Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, broken down by gender and age - <AUTHOR> http://polygraph.cool/films/index.html <comment><USER2> I love it when people actually provide data rather than merely working based on "gut feelings"! I have a few questions jump out at me as potentially affecting the reliability of the analysis and conclusions, though:

1\. Since the mapping from lines to gender goes through the actor/actress involved, it seems that "trouser roles" (particularly in animated features) may skew the statistics. I don't know if the effect is large enough to matter, though.

2\. The analysis seems to be conducted on the basis of "lines" rather than "words". Does this skew the results? I wouldn't be surprised if predominantly- male "action" scenes had fewer words per line (or, put another way, more lines per word) than other scenes.

3\. The analysis of actor/actress ages aggregates screenplays over all years of publication. This makes it impossible to distinguish between a bias towards _young_ actresses and a bias towards _actresses born after a particular date_. This is a very important distinction in terms of policy response, since there is little gap between genders up to age 31: If the problem is "older actresses don't get many roles" then it needs a response, but if the problem was "actresses born before 1985 don't get many roles" then the problem will self- correct as the older generations are replaced by more egalitarian ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking at the movies with > 60% male lines, a lot of them seem to be action or war movies. I don't think it is unfair if not 50% of war and action movies have a female heroine, because there are reasons men are more likely to go to war or do dangerous jobs (and no, that reason is not lack of role models in popular entertainment).

I don't think an analysis like this is very useful at all. What matters is that all demographics get to see the films they like. It doesn't hurt one demographic if another demographic has more films made for.

Take women's magazines for example - while I haven't counted, it seems there seem to be an awful lot of them. Would it hurt men if there were more women's magazines than men's magazines? I'd argue it wouldn't hurt men at all.

So if you can show that there is a significant population that doesn't get to see the movies they want, I think you could get a better response.

<comment><USER4> The idea that you trust your judgement on the magazine ratio is probably one of the reasons that this analysis is useful. Are you sure that you aren't just biased against noticing men's magazines? Or perhaps there are a lot of magazines with language specifically gendering the reader as male that you consider neutral...

<comment><USER3> I am sure there are certain media that cater primarily to women. For example, at least in my country, there is a whole genre of romantic novels about physicians.

The main point is that it is not a problem if some product category caters primarily to a specific demographic. What would be an issue would be a significant part of the population being neglected. However, there is no reason why that shouldn't be fixable by the market alone.

I can think of several TV series that cater specifically to women, with lots of women talking.

How can we be sure that the 2000 movies the article talks about randomly selected movies, not movies cherry picked to show the desired result?

Even if we pick random scripts that are available online, there might be an inherent bias? For example, maybe older scripts (from the 50ies) are more likely to be online?

<comment><USER4> I encourage you to do some quantifiable analysis that you judge to be free from bias and see if you get a different result.

You seem to be immediately dismissing this analysis as not useful, while only providing anecdotal evidence and questions. Do you feel like your points are more/less useful than the quantified analysis in the article?

<comment><USER3> In what way do you think my comment is biased (given that I explicitly marked the women's magazine as a guess and an example)? In what way do you think the analysis is useful?

I think an analysis like that can be amusing. I am not convinced that it is useful, as I explained in my previous comments.

As for doing the research myself, I may, but it is expensive. I don't have a gender studies grant or anything to pay for it.

<comment><USER4> I think you're biased because you're dismissing this article without any evidence. I encourage you to post some research about the topic. As for the gender studies grant comment, do you have any evidence to suggest that the authors had such a grant?

<comment><USER3> I didn't dismiss it, I question it's usefulness. The article itself doesn't provide any evidence for it's usefulness.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused because I think typically a person would consider implying an article or perhaps a piece of code is useless would be an extremely dismissive move. Do you think it is unreasonable for me to imply you are being dismissive when, faced with a quantified piece of research, you suggest it is useless without providing a quantified counterpoint?

<comment><USER3> You might enjoy this paper about gendered glacier science: [http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/08/030913251562...](http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/08/0309132515623368.abstract)

I have provided an explanation of why I don't consider it very useful. From the article itself you can gather that there are many movies with more female than male lines. Therefore I question that women are disadvantaged by the available movie offerings.

So what exactly are you talking about? What, in your view, is the usefulness of the article?

<comment><USER4> I find it kind of confusing that you seem to be posting articles, claims and references to funding that can't be found in the article, or don't seem related to the article.

For instance, you've just now made the claim that there are "many" movies with more female than male lines. The article clearly states that in their analysis, they found that 1505 films had 60% or more male lines, while only 173 had 60% or more female lines. That's a ratio of nearly 10:1. Where are you getting your figures from?

Additionally my initial criticism of you was that you seemed happy to trust your intuition about magazines without any quantifiable evidence. I implied that perhaps without this article, you'd be making a similar claim about the prevalence of movies with women as the predominant speakers in them. This analysis is useful because it can be used to demonstrate that there truly is evidence of a gap between the amount of talking time men and women get in movies.

Perhaps you should examine your behaviour and ask yourself if you're truly free from bias, when instead of quantifying your objections to a quantified claim, you've implied that somehow this is the work of biased academics.

<comment><USER3> I find it confusing that you don't even seem to read my comments, and instead claim I said things I didn't. Perhaps instead of accusing me of bias, you should work on your reading skills?

I never made a claim about the authors funding. I also didn't claim that they are biased (although I find it curious that they only use 2000 of the 8000 scripts they found). I DO think they have an agenda, but I wasn't talking about that in this comment thread yet. Nor did I claim that their numbers are wrong.

So if it is important to you that a film you watch has more female than male lines, you have more than 150 to choose from. If you are generous and include movies with an even number of male and female lines, you are up to 490 movies (out of the 2000 they analyzed), or roughly 25% of all movies. Maybe that is plenty enough?

I never doubted their result that there is a "gap" between talking time, averaged across all movies (or at least the movies they looked at). However, why should you care about talking times of movies you don't watch? What matters is the movies you watch. That is all I am saying.

Personally I also think it is stupid to judge a movie by that criterion (likewise for the Bechdel Test), but if it is important to you, why not. But unless you run out of films to watch, there isn't really a problem.

<comment><USER4> > How can we be sure that the 2000 movies the article talks about randomly > selected movies, not movies cherry picked to show the desired result?

Could you let me know how this doesn't read as implying the author has bias? Am I perhaps misreading this?

> I don't have a gender studies grant or anything to pay for it.

Am I perhaps misreading that you think research like this is funded by gender studies grants?

Also I'd consider "having an agenda" to be a subset of "being biased". Perhaps you could state what you see the differences as, and perhaps the evidence you have that suggests the author had an agenda before embarking on this analysis?

From the article as a counterpoint to your claim of an agenda:

"Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles. But it's all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion."

And here's a screenshot from the reddit discussion: [http://imgur.com/XvaZbFy](http://imgur.com/XvaZbFy)

You also have provided no quantifiable evidence that there is a bias in favour of women in any area of media, let alone in an area as broad as "movies". Do you have such evidence?

Also at what point did anyone mention they were afraid of running out of movies to watch?

<comment><USER3> "(2000 movies cherry picked?) Could you let me know how this doesn't read as implying the author has bias? Am I perhaps misreading this?"

That was a question I posed, not a claim. They mention they only used 2000 of the 8000 movies and never explain why. And yes, I don't necessarily trust those authors (the way you seem to do), because they have an agenda. Doesn't mean I believe they are lying, but it must be allowed to poke at the article with a stick.

"Am I perhaps misreading that you think research like this is funded by gender studies grants?"

I have no doubt that studies like this is sometimes funded by gender studies grants. I didn't make that claim about the article here. Still, somebody needs to pay for it. So you can not just dismiss anybody else's response with "why don't you do your own study".

"perhaps the evidence you have that suggests the author had an agenda before embarking on this analysis?"

They say so themselves in their article, right at the top. They set out to demonstrate that white men dominate movie roles.

"You also have provided no quantifiable evidence that there is a bias in favour of women in any area of media, let alone in an area as broad as "movies". Do you have such evidence?"

I never made a claim of bias in media, just that there is plenty of stuff for women to consume (not saying there isn't bias, just that I didn't talk about it). A quick Google search or visit to your nearest news agent could confirm that for you, I don't think I should have to invest time to provide you with a dossier for that.

"Also at what point did anyone mention they were afraid of running out of movies to watch?"

Well what are the authors afraid of? They say "white men dominate movie roles" and assume that is self-evidently a problem. Well, it is not, so I tried to guess why it could be a problem. The only time I would consider it a problem would be if it would lead to some demographic (say, women) running out of movies to watch. However, if there was so much unfulfilled desire, it would be a market opportunity and I can't see why the industry wouldn't react. In fact, if feminists are so convinced that many, many women are longing for different movies, they should raise money to make those movies. (Anita Sarkeezian already raised amore than a million $ for some lousy YouTube videos, so it certainly isn't impossible to raise money for feminist movies).

Let's take another occupation, modeling - it seems as if women dominate the modeling industry. Is that a problem? Do we need a campaign for more male models, and higher pay of male models? I personally don't care, because I am not interested in seeing more male models. If a lot of people were interested, the industry would most likely react.

In the same way, if a lot of people want to see movies with male actors (say they are into war movies, or action flicks), why would it have to be considered a problem?

<comment><USER4> > They set out to demonstrate that white men dominate movie roles.

They don't write this in the article so why do you say this?

> In fact, if feminists are so convinced that many, many women are longing for > different movies, they should raise money to make those movies. (Anita > Sarkeezian already raised amore than a million $ for some lousy YouTube > videos, so it certainly isn't impossible to raise money for feminist > movies).

You're ranting about something not related to the article, again.

> it seems as if women dominate the modeling industry.

Another claim with no evidence. Another perfect demonstration of why the quantification in the article is _useful_.

<comment><USER3> "They don't write this in the article so why do you say this?"

They write it literally in the first paragraph: "white men dominate movie roles... But it's all rhetoric and no data...To begin answering these questions"

"You're ranting about something not related to the article, again."

You don't seem to understand or not want to understand the point I am trying to make. Nor have you ever answered my question what, in your opinion, is the actual problem the article uncovers?

"Another claim with no evidence. Another perfect demonstration of why the quantification in the article is useful."

That is just ridiculous. First, just because you throw some numbers or data around, you don't have evidence. In this case, you have data about lines in movies, but not about customer demand for movies of various properties (for example). Second, it is still possible to have a conversation without an Excel sheet in the background. You also don't seem to be interested enough in my argument to do your own research.

I actually did google a bit on the model thing, but the first hits were about male models earning less than female models. Finding actual numbers of employed models and the exposure they get would have taken longer. It simply didn't seem worth it for an example, given that I am not campaigning for model rights or anything.

Maybe I would have even made that effort, but the model, as well as the women's magazines, are actually just an example. I clearly stated that. They are meant as a thought experiment. Unless you are convinced that there is no industry on earth dominated by women (are you?), it doesn't matter if in one particular example the numbers add up, because by magic of armchair thinking, you could just pick another example to clarify the concept. Or let's assume no industry on earth is dominated by women. You could STILL make a thought experiment and think of some theoretical industry where women dominate, to try to understand the point. If you have at least a shred of imagination, that is.

I am not going to repeat the point I was trying to make, as you seem to be not interested in understanding it (not even accepting it, just understanding it).

Should my estimate of your motivation be wrong, ask away and I'll try to clarify. Otherwise, why not end the discussion here.

<comment><USER4> Without your ellipses it doesn't come across as a literal statement:

"The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles."

That is not equivalent to "White men dominate movie roles." The _prevailing theme_ of the shit Hollywood is getting is that white men dominate movie roles. How can you look at yourself as a reliable source when you need to chop up quotes so needlessly?

Interestingly, even given your massacring of quotes, you seem totally willing to conduct thought experiments, and use the results (lol) of your thought experiments to accuse articles of being useless. Without quantification, in the words of the article "it's all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion."

Unfortunately, you seem absolutely convinced that the burden lies on me to provide proof, that meets your standards, for claims you make from thought experiments, that aren't addressed or even mentioned in the article.

As I said very early on, I encourage you to do some quantifiable analysis.

<comment><USER3> Huh, you blame me for not providing data, but you don't want to provide data yourself?

I don't understand your comment on my quotes of the article. They clearly set out to show in what ways white men dominate movie roles. My quote didn't distort that statement at all - I only chopped it up to make the quote shorter.

You still haven't answered what you consider to be the use of the article? What are we even talking about?

What data ("quantifiable analysis") do you want me to provide? I don't understand you.

Thought experiments aren't useless, and data isn't automatically useful. You seem to be blinded by the presentation of the article (has charts and data, seems legit). It's like trusting a person because they dress like a physician - understandable human flaw, but misguided.

<comment><USER4> I'm not dismissing a quantified claim without evidence, so why would I provide data?

Interestingly, after the phrase you quoted out of context, they don't mention race again. Also they clearly aimed to discuss the claims made against Hollywood in a quantified manner. You are clearly just assuming that they had an agenda.

Could you provide any quantifiable analysis for your claim: "What matters is that all demographics get to see the films they like. It doesn't hurt one demographic if another demographic has more films made for."

Unfortunately you seem blinded by a high opinion of your own opinions. I trust the article more than I trust your armchair assumptions.

<comment><USER3> It's pure logic: if people have enough films to watch, how would it hurt them if there exist other movies they don't watch? What kind of data would you like to see to quantify that?

Let's take data from the article. Does it hurt you that the movie "3 women" exists, which according to the article has over 90% female lines? (I assume you are male)

Does it hurt you that the movie "Agnes of God" exists, which according to the article has over 90% female lines?

And so on - you never said what your problem is...

Does it hurt you that there exists aisles and aisles of nail polish for women in most drug stores, and only few nail polish aisles for men? Do you need me to quantify that? What would be the benefit of demanding an equal number of nail polish aisles for men and women?

And if you say "you trust the article", what exactly do you mean? I don't dispute their numbers (which doesn't necessarily mean I believe them, but as a working assumption, let's assume their analysis is correct). I dispute that they have uncovered a relevant problem. How would you quantify relevance here? What makes the paper relevant to you? What consequences should be drawn (if it is relevant, it means there should be a reaction to it)?

As for agendas, believe whatever you want.

<comment><USER4> Could you provide data that clearly indicates that the imbalance in film representations of women causes no harm?

My position has always been that you've assumed this article is useless without providing any evidence. I trust the article's claims more than your armchair pontification about whether it is useful or not. I have very little doubt that you'll continue to believe that magazine ratios are in favor of women without any evidence, with or without a quantified study on the subject. If that study came out in favor of men's magazines, it sounds like you'd accuse the authors of an agenda, as well.

Fortunately, more logical people have probably read this useful article and realized their assumptions about the representation of women in film were flawed.

<comment><USER3> You still didn't say what you consider useful about the article. The article also doesn't explain why imbalance in film representations is bad, it just assumes it. But because it has some numbers and charts, you seem to believe it proves everything you want to believe.

And your quote about the number of logical people reading the article comes across as really silly, after you have asked for evidence so many times. Have you quantified the number of "logical people" who found it useful vs the number of "logical people" who found it useless? Do you have evidence that the people you consider logical and who found the article useful are really logical?

You going on about the magazines just proves that you don't understand my point. I think it is enough now - you could just reread my previous comments if you are still interested...

<comment><USER4> The irony is delicious when you demand data to back up the negative assumptions I make about your motives and mental faculties. I'd provide more evidence, but it is expensive. I don't have a gender studies grant or anything to pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related Reddit post, with one of the authors answering questions:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4e15fa/the_largest_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4e15fa/the_largest_analysis_of_film_dialogue_by_gender/)

Also, from that thread, someone posted that USC does an annual film gender study. The latest is here [pdf]:

[http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Applications/Content...](http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Applications/Content%20Manager/%7E/media/3E7C3476F61349A8A6246F95332F9256.ashx)

</comment><comment><USER6> A disproportionate amount of movies are about crime stories. Most policemen and criminals are young and men (today, and even more in the past). For the same reason most war movies will also be dominated by young men. Same thing for western movies, the role of women at the XIX wasn't to hold the gun, and guns is what keeps the audience entertained. Why would it be surprising to have a disproportionate amount of young males on screen given the sort of stuff the audience watches?

For the same reason I would expect to see a disproportionate amount of policemen, soldiers and criminals.

They should do that by genre. I would be surprised if comedies, romance, or drama would be much imbalanced.

<comment><USER7> There is a by-genre section in the article which shows little deviation in the trend across the board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why did they google 8000 screenplays and matched their lines, then used only 2000 for the analysis?

<comment><USER8> Author here: we scraped every script website on the Internet. First we tried to normalize the dataset but only doing stats on the top 1,000 box office, but we were missing too many scripts. So we decided to go big and then display a cut of the data that's only films in the top 2,500 box office (we had about half of those).

We're aware of sampling error and the potential for cherry-picking, but also struggled to figure out what was a representative sample.

<comment><USER3> How do scripts end up on such script websites? Is it a fair assumption that it is random if a movie's script is online or not?

If you go by box office success it seems to me you already introduce the bias of consumer preferences, not choices of the movie industry. Wouldn't it be better to go by production costs (and marketing budget, if that is not included in production costs)? Although over time one would hope the industry choices would reflect consumer preferences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I would much prefer to see is what effect the % of dialog has on profitability. Audiences buying behavior is what is responsible for what kinds of movies, actors and characters are made because movies are profit driven endeavor.

Looking at their data, I took the "top 20" male and female movies and compared their world wide gross, male movies averaged 50% more than female.

[http://i.imgur.com/24dUzBD.png](http://i.imgur.com/24dUzBD.png)

<comment><USER10> How would this show the effect of male/female dialog on profitability? All it shows is that the most profitable films feature heavy male dialog, not that audiences select for more male dialog when seeing a film. And what is your thesis here anyways? That the film industry features men more heavily because society is misogynistic (just not the film industry itself)?

<comment><USER9> It would just show the bias of the consumer, which would explain the bias in the product? Action movies for example are incredibly male dominated and also very popular, until the general public is OK with seeing women getting beaten, killed and abused I dont see this ever changing.

The majority of the films in this list that have predominately female characters all fit into a specific mold of story telling with very little overlap with the types of movies that feature predominately male characters. I very much doubt that either group who consumes these types of movies is interested in the same sort of stories about the opposite sex. That of course is my opinion.

I dont see how any of that is misogynistic? That would be like saying teenage girls are misogynistic for favoring boy bands over girl bands.

<comment><USER11> _" Action movies for example are incredibly male dominated and also very popular, until the general public is OK with seeing women getting beaten, killed and abused I don't see this ever changing."_

Angelina Jolie has made several action movies where she gets banged up quite a bit. ( _Salt_ was originally designed for Tom Cruise; Jolie was a big improvement.) So has Scarlett Johansson (who, as Black Widow, ought to have an origin movie but isn't getting one.) Sigourney Weaver also had some tough times in her action movies. All of those were successful films.

<comment><USER9> Dominated - Have a commanding position over.

No one said they do not exist.

Salt is rated PG-13 Aliens while rated R is 37 years old.

I dont understand the point you are trying to make?

How many movies have you seen, where men beat up women? How many movie shave you seen, where women beat up men?

As long as society has asymmetric views on gender you will never have equality of roles in movies.

<comment><USER10> This is an almost tautological position though. Films have a gender bias because society has a gender bias because, among other things, films have a gender bias. The reality is human beings have agency to make new things, dismantle previous stereotypes, and create an equal footing. Female action stars are not a concept that puts us at an impasse for creating gender equality (in fact, I'd argue with things like the Hunger Games, some of the marvel films, etc. the trend is to begin featuring women incrementally more in action films). I still haven't seen any evidence that gender stereotypes or prevalence of women are a causal factor in profitability, but even if that were the case I think we need to ask ourselves if that's a just position to take for defensibility.

<comment><USER9> I haven't seen any evidence that gender equality in film dialog is a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is the layout of that page just broken, with text on top of text, or is it at my end?

</comment><comment><USER12> What about the old trope that the hero uses a Mac and the bad guys use Windows? :-)

</comment><comment> Syrup-tan How to mislead with bar graphs; the tutorial

[https://denpa.moe/~indy/e75d18.png](https://denpa.moe/~indy/e75d18.png)

<comment><USER13> The bar graphs were not designed to compare total amount of lines for each gender/age-range combination. Rather, they're meant to indicate how the percentage of lines for each gender is skewed older for male actors vs younger for female actors.

If they were to determine the length of each bar using amount of lines instead of percentage of lines, all that would be immediately clear is that females have less lines, a fact well established in the rest of the article, and the point would be lost.

<comment><USER8> author here. YESSSSS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, that's not very surprising. People write what they know, and most of the screenplays are written by 30+ male writers.

If 20-30 year old women would write more great scripts the situation would be different.

I don't think that screenwriters owe us any social justice. All they need to do is to write the best story they can, and it's much easier to do if you can more easily relate to the main characters.

<comment><USER15> > If 20-30 year old women would write more great scripts the situation would > be different.

How do you know they don't?

<comment><USER16> You presume Hollywood is more misogynist than profit driven, and would pass great scripts if delivered by women?

Maybe women are discouraged from becoming writers at an earlier age, but the above sounds BS.</comment></comment></comment>


US Air Force says decision-making attack drones will be here by 2047 - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/28/us-air-force-says-decision-making-attack-drones-will-be-here-by/

<comment><USER2> They set the 2047 as deadline, beacuase by 2037 they would have ground tested various weapons and aircrafts (eg. LM FB-22).

However several papers and articles I read time ago, reported that the DoD was searching for advanced methods (read AI-like) to recognize enemy vehicles (and personnel). Unfortunately I can't find the links.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know how long the folks making the prediction expect to live? I ask because this sounds like an instance of "AI will be good enough right around the time that I should die", as in [http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/03/the_maesgarre...](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/03/the_maesgarreau.php) (which was recently mentioned in HN).

</comment><comment><USER4> It reminds me of a story (how to apply for a job to teach a mule to speak):

 _Before ten years pass, I die, the mule dies or the sultan dies..._ </quote> <http://nasredin.blogspot.com/2007/11/ibn-khaldouns-mule.html>

taken from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411695>

<comment><USER5> Ah, that was a fantastic story, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of Arabian Nights, which is really a fine read. Lots of proverbs and fun little stories - you might want to check it out, I'd recommend Husain Haddawy's translation. Looks like the Deluxe Edition is on sale right now for $12, which is a steal. One of my favorite books.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393331660/> (no affiliate link)

On an unrelated note, it's worth reading the general summaries of Ibn Khaldun's works too. A lot of things we take for granted now but were incredibly advanced back then, as well as some good observations generally on how to think and consider things. It'd appeal to the sort of man who generally likes Adam Smith, Carl von Clauswitz, Plato, etc.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun#Works>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I could say nearly anything will be here by 2047.

<comment><USER7> I want my jet pack and flying cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How long did the atomic bomb take to develop? 10 years?

<comment><USER9> 4-6, but under highly exceptional circumstances that are probably impossible to reproduce in peacetime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's always fun to watch non-programmers underestimate the difficulty of human-equivalent AI.

<comment><USER11> I don't really know what you mean by "human-equivalent", but I'll assume you mean an AGI. I don't think an actual programmer is the most qualified to build it. It could equally be a neuroscientist or a mathematician (who does some Maple or Python on the side for their job), and more realistically a multidisciplinary team.

I've seen plenty of programmers underestimating the problem of AGI as well!

<comment><USER12> _I've seen plenty of programmers underestimating the problem of AGI as well!_

...though for every one that underestimates it, there are plenty that overestimate it.

Solving this problem doesn't necessarily mean that we do anything at all clever; it really may just boil down to having decent brain scanning technology and lightning fast processors to run the simulations. We'll definitely have the computers, in time, so the only question is whether brain scanning improves. If that's what it comes down to, programmers and computer scientists are pretty much irrelevant, and the real heroes will be the guys doing medical tool development.

Granted, it would be deeply unsatisfying to "solve" the problem by blindly copying nature. But there's a very real possibility that it's going to turn out to be our first viable solution to the problem, and let's be honest: it's not going to be very difficult to do if the enabling technologies are already in place.

<comment><USER13> > deeply unsatisfying to "solve" the problem by blindly copying nature

The image that jumped to my mind, was the wing flapping airplane prototypes that, quite literally, never got off the ground, and that we all laugh at today.

Perhaps, in the end, our solution won't match natures.

That also leads me to another thought, which is the definition of the problem.

Going back to the airplane. If the problem had been defined as "to build a machine with birdlike agility and control", than we still wouldn't be there. Instead of patting ourselves on the backs, we would still be miserably failing, over 100 years later. But we didn't really need birdlike agility, we just wanted to fly, which, it turns out, is much easier.

The problem statement for a lot of AI research seems similarly ambitious. Do we really want to create some sentient being, trapped in a box? Or is what we're really after, a little more practical and obtainable?

I think folks like the military, get this. They have a definite objective that they are trying to accomplish. Autonomous desert navigation, autonomous urban navigation, autonomous enemy identification. These are things you can define, measure, and make progress on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did they say 2047 instead of 2050 in order to make it sound like less of a guess?

<comment><USER15> Seriously. 38 years in the future? That's the same span as from 1909 (the dawn of heavier than air flight and radio) to 2047 (computers, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles, radar, submarines, jet aircraft). And from there to 1985 (guided missiles, ICBMs, satellites, GPS). With such a long time frame damned near any prediction may come to pass.

It's plenty likely that by 2047 we'll not only have fully autonomous combat aircraft but we'll have automated aircraft fabricators and aircraft fabricator fabricators.

It's almost as valid to say that we'll be fighting sentient robots in hand-to- hand combat in a post-apocalyptic world in 2047.

<comment><USER16> Your point is a good one but I think it's somewhat cheating to pick 1909-1947 as your arbitrary 38 year period since both world wars happened during that period. A world war has a way of spurring innovation in killing technologies more than anything else. I guess it's possible we have two more world wars between now and 2047, but that seems unlikely to me.

<comment><USER15> Well, I picked two periods, 1909-1947 and 1947-1985, in one two world wars occurred, in the other the Cold War occurred. But that's the point isn't it? Over time history happens. The time line is not a steady state. People thought that the end of the Cold War was the end of history, but that wasn't the case at all, plenty of history happened and is still happening, throughout the world. Plenty more history will happen in the next 38 years. Perhaps that history will include a war between nuclear powers (somewhat unlikely) or perhaps it will include things we cannot anticipate today, but it's a bit silly to imagine that we can predict what the technology of 2047 will look like.

That's BDUF at its worst. Better to look at the technology needs of today while planning for flexibility and be able to iterate rapidly if we see a need for change down the road. If the US had locked itself into some grand technology road map in 1909 it would have most assuredly lost WWII because it could not have anticipated the technological needs of that war.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: The Markdown Resume - <AUTHOR> http://mszep.github.io/pandoc_resume/

<comment><USER2> I did something similar while in grad school when I was applying to jobs several years ago, except I made it so that I could customize the output.

I found myself spending so much time manipulating my resume to match each job description I was applying to, that I put all of my experiences, interests, etc. into a sqllite db. Using that, I created a UI to quickly select which items I wanted in this iteration of my resume, and then spit it out in a few different HTML formats that could be easily converted to txt or pdf. I eventually intended to do ngram matching with job description bullet points, but I got hired and moved onto other projects.

The sqllite db was overkill. Honestly I think what would have been better would have been a json format not unlike [http://jsonresume.org](http://jsonresume.org), because it allows for more attributes, some of which could be used to group experience.

This markdown is nice because it's humanly intelligible, but what if you want to give hidden attributes to the different items - attributes which shouldn't be in the final media file?

<comment> dj-wonk Clojure people like EDN instead of JSON. :) When I hire contractors, I ask for an EDN formatted resume, submitted via curl to a quick web app. I validate it on the server side. People enjoyed it (at least the ones who succeeded).

<comment><USER3> It's too bad the EDN standard ain't an actual standard or proper spec. I had to rail on those people for fucking ages to get any ambiguities fixed and last I gave a damn it still:

1\. Wasn't congruent with what Clojure's parser allows

2\. Defined by whatever Hickey feels this year

I've worked on more than one edn parser in non-Clojure languages, it was Total Hell.

Hitching your wagon to EDN isn't advisable, there are better formats if you need them.

<comment> dj-wonk I don't think that "Whatever Rich Hickey feels this year" is a serious pain point. Rich isn't fickle with changes; quite the opposite. Clojure has evolved, but Rich explains himself well.

What changes have bothered you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And when your boss wants to fire you, she just does a pull request.

</comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only person in this thread who doesn't think that the structured nature of a CV isn't necessarily super important? Having a readable, well laid-out and well-written CV can be vital in deciding whether someone is worth contacting or not.

I love putting "structured data" in formats like JSON as much as the next guy, but sometimes that approach misses the point a little bit IMO.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I feel that presentation nuances in your printed or PDF resume are important.

For example, how does this structured approach ensure that everything fits neatly on one page?

<comment><AUTHOR> You and parent raise fair points, but I think this approach is a good compromise between the structure that you get from markdown and the aesthetics that ConTeXt is able to achieve.

To expand on your point, it's true that this approach does not automatically fit a given amount of content neatly into N pages, but I don't think there exists a system that can; you'll always have to iterate on what exactly to include if you want to have exactly N fully filled pages, regardless of your document processing workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been playing around with this, too. Markdown -> PDF with a CSS3 stylesheet was what Iw as aiming for. I tried a few engines and none of them would preserve text, which I see as quite important for resumes. You've done a nice job though with ConTeXt.

I mostly wanted to be able to style my resume using CSS3, which is not possible with your method, which is a shame - but this is still pretty great. Nice job :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :-)

I considered this too, and indeed I was not able to find a way to use a single stylesheet with multiple formats. However, I found that many css commands have (near) equivalents in ConTeXt, so translating the css wasn't as much work as I was fearing. I don't know how this would have worked with LaTeX, but I get the impression it wants to do more of the layout work itself..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A couple of years ago I started using LinkedIn's resume builder [1]. It takes my existing LinkedIn profile information and generates a nice-looking PDF in one of several user-selectable formats. I tweaked my profile information so that it looks decent in resume style. That satisfies 99% of my need for resumes -- and besides, most of the time anyone who asks for it has already looked at my LinkedIn profile anyway, and probably only wants a PDF as something to put in their file.

[1] [http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/](http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/)

<comment><USER8> +1 for the resume builder, it's super easy and the results look great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's another option based on JSON. It went viral on HN 4 days ago: [http://jsonresume.org/](http://jsonresume.org/)

The HN post can be found here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996464)

</comment><comment><USER10> The biggest problem I see is that there is no semantic information present, making it hard for machines to digest or convert into other formats. (e.g. hResume or jsonResume)

Otherwise its aesthetically well rendered:)

<comment><AUTHOR> (author here)

You're right; I considered this aspect, but thought it was more important to preserve the flexibility to e.g. name sections whatever I want, or order them however I want. Ultimately I see the final document (html or pdf) as primarily intended for human, not computer consumption.

<comment><USER10> > Ultimately I see the final document (html or pdf) as primarily intended for > human, not computer consumption.

Which for a resume isn't a bad assumption. Additionally, if I choose to use something semantic to define the resume, this is a wonderful way to format it nicely:)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, the two approaches are complementary, and it might even make sense to write a tool to convert from json to markdown, in order to take advantage of the formatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A JSON or YAML structure, like [http://jsonresume.org/](http://jsonresume.org/), may be a better approach. Markdown is great at doing regular content, not so much when it comes to dealing with structured data, which is mostly what a resume is: collections of objects for education, experience, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> (author here)

I thought about this too, but came to the conclusion that since markdown (or, more precisely, the pandoc internal format) does offer enough structure in the form of lists, tables, headers, even footnotes etc, it makes sense to stay in markdown because it's much more human-friendly than, say, json.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you about JSON. YAML Front Matter (like in Jekyll), allows you to have a mix of both markdown (for the bio part) and structured fields (for the education, past experiences, diplomas etc). Works for websites, should work for your resume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now you can add markdown resume on your markdown resume... How cool is that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha I'll have to do that soon...

In the meantime, I actually am looking for a job, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833969) for details :-)

</shamelessplug>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We have created a bridge with LinkedIn, so you can create a baseline resume which you can then enhance: [http://www.summagram.com/](http://www.summagram.com/) (click on 'create resume' button: The whole thing is in early beta, so you will be helping out the testing quite a bit by doing this). The raw data in json format is available as well. Summagram is intended for any kind of document, so the schema is a bit generic.

</comment><comment><USER14> Happy to see the Resume is based on ConTeXt, my favorite typesetting system. The developer is a friend of mine. Loooong time ago I've started [http://wiki.contextgarden.net](http://wiki.contextgarden.net) to collect information about ConTeXt.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I like it better than LaTeX as well, having only used it for this project. Apart from being more convenient for specifying layout, I like the fact that it's a coherent system, compared to LaTeX's jungle of packages when you need to to anything interesting...

About your site, I used it extensively and it was a great help :-)

<comment><USER14> It's not my site anymore, I was just the one who started it. All credits should go to the new maintainers and active people there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We are creating a service to let people create docs in json format, and share the resulting docs as interactive data docs. I feel resumes are a specialized use case for this (eg: [http://www.summagram.com/Summagram/ViewSummagram/Jose%20Paul](http://www.summagram.com/Summagram/ViewSummagram/Jose%20Paul) ) I just saw the jsonresume page. Very interesting. Am looking at incorporating their structure into our editor and viewer.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. Does anyone remember xmlresume from ~10 years ago?

[http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/](http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/)

<comment> dj-wonk I bet most people either (a) don't remember the unholy combination of XML and a resume (b) or wish they could.

<comment> dj-wonk I meant "wish they could _forget_ ".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On a similar thread, I've had my resume as markdown for a while with a little PHP script to compile it to PDF and HTML.

[https://github.com/donatj/resume](https://github.com/donatj/resume) Build script [https://github.com/donatj/Resume/blob/master/build.php](https://github.com/donatj/Resume/blob/master/build.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> (author here)

Interesting, I wasn't aware of DOMPDF...

Your pdf looks much nicer than what I was able to achieve going from html to pdf with wkhtmltopdf. Then again, your css stylesheet is a bit simpler than what I'm using, I wonder if that'd make a difference.

<comment><USER16> DOMPDF is by far my favorite PHP PDF Library, its not the most _capable_ but its arguably the most consistent and least finicky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've used this approach for the last few months and I really like it. I don't see why you need to convert to HTML and then PDF though, as pandoc is flexible enough for you to write templates for each output format. My resume ([https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/resume](https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/resume)) uses that approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> (author here)

But that's exactly what my approach does though, it improves on an earlier approach which generated pdf via html by adding a ConTeXt template which allows pandoc to generate a pdf directly, and gives the resume a similar look and feel to the html version.

Using ConTeXt instead of LaTeX has the advantage that it's nicer for setting layout properties, is more of a coherent system (in contrast to LaTeX's maze of packages), and is not specifically geared towards producing scientific documents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Honestly, if you're applying for an engineering position, a monospaced resume (like the markdown one shown here) might actually be a cool idea.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just maintain mine in HTML so it's all pretty and designey.

Then I use @media print css to make it grayscale and exactly one page if printed.

Lastly I use chrome's Print to PDF option to make a PDF version of it.

I think I could prob jam the HTML into word if I really needed a .doc but who really wants to work a place mandating that.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been using Markdown + Pandoc for my resume for the last couple of years: [https://github.com/calebmadrigal/Resume/blob/master/resume_c...](https://github.com/calebmadrigal/Resume/blob/master/resume_caleb_madrigal.md). It's definitely nice to easily update it on Github.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a markdown resume as well, but I just used Marked[0] to convert it to a nicely-formatted PDF. Then again, I've never needed to submit a MS Doc file.

[0]: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marked/id448925439](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marked/id448925439)

<comment><USER5> Can you style it yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> (author here)

Flexibility in styling is not a strong point of my approach to be fair, since you'd need to write new styles in both css and tex.

If people want to contribute new css styles, I can try and come up with tex equivalents...

<comment><USER5> Even better: a transpiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Markdown resumes are neat just like the LaTex and others but I feel like they're a bit gimmicky (every developer does one it seems). Maybe that's the point. Some days I feel like I'm the only one who applies a set of styles and formats to my resume current sitting in Google Docs or Word.

<comment><USER23> Thing is, as a developer, I don't have Word on my computer. So when it comes to reviewing resumes, one in Word format is going to be very difficult for me to view. I might just not bother.

PDFs are fine. But, IMO, Markdown is better, because it's also demonstrating a skill that's usable in your job.

<comment><USER24> Out of curiosity, what do you use as an alternative to Word if you do have to open something in a .doc/.docx format? Surely just saying "I don't have Word because I'm a developer" can't work in every situation?

<comment><USER25> I use Bean (for Mac, no longer supported) for reading documents. Open Office and Libre Office also work.

Honestly, I use Word for writing formal documents on the rare occasion when it happens, such as letters to the government. But not for resumes. The formatting is just too frustrating. I've been using HTML and markdown for that. www.rocketships.ca, for example. I never send .docs to anyone - .pdfs or raw text only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> After Word/PDF/Latex/PS/HTML and XML, web-famous resumes have come so far in Flash, JSON, now Markdown. I suspect there were Java applets and iphone/android app as resumes.

What's left? a YAML resume?

<comment><USER27> Non-'standard' resumes are terrible for recruiters as they have to be parsed before they can be read properly or added to any tool they may be using.

By 'standard' I pretty much mean PDF.

<comment><USER28> In EU the Europass CV [1], or "Standard European CV" as everybody calls it, is the de-facto standard CV. It is often the compulsory format for CV for jobs in the public sector and it is also suggested by many businesses.

[1] [http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/en/about](http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/en/about)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You should also look into this gem which converts to html, Markdown : [http://prat0318.github.io/json_resume](http://prat0318.github.io/json_resume)

</comment><comment><USER30> Since jsonresume.org allows for Markdown export of the resumes, it should adopt this format specifically for its markdown exports.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm working on a yml-formatted resume built in Jekyll. I'll post it when it's done.

<comment><USER32> Hi, you might be able to take some pieces from mine at [https://github.com/bamos/cv](https://github.com/bamos/cv). I use Python and Jinja templates to convert a YAML document to Markdown/HTML and PDF and currently publish it to my Github pages Jekyll blog at [http://bamos.github.io/cv/](http://bamos.github.io/cv/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In pandoc how do you convert a directory of .md files into HTML?

<comment><AUTHOR>
        pandoc dir/*.md --to html

should work.

<comment><USER33> That will print it in the terminal but how do I save each .md file as a .html file?

<comment><USER34> Use a for loop?

        for f in *.md; do
            pandoc $f --to html > $(basename -s.md $f).html
        done

EDIT to fix the adjectival basename call.

<comment><USER35> agreed, this is exactly the sort of thing for loops in shell are useful for.. incidentally, in zsh you can do this with

       for f (*.md) pandoc $f --to html > $f:r.html

personally I find that when I can fit a loop on a single line in zsh I'm much more inclined to use them</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard - <AUTHOR> https://monitoror.com <comment><USER2> Panic used to have an iOS app that did this. It was called Status Board, and was magnificent.

You could put it on an old iPad on an easel on your desk and watch everything from RSS feeds to ping statistics. In an office setting, you'd hook the 'Pad up to a cheap flat screen TV so everyone could see.

Sadly, Panic discontinued it when it decided to go after the video game market.

<comment><USER3> But why do you need an app where webpage is more than enough?

<comment><USER4> Because it cost like $10 and 5 minutes, could be set up by non-web-plumbers, and was pretty out of the box.

<comment><USER5> Aside: this is one of the biggest lessons of my adult life. Just because I _could_ make something doesn't mean I _should_ make something. Learning to value your time is a very underdeveloped skill.

<comment><USER6> But...but.. something.. something Stallman...vendor lock-in...closed-platforms bad...something.

<comment><USER3> If it is a sarcasm, then please mind that original comment author got really humped by this app's vendor when it stopped working. Maybe Stallman got something right after all?

<comment><USER2> It didn't stop working. It just doesn't get updated anymore.

<comment><USER7> In Stallman thinking though, he doesn't have the freedom to fix or update it himself.

(I don't think Stallman's ideas are necessarily right for everybody, but I'm glad he's doing his thing right out in his end of the bell curve to counteract the opposite end of the software philosophy craziness...)

<comment><USER8> Under Stallmans model the developer works for free, and I guess they need a second job to pay the rent. Ah but GPL doesn't mean free as in beer? Oh yes for practical purposes it does mean exactly that. Outlier business models excepted of course!

<comment><USER3> Actually no. Under Stallman's model it is perfectly okay to demand and earn payment for your work, but results still would be free, quote, as in "free speech", not "free beer", unquote. Did you see bounty offers in open source repos' issues?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know people like wallboards and monitors but we found them anti-pattern. If you find yourself looking at a wallboard/dashboard, it should already be an automated alert.

<comment><USER10> Strongly disagree.

Understanding your metrics is a key part of so many roles, from devops, to product teams, to marketers...

Yes, you should be automating alerts whenever possible. Yes, you should be putting up key metrics in a visible place so everyone can see how the product is performing.

I can't tell you how many times I caught an issue because I knew our metrics backwards and forwards, but it didn't trip an alert threshold. Not every issue follows a pattern easily defined in a check, and human brains are incredible computers capable of helping to fill in that gap.

<comment><USER11> > _I can't tell you how many times I caught an issue because I knew our > metrics backwards and forwards, but it didn't trip an alert threshold._

So how many times was an issue _missed_ because you weren't in the office, or because you were looking at your own screen and not dashboards at the moment?

Humans are incredibly powerful, but our whole job as SREs is to make things reliable, repeatable, and scalable. We're doing an industry-wide migration from elegantly hand-crafted LAMP stacks running SSH to Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code, not because you can't fix problems with SSH (you can, and you can usually fix them faster and better) but because you can't _scalably_ fix problems with SSH. Similarly, if a human found an issue and alert didn't trip, I'd count that as a bug/missing feature in the monitoring.

It's valuable while you're still small and working out your monitoring to keep a human in the loop - but at some point you need to get rid of that single point of failure. By all means, rely on a human to figure out where your alerting is lacking (just like you rely on a human to write the infrastructure-as-code), but you should eventually not rely on human intervention to actually keep incidents from happening.

<comment><USER2> _So how many times was an issue missed because you weren 't in the office, or because you were looking at your own screen and not dashboards at the moment?_

That's not a problem with dashboards. That's a problem with training and staffing people.

 _because you can 't scalably fix problems with SSH._

The number of businesses that need to worry about scalability is vanishingly small compared to the number of businesses that don't. Let's not pretend that one company's problems are the same as another's.

 _you should eventually not rely on human intervention to actually keep incidents from happening._

He didn't state that the dashboard was the only way his organization kept tabs on things. He indicated that it was only one way, and specifically stated that an alert system also exists.

<comment><USER12> >That's not a problem with dashboards. That's a problem with training and staffing people.

Training and staffing people to look at dashboards? I've never heard of this and it sounds awful.

<comment><USER2> "Hey, Mike. On your way to the Keurig, remember to glance at the status panel on the wall and let us know if something doesn't look right, OK?"

Brutal.

<comment><USER13> Why should Mike have to remember this? Why should all of your infrastructure depend on Mike not getting a text from his wife while walking to the fridge for a La Croix?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Care to explain why one would use this over something much more capable like Grafana? [1]

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

<comment><USER15> Grafana needs a backend datastore, and typically prometheus exporters on each app, etc to get timeseries data that gets into the backend.

This seems to be checking endpoints for data at that specific time, not really doing any complex calculations or anything of that nature.

<comment><USER16> How often do you have data that is

1) important enough to display on a dashboard 2) not important enough to record so you can track it over time

?

<comment><USER17> Build status immediately jumps to mind.

<comment><USER18> Getting any sort of interesting insight from that surely requires the context of historical build statuses?

How long will it be down for? When will it be down next? How likely is it that it goes down next week? Is it just me or has it been down a lot this month?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Strangely the page doesn't say anything about it being Open Source.

It's MIT licenced by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> You right, I should add that to the landing page :)

It's in the footer but... who looks at the footer? :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For a terminal version of this, I really like [https://wtfutil.com/](https://wtfutil.com/)

Create a config file, and you get something similar.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been looking at different status board tools and the one thing I've always found missing is dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 tests. It'd be nice to be able to see that both protocols to a given port are working as expected.

I don't want to write my own, so I'll probably settle on one and try to offer up a PR for dual-ip stack checks. I'll take a look at this one too.

</comment><comment><USER22> Problem with this is that any half competent team can put something like this up in an hour or so. Wallboards are for high level stats - like 1 or 2 numbers the team should focus on.

Maybe the tiles are super smart and can do uptime testing, log monitoring etc in which case this should be positioned as an uptime tester/log monitor etc

<comment><USER23> Speaking from personal experience, our team originally made our own wallboard, and it was put on a big monitor in our space. Originally all was fine, the board would stop updating numbers once in a while, but nobody really cared. Just ssh into our raspberry pi, and restart the services.

Turns out that our scrum masters and product owners looked at this board when they walked by, now they wanted to see other things as well. So they started allocating developer time to build these statistics, obviously a job nobody wanted to do. So we bought an existing solution that had all the data sources we needed, and let the business manager their stats.

So yeah, I agree anyone could build it themselves, but it rarely sticks to those 1 or 2 numbers, in which case, it's cheaper to spend a couple of bucks, than have developers continue to support it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Reminds me of [http://dashing.io/](http://dashing.io/)

<comment><USER21> Dashing was kinda garbage through. There was no standard/sane way to install new plugins. I haven't checked out the currently maintained for, but the original is dead/archived. I made the following for Dashing for tracking Seattle Transit:

[https://github.com/sumdog/seatransit](https://github.com/sumdog/seatransit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this like an open-source Geckoboard?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kind of, yep :)

But there is no graph/visualization support for now, and Monitoror is more for IT monitoring right now.

It will evolve to add more and more tile types.

Feel free to create issues if you need specific tile types :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Could you grab and parse content with this? I'm not really using CI stuff, but showing events (calendar), grabbing weather data or output from other simple commands (health checks) could be of use. Didn't find any of that in the example tiles

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, check HTTP-FORMATTED tile :)

You can display content from JSON, YAML or XML available over HTTP

<comment><USER26> oh didn't see that HTTP-RAW also returns the regex match. Thanks. will give it a try Any possibility for command outputs thought?

<comment><AUTHOR> Put the output in a file and expose it with a simple HTTP server :)

I do not think that we will add some command call since it can be heavy and can potentially add some security concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The first UI config example has a PING tile, but PING type seems to be disabled by default, and I can't find how to enable it in the docs. So maybe a good thing to make more clear for people wanting to test quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> You right, I will change the config example for now.

Check the note in the Ping section here: [https://monitoror.com/documentation/#ping](https://monitoror.com/documentation/#ping)

I will work on making it more obvious/visible :)

Thank you for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks like it doesn't actually support changing the port currently, despite the documentation saying it is possible. I already use port 8080 so kind of stuck until I can use a different port.

<comment><USER29> I got it to run on a different port just fine with the MO_PORT environment variable, FWIW.

<comment><USER28> Turns out its just too early in the day. I wasn't saving the variable beyond setting it. So when I switched terminals it didn't exist. Put it in my bash profile and all is well.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use .env file too, or even put it before the command like that:

MO_PORT=8888 ./monitoror

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice design! Looks to be targeted at developers, but it could be good for product managers too. Some tile ideas; Issue counts, PR counts, vanity metrics... plenty of room for extension :)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is already GITHUB-COUNT tile type for issue/PR count :)

And yep, we plan to add more and more tile types as user ask them.

Thank you, glad you enjoy the design :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cool item but didn't scale well for mobile (iOS iPhone XS Plus)

</comment><comment><USER32> Neat. I want to add crabby support:

[https://github.com/chrissnell/crabby](https://github.com/chrissnell/crabby)

</comment><comment><USER33> This is cool, but I'm running into a lot of issues with multiple Jenkins tiles. The name from one is erroneously propagating to following tiles :/

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice handy tool, one grip is the scaling with different sizes, the text does scale, but not the box modules.. Small thing but really nice tool

</comment><comment><USER35> nice

</comment><comment><USER36> Site down :-)</comment>


Live startup legal advice - <AUTHOR> I'm testing a new concept that lets startup founders get live legal advice over skype. The lawyers on the site are real startup and business lawyers in California and are offering free consultations and discounted rates to startups.<p>Give it a try at www.lawdingo.com, and then let me know your thoughts here! <comment><USER2> Would be nice if there were some type of Scheduling mechanism. They're all "away" or "unavailable"

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool! Is calling necessary? I'd rather just send them a message over Skype.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good feedback. Technically, you can do that to. Just call them, but cancel the video part of it and just chat normally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is lawdingo.com a play on words of mandingo?</comment>


How "engagement" made the web a less engaging place - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/how-the-like-button-ruined-the-internet/519795/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I think this article missed a huge reason for the race to the bottom, and that's internet advertising. Articles are not written for "engagement" (per se), they're written to make the publishers money. I think nobody is actually expecting anyone to _click_ an advertisement (at least not on purpose), but getting people to view the article, and therefore view the ad, is likely the website's primary source of income.

And as more and more ads are viewed and not clicked, (there's probably some adtech term for this) the price per view is going to go down, which will encourage _more_ clickbait, which will drive the value of an impression down, etc.

The article struck me as a bit weird, it complains about yellow journalism, but it doesn't really dig into why it's happening. It just declares that shitty articles are written for the metrics, and leaves it at that. As if "metrics" had any intrinsic value. The mapping of metrics to money, as done by internet advertisements, is the actual problem.

While engagement is certainly a way to get more people to view more ads, it's but a tool and symptom of the system it's a part of, not the genesis of it.

<comment><USER3> I can't speak for everyone, but my site ([https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com)) keeps the advertising very much aligned to the content so I do expect that readers will click the ads on purpose and actually gain value from them.

When you're browsing around looking at office design projects and photos, you're seeing static advertisements for office furniture and services you might be interested in if you're in the industry. And if you're spending time on a website that consists only of office photos, you are probably are in the group interested in the advertisements.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > I do expect that readers will click the ads on purpose and actually gain > value from them.

I would be interested to know whether you have any stats to back this up; _if_ it works this would be great.

<comment><USER3> What sort of stats are you looking for specifically?

<comment><USER4> Click Through Rate?

<comment><USER5> CTR doesn't differentiate between accidental clicks and clicks from people who appreciated the advert. Sure, you could give it a gut judgement based on industry standard CTRs / personal experience, but it would be very rough.

To actually judge whether users wanted to see the advert the best metric would be conversions, but that's likely data the site owner wouldn't have (and even with that data, you'd need something to judge it against - for all the talk that most adverts are ignored, the fact remains that some adverts through Google/Facebook/whatever ad-network _can_ lead to direct conversions with a positive ROI).

Not saying it wouldn't be interesting to hear what his typical CTRs are, just that nobody should look at the answer and think you can make significant judgements based on them.

<comment><USER6> Comparing the ctr to the average sounds a lot better to me than "rough".

<comment><USER5> It's better than nothing, but it certainly isn't better than rough.

Setting aside what's "average" \- are you controlling for the type of advert (both what it's advertising and its format), the type of audience, etc...

Over the years I've seen plenty of examples where CTR and ROI just aren't linked at all. Right now my work doesn't involve a huge amount of this kind of advertising (though I do have experience overseeing 7 figure budgets in the past) so I don't have much great data to pull examples from, but here's one real example from a couple of months ago:

Two not-huge (sub $10k) media buys, both direct with websites (not through networks), both with websites that are well-respected by their readers and by their industry, both using the same adverts. One of the sites excitedly sent us a report about how well the ads had performed, a 5.63% CTR for banner ads, clearly we're popular! The tracking on our side showed that of the just over 15k clicks they sent, 12 converted into users for us. Meanwhile the other site was reporting a 1.32% CTR, sent just over 6k clicks (pricing and order size wasn't exactly identical between the two sites), and landed 700 new users. I know both companies well enough to not suspect click fraud, and I've seen the company that performed badly perform well on other campaigns. But if you just looked at this comparison, there's no argument that the campaign with a much lower CTR was actually hitting an audience that was more interested in what we had to sell than the one with the high CTR. There's lots of possible reasons, from accidental clicks depending on how sites are set up to the audience targeting each site did (both are big enough sites to offer specific targeting within their audience), etc.

(Edit to add that of the two campaigns I compared, both produced a negative ROI from my point of view, i.e. our CPA was far too high - just one was a lot worse than the other. I just pulled up the first spreadsheet I saw from the most recent obvious example I could think of for CTR != ROI.)

If CTR is the only metric you are able to look at, then you can do your best to make judgements on it. But the reason the adtracking solutions that annoys so many people exist is because without proper tracking, it's really hard to actually judge the value of any advertising you buy.

All that said, CTR does still have a big place in the industry, because generally speaking websites (or ad networks) are able to tell potential customers their typical CTRs, but aren't able to give data about further down the funnel (conversions, etc.) because this is data the ad buyers control, not the ad sellers. But it's really important not to think it tells the full story.

<comment><USER3> I agree that just looking at clicks or CTR can be misleading. Because the people clicking in my case usually can't buy something directly after clicking it can be even more murky. But this particular industry has primarily been advertising in magazines, so in some ways it is actually a better situation than before.

Also, by ~5% CTR in your example are you meaning that for every 100 impressions that campaign was getting 5 clicks?

<comment><USER5> Yep, CTR is clicks divided by impressions. Although thinking back I believe they were site skins with billboards, not just banners. Even still, for that ad format on that site I would have expected 1-2%. (And yeah, skins do tend to get more accidental clicks than a small banner ad, but in many cases can also provide better results regardless of accidental clicks.)

Depending on the ad format/placement and many other variables, it's possible to have a high-ROI advert with a 0.1% CTR, or a low-ROI advert with 5% CTR (or the exact opposite).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In general, as someone who consulted on the NYT front page, and several other higher profile news products in 2009 on...

The major change is simply economic: that the product stopped being the publication and started being the article. The public turning point for this granularization was when Gawker decided to play per click in March 2008. As this motivation was generally adopted industry wide, it separated a writers incentives from that of a the publication as a product.

We no longer had a quality bar set by brands, and instead a race to the bottom set by individual writers competition. You can see it everything from click- bait headlines to inflamatory articles, all the way to its final form: Fake news written only for views at the price of all other qualities.

<comment><USER8> This is a major reason, though certainly not the only reason, that the NYT has moved toward a primarily subscription-based business model for their online offerings. It's actually been very successful to date, and I think it's a good move for resisting the urge of clickbait. ([https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/](https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/))

<comment><USER9> They don't really have a choice. I don't think you can simultaneously offer a quality product and still compete for advertising dollars with the Buzzfeeds of the world. The _Times_ had a huge advantage in that they had a solid pre- internet brand. I wonder if it's even possible to start a company like that today without sinking hundreds of millions into getting it off the ground.

<comment><USER10> In this space, I'm very curious to see how the English version (just launched) of decorrespondent.nl will fare. This is a Dutch-language high quality news platform started only about 3 years ago, and the model is yearly paid subscription. I think this would be an example of what you're referring to. To be fair though, the editor who started it came from a well-respected traditional media newspaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am doing my part to combat this trend by writing very dull and unpopular blog entries. No likes for me thank you very much.

<comment><USER12> I'm conflicted on upvoting this comment, because if I do I'm just part of the problem right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a rather interesting stance to take for a publication whose article quality has degraded and ad size has increased (thirty-eight trackers, including two from Facebook, detected by my adblocker when I tried to access the article) over the past five years to the point where I refuse to read them.

If you take a look at the homepage through the Wayback archive as it used to appear in 2005[1], 2011[2], and today, you'll see how content disappears and click-baity headlines rise over time.

The Atlantic is very much a part of the problem of "the race towards the bottom" the author describes, and instead of having a discussion about how to fix it and maybe trying different revenue models, it continues to un- ironically have share and tweet buttons at the top of this article.

[1] [https://web- beta.archive.org/web/20050210070148/theatlantic....](https://web- beta.archive.org/web/20050210070148/theatlantic.com) [2][https://web- beta.archive.org/web/20110731234233/http://www.t...](https://web- beta.archive.org/web/20110731234233/http://www.theatlantic.com:80/)

<comment><USER14> Publishing pieces like this is one of the few ways the editorial side can put public pressure on the ad sales / revenue side to change or improve their behavior, particularly if other attempts have been ignored.

Writers may not be able to bite the hand that feeds them, but they can nibble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately, most people read the headline and then decide whether or not they agree with the article. My girlfriend works at a major online media publication and a lot of their Facebook shares and clicks happen before the user has viewed the story.

<comment><USER16> That makes sense, your likes/shares aren't for _you_ they are for other people to see. So it's more important to like and share the things you want other people to see you like/share than to have them reflect your actual preferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Upvoting something is not bad, but it becomes bad if every upvote is not based on an expressable reason beyond I agree, support, etc. with no valid reasoning.

Likes would be a lot more meaningful if randomly the user was required to express the reasoning behind why they liked something. If the user showed a pattern of not being able to express why they liked something, at the very least, other users would not see their vote as part of the count.

This would also likely increase the cost for "like spammers" \- but the real value would be that likes were more meaningful.

<comment><USER18> What you mention here is why I disagree with the fact that you can up OR downvote here without commenting. A comment should be required before you can upvote or downvote. All for similar reasons you raise here.

<comment><USER19> I think a more useful solution is to move away from a binary "up/down" vote to a system which gives multiple options with differing meanings to each.

Agree, useful/helpful, disagree, not relevant, spam, illegal, inflammatory, etc...

Then you can apply different weights to different votes and maybe even allow people to sort by the different values. Even some "dark" UI patterns might work well like completely ignoring some values (like disagree) and leave them there as a way for some to express that without having it change anything.

I haven't given much thought to the details, but it seems like this could help on the surface.

I feel like a major problem would be getting people to actually vote. It's already hard enough IMO and I frequently forget to vote on comments which I very much enjoyed and we're very relevant (like your own until this moment), and needing to have many options to choose from and possibly multiple steps would make that bar even higher which means less votes overall. Also getting across the meaning of what each vote really is meant to represent would be tough as well...

<comment><USER20> _Agree, useful /helpful, disagree, not relevant, spam, illegal, inflammatory, etc..._

Now limit the number of times I can vote within a given time period, and you've reinvented Slashdot.

<comment><USER19> But I want the opposite.

Encourage people to vote as many ways as possible, as many times as possible, as much as possible.

Check off not-relevant, agree, inflammatory. Or maybe disagree and relevant.

No limits, maybe some weighting, but no limits.

Just because some of the ideas have been done before doesn't mean it's just a reinvention.

<comment><USER20> _Encourage people to vote as many ways as possible, as many times as possible, as much as possible._

Here's the magic of the Slashdot system: not everyone has all day to click voting buttons, but some people do. So what you'll end up with your proposition is voting dominated by people that make a career out of hanging out on one web forum, with the conversation consequentially dominated by them.

The Slashdot system is more like jury duty: go in, do your civic duty by casting your five or ten votes, then go on about your day. I don't want a justice system dominated by people with nothing better to do than sit on juries every day.

<comment><USER19> That just lowers where the "poweruser" bar maxes out, it still doesn't encourage users to vote, nor does it really help with the reason for voting (as after I use my 10 votes, what happens when I see clearly off topic or bad content? Do I need to un-vote something good? Do I need to choose to un-vote something "less off topic"? Should I just ignore it?). I have a feeling that it would be gamed as well, comments or posts earlier in the day would be more likely to get votes.

I feel making the voting process easier by creative UX would help, and then weighting can take care of the rest. If a power user votes 100X more than the average, have their votes count 100X less, or some kind of other method to weight them back into normalcy and keep the system from becoming a "most active dictates what the platform is" kind of thing.

<comment><USER21> I think you're overestimating people's need for encouragement. Slashdot cleverly gives out moderator points occasionally, not regularly, which gives users the experience of wanting them but not having them.

Slashdot sets lower and upper bounds on comment scores and lets readers set a threshold. Promoting good posts has more impact than demoting bad ones, so you'd probably just ignore all but the worst off-topic posts.

Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.

<comment><USER19> >Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.

But the nice part is you can control how you approach this weighting.

Perhaps every days votes is normalized to 10. So if I only voted once it counts 10x, but if I voted 100 times each would count .1x.

There are tons of ways to implement it so the feeling of uselessness doesn't apply, after all, qt the end of the day we are pretty gullible bags of meat.

<comment><USER21> If the weighting formula is known, I'm going to think twice before casting my second vote of the day. And it only takes one person to reverse-engineer it.

That might not be a bad thing. I'm just saying it works against your goal of getting people to vote as many times as possible.

You owe it to yourself to at least study Slashdot's system before putting too much thought into creative UX, dark patterns, and complex weighting. It isn't the last word in comment scoring, but as someone else pointed out, you could probably fill a book with all the lessons that shaped it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Didn't Friendfeed invent the Like button?

The article goes too far but there is something to be said about its core argument.

I don't think the Like button or emojis are good at recognising Value. A popular extrovert with 1000 fb friends uploads a selfie and gets 100 Likes.

Meanwhile a quiet but conscientious person uploads a before and after picture of a litter-pick they have undertaken and they get 2 Likes from their 50 friends.

There has to be a better way of recognising and incentivising the latter activity across social networks.

<comment> et-al This was an issue when Twitter/Facebook/Instagram switched from chronological feeds to "curated" feeds. i.e. Let's increase the echo chamber.

<comment><USER22> Great point.

Also, I think a problem is one person can only send one like.

Returning to my example, I'd like to be able to give the litter picker 20 likes, and maybe the Selfie uploader 1 like.

I think there has to the option of another accreditation technology which runs across social networks.

It's an area I'm interested in and looking to do my next project on...

<comment><USER23> Then you should go to slashdot, they have been doing that for awhile...

<comment><USER24> Doing which? Allowing multiple likes? Cross-site accreditation?

Slashdot hands out Moderation points sometimes, and asks people to meta- moderate sometimes -- both different from Likes.

<comment><USER25> For varying definitions of "sometimes."

I don't visit Slashdot anymore, but for the period between 2004-2010, I had virtually unlimited mod points.

<comment><USER24> Understood. Even then, though, you couldn't mod the same item more than once, iirc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py Simple metrics get us to local maxima, but it's unlikely they can get us out of them.

This is why privacy matters -- deep consumer data leads to 'binge products'. This is the business netflix is in. It's possible to create cocaine using this model but it isn't a great way to make something awesome and new. 'What's new' will always come from the fringes.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would never put a "Like" button on a web site of mine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I took the "Like" button away from my blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think upvotes accomplish similar goals. I am significantly more likely to click on HN/reddit links with high scores. In fact, my attention when browsing a link aggregator is split about 60/40 between the number of upvotes and the titles.

I have limited time to browse, and it is much faster to "filter" content by outsourcing that to you guys.

</comment><comment><USER28> I guess that's downside of focusing on a single metric for defining success (and the rewards that come with it). Wine ratings, stock prices and standardized tests have the same downsides of driving homogeneity and risk avoidance.

</comment><comment><USER29> Google Reader had "social" features? Heh, I never knew. And I was one of the people who got mad as hell when they shut it down and tried out ~30 clones before settling on a self-hosted TinyTinyRSS instance.

<comment><USER30> I feel the same: the first...third? of the article was basically news to me.

I thought the article was going to be about how every web designer interrupts whatever it is you're there to read/see/etc. Multiple times. Instead we get yet another Medium-quality thinkpiece extrapolating someone's personal experience.

At any rate, the title here should match the article's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So web content, notably blog posts, have gone the way of musical content. That is, the written "albums" no longer sell; the market just wants "singles."

So the blog version of "Stairway to Heaven" will become as rare as Bowie and substantive songs will be as tears in the rain.

</comment><comment><USER32> Like/Dislike is black and white by nature -> it will naturally divide people into red camp and blue camp. And those who don't vote are not heard.

<comment><USER33> Correct me if I am wrong but Facebook can track how much time your browser spends on a given post when scrolling the feed so I am confident that the voice of those who don't vote is somehow being measured at some point.

<comment><USER32> So only Facebook would know the neutral votes. For everyone else, it's the two opposing sides/extremes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's seo, people outsource writing crap blogs for seo ranking and having fresh articles that Google wants to see the site is updated

</comment><comment><USER35> Sadly the article has Revcontent at the bottom. Oh the irony...

</comment><comment><USER36> L'enfer c'est les autres.

</comment><comment><USER37> I liked this article. Big thumbs up from me.

<comment> ryan-allen But did you share it on Facebook?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Perhaps that's why podcasts have surged in popularity and why you find such a refreshing mixture of breadth and depth in that form: Individual episodes don't matter; what matters is getting subscribers. You can occasionally whiff, or do something weird, and still be successful."

Disagree. I think that is one of the main reasons of why podcasts haven´t become more popular. It is way harder to see people sharing just one episode or a piece of an episode in a conversation. Usually, they just say they listen to a particular podcast and you should go and listen to someone talk for 30 minutes before decided if you wanna follow him. And that particular episode that you chose could one of the worst that the podcaster has produced.

Individual episodes matter, especially to bring more people to your subscribed list.

A personal example it is how I discover the best, IMO, podcast: 99%invisible. I was reading the most upvoted comment about a shared video on Reddit about how Taiwan collect their trash and he was suggesting listen to this podcast episode [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation- anxiety/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/) After listening to the episode, and to his sponsor to this particular episode, I subscribed.

And brands cares way more about engagement than about the numbers of the subscriber. You could have a big number of subscribers that doesn't react to anything that you produce. And you could have a small number of subscribers that really like your content and, especially, trust in your endorsements. And the best way to metric this is seen the numbers of sharing, likes, and comments in the content that you produce. Engagement numbers is more important than plain numbers, for everybody.

[http://www.adweek.com/digital/micro-influencers-are-more- eff...](http://www.adweek.com/digital/micro-influencers-are-more-effective- with-marketing-campaigns-than-highly-popular-accounts/)</comment>


Donald Trump is like a biased machine learning algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://mathbabe.org/2016/08/11/donald-trump-is-like-a-biased-machine-learning-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> I am not sure if there is ever non-biased machine learning algorithm, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Learning and bias are components of the same concept.

</comment><comment><USER4> Totally Click bate. Worthless article. I want the 30 seconds back

<comment><USER2> TBH, I have learned to always start with the HN comments; then see if the linked article is worth reading.</comment></comment>


Spent $200k biohacking- became calmer, thinner, extroverted, healthier, happier - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-became-calmer-thinner-extroverted-healthier-happier-2a2e846ae113 <comment><USER2> I was pretty impressed by this entire article. The price tag is enormous, and I can't really imagine that level of money, but being healthier does have its benefits ...

Some of the supplements choices are a bit on the edgier side, so I'd recommend looking at places like Reddit and Examine prior to trying them. Speaking from my prior experience, a stack (nerd term for collection of supplements) that works anecdotally for one person rarely works for anyone else.

Disclaimer: I also commented this on the HackerNoon article, but I created an open-source / free project for those interested in tracking supplement and activities and how they impact sleep and productivity.

[https://betterself.io](https://betterself.io) Examples : [https://imgur.com/a/jXyhJ](https://imgur.com/a/jXyhJ)

The writer brings up meditation, which is something I observed also from tracking it - [https://imgur.com/a/l377Y](https://imgur.com/a/l377Y). Meditation has made one of the biggest impacts on my life, but it took me forever to sit down and finally make it a habit. I meditate close to an hour to the start of most days.</comment>


The Widespread Hatred of Immanuel Kant and Karl Popper - <AUTHOR> http://erikpoupaert.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/the-widespread-hatred-of-immanuel-kant-and-karl-popper

<comment><USER2> Widespread hatred? That presupposes even wider-spread recognition. But that doesn't exist. Surely you jest or, more likely, profer clickbait.</comment>


Bills Across the Country Could Increase Penalties for Protesters - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512636448/bills-across-the-country-could-increase-penalties-for-protesters?utm_source=facebook.com <comment><USER2> I live in the Twin Cities so I don't like people protesting on highways. Blocking the highways had nothing to do with their protest and was supposed to just be as disruptive as possible. I don't think protesters have a right to indiscriminately disrupt people with no limits. That being said some of these bills are awful.</comment>


APFS Distributed FS Like Gluster on ZFS? - <AUTHOR> I tried to research if APFS is somehow able to run as a distributed FS. I had in mind something similar as Gluster FS on ZFS. So far I couldn't find any information. Anyone? <comment><USER2> Most filesystems aren't distributed. If you can't find any evidence that it is distributed, isn't that a good signal that it's not? Apple's server software, such as it is, is not exactly a core business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It is more curiosity if I could build a pool across devices and if they planned that in.

<comment><USER3> Unlikely, it's an FS they're designing for user devices not for use in implementing icloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Look into moosefs (moosefs.com) - it's somewhat similar to Gluster, it works well on OSX and you could build a pool using all your devices.

All of your devices need a folder where you'd store data, those devices need to run a process called chunkserver (mfschunkserver) and simply add their storage space to the pool.

Mounting the pool is done using mfsmount (uses FUSE).

You'd need one of the devices (or another dedicated computer) to be the master (mfsmaster) that needs to be always online.

The restrictions are that all the machines must see each other over the network - either local lan or routed network (or a vpn where you set up routes).

Moose uses concept of goal and storage classes, you can simply set your files or folders to say goal of 3 and it will attempt to store 3 copies across however many devices (minimum 3 to meet this goal). Storage classes are more complex and allow you to specifically control on WHICH chunkservers to store certain files/folders.

I'm using it across 4 machines, where 1 server is physically in Italy (Milan), another in Los Angeles (in a datacenter) and two more at home (also L.A.). One of my servers at home has 4TB drive so this one always stores everything, plus 2 copies across remaining 3 servers for redundancy.

All I need to do to have my data available to me is to VPN in to my network and run mfsmount on my laptop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks you so much, this is a terrific description. On the side I had a look at XtreemFS and slidely different Ori.</comment></comment>


Field Guide to Genetic Programming (Free Book) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/

<comment><USER2> Awesome!

Back in college I made a Matlab program that used Genetic Algorithms to find the optimal flight path for spacecraft that had to do "fly-by"'s of particular planets at particular times. It was complicated, but a lot of fun. (Unfortunately haven't needed to do anything with it since.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm presently doing research on Genetic Programming. I'm just an undergrad but I've read a fair amount on the subject and feel that I basically understand it at this point. However my understanding is largely academic and I'm curious as to how marketable the ideas are. Since YC is exactly the crowd that I should ask to find this out, I'm asking. Particularly has anyone used any sort of an evolutionary solution in their product, considered it? If the later why did you decide against it? Has anyone heard of it or is it a new idea? Most important question, who's intrigued and sees potential? Because I do.

<comment><USER4> I'm working on something for weebly.com that uses a genetic algorithm and even some genetic programming. If anyone here is interested in applications of GP, please get in touch. Email greg at startup-name-dot-com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isnt GP patented? That will probably kill off any commercial applications.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool! Reminds me of Prolog.</comment>