Text Processing API / Service - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am looking for a Service / API that can process text and give me important keywords from it.
I have looked at Alchemy and Yahoo's API.
Are there any such other APIs / Services.
Thanks :) <comment><USER2> I discovered Repustate.com here on HN and played with it some time ago. Although I believe it only works by giving it a URL and it extracts various types of semantic data from it.

<http://www.repustate.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Open Calais (try <http://viewer.opencalais.com/> for demo)

Evri (<http://www.evri.com>)

Also see <http://faganm.com/blog/2010/01/02/1009/> for a nice comparison of services.

What are you working on? (I'm familiar with other stuff in this space)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

I am working on an intelligent feed reader which keeps track of what kind of articles you like and show articles which are of your interest.

To learn user's interest, he has to like/dislike an article.

<comment><USER4> I've long considered using bayesian classification to mark feeds for like/dislike so the system can learn what I like, but from what I hear, the amount of text in the feed may not be sufficient to classify properly. I have previously looked at <http://uclassify.com> that provides such a web-service that classifies text based on various criteria. I also remember signing up for an actual rss reader web-service that planned to use bayesian classification to learn your likings a couple of years, but they never released -- I don't recall the site name right now.</comment></comment></comment>


what's the best scalable language? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Define "scalable".

Trivially, Erlang; because the language and implementation, including Mnesia, go together.

However, you might find its performance characteristics don't suit your problem domain: it's not fast compared to C:

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all⟨=hipe&lang2;=gcc](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=hipe&lang2=gcc)

Also you are forced to message-pass, which adds overhead of a processor talking to itself; for some applications you want shared memory and parallel computing rather than message-passing and concurrent computing.

You also might find that its behavior running on multiple nodes isn't optimal, because it's a generic solution; you might do better with a specific solution with a truncated feature set, written in a language with a faster runtime (SBCL; C++; Haskell; etc.). You might also want guarantees of order, execution time, or determinacy -- something else it doesn't give you.

Furthermore, you might find that it's not scalable on the programmer-end; more people may have experience with Python, Ruby, or Lisp. Or it may lack libraries you want, and thus not "scale" to cover certain types of applications, given the constraint of human developer time.

So the answer is, "it depends".

</comment><comment><USER3> Best language that scales? Or language that best scales?</comment>


An illustrated guide to our collapsing Antarctic glaciers - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/209528/an-illustrated-guide-to-our-collapsing-antarctic-glaciers/ <comment><USER2> If you haven't seen it, the following video is amazing. The glacier that's falling apart is about the size of Manhattan.

"CHASING ICE captures largest glacier calving ever filmed"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU)</comment>


Players to sue for hundreds of millions over use of their statistics - <AUTHOR> https://theathletic.com/1949883/2020/07/27/ornstein-hundreds-players-lawsuit-southampton-leeds-wolves-premier-league/ <comment><AUTHOR> 400 football players in the UK are suing the gaming, betting/gambling and data processing companies for lost income.

The article is pretty well sourced, but this is breaking news, so expect confirmation soon. If it is against HN rules, please delete.</comment>


$1,000 bounty for open drivers for the new xbox kinect camera - <AUTHOR> http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the-ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/

<comment><USER2> Bounty is now $2000.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone Building Next Gen IDEs? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking around, and one of my interests is the human-code interface. Is anyone building the next generation of IDEs - integrating AI for code generation, visual UIs for an overview of structure, etc? <comment><USER2> I will soon start working on a IDE / developer tool for a niche industry. I am actively looking for desktop gui frameworks to build performant desktop apps. There will be lot of trees and mind-map style diagrams with traced signals. So, I have currently ruled out Electron and looking at building a native tool as cross platform is not a priority.

I recently came across this excellent article comparing GUI frameworks [1]. It is definitely worth a read for anyone looking at building a serious desktop app.

I have put my particular requirement in a longer format here if anyone is curious and has some suggestions [2].

[1]: [http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui- trai...](http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui- trainwreck-2016-edition/) [2]: [https://pastebin.com/8SUpcgWJ](https://pastebin.com/8SUpcgWJ)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working on an open source programming assistant[1]. We use ML to power two way code generation so you can use the tool throughout the lifetime of a project. Since it can read code as well as generate it there are a lot of cool things you can do like transforming one kind of code into another and keeping your backend/frontend in sync automatically.

We're part of the YC S18 batch. Happy to show you more

[1]: [https://useoptic.com](https://useoptic.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is something I'm also interested in, and have been thinking/working on collecting data for training AI for various features, like removing the need to lift your hands from the keyboard with "Type where you look" eye-tracking. And improving syntax, code clarity, comment improvement highlighting with code review data.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wondered if you had a voice enabled VR what kind of design environment could be created.

I thought about what it would be like to say red ball and red ball appears then "bigger" or "3 feet wide" and it gets bigger.

"Iphone screen"</comment>


Malcolm Gladwell: Who says big ideas are rare? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

<comment><USER3> My key take away from this article is that, for the most part, good ideas are a commodity and _great_ ideas are rarely uniquely arrived at. This is one of the reasons VCs will never sign NDAs, because if they haven't already seen the same idea you're pitching from someone else, they most likely will soon. Just about every source I've read says that success is rarely the idea and most often the people behind it. Ideas are a commodity.

It's a lot like playing billiards. Given the same set of circumstances on a table and a number of players pondering the same problem, _"where should I hit the cue ball?"_ , it is very likely that two players come to derive the same idea. Whether or not the player can make the shot, that's a matter of talent, practice, and a little bit of luck. Until you've reached a certain level it's your ability to make the shots you dream up, not your ability to dream up shots, that will determine whether you win or lose.

<comment><USER4> "where should I hit the cue ball?"

Immediate entry into my book of useful analogies! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Was anyone else slightly perturbed by this article? The existence of well- funded and -connected companies like Intellectual Ventures, and their obvious influence over the authors such as Mr. Gladwell that serve to glorify them to the reading public, is rather frightening to me. As far as I can tell, they do not make a single product, nor do they provide a single service. Instead, they charge others for the right to use "their" ideas.

It sends a bit of a chill down my spine -- I'm trying to imagine what my copy of Kleppner & Ramsey's 'Quick Calculus' (about a $20 book) would have cost if Newton had 'patented' Calculus, and if his (hypothetical, avaricious) descendants and their attorneys had insisted on their 'right' to a cut of the profits.

<comment><USER6> Remember that, unlike modern copyright and all trademarks, patents still expire. You get 17 to 20 years. If Newton had patented calculus... the patent would have expired centuries ago.

So let's try an alternative view of Intellectual Ventures: They perform the valuable service of donating piles and piles of inventions to the world's stock of prior art. Each donation takes twenty years to mature, of course, but after that it's available to be developed into a product without any patent worries, because the patent will have already been filed and allowed to expire. If one of their ideas looks particularly great and you don't want to have to wait twenty years, you can get an early start just by paying them a royalty.

This, of course, is _the original purpose and spirit_ of the patent laws. And, though patents are broken in various ways right now, that purpose is still alive -- especially relative to the terrible situation with copyright law, which is nigh-100% broken thanks to the Disney Corporation and its pet lawmakers.

<comment><USER7> There are two common ways to justify patents:

1\. They help the public by encouraging inventors to publicly document their inventions

2\. They protect and encourage inventors by giving them control over intellectual property

You've taken Position 1, which I find to be a very weak argument in favor of patents.

The world owes a great debt to Einstein and Godel, for relativity and incompleteness, but it is widely recognized that without them the same results would still have been achieved only a few years later. That's the way science works. It progresses along a linear track, and the best minds are only a few years, and more often a few months, ahead of the pack. The literature is rife with examples, but here are a few more good ones to chew on: Newton-Leibniz, Cook-Levin, Knuth–Morris–Pratt, Williamson-Diffie-Hellman, and Cocks-Rivest- Shamir-Adleman.

Though Williamson and Cocks are special cases because of the secrecy granted to government institutions, the point is clear: it is almost certain _someone else_ would've arrived at the same ideas around the same time. Ideas are precipitated by conditions. These citations make this explicit with conflicting dates. You usually don't get this type of evidence because you usually don't get to publish the same idea twice.

For Position 1 to make any sense, it would have to take me longer than 20 years to reverse engineer your idea. Most patentable ideas could be reverse engineered in a day, and more to the point, most patentable 'flashes of genius' are repeated by other people in a vacuum, that is, without any knowledge of the original. Conditions are such that nowadays most people have the same idea within weeks of each other.

With an environment like that, patents are not working to bring new ideas to the public. The public is already having these ideas. What the patent is doing is preventing competitors from entering the market, when competition is almost universally good for the public. You can make the argument that the patent serves the interest of the patenter, and that would be true, but any argument that makes the claim that patents support the public---except in the circuitous way that they help inventors---is specious at best.

I know a lot of people who've dealt with the patent system (software). I'm in the process of filing two myself. I don't know anyone who looks at the patent database as a 'treasure trove' of ideas they can put to use. Most people think of it as a 'minefield' of ideas that are already taken. The patent database is boring, and all of its contents are written specifically to hold up in court battles, not to explain ideas to people who might put them to use. That's a pretty good empirical argument that the patent system is not working according to the guidelines in Position 1.

You take a very sympathetic view of Intellectual Ventures, but to me they don't look like a particularly benevolent company. If they're so intent on licensing new inventions to the public, why isn't there any link to their inventions on their website? Why aren't they pushing a product? There isn't even a basic search link to the USPTO that fills in their name in the assignee field.

The fact that this company raised "hundreds of millions of dollars" indicates to me that a lot of very intelligent people view this as a very profitable field. It is worth keeping in mind that Intellectual Ventures, as a company, aims to produce no product. They only seek to amass a portfolio of rights granted by the US Government to seek injunctions against others using ideas to which they've laid claim.

Now I suppose it is possible that Intellectual Ventures could come up with useful inventions and license them to the public at a fair price, but that is not the impression I get in their case. It seems to me that, their contributions to national defense notwithstanding, they've created a humongous patent troll, and that they intend to front-run intellectual development in this country. They only have to pay a stable of experts to stay a few months ahead of the state of the art, and they don't have to pay a dime for product development. Whether or not they turn into a patent troll, this is in fact what they are incentivized by the market to do. Companies with unregulated, government-granted monopolies rarely charge fair rates for their services.

Public understanding will almost certainly be advanced short-term by Intellectual Ventures, but the question is whether they are deserving of this money, producing no product themselves, and whether they won't harm us in the long run by stymieing the progress of someone who might. Remember, without the protections of patent law, this company wouldn't exist. My concern is not with the people who start a company like Intellectual Ventures, but with the patent laws that make it so enticing for a company like Intellectual Ventures to behave in a counterproductive way.

<comment><USER8> "The world owes a great debt to Einstein and Godel, for relativity and incompleteness, but it is widely recognized that without them the same results would still have been achieved only a few years later. "

This is hardly widely recognized.

<comment><USER9> 1.The mathematics that sort of fell into and formed the structure of Einsteins work was about 50 years old when he used them. I am talking about the attempt to prove Euclids 5th axiom using the first 4 and the subsequent evolution of hyperbolic geometry.

2.Godel was working on the problem that was proposed by Hilbert (Google for Hilbert's List Of Problems). At the time when Godel was working on it, it was actively pursued by prominent math dudes of the era;

One connection that I find in both these cases is this: They were both trying to prove something is not possible. And whenever that happened in Science - <USER2> usually causes a huge splash. Another example is Group Theory: fell out of the proof for the fact that a 5th degree equation cannot be solved using algebra.

<comment><USER10> Actually, I believe group theory emerged very gradually from many simultaneous developments. Other sources: permutations, symmetries of crystals and linear transformations, quaternions and matrices (though theory of equations was indeed the main driver). I believe it wasn't until after a bunch of these had reached a high level of development (around 1880) that the abstract group concept began attracting attention as a field of research, because then people could see its use for unifying all those others. Abel's proof for 5th-degree polynomials came out in 1824, and Galois' general proof was published in 1846, so this was slow going, even by nineteenth-century standards.

BTW, I thought I read that Gödel worked pretty much as a lone wolf on his stuff, as most mathematicians weren't into it. And the trend has continued: foundations of mathematics has gotten research attention from surprisingly few people. I'm not 100% sure of this, though.

But anyway, yeah, proving that something can't be done is definitely a big deal. Interesting observation. I will percolate on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article suggests that geniuses may just be more efficient discoverers than the "average" researcher. The example is that Kelvin had 32 multiple discoveries, so the implication is that Kelvin is equal to the sum of those 32 people.

Maybe there's something to this. But I have to wonder if certain discoveries really do require a genius, and not just someone who is good. That is, is a genius more than just the sum of his lessers?

What pops into mind is special and general relativity. In Bill Bryson's _A Short History of Nearly Everything_ , a physicist says that special relativity was an idea whose time had come. If Einstein hadn't discovered and published it, someone else would have. But he followed that up with if Einstein hadn't come up with general relativity, we'd still be waiting for it.

Going back to Newton, calculus was a multiple, but as far as I know, his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation are not.

</comment><comment><USER12> The article sounds doubtful: the smart guys gathered and invented something, but, as I understand (having jumped paragraphs to save time), they only patented their ideas, neither evaluating, nor testing any of them. This may lead to making a set of useless patents that nobody will ever try to use.

Imagine that instead of YC there were a "think tank", a gathering of people who would invent websites or startups and then just document the ideas. This can be much more entertaining and may seem a deeper thought than advising on and evaluating the "materialized" projects. But how many projects, that sound nice, will ever be done, and how successful can they be?

<comment><USER10> I would love to read what such a think tank comes up with. Right now my brain is fried for coming up with business ideas, but groovin' on doing implementation work. If I knew of a small web-site idea that had a really good shot at making money by subscription, I would blast it out immediately. Then my rent would be paid for when I go to grad school this Fall. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not the big ideas that are rare - it's the execution/implementation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Intellectual Ventures sounds like dinner in grad school

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised that we are able to get articles that are future dated.

It's not even May 12th yet but I get to read the articles now - now that's a discovery!

<comment><USER16> You must not read magazines (the dead-tree type) much.

<comment><USER15> I used to but I've moved on to the wonderful world of the internet.

At least I never bothered with TV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well well worth the read, thank you.</comment>


Ask HN: What's are the terms of your company's patent incentive program? - <AUTHOR>

Does your company have a patent incentive program? Generally, what are the terms?  What size is your company? How much effort does the inventor spend in crafting the application? <comment><USER2> We don't have one, but in previous companies (2, to be exact) the terms have effectively been: a pittance reward ($1000-$5000) plus an unlimited obligation to defend the patent in the future, long after one has left the company.

That latter part actually came up for me once; I was offered compensation for significant time spent providing expert support for a patent cross-licensing dispute, long after I'd left the company, but it was at a fiat rate far below my actual market value at the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Was the rate agreed upon on the front-end, in the invention assignment agreement or later? I haven't seen that term before, but if they had to pay for your time at a decent rate, I'd be okay with it. However, it sounds like the rate wasn't enough to make it worthwhile.

<comment><USER2> Generally, patent program or not, employees at companies with real employment contracts (ie, any BigCo) don't really have the power to hold their employers hostage for terms for patent assignment, so this is a distinction without a difference for me. But, "before assignment" is the answer.

You should not be OK with being legally obligated to do work for your former employers on their schedule.</comment></comment></comment>


Trestle - now with Windows Phone 7 and ASP.NET clients - <AUTHOR> https://www.trestleapp.com/blog/wp7-and-now-asp-net

<comment><AUTHOR> I know WP7 and ASP.NET don't get the love on Hacker News that other languages get, but we're supporting both on Trestle now. If you're a WP7/ASP.NET dev we'd love to get your feedback. Thanks!</comment>


A Do-It-Yourself paper digital computer (1959) - <AUTHOR> https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/11/a-do-it-yourself-paper-digital-computer-1959.html <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the Digicomp 1!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi- Comp_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I)

</comment><comment><USER3> If I had found one of those when I was a kid I would have been in heaven.

What I did have was a CARDIAC [0] computer. I found it when I was 10 (this would have been in the early 1970s) and it turned me on to programming. I still have it, although some memory cells are burned out (too many erasures) and I tried building larger, more complicated variants with extended instruction sets.

[0] [https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/museum/cardiac.html](https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/museum/cardiac.html)

<comment><USER4> I also had a CARDIAC, but on top of that I had a series of computers starting with KIM-1 (6502) and SDK-85 (8085, which was Intel's answer to the Z80 at the time). Fun times, and I think we've lost something since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me a lot of the marble calculator [0], though with far more moving (and fragile) parts.

[0] [https://lapinozz.github.io/learning/2016/11/19/calculator- wi...](https://lapinozz.github.io/learning/2016/11/19/calculator-with- caordboard-and-marbles.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> This kind of computer might be just what we need for a Venus rover

[https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6933](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6933)

<comment><USER7> Electronics are still more likely I think.

Some sources claim [1] that even in the 1980s the Venera program had developed circuits capable of working outside of the probe's pressure hull, at Venus temperatures. I don't remember ever seeing any details on that. If I would have to guess, it was vacuum tube technology.

For future probes, silicon-carbide semiconductors seem promising. Some proof- of-concept electronic instruments working at 500 C have been published in recent times [2].

[1] [http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venera11.htm](http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venera11.htm)

[2] [https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012LPI....43.1259H/abstra...](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012LPI....43.1259H/abstract)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> looks like the octave key mechanism on a woodwind.

</comment><comment><USER9> wow!</comment>


Are You a Good Programmer? - <AUTHOR> http://techiferous.com/2011/08/are-you-a-good-programmer

<comment><USER2> Oh yeah, I'm The Conqueror. And I'm not saying that as a gloat, either. I recognize my issues and deal with them. Keeping the code un-complex and working on front end stuff is my bane.

I once killed an open source game because the other devs couldn't understand how I'd implemented actions. They all quit. Even after I offered to remove my changes and we could do it another way. -sigh- (I still think it was the best way, though. lol)

I've met The Philosopher, too. If you meet a good one, make him be your mentor. It'll stroke his ego and up your game considerably!

</comment><comment><USER3> Entertaining characterisation if nothing else, but also quite accurate at describing some known stereotypes as well! I suppose I am mostly The Inventor, with a bit of Problem Solver thrown in.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting ... I think I've got a mix of these "personalities". I was more of a Philosopher when I was doing embedded programming since there's a huge and real cost involved if you ship 100,000 units with the wrong code (this was before you could reflash every little toy you bought).

Now I'm more of a conqueror ... there's often no cost to having a bug on a web application, so get the code out the door and deal with the bugs that are found later. You can still keep the code reasonably clean!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a Problem Solver, but have some traits of an Inventor. I believe in being pragmatic, but also realize if you make the process dry + boring, it's not a good recipe for productivity, which is essential in solving problems. People say you should use the language you know best in creating a startup, but if it bores you to hell, you're better off using a new one</comment>


Sears stock plummets nearly 15% as it struggles to stay in business - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/sears-flags-going-concern-doubts.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is something very personal to me, as one of my first jobs was selling computers in the electronics department at a local Sears in my town's shopping mall. I remember seeing the egg shaped color iMac selling off the shelves and thought to myself, boy Apple is really getting popular. I an now a longtime $AAPL shareholder.

I don't think everybody realizes how big and important Sears is to the American retail story. They are a 123 year old company (founded in 1893, in Chicago). They pioneered the concept of magazine orders, and many people will recall buying holiday gifts from Sears magazines.

Let's hope they can get it together, but Edward Lampert has shown no such indication. He's run the company into the ground only fattening his own pockets and his hedge fund.</comment>


All Righthaven lawsuits put on hold by Federal Judge - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/judge-halts-every-righthaven-case-in-colorado.ars

<comment><USER2> halts all _Colorado_ cases...</comment>


Amateur Photographer Shoots 37,000 Photo Panorama of the Night Sky - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/sky-panorama/

<comment><USER2> A magnificent starscape from the point of view of our pale blue dot.

Ironically you may be inclined to look at the brightest, colorful part of the galaxy but be sure to take a look at the overwhelming number of stars that pop up by zooming in the darkest areas by a few notches. Breathtaking.

Best experienced fullscreen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Openzoom version works better for me: <http://media.skysurvey.org/openzoom.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> i just love the fact that with all the really expensive (so i believe) hardware and software he used, this really stood out to me:

"GIMP: final assembly, curve & saturation tweaks" (from his website skysurvey.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> I was curious what software would be powerful and flexible enough to stitch together 37,000 photos. Clearly GIMP is the choice for that job.

<comment><USER5> Mosaics that include far more photos are made all the time using spacecraft data. One of the software packages of choice is ISIS: <http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's amazing. I would love to know what is in the center of is in the center of our galaxy?!

<comment><USER7> Current theories hold that there's a supermassive black hole at the center, surrounded by a very high density of massive, old stars.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how long the hardware took to render/stich it all together? Amazing shot</comment>


When Steve Jobs' ex-girlfriend asked him to pay $25M - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/08/06/steve-jobs-apple-girlfriend/

<comment> at-fates-hands Weird article.

I can't determine if she was just after his money, or genuinely thought having money would solve all of her problems.

The one issue I do have is with Jobs basically ignoring his daughter for most of her life, which isn't cool. Maybe because he'd have to deal with her mother and was just easier to ignore them both?

Again, this article brings up a lot more questions about the mother than Jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> The way she figured out what he "owes" her says a lot about her. She must have been thinking about his money constantly. Also as mentioned he provided them with house and basic financial support, but she lost it. I would be very careful about dealing with person like that worrying that the $25 million would be just a beginning.

Also $25 million for a good life? That's the amount needed for very rich life. Artist that cannot sustain herself, looses everything and lives with friends writing letters for few years asking for money from her ex. Sounds great.</comment></comment>


Show HN: 1-hour Interview with DHH from Basecamp about Marketing BS (MP3) - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/z4o9t3lplt855dg/E001%20-%20DHH%20-%20The%20Language%20of%20Bullshit.mp3?dl=0 <comment><USER2> Well, I don't usually listen to podcasts, but I'm really glad I took some time to listen to yours.

As everything else, a lot of this common marketing BS are very seductive when you're in need. They're usually advertised as a way to get higher sign-up and conversion rates and, when you fear that you might be going out of business, an exit popup with an autoplaying video doesn't even look as bad as it really is.

I'm looking forward to listening to your next episodes. ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! I'm only seeing this now. RESIST THE TEMPTATION :)

We're live as off today btw: everyonehatesmarketers.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am going to wait for this to come out on the Everyone Hates Marketers podcast. My phone will not let me download it correctly. I use the Pocket Casts app when its official and this solves the issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, that makes sense. Here's my email if you want to get notified: firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


Parsing: A Timeline - <AUTHOR> https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/timeline_v3 <comment><USER2> Great resource with references. Amazing work. A must read for anyone starting a PhD in related topics.</comment>


KTF – Kernel Test Framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/awslabs/ktf <comment><AUTHOR> It is a simple kernel test framework, that can be used for hardware testing (e.g. CPU), hypervisor testing or security research.

Quoting Deepak Gupta: "Quickly want to write a test to check hardware behavior, want to control all aspects of CPU to make bug trigger easily and don't want to deal with Linux/windows and their kernel modules, please do check out kernel test framework."</comment>


Why is the FB leak getting more attention and momentum that the Equifax hack? - <AUTHOR> FB should definitely be held to the fire, but it frustrates me that there is more momentum to regulate FB and prevent a similar situation than what happened with Equifax.
The latter has more implication on damaging a person's prospects of living productively in society (think about all the stuff your credit score impacts) than the Facebook data leak.
At least FB is voluntary - you can't opt out of social security numbers. <comment><USER2> Because normal people don't understand or care about what equifax is or does or has. They "know" what a credit score is insofar as it's a number that lenders care about. That's about it.

People are mad about facebook because it's an actual part of their daily lives and they "know what it is". I put that in quotes because it seems people are just now figuring out what facebook _actually_ is, in terms of funneling man- cattle into advertisement pens.

Imagine if your company had some obscure HSA type benefit that you didn't really understand, and you could have made $2k in tax gains and didn't, and now the window's closed. Bummer, but i mean... whatever. It's all confusing accountant jargon anyway.

Now imagine that your company would expense $2k in meals as long as you filed for reimbursement within 72 hours, and you missed out on $2k of free lunch. You'd be mad as hell!

Same money. Different levels of personal "realness" based on comfort with the underlying concept.

<comment><USER3> > _normal people don 't understand or care about what equifax is or does or > has_

People also discount hypothetical harm versus tangible harm. We haven't yet seen a massive fraud carried out with Equifax's data. We _have_ seen malfeasance resulting from Facebook's negligence.

There is also an international component to Facebook which does not exist with Equifax.

<comment><USER4> I'd trade "Cambridge Analytica knows I like Saosin" for "hackers know my social security number" any day.

<comment><USER5> You're not alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Because Equifax was a hack, Facebook's situation was WAI.

Your bank putting a bad lock on the safe is different from the bank creating a back door where others get a red carpet to the safe.

<comment><USER7> What is WAI? I searched for "WAI" by itself and with "Facebook" and got nothing useful. You're the only person using this acronym and no one else seems to be responding to it; do you mind clarifying it?

<comment><USER8> This happens a lot on HN. Personally I don't mind it, but it is problematic for discussion.

I enjoy the puzzle of guessing acronyms based on context. Apparently it's part of my MBTI personality type... and I think I got this one right as "working as intended," but I only have the context in this case because I share the OP's opinion on the matter at hand.

That illustrates the problem that using unidentifiable acronyms limits discussion by constraining your audience to those who already agree with you or share your expertise.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting that you realize they are problematic for discussion, yet continue on to use the acronym "MBTI".

<comment><USER8> I don't know what it stands for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 The Equifax breach affected data about people that was collected as part of practices that tie to big finance, whose behavior feels hopelessly disconnected from the everyday lives of individuals. It's the System, it's always been the System, and will probably always be the System, made sure of by lobbyists, inertia, and lack of good answers that are equally palatable to everyone on how to do it any other way.

For common people, there's a sense of helplessness, and for politicians there's a sense of inconvenient consequences for having punted the topic of national identity to the States and the private sector -- and too many barriers to achieving realistic progress on doing it any other way.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is about data that was once relinquished by users voluntarily for a different purpose, or collected by Facebook as part of its normal operating practice, that found its way through multiple hands in unsavory backroom deals, and ultimately ended up with a radical actor who ostensibly used it to help a widely-derided candidate eke out a narrow and unexpected victory in the US presidency.

It's an issue that emotionally tugs at all sorts of people for all sorts of different reasons: multiple breaches of trust, a corporation's business model laid bare to everyone who's been unaware, the complete lack of accountability to the chain of custody of people's data, the unsavoriness (depending on the viewer) of some of the characters involved -- it's a story everyone can get upset about. More critically, it's a story that annoys politicians too, and unlike with Equifax, they are actually equipped and willing to take action on it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the primary difference is that Equifax is more of an isolated incident while the Facebook leak is part of a bigger story. That bigger story is about what happened during the 2016 US presidential election, the Brexit referendum, and other recent elections. That story seems to have revealed a fundamental flaw with how democracies function in the digital age. Understanding and fixing that flaw is one of the most important things we can do as a society because our governments have a hand in every part of our lives. That goes much further beyond the hours and money that victims of the Equifax hack will undoubtedly lose.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _Why is the FB leak getting more attention and momentum that the Equifax > hack?_

Mainly because the news and other mass media feed on _recency_. Equifax is yesterday's news.

Also, Facebook is actually a concept in people's lives, whereas Equifax is just a kind of hidden parasite that large numbers of people are affected by, but do not interact with directly.

</comment><comment><USER12> I suspect there are 2 main causes:

1) People perceive that FB might have helped Donald Trump get elected President of the United States.

2) The traditional media companies see Facebook as their rival and hate how Facebook can control access to a significant percentage of the population. Therefore, it is in their interest to amplify anything that has the potential to harm Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER13> totally agreed with this. we had data leaks that involved our credit card, bank account, SSN, etc. but media & gov is tripping over fb leaking our likes and friendship connection? what crazy world are we living in? this seems more like a publicity stunt than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER14> Part of it (I suspect) is that while Equifax's issues were egregious and woefully under-responded to, it still is essentially one thing...your FICO score and the info that feeds it, that was the main loss/breach.

To a lot of casual consumers, that still feels fairly attenuated from daily life.

FB on the other hand, is something people willfully interact with and hold 'private' conversations on and divulge personal data across a spectrum of areas. It feels more visceral and violating.

<comment><USER15> Yup, the Equifax breach affects "just money".

Facebook being evil impacts who you are as a person, what you will do, what you have done, etc.

<comment><USER16> I can uninstall Facebook and opt out of it. I can't uninstall Equifax. My identity was stolen. It's more than "just money". It's something I will have to deal with for the rest of my life. Always looking for my shoulder.

Facebook is insignificant by comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Facebook leak gives an opportunity to the media apparatus controlled by Dems to promote the idea that there's a link between Russia and the electoral result in the last US elections. I have not read an article about the FB without direct or indirect insinuations that _it changed the US elections_ yet.

The underline narrative is that everyone who voted _the wrong_ candidate was _ill-informed_ or _tricked_ on purpose, while everyone who voted for the _right candidate_ is educated and well informed. I'm in mid-30s but in the world of politics, I never saw such a ferocious reaction form a losing party in a western democracy. Politically speaking, we live in _very_ interesting times I believe.

However, anything that improves awareness about privacy issues is to be welcomed IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER18> My take on this is, financial industries are old money firms. They have got their hooks in proper into the system. They can control the damage that can be caused by Congress. Tech industry is new money. They will first have to replace the old money guys to get the same respect.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a US citizen so don't know much about Equifax, but from what I have read about both issues (mainly through HN about Equifax) a main difference between the two cases is that companies like Facebook are way more visible and advertise that they have good will (they want to change the world, make it a better place, connect people, etc..), whereas sth. like Equifax operates in the background and does not try at all to convince you that they are a willingly benevolent actor. So Equifax was just another fuck-up, but at a bigger scale, whereas with Facebook it's more of a fraudulent PR. Moreover, Equifax was hacked, Facebook has been used as it was meant to to exploit people.

</comment><comment><USER20> ISP astroturfing and the incoming government filter/firewall that they are helping build [1]. SESTA/FOSTA are also part of this.

The internet is being turned into hotel wifi and ISPs are the brownshirt errand boys helping it because of their privileged monopoly/network position in the aristocracy and plutocracy.

Partly it is because everyone knows Facebook and the division in our country is intense right now.

Mostly though it is because all that money that the ISPs used to put towards removing privacy protections and net neutrality are now aimed at censorship, tracking and control instead of innovation and expansion with new product offerings. ISPs know they will have the monopolies needed for implementing it and they will get deep access into the data to help their ad/tracking/data selling efforts.

"Goodbye" \-- _Internet in 2018_

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2017/04/internet-censorship-is- advanci...](https://www.wired.com/2017/04/internet-censorship-is-advancing- under-trump/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Because equifax is not eating mainatream media's advertising pie i guess.

</comment><comment><USER22> One word. Trump.

<comment><USER23> It's as simple as that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Politics, control, power.

 _He who controls the flow of information, controls the world_ \- _History is written by the victors_ \- Ingsoc's _Newspeak_.

</comment><comment><USER25> Simple, because Facebook are a threat to the entire way of life for mainstream press, so they will jump all over this, spin it and twist it in all sorts of wonderful, self serving ways to ensure their continued existence against the beast that is threatening to turn them into inconsequential dinosaurs.

</comment><comment><USER26> At least in europe, people don't care for equifax, but Facebook is very popular and certain to generate enough clicks whenever it's mentioned in the title. To answer your question, the reason is clicks.

</comment><comment><USER27> Probably has something to do with the frequency of how often people consciously use Facebook. Maybe they have comparable amounts of data, but Facebook puts a lot of effort into making you think about it all the time.

</comment><comment><USER28> As an European I care very little about Equifax as it doesn't affect me.

Facebook on the other hand, affects me because I used to bena member and also because Facebook's tracking tentacles are all over the web.

TL;DR: the Facebook data leak is a global issue, the Equifax leak is only an American problem.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think it's exactly that sort of helplessness. I never did have control over what was shared with Equifax or what they told other people about me.

</comment><comment><USER15> "The latter has more implication on damaging a person's prospects of living productively in society"

Does it though?

If someone wanted to destroy you they'd rather have your psychological profile than your social security number.

The worst someone can do with your social security number is have some collectors (who legally can't collect money from someone who doesn't owe it) bother you.

The worst someone can do with your psychological profile is undetermined at this point, but it looks to be much much worse.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you study machine learning, you'll encounter a definition of "bias" that initially seems to differ from the conventional definition, in that a system is "biased" by what it is capable of representing. If I have a simple AI system that I feed two numbers to, "yellowness" and "curviness", it's going to decide a lot of things that aren't bananas are bananas, because the representation that it has access to is very biased and is not capable of representing the full complexity of objects in the real world. This results in a classifier that is very "pro-banana biased".

I say "initially seems to differ" because in my opinion, if you meditate on it for a while, it becomes increasingly clear that the conventional definition is actually a moralistic (in every bad sense of the term) mess, and this definition actually applies very well and clarifies a lot of thought in this area. But that's just a sidebar.

The main reason I bring this up is that I'd submit the reason people are more upset about Facebook is that they find it much easier to _represent_ Facebook in their minds than they do to represent Equifax.

Equifax is, on average... something... something... credit cards? Financials? Ugh. Complicated. I've got no representations for that crap.

Facebook, by contrast, is what I spend two hours a day in. It's what caused that entertaining family drama (depending on which side you were on) last month. It's where I reconnected with... you get the idea. Very easy to represent. Very easy to personify mentally, since the human brain that is optimized for tribal living on the savannas of Africa (more or less) reuses a _lot_ of circuitry for things not in the original design spec, and we use our very capable "model complex behavior as stemming from human motivations" circuits a lot. And that personified Facebook just betrayed you by spreading gossip about you all over the place, _without your knowledge_ (you knew about the rest of what it does), and for their benefit and to your harm. And is being very unapologetic about it.

So there's a whole complex of ideas readily at hand in our brain to understand Facebook. Facebook is basically being modeled as a friend, perhaps even your best friend, who just stabbed you in the back for their own gain. Yup, people are pissed. Where as Equifax was... something, err, people in an office and they dropped some papers on the ground or something? People's brains are readily able to represent Facebook using pre-existing circuitry, Equifax is just a confusing mess that most people can't get a handle on.

Bear in mind that we have a very-above-average concentration of people reading this post who do have the ability to understand Equifax. I'm speaking to the public case here. I also don't think the public is "stupid" on this matter; I just think most people lead lives that involve developing representations for all sorts of things I don't understand per se, but don't involve developing the rather artificial representations needed to understand the unbelievably complex financial industry that exists today.

</comment><comment><USER31> Because it influenced the election in the United States.

</comment><comment><USER32> Cool to see Russian bot talking points on HN now.

<comment><USER15> This was my first reaction as well, but I've met people IRL that seriously believe that the Equifax hack is more important than Facebook's tracking.

This is definitely a discussion worth having.

<comment><USER30> You say that like it's some sort of impossibly silly idea? I have to admit to not being entirely certainly how to score it myself, because in terms of _direct_ damage the Equifax is worse, but in terms of what is _corroding society_ Facebook is worse, and it is not immediately obvious to me how to compare the two radically different vectors.

The idea that the only possible reason to believe one side or the other is that one is in direct pay of a nation state spreading propaganda is probably one of the more anti-intellectual things I've heard this week. Or something like that. Don't have a great word for what this seems like to me. But it's definitely a "what???" moment.

<comment><USER15> Good points. I guess they are very different situations that can't be compared easily.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eric Lundgren loses appeal on computer restore discs, gets 15 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Recycling-innovator-Eric-Lundgren-loses-appeal-on-12860464.php <comment><USER2> The article states that he got 15 _months_ , not years.

<comment><AUTHOR> super my bad – fixed the title, thanks for catching this.</comment></comment>


Uber Revenue Leaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-projection-in-2015-2014-11

<comment><USER2> Wow. That's what I call hyper growth. $10 billion by 2015 with 300 percent year over year growth.

I wonder if stating the $10 billion topline number is misleading. Under GAAP, they are probably only allowed to say $2billion in revenue. It would be the equivalent of eBay stating the gross value of all its auctions as its own topline revenue, rather than the commission it takes. The same thing with a payments company (payPal, Stripe) claiming the total value of its processing payments as topline revenue.</comment>


Predictions holds true: "Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme"  - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/17/perlas-prediction-holds-true-facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme/ <comment><USER2> _Now, it is possible that some extremely niche businesses have found limited utility from ads (for example, BustedTees and social games may be the lucky few)_

Woah, wait, stop. It was jarring that the author glanced over this. You can't dismiss the exceptional just because it's exceptional. You can dismiss the exceptional when you understand _why_ it's exceptional and can make an argument for why it is irrelevant.

In other words, why are social games and Busted Tees successful? There's really not a lot of obvious crossover in what they're selling. One possible explanation is that they're "impulse" purchases which mesh well with a social environment. Social games mesh because Facebook connects you to people and once you're connected you would like to _do_ something with them. T-Shirts seem to be a similar sort of social sharing, à la Pinterest. This seems to imply a lesson: if you wish to market on Facebook you should probably be marketing _with_ Facebook. GM probably didn't have success because what they were doing was really orthogonal to the Facebook experience.

One thing that people tend to forget is that most ads are _really bad._ Just because naive advertisement doesn't work on Facebook doesn't mean _all_ advertisement doesn't work on Facebook. I wouldn't count Facebook out so quickly -- they just need to pivot their advertisements to make them more lucrative for all involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is that these are small markets (funny shirts) compared to stuff that actually makes lots of money (cars).

Funny shirts do not a $100 billion company make.

<comment><USER3> If I had to guess I'd say a very large portion of Google Ad Words revenue is made up of Funny Shirts. Or San Francisco Dog Walkers or Faucet Sales in Portland.

You're digging yourself into a hole with this position. Very successful advertising businesses are built on small niche advertisers. (valpak anyone?)

The question for Facebook is whether there's enough of these successful advertisers to make a 100B business.

<comment><USER4> Because you go to Google when you want a dog walker or new faucet, you don't go to Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There has to be a better term than Ponzi Scheme. The point being made is that (in theory) a bunch of customers will buy ads on facebook, see poor returns, and not renew their ads. In the early days, this pattern will look like impressive growth, and people will think that growth is for the long haul.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're right. English doesn't have the right term (does another language?). Paul Graham used the same term in another essay.

Should we make one up right now?

<comment><USER6> I wish "Positive feedback cycle fuelled by new advertisers' naivete" had a better acronym. PFCFBNAN doesn't have the ring I was hoping it would.

<comment><USER7> Maybe just "bubble" instead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Facebook is a ponzi scheme, but for a different reason. Look at the sky high valuation. Facebook is not worth $100 billion, not even close. The only reason the valuation got so high is because Facebook's "future valuation" has been "sold" to us ever since they got to a $20 billion valuation or so. So some investors bought Facebook shares, then made a big deal about it to others, and then the others bought at higher valuation, and so on. Even now, they keep doing this.

<comment><USER3> Facebook should have earnings of around $1B this year. A $100B valuation (100P/E) is high (very high) but within the realm of possibility.

I'd expect their market cap to settle between 30-45B within around 6 months (unless they launch some revolutionary ad or product stream - but wouldn't they do that pre-IPO?)

<comment><USER9> A P/E ratio of 30-45 would still indicate the market believes in a very high potential for growth. That just doesn't seem reasonable. Their potential user base is already nearly fully saturated (the SEC filings show no growth at all in some markets), and people already seem to spend as much time as they possibly could online using FB. What could FB do to grow revenues that much besides sell more of their users' data or cram every page with more ads, both of which would risk driving away users?

<comment><USER10> Well firstly it is ridiculous to assume that their potential user base is nearly fully saturated. There is massive opportunities if they can get China and India onboard. And there is still plenty of growth as technology spreads through the remaining parts of the world.

As for revenue they don't need to have more ads. They just need to continue to provide different ways for advertisers to find the slice of Facebook users they need. Facebook already is much, much better than Google and eventually more and more advertisers will realise this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I fail to see how this is a Ponzi Scheme.

In a Ponzi Scheme, early investors are paid returns based on the investments of later investors.

So who are the "investors" receiving returns? If we're talking about ad buyers, they're not being paid anything worthwhile regardless of when they invested, early or late. If we're talking about shareholders of Facebook, early shareholders aren't receiving returns based on later shareholders.

Perhaps describing Facebook as a bubble might be more apt. But it's pretty strange that this guy spent all this effort to define what a Ponzi Scheme is only to mis-describe something as a Ponzi Scheme.

<comment><USER12> re: "So who are the "investors" receiving returns?"

The VCs and everyone else who got in before the IPO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think what we're seeing here isn't an issue of Facebook's viability as an advertising platform. It has the eyes, and it has the in.

Consider this: I post a link on my friend's wall about a show coming up that I want to see playing locally. Why isn't Facebook right in there with a ticket deal for two? Is it invasive? Maybe a little, but if it's coming in with a deal, then it's more than likely a welcome invasion (as odd as that sounds). Hell, if the deals are good enough, you might even see people _encouraged_ to spout off keywords to attract ad bots.

People are using the tech to connect to one another on a social level. Even Facebook doesn't understand this yet.

With our site NoSweaters.com, we went out hunting the web to see where people were asking the question, "What should I get my <person> for <occasion>?" It's a question being asked _everywhere_ , and especially on Facebook. Why are they not right there with suggested items?

It seems like a staggering oversight. No, Facebook isn't Google, but it's got such amazing potential.

</comment><comment><USER14> The whole argument here is predicated on the idea that Facebook won't figure out ways to provide more value to and derive more value from its userbase, and that advertisers won't figure out how to adapt to social advertising as a medium more effectively. Big brand marketing is very much in a radio-to- television-style transition right now: just because the old bag of tricks doesn't work when glued onto a new channel doesn't mean that social will never provide value to media buyers. Facebook WANTS their advertisers to succeed, and you can bet there are a lot of very smart people thinking about this problem right now.

I think the far bigger threat to Facebook is in the "it stops being cool" market fragmentation possibility. As long as a huge percentage of people in the world are spending a chunk of their time on Facbook, I wouldn't bet against eventually finding a way to market to them effectively.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have to agree with Ford[1] on this one... Facebook ads offer a terrific ROI (in my experience). I'm very surprised by all of this negative press.

[1]: [http://www.freep.com/article/20120517/NEWS09/205170633/Faceb...](http://www.freep.com/article/20120517/NEWS09/205170633/Facebook- sparks-divide-GM-Ford-advertising-strategies-diverge)

<comment><USER16> What do you sell?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook isn't like the yellow pages, your viewers aren't hot and ready to buy or looking actively shopping. Ads on Facebook (while target-able) should be used for brand building and recognition. Don't expect immediate sales or active clicking. Purchase and spend with this in mind and weigh it against your marketing goals and strategy.

<comment><USER18> Facebook allows you to choose to either pay for impressions or for clicks. If you choose to pay per click, then why exactly is it only for branding? If the user clicked your ad, then there's your intent. If he didn't, then you didn't pay anything anyway.

Why exactly is that everyone keep repeating that facebook ads are for branding, there's no intent, low CTR etc. When you opt to not pay when a user doesn't click anyway?

In the article he talks about an example of a person who payed $100 to sell a single book. But I just looked at Facebook, and it costs around $0.25 per click. That means that 400 people actually clicked on his ad and only 1 bought a book. That's not a low click-through-rate, that's a low people-interested- in-your-book-rate. How is that problem any different from Google?

<comment><USER17> Touche. I'm not entirely familiar with the options. In this case if you go the CTR route, then you could still possibly use it for branding purposes but still have the click through try to funnel a person into a sale... makes me wonder if there is click fraud going on. Anyways if people don't click on ads, then you might be able to game the CTR route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is kind of ridiculous... someone has a positive ROI on FB. If no one does, then CPC/CPM prices will drop until they do.

<comment><USER16> Have you seen the CPM's on Facebook? They have dropped. They're about as close to zero as they come...for a reason.

<comment><USER20> I setup a FB CPM campaign over a year ago, at a very low CPM bid, and basically forgot about it because my ad never outbid other campaigns. Then in September of last year, it started spending the daily limit.

I initially thought that FB was fudging the black box to extract more money out of advertisers before the IPO to make itself look better on paper. But, now I'm more convinced that the market for FB advertising has dried up a bit, confirming your comment.

<comment><USER21> It sure can't be explained by the fact that ad delivery systems are seldom static and are continually being tweaked based on the latest research....oh wait, it can, but you just go ahead and pick whatever is expedient with your beliefs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why I firmly believe that the "Give stuff away for free + advertising = $$$" model will fail. People need to sell products, for money. That's what I'm going to do with my startup. Consumers will be customers, not the product.

<comment><USER10> One of the most successful and enduring businesses of the last 100 years has been television. A large chunk of which uses such a model. So the idea it will fail is a little misguided.

<comment><USER23> That model is still hanging on because old people still watch television. Meanwhile, young folks are downloading shows or recording them with a PVR so they can skip commercials. The best shows on television are on premium cable, subscription based, with no commercials. Netflix, Hulu, Youtube are great alternatives.

How are radio and newspaper ads doing? Just because the television advertising model hasn't crumbled _yet_ doesn't mean it's invincible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Facebook is probably not as "effective" at large spends as traditional media buys are, but Facebook is an INCREDIBLY lucrative system for advertising and social interaction if dealt with in an intelligent way. I think the problem people are having is the impedence mismatch of treating pull based engagement to traditional push marketing.

Traditional advertising is about pushing people to buy a product like a car or soda. Pull based engagement is more about people seeking you out and your business interacting with them at a time and place of their choosing.

Facebook is a _social_ network, not a shopping mall or yellow pages. Google is more of a yellow pages for most people. I bet GM would be more successful if their $10 million spend went to push local dealerships and created customer to dealer relationships via coupons or creating local car clubs for various brands/models.

Local businesses would be more successful on FB if they treated as a lead gen system to build up their own mailing lists to offer ongoing coupons, sales, information, etc. You know, creating a relationship with them.

The point is, all of this goes against traditional advertising and marketing ideas where you just had to blast out a bunch of ads to TV, Radio, Newspapers, or more recently Google. Buying ads on Facebook isn't about flipping $1 of advertising into $2 in sales. That works for a few niches. For everyone else, use the cheap lead acquisition cost to build a long term relationship. It's harder, but it's WAY more valuable.

</comment><comment><USER25> Slightly off-topic, but is there a way to bet against Facebook? If one were to accept the premise that Facebook is Ponzi-like, would it be possible to make money off its assumedly forthcoming collapse (indirectly, as collateral of the collapse, not in a way that actively seeks to harm other parties)? I ask because it seems as though the only actionable intelligence from this line of reasoning is to stay away from Facebook, with no mention of a way that such knowledge can be turned to further advantage.

<comment><USER4> There is, you can short the stock. But that isn't allowed to start until a little ways after the IPO.

<comment><USER23> If you're confident that Facebook is going to tank off the hop (and brave) you _could_ short some other tech stocks (GRPN, LNKD) in the hopes that the negative sentiment spills over.

<comment><USER23> Today:

LNKD down 2%

GRPN down 5.5%

YELP down 6.5%

ZNGA down 7%

Too bad I myself am not brave and did nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Facebook is sitting on top of a tons of personal data that is incredibly valuable to marketers. They currently don't share this information, but if the "Ponzi Scheme" were to start crumbling all they have to do is give more access to data.

Suppose your spouse's birthday is coming up, Amazon targets you with a "<name>'s birthday is coming up, here is something she/he likes". As simple as that.

<comment><USER27> Does it have value? Yes.

Is Facebook worth $100bn? No.

There is a difference between value and price, and startups/VCs love to play with both terms to make their economic case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I find myself clicking ads on only two sites: Reddit and Facebook (among the 20 or so sites I don't adblock). Facebook has been pretty good at personalizing ads towards me (although I had to hide the ads that went along the lines of "learn to code at so-so online uni"), but what gets me to click is the "This many friends liked this". Digital word-of-mouth really is effective. Maybe I'm some extraordinary exception... I would still think Facebook has an amazing potential make a profit. I mean, it sure helps that it has 900 million customers/products.

<comment><USER29> Agreed. Anecdotely, I click on Facebook ads all the time. I don't remember the last time I've clicked on a Google ad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well I guess this means that all major television networks are ponzi schemes, seeing as how their major revenue source is advertising. The bottom line is that eyeballs are worth money. Facebook is made up of great content, even better than CSI or the Superbowl. Essentially - all your friends and family.

It also goes without saying that ads are not their only revenue source. They take a sizable chunk of Facebook credit purchases, and have shown that they are dedicated to expanding their platform. I don't think that Mr. Holiday is looking at the big picture.

<comment><USER31> A major difference between Facebook ads and TV ads is that Facebook doesn't completely interrupt your content viewing for several minutes at a time in order to show you an ad - they're easy enough for your brain to filter right out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Shit, everything that does not involve direct transactions on the web is a big Ponzi Scheme.

<comment><AUTHOR> I specifically note that Google's ads are quite effective. They are not direct transactions.

<comment><USER32> Specifically noted...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps the problem with Facebook is relying on click throughs as a measurement of success for ads. If Facebook is more of a consumption site, then the ads should be more tailored for eyeball count rather then click count.

</comment><comment><USER34> Facebook is a brand awareness platform, not a lead generation or point of sale utility.

</comment><comment><USER35> > Facebook ads. They are worthless.

</comment><comment><USER36> Forbes recycling recent news and extrapolating rather baseless conclusions.

HN needs a Forbes filter.

Edit: turns out the HackerNew Chrome extension allows domain filtering. Yay!

<comment><USER16> I've known Joseph for a while--I wanted to make sure he got credit for being right about this over a YEAR ago. Meaning GM could have saved $10M if they'd read his blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "I wish I could short Facebook."

I bet he is loving that Facebook went public.</comment>


For HTML5 apps, the "app store" concept is just a red herring. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tubejumper.com/index.php/2012/02/12/for-html5-apps-the-app-store-concept-is-just-a-red-herring/

<comment><AUTHOR> An old post of mine that I've been thinking about more lately due to the discussion about mobile being a difficult area for Facebook. Also sorry about the title, I was sick that week and had recently watched Clue.</comment>


How to Become Irreplaceable: A Quick Tip for Software Developers - <AUTHOR> https://remotemasters.dev/irreplaceable-software-developers <comment> code-is-code This is only correct in theorie.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why? You are not always can decrease technology dependency but your intent is the key.</comment></comment>


Let's Buy CNN - <AUTHOR> http://www.letsbuycnn.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Some background — [http://time.com/3023062/jon-stewart-kickstarter- cnn/](http://time.com/3023062/jon-stewart-kickstarter-cnn/)

</comment><comment><USER2> ha, I'd add a tier where you get to change the name</comment>


Mega.co.nz: 1st week report of vulnerability reward program - <AUTHOR> https://mega.co.nz/#blog_8

<comment><USER2> The smugness of this post reaks. Rather unwarranted considering the number of XSS vulns found, I also question their classification of these, XSS in this system entirely breaks their "encryption as a mass product" philosophy. (provided you give them the benefit of the doubt and assume its for the users and not their protection)

Taking they want to tout this system as security focused I'm quite amazed they seem to not have scrubbed a single output. I highly doubt they fixed it properly either.

</comment><comment><USER3> This definitely seems like the best way they could handle the recent coverage of their security.</comment>


Strategies, tools and tactice for mobile growth - <AUTHOR> https://growthhackers.com/slides/mobile-growth-best-strategies-tools-tactics/?utm_content=buffer94c59&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

<comment><USER2> The slides have summarized key pointers nicely. Kind of reminds the focus on the initial steps while launching a mobile product.</comment>


Neural Transformation Machine: Sequence-To-Sequence Learning - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06442

<comment><USER2> The OP paper proposes a different architectural approach to the translation task of the 2014 NIPS paper by Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals & Quoc Le, _Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks_

[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence- learni...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning- with-neural-networks)

which "uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector." The task was English to French.

Meng et al.(2015)(OP) translate a Chinese sequence to English, using a network based on Neural Turing Machines(NTM) which uses LTSM units, they name this novel architecture Neural Transformation Machine (NTRam).

The Neural Turing Machine(NTM) was proposed by Deepmind's Alex Graves, Greg Wayne & Ivo Danihelka, it couples a neural net and LTSM memory to produce a differentiable, thus trainable analogy to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture - to perfom copying, sorting and associative recall. An exploration of whether Neural Networks can be put to basic computing functions.

 _Neural Turing Machines(2014)_ by Alex Graves, Greg Wayne, Ivo Danihelka

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401v2](http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401v2)</comment>


Show HN: Calendar with integrated timeline for fast navigation - <AUTHOR> https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/calendar/shared/2700/8826686332/ <comment><AUTHOR> Submitted this again as I did not get any responses last time :( Would love some feedback.

You can view alternative calendar designs here:

* [https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/calendar/shared/2691/88266...](https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/calendar/shared/2691/8826686332/)

* [https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/calendar/shared/2701/88266...](https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/calendar/shared/2701/8826686332/)

* [https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/calendar/shared/2702/88266...](https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/calendar/shared/2702/8826686332/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks really well done. Have you considered a developer's license so people can build it into their apps?

How difficult would it be to make this work with google calendar?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to comment. At present, we are still working out how people might use our software. But we would definitely consider licensing it to third parties to incorporate into their products - probably on an annual license fee basis.

With regards Google calendar, you can display Google calendar events in a ChronoFlo calendar via our iCal feed option. See the below blog post for further details on this: [https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/tutorials/entry/make-a- bra...](https://www.chronoflocalendar.com/tutorials/entry/make-a-branded- version-of-your-google-calendar/)</comment></comment>


Happy Pi Day - <AUTHOR> http://thesharklady.com/tech/fun-stuff/happy-pi-day

<comment><USER2> MIT is purportedly releasing their admissions decisions on 3/14 1:59.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also the attempt at the world's biggest mathematical magic trick, happening on Pi day:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189470>

</comment><comment><USER4> As an engineer, I choose to celebrate my Pi day on July, 22

</comment><comment><USER5> pi = 6.283

<http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.html>

<comment><USER6> I read that just now and just makes me think how often I would have to use pi/2. (I'm in mechanical engineering.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spicy Pi Bacon Squared: the ultimate Pi Day dessert! [http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2009/03/spicy_pi_bacon_squar...](http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2009/03/spicy_pi_bacon_squared.php)

</comment><comment><USER8> π ≈ 62832 / 20000 from the Aryabhatiya: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhatiya>

<comment><USER5> Zu_Chongzhi got a better one 355/113

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is also the final day of Nerdigras: <http://www.google.com/search?q=nerdigras>

</comment><comment><USER10> Its my B'Day too! Time to have some pi.</comment>


Palaeogenomic insights into the origins of French grapevine diversity - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-019-0437-5 <comment><USER2> This is so on topic that I have to upvote.</comment>


DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20141209006143/en/Fast-Growing-DigitalOcean-Receives-50-Million-Expand <comment><USER2> I really like the content marketing approach DO took.

If you google for some standard server maintenance problem (e.g. migrating from Apache to nginx), it's usually DO which is ranked first. Their posts are relatively high quality, and there are a lot of them, enough to cover many common problems. For example: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- migr...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-migrate-from- an-apache-web-server-to-nginx-on-an-ubuntu-vps)

It doesn't show annoying pop ups, anything like that, but after visiting those pages many times you might decide to give DO a go. Well, that's what I did.

Also, some people say that similar cheap VPS providers exist for a long time and what DO did was put a nice simple UI. That proves that to create a successful product, you don't need some new complicated features that your competitors do not offer. Making interactions with the system easier, improving user onboarding process by reducing friction can go a long way.

<comment><USER3> I think it was Slicehost that pioneered this approach for VPS hosting companies quite a while ago, although it may also have been Linode as I really didn't become aware of them until Rackspace bought Slicehost and I had to migrate.

<comment><USER4> Slicehost had it first, then Linode followed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe the title can mention that this 50 million is a credit facility, not equity funding.

<comment><USER6> So what is that to us who don't speak English natively, a loan?

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's money now in exchange for money in the future, vs money now in exchange for ownership.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't this be a better deal than money in exchange for ownership? I mean, they get the money and still have control of the company.

<comment><USER8> Companies take debt to optimise tax.

<comment><USER9> Well, I need to ask what does this mean, I appreciate it if anybody can explain in with an example :)

<comment><USER10> The better wikipedia article would be [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_shield](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_shield)

Debt itself (as a liability) is definitely not deducted from profit, but repayment of debt is deducted from the profit, and - what is more important - interest on debt is deducted from the tax base as a result. Which means that if you can load up on debt to get higher return, than you would get investing your own money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It blows my mind that this is happening. Back in the day, there were a thousand cheapo VPS providers out there with similar rates. But DO were the ones to put up an extremely simplified interface to spinning up VMs and that has seen them skyrocket (I'm not saying this is a bad thing).

At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooked by many customers.

<comment><USER12> Why is Linode so much better? I got a bunch of free credit for DO and I'm only using it for small things so I went with them, thinking about spinning up larger projects however and would like to look at my options.

<comment><USER13> The only thing I'm aware of that, supposedly, made Linode better, is they guaranteed full compute power. If it said you got 1 CPU core, then that was yours, period. From what I understood with DO, their approach was that they'd make every effort to deliver the equivalent compute power of 1 CPU, but would not peg it to you exclusively. I also think this may have changed for DO.

<comment><USER14> I've been following my DO allocation using New Relic. When I first signed up, I noticed the hypervisor stealing from my allocation. Not a lot, but some. After a week or two, however, this ceased. I can now report that for almost a year now I have been receiving my full allocation. I am very pleased with DO, but based on the good things that I've read on here, I'll give Linode a shot if DO ever drops the ball horrendously.

<comment><USER15> What's the best way to check allocation theft using NR?

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure of the best way, but I was able to tell by looking at the CPU usage chart when you are analyzing your server. The brown line indicates resources stolen by the hypervisor.

There's probably a better way to find out...

<comment><USER15> Good enough, will test. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Recently one of my production node landed on a bad physical host, DO reboot my node twice within 24 hours, I tweeted about it and DO support open a ticket for me.

Since the physical node have problem, I plan to take snapshot then spin up a new node using the image. However, as the physical node have problem, the snapshot take more than 7 hours and still failed to snapshot (No way to cancel snapshot task).

DO support told me the snapshot is running, but I seriously think their support not honest about it and I ask they provide proof to show the snapshot is moving, they failed to do so. (From UI I can see JSON response show progress stuck at 3%, they lied)

Yesterday, DO reboot again my node.

Just my two cent, never ever use DO for serious production usage.

<comment><USER17> Alternative perspective - Recognize any time you use a cloud provider, you need to be aware that not only are the nodes ephemeral, but the zone/data center you are deploying on may go down as well.

Plan for your server to go down at any time, and, if you have actual $$$ in play, also plan for the zone to go down.

Amazon encourages this thinking by having very low-latency links between AZ (Availability Zones) - and they also recommend deploying in two geographical regions should a regional disaster occur.

<comment><USER16> I know that all. The point is, DO support lied. After reboot, they still put my node in bad physical host. Also, DO reboot without notice (AWS have EC2 events).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use and enjoy DigitalOcean. Good community docs, good support all around. I've referred a few people to it as well. I'm hoping they keep their support/pricing even if they get big.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is digital ocean profitable ? Is the 5 dollars server killing them or putting them on top of chart ?

<comment><USER20> OVH offers KVM virtual servers with SSD starting at $2.5/mo[1], and announced they will have an even smaller $1.25/mo plan[2]. All that with more memory than DO.

I'm guessing that VPS providers have a low support cost/customer compared to shared hosting. No hairy compatibility issues, everything is neatly abstracted away, everyone has their own, independent environment with most of the administrative tasks offloaded onto the user.

After you toss in a few guides that double as marketing, and are usually written by the users themselves, all that's left is to take care of the hardware and bill.

[1] [https://www.runabove.com/index.xml#compute](https://www.runabove.com/index.xml#compute)

[2] [https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/524334437039747073](https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/524334437039747073)

<comment><USER21> Is there anything inherently different (security, performance, or otherwise) about these servers of Runabove's?

I run a fair amount of dev servers, and that price ($2.50) is mind blowing. But i fear that it's far too cheap to be anything but a letdown.. Thoughts?

<comment><USER20> They're based on OpenStack where DO rolled out their own system, I believe. On the upside, you can use all the CLI tools (nova, etc) that come with OpenStack, existing software should be compatible, and you get some of the additional cloud features (object storage, security groups). On the downside, the panel isn't as nice. The "expert mode" is just OpenStack's Horizon.

But the servers, the instances themselves, are not really any different. I benchmarked the cheapest one for ServerBear[1] a few days ago.

The one thing I miss is IPv6. DO is ahead here.

Would it be OK if I plugged my referral link[2]? With it, you get $10 to test things out.

[1] [http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2014/12/09/ZyiLDuXgJGD577Eo](http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2014/12/09/ZyiLDuXgJGD577Eo)

[2] [http://runabove.me/QEME](http://runabove.me/QEME)

<comment><USER22> I was going to sign up, but halfway through realized I can't do it without actually providing a payment method (in spite of the credit). I hope you got the $10 credit for my initial sign-up though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It'll be interesting to see if the Mesosphere thing takes off. It seems to be up and running with a 10 instance cluster for 30c/hr.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8521311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8521311)

[http://thenewstack.io/mesosphere-now-supported-on-digital- oc...](http://thenewstack.io/mesosphere-now-supported-on-digital-ocean-for- scaling-and-managing-apps-without-devops-hell/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Awesome, maybe now they can afford to accept debit cards.

<comment><USER25> I never had a problem paying via debit card when I used them. I don't have any active droplets with them right now, but I've always paid with my bank issued debit card, and looking at it now it's still the active payment method on my account.</comment></comment>


How I found one of the earliest browsers on a NeXTcube - <AUTHOR> http://pupeno.com/2015/12/21/how-i-found-one-of-the-earliest-browsers-in-history/ <comment><USER5> When I joined NeXT one of my first assignments was to evaluate a new piece of software that we were considering releasing. It was software that would automatically prompt you to sign up for an Internet connection when your new NeXT machine first booted. It communicated with Virginia to get the new machine an IP address. I ran it a bunch of times and it usually worked - <USER2> it would sometimes fail. And when it failed, we had no way to debug the problems on remote systems outside our control. And since there were monetary charges involved, this got very messy very quickly.

Based on my strong report, Steve decided that NeXT boxes wouldn't automatically sign you up for an Internet connection - since we couldn't debug or support the customer when things went wrong.

Candidly, I've looked back on that report and wondered if I set back the entire industry. We weren't looking at browsers - but we were looking at access to all communication possibilities across the Internet as well as the access to University and Government resources (ftp and remote mounts.)

<comment><USER6> Or maybe you prevented a bunch of people from having a first bad experience with the internet.

<comment><USER7> Or maybe they provided the conditions ripe for Sky Dayton, of Earthlink, to negotiate with Steve Jobs to have Earthlink bundled on the iMacs when he went back to Apple ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently Steve Jobs narrowly missed Berners Lee demonstrating his browser for inclusion with an upcoming version of next step to catch a plane.

I constantly think about how them meeting that day may have moved the mainstream adoption of the web up by 5 years.

<comment><USER9> Harumph. I was an editor for NeXTWorld magazine [1] at the time TimBL invented the web. "WWWNeXTStepEditor version 0.12" was the first web browser I used.

Mass adoption of the web was held back by lack of ISPs. It may seem strange now, but in 1991 there was no way to connect to the Internet unless you were affiliated with a university or a big R&D company. in 1991, TimBl's WWW wasn't any more relevant to NeXT than Gopher or Brewster Kahle's WAIS or, for that matter, CompuServe.

Some of us at NeXTWorld, including John Perry Barlow, Simson Garfinkel, and Seth Ross saw the potential of the WorldWideWeb, but we never wrote about it at NeXTWorld because most NeXT users couldn't connect to the Internet. I don't know when Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb but he had many opportunities and it never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple. By that time, Marc Andreessen had released Mosaic, the first web browser for Windows, and ISPs were sprouting up to enable consumer connections to the Internet.

NeXT computers would have needed to provide a modem, and PPP for TCP/IP over dialup, and NeXT-provided connection points (through a 3rd party partner?) to make the web useful to NeXT users outside of academia and government.

[1] [http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html](http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html)

<comment><USER5> The prototype I evaluated at NeXT was supposed to work with any modem (remember Hayes compatibility?) and didn't need PPP, since we had arranged a proprietary handshake with the organization that gave out IP addresses (I've forgotten the name. At the time I believe there was just one entity allowed to give out IP addresses.) We discussed requiring a specific modem - but decided that we didn't want that to be a requirement for getting an IP address.

Ultimately, it came down to "unsupportability" by NeXT. Several people other than me told Steve that things would go wrong connecting to the Internet, and when they did we would be mostly helpless to support them. At the same time, the organization in Virginia didn't want to support the software either - <USER3> software was a "black box" mostly provided by us on their machines. So we killed the project. I never heard anybody mention browsers.

<comment><USER9> It's absolutely fascinating to hear this story. I'd never heard it before. That was a historically significant moment. Do you recall if the software was internally developed at NeXT or acquired from a third party?

<comment><USER5> I was told that we had developed most of the software in conjunction with the group that gave out IP addresses - but that we ended up doing almost all the work ourselves and setting up their machines at their site. (They were skeptical about the whole project, and not enthusiastic about the automatic registration of new IPs. When I spoke to them it was obvious that they wanted to ignore the whole project.) My impression was that our engineers who had done the work weren't around Redwood City (or perhaps they had quit - <USER4> weren't doing well and lots of people were leaving at the time.) So I was figuring out the code on my own and doing the debugging - nobody was taking ownership of the code. It was an overly complex mess since it both registered for an IP and then did billing. Very fragile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You copied that binary right? I think from a historical perspective that would be important to preserve...

<comment><USER11> Looking at the file listing in the terminal in the photo (0_16, 1_0, 2_01), it looks like it's the exact same files as can be found here [http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT...](http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT/)

<comment><USER12> Yep, and it turns out according to the README it's the editor, which is still cool.

> WorldWideWeb_0.16.tar.Z is the only wysiwyg hypertext editor for the NeXT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's with all the secrecy?

<comment><USER14> The author seems to think that somebody would want this machine so badly as to break into somebody's house?

<comment><USER6> No, there's no need to break. This machine, under certain circumstances, can be publicly accessible without any problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That is cool! It's also a bit disconcerting that so much computing history is disappearing, and will not be accessible even in the lifetimes of those who experienced it. I imagine there will be digital archaeologists in the future who spend careers finding this kind of stuff and attempting to simulate how it must have worked back in the long ago times...

<comment><USER16> and black marketeers, and hoarders, and vandals...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sir Tim Berners-Lee is actually quite reachable; he participates in numerous Semantic Web mailing lists these days.

<comment><USER6> I don't want to send him a public personal message and the one I sent didn't generate any reply.</comment></comment>


Bill Murray's Unreleased 1984 Sci-Fi Comedy Is Now Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/07/09/bill_murray_nothing_lasts_forever_tom_schiller_s_unreleased_1984_movie_is.html?wpisrc=hpsponsoredd2

<comment><USER2> Nice to see this getting a bit more exposure. It's a quirky film but I enjoyed it when I saw it last year.

<comment><USER3> So hip

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great film, but this is _not_ the proper release that people have been waiting for. It's been on YouTube for years, and the copy is a rather poor TV rip. The colour scenes (important for the plot) are washed out.

</comment><comment><USER5> One private movie torrent tracker had a TV rip of this uploaded 4 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like it was released. How else did it end up on TV?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great. Founders need to see this.</comment>


The Torte Botnet: A SpamBot Investigation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/SpamBot-Investigation-whitepaper-R3.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, author here, if you have any questions I'll around to answer them here.</comment>


New software obfuscation throws wrench into reverse engineering - <AUTHOR> http://threatpost.com/new-software-obfuscation-throws-wrench-into-reverse-engineering

<comment><USER2> Oh the efficiencies to be had when everything is passed through lattice-based cryptography.

Definitely worth it.</comment>


Angular 2 and React Native - <AUTHOR> http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/04/angular-2-react-native.html <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like there will be a reasonable bridge to get your angular2 code running like a react native app. I wonder how this compares to nativescript.

This, I think, is going to be the reason I finally go and port my big legacy codebase (hard to think of a two-year-old project as "legacy", but here we are in the javascript world) over to angular2. It'd be nice to get a decent mobile experience for my users (in the absence of iOS's mobile safari improving some of their progressive web app style features like service workers and so on) without having to write code in swift.</comment>