The aesthetics of science fiction spaceship design - <AUTHOR> https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/4935 <comment><USER2> One of the most unexpected & interesting "history of space aesthetics" to me came from the recent documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune" (which is awesome!).

The film recounts the attempt by avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky to turn Dune into an epic, 12 hour film in the mid 70s.

He assembled an incredible cast of conceptual artists and designers including Moebius (jean giraud), Chris Foss, HR Giger , and others and designed a giant illustrated tome laying out the shot-by-shot epic, largely penciled by Moebius and filled in with art from the other contributors.

Producers scoffed at the scope of the vision but ultimately the team of people that Jodorowsky got together went on to design the art & aesthetic for seminal credited films including Alien, AI, Gaurdian's of the Galaxy, Tron, etc.

And even more broadly this group is credited with the inspiration behind the aesthetic of Star Wars(1), Blade Runner(2), and more recently Fifth Element.(3) as their giant tome of incredible, outstanding sci-fi conceptual art was passed through Hollywood in the giant, fabled Tome.

As a nod to the importance of Moebius' designs in particular, the imperial probe droid in Empire Strikes Back is a direct copy transfer of one of his creations (4)

I was already a hopeless fan-boy of Moebius & Jodorowsky thanks to "The Incal" \- which in and of itself is one of the most inspiring pieces of storytelling and graphic art I've come across, but Jodorowsky's Dune cemented to me that the early works by these teams are the true inspiration for much of the visual sci-fi aesthetic that has predominated 50+ years of pop culture.

(1) [https://kitbashed.com/blog/chris-foss-and-the-triangular- tot...](https://kitbashed.com/blog/chris-foss-and-the-triangular- totalitarianism) & [http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/7-famous-sci-fi-movies- inf...](http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/7-famous-sci-fi-movies-influenced- by-jodorowskys-dune/)

(2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tomorrow_(comics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tomorrow_\(comics\))

(3) [https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=376571](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=376571)

(4) [https://kitbashed.com/blog/moebius](https://kitbashed.com/blog/moebius)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the interesting background. Do you know if the "Tome" has been published?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously, this thesis is much more in depth but it reminded me of this fun video titled, "Why Every Movie Space Battle Is Wrong! (Because Science w/ Kyle Hill)" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea89t9U2ZJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea89t9U2ZJk)

<comment><USER5> Yeah.

As I learned more about science and actual spacecraft, I got increasingly frustrated with science fiction and anything related to spacecraft. But there is a spectrum of realism.

For example, with Babylon 5, the fighters had inertia, and would often face in the direction of the enemy while travelling in another direction. In contrast, Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes.

Later, I was reading about molecular nanotechnology, and then considered the idea that un-augmented meatbags like us travelling among the stars is absurd. From an energy expenditure perspective and practically perspective. Basically, if we have the technology to travel to the stars, we won't be humans anymore.

And these days, I just look for shows that feature "good writing" in the sense of dialog and overall plot.

<comment><USER6> I liked the Gap Series by Stephen Donaldson, he gets zero-g and distances right. I can't remember if their weapons were energy or mass, but space battles essentially boiled down to rolling your ship to always present your best charged shields and damage absorbers towards the enemy.

I'm also a big fan of the Culture series by Iain Banks, it's a lot of high- high-high-tech technobabble, but he gets some physical basics right, it doesn't matter if your ships is enormously more technologically advanced than someone else's, if they can project enough energy onto you, you will be vaporized. He also gets the timescales and distances correctly, because none of it runs on a human decision-making timescale, it's all sentient weapons and AI's, so a close quarters battle is over in seconds.

<comment><USER7> I liked that bit where the ship's Mind is replaying the battle in slow motion for the humans.

As I remember the story, the actual battle was a loud bang and a violent jerk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised that there's no mention of rotation for "artificial gravity". Peter Watts, for example, uses some realistic designs in his work. So does Alastair Reynolds.

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

It popped up in The Martian, but some of the early 'hard sci-fi' I read - Stephen Donaldson's The Gap series - described similar designs. Rendezvous with Rama would be an earlier, more famous example. I've been surprised that it doesn't show up way more often.

<comment><USER8> It's just cooler to assume non-rotational artificial gravity, I guess.

Edit: And I do love Watts' design, because it handles the acceleration to coast transition so well.

<comment><USER10> Additionally, the implications of non rotational artificial gravity are more significant in a science fiction context. In foundation, Asimov regards "gravitics" as the pinnacle technological achievement of man (psychohistory notwithstanding).

<comment><USER8> True. And inertia management, which allows arbitrarily high acceleration, with no internal effects. Reynolds and Banks, for example. And they're an interesting juxtaposition, in that Reynolds tended to paint AIs as evil, while Banks' Minds are overall decent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The program written for the thesis produces output that looks like a low-rez procedural city generator. There are lots of those good enough to make a city that can be flown over. Few can make a halfway convincing city at ground level. (Although this one [1] isn't bad.)

Procedural generation of natural terrain with vegetation is very well developed. Cities and buildings, not so much.

[1] [https://github.com/pboechat/ProceduralCity](https://github.com/pboechat/ProceduralCity)

<comment><USER12> A big reason I could never get immersed in flight simulators, both civil and combat. I'm all fine, flying in my plane/chopper around mountains, rescuing people/shooting bad guys, and then suddenly... what on Earth is that ugly, low-poly (or flat) collection of rectangles? Is that... a "city"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So this is all or mostly American movies and tv? I was hoping for classic sci- fi cover art

<comment><USER14> They do cover some of it an appendix. Even video game ships are only briefly covered, in the appendix.

But I think, no mention of the Warhammer 40k universe though.

<comment><USER13> I think that I'm just uncovering a personal tacit assumption. I grew up in a household with a lot of 60s and 70s sci-fi books and magazines, so that was where my mind immediately went. I also need to have my arm twisted to admit that star wars is sci-fi. I suspect someone could write an amazing series of coffee table books threading all this together, comics, magazines, games, tv, movies. It would be glorious

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I think Star Wars belongs more in the category of "futuristic space" than "sci-fi", really, but one can't really argue that it would influence sci- fi ship designs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I missed StarGate references in there! Plenty of ships in those series.

<comment><USER15> Quite a few things are missing. And as someone else pointed out, very American slanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> (2010)

</comment><comment><USER18> no Moya ?

<comment><USER15> But the dragonfly ship is mentioned, don't see that every day...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "In this thesis, we present a detailed analysis of the conventions that appear in fictional spaceship design, including a discussion of their origins, their uses in emulating certain traits, and reasons these conventions might be followed or ignored."

Is there any further proof needed that we live in an enormously wealthy society that we can afford to pay people to engage in such frivolous research.

It's also proof that AI will not result in net unemployment, because it will just open up the possibility of more of these sorts of frippery jobs.</comment>


Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer Explained The Hedge Fund He's About To Launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-weev-auernheimer-hedge-fund-2014-4

<comment><AUTHOR> what if there are some other "flash boys" like agents/security firms selling some heartbleed-like bug info to some, while delaying such info to some?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do when someone gets to market before you? - <AUTHOR>

Was working on an idea for the past year or so, not full time or anything, but I sunk some hours into it. About 75% of the way there now, and things are moving faster. Yesterday an app launched that was essentially the same thing. I'm a little bummed out, but thinking about what to do now.
Has this happened to anyone else? Did you give up and move on? Or did you shift the focus so there were some big differences between competitors?
Thanks <comment><USER2> This is great; you have just received validation that there is a market out there for your app. How big is this competitor and how far are you from launching?

(If you are talking about a Google I/O launch, well... don't give up yet. You never know when a project will join the Nexus Q and Google Reader.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure how big the competitor is in terms of manpower, but it looks like ~40k downloads over the past 24 hours, though the reviews on implementation have been mediocre, because they're being flooded with users which took their site down.

As far as launching mine, probably 80 hours of work.

<comment><USER2> I say go for it. There's more than enough market for you two, and if you do a better job than them, you can get a very nice slice of the pie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd say to study them and use their "weak point" to make your app better! This might slow down your work but it might worth the time.

<comment><USER4> Also, the competitor's launch can be helpful in that there are now a lot more people that understand what your app does and might be looking for a better or more customized-to-their-needs version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the size of the market ? - assuming it's substantial I wouldn't overly worry about it. But it's important to think about your longer term competitive advantages and how you'll defend them.

Your product will naturally evolve as a result of interactions with your customers, so to some extent your products will diverge naturally anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> You've still the chance to be better than them in every way (features, quality, marketing). Nothing's lost yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is your app? Facebook started after myspace and friendster and we know how that turned out.</comment>


Damnit…FriendFeed Gets Even More Useful With An Interestingness Filter - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/damnitfriendfeed-gets-even-more-useful/ <comment><USER2> Really liking this new feature. And it loads nice and quick, too. Thanks guys!

</comment><comment><USER3> Arrington needs to make it less obvious that he's on FriendFeed's payroll.

<comment><USER4> I don't think so. I don't think he really gets friendfeed.

TC commenters are worse, though. One comment was so ignorantly negative it made me laugh:

# Darren Neimke

June 6th, 2008 at 4:16 am

Wow, that's so cool. $5M and they managed to get 3 new hyperlinks on the page. Sweet.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which social network(s) you're active on? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> HN. Not really a social network, and that's one of the main reasons why I like it.

Besides HN... I don't really curate my other social networks. My FB has been disabled for newarly two years now, i never really understood what is the interesting/useful part of twitter and snapchat/instagram... I really don't see the point.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...and what about messengers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reddit and HN, and very rarely Twitter. For IM Telegram and rarely Whatsapp and Facebook.</comment>


Video of 1 week before and soon after 1904 San Francisco earthquake - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DNINOxRxze9k%26feature%3Dplayer_embedded&start1=&video2=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DVTALTvev7Is%26feature%3Drec-LGOUT-exp_stronger_r2-2r-2-HM&start2=&authorName=DJ+E-Train

<comment><USER2> amazing how much more vibrant it was before the quake than it is today. Traffic flowed in all directions all at once and somehow it all worked.

There's some recent thinking about removing all of the traffic signs and signals actually making a street safer.

often we build up these systems with incremental steps that seem to make sense to somebody, but put all together actually produce a worse result.

but don't expect it to change quickly. its only the users that have the information. the planners will take a lot longer to figure it out.

there is also thinking to close streets to traffic, even if just for a few days a month. people love it. but they used to flow pretty freely, on foot and on bikes before all the traffic management

<comment><USER3> Two different models of travel: One up which everyone is equally opportunistic (or kindhearted) and the system solves itself bottom-up. The other in which people are protected from their worst instincts (or those of others, who may be stupid or malevolent) by a rigid set of rules and signals. Of course this is a dialectic not just for traffic flow but political systems, public/private class variables...

<comment><USER2> very true. "we'll tell everyone what to do and when" seems a good model in the abstract but in practice its not as good as everybody making their best judgements based on the signals available where they are, while broadcasting their own intent.

There are good reasons why human intelligence is naturally distributed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe it was in 1906.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. It was 1906 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake> April 18, 1906 at 5:12AM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wasn't anyone else annoyed by the ultra high pitched beep, I thought my ears were going to bleed

</comment><comment><USER6> mean the fire of 1904 caused by the quake?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your AQ? - <AUTHOR>

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html I'm curious if the overall AQ here is what I'd expect it to be, given that this is Hacker News.
Edit: BTW I got a 42 on this. I'm honestly not that surprised because I have always considered myself severely socially awkward. I don't have many friends and whichever friends I do have aren't particularly close. <comment><USER2> 30 - I actively 'dislike' social situations that require the well-worn path of meeting someone, breaking through the glass wall of politeness and actually talking about something interesting and pretending to be interested in what they are saying. Concurrently I am trying to ensure I am projecting the mannerisms of someone that is interested while waiting for conversation signals that they are: interested, disinterested, hungry, thirsty, a douchebag etc

Sometimes its just seems like so much work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Score: 26. Anxious wreck. Hate talking to people, they love talking to me. Crave attention from people, but shy away when they show it. Statistics nerd, but not too overboard. Also, sense more things than the average person... very aware about the environment around me and how it effects me or could possibly effect me. Autistic? Nah. Anxious, shy, interesting, and able to communicate, yah.

<comment><USER4> i'll second that for score and sensibilities, though I prefer code and politics to statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 32\. I have trouble with social situations, especially discerning nonverbal reactions or ironic speech, but enjoy fiction and stories about people. I love proofs, argument, and reasoning about systems, but suck at numbers and dates. Overall I'd say I'm "normal"--just analytical and sometimes awkward.

<comment><USER6> Me too! I wager you would fall in the INTJ spectrum too like me. I like this kind of stuff as it gives me clues on what I should probably be looking for when dealing with people.

It also gives clues into other other people and what their motives may be.

<comment><USER5> Yup. Strong INTJ here. If I recall our earlier polls correctly, there are a lot of NTs on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got 30. People have remarked that I seem annoyed when I talk to people, as if their conversation is bothering me, even though it isn't.

Anyone else annoyed by the fact that they spent some mental effort to choose between "slightly" and "definitely", only have them weighted the same?

</comment><comment><USER8> 17\. Very close to control group. I work in an organization with someone who is a sys/server admin that seems very autistic but is fully functional. I think he's married and has kids. I think slight Autistic tendencies and IT seem to mesh well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Man, that's boring: I scored 19 :( I've always seen myself as an introvert and self-centered guy, but I seem to work very well on social stuff, it's like some superpower I refuse to acknowledge.

</comment><comment><USER10> Agree: 2,4,5,6,12,13,16,21,23,46: 1 point Disagree: 1,8,10,14,15,29,30,34,37,40: 1 point Score: 20

</comment><comment><USER11> Agree: 5,6,7,12,16,18,19,23,42,43: 1 point Disagree: 8,17,30,32: 1 point Score: 14</comment>


Canvascape - "3D Walker" - <AUTHOR> http://www.benjoffe.com/code/demos/canvascape/ <comment><USER2> Hello, let me tell you a secret.

The _only_ reason Flash doesn't yet have awesome-looking first person shooters is the inability to implement mouselook properly. In all FPS games the mouse cursor is locked to the center of the screen, so you can turn left by any amount by just moving the mouse left, without worrying that it will hit the screen's edge or leave the active area. Flash can't do that. Neither can HTML, as far as I know. So don't get your hopes high for first-person shooters using Canvas.

<comment><USER3> > without worrying that it will hit the screen's edge or leave the active > area. Flash can't do that

If Flash didn't provide a mechanism to lock cursors, how about fullscreen?

<comment><USER2> In fullscreen the cursor can still hit the edge of the screen and stop. Kinda breaks the immersion when you're trying to turn left quickly to shoot a baddie and suddenly can't turn anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Strange that you can jump while moving OR turning, but not when moving AND turning.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm impressed, it's not far from implementing Doom in javascript :)

<comment><USER6> This demo dates back to 2005. And here's something from 2006 that's a little more doomish:

<http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/83/play.xhtml>

These days, people are working on Quake 2 with WebGL:

<http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/></comment></comment>


Is there a way to browse all questions posted on HN? - <AUTHOR> The 'Ask' section shows only the latest 60 questions. <comment><USER2> Try typing "Ask HN" into the search box at the bottom of the page.</comment>


Show HN: We made an addictive way to browse pictures on reddit - <AUTHOR> http://mongout.com <comment><USER3> I'm surprised you aren't getting more love on this one. I've already added the site to my bookmarks bar. I love reddit primarily for the images.

Usually my browsing of reddit is done like this.

1\. Click homepage.

2\. Determine which links are images.

3\. Click image link

4\. Chuckle, or shrug

5\. Two finger swipe back on my trackpad on lion

6\. Scroll

7\. Repeat 2 - <USER2>

Now its

1\. Go to Mongout 2\. Click right 3\. Repeat 2 ... again and again

I'm also a big fan of the progress bar. If there was no bar I'd feel ungrounded in the infinite space of reddit. Additionally, because its so addicting to look at reddit images, I can say to myself "I'll look at enough images that fills one progress bar"

Its super simple, and really well executed. Big time props!

<comment><USER4> Get Reddit Enhancement Suite => View All Images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't imagine using this over reddpics. Their tiled interface allows me to browse posts faster than the normal reddit interface. This in contrast feels slower than either, since you can only see a single image at a time.

<comment><USER6> Or panoptikos.com even...

<comment><USER7> Or scrolldit.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You should preload the next image, so when I hit [right] key, it just shows up without delay.

<comment><USER9> right/left was pretty snappy for me, but I found myself wishing it would preload the reddit page each time. I found myself hitting [up] for every single image (because I needed the explanation that often..)

<comment><USER10> That would unnecessarily eat up a ton of bandwidth, I think people using this will usually go through most photos without pulling up the thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like it. Imgur actually has left / right arrow support as well. (Example: <http://imgur.com/gallery/ExxXR> then hit →) I find it works well for a few chuckles if I happen to be eating at my desk in search of some web bubblegum.

<comment><USER12> [http://imgur.com/r/<subreddit>](http://imgur.com/r/<subreddit>); shows all the linked imgur pictures in that particular subreddit and links back to the posts. Like reddit you can chain subreddits eg <http://imgur.com/r/pics+funny>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's probably worth noting that in other parts of the English speaking world, the word "mong" is derogatory and offensive.

I'm not sure if "MongOut" is a derivative of MongoDB, but if you're aiming at a maintream global audience you might want to consider the sensitivities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we've got similar feedback previously, but decided to stick with the name as it was memorable. I do realize that this is something that could put people off though.

<comment><USER14> psh, who cares MongoDB has the full-blown Mongo in there and they're doing fine.

<comment><USER13> "Mongo" != "Mong"

'MongoOut' would be fine

'MongOut' is not.

<comment><USER15> at least in Germany Mongo is short for Mongoloid (Down syndrome) and is a insult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just use a bookmarklet I wrote (<https://gist.github.com/1572878>), which enables me to go to any reddit page, and then click the bookmarklet to see all the images inline.

<comment><USER17> Bookmarked

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very enjoyable.

Feature Requests:

1\. Preload next image? My connection sucks so pre-loading would be extremely valuable.

2\. I would also love to see the top comment for each photo. Though, I suppose that may make it less addicting and cause traffic to bleed back to Reddit.

Great work ^_^

<comment><USER19> Preloading please! Time spent watching a little arrow twirl stops it being worth using for me.

<comment><USER20> We just added preloading for the next image, sometimes you hit one which takes a while - it's faster than before though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Right, I'll just round up my suggestions and those I agreed with from other comments:

\- In portuguese, and I imagine a lot of other languages, "mongo" is a pretty nasty word. Think "retard", only worse.

\- Have this linked with your reddit account so you can up/down vote. Also, then you could, by default, show pics from the user's default subreddits. You should allow an user to add/remove subreddits to get pics from, independently from the user's default subreddits.

\- Gamify this. Think up some sort of achievements (opting out has to be an option, of course). First step: you have that bar filling up, what about having a counter nearby, which increments everytime the bar fills?

\- You should do some preloading up to a max of USER_CONFIGURABLE_NUMBER images, have a sane default like 1 or 2.

That's it for now.

Edit:

\- I just got a imgur "this image is no longer available" thingy. I think you can scratch those from showing up entirely.

\- You could add some sort of sharing feature. A permalink would be a nice step in that direction. I just found an image I'd like to share with a friend and I noticed mongout wasn't gonna be a part of that process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback.

\- We didn't realise that mongo had such a negative connotation Portuguese - in british english it doesn't. We'll probably stick with it for the time being but change it if we offend people.

\- Yes, we really want to add in a way to select different subreddits. Not too sure about letting people sign in though but definitely a good idea.

\- We might go for non-obtrusive game mechanics, so the progress bar + points + leaderboard + tweet progress. It just didn't make it into this release.

\- Preloading images is a good idea that we didn't think about.

<comment><USER22> Mongo most definitely has negative connotations in British English, though not as much as Mong afaik

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been using Flipboard[1] on the iPad to read pic heavy subreddits that I don't necessarily want to see everything from but like to browse from time to time.

Yahoo pipes[2] turns the subreddit's top stories .json representation into an RSS feed, and then Twitterfeed[3] posts that RSS feed to a custom twitter account which I can then follow on Flipboard.

I got this setup from <http://miguelrios.org/reddit-in-flipboard/> and a handy trick is to combine subreddits. So for example I have the 'SFW Porn Network' reddits all combined using the + e.g., /r/earthporn+cityporn+... etc.

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

[2]: <http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/>

[3]: <http://twitterfeed.com/>

<comment><USER24> Don't know if this will help at all, but you can append .rss/.json/ to any reddit URL. e.g:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.rss> <http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.json>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Awesome work! -- I've also built something that is, awkwardly, nearly exactly the same. Check out <http://imgist.com>

<comment><USER25> Some of the challenges I ran into, and surmounted, include preloaded images, URLs that allow you to link directly to the image, getting facebook sharing to register the image you are currently viewing when you want to share the image, zooming and unzooming large images, and saving favorites in user accounts.

Another challenge was elegantly showing the UI elements without in any way distracting from the image -- I think by fading them out after a couple seconds of mouse inactivty, we accomplished that pretty well. Left/right keys are obviously the best way to do things, but we also wanted "point and click" users to get it right away as well, so we allowed for that in the UI. I think mongout's way of doing it is pretty elegant though, with the picture of the arrow keys.

Things I still intend to iron out are the ability to mix and match arbitrary subreddits and non-reddit sources, and an integration with facebook accounts.

This has been my main side project for the past year, and I'd love to chat about any and all aspects of it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of the iPad app Prism: [http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/prism-the- image-browser/id488...](http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/prism-the-image- browser/id488236799?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER27> Well done. Kept me engaged to the last picture. A couple of observations though:

The left-right keys still advance to the previous / next picture in the background, when the comments are in the foreground. Suggest that a left or right hides the comments as well as moving forward or back.

I second the comment made elsewhere on pre-loading the next picture to save your users waiting for the load-time.

How do I navigate the comments with the keyboard? I use the cursor keys to scroll down, and it doesn't work, as up / down is mapped to show / hide comments.

<comment><USER28> > Suggest that a left or right hides the comments as well as moving forward or > back.

Agree, this behavior was very unintuitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is basically why I hate the internet.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like the idea - but it doesn't feel "addictive" yet.

Feature request: filter out photos of cats.

<comment><USER31> I'd like the complement "nothing but cats" photo stream.

<comment><USER25> <http://imgist.com/aww/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's a lower-fi version

[http://22.214.171.124:8000/#pics;funny;humor;comics;reddit.c...](http://22.214.171.124:8000/#pics;funny;humor;comics;reddit.com;geek;offbeat)

hack the URL to control subreddits

source here <https://github.com/mwhooker/procrastinatr>

<comment><USER33> Any plans to support setting subreddits on the hifi version?

Nice site, btw.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We actually had subreddit support in an earlier version but decided to take it out for the sake of simplicity. It's definitely a feature that we'd like to add back in though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very nicely made. My only criticism is the purple progress bar- what's the point of it? I thought I was going to run out of images when it filled up, but it just kept going. Is that filling an indication that it's going to yesterday's posts? It feels unneeded, it's distracting.

<comment><USER34> The point of it is to get you to keep clicking next.

<comment><USER10> Shouldn't interest do that?

<comment><USER34> Why have one motivation when you can have two!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I love the idea of this, but one of the problems with building products like this is that it's basically other people's content (or other people's other people's content...) and is probably hard to scale a business around properly.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We've got some pretty granular analytics on the site. It'll be interesting to measure how much people are engaging with it. We'll probably write a blog post sometime over the next few days regarding this if anyone is interested.

</comment><comment><USER36> I made something similar last week (<http://image-roulette.com/>), but it just uses imgur itself, instead of the reddit-curated images.

I think your approach was better.

</comment><comment><USER37> You mean other than just using reddit?

<comment><USER38> Well, all the "christians suck, athiest rule!" posts do give it a more hostile tone. I'm not aware of any other subreddits with what amounts to hate-speech being allowed on the front page.

Yes, we, the rest of the world understand that the 'religious issue' in the US has become tied in with the 'political issue'. But (again speaking on behalf of the rest of the world) we just wish the US would grow the @@@@ up and get the @@@@ over it.

<comment><USER37> I was trying to make a joke about the addictiveness of reddit, but I agree, several of the subreddits are just complete bigoted shit. I've taken to just unsubscribing from them rather than getting angry everytime a post comes up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Put on bigger controls for embedded devices that have no keyboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be adding in swipe left/right controls for touch devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Down arrow isn't working for me. What is it supposed to do?

<comment><USER11> Up shows comments on reddit. Down then hides those comments. Until you press up, down doesn't do anything.

Btw: appropriate user name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The only thing I really want is better urls. If I see an image/thread I want to share I would love to just be able to simply copy the url.

</comment><comment><USER42> You must be against the advancement of the human race. Don't we all spend enough time on Reddit already?

Just kidding, this is excellent. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER43> 1\. Make ESC close zoomed images.

2\. Let me get the URL of the reddit page somehow.

3\. Add tooltips for the arrows - what does the down arrow do?

</comment><comment><USER44> If you only want to see the images I made a bookmarklet [1] that inlines them, & does imgur images smartly too. It's good for f7u12, at least.

[1] <http://fuseki.net/home/linked-images-bookmarklet.html>

</comment><comment><USER45> Wow, the image came up when I first loaded that page was absolutely NSFW. Yikes. Be careful.

<comment><USER20> We've added a NSFW filter (based on whether a reddit post title has the word NSFW in it). Should cut down a lot of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Seriously, I enjoy visiting HN and loading all the articles and comments in a new tab that appeal to me then slowly going through them but since first landing on this beauty I've been clicking through images for the last hour!

</comment><comment><USER47> This site's really slick! Do you think you could add an auto-play feature so it'll be a slideshow? I've got two monitors hooked up and it'd be a good screen filler to have that just running on one screen.

<comment><USER10> reddit/imgur might not like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Neat! Intuitive, no explanation needed except for the diagram of the arrow keys below. Suggestion: Add a timer to show people how much time they waste (of course, not everybody wants to see that).

</comment><comment><USER49> Would be cool if you added pushState or /#/ history. You can for example use history.js: <https://github.com/balupton/history.js>

</comment><comment><USER50> I made something similar, but as a desktop app. It does all web pages, not just images.

<https://github.com/FigBug/Allochthon/wiki>

</comment><comment><USER51> Thanks. There went 40min.

</comment><comment><USER52> Slick site! It would be good if going back through the navigation history took you through the images you had viewed. Currently it just goes in and out of thread view.

</comment><comment><USER53> I love the interface. It would be great if you could add the ability to login, upvote/downvote (near the comments icon). Realtime reddit content would be great.

</comment><comment><USER54> I like this a lot. It's very difficult to hit the arrow buttons on an iPhone, though. An alternative navigation method or larger hit areas would be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for the feedback!

We've pushed up a new version:

\- preloads the next image, slightly faster than before.

\- smarter ordering, the newest and best content is pushed in hourly.

\- finally, a tweet button to spread the love.

</comment><comment><USER55> I am in love with it. Never browsed Reddit with so much enthusiasm as I am doing it now. Like it so much, I created an account; I never cared for one before.

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER56> Delicious. An easy up/down vote way would be great.

</comment><comment><USER57> Might defeat the purpose but you should add top comments as well. Part of the fun of browsing is the added contextual humor :)

</comment><comment><USER58> I've been using <http://pics.fefoo.com> for a long time for the same purpose.

<comment><USER59> I was going to mention pics.fefoo.com too, but you beat me to it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I just wasted 3 hours on this (in a good way).

</comment><comment><USER61> Tech issue, can't scroll comments on the iPad.

<comment><USER62> Confirmed. Came to log the same report.

I was happy to see the onscreen arrows since many experimental UIs seem to be relying on the keyboard exclusively. I figured those keys meant some thought went into iOS support.

Regardless, I'm still having fun just clicking thru the pics. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Addictive is an understatement. You should all be killed before you murder and further productivity!

Seriously, nice job, very cool.

</comment><comment><USER64> What about imgur's ad revenue? If you're circumventing that, then you're shooting your very platform in the foot.

</comment><comment><USER65> Great job guys. Add in the support for subreddits and you've got yourself an instantly addictive product!

<comment><USER20> Why thank you sir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> My internet connection maybe slow, but there was a lot of load time between pictures.

But did use it for like 10 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER67> <http://pics.fefoo.com/>

I had made something similar a while back.

</comment><comment><USER17> wow. this is amazing, I always wanted some like this. Is there any way we can choose subreddit?

</comment><comment><USER68> So did I: <http://imgonly.info>

</comment><comment><USER69> Y u post it here instead of reddit? jackiechan.jpg (its nice btw :)

</comment><comment><USER70> Isn't the addictive way to browse pictures on reddit, reddit?

</comment><comment><USER71> Thank you, I just lost an hour of my life. Addictive, check.

</comment><comment><USER72> Good work. It's pretty clean.

Consider mapping a key to share links too

</comment><comment><USER73> Great site! What's the stack this is built on?

<comment><USER20> Thanks! Ruby & CoffeeScript / Rails 3 & Backbone.js. Hosted on Heroku.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Awesome man, well done its so captivating!!

</comment><comment><USER75> you might as well use this: <http://imgur.com/gallery>

</comment><comment><USER76> Now all it needs is some good content

</comment><comment><USER77> I love not having to use my mouse.

</comment><comment><USER78> I would put the title on top.

</comment><comment><USER79> I think you need a favicon =)

</comment><comment><USER80> Make this for 9gag! Please.

</comment><comment><USER75> so basically, you are just relinking imgur images? really?

</comment><comment><USER81> you should show the top couple comments

</comment><comment><USER82> I do not like these kind of services because they take away ad revenue from the sites providing and generating that content.

"Mongout" seems to do this for reddit and imgur, both sites where I willfully disable my ad-blocker.

<comment><USER83> And if the author didn't talk with imgur's owner then it's very likely his domain will get banned (+bonus points for not linking to imgur). I know a site which can't hotlink imgur images and I'd imagine there's plenty of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I really like this idea and the simplicity of it! Great work, and can't wait to see what future iterations bring!

</comment><comment><USER85> Sorry, clicking next, and waiting 5 seconds before seeing the next image is not what I'm after.

<comment><USER86> Weird. You only posted two minutes ago, but our experiences seem to have been much different as it loaded the next images instantly for me. The only delay was for comment pages, but that's to be expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Something needs to happen when you fill the bar, otherwise, why is it changing?

<comment><USER20> Definitely. We'll probably add a counter next to it to show the number of sets you've viewed (as suggested by franciscoapinto)

<comment><USER87> More than that. Make it feel like I'm accomplishing something.

Outstanding job, the interface is as simple as it could be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> It is addictive but the little arrows are a pain on the iPhone.</comment>


8 Interesting And Really Helpful Vim Editor Features - <AUTHOR> http://mylinuxbook.com/vim-editor-features/

<comment><USER2> "block and hit = followed by shift+6 ie %" -> my % is on number key 5.

otherwise a nice intro vim article</comment>


Have You Seen This Cache? - vezzy-fnord https://push.cx/2015/have-you-seen-this-cache <comment> vezzy-fnord The concept the author is looking for strongly reminded me of Amoeba's Bullet file server (Renesse, Tanenbaum, Wilschut 1989).</comment>


Global Gender War - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dilbert.com/post/133406477506/global-gender-war <comment><USER2> Well I think he found his niche and now he just panders to his base.

<comment><USER3> Or, he's finally reached a level of success where he is independent enough to be able to freely say [1] what he thinks without fear of negative consequences resulting from a media backlash.

Unlike what Tim Hunt had to go through.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)</comment></comment>


CWork: Cheap microjob platform for web scraping - <AUTHOR> We have a very skilled group of people based in Bangladesh, who will do data scraping for you. We have developed a mobile app, where thousands of users can join and do one of your tasks. We have currently 500+ micro worker, who are ready to do the job. You can find more information on our website www.cworkmicrojob.com
Moreover, we provide have designed 3 steps data quality assurance system, where team leader of the workers views their submissions in the app, then if the leader approves, it comes to cWork microjob platform. Our in-house quality assurance team again checks the data. If the data quality is approved, then we send the data to the clients.
Additionally, you can log into your dashboard and view live working progress. You can see how many people are working, how many have submitted and how many is waiting in the que. After you get the data, you can finally accept or reject from your dashboard. If rejected the work goes back to the job pool. <comment><USER2> I need this kind of work.

How do you price this work?</comment>


Frontmacs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs <comment> cup-of-tea I have mixed feelings about emacs starter kits. On the one hand I'm always happy that more people might discover emacs. It's quite simply the most powerful text editor out there. Hands down. I could not imagine using a computer seriously without emacs.

On the other hand, the power of emacs comes from the fact that it's essentially a lisp interpreter which is good at doing text editor stuff. If you abstract this away then what you get is an editor which is implemented in emacs, but is ultimately comparable to any other text editor.

Emacs really shines when you make it your own. And that goes far beyond the usual "customisation" that you see. I have files full of macros that help me write lisp which eventually changes the way the editor works. And some of that functionality helps me write the macros that help me write lisp that (...and so on).

For those that don't use emacs the above might sound bizarre. Maybe it's only attractive to a few programmers. Or maybe you have to try it before you really understand. I don't know. But that's why I have mixed feelings.

<comment><USER3> I use Spacemacs but it isn't always perfect and if Spacemacs doesn't wind up working I end up just using vanilla emacs because MELPA is a dice roll whether it will work or not every single time for me, usually regardless of OS. I just know enough basics of emacs to edit code, but I wish adding packages didn't involve so many hoops such as having to add a repository that everyone already goes out of their way to add to emacs and having said repository fail on you.

I'm not sure what reason the emacs team has for just not adding MELPA but it would change the game for me if it were an official addition and would require it's addition to work out of the box. Till then, emacs is a long way away from being my default editor, and VS Code and JetBrains are more of my defaults.

Out of the box functionality is key for any editor in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> Why not use melpa-stable?

<comment><USER3> That's what I use. The issue is in some builds of emacs on different OS' it cannot hit the HTTPS servers themselves for whatever reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (edit: reposted this comment in their bug tracker)

You might want to warn people that this enables auto-saving buffers on many buffer/frame events that are usually considered safe.

[https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs/blob/master/frontm...](https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs/blob/master/frontmacs- editing.el#L128)

        (defadvice switch-to-buffer (before save-buffer-now activate)
          (when buffer-file-name (save-buffer)))

        ; the same defadvice is applied to:
        ;    other-window
        ;    windmove-{up,down,left,right}

This absolutely _needs_ a warning.

        (add-hook 'focus-out-hook
                  (lambda () (when buffer-file-name
                               (save-buffer))))

Also, maybe this should only happen to buffers that are already backed up in the VCS? Saving unknown changes back to the original file whenever the frame looses focus - which can happen due to external, unpredictable events - <USER2> like an accident waiting to happen.

<comment><USER6> As a general fileditor, it may be scary, yes. But I have this in IntelliJ and love it. Saving is just a useless keystroke for most of my development time. Things are in VCS, and if not, I can also use local history to roll back.

<comment><USER7> Local history is the feature that makes this practical. Without it, there will be blood spilled.

<comment><USER8> I don't agree. I used IntelliJ for work for the past two years and I've never had any problems with auto saving (in fact, I find it quite convenient, although muscle memory means I still do :w with my vim bindings) and I've never seen ever used the local history feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some screenshots could be nice, probably most people are not tend to try it out until they see a screenshot.

Anyway, I am a simple man. I see people using Emacs and I become happy.

<comment><USER10> Agree! I am not a developer or an overly technical person and I recently started using Emacs because of an article here (using ido and org mode). I like it but I'm not fluent enough, or know enough of what it does to switch to it for everyday tasks - but there's a beauty in navigating file systems, creating files, switching windows all with your keyboard.

Does anyone know if you can actually write code on Emacs, like HTML/CSS/Javascript?

<comment><USER11> _Does anyone know if you can actually write code on Emacs, like HTML /CSS/Javascript?_

Do you mean modifying Emacs while it is running?

If you switch to the " __* scratch __* "[1] buffer and type one of these _and_ after each of these either press «Ctrl-J» or «Alt-x eval-print-last-sexp»:

      (message "Hello, World!")

      (setq cursor-type 'hbar)

      (setq cursor-type 'box)

      (setq indicate-empty-lines t)

      (setq show-trailing-whitespace t)

Is this what you meant?

[1] I have no idea how to get a normal asterisk on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My prefered way to quickly test these things without having to mess with your own setup, elpa directories etc:

      mkdir /tmp/.emacs.d
      wget -P /tmp/.emacs.d https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thefrontside/frontmacs/master/scripts/init-frontmacs.el
      echo '(load (expand-file-name "init-frontmacs.el" user-emacs-directory))' > /tmp/.emacs.d/init.el
      env HOME=/tmp emacs

</comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off-topic, but:

 _> Most of the planet doesn't treat editor configuration as software. We do._

This is so true! And it applies to many, many other types of configuration as well.

<comment><USER14> Reminds me of the evolution of Lua [https://www.lua.org/history.html](https://www.lua.org/history.html) from a configuration language to a full blown programming language.

Awhile ago, we've used this code as data approach in a game development studio for everything. For example, maps/levels were stored as a Lua scripts that get executed on load and contain a sequence of PlaceObject, SetProperty, etc invocations.

It doesn't come without drawbacks, though. For example, Autodesk Maya stores scenes as Mel code (as a bunch of createNode, connectAttribute, setAttribute commands). This script gets executed on load in a single thread (utilizing a single from your N cores) and scene loading can take ~30 min on large scenes. Security is also an issue but it's fixable with proper environment sanitation and sandboxing.

<comment> cup-of-tea Emacs just used a full blown programming language right from the start. And one of the very best: Lisp.

<comment><USER15> > And one of the very best: Lisp.

Got any hard numbers to back up that bold claim?

<comment><USER4> What numbers do you require? If there was a metric measuring simplicity then Lisp (or perhaps a modern variant, Scheme) would probably win - it is a local optimum of language design, essentially just lambda calculus exposed via a very simple grammar (which aids meta-programming).

<comment><USER15> Any kind of serious study will do :)

<comment><USER4> Such studies are very hard to do, it is almost impossible to factor out social preferences. For me personally, I am most productive in languages like Haskell and OCaml.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great approach. Now what does it do? (Or rather, what can I do with it specifically compared to other distros, and how?)

</comment><comment><USER17> It claims to be "Awesome by default", but does not tell much about what that actually means.

<comment><USER18> It installs vim.

<comment><USER19> You mean evil-mode?

/s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So many buzzwords and startup like speak but no "made with love"?

</comment><comment><USER21> This is very similar to what I have configured in my .emacs[1] and custom.el[2]. I like that this project is minimalist. If I were to start using emacs 2 years ago, I'd probably start with this.

A slight gripe I have with Frontmacs is everything is loaded eagerly on startup. I'd imagine this massively increases start up time given how heavy weight some of the packages are (yasnippet, magit, tide). I also find issues with it calling itself _awesome_ without integrating with any emacs window management package.

Most config in emacs these days is just installing a couple of packages and toggling on and off a couple customizable variables, and occasionally a couple of `add-hook` calls. These are all low hanging fruits since packages became an official thing in Emacs. The most annoying and non-obvious part of Emacs is how it manages windows. To tame the totally insane default window management system, you pretty much have to shop for a layout manager of some sort, and in order to do that, you have to know what Emacs is doing under the hood. That's hard and I wish more of these Emacs distros would come integrated with some sane window management package.

I used to just rely on popwin and desktop mode mainly, and used golden-ratio and centered-window-mode for a while. Recently I've completely ripped them out of my config and replaced them with [purpose]([https://github.com/bmag/emacs- purpose](https://github.com/bmag/emacs-purpose)) and [perspective]([https://github.com/nex3/perspective- el](https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el)). I'm loving them so far, others seem to like e2wm, tile, rotate and others.

[1]: [https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs](https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs) [2]: [https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/cus...](https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/custom.el)

</comment><comment><USER22> After years of using other people's configs, I found that they never really fit my way of working completely and they're filled with things I don't understand and/or don't use. I think most people will want to use their own configs after a while, and that's one of emacs's greatest strengths. Nowadays we have multiple package repositories and multiple ways of configuring it to suit your tastes.

I also find the description filled with buzzwords and buzz-phrases to the point where it becomes meaningless.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I think most people will want to use their own configs after a while

"after a while". Agree. I think they are called "starter kits" for a reason :).

> I also find the description filled with buzzwords and buzz-phrases to the > point where it becomes meaningless.

I have looked into their config today. Nothing very amazing, but indeed a better default experience. It's much simpler (compared to Spacemacs) which I think is more beginner friendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > We don't want to maintain code, we just want to enter a few keystrokes and > download more awesome.

The phrase "download more awesome" makes me very strongly doubt whether the authors are genuinely experienced with the difficulties of software engineering.

<comment><USER24> Clearly they are. One phrase like that has no bearing on someone's experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Most of the planet doesn't treat editor configuration as software. We do."

But I also wanna be the cool kid, and not a part of the herd :'(

</comment><comment><USER26> What is the difference between this and spacemacs?

</comment><comment><USER27> Do any of the frontside people use evil mode ?

<comment><USER28> I don't believe so. We usually recommend spacemacs for that. (They do an excellent job with their config)</comment></comment>


Disinformation campaigns targeting veterans are in the spotlight on Capitol Hill - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-technology-202/2019/11/13/the-technology-202-disinformation-campaigns-targeting-veterans-are-in-the-spotlight-on-capitol-hill-today/5dcaeed8602ff1184c316409/ <comment><USER2> what won't they do</comment>


Show HN: McDonalds' outlets in the US represented by Burger emojis - <AUTHOR> https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com/1ef02d8d-1889-5a4b-b42e-e9c85a701d94 <comment><USER2> I'd rather see it on a map of the USA?

</comment><comment><USER3> I do enjoy eating a McDonalds -occasionally-

No other place have I seen such great diversity in employment, I met a lot of great people who have a background from McDonald's in their youths.

That said, I always wondered how I would appriciate working there with t-shirt with "I'm loving it" written all over.

<comment><USER4> Growing up I worked at a local pizza chain.

Decades later vividly remember the smell and how the ugly white and green polo felt on me. I was not a fan of the uniform.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> New link: [https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com/mcdonalds/united- states/](https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com/mcdonalds/united-states/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Isnt the number 14,146 enough, why print 14.146 hamburger icons?

<comment><USER6> Its a lot more informative to scroll and comprehend the size of the number

<comment><USER7> That's why i love putting sizes into Wolfram Alpha, it gives you various alternative measurements like "football fields" so it's often easier to comprehend

<comment><USER8> If each McDonalds were the size of a football field, then every McDonalds laid end to end would span the length of 14,146 football fields.

<comment><USER9> If you lined all the drive-throughs end to end would it get to the moon and back?

Edit: not even close. You'd need a little under 2mi of drive through per location to get to the moon

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "In United States you can buy 8 Big Mac's with $50"

Followed by ten burger emojis..

<comment><USER11> Based on other countries it looks like they are truncating the unit price before dividing $50 by it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies, the burger calculation was rounding off to the wrong integer - Javascript . Fixed it! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yeah I'm gonna be that guy and say all I see are a bunch of little empty boxes.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow... What device / OS are you using? The site uses regular Emoji's as opposed to images to ensure your cpu doesn't slow down.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> fixed it - it should redirect to correct url! :D

</comment><comment><USER13> 404

<comment><AUTHOR> Just fixed the slug [https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com/mcdonalds/united- states/](https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com/mcdonalds/united-states/)</comment></comment>


Download Adobe Creative Suite 2, Including Photoshop and Illustrator, for Free - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5973750/download-adobe-creative-suite-2-including-photoshop-and-illustrator-for-free

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, if you're using an Intel-based Mac, the Mac versions of applications are limited to Power-PC machines.</comment>


Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying - <AUTHOR> http://jensimmons.com/post/jan-4-2017/replacing-jet-engine-while-still-flying <comment><USER2> Let's put Rust into microwave too</comment>


AutoML-Zero: Evolving machine learning algorithms from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/automl_zero <comment><USER2> Next:

\- Autosuggest database tables to use

\- Automatically reserve parallel computing resources

\- Autodetect data health issues and auto fix them

\- Autodetect concept drift and auto fix it

\- Auto engineer features and interactions

\- Autodetect leakage and fix it

\- Autodetect unfairness and auto fix it

\- Autocreate more weakly-labelled training data

\- Autocreate descriptive statistics and model eval stats

\- Autocreate monitoring

\- Autocreate regulations reports

\- Autocreate a data infra pipeline

\- Autocreate a prediction serving endpoint

\- Auto setup a meeting with relevant stakeholders on Google Calendar

\- Auto deploy on Google Cloud

\- Automatically buy carbon offset

\- Auto fire your in-house data scientists

<comment><USER3> Would be funny but most of those things are already on AutoML Tables, including the carbon offset

[https://cloud.google.com/automl-tables](https://cloud.google.com/automl- tables)

<comment><USER4> > _Would be funny but most of those things are already on AutoML Tables, > including the carbon offset_

GCP datacenters are 100% offset with PPAs. Are you referring to different functionality for costing AutoML instructions in terms of carbon?

...

I'd add:

\- Setup a Jupyter Notebook environment

> _Jupyter Notebooks are one of the most popular development tools for data > scientists. They enable you to create interactive, shareable notebooks with > code snippets and markdown for explanations. Without leaving Google Cloud 's > hosted notebook environment, AI Platform Notebooks, you can leverage the > power of AutoML technology._

> _There are several benefits of using AutoML technology from a notebook. Each > step and setting can be codified so that it runs the same every time by > everyone. Also, it 's common, even with AutoML, to need to manipulate the > source data before training the model with it. By using a notebook, you can > use common tools like pandas and numpy to preprocess the data in the same > workflow. Finally, you have the option of creating a model with another > framework, and ensemble that together with the AutoML model, for potentially > better results._

[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine- learning/u...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/use- automl-tables-from-a-jupyter-notebook)

<comment><USER5> This sounds like the sort of thing that would be useful outside of data science. Which leads to the question of whether it needs to be generalized, or redone differently for different specializations. Which in turn seems like the sort of question that it's tricky to answer with AI.

<comment><USER4> > _This sounds like the sort of thing that would be useful outside of data > science._

The instruction/operation costing or the computational essay/notebook environment setup?

Ethereum ("gas") and EOS have per-instruction costing. SingularityNET is a marketplace for AI solutions hosted on a blockchain, where you pay for AI/ML services with the SingularityNET AGI token. E.g. GridCoin and CureCoin compensate compute resource donations with their own tokens; which also have a floating exchange rate.

TLJH: "The Littlest JupyterHub" describes how to setup multi-user JupyterHub with e.g. Docker spawners that isolate workloads running with shared resources like GPUs and TPUs: [http://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/](http://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/)

"Zero to BinderHub" describes how to setup BinderHub on a k8s cluster: [https://binderhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zero-to- binderhub...](https://binderhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zero-to-binderhub/)

<comment><USER5> The notebook/procedure thing. Like, doesn't everybody everywhere operate on a basis of mixed manual/automated procedures, where it needs to fluidly transition from one to another, yet be controlled and recorded and verified and structured?

<comment><USER4> REES is one solution to reproducibility of the computational environment.

> _BinderHub ([https://mybinder.org/](https://mybinder.org/) ) creates docker > containers from {git repos, Zenodo, FigShare,} and launches them in free > cloud instances also running JupyterLab by building containers with > repo2docker (with REES (Reproducible Execution Environment Specification)). > This means that all I have to do is add an environment.yml to my git repo in > order to get Binder support so that people can just click on the badge in > the README to launch JupyterLab with all of the dependencies installed._

> _REES supports a number of dependency specifications: requirements.txt, > Pipfile.lock, environment.yml, aptSources, postBuild. With an > environment.yml, I can install the necessary CPython /PyPy version and > everything else._

REES: [https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/specification.h...](https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/specification.html)

REES configuration files: [https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.ht...](https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.html)

Storing a container built with repo2docker in a container registry is one way to increase the likelihood that it'll be possible to run the same analysis pipeline with the same data and get the same results years later.

...

Pachyderm ( [https://pachyderm.io/platform/](https://pachyderm.io/platform/) ) does Data Versioning, Data Pipelines (with commands that each run in a container), and Data Lineage (~ "data provenance"). What other platforms are there for versioning data and recording data provenance?

...

Recording manual procedures is an area where we've somewhat departed from the "write in a lab notebook with a pen" practice. CoCalc records all (collaborative) inputs to the notebook with a timeslider for review.

In practice, people use notebooks for displaying generated charts, manual exploratory analyses (which does introduce bias), for demonstrating APIs, and for teaching.

Is JupyterLab an ideal IDE? Nope, not by a longshot. nbdev makes it easier to write a function in a notebook, sync it to a module, edit it with a more complete data-science IDE (like RStudio, VSCode, Spyder, etc), and then copy it back into the notebook. [https://github.com/fastai/nbdev](https://github.com/fastai/nbdev)

<comment><USER4> > _What other platforms are there for versioning data and recording data > provenance?_

Quilt also versions data and data pipelines: [https://medium.com/pytorch/how- to-iterate-faster-in-machine-...](https://medium.com/pytorch/how-to-iterate- faster-in-machine-learning-by-versioning-data-and-models-featuring- detectron2-4fd2f9338df5)

[https://github.com/quiltdata/quilt](https://github.com/quiltdata/quilt) (Python)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shouldn't this link directly to the Readme?

[https://github.com/google-research/google- research/blob/mast...](https://github.com/google-research/google- research/blob/master/automl_zero/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of [https://www.nutonian.com/products/eureqa/](https://www.nutonian.com/products/eureqa/) which I used quite productively to model multivariate distributions from data back in the 2000's. Funny how everything stays the same, but with a new set of players on the bandwagon.

<comment><USER8> Not really similar. Nutonian did straight-up genetic programming symbolic regression. This does genetic programming to discover ML algorithms.

<comment><USER7> Actually it is somewhat similar as both find the model, and obliviously fits the data to that model in the process. My use was finding a parameterization that could be reused through regular regression fitting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _AutoML-Zero aims to automatically discover computer programs that can solve machine learning tasks, starting from empty or random programs and using only basic math operations._

If this system is not using human bias, who is it choosing what good program is? Surely, human labeling data involves humans adding their bias to the data?

It seems like AlphaGoZero was able to do just end-to-end ML because it was able to use a very clear and "objective" standard, whether a program wins or loses at the game of Go.

Would this approach only deal with similarly unambiguous problems?

Edit: also, AlphaGoZero was one of the most ML ever created (at least at the time of its creation). How much computing resources would this require for more fully general learning? Will there be a limit to such an approach?

<comment><USER10> > It seems like AlphaGoZero was able to do just end-to-end ML because it was > able to use a very clear and "objective" standard, whether a program wins or > loses at the game of Go.

Just a fun note: winning or losing at the game of Go is actually surprisingly subjective:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)#Scoring_rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_\(game\)#Scoring_rules)

<comment><USER11> The game ends by agreement of the players. If they don't agree on the result ("those stones are alive!") they must keep playing. Chinese rules are much better at this than Japanese ones especially (IMHO) the old ones with the group tax. There are no ambiguities there. Unfortunately the group tax is unpleasant and Chinese rules are a pain to score manually. Japanese rules are full of flaws but are such a nice shortcut that almost everybody except China use them or some variant of them.

Btw, if any Chinese player is reading this, how do you count the score while playing? Do you count territory and remember the number of captured stones or do you count both stones and territory? Thanks.

<comment><USER10> > The game ends by agreement of the players. If they don't agree on the result > ("those stones are alive!") they must keep playing. Chinese rules are much > better at this than Japanese ones especially (IMHO) the old ones with the > group tax. There are no ambiguities there. Unfortunately the group tax is > unpleasant and Chinese rules are a pain to score manually. Japanese rules > are full of flaws but are such a nice shortcut that almost everybody except > China use them or some variant of them.

Ambiguities? No. Subjectivity? Yes.

<comment><USER12> No, not really. Under Chinese rules, eventually it will reach a clean, objectively scored state. Of course, human players will agree on the score before this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of John Koza's Genetic Programming, a technique for evolving small programs. There is an old Common Lisp library to play with it.

<comment><USER14> My reaction too. They've reinvented genetic/evolutionary programming. They should probably read some of the decades of work that have already been done on it.

<comment><USER15> Same here. When I studied genetic programming, I was hoping that's where problem solving evolve from as it was flawless. But recent events prove otherwise which made me believe we are using the wrong tool for the wrong problem. Here is why.

When AI gets to 100% accuracy, the equation to find the answer becomes 100% accurate. We no longer have to run the AI with heavy resources and equation can be converted to an executable program. This modal of AI will save computing power, and uses resources smartly.

Example.

AI tries to find right equation to add two numbers.

AI finds the equation to add two numbers.

AI outputs the equation as an executable program.

AI discards itself.

<comment><USER8> You might not be familiar with how neural networks work. When training they do use a lot of computing power. But when running they don't. Yes, they still require some external boilerplate code to multiply the matrices, but you already have it and it's not heavy. So yes there is some convenience in program synthesis in a human programming language, but it is a small convenience, not a game changer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those interested AutoML-Zero cites "Evolving neural networks through augmenting topologies" (2002) among other "learning to learn" papers and is worth a read if you have time and inclination.

For those with more background and time, would any mind bridging the 18 year gap succinctly? A quick look at the paper reveals solution space constraints (assuming for speed), discovering better optimizers, and specific to the AutoML-Zero paper: symbolic discovery.

</comment><comment><USER17> Now, can we evolve a ML algorithm that would in turn produce a better AutoML? Ladies and gentlemen, the Singularity Toolkit v[quickly changing digits here].

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting, but how does it perform on standard benchmarks like image net and MNIST?

<comment><USER19> I am way out of my depth so maybe this is pure nonsense, but presumably the goals aren't so much to evolve better performing models directly for some dataset specifically, but to see what kinds of model families it evolves and whether we've thought of all of them?

Once we've got one we can then presumably train specific models in a more targeted way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> if AutoML-Zero is going to be more than a grid-like method then I think it should try to learn a probabilistic distribution over (method, problem, efficiency) and use it to discover features for problems using an auto-encoder in which the loss function is a metric over the (method,efficiency) space. That means using transfer-learning from related problems in which the similarity of problems is based of the (method,efficiency) differency.

Problem P1 is locally similar to P2 if (method,efficiency,P1) meassured in computation time is similar to (method,efficiency,P2) for method in a local space of methods. The method should learn to classify both problem and methods, that's similar to learning words and context words in NLP or matrix factorization in recommendation systems. To sample the (space,method,efficiency) space one need huge resources.

Added: To compare a pair of (method,problem) some stardardization should be used, for linear problems related to solving linear systems the condition number of the coefficiency matrix should be used as a feature for standardization and, for example in SAT an heuristic using the number of clauses and variables should be used for estimating the complexity and normalization of problems. So the preprocessing step should use the best known heuristic for solving the problem and estimating its complexity as both a feature and a method for normalization. Heuristic and DL for TSP is approaching SOTA (but concord is better yet).

Finally perhaps some encoding about how the heuristic was obtained could be used as a feature of the problem (heuristic from minimum spanning tree, branch and bound, dynamic programming, recurrence, memoization, hill climbing, ...) as an enumerative type.

So some problems for preprocessing are: 1) What is a good heuristic for solving this problem. 2) What is a good heuristic for bounding or estimating its complexity. 3) How can you use those heuristics to standardize or normalize its complexity. 4) How big should be the problem so that the assymptotic complexity takes over the noise of small problems. 5) How do you encode the different types of heuristics. 6) How do you value the sequential versus parallel method for solving the problem.

Finally, I wonder if once a problem is autoencoded then if some kind of curvature could be defined, that curvature should be related to the average complexity of a local space of problems, also transitions like in graph problems should be feautured. The idea is using gems of features to allow the system to combine those or discover new better features. Curvature could be used for clustering problem that is for classification of types of problems. For example all preprocessed problems for solving a linear system should be normalize to have similar efficiency when using the family F of learning methods otherwise a feature is introduced for further normalization. For example some problems could require to estimate the number of local extrema and the flat (zero curvature extend of those zones)

<comment><USER21> Very insightful comment, thank you. There's one other related thing I also find worthy of exploring further namely the population based training used by AutoML-Zero at the moment seems extremely simplistic, and there exist a lot of bleeding edge methods in that area which can tremendously improve outcomes of evolutionary algorithms, I've tweeted about them here (and at the AutoML-Zero people):

[https://twitter.com/no_identd/status/1238565087675330560](https://twitter.com/no_identd/status/1238565087675330560)

And it doesn't seem unlikely that tweaking these would tremendously improve the outcomes. Combining that with what you've just described would… well, I'll leave that to the readers imagination. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Basic Tech Bros still don't get it. This is cool but real problem is finding/defining the problem. And you don't get a million guesses.

Here is a simple test: get me data to predict the future. Can an algo like this learn to read APIs, build scripts, sign up and pay fees, collect data (laying down a lineage for causal prediction), set up accounts, figure out how account actions work and then take actions profitably without going bust?

If it can even do the first part of this I am in. But I doubt it. This is still just at the level of "cool! Your dog can play mini golf."

<comment><USER23> Can you please omit name calling from your comments here? I'm sure you can make your substantive points without that.

This is in the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).</comment></comment>


The Web Way to Learn a Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/technology/personaltech/28basics.html?src=me&ref=technology <comment><USER2> I find LiveMocha particularly interesting for their use of crowdsourcing --- which has evolved quite a bit since I joined. Basically, they have generic course templates in English, and then give people "MochaPoints" (which as far as I can tell are completely useless) for translating the course into their own language, or making recordings of phrases, or even just evaluation others' translations. And of course, MochaPoints are prominently displayed on every profile, making you aware of the pecking order and incentivising you to increase your own points.

This isn't a perfect approach (it's heavily biased towards people who like learning by memorising phrases, rather than people who like learning by picking apart sentences through detailed study of grammar --- I don't think crowdsourcing explanations of grammatical points will ever bring satisfactory results, anyway), but it works well for people who like it.

</comment><comment><USER3> >even ending her declarative sentences in that rising questioning lilt characteristic of many young Californians.

I really enjoyed this bit?

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem I have with most language software is they don't take advantage of spaced repetition. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>

I looked at Rosetta Stone a year or two ago, and the best they had was occasionally bringing you back to a previous lesson.

</comment><comment><USER5> I tried to learn Estonian from a software package called Byki, it taught that "Head ööd" means good night, but later I heard it had connotations more along the lines of "I'm going to bed now".

It suddenly became clear to me why the waitress across the road would smirk every time I said good night to her, oops.

<comment><USER6> I have reason to believe the latter connotation may have been a misunderstanding. As an Estonian, I am quite convinced that "Head ööd" means "Good night" and is in no way connected to wether you are actually going to bed. Unless you add a wink or something.. :)

<comment><USER5> Iiinteresting, my buddy's wife may have been pulling a fast one on me. Not typical of her and there were three other people saying the same thing but perhaps I was just being duped.</comment></comment></comment>


Innovation Thinking Methods for the Modern Entrepreneur [Book] - <AUTHOR> http://innovationthinking.org <comment><AUTHOR> Ok, let's hit the ground running. This is a (perhaps controversial?) para from the book. What are your thoughts on it?

"Programmers aren't actually wanting to write complex, inaccessible code linearly file after file, jumping through dozens of hoops and check-in systems to get anything done. They don't even want to be discussing on Hacker News how _their way_ of jumping through those hoops is _the best one_. Their Original Intent is they want to create an abstract model about the constraints and logic and data processing that a system should implement in order to reliably do what it's meant to, and they want it implemented in a lowest-total- lifecycle-cost way. And programming languages, compilers, databases, and everything else they currently use is just the _current option_ to do that based on how file-systems, checkin-tools, test-automation tools, deployment tools, computer processors and memory-designs _currently work_." \- Chapter 12, Innovation Thinking Methods for the Modern Entrepreneur - [http://amzn.to/1pMdJM9](http://amzn.to/1pMdJM9)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News.

This book is launching today. It offers a framework of thought that can help find "step-function better" products simply and reliably. We think it'd be great for startups or product teams.

I thought we might do something fun today. To be intellectually interesting, I figure we could quote paragraphs from the book here throughout the day, and see what type of conversation it sparks.

Hope you all join us in the discussion.</comment>