The Business of Phish - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/48216173465/the-business-of-phish <comment><USER2> I really like Phish a lot, as my coworkers will attest since I have shitloads of their live shows filling up my iTunes album list. They're really one of the best live bands going now, definitely one of the best live bands of all time.

As the article says, their studio albums aren't that interesting. Especially after you've had a taste of their live shows. It's not just them, though. Once you start getting into live music more, everyone's studio albums sound bland. Go listen to Led Zeppelin's "How The West Was Won" (3 CD set made from a live show in LA around 1971 or so).. after that the Led Zeppelin studio albums just aren't as good as they used to be. Same goes for almost every band that I've heard live, or that I've heard live recordings of.

I think that's what Phish really has going for themselves, business-wise. Most bands you hear on the radio aren't really that good at their instruments, but with recording technology you really don't need to be that good. That's why you've got some artists who basically exist because they've got the right look. But Phish can go out there and perform 60 live shows in a year and feel confident enough in the performance that within a few hours the show will be available for download from livephish.com, and they can do this because they're actually really good musicians. They're able to fill this desire for good quality, energetic, live performances instead of bland studio recordings in a way that no other band has ever been able (or even tried) to do before.

<comment><USER3> > Once you start getting into live music more, everyone's studio albums sound > bland

Speak for yourself. Some of us like the possibilities the recording studio yields as an instrument. And by "some of us" I mean "most of the music listening public".

Led Zeppelin, in particular, is well-known for their pioneering studio work. Most of Zeppelin's most famous songs are studio tricks. Stairway to Heaven-- too many instruments to do with four people live. When the Levee breaks--tapes slowed down and run backwards. Achilles' Last Stand--a dozen or so overtracked guitars. Kashmir--the famous "hallway echo" on the drums with a phaser on top, multiple mellotrons, multi-tracked everything, &c. What's especially good about their studio albums is that they sound natural and alive, but this was another studio trick by splicing together the freshest takes, inventing new natural-sounding mic setups, etc.

They were also known for lazy, lackluster live performances, especially as Page and Bonham sunk deeper into substance abuse. So that's a very strange example. I don't really like the implied attitude that live music is best, and we are required to like it over "bland" studio music, and it's strange that you picked the most un-bland studio band since The Beatles.

<comment><USER2> I _was_ speaking for myself. Since this is Hacker News and people are interested in business, I wanted to talk about what's unique about Phish and what they're providing that nobody else is willing (and quite frankly, able) to. While there are some bands that I prefer in their studio-album form, my overwhelming preference tends toward the excitement of live shows if they're good. I was originally a music student before I switched to writing software, and so perhaps my hours spent in the practice room shaped my appreciation for music more in the direction of the performance. But the real point of my original post is that in the world of pop and rock, _almost everyone_ is leaning on the studio to craft their music and very few are properly _good_ at singing or playing their instruments. And that's the interesting part about Phish, because they're not necessarily very good songwriters (sorry fellow Phish fans, but their lyrics are just not very good ;) ) but they are actually very good musicians and performers. Even if you don't get into their music that much, you kind of have to hand it to them for being basically the only band out there that is willing to sell you a download of their concert almost immediately after it's done.

I'm aware that Led Zeppelin wasn't a famously great live band. Even Jimmy Page has written about how difficult it is to find any decent recordings of live shows of theirs. But "How the West Was Won", even though it has had a lot of studio enhancement work to it, is just so much more exciting than their studio recordings. It has a more improvisational feel to it in many places, and you get a sense of ensemble and of reaction between the band members and between them and the audience.

I didn't mean to say that _all_ live music is, by definition, better and I certainly didn't say you're _required_ to like live music. I'm sorry you're choosing to interpret my original comment as some kind of personal attack on your music listening habits, but I hope you'll get over it.

<comment><USER3> I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but you're still mixing taste and judgment. It sounds like you are _judging_ live music as Good and studio albums as Bad, not describing your own taste.

If you're not telling people they should listen to live music and then studio albums will sound bland, then don't say things like, "Once you getting in to live music more, studio albums sound bland". Then you turn your nose at albums that both critics and the masses absolutely love, and would say are the opposite of bland. (And of course you have to add how you're a trained musician, throw in some passive-aggressive insults at the end, &c. This sort of stuff is not done in the service of discussion or appreciation of music.)

<comment><USER2> Sorry, that wasn't my original intent. I'm just not a great writer. My intent was to describe more of the perspective of a someone interested in something that mostly doesn't exist elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was an incredibly long article. I like the (now I can't seem to figure out who it is from) quote, "I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter." There was a lot of history-of-the-band in the middle that didn't really feel absolutely necessary. It started to feel like a lot of fan self indulgence.

That said, it did convey the very important lesson: don't go into debt. When talking about bands going on a meteoric rise, being pushed by their record labels, you're talking about bands going into debt to the record label. As long as you're not in debt, you don't have people banging on your door asking for money. And that's when you can do whatever you want to do, make things as good as you want to make them, and create something truly special.

It sounds like that is what happened to Phish when they first broke up, instead they fell into a kind of perceived debt to their production staff. They weren't very interested in playing, but they couldn't do whatever it was they actually wanted to do, because they had people to pay.

And based on my own experiences with debt, I can see how that feeling can lead to substance abuse. My own life has become so incredibly much happier now that I know I don't have that debt hanging over me. And it comes back whenever I have someone knocking on my door, saying I owe them money (i.e. taxes).

So stay out of debt, kids. Whatever you do, stay out of debt. College isn't worth it. Believe me, people were starting to question whether or not college was worth the debt when I started 10 years ago, and the situation has certainly not improved over time.

<comment><USER5> The article was long, you summarized it nicely. But I love the last line of your comment;

"College isn't worth it. Believe me, people were starting to question whether or not college was worth the debt when I started 10 years ago, and the situation has certainly not improved over time."

You know, I wish someone would have told me this when I was 18 (21 now). You DO NOT need a college education. Sure, it helps, no doubt. But IMO it only really helps if it is one of the top schools (MIT, Stanford, Harvard etc) and if you look at tuition costs often times those schools aren't that much more expensive then some B/C level school.

I think the problem started with the parents of my generation. My parents (along with their peers) were taught college was the universal way to succeed which transferred over into what adults preached to kids my age. I think being in college (back in the day) made you stand out. But with every kid being taught that same thing, how can you stand out if everyone is doing the same thing? Doesn't it defeat the purpose? Sure, the argument is it makes you a well rounded student, no doubt it does that. But spending 80k+ on learning about the annual rainfall in Brazil doesn't do you much good for your job prospects.

I think my generation should make their own education. I personally dropped out of school to learn software, got accepted into Dev Bootcamp and will be continuing my education there. Don't ever let school stand in the way of your education.

Here is a great article on the subject. This kid was a Thiel Fellow and has spent the 100k he was rewarded (as part of the fellowship) to write and focus on education. It's a great read and his book looks pretty good.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/03/05/dale- step...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/03/05/dale-stephens- ditch-college-and-create-your-own-educational-experience/)

<comment><USER6> > _This kid was a Thiel Fellow and has spent the 100k he was rewarded (as part > of the fellowship) to write and focus on education._

It's never been too clear to me what that Thiel fellow ever really accomplished. On the surface, it seems that he got his fellowship, dropped out, and has since made a tidy business out of talking about his experience. Maybe I'm being too harsh on the guy, but he strikes me as a self-help guru for the education sphere.

> _I think my generation should make their own education. I personally dropped > out of school to learn software, got accepted into Dev Bootcamp and will be > continuing my education there. Don't ever let school stand in the way of > your education._

Somewhat ironically, my interest in pursuing a full CS/EE education increased dramatically after attending DBC. Either way, congrats & good luck. I have nothing but praise for the staff there. I'm sure it will be a positive experience.

<comment><USER7> CS/EE is one degree that will easily pay for itself, later if not sooner. English Writing is not.

<comment><USER4> Depends on what you pay for it. It is also one of the jobs that you can potentially learn without a degree. Sure, it might _eventually_ pay for itself, but that is a long time of living in debt that is not fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Didn't Phish inherit the Deadheads after the Grateful Dead stopped performing? That's a unique situation and hardly a business model.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure that's generally the case, though I'm sure it does happen.

My dad and my uncles (all born in the 1950s and 1960s) were serious Deadheads. They've gone to over 100 Grateful Dead shows a piece. None of them really have any fondness for Phish, but I have no idea why.

I know my anecdote can be countered by several of the opposite side, but as a laymen to jam music, I can definitely hear a very fundamental difference between Grateful Dead music and Phish music.

<comment><USER10> Not to put too fine a point on it, but Phish's lyrics are offensively awful to the ears of most deadheads.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. My dad always reiterates how important lyrics are to him. We have a very nice hardback copy of Box of Rain by Robert Hunter in the house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This article kind of reminds me that there was a piece on NPR a few months ago about Nickelback, and how despite the fact that every person I know hates that band apparently they're wildly successful from a business perspective. The main guy in the band basically treats it entirely like a business, they're very efficient in how they run their tours, etc.

[http://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164858831/love-to-hate- nickelb...](http://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164858831/love-to-hate-nickelback- jokes-on-you)

<comment><USER11> To be fair, that article is just a link to a Businessweek article which goes more in-depth: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-08/genius- the-n...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-08/genius-the- nickelback-story)

<comment><USER2> Oh, I didn't even know that. I heard them talking about it on NPR a few months ago so I did a quick Google search specifically for NPR and Nickelback and that was the link it gave me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> thats the magic of jam bands. its amazing getting lost in a jam, feeling the transition from one song to another, forgetting the bad has been playing non- stop for the last 30 minutes. its the newness that is most attractive for me. its the closest live music that comes to dj's spinning live. you don't know what your gonna get till its time.

its sad to see this type of music dwindle away when it was so rampant during the 60's. its magical feeling the energy from a band that can talk to each other through their music. its the same magic that happens between basketball players when they are in the zone and can pass the ball without looking to their team members.

magical.

<comment><USER13> Hippy :) I kid of course. I've never been able to get in to the jam bands. Many of my friends love Phish, the Dead, Umphrey's McGee, The Big Wu etc etc. I've tried to get in to their music, but every time they do those long jams I get bored.

What's interesting though is that I love a good solid 20 minute epic trance tune. It's basically the same thing, so I'm not really sure why I prefer electronic "jam" music over more traditional jam bands.

<comment><USER14> There is also the whole world of Jazz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It feels wrong to write a long piece on Phish without mentioning LSD. Phish continued the legacy of the grateful dead and inherited much of the 'family's cultural traits and people... And an undeniably big part of that family was always acid.

It's not that you needed to be on it to enjoy their (great) music, or that the band was always on it... Rather it's that it's always consistently available in their circle and this allows countless people to get _turned on_ to a whole new part of life through their relationship with going to a show. This helps makes many people's first Phish show one of their peak life experiences.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think Phish's style is really similar to the Allman Brothers' back in their heyday. Although I doubt they profited massively from it, Live At Fillmore East is a jam rocker's dream album.

This article brings up an interesting thought: back in the '60s and '70s when most rock bands extended improvisations into their concerts (Led Zep, Hendrix, Floyd, etc.), did none of them think of recording and distributing each live show as a standalone piece like Phish? Or were they perhaps already 'mainstream enough'?

<comment><USER17> At some point, probably in the 70s, Frank Zappa began obsessively multi- tracking nearly-all performances (at significant cost back then). This led to a bunch of interesting output, including things like compositions based on an improvised guitar solo, separated from it's original backing, and placed in a completely different harmonic context. Also, lots of straight-up live compilations (with some overdubs), chiefly the You Can't Do That On Stage Any More (YCDTOSA) series, which is a six volume set of double-CDs.

For most people, back in those days, getting a sufficiently high-quality recording of a live show was prohibitively expensive.

Like Phish, Zappa was very much a cottage industry, unmolested by mainstream music industry stuff after the very early days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I attribute part of their success to an attitude they brought to their work. They were extremely serious about their music, about their shows, and about the fans. But they didn't take themselves seriously. Trey pretty much sums all of this up well in one of their documentaries.

With this attitude of theirs they also came on the scene at a good time. In the mid 90s, grunge rock was dying or dead, and the serious bands such as Nirvana gave way to materialistic hip hop, commercial rock, and (remember?) swing. Phish, at least for me, filled the void of grunge rock and opened me up to a whole new world of music. I could get really into Phish because I knew they approached their music with such care. It's hard to invest time in appreciating something and studying it when you have doubt that there's actually no substance or skill underneath, at least when it's not the most approachable material. Phish really never disappointed in that regard.

Further, it's hard to overstate the genius of two people in Phish: Trey and their lyricist Tom. Trey is not only incredibly skilled, he has an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm powered directly by the crowd. If you watch him play, he's so tuned in to everything around him, you can feel that he's not really focused on the guitar (the physical aspect or the theory). It's not a challenge for him to manipulate it which lets him focus on playing with the rest of the band and the crowd which he does so well. The best analogy I see is what a touch typist experiences with the keyboard. You really don't think about typing. Now imagine being able to type messages live to people and every character you type is truly thrilling and enjoyable to your audience, and oh you can write in rhymed iambic pentameter without trying.

And Tom's lyrics I think are simply fantastic. Round Room I think really shows his true excellence. He can craft together 3 or 4 meaning and themes at once without making it seem like a big stretch. And he has such a soothing tone it sounds like a children's book sometimes, but the meaning is really almost beyond the realm of being able to consciously analyze it, yet not reaching the level of absurd.

</comment><comment><USER19> A nice (and shorter) article from Marco Arment on Phish: <http://www.marco.org/2011/05/26/geek-intro-to-phish>

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm hoping to make a pilgrimage to the Gorge this year. I'm happy to see this article here on Hacker News as Phish has been a central point in my life for going on 20 years.</comment>


The technology behind Nextdoor - <AUTHOR> https://engblog.nextdoor.com/2015/07/02/what-is-the-technology-behind-nextdoor/

<comment><USER2> I'm kind of disappointed by the cynical tone that has been increasing on HN over the past year or so. This is a straightforward blog post that is transparent about a wide range of technologies used in several areas (not just the user-facing portion). I found it informative. For example, it validates some of my concerns about scaling using PostgreSQL. They're using a single write server in a top 2000 site (according to Alexa).

<comment><USER3> Yeah as am I. These cynical comments can be completely replaced by a downvote if they honestly don't think that this is interesting or appropriate.

On a separate note, it was great to hear that PostGIS (which is amazing btw) scaled well and can be used on a site with this much traffic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting to hear they were so dissatisfied with Celery/RabbitMQ that chose to write their own queuing system. I'm looking in to implementing a queue for background tasks right now, and was down to choosing between Celery/RabbitMQ and beanstalkd. Perhaps I'll check out their new "Taskworker" ("Kale"?) app that they have open sourced. ([https://github.com/Nextdoor/ndkale](https://github.com/Nextdoor/ndkale))

<comment><USER2> I know it's early days, but I'm excited about Salvatore's new project, Disque. He certainly knows how to find a technical niche with a big need.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9818403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9818403)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Python/Django is still lovely for putting together a quick project, but I don't think anyone would pick this stack (Python/Django/Tornado/RabbitMQ etc) for a scalable server in 2015 anyway. It was a good choice in 2011-12, when Nextdoor started. As of today what's posted in this blog is pretty common knowledge within Python backend developer community. Of course the comfort level of team members in picking up other technologies matter.

<comment><USER6> What do you think they would use now? I'm not sure Node/Mongo etc is without it's problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> File under: "Things I Never Wondered About".

</comment><comment><USER8> some kind of queuing as well

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm guessing there's a web stack of some type, backed by a database, perhaps with an API mid-layer. Probably some type of FTP or other content upload system for articles, and an image origin for a CDN. Also, perhaps a data ingestion and ETL system.

<comment><USER10> And I think it's all done by computers.</comment></comment>


Federal German Government limits access to genomic data on SARS-COV-2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.biostars.org/p/427840/ <comment><AUTHOR> here is what I found most outrageous:

> _" You may not distribute GISAID data outside the GISAID community, such as > by releasing genetic sequences obtained in GISAID in any publication"_

flies right in the face of reproducible research and open access</comment>


Firefox Quantum U2F Support (FIDO/Yubikey) - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-add-on/reviews/920895/ <comment><USER2> This + simultaneous profiles are the only things stopping me from giving Firefox a shot again

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It works fine for me when logging in to GitHub, but I think Google auth has blacklisted Firefox, rather than looking for presence of the Javascript API. Hopefully Google will sort that out soon.</comment>


Where do you find freelancers? - <AUTHOR> Where have you had success hiring freelancers? I've hired on upwork, freelancer, fiver and found the experience lacking. Why aren't there decent portfolios to look at? Lots of time wasted qualifying/disqualify candidates/companies. Lots of auto reply spam. This has to be a market opportunity for someone. I've used Indeed for local hires, but haven't used stackover jobs yet. I'm looking for short term flex hours mid level mobile development in react native and xamarin and am exhausted by these platforms. <comment><USER2> These platforms commoditise development work. So, you get what you pay for.

I'd look for places where React Native and Xamarin developers meet. There almost certainly are Slack communities for these technologies.

Such communities often have a dedicated #jobs channel. Seeing who is most active and who seems to be most knowledgeable about the specific areas of expertise you require can also be very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Experienced freelancers won't work for the rates you're willing to pay judging by the platforms you're looking at and are likely booked up far in advance. There isn't really a market opportunity because good people who have work don't want a third party platform inserted into their business leeching money.

</comment><comment><USER4> Upwork is great, I found a lot of good Eastern European developers. I set the rates to at least 75 USD/hour however (which is a lot by Eastern European standards, and so it's very worth it to them), and I ask questions through the project proposal and the chat as to whether they know exactly how to solve my problem or not. This process weeds out most of the unqualified candidates. Perhaps you are not vetting thoroughly enough or not paying enough to be worth their time.

<comment><USER5> Upwork can be really great, but most people use it wrong.

Don't wait for the good developers to apply, invite them proactively. 95% of the developers applying themselves are sadly the bottom barrel. First weed out from their profil history if they know what they are doing. Only work with people that have 100% Jobsuccess with relevant projects and have the "Top Rated" Badge. Then do a small test project with them or a free consultation call to check for details, how good their english is and cultural fit.

I have both hired myself and got hired on very successful projects (e.g. build an MVP for a startup in a month that led them to secure a funding round) this way. In case anyone wants to see my profile [https://www.upwork.com/fl/tobiasheidingsfeld](https://www.upwork.com/fl/tobiasheidingsfeld)

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say I fall into this camp of using is wrong. I'm only inviting a few candidates to a job post and the majority of applications are people manually or auto responding. I experiment with a private post and only inviting candidates.

Searching seems to be off at Upwork, for example, I'm look for someone add faceID support to a RN app and the results aren't too helpful. Looking at searches like "react native faceID" on upwork you would hope the top of the list would be the most relevant profiles containing all three terms or simply a search of "faceID" would return profiles containing this or biometric or react-native-touch-id, but searching the profile contents of the top five search results for this for me yield none of them having the search term. Testing google index against upwork is more effective for me 'site:upwork.com faceID'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you tried Google or asking people you know for recommendations? Most of my clients find me via my personal website that way.

I wouldn't add myself to any of the sites you mentioned. I don't want to be listed somewhere as an interchangeable commodity, don't want an intermediary getting in the way of payment and communications, and don't want to be somewhere that attracts clients looking for the cheapest option. I can't believe some of these platforms allow screen capture software that let clients spy on the contractor either.

</comment><comment><USER7> Try joining some slacks and discord's for programming some have hire me threads. Also try Reddit and of course HN who wants to be hired. All these places tend to have portfolios posted.

There is an opportunity but as soon as you make the next upwork ... well you've made the next upwork! Make the next medium same thing. The gets shit as gets popular cycle repeats again and again.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wrote a free book about this (no email wall, it's a Google Doc): www.productizeteam.co

My process:

1\. OnlineJobs.ph/Dribbble/JobRack.eu/Local hiring website (exammple: Ejobs.ro)

2\. Post a clear job ad with requirements/commitments/application form

3\. Video call with the selected applicants

4\. (Optional) Paid test task

5\. Hired - Sign independent contractor agreement

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading the question I don't see any obvious attractions for good freelancers. Short term flex hours and competing with Fiver and Upwork on price is not how a freelancer maintains a sustainable business.

</comment><comment><USER10> Also every month there is a thread where you tell people on HN that you are looking for freelancers or alternatively contact the right people yourself.

See -> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342497)

</comment><comment><USER11> Upwork has worked well for me. You really have to invite promising candidates individually instead of opening the floodgates, and even then the hitrate is low. I typically give a small assignment to around 5 selected freelancers. I've found some amazing people this way, and are still working with them on an on-going basis.

<comment><USER12> Hi,

I am a software engineer with 3 years of experience building web application in technologies like Php, Laravel, JavaScript, TypeScript, Reactjs, Nextjs, Nodejs, Expressjs and other tools. I have a very little experience as a freelancer (did some tasks on fiverr but didn't like that all). I am looking to work with clients on long-term basis. Are you looking for more freelancers to work with? If yes, I am interested. Looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Why aren't there decent portfolios to look at?

It's a chicken and egg problem. Most clients want to see previous work, but don't want their project to eventually become part of that previous work. The issue is compounded by the fact that most commercial software isn't flashy and easy to demonstrate to the casual observer like, say, a Dribbble account is for designers.

If experience with my own clients has taught me anything, it's that the best way to find good people is to just talk to them. Start incrementally - first a talk, then give them a few days worth or work, then a week, then more. Evaluate them at each step - starting with how they communicate and how professional they are and then the quality of their deliverables. I've noticed a pretty strong correlation between bad communicators and poor quality of work, thought YMMV.

> Lots of time wasted qualifying/disqualify candidates/companies.

Let me put it this way - there are two kinds of freelancers out there:

1\. Those that invest in their visibility and charge for it. 2\. Those that don't.

They might be equally good developers, but you're going to be paying a premium for the first one since he has intentionally made himself easier to find.</comment>


First stable release of Ubuntu Unity 20.04 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ubuntu_unity/status/1259016071920513024 <comment><USER2> I've only ever enjoyed using Ubuntu with Gnome 2. Nothing else has come near meeting that standard.

<comment><USER3> You'd probably like MATE then: [https://mate-desktop.org/](https://mate- desktop.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm actually sad Unity 8 never shipped. I was really looking forward to seeing it develop, it had a lot of brilliant ideas.

Especially those desktop widgets. They were beautiful!

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's just me but I can't find a single link from that Twitter account to an explanation of what is "Ubuntu Unity Remix".

My first guess is that it's an Ubuntu fork with the Unity interface instead of the Gnome Shell. But the logo and icons on the Twitter page + the "Remix" inside the name suggest it may be an multimedia editing oriented distro?

<comment><USER6> I agree, and they have no homepage or anything either. Unity was (is) a desktop environment alternative to Gnome. It used to be the default in 16.x but Gnome became the default in 18.x.

Remix is (I think) an updated, forked version of Unity that is now being maintained and advanced with the latest versions of Ubuntu. This is particularly exciting for me and other Unity lovers because I pretty much only use Unity as my DE. I have been manually installing it as a replacement for Gnome and this update is very exciting. I think Unity is a lot better.

<comment><USER7> Can you please elaborate a bit more on this "now being maintained and advanced with the latest versions of Ubuntu"?

I mean, is it really different from the Unity version you can still find and install from the 20.04 official package repository? The problem I see with this is that you have to trust a binary distribution (not just the package, but the entire OS) bundled by a not well-known team.

For me, it would be great if Unity could be maintained and developed just like any other desktop environment (i.e. XFCE) which is completely open source and you can get from your command line just apt'ing it in vanilla Ubuntu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why was a Twitter post to the download link posted?

Better link (still useless but at least contains a screenshot in addition to the same download links): [https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-unity- remix-20-04/1596...](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-unity- remix-20-04/15968)

</comment><comment><USER7> I heard Ubuntu 20.04 still shipped with Unity as a package, but I suppose you can't get it just installing it.

After quite some time using 14.04, I miss Unity. In fact, I always liked it, despite all the criticism it got. Compared to GNOME 3, I think those "small things" were better, like having the pidgin icon turn blue in the top right corner of your screen whenever there's a message. Now you have a popup notification every one can read if you're sharing your screen, but at the same time you can easily miss it if you weren't paying attention. The same happens with the Thunderbird integration, etc.

<comment><USER9> You absolutely can get it by installing the package!

[https://itsfoss.com/use-unity-ubuntu-17-10/](https://itsfoss.com/use-unity- ubuntu-17-10/)

That's the beauty of desktop Linux Imo. If you change your mind, you can just change whatever you want on the fly

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When Unity was introduced I did not like it at all and now it defaults to Gnome 3, which also feels weird to me. I'm not sure but it feels like it all started with moving from Start Menu to Windows 8 and very large tiles, which was marketed for tablets and touch screens, and seems like Unity and Gnome followed. I never liked this trend and today go with Xfce or LXDE, where I found more practical and feels like a computere, or I am just old fashioned.

<comment><USER11> I think you are mistaken, only unity 8 was designed for touch screens.

Yes, Gnome 3 might feel odd. But I noted it improved my productivity once I get hang of the win-button, virtual spaces and hot corners.

Please give it a serious try

<comment><USER12> Agreed, this is one of the common misconception of Gnome 3. Gnome 3 actually encourages keyboard driven workflow: "Ensure that every operation in your application that can be done with the mouse can also be done with the keyboard."[1].

They use 'big buttons' mostly for accessibility reasons.

Although I personally don't use Gnome 3 as DE because of lack of customizations, I agree to most of their Human Interface Guidelines[2].

1\. [https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/pointer-and-touch- inp...](https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/pointer-and-touch- input.html.en)

2\. [https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/](https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/)

<comment><USER13> Also, if you happen to be on a laptop, Gnome 3 on Wayland is a MUCH better experience for touchpad input.

Less of a gnome thing than a wayland thing, but it matters since not that many DEs support it yet.

Basically, after having moved to wayland I find it incredibly difficult to go back and use X on laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not an official canonical product.

Also, a little more, but not a lot more, than a few "apt install" commands.

I guess it's useful for people who use Linux, like Unity, do not know how to "apt install" it themselves, AND trust a random googledrive/mediafire download as their main OS. I don't know any of these people myself, but I'm sure they must exist.

</comment><comment><USER15> Cool side project for anyone who was really keen on Unity. FWIW, though, someone has a Unity-like theme available for KDE that will give you a similar layout and can be applied with one click.

I'd still say Ubuntu going w/ GNOME3 vanilla is probably the best thing to ever happen to GNOME3. It's received a _ton_ of fixes and improvements as a result of Canonical pounding on it.</comment>


Hardware Acceleration of Key-Value Stores [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://zhehaomao.com/papers/memcached-fpga-accel.pdf

<comment> TD-Linux Their system works well on a RISC-V, which is a deeply pipelined but in-order architecture running at only 50MHz, with very fast memory relative to its clock speed. I'd like to see results compared to a more reasonable CPU implementation. For example they could have used a Xilinx Zynq, which includes hard Cortex A9 cores, which are out-of-order and superscalar. They also run at a much higher frequency relative to the memory speed.

I think this paper vastly underestimates memory constraints of higher performance systems.

<comment><USER2> Another comparison point (curiously not referenced in the above paper) is this similar effort: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud13/workshop- progra...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud13/workshop- program/presentations/blott) [PDF/slides/video]

From a quick skim, the Xilinx work synthesises the entire network stack (including TCP) in hardware, unlike the above study, which only supports UDP in the HW traffic manager.

The numbers in the Xilinx paper are more attractive than what this study found and the paper also includes power measurements (since Joule/request is one metric on which FPGAs and hardware do quite well compared to software).

That said, much of the latency gain likely comes from bypassing the OS kernel and its generalised network stack. There is plenty of existing work (unfortunately also not referenced in this paper) that does this and which achieves very low latency, albeit -- to be fair -- on x86 hardware. (Examples: Arrakis [1], IX [2] and MICA [3].)

[1] -- [https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical- sessions/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical- sessions/presentation/peter)

[2] -- [https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical- sessions/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical- sessions/presentation/belay)

[3] -- [https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi14/technical- sessions/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi14/technical- sessions/presentation/lim)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At first, I was impressed they reduced latency by 10x:

        Our initial evaluation with a realistic workload shows
        a 10x improvement in latency for 40% of requests without
        adding significant overhead to the remaining requests.

And then I re-read this claim, did a little math, and realized that they only reduced it by 36%.

"10x for 40% of requests" is a skeezy way of saying 36%.

<comment><USER4> And that's not taking into account the "not significant" overhead added to the remaining 60%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nothing revolutionary, but someone had to do it. (Of course, you would take something expensive in software and implement the logic in software. Of course you can get by implementing only the most common requests: GETs to a small subset of keys.)

I don't intend to criticize this paper in particular, but, generally, I don't see small performance improvements in such software to be very useful for society. Academia just becomes a research arm of corporations that might even be a net negative for society: eroding privacy rights (Facebook et al) or introducing volatility into stock markets (HFT could use this paper's insight just as fruitfully.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Main source of latency will be network. The main problem are synchronous GET requests as then performance == latency. Better go async instead of reducing latency with hardware accel.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily if the request is coming from within the same data centre. Then the network can introduce less latency than disk access do.

<comment><USER8> I have to agree with moru here. The latency on memory access will be negligible with respect to the latency of any io operations, even within the same data center. In my experience anything that involves the OS is >> 1us. Also beware of anything that declares 10x performance improvement.

<comment><USER9> You are assuming that a high performance, latency tuned system is using the OS network stack. This would be a petty naive implementation. Offerings from Solarfalre (OpenOnload) and Exablaze (ExaSock) transparently offload and bypass the kernel stack. Quoted performance numbers are around 1us, of which 500ns is spent getting up and down the PCIE bus. Offloading to the nic makes a whole lot of sense in this space except that it has already been done, and with more compelling perfomance. The authors compleltly failed to take into account existing work.

<comment><USER6> nope RTT even for these kind of network hardware is >=10 microseconds (I deal with such stuff professionally). Still a big gain going async :-)

<comment><USER9> Surprising. >10us sounds pretty slow to me.

<comment><USER6> round trip. one way 5 to 7 micros. some special cards go down to 3 one way, however with rtt, software usually adds some 2 micros overall

<comment><USER9> Less than 1us, RTT to software ([http://exablaze.com/exanic-x4](http://exablaze.com/exanic-x4))

Less than 400ns per switch hop ([http://www.arista.com/en/products/7150-series](http://www.arista.com/en/products/7150-series)) excluding congestion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


File uploads with JQuery? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Does anyone know of tutorials that explain how one can use JQuery (together with PHP) to upload files to a server?
I have an PHP based upload script but the problem is that the whole page gets refreshed when I try to upload a file. I wish to "AJAXify" the upload process (if I may use that word) using JQuery.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Javascript won't help you much when it comes to dynamically uploading content. Adobe's got a really flexible uploader in Flash, and the nicest Javascript interface I've seen to it is <http://swfupload.org/>, though it does take some work to integrate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing this.</comment></comment>


Do-it-yourself OCR with Perl modules [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://perlmeister.com/lme/prod-0706.pdf

<comment><USER2> OCR with Perl is pretty old. People who frequent perlmonks get a kick out of trying to implement their own home-brew reader. For instance: <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=124732>

<comment><USER3> I didn't realize how old that thread was until I encountered this comment:

"Your 1st suggestion is pretty much what Altavista uses for basic search engine submissions."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Python <http://sajjad.in/content/ALPR_paper.pdf></comment>


Japan is using bots as companions and caretakers - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2018/02/05/aging-japan-robots-virtual-reality/ <comment><USER2> It all depends upon trial and error method.. It also needs lots of testing for better performance</comment>


Frinkiac: Simpsons quote search engine - <AUTHOR> https://frinkiac.com <comment><USER2> One of the authors here. I blogged a bit the other day about how we built this: [https://langui.sh/2016/02/02/frinkiac-the-simpsons- screensho...](https://langui.sh/2016/02/02/frinkiac-the-simpsons-screenshot- search-engine/)

<comment><USER3> Was this done using the DVDs? I'm curious about any potential licensing issues with the screen caps and subtitles. Did you have to get permission/sign something - or does this fall under fair use?

<comment><USER4> No way this is licensed (no copyright notice, even; not even a mention of Fox), and no way it is fair use. It has frame-by-frame, full resolution images and full transcripts of every episode up for browsing. This is textbook mass copyright infringement. Short of offering unlicensed video downloads for a fee, it could hardly be more clear-cut.

Yeah, it's cool, I get it, but you can't just steal and redistribute content en masse for your cool project. Well, he did, but I expect he'll be hearing from Fox's lawyers soon.

<comment><USER5> It is arguably fair use in the U.S. I don't think there is enough case law to be sure. It's hard to predict how it would go in litigation. I think you're right that the defendants wouldn't have a particularly strong case, but they wouldn't have the weakest.

The courts have generally judged significant "transformation" of the source material to be powerful in determining fair use. I think that would be in their benefit. Also it could be argued that this has very little effect on the market for the original copyrighted material, which would be in their favor. Of course, the copyright holder would see and argue it differently if they choose to sue. And the "the amount and substantiality of the portion taken" would not look good for the defendants -- but even though some common belief focuses on this factor almost exclusively -- thinking as long as you copy only 10 pages or whatever you're good, and if you don't you're definitely not -- that's not how it works, it's just one factor, and one that the courts in the past couple decades have somewhat de-emphasized.

But I don't think we can say "no way it is fair use", or "it could hardly be more clear cut." It could go either way. Fair use in the U.S. for novel things, not already well established as fair use or not, almost always looks like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is impressive. It found everything I tried. If the author is reading, showing GIFs or a small video clip instead of a static image would be preferable.

My favorite Simpsons quote: [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=up+and+atom&e=S07E02&t=673...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=up+and+atom&e=S07E02&t=673422&m=+UP+AND+ATOM).

Coach: Up and atom!

Rainier Wolfcastle: Up and at them.

Coach: Up and atom!

Rainier: Up and at them!

Coach: [annoyed] Up and atom!

Rainier: [louder] Up and at them!

Coach: Better.

<comment><USER7> Simpsons gifs as a service... al la:

[https://twitter.com/StarWarsDotGif](https://twitter.com/StarWarsDotGif)

Its open source and maybe could be repurposed?

[https://github.com/LindseyB/starwars-dot- gif](https://github.com/LindseyB/starwars-dot-gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love this. It found everything I threw at it. I hope the Fox lawyers don't take it down.

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=THERE%27S+A+STUFFED+PEPPER+...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=THERE%27S+A+STUFFED+PEPPER+IN+THE+TRASH+FROM+LAST+NIGHT.&e=S06E14&t=214897&m=+THERE%27S+A+STUFFED+PEPPER%0A+IN+THE+TRASH+FROM+LAST%0A+NIGHT.+JUST+RINSE+IT%0A+GOOD.+Kid%3A+Come+home%2C%0A+Lassie%21)

<comment><USER9> I searched for "moon pie" and didn't find what I was looking for. :(

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I _was_ saying Boo-urns, and it couldn't find it.

Also, yeah, this is coming down as soon as the lawyers get ahold of it.

<comment><USER11> They may or may not (be allowed to) have a sense of humor about it. Our 24 Hours of LeMons car's publicity was sent to Matt Groening by a friend, and he passed it around the office. Apparently he asked their publicity folks if they could invite us up to show off the car about the same time that legal asked about sending us a cease and desist.

In the case of the car, it's probably fair use and the only issue was likely that we have non-Fox-approved sponsorship on it, but they probably decided their advertisers wouldn't complain about it because it's not exactly big bucks changing hands here.

So yeah, we got to meet Matt Groening and David X Cohen and Al Jean and a lot of the writers. It was definitely a cool experience.

[http://www.thehomercar.com](http://www.thehomercar.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just in time for the Grammys!

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=grammy&e=S10E14&t=1008006&...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=grammy&e=S10E14&t=1008006&m=+OH%2C+THAT%27S+VERY+SWEET.%0A+HAVE+A+GRAMMY.+UH..).

Once the AV Club finds this I think a black hole will open and consume us all. The website is quite cool though!

</comment><comment><USER13> If I could use this to get subtitled gifs of the scene in question, not just screenshots, it would go from amazing to godlike. On the roadmap for v2, hopefully?

<comment><USER14> CLICK THE IMAGES

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=lousy+smarch+weather&e=S07...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=lousy+smarch+weather&e=S07E06&t=598313&m=+Oh%2C+lousy+Smarch+weather).

<comment><USER15> For me I don't get gifs, just a list of stills from the same scene

<comment><USER16> I think he's making a joke about clicking the "next image" fast enough that it appears to be animated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I tell people every day that you don't win friends with salad. Glad I finally have the images to go with it!

<comment><USER18> I know that feel[1][2] bro.

[1] [http://www.redbubble.com/people/babushack/works/12826784-you...](http://www.redbubble.com/people/babushack/works/12826784-you- dont-win-friends-with-salad?grid_pos=2&p=t-shirt)

[2] [http://www.redbubble.com/people/newdamage/works/9371721-i-wo...](http://www.redbubble.com/people/newdamage/works/9371721-i-won- friends-with-salad?grid_pos=3&p=t-shirt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great work! Tried out some of my favourites and it worked like a charm.

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=that%27s+a+paddlin](https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=that%27s+a+paddlin)

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=thrillho](https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=thrillho)

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=now+where%27s+me+toothpick](https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=now+where%27s+me+toothpick)

<comment><USER7> All my favorites are there:

"we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=we+tried+nothing+&e=S08E08...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=we+tried+nothing+&e=S08E08&t=1014362&m=+YEAH.+YOU%27VE+GOT+TO+HELP%0A+US%2C+DOC.+WE%27VE+TRIED%0A+NOTHING%2C+AND+WE%27RE+ALL%0A+OUT+OF+IDEAS.+%0A)

'see you suckers' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=suckers&e=S14E18&t=688354&...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=suckers&e=S14E18&t=688354&m=+So+long%2C+suckers.+%28%0A+laughing%29)

'the buddy system... foolproof' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=buddy+system&e=S14E03&t=94...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=buddy+system&e=S14E03&t=944235&m=+is+anyone+missing+their%0A+buddy%3F+ALL%3A+No.+Ah%2C+the%0A+buddy+system.+Foolproof).

'I'll never be the darling...' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=stoke+their+beards&e=S06E0...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=stoke+their+beards&e=S06E02&t=899915&m=+OH%2C+I%27LL+NEVER+BE+THE%0A+DARLING+OF+THE+SO- CALLED%0A+CITY+FATHERS+WHO+CLUCK%0A+THEIR+TONGUES%2C+STROKE%0A+THEIR+BEARDS+AND+TALK%0A+ABOUT%2C+%22WHAT%27S+TO+BE+DONE%0A+WITH+THIS+HOMER+SIMPSON%3F%22)

'mountain of sugar' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=mountain+of+sugar&e=S06E02...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=mountain+of+sugar&e=S06E02&t=1068701&m=+A+MOUNTAIN+OF+SUGAR+IS%0A+TOO+MUCH+FOR+ONE+MAN.%0A+IT%27S+CLEAR+NOW+WHY+GOD%0A+PORTIONS+IT+OUT+IN+THOSE%0A+TINY+PACKETS)

'childrens dance recital' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=parents+expect+a+children%...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=parents+expect+a+children%27s+dance&e=S11E20&t=1082360&m=+I%27M+SORRY%2C+LISA.+PEOPLE%0A+GO+TO+A+CHILDREN%27S+DANCE%0A+RECITAL+EXPECTING+A%0A+CERTAIN+LEVEL+OF%0A+PROFESSIONALISM).

'wookie' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=wooki&e=S06E02&t=1301984&m...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=wooki&e=S06E02&t=1301984&m=+%28+Ralph+chanting%29%3A+I+BEAT%0A+THE+SMART+KIDS.+I+BEAT%0A+THE+SMART+KIDS.+I+BENT+MY%0A+WOOKIE.+HEY%2C+RALPH%2C+WANT%0A+TO+COME+WITH+ME+AND%0A+ALLISON) 'idiots island' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=any+sign+of+inteligence&e=...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=any+sign+of+inteligence&e=S15E19&t=41250&m=++a+rose+of+continuation%3B+%0A+and+he+hurled+a+rock+of%0A+rejection+at+anyone+%0A+displaying+intelligence%2C%0A+character%2C+or+ethnicity).

'George Harrison' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=george+har&e=S05E01&t=9790...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=george+har&e=S05E01&t=979010&m=+HELLO%2C+HOMER.+I%27M+GEORGE%0A+HARRISON.+OH%2C+MY+GOD%21+OH%2C%0A+MY+GOD%21+WHERE+DID+YOU+GET%0A+THAT+BROWNIE%3F)

'Beer' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=killing+you+with+beer&e=S0...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=killing+you+with+beer&e=S04E19&t=1079327&m=+YOU+DON%27T+LIKE+ME%2C+AND+I%0A+DON%27T+LIKE+YOU+BUT+LET%27S%0A+JUST+DO+THIS+AND+I+CAN%0A+GET+BACK+TO+KILLING+YOU%0A+WITH+BEER).

'alcohol' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=+the+cause+of&e=S08E18&t=1...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=+the+cause+of&e=S08E18&t=1306704&m=+TO+ALCOHOL--+THE+CAUSE+OF%0A+AND+SOLUTION+TO)

<comment><USER20> 'help yourself to some more stock' [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=help+yourself+to+more+stoc...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=help+yourself+to+more+stock&e=S13E18&t=741324&m=help+yourself+to+some+more+stock)

<comment><USER7> "bubbles can burst?" [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=golden+age+&e=S13E18&t=107...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=golden+age+&e=S13E18&t=1074365&m=+Bubbles+can+burst%3F!+Yeah%2C%0A+but+it%27s+a+golden+age+for%0A+the+repo+business.+One%0A+that+shall+never+end).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is great and long over due.

For those of use who grew up having conversations in simpsons dialog, this will help provide those in my wife who don't have such habits develop them :)

</comment><comment><USER22> small point - the encaptionator should put a 1/2px black stroke around the white text so it is visible against any background colour

edit - after reading the FAQ I see you are working on this

I withdraw my question [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=withdraw&e=S08E14&t=688870...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=withdraw&e=S08E14&t=688870&m=+I+WITHDRAW+MY+QUESTION).

</comment><comment><USER23> This is the reason the internet exists.

</comment><comment><USER24> You call this a tax return!?

[https://frinkiac.com/meme/S07E17/702635.jpg?lines=+You+call+...](https://frinkiac.com/meme/S07E17/702635.jpg?lines=+You+call+this+a+tax%0A+return%3F+You+call+this+a%0A+super+computer%3F)

</comment><comment><USER25> Some great screencaps compiled in this article:

[https://www.inverse.com/article/11007-frinkiac-is-the- visual...](https://www.inverse.com/article/11007-frinkiac-is-the-visual- simpsons-search-engine-the-world-has-been-waiting-for)

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't believe how fast it is.

</comment><comment><USER27> Who can write a Simpsons quote search engine?

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=the+garbage+man+can](https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=the+garbage+man+can)

</comment><comment><USER28> Any chance of OCR? I searched for "Pharm Team", which was the name of the company at [https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=major+league+baseball&e=S1...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=major+league+baseball&e=S11E02&t=326760&m=+UNTESTED%2C+POTENTIALLY%0A+DANGEROUS--+CANDY+BAR%3F%0A+NO!+IT%27S+A+NEW+DRUG%0A+CALLED+FOCUSYN.+A+DRUG%3F) though the name was never said.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is great! My only complaint is that it comes up with lots of near duplicates. The images look they are different frames, but the quotes they reference are the same

<comment><USER30> I think that's a feature. You get to choose which frame you prefer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is amazing. I hope there's an api for this

<comment><USER32> Break out your Chrome inspector and follow along in our exciting home version:

[https://frinkiac.com/api/search?q=hoyvin](https://frinkiac.com/api/search?q=hoyvin)

Results look like this:

[{"Id":1745953,"Episode":"S13E08","Timestamp":797213,"Filename":""}]

Concatenate the episode and timestamp to get the image:

[https://frinkiac.com/img/S13E08/797213/medium.jpg](https://frinkiac.com/img/S13E08/797213/medium.jpg)

Caption here:

[https://frinkiac.com/api/caption?e=S13E08&t=797213](https://frinkiac.com/api/caption?e=S13E08&t=797213)

Look for the Subtitles array:

"Subtitles":[{"Id":138914,"Episode":"S13E08","StartTimestamp":794266,"EndTimestamp":796533,"Content":" ( gavel pounding ) So, Professor,"},{"Id":138915,"Episode":"S13E08","StartTimestamp":796533,"EndTimestamp":799834,"Content":"tell us about Operation Hoyvin-Mayvin."}]

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> You'd have to be stupider than a monkey to not like this. Are you stupider than a monkey?

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=how+big+of+a+monkey&e=S12E...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=how+big+of+a+monkey&e=S12E02&t=433099&m=+ARE+YOU+STUPIDER+THAN+A%0A+MONKEY%3F%0A%0AHOW+BIG+OF+A+MONKEY%3F+)

</comment><comment><USER34> I made this Chrome extension to generate animated GIFs from frinkiac [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/frinkiac- gif/dlaba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/frinkiac- gif/dlabaelekmgjofhdmnpmdigegdgndgdc)

</comment><comment><USER35> on the legal/lawyer talk tip - there have been a few notable other simpsons screencap repositories (like Lardlad) that have remained online for years. Wondering if there's some leeway or can't chase after a single frame (rather than video with picture and sound, which they are notoriously strict on youtube about etc)

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a great tool. Any copyright issues? I tried it, "but it disappeared into _' fat air'_."

</comment><comment><USER37> Every time you type a character in the search box, it adds a browser history. That is not great...

<comment><USER14> WORTH IT.

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=meme&q=gamblor&e=S05E10&t=1151749&m=...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=meme&q=gamblor&e=S05E10&t=1151749&m=I+CALL+HIM%0A+GAMBLOR%21+%0AAND+IT%27S+TIME+TO%0A+SNATCH+YOUR+MOTHER+FROM%0A+HIS+NEON+CLAWS%21)

<comment><USER38> Hmm... [https://frinkiac.com/?p=meme&q=gamblor&e=S05E10&t=1151749&m=...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=meme&q=gamblor&e=S05E10&t=1151749&m=I+allow%0Aarbitrary%20text%0Ato%20be%20inserted%0Ain%20the%20picture%21)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> No Milpool! :(

More seriously:

1) Awesome!!!

2) It would be great if the search results page listed the quotes in addition to showing the images.

<comment><USER14> It totally does have milpool:

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=meme&q=i+think+i+left+my+glasses+in+...](https://frinkiac.com/?p=meme&q=i+think+i+left+my+glasses+in+your+pool&e=S06E01&t=445595&m=I+think+i+left+my+glasses%0Ain+your+pool.+)

It's just that nobody ever says "Milpool" in the dialogue.

<comment><USER39> Excellent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> curious about how it works/was developed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11036894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11036894)

</comment><comment><USER40> First thing I searched for: "Kids, you tried your best, but failed miserably. The lesson is, never try." Got the exact episode. This is great :)

</comment><comment><USER41> I was hoping to find the quote in which Grandpa Simson mentions Estes Kefauver, but searching for "Kefauver" yields no results. :-(

<comment> squeaky-clean It looks like there's no episodes indexed past season 15, and this quote is from season 20.

[https://frinkiac.com/?p=episode&e=S20E14](https://frinkiac.com/?p=episode&e=S20E14) Should be the episode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Authors: Can you describe the backend infrastructure?

I'm just a bit curious here about the costs of running a toy service like this.

</comment><comment><USER43> "And that is why The Lord of the Rings can never be filmed!"

Stumped ya Frinky. It didn't have to go down like this.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is an amazing feat of human ingenuity.

</comment><comment><USER45> Awesome. I could find an episode about "tiger-repellent rock" just by searching for "tiger".

</comment><comment><USER46> Much cooler than expected. So I assume this is fairly trivial to adapt to any other set of subtitled videos?

</comment><comment><USER47> "Hi Supernintedo Chalmers" LOL...this is freaking awesome. GIFs would be an improvement :)

</comment><comment><USER48> Though you may be rat-like in appearance, you are truly king among men for sharing this!

</comment><comment><USER35> also, why didn't this get picked up in the duplicate post algo HN? For the blog writeup @reaperhulk you should have put 'Show HN' in your original post to get more traction or something

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm getting a nothing found error? Is this a mobile bug?

<comment><USER50> Getting the same results from my laptop at the moment also. Everything is returning 'Nothing Found' Error. It was working earlier today. (Can you tell it is Friday?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> needs a random button

</comment><comment><USER52> How is this so fast?

</comment><comment><USER53> Brilliant. just what I need to needle the wifey

</comment><comment><USER54> YES.</comment>


TEDxNashville - Jack Kruse - Brain Surgery Without a Scalpel - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qNEeqCACwo

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent example of snake-oil seller (regardless whether or not the described techniques work (the author neglects such things as randomized trials)).</comment>


Ask HN: Are there males in charge of HR anywhere? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes? Eg there are men in this LinkedIn list -[https://www.linkedin.com/title/vp-of- people](https://www.linkedin.com/title/vp-of-people) (Found by googling "VP of hr people")

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course there are.

A better question might have been "are males in charge of HR _everywhere?_ ".

Because if they were, there might be a legit argument for -- oh wait just a damn minute -- I'm not _even_ going to step into _that_ minefield.

::washes hands::

</comment><comment><USER4> What do you mean? I've seen both males and females in charge of HR.</comment>


Views of the economy have turned sharply negative in many countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/03/views-of-the-economy-have-turned-sharply-negative-in-many-countries-amid-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> For my small business that powers ecommerce integrations? Good

For the 1/2 of retailers I walk by who have locks on the door? Bad

Hard to reconcile the fact that most people work for the latter, while house prices go up.</comment>


JS-SIMD - <AUTHOR> http://sunfishcode.github.io/blog/2014/09/09/js-simd.html

<comment><USER2> JS SIMD will support the ARM Neon instructions. Here is the spec [http://esdiscuss.org/notes/2014-07/simd-128-tc39.pdf](http://esdiscuss.org/notes/2014-07/simd-128-tc39.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Intel, Google, and Mozilla are working together to propose this SIMD API for > standardization.

Here's hoping they wind up doing this for "JavaScript Shared Memory, Atomics, and Locks" (aka Pthreads)

<comment><AUTHOR> People on HN complain about Emscripten being the devil's work, and now here is someone asking for pthread support? I need to go sit down...

<comment><USER4> All of those people work on Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> With SIMD in JS, PNaCl and Dart VM become increasingly irrelevant. Now all that stands in the way is shared memory.

<comment><USER5> SIMD makes JS a better compile target. The Dart VM is still more "lightweight" (it has to generate a lot less native code) and it offers much faster startup (10x). There also aren't deoptimization traps scattered all over the place. The performance is very predictable.

As far as the VM itself is concerned, it doesn't really matter if other browser start to support Dart natively. The VM is extremely useful for development, you can embed it in native applications, and you can use it to write web servers and other command line tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> Startup compared to v8. v8 compiles all JS to bytecode first, which is where it gets poorer startup time compared to SpiderMonkey's interpreter, or JavaScriptCore's handwritten assembly interpreter.

How many people are using the Dart VM outside of Dartium? Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?

<comment><USER5> It's not like SpiderMonkey starts up instantaneously. Also, an interpreter is of course slower than the quick and dirty native code generated by V8.

JSC doesn't seem to have an advantage in the extremely short-running SunSpider benchmark suite.

Dart's snapshots are also something you just can't do with JavaScript, because the program structure is created imperatively with JS. You have to run quite a bit of code before you can actually run the program itself.

> _Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?_

Worried about what? Why would you care anyways? Do you also get worried if some game uses a Lua VM?

I use Dart for pretty much everything. Command line tools, web servers, and client-side scripting. It's an excellent choice for the things I do and the things I want to do.

It's a better fit than Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, or PHP. I still do use those languages occasionally, but Dart is my primary language now.

<comment><USER4> Mike Pall would disagree with you about interpreter vs compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does ARM have any say in this standardization?

<comment><USER7> The Dart SIMD API [1], which this work is based off of, is supported on ARM chips with NEON. I'm sure the JavaScript API will be too.

[1]: [https://www.dartlang.org/articles/simd/#implementation- statu...](https://www.dartlang.org/articles/simd/#implementation-status)</comment></comment>


How Intel is buying, building a piece of the tablet market - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089421/how-intel-is-buying-a-piece-of-the-tablet-market.html

<comment><USER2> Isn't paying customers to choose their chips anti-competitive? I wonder what the EU Commission will have to say about that. Didn't Intel get fined €1 billion for something very similar during netbook age a few years ago?

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/intel-fined- over-e1-billion...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/intel-fined- over-e1-billion-for-violation-of-european-antitrust-laws/)

I mean even if Intel isn't the biggest player in the _mobile_ chip market, they're still #1 in chip revenues overall, I think, and it seems quite silly to have one competitor _pay_ customers to choose its chips over the competition's chips. That can't be legal, and if it is, then it shouldn't be.</comment>


Watch Darpa's Robotic Dog Follow Its Master (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/alphadog/

<comment><USER2> Hopefully Wikileaks will survive so I might know the wedding parties and whatnot that this thing wiped out "accidently" in the "war on terror". Otherwise, cool technology.

</comment><comment><USER3> Always fascinating to watch these robots, but I really wish they'd show them going over terrain that a wheeled robot couldn't. Isn't that the point?

<comment><USER4> I have to disagree with you here. Look again at the rocky steps the robot walks down (0:19 and 0:50), and the slope of the hill it's climbing. It's hard to make a wheeled robot that can climb (400 lb. payload -- 1200 lb. unloaded) a hill of that slope in loose/rocky dirt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know many find it creepy as hell, but I love this thing. Wouldn't be fun seeing it as an enemy though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Imagine being the prey of this robotic dog rather than its master...

</comment><comment><USER6> rat things... great...</comment>


Chart.js - open source HTML5 charting library - <AUTHOR> http://www.chartjs.org <comment><USER4> A bit of the shame on the interactivity:

"If you are looking to add interaction as a layer to charts, Chart.js is not the library for you. A better option would be using SVG, as this will let you attach event listeners to any of the elements in the chart, as these are all DOM nodes."

Most charts are far more useful with rollovers to let the user interpret the data. I'd say this is a must have for most anything where you really are trying to give the user insight into the dataset.

Also seems to be a bit of a punt by saying this just isn't possible in Canvas. We know where the cursor is no? And we know where the points are. So can't we react to the cursor hovering over a point? What am I missing?

<comment><USER5> We actually have our own in-house charting library at Chartbeat that uses Canvas that does exactly that (roll over the main chart):

<http://chartbeat.com/publishing/demo/>

<comment><USER4> Nice! FYI, those charts are VERY fuzzy on my retina display. :(

<comment><USER5> Yeah. We're actually in the process of moving to D3 partly because of this. :\

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well done nick. This is the perfect example of a _unicorn_ project - <USER2> perfect mix a technical solution, but with immaculate design sense. Even the documentation is beautiful.

Would love to see this MIT licensed.

I would love to see you rewarded for this project. Donations or a commercial support licence?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just updated the online docs and readme on Github with an MIT license, so feel free to use!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I _love_ about Highcharts is that the documentation is heavily linked to examples on jsfiddle. Your documentation looks really nice and you have lots of nice examples, but I can't _play_ with them.

edit: I meant to say that I can't play with them as far as I can tell. Is there a way that I'm missing?

<comment><USER8> +1 on this - jsfiddle documentation would be killer !

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good job, your charts look really good. Too bad they aren't interactive, it makes the legend+values mandatory to understand the data. Unless you just want to use them as art.

Also, the pie chart and doughnut charts seem odd. The general rule is to order the values clockwise (biggest piece starts in top middle and extends to the right). It really helps readability and is a convention.

Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER10> Indeed. I was looking at this hoping to find a way to label pie charts or even have the inner circle of the doughnut chart display the part of the chart I'm hovering over.

A great start! Definitely room to grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been making a ton of d3/html5 charts lately, and I've been terribly dissappointed by the open source offerings of graphs that are both beautiful(tons on dribbble, few even in html) and functional. Was going to work on one, but this actually looks really good!

edit: any reason you decided not to use D3 for this?

<comment><USER12> Found this in the docs:

"Chart.js uses the canvas element, which is a single DOM node, similar in characteristics to a static image. This does mean that it has a wider scope for compatibility, and less memory implications than SVG based charting solutions. The canvas element also allows for saving the contents as a base 64 string, allowing saving the chart as an image.

In SVG, all of the lines, data points and everything you see is a DOM node. As a result of this, complex charts with a lot of intricacies, or many charts on the page will often see dips in performance when scrolling or generating the chart, especially when there are multiple on the page. SVG also has relatively poor mobile support, with Android not supporting SVG at all before version 3.0, and iOS before 5.0. (caniuse.com/svg-html5)."

<comment><USER13> But on the other hand, SVG is infinitely more useful if you want to extract chart data from the page.

<comment><USER14> How is that more useful than a link to the source data in a format appropriate to the data?

<comment><USER13> It's not, but how often do you see a news source link to the raw data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People seem to be really put off by the lack of interactivity. Interactivity might be fun, but it mostly gets in the way and can be an impediment to telling a story because it let's developers pass the buck to the end user.

Interactivity is just a feature. What's the real benefit and purpose? So users can navigate the data? OK, then what? So they can find meaning hidden in the data? Code capable of multidimensional analysis is going to be more effective than eyeballing a 2 dimensional representation of the data.

Don't force your users to move the mouse around, hover, click, and search around for meaning.

For all charts, figure out what story you want to tell, then tell that story. Don't force your user to search for meaning.

</comment><comment><USER16> Regarding "object oriented" vs "object orientated", the former is the standard variation while the latter is what linguists call a backformation.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation>

Basically, someone interprets "orientation" as having a stem of "orientate" analogous to how "contemplation" has a stem of "contemplate". Of course, the real stem is "orient".

</comment><comment><USER17> This is by far the best chart library of the easy offerings - outside d3.js.

I would love support for a vertical and horizontal stacked bar chart for things like budget break-downs and general side-by-side comparisons.

Your Y axis has too many values in my opinion. I know it can be hard to code, but I think the example charts can do without the *5 values.

Great job!

</comment><comment><USER18> This seems to be exactly the library I was waiting for, because it meets several requirements: It is framework agnostic and lightweight. We are using Rickshaw at the moment, which has d3 as a dependency and that alone results in bloated javascript just to write some basic graphs. Well done and thank you!

</comment><comment><USER19> Beautiful looking charts but what's the obsession with animation - <USER3> distract rather than aid understanding.

</comment><comment><USER20> "An apology to open source" "At midnight on the 18th March 2013 I posted Chart.js online. On the morning of the 19th March, I've had to take it down due to IP concerns with my current employer."

It has been taken down. Looks like the project ran into some trouble.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just curious as it seems pretty static; inputting values and outputting charts. Any capabilities to add interaction like selecting data points and analysing a particular point with it's other attributes that are not plotted?

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe I'm missing something but how to use it? I put Chart.js and an example html file (I just copied all relevant html from pie.html file) in a folder but when I open it all I can see is a blank page. What gives?

</comment><comment><USER23> Finally a charting library with a decent radar chart implementation. I've had numerous uses for these over the years and the only popular use of them I've seen any time recently was in a few Pokémon games.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's no mention about the license. This has been raised on the issue tracker: <https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/issues/1>

<comment><AUTHOR> Just updated and closed this with an MIT license added to the docs and readme on Github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> @nnnnnick this looks great. I work with d3 on a daily basis and while I think that it's a great toolchain, the need for something small, fast and canvas based was absolutely needed. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER26> Fantastic! No dependency, no external libs, lightweight and to-the-point. We need more like this. Thank you very much.

I haven't played with it yet and there seems no labels and/or legend support in pie charts.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just tried printing the site to see if the charts work in print, and unfortunately, they don't. An image fall-back apparently needs to be implemented.

I really wanted to use this for my blog.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thanks I will use this instead of highcharts in my <http://weekplan.net> application, it will save me a few kb.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been working on a reporting interface and was planning to take a look at possible charting solutions. This has been a great timing!

Looks great btw.

</comment><comment><USER29> The tree colors at the top just looks like Pocket: Read me later

Otherwise, good job. Like other said, interactivity is lacking though

</comment><comment><USER30> Just out of curiosity, what did you use to put together that amazing documentation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't use any particular software or tools as such, but used Google prettify (<https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/>) for coloured syntax highlighting.

Wrote the content in plain HTML, and used jQuery to build the nav on left hand side from the headings on the page.

<comment><USER30> Great job, some of the best docs I've seen in a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does this compare to Flot?

</comment><comment><USER32> This is the most beautiful chart library I've come across so far. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER33> Good job! Thanks for doing this. Will use it in my next project.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is beautiful. Well done, looking forward to using it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Really cool, looking forward to giving this a try.

</comment><comment><USER36> Really nice work! Where can we see more examples?

</comment><comment><USER30> So glad someone made this, fantastic work!

</comment><comment><USER37> Superb, just what I were looking for.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why would you call it a HTML5 library?

This is a canvas JS library.</comment>