IBM takes first 3D image of atomic bonds - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5346964/ibm-takes-first-3d-image-of-atomic-bonds

<comment><USER2> WOW! this is a big breakthrough. I have friends working in my collaborators group using STM and AFM at UHV (Ultra High Vacuum) and ULT (Ultra Low Temperatures), and know second hand how difficult/near to impossible it is.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is the picture 3D? Also shouldn't we see electrons in pi clouds above the aromatic rings?

<comment><USER4> I'd say it's 3D in the sense that it's a height map rather than a cross section. (We've been able to see cross-sectional images of bonds for some time using transmission electron microscopy, I think). It's not a full three- dimensional structure though, and it'd only work on flattish molecules like this.

It should be noted that this sort of resolution has been attainable for some time using scanning tunneling microscopy, but I'm pretty sure this is a first for atomic force microscopy. STM doesn't give you a very good image of bonds -- in fact bonds are generally the thing you _don't_ see, since STM works by pulling electrons in/out and bonds are stable places where electrons really don't want to come out of or go into. AFM, on the other hand, shows bonds very nicely.

You can sorta make out where the aromatic rings are. I'm not sure why it's so bright at the ends -- any organic chemists out there who can explain that?

<comment><USER5> about the brightness at the ends - I'm pretty sure that is due to the fact that this is a pi-conjugated system; that is, the pi-bonded electrons can jump around the whole molecule. This, together with the fact that the molecule is finite in size, means that the pi electrons are confined to a rectangle of lower potential energy, and when you solve the quantum mechanics (similarly to the quantum harmonic oscillator) you'll find higher electron density at the edges of the confining potential.

<comment><USER4> I'm totally willing to trust the word of someone called "graphene" on this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are the samples cooled to near zero when scanning like this? As far as I understand, even slight temperatures cause molecules to move at ridiculous speeds.

<comment><USER7> They said it was a 20-hour scan, at 5K, with the AFM tip 0.5 nanometers from the pentacene molecule. The molecule itself is 1.4 nm long, so they were only about 30% of its length away from it in the vertical direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> great comment on the page: "trivia: molecules have no color" They don't? Then where does color come from? Why wouldn't gold atoms be golden?

i'm hoping the guy was being sarcastic but...

<comment><USER9> Color is the wave length of light you can see. Red is one wavelength, blue another, infra red and ultra violet yet another. But you can't see those last two.

Molecules have no color because they are smaller then the shortest length wave of light you and I can see.

Think about dropping a stone in a quiet pond. Think of the waves that are created. If they bump into a large obstacle they are reflected back. If they hit a tiny one, like a thin blade of grass sticking out of the water, they just flow around.

Gold is golden because a whole lot of gold atoms bunched together reflect a yellowish range of light. Gold the material is gold colored. A single gold atom does not have color.

<comment><USER10> So if I'm a gold atom, and I absorb some photons, a bunch pass through me, and some get reflected - and the photons that are reflected from me over a period of time happen to be average out to something a cone cell in the retina would interpret as gold- couldn't I say that I'm gold-colored? In other words, replacing the billion-atom aggregation with a simple time series?

It seems to me it's an argument about semantics, not physics.

<comment><USER9> Ah but protons aren't particles... except some times they are, other times they are a waves. The bottom line is individual atoms don't reflect protons.

<comment><USER11> Did you mean photons?

<comment><USER9> Embarrassingly, yes. Obviously I can neither type nor spell well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Judging by how big of a feat this is to image a molecule, how on earth do we know how things like cellular respiration work? How do we know cells use ATP, etc without being able to watch?

(I may make this question a separate post to HN, it's been bothering me for a while.)

<comment><USER13> Biochemists use easily hundreds of different techniques to elucidate, logically or probabilistically, details about cellular processes. They take serious advantage of techniques like optical properties of solutions and selective targeting of fluorescent tags to visualize effects. Moreover, they tend to abuse the very nanomachine proteins they're trying to study in order to study them further.

A simple example (the names are removed to make this easier to digest, but if you're curious it's the action of Glyceraldehyde-3-Phosphate Dehydrogenase in glycolysis) involves a protein which is known to play a part in the breakdown of glucose. This protein catalyzes the addition of a "high energy" phosphate to our compound so we can break it down further while also pulling off a reactive hydrogen (and adding it to NAD+ to make NADH) so the cell can use that later (another kind of energy like ATP).

Biochemists, assuming they can already purify the compound and know the overall reaction, investigated the action of the enzyme by mixing in a highly reactive fluorescent-tagged molecule that looks similar to the product of the reaction. This molecule bound permanently to the inside of the enzyme which was then denatured and sequenced, looking for whatever amino acid showed the fluorescent tag (cysteine). Then the inserted modified reagents which contained radioactive hydrogen and phosphate to figure out where exactly those molecules ended up. In this way they learned where the enzyme added the phosphate to the product and exactly which hydrogen was removed from the initial compound to make that NADH.

Biochemistry is a really fascinating story of minute triumphs of discovery. Unfortunately, like any part of science like that, it means that the day-to- day life of a biochemist is backbreaking and tedious. Regardless, if you're interesting, there is a lot of fun stuff to study.

<comment><USER13> Oh, and as far as imaging goes, it's simply _amazing_ what has been done with X-ray crystallography.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That is fucking awesome.

It's depressing to consider the fact that it would probably get downvoted on the science subreddit.

<comment><USER15> Second that. Picture of the year as far as I'm concerned. Simply unbelievable. What a time to be alive.

So, now that we can 'see' the 3D arrangement in a manner of speaking is there any way we could feed known protein structure in to neural networks by imaging them in quantity and take some of the sting out of protein folding by identifying likely candidate ways to do the folding ?

Or is that too big of a leap ?

<comment><USER3> I think there would be major issues getting folded protein to 5K. Plus proteins "live" in 300K and the oscillations are probably very important for the function (perhaps even more than a single arbitrary structure you would get from a picture like this).

<comment><USER16> Yes to all of the above. Not to mention that we've long been able to visualize protein molecular structure using X-rays and NMR. This probably isn't very useful to anything related to proteins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If that's true, IBM is probably making history (again)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow this blew me away! Nothing beats visual confirmation from an emotional perspective ;-)

</comment><comment><USER19> Where's the URL to the original IBM press release / article? I would rather read the news from the source, than from those gizmodo subhuman morons any day...

<comment><USER20> _"I would rather read the news from the source, than from those gizmodo subhuman morons"_

Cut them some slack. At least they're watching/trying. Their article is a news item here, after all.

<comment><USER19> Have you read the comments on gizmodo?

They're trying? Trying what? What they usually do is copy-paste from the source. That does not add much value. Hence, I ask again: where's the URL to the original press release? I don't want to read such great news from a website that allows comments from retards who know nothing about Physics...

<comment><USER20> I have an easy win for you. Stop reading the comments! They are almost universally awful.

<comment><USER19> True. But would it be too far-fetched to claim that the quality of a website / blog can be indirectly measured by the quality of its comments? A quality blog should not tolerate certain comments which are more appropriate for YouTube.

<comment><USER20> Sigh, when you find the answer to that question, let me know ...

<comment><USER19> They will never sell _Chanel No. 5_ in gas stations because it would cheapen it. Likewise, a blog that tolerates retarded trollish comments looks cheap. If I were one of the IBM scientists who worked on that project, I would hate to have my work publicized by a blog as distasteful as Gizmodo.

Call me elitist if you will. BTW, my question was rhetorical.

<comment><USER20> If you're elitist, it's in a good way. I agree.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jury awards Apple $1bn in damages from Samsung - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19377261

<comment><USER2> derp.</comment>


Unique Sport Project ICO - <AUTHOR> It's not a secret that in the european football the overwhelming majority of clubs are subsidized by their owners. This trend is increasing every year - mainly this was the reason for the new policy of The UEFA that is called Financial Fair Play Regulations, due to which the expenses and incomes of clubs are now strictly controlled. But "PSG" football club this summer proved that if you want, you can bypass this rule - according to the documents, Neimar was given hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to make him the face of the future World Cup in Qatar in 2022, and then he transferred most of the money to buy his contract from "Barcelona". As expected, it provoked a chain reaction - many coaches complained that now average players are several times more expensive than just a couple of years ago. Then we witnessed the transfer of the young Ousmane Dembele for almost 140$ million with bonuses, so the transfer record was beaten 3 times this summer.
And this is only the beginning - in fact the same big clubs understand that they also need to spend as much as the "PSG" and the "Manchester City" football clubs in order to play at the same level. We see the first results even now - the owner of "Milan" FC is desperately looking for money, since he has already spent more than $250 million this summer. Thus, the expenses of clubs only grow each year, and even the owners of the most famous clubs in the world, such as "Milan" FC, are looking for investors - and this gives great opportunities for our future platform.
With our project you will be able to manage your favorite club not only in games, but also in real life.
We will build a system in which each decision will be taken collectively, discussions and surveys will be created by everyone, and every person will be able to vote.
Want to know more? Check out our website - http://sportience.online/! <comment><AUTHOR> [http://sportience.online/](http://sportience.online/)</comment>


Try This Idea to Get Your Resume Noticed - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds/2008/06/05/your-resume-headline-should-get-my-attention-first/

<comment><USER2> > Voted 'most likely to succeed,' when I should have been voted 'most likely > to help ABC develop killer products.'

You'll sound like an utter nob if you write like that. I once received a resumé titled "Steely-blue-eyed contract killer" which didn't go immediately in the bin -- because we were too busy having a laugh about it. _Then_ it went in the bin. Some of the given examples seem very reminiscent of the kind of person who thinks rather too highly of themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> This method _might_ work if I wanted to hire a salesman. For anyone else, it strikes me as phony and affected. Do I really care if a job prospect married the prettiest girl in his small town? I am more interested in whether he or she is competent and a self-learner.

</comment><comment><USER4> People who look at resumes all day spend 15 seconds looking at most resumes because that's how long it takes to find something stupid or disqualifying for the job, not because they look for something awesome for 15 seconds and then chuck it if they aren't grabbed by your whimsical creativity.

Your resume should get you in the door -- use your interview to convey what a unique and special snowflake you are.

</comment><comment><USER5> My resume got noticed at the last place I applied to because the guy who was making up the short list had already been talked to by two people who could recommend me.

<comment><USER6> Seriously.

If you know someone in the company, skip H.R. and send your resume directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably super valuable for receptionists and paralegals.

For developers though, the only purpose of a resume is to get an interview. Competant developers are _rare_. Everyone with a decent resume that is keyword-compliant is getting interviewed.

If you read this board, your resume probably doesn't need to waste time "selling". Just write what you've done and what you know. Save the selling for the phone screen.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My intention was not provide a flip one sentence Leno-type headline to a resume, I apologize if the idea is offensive. I may have been in one of 'those' moods. I do think that you must grab the hiring manager's attention in a few seconds. Unfortunately, most people tend to bury their achievements, work ethic, attitudes, etc. Put them front and center works best.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's just silly/stupid. A good resume speaks for itself and is instantly obvious from 1) The grammar and words used 2) The length of the resume (yes, believe me, size does matter) 3) What it says. Content is king, it doesn't make a difference if we're talking articles or resumes/CVs.

A resume isn't where you show off your humor, that's what interviews are for.

<comment><USER9> Length? Shorter or longer then?

<comment><USER10> The direction I've received from various employment consultants is to keep everything on a single page if possible. Two pages at the absolute maximum.

<comment><USER11> I too have been told this from several leading firms.

Your resume is an _invitation_ to interview. It should be used like an advert, short and to the point and highlighting your best features.

My 1-page resume always impresses people much more than my 2-page resume.

<comment><USER12> I think employment agencies say this because they are in the habit of retyping and reformatting resumes and longer resumes take more time to manage.

I started to have better responses when I started ignoring the advice to keep the resume to one page.

The number of pages is also ambiguous when everything is transmitted electronically, I always provide a link to the on-line HTML version, and sometimes attach a PDF generated from that. It's not actually that long when displayed on-screen.

I have personally not had any trouble getting interviews because I have a 3 or 4 page resume (once printed out). In order for it to be one page, I'd have to exclude a significant amount of my work experience, work experience which is relevant to the jobs I'm applying for. The resume should be an indication of exactly what you can do, your experience and capabilities should be laid out _before_ the interview. The interviewer should be able to look at your resume and say "This person has the skills and the experience we need, let's talk and find out if they're a good fit", not "I can't tell what this person is capable of because their resume is not very detailed".

<comment><USER12> Also, I try to write my resume with a focus on technical readers, not necessarily HR. Part of the goal is to get past the resume screeners, but if you want the job, having something to talk about, prompted by the contents of the resume, during the technical interview with actual technical people is a big advantage. The last thing you want is to have a sparse resume such that the interviewer does not have a basis for asking questions.

I guess this can kind of come off like "pre-loading the interviewing process", but when I've had to be the interviewer, the better interviews (and the better candidates) were the ones who already knew what they knew and didn't need to spend time reviewing their own past during the phone or face-to-face interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the resume headline (from GL Hoffman) is a fabulous idea because, as a former corporate recruiter I had to read thousands of resume. A headline a resume would certainly get my attention and get me to read with greater attention.

Resume headlines can certainly apply to highly technical careers as well.

The reason the headline works is because corporate recruiters are famous for screening out exceptional engineers simply because the engineer did not have enough of the right buzzwords in their resume, hence the hiring manager never gets to see the exceptional candidate.

<comment><USER14> "The reason the headline works is because corporate recruiters are famous for screening out exceptional engineers simply because the engineer did not have enough of the right buzzwords in their resume..."

Anyone who recruits in this fashion is someone I would automatically ignore when looking for a job. A headline like those quoted would do nothing but garner ridicule if you applied to my group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of pickup-lines for girls.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can not imagine writing a headline like that for a resume. I would feel utterly ridiculous, like I was writing an upsell for some crappy sold-by- infomercial product.

</comment><comment><USER17> May work for blue collar jobs. Certainly not for any 60k plus jobs. The idea sounds second only to making videos for getting hired.

</comment><comment><USER18> My resume got noticed by Volkswagen and Cisco because I put "beer brewing" under my interests. YMMV though.

</comment><comment><USER19> ... or you could make it a one-page, succinct advertisement of yourself and leave the bullshit out.</comment>


Lessons learned from creating a real-time collaborative rich-text editor - <AUTHOR> https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-rich-text-editor-with-real-time-collaboration/ <comment><USER2> > We were quite seriously scared of repeating the infamous history of Netscape > which was a well-known example of failing to successfully release a newer > version of a popular software after deciding to rewrite it from scratch. > Fortunately it did not happen in our case.

Big kudos for pulling it off!

> Two main candidates are Operational Transformation (OT) and Conflict-Free > Replicated Data Type (CRDT). We chose OT and perhaps one day we will write > down our thoughts on the ongoing OT vs. CRDT battle.

Please do, I would love to hear your thoughts on OT vs CRDT!

<comment><USER3> Ditto. Would love to hear more about the OT vs CRDT decision!

<comment><USER4> You both may enjoy [http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with- history/](http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/) if you haven't seen it already, it's an absolute gem, and touches on exactly this.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the suggestion, that was a very enjoyable read indeed :)

Thanks to the author as well, for distilling so much information into the very readable document that this was.

One thing I am wondering about is in the conclusion of the document, the author says:

> You'd be hard-pressed to use CRDTs in data-heavy scenarios such as screen > sharing or video editing.

With regards to video editing, could it not be rather doable after all?

Consider a non-linear video editing system (NLVE) [1] like Adobe Premiere Pro [2].

While the size of the video data source material you are editing might range into probably several hundreds of gigabytes for a 4K feature length film, the project file itself remains very small, because the video data is kept separate from the timeline data.

Wikipedia explains:

> Non-destructive editing is a form of audio, video, or image editing in which > the original content is not modified in the course of editing; instead the > edits are specified and modified by specialized software. A pointer-based > playlist, effectively an edit decision list (EDL), for video or a directed > acyclic graph for still images is used to keep track of edits.

Are these not in fact the sorts of data structures that would lend themselves the most naturally to being implemented as CRDTs? :D

As for the video source material that is used in the project, those files can be distributed by users outside of the editor software using for example BitTorrent, or they could be automatically distributed by the editor software via for example public IPFS or a private Dropbox folder, or if the users that are working together are on a shared network then the source files could be located on a shared NAS.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- linear_editing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- linear_editing_system)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The number of tests: 12500

> Code coverage: 100%

> Development team: 25+

> Estimated number of man-days: 42 man-years (until September 2018), including > time spent on writing tools to support the project like mgit and Umberto > (the documentation generator used to build the project documentation)

Software is expensive

<comment><USER6> show this stats next time the junior dev will say that she/he will develop own WYSIWYG editor in like 1-2 weeks for the project needs ;)

<comment><USER5> `import editor from CKEditor`

or something like that ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested in this issue I would suggest taking a look a Neil Fraser's Differential Synchronization.[0] It took me 2 weeks as a solo developer to add real time collaborative editing to our product using that method.

[0]: [https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/](https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/)

<comment><USER8> Differential synchronisation works very well indeed for plain text, but as Neil himself has pointed out, it doesn't necessarily work well for tree- structured data (like XML or JSON) because there's no guarantee that the combination of separate syntactic-validity-preserving edits will necessarily be syntactically valid.

<comment><USER7> The solution to this problem is to add a translation layer from the tree structure to plain text. If you can do that you can work on any arbitrary data structure easily. I'll leave it up to the reader how to figure out how to do it ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been there (although, in case of OT). When implementing CKEditor 5, we started with a linear model and just a couple type of operations (the usual set). At that time, we weren't able to transform that linear model to a tree model because conflict resolution based on that simple set of operations was too dumb. As I mentioned in the other comment about CRDT vs OT, we'd still consider having a linear + tree model duet, but so far it's purely theoretical discussion whether it has a chance to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice article. This is a great example of how Domain-Driven Design pays off. By really paying attention to how users think of the problem and expressing that in their design, they ended up with a richer domain model which in turn let them get better code _and_ a better user experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! A good UX was indeed one of our main goals and we weren't sure whether we're not overdoing this (again, the Netscape history ;|). But we kept in mind that simpler solutions already exist and it doesn't make sense to just copy them. That'd make the job easier, but we'd end up with the same issues that we identified in the existing platforms (annoying conflict resolution, stability issues, platform limitations to linear content – no tables, no nested blocks). So we risked taking the long path. The UX served as a compass and allowed making some reasonable shortcuts in some non-critical places. If we'd try to solve all possible issues that we've hit, we'd still be in the starting point :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It says on the pricing page that CKEditor 5 has "GPL 2+ copyleft Open Source" license. Can someone ELI5 that?

[https://ckeditor.com/ckeditor-5/pricing/](https://ckeditor.com/ckeditor-5/pricing/)

<comment><USER11> I guess you have to make your whole frontend open source if you use their editor under that license? I'm not sure how GPL interacts with scripting languages. Do you have to run GPL scripts on a GPL'd interpreter for it to be permissible?

Regardless, the pricing for their commercial offering seems really intense. $29/mo for 25 MAU? I feel like they're missing a few zeroes there. Maybe they meant 2,500 MAU? 25,000 MAU? The demo I played with makes it clear that the editor component is rather nice, but I would rather look at alternatives at that price. I would imagine the collaborative nature is what influences the price, but somehow Google Docs and MS Office do fine with collaboration as a core product feature without charging >$1/MAU just for that feature.

<comment><USER12> > _the pricing for their commercial offering seems really intense. $29 /mo for > 25 MAU?_

The page doesn't seem to imply that the price for 25+ users would scale linearly; for that they have a "Contact Us" call to action for negotiating pricing.

25 MAU seems reasonable to me for the following use-case: Company A sells a custom CMS to Company B, with a CKEditor-powered admin area to be used by <25 of Company B's content writing staff.

<comment><USER13> >The page doesn't seem to imply that the price for 25+ users would scale linearly; for that they have a "Contact Us" call to action for negotiating pricing.

I confirm that! It is just a specific offering for a small project where 25 people team use our editor. It's a fair price (covers granting the commercial license, the right to use / change / hide our code, enterprise support, maintenance, warranties, indemnifications, etc). For bigger projects we always try to implement a licensing scenario that works well for a given customer. Contact us and we will do our best to craft you an optimal plan.

<comment><USER14> It might be worthwhile putting some bracketing or aspirational pricing up there with it too then as you're potentially scaring away potential commercial clients who look at that price and can't see how they could justify its inclusion at a prices they would have to guess at using that as a base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice! I too, would love to read more on the OT/CRDT trade-off.

Companion reading (the approach taken in ProseMirror, which was implemented in significantly less person-years): [http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative- editing.html](http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative-editing.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Do you ever garbage collect the graveyard? I wrote a tree based OT (slightly different domain) and never found a great solution for that.

<comment><USER17> Interesting question! Actually, at the moment we don't :).

We did some testing to see how big this issue is and it turned out that it's not dramatic. The main difficulty with graveyard purging is that you need to keep the undo in mind. Elements in the graveyard are used for undo, so garbage collecting will have to be strictly connected with limiting undo steps.

Add to that collaborative changes and it becomes a tougher problem. Therefore, we'd probably start from what seems to be the safest option – trimming the history stack and implementing a garbage collector that goes through all the possible reference points.

<comment><USER16> Yup. Ran into the same thing.

Another Q for you if you're still around: did you have to make any changes to your algorithm for when it's running through the undo queue, or is it basically the same thing but in reverse? I found some operations could better preserve intention with some adjustments to the undo transform

<comment><USER17> Oh, don't get me started on modifications we needed to do to make undo look reasonable ... :) At first, we thought that undo is the same thing as collaboration but... nope.

The crucial difference is that with undo you have a context (old document state). With collaboration, you don't. So if both users put a character at the same position, in collaboration the order of output doesn't matter (and can't be solved really). In undo it does, because a user remembers what was the order of the letters before they made a change.

<comment><USER16> We should compare notes some time :) Sounds like we had to solve a lot of the same issues and the dearth of info on this topic is surprising!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there a sharedb compatible OT type definition? Like how [https://github.com/ottypes/rich-text](https://github.com/ottypes/rich-text) exists for Quill? [https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/](https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/)

Also is it possible for third party plugins to add new operations (defining their own conflict resolution against the existing types)?

<comment><USER17> Our first idea was to have four basic operations (insert, move, attribute, remove) and then have "deltas" (wrap delta, unwrap delta, merge delta, split delta) which were built using those operations and for which we described additional transformation cases. In this approach operation transformations were set in stone, but you could add your own deltas and provide your own transformations for them.

In the end, we concluded that users will see defining deltas and transformations as too complicated and won't use it. Later, we also decided to drop deltas idea at all and we rewrote deltas into operations.

As an alternative solution, we provide the post-fixing mechanism. Your plugin can listen to all the changes done on the model and apply fixes if something has gone wrong. We used it for the famous "insert table row / insert table column" problem, to add the missing cell. This alternative is not as clean as explicitly providing a transformation algorithm but it is much easier to implement.

The problem with defining your own operations is that you need to write transformations against all the other operations which is a huuuuge work. It took as a few years and we still see some room for improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Amazingly good illustrations. Whoever did that should illustrate all the books.

<comment><USER20> While I generally agree they are nice, one nit is that some of the fonts are unnecessarily small and/or faded. It looks to me they could be made more visible without sacrificing the visual utility of the diagrams. Roughly 1/3 of the population would have age-related vision difficulties with those kinds of fonts. Every graphic designer should take courses in accessibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Been searching for a bit and it appears that the real-time collaboration part isn't open source and requires you to use their cloud service to make it work. The pricing for that isn't available on their website and instead requires you to contact them.

I hope I'm wrong since I have some ideas I'd like to try it out with. Sending my customer's data to their cloud is probably a non-starter.

<comment><USER22> Recently we realised that our public communication about collaboration is quite confusing ;( We mention "Cloud Services" everywhere, but the reality is that you can have an onpremise installation of our collaboration backend that you can host/control by yourself. The SAAS offer was first, that's why the current website looks how it looks. The onpremise offer is currently in a closed private-beta state, so if there is anyone willing to give it a try, we're open. We'll make it fully public in a month or two, after we polish the documentation and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there any difference in editing a structured document which is intended to ultimately be text for presentation and reading, versus a structured document which is describing requirements for code or a storyboard for a design? Do these different end-results change the collaborative environment?

<comment><USER24> I would think yes. Structured editing is tough because of the interaction possibilities. Think of it in simplistic terms "add words to paragraph" at the same time as "remove paragraph." What do you do?

With text presentation and reading, you are ultimately limiting the number of things that can be seen that way. Though, you can of course expand your entity list to include more and more things. Headers, lists, sections, chapters, paragraphs, etc.

That is to say, I think this is already difficult for structured text. Adding more structure, in the forms of "requirements section" and such just compounds on that complication. I'm not sure it adds more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is the main use-case for this? I'm looking at it from a coder's perspective. When I'm writing some code I wouldn't want somebody else inserting characters into my code while I am editing it.

But I can see that if the app is divided into a multiple code-files then different coders can be working on different files at the same time. Still I prefer some form of code ownership or at least locking of multiple files just for me while I'm working on them.

I don't quite see how it would be much different for other kinds of text. While I'm writing this post right now I wouldn't want somebody else modifying its beginning while I'm writing its end.

Not saying there aren't any good use-cases, just can't think of any right now. So that's my question, what are they?

<comment><USER26> The typical way I've seen this used is almost like pair programming. One user will write a draft of something, or add an image or chart while on a conference call with the other editor(s). Honestly, I see it a lot more with spreadsheets than with rich text, but the use case is there. It was one of the features that put Google docs on the map back in the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can imagine real-time collaboration is an immensely interesting problem to work on.

Also wonderful blog post, actually read it in full, thanks!

<comment><USER20> If I were Google I'd buy up CKEditor to help compete with Microsoft Office.

<comment><USER28> I do not think they are interested. Google Docs/Sheets gets features at a very slow pace -- if Google wanted to compete with Office they could literally pour hundreds of millions and a legion of developers into it. As the only monetization I am aware of is Google Suite perhaps that's not enough to justify it. Unless you want to see ads in Docs / Sheets... also, Google Wave has been cancelled.

<comment><USER20> Re: _Unless you want to see ads in Docs / Sheets_

The more you use a product, the more you visit related sites and materials on the web; so yes, ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Recently saw a fantastic intermediate talk on this subject called CRDTs and the Quest for Distributed Consistency[0]. One product of the research was automerge[1], a library for handling collaborative editing of JSON-like data models

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5NULPSiOGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5NULPSiOGw)

[1]: [https://github.com/automerge/automerge](https://github.com/automerge/automerge)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a great blog post.

It was interesting to see how they approached moving from a linear data model to a tree structured data model. Is anyone aware of similar work with graph structured data, as you find in electronic design automation? Think collaborative schematic editing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice writeup! A tiny nitpick, shareJS (DerbyJS) had/have an object based OT implementation (ie. tree) since before this was started I think (or around the same time).

<comment><USER17> As far as I remember shareJS was available when we started to work on tree- based OT. We researched it but it turned out to be too simple for what we wanted to achieve and there was no special handling for some edge cases that happens during collaborative editing.

We achieved something similar to shareJS functionality quite early, to be honest. What proved to be extremely difficult was all the extras to smooth up the user experience. We would have to (heavily) extend shareJS anyway, so it made more sense to go out with own solution, crafted for our needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > We started building our next generation rich-text editor with the assumption > that real-time collaborative editing must be the core feature that lies at > its very foundation

Am I the only one who doesn't like other people typing through my work? Why not simply let the user choose when to merge their work with others?

Honestly, sometimes I feel collaborative text editors have been created "just because we can" or "just because we want to see if we can".

<comment><USER4> if jira and confluence allowed this my company would benefit from probably a double digit efficiency boost.

we have to split our "collaborating" to google docs, and our "carving in stone" in JIRA and Confluence.

I'll say though that the "suggested edit" and "comment on a range" features (and the distinct edit modes about commenting, suggesting and approving edits, and free for all battle royale are all valid modes for us all the time.) (300 person SF+intl. software company)

<comment><USER33> Doesn't Confluence have collaborative editing? [https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/collaborative- editing-8...](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/collaborative- editing-858771779.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How do you keep track of the nodes in the "graveyard"? Does that mean that each node has to have some sort of UUID across clients?

<comment><USER17> Graveyard is just another root, like the main one. So, the same way that all elements have the same position in the main root for all clients, elements in graveyard also have the same position for all clients. Thus, their path is kind of UUID for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The link at the bottom which said that you could check out a demo was confusing because there was no demo there.

Demo can be found at [https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/collabor...](https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/collaboration/overview.html)

<comment><USER17> It seems that the link is fine. Scroll a little down and you can test the collaboration in Letters (built using CKE5) or with CKE5 document build (switch the tab).

<comment><USER2> I should note that I am on mobile. On mobile I don't see a demo in the link from the OP whereas the demo in the link I posted above is available on mobile.

<comment><USER22> Yes, that's correct. The demo for mobiles is intentionally hidden because both examples on ckeditor.com are right-now desktop-like. We'd be working soon on a solution that would provide much better UX for mobiles, once we do it we'd show a dedicated demo for mobile devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nice write-up. I've seen[0] the blood, sweat and tears that went into this project and I have to say it has come a long way.

BTW any timeline on sunsetting the venerable CKEditor 4?

[0] I was part of the CKEditor 4 team back when the CKE5 guys were laying down some the first iterations of what is described in this blog post.

<comment><USER22> Hey Tade0! As much as we love CKEditor 5 that we created, we also love our users who are still widely using CKEditor 4. Some of them invested many, many months to create custom plugins, adopt CKEditor to their systems and so on. So, being a responsible company, we will maintain this product still for several years. As a company that creates components, which are embed into other systems, we have to simply deliver stuff that others, including big enterprise customers, can rely on. I know it's a bit unusual in JavaScript world to maintain software for 8(!) or even more years, but this is what we do. Yes, we're a bit crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is a disguised ad for their saas offer. Seems interesting but no public pricing. Meaning it's probably very expensive and targeting big customers.

</comment><comment><USER37> It is clear that Google Docs is using OT.Curious to know what Office365 is using for its real-time collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is pretty interesting, would like to apply it to other kinds of editor.

These abstractions should be in the OS really.

</comment><comment><USER39> I dont understand why this is so hard. If you take a document and enter each character into a database as a separate entry, then only lock each character as it's changed and unlock it immediately afterwards. The likelihood that all individuals will be modifying the same character at the same time is low. and while it's locked, the person trying to change it will see it's not changing - so they'll try again in a second or two by which time it will be unlocked.

<comment><USER40> Among the many other problems with your proposal, you are assuming an editor that can only insert and delete characters, so no selection, copy, paste, search and replace, and any other features that involve modifying more than just one character in a document at a time, since you're critically depending not just on the fact that all edits can theoretically be represented by single character changes but that the rate of such changes must necessarily be very, very low, bounded by human typing speed.

"OK, so to fix that, I'll just..."

That'll break in some other case. If you then work on fixing that up, in another 20 or 30 steps, you end up at these algorithms. Or something far worse, which is actually pretty likely if you try to bodge something together one hyper-local problem at a time.

<comment><USER41> No, op is assuming that an editor can only _replace_ characters.</comment></comment></comment>


Does Adding Expensive Housing Help the Little Guy? - <AUTHOR> https://marketurbanismreport.com/does-adding-expensive-housing-help-the-little-guy/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in this topic, you might also like the recent Econtalk episode, "Philip Auerswald on the Rise of Populism," [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/09/philip_auerswal.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/09/philip_auerswal.html). The spread of housing restrictions via zoning has had much larger impacts than is commonly appreciated. I find it interesting especially that Piketty's famous results are really a result of capital accumulation to landlords: [https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...](https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf) who benefit from supply restrictions.

I've been writing about (and to some extent working in) these issues for a while and come at them from another angle here: [https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a- fut...](https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-future-in- seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities)

<comment><USER3> Thomas Sowell is brilliant at highlighting the unexpected nature of many parts of economics as well as the countless government policies initiated in the name of helping the poor or lower class that end up either doing little to help or, more often, ultimately helping the upper-middle class and above the most.

He helped me grow beyond a cliche idealistic libertarian worldview into something much more practical and based in real world policy.

I highly recommend his 'Wealth, Poverty and Politics': [https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas- Sowell...](https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas- Sowell/dp/046509676X/ref=sr_1_4/)

Or for something more lightweight see his book 'Basic Economics': [https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas- Sowell/dp/0465...](https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas- Sowell/dp/0465060730/) \--- Despite it's name it's not an economics 101 guide, it basically a teaching-through-example guide by listing policy after policy that were implemented in the realworld, for ex:

\- rent control in NYC/Toronto in the 1970s which severely reduced access to affordable housing, disincentivized building maintenance, incentivized arson, and gave countless upper/middle class residents cheap rent for beautiful properties

\- various industry licensing pushed by market incumbents not protecting consumers, such as interior designers requiring 4yr bachelors degree to choose the colorscheme of an apartment

\- etc, etc

He digs into their good intentions but unintentional self-defeating side- effects. Many of which have countless analogies to today (see Uber vs Black cabs in London).

After reading it I'm hardly surprised Japan's economy has stagnated, to the point where it's almost so obvious it saddens me. They are one of the worst proponents of the type of heavy handed economic-intervention he critiques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This just in: woman who has staked her career on a pro-housing political platform announces that market-rate redevelopment is good for everyone.

The question is not _"will adding N market-rate units help?"_ because that's trivial. Of course it will. The question is: _"what if you have to knock down N affordable units to build M market-rate units?"_ This "simulation" doesn't even come close to addressing that question.

Like it or not, that's the situation in San Francisco.

<comment><USER5> > The question is: "what if you have to knock down N affordable units to build > M market-rate units?"

No it isn't. No one is seriously proposing knocking down N affordable units unless they're also including N+X affordable units + M luxury units in the new structure. Any such plan would be a massive waste of time because it has zero chance of being approved.

This article is addressing protesters against "The monster in the mission!!!!1" who marched against replacing an empty warehouse and a Burger King with 16 stories of housing. It is also addressing people like Dwyer who thought they were untouchable and important enough to work against building more housing without suffering any consequences.

I've noticed some attitudes starting to shift out in Sunset as lifetime SF residents find their kids coming home from college or getting married, yet being forced to live hours away. Suddenly the anti-development stance is less attractive when it means never seeing your grandkids.

Ultimately I don't think the Bay Area can muster the political will to solve the housing problem. Too many people benefit from eternally-rising housing costs or have a "screw you, I got mine" attitude. The state government will have to step in and remove local zoning control.

<comment><USER4> There are essentially no development projects in SF that don't involve demolishing existing housing. While I grant you that some such projects have (ridiculous) community resistance, these still aren't the norm.

In most places in SF, the resistance comes when housing is being replaced and/or the developer doesn't want to build low-income units (instead preferring to donate to the low-income housing fund). It's not a clean story.

<comment><USER6> In both Oakland and SF, there's been significant resistance to projects that propose to replace things that are not housing at all with things that are. If memory serves, the "Monster in the Mission" was proposed for an empty lot. I saw significant resistance to putting a tower in a _literal_ hole in the ground at MacArthut BART.

In SF, the resistance often seems centered on the idea that however much subsidized housing the developer proposes isn't enough for the interest groups fighting it. Often the push is for 100% subsidized, plus assorted "community benefit" donations to non-profits.

<comment><USER7> Even 100% affordable housing gets objected to: [https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/6/13189882/1296-shotwell- affor...](https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/6/13189882/1296-shotwell-affordable- housing-opposition)

To be honest, people like to extol the virtues of Bay Area liberalism, but to me the housing policy in the Bay is one of the most systematic (and regulated) form of prejudice. Cities like SF are losing their minorities, their middle class, all to fatten the paycheck of existing landowners. Almost the entire black population has emptied out of SF. It's one of the most pervasive form of class discrimination I've seen.

<comment><USER8> It comes down to incentives. With the current policies in place, there isn't much incentive for incumbents / existing residents to allow more housing.

If you are a home owner or landlord, reduced supply results in asset appreciation.

If you are a renter with rent control, then building more housing in your neighborhood may not seem like much of a benefit either.

Policy makers are always looking for piecemeal solutions, e.g. let's give teachers a rental subsidy, tweak the % of affordable housing that must be build, etc.

Lawmakers really need to create incentives so incumbents have a reason to want more housing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the linked "Residential Nexus Analysis":

[http://sf-planning.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Docume...](http://sf- planning.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents/8380-FINAL%20Resid%20Nexus_04-4-07.pdf)

>The prototype rental unit, also drawn from the Sensitivity Analysis work program is also 800 square feet and rents for $2,500 per month or a little under $3.20 per square foot per month. New rental units are not feasible in today's market; however, the inclusionary program will be in place beyond the current market cycle and must anticipate development of rental units in the future. The assumed rental rate is higher than is achievable in the current market except under extraordinary circumstances (luxury projects in premier locations, etc.). The rental rate has been estimated as the required minimum level for a project to be feasible, given total development costs, conventional financing terms, and typical operating expenses. The household living in this unit is likely to be paying approximately 30% of income on rent (not including utilities). This translates to a household with a gross income of $102,000 per year.

This is a rather interesting claim that I haven't heard come up in this debate before. I'm not sure if it's just because it made more sense to sell condos in 2007 (before November) or because construction costs are actually so high you can't build apartments that cost less than $2500/month and/or $3.20/sf.

It seems that research into cheaper building types, and regulatory initiatives to permit those, ought to be part of a solution. Although since the majority of the value of a property in SF is often the land, a land tax might be called for as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't assuming that demand is exogenous ensure that their model will return the result that they want? It seems that how exogenous demand is is the central question in the housing debate; if SF is so desirable that building more luxury apartments just brings in new rich people, then this model is useless.

(I think, and hope, that it's not. But I think the author danced around the central question by building this model.)

<comment><USER11> I think Sonja's study does more than "prove a point" \- it also illustrates exactly _how_ "luxury" housing helps everyone, which is a huge sore point in local politics. Understanding of the nature of how flexible preferences and different levels of wealth interact is still a useful exercise.

It would be very difficult to devise a study to prove whether exogenous demand is real, but a casual examination of San Francisco suggests that it is not - SF has built very little housing and still consistently out-attracts many other metro areas.</comment></comment>


What open source solution powers your entertainment media center? - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.com/life/15/1/what-open-source-media-center-solution-do-you-use

<comment><USER2> I personally use an old desktop machine next to the router with Plex Server installed on it, 2 2tb drives of films and TV shows and a Chromecast, with the plex app on my android phone which links up the two.

I just browse the plex app for stuff I wanna watch, click cast and then voila! On demand TV and films, wirelessly, without having to move my arse off the couch.

What a time to be alive.</comment>


Mao Kun Map - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Kun_map <comment><USER2> > Of interest is the inclusion of what are interpreted as Paracel Islands, > Macclesfield Bank or Spratly Islands – the names Shitang (石塘), Wansheng > Shitangyu (萬生石塘嶼), and Shixing Shitang (石星石塘) are noted on the map, although > identification of these islands may vary with different authors.

Ahh, _that's_ what this is about

<comment><USER3> What do you mean? Are those the names of those disputed islands in the South China Sea? Are you implying this is Chinese propaganda? If the above is true then it certainly looks like it.

<comment><USER4> Africa is also on the map and that doesn't give China a claim over parts of Africa either.

I don't think anybody thinks that a place being on a map means the country where the map maker is from gets to control that place.

<comment><USER5> Oh yes they do...

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

<comment><USER6> > "North Korean authorities were less keen on emphasizing the principle of > effective possession (a keystone of the South Korean standpoint), for this > would have recognized the Republic of Korea as a legitimate state entity."

For reference, according to [https://dprktoday.com/assets/img/top- bg4.png](https://dprktoday.com/assets/img/top-bg4.png) korean unification (modulo some minor bothersome separatists somewhere out in the provinces) is already a thing.

I think Alexander the Great was probably in a more descriptive than prescriptive mood when he was asked upon his deathbed who would inherit his empire. His reply: "the strongest".

(if conflicts are never ended there are no treaties documenting known agreements between conflicting parties. _cough_ cyprus _cough_ )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess a linear map of the coastline would be intuitive to a trader used to sailing along the coast, but it was pretty disorienting to try and match it to modern maps.

I think the big island at the end (i.e. leftmost in the gallery) labeled 忽魯謨斯 ( _Hūlŭmósī_ in modern Mandarin pronunciation) is supposed to be Hormuz, but I'd never have guessed that if it hadn't been mentioned in the article. (TIL there's not just a Strait of Hormuz but also an island.)

</comment><comment><USER8> As a Path of Exile player this title was interesting to see.

<comment><USER9> Yes, my first thought was "did grinding gear games write something new and technologically interesting?"

How have people been finding the Harvest league in PoE? I'm loving the easier crafting, but dislike the seeds/garden layout/management aspect.

<comment><USER10> I like even though I'm getting only mediocre crafting options so far because I never took the time to arrange the garden in a way that would allow growing higher tier seeds. It's a pity that they do not come with an auto-arrange feature that does the annoying placements.

<comment><USER11> I'm hoping if it goes core they will allow importing the layout just like hideouts.

<comment><USER10> Great idea.

Highlighting connections of storage tanks and pylons would also be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a coastal trading location, Mogadishu is a very old city. It would be fascinating to have a time machine and see some of the first interactions and trade between the Chinese fleets and locals in Mogadishu.

</comment><comment><USER13> The scanned items may be downloaded as glorious 100+MiB TIFF files, if you're interested.

[https://www.loc.gov/item/2004633695/](https://www.loc.gov/item/2004633695/)</comment>


Talk about the problem, not the solution - <AUTHOR> http://katgleason.tumblr.com/post/47257463324/talk-about-the-problem-not-the-solution <comment><USER2> _"one of the biggest mistakes "nontechnical" people make when communicating to great hackers about product is that we try and tell them the solutions before we ever tell them the problem"_

This is spot on.

I spend a bunch of my time helping ux, business and dev folk play nice together. This is definitely one of the major problems and something I babble on about to tedious extremes.

It's usually not as simple as a lack of trust though. It's more often things like people not having good ways to communicate the problem (as opposed to possible solutions). Or organisations being set up in such a way that the technical folk aren't in-play at the point where problem discovery is happening. Or the non-technical folk being assessed on "solution providing" not "problem defining".... and so on.

Trust is sometimes an issue - but it's often not the major cause.

(There is also a class of tech folk in some organisations who aren't interested in that level of problem - who want to get "the spec" and focus on the implementation problems that interest them more.... but I don't think this is the kind of tech folk the OP is talking about).

<comment><USER3> > Or organisations being set up in such a way that the technical folk aren't > in-play at the point where problem discovery is happening. Or the non- > technical folk being assessed on "solution providing" not "problem > defining".... and so on

 _This_ is the fundamental problem and is, I think, largely due to the fact that the kinds of problems we are solving do not naturally fall into the neat specialties into which most companies categorize their workers. Specialization promotes serial thinking whereas what's needed is near simultaneous thinking and _that_ requires deep communication (and smart people)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the OP is on to a pretty big theme. Most of our lives we're taught to solve problems, not to find them. The idea of an exam is that you're given a bunch of problems to solve. Most people describing themselves would (or would like to) score themselves highly on the ability to solve problems.

In an environment where everyone is smart and driven (such as SV), being a good problem solver is just not enough. Being good at finding and articulating valuable problems is much harder, and I would bet that more startups/founders fail at this. Part of this is because, most people are never trained, and never think to ask what makes a valuable problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this is why I as an a graphic and web designer don't always enjoy working on the projects of clients. Whenever they ask for a redesign they want me to visualize and build the solution for them. They don't always ask me to look at the problem and then think of the solution.

When I work on my own personal projects I get to do both, which is why the work I do for myself is miles ahead of the work I do for clients.

<comment><USER3> Over the years, I constantly remind my manager, clients, an colleagues to bring me in much sooner than they think they need to. When that happens, the problem definitions are much easier and the resulting solution works. Obvious, when you think about it. The analogy I use is that if we were constructing houses, then my role is both architect and builder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two things.

1) A clip from Moneyball: <http://youtu.be/HiB9L3dG-Aw>

2) I remember from a book about someone marketing in Japan. They were trying to sell a rice cooker that could also cook other foods. They couldn't understand why this convenience wouldn't sell. It seemed to solve a "problem." In many consumer interviews, a passing comment revealed the new problem they had actually created. Housewives feared that the taste of other foods would creep into the rice and ruin it. They stopped selling the cooker.

<comment><USER7> I have one of those rice cookers. It's the single best piece of cooking equipment I've ever owned. It has a Teflon pot, so flavours don't linger. We cook chilli in it, wok-style fried rice dishes, baked fish, breakfast fry ups, and a lot of boiled rice-based dishes. Awesome piece of kit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is also a big problem in health tech: the people that are good at identifying the problems (doctors, public health officials, etc.) don't communicate them but instead focus on convincing others to build their vision of the solution (which tend to be inadequate, or even counterproductive).

Given that the author is the founder of health tech startup (EligibleAPI.com), it's hard not to read this as being implicit in the post :)

</comment><comment><USER9> "A&R" apparently means "artists and repertoire", which is a standard department in a record label (and analogous to a tech company's R&D department).

<comment><USER10> It's more like business development rather than R&D. It's basically about finding new talented recording artists (performers) and publishers/writers who would be a good match for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm worried about the tendency to letting _just_ "nontechnical" people "define the problem", and the general relegation of "technical" people to only build and execute a vision.

Some people have a background that deals mostly in perception and form, while others deals mostly in structure and function. If both balance strategic trade-offs of the product, both are designers. If they only execute plans, they are craftsmans and technicians.

Which one of them is better for "defining" the problem deppends on the problem. Both can learn to have holistic vision, and how to understand where their expertise and skills end.

There _are_ creative and intuitive technical people. They are out there, as many as "artists" that can truly design products.

</comment><comment><USER12> OP, what are your motivations behind this?

Anyways, this is right on the money. Finding the problem is an art in itself. It's only once we find the root problem that we can design the holistic solution, otherwise it's a whole bunch of patched held together by desperation and neediness.

Example: if it turns out poverty is related to global warming and for the past decade we've spend resources trying to rid poverty in isolation, we are all sorts of screwed.

This is exactly the job of a Product Designer.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey namank, no motivation just sharing my thoughts. we're building eligibleapi.com though if you want to check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Client: I want to get from this side of the river to the other side.

Provider: I think this bridge design will fit your needs.</comment>


IBM Sees Broader Role for Watson in Aiding Research - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/27/ibm-sees-broader-role-for-watson-in-aiding-research/

<comment><USER2> I'm reaaaally getting tired of IBM's PR department plastering Watson press releases all over the place in the guise of "news". Especially when "Watson" is more of a brand name, and there's next to no evidence that whatever "it" is is actually better or more cost-effective than off-the-shelf techniques (let alone the frontier of research) at any particular machine learning application.

"Ford sees broader role for Taurus in aiding transportation networks of the future!" Of course they do.

<comment><USER3> Watson may be overhyped, but it isn't a replacement for off the shelf machine learning algorithms. Watson is more like a search engine that takes advantage of _a lot_ of natural language processing. It is for answering questions in natural language and searching through huge amounts of literature automatically.

<comment><USER2> So, like Solr?

I don't mean to be glib; and I do understand that "answering natural language questions" is distinct from "search engine". But I have the feeling that it's a capability distribution that is much more impressive in the context of a full-court IBM sales pitch to an executive who saw it on Jeopardy once and wants to get in on this machine learning thing that everyone's talking about, than as a tool used by experts to do a task or set of tasks better. Their shameless press release marketing isn't exactly dispelling that notion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article is scarce in details but this is a real product with real applications. The software uses NLP and ML techniques to sift through large amount of scientific documents, i.e., patents or publications, and extracts relevant entities, e.g., proteins, drugs, genes and their relationships, e.g., how a protein acts on a gene, and lets the user visualize all this and query it using natural language.

I can give more details if anybody is curious. (Disclaimer: I work for Watson)

<comment><USER5> Is there an API for Watson? Is it possible as a developer to obtain access?

More abstract: Watson, based on this article ([http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson- me...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical- doctor)), can already diagnose cancer better than a human doctor. Will we see more of this functionality rolled out publicly? Or will it be reserved for use by healthcare organizations?

<comment><USER4> Platform 2.0 is coming in October. It will have many new APIs, the docs and code examples will be public, and we will start opening out for beta testing to a much larger set of developers. The goal ultimately is to offer all these capabilities through APIs to anybody.

<comment><USER6> I went through the paperwork pile to apply to round one access of the Watson APIs and discovered the shocking restrictions/requirement that the system apparently "needs" unstructured text, and if your dataset is more structured than unstructured they won't accept you into to the program.

Needless to say I was a bit annoyed, because I was already using fact extraction in the system I wanted to test Watson's query 'skill' on. I'm in no position to store the raw text. That would require over a hundred times more storage, probably closer to a thousand times the storage costs, making it fiscally untenable for me to even build the database let alone a product with it. Any idea if release 2 in October will change this restriction and give people who aren't sitting on GB of unstructured text, like myself, a chance to apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Other companies focused on genes related to extending human life span are Google's Calico [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_\(company\)) and [http://genopharmix.com](http://genopharmix.com) and [http://www.humanlongevity.com/](http://www.humanlongevity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> As awesome as it was watching it play Jeopardy, it feel like that is all it has ever done. So many press releases boast about the areas it could improve, however the real-life tangibles seem disparate at best. It would be great if the PR department touted its actual, real-life, in-the-field results rather than hypotheticals. Next up, Watson considered for role in improving food production!

</comment><comment><USER9> I am very interested in the IBM Watson platform but so far I am still on the waiting list for being considered for early access.

Hint to IBM: at least make all documentation, example code, etc. available for perusal.

<comment><USER4> It will happen on October 7th.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the information. I put October 7 on my calendar as a reminder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a terrible, terrible article. Why is this blog-able information, there is nothing substantial here. Everything is future possibilities and no concrete details.

There have been many people working on similar projects to this in academia and otherwise. "Identifying the proteins that modify p53" is incredibly easy with the database information in Medline and doesn't require a "Watson" to do so. That being said, finding connections within medical literature could be interesting, but only if it is combined with other public databases that describe protein interactions and gene information. This blog post could be much more detailed in this sense.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice Try....

As someone who works in the biological sciences and who has played around with various machine learning algorithms (ann, k-nn) this sounds like an advertising gimmick. I am all for using computers to process and analyze data, but frankly machine learning has not reached a point yet where algorithms can "identify" new hypotheses by sifting through the scientific literature.

<comment><USER12> sorry, but, ... playing with KNN/ANN and claiming insight into ML is like playing with a nerf gun and claiming knowledge of advanced tactics.</comment></comment>


AngelList Tests Charging For Job Posts - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/angellist-tests-charging-for-job-posts-pay-10-of-salary-or-25-equity-after-hiring/

<comment><USER2> The headline is sensationalist but incorrect. There is no cost for posting - only if you land a successful hire, similar to how some others in the space work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like one of the most expensive job posting boards ever? Those are basically recruiter-level fees, is that quality that much higher?

<comment><USER4> Not sure if it is a quality one for posters but for potential candidates it provides one of the best tools.

\- Upfront salary/equity range. No need to spend a month and later hear 'sorry your salary expectation is not in our pay band'

\- No middlemen. You know the company behind the job upfront.

\- A lot of information about the company upfront. I am not sure there are any job sites that provide this much of information.

\- Simple and useful filtering.

To me it has all the best things a potential candidates looks for in a job posting.

I only wish these guys don't go around screw it up with insane fees. Off all the things in agel.co they want to go after jobs?.

<comment><USER5> > _it provides one of the best tools_

> _I only wish these guys don 't go around screw it up with insane fees. Off > all the things in agel.co they want to go after jobs?_

Isn't there a bit of a disconnect there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "amount payable only after a person is found and hired, and refundable if the candidate leaves the job before 90 days"

So how do they follow up with this? What if someone just says the person left the job? Do you have to sign a contract with angellist? And how is equity calculated for private companies?

<comment><USER7> they're angellist. all they do is equity for private companies. though if you mean companies not planning on exiting, they can still get a stake, and maybe get a dividend later?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I saw this weeks ago when I thought about posting there and it scared me off - are they saying I was randomly selected to NOT get it for free? That sucks.

<comment><USER2> Not random, we've just been doing it for new companies joining the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They've been doing this for a while. I remember seeing this when I tried to post a job back in December.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, not to be blunt, but someone there was high when they came up with those prices. Full-service recruiters charge that much - AngelList is a job board. The value prop is completely missing too, there's just a modal of "oh, btw, pay us a recruiter's fee". This would send me running the other direction from posting jobs there.

<comment><USER2> It's about 1/3rd of what technical recruiters charge. And again, it's only on successful hires. And if you can't afford it, you can give equity. And it's an honor system. And it's a test. And other folks in the space, like DeveloperAuction, charge more (Google around). But you can't please everyone :-)</comment></comment>


Ticketing - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2014/11/ticketing/

<comment><USER2> I have a partial season ticket package with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs use a system called FlashSeats, which is conveniently owned by the Cavs' majority owner, Dan Gilbert. All of my tickets get automatically added to Flash Seats and I can sell or transfer my tickets on the Flash Seats marketplace or buy additional seats on it. When selling my seats, I set a "buy it now"-type price where people can instantly buy them or people can "bid" on seats and I can either accept or reject those bids. If the seats get sold, the transfer is done automatically.

At the gate, I use the Flash Seats app on my phone as my ticket. You can also hook up your account to your driver's licence or credit card and use that as verification at the gate.

The good deal for the Cavs is that they own their secondary ticket market and can profit from the fees charged by Flash Seats. For ticket buyers, it's so- so. I can't sell my tickets on eBay or StubHub, but people generally understand that if you want to buy Cavs tickets, you have to buy them on FlashSeats (the entire season is essentially sold out), so there is plenty of action in the marketplace.

My biggest gripes with FlashSeats arethat that iPhone app is pretty terrible for selling tickets and that the website app is horribly dated and the UI for buying tickets sucks, which probably reduces my ability to sell tickets by some amount. Stubhub has a better UI by leaps and bounds. FlashSeats reminds me of what web apps looked like in 2003 or so and there is no "arena view" or easy way to tell within the app where the seats are actually located. Since the Cavs' arena, Quicken Loans Arena, has an excellent seat viewer on their website, I can't believe the two aren't integrated in to make the buying experience better.

As a total aside and anecdote, I used to buy and sell concert tickets, mostly summer Jimmy Buffett concerts, when I was in college is the early 2000's. I would buy on Ticketmaster and sell on eBay. Back then, I could get really strong average margins on my ticket resales. In my casual observations, it seems like better ticket marketplaces like StubHub have reduced the premium you used to be able to get flipping tickets.

<comment><USER3> Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't the Cavs threatened to revoke your tickets if they catch you selling on a different site?

Also, hello fellow Clevelander :)

<comment><USER2> I haven't tried selling elsewhere but I've heard of people doing it. The last time I tried selling Cavs tickets somewhere else was when you could still get them as paper tickets from Ticketmaster.

Since transfers on FlashSeats are free, you could sell them somewhere else and just do the exchange on FlashSeats. I'd imagine you're right in the Cavs taking issue with doing that. Teams are running their own secondary markets to capture the extra revenue that was going to places like StubHub. I will say that having an official secondary market is nice, I just think the FlashSeats experience is lacking.

Glad to see another Northeast Ohioan on here!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of "great" stuff in this post.

1) Problem only rich people have (sharing Nets season tickets)

2) Talking his own book (slavish praise of the Coinbase mobile app; Coinbase is a portfolio company)

3) Mentioning irrelevant Bitcoin features (tracking ownership of the tickets is the least difficult problem he presented and could be done trivially on a centralized server rather than using computationally inefficient colored-coin techniques)

</comment><comment><USER5> My takeaway from this and about 1/2 of AVC's recent posts is that he is long Bitcoin to the gills and wishes everyone else saw value in Bitcoin like he does.

FWIW, I like cryptocurrencies and believe in their utility, but I don't like Bitcoin. There's just too much mystery around its genesis. Will the real Satoshi please stand up?

<comment><USER6> What does Bitcoin's genesis have to do with its value, usability, or why you dislike it?

<comment><USER5> In short, it hurts the product's transparency. Users don't really understand who gains and loses by its adoption. Gold bugs hoard gold because they don't trust the government. Maybe I'd be a dollar bug and hoard dollars because I don't trust Satoshi (or trust him less than the Fed). But I can't even figure out if I don't trust Satoshi or not because nobody knows who he is and what his/her/their long/short term intentions with the alleged $100M bitcoins Satoshi controls.

<comment><USER7> You're not trusting Satoshi, you're trusting the blockchain. Everything is open source. Satoshi is no longer associated with Bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> Well, that's just it. I trust the blockchain (and other open source methods _), but not Satoshi. i.e. when it becomes easier to use cryptocurrencies, I 'll use dogecoin, litecoin, or something else.

However, right now, they just seem too hard to use. And solutions that are easy to use, like non-bank banks such as Mt Gox, well you know how that turned out.

_and I used to trust bash and openssl</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Recruiters still believe in cold emails - <AUTHOR> I'm a SWE in the bay area with 8-10y of exp. I get about 1 to 3 cold emails a week from recruiters about positions. I'm talking about basic emails. Here is the most recent one:<p>"I work at a tech startup called XYZ we're a NN person team and we recently launched into the SF Bay area. We work with some of the best SF tech companies from early stage to IPO, such as AA, BB, CC, DD, and EE. Our mission is to discover the best talent bla bla bla blabla... Would you have a few minutes to chat sometime today or tomorrow?"<p>First of all, how do recruiters get my private email address? I don't share it, only with a few close people or my current employer (as well as the ex-employers I guess). Second of all, why in 2016 recruiters don't make any effort in trying to get attention from people who already have high profiles, great jobs and no reason to look for a change? Just curious... there's absolutely zero innovation in that space. <comment><USER2> LinkedIn sells it to them if your on that site, thats what they charge $5k a year for on the pro version.

Also when you submit your resume to a recruiting firm, they keep it on file. When the firm gets new recruiters, they gain access to your email. When they leave the firm, they take emails with them.

Emails are still one of the best forms of engagement. SMS text messages are another.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm on linkedin but I used a different email address for that. I might have sent out a few resumes about 5 years ago... I believe emails are one of the best form of contact, not engagement.</comment></comment>


It may be beside the point but Psychographic Targeting is useless Pseudoscience - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/ <comment><USER2> It seems that the real test of whether or not it's useless pseudoscience is in the empirical evidence, not the narcissistic ramblings of a out-of-touch former stockbroker. Kosinski and Stillwell managed to make a number of predictions out of the models; it's a step from there to political ad targeting. There might be more effective methods of political ad targeting-- maybe some steps could be skipped--but that seems to be an empirical question more than anything.

It's all bits of information in the end and how you use them. There's nothing "metaphysical" about them.

As for companies making overhyped empty promises? Not unique to political science.

I'm tired of this kind of imperious bigotry from overpriviledged silicon- valley types. It helps no one.

There's an important question about whether or not this stuff worked, but here we are, with Trump as the president when all the models predicted Clinton would win. That's not exactly an experiment I want to try again.</comment>


Hall effect krypton plasma thruster passed tests - <AUTHOR> http://www.naukawpolsce.pap.pl/en/news/news,398704,polish-plasma-thruster-prototype-for-space-probes-already-operational.html Previous article about the engine (from 2011) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111006084023.htm.
Video from the tests: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP48Eb4lr54
Surpsisingly engine worked at the first try in simulated space conditions :)
Engine has mass of 4kg, and length of 12 cm. It' meant for adjusting orbit and manouvering in space of probes with mass around 100 kg.
It uses krypton (33$ per 100g) instead of Xenon (120$ per 100g) as propellant so should be much cheaper, while it's simillary efficient as other thrusters. <comment><AUTHOR> Previous article about the engine (from 2011) [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111006084023.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111006084023.htm).

Video from the tests: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP48Eb4lr54](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP48Eb4lr54)

Surpsisingly engine worked at the first try in simulated space conditions :)

Engine has mass of 4kg, and length of 12 cm. It' meant for adjusting orbit and manouvering in space of probes with mass around 100 kg.

It uses krypton (33$ per 100g) instead of xenon (120$ per 100g) as a propellant, so it should be much cheaper, while it's simillary efficient as other hall effect plasma thrusters.</comment>


Hubble Captures Birth of a Star - <AUTHOR> http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/38/

<comment><USER2> Here's everything: <http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/index/0/></comment>