories are the price one pays for good ones. So I think the answer here is continued community vigilance.

Usually we'd see a point like this before 11 hours had gone by, but clearly not always, so everybody: if you notice something misleading on HN, especially if it doesn't get fixed right away, please alert us at email@example.com. We can't read all the comments but we do read and reply to emails.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my fault. I tell companies not to submit for an interview unless they're at least a few months old, otherwise they won't have much to say. Because of that + Dawson's reported $15k/mo figure + the fact that Logojoy's story is inherently interesting, I blindly assumed the business was started earlier in the year than it was.

Go figure that the interview in which this happens is also the one that gets to the top of HN for the longest time. In the future, I'll do more to verify the launch dates so I don't end up with another interview where the average revenue is such an extrapolation.

As for including revenue numbers in titles, I agree it is a bit clickbaity (or at least very enticing). But at the same time the entire point of these interviews is transparency, and highlighting the revenue numbers adds crucial context. I'm happy not to include revenue numbers in titles, though, if HNers or mods don't want to see those.

<comment><USER6> I can't speak for the mods, but I for one am in favour of highlighting the revenue numbers, _provided they 're accurate._

And on a meta-point, I appreciate the effort, honesty and transparency you put into IndieHackers, it's a great resource for me.

<comment><USER7> It's little more complex than just "highlighting the numbers"; in my opinion, there really needs to be a definition of what is being counted and how that's universal within Indie Hackers presentation of startups.

For example, three identical startups using different accounting methods (cash vs accrual), time periods, etc. would have at face value potential vastly different numbers, though the reality is they are identical in every way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I've been a designer for 12 years or so... I would get frustrated designing > logos for small businesses because (a) it was so time-consuming to create 30 > mockups, (b) it would take weeks to do those small back-and-forths, and (c) > the logo would end up being so simple that I felt like that entire process > was a waste... As soon as I had the idea ... I started working on it.

I think this is my favorite part of the story. If you've been a designer (or any profession) for over a decade, even with frequent frustrations, it takes a certain kind of humility and introspection to realize that maybe it's not just about your customers being "broken" (by choosing the designs that take the least effort) or needing to find more sophisticated customers who value your talents.

Sometimes (ok, usually) it makes more sense to build what people really _want_ rather than giving them what we think they _should_ want. As a developer and entrepreneur, I have to be reminded of that fairly often.

<comment><USER9> This tool is pretty good! (This from an inexpert small business person, with no design sense -- but still, that describes a lot of potential users.)

I've been on the other side of the annoying design client experience, playing the role of annoying client. My old law partners and I asked a design firm to do an identity for us, some 7 years ago now. They spent a LOT of time with us, presented numerous concepts, and eventually the only logo we could agree on was a blue circle with our firm name inside of it. Actually it was a pretty good logo, if I do say so myself! But I could tell it was painful for the designers to hold our hands through this process.

The chair of the firm where I started my career liked to talk about the "$300,000 period". The firm had a slogan, something like "We're there for our clients." (minor details changed to protect the guilty) As part of a firm-wide rebranding, they hired an agency to help them update their identity including this slogan. The result was to put a period in the middle, so it became something like "We're there. For our clients." $300k, boom!

I played around with the AI logo creator. It is good as a starting point, if you want an logo that looks more or less like other logos in the training set. I suspect that describes 99% of small business users, so it's perfect! Just provide a MOO integration and you'll turn $15k/mo into $100k.

I would be interested to see the tool opened up, so you could do logos with arbitrary training data -- but with some hard constraints imposed by the user so it's not just a sea of pornographic aliens cavorting on Dali-inspired worlds. (edit: unless that's what you're going for, of course)

At the end of the day, what justifies a big agency fee is partly just the ability to make high-ego corporate clients feel good about their decisions, and to help them sell those decisions within their political environment.

<comment><USER10> May I ask what does MOO stand for in your comment?

<comment><USER11> on a guess, possibly this : [https://www.moo.com/us/](https://www.moo.com/us/) (site for post, business and everything cards)

<comment><USER9> Correct. Almost everyone I meet who is hanging her own shingle, or promoting a startup, uses moo.com for business cards etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What struck me the most is going with the old and tried tools (PHP+MySQL). Nowadays everyone - myself included - is trying to have an excuse to try the sexiest JS framework of the day and most of us fail miserably to deliver anything useful - because of lack of experience or just reinventing the wheel altogether.

Old and boring is still sometimes the best.

<comment><USER13> > Old and boring is still sometimes the best.

It's not so much old vs new, or cool vs boring, but rather the thing you are most experienced with. If the goal is to just build the damn thing, go with a stack you would be most productive in.

<comment><USER14> When I've seen people set out to learn something _and_ build something, they tend to accomplish neither—but if they focus on just one of those, the other is often a happy side effect.

<comment><USER15> But often, you only learn something by building something.

<comment><USER16> performa prototype build of a thing you've already built. You'll gain the new knowledge in context, making it even more valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Its refreshing to see a startup doing well and not feeling the need to force a subscription on people.

I get that SaaS can be a good business model (great, even). On the other hand, I think _subscription fatigue_ is real and you should think hard about your pricing. Dawson is making $15K/month on ONE TIME fees–and fees that are lower than a lot of monthly SaaS plans.

I want to see more of this.

<comment><USER18> Thanks! Yeah, it's a little unnverving not knowing if you'll make any money tomorrow, but it's a simple model that fits the solution.

<comment><USER19> I've been trying to get my logo. My card was charged, but almost 24 hours and no logo...I emailed you like the page said but nothing...even sent a tweet...what's going on there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > What really worked for me is building a small product. The big picture I > have for Logojoy will take years. I was able to get really excited about it > because I decided on the simplest version of it. Spend time deciding on the > most critical features to launch with, and only build those.

Great advice.

<comment><USER21> >Once you truly know that every problem can be solved by breaking it down into smaller pieces, nothing can stop you.

Also great advice. I've used this mentality to go places I never thought possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hey guys - Dawson here (founder) let me know if you have any questions about Logojoy / the story.

<comment><USER22> Have you looked into whether this is legit on legal usage? You appear to be using noun project icons in these logos, and afaik most logos on the noun project are creative commons with attribution (and I confirmed by selecting a few logos with icons which matched this license on the noun project site).

It doesn't appear that you provide any attribution at all to the icon creators wherever you display the icon, and I have no idea what license you deliver to the end user (I haven't went through purchasing a logo - knowing that you're just sticking some text with a noun-project icon doesn't strike me as worth it, honestly). Are you in the clear to be displaying these icons with no attribution, and are the users that buy your icons clear to be putting it on websites and business cards without attribution?

I haven't even looked into whether your font usage is appropriate, can you clarify that as well?

<comment><USER4> The Noun Project has an API plan which allows for usage like this I believe: [https://thenounproject.com/developers/](https://thenounproject.com/developers/)

Squarespace, Tailor Brands and some other tools are using the API for logo design (without the attribution) much like what Logojoy is doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I imagine this was upvoted because of Indiehackers credibility, so people just assumed the achievement of $15k/mo was true.

Until mikejarema noticed in another comment that the product was launched 15 days ago and the title was BS, I believed too. Now I flagged the story because it is basically a lie. And IndieHackers lost a lot of its credibility for me by now.

Other people noticed the AI part is most likely BS too. But that is a less black and white lie than claiming that the creator _" makes $15k/mo"_ when he hasn't made $15k total in the whole product lifetime.

Shame on you indiehackers for outright lying (maybe twice) in the title just to get clicks. You gamed HN for this one, but I have the impression that this will hurt you in the future.

</comment><comment><USER24> I could not for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do on the "pick up to 3 symbols" page. And I really tried!

<comment><USER25> I had to hit enter and wait...and wait...and wait

<comment><USER26> Well, if it doesn't find any icons it will not change anything on the screen. :)

<comment><USER27> Should probably return a "We couldn't find anything like that :/" so you can know whether it's loading or just came up short.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a graphic designer, I implore you to PLEASE develop that good banner ad creation AI product. There are few things and mind numbing as creating 15 variations of the same banner ad over and over and over... My manager and I would both rather have me working on something else.

<comment><USER29> Have you seen [https://www.makethunder.com/](https://www.makethunder.com/), thefalcon?

I've not used it, but it looks like it might help. Here's a demo video: [https://vimeo.com/163751319](https://vimeo.com/163751319) (warning: loud surf-rock soundtrack).

<comment><USER28> I had not seen it, thank you very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very impressing, hits the sweet spot for projects that need a logo but don't have a big budget. A few comments:

* I skipped picking symbols and it generated a logo with a monogram. I wanted to get rid of this so I looked in the Symbol menu and was frustrated not to find it. I eventually found it in "Layout" but that's not the first place I thought to look.

* There's a lot greyed text used on controls, which is both hard to read and makes it look like the controls are disabled. e.g. horizontal scroll buttons, uppercase/lowercase toggle, text input boxes

* Logos on the preview page load slowly/inconsistently at times, leaving the sample images blank. Perhaps use loading indicators or don't show backgrounds until logo is ready.

* reloading the page loses your work (oops)

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the feedback, really really appreciate it. I've taken notes!

* slow-loading/blank logos is due to HN traffic * reloading the page won't lose your favorites if you have signed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I did all the work and then got a registration popup that prevented me from seeing what I was registering for :(

<comment><USER32> Same. Developer tools helped me remove it :)

<comment><USER33> Yep. Right Click, Inspect then Right Click, Delete element on the modal. Then click the left arrow icon (upper left, next to hamburger), then click "see logos" again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If I could offer feedback about the pricing structure -- I think if I didn't know (from the article) that it's free to create unlimited logos, I wouldn't have figured that out by looking at your pricing section.

And I know it says "It's free to build unlimited logos. Only pay when you want to download" right there in plain text under the headline, but my eyes skipped over that part. I expected clickable price boxes too. I think it looks so similar to a typical SaaS pricing page that I assumed it works the same way. I don't know how best to fix it, but it might be worth testing different arrangements to make it clearer that it's free to sign up and create a logo.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for your feedback, will definitely test different arrangements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> You should expand to recreational sports teams. The logos all follow similar formats and everyone wants one that looks professional but on a limited budget. There are design services that will do it manually but your algorithm approach would work really well for it as well.

</comment><comment><USER36> I used it but wasn't too impressed with the quality of the results. Squarespace logo builder is still better. The good news is that that lots of people now know there's a market for this and we should see some impressive products in the pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER37> So.... ML/AI to me this looks more like a rand() than anything else. What am I missing?

<comment><USER38> VC Money

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm happy this guy built something that's generating income, but the results of my attempt to use it just now were really underwhelming. Page after page of COMAPANY NAME on plain cards with different fonts didn't really demonstrate much AI. My takeaway here is that this "story" is not yet a story. Maybe 1-2 years from now, after the product has really developed and evolved, it will be something.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, same experience here, there are other sites offering different fonts + 'clipart' to make a rand() logo. Don't see much AI here, still waiting for SkyNet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Just a quick feedback:

I tried making a logo that used the character ó, and it seemed that some logos rendered that character correctly, but others omitted it. So the word móbile in some logos would display correctly but in others it would show up as mbile.

<comment><USER42> I have the same problem with the word dépôt it will render as dpt instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you're still reading this: could you please allow + in the e-mail address?

I understand why you want me to sign up, but I have no idea how much e-mail you're going to decide to send me, and sending it to a plus-address allows me to filter it on my terms.

There's really no reason _not_ to allow the + sign, unless you're going to do something nefarious with my e-mail address and you don't want me to know it was you.

<comment><USER44> How would plus-addressing prevent them doing something nefarious? I would think that if they're selling it, they could strip out anything post-plus in the process easily.

<comment><USER43> That is true. So the only reason for disallowing plus signs in addresses is ignorance, not malice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > Firefox is not supported. We recommend using chrome.

No joy for me.

<comment><USER46> If people would write to standards w/o crazy tricks or browser specific extras, it wouldn't matter what was used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Good site, scary site, good because it does a great job at creating a simple logo. I suspect that it can cover the majority of the small companies that want a logo. It certainly does a good job. I tried and created a pretty good one.

I've used other similar sites but they've all been created by a team of programmers and system/network administrators over a few years.

Scary because it brings into focus how easy it is to replace what could be considered a somewhat complicated job. Yes, it can't replace all graphic designers but it magnifies the power of a few by a large factor. In this case, just one motivated individual.

Edit: changed bad to scary, fits better with my thinking, and fixed typos

<comment><USER48> From my perspective, this tool and others like it in areas like web development or stock photography are beneficial. Affordable access to these resources for businesses and individuals will make the world a better (aesthetically speaking) place.

When I'm introduced to new clients, I always explain that what they get out of hiring me is my critical thinking and manner of solving problems. Deliverables, be they logos or videos or interactive experiences, are incidental to the strategy.

Sometimes clients say all they want is a <logo|image|video>. After listening to their reasoning (financial, time sensitive, short-term need, etc), as designers we can and should offer honest advice and any guidance that comes along with that. I'm often amazed at the public ridicule some designers will put people through for simple inquiries. It might not be the right project for me, and I would thus not recommend anyone else for it, but I could point them to a service like this.

<comment><USER49> > Affordable access to these resources for businesses and individuals will > make the world a better (aesthetically speaking) place.

Either that or it will turn "good typography" into the new "ComicSans". Already in the hip areas of big cities (say, "AirBnb city-trip cities on all continents") you're seeing neat type on Every. Friggin. Barbershop or corner cafe.

Still, that's can only drive the "true creatives" to discover and explore the next frontier of aesthetics to then, once again, help "high worth" clients set themselves apart from the crowd, once again. Not the worst dynamic in the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The icons seem to come from thenounproject? I saw my own icon (or derivative) being used without attribution.

</comment><comment><USER51> Could you go into any more depth about the ML being used?

Also, did the site break from traffic? Because I just finished picking out my things and it's been stuck on generating logos for the past 5 minutes.

<comment><USER18> If you click into a logo, then click back out, it should un-stick.

I talked about the ML in a comment here and on IH.

And yes the site is definitely hurting right now :P

<comment><USER52> Where are you hosting it?

<comment><USER53> Seems heroku

        $ nslookup logojoy.com
        Server:         184.108.40.206
        Address:        188.8.131.52#53

        Non-authoritative answer:
        logojoy.com     canonical name = carbonlogo.herokuapp.com.
        carbonlogo.herokuapp.com        canonical name = us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com.
        Name:   us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com
        Address: 126.96.36.199

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wonder how this compares to Fiverr [1], which actually has human-power behind it, and lets you create a logo for only a few bucks.

[1] [https://www.fiverr.com/categories/graphics- design/creative-l...](https://www.fiverr.com/categories/graphics- design/creative-logo-design)

<comment><USER44> In that case (based on minimum wage in the US), either you're getting five dollars worth of quality, which is probably even less than this because this process allows extremely fast revisions, or the person doing it is getting massively underpaid. Or they live somewhere that cost-of-living and a typical wage are low enough that $5 for the work makes sense. Or they're using an automated system with an even lower cost-per-unit, which probably overlaps with the first possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Nice product. I went through the logo creation process, and I was surprised at how nice some of the logos were. The site was simple to understand and easy to use as well. Excellent job!

The only criticism I have is that the max password length is too short. I couldn't enter the generated, 30-character passwords I typically use.

</comment><comment><USER56> Some feedback:

I love the UX/UI - but I cant tell it where to put the color/font selections and it only previews with "COMPANY NAME" instead of actually updating with the company name and slogan that you asked me for in the beginning on the selection process...

So - I don't know if I like the selection based on that because I wanted the reverse of what it offered (I wanted orange letters with grey background - <USER2> it only gives me orange bkgd with grey letters...

I would also like a bit better control over the location of the icon.

The "saved logo" update pop-up is confusing as when I go back to logo - <USER3> doesn't always hold the design I selected...

Otherwise this is impressive and awesome... I'd like to use it.

</comment><comment><USER57> Do you have a plan of attack to ensure that your machine learning will still be able to make really unique logos while at the same time prioritising pleasing aesthetics? Is there an element of mutation where it will suggest something totally obscure?

</comment><comment><USER58> A very similar service that's donation-based: [http://emblemmatic.org/markmaker/](http://emblemmatic.org/markmaker/)

The UX isn't as good and the app isn't as full-fledged.

</comment><comment><USER59> Does the coder of Logojoy 'own' the logos that its AI produces?

<comment><USER60> Not under US copyright law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Really impressive!

I feel there's still so many ideas to make a business around if you base it on ML/AI. Being early here could potentially net a huge passive income. Personally I have an idea in mind, and I'm still learning ML slowly on the side. In my eyes this is the true way to independence from "the system" for people who put in enough effort and who have enough knowledge.

Why do we not see more of this yet? Is the combination of people who know machine learning, and people who are entrepeneurs so narrow?

<comment><USER18> One thing is the intimidation factor. 3 months ago, I had 0% confidence that I could do anything that even touched ML. I'm still very new to the game, but once I started learning about it, it became much more approachable.

<comment><USER62> What your product does isn't machine learning. It is even a stretch to call it an artificial intelligence. It's all marketing, self-promotion nonsense

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Now this is pretty cool. of all the articles indiehackers has posted in the last few weeks, this one is actually innovative and new.

very cool!

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure if this is a scam. I went through the process and paid and I should get a logo in 30 minutes, but I've been waiting for 12+ hours and still no logo. I email the CEO, which the site says to email at email@example.com, yet no response and no sign of a logo in my emails...hmm!

</comment><comment><USER64> It would be nice if you keep the selected options in browser session, in case i accidentally navigate away from the site, I don't have to retype everything, and also if i favorite a logo the ability to view logos like it (or based on the choices that led to it)

</comment><comment><USER65> FireFox not supported by LogoJoy. The joy has left me, I really liked the whole idea though.

</comment><comment><USER66> Logojoy's page pops up:

"""

We're experience some technical difficulties right now (looking at you, HN). If you experience any bugs, try a couple more times or sign up and come back a little later to make your logo. Thanks! """

</comment><comment><USER67> I was going to say that I could hire a human designer on Upwork to design a logo like that for the same kind of money, but I guess I can't argue with your revenue numbers. Congratulations!

<comment><USER68> Indie Hackers has a vested interest in inaccurate/misleading revenue reporting[1]. Regardless of that, I'm not sure they properly verify the revenue in the first place.

I wouldn't go as far as to call the numbers a lie, but I would never use this website as a data point to create a business model.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Really inspiring story, great product and awesome transparency. Big Kudos for all of this.

This guy deserves VC money to make his next big company than most of the current startups we are seeing.

</comment><comment><USER70> I want to promote your product; do you have affiliate options?

</comment><comment><USER71> Totally read it as 'AI-powered lego creator' and became terribly confused for a few seconds. But still, someone should create one of those.

<comment><USER72> > 'AI-powered lego creator'

AI-Powered Lego creator would be pretty awesome. Make custom lego sets based on various real life things you pick.

<comment><USER73> Well, why not? With modern 3d printers this is definitely possible. Oh, some will be veeeerry funky looking, for sure (not from printing process; from design), but that might just be more entertaining

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Thanks for posting and sharing your story. It was an inspired use of a learning get algorithm and we can all learn from it. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER75> I've had better luck with these guys:

[https://www.tailorbrands.com](https://www.tailorbrands.com)

</comment><comment><USER76> Hmm.. A sophisticated search and mashup with nice presentation - but ... I don't think I'd call it A.I.

</comment><comment><USER77> Super beat that you need to sign up for it to view the logos it produced. Enjoy the fake email I guess.

<comment><USER30> The messaging here is a little coy - "Signup to save your progress" But I don't care about saving my progress, I'll just close this and... oh, I can't. So it's not so much, sign up to save your progress, it's sign up, period.

<comment><USER78> Yes, this is the point at which I exited also. I believe you'll be losing a lot of people at this point.

You should make it possible to close this dialog and store a session cookie so people can come back.

<comment><USER79> Probably not if you really need a logo.

<comment><USER80> Yes, I need a logo, but do I need _this_ logo? I haven't seen it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> how to "earn" 15k/mo:

"It starts with tracking basically everything our users do."

maybe our machines are learning, but these so-called hackers certainly aren't.

</comment><comment><USER40> @csallen Is a bit quiet

</comment><comment><USER82> Guys, don't view source. It's a jQuery hell.

</comment><comment><USER83> like I'm going to install a new browser just to visit a site. no thanks.

</comment><comment><USER84> Great work.

</comment><comment><USER85> test it

</comment><comment><USER86> > _I 've been a designer for 12 years or so_

...

> _Firefox is not supported. We recommend using chrome._

'Best viewed in Netscape Navigator at 800x600'

<comment><USER87> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065810)

> Firefox has known issues with svg

> I'm sure we can get around them, but not in v1

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Their website is broken because of an HTML syntax error.

Cases like this remind me that success is often "right place, right time." Notch is another good example of bad engineering going far.

<comment><USER89> This is an especially cynical and petty comment, and that's coming from someone who isn't exactly a glass is half full type of person.

As someone who's launched several ventures, this solves a big pain point and it is very apparent that a lot of thought went into putting this together.

There is room for improvement, sure, but to dismiss it so casually or attribute its success to dumb luck because of a syntax error really sounds jaded.

<comment><USER90> Gotta agree with ya. There's been times I've wanted a logo or something (mainly for just playing with an idea), and I really stink at artwork. Sometimes I can get something passable out of inkscape - but it is rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> HN is crashing Logojoy lol!

</comment><comment><USER92> Makes the case for an AI-powered bug bounty service. Blockchain if big enough.

</comment><comment><USER93> They say: don't worry! Jobs taken by AI will be replaced by new ones yet to be invented.

Right.

</comment><comment><USER94> Semi-related but wow: _/ app.php_ \-- hadn't seen that in a while. It's like bumping into an old friend in the street.

<comment><USER95> You've probably bumped into that friend many times in the street on an almost daily basis without noticing it..

It's just that most sites/frameworks that use PHP use some kind of rewriting so the ".php" isn't visible (CodeIgniter/Wordpress and many others do this automatically).

<comment><USER94> Oh yeah true I forgot about that... of course.</comment></comment></comment>


Inside America's Toughest Federal Prison - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-toughest-federal-prison.html?_r=1 <comment><USER2> Great article. Interestingly, I knew this lawyer (Aro) when he was still corporate. Even then, though, he came across as compassionate and reasonable, even when not representing the common man. This "sudden change" in career path doesn't shock me one bit. Good on him.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a side note, USP Marion, in Illinois, now is used as one of 13 medium security facilities to house federal sex offenders and protective custody inmates.

</comment><comment><USER4> The story about Jack Powers is scary, is anyone capable of defending themselves against the Aryan Brotherhood?

<comment><USER3> In or out of prison?

<comment><USER4> Both.</comment></comment></comment>


Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA Augmented with Co-Packaged – Community Forums - <AUTHOR> https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Virtex-UltraScale-FPGA-augmented-with-co-packaged-HBM-DRAM/ba-p/827308 <comment><USER2> This post is sort of timely for me to rant and share with the HN community. I'm a hobbyist with FPGAs .. been fooling around with Altera parts for over a year. I finally got my first Xilinx part and wow .. at least a part of the company doesn't seem to give a shit. The part I got was a spartan 6 on a Papilio Pro board. The Papilio community are awesome but shame on Xilinx. They provide the Win 10 version of ISE Design Studio inside a freakin VM!!! I couldn't believe it when I saw it. Whoever green lit this has just stopped caring IMHO. I wasted 3 hours of my life getting a hello world style program to run. Imagine running a linux vm inside a Windows 10 box to work with an embedded device :( :( If this is how Xilinx treats old parts, I'm staying with Altera parts in the future. Personal opinions yada yada.

<comment><USER3> Xilinx doesn't want you developing new designs with the 6 series. The VM is really only for people updating old designs. Get a 7 series or later part with Vivado and your life will be significantly better. Having used both Vivado really is a lot more efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish the Ultra-scale devices did not cost an Arm and a Leg. Although, I only personally have a couple designs that could come close to using the amount logic they provide.

Although, 8GB of HBM could do some nice things. Also the UltraScale+ plus are one of thew few FPGAs capable of 1 GHz sequential logic for quite a few designs. So you could probably get a lot of performance for some signal processing or compute.

<comment><USER5> F1's on AWS are I think ultrascale+, though I don't know how fast Amazon actually lets you drive them.

<comment><USER6> There are a few different available clocks, each in different configurations (you always get a _set_ of clocks, really), but you can get up to a 500Mhz clock out of them for specific clock lines from a specific configuration, with that particular configuration backed by a 250mhz "main" clock as well.

<comment><USER3> Do they let you use the clock management tiles or are they all tied up? With those you should be able to generate whatever clock you want.

<comment><USER6> No, at least not directly with the way the HDK is set up out of the box; there are "Clock Recipes" you choose from at build time, and a recipe is just the pre-canned configuration. 3 different groups, each one with a chosen (single) recipe, each group giving you a few clocks of various frequencies.

The clock recipe is examined as part of the "AFI Manifest" when Amazon creates FPGA images you can load, so I doubt you can go out of the way very much, here.

[https://github.com/aws/aws- fpga/blob/master/hdk/docs/clock_r...](https://github.com/aws/aws- fpga/blob/master/hdk/docs/clock_recipes.csv)

[https://github.com/aws/aws- fpga/blob/83c80efd30862d862ea8f99...](https://github.com/aws/aws- fpga/blob/83c80efd30862d862ea8f99ff4045a22d57e3453/hdk/docs/AFI_Manifest.md#L41)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mods: please fix the severely broken title, thanks.

Also: that looks scary! Didn't see a price, is $nnnn enough? Whoa.

<comment><USER8> $nnnnnn Probably north of $100k each unless Xilinx discounts them for high volume purchases.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, as far as I can tell, on a lot of these products volume discounts can easily be in the 95%+ range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They mention that the applications are in high performance compute - so what could one do with an extremely powerful FPGA in a server?

<comment><USER11> Accelerate the most demanding tasks of your server's workload. Crypto, audio/video encoding, compression, database lookups, neural network training, computational fluid dynamics, numerical mathematics, high frequency trading etc.

<comment><USER5> I hear this a lot, but every time I try to implement a specific algorithm (in crypto, compression, and ML so far), I find that a GPU practically beats the FPGA on every metric but power, especially total cost. No matter how nicely the problem seems to map to an FPGA, GPUs start from such high performance that I can't seem to beat them- the one exception so far being some genomic algorithms.

Are there any really good papers, projects, or products that show where FPGAs provide a major commercial benefit over a GPU?

<comment><USER12> > Are there any really good papers, projects, or products that show where > FPGAs provide a major commercial benefit over a GPU?

A couple applications that come to mind:

\- RF, including cellular base station hardware and radar

\- ASIC prototyping

\- Low production run computer hardware, including some RAID controllers

<comment><USER13> High-end AV equipment like mixing consoles often use FPGAs alongside or instead of discrete DSP chips. The application demands sub-millisecond latency and deterministic performance but is too niche to justify spinning an ASIC.

IMO, those are the main factors that justify FPGA selection - low latency and hard real-time performance. I understand that military and industrial designers make extensive use of FPGAs for these reasons; the throughput isn't necessarily any better than an ordinary processor and the cost is drastically higher, but you have absolute certainty about latency.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Life inside the North Korean bubble - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8701959.stm?ref=d

<comment><USER2> How did "(cool video)" get appended to the title? Affixing the adjective "cool" to anything about North Korea is beyond my comprehension.

<comment><USER3> I find the glimpse into such a surreally horrible society fascinating (and cool) too. You should read this:

[http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/28/101-being- offende...](http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/28/101-being-offended/)

Those who enjoyed this should google "viceland north korea" for a very cool documentary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note the search results from the video at 13:21 featuring two IBM hits for the local "intranet". Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> At least their way of life must be sustainable (this is a cynical, bitter joke).

</comment><comment><USER6> _"Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man."_

</comment><comment><USER4> I think there is _nothing_ cool about this. Also "National Geographic: Inside North Korea" [1] gives a good insight of what is going on inside north korea. (Especially the end of the video).

[1] <http://www.megavideo.com/?v=KBMBL7GJ> (video)

<comment><USER7> That megavideo link is shit. Here's a better one: [http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3684218/National.Geographic....](http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3684218/National.Geographic.Inside.Undercover.In.North.Korea.DSR.XviD- Bi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That reporter was too annoying to watch. I recoiled in horror every time she asked an aggressively offensive question, and I can't tell if that's a particularly forced accent or a speech impediment.

I liked the Vice Magazine video myself:

[http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice- guide-...](http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to- north-korea-1-of-3)

<comment><USER9> Wait, so it's bad that reporters ask hard questions?

<comment><USER10> All comments about English dialects aside, I also found the reporter unbearable. (Full disclosure: I stopped watching after "A good day to invade?")

It wasn't that she asked difficult questions -- that's wonderful. It's that she asked vapid questions, which incidentally turned out also to be difficult.

She led people into the answers she wanted. E.g., it didn't look like a young lady she questioned actually thought the NK grand poobah dude was actually a god, but the reporter got her to say it.

More than anything, it disgusts me because it makes life harder for people who ask _good_ difficult questions.</comment></comment></comment>


How Silicon Valley's bias against marketing obliterates value - <AUTHOR> https://threadling.com/silicon-valley-anti-marketing-bias/ <comment><USER2> I haven't seen that much bias. If anything, the opposite - PG said his own startup spent a lot of money on PR ( [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) ) , and Steve Blank and Osterwalder make a big point of marketing ( [https://steveblank.com/category/marketing/](https://steveblank.com/category/marketing/) )</comment>


What Does It Take to Become an Entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/articles/201102/what-does-it-take-to-become-an-entrepreneur.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+inc%2Fheadlines+%28Inc.com+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher <comment><USER2> What it takes to become an entrepreneur:

1\. Create something other people want or need. (If you don't know, test ideas in low-risk ways until you find something that works.)

2\. Attract the attention of prospects, and make them interested in learning more about what you're offering.

3\. Encourage your prospects to trust you enough that they give you money in exchange for your offer.

4\. Deliver the value promised in a way that makes your customers happy.

5\. Collect more money than you spend, and enough to sufficiently compensate you for the time/energy/money invested.

That's it. Anyone who tells you entrepreneurship is more complicated than that is either trying to impress you or sell you something you don't need.

</comment><comment><USER3> What you need is simple. All below are metaphorical, not physical

1) Cojones - Extra large

2) A Bulldog's jaws - Once you grab on to something, you don't quit.

3) Bulletproof vest - There'll always be detractors, hanger oners, I-told-you- so'ers. Let it all bounce off.

4) A Dog neck cone - For focus. You only look back for lessons.

I'd add more, but with those 4, you can accomplish pretty much anything.

</comment><comment><USER4> A. Stop reading articles on "What Does It Take to Become an Entrepreneur?" — if you really want to do something you're either doing it or not...

</comment><comment><USER5> _You have to make a choice: do you want to go to work every day feeling safe and having someone take care of you, or do you want your learning curve to be steeper and higher? It's a lot easier to be in the corporate world._

No one will _ever_ "take care of you". Depending on what you're doing at any given time, your learning curve can be steeper and higher _anywhere_. I imagine a Google fellow just might have a steeper learning curve than someone opening a storefront. Why does so much "entrepreneur" advice find a way to insult people with jobs?

 _There are some people who get fired from every corporate job they have ever had; those people are the entrepreneurs._

Or maybe just shitty workers or people with significant issues. BadInCorporateWorld != Entrepreneur

 _If there is any other career you can do, you must do it. This is the worst career ever. You make no money, it's high risk..._

That could be said about any career. You should want to do it anyway.

 _There was a great article in the Harvard Business Review..._

So we should listen to OP because she read something somewhere. Advice from hard knocks trumps heresay. Where is it?

 _Venture capitalists are looking for someone who is somewhat crazy—just on the right side of being a psychopath._

Citing?

 _I can't stress enough how crazy running a venture-backed company is._

OK, something's fishy here. OP is a blogger. Then why would she need venture capital? Is she confusing "venture" with "angel" or with "friends/family". If so, then why should we listen to her? If not, then why does this article raise more questions than it answers?

 _Every 20-year-old will say I want the venture capital, and every 45-year-old will say, "I don't."_

Every?

I used to enjoy Inc, but honestly, I could have gotten deeper insight about entrepreneurship from half the people here at hn. Or the local bus stop. Moving along...

<comment><USER6> I am a 24-year-old and would say that I would rather do the consulting + startup route than VC funding. However, I tend to not be attracted to building the next twitter, groupon, Facebook and instead would rather build the next company you've never heard of(TM).

<comment><USER7> Not that I'd know, but it must be a lot of fun lurking in the shadows/periphery with a bunch of mysterious money.

It's the hedge fund vs. web startup mentality :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't you folks think this would discourage people from joining a startup? Who wants to work for a psychopath?

That having been said, I've noticed the startup world seems to have more than its fair share of psychopathy, but psychopathy seems to have little bearing on whether the individual succeeds.</comment>


I Choose Superman - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2013/04/21/i_choose_superman.html

<comment><USER2> My family has an obsession with Superman too. Basically for the same reason that the author states; he always does the right thing. Unrealistic, but then again I've always had a problem with people shouting "unrealistic".

When I was in high school, we used to read these miserable, loathful stories about people having affairs (The Awakening), or committing suicide (Ethan Frome), or murdering each other for fun (The Most Dangerous Game), or a variety of other unpleasant topics, and I would get sick of these books and ask the instructor why we couldn't read a happy book once in a while. "That's not how real life works," she quipped. Yeah, but real life isn't that freaking depressing either. And occasionally in real-life, amazingly happy things _do_ happen and I want to hear about them. Why would I want to read a book that captures the mundane, the ordinary, the boring plight of a human life that I can easily experience myself? I would much prefer to read about the extraordinary.

I have high hopes for this Man of Steel movie this summer. So far I've liked every Christopher Nolan film I've seen. On the other hand, I thought Superman Returns was an absolute disaster. Clark was a flat, nonchalant character without much of a moral direction. The script didn't even follow the comics very well. Lex Luthor came across as a buffoon. The citizens of Metropolis were generic and forgettable. And Lois was rather whiny in my opinion and had a child with Clark before they even got married. I don't remember that happening in the comics.

<comment><USER3> Regarding people shouting "unrealistic": "The solution, obviously, was to hurry up and become God."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I choose Batman.

While Superman is a good superhero, I think he just got the powers handed to him on a silver platter.

Batman on the other hand was a normal human who got his powers with hard work.

With Batman, it is exciting to see him fight crime because if he gets shot, he is dead! Superman doesn't have much to fear, you can shoot a bullet in his eye and you'll end up breaking the bullet only.

Batman has also been portrayed as more intelligent most of the times and that is another quality I like!

So yes, Superman is fine. But I choose Batman.

<comment><USER5> The reason more people choose Batman is he's more identifiable with. You can look at him and say:

"If only I really applied myself, I could make some money, learn Kung Fu, set up a base, invent some cool toys, do a lot of planning and do what Batman does."

Superman, on the other hand goes something like this:

"If only I was an alien... Aww screw it. Nevermind."

<comment><USER6> "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad." -Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think this should be on the front page of Hacker News.

Then again, some other people thought otherwise.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure why you think that. Michael Lopp (Rands) is a noted software engineering and management commentator. His thoughts on hope in the face if tragedy are interesting and relevant.

<comment><USER7> Well, it might have just been too deep a meaning for me - but even if the author is a "noted person", that would not automatically make anything he says/writes/publishes interesting or relevant - at least not to everyone.

But seeing as being relevant to everyone there is is pretty much an impossible feat, I'll just leave it at saying that I just couldn't make much sense out of that article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seth Godin had a great blog post last year about "Superman, Batman, and worldviews" at [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/07/superman- bat...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/07/superman-batman-and- worldviews.html) here is the core of his analysis:

       Consider two common worldviews: Superman's and Batman's.

       Batman comes to the world angry. His origin story is filled
       with vengeance and revenge, and in his iconic (non Adam West)
       backstory, he is the merciless enforcer of right and wrong.
       Batman-types see the world as a zero sum game, and battles
       are either won or lost.

       Superman, on the other hand, comes to our world with his gifts
       and sees his life as an opportunity and an obligation, one that
       he embraces. Superman could easily kill all the bad guys in a
       heartbeat, but he never does. For him, every challenge is an
       opportunity for healing. He believes in redemption and finds
       pleasure in using his gifts to help others.

</comment><comment><USER10> I always liked Batman because he was obsessed with perfecting himself, while I liked Superman because he was like a universal punishment of evil and an example of morality, someone given amazing powers who chooses to be selfless, never lie, etc.

Superman can become boring if not written well, unfortunately. But there are some cool moments from the comics, like when he talks a suicidal girl off a ledge, or when he discovers Captain Marvel is a kid and angrily confronts the wizard Shazam about burdening a child with that kind of responsibility. I like him because he's a big boy scout, but he needs well-written situations for it to work.

</comment><comment><USER11> While we're at it.

If you want to read some great, inspirational, and easy-to-get-into story about Superman, read All Star Superman by Grant Morrison.

[http://www.comixology.com/All-Star-Superman/comics- series/16...](http://www.comixology.com/All-Star-Superman/comics-series/163)

I also loved Superman-Batman by Jeph Loeb. But it's way more... action comic- bookey.

<http://www.comixology.com/Superman-Batman/comics-series/378>

</comment><comment><USER12> obligatory: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTJIBGNId0>

</comment><comment><USER3> _Perhaps the biggest critique you can make of Superman is that because he makes it look so easy with the flying and the invulnerability that doing the impossible is somehow easy or even achievable. It's big. It's over the top. It's unrealistic and no one human can ever complete the feats of a single Superman. But it's not the individual feats of Superman we care about, it's that we, as a group of humans, working together, can do anything, even though it's never easy._

While I entirely agree with the commenter regarding Superman being an unpaid cop for the capitalist class, I do wish to note that _Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann_ , at least, manages to be properly revolutionary with many of the same themes ;-).</comment>


Dreamhost offers 2 years free for old GeoCities accounts - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/24/theyre-internet-history/

<comment><USER2> This is still a bad deal. You're moving from one crappily-run, crowded ghetto to another crappily run, crowded ghetto that won't even let your site use 10% of a server's CPU without shutting you down.

They're better off with free blogs from blogger.com or Tumblr.com or WordPress or anything, really.

<comment><USER3> If a site is big enough that it has trouble running on Dreamhost then it already had trouble running on Geocities.

Good marketing on Dreamhosts side..

<comment><USER2> I guess my problem is that marketing is the only thing Dreamhost is good at.</comment></comment></comment>


Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/327/

<comment><USER2> Are you really posting this now?</comment>


Nvidia Shows Off New Ray-Traced Minecraft Screenshots - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/308582-nvidia-shows-off-new-ray-traced-minecraft-screenshots-modding-resources <comment><USER2> This is not an apples to apples comparison. Minecraft could look 99% like the RTX photos with RTX off it was coded that way easily. This smells like pure marketing.</comment>


Google Shuts Down Picasa Web Albums - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/02/12/sayonara-picasa-google-shuts-down-album-service-in-favor-of-photos-app/ <comment><USER2> Blog direct link: [http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from- pica...](http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html)

<comment><USER3> Ok, we merged this thread into [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11089174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11089174), which has the original source and was posted earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too bad Google Photos is such a pain to use. It has a mixture of terrible photos dating back to almost 10 years for me and many of these images have been organized, externally, or simply deleted. Trying to clear out Google Photos so I can restock it properly is pretty much impossible. I've wasted hours trying to do it.

I pretty much don't use it at all at this point.

<comment><USER5> That's too bad, my experience with google photos has been great. You've definitely gotta do some work to clean up, but that's on the user to either not pull from folders they don't care about, or delete the photos they don't need.

<comment><USER4> Since they added photos later it's pretty much impossible to clean up if you have several thousand photos that need to be removed or deleted. Even doing then kne at a time after a while of deleting them one at a time their httotebdpoints start throwing errors for me.

I've never found a way to mass delete even a portion of my photos and have it work. Once that step is done I vet it's great but at this point I just can't use it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Repugnant Conclusion (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - <AUTHOR> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ <comment><USER2> <From Section 1>"A straightforward way of capturing the No-Difference View is total utilitarianism according to which the best outcome is the one in which there would be the greatest quantity of whatever makes life worth living (Parfit 1984 p. 387). However, this view implies that any loss in the quality of lives in a population can be compensated for by a sufficient gain in the quantity of a population"

Well yes, but while 'total utility' may be a relevant measure for a population, populations in the aggregate do not have conscious experience. Therefore 'total utility' is irrelevant for the individual. It's a very poor measure of the 'quality' of a society.

A much better (and more intuitively appealing) measure incorporates 'total utility' but divides it by population to get average utility. If we take this as our guiding measure then we aren't forced to reach The Repugnant Conclusion.

But on second thought, this also presents a problem. Because then we could posit a world in which most of the population lives in misery but a small percentage lives wonderful, fulfilling 'maximum utility' lives. Average utility as I've described it would favor some of these these worlds - given a large enough population - over ones in which there's a more even distribution of utility.

Therefore let's take a page from economics and incorporate a GINI Coefficient measure of utility into our consideration of an ideal world. This should actually eliminate the threat of a Repugnant Conclusion.</comment>


Geek way to find Instagram accounts of neighbour girls - <AUTHOR> https://instmap.com <comment><AUTHOR> I plan to add Facebook a bit later. Maybe FB data it's not open like IG but I will try. Thanks for your feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> Would it be feasible to make a similar site for Facebook events happening in an area?</comment>


How To Do Philosophy (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html <comment><USER2> (As a current Philosophy PhD Student...)

PG's essays are consistently great. Although in this case, I disagree with the central thesis that the history of philosophy is merely a history of confused talk. Certainly, a lot of philosophizing (especially OLD philosophy) commits just this sin. But that's not to say that philosophy as a methodology is inherently broken, that one has to be caught up in the muddle of confused language. In fact, my own study of philosophy has taught me that philosophy, at its best, clearly lays bear the ways in which language confuses us. Philosophy, then, allows us to transcend the little confusions that pervade our everyday language.

And what PG comes to saying, that philosophy should change people the way we go about doing things, is essentially a reworded statement of the Pragmatist's ideal. Peirce, James, and Dewey said the same thing a hundred years ago. PG is right to stress this idea, but if his claim is that philosophy is not sensitive to it, he's just wrong.

<comment><USER3> I feel you fall into the very trap of which he speaks. Even a Philosophy Ph.D.Student, wise in the way of the Ancients, and eager to speak plainly, finds it impossible to not be 'caught up in the muddle of confused language.' Your study has apparently taught you that philosophy 'lays bear' the ways language confuses us. And that statement did indeed confuse me mightily. Presumably it is a subtler articulation of underlying intent than the everyday process of 'laying bare.' But perhaps I am wrong in this?

<comment><USER4> That's the wordiest typo nitpick I've seen in a while.

<comment><USER3> Precisely. LOL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if this is a UK/US thing - but the undergrad philosophy course pg didn't seem to touch upon things that were happening in modern philosophy judging by the essay.

I did a contextual course in cognitive philosophy as an undergrad back in the late eighties (roughly equivalent to a minor in US universities) - so only about two or three years after pg graduated.

Even in that - a minor in a narrow chunk of philosophy - we were exposed to modern philosophers - people like Daniel Dennett (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett>), Andy Clark (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark>) and many more. All of which were looking at work coming from the sciences to ground their thinking - and indeed suggest courses for further research (look at Dan Dennett's influence on cognitive psychologists for example).

There's a _whole branch_ of Philosophy (Experimental Philosophy - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_philosophy>) that's been going since 2000 with antecedents long before that.

At the time pg wrote this essay experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Knobe>) was being written about in the NY Times ([http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09wwln- idealab-t....](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09wwln- idealab-t.html?_r=0)).

(Freaky PS... in double checking roughly when pg was born to see when he would have been doing his undergrad philosophy course - I see he was born in Weymouth, Dorset, UK.... about half an hour from where I live now ;-)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a grave injustice to the vast field of philosophy to judge it by one undergraduate's impression of Plato, Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, and Wittgenstein.

By his own admission, he didn't get much out of his experience. Should the entire field of computer science be judged by one unenthusiastic undergraduate's impressions of Java?

<comment><USER7> That argument applies to more than just philosophy. And yet, if you accept that not all religions can be true, and that most of the major ones have long scholastic traditions, then there must be _at least_ one field of study which is vast, majestic, and wrong.

So, what method would you propose for determining which academic fields are worthwhile, in their current state?

(I think I just did some philosophy. Oops.)

<comment><USER6> For a method for determining "which academic fields are worthwhile", perhaps it might be wise to start by becoming well familiar with the fields in question -- something that the author of the above essay did not seem to have taken the trouble of doing.

And how much less familiar with philosophy are most of the readers of this essay? I would venture to guess that they are not even philosophy majors, but rather computer science majors or self-taught computer programmers. What a shame it would be if they thought the essay's author knew what he was talking about and dismissed all of philosophy out of hand.

All of philosophy might be "wrong", but if that's so, it's going to take a lot more than a vague, ill-informed five page essay by a disaffected undergraduate to convince me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like this essay, check out <http://lesswrong.com/>

They seem focused on what PG is proposing.

<comment><USER7> Particularly on-topic is a series of articles by Luke Muehlhauser about "how to do philosophy when you take cognitive science seriously."

<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality_and_Philosophy>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice article but isn't this mostly a restatement of Wittgenstein's thoughts on philosophy? pg gives the impression that Wittgenstein had an obvious idea that only he bothered to put into writing. Like many great ideas, Wittgenstein's later philosophy only seems kind of obvious after you encounter it. And its probably not fair to suggest that Wittgenstein just shut down philosophy instead of studying it as 'an example of reason gone wrong'. 'Studying philosophy as an example of reason gone wrong' is basically a description of Wittgenstein's later thought.

Similarly, its difficult to answer the question 'has (western) philosophy just been a complete waste of time' because we don't know how much of our thinking has absorbed wisdom that came from philosophy. I suppose you could compare our society to another technologically-advanced and successful society which hasn't been as exposed to it. Like China, as pg suggests. But they have that whole totalitarian-state thing going on so perhaps they are not the best exemplar.

</comment><comment><USER10> One of such useful general ideas is to know when to stop.

Pilling up meaningless words (or Java-classes, or CL macros) is not just waste of time, it creates even more confusion and messes everything up.

When very few people trying to capture the essence of a phenomena, so to speak) they end up with something really clever, like Plan9, or Scheme (or Arc) vi, Emacs, etc.

So, there is a simple heuristic - as long as you saw piles upon piles of crap (J2EE, NodeJS, Clojure, everything that comes from MS or SAP) - just avoid it.

"Perfection", as we know, is achieved not when it is nothing more to add, but when it is nothing more to remove.) This means, for instance, that we need less special forms (but moar small macros), less special characters (and using them consistently - I could write a brochure, about why using ~ instead of , in Clojure's macroses is not just a stupid break of consistency and familiarity, but also lack of taste - , "matches" with ` while ~ not.))

Most of the time, even a single glance at a text or source code is enough to form a correct intuition.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you think philosophy needs "fixing" it isbecause you see it as something external, a problem shich is out of yourself.

The fact is philosophy is the reaction of each individual to his confrontation with reality, language, morals and people: you cannot "fix" individuality.

And the "muddle" is as ols as Descartes... don't start me on this.

Tryng to "fix" philosophy with "science" makes me laugh: which one, maths? physics? string theory? behavior sciences??? COME ON.

Just think by yourself and accept you may not understand other people's thoughts before trying to 'fix' them.

</comment><comment><USER12> I usually like PG's essays, but this one is nowhere near as good as his essays usually are. His argument has more holes in it than aerogel.

> _Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by > confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by > "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."_

Isn't that exactly why (analytic) philosophers make a great deal of effort to clarify the sense in which they're using a word? Philosophy professors often tell students not to quote dictionaries in their essays, because typical definitions of English words are nearly useless when it comes to modern philosophy. Yes, ancient philosophers got confused by words. But people do learn from their predecessors' mistakes! Read any good paper from the last century that deals with free will, and it won't take long before you come across words like "P-free", "Q-free", "T-free", etc., each with its own precise definition. Nobody cares whether we have "free will" in a fuzzy sense. What actually matters is whether we have "ABC-free DEF-will", where "ABC-free" and "DEF-will" each have very precise definitions.

Has America become a communist country? Depends on what you mean by "communist". But this doesn't mean that there aren't any interesting questions to be asked about shifts in America's ideological makeup.

> _Instead of trying to answer the question: What are the most general truths? > let's try to answer the question: Of all the useful things we can say, which > are the most general? The test of utility I propose is whether we cause > people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward._

I'm afraid a lot of people who are attracted to philosophy actually want very much to tackle the first question, and find the second question rather uninteresting. If you're someone who is deeply attracted to the P=NP problem and similar topics, would you find it satisfactory to spend your life creating the next Instagram instead?

Seriously, I want to know whether there exist any general truths. Using a suitably precise definition of "exist", "general" and "truth", of course. I don't give a damn whether those truths (if they exist) have any impact on human life, although I don't deny that it would be neat if they did.

Given what's being proposed here, the title of the article should be "What to do instead of philosophy", or at best "How to do this special kind of philosophy", not "How to do philosophy (in general)". The same applies to the lesswrong crowd. I don't have anything against what they're trying to achieve, but let's call a spade a spade. Failure to do so only exacerbates the confusion-of-words problem that PG rightly points out.

> _Knowing we have to give definite (if implicit) advice will keep us from > straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using._

If the resolution of English words is not enough, why not try to increase the resolution? Why give up already?

Steve Jobs gave us the Retina Display while everyone else was playing with anti-aliasing. The pseudo-words I mentioned above are one way to do to human languages what Steve Jobs did to mainstream computer displays. (Okay, I'm oversimplifying. The history of high-res screens is much more complicated. But anyway.)

Also, we already use words like "#fdfdfd" and "#fcfcfc" to increase the resolution of words like "white".

Disclaimer: I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, so I'm probably biased.

Edit: Increased precision in some of the sentences.

<comment><USER13> I did Philosophy as a degree and pg's essay, which I read a while ago, was one of crystallization, a total clarification of something that had been bugging me for years.

I personally believe that Philosophy is the place where amateur thinkers reside until a discipline matures and breaks off. Philosophy is thinking without the effort of doing. First it was Physics, Law, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine and we are now seeing Psychology and Sociology departing Philosophy, taking morality and personal identity into the realms of actual science instead of thought experiments. Soon Philosophy will be left with its history and debating the meaning of words. CS and Maths have taken all the interesting logic questions away from Philosophy for example.

I believe what pg advocates at the end has already happened, is always happening to Philosophy. The general truths philosophy helped discover are the sciences, it just that as we get to answering the general truth the philosophers step aside for people who actually do.

Most previously interesting philosophical questions are now interesting scientific questions. There's not much left for philosophers to actually talk about.

<comment><USER12> I think you're right about mature disciplines breaking off from philosophy, but I don't see morality and personal identity departing the realm of philosophy any time soon.

Sociologists only tell us how human societies behave, not how they are _supposed_ to behave. You might hold the opinion that we can somehow derive the _ought_ from the _is_ , but if that's the view that you're trying to advocate, then you're already doing metaethics -- a branch of philosophy.

Psychologists and neuroscientists might be able to tell us how children acquire a sense of identity, or how patients identify themselves after massive brain surgery. But I don't think their job description includes figuring out what the essence of a person is, or whether there is such a thing as an essence of a person in the first place.

As for law, it is unlikely that you will be able to settle the question, "Why in hell should anyone obey the law?" or "If the law is unjust, should I still obey it?" until you've settled some questions about morality. Just because a law is (un)constitutional doesn't mean that it is (im)moral.

Guess what, you can even combine questions about morality with questions about personal identity, and throw in some legal theory as well, to end up with some really interesting philosophy [1].

[1] <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/>

<comment><USER14> We have neurological evidence pointing to how our very sense of "self" exists as a construction of the brain, associated with specific regions.

Drugs that induce "a sense of oneness with the universe" appear to just turn off that "self illusion" part of the brain. Compare it to when I kill my Gnome/KDE daemon and see the shell underneath.

In short, neuroscientists have already discovered "the essence of a person", regardless of job description.

<comment><USER12> If identifying the brain region or drug that produces the sensation of identity counts as discovering the essence of identity, does identifying the brain region or drug that produces the illusion of being a cat count as discovering the essence of feline nature? Would the illusion provide us with accurate rules to distinguish felines from other animals?

This is exactly the kind of equivocation that contemporary philosophers complain about nearly every time an arrogant scientist announces the end of philosophy. Not because the scientist's answers are uncomfortable, but because they don't even answer the same question. (Arrogant philosophers, in turn, would say in Latin: _ignoratio elenchi_.)

Yes, we already know which binaries produce the KDE Plasma Desktop when executed from the bash shell. We also know exactly which bits produce which parts of the GUI. But what we really wanted to know were the conceptual, historical, and perhaps even ethical significance of the design decisions and system architecture that make KDE what it is. (If we replaced Qt with something else, would it still be KDE?) You can't answer that question by showing us a million lines of C++.

<comment><USER14> _Would the illusion provide us with accurate rules to distinguish felines from other animals?_

"Felines" as a group exist only as a cognitive shortcut. Looking at the genetic and evolutionary data, we find a continuum where felines and other families bleed together in a very fine gradient. We just happened to draw boundaries in the interest of productive discussion. We will never find "the essence of feline nature" because there is no such concrete thing as a "feline" which would have such.

For a human example: at what point do we stop being conscious when falling asleep?

<comment><USER15> He didn't ask you whether there are accurate rules for distinguishing between felines and other families, he specifically and precisely asked you if you can _deduce_ those rules from the illusion! It's the same inference you were trying to make about the nature of the self. Read more carefully.

<comment><USER14> Short answer: no. Long answer: no, because we derive these distinctions from the real world instead, changing them as necessary to better reflect new knowledge. See "birds are dinosuars" and "the brontosaurus never existed".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dilettante.

<http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3s458i/>

Just picking one of the many hilariously patronising statements in the essay, the author says "we may be able to do better" than the great philosophers by, in effect, making a big list of things that are true in general, and cause people to act differently.

How do we measure truth? Who decides? What happens when the people who decide become political? What if someone is wrong? What if an action that you thought was true causes someone to do something morally wrong? What is morally wrong?

What if others want to talk about things that aren't on this list? Do you stop them? Are they wasting their time if they ask other questions?

Maybe people in philosophy are looking at things now that will only make sense to others in decades to come. That happens to be my opinion. It is worth studying anything somebody gives their life to _very carefully_ before writing it off as a "swamp of abstractions".

</comment><comment><USER17> Some commenters are defending modern philosophy, but I think there is something legitimately wonky in the discipline. I can't figure out the best way to describe it, but, to state it poorly, studying philosophy often feels like filtering out a ton of BS.

I'm saying it's all BS (it's not) but that there's too much.

I don't think it has to be that way. Example ideas:

* Writing in philosophy could be improved (<http://tylerneylon.com/a/writing-about-philosophy/>)

* The attitude toward 'what is philosophy?' could be improved ([http://www.richardprice.io/post/35542139118/one-hypothesis-a...](http://www.richardprice.io/post/35542139118/one-hypothesis-about-the-role-of-philosophy))

</comment><comment><USER18> There is one thing that I could do differently that's enormously significant: freely undertake teleportation and mind uploading, given I live to be able to do it; and it's in turn what's driving me just now into Philosophy (I'm learning German even). Surprisingly for me, Graham nails that, but may not quite explore the possibilities ensuing, when he talks about sectioning one's brain in half, putting the other in a clone body, and trying to figure out which person you are now.

My working line of reason is that consciousness is, as he puts it, merely an abstract concept we get attached to and have the illusion of having. There is no consciousness, only the awareness of a single moment--a point in time. What we take for consciousness is nothing more than a succession of these single moments, much as a computer's processor clocks at so many Gigahertz. With each moment of awareness creating new memory and storing that memory back in the brain, the subsequent moments are able to access it.

You coud think that the current moment of awareness is all that ever really "exists", because for all the other previous ones you only have the memory, you have no concrete evidence that it ever existed. There is no past awareness, there is only a current awareness of what we have registered as the past. With that decoupled thinking, you can start to realize that any given moment of awareness that I have is as different (and as similar) from any given moment you have as it is different from a moment I had 5 minutes ago, or ever.

So who I "am" now is as entirely different from who I was just a second ago, in essence, as it would be different from a clone that could be made of me. There is nothing in my flesh ensuring I am a continuous consciousness. There is only the memory. The reason I am closer to my 5-minute younger self than I am to another human being is that the former and I share all the memory up to 5 minutes ago. We have a base commit to our memories in common. But a clone of me, made now, would be exactly as close to my 5-minute younger self.

The bottom line is that I should not think that being teleported should kill me, as that would imply that I'm dying after every moment of awareness, birthing a new person who happens to share all my memories. Indeed I may well be, and we have the illusion that we have a continuous life since we have all these vivid memories of what just happened a second ago, even if it's not us who lived through it.

And though I'm finding this train of thought increasingly alluring, I know nothing of how philosophy ever brushed it, or it may well have tackled it head on and I wouldn't know it.

<comment><USER19> I presume you are acquainted with Buddhist thought on this matter? One of the central tenants of Buddhist philosophy is the idea that there is no such thing as the self, but rather a linked series of experiences. The Chan and Zen traditions make something of a big deal about this; the main goal of the religious and esoteric practices associated with them is to come to the realisation that you do not in some sense exist and are 'selfless' at this point you are said to be enlightened. (As an aside one of the core rules for Buddhist monastic communities is that you can't claim to be enlightened as if you have achieved enlightenment there is no self to make the claim.) The European philosophers came to the idea much later on, historically this would seem to be a side effect of the notion of a soul, and in particular its indivisible nature.

<comment><USER18> Buddhist philosophy did shape much of my thinking in the years I read and meditated on the Vipassana variety. But I hadn't been aware that other traditions took the notion of detachment as extremely--and down to it's essence--as I'm now taking, thanks for pointing it out. I hear all of the hype around Zen but the fetishism of Japanese culture keeps me at a distance; though Chan sounds like a wonderful indulgement to go with my Mandarin studies, I'll look into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was puzzled by the statement that he didn't learn much from the classes he took in formal logic.

>(Consider "I don't know if I learned anything from them. " Footnote: 1 "In practice formal logic is not much use,..." )

This guy has programmed massive amounts of LISP code, and written books about LISP.

How can he say that his training in formal logic didn't take him anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER21> I've always enjoyed reading this (by ― Mikhail Naimy, from - The Book of Mirdad)...

"Logic is immaturity weaving its nets of gossamer wherewith it aims to catch the behemoth of knowledge. Logic is a crutch for the cripple, but a burden for the swift of foot and a greater burden still for the wise."

</comment><comment><USER22> My guide to doing philosophy: study philosophy (along with history and other related subjects) until you're in your early twenties, then choose which philosophy you think is right and live by it.

<comment><USER12> In fact, this is what most "professional" philosophers do. The theories they prefer are more or less set in stone by the time they do their Master's (age 22-24). After that, it's mostly refinement and minor adjustments, and arguing with everyone who disagrees. Of course, those minor adjustments make all the the difference between a convincing theory and a ridiculous theory.

Some people are exceptions; that's when you hear them being referred to as "the early Tycho", "the late Tycho", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does he _ever_ get any less arrogant?</comment>