A mobile, desktop and website app with the same code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benoitvallon/react-native-nw-react-calculator <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't do this project to convince people that the "write once, run everywhere" is the holy grail but I wanted to explore how it is possible to do it with the actual tools.

It happened to be really convincing (at least to me) in the case of a small project like the one I did but I am also convinced that for bigger projects people should be very careful and think twice before going with this paradigm.

<comment><USER2> Hasn't this already been done? It's called a web app using html, css and javascript

<comment><USER3> Yes it has been done and to a greater extent than your dismissive comment. It still doesn't detract from the noteworthiness of the OP.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it was dismissive at all. When a post rises to the front page of HN people are going to post comments both agreeing or disagreeing. In my case, I don't see what all the hoopla was about or how this was upvoted to page 1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I understand THIS project's intent which is to learn and discover how possible it is to achieve, However the fact that I'm seeing more and more Javascipt apps being released for desktops really disappoints and scares me. The performance, weight and often security concerns that come with JS frameworks is frightening and while it's fantastic that JS is perhaps lowering the bar as to who can write an application (perhaps) - it's also making it easy to do the wrong thing.

<comment><USER5> Do you not think a similar thing was said when Cobol came out and young, new developers started abandoning assembly? I don't think being disappointed or scared is necessarily the most reasonable reaction to have in light of the fact that this is just the way technology works. And in the end, it probably is a good thing.

<comment><USER6> Except Cobol didn't suddenly gain a lot of popularity after C++ was well established. There are plenty of languages even more abstract (and I would argue easy to use) than JavaScript, some of which don't sacrifice nearly as much performance.

The movement to JavaScript is a product of web developers branching out into other areas (great!) without taking the time to learn another language (not so great :/). I don't think performance is an end in and of itself, and I don't turn my nose up at picking a technology because developers and expensive and processing power is cheap, but I still think writing everything in JavaScript is a step backward.

edit: Accidentally wrote developers are cheap and processing power is expensive :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm doing exactly the same with [http://duckie.tv/](http://duckie.tv/)

Runs as: \- Mobile (Phonegap) \- Native (nw.js) \- Website \- Chrome extension

with exactly the same codebase.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't sound the same. PhoneGap uses a web view to render your layouts, React Native uses native platform components to render layouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a pretty clever implementation. We're demoing out a POC React Native app this week at Vogue. I initially thought that we could share a lot, but due to the specific implementation of containers and styles, there is less than I expected. All helpers, stores, and dataflows should be preserved though. Breaking this apart at the render methods and having build processes that chose the right renderer is something I have been theorizing on as the proper approach. Thanks for sharing this!

</comment><comment><USER10> Way cool! Looks like a common `Keyboard.js` will render either `KeyboardRender.js` on web/desktop or `KeyboardRender.ios.js` on mobile.

KeyboardRender.ios.js: [https://github.com/benoitvallon/react-native-nw-react- calcul...](https://github.com/benoitvallon/react-native-nw-react- calculator/blob/master/src/common/components/KeyboardRender.ios.js) KeyboardRender.js: [https://github.com/benoitvallon/react-native-nw-react- calcul...](https://github.com/benoitvallon/react-native-nw-react- calculator/blob/master/src/common/components/KeyboardRender.js)

I'm wondering, though, if we can take this a step further and write Keyboard as the _exact_ same code by composing it with more general components like `<View>` instead of `<div>`. This will require inline styles instead of class names, though.

I theorize that this will be made a little easier for you with the use of react-native-web: [https://github.com/necolas/react-native- web](https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web)

Cool project, though, thanks for sharing. Code is very clean, I'll definitely be using it as a reference.

<comment><USER11> > This will require inline styles instead of class names, though

That's probably not a bad thing; at the moment there's duplication of inline styles for the mobile view and styles in a CSS file for the web/desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a little hungover, so a bit stupid today.

So, the mobile app is an actual native app, with no phonegap / webview.

The desktop app is a webkit browser packed as its own application.

And the server app is a single-page app run in the browser and served from a server.

Correct?

<comment><USER13> Probably yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Facebook has a pretty solid blog post about how they use a similar architecture to share code between android & ios apps:

[https://code.facebook.com/posts/1189117404435352/react- nativ...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1189117404435352/react-native-for- android-how-we-built-the-first-cross-platform-react-native-app/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I like this as a thought experiment - can I write JS code (specifically using React) that can be shared across a variety of devices. At the same time, I would not do this for any sort of non-trivial production application. The main reason being that you're going to end up writing platform specific logic at one point or another (basic example: Handling files on the web vs on mobile - ios / android vs via node webkit). I think that the codebase is already doing something like this with its .ios.js files.

Eventually you'll end up with some shared code and other platform specific code and you'll wonder why you don't just split up the codebase into individual applications (that can easily be worked on by independent teams). You can still have a shared dependency that handles logic, but you can iterate on each application independently.

<comment><USER16> Very few large multi-platform applications use separate code bases. Why should it be different for a javascript/React app?

<comment><USER15> I'm assuming that you mean Linux/Windows/MacOS when you say multiplatform. I agree that for Desktop apps its sometimes okay to use the same codebase (thinking of Blender, Gimp, other open source apps that work across Desktop OSes). Other times there are apps that work significantly better because they utilize an OS's strengths (Pixelmator for MacOS).

The key difference here is that user expectations are completely different between a mobile app, a desktop app (either native or node webkit), and a web app - at the moment I would say that its rare to see any app share the same codebase (not including shared libraries/dependencies) for all of those. As this post shows, its not impossible, but there are still some tradeoffs.

If I was starting a brand new application that needed to work across all platforms, I would still consider having independent code bases sharing a library as a dependency rather than having a single codebase for everything - especially if I wanted to be sure to have the best possible experience for each platform.

<comment><USER17> The whole "write a shared library, and layer your platform-specific UI on top of it" sounds great in theory and is brought up all the time, but vanishingly few apps actually do this from what I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any thoughts on adding React Native for Android support? I know it's newer than the iOS counterpart but would be curious how hard/trivial it would be to include it

</comment><comment><USER19> As a native mobile developer... How is react-native (or something similar) not the future?

<comment><USER20> From everything I can tell as well as talking to many people in the industry, React Native (or something very much like it) is definitely the future.

<comment><USER21> I still live in fear of the day some time down the road when all the people far smarter than me start writing articles titled "Why Function/Reactive/Reactifluxidux architecture was a horrible decision". That's the nature of tech I suppose.

<comment><USER22> It is always a horrible decision and often driven by an incompetent management not to go native. If I'd ask my aces to use react, I am pretty sure at least one would puke over the desk, another one would jump out of the fifth floor and the rest would simply decline and start question my competencies. (I know you'd puke Felix!)

On the other hand we're earning a lot due to all the unnecessary and wasted resources we have to sell to meet performance expectations of our customers ( and those guys happily buy it ) you could reach with 1/1000 probably 1/100000 of the MIPs by utilizing native C.

Utilizing react is not even programming or engineering. That's assembling. _rant off_

<comment><USER23> you're going to get downvoted and you'll think it's because you badmouthed a popular technology. It's not because of that, it's because you criticized something on a technical forum without giving any concrete reasons why said technology is bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't know much about React. When poking through the code I found this:

[https://github.com/benoitvallon/react-native-nw-react- calcul...](https://github.com/benoitvallon/react-native-nw-react- calculator/blob/master/src/common/stores/CalculatorStore.js)

Lots of ad-hoc global variables like _lastPressedWasEqual. Is this idiomatic?

<comment><USER25> They aren't global, they're local to the source file, which represents a singleton class, so it's not really dangerous. You could think of them as static variables in a singleton class.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure what justifies using a Singleton here - what if I want more than one Calculator in my app?

I also noticed that we have a Store (which I interpret to mean model-layer) handling key events, e.g. "processBackKeyPressed()". Is that common too? From my outsider's perspective, this looks like a layering violation.

<comment><USER25> I didn't write this so I am not in a good place to argue in favor or against any pattern, but the obvious answer here would be the needs of the application justify a Singleton. The app doesn't support more than one Calculator, adding additional object management for a feature that isn't necessary is strictly wasted effort.

I don't think it's a "key event" in the sense you're imagining. The store is a black box around a calculator device with emulated physical buttons, so "back key pressed" is one of the store's fundamental actions. I might be wrong about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Q: Say you find a bug in a component, do you need to edit both .js and .ios.js files to fix it? Yes? Not the same code base. No? Quasi the same code base.

IMO same code base is just that, no ambiguities. In this example it would be the same js, html and css that run inside a different container (browser, nw, node or webview)

</comment><comment><USER27> In the past, I would have jumped at these demo apps screaming "but they won't feel native! They won't integrate well!"... however, these days all major OS developers are busy knee-capping themselves and making their desktops feel and act like webpages, so hey, it might actually work.

<comment><USER16> The mobile app uses native components.

<comment><USER28> The GP is talking about look and feel, not native vs multiplatform components.

The point about everybody converging to the flat paradigm that evolved from the mobile web is a valid one. What is good for small touch devices may not be for large mouse-driven ones; the removal of affordances and button labels in particular is a problem in the new style favored by web designers.

However, I would also complaint against developers trying to make web applications feel like desktop ones, with window management and all, which is a similarly recurring and worrying trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm doing the same within the confines of a Rails app. Works well so far. It'll be a while to release. I may open source the scaffolding portions of it.

Off topic but does anyone know people hiring freelance React Native? I'd really like to focus there myself. It's the future.

<comment><USER30> If you bill yourself as a mobile dev expert and work for non-technical teams, you could probably take any mobile dev job.

For instance, if a hospital is looking for someone to build an appointment management app for their patients, they don't care if you use Obj-C or JavaScript - they just want an app that works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very interesting. Really nice stack: allowing extensive re-use, across a huge range of devices (Android seems to be worked on), fully open source!

For personal taste I'd put a little PureScript or Haskell (with GHCJS) in the mix :)

</comment><comment><USER32> History has shown me that "write once, run everywhere" is a holy grail for internal developers and consultants.

But this web everywhere shit...

That might do it.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is somewhat silly. By this logic, any website could be billed as "A mobile, desktop and website App with the same code".</comment>


Ask HN: Which are some proprietary programming languages? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Java seems proprietary, based on the ongoing lawsuits between Oracle and Google.

Is there any entity that could sue Google over the same transgressions if the language were, say, C++?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language#Proprieta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language#Proprietary_languages)

</comment><comment><USER3> What would be your definition of "proprietary" here?

In some ways, Java is a proprietary programming language, owned now by Oracle.

Some privative applications have custom programming language, just like some free software also have custom programming language (even if nowadays, there's a choice of re-usable embedable programming languages, some of them even standardized).

But what we can note in general, is that the "proprietary" programming languages are a PITA to use.

For example, in Objecteering (version 5), there was a scripting language named J which was horrible. For a fee, you could get one that was slightly less horrible to use too. But still.

"Happily", in Objecteering version 6, I'm told they switched to java instead, and indeed nowadays the offspring of Objecteering, Modelio, is based on eclipse and uses Java.

Two other examples coming to mind are:

\- AutoCAD, with its infamous AutoLISP. Not that lisp be a bad embedded programming language, on the contrary, if you look at emacs and its emacs lisp (which is not the best of the lisps around but still let us write nice lisp programs, from the small punctual customization to whole applications (emacs has spreadsheets, web browsers, database management systems, games, IDEs, anything written in emacs lisp)), or embeddable full Common Lisp implementations such as ecl (libecl.so) or other less well known lisps provided as libraries to be embedded in applications. But amongst the lisps, AutoLISP is one of the worst. Not as bad as Gosling's MockLisp, the (pseudo) lisp that was used in Gosling's Emacs, but still bad.

\- CYC and OpenCyc have a CycL lisp like language that's also quite bad, from the language point of view. It's a wonder, given the availablility of ecl, why people insist on designing their own half assed bad lisp, instead of just embedding Common Lisp. Or even scheme, there are some quite good scheme implementations that you could embed in applications...

There's of course also:

\- AppleScript. What an horror! I mean, I can understand that 30 or 40 years after the COBOL experiment, they wanted to try it again to see whether they could at least design a programming language using an English subset that any non-programmer could use to script their system and applications. But this SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE FUCKING LABORATORY! as a clearly failed experiment.

And anything "4G" and "integrated".

I'm sorry I can't give you more examples, since as I mentionned above, it's generally a very difficult experience, I try to avoid anything related to "proprietary" programming languages, so it's difficult to have an exhaustive list.

Now we have to be careful to distinguish "proprietary" programming language, (where the purpose is to provide a "Turing-complete" programming language to write scripts or high level applications), from DSL, Domain Specific Languages, that can have notions, notations and syntaxes that may seem strange on the first look, but that are justified by the existing habits and usages of a given community of users in a given domain. You may find in application some domain specific language that may look strange but that fulfill completely the need of their users. The problem only comes when they want to have programmers use them.</comment>


New Site Helps Fund Black Founders - <AUTHOR> https://fundblackfounders.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Arlan Hamilton was the keynote speaker for Detroit's Startup Weekend. She knows the people who created this site and wanted to see it get some publicity.

The idea is to get the first $5000-$10,000 of seed money to black founders. If you're not a accredited investor this provides a way for you to help black founders.</comment>


Rightscorp Threatens Every ISP in the United States - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-threatens-every-isp-united-states-160812/ <comment><USER2> Looks like this judge is out to set it right for the poor victims of copyright theft:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liam_O%27Grady](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liam_O%27Grady)

"O'Grady is the presiding judge in the current extradition proceedings against Kim Dotcom relating to the Megaupload"

</comment><comment><USER3> ISPs have been protected from this sort of prosecution for decades. This is a sad day.

This will pass in time. It is literally impossible for an ISP to police their traffic for piracy, especially since the piracy scene is constantly shifting.

Still, you know that ISPs will respond with harsher treatment towards their customers. So be certain to follow the 3 rules:

1\. Only access trackers using the TOR network. 2\. Force encryption in your BT client. 3\. Route all traffic through a secure proxy service.

Keep yourselves safe from those evil bastards until sanity returns.</comment>


Medicare card details of every Australian currently up for sale on the dark web - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/consumer-security/medicare-details-of-every-australian-currently-up-for-sale-on-the-dark-web-20170703-gx40ow.html <comment><USER2> The title is misleading. There isn't a mass dump of Medicare records, there's just some crook in DHS who will email you a single record in return for $30, presumably in bitcoin. No doubt there are a dozen crooks who will print the same record for $30 cash.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just curious:

If I was an Australian citizen and I wanted access to my full medical records, would it be cheaper / easier to go through legal or illegal channels?</comment>


"Don't forget to blacklist malicious usernames if you allow user-generated URLs" - <AUTHOR> https://www.paypal.me/support

<comment><USER2> The title with quotation marks is a tiny bit misleading; I was expecting this to be a blog post or something where Paypal advised developers to handle user- generated urls with care, which would have made the paypal.me mistake (first discussed here yesterday[0]) that much more embarrassing. In truth, it's a quote from a post submitted to Reddit about an hour and a half prior to this one [1], making me think the url should probably point to that (or the quotation marks removed, since it's not really quoting anyone, but then it's a straight up dupe of a Reddit submission).

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10152224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10152224)

[1]: [https://redd.it/3jd1bj](https://redd.it/3jd1bj) (from Artemis2)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More:

\- [https://www.paypal.me/login](https://www.paypal.me/login)

\- [https://www.paypal.me/help](https://www.paypal.me/help)

\- [https://www.paypal.me/demo](https://www.paypal.me/demo)

[Source]([https://redd.it/3jd1bj](https://redd.it/3jd1bj))</comment>


A New Design for Cryptography's Black Box - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150902-indistinguishability-obfuscation-cryptographys-black-box

<comment><USER2> _To start reading your emails, an intruder would have to work backward from that product and identify the two primes that were multiplied to produce it — a task that's understood to be impossible given the limits of current computing power._

There is a difference between "impossible" and "will probably take a really long time".</comment>


Mapping Tech (with) Bubbles - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zillabyte.com/2014/11/23/mapping-tech-bubbles/

<comment><USER2> Nice use of CartoDB. Not surprised to see everything in Financial District and SOMA, but Palo Alto was interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: Production ready postgres ORM for Node.js? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
do you know maybe if there is some production ready PostgreSQL ORM for node.js platform?
Best, Wiktor <comment><USER2> I'm using Sequelize with a pretty good amount of success. It offers a really nice way to build models and has a nice syntax. And best of all is based on Bluebird promises :)

* disclaimer: the app I'm currently using Sequelize on doesn't get a ton of traffic so I can't speak on that

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.camintejs.com/](http://www.camintejs.com/)</comment>


Why doesn't IPhone video camera have a pause button? - <AUTHOR> Android phones have had this for a long time. What could be so hard about adding a pause button to the iPhone video camera? Is it a legal thing? A patent issue? <comment><USER2> What's the use case for a pause button on a video camera? I use my iPhone camera many times weekly (vlogging), if I want to stop a video and move somewhere else and start again, I just take a new video instead and fix everything in the edit.</comment>


Ask HN: security impact of HTTP POST resubmission? - <AUTHOR>

Web browsers remember the content of the forms submitted to a web site, including the user name and password in there, if any. We know this because pressing "refresh" button will resubmit the form, and we can see the password resubmitted on the server.
So if you sign in to a site, then navigate away, then sign out, then close the browser, you think you're pretty safe. A hacker comes to the same machine, launches the browser (which helpfully restores the session and browsing history), press the "back" button a few times, confirms form resubmissions and viola - he is signed in as you.
So that's pretty grim, then. What can we do?
As a user, there is nothing you can do. Avoid any computer that is not your personal one?
As a web site developer you can do http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post/Redirect/Get to protect your users, so the POST target is not shown in the browser history. Whether the data is still present in the browser history in a hidden form is an open question. Does anyone know the answer?
I was only able to find one place where this is discussed: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/21282/how-to-disable-caching-of-form-data
Any more pointers will be appreciated. <comment><AUTHOR> By the way ASP.NET by default generates code for you does POST/redirect/GET on success, but does not if there was an error, such as a typo. That's still disclosing lots of information, imo.

            [HttpPost]
            [AllowAnonymous]
            [ValidateAntiForgeryToken]
            public ActionResult Login(LoginModel model, string returnUrl)
            {
                if (ModelState.IsValid && WebSecurity.Login(model.UserName, model.Password, persistCookie: model.RememberMe))
                {
                    return RedirectToLocal(returnUrl);
                }

                // If we got this far, something failed, redisplay form
                ModelState.AddModelError("", "The user name or password provided is incorrect.");
                return View(model);
            }

How is this problem handled in other frameworks?</comment>


Raspberry Pi: A $25 ultra-low-cost computer that can run Quake 3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/photos/raspberry-pi-a-25-ultra-low-cost-computer/6286417?tag=siu-container;attachment_3709

<comment><USER2> Hopefully this doesn't become abused as the new disposable-AOL-CD of our decade...

How would you use this for something that seemed cost-prohibitive before? (E.g., I can see this being useful in testing server/client systems or learning networking administration.)

</comment><comment><USER3> straight to the website: <http://www.raspberrypi.org/></comment>


How the NSA could stop sucking and be awesome instead. - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/post/58735980543/how-the-nsa-could-stop-sucking-and-be-awesome-instead

<comment><USER2> > Recommendation 1: NSA could provide open source reference implementations of > cryptographic and other security-sensitive code.

This would negatively impact the market of folks who sell cryptographic implementations. I'm not sure the government should be doing that kind of thing. The government, through NIST, already certifies implementations of cryptographic algorithms and allows the marketplace to decide which product is superior.

> Recommendation 3: NSA could provide a training program for American software > and IT professionals on security best practices. For bonus points, the cost > of this program could be tax-deductible.

There are plenty of training programs that talk about security, some of which may already be tax deductible. (I am not an accountant, but I believe job related training is tax deductible.) CERT's Secure C Coding class and several SANS courses come to mind. Again, why should the government compete in these markets?</comment>


Accurate re-creation of Sherlock Holme's rooms based on readings from all novels - <AUTHOR> http://www.stutler.cc/other/misc/baker_street.html <comment><USER2> I'd say that's a creation, not a 're-creation' since it never actually existed in real life, Sherlock Holmes is after all a work of fiction.

It also can't be accurate since the original is (for the most part) imaginary, and everybody that reads the books will see this different with their own imagination augmenting the text.

Taking it to the point of reconciling all the bits of data in the stories without finding contradictions suggests that Conan Doyle had a pretty extensive series of notes on his characters lodgings.

<comment><USER3> Sherlock Holmes is a work of fiction, but 221b Baker Street is a real address. You can go there today and visit it in London. It's a popular tourist destination. Conan Doyle did visit the house and I've been told that details match up with the building that's in the books (such as number of stairs). They've decorated the rooms there to match the details from the books too.

<comment><USER4> That's like one of those " _Now_ there is" jokes/stories.

Search for "there was no 221 Baker Street during the years of the Sherlock Holmes stories".

<comment><USER3> Yes, but rather than him just randomly select an address for a location he has taken the time to visit it and describe it accurately in his books. If he's gone to this level of detail already, it would make sense that the layout of the furniture, fittings and items in the building also map to an accurate model.

Some authors can't always go to this level of detail. For example J. K. Rowling was in Scotland when writing the first Harry Potter book, as a result she describes Kings Cross from memory, confusing it with another London Station, so her description of it does match the real world location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't see (let alone observe) whether they got the seventeen steps right or not.

</comment><comment><USER6> I couldn't help to notice that the poor man has no toilet.

<comment><USER7> There's probably a toilet elsewhere in the building.

<comment><USER2> There quite possibly wasn't.

The stories start in 1887, interior flush toilets were something of a luxury at the time, having only been popularized two years prior (by a guy called Twyford).

Houses that already existed did not have room for a 'privy' unless they were extensively remodeled (a toilet needs a lot of plumbing).

If there was a toilet it was most likely on the ground floor, near the front of the house (to economize on the runs of big diameter pipes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a huge surprise to many that there is only one bed?

<comment><USER5> Watson's bedroom was presumably on the floor above the pictured floor. (They also don't show Mrs. Hudson's bedroom.) Watson moved out pretty early in the series after marrying Mary Morstan.</comment></comment>


Why don't our brains explode at movie cuts? - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-dont-our-brains-explode-at-movie-cuts/ <comment><USER2> Making cuts so that you don't notice them is an art. [https://vimeo.com/channels/everyframeapainting/122702786](https://vimeo.com/channels/everyframeapainting/122702786)

Edit: another video [https://vimeo.com/channels/everyframeapainting/113439313](https://vimeo.com/channels/everyframeapainting/113439313)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. I had seen some of Kurosawa's films but was unable to pinpoint why they felt so different from modern films.

<comment><USER2> Another from the same channel, not related to cuts though [https://vimeo.com/118078262](https://vimeo.com/118078262)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our brains don't "explode" at movie cuts because there's years of evolution about the techniques that makes a cut appear fluid, essentially keeping a continuity of the movement and position of the main subject of the action.

The photographer and the editor take particular pains to ensure that. E.g. if you "cross the line" between two actors, you'll see a "jump" because the actors will swap positions. If you cut in a movement, the next shot will have to show something continuing the movement, or the cut is done when the object stops or is hidden behind something.

That makes the cuts a fluid motion even if the whole scene changes. If you break the rules, even if the scene is the same, you'll feel a "jump" between the shots and it will feel unnatural

( For the interested, here is a very detailed description of the common "idioms": [http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel- Arijon/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel- Arijon/dp/187950507X) )

<comment><USER5> Moreover continuities nowadays are extremely distracting, at least if you know what to look for. Some things like if a chess board completely disappears for a scene pops out to me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeMM4hCdDyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeMM4hCdDyk)

<comment><USER6> Argh. I fully support camera and phone manufacturers adding a feature whereby it stops recording the minute someone tries to point it at a TV. WTF.

<comment><USER7> It's the analog hole. If I upload The Simpsons to YouTube, it's taken down immediately. If I upload a video recording of a TV showing The Simpsons, it needs to be taken down by hand.

I also sometimes take still pictures of my computer monitor because there's no good way to take a screenshot of a PC and send it in a picture message to someone without uploading to Imgur or Dropbox or something, which takes time compared to just snapping a pic.

What _I_ would fully support is having TVs with good enough screens that you can't tell the difference between recording them and recording a real-life scene.

<comment><USER6> But there are literally millions of Simpsons clips on Youtube. Nobody minds as long as they're very short clips.

It's not the look of the screen that bugs me, it's the inability of the person to hold the phone still and stop talking. I suspect that what's _supposed_ to be happening in this scene is that Ace Ventura has swept all the pieces off the chessboard in an excess of accusatory zeal, but I can't tell if there's any sound of chess pieces hitting the floor because the guy keeps talking and waving the phone around.

<comment><USER7> Yes, people in general are terrible when they're recorded. It's not as bad in real life, in the moment, but watching it on a video is awful. I recorded a fantastic event once that was completely mindblowing. Could not watch the video because everything that happened seemed so awful. Our minds are machines of context and in-the-moment stimulus that has up performing actions that don't hold up to repeated or out-of-context viewing. That's why actors are so highly trained and respected, because even pretending to be _yourself_ is impossible for most people. Recordings are just so unnatural that we have to get ourselves into a different mindset before hitting the red button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Humans have been able to instantaneously change their field of view long before films/television.

Just throw a blanket over your head, or close your eyes and turn around and open them.

We evolved long ago to process new imagery and quickly react to it.

<comment> post-it-note Not only that, but in order to make intelligent inferences from multiple points of observation (a memory of an aggressive animal and the aftermath, combined with a present visualization of a different but similar aggressive animal, and knowledge of one's offspring nearby).. All of these things can be visualized in the mind as a sequence of environmental, first person perspective imagery, with emotional associations and connected knowledge, that comes in the form of feelings, and constructed symbolic representations of reality.

We put things together almost instantaneously without even understanding how we fill in the gaps. The same mechanism occurs when one jumps to conclusions, or understands how one line of a mathematical proof implies that the next line can now be read. It's all absurd and has the potential to be brain exploding when you really sit and try to think about what makes you think that gap is totally filled, but it's also not, because memories and feelings like 'obvious', and also because it's a big part of science to question those gaps.

Brains are weird though, even with all the explanation and science and repetition and predictability in scientific knowledge, it is still 'awe' invoking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've noticed in recent years that I really cannot parse out quick cuts in movies anymore. For example, I have a very hard time following action sequences in the Marvel movies, and the Transformers movies were just a jumble to me. I mostly don't even bother with trying to watch movies anymore.

I'm probably just getting old...

<comment><USER10> These action sequences being a jumbled up mess is a feature, I think. It allows the action on-screen to be visually sloppy and imprecise (thus easier to make), and the audience makes up for it (subconsciously) with their imagination filling in the imperfections with something even better than what they could put on film.

At least, that's what I tell myself. Perhaps we're both just getting old.

<comment><USER11> You're exactly right. Not only is the ASL (average shot length) decreasing over time _, but flurries of quick shots are great for hiding action that doesn 't actually happen. It's definitely can be used as a crutch. Not always, it can accelerate the feeling of action, but often feels lazy, and a disservice to the viewer.

_e.g. Citizen Kane had an ASL of 12 seconds. Transformers: Dark side of the moon? 3.4seconds! [http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php](http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php) Average ASL in 2006 was actually 2.9s.

<comment><USER12> Comparing to Citizen Kane seems unfair as it's not an action movie. So here are some other action movies. (NB: There are multiple entries for some of these but I'm not listing them all).

      Die Hard      4.5
      Die Hard 2    3.1
      Die Hard 3    1.8
      Armageddon    2.2  -- at least he's ben consistently on the quick side
      Total Recall  3.7  -- original, 1990
      Robocop       3.7  -- original
      Haywire       6

And I keep trying to search for movies they don't have in the database. So certainly for action movies (1980+), at least for some popular ones, the ASL isn't out of the ordinary.

But then I searched for Alfred Hitchcock and got some interesting results. This database has many duplicate entries and some wildly different values. The Skin Game had 3 entries at about the same time (17.1, 17.3, 17.4). However, Rear Window has an entry at 3.7 and another at 8.8, and several at 10.5. I suppose I need to read about their methodology to understand why there's so much variance.

<comment><USER13> It's crowd sourced. They have software that returns timestamps when you click a button and you use it when watching a movie. It's definitely error prone and the data should be treated as if you got it from Mechanical Turk.

There's so much data in movies that is really hard to get automatically. We should really be digitizing and cataloging old films if we're able. It's hard to find films in the public domain but this is what we should be doing with them: 4k scanning and digitizing. Perform a rough automatic restoration on all frames and audio then put it all online, every frame in 4k, and accept pull requests. During this process all shots and scenes should be accounted for. They are timed with actors and locations marked. Subtitles should have crucial metadata such as the actor speaking the lines. Music and musicians should be identified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Often, the sound from the scene following the cut precedes the cut itself. There must be a name for this technique and a reason for it-- anyone know?

<comment><USER15> It's called a J-cut: [http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/18690/sound- of-a-n...](http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/18690/sound-of-a-next- scene-starts-one-moment-earlier-than-video)

<comment><USER16> Cool, I never knew there was a name for that. Watching lost, I would always know a flashback was coming up when I started to hear the ambient noise of the next scene. (Or maybe there was a special flashback sound effect? Some kind of swoosh? Having trouble remembering...)

<comment><USER17> There was a definite rumble for flashbacks. Kind of like a muffled jet engine (perhaps exactly that on purpose).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We don't see a continuous view of the world anyway; eye saccades blur vision but the brain edits it out.

<comment><USER19> It also compensates the fact that we have a very near field of high-res vision, that is constantly pointed at a different direction, by still keeping the big picture in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Movies do not follow the logic of external sensory input, they follow the logic of internal reflection on memory that gives rise to dream and story.

</comment><comment><USER14> Watching TV/movies is definitely something that we learn to do, though most of us learned so early that we no longer remember it.

Source: anecdotal evidence from friends/relatives who observed childrens' reactions when first exposed to TV/movies when they were relatively old.

<comment><USER21> The article mentions an experiment where they showed short movies with local actors to people in a village in Turkey who had never seen movies or television. They found that people processed the cuts with no issues.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, it's likely that the state of the visual cortex suffers a hard reset on the cut, but we integrate our experience at a higher level (semantic, not pure visual). It's the higher level that dictates our overall response. It might be one of the reasons why we possess intelligence and awareness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've wondered something similar about movies: why do they even make sense to our social brains?

Throughout history, you'd never be in a position where there would be two people having a confidential conversation in which you weren't an active part. How does the monkey brain react to that? The closest thing might be e.g. two village elders discussing your fate in front of you, such that you know you can't participate.

But then, if that's how your brain frames it, why would you enjoy that at all? It would throw off all the indicators of you being low status.

<comment><USER24> >Throughout history, you'd never be in a position where there would be two people having a confidential conversation in which you weren't an active part.

It's literally how you learned to speak.

<comment><USER23> It's part of how you learned to speak, but the full process still requires your interaction, which the movie doesn't allow. In any case, _after_ that developmental stage, it's a very atypical situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the fact that the movie represents a part of your visual field makes it understandable -- the surrounding setting is stable. If everything around you changed instantly, your brain would have a hard time adjusting. Might be interesting when more sophisticated VR is available.

</comment><comment><USER26> One thing I noticed while watching the movie Birdman was the long shots for the scenes instead of multiple short takes. I felt uneasy the whole movie because of this, maybe my brain got used to the short takes.

</comment><comment><USER27> Because we blink; its normal for our brain to process rapidly-changing scenes.

<comment><USER28> yes, or dart our eyes. I think this is the answer.

But the author still has an interesting perspective, as obviously to an extent we immerse ourselves in what is shown on screen, even though we always know we're outside of it. (It's on a screen at a fixed length from us.) That is something evolution never made us do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We already have a name for this in film theory; it's called _suture_ , our ability to mentally 'stitch things together. The reason people typically ignore drastic changes in continuity (eg the example of different color scarves etc.) is that we don't process the whole scene at once; even in fairly static shots we have regions of interest - if it's two people talking to each other without much movement, then you'll look at their eyes - and in shots involving motion, wherever in the frame the motion ends in one shot will be where you'll focus your attention following a cut.

Commercials exploit this all the time. Next time you watch TV, squint and/or turn off the sound to break your connection to the semantic content of the advert, and try to just look at it as a series of random shapes and colors. Frequently, the most dynamic shot in the commercial is followed by a relatively static shot of the product, with the product situated at wherever the greatest movement in the frame was (typically lower left or right third in live action).

This is especially true for detergent and personal care products that need to be picked out from crowded shelves at the supermarket. It's also why locally produced commercials look cheap - there's usually no sense of movement within the frame, just a series of images that don't connect up visually and so leave only a random fragmentary impression in the mind.

Startup owners, this is often also a problem for you: it's really easy to make a video these days and everyone wants to tap into the feel of those Apple commercials, but it requires a lot more than a cute acoustic guitar track and footage of people looking happy! When you opt for a video presentation rather than text copy on your landing page, you're asking the visitor to process a _lot_ more information a lot more rapidly. If you don't have a cohesive visual as well as semantic narrative, then your video can end up making the same bad impression as the stereotypical 'geocities' web page does for static presentation. Put another way, if your shots don't link up or your sound isn't good, then you will never make it past people's visual cortex.

Your semantic context rides into people's brains on the back of the visual and audible context you create for it. _You_ can watch your product video endlessly and feel good about it, because it's an expression of _your_ semantic map. People who don't have that semantic map already in place (ie everyone else) won't be able to put it together if you just give them the pieces in video form but don't show how they cohere. You find it illuminating to test your product video by playing it on a large TV to small children or even pets. Animals will watch TV _if it seems like something is happening_ ; if you can't hold the attention of a dog or cat, then I guarantee you that whatever it is you're trying to explain to your human viewers isn't getting through to most of them.

</comment><comment><USER29> Try sightline the chair in VR. Real life cuts are shocking.</comment>


Show HN: Buttons Library Version 1.0 with Customizer & Builder - <AUTHOR> http://alexwolfe.github.io/Buttons/

<comment><USER2> We updated the library with a Button Builder which allows you to include or remove only the buttons you need for your project (perf matters!), and added a couple more button styles too. Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER3> Yay! A good alternative to using bootstrap's buttons everywhere. Hopefully people will take note.</comment>


The Next American Car Recession Has Already Started - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-13/the-next-american-car-recession-has-already-started <comment><USER2> I wonder how many potential sedan buyers are just deferring their purchases awaiting a cheap electric with good range?

<comment><USER3> Waiting for a station-wagon, actually

<comment> King-Aaron This.

BTW, fellow wagon connoisseur... Have you seen the 2018 Porsche Panamera wagon?

<comment><USER4> And the Panamera can tow a boat (seriously, IIRC, the euro model can tow a few thousand pounds - US car isn't rated because lawyers).

<comment> King-Aaron Yeah, but... [https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3817/9066371914_b93ba47d92_b.j...](https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3817/9066371914_b93ba47d92_b.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this affecting non-American manufacturers? If not, why?

To a casual observer, the writing has been on the wall for sedans for some time. Why would I want to buy a sedan when I could buy a crossover SUV with the same fuel economy for the same price?

Ford has been on top of this trend - they announced they are discontinuing ALL sedan production earlier in 2018.

Car manufacturers come out with new "generations" of vehicles every 5-10 years, so change in production methods is part of the industry. Why can't American manufacturers adapt?

<comment><USER6> > _Why would I want to buy a sedan when I could buy a crossover SUV with the > same fuel economy for the same price?_

Because you live in a city designed for horses and carriages? It's tough enough driving a small sedan in Sydney, the idea of trying to park an American-style monster SUV here scares me. Much of Europe and Japan is exponentially worse.

Fun fact: in California, most lanes are 12 feet (3.7m) wide. In Sydney, many major roads including the Harbour Bridge have 2.8m lanes, and there are buses 2.5m wide driving on them.

<comment><USER7> But why do you want to drive a car into a city?

<comment><USER6> I don't and very rarely do, but there are narrow lanes on many Sydney arterial roads well outside the city, like Parramatta Rd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Funny thing about SUVs. Everyone seems to universally hate them on the internet, but they make up for > 50% of all new car sales in the US. Even funnier to me is the folks that in one breath say they want the W126 manual wagon but then scoff at an SUV which is a STATION WAGON, slightly raised. Subaru has been killing it by marketing their SUVs as wagons or vice versa. I drive an SUV. Its a grand cherokee. Its the SRT model. Its my favorite car ever.

<comment><USER4> I don't get it. Having owned both SUVs, wagons, and hatchbacks, I'll take a wagon or hatchback every time. Better handling (usually), better fuel economy (usually), and easier to get into (SUVs are tall), and usually less expensive (because SUVs have higher margins). If I really needed a third row, I'd buy a minivan.

<comment><USER8> Unless we are vastly different heights, an SUV is always much easier to get into. I had an Audi A4 prior to the Grand Cherokee, and nearing 40 years of age, I grew tired of the "fall in/climb out" ingress/egress of a sedan that is low to the ground. Im 6'2", and my Grand Cherokee (which sits about and 1.5" lower than the other models) is pretty much perfect sit height. I don't need a third row, and the grand cherokee is not 3 row, you have to get the Dodge Durango for that extra row. I love wagons and hatchbacks and SUVs. They are variations of the same flavor. That was the point I was driving at. A wagon is the same shape as an SUV. The spaciousness of a wagon is practical. An SUV sits higher and is easier for some to get in and out. I don't see why there is any distinction made. I would not correct anyone who called my Grand Cherokee a "wagon". Remember the original Grand WAGONeer?

<comment><USER4> You're 7 inches taller than me, which I'm sure makes a difference!

Yeah, it really depends on the SUV. The big Lexus/Land Cruiser is tall like a truck. The mid-size RX is, like you said, effectively a tall wagon. Same for the Tahoe vs whatever GMC calls their mid-size these days.

And, yeah, the wife's little BMW is low and if I've had a few hard workouts (and the resultant sore back/legs/etc), it's an effort to get in/out. Getting "old" sucks (turn 42 this weekend).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Suv sales are going up. It's just people don't like sedans. I think title is a little misleading.

<comment><USER10> I've read somewhere that SUV attracted people because they were in an easier emission category, which meant they appear cheaper for the size.

<comment><USER11> Sedans are also less desirable as more and more people drive SUVs -- it makes it hard to see traffic and it's more dangerous when you are the lowest person on the road.

<comment><USER12> Nah, low center of gravity with nimble handling is better. I'll take an all wheel drive S4, ATS, C class or 3 series over an SUV any snowy day. Sport sedans have swagger too, the only swaggerific SUVs are the Escalade, Cullinan, Urus, Porsche SUVs. But those are out of the price range most of humanity can afford to buy within. I have never had a problem seeing traffic.

<comment><USER13> > I'll take an all wheel drive S4, ATS, C class or 3 series over an SUV any > snowy day

I hope you're putting on the correct type of tires for snowy days. A lot of those models come with summer/performance tires which are incompatible with snow. For my S4, I have a set of Bridgestone Blizzak snow tires that I use during the winter months.

<comment><USER14> I had an awd ats with blizzak all around. It handled the snow better than any suv I'd been in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With gas under $2 a gallon, it's not surprising that SUVs are selling like hotcakes and sedans are barely moving.

Bump gasoline up a dollar or two, then SUVs and trucks will slow down.

Cars are also better these days, lasting longer. I've got a 10 year old car (had it for a year), it's been rock-solid reliable. I think good used cars are a compelling alternative to a new vehicle.

<comment><USER16> >Bump gasoline up a dollar or two, then SUVs and trucks will slow down.

That was true in 2003, but I don't think it is anymore. The MPG penalty for a crossover compared to a sedan is only about 15% now which is probably worth it for most Americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looking at the graph in the article, it seems that the total number of vehicles across sedans, suvs, and pickup trucks has actually increased.

Given that the demand for vehicles is actually increased, the automobile manufacturers don't have too many plants overall, they just don't have the right mix of plants.

</comment><comment><USER18> My Mazda 3 hatchback manual gets 39MPG. I'm 6'2" and have 3 kids. Probably the best car I've ever owned. _shrug_

</comment><comment><USER19> ICE sedan sales may be falling, but the Tesla Model S and Model 3 are selling just great.

</comment><comment><USER20> #thanksobama for throwing taxpayer money at GM, only to have them do their inevitable restructuring a few years later than otherwise.

<comment><USER21> The "GM" that got the money was already restructured, it is "new GM", the shareholders in old GM were wiped right out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motors_Liquidation_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motors_Liquidation_Company)

Propping up GM legitimately helped hundreds of thousands of workers. Whether it was a good use of the money is a different question than that, but the money didn't go to shareholders, it went to keeping the operations going.

<comment><USER20> It's impossible to tell exactly what would have happened in a bankruptcy, but the entire company would have almost certainly been restructured, which would have meant generally clearing out the dead wood: shuttering factories, renegotiating anachronistic/extravagant union contracts, etc.

Coercing private citizens to pay for mismanaged companies and subsidize the gold-plated pension benefits of Baby Boomer employees is utterly immoral.

<comment><USER21> If you click the link I gave up there, you'll see that it was reorganized in a bankruptcy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Decentralized Food Delivery or Grocery Delivery Platform - <AUTHOR> Dear Friends,
Website : https://nearbyshops.org
Github : https://github.com/NearbyShops
We are releasing first of its kind decentralized hyperlocal shopping platform. Which can by used for food or grocery delivery or any other hyperlocal business.
You must have heard of Mastodon (https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon) a decentralized alternative to Twitter.
Similarly Nearby Shops is a decentralized alternative to commercial e-commerce platforms.
This decentralized technology has a great potential to enable collaberation and help small business compete with large corporations.
Please checkout our website and github repository !
If you like this technology please participate and share this project with as many people as you can. <comment><AUTHOR> Please checkout our website and Github repository

Website : [https://nearbyshops.org](https://nearbyshops.org)

Github : [https://github.com/NearbyShops](https://github.com/NearbyShops)

</comment><comment><USER2> Very interesting. Not sure I understand what the "Local Market Aggregators" are. Are they aggregating on each self-hosted API into a single API ?</comment>


Ask HN: What are problems you have in your every day life? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I greatly desire a fun method of personal transport to get around to the shops, to work, etc. I don't want to sit in traffic, and I feel biking isn't safe when there's distracted drivers on the road.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that jet packs actually exist in real life. Unfortunately, they're very loud, have a very short range, and are $275,000 USD. They would probably be regulated like cars some day.

So I guess it's just a dream until some cheap form of quiet propulsion is invented. It takes a lot of electricity to put even a 120lb human in the air for a few seconds!

</comment><comment><USER3> I think using computers is causing me memory loss, I notice it more frequently now - it worries me so it pushes me to read more books. My speculation is that the light from monitors and other devices somehow makes me forgetful.

I am certain the distractability of the web is bad for us and can see myself spending less time on this app in the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> Mobility</comment>


Ask HN: Should Stripe lower its fees during the crisis? - <AUTHOR> So I just happened on a post by Tobi Lutke of Shopify asking for suggestions from merchants and it occurred to me that one of Y Combinator's biggest companies (Stripe) is in a unique position to help quite a few small businesses today with a rate cut. Dropping the charge by even 1% would mean cash today in the hands of small businesses.
What do you think? How would this help your business?
And as a side note, what other Y Combinator businesses could help out during the crisis? <comment><AUTHOR> Ref: Tobi Lutke's post [https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1239530650979504135](https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1239530650979504135)</comment>


World's steepest funicular railway opens in Switzerland - <AUTHOR> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/high-point_world-s-steepest-funicular-railway-opens-in-switzerland/43758880 <comment><USER2> Apparently I had no idea how to interpret percent grade numbers, because I would've thought a 110% grade was impossible or meant going directly vertical or something.

But actually the internet tells me it represents rise/run as a percent, so a 110% grade is slightly more than a 45 degree angle. The more you know!

<comment><USER3> So a 90° angle is... infinity%?

<comment><USER4> It's related to a ratio. A ~6 degree slope would have you dropping one meter for every ten meters you move forward: 10%. 45 degrees means one meter for every meter forward: 100%. Keep plotting that out and it approaches infinity as you reach 90 degrees (or just ask, "for every meter forward, how many up/down?" if it is 90 degrees.)

<comment><USER5> The problem is that "forward" is ambiguous. You can measure it relative to your direction of travel, or perpendicular to the gravitational vector. For small gradients these are more or less the same, but the steeper the slope the more these two measures diverge.

<comment><USER6> Fortunately, as 110% it's not ambiguous anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went with my family before they shuttered the old funicular. The old funicular was expensive to maintain and prone to interruption by falling rocks. So they decided to scrap the old funicular and build a new one. However not everything worked out to plan. After all there was a two-year delay. They underestimated the difficulties the steep grades created. For example they had to tether all workers to ropes. Tools falling down turned into dangerous projectiles. Tunnel boring machines had to use a climbing contraption to bore literally upwards. An so on.

By the way would have Elon Musk helped by combining his Boring Company and SpaceX to bore upwards?

</comment><comment><USER8> There are a few videos of the built thing running on YouTube, and [http://stoos-muotatal.ch](http://stoos-muotatal.ch) none of which are perfect but this is my fav:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C5YoI5F3xEw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C5YoI5F3xEw)

<comment><USER9> One more for consideration - does a nice job of showing how the cars work: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se4KrC0nfGE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se4KrC0nfGE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Scenic Railway in the Blue Mountains, NSW is listed at 52deg so I believe it's still steeper?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katoomba_Scenic_World#Railwa...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katoomba_Scenic_World#Railway)

<comment><USER11> Unless they've used 400deg degrees to make it sound steeper. In that case, the Scenic Railway would be slightly less steep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I went on this one once, it's actually the worlds oldest I think. Short, but incredibly steep!

[https://www.salzburg.info/en/travel-info/arrival- traffic/cab...](https://www.salzburg.info/en/travel-info/arrival- traffic/cable_railway)

<del>I can't find any info on an exact percentage but I'm surprised another railway beat it as it really is very steep</del>

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m507EEHp34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m507EEHp34)

EDIT: 62% according to wikipedia (once I found the right name for this railway). That's less than half the one linked in this post. Impressive!

</comment><comment><USER13> Intamin offers comparable systems.[1] Intamin is primarily a roller coaster manufacturer. As a sideline they offer the "Mountain People Mover", which uses roller coaster track and wheel systems. It's electric drive, not cable drive, so it's a people mover, not a funicular. The track can be much more curved, in all axes, than with a cable driven system.

Intamin offers the tilting cabin option, but their existing installations don't use it.

At some inclination, cable-driven systems are considered elevators. The George Washington Masonic Temple has cable-hauled elevators which are 82.5 degrees from horizontal. This is a 759% slope. They're tilted in two axes, because the building is a narrowing tower with big meeting rooms on several floors, and the elevators don't break up the space.

[1] [http://www.intamintransportation.com/transportation/Mountain...](http://www.intamintransportation.com/transportation/MountainPeopleMover/tabid/119/language/de- DE/Default.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER14> I rode the cog railway up Pike's Peak a few years ago.

If you EVER get a chance to ride the train documented here, or any other such train, BY ALL MEANS take it. The views are just spectacular. And, on a train, you're not distracted by driving, so you can watch the view the whole time.

<comment><USER15> There used to be a funicular nearly adjacent to the starting point of the Cog Railway that would have given the Swiss one a run for its money, as the Manitou Incline hit 68° in some points. The Manitou Incline shuttered in the 90s after a rockfall damaged the tracks. It's a popular endurance trail now, with people 'running' up the old incline track to the top of Mount Manitou.

I'd like to second your post though. I took the Cog Railway up to the summit of Pikes Peak right before Christmas a few years ago and we were blessed with having to stop as a herd of Rocky Mountain big-horn sheep moved across the path. There is a protected lambing area on the backside of the mountain which of course I've never visited but to see these animals up close at 11,000 feet was spectacular.

Plus you can buy fresh donuts and coffee up at the summit. A nice way to visit 14,000 feet if you're not inclined to the wonderful but strenuous Barr Trail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the California/bay area folks there is a tram from Silver Lake to Lake Agnew over in the Eastern Sierra (near june lake) that has a max of about a 105% grade. Sadly, you can't ride it but you can hike up parts and around the station at the top. Even trying to climb up is quite a challenge. Its quite amazing. Built in 1915 to support construction/operation of the Lake Agnew and Gem Lake dams. I suggest going up in the fall when the aspen are changing color.

</comment><comment><USER17> At what point does a funicular become an elevator?

<comment><USER18> At precisely 90 degrees.

<comment><USER19> Apparently not! [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incline_elevator](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incline_elevator)

It seems the distinction is that funiculars operate in balanced pairs, while elevators are independent units.

<comment><USER20> I went to Germany this year and I made a point of planning a visit to a funicular. To my great disappointment, the funicular we found in Freiburg am Breisgau used a counterweight instead of another car. Now I wonder if it was really a funicular at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looking at an image in a Guardian article about it ([https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/15/world- steepest...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/15/world-steepest- funicular-rail-line-open-switzerland)) what is the purpose of those panels further up the mountain on either side of the tracks?

Is that to try to catch the train if it falls off the tracks?

<comment><USER22> Those are avalanche protection fences

 _Edit:_ s/avalanche protection/snow/g

> > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_fence)

<comment><USER23> Specifically, they're called snow sheds[0] as they're angled to capture and hold snow deposits, serving as a physical obstacle to accumulated snow that could then later slide. The big risk there would be a slab avalanche,[1] possibly triggered by the funicular's own vibrations. Because the snow sheds are directly supporting any heavy deposits of snow, they isolate the slab from a weaker snowpack that'd otherwise be underneath it.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_shed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_shed)

[1] [https://www.meted.ucar.edu/afwa/avalanche/navmenu.php?tab=1&...](https://www.meted.ucar.edu/afwa/avalanche/navmenu.php?tab=1&page=2.3.0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is "funicular" the name of some new neural network hill climbing technique?

<comment><USER25> I bet somebody will read your comment and name their next method that way :D

<comment><USER19> It would be a good name for a network that learns by making some other network stupid.

<comment><USER25> FunicuGAN?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems strangely inexpensive to me. Serious engineering, special train, 1.3 km construction on difficult terrain and only 45 mln. Euro?

In comparision, new Dublin tram line - COTS cars, 6 km line for 368 mln Euro. Or Detroit Qline, $180 mln. for 5.3 km line.

<comment><USER27> Trams are expensive because of all the pipes and cables under the street that have to be moved. Also a funicular train is driverless and unpowered, more like big elevator car than a train.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A vertical railway is just an elevator, isn't it?</comment>


Facebook Designing New Campus - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100483906554181&set=a.612287952871.2204760.4&type=1&theater <comment><USER2> This will most certainly be interesting to watch. My visceral reaction to the idea of one giant room was, "Wow. No thanks." I'm not personally the biggest fan of Frank Gehry's work, either.

That said, I'm always a little bit excited when people push architectural boundaries, especially when it comes to workspaces. Hopefully my friends at Facebook will still be around when this is completed.

<comment><USER3> My visceral reaction to the idea of one giant room was "Rad". Love open floor plans.

I'm really curious what the final interior plan will look like; presumably it's not some huge airplane hanger of openness but some clever way of staying open-while-interesting.

Like you, though, I'm just excited at the prospect of larger companies doing something different. Should be fun to watch.

<comment><USER4> They (Facebook) should really look at what research has found before they jump feet-first into having an open floor plan. It's not like they've just invented it!

Open floor plans were invented as a way to cram more people into less space, thereby minimizing cost of office space per employee. They were _not_ invented to improve productivity.

<comment><USER5> Facebook offices have always been open plan. I personally like it. It can occasionally been frustrating, but overall the benefits outweigh the negatives for the way we work. I don't believe that it has ever been about minimizing costs.

Many people work from home or camp out in a small meeting room if they want privacy. There are also over ear head phones available for free all around the campus.

<comment><USER4> Wikipedia has an article that links to a lot of the research on open plan offices (and other configurations):

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every time I'm reminded of just how many programmers Facebook has it bothers me that he missed such a cool opportunity. He gets programming better than probably any BigCo tech CEO and yet he made the same damn mistake of hiring thousands upon thousands of programmers instead of just getting the 10X Programmers and having 1/10th as many while paying them 2x as much.

Imagine if the budget for this 5000 person building was spent to house 500 people. It could make Google's campuses look downright spartan. It would make everything else a distant second choice for most people.

<comment><USER7> I've wondered what it'd be like to have a company that capped its growth at around 500 people, but made damn sure that those 500 were among the brightest in the world. Would it be an innovation think tank? Or would they find that those 500 brilliant people spend so much time doing drudge work that they can't get any actual work done? Or would they just automate all the drudge work away?

I imagine it might be a little like RenTech in the financial world, which according to Wikipedia has only 275 employees and $23B in assets under management, for roughly $100M/employee. Wonder how that would translate to an organization focused around building actual products for people.

<comment><USER8> Theres also Valve Software (read their lovely handbook! <http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf>). They (to my knowledge) only hire folks who're at senior grade in terms of their skills. Also Valve software just generally sounds like an amazing work environment.

aside/caveat: I'm aiming to create just such an organization (operationally structured a la Valve) in terms of caliber of folks in NYC with WellPosed. I'm settling for nothing less than having an organization dedicated to building tools/products meant to make innovation happen faster on our wee world. I'm starting with fixing machine learning / numerical computation, BUT _done right, rather than automagic bullshit everyone in "big data" keeps jerking off to the press :)_

It looks like I'll be able to get things off the ground sans investors too (which is kinda key for what I want to do forever). Any NYC area senior grade awesome folks who like work broadly deep across math, cs, engineering things nicely and sane work expectations etc a la the organization referenced above, shoot me an email and chat, Please

I'm working to create something special that I want to last forever, and I need the most amazing people on the planet to make it happen :)

(pardon my reply turning self promoting, but I'm deadly serious about what i'm doing, and its exactly that sort of place i'm aiming to create)

(also: your hypothetical lots of smart people not getting anything done is called a circle jerk, not a business that could successfully recruit amazing people and retain them.)

<comment><USER9> Ahem. Rather than automagic bullshit, could you just do machine learning which handles multiple data-types.

That would be a big change for the ML crowd to have to deal with real world, multiple typed, dirty data. Earthshattering, I know. (Yes, we've already spoken by email. Best of luck on your adventures)

<comment><USER8> I said the other folks are doing automagic BS, :-)

Yup, Thats one of the problems I'm solving "right" (or nearly so) in the basic alpha as it gets in shape.

Thanks! Were you the unicorn email dude?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wouldn't say that this is the worst possibly use of Facebook's money, but I would rank it up there.

Building a new HQ is largely an exercise in vanity and boasting. There is almost always an existing building that would serve just fine, otherwise.

"The largest open floor plan in the world"? Oy. I hope they hire some good acoustics folks before they finish the planning stages.

<comment><USER11> It's amusing to correlate "new campus" with "stock drop" in the history of Silly Valley.

Atari, Apple, Sun, Cisco . . . these companies all had significant hard times about the time they started large new sets of buildings.

<comment><USER12> SGI built a new campus (now the Googleplex) in 1998, the same year they announced they were switching from their own MIPS processors to Itanium and shipping Windows NT workstations. In 2005, SGI was delisted from the NYSE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me a lot of this:

[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_gAOnHhen4zY/S9r-pZcS6bI/AAAAAAAAAA...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_gAOnHhen4zY/S9r-pZcS6bI/AAAAAAAAAA0/zvIvuyTfkZM/s1600/cafo.jpg)

Open floor plans don't make collaboration any easier. You still have to walk over to the other person just now, you must also try and hear yourself think over the hundreds of other people inside a hanger. This is the epitome the of a cog in the machine work environment to maximize people per square foot. It's degrading but in a way that's quite fitting for the way Facebook is going right now.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think I understand the reasoning behind open floor plans, but what's the point of having everyone in a single mega-room? It's not like the two people in opposite corners of the hangar will be able to communicate seamlessly just because they're in the same "room"; they'll have to walk over to one another just the same as they would if they had walls separating them.

(Of course being in the same room doesn't _hurt_ in that respect either, but partitions have other advantages as well, e.g., aesthetics and noise.)

<comment><USER15> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Honestly? It looks like a vision of hell.

If there's one thing Microsoft got right, it's that they read _Peopleware_ and took it at least half seriously.

<comment><USER17> Could you elaborate on the design?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having worked with smaller teams in open plans, and now being in a coworking space, I have to say, I don't like it. It's really easy to get distracted by the smallest movement around you, or someone having a phone call, or two people laughing. I don't think cube farms are necessarily the answer either, but without serious consideration for noise dampening, the "one giant room" will be a pretty big distraction.

</comment><comment><USER9> Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking... Just a moment!

Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking... Just a moment!

Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking... Just a moment!

</comment><comment><USER19> Some of Frank Gehry's designs definitely look like the Facebook stock.

</comment><comment><USER20> I worked for a number of years in the MIT Stata Center, an office building designed by Gehry. It was a trainwreck on so many levels. This article (<http://www.fastcompany.com/641146/lost-funhouse> ) details the some of the construction issues, but even if the building had been watertight, on budget, and on time, the design itself made it difficult to work in.

<comment><USER21> Indeed. The quality of design affects the quality of construction. The cost per square foot is typically shocking and the Ghery definitely places form over function. After visiting many buildings by Ghery, Hadid, Holl, and Libeskind I've found them all to be lacking. If you prefer modern design with refinement seek out Ando or Meier. There are plenty of others, as well, who have much more talent.

<comment><USER22> The Norman Foster buildings I've been in have been pretty good. Apple made the right choice.

I wonder if there will be some amazing Chinese architects in the next decades, given their pace of construction.

<comment><USER21> Foster as well as Piano have some very refined work. Foster is at his best when doing renovations and additions. He has a very delicate approach which is handsome and actually celebrates and enhances the existing structure.

I'm still waiting for some great Chinese architects to step up. They aren't given much room to flex their talents, however, due to the very brand conscious nature of the consumer. For instance there is a recently completed Ghery building here in Hong Kong with a flat on the 8th floor listed for $400 million Hong Kong Dollars, or roughly $51.5 million USD. Insane. But that's what the market is after.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hope it holds up better than the MIT Strata Center...

</comment><comment><USER24> Here's the design which would truly reflect the vision and dynamism of the company:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon>

[http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/01/05/surveillan...](http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/01/05/surveillance- entertainment-a-panopticon-in-the-clouds/)

</comment><comment><USER25> What's with the high voltage lines right next to the building? Or is it something else?

</comment><comment><USER26> Old Sun campus too small for these guys already?

<comment><USER27> My impression was that they were only using half of that campus and that was when I visited somewhat recently. I'm not sure what the objective is here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Where is this thing supposed to go? Are they designing to a particular site?

</comment><comment><USER29> when a tech company builds a new campus, that's it. All downhill (further downhill).</comment>


Innovating during a recession - <AUTHOR> http://sloanreview.mit.edu/improvisations/2009/02/11/innovating-during-a-recession/ <comment><USER2> I am a huge fan of Jim Collins and "Good to Great". The "stop doing list" is a great discipline to instill in any organization.</comment>


Home Assistant: An open-source home automation platform running on Python 3 - <AUTHOR> https://home-assistant.io/ <comment><USER4> I have noticed before that most of the home automation sw available on the web is in python. I wonder if there is a reason.

<comment><USER5> is it? I see a lot of other languages as well.

OpenHAB - <USER2>

Domoticz - C++

Domotiga - Non-python

Pilight - <USER3>

Pimatic - Node.js</comment></comment>


Social Media Networking For Professionals With Deadlines - <AUTHOR> https://www.awarelabs.com/blog/social-media-networking-for-professionals-with-deadlines/

<comment><USER2> Is there any study that at least suggest that this kind of marketing works (ie: generates real conversions)? Honest question here.</comment>


How World War III Became Possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war

<comment><USER2> Something I didn't realize before checking after reading this article: the Doomsday Clock[0] is currently set to 3 minutes before midnight. It was only set closer to midnight from 1953-1960, and this is tied with 1949-1953 and 1984-1988.

While the clock isnt't an accurate or objective measure (just the opinion of the _Bulletin of Atomic Scientists_ ), that's pretty disheartening.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock)</comment>


On Goldman Sachs Culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/07/29/will-everyone-please-shut-about-goldman-sachs?page=full

<comment><USER2> Here's a more illuminating 2004 article by Bethany McLean:

 _The paranoia that keeps driving Goldman Sachs to the top_

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/09/06/380330/index.htm)</comment>


Show HN: I Made this learning urinal simulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.urinalman.com

<comment><USER2> This is great. I love the use of CSS for masks on the urinals to show the pee.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is so cool, do you have any analytics from the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, almost at 3000 unique visitors for the first 2 days</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to encourage my team to learn more and improve our skill set - nevi-me I work for a fairly large Data consultancy of about 150 people. We do mostly data management projects, and data analytics.
Most of our house uses SAS, SQL (Microsoft) and Qlik technologies. We have varying skill sets, with about 60% having Engineering or Math/Stats background.
The problem's that we seem to be grooming more 'people managers' than technical people, even our juniors join the team with little coding background, but end up not wanting to program.
What ways can I try to get them into more work that requires using Python, R, JVM family, JS etc. ?
Some people in the team feel like we're falling behind what rest of world does in terms of analytics. It would be great for us to change this position.
Thanks <comment><AUTHOR> Answer this question honestly : would your employees feel that it is in their best interest to learn new things and teach them to the company ?

Having a learning-oriented company can only happen if people are aligned, and if making the company smarter makes sense to them.

Most of the time it is the contrary and what makes sense is the status quo and protecting long-earned corporate political capitals.

This is the root that you need to address, the rest will follow.

On another note, I'd be concerned that your junior devs don't like coding. It's a very bad sign. The best senior software managers still insist to have control on the design and the architecture. Bill Gates remained the chief engineer and architect for a reason. Your folks won't be good software managers if they are not passionate about writing good softwares and continuously improving their practice. I think you should replace them.</comment>


How well can you tell factual from opinion statements? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/news-statements-quiz/ <comment><USER2> Their full results from the study are here: [http://www.journalism.org/2018/06/18/distinguishing- between-...](http://www.journalism.org/2018/06/18/distinguishing-between- factual-and-opinion-statements-in-the-news/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The results of all test takers is the most interesting but there is no way to link directly to them. They're shown at the end of the test.</comment>


Bitbucket Outage - <AUTHOR> https://status.bitbucket.org/

<comment><USER2> Chrome says "This is probably not the site you are looking for!". Server certificate apparently does not match to the URL. Anyone knows if this has anything to do with the outage?

<comment><USER3> You can use HTTP version: [http://status.bitbucket.org/](http://status.bitbucket.org/) (I'm having the same warning BTW)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Website availability downright dropped to zero and still no information neither on Twitter nor on [http://status.bitbucket.org](http://status.bitbucket.org) .

(Fixed URL)

</comment><comment><USER5> and it's back</comment>


Facebook Now Cares About How Long You Look at Stuff in Your News Feed - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/12/facebook-now-cares-about-how-long-you-look-at-stuff-in-your-news-feed/ <comment><USER2> The reason I spend so little time looking at things is the fact that they're yesterday's news. There's "top stories" and "most recent", which is really "top stories" wearing a different hat. No way of getting just the new updates from my friends in a chronological order.

As a recent example, my friend A posted that they're going out for drinks and are looking for company. Instead of showing me this quite time-sensitive piece of news, FB wanted to tell me that my friend B liked the picture of C from 2013.

The drinks invitation became visible three-four days later, when it started to get comments about people seeing it too late. Now it's been stuck to the top of my "most recent" for at least a week.

<comment><USER3> yes. I miss when facebook was more of a social message board than... whatever it is now.

<comment><USER4> It's a self promotion tool now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I may be in the minority, but I had figured they'd been doing this for years

<comment><USER6> I agree. I figured it'd be pretty simple to do, especially for the iOS/Android versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a stupid trend going around where Facebook Pages post word searches and hidden object games about whatever brand they're promoting.

I guess we now know why.

</comment><comment><USER8> I assumed they were already doing this. As a result I started to deliberately modulate the amount of time I spent looking at various people or things. I guess now it will actually be effective.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what unintended consequences this could have, like attractive people showing up in more people's news feeds more often.

<comment><USER10> No wonder people keep posting on my wall! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was wondering when they would do this.

I find myself scrolling down and glancing for things. If I spot something that might be intriguing, whether a picture, article, or cat pic, I'll scroll back up. I can't be alone in this.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Dwell time" (as it is known in the industry) has long been a feature at major search engines and news portals. It is a pretty good signal of relevance.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thats a good thing I use the facebook feed eradicator. I love it. No more posts that I don't want to see.

</comment><comment><USER14> You'd think there could be a way that they could track the times between pulls for the newsfeed as you scroll and get a lower resolution view of the same phenomena, basically how long you looked at those posts but without as specific data as tracking a javascript timer.

</comment><comment><USER15> At this point I spend more time on [https://www.messenger.com/](https://www.messenger.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Worth reading Zelikow and Allison's "essence of decision" \-- now that they have evolved into a complex bureaucracy with multi-level masters to serve (middle managers, shareholders, political actors), they quite literally can't do anything except maximize profit by driving traffic via click optimization. Bureaucratic process and palace politics (models 2 and 3) are driving outcomes, not executive vision (ie Zuck, model 1)... Time for _sadface_.

</comment><comment><USER17> to neuter this, you can use the mobile site and disable javascript. I used to also use fbcmd (via commandline), although it seems the maintainer has left.

</comment><comment><USER18> Or they could add a button "Care" ?</comment>


Yahoo Shares Spike 7% on Report That It Might Sell Off Its Core Business - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/yahoo-shares-spike-7-on-report-that-it-might-sell-off-its-core-business/ <comment><USER2> Discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10659979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10659979)</comment>


Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org? - <AUTHOR> http://justinsomnia.org/2011/03/why-does-that-qr-code-take-me-to-justinsomnia-org <comment><USER3> QR codes are a massive phishing scam waiting to happen. I'll just go cover up the one at my bank with a sticker of the same exact size that links to my own site that looks exactly like the bank's site. Or maybe I'll put one on the ATM and see how long I get traffic before someone takes it down.

<comment><USER4> I also think QR codes could eventually be used by "shock site" trolls as in the bad ol' days on Slashdot. It's perfect because there's no way to inspect the URL before visiting the website. I've scanned a few QR codes on street lamps (for music events, etc.) and this is always in the back of my head.

Here's a much more fun example of a QR code prank: [http://fbcdn- sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/302963_1...](http://fbcdn- sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak- ash4/302963_10100624084077408_10715714_59172015_1090246928_n.jpg) (totally SFW of course)

<comment><USER5> I do agree that QR codes can be used for trolling, but there's _absolutely_ no reason you can't inspect the URL before visiting a link from a QR code - <USER2> that's stored in the QR code, after all, is the URL!

The trivial technical solution is a QR code reader which tells you where you're going before it sends you there, which ZXing (the Barcode Reader for Android) and several iOS QR readers already do.

<comment><USER6> Short URLs (very common in the QR code space, for making a smaller code) quickly circumvent this solution. If I see "bit.ly/asdf", I'll assume they just shortened their URL.

<comment><USER7> And this is one of many reasons that URL shorteners must die. If it weren't for Twitter, people wouldn't be so used to blindly clicking through short URLs.

But anyhow, most URL shorteners offer an API to retrieve the long URL. You could implement that in your QR code scanner as well, for the most popular URL shorteners, to allow people to see where they will be redirected to.

<comment><USER8> Alternatively on Android, you can use FairyPreview to decode most minimized URLs for you before sending them to the browser.

[https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpr...](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpreview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I worked in marketing communications, we had a policy that anything that could be mistaken as final, approved assets in a printed piece had to be covered with a big, diagonal, magenta "FPO" label (for position only). Whether it was an inaccurate placeholder image, or a justinsomnia QR code, it had to be obvious it was not the final art.

</comment><comment><USER10> This only supports my long running contention that normal people (outside of Japan) do not understand QR codes, and wherever they are printed, you would be better off writing a short URL. They are 1) opaque, 2) ugly, 3) impossible to memorize, 4) confusing to non techies and 5) no faster than typing the URL for the majority of viewers.

<comment><USER11> I agree with your first four points, but how did you arrive at your fifth point? QR Code applications I've used scan in about 1-2 seconds (the time it takes to auto-focus), which I think is probably faster than typing a URL.

<comment><USER12> If you include the time it takes the download (or find) a QR Code app, it makes sense. Considering that neither iOS nor Android come stock with a reader.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, no doubt it takes time to set up a phone to read QR codes. I was more interested to see whether there was some link/study which compared the actually processes of typing vs. scanning, which I thought was the intent of his fifth point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We use QR codes extensively where I work. We use them in print ads and on TV commercials and I have a re-occurring nightmare that we'll use the 'wrong' QR code somewhere disastrous... like printing a link to our competitors on 10,000 brochures or something like that.

I insist that I check all QR codes before they're sent out, and I scan them with 2-3 different QR scanning apps.

As another commentor mentioned, I often send our QR codes to a redirector URL - either a branded redirector service I built, or to a WordPress site with the redirection plugin, or even to it's very own domain name which is configured for forwarding.

<comment><USER14> Very curious - are they actually effective? Do people use them? What's the "click-through" rate like?

<comment><USER15> An interesting data point - Storm On Demand (<http://www.stormondemand.com/>) use AdWords a lot, and I'm always seeing their ads (clearly Google has designated me their target market - correctly).

Some of their MPU adverts had QR codes in them, and I called this out on Twitter telling them it was moronic to think that anyone would want to scan the QR code off an advert rather than just click it. Their response was that in their testing of many different adverts, the ones with QR codes were getting the best CTRs. They didn't know the reason for this, and neither do I - but it's interesting none-the-less.

<comment><USER16> It'd be interesting to compare the CTR to the scan-through-rate(% of people that scan the actual QR code).

I'd imagine that quirkiness of a QR code to the average user would pop-out of the page quicker and catch their attention faster than a normal image would.

<comment><USER15> I did ask that and, while they obviously didn't give figures for either, did say that by CTR they were judging actual clicks - i.e. yes, it was a case of having a QR code making people click it, not that it was making people scan it.

(They were also tracking QR scans seperately, but didn't say how well that was going.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I made the experience that it's never a good idea to point a QR code to a fixed domain. Always create a little redirect app where you can define later on what target the link should point on.

So for example point the link to <http://mysite.com/qr>

where you have a little redirection-php file that you can edit at all time.

<comment><USER18> As a user, that would really annoy me. I like to know where I'm going before I put a URL in my browser.

<comment> iso8859-1 I don't think the majority of users check the URL of the QR code. Why wouldn't you trust the advertiser? I think it's really rare to see an advert that looks innocent, but actually isn't, and at the same time contain a QR code that has a "malicious-looking" URL.

<comment><USER18> I guess I'd trust ads more than random QR codes on blogs. My point is, if the point of a redirect is that you can send people to a different page later in time, then you really can't depend on the QR code taking you where you expect, or even to the same page that it used to go to.

<comment><USER19> If this is such a concern, you can always have your browser ask you for permission before it follows a redirect. Any URL anywhere could potentially redirect.

<comment><USER20> I guess the point is that there is a certain amount of comfort to be had if the url is <http://www.domainname.com/> because at least then you know that any redirects are intended for the entire world: no one is shuffling you though ad trackers making you feel like a pawn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know of a FF plugin that will decode QR codes in images on a page, and maybe even turn them into live links? Here's one for Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bfdjglobiolninfgld...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bfdjglobiolninfgldchakgfldifphic)

<comment><USER21> Here's our Mac OS X program that reads QR codes anywhere on your screen -- any program (browser, editor) -- and makes them live links.

<http://www.ripeapps.com/#qrreader>

<comment><USER22> Check out the discussion here <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3532925>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> <http://www.shouldiuseaqrcode.com/>

<comment><USER24> It says no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One way to combat the issue is to create a "designer code", which is an intricately designed QR code. You can check out examples at <http://www.paperlinks.com/designercodes.php>. It is much harder for wrongdoers to mimic one of these.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is a Vietnamese restaurant here in London where waiters have QR-codes in the back of their tees. Just last week I was there and some older guy was following a cute tall and slim waitress around with his iphone, trying to scan it. Creepy as fuck, but I guess it was justified by the QR code placement.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting story, though I don't understand what he says at the end about not being able to redirect the QR Code to another link because the QR Code is the link. Why not just send a 302 redirect?

He sounds like he wouldn't do it on principle, but I don't understand the technical reason why he couldn't.

<comment><USER28> Because then his blog would be unavailable? The code points to the root of his domain.

And even if he was willing to have his blog redirect to that other site, there's still the issue about all these other misprinted codes. If they point to $randomblog it's mostly funny. If they point (via the redirect) to $possible_competitor, it's much worse

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Side note, Justin's an awesome guy, he just did a short stint as a co-worker at Kiva for the last 4-5 months, but is now working on a startup. We had a great laugh around the office last month when he was still here.

</comment><comment><USER30> Odd, I thought it would have created a larger ripple after reading. See here: <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http://justinsomnia.org>

</comment><comment><USER31> ohkhey, that explains, why <http://miniqr.com/justinsomnia> is one of the most visited pages on miniqr, the QR code was scanned via <http://miniqr.com/reader.php> more than a 100 times. (a nice gallery of people scanning the QR code visible if you visit the first URL)

</comment><comment><USER32> QR codes are the new XML. great technology that's perfect for a certain role but being used in far too many other roles whether it's a horrible fit. But it's another buzzword for a resume!

<comment><USER33> Not just another buzzword for a resume, I put one on my resume. I got more responses but no more offers doing that. It seemed to grab attention and then distract people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Funny. I used his QR code to test my barcode scanner when I first got it working in my iPhone App.

+1 pageview.

</comment><comment><USER35> Would be great for viral marketing. As far as I know it is possible to forge codes that are valid but have an image embedded. A stickfigure giving another one oral pleasures for example. Place it in the streets and people who think of QR codes as random jumble will see it as a funny coincidence, take a picture for the funny pages and maybe decypher it and visit your erotic gadgets shop.</comment>


Heat: the next big inequality issue - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/13/heat-next-big-inequality-issue-heatwaves-world <comment><AUTHOR> I don't know how people manage to live without AC. This has got to be near the top of the list regarding quality of life, right up there with clean water and plumbing.</comment>


American Politics: Bad Boys vs. Mean Girls - <AUTHOR> http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2017/08/american-politics-bad-boys-vs-mean-girls.html <comment><USER2> This person appears to be serious, unfortunately.</comment>