Dude, What's with the Web Site? - <AUTHOR> http://heavycatweb.net/website.php <comment><USER2> Between the meme responses ("cool story bro" etc) and the misunderstandings, this has to be the lowest value HN comment thread ever. It's like I'm reading 9gag.

For a site were tons of people speak of the value of simplicity, and every other day they "Show HN" their own "static site generator", it's surprising how many people do NOT get his message.

First, he is not a web developer. He is a busines owner that also had to create a site for his business. He chose to follow the KISS principle, and that's what he advocates: catering to content first, fancy stuff second (or never at all).

The peripheral details to his post (if he personally uses Flash for some stuff but you don't like it, or if he has a line about coding important apps in C and you disagree) don't matter.

What matters is that for content websites --which makes most of them out there, including all blogs and brochure-ware sites --, his advice is spot on.

As for his website "looking like crap" (as 1-2 people comment below). That's the whole point. As long as it gets the job done he doesn't care. And it's not worse than Hacker News (no paragon of great web design) or Paul Graham's site.

Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero-content marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D transforms and the whole works?

<comment><USER3> > Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero- > content marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D > transforms and the whole works?

I'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the false dichotomy?

<comment><USER2> > _I 'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the > false dichotomy?_

Because real life is full of dichotomies, and they are not all false. They even exist in our profession -- we call them "engineering tradeoffs".

Have you seen many "fancy-ass websites" with great essay content?

Perhaps you can find 1 or 2. I doubt you can find 10. There's a reason for that too. Most of the good writers I've read value simplicity, both in their writing and in their presentation. And, as they believe in the value of their content, they see no need to dress it on a "fancy-ass website".

That's what the whole "content first" / "minimalism" etc movement has been all about, from the 37 Signals blog to the emergence in our community of stuff like Jekyll.

And I don't see what the fancy-assness of the website would add to PG's essays. Care to enlighten me?

<comment><USER3> > Because real life is full of dichotomies, and they are not all false.

That doesn't justify the specific dichotomy you presented. Nor does the general lack of (vaguely defined) "fancy-ass" websites with good content.

In my opinion 37signals has a "fancy-ass" blog with solid content. It has a clean, pleasing look, displays well on mobile and browsers, and even provides a search interface. PG's essays could be better presented in all of these respects.

Maybe we should get your definition of "fancy-ass" so we can decide what we're even talking about.

<comment><USER2> > _That doesn 't justify the specific dichotomy you presented. Nor does the > general lack of (vaguely defined) "fancy-ass" websites with good content._

Well, I'm a pragmatist. If I observe a "general lack" of a certain combination of things ("fancy ass websites" with "good content") I assume there's a reason for that.

It doesn't even matter if the connection is casual. It's enough that it exists, because that means that the presense of one ("fancy-assenss") is enough to predict with good success the lack of the other ("good content").

> _In my opinion 37signals has a "fancy-ass" blog with solid content._

I see nothing fancy ass about 37signal's block. It's "clean, pleasing and displays well on mobile and broswers" not by some fancy-assness, but because it's minimal and bare-bones -- the very opposite of fancy-assents.

Essentially it's merely styled text.

> _Maybe we should get your definition of "fancy-ass" so we can decide what > we're even talking about._

Well, if we go by TFA's description, that would be anything that couldn't be achieved with HTML 4 and no JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Think about all the most popular, successful web sites. Google. Craigslist. > YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have > in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color > backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient > sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. They are all simple > and functional, and those six web sites together represent about a trillion > dollars in value.

With the exception of Craigslist, all of the sites he lists are complex web applications.

The author conflates shiny gimmicks and modern web technology.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I'm not sure why he wrote that Youtube has no videos.

<comment><USER6> Especially with the heavy cat home page having a youtube video on it.

Besides the slight hypocrisy, I understand the point the author is trying to get off as simplify simplify simplify. When you have been doing it for as long as he has, seems like the natural progression.

<comment><USER7> > I understand the point the author is trying to get off as simplify simplify > simplify

That's not actually the point. The point is that the author wants to be seen as a badass iconoclast. Unfortunately, he (or she) has no actual valid ideas, so he's joined a cargo cult of simplicity-worship, as if eschewing everything complex in a web design automatically makes it good.

The points made are hilariously ignorant. The argument about how it was dumb of people to make Doom for DOS because "DOS wasn't designed for that" is jaw- dropping. Claiming that you should write all web stuff in C, OMG. The defensive explanation about why they build sites with Flash. Oh wait, I just figured it out. These guys are Flash developers and nobody wants Flash these days, so they're flailing, trying to explain why modern web development practices are no good, but sites that consist solely of a Flash widget are totally where it's at. All is clear now.

<comment><USER8> Ah come on. He does have a bit of a point. Sure youtube has videos. Excepting the page that actually plays a single video he does have a point. There's exactly one piece of somewhat moving interface in the entire site. Like in windows 3.1 (and they were hardly the first to do that). The rest is text and a grid of images. Even the most advanced websites are not much better. I mean I love how google has used moving gifs in the google.com/photos stuff to actually show something moving, but that's about as advanced as interfaces get. In some ways, including what can be done with interfaces, the web is only at the level desktop interfaces were at 10 years ago.

I think the author of the article wants to compare that to, say, the starcraft menu interface. Or windows desktop applications. Or, to a lesser extent, flash interfaces. This would be a good example. Can you imagine doing this in HTML ? [http://demo.northkingdom.com/gettheglass/](http://demo.northkingdom.com/gettheglass/)

And he does have a point. Recreating the starcraft interface in HTML5+CSS+Javascript is possible of course. In the same sense that you can write windows 95 in pure lambda calculus (frankly, I think the lambda calculus rewrite would be easier since there's translation tools).

I'm with the rest of the people here. Those fancy interfaces have little function, don't interact well with the rest of the world (e.g. search engines, content aggregators, ...), they're accessibility nightmares, ... But they're cool. But my opinion on them has exceptions : for some things, like games, that's more important than all those other things.

<comment><USER7> > There's exactly one piece of somewhat moving interface in the entire site. > [(YouTube)]

You are making the exact same mistake he is. You are picturing what you remember of YouTube and in your recollection, it is simple. This is because they have done a reasonable job of using a simple design, not because they have avoided "moving" things. Go look and you will find plenty of menus, tabs, comments, and other ui elements that are built of the exact stuff he says is worthless. Holding any of these sites up as an example of being essentially just text and a few images just indicates that you don't have much of an eye for detail.

<comment><USER8> I'm not claiming the youtube interface is not functional, I'm claiming it's ugly. It's not about whether interface elements are animated or not (I am criticizing however how hard it is to make them move). And I understand us techies like a really simple design. The difference is that I don't see the world as sharing my opinion. Simple websites are good for various technical reasons, and I understand that. Scraping them (not that ggl makes it easy), interacting, using the website as an API, all things that matter to techies.

But let's be honest : they're ugly. Youtube, for example looks like an ancient file manager, at best.

Let's compare, a native application with a -somewhat- similar purpose versus youtube.

XBMC: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34h_sQ7-G1s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34h_sQ7-G1s)

TiVo: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvgoLVzijE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvgoLVzijE) (I realize it's an irritating commercial. But look at the interface)

Netflix on ios: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-4_ADXYT3E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-4_ADXYT3E) (sorry about the reviewer, and already much worse than XBMC or TiVo)

Youtube: [http://www.youtube.com](http://www.youtube.com)

This is a very nice animated interface (imho): [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCw0eWa- LkA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCw0eWa-LkA) (not related to videos though)

The sad part is, that you're right about Youtube as compared to some of it's online alternatives. Compared to those, it's not bad. But the whole point was to criticize online development tools like HTML and Javascript, as compared to offline ones. Flash versus HTML and the quality of interfaces they enable.

I would even go so far as saying that, when it comes to native apps XBMC and TiVo count as "good". They don't quite match my standards for "great" at all. Youtube ... euhm ... is at the level where I'd have trouble accepting it from a first-year programming student. Certainly wouldn't merit an A.

<comment><USER7> > But let's be honest : they're ugly. Youtube, for example looks like an > ancient file manager, at best.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but it seems fairly obvious you don't agree with the OP's crazy pronouncement that websites should just be text and a few images. We may be in one of those "violent agreement" situations, so I'm just going to call this argument done. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen to reach 50 votes on HN. Who is upvoting this?!

I can't even figure out the point of it all, between the tangential boasting of being one of the first sites on the web (is this even true?), saying to write in C instead of HTML (is he programming-illiterate?), rants about how bad "background music, gimmicks" are and then boasts that their site will use Flash because it will "make our graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good".

This doesn't even look like satire, it's complete nonsense as far as I can tell.

</comment><comment><USER10> Twitter and Facebook front ends have as much complexity as any fancy gizmo FWA site. And took even more work to get right, because most fancy gizmo sites are throwaway internet flyers, see them once and forget. If they flop it's no big deal. It's also why they get shut down, after the promotion they have no useful traffic, so no one even bothers to pay for hosting.

I agree with their philosophical principle though, a content site shouldn't be as complex as an application, but they often are.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to > do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. > You write it in C.

WTF?

<comment><USER12> I stopped reading right there. I don't know if this is satire or not, or what...

<comment><USER13> Hmm well it's all inline styling...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've seen too many people's solution for a problem is to throw Javascript libraries at it with no regard for page load times. Or want to use something flashy and sexy without a reason that improves ROI. They just want it to be sexy.

I love the idea of simplifying until all that is left is the bare minimum to get the job done.

<comment><USER15> jQuery minified is less than 100kb. Those ugly anime cats on this site are almost 70kb together, each one making its own request.

How can someone simplify with so little understanding of the subject matter?

<comment><USER16> And almost everybody will be pulling jQuery from a cached version of the one on Google's CDN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> artumi-richard He goes too far. Images should also be abandoned. And maybe colour. And in this case, perhaps the text too.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some guy with a web site which I've never heard of, that looks like shit, tells me that I should do web dev in C. Cool story bro.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can understand where he's coming from. I've always been amazed at how carried away people can get with the their web designs and applications. Several typefaces, a ginormous color palette, skeuomorphic stuff, wizzbang doo-dads, unnecessary libraries, the list goes on.

I can appreciate a well-designed and well-built site. One that pays attention to hierarchy and how the information is presented with an eye toward performance and scalability. I always find that my favorite sites are the ones that seem to take Edgar Allen Poe's advice for writing a short story. Every component has a reason for being there (i.e., it is functional). If the component or element's purpose is to be there for the sake of simply being there (it just looks cool!), then it shouldn't exist.

I suppose that's minimalism. But oftentimes, minimalism goes against what people think of in terms of "creating an experience." Most of the time when I visit a website that creates an experience, I am left with a sour taste in my mouth.

</comment><comment><USER19> > The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely one of the first > 200 sites to go live on the web.

What?

<comment><USER20> Registered in 2008? I doubt it ;)

<comment><USER21> Could have let it drop and reregistered it.

Edit:: oldest Archive.org entry for this domain is 2009; [http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavyca...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavycatweb.net/)

<comment><USER22> But that talks about them being online in 1996.

<comment><USER21> Yeah I am skeptical myself, but this isn't definite proof that the site isn't as old as he says, just could mean IA-Archive bot was blocked from indexing up to 2009...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Dude, what's with this article being on the first page of HN?

<comment><USER24> do u even web, bro

<comment><USER25> No time to web, lifting. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let's be clear: web site != web app

I think the author forgot to check out the noted companies' other web properties...

</comment><comment><USER27> I'll just leave this here: [http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table- epics-fantasy...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table-epics- fantasy-adventure-graphics-series?c=comments)

[https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterpris...](https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterprises.com) and the parent company were both created in 2008 [https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.co...](https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.com), so either the author has a time machine or is lying?

</comment><comment><USER28> That page is PHP, I thought he said he was going to use HTML...

</comment><comment><USER29> There are some very good reasons why modern designers don't use background music. Elements don't blink and strobe like they did in the 90s. The time for skeuomorphic visual design is over. We've learned from our mistakes. Instead, we embrace technologies that help convey the site's meaning and purpose to the user.

Sometimes that takes the form of a fancy JS single-page scroll ([http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/](http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/)) to give a more natural flow to a traditional sales funnel. Sometimes that means robust streaming video ([https://developers.google.com/youtube/](https://developers.google.com/youtube/)), so people can watch live music or election coverage from home. Sometimes, it's adding a Leaflet map widget to one of the most design-conservative sites on the web ([https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648](https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648)) to help people find new apartments. All of these sites are elegant and work as expected, and they rely on far more than HTML4 and inline style tags to do so.

</comment><comment><USER30> TIL youtube is text with the occasional image.

</comment><comment><USER29> Oh look, animated GIFs. [http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php](http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php)

</comment><comment><USER31> Dude, what's with the pretentiousness?

<comment><USER32> I'm surprised he didn't say he writes HTML with a typewriter and has an assistant scan it in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Get off my lawn!"

</comment><comment><USER34> Dude, What's with the Lack of Knowledge

I've been in the Web business for over a decade.

The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely not part of the first 200 sites to go live on the Web. Search engines then did not have the analytics results to prove this because that's all there was. Yeah. They've been around for a bit. They just weren't the first site with a background color other than gray.

During that time, I've learned a few things. One of them is that probably half of Heavy Cat's competition soared to amazing heights by building "cool" Web sites to market their products. The reason is pretty simple. HTML is designed to present text and the occasional image. When you spend money and time to try to make it do more than that: innovation is born.

CSS is not intuitive. The only reason most people don't complain more about it is because they learn to use it. HTML is not intuitive either, but at least it's easy to learn once you realize there's a Box Object Model. JavaScript is very useful, and also pretty amazing. You can spend days, weeks and months cramming them together in new and innovative ways and ultimately you'll end up with a lot of well spent time and a site made of unique functionality and the occasional video.

You know those sites with the long lists of really amazing-looking Web designs? Funny how all those links go to prosperous sites with a link trying to sell you the products they've created.

DOS was the same way. It was a simple, quick shell and file system for PCs. It took a couple of stone cold geniuses years to make the DOOM engine. Why? DOS wasn't designed for that. Which is why they made it in C with their own graphics library and only hooked into the system APIs they needed. All the DOOM engine parts had to be invented from scratch.

I have decided after over a decade that I'm tired of trying to make bad developers understand the abilities of the Web. HTML is amazing and full of possibilities. It can be molded like clay into beautiful creations. That's it.

Here's a pro-tip from a seasoned veteran of Web development: if you're going to write an article flaming Web technologies, learn to capitalize Web and JavaScript correctly. And, more seriously, never use markup as a high level imperative language.

Now I do get some benefits from doing Web sites this way. One, it's simple and easy to update with the advent of modern technologies like content management systems. Two, it's not cluttered with distractions like all the incoherent blog articles. Three, they load ultra fast when you keep scalability in mind. Why look at that! We've solved all the problems most "shitty" Web sites have, at a portion of the profit they generate!

Think about all the most popular, successful Web sites. Google. Craigslist possibly, YouTube -- I mean Google. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Mountains of servers, load balancers, support staff, etc. to preserve up time and availability. There's animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, sound in general, gimmicks like games and apps, gizmos like Google's widgets or gew-gaws (whatever that may be). They are all complex and functional, and those six Web sites -- well more like four -- together represent about <a non-verified, completely shot from the hip> dollar amount value.

Simplistic and forgotten. That's what Heavy Cat's site is going to be. They have a lot of information, if you can consider seven main pages to be "a lot". They have a choice. They can spend six months building a gee-whiz site, or they can build more marginally profitable products. They chose the products.

They use Flash too, as a final insult. You know why they use Flash? Because it's the only thing they learned how to use. The tools integrate well into their established workflow and they interoperate well with all the tools designed by the exact same software firm (somehow). They allow them to make graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good. As they should, with the monthly subscription costs.

Someday Heavy Cat might use HTML5 too. But Flash had a 16-year death, so they're going to use what doesn't work with the majority of the world. If you are on an Apple phone, or just don't want to run Flash, their site will look even shittier. If you want to look at their Flash stuff, bend to their will.

They also no longer care about SEO, so you won't see their Web pages on any search engines much. Searching for anything but "Heavy Cat" directly yields no results referencing their site.

Matt

</comment><comment><USER24> Ahistorical braggadocio posted to HN with a green account.

I'm calling shenanigans.

</comment><comment><USER35> Without taking progressive enhancement into consideration, let's look at the facts.

From the article:

 _Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple 's company site. What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew- gaws._

Let's see:

Google: Currently has a game on the homepage. Certainly could be considered a `gimmick, gizmo, or gew-gaw.`

YouTube: Obviously has video, some fancy modals can be found by hovering over certain things, I'm sure there's a ton that I am missing.

Facebook: The site is built on databases, JavaScript, and other technologies the author apparently considers `slow, buggy nonsense`. Where do you think all those user images are stored? Chat certainly requires either AJAX or Websockets (I have not checked).

Twitter: OK, we are closer to `text and images`. Still, these guys released Bootstrap [http://getbootstrap.com/](http://getbootstrap.com/) which changed the web -- obviously huge proponents of CSS. I think the understanding today is -- even if you are not a designer/front-end developer, it is unacceptable to deliver work without minimal styling, since you can throw Bootstrap on something with little effort. Do you prefer plain browser styled inputs to that? Twitter also has a ton of infrastructure underneath that 'simple' 140-character messaging 'social network'.

Apple: [http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/](http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/) Enough said.

\--

And finally, the comment `Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. You write it in C.`.

I'm confused whether you mean "do something remarkable on a computer" (as written) or "do something remarkable on the web". Your essay appears to be a rant on why, you think, the web sucks. I get it, most of the technologies we use are somehow dependent on C (CPython, most databases, OS). So, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Those libraries written in C enable us. What does that have to do with the average web developer doing something remarkable? Most of us will never have to deal with the scaling problems of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Python is fast enough for me. Ruby is fast enough for most Rails users. If I ever need more performance, perhaps I will look into Go. The key point is `if`. I'm not going to start a new web project in `C`, when modern languages and frameworks ease the level of effort to write the code, and contain features I would otherwise have to re-implement.

You sure you aren't trollin`?</comment>


Use the Microsoft Live API to locate the physical coordinates of a MAC address. - <AUTHOR> http://elie.im/demo/geoLive.php

<comment><USER2> Or not. "Results: MAC address not found in the Live database"

<comment><USER3> It wants the MAC of a public wifi access point (rather than one's own MAC).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It can't handle MAC address in lowercase. Lame..

<comment><USER5> Indeed, and requires : seperators when - is common too.

Hint, on a Windows machine "arp -a" will print the MAC addresses of the machines on the local subnet.</comment></comment>


Upcoming Galaxy Map Could Radically Transform How We See the Milky Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/upcoming-galaxy-map-could-radically-transform-how-we-see-the-milky-way/ <comment><USER2> Similar article/comments from 2 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12466135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12466135)

<comment><USER2> Actually, nearly no comments. Similar article then: [http://www.nature.com/news/milky-way-mapper-6-ways-the- gaia-...](http://www.nature.com/news/milky-way-mapper-6-ways-the-gaia- spacecraft-will-change-astronomy-1.20569)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes I fall into the "what's left to discover" trap. Great to see fundamental understanding of our universe increasing!

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't wait till someone imports this data into a visualization - I wonder if it can be put into universe sandbox?</comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody have a free giveaway domain name? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> There's a straightforward way to do this, you know. You can search the domain registry for free, using "whois" until you find an unregistered name you like. Then register it.

<comment><USER3> I think they are asking if someone has an already registered domain that they would be prepared to transfer for free.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MerkleX, the fast decentralized exchange you've been waiting for - <AUTHOR> https://merklex.io/ <comment><USER2> From end user perspective, what's the benefit of a decentralized exchange over something like Coinbase Pro?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main benefits for me are: access, control, security, and cost.

access: There are a lot of regions that Coinbase Pro and other exchanges are unable to service. Decentralized exchanges are open to anyone with an internet access.

control: On merkleX you play by the rules of an immutable Smart Contract. The rules of centralized exchanges are subject to change and unexpected downtime. There's been multiple occasions where Coinbase withdraws have been frozen for almost a day due to scaling issues and internal decisions.

security: This is a double edge sword. The rules of merkleX put immutable code in charge. There is no way for a bad actor from the inside or the outside to lie, hide, or steal. The other edge of the sword is if there is a logical or implementation bug in the code that is in charge. Our approach for this is to keep things simple and have really aggressive security audits.

cost: Centralized exchanges have a large ongoing overhead for compliance, security, and bureaucratic process. Once a decentralized exchange becomes established the operating costs become tied to the Ethereum Gas usage. Depending on implementation this can differ dramatically but with the right technology, which we think we have, it is quite low.</comment></comment>


Business Travelers Want to Be Left to Their Own Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/business/business-travelers-want-to-be-left-to-their-own-devices.html

<comment><USER2> "But technology in the future will allow them to see travelers' positions — through the GPS device on their phones — to track their movements. If a passenger is late for a flight, for instance, an airline might decide to rebook the passenger on the next flight automatically. The car rental service or taxi service would know of the delay, and the hotel might be notified of a late arrival — all seamlessly."

That's Just Creepy.

This just clinched my decision to leave my iPhone powered off unless I am specifically expecting an _important_ call, or I intend to make a call myself.

<comment><USER3> I would love this!

But since airlines currently have trouble with basic things like crediting my miles correctly, sending me texts about delayed flights and letting me book flights without repeatedly logging me out; I'm not holding my breath.

These kinds of services are only useful of they work perfectly every time. A glitchy service would be worse than not having it at all.

<comment><USER2> A good start would be to send an electronic ticket that Mom's iMac can successfully download over her Earthlink dialup.

What she gets is a few megabytes of mind-boggling HTML, CSS and Javascript, all so she can print a hardcopy with an eight-character booking number.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this solved by mobile devices and LTE? You can just show them a QR code that's emailed to your phone, both at the TSA checkpoint and at the terminal. I never print my ticket out anymore (and don't have a printer to do so).

<comment><USER2> My mother is quite happy with her $35.00 Walmart pay-as-you go phone.

For quite a long time I struggled to convince her to learn how to use its contacts list, but always she refused.

For years, she had the idea that leaving her phone powered off would save her money. She finally relented when I pointed out to her that I might need to reach her in an emergency.

My aunt - her identical twin sister - absolutely adores me, just loves to see me in person, but cannot bear to speak to me on the phone for longer than just one or two minutes. This because she has the idea that long distance service is exhorbitantly expensive.

I can still remember when we lived in Italy, and Mom needed to call her sister, who was coming to visit. We all got up real early in the morning. Mom requested a call to the US from the International Operator, then Mom, my own sister and I took turns waiting by the phone, so we could pick it up right away when the International Operator called us back with an available line.

<comment><USER5> I had similar issue where my grandmother would not talk more than one minute when I'm calling from abroad. Trick that worked on her was telling her that I have "free minutes" so she does not need to worry about the cost.

<comment><USER2> My mother knows what VoIP is; I expect that's because she is quite thrifty. Yet I cannot convince her to actually avail herself of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be happy enough if my company didn't hire a travel agency to book our flights. A $60 surcharge so they can ignore my directions and call instead of email me, to offer me a flight that goes against everything I wrote down on their form, so I can look up a better and cheaper flight on Hipmunk for them.

At least they seem to have gotten me the right hotel this time, unlike a few of my coworkers.

<comment><USER7> I just send ours the technical summary that the ITA Matrix spits outs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Obvious puff piece for certify.com with no basis in reality is obvious puff piece.

<comment><USER4> Not sure it's for Certify, but my first thought when I saw the title was: [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)</comment></comment>


Denver Police Are Using a Nose Telescope to Sniff Out People's Weed - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/denver-police-are-using-a-nose-telescope-to-sniff-out-peoples-weed?utm_source=vicefbus

<comment><USER2> They have the olfactometers to enforce odor ordinances. Because, you need to be able to measure the odor to enforce the ordinances.

The author is just "concerned" that the police will abuse the new ordinances to prosecute pot smokers, even though the act of smoking is now legal.</comment>


Ask YC: any chance to see a special RFS[9] application form? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> RFSes don't have distinct application forms. There's an RFS dropdown on the standard application form.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Creating a Lightsaber with Polymer - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/case-study/lightsaber <comment><USER2> I can't be the only person who's had just about enough of these cross- promotions. We get it. There's a new movie. I almost feel like not watching it out of protest for how over saturated the advertising has been.

<comment><USER3> It's not a movie, it's a marketing event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fun app, but it's like they chose all the buzzwordy tech from two years ago that frontend devs no longer use. Bower? Jade? Gulp? CoffeeScript? Polymer?

And for what? The mobile page is just a single button with an accelerometer listener and websockets / webrtc glue, it shouldn't need any of those. The desktop page is mostly Three.js for loading and rendering the textures, and also the communication with the phone. What advantage does Polymer have over just writing normal ThreeJS and some vanilla js?

<comment><USER5> What do devs use instead then? React/(ES6|TS)/jspm/System.js?

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily. It's just funny that they're bragging about choosing these particular technologies when they've all fallen out of favor in the last year and a half or so. Odd to see in a tech demo writeup like this.

My point (downvotes aside) is that Polymer (or any UI library -- react, angular, whatever) is overkill for this type of application. Without digging too deep into their source, it seems like it could've been done easier and cleaner in vanilla JS and ThreeJS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does this site stop the tap on the top of the screen / title bar of safari from scrolling up to the top? Rather irritating.</comment>


One Major Reason Cryptocurrencies Haven't Gained That Global Adoption Just Yet - <AUTHOR> https://zycrypto.com/one-major-reason-cryptocurrencies-havent-gained-that-global-adoption-just-yet/ <comment><USER2> How about that they solve no real G12 (major global economy) problem other than potentially allowing pseudo-anonymous transactions. A benefit that comes with as much baggage as boon.</comment>


Mysam: An open, web-based intelligent assistant that can listen and learn - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/daffl/mysam <comment><AUTHOR> And here is the video showing mysam in action: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxFtSsCM_bo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxFtSsCM_bo)

<comment><USER2> Just sent you a logo proposal

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is awesome, I already see tons of applications to this!</comment>


Jack Ma Says 12-Hour Work Week Could Be the Norm - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-29/jack-ma-says-forget-long-days-ai-could-bring-12-hour-work-weeks <comment><USER2> At the risk of being downvoted - I have stopped paying attention to Jack Ma. He only knows to to talk.

Edit - Since someone's asking for an explanation as to why I stopped patting attention to Mr Ma ...

I have seen 2-3 videos where he sounds really inspirational. Like one where he breaks down a persons career timeline and what he would be doing at particular age groups. (Probably the most viral video of him)

Second video where he speaks on how we humans can stay relevant in age of AI (By changing education in his words, teaching children to paint, play sports et al which we already do anyways).

The second video was where I started doubting if he's a clueless person and just goes around fooling people.

Final nail in the coffin was his video with Elon Musk. I couldn't believe for a minute when Mr Ma says he has just returned from Mars. After that he said AI should be named Alibaba Intelligence (If he had only cracked open a book and read about the Dartmouth conference). And then the icing on the cake, the answer to AI is love.

I won't deny that love may be answer to AI, but Jack was just mincing words to make another inspirational video.

<comment><USER3> Someone needs to post the video of him and elon musk here for those who haven't seen it.

<comment><USER4> [https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw](https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw) (just the cringe)

I didn't really care for what Jack Ma had to say before seeing this video. After seeing it, I feel like he should be actively avoided as a source of wisdom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read this as 12 hour workday and got irate. That's the tune he usually sings...

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90335059/alibaba-founder-jack- ma...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90335059/alibaba-founder-jack-ma- says-12-hour-workdays-are-a-blessing-but-hes-wrong)

<comment><USER6> Pretty much what Alibaba is practicing in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a 5 minute summary of the conversation between Elon Musk and Jack Ma. [https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw](https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw)

<comment><USER8> Honestly I just see Elon being trolled in that video. It's easy to see it the other way around if you come from a different frame of reference. But from my frame of referenance the idea of commercializing Mars, AI revolting against humans, are ludicrous ideas.

AI can be bad, but only through abuse by humans and not by the plot of Terminator. Mars is great but I feel like we have more pressing issue to solve. Being rich and privileged can blind us to the pressing needs and focus on overly lofty ambitions.

<comment><USER9> I would take colonizing Mars (with 12 hour work days) over wage slaving 12 hours a day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Instead what we get are some people working 140 hours for 40 hours pay while millions are completely pushed out of the economy. These kind of benefits will not happen automatically it's going to take serious class warfare and real revolution and bloodshed to get there .

<comment><USER11> The benefits not happening automatically doesn't mean bloodshed is the solution. I like to think that we could solve the problem with intelligence and design. I forsee that some nation will come up with a better system that does not require everyone to be consuming and employed. Maybe a UBI? Maybe some universal dividend on capital? The savings from having only the best workers employed, combined with the fruits of leisure, will propel that nation ahead and others will struggle to catch on with it.

<comment><USER12> More likely they will be destabilized/invaded/boycotted/cherry- picked/psyopsed/bombed-into-freedom or beat into submission in any other way.

<comment><USER11> +embargoed.

Soft power is crucial to prevent that, that's why the surpluses of such system should be directed to arts and technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If this ever happens, the reality will be closer to having companies keeping 30% of the people to work 40 hours and just not bothering to hire the other 70%.

<comment><USER14> This is what will happen. one person will learn 2 skills, get a small increase and work a normal week, while person 2 get downsized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oligarchs crystal ball gazing about future money making opportunities for minions after they have automated most job roles out of existence.

<comment><USER16> Automating whatever could be automated without loss of quality is the right thing to do.

Making sure everybody have high living standards (as supported by above automation) is a job of democratic governments

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As long as we have housing and health as limited resources people will just use time to work harder to obtain those resources.

</comment><comment><USER18> > _The economic problem may be solved...man will be faced with his real, his > permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how > to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for > him, to live wisely and agreeably and well...three-hour shifts or a fifteen- > hour week may put off the problem for a great while._

— John Maynard Keynes in 1930.

Still waiting for this to be true before buying into the 12-hour work week theory.

</comment><comment><USER19> This guy ask employee to work 996 and defended that practice openly.

And frankly, he is about clueless as most citizens on AI (as demonstrated in his awkward interchange with Leon recently), there isn't much of weight of such statement...

</comment><comment><USER20> Jut image what father /mother you could be: leave work at 9 and come back at 9, exhausted. 6 days a week. Time with your kids? I guess one could it for a year or months at certain periods of their life but as norm?

</comment><comment><USER21> Possible indeed, Keynes pointed that out a couple generations ago. And as always it depends solely on whether society is run such that people benefit from or compete with technology.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wouldn't be surprised if this guy ended up being a puppet for some larger entity this entire time ala Epstein.

<comment><USER23> I've wondered about that myself. Ma's background, the things he says in public, his weird movie, and so on, don't match the concept of a ruthless businessman. He could well be the friendly face of a cabal of PLA generals or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Where, by the subjunctive mood verb "could", they mean "never will be"?

<comment><USER25> Just conditional mood rather than subjunctive I think.

[http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/grammar_moods.html](http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/grammar_moods.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Ma/Musk AI debate in China showed two very different societal approaches to how to handle the impact of AI.

Ma's approach is: everybody work less and enjoy the perks.

Musk's is: learn AI or perish, and beware the consequences.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, although the messages are different. I believe this because Musk's assertion of an elite few living in tall spires and the masses living in relative poverty was overtly dismissed by Ma, but I felt that his facial expressions suggested that he was hiding his agreement of it.

<comment><USER27> Everything you said is wrong.

1: Ma said that AI can never be as smart as a human. The core of his argument was that humans will always be more clever than machines because humans create machines. Humans working less is just a byproduct of this. I was amazed to see how stupid Ma is. He is truly ignorant.

2: the core of Elon's argument is that AGI is detrimental to human society. Elon's first choice is to not have AGIs come about. Merging with them is his second choice and a stopgap measure. It isn't learn ai or perish, it's learn ai and reduce the probability of perishing modestly. You may not realize this without having heard other interviews though.

3: musk never said anything about people living in spires as a societal inequality thing. He said in terms of being able to see what's coming, some people are atop spires and some people are on the ground. All he's saying is that some people can see clearly what's coming (AI turning the world upside down) and most people can't see what's coming. Nothing to do with socioeconomics or inequality. Wasn't a social comment.

<comment><USER26> I was referring to their messages to the public about how to react to advances in AI. Your interpretations are about AI's impact on society. I don't disagree with your interpretations, but it definitely doesn't make mine wrong. They're different facets of the same conversation.

<comment><USER27> I don't follow you. I have accurately described what they actually said in the China video. Your descriptions were wrong. It has nothing to do with my point of view. Go review the video.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Replacing Our $5,000 Design with a Stock Template: A Relaunch Case Study - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecommercefuel.com/inside-relaunch-online-store/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's incredibly easy to be fooled into thinking design is so paramount, when really it's usability and a clear, powerful message is really what you should be focusing on. I'm sure I'm not the only person to make this mistake.

If you have any questions about the relaunch or the business, please let me know - I'm happy to answer them.</comment>


Ask HN: Any options traders around, are you following any UOA? - <AUTHOR> Curious to hear if any of you are trading options and if you are if you're following any UOA(Unusual Options Activity)?
If you do are you using a service manually(watching the data on a service/website) or tapping into a API to analyze data locally etc?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Long time ago i did that.

But for every amazing win there were tons of trades where losses would offset these wins.

That was manual work.

I still would consider it as an interesting approach to do it via API's and ML/AI models.

For every major announcement that shakes the market - there is _always_ someone who knew and couldn't hold his hands steady. Thus option trade spikes. Fun to explore.

</comment><comment><USER3> UOA has never really helped me. I haven't run into a trade that I am taking which had unusual options activity. I mean it would be listed, but didn't give me enough information to agree/disagree with me. Granted I only looked at barcharts when I was investigating it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Barchart while free it's having a lot of data that is actually not in the UOA category posted as UOA, i'm not sure how they get their data etc but it shows a bit of disconnect compared to what i would call unusual.

<comment><USER3> What would you call unusual? I mean there is value if you can guarantee that the person buying 1300 4/26 AAPL $207.50 calls is not hedging (Hypothetical trade here) because then it makes sense to follow it, or investigate why. However, in many cases there may be another trade either stock buy/short, or calls/puts spread out against multiple strikes/expiration's which can signal unusual trading but it's just a hedge or a calendar spread and so on.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the other part of the equation, you never know the intention of the buyer/seller and can only speculate. There's a general consensus on some types of orders going thru and the general expectation for those trades(ex. block vs split vs sweep, ITM OTM ATM and long term/short term expirations) where you can make a pretty good assumption but can never know for sure. Spreads are usually followed thru as being spreads and you can make that out as the trades go out together on the short/long legs etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is all BS imo. There is a guy in CNBC who always spits out companies with UOA every week. I believe he only brags about the winners and conveniently shoves the losers under the rug (and there are a lot of those)

<comment><AUTHOR> I tend to agree here as for ER the data is mixed even when it shows to be directional, i don't trade ERs in general as i don't like trading binary events, to much lotto.</comment></comment>


Tesla owner killed in crash was watching 'Harry Potter' while using autopilot - <AUTHOR> http://www.dallasnews.com/business/autos-latest-news/20160701-tesla-owner-killed-in-crash-was-watching-harry-potter-while-using-car-s-autopilot-survivor-says.ece <comment><USER2> Well, what do they think people will do when the car is on "autopilot"

If we don't want people to treat it like autopilot, maybe we should come up with a different name.

Maybe:

"You need to pay a little attention because we are overconfident about AI" \- pilot

<comment><USER3> I do think the name is dumb but I would imagine you get a warning when it is activated.

They should rename it after the guy who died. Eg: Bob Smith = Smith mode. "Bob Smith died because he was not paying attention, please use Smith mode responsibly."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> \- Allegedly - watching Harry Potter while driving.

Who knows what might have been triggered after a crash like that? Maybe his ipad turned on and started playing some music or something strange like that.

While this is a very sad incident, my question is more future focused. Can a software update fix this blindness or does it require a hardware upgrade?

<comment><USER5> It was a portable DVD player that was open and playing..

<comment> matt-attack That's impossible. No one has used one of those since 2002.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly one of the leading causes of general aviation accidents is CFIT, controlled flight into terrain. One major cause is pilots not paying attention to automation (autopilot).</comment>


Making Money from Open-Source Software - <AUTHOR> https://ayende.com/blog/186147-A/making-money-from-open-source-software-how-we-do-it <comment><USER2> For others looking for ways to monetize open source, we've learned at Ionic that many enterprises aren't just looking to buy a premium version of your OSS project, they want your help solving (with software) a ton of related challenges around the technology/space, too.

The big money is in doing _those things too_ and not just being one small piece of the puzzle. So, for us, that means helping teams be successful with app development in general using our software/tech in the process (i.e. scalable software product on a yearly subscription and the same as sold to other customers, not custom development).

If you want to go down that route, get ready to have excellent support and be willing to be seen as an expert that your customers are going to call upon. But support is tablestakes for B2B so that comes with the territory.

Of course, this is no small leap. Going from having a successful open source project to building an enterprise business around it is really hard and took a lot longer than I expected. Looking back I wish we spent a little less time worrying about GitHub stars and more about solving enterprise problems, but we made it through!

Of course this is just one way to monetize and I'm also excited about the growing OSS sustainability offerings out there, like Tidelift

<comment><USER3> Isn't it just consulting? How is it different from just offering dev services as a feeelance agency?

<comment><USER2> No, you are shipping and licensing a software product (like SaaS) and you're not building custom solutions (in the general case), but you are backing it with support. Support is also not the same as consulting hours as you aren't billing hourly for it and customers can only purchase it if they also pay for the software. It's probably more like an insurance policy than anything (and should be high margin on its own)

Support is tablestakes for B2B so this isn't unique to OSS

<comment><USER4> Sounds like fixed-price consulting to me.

<comment><USER5> > Sounds like fixed-price consulting to me.

Is there no difference between technical support and consulting?

I see technical support as answering emails and picking up the phone when someone needs the help using your product.

For instance, AWS Support Plans[1].

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/)

<comment><USER2> Yes there is s huge difference. One is a yearly subscription and the other is billed per-hour or is a set of consumable hours you buy one-off. Most teams don't just sell support on its own, you only get it if you have a subscription to the software product behind it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work for a Danish municipality that co-operates a number of open source projects with other muniplacities. I know we're a niche of sorts, but the setup we apply is to find small local development houses who can build and maintain our code based, but also sell us hosting.

We'll need a system to handle our vacationflow, with employees reporting it, managers approving it and an integration to our payment system. We'll handle the business understanding (it involves around 33 different tax laws and some silly organisational culture), the project management and the whole governance around the code base. You do the coding, and then you sell us the hosted solution which you run in Azure or AWS letting our ADFS handle authentication.

It's worked marvellous so far.

<comment><USER7> > whole governance around the code base

Yes, ideally you want to have some highly competent in-house technical ability to assess the quality and maintainability of the codebase that is being produced, separately from the business requirements, otherwise there is a fair chance that you may end up with a lot of low quality code and a system that cannot be safely or cheaply modified.

I've seen a couple of organisations outsource development, keeping only project management and domain expertise in house, but having no in house ability to assess the quality of technical work.

Don't do that. If your vendors fill your project with the most profitable least experienced/capable developers, after enough years of that you'll get to have exciting meetings about "we're no longer able to estimate how long it will take to make changes to the system".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reupping Nadia Eghbal's excellent, _Lemonade Stand: A handy guide to financial support for open source_

[https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade- stand](https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand)

 _This document aims to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways that people get paid for open source work. Hopefully, projects and contributors will find this helpful in figuring out the best options for them._

</comment><comment><USER9> Fun timing, we're about to publish an update on how we've done it (last mentioned in 2016 [https://blog.sentry.io/2016/10/24/building-an-open-source- se...](https://blog.sentry.io/2016/10/24/building-an-open-source-service.html) ).

The #1 piece of advice I could give is standard b-school boilerplate: figure out what your unique advantage is and how the market wants to pay for access to it. That might be training, support, SaaS or paying for features but you have to do the legwork.

</comment><comment><USER10> When you talk about making money with open source software, it's about figuring out what scarcity to sell:

[https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to- scarcity...](https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I personally like CrossOver's model. It doesn't include anything you couldn't already do with Wine, but it's less setup, and you have a support staff that can look at it if you really need a particular program to work under Wine. Any improvements they make are upstreamed to Wine.

I have no idea if they're "profitable" or not.

<comment><USER12> Well, if they aren't then someone with very deep pockets is having fun there because they are like thirty people and have been around for more than twenty years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there any examples of small/simple projects or pieces of code released under the GPL, with a non-GPL dual license being sold for $X000?

</comment><comment><USER14> Would offering a "subscription" improvement program be a viable alternative? You the developer are the expert on the software, and hiring the original developer to modify or tweak the code may make sense, But make it a reoccurring fee kind of like a subscription. You could offer services based on the intensity of the work. Perhaps one subscription offering differs from another by the total max hours. Like the gold plan would be 40 developer hours per month and silver be 30 or whatever. You would have to feel out what kind of commitment could be there.

But it can be nice for you that those hours are max. If they don't ring you up at all you still pocket the money for that month.

<comment><USER15> I don't think so. I don't see why someone would choose this subscription model over a standard contracting model, billed by the hour. Or, billed by the hour with a 30 hour/month minimum and maximum.

I would also question the ethics - if three customers want the same thing, do I bill each of them? Or each of them at 1/3? After all, they are paying for _hours_.

I charge a yearly support fee for my product, which covers any questions (rare) and funds additional development. Support customers get free upgrades, so I don't need to figure out the hourly billing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> After reading this several times I still don't understand "how [they] did it." Also tried the AGPL description.[1] Can someone confirm: They just licensed it so that commercial use is prohibited without payment?

I've worked (and am working) with companies that have an open-source product and a commercial offering built around it. My experience is that it's easy to get _some_ companies to pay you, whether it's for the right license, added features, support, or consultation. But to make any significant revenue you're going to have to work hard to provide a lot more value on top of the open- source option, and you probably don't want it to be "consulting."

Then you realize that all your prospective buyers are anchored at "free" and need a lot of convincing (perceived value) to pay for the commercial version. The positioning needs careful consideration. Nobody wants to pay a five- or six-figure license for a slighty-better-than-the-free-version solution.

[1] [https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public- lice...](https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public- license-v3-\(agpl-3.0\))

<comment><USER17> It is more nuanced than that: RavenDB seems OK to use if you have an application that shields its users completely from the database itself. The database server is AGPL, but the client library your application uses is MIT licensed, which is fairly liberal. If you were to directly embed RabenDB in a product, you would have to provide the full source, even if you run it as a service and don't distribute binaries of the software.

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I understood (surveyed this a while ago) RavenDB wants commercial clients to pay. They do this by licensing the free version as agpl. You pay to get another license. Keeping your code agpl as a commercial entity is a kind of loophole in their eyes.

So they keep commercial clients out by using agpl. That means they want you to pay even if you build a website that uses a cms that uses ravendb. Even though agpl perhaps would let you get sway with it. Dont think so though.

<comment><USER17> As I see it the licensing of RavenDB lets you get away with things like a closed source CMS using the DB for your own use, as long as the database runs as its own process. Not sure of you could sell the CMS binaries without source code, though.

<comment><USER18> You can if you distribute separately and the CMS binaries aren't embedding the DB software. You would ship an installer for the AGPL portion to comply with those terms, and your CMS would use a REST interface to interact with the AGPL-licensed backend

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TL;DR: AGPL database. Permissively licensed client libraries. Dual licensing the database. But really you should read the post, for the thought process that led to that approach.

Among well known database vendors, the natural comparisons are MongoDB and MySQL.

Like Mongo, RavenDB is available under a single network-copyleft license. Like Mongo, RavenDB client libraries are permissively licensed. However, MongoDB focuses on selling all-encompassing packages that include a mix of support, services, and add-ons. To hear this post tell it, Hibernating Rhinos is running more of a pure dual-licensing play with RavenDB.

That approach puts them close to MySQL. However, MySQL dual licensed both database and client libraries. Nobody needs to buy a commercial license for RavenDB client libraries.

The obvious question, in current context, is whether Hibernating Rhinos is cruising for a cloud provider bruising, the kind of which Mongo has loudly complained. Cue Server Side Public License.

Here follow shameless but relevant plugs:

Plain language, more general take on an SSPL-style license: [https://github.com/kemitchell/shared-component- license/blob/...](https://github.com/kemitchell/shared-component- license/blob/master/license.md)

Open form paid license agreement for indie developers dual licensing, or doing paid add-ons: [https://github.com/indieopensource/paid- license](https://github.com/indieopensource/paid-license)

License Zero, which offers dual-licensing back-office as a service, as well as public licenses without the problems and known vulnerabilities of *GPL: [https://licensezero.com/](https://licensezero.com/)

</comment><comment><USER20> My personal project _Video Hub App_ is for sale for $3.50 per copy, but is also open source: [https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub- App](https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App)

Have 437 sales as of today (released 1 year ago) with many people opting to pay more than $3.50 -- though I'm funneling $3.50 from every sale to a GiveWell recommended charity.

<comment><USER21> I've looked into your app and loved it. The only thing preventing me from paying for (and using) it is tag support.

<comment><USER20> Tag support is coming in version 2.0.0 (before March 22nd). Pull in the current _master_ to see it! Currently very WIP (UI needs minor polish and there are some bugs) but tags are usable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm using IssueHunt. [https://issuehunt.io/](https://issuehunt.io/) It is an issue based bounty service for OSS. Actually I have not maintaining open source, but I'm using them in my work. So as my appreciation, I sometimes put bounties for issues of several projects. It seems that maintainer and contributor can get bounty.

<comment><USER23> How much have you paid out so far?

Most projects like that are well-meaning, but are more like tip jars than real monetization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not a question about the article but related: what software tools are lacking in the community? Where should people start looking when brainstorming for project ideas?

We can all agree we need to give back to the community. Eventually we will need to eat too.

</comment><comment><USER25> getting paid for integration?

1) create a popular open source product

2) give it away, building market share and awareness

3) shake down corporations making money from your open source product in the form of "licensing & maintenance agreement*

4) Trickle down effect on non corporate users who in turn feed back into the loop by performing QA and community support.

I personally believe this is the future of software, at least someone who is competing against VC funded proprietary entities looking to IPO and not really give a shit about the product that brought them in a position to raise money.

What do you guys think? This is just my opinion of course downsides to this model.

One major downside of openin the doors to everybody is you get a ton of noises. People who shouldn't be using it complaining and it's always tricky to manage, especially when people feel entitled to it as it is free.

An argument to this noise is that any noise is better than no noise, meaning any type of engagement good or bad is considered a plus for the app, to discover new shit

</comment><comment><USER26> I guess it depends on the category, for something like a database it can be easy to charge money (e.g. managed instances, charging cloud vendors, etc...) but something like frontend javascript framework it's almost impossible to do that</comment>


Saturn deal is called a new business model - <AUTHOR> http://www.freep.com/article/20090606/BUSINESS01/906060412 <comment><USER2> I guess the new business model being presented is the dealer network owning the company (as opposed to the other way around), and the "company" being centered on design and marketing, as opposed to manufacturing. In some ways - but on a larger and more expensive scale - it reminds me of how the computer industry changed from corporate-owned manufacturing, to everyone using four or five no-name companies in Taiwan for everything. It worked out pretty well for the major players in that industry (Dell, Compaq, Apple, etc.), so I wonder how it will work out for cars.

I'm not sure, however, how it will work out with the labour situation for factories (I'm thinking long-term, once their two-year contract with GM expires). In order to make this work, you'll have to have some free-standing auto plants willing to bid for the contracts to build the cars; an industry which doesn't currently exist (almost all auto factories are owned by car manufacturers). Conventional economics says that in order to get prices down with this process, you'd have to have competition in the bidding process for these plants, but I'm not convinced that there would be enough (any) plants who would bid for them. I'm also not sure how the existing supplier network would work out, and how they'd stay in business.

All-in, it will be interesting how this shakes out over the next five to ten years - if it works, it's got the potential to change how the industry works.</comment>


Take Cover Against This Drone Attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/take-cover-against-this-drone-attack-1459291069 <comment><USER2> I think that some regulation is needed. Drones can posses a big security threat, especially near airports.

<comment><USER3> I am pretty sure that it has long been illegal to fly any non-FAA-approved aircraft (whether manned or not) near airports without that airport's approval. Does that qualify as some regulation to you?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Losant Kiln – The easiest way to build APIs for IoT applications - <AUTHOR> https://www.losant.com/iot-platform/kiln-iot-custom-experiences <comment><USER2> This is really exciting news from the Losant team. I know that you folks have been hard at work to get this shipped. I'm looking forward to using this with one of my side projects.</comment>


Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop - <AUTHOR> http://wikiloopr.com/ <comment><USER5> From a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising.

Think of the act of clicking the first link in the Wikipedia article as a function that takes in the page you're on and outputs another page.

If you call this function on itself over and over again (ie use the output of one step as in the input of the next step), you will eventually enter a loop. The proof of this is simple: there are only a finite number of Wikipedia articles, therefore you must eventually reach an article you've seen before. (This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic.)

Since it's necessarily true that all articles will eventually reach a loop when you iteratively click the first link, we have to ask: how unusual is it that they usually reach the SAME loop?

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I'd love to know how many _different_ cycles the wikipedia article graph contains. If most articles lead to 1 out of 20 possible cycles, it's much less interesting than if it's 1 out of 5,000,000.

<comment><USER7> I've been looking to do something like this with the Networkx library in Python, though on an internal company MediaWiki with a much smaller article base. Going to try to visualise much the same thing, the major loops and cliques in the graph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This may be hyper naive but is this the consequence of beginning most articles representing the current topic as a more specific form of another topic?

For example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra>

"Algebra ... is a branch of mathematics." (mathematics being a link)

So if you continue to generalize you'll end up at the most general subject which appears to be philosophy.

[update] added an example

<comment><USER9> ah so thats why the degree is called Doctor of Philosophy?! Thanks for the enlightenment! I've wondered quite a lot of times why I'm a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, and not Doctor of Computer Science.

<comment><USER10> Traditionally, a university had four faculties, the lower or artists faculty, and the three higher faculties of theology, law and medicine. Students would start in the artists faculty learning the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (including astrology)) to become a magister artium (M.A.) and then go to one of the higher faculties to get their doctorate (Th.D, LL.D or M.D., respectively). Philosophy and science (née natural philosophy) developed in the artists faculty and over time became important enough to grant the artists faculty the right to grant doctorates, too, with philosophy leading the way. That's why many science faculties, which split off of the artists faculty over the centuries still grant the title of a doctor of philosophy.

Ah, and the first three of the liberal arts that were the first thing a student learned, grammar, rhetoric and logic, were called the trivium, hence the modern word "trivial" for obvious things everyone should know.

<comment><USER11> Really cool comment, I love finding interesting trivia in forums.

<comment><USER12> > 'interesting trivia'

In the above - grammar, rhetoric, logic - formed the "trivium" and - arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy - formed the "quadrivium".

Also "trivium" represented the place where three roads would intersect. People would meet here and exchange pleasantries and gossip. That is how you get the current meaning of the word "trivia".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are hypertext expressions of the purest form.

As a nerdy kid, over a few years I read my way through a significant chunk of the early 1990's Groliers Encyclopedia set my Grandma bought me at Krogers. And it was never cover-to-cover reading, instead it was filled with hopping around, page-to-page, volume-to-volume. Start at oscilloscope, but what's a cathode ray? And then it's in television? How does broadcasting work? I'd sit on the floor with a half dozen open encyclopedias open around me, the same way we can do now with browser tabs.

Wikipedia has many flaws, but it's a fantastic tool and I'd have killed for it as a 12 year old with 5 volumes of an encyclopedia in my backpack!

<comment><USER14> Ah yes. To me (to my productivity's detriment...) quite often when I visit Wikipedia it becomes a learning adventure. From one thing you can hop to the other, finding out all sorts of interesting and obscure things. To a curious mind like mine, Wikipedia is heaven!

<comment><USER15> For myself, I would broaden this and say that almost every link I visit on HN, or every forum post I read leads to more than 1 additional link. Thus three windows of Chrome open with 10+ tabs each :)

I find this drill-down effect to be quite illuminating, if not productive. Strangely, it seems to provide both depth and breadth of topics in relatively equal measures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums. [http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309) There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here: <http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/>

<comment><USER17> Seems like there is an even older link here on HN <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896>

<comment><USER16> OK, and this game <http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy> was played at least as far back as August 2010.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a site: <http://TheWikiGame.com> that makes a game out of a related idea (finding the connection between Wikipedia articles).

Recently, I've been giving access to the game data to people (like university researchers, etc) to test different theories on path connections made by real people, etc.

The game has now been running for over 3 years, has about 1.19 million players, playing over 1.37 million games, with about 1.22 million won games (successful start/end article connection).

Got a really cool application for all the game data? I'd love to hear: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER19> Maybe the interesting part is the 150,000 lost games.

<comment><USER20> Surely most of those are just abandoned games?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nobody linked xkcd yet? Relevant Alt-Text: <http://xkcd.com/903/>

</comment><comment><USER22> Wikipedia is aware of this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy>

<comment><USER23> As they describe in the page, when you describe something, you are trying to place it within a general framework.

In trying to describe a domain in an encyclopedia, it does little good to use language specific to the domain. If your reader doesn't know what Biology is, it's little use trying to describe it in terms of Microbiology and Immunology. You have to use more general language.

There are are few words more general and meaningless in our language than "organization".

edit - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems like it would be nice to cache some of these requests, instead of repeatedly hammering the Wikipedia API. And why is it grabbing images?

<http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png>

(Incidentally, my test case for the screenshot did not lead to Philosophy!)

<comment><AUTHOR> totally agree. i hacked this together pretty quickly last night. definitely a lot of room for improvement. thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER25> It looks like there is a bug where it doesn't fetch the correct page:

<http://wikiloopr.com/anime>

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Either philosophy is a dead end, then, or it is the base of all knowledge. Depends on whether knowledge is a tree or a graph, which is... a philosophical question!

My brain exploded.

<comment><USER27> If there is some characteristic Q that is true of all knowledge, then Q must be true of Q. A cycle!

<comment><USER28> Only if Q is knowable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I seem to have broken it here: [http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2...](http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2%80%9376000)

Wikipedia page: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2%80%9376000)

That is, however, a weird Wikipedia page. It seems like the first link is a target to another location on the page, which (I'd assume) would put it in an infinite loop.

<comment><USER30> "Egypt" also breaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny, but it's true that everything in life ultimately leads back to philosophy.

As noted by XKCD, everything is based on something else: <http://xkcd.com/435/>

And I think after Maths on that should come Philosophy.

<comment><USER25> "Nematode" and "Flow (psychology)" stop at "psychology" which I think is just another example of that discipline putting on airs.

<comment><USER14> That's changed now, thanks to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Guys :) This is always fun when it crops up - especially the musing on how deeply rooted the topic of philosophy is.

But _please_ don't go editing articles to improve the loops or otherwise change them. Unless of course the change is beneficial to the article.

It's like going for a walk somewhere fascinating; enjoy the view, but leave nothing behind :)

</comment><comment><USER32> What happens for Biology? <http://wikiloopr.com/Biology>. For me, it goes down until it gets to Biology, and then highlights Biology over and over.

      Biology
      Natural science
      Science
      Knowledge
      Fact
      Proof (truth)
      Argument
      Philosophy
      Problem
      Doubt
      Belief
      Proposition
      Logic
      Reason
      Human
      Mammal
      Class (biology)
      Biological classification
      Organism
      Biology

The first link on the Wikipedia page for Biology is "Biology(disambiguation)", but the first textual link is "Natural Science". I assume it loops on Biology because it keeps going back between Biology (the article) and Biology (disambiguation), but that doesn't explain why the first redirect is to Natural Science in the very beginning.

Am I just missing something here?

Edit: This no longer happens. Now it properly loops on Philosophy and Proposition.

</comment><comment><USER33> Here is a similar visualization of the phenomenon from last year <http://xefer.com/wikipedia>

<comment><USER34> This is a superior visualisation in my opinion - it actually builds you a tree of links as you enter subsequent searches. Quite interesting to see how article chains cluster into 3 or 4 different "main branches".

<comment><USER35> Except there's no autocomplete. I couldn't match Carly rae jepsen... but once you get it, it is much cooler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Works for:

* Carly Rae Jepson

* Paul is dead

* Telephony

* Easter Island

* Drum and bass

* Sunglasses

* CAT 5

* Willy Wonka

* Black hole

* Vancouver

* Cloud Cuckoo Land

* Bacon

* Radish

* Brunette

* Dunning-Kruger Effect

* Lady Gaga

* Sailor Moon

If the chain hits Philosophy first, it converges on Philosophy/Argument. If it hits Fact first, it converges on Fact/Truth.

</comment><comment><USER37> I can't replicate it, but I encountered a weird bug. I entered "Star Trek" and hit Enter. The suggested items list appeared and I clicked on "Star Trek". Page titles appeared as normal, but everything appeared twice, like so:

      Star Trek
      Star Trek
      Cinema of the United States
      Film
      Cinema of the United States
      Recording
      Data
      Level of measurement
      Film
      ...etc until the last page title, "Reality"

Seems like two processes were running in parallel and outputting to the same stream.

<comment><USER38> I also got a weird one:

        Anime
        Animation
        The page you specified doesn't exist

<comment><USER39> That's funny because the first link on the Animation page is

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

Is that an Easter Egg (illusion == doesn't exist)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I love wiki. I spend hours following links. Having loops is a feature or else I might never stop.

Greek City States ->

      Polis
      City
      Human settlement
      Statistics
      Data
      Level of measurement
      Stanley Smith Stevens
      United States
      Federalism
      Politics
      Art
      Human behavior
      Behavior
      Organism
      Biology
      Natural science
      Science
      Knowledge
      Fact
      Proof (truth)
      Argument
      Philosophy
      Problem
      Doubt
      Belief
      Proposition loops to Philosophy

</comment><comment><USER41> When images appear first in the page's source, the wrong link is chosen. I assume you are trying to go for the first link, as a human reader would see it.

For example, the page on Anime:

<http://wikiloopr.com/Anime>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=edit)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! gonna fix that later

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> <http://wikiloopr.com/whale>

"Whale" leads to the "pinniped"/"marine mammal" loop. How about that one?

</comment><comment><USER43> _In fact, according to a crawl of the Wikipedia database from May 2011, nearly 95% of Wikipedia articles will take you back to Philosophy._

\- Always interested in the backstory of folks that sit around thinking this stuff up (and then testing it).

<http://www.syndiosocial.com/the-philosophy-of-networks/>

</comment><comment><USER44> I think this is fairly trivially explained in most cases by the fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Almost by construction, nearly every article starts with "X is a Y" (modulo grammatical niceties) where Y is a more general class to which X belongs. In cases when the article doesn't follow that form, the first linked term is usually still explanatory or definitional in some sense and hence more general, and cases where that doesn't apply (e.g. Obstacle) are unusual enough that they don't generally break the cycles. There are no "Wikipedia axioms" that I know of, so this is pretty much guaranteed to end in a cycle looping through a limited set of terms used to talk about abstract concepts. Hence Philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER45> One of these, at least, is supported by a pretty weird edit:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=51...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=510188633&oldid=510134116)

</comment><comment><USER46> Few days ago, when this was on MainPage, it ended in different loop than now.

Today most articles ends in cycle between Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.. ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy> )

few days ago, it was cycling between Philosophy and Agency ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)> )

What changed and why?

<comment><USER46> Aha, someone changed the first link on page Problem from purpose to obstacle.

Its a little bit like butterfly effect :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Problem&action...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Problem&action=history)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> You have a bug. Pages like <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc>. (note the dot at the end) have a "geographic coordinate system" link at the top, that isn't part of the article. So queries like <http://wikiloopr.com/Steve%20Jobs> are actually returning wrong results.

<comment><USER48> Yep, it's seeing the "Coordinates" link at the top right corner of the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is the shortest one I've found so far - <http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python>

<comment><AUTHOR> here's the shortest one i've found: <http://wikiloopr.com/home>

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Oh, I think I found one that doesn't loop:

Port Arthur <http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur>

Either that, I found a bug.

<comment><USER51> Not as dramatic but <http://wikiloopr.com/Nelson> ends up with Great Britain (and then claims it loops to itself with no intermediaries).

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Epistemology reigns supreme.

<comment><USER53> How do you know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Does this hold true with following the xth link on the page? I'd predict it does, but the further x is from 1, the longer the average chain before you get to the loop (by virtue of definitions being at the top of wiki articles, then at some point the average length would hit a consistent level). Would love to see this modified to let you determine x.

</comment><comment><USER55> I quite like the loop between Doubt and Belief <http://wikiloopr.com/Doubt>

<comment><USER56> The loop found for "Psychology" is pretty neat: <http://wikiloopr.com/Psychology>

Edit: Looks like somebody is editing certain articles that don't have philosophy as the first link to have it. Psychology used to loop with itself through like 5 intermediates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> After having twenty tries that got me into the philosophy loop, I started to think what are the most basic concepts that philosophy is "made of". Maybe I could escape the loop that way?

And lo and behold, I tried word "word" and it loops between "emotion" and "psychology". <http://wikiloopr.com/word>

<comment><USER14> I fixed that.

<comment><USER57> So did you edit Wikipedia to ensure the Philosophy loop?

<comment><USER14> Yes.

<comment><USER58> Now it loops between "Human" and "Reason". I think there are two secret cabals at work. One to break the Philosophy link and one to thwart these evil schemes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This reminds me of a game I used to play as an intern with other interns to kill time. Someone would pick a Wikipedia article deep down in the bowels of Wikipedia and we would race to the article from Wikipedia only using links. We could get the article surprisingly fast, most within only 5 intermediate page visits from the homepage.

</comment><comment><USER60> This behaves erratically. Sometimes it considers the coordinates link, above the entire article the "first link" (in the "Michael Phelps" chain), sometimes not (Chicago). Consequentially, I believe "Michael Phelps", when the coordinate link is ignored, leads to it's own loop that is not the philosophy loop in question.

</comment><comment><USER61> Nice demo, but I think it is an incorrect asumption that the first link is to a broader subject. For example, for Perú it says: "It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil" So Perú->Ecuador left me with a big wtf..

<http://wikiloopr.com/Peru>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> about an hour after posting this, someone changed the philosophy page so the philosophy-reality loop doesn't happen.

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

it still brings you to a loop, but it's not an immediate back-and-forth between the last two.

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't think the loop is the interesting part, what's interesting is that articles lead to philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER50> Funny... As I was playing with this, somebody changed the order of:

"In philosophy and sociology..."

On the Agency (philosophy) page. This changed the output of the results, but in the end the loop still existed. However, I couldn't help but feel like someone is trying to hack the matrix.

</comment><comment><USER63> Someone just changed the Reason page [1] which is now putting the focus on Biology instead of Philosophy.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=5...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=510134116)

</comment><comment><USER64> Puts me in mind of Translation Party[1] (which is back up, kudos to WillC and Rick!). There's a lot to be entertained via this sort of vertex-following algorithm.

[1] <http://translationparty.com/>

</comment><comment><USER65> Here's one that - if executed on the Federation computer on board the Starship Enterprise - would make smoke and sparks fly from the terminal...

<http://wikiloopr.com/Reince%20Priebus>

</comment><comment><USER66> I played with this [1] when I first started programming in Ruby. The results were super interesting (but now I regret not using the Wikipedia API...)

[1] <https://gist.github.com/1654064>

</comment><comment><USER67> Strangely, <http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos> takes you to a different loop than <http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos>

<comment><AUTHOR> clearly burritos are the more logical thing to eat

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Interestingly, Paul Graham [1] leads to the photographer, but still leads back to the Web before heading to philosophy/proposition.

[1] <http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham>

</comment><comment><USER69> Keith Chegwin gets stuck in Great Britain, which is probably for the best.

</comment><comment><USER70> I remember someone on reddit posting a python script that does the same thing (following the wiki chain to Philosophy).

Amusingly, my test got stuck in a loop between Science and Natural Science. :)

</comment><comment><USER71> All roads lead to Mathematics answers it -- <http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads- lead-to-mathematics/>

</comment><comment><USER72> You could optimize this a bit by caching the loops, I noticed some pauses between Fact and Truth, seeing as how that loop always comes up it would be nice to cache it.

</comment><comment><USER73> And if you go to the last link in any regular paragraph (not footnotes nor tables, nor references) you may often end up bouncing around sports teams.

</comment><comment><USER74> <http://wikiloopr.com/Gate%20City%20Bank> I think this one is bugged haha

</comment><comment><USER75> Looks like <http://wikiloopr.com/Crystal> breaks it (The loop has no other end)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now it appears to be looping between Natural Science and Physics. But they're really far apart so you might not seem them on your screen at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> The first word I tried — jeans — and it failed to make philosophy loop :) Apparently, any articles from generated list will fail too.

<comment><USER77> Jeans made the philosophy loop for me?

<http://i.imgur.com/rgMkh.png>

<comment><USER76> Somehow there was Emotion/Psychology loop there. Now it goes even further, than yours image, the loop is Argument/Philosophy now. Clearly, wikipedia is changing or tool was enhanced :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> <http://wikiloopr.com/texting> Yay! FInally found one that doesn't work.

<comment><USER79> That loops between philosophy and preposition.

<comment><USER16> It's been modified since then. [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging&action=history)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Bangkok is 25 and Chopsticks loops with itself.

</comment><comment><USER81> Interestingly, things like "Hat", "Shoe", and "Human" end up in a Psychology/Emotion loop, rather than the Philosophy loop.

</comment><comment><USER82> I think I beat it... <http://wikiloopr.com/Caterham%20CSR>

</comment><comment><USER83> <http://wikiloopr.com/Sigur%20Rós> did I break it?

</comment><comment><USER84> I wonder if this says more about the people who write the articles or the nature of the subjects themselves?

</comment><comment><USER85> 'television' was the first search term I could find that broke the loop - <USER3> the fifth or sixth attempt

</comment><comment><USER86> WikiRaces! <https://twitter.com/wikiraces>

</comment><comment><USER87> Try this <http://wikiloopr.com/kumbanad>

</comment><comment><USER88> "HTML5 Canvas" gets into a loop on Truth ... Fact ... Truth. Not the usual philosophy loop.

</comment><comment><USER89> Interesting find: "Sherlock Holmes" avoids the Argument/Philosophy loop; "Poirot" does not.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> yesterday, the loop was always the same. since this made it to the top of hacker news, the loop has been changing. look at the revision history of some of those pages and you'll see that people on wikipedia are messing with the loop.

</comment><comment><USER90> We used to play this as a game back in high school. First one to find the loop won.

<comment><USER91> Same but at the boring callcenter job I had at the time. Dell Enterprise support, we would get virtually no calls sometimes and we would make up shit to find on wikipedia and whoever found it from a specified starting point in the least amount of jumps won.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> i started with "The Tyger" and got this:

      The Tyger
      William Blake
      Romanticism
      Industrial Revolution
      United Kingdom
      Britain (placename)
      Great Britain

_shrug_ apparently, william blake is indisputable.

m3mnoch.

</comment><comment><USER93> I got stuck in a philosophy-argument loop instead of philosophy-reality ;)

</comment><comment><USER94> I thought Wikipedia hates sites like this. The do more harm than good.

</comment><comment><USER95> First two I tried led to different loops:

1\. Elephant (Mammal ... Human)

2\. Big Bang (Fact ... Truth)

</comment><comment><USER96> I think this works for any link, not just the first link.

</comment><comment><USER97> "Greg James" As in Radio one DJ.....Doesnt work!

</comment><comment><USER98> Are there any major articles that don't loop?

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe not major, but the ones i've found so far that don't do it are

<http://wikiloopr.com/home> <http://wikiloopr.com/chopsticks> <http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python>

<comment><AUTHOR> also, anything that leads to marriage <http://wikiloopr.com/dating>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Shakespeare - 28 links. My personal best.

<comment><USER100> MAF [1] - 30. Though, it's a bit of a cheat since the first page is surely disambiguation.

I also found M62 Locomotive [2] at 26 to be interesting.

1: <http://wikiloopr.com/MAF>

2: <http://wikiloopr.com/M62%20locomotive>

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> In another time it would lead to "God"

</comment><comment><USER102> "booger" doesn't do it. Just sayin.

</comment><comment><USER103> ironically, starting at "strange loop" avoids the repetitive philosophical argument

<comment><USER104> That works because somebody is being funny, and created a self referential strange loop inside Wikipedia.

That's a good find you found. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loops>

<comment><USER16> Hofstadter was a genius, one of his books was called "I am a Strange Loop" and xkcd (jokingly) reported that his autobiography reads:

      I'm
      so
      meta
      even
      this
      acronym

<comment><USER105> Here it is: <http://xkcd.com/917/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> TIL Wikipedia has a JSON API!

</comment><comment><USER107> "Honda" only goes 3 links

<comment><USER108> <http://wikiloopr.com/home> Home - Residence - <USER4>

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> "Lies" doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER110> Wikipedia is a dense oriented graph, no wonder it has many cycles. What's the big deal?

</comment><comment><USER111> Pseudodiarrhea gave me a unique loop.</comment>