Layoffs hit Quora - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/layoffs-hit-qa-startup-quora/ <comment><USER4> Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down.

Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content.

Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets. This is theft!

My guess is that Yelp is next.

EDIT:

I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now. The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?

<comment><USER5> Have you considered that Quora is failing because it's user-hostile? I do not visit Quora links on Google because I know it's going to tease me with a snippet and force me to login.

<comment><USER6> That plus it seems >90% of answers are guerilla advertising

<comment><USER7> And those two facts are related. Quora actively drives casual users away with the forced-login behavior. So the only people on Quora are the people with strong incentives to do so... that is, people who are being paid. Marketeers.

<comment><USER8> That's interesting. I only "follow" (or whatever they call it) a few people on Quora, and Quora sends me an email of what some of them have said over the last two or three days, and I pop over to see what the opinion is about. And, then, there's already some sort of conversation or fight underway - <USER2> usually pretty light.

Generally, I find Quora to be a pretty "ok" place to have a conversation. Better than most of Reddit, for sure. (Reddit does have some fantabulous subs to be sure, but not very many! :-) )

EDIT: HN is good for conversations in threads, although they can veer off track pretty wildly. Reddit can get pretty vitriolic. You _could_ have a conversation, but the participants destroy it. Twitter? Fuggedaboutit. Are there sites I ought to look at where I can have a polite discussion with people that I may or may not agree with on various topics? [FWIW - <USER3> 2008, Reddit itself was pretty close to this, except for maybe /r/politics]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to enjoy Quora, but it lost its charm and I quit once my feed became mostly filled with questions such as:

\- As a software engineer, what makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it?

\- What did your mother say that made your jaw drop?

\- What can I learn in one minute that will be useful for the rest of my life?

Those open questions just feel clickbait-y, with no real value added.

I occasionally see questions similar to the last one on HN (for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129)), it's OK once in a while, but I hope it doesn't become the norm. I think the HN userbase's mindset and strong moderation guarantees that for now.

<comment><USER10> At one point years ago I signed-up for Quora, and the question feed was filled with stuff like:

* Did Picard violate the Prime Directive in TNG S6E13?

* If five ninjas attacked you, how you would you physically defeat them?

* Here's the intellectual take on Spiderman fighting Batman, do you agree?

* Men who have dated supermodels, what was it like?

I thought it was supposed to be a somewhat serious site but it obviously wasn't. I don't think I ever went back. Perhaps the whole point was just a glorified PHP BBS, with a nice theme, better seo, and SV in-crowd early adopters. I never got it.

<comment><USER11> > Did Picard violate the Prime Directive in TNG S6E13

I know you typed that randomly, but for anyone wondering:

> Geordi La Forge falls in love with a woman accused of murder in an isolated > communication relay station. The Enterprise crew investigates the crime, the > only other suspect is a Klingon officer who frequently visited the station. > > In 2019, ScreenRant ranked it the ninth worst episode of Star Trek: The > Next Generation based on IMDB ratings, which was 6.1 out of 10 at that > time.[3] They were critical of the Klingon subplot and described Geordi as a > sexual predator.[3]

> If five ninjas attacked you, how you would you physically defeat them?

Don't let them circle you?

> Here's the intellectual take on Spiderman fighting Batman, do you agree?

Batman would win. Bruce Wayne is smart and has a bat cave and Peter Parker is just a junior intern at buzzfeed.

> Men who have dated supermodels, what was it like?

I would click that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've said it in a few other posts but post WeWork, a lot of the big D, E, F companies are expected to hit profitability/break-even soon.

Some other threads are talking about Google stealing a lot of the content. That's definitely true for weather, flights, but things like long form content is still long form. I would argue these layoffs aren't a function of the GMachine at work, but more generally all the big tech firms with lofted valuations are being 'called in'. Every week, I see at least 1 large name running lay offs here on HNews.

The bubble at the 1B+ vals has started to correct. Firms are expecting people to prove their worth. Lots of times this means IPO and then trading on a multiple of earnings. Many of these guys aren't even near net positive so it's very scary.

I expect 2020 to be the year startups have a lot of trouble at the Series C.

<comment><USER13> This feels insightful. I work for a big tech company (not faang) and we're doing a bunch of insane cost cutting bullshit and we've had a hiring freeze for maybe 10 months now.

It's interesting to see the inside view but see that none of it hits the financial press, or even the analyst stuff like seeking alpha.

<comment><USER14> Keep notes? I'm sure I'm not the only one on here that would love to compare/contrast what you are going through with what the rest of us have as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup

Has the word "startup" simply replaced "company"? I'm thinking we should at least draw the line at a full decade.

<comment><USER16> I have recently interviewed at one of the largest, oldest educational institutions in the US, and also interviewed at one of the largest tech companies in the world. Both of them used the phrase "want to work at a startup?" in the job descriptions and both hiring manager said something along the lines of "we have a great startup culture".

At this point the word is meaningless to me. If anything I have noticed that "we are like a startup" is really code for "we are incredibly disorganized and chaotic but for some reason we are proud of it." Any time something went wrong with one of these companies (was late to a meeting, forgot to attach something to an email, etc) the excuse was "sorry, that's just how it is working at a startup haha!"

<comment><USER17> I do consulting and have worked with clients ranging from 3 person seed stage startups to Intel and Nike, so pretty much the whole spectrum.

Really the only difference to me is that startup executives treat your time like it doesn't matter, 100% of the time. At bigger companies, we will schedule a meeting and talk about something. Many of my small inexperienced clients just send Slack messages one after the other at 6PM on a Friday that make no sense and clearly have no thought behind them beyond "this worked for my friends startup, lets try the same thing!!"

It just feels like 95% of startup founders I meet nowadays are so scatterbrained they can't communicate and will certainly never prepare for anything, all while expecting their employees to always be 100% prepared.

<comment><USER14> Today I learned: My father is a start-up exec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quora is a site that is somehow successful despite its product development decisions. They seem to constantly make the site and community worse with every update.

There's still a decent amount of amazing valuable answers from real verified experts but the experience of using it is horrendous and I've completely stopped trying to write anything anymore.

<comment><USER19> I can't decide whether I hope that whoever decided that iOS Safari users on Quora would get a blocking "F you; use our mobile app" experience after scrolling a short distance is included in the layoffs or will be allowed to stay on and continue the destruction of the company.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, do you want them to take that stratagem to their next company/product?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Like others I'm amazed that Quora still exists. In my experience it's accessible to people outside the programming bubble, but eschewed a lot of deliberate choices that StackOverflow made back in the early days. The result is that it's more of a question and opinion site, than a question and answer site.

There isn't anything wrong with this differentiation in some ways, but it has driven the company further down the SEO path and they don't seem to have tried other things. It feels like SO has built up a recruiting business, tried many times to get their Q&A software into companies with varying success, really managed the costs of their business, and invited public scrutiny of their tech. I can only imagine how much Quora are hemorrhaging from running costs and bad tech choices.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not sure if a bit of confirmation bias on my side but seems like there is a recent big uptick of layoffs at Silicon Valley companies? Popular ones like Quora, TripAvisor, Ebay, Mozilla, Uber, 23andMe, etc we hear about but among my own network, i am even hearing it from smaller startups & businesses.

Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue is not the word for it. Symptom is probably a better description and it feels we are at the precipitous of an incoming storm/crunch/etc.

Please tell me I am imagining things.

Edit: I guess my question is more are all these layoffs an indicator of an incoming recession or is it something more nefarious like the big tech (FAANG) are taking steps to widen their positions while they are still in a "strong" position to do so (e.g. google).

<comment><USER23> The Fed is pumping money, the yield curve inverted, job openings are flat/declining, people have been predicting recession for 2 years... the precise date of an actual recession is not declared until long after the fact, but I certainly wouldn't bet on the recession not having started already. And there are strong political reasons to avoid any mention of recession, so we might see economic indicators getting distorted in the coming months.

<comment><USER24> Alternatively

The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there's less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?)

Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, which means there are less job postings.

People have been predicting doom since the dawn of mankind and sometimes they're right.

Not sure about the yield curve enough to offer any explanation or even what it means when you say it's inverted.

Not sure who's right or what signs are meaningful. Dimension reduction of a search space is a difficult problem. Lots of times people see what they want to see.

I can't help but just throw my hands up these days and go back to ViM, if it was Vegas I'd split my money fifty fifty on doom and gloom and outstanding success.

<comment><USER25> > no one seems to know why there's less liquidity there

It's because JPMorgan Chase and friends think there is too much risk of intraday bankruptcy right now and no one wants to be left hanging on their loan.

<comment> o-__-o here's an interesting thought experiment.. what happens to your loan when your bank goes bankrupt ?

<comment><USER26> Your loan is an asset of the bank. The administrators or liquidators of the bank can sell that asset to someone else.

Or the entire bank can be purchased/merged in which case your loan becomes an asset on the purchaser's balance sheet.

Bankruptcy doesn't mean "all bets are off".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Years ago, I would occasionally answer a question on Quora, which usually seemed like a real question from a person trying to figure something out (for example, software career questions).

In recent years, oddly, even the questions seem fake, as if somebody somewhere is being paid to come up with questions. Why would I spend time to answer if not even the person asking seems to really care? Perhaps, I am not the only one to stop seeing the point in Quora a while ago.

<comment><USER18> That's because they started paying people to post questions, which is completely absurd since the real value is in the answers.

Unfortunately, as predicted by pretty much everyone, it led to a massive influx of generic, repetitive, and trivial questions spammed endlessly to the top writers who have now stopped contributing. Most questions are just spam sinkholes in an endless battle by fake accounts for top position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I used to be quite active on Quora, but have noticed a decline in content and ux quality - seems like they are trying to 'growth hack' in a way that is not benefiting users, e.g.:

\- Links to other questions open in new tabs

\- Most content is not shown unless you login, they are really trying to push being logged in and their mobile app

\- Answers with images seem to be ranked higher (even if poor quality)

\- Clickbait-y questions and answers

I hope they can return to quality since in the beginning it was such a great resource - it was awesome to be able to get answers from domain experts, celebrities, etc... and the site was very usable.

<comment><USER20> The ads are also very well-disguised, as if they were native content. I understand they're trying to stay alive, but at some point you end up driving people away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's genuinely hard to believe that Quora is still running.

<comment><USER30> I get where you're coming from. But I have to admit, I read my Quora digest email really often. I'm impressed how often I not only click through to read an answer, but enjoy the answer and find it valuable.

Quora definitely does some questionable things nowadays, but I'd also argue they are still getting some key things right too.

<comment><USER31> The difference I'm seeing in the comments seems to be between actual Quora users and people who just keep stumbling on Quora via search. My impression is that Quora does well at tailoring content for its users while being obnoxiously aggressive about getting non-users to sign up.

<comment><USER32> Sounds very similar to Pinterest; a spammy clickbait-ridden excuse for a website serving only to deceive you when you search for products or images for non-users, or an amazing tool you can use to categorize all the things, and find inspiration for similar items for users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Say what you want about how bad Quora content is, Quora has the most engaging email digest I ever knew.

Every day they send me an email with some answers on topics I'm interested in, and I can't help but click on 6-8 of them from EACH email. The median CTR in any other of email digests recieved by me is zero.

<comment><USER34> I had the same interaction but one day their algorithm flubbed and sent me a question that had very obvious Avengers: Endgame spoilers in the title. I had to unsubscribe after that.

<comment><USER33> But you should have seen Endgame on the first weekend it was released! /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I used to be on the side of "why do we need Quora" camp but over the last few years I see that they have some really good content that no one else has, particularly content about obscure questions that wiki is not meant for. So I end up visiting often. The problem is they don't have a way to monetize the content. They can only survive on cash so long.

</comment><comment><USER36> The team at Quora is really strong. Many ex-Quorans have gone on to start their own really successful companies.

If you or someone you know is affected, feel free to use this spreadsheet: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hk4REpHkCCTS74MGGRNR...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hk4REpHkCCTS74MGGRNRHX1kQPEls4_vseUbul9dYW4/edit#gid=0)

</comment><comment><USER37> Companies like Quora should provide at least three or six months of severance in cases of layoffs. There's no reason they can't. They surely knew three or six months in advance that they would likely be making this move.

As startup workers, we should shame loudly and publicly companies that don't provide sufficient severance packages. It's the difference between causing a slight disturbance in worker's lives and potentially huge financial hardship.

(Of course all employees should have a financial reserve. The fact is many people don't though. And even if they do, it hurts a lot to make them burn it down.)

Someone should make a blacklist of startups that did layoffs without sufficient severance. Maybe I'll get around to it.

<comment><USER38> You should should loudly at the state of California for still paying a max of $450 per week for unemployment.

If you're playing the startup game, you're trading job security and pay for potential upside. I know people who've been burnt just as bad as a layoff because the company got sold for scraps. Don't expect big company benefits out of a startup; that's not how the game works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Better title: Quora still inexplicably exists 8 years after its irrelevance became apparent.

You know, good news story.

<comment><USER40> > _You know, good news story._

You're missing the forest for the trees.

It's Quora. It's Softbank imploding. It's WeWork. It's Wag. It's Uber. It's Tesla. It's Doordash. It's Lyft. It's Casper. It's 23andme. It's Digital Ocean. It's Mozilla.

Who knows what the financials of the giant private companies actually look like?

This is classic late economic cycle: the companies still _appear_ to be succesful, but the fundamentals are shifting.

<comment><USER41> Did you intend to include public companies on your list?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is it time to revive fuckedcompany.com yet?

<comment><USER43> Is it ever not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can they accidentally delete the breadcrumbs of questions I read, which they appear to keep about me, on the way out? Initially I loved Quora and participated, but some magic default setting toggle changed and suddenly I'd get emailed about something I clicked on due to a Google search result which took me to a Quora question or answer - pre-authenticated of course.

Most of that is my fault, but now that info is available someplace forever.

</comment><comment><USER45> Quora used to be OK, many years ago. I wrote a few detailed technical answers about C, C++ and embedded programming.

Then it basically became GeoCities or MySpace or whatever. Garbage, filled with ads and posters shilling their services and goods, just yucky. Plus, as others have mentioned, doing a simple search, going over to quora, and then being forced to login.

<comment><USER46> I stopped using it when they pulled the same "you can read this public user- provided comment, but if you want to read the NEXT one, you need to log in" shit that Facebook does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In the past few days, Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor all announced layoffs. Coincidence or early sign of something bigger?

<comment><USER27> My thoughts exactly. Two scenarios: \- the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, which is when they get paid, so lots of companies are now doing layoffs instead of just getting more VC money \- or, the economy (which hasn't had a real recession in a long time, since not even 2011 was quite a recession) is just due for a recession and tech startups are the canary telling us this is so

<comment><USER40> > _the WeWork IPO-that-wasn 't has caused most VC's to decide that you really > need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO,_

That's a polite way to put it.

I'd say the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't was the _public_ saying don't foist your shit on us. How many VC bagholders are now sitting on "billions of dollars" in meaningless paper gains based on nothing but SoftBank's and others nonsense valuations?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Working at a company where the founder is so wealthy from a past exit can be really frustrating because they have little financial incentive to be running the company in a way that is in the best interest of the common shareholder (e.g. employees).

</comment><comment><USER48> Quora's web page restrictions were always annoying.

You can search for something from Google, and the site allows you to view the page. Then the page suggests other links, and when you click on it, it forces you to sign in.

The trick is to copy that link, and open the page in a new incognito window.

I don't know why they did it this way, but it's thoroughly annoying, and I try to avoid visiting the site if I can. And I roll my eyes whenever that site comes up in a search result.

<comment><USER49> Or, add a question mark at the end of the Url and refresh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> There is some really good content on Quora (by which I mean good writers, and even some war criminals...) but they need beating into shape.

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't understand what's going on with Quora. It used to be full of insightful answers that improved the quality of my life. But now my feed is cluttered with clickbait's being recommended by random people saying "Good article." and -- just in general -- very low quality answers written by people without experience and who fail to back up their claims with evidence. It's become a big source of frustration reading these "verbal vomit" answers and trying to sort through the misinformation.

Whoever the ML engineers on the recommendation stack were.. really fucked up imo.

</comment><comment><USER52> "Layoffs hit techcrunch" will be next: uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading: [https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_...](https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc- session_a7ec9796-3f8a-4bd0-806a-953f55eac9f5)

<comment><USER53> They hijacked my back button, may be why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> A few days ago a search about CNAMES landed me on a Quora page which I quickly left. Like a fool I wasn't incognito. And less than 24h later I got an email from Q to highlight other stale and incorrect information on their site.

Creepy and bad.

Unfortunate that layoffs don't start with upper management.

</comment><comment><USER55> Personally I love reading some answers on Quora. But it's not because of Quora; the answer could be on any other site. I tried Quora Ads and lost some money only to discover that the returns are comparatively the worst among all the channels we tried, and off by several folds. That takes me and my money off of Quora Ads. If the company wants to monetize by selling ads, they should probably spend time making the advertisers' experience better. Because at the end of the day the advertisers are the people who are paying them.

Disclaimer: I didn't write this to badmouth or (un)recommend them. I am only curious if other people's experience is the same.

</comment><comment><USER56> There used to be quite a few very interesting and insightful people who answered questions over there. These days it's all people trying to shamelessly self-promote with very low quality answers, something Quora should have banned a long time ago.

<comment><USER57> I'd be surprised if that wasn't a decent chunk of their traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I don't understand why Quora had so many employees. I don't intend to harsh on them: I literally don't understand their business.

To my naïve understanding: they have an authentication system, a moderately high throughput CMS with a search engine, and...? + User-generated content. OK, some DevOps people, some people who negotiate with the CDNs. They seem pretty snappy so some serious work presumably went into the back end, but still. WhatsApp had only 50 people!

What am I completely missing here? why did they have 200 people?

</comment><comment><USER59> IMO these types of companies never had a future. They only succeeded because of monetary inflation in the corporate sphere due to ultra-low interest rates.

If the interest repayment on a bank loan is less than 2%, then it means that any business which can make more than 2% profit on their activities is profitable. But do such businesses deserve to exist? The Fed sets the interest rate so they decide what kind of business is profitable and is allowed to exist.

It's obvious why the current economy has benefited tech companies that operate at high scale with ultra-low or close to 0 profit margins.

</comment><comment><USER60> California Employment Development Department said the company had not filed the type of notice that is required for mass layoffs, suggesting the cuts in the state involve fewer than 50 employees.

</comment><comment><USER61> "We need to reduce our burn rate to a sustainable level from which we can focus on pursuing the mission and growing the business over the long term.". The question is: what mission?

</comment><comment><USER62> We talked to Quora's CEO about 2 years ago about premium content and alternative business models, including subscription.

There was no interest at the time and advertising was a sole focus for business model.

CEO never followed up.

Sad.

</comment><comment><USER63> It's surprising to me that they just started layoff this year. This "startup" will come to an end because of its arrogance.

</comment><comment><USER64> Seems like a pretty solid wave of layoffs as of late. Harbinger of startup doom? Temporary correction?

</comment><comment><USER65> So they overestimated what Quora really could be and burned way more money? Or is Google suffocating smaller tech companies?

Content curation doesn't scale as well as search algorithms. It reminds me of Yahoo and other portals who relies on editorial staffs (not meant it in a bad way).

</comment><comment><USER66> This is an honest question, what is Quoras business model? It feels like a traditional forum.

</comment><comment><USER67> Quora used to be my favorite place to find interesting answers. Now the site is filled with marketers. It's mystery for me how the site still show up on Google every time I need to search something.

</comment><comment><USER68> Gheesh... First Uber, DigitalOcean, 23AndMe... and now Quora

</comment><comment><USER69> is layoff announcement becoming more frequent recently?

</comment><comment><USER70> burn rate? so they are still running on vc? i guess it doesnt surprise me. they arent the worst thing to get massive vc. i will be very entertaining to see when the next recession hits and all these shitty companies dry up overnight. and it will be nice to have fewer arrogant tech peoples around who only have money because of misguided investors who have more money than sense.

</comment><comment><USER71> I knew Quora's time was up when they sent me a partner program email. It devolved into "yahoo answers" very quickly after that.

</comment><comment><USER72> "Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup"

Companies that are ten years old are no longer startups.

"IBM, a 109-year-old software & services startup, will enhance the red carpet livestream with Grammy Insights with Watson this Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles."

;)

</comment><comment><USER60> Do we know how many ? News is useless unless its more than 10%

</comment><comment><USER73> Quora layoffs just before peak election season?

I did not see that one coming.

</comment><comment><USER74> Why are Tech Crunch highjacking my back button?

</comment><comment><USER75> Quora was a good product. I remember the first time I used it, I was amazed by the quality of their answers. Even Jordan Peterson betseller book was based on a Quora answer. Sadly, they decided to focus on questions instead. Now, it's filled with garbage questions and it is just slightly better than Yahoo answers.

</comment><comment><USER76> is it really a startup if it's been around 10 years?

</comment><comment><USER77> According to the article, the number of layoffs is unknown (though I assume we'll know shortly since they're required by law to report it in California). They have approximately 200 employees, it also mentioned.

According to a quick search, they were certified for 57 H1B visas. You read that right: 57 employees, in just 2019, of an approximate 200 person workforce, are foreigners that CEO D'Angelo claimed he was required to hire because he could not find US workers.

It looks like another 50 or so in the previous two years.

So half their employees are foreigners? How many US citizens are being laid off?

Some of these jobs, according the Department of Labor's data, are paying as low as $60K... in Mountain View.

Truly disgusting that this company is abusing the system like this. A fair punishment for these companies, along with all their visas being immediately revoked and a massive fine to discourage others, would be for the executive board to be forced to move their company to S. Asia, since apparently that's where their talent pool originates. If they aren't willing to hire US workers, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the infrastructure, laws, capital markets, etc. that are provided by US taxpayers.

* email@example.com

* [https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Quora/1096469.htm](https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Quora/1096469.htm)

* [https://h1bsalary.online/extended_lca_data.php?LCADataID=781...](https://h1bsalary.online/extended_lca_data.php?LCADataID=7815163)</comment>


Ask HN: Which SDK is better if I want to use numbers in my app? - <AUTHOR> I need some way to make ar app where it can read numbers, I know on Vuforia it is not possible. <comment><USER2> Like with OCR?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, like with this. But as I understand with OCR you should be connected to the internet, I would like to have app working without internet.</comment></comment>


Commands as a Service with Cmd.io - <AUTHOR> http://gliderlabs.com/devlog/2016/announcing-cmd-io/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. How does it compare to a tool like Ansible?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wut</comment>


Show HN: YouTuLong – TL;DW chrome extension/website for YouTube - <AUTHOR> Two links, So I'll post a message:
Chrome Extension: http://goo.gl/rhwid5 Website: https://youtulong.com
Basically, it runs a simple skip to timeframe script with youtube API, thus TL;DW's videos without actually editing video.
By using the chrome extension (shows and runs TL;DW's made for the video you are watching on youtube), the users remain in youtube website, so no traffic gets stolen.
For more advanced features, use the website. <comment><USER2> It isn't totally obvious what it does. Can it skip multiple times? The videos on the home page aren't really that inviting-looking so I only looked at the tuna, which seems like it could have been achieved with a simple timestamp in the url.</comment>


Show HN: Resume Reviewers – Get apersonal resume review by email within 48 hours - <AUTHOR> 	I run a service called Resume Reviewers. What we are is a small startup that is solely dedicated to providing high quality, personalized resume reviews. All of the reviews are done over email because we feel that it makes for a more personal conversation between the reviewer and the client.
I am just looking for some feedback more than anything. Thanks!
If you are interested the site is: https://resumereviewers.com/ <comment><USER2> Good luck with your new idea. I think its much needed. You can also add review for cover letters, follow-up emails or guides on how to handle phone call interviews. Basically you can expand to many different stages of hiring process and even connect with head-hunters for special positions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, indeed there are any more ways we can expand this. Thanks for taking a look.</comment></comment>


Kedro: open-source library for production-ready machine learning code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@QuantumBlack/introducing-kedro-the-open-source-library-for-production-ready-machine-learning-code-d1c6d26ce2cf <comment><USER2> > Machine learning models which can be deployed effortlessly and operate > unattended are far more likely to achieve commercial objectives.

Likeliness of achieving commercial objectives is tied to the commercial usefulness and accuracy of your analysis and predictions, not the ease of deployment, or-even more curiously-ability to be left unattended.

<comment><USER3> It's surely not a particularly contentious point that hard to deploy systems that require lots of attention to keep running are less likely to achieve commercial objectives.

Just like your website being stable and easy to update helps your business use it to make money. Of course it _also_ needs to be tied to commercial usefulness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like how they implemented the data catalog [0] so that it's yaml- based and also has a paths-style cascading method of files that can be common across or within teams as well as personal for individual projects. I think this makes it easy to build up with tools for meta analysis (how many data sets are used, etc) and even viz using a variety of tools rather than having the metadata management tied to a system or product.

Are there other techniques for data catalogs that are file based or at least open standard based that scale all the way up from developer?

[0] [https://kedro.readthedocs.io/en/latest/04_user_guide/04_data...](https://kedro.readthedocs.io/en/latest/04_user_guide/04_data_catalog.html)

<comment><USER5> There's the intake project from the Anaconda folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Conjecture: production quality of ml code has mostly to do with how heuristics are designed and battle tested and almost nothing to do with how the training/inference pipeline is constructed.

<comment><USER7> Just because the challenge is relatively trivial to solve, doesn't make it any less important though. Experiment management, and the transition to production, is recognised as having potentially high impact to successful delivery. My understanding is that this takes care of details, which can otherwise get forgotten in the race for the best model. But YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious as to if anyone can say how this compares to dagster since both libraries seems to rely on deploying to engines like Airflow?

<comment><USER9> Kedro puts emphasis on seamless transition to prod without jeopardizing work in experimentation stage:

\- pipeline syntax is absolutely minimal (even supporting lambdas for simple transitions), inspired by the Clojure library core.graph [https://github.com/plumatic/plumbing](https://github.com/plumatic/plumbing)

\- sequential and parallel runners are built-in (don't have to rely on Airflow)

\- io provides wrappers for existing familiar data sources, but directly borrows arguments from Pandas, Spark APIs so no new API to learn

\- flexibility in the sense you could rip out anything, for example, the whole Data Catalog replacing with another mechanism for data access like Haxl

\- there's a project template which serves as a framework with built-in conventions from 50+ analytics engagements

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> tldr, if you really dig past the marketing (from the FAQ (1)):

> We see Airflow and Luigi as complementary frameworks: Airflow and Luigi are > tools that handle deployment, scheduling, monitoring and alerting. Kedro is > the worker that should execute a series of tasks, and report to the Airflow > and Luigi managers.

> Create the data transformation steps as pure Python functions

Personally, I feel mystified why you would use something like this rather than a more mature product like say, Spark, that natively supports clustering, etc, which is what I would really like to see in the FAQ.

Is it a processing solution? Not really, since it suggests you can offload the heavy lifting to an engine, eg. spark. An orchestrator? Apparently not, because that's a complementary product. So... it's like, a configuration management tool?

Pretty hard to see the use case to me.

1\. [https://kedro.readthedocs.io/en/latest/06_resources/01_faq.h...](https://kedro.readthedocs.io/en/latest/06_resources/01_faq.html#how- does-kedro-compare-to-other-projects)

<comment><USER2> Because running Spark to do anything that doesn't actually require a whole cluster is like using earthmoving equipment to assemble a series of small ikea tables?

<comment><USER10> If you're doing something that trivial, you don't need anything more complicated than airflow.

<comment><USER11> We experienced a big hit on our productivity when we were using airflow, as there is significant overhead when running pipelines.

We think this is easier than airflow and needs less setup:

      - You don't need a scheduler, neither a db, nor any initial setup. On the contrary, kedro provides the `kedro new` command which will create a project for you that runs out of the box (optionally with a small pipeline example).
      - You can run your pipelines as simple python applications, making it easy to iterate in IDEs or terminals
      - Tasks are simple python functions, instead of operators
      - Datasets are first level citizens. You don't need to explicitly define dependencies between the tasks: they are resolved according to what each task produces/consumes

We also think that a big differentiating factor is the `DataCatalog`. Being able to define in YAML files where your data is and how it is stored/loaded means that the same code will run in any environment given the appropriate configuration files.

This makes testing & moving from development to production much easier.

(Disclaimer - I am one of the lead developers of kedro)

We hope that you give it a try and give us feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Starting to see a lot of these frameworks pop up to simplify deployment of machine learning models. I'm really hoping one or two start to stand out...but it doesn't feel like this one.</comment>


Ask HN: How does 'Free for a day' iPhone App Strategies perform? - <AUTHOR>

Any of you have experience with this kind of strategy? Did it improve your sales the days after? Would you recommend it? <comment><USER2> I've seen it help for unranked applications.

If you're currently a decently-ranked paid application, don't forget that in the transition back from free -> paid you will be unranked until you have sufficient paid purchases over time to rank again. You could end up throwing away whatever momentum you have :-)</comment>


Local—now with a dash of Zagat and a sprinkle of Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/localnow-with-dash-of-zagat-and.html <comment><USER2> Whoah, "Any future ratings, reviews, or photos will be visible on the web under the name <my name>". "Your reviews and associated photos are displayed to [...] anyone who views places you've reviewed."

No way to "share with precisely the right folks"? Talk about awkward online sharing. Ugh.

I wrote 198 reviews in the past but I don't feel comfortable making them public. I'd be fine with extended circles or some such. If I try to edit them, I get forced to make them public. I'm a bit disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER3> This just looks awful.... Looking for restaurants in my city I get a list, of which I can display a whole two (!!!) on my screen at once, next to a tiny sliver of a map, because google wants to provide me a link to every service they have ever invented on the side of the screen (seriously, this is barely an exaggeration).... And within this list I get a host of useless information such as "at a glance: flavour, dining experience", "Score: overall: 15" (15 out of what?!!!), and a half of one persons text review (what good is half of one review for anyone?). Awful design. Just afwul.

And this is aside from the fact that the big 'restructure' and integration with G+ to succeed really needs me to have all of my friends using the same service, reviewing restaurants under their real names (v. unlikely).

Why don't google just focus on providing some clean and simple frontends to all that data they have. I'd love a better service to look up a decent restaurant to go to. This is very definitely not it...

<comment><USER4> This sounds like a "30 seconds of usage just to find reasons to bash another G+ product" type of review. The Zagat rating system is pretty clearly described when you choose a category, and it's also shown if you hover the score. Also, are you saying there's too much or too little text? First you're complaining that you can't see enough, then you're saying there's not enough information. There's a contradiction here.

I honestly think it looks fine, and seeing 3 restaurants per category to choose a category seems fine to me. I think there's all the info I need at each step of drilling down as well. Looks great to me.

<comment><USER3> > Also, are you saying there's too much or too little text?

Its both. There is loads too much stuff on the screen (that I'm not interested in in the slightest), and at the same time it is very difficult for me to try to make a comparison of multiple restaurants. Whether I want to do this by average review, price, location, by looking at individual reviews, etc. it all involves a huge amount of scrolling and clicking and remembering where to scroll to on the previous page etc. (much more than necessary). At least for the way I want to look for restaurants.

Actually the Zagat rating system is pretty straightforward, but I don't seem to get it in my city (outside the USA), just an 'overall score'.

Also - Apologies if I was a little on the condescending side - its genuinely because I want google to produce a good product that I can use, but for me I can never see myself finding this useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like Google and G+, but I think the appropriate place for these updates is in Google Maps. I don't know when I'll be searching for food in G+. Probably not soon.

IMO, what really needs to be updated are the Maps pages that look like this: <http://goo.gl/RwKqM>. Every time I land on one I just end up manually typing the restaurant's name into Yelp instead. That's extra work, but I do it. Then I'm in Yelp and I just browse around in there instead of Google Maps, so those pages pretty much actively push me to use another service.

Generally I go to yelp because clicking the restaurant's picture doesn't eject me into a random site that the picture was scraped from, the reviews seem to be more helpful, and the users all have pictures. All the blank user silhouettes on the maps pages make it feel cheap. A lot of other things could be improved too but I can't think of what specifically atm.

<comment><USER6> The Google+ Local landing pages _are_ the replacement for those Maps pages. It may take time for this to roll out but it's what I see when I click "more info" or the restaurant name from a search in Maps. It's a huge improvement.

<comment><USER5> I agree! I wasn't seeing this earlier but now I am. Pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This interface is way too cluttered. They're showing a half-dozen arbitrary numbers per restaurant and that means absolutely nothing to me. The UX needs a lot of work and needs to get beyond this silly made-for-computers rating system.

Do they really expect me to calculate the average "cost per person" too? I know it says optional but that's absurd.

<comment><USER8> "Made for computers rating system"? The thirty-point scale is exactly what Zagat has done for years.

 _Do they really expect me to calculate the average "cost per person" too? I know it says optional but that's absurd._

Total bill divided by number of people. It's optional, but ultimately a very helpful field for those who are reading your review. Most people want to go to a good restaurant, but not if it costs $300 per person. Being able to filter those out without manually reading each review is helpful to them, and theoretically you are writing a review to help other people :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google keeps changing the names of things that they've previously launched. Google Docs becomes Google Drive. Google Places becomes Google Plus Local (aside-- why isn't Local tied into search instead of Google+?!).

I think name changes like this are incredibly resource-consuming and confusing for users. It's interesting to note that Apple has never changed iTunes' name, even though it's way broader than "tunes" at this point.

<comment><USER10> Google Docs is still around. Google Drive is just an addon to that which provides storage for more than just documents. Previously this was integrated into Google Docs, which made no sense.

<comment><USER9> In the black bar at the top of gmail, there used to be a link called "Docs". Now it says "drive". It's been pretty well fully rebranded to "Drive". In fact, docs.google.com redirects to drive.google.com.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, apparently I haven't been upgraded to Google Drive. All my links still say Docs, as well as the URL. Although I do now see this message:

"Google Docs will soon be upgraded to Google Drive"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was wondering when Google would tie in their purchase of Zagat.

Now, if only they would save the Zagat brand by restructuring its criteria. When I saw a Zagat sticker on the outside of a KFC I almost threw up. They need to remove themselves from the fast food space entirely: <http://www.zagat.com/fastfood>

<comment><USER12> Your Zagat rated pretentiousness is delicious.

Why shouldn't fast food be rated?

<comment><USER11> Because there is no differentiating factor between a 5-star steakhouse and a fast food joint. They need different logos/stickers to display on the outside window IMO.

<comment><USER13> Zagat already rates everything from the corner burger joint to a steakhouse. Having the Zagat sticker in the window doesn't mean anything, it's about the rating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've always found the Zagat "30 point" scale to be confusing

I'm surprised to see that it made the cut into Goog's interface for general consumption:

I've always thought that the Metacritic / RottenTomatoes / etc scoring system was more intuitive where they show an aggregate professional review score side-by-side with user reviews:

eg <http://www.metacritic.com/movie/men-in-black-iii>

<comment><USER15> Not to mention the Zagat ratings are often wildly inaccurate. For example, in my city, they gave the "best French restaurant" title to an overpriced chain, not to the actualy French restaurant, run by a French chef, that has a 3 month long waiting list. Having been to both, and to France, the two don't compare, and yet Zagat doesn't even mention the good place.

Not to mention your very valid point on their "30 point" system which just plain doesn't make sense. A metacritic type thing would in fact be WAY better. Also they should add Michelin stars, because those I've at least found to be reliable.

<comment><USER16> Zagat ratings are often used by travelers, casual diners, etc. If they included a restaurant with a 3 month waiting list they'd be setting up a lot of their readers for disappointment.

<comment><USER17> _If they included a restaurant with a 3 month waiting list they'd be setting up a lot of their readers for disappointment._

Unless they're planning in advance. I'd be kinda pissed if I arrived in a city and learned there was a kick-ass French restaurant but was not warned to book in advance when that was a real possibility and I could have done so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This might be better if G+ had any frickin' idea where I am. None of the places listed are local.</comment>


India wants to build the largest (by far) solar project (4,000 MW) - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/india-wants-build-solar-project-so-large-4000-megawatts-it-would-dwarf-everything-else.html

<comment><USER2> (Y)</comment>


Shared folders and multiple file upload in Google Docs - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/shared-folders-and-multiple-file-upload.html

<comment><USER2> Now if they just created a decent file manager that would allow me to managed all the attachments in my Inbox, I would be a happy man!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised they don't also/instead allow docs to be tagged.</comment>


Africa's Aid Mess: Why the philanthropy of Gates, Clinton and Bono fails. - <AUTHOR> http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424053111903747504579185800700741812.html

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of a quip I read somewhere: "OLPC is a rich man's idea of what poor men need. It's like donating an expresso machine to a homeless shelter."</comment>


Why Do Fantasy Novels Have So Much Food? - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fantasy-books-food <comment><USER2> As a fantasy author, I am constantly looking for ways to provide description that engages all five senses. In most fiction, the vast majority of description is focused on what characters see, but if you really want to place the reader in a setting, it needs to feel tactile. When a character walks into a boggy marsh, I don't just want to describe the tepid pools of water; I want to describe the pungent stench of rotting wood, and the texture of the soggy ground underfoot. It's one thing for a character to remark on how hot and humid it is; it's another to describe the feeling of the wet, vaporous air as beads of water are condensing on your skin and coalescing with your sweat.

Food is great at engaging all five senses. Not only is it one of the few places where you get to talk about taste, but food gives off aromas. Eating food is a tactile experience: you can _feel_ the stickiness of a sweet jelly as you lick it off your fingers. Food has a texture that you can feel on your tongue, and it feels different in your mouth depending on whether you allow it to slowly slide down your throat or stuff your cheeks with it. And kitchens are full of sounds that add richness to the setting: you can hear the crackling of a fire, the sizzle of a piece of meat dropped onto an iron cooking surface, the delightful _shing_ of a carving knife being sharpened. You hear things at the dinner table, too: the delightful crunch of biting into a cracker, or the clattering of cutlery on plates. A baked pastry will make different sounds when you bite into it depending on whether it crust is hard or thin and flaky.

Fantasy is often viewed as one of the most immersive genres, largely because it spends so much time on providing detailed description that not only tells you what is happening in the world, but giving you a sense of what it _feels_ like to live in that world. This often means that fantasy novels are longer and slower paced, but one of the reasons that many people enjoy large fantasy tomes is that they enjoy the feeling of being transported and immersed in another world.

<comment><USER3> I usually end up skimming/skipping lengthy food descriptions in fantasy books. They don't add much to character or plot development. I like the idea of 'engaging all five senses' but think there should be more intentionality in it than just engaging senses for the sake of engaging senses, which is often what food descriptions seem like.

<comment><USER4> That's how I feel about visual descriptions in many books. I have a weak visual imagination, so most of it goes straight through me without leaving an impression. I wonder if non-visual sensory description is especially valuable to people like me? I'm not particularly interested in food (or in fantasy for that matter), but the snippets of description in Kuiper's comment helped me to understand why those non-visual sensory elements can make a setting feel real.

<comment><USER5> Stephen King's "On Writing" has an illustration of the opposite approach to this style: being judicious in description and still creating a rich environment in the reader's mind, with just enough of the important details.

It begins "Look - here's a table covered with a red cloth." [https://www.google.ca/amp/s/mukundacharan.wordpress.com/2011...](https://www.google.ca/amp/s/mukundacharan.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/writing- as-telepathy/amp/)

As someone like you who hates too much description, I'm comforted in the idea that judicious description is a skill to be appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Other characters only get stew, which is oddly omnipresent. In her satirical travel guide to fantasy literature, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Jones jokes that stew "is the staple food in Fantasyland, so be warned..."_

I'm a novice cook, but if you've got a hodgepodge of foraged ingredients, some kind of stew is definitely what I'd be making. Hard to imagine an intrepid adventurer having the time or equipment to cook much else.

I mean really, when was the last time you cooked a perfect omelette or steak over a campfire on the lam?

<comment><USER7> From my understanding, French kitchen gardens are called 'potager' gardens, which stems from soup/food cooked in a pot. I suspect that a lot of historical cooking was 'heat some liquids and what you have on hand in a pot'.

<comment><USER8> It's also a good way to get some sterilized water into your system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm making my way through Wheel of Time right now. There probably could've been two fewer books if the descriptions of food and female characters' breasts were edited down.

<comment><USER10> Wheel of Time the best book is around a 7/10\. With some dropping as low as 3/10\. There are much better examples of more immersive Fantasy out there. WoT, is a great example of a massive but mediocre series.

EDIT: The ratings are my opinion, but the downturn can be seen on goodreads ratings and is discussed in the WoT community. While not all agree there was a downturn, it being a point of contention in this series is an indicator there was one for most people.

<comment><USER11> As a completionist, the WoT series is one of only two that I've ever _intentionally_ decided I did not want to finish. After six or seven books of weird preteen level sexual politics and behavior, and stupid plot threads because of if, I decided I'd had enough.

For reference, the other series was Twilight, and I made it all the way through book three before I gave up in disgust at that waste of time. So maybe that means WoT is roughly twice as good as Twilight in my eyes? I'm not exactly sure that's high praise. Or praise at all...

<comment><USER12> Wheel of Time is my go to example of bad fantasy literature. But there is someone disagreeing in here. Maybe it's just sunk cost bias. But anyhow it goes to show how tastes vary.

<comment><USER11> To each their own. It's often brought up in discussions as people's favorite fantasy series, or an example of a good series. I don't fault anyone for thinking the former, but I think the latter requires a bit of justification if not presented in purely subjective manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Blog devoted to making meals from Game Of Thrones: [http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/home/game-thrones- recipes/...](http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/home/game-thrones- recipes/recipes-by-meal/)

Blog devoted to "revisiting rpg rations": [http://cookingtheperiodway.blogspot.com/](http://cookingtheperiodway.blogspot.com/)

Somewhat related, blog from the food stylist for the recent Hannibal and American God series: [http://janicepoonart.blogspot.com/](http://janicepoonart.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER14> I tried making one of those Game of Thrones recipes, but Whole Foods told me they don't carry aurochs shoulder anymore :-(

<comment><USER15> Also, slug liver is really hard to come by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Redwall was one of my favorite series. I saw Brian Jacques at a book signing. He had a very entertaining personality and was really excited to meet his young readers.

I didn't realize other books had so much food.

<comment><USER17> Just reading the headline I immediately thought of Brian Jacques. I devoured (heh) those books as a kid.

<comment><USER18> Same here, Redwall and scones in particular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tolkien wrote LOTR in the late 1930's, right after the Great Depression. I would guess that the UK weathered it better than places like the US dustbowl states, but it really made an impression on people. My grandparents would have a pantry full of canned food, yet claim they didn't have anything in the house to eat. And my mother who went through wartime rationing in the UK (she picked up coal that fell off the trains to heat their house), has similar behavior. So I'm not surprised if some of the older fantasy authors include lavish descriptions of food in their novels, as that would be an ideal for them.

<comment><USER20> Tolkien had already been through one war and was writing LOTR during the second. He was certainly familiar with rationing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought everyone knew to not eat the food in Faerie.

Unless Mr. Valabar prepares it, of course.

Eating food is something everyone does, and is an important cultural indicator in the real world. When your book is essentially a travelogue of the hero's journey, _of course_ you're going to describe the food. For the rest of the age, tourists are going to just show up in Mordor and order a bowl of authentic Master Samwise's coney stew. And they'll visit Lonely Mountain to order lakemen's cram, whether the locals still eat it or not. It'd be like going to Mexico and never eating a taco.

<comment><USER22> > It'd be like going to Mexico and never eating a taco.

Just remember that there's only a very small subset of "tacos" that actually represent historic/traditional Mexican cuisine, and it gets even more controversial when you try to define what it means to be Mexican (does Tex Mex cuisine count?) -- it's really a fascinating history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't forget the Dragonlance cookbook.

Brandon Sanderson pointed out that showing meals is a great way to demonstrate worldbuilding and culture at the same time in a scene.

<comment><USER24> I never thought of that but yeah George RR Martin definitely uses it to portray the culture of the kingdom: from the spicy pepper-infused Dornish cuisine to the "bowl o' brown" from the flea bottom of kings landing, it really is a fantastic plot device to convey a great deal of information so concisely.

As a consequence I can't read his books while even a little bit hungry.

</comment></comment><comment> Null-Set It has been argued it stems from a tradition of using food as an allegory for sex in fairy tales. [http://www.slaphappylarry.com/food-children-literature- ficti...](http://www.slaphappylarry.com/food-children-literature-fiction/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Only fantasy novels? To take an example close to hand, Flaubert's _Sentimental Education_ describes a fair number of elaborate meals.

<comment><USER26> It's big in historical fiction, as well. Patrick O'Brian goes on at length about burgoos and wine, and soused hog face, and suet pudding, not to mention the infamous toasted cheese that Killick is always whipping up in it's special sterling silver chafing dish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This goes back all the way to Homer's Odyssey. Half of that work is Odysseus or Telemachus and whomever they've met eating copious amounts of meat and bread, and drinking quite a lot of wine. Yet not a vegetable to be found anywhere…

</comment><comment><USER28> For the same reason that there's so much high school in Anime?

<comment><USER6> You mean the target market of fantasy novels is chefs?

<comment><USER28> No.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "What do they eat?"[0] is an obnoxious and repetitive question certain readers will ask when engaging a fictional world... but even when you don't consciously ask it, your brain will likely notice the answer's presence / absence while it determines the level of immersion you feel.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwlt4FqmS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwlt4FqmS0) explores this in the context of video games...

</comment><comment><USER30> It translates to the big screen too. I remember being highly distracted during the first LOTR movie, when the adventurers pile in and raid Bilbo's pantry for an on the spot feast - I was thinking "How come a tiny, friendless Hobbit who lives a typical bachelor lifestyle would have such vast quantities of perishable food in his pantry? Enough to feed a horde of hungry humans like that?".

I look back to my own bachelor life in the past, and I barely had a sandwich in my fridge!

<comment><USER31> Hobbits are explicitly noted for being particularly fond of and interested in food, and Bilbo is a wealthy bachelor with, even for a Hobbit, an unusual interest in food.

Being surprised that he has an inordinate quantity of food is like being surprised a wealthy single geek has an unusual quantity of computing equipment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Noticed this as well. I've learned to identify pretty quickly whether a section is merely descriptive. Being able to skim is a pretty valuable skill imo.

That's not to say that such detail isn't valuable, of course. But, at least for me, there's a time and place for it. The first time I read LOTR I skimmed past the food and the songs, as I cared more about the plot, but I did otherwise on subsequent readings.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm not sure if Neil Gaiman counts as a Fantasy author but In American Gods this is kind of referenced in a tongue and cheek way where it's insisted upon that they must share a drink of Mead before setting out on their journey 'because mead is traditional for this sort of thing'. Though that also harkens back to mythology which is a large part of the novel.

</comment><comment><USER34> A science-fiction novel in which food is central to the plot is "Alastor: Wyst" by Jack Vance. The characters are bored by the tasteless food they usually have to eat ("Some gruff and deedle, with some wobbly to fill the cracks!") and go on expeditions ("bonterfests") in search for tasty, natural morsels.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apart from the Reptilian aliens, who actually eat little mice for celebration, people in Star Trek hardly ever touch their delicious food. Which frustrates me no end, but it does give the impression those people must be affluent beyond imagination, systematically ignoring food like they do.

<comment><USER35> In TNG/DS9/VOY it's both true and false at the same time. True, they're affluent in the sense of living in a post-scarcity economy with matter replicator technology; however the food they eat while in space, despite good looks, generally tastes like crap - as the characters frequently mention. Apparently 24th-century replicators are still not advanced enough to create something tasty, so they try to eat food from grown ingredients whenever they can.

<comment><USER36> The more likely explanation is that they are all organic, artisanally-prepared food hipsters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Jacques said that his book's fictional meals stemmed from childhood food > fantasies during the years of British rationing.

He also wrote books (i.e. Redwall) with blind children in mind, which might explain some of the emphasis on the taste and texture of the food.

</comment><comment><USER38> This didn't really answer the question though. The only two reason's given were LOTR and Redwall, and it was not expanded on much. I was hoping for a more concrete answer.

<comment><USER20> "because Tolkien did it" is very often an answer in the genre

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Depending on where you draw the lines, this is perhaps slightly outside the genre, but not a mention of _Alice in Wonderland_?

Also, SF often uses food and drink for atmosphere, from the replicators in _Star Trek_ , to the yeast-derived meals in _The Expanse,_ to diner food on Gibson's Bridge.

</comment><comment><USER40> I was really surprised to see the butter pies from A Tale of Time City as the first example here. I don't know anyone else besides my mom who has read that one, but I distinctly remember being envious of the children from the future who had such tasty snacks.

</comment><comment><USER41> In Japan, we have a "Potato Police" who blame the typical medieval fantasy novels which features the potato. For the potato didn't exist in medieval period.

<comment><USER42> The potato was first cultivated before 5000bc [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato)

It wasn't in midevil Europe, but most fantasy is a whole new world so there is no reason to say potato shouldn't be in any novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Try Korean dramas. When there's food, you get detailed close-ups of the food.

<comment><USER44> From what I've seen, the last Final Fantasy game had a lot of food close-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Reading fantasy novels has always made me hungry. Not kidding.

</comment><comment><USER46> starving artists picture what they most desire might explain some of it. But probably it is just a naive attempt at world building, and doing what others before one has done.

</comment><comment><USER47> I personally tend to skim sections on food as they are boring to me.</comment>


What the Grayscale Challenge Taught Us About Phone Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/internetcitizen/2018/02/13/grayscale/ <comment><USER3> > _I asked myself how many people already see the whole world like this by > default. I guess about 8 percent of men are colorblind (women are much less > likely to be colorblind) and I was thinking about what that might be like._

For the record, the most common type of colorblindness is red/green. So it's not like 1/10 men can't see _any_ color and "see the whole world like this".

<comment><USER4> I know that my phone has a "low power mode" which turns everything greyscale. Many phones have a "low-light reading mode" as well that turns warmer colors. I wonder how difficult it might be to have color blind mode for specific types of blindness? Might be interesting to UX designers

<comment><USER5> > my phone has a "low power mode" which turns everything greyscale

Why do grey pixels consume less power than red pixels of the same brightness?

In fact, assuming (maybe wrongly) that your phone screen's colors are created from RGB, CMYK or some other combination of primary color 'dots' in each pixel, grey would require lighting all the dots in a pixel, while 'redscale' would limit power usage to 1/3 or 1/4 of the dots. I realize there are many other issues potentially involved, but perhaps someone could explain.

EDIT: Sorry, the correct terminology of 'dots' and pixels is lost in my brain someplace and I don't have time to find it.

<comment><USER6> Maybe it's an issue of LCD backlighting?

The backlight has to be strong enough to supply the _highest_ R,G, or B value, while the lower values have light blocked off (by polarization) and turned into heat.

When the LCD display shades of grey, the RGB values are more likely to be in tandem, so maybe you can get the same final brightness coming out with fewer photons being overproduced at the start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm currently going greyscale and have not noticed many differences in my habits. In the past week I've been using YouTube less but my YouTube habits have always ebbed and flowed. I'm reading the news apps on my phone slightly more.. greyscale makes articles have a dead tree newspaper feel with the black and white photos. Google maps is noticeably more difficult to use and so is Google calendar, which categorizes events by color.

<comment><USER8> I think that for those that go for the visual experience this may detract them. But I go for the text experience, so..

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I thought about doing this...but then I realized I've already cut back the behaviors this is trying to control, or never adopted them in the first place (I was a late smartphone adopter and have had most notifications disabled for as long as I've had one).

This grayscale challenge seems more to help phone addicts break their habit, but seem to do much if you aren't one and/or don't use social media apps.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea. I'd probably do it if I could selectively enable color only for certain utilitarian apps, like my Camera and photo-viewer.

<comment><USER10> on iOS you can make it so when you triple click the home button (or the side button on the X) you can toggle color filters

<comment><USER9> I have a Pixel and when I tried it I had to dig into the developer settings. Phone addiction isn't a big problem for me so only a more polished solution would make sense.

I'd really like something like the pre-existing app-specific settings like Android has for notifications and permissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >I asked myself how many people already see the whole world like this by default.

>...

>As a designer, I depend heavily on color...

I'm a little surprised that a visual designer wouldn't already be applying basic accessible design practices - but I guess it's not something most people think about day-to-day. Still, at the very least, consider running your palettes through a simulator such as:

[http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness- simula...](http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/)

<comment><USER12> If you're doing things on the web, this extension can simulate the various types of colorblindness on any page you visit:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegkcmilinpcimpjkfhjfgmhieb?hl=en)

<comment><USER13> By extension (get it?), this extension simulates other vision deficiencies:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbnhckmgdhmgdckeigabjfbddl)

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this product besides that I use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been on this for a few weeks now and has made a huge difference in compulsively checking email and twitter.

Pro tip: add it to the triple home button click (Settings>General>Accessibility>Accessibility Shortcut (all the way at the bottom)>Select 'Color Filters') for easy switching for color/grayscale.

<comment><USER15> It's weird, I have "invert colors" but not any other options. I'm on Marshmallow (samsung s5)

<comment><USER16> I just went through this on my S5.

"Here's a solution! Go to "about device", find "build number", and tap it a bunch of times until the phone tells you you are a developer. Then, go back to settings, and above about device, you will see a new option called "developer options". Open it, and find "Simulate color space", and set it to "Monochrome"."

Ref: [https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/686329-why- th...](https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/686329-why-there-no- more-grayscale-galaxy-s5-6-0-a.html)

<comment><USER17> Worked for me, thanks!

BTW, I had to vouch for your comment to get it to not be [dead].

<comment><USER15> That's weird. A couple of days ago their comment was visible fine, and they only have one comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think we're at the tail end of a unique cultural moment where "phone addiction" is even a conceivable idea. They are already arguably _the_ human tool, and in a decade or two the devices will be so firmly a fixture of interaction that "phone addiction" will seem as quaint an idea as "book addiction."

<comment><USER19> I would compare it to sugar instead. At some point in the last century, food companies figured out that they could leverage the sweet tooth inherent in us using refined sugars. Dental health declined rapidly and obesity went up. It took a couple of decades for society to catch up and put in place countermeasures. To me it seems it's getting better, although at a pretty slow pace; people generally know more about the issue, sugar taxes are being put in place, and there's now some social stigma around excessive candy eating.

Similarly, we're beginning to wise up around the exploitation of our attention. The dopamine hit is real, just like with sugar, but we can also learn to override those impulses by focusing on longer-term goals (being in shape, having a healthy social life).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a great idea because it's in that goldilocks zone - pretty easy to toggle but not so easy that I'll disable it for something arbitrary.

<comment><USER21> On iPhone I set it to switch between Greyscale and Normal with a triple click of the home button so it's really quick to change if I want to watch a video.

<comment><USER22> How do you set it to do that?

<comment><USER23> Settings -> General -> Accessibility Shortcut -> Color Filter.

<comment><USER22> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I found this challenge actually harmed my productivity - I wound up reading more reddit comments and playing less little puzzle games (think Flow Free, not Clash of Clans). The little puzzle games were relaxing and I could pay attention to music or a podcast while playing them. Reddit comment threads are often political and angry and reading text draws my focus entirely - <USER2> me feeling mad about things I really have no control over and which actually have fairly little impact on me. Uninstalled the reddit app when I realized it had this influence for me at least.

</comment><comment><USER25> On ios, you can set the accessibility shortcut to enable/disable greyscale quickly. Useful for when you need colour.

Settings --> general --> accessiblity --> scroll to accessibility shortcut at bototm --> choose colour filters

Enabling greyscale itself is in the display accomodations --> colour filters section of accessibility

Once enable, just triple tap home to turn greyscale on/off

At least some android systems have a similar setting.

I am not sure if this is actually affecting my usage, but I only figured this out a couple days ago. My compulsive usage is mostly text, which grayscale has little impact on.

<comment><USER26> Its possible that its better to leave the option more inaccessible to further incentivize yourself from reverting back to color mode. Maybe those few extra steps of converting back to color will stop you from doing so

<comment><USER25> Agreed. But, in my case I couldn't use grayscale without this. I _need_ colour many times a day for work.

So, this is actually what made greyscale possibly at all. I do agree you have to watch for leaving it off though.

If you find yourself switching it off you can set a daily reminder until the habit sticks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anybody know how to grayscale all web pages in browser, and then add my custom syntax highlighting for code and links. It is not possible to change colors after applying CSS grayscale filter.

<comment><USER3> I tried doing this also, but couldn't find a way to make it work easily. Since my use case was slightly different (wanted to de-saturate everything except the body text on websites), I used a semi-transparent layer instead of grayscale. You can see what the result looks like in my Chrome extension [1]—it's the Focus Mode feature, which is still in beta and off by default.

1: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline- reader/ifj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline- reader/ifjafammaookpiajfbedmacfldaiamgg?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting, I've been using my phone in grayscale only mode for a couple of years mostly for battery life and cause it doesn't really matter when all I use it for us reading and writing. But when I try to use it for something else I have to disable the grayscale, which is annoying, so I guess I've been unknowingly curbing my usage by doing this...

</comment><comment><USER29> In design class we were taught light text on dark backgrounds are easier on the eyes for light emitting mediums. A nice side-effect of forcing such themes on browsers and Windows is that it cut out colorful distractions.

Sadly these themes and style overrides often make sites unusable.

Edit: typo fix

</comment><comment><USER26> Has anyone tried changing their computer display to grayscale as well? I tried it for a bit but found that code syntax lacks color. Also graphics in papers all of a sudden are infinitely less informative (elucidating blue from red is really hard in grayscale)

<comment><USER15> Indeed, there is a small movement in the development/programming community that advocate this :)

[https://dev.to/huytd/turning-off-the-syntax- highlighter-8af](https://dev.to/huytd/turning-off-the-syntax-highlighter-8af)

[http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/)

[https://kyleisom.net/blog/2012/10/17/syntax- off/](https://kyleisom.net/blog/2012/10/17/syntax-off/)

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- nuts/hJHCAaiL0s...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/kG3BHV6QFfIJ)

[https://www.robertmelton.com/project/syntax-highlighting- off...](https://www.robertmelton.com/project/syntax-highlighting-off/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12886067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12886067)

[https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/disable-syntax- highlig...](https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/disable-syntax-highlighting- in-vim/)

[https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/8751/how-to- completel...](https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/8751/how-to-completely- turn-off-colorscheme)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> On one hand, configuring my phone to grayscale is to me a very intriguing "lifehack". But for better or worse, my phone is also my primary camera, and I tend to think that setting it to grayscale would impair my ability to take photos.

<comment><USER31> Not at all. You'll develop an eye for tonal contrast with your hip black and white camera!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wish I could try this!

I doubt there are many others here, but if anyone is still using a Windows Phone, I just submitted a suggestion for greyscale options to the MS Feedback Hub, so you can search "greyscale" there to upvote the suggestion.

<comment><USER33> Microsoft added it to the Windows 10 platform already, so I would suspect mobile should get it when it the fork merges back (mobile is currently an RS2 [CU] fork, not quite feature par with RS3 [FCU], and supposedly sometime after RS4 the platform should remerge as the CShell and other efforts move along).

Related: on any Windows 10 device updated to the FCU the shortcut key Win+Ctrl+C switches the current Ease of Access color filter (which defaults to grayscale) on/off immediately. It was making the rounds recently as one of those quick "confuse a coworker" pranks like the monitor orientation keyboard shortcuts.

The Insider builds are showing a lot of interesting work going into a rules engine for Quiet Hours which in recent builds was renamed to Focus Assist. Grayscale might be a good suggestion for Focus Assist rules, especially if the Focus Assist rules engine also takes over Night Light functionality (which I don't know if has been mentioned yet, and my Insider tablet was in the process of updating through a couple weeks of updates when I last left it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wow, I am trying this now. This is very strange. It definitely makes flashing red notification badges easier to avoid. But the lack of color diversity makes it hard for me to navigate certain apps. Very weird.

</comment><comment><USER35> I tried this and it didn't make me use my phone less. That said, I don't use my phone for hours and hours to begin with. Was this anyone else's experience?

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there a way to do this with color profiles in Linux?

<comment><USER37> Your monitor might support it?

<comment><USER36> Using a laptop, unfortunately I can only control its screen via the OS.</comment></comment></comment>


STARDATA: A StarCraft AI Research Dataset - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02139 <comment><AUTHOR> From an authoer (Z. Lin):

"We're releasing a dataset of 65k StarCraft: Brood War games, 1.5b frames, 500m actions, 400GB of data. Check it out!"

> > [https://github.com/TorchCraft/StarData](https://github.com/TorchCraft/StarData)</comment>


It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code - <AUTHOR> https://qntm.org/clean <comment><USER2> To be entirely honest, most of his books are pretty awful, as they are mostly preaching something for the sake of preaching and selling the books. I bought his last one (Clean Architecture) as I wanted to improve myself as an architect, just to realize its riddled with fluff and rarely anything in there is actionable advice. For some reason the reviews from his followers are mostly glowing.

I also found myself agreeing with everything written in this blog post. For the record I have read his famous Clean Code, Clean Coder and Clean Architecture and I don't find them all that meaningful.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have code running in a product first put together in 2001 that is still in operation today. It was rewritten in a different language shortly thereafter, then refactored again sometime after that. I wrote it, and you know what? It's still bad! So, I'm not that great of a programmer.

:-)

I had to sell a portion of the code a while back. Embarrassed for anyone to see it, I tried to focus on just one thing: _make it easy to read and follow_. Especially since the client was buying the source code.

It was really freeing. I didn't need to care about all the industry "standards". By presenting it as "easy to read" I could unburden myself of intellectual contests. They do have merit and I appreciate those smarter than myself. But for this situation, the client was at liberty to turn the code into anything they wanted. My code must be the standard for readability and it was fast enough. They added "const" to everything and that was probably proper.

These manifestos are really just guide rails which without could otherwise send you over cliffs. Guides are not laws and rules to be adhered to literally. They are to make you think about why you have twenty levels of inheritance, ten function parameters, and abstractions that don't apply to the domain you are modeling.

If I was to instruct a young programmer today, I would steer them more towards being "simple" and less towards "impressive". Being impressive and clever has its place. Too much, however, and no one will know what you were doing.

<comment><USER4> I would say many examples in the book is just for demo. In real life, it have to trade off somethings

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of Robert C Martins pieces are just variations on his strong belief that ill-defined concepts like "craftsmanship" and "clean code" (which are basically just whatever his opinions are on any given day) is how to reduce defects and increase quality, not built-in safety and better tools, and if you think built-in safety and better tools are desirable, you're not a Real Programmer (tm).

I'm not the only one who is skeptical of this toxic, holier-than-thou and dangerous attitude.

Removing braces from if statements is a great example of another dangerous thing he advocates for no justifiable reason

[https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3202...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/320247/has- can-anyone-challenge-uncle-bob-on-his-love-of-removing-useless-braces/320262)

Which caused the big OSX/iOS SSL bug in 2014, see [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html)

This link and thread on hackernews is good too

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440848)

>The current state of software safety discussion resembles the state of medical safety discussion 2, 3 decades ago (yeah, software is really really behind time). > >Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented. The former school argues more or less what Uncle Bob argues: blame the damned and * who made the mistakes; be more careful, damn it. > >But of course, that stupidity fell out of favor. After all, when mistakes kill, people are serious about it. After a while, serious people realize that blaming and clamoring for care backfires big time. That's when they applied, you know, science and statistic to safety. > >So, tools are upgraded: better color coded medicine boxes, for example, or checklists in surgery. But it's more. They figured out what trainings and processes provide high impacts and do them rigorously. Nurses are taught (I am not kidding you) how to question doctors when weird things happen; identity verification (ever notice why nurses ask your birthday like a thousand times a day?) got extremely serious; etc. > >My take: give it a few more years, and software, too, probably will follow the same path. We needs more data, though.

</comment><comment><USER6> I spend so much of my time doing an invisible facepalm over dogma that developers believe, but can't ever justify _why_. It's always stuff that _sounds_ sensible, but the lack of nuance makes them so destructive in practise. Whether it's "I try not to make my classes go over 250 lines", "make a function do exactly one thing well" ( _nothing_ does only one thing! bonus points for mentioning the "unix philosophy"), "functions with a cyclomatic complexity over x should be split up" (thanks, you've just made my analysis of this code n^2 times harder).

Meanwhile I count the days go by as people fight with linters and otherwise muddy git history trying to achieve an "A" "code quality" score. It's amazing people are paid to do this.

</comment><comment><USER7> >Outside of a book, do we still read code from top to bottom?

This one I disagree with. We frequently read code in a browser, as part of a pull request or just exploring a repo.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looking at the post, it seems the advise would be: "Recommend clean code and leave it to the coder to interpret what clean code is."

I think it would still be a valuable advice compared to none at all.

<comment><USER9> How is advise from someone who literally can't do the thing they're advocating valuable? Because it confirms some old tired OOP tropes?</comment></comment>