Six years later, Star Citizen is still raking it in - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-13-six-years-later-star-citizen-is-still-raking-it-in <comment><USER2> 6 years ago I was 20 years old in college. I got so excited a new a mmo to play in space and drank the kool-aid. Dropped $150, played with my super cool ship in my hanger at 15~fps having a good time looking at all the details on my aegis gladius, watching the stairs come out of the ship and so on.

Eventually I could fly it, and it was cool but of course it was alpha and there was nothing to do except drink more kool-aid. More ships, more promises, more stars, more space.

Now, my same ship can land on planets, I can walk around and it's great. Honestly it's pretty cool. The only issue is now I am 26, married, spend 75% of my awake time working or with my wife. I don't want an mmo.

I am no longer the target demographic, and the majority of the early adaptors are not either.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps you will still enjoy Squadron 42, Star Citizen's single player campaign that's an on-ramp to the MMO.

<comment><USER4> Squadron 42 was meant to be released in 2016. It's 2018. It's not getting released in 2018, is it? Want to bet 10$ it's going to be released in 2019?

<comment><USER5> That's $10 I'd rather save, my dude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No better way to rustle jimmies than to mention the likely truth that Star Citizen is vaporware and will never see the light of day. The more time passes the more likely that is. Anyone not invested in its success can look at the timeline of moves by the company up to now, the scope of the project and its bloat, and especially the CEO, and reach the same conclusion. Nonetheless, I expect to have this same argument with a starry-eyed dreamer 5 years from now.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you and disagree with you.

I am not a hardcore supporter of Star Citizen, and I have not put any money towards the game. But I have played the Alpha during their free weekends, and they are slowly making me a believer.

I played a game with three of my friends where we loaded into a space station, jumped into a multicrew ship, and headed out to find our way among the stars. We were able to do things like jump out of the ship on EVAs into open space, jam speeder bikes into the back of other ships and drop them out over the surface of a moon, and generally do awesome (read: silly/idiotic) space adventure stuff.

It's not really a 'game' yet, but they are pretty clearly putting together some sort of experience that is very much playable. It's not enough to make me spend money, but it's closer than anything else I've seen in the genre for sure.

<comment><USER8> As someone who hasn't looked at it closely, does it still feel like a set of diverse tech demos or is it beginning to come together as a cohesive experience?

<comment><USER7> What I've played:

You start in a space station, you have a set of four ships you can take out to go explore -- a quick racer, a speeder-bike, a small multi-crew gunship, and a mining vessel. You can fly around a single solar system at super-light speed, doing missions, mining, pirate hunting, and generally doing space game stuff (like deliveries, commodity trading, etc.) The basic game loops are there, including player driven quests.

For example, I received a notice that a player had stranded themself on the surface of a moon with no fuel, and needed transport back to the station with some cargo. They were offering N credits. I accepted the mission, got a marker, flew out to the moon and rescued them. They turned in their mission, payed me my reward (I think this was automatic), and then went on their way (presumably to refuel their ship.) It was super slick.

You can buy upgrades for yourself and your ship, and you can fly from space station to the surface of planets with no loading screens or barriers. There's little to no consequences for failure, so that part still feels very demo-y. Lost a ship? Click the 'Gimme my ship' button back at the space station and wait 10 minutes.

It's still janky from a performance and stability standpoint, but it's a prerelease game, so expect that. (FPS stuttering, difficulty connecting with other players in my squad, etc.) Initial load times are very long, and sometimes UI elements don't work correctly.

<comment><USER9> >> payed me

Should be "paid me". I see this so frequently on HN, is this how it is taught in school now?

<comment><USER7> Nope, just fat fingered that one while typing up my response. I'll keep you in mind if I need someone to check my posts for typos in the future though!

<comment><USER9> It was not meant to be personal, it was a serious, if off-topic, question. For example, check out this search:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=payed&sort=byDate&prefix&page=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=payed&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I watched the game play demo they presented at the recent Citizencon ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-fkMHOyswU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-fkMHOyswU)). As I don't follow Star Citizens development closely, it was a fascinating view into that universe and the developers behind it. To me it felt they're getting lost in all the little details on the planets, instead of concentrating a bit more on the space and its use with space ships. After all, selling space ships is what they make a lot of money with.

They're talking about an incredible level of detail on the ground (e.g. a working subway system, physically correct ice cubes in drinks and plans to receive damage, when you're in a room with a fire, which consumes the available oxygen), but there was literally nothing about new stuff in space (or is that already completely done and working?).

Given their ambitions I hope they succeed long term and will continuously develop the game, similar to EVE Online.

<comment><USER11> That's been one of my red flags too, the lack of significant progress on fundamental parts of the game, such as the flight model and even just the combat AI. Nevermind the parts that will require real groundbreaking work, such as the game-wide economy, AI, and shipmate AI. Nevermind the balancing work. That they're even thinking about how ice cubes are modeled really seems to indicate that work is expanding to fill the time.

<comment><USER12> Expanding to spend the money that they've raised, perhaps? After all if they've already raised it, it doesn't really matter _what_ they're spending it on. In normal game dev they would have to make a game that people wanted to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who doesn't play but has watched it through its development, I feel like the developers have a fatal weakness for shiny objects (not that anyone needed me to tell them this). I'd be much more bullish on such an iteratively developed mega game if it started out focusing on an MVP and added stuff from there, instead of this discordant feature vomit. I don't think there's anything wrong with the iterative model for game development (even "boxed" games are doing it; see Overwatch, Diablo etc.) but it needs to be managed sanely and developers shouldn't be afraid to redo stuff when the standard changes or get too caught up in sunk costs.

<comment><USER14> Just look at Elite Dangerous or Rim World. Amazing, fantastic games that started off very primitive, with the core of the gameplay at least prototyped. And now, a couple to a few times a year, in both games, we get an update that makes it more awesome.

And those effects are compounded - both games are far superior than other games in their genres because they steadily improve and focus on the core gameplay features.

Elite dangerous has had a working game for 6 years and has released at least 15 pretty big updates (with another one only like 2 weeks away). Star citizen is focusing on ice cubes and the rest of the game isn't even really a playable game.

I feel bad for people who are thousands deep into SC.

<comment><USER15> Difference is that a lot of people don't care about ED just because they released a flight simulator first. So for me ED will always just be that.

The promise of what SC wants to be is what is keeping people excited. 6 years in and the demos are still amazing. It's nice to have a game to hang your hopes to.

If we actually get to play it one day I'll br even happier :p

<comment><USER14> That's a really strange viewpoint to me. By that logic we shouldn't really care about most things because of what they once were.

The U.S. because it was an up-jumped violent militia.

Linux because it was some Finnish dude's hobby project.

Nintendo because it was just some family company that made playing cards.

Things evolve, improve, and become far more than their initial incarnation. And they may do so for decades. Bringing it back to space sims, I'd rather a solid playable base that can be continuously improved, than a series of half- playable cobbled together tech demos. But hey, only time will tell eh? Maybe I'll revisit this comment chain and feel like a fool in a year. Or 5. Or 10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All this has done was to get Chris Roberts out of debt and now seriously rich, get his wife to star in a film next to Gary Oldman and give his brother a cushy job. Delivering a game at this point would be killing the golden goose. Chris is paying himself literally millions from your money and presumably laughing all the way to bank. He has nothing to gain from ending development as long as you're paying his exorbitant salary.

</comment><comment><USER16> All this dough and no time to work on the Linux port they promised from a long-met stretch goal, or the only reason I originally backed it, something I now deeply regret.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot of negativity aimed at Star Citizen, but from where I stand they are the closest to building the game that a whole lot of people want to play.

Note: Closest != close

The idea of getting a crew together to fly a large spaceship around is a foundational piece of the sci-fi narrative -- from Leviathon Wakes to Firefly, Star Wars to Star Trek. We want to play those kinds of stories, but that's a challenging game to build. Star Citizen seems to be the first game to seriously try and build it.

Do I think they'll succeed? I'm not sure. Am I really, really hoping they do? Hell yeah.

<comment><USER17> Most polished maybe. Space Engineers is like minecraft in space. Some friends and I have been messing around the last two weekends. We've mostly been concerned with getting our production facilities up so I don't know how well it supports multiple crew members controlling the ship independently (i.e., turrent control vs. pilot vs. whatever else)... but then again SC doesn't have that yet either, I think.

<comment><USER18> Star Citizen definitely supports a pilot, turret gunners, and an engineering station simultaneously being managed on the multi-crew ships.

That being said, there's neither PvE content on the scale to need that, nor PvP density to support it either.

<comment><USER19> My little one-man indie open source space game supports multi-crew, pilot (navigator), turret gunner, engineering, comms, damage control, science (scanning) and game-master stations. It's called Space Nerds In Space. I also lack sufficient PvE content and PvP density, but I'm raking in $17 a month on patreon.

<comment><USER20> Link?

How many players are supported at a time?

I frequently get together with friends and chill on some Discord's and Slack Channels for gaming.

I can probably scrounge a few people together to give it a go.

Also: shoutout to FOSS game dev. I help out on Cataclysm:DDA, which is also rather large in scope

<comment><USER19> [https://spacenerdsinspace.com](https://spacenerdsinspace.com) It's really more of a LAN game. I've run as many as 20 clients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> SC is a huge disappointment for me. It is not playable yet, even though there are things to do if you log on. It looks like it has all the features of a bubble - a hype. If this had been a normal project everyone involved would be worried about whether or not they can deliver due to the continuous postponements. It is not a normal project however, people are still "buying the pitch". It's the idea of SC and the vision of SC that keep people enthusiastic, and SC are feeding the hopeful. It is however suspicious that they have changed their TOS to make them less customer (player) friendly in the "rights dep". If they finish the vision I will definitively use my license to try it out, even though they seem to take the "pay to win" concept to new highs. I very much feel that the money I have spent, though, has been lost to someone who did not succeed to deliver. That is not uncommon in early access games, and is what to expect from many projects I and others help by purchasing an early license. SC However is different, though. They seem to keep on building the hype instead of coming out clean and say it as it is. The game will most likely launch one day, but I expect it will be something completely different than originally sold to me and many many others. I hope they prove me wrong, but as of today SC is guilty of promising more than they can keep

</comment><comment><USER22> What a lot of people seem to forget is their backers voted to keep going:

[https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm- link/transmission/13...](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm- link/transmission/13944-Letter-From-The-Chairman-46-Million)

To a lot of backers this isn't just a game, they wan't to build a space matrix.

Lets also remember that crowd funding is not the only way this game has been funded, primarily yes but there's always been private equity and I wouldn't be shocked if we hear about more in the future.

Star Citizen is the excuse to build a platform for a digital universe.

<comment><USER23> It's surprising that only 55% voted yes considering how many spend a lot of money for nothing (nice pictures of items that may come) and still voted "no".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was on the fence when Star Citizen first showed up, but in the end I avoided it because the goal just seemed so absurdly over complicated. The Wing Commander series was great, and Freelancer was tons of fun, but the idea of having a brand new studio turn that kind of skill based gameplay into an MMO was just crazy talk. I spent a fair amount of time in EvE so its not like I hated the MMO idea, it was just too obvious the core idea was overly ambitious at best.

If they had started with S42 as a single player game, with a massive universe you could actually have an effect on (like X1/2/3, but you know, good), and then said they were building out a MMO version of it, I'd have thrown my wallet at them.

</comment><comment><USER25> I got there early (big fan of freelancer), and played a bit. The game is just technically bad for now. Like not even a pleasant alpha to explore. I won't get my hopes up.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm so frustrated with star citizens development. Don't get me wrong I'm a happy backer (only $20 so maybe that's why haha), but I spent months of my free time writing software to work with star citizen, and due to the glacial pace, I feel like it's a waste of time.

Full voice controlled copilot with onscreen overlays, voic support and fully customisable commands - useful for the dozen or so pilots I was able to get to test, but it's quite difficult to gain any sales when the game isn't anywhere near where we thought it would be by now.

Oh well, at least I learnt a lot (my first software release haha).

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm a backer of Star Citizen and I've gotten my value out of backing it just from the community and all of the content that keeps coming out on the game. It's been $50 for me for hundreds of hours of entertainment so far, much better value than two tickets to the movies.

I do believe that there has been a bunch of mismanagement, which is a shame, but I still look forward to playing it sometime within the next 5-10 years. No game has ever been as ambitious as the scope of what Star Citizen aims to do.

<comment><USER28> I just came in here to sarcastically say something like: "This is a fascinating new business model where the product is DLC trailers and hype and the act of buying DLC but not playing anything".

I did not expect someone to say that non-ironically and be happy about it ...

<comment><USER29> You can play the game though. It's nowhere near finished, sure, but I've put way more hours into Star Citizen than I have some other games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The core problem here is how one goes about seeking funding. Star Citizen has been hugely successful in gaining funding, which has been more of a problem than a benefit. Every new round of crowd funding or investment was married to increased promises from the devs to deliver even more. The game had to be all things to all people. Which is always easy to do hypothetically in the future than practically in the here and now.

</comment><comment><USER31> > including lifetime insurance, for £536.

uhm. Insurance? On your in game digital asset? Really?

<comment><USER22> There's in-game insurance, everyone and anyone can get it for any ship.

Some of the pledges have it as a bonus so you get it for free for that ship or for a few months. If you get destroy you can get everything back for basically nothing and faster.

Insurance isn't that big of a bonus but it solidifies your pledge. You tend to see lifetime attached to higher priced or rare packages/pledges. Which is a good message to send to backers that are willing to hand over 500+

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Star Citizen, aka Feature Creep: The Game.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why

<comment><USER7> Because it's closer than any other game in the genre to the genre ideal. I have not put any money in, but I have played in their free alpha weekends, and that game is right on the edge of being incredible. (Where "on the edge" is defined as, "Has a crap ton more work to go".)

Honestly, that game in its current alpha state has given me experiences totally unlike anything I've seen in another game.

<comment><USER18> That's the thing that's insane to me. When I think "hey, can I do this", and it's something the designers didn't expressly intend, but because everything is done to the fidelity that they've made possible... there's nothing mechanically preventing you from doing so.

It's missing a _lot_ still, and the scope creep has been incredible. Who knows when or if they'll ever meet even the basics of their original promises.

But for example, I found a strategy to board (and steal) spaceships that were intended to be "locked", because I managed to get to an entrance that was not locked, once. I watched some entertaining videos, like where people boarded NPC fighters mid-flight, or parked spaceships inside other spaceships they weren't really intended to fit into.

A lot of AAA games "cheat", where the visuals and the actual game mechanics are pretty different. For instance, in Tomb Raider, a dramatic ledge sequence, underneath, is just a couple arrow keys you can use to balance a value and progress forward. All the wind, leaves, character movement, all of that means nothing, it's just the art layer. Meanwhile, Star Citizen has dealt with bugs like the flashlight coming unstuck from a pilot's suit midflight.

It's incredibly unique. And maybe it's an incredibly unique tech demo that will never go anywhere. Maybe Crytek will take RSI for everything they have. Maybe eventually someone else will take the reigns after they go bankrupt and finish it up somehow with more manageable expectations. Who knows?

But it's the most interesting thing anyone's done in the industry in a long time.</comment></comment></comment>


A big "Fuck Off" by the content industry and Netflix to users worldwide - <AUTHOR> https://blog.vrypan.net/2016/02/19/a-fuckoff-from-netflix-to-users-worldwide/ <comment><USER2> This is Netflix more aggressively enforcing its contractual content restrictions. Not particularly shocking, and calling it a "bug" is clearly out of anger.

But that being said... the bit about how this will simply encourage piracy is spot on. Perhaps Netflix themselves have no choice but to do this if they want to keep their contracts, but as usual content industries are shooting themselves in the foot by thinking that people on the wrong side of a national border will just politely give up rather than find another way to get the thing they want.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think the author has thought this through.

If they don't have the licence to show something in a particular place, then they must at least show that they're actively trying to stop people in that region accessing the content. Which is what they're doing.

No point in throwing toys from the pram.

<comment><USER4> > If they don't have the licence to show something in a particular place

There's no licensing problems for self produced shows, except maybe the soundtrack - but then again, Netflix isn't stupid and has negotiated for worldwide licensing. At least I hope so, because failing to secure these rights would be... epic failure.

<comment><USER3> I don't think they have enough self produced shows to make it worthwhile pumping just that content all over the world. People pay because they want the whole lot. Probably easier for Netflix to cut them off, rather than try and sell them a lesser product.

As an aside, I think 'Netflix Original' is a bit of a misleading title. Most of the Netflix Original shows (at least on the UK version) weren't actually Netflix 'originals'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When has it ever not been like this? They aren't going to change for a while longer.

</comment><comment><USER6> this is a bit of an oversimplification

</comment><comment><USER7> It might not be Netflix's fault because they've got thumbscrews applied but the content producers are definitely saying "fuck off".

</comment><comment><USER8> If I couldn't use NetFlix and VPN I'd cancel my subscription. The choice here in the UK is abysmal.</comment>


How can tech help to improve relationships in the classroom? [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://kosmosschool.com/podcast/ep5-jan-rihak-tech-and-teacher-student-relationships/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi :-)

Here's the latest episode of our podcast series Kosmos with a K featuring a conversation with Jan Rihak, co-founder of Classtime. Listen here or on your favorite podcast platform.

In this conversation with Jan Rihak, we talk about engagement in the classroom and how technlogy can help teachers supercharge their relationship with their students. Also, we discuss why bottom-up sales strategies in EdTech make life easier for entrepreneurs and startups.

Looking forward to your feedback and thoughts.</comment>


La Paz adapts to a world without water - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/la-paz-without-water <comment><USER2> The coming migration of people throughout the whole world in search of water and a hospitable place to live will be unlike anything we have ever witnessed, billions on the move.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couple the forced migrations of people looking for water with people fleeing from water (rising sea levels), and we are potentially in some societal _deep shit_.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger: a contrarian view - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/02/silicon-valley.html

<comment><USER2> god bless Andreesen. As someone who actually used to use Mosaic, I feel vaguely vindicated that he is not, in fact, a dumbass.

Disney, in particular, looks to be set to go on a rampage. Internally it's pretty clear that some dead weight needs to go, and new talent is finally being purchased at market price -- Pixar was the top of the slope.

As far as I can tell, Yahoo would be a very expensive albatross for Microsoft. And I'm just fine with that. Meanwhile the rest of the field remains free to innovate and shoot for Teh Next Google status/mindshare.

<comment><USER3> Other than Club Penguin and Pixar, has Disney done any acquisitions recently? These are the only two substantive ones I know of, but maybe there are more on the smaller scale?

<comment><USER4> They're planning more.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/new-group-at-disney- to-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/new-group-at-disney-to-make- consumer-internet-acquisitions/)

Ah yes. Now I remember... It will be very interesting to see where they go with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found this line interesting:

"were tiny enough that Yahoo didn't even have to disclose the purchase prices"

What's that amount? Does anyone have a sense of how high an acquisition price can be before it MUST be disclosed?

</comment><comment><USER6> "the best way to get bought is to not be for sale."

Worth it's weight in gold!

The startup I worked for previously was so obsessed with making the right noises and preparing themselves to be acquired that they forgot all about usability, reliability and making a product that actually made a difference to the user's work flow. And they are still waiting to be acquired 4 years after they began.

</comment><comment><USER7> From the article "most startups that start with the goal of getting bought, fail."

Hmm. Startups that aim to get bought fail before this happens. However, few startups float. The majority are bought and the remainder stay private. So, the best way to maximise your return is to avoid being bought, even if it is the most likely option. That is a paradox.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice to see him doing some substantive blog posts again.

</comment><comment><USER9> the only prob I have with the article is that it doesn't mention the open source projects that yahoo provides with either developers, money, or both.

these projects are either important to starups now or will be in the near future

</comment><comment><USER10> great post. i think the point about the merger being a huge distraction for goog/msft/yhoo is also important for startups that _cough_ might be making competitors to things large companies might also be working on :)</comment>


Ask HN: AngelHack Free Developer Code - <AUTHOR>

http://ahsp13siliconvalley.eventbrite.com/event/5909215623
Being the newbie developer that I am, this is one of the first hackathons that I will be doing and the price tag of $59 is pretty up there for an entry fee.
0101100100110011010101100111011101100010001100100011010001100111010110010011001000111001011010110101101001010100011011110110011101010011010101010011000101010100010101000011000001111000010001100101001001010110010100010110011101001111011110010110101100111101
Any hints on what the binary string might mean? I tried converting to ASCII characters but they seem pretty meaningless. <comment><AUTHOR> Any help would be much appreciated!

<comment><USER2> hint: base 64

<comment><AUTHOR> THANK YOU SO MUCH!</comment></comment></comment>


Patterns for Managing Source Code Branches - <AUTHOR> https://martinfowler.com/articles/branching-patterns.html <comment><USER2> I have been practising something that we might call "continuous rebase", for the lack of better term. It is essentially a combination of feature branches and continuous integration, but instead of making frequent merges from a feature branch into the master it is done in the opposite direction: the feature branch is frequently rebased on top of the master (or, at the very least, the master is merged into the feature branch, if the rebase is too difficult).

This approach has the advantages of both of the other approaches:

        * the code is integrated with a great frequency
        * any conflicts can be resolved in the feature branch and will not break the master
        * the new features are isolated, and there is no need for feature switches

</comment><comment><USER3> For historical context here is the classical paper on source control branching patterns I would normally recommend:

"Streamed Lines: Branching Patterns for Parallel Software Development" by Brad Appleton, Stephen P. Berczuk, Ralph Cabrera, Robert Orenstein. [1]

It was presented at Pattern Languages of Programs '98 (PLoP '98).

Incidentally, looking at the proceedings [2], Martin Fowler as co-author on another paper at the same conference called "Temporal Patterns".

[1] [https://hillside.net/plop/plop98/final_submissions/P37.pdf](https://hillside.net/plop/plop98/final_submissions/P37.pdf)

[2] [https://hillside.net/plop/plop98/final_submissions/](https://hillside.net/plop/plop98/final_submissions/)

<comment><USER4> Came here just to leave the following link : [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/367720.Software_Configur...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/367720.Software_Configuration_Management_Patterns) which is the Berczuk book about such patterns. I read it years ago, it's good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic, having looked through Martin's blog before and found some gems that really leveled up my process on managing code.

As an aside - beyond the coming installments of this series, can anyone recommend sources for setting up CI locally, or for small teams? DDG is giving me pages on GitHub Actions, Atlassian, and DigitalOcean blogs, but these are all process or product specific.

<comment><USER6> Mostly the driver doesn't matter; for the CI stuff you basically want to carry out "actions" on "events". As a concrete example you might wish to run your test cases when a new pull-request is opened, or an existing one is updated.

The way that glue/integration works is going to be somewhat specific to the setup you're already using. That's why you'll find Github Actions being documented for Github, Jenkins for self-hosted repositories, etc.

Broadly speaking it doesn't matter which "thing" you use to drive your CI, the key is that it works reliably and that the stuff which is executed is inside your repository. That way:

* Developers can run it manually if they wish (e.g. "make test")

* The CI system can be swapped out in the future, if you need to.

As a concrete example once I migrated a company's repositories from bitbucket, using their pipelines, to (self-hosted) Github Enterprise. Because the pipeline just said "Run .git/tests.sh" porting the glue was trivial.

I even published a github action for those using github, so that you can launch your project-specific tests in a portable and simple fashion:

[https://github.com/skx/github-action-tester](https://github.com/skx/github- action-tester)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice. I liked Ken Beck's quote. Insightful as always.

As far as I remember, Continuous Integration (CI) was about merging your code with the rest of the team as frequently as possible. Jenkins, and other tools were not even in the horizon. Because in the waterfall prehistory, some teams used to divide the system in parts and integrate the source code at the end. And it was hell. So now we have these powerful tools like git, and in a way we use them to cheat and not do CI.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it occurred to me that one day I would have to choose between CI and code reviews, and yet that's where I've been living for years.

I think I'd rather have CI.

<comment><USER9> Nothing to stop code reviews either. Just don't make them a gateway. Allow code to be merged then reviewed if necessary. If you have good common coding practices and testing then likely more than safe.

<comment><USER7> Great advice. This is why it is good to go back to the basics. Adding gateways goes against any lean principles, introduces delays (=waist) in the process.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TextSecure is becoming Signal - <AUTHOR> https://www.whispersystems.org/blog/just-signal/ <comment><USER2> In the short term, as someone running without Google Play Sevices, I'm curious to see whether this just gave me access to the functionality of TextSecure again or broke RedPhone.

Regardless of which, I'm optimistic about the long term support for my own use, and I think the unification is going to be good to help the program spreading. Now for the people who don't really get the point of protecting our privacy but are just going along anyway I'll be getting calls _and_ messaging for one round of persuasion. Much rejoicing.

Thank you Open Whisper Systems!

</comment><comment><USER3> Now just so some UI polish (or maybe calling should be a part of the texting UI. Who am I to judge) and a better audio codec (say, CBR opus) and Signal has everything I could ever imagine wanting. I have had a rock solid experience, and the simplicity is amazing . My whole extended family is using it, and a couple of them are computer illiterate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great work Moxie and all the folks at Whisper Systems!

I was actually in the middle of re-writing a lesson on mobile phone security for activists in the field that I am giving in about an hour when I saw the new blog post. Never have I been so glad to be scrapping parts of a presentation and lesson plan at the last minute. There will be another 20 vulnerable human rights defenders in the field using Signal by the end of the day :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this app widely considered safe? It seems to ask for an awful lot of permissions and is definitely communicating with a server while it operates

I'm aware of who Moxie Marlinspike is and have seen the Open Whisper Systems testimonials, I was just surprised with how much it asks for, has anyone dug through the code to get a feel for the risk profile of letting this app into everything on my phone?

</comment><comment><USER6> Poor choice. They should've gone with "TextSecure". "Signal" is too generic, and I don't see any security aspect related to it. (But who am I to complain, I'm using Threema, anyway.)

<comment><USER7> Frankly it is a stupid choice.

"Have you got signal?", "Get signal so I can message you!"

It is already a widely used word relating to cell phones. Even with context, it's not obvious which "Signal" one is necessarily referring to.

<comment><USER8> 'Have you got the signal app?' \- solved.

<comment><USER7> The signal app, the one that shows me how strong my mobile signal is? Yes. (Annoyingly only for one SIM though.)

"The app called Signal" would be the only sensible way to do it that I can immediately see, but it's still clumsy and daft.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> Since I see some misunderstanding about deep learning, let me explain the fundamental idea: It's about reusing intermediate work.

The intuition is let's say I told you to write a complicated computer program. Let's say I told you that you could use routines and subroutines, but you couldn't use subsubroutines, or deeper levels of abstraction. In this restricted case, you _could_ write any computer program, but you would have to use a lot of code-copying. With arbitrary levels of abstraction, you could do code reuse much more elegantly, and your code would be more compact.

Here is a more formal description: If you have a complicated non-linear function, you can describe it similarly to a circuit. If you restrict the depth of the circuit, you can in principle represent any function, but you need a really wide (exponentially wide) circuit. This can lead to overfitting. (Occam's Razor) By comparison, with a deep circuit, you can represent arbitrary functions _compactly_.

Standard SVMs and random forests can be shown, mathematically, to have a limited number of layers (circuit depth).

It turns out that expressing deep models using neural networks is quite convenient.

I gave an introduction to deep learning in 2009 that describes these intuitions: <http://vimeo.com/7977427>

<comment><USER3> _If you restrict the depth of the circuit, you can in principle represent any function, but you need a really wide (exponentially wide) circuit._

Are you sure it's exponential ?

If you look at binary functions (ie. boolean circuits) any such function can be represented by a single layer function whose size is linear in the number of gates of the original function (I think it's 3 or 4 variables per gate) by converting to conjunctive normal form.

Of course it's not obvious that a similar scaling exists for non-binary functions but I'd be a bit surprised if increasing depth led to an exponential gain in representational efficiency.

<comment><USER2> I am not _sure_ in the sense of: If I were dropped on a desert island, I could derive a water-tight proof of this result from scratch.

I am _confident_ , though, based upon my reading of secondary sources written by people that I trust.

From one of Bengio's works (<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/papers/ftml.pdf>): "More interestingly, there are functions computable with a polynomial-size logic gates circuit of depth k that require exponential size when restricted to depth k − 1 (Hastad, 1986)."

<comment><USER3> I think my argument was mistaken. The CNF form I was thinking of involves adding unknown variables so it doesn't actually allow you to compute the function in one step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not an expert on this, but I think this article overstates the relationship between "deep learning methods" and "neural networks". Neural nets have been around forever and, in the feed-forward case, are actually fairly basic statistical classifiers.

Deep learning, on the other hand, is about using layers of classifiers to progressively recognize higher-order concepts. In computer vision, for example, the first layer of classifiers may be recognizing things like edges, blocks of color, and other simple concepts, while progressive things may be recognizing things like "arm", "desk", or "cat" from the lower-order concepts.

There's a book I read a while ago that was super-interesting and digs in to how one researcher leveraged knowledge about how the human brain works to develop one of these deep learning methods: "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins ([http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff- Hawkins/dp/B000GQ...](http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff- Hawkins/dp/B000GQLCVE/))

<comment><USER5> No.

All currently used deep learning algorithms are special cases of neural networks. The reason why this is called "deep" learning is that before 2006, no one knew how to efficiently train neural nets with more than 1 or 2 hidden layers. (Or could, because of computing power.) Thanks to a breakthrough by Dr Hinton, this is now the case.

But all models used are neural nets. It's just that a vast amount new algorithms for training them have been developed in the last years and people came up with new ideas on how to use them.

But it is all neural nets. And that's the whole beauty of it.

<comment><USER6> What was the breakthrough?

<comment><USER5> The breakthrough was the insight that while you cannot train a deep neural net at once with backprop, you can train one layer after the other greedily with an unsupervised objective and later fine tune it with standard backprop.

Years later, Swiss researchers (Dan Ciresan et al) found that you can train neural nets with backprop, but you need lots of training time and lots of data. You can only achieve this by making use GPUs, otherwise it would take months.

<comment><USER7> You can't train fully connected deep models with backprop, or at least not easily or well. An alternative solution to this problem is spatial weight pooling (Yann's convolutional networks) which play well with SGD.

<comment><USER5> Yes you can.

Check out the publications by Ciresan on MNIST, have a look at Hinton's dropout paper or at the Kaggle competition that used deep nets. Or try it yourself and spend a descent amount of time on hyper parameter tuning. :)

<comment><USER7> Which of Ciresan's projects are you referring to? Everything I've seen by him uses convolutional layers of some sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Geoffrey Hinton, mentioned in the article, has his class on neural networks available on Coursera <https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets>

<comment><USER9> Hinton was one of the people who invented backpropagation, which has let neural nets be as powerful as they are today. Somehow, despite his brilliance and intimate familiarity with backpropagation, his explanation of it is stunningly clear and simple. I'm thoroughly enjoying this course and recommend it to anyone who wants to build their own neural networks.

<comment> T-A "If you can't explain something simply, you don't know enough about it. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother." - Some German dude :)

<comment><USER10> C.S. Lewis? "Any fool can write learned language: the vernacular is the real test. If you can't turn your faith into it, then either you don't understand it or you don't believe it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those looking to learn about these techniques, I'd highly recommend the deep learning theano tutorials.

Hinton has a class on Coursera--I think it would be very confusing for beginners, but it has really great material.

Also, I run the "SF Neural Network Aficionados" meetup in san francisco and will be giving a workshop in January about building your own DBN in python, so feel free to check that out if you're in SF (although space was an issue last time).

<comment><USER12> How is "deep learning" different from "neural network"?

<comment><USER13> The idea of having multiple levels of representation (deep learning) goes beyond neural networks. A good example is the recent work (award-winning at NIPS 2012) on sum-product networks, which are graphical models whose partition function is tractable by construction. Several important things have been added since 2006 (when deep learning was deemed to begin) to the previous wave of neural networks research, in particular powerful unsupervised learning algorithms (which allow very successful semi-supervised and transfer learning - 2 competitions won in 2011), often incorporating advanced probabilistic models with latent variables, a better understanding (although much more remains to be done) of the optimization difficulty of training gradient-based systems through many composed non-linearities, and other improvements to regularize better (such as the recent dropouts) and to rationally and efficiently select hyper-parameters (random sampling and Bayesian optimization). It is also true that sheer improvements in computing power and amounts of training data are in part responsible for the impressively good results recently obtained in speech recognition (see recent New York Times article, 24 nov, J. Markoff) and object recognition (see NIPS 2012 paper by Krizhesky et al).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was involved in the speech recognition work mentioned in the article and I led the team that won the Merck contest if anyone has any questions about those things. I also spend some time answering any machine learning question I feel qualified to answer at metaoptimize.com/qa

<comment><USER15> Congratulations on winning the Merck contest! That was an impressive demonstration.

About 12 years ago, I switched from a Bio major to CS. I hoped to major in AI, but after taking 2 upper level classes, one focusing on symbolic AI and the other focusing on Bayesian networks, I was completely turned off.

Our brains are massively parallel redundant systems that share practically nothing in common with modern Von Neumann CPUs. It seemed the only logical approach to AI was to study neurons. Then try to discover the basic functional units that they form in simple biological life forms like insects or worms. Keep reverse engineer brains of higher and higher life forms until we reach human level AI.

Whenever I tried to relate my course material in AI to what was actually going on in a brain, my profs met my questions with disdain and disinterest. I learned more about neurons in my high school AP Bio class than either of my AI classes. In their defense, we've come a long ways, with new tools like MRIs and neural probes.

The answers are all locked up in our heads. It took nature millions of years of natural selection to engineer our brains. If we want to crack this puzzle in our lifetimes, we to copy nature, not reinvent it from scratch. Purely mathematical theories like Bayesian statistics that have no basis in Biological systems might work in specific cases, but are not going to give us strong AI.

Are these new deep learning algorithms for neural networks rooted in biological research? Do we have to necessary tools yet to start reversing engineering the basic functional units of the brain?

<comment><USER16> We think so (<http://vicarious.com/>), but we are obviously biased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I played around for a while with writing an RBM learner in Go (RBMs are a particular instance of deep learning which Hinton specializes in).

More an experiment than anything else, but for anyone who is interested: <https://github.com/taliesinb/gorbm>. I don't claim there aren't bugs, and there is no documentation.

The consensus I've picked up from AI-specializing friends is that there are a lot of subtle gotchas and tricks (which Hinton and friends know about but don't necessarily advertise) without which RBMs are a non-starter for many problems. Which I suppose is pretty much standard for esoteric machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER18> Deep belief networks are extremely powerful, we are finally getting to the point where we don't need to do tons of feature engineering to make useful complex classifiers. Used to be you would have to spend a ton of time doing data analysis and feature extraction to get useful and robust classifiers. Of course the usefulness of those sorts of networks were limited by how well you did the feature extraction. Now you train networks with much more minimally processed data, and get great results out of them.

</comment><comment><USER19> Since the fall of AI, there are two groups of people in this topic -- one trying to make some reproducible, robust results with well defined algorithms and second importing random ideas from the first group onto some questionably defined ANN model and getting all the hype because of the "neural" buzzword. "Deep learning" is actually called boosting and has been around for years.

<comment><USER20> Unsupervised pre-training is fundamentally different than boosting.

Boosting is a clever way of modelling a conditional distribution. The insight behind the success of pre-training is that, for many perceptual tasks, having a good model of the input (rather than the input->output mapping) is key.

I have no delusion that the algorithms that work for training deep networks are anything like what the brain actually does, but I don't care. There are many tasks where deep neural nets are state of the art.

<comment><USER21> Not to argue with you, robrenaud, but Hinton himself writes in their 2006 paper 'A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets':

 _The greedy algorithm bears some resemblance to boosting in its repeated use of the same "weak" learner, but instead of reweighting each data vector to ensure that the next step learns something new, it re- represents it._

I guess that most people however would not think of this interpretation of greedily pretraining deep networks :). (I wonder if mbq had this in mind).

In the same article your point about good models of the input is mentioned, too (only copy&paste a small part of the paragraph):

 _Unsupervised methods, however, can use very large unlabeled data sets, and each case may be very high-dimensional, thus providing many bits of constraint on a generative model._

The 2006 paper is really an amazing read in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pegged to the NIPS conference next week: <http://nips.cc/Conferences/2012/>

</comment><comment><USER23> _The students were also working with a relatively small set of data;_

ANN-s are overfitted more often than not.

</comment><comment><USER24> Are there any good C++ or Python SciPy libraries for building and training deep learning networks?

<comment><USER18> There is a C++/Cuda library with a python frontend that I am starting to play with that is from one of the guys who works with Hinton. It is written by Alex Krizhevsky and has lots of tools for training feed forward networks with lots of different connection topologies and neuron types. If I am not mistaken this was the library that was used in the recent Kaggle drug competition that is referenced in the article. There is some good starting point documentation here as well to look into, as long as you know enough about the mechanics of Artificial Neural Networks it has some really interesting stuff in there.

Here is the link: <http://code.google.com/p/cuda-convnet/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there a good place to plug-in to get an overview of what (has been and is) going on in this area, without having to dive in all the way? An overview of the concepts, not the nuts and bolts, not the heavy-lifting.

<comment><USER26> the one overview I've found the most useful is <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk> (Bay Area Vision Meeting: Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning by Andrew Ng in April 2011).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can someone contrast what's in that article with what Jeff Hawkins' Numenta is attempting?</comment>


Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages - <AUTHOR> https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/link-twitter-to-facebook <comment><USER2> To be clear, Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post _anything_ to a personal profile.

More details: [https://betanews.com/2018/08/02/twitter-facebook- crossposts-...](https://betanews.com/2018/08/02/twitter-facebook-crossposts- stop/)

<comment><USER3> This includes most blog integrations, eg. being able to configure Wordpress to post a plug on your personal FB when you write something in your blog.

<comment><USER4> Good! This means more open distribution methods (email) will be given priority again.

I don't want Facebook, nor Twitter. Just take my email address and send me your content, or offer an RSS feed.

EDIT: Anyone know if this kills Buffer and other social feed managers?

<comment><USER5> Good - if you don't like/use Facebook. For people who like/use it (and there are many), this is a very sad day.

<comment><USER4> What the walled garden giveth, it taketh away. Build on someone's platform? Depend on it exclusively? Gonna have a bad time. You would think folks would learn by now.

<comment><USER6> The real problem is that if 80% of your audience is in the walled garden, and no more than 10% of your audience is on any one of the many other alternatives, you're kind of stuck if you want to reach as many of them as possible easily.

<comment><USER4> It's not your audience; it's Facebook's audience. You've just been granted the temporary privilege of access to them with no further guarantees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised at the almost universal outrage over this. I assumed this was in response to the whole election interference campaign and related issues, i.e. preventing bots from blasting out content and predetermined times or in response to specific keywords in the news, things like that. So this seems like a step in the direction of ensuring actual humans are doing these things (or at least make it slightly more difficult for the bots). But maybe I'm wrong. I don't really use Facebook to begin with so I'm probably missing something here.

<comment><USER8> I'm surprised at the outrage too. Your personal profile on Facebook is supposed to be a place to post your holiday photos, pictures of your kids, updates about events in your life etc, not mindless automated stuff like this. Part of the reason Instagram has surged in popularity lately is because it's generally real humans posting the content rather than endless automated shitposts (I'm not saying they don't exist, but it's certainly more difficult to implement than it is on Facebook).

You'd think the posters in this thread have some kind of business interest in this functionality based on the way they're reacting.

<comment><USER9> > Part of the reason Instagram has surged in popularity lately is because it's > generally real humans posting the content rather than endless automated > shitposts (I'm not saying they don't exist, but it's certainly more > difficult to implement than it is on Facebook).

We are clearly not looking at the same subset of Instagram. I don't know anybody that actually uses it to post real content; it's just an endless feed of meme shitposting to laugh at.

<comment><USER10> Is this you? [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/the-i...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/the- instagram-forums-where-teens-go-to-debate-big-issues/566153/)

<comment><USER11> Hey that was a pretty cool read.

Interesting to see what the kids are up to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So basically this removes _my_ ability to set up crossposting through a nicely maintainable API, without making it much more difficult for any bot organization with an IT staff on call to switch to something like Selenium for their propaganda posting?

</comment><comment><USER13> People who follow me on Facebook are different than people who follow me on Twitter. The integration was nice because I could send messages to both platforms at once and would get responses from different people on each.

I'm not going to copy-paste every tweet into Facebook, so I suspect I'll basically go silent on that platform. Which sucks. And if I'm not an active part of the Facebook community, I'll probably visit facebook.com very rarely.

<comment><USER14> I switched from Facebook to Twitter/Snap/Insta.

Much easier than I expected, I still check my facebook once every few weeks, but the content on FB was garbage.

<comment><USER15> Here here, re: content.

My usage of Facebook would probably increase if there was a way to filter-on site-keywords in and out of my newsfeed instead of relying on a browser extension.

As it is, I'm constantly hiding posts, snoozing or unfollowing people altogether-thinking "Fine Facebook, if you want to use algorithms based on how I use the site to customize my newsfeed, customize _this_ ".

Seems the site hasn't yet picked up that I don't want everyone's oversimplified political hot takes (but I like one Nicholas Cage meme and suddenly FB reacts "Would you like ALL the Cage recommendations??" No, not really). I like checking in on my friends, and that's the extant of how useful FB is to me, but there's a real fatigue to the political fatalism front and center.

So, twitter it is. So I can get my oversimplified _sports_ hot takes. Those are at least humorous and entertaining.

If a social network comes along and grants me that kind of control, I would gladly beta that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I may be swimming in the opposite direction, but I like to see that go. I left Twitter (well, abandoned my account) years ago, tired of the excessive noise and progressive loss of relevance to me. Seeing tweets on the FB feed always makes the author seem lazy and desperate to have a presence in every social media site, just because. I know that the change won't stop all of that but will certainly reduce it. FB isn't exactly a noiseless feed but I sort of have to put up with it given family and friends.

<comment><USER17> > seem lazy and desperate [...] every social media

Wow that's quite the overreach. I mean, if not wanting to do the same thing twice means being lazy, and wanting to reach people who are in one media but not the other means being desperate, then... I'm totally guilty! But I don't really agree with either premise.

<comment><USER5> Yup. Not only that, but this is basically _missing the whole point of computing_ , which is for humans to not do the stuff computers are better at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apparently, a (for better or worse) big part of the web just lost a significant interoperability feature. Shame. And a reminder of how life with SaaS platforms looks like. You have little ability to improve things for yourself.

<comment><USER18> Meh... this should make facebook way less spammy. I approve. People can still share things organically.

<comment><USER5> Majority of spam comes from Facebook _pages_ and groups, not individual profiles. Which, apparently, this change does not affect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This was the only way I used facebook. Time to move on

<comment><USER20> I didn't know that was possible, so I used to do the same thing via IFTTT, that probably still works.

<comment><USER2> Nope. All automated posting to a personal profile is now blocked.

<comment><USER21> Ifttt to fan page should work

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> On related note, Python's mechanize and requests libraries will probably soar in popularity.

<comment><USER23> I haven't tried to, but I think you'll need a software that can interpret js to interact with FB. Like webdriver, or headless chrome.

<comment><USER24> You could use [https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/) which doesn't use any JavaScript (there is actually no script tags in the page source).

<comment><USER5> I wonder how soon they'll try to plug that hole with something like requiring 2FA for each login.

<comment><USER25> It's not hard to automate 2FA. Especially if it supports offline google-style 2FA. But SMS are doable too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So, does this not apply to Pages? Only personal profiles? If it applies to pages too, it's going to break thousands upon thousands of post automations for publications.

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems that everyday brings news that justifies me leaving FB.

</comment><comment><USER28> I exclusively use FB, so I had automated posting of tweets (from my kids schools) to FB so I could stay in the loop.

Also at work we Tweeted Facebook activity.

I'll have to use Twitter now instead of just using Facebook. Is the hope from Facebook that people will just not bother with Twitter?

Why haven't Facebook notified us wrt business use that Tweets will no longer be pulled in?

</comment><comment><USER29> Thank you. I wish I was considered common courtesy to not cross post. If I'm following you on more than one service then everytime I see your double or triple post you've effectively wasted my time.

Heck, I wish it was more common to consider if what you're posting is really worth interrupting all of your followers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's not the original title, but "How to use Twitter with Facebook" does not sum up well what changed.

<comment><USER30> The title is somewhat contradictory: "FB ends the ability to auto-post tweets to your profile" on an article about how to auto-post tweets to your FB profile.

<comment><USER31> The first section on the page is that this feature is going away. It was pretty self evident upon clicking the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does this change impact the ability to programatically create ads? I seem to remember the Facebook API treating ads as a kind of shadow post on a page the last time I messed with it. If that is still the case, this could also force users into the Facebook UI for that functionality.

</comment><comment><USER33> Facebook must be destroyed.

<comment><USER34> 21st-century Carthage

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It looks like MySpace v2.0

</comment><comment><USER36> This going to encourage dark patterns like asking for Facebook username and password for apps that want to support automation.

</comment><comment><USER37> For those who miss the functionality, you can use IFTTT for this: [https://ifttt.com/search/query/facebook](https://ifttt.com/search/query/facebook)

I use it to post pictures to twitter whenever I post to instagram, but there's a lot of nice facebook <-> twitter functionality too.

<comment><USER38> I don't think so, _ALL_ automated posting is blocked now ;(

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm guessing they'll still allow automatic posting from Instagram

<comment><USER40> Sure, why not? They have full visibility and control over both sides of that transaction in a way they don't with other integrations.

Same reason Apple can use private APIs but no one else can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I assume IFTTT would continue to be a good solution, no?

<comment><USER12> Nope, this breaks their automation as well. Facebook has basically removed posting ability to personal feeds from their API entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> My page is about to get a whole lot quieter now lol

</comment><comment><USER43> Sounds like circling of the wagons to me, to reduce or prevent Facebook users from leaving the domain.

</comment><comment><USER44> First Alex Jones. The this.

Way to go Facebook! /s

<comment><USER45> Too bad. My favorite part about Facebook was the false assertions that shooting victims were paid actors, and the never-ending torrent of twitter's recycled hashtag spam.

<comment><USER5> Good riddance. Got to leave more space for marketoid spam from Facebook pages. How dare an individual automate _their_ posting and crowd out what's important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What? Having social iteraction owned by a private quasi-monopoly means the monopoly can screw with how you interact with the world at will? Who could have guessed that?

Really, I don't understand how this is news. It's what was going to happen, everyone with half a brain has known that since facebook started being a thing, and anyone who cared could trivially avoid it. So how is it that there are still people who apparently care that this happens?

<comment><USER47> > Really, I don't understand how this is news. It's what was going to happen, > everyone with half a brain has known that since facebook started being a > thing

Just because something isn't a surprise to you, doesn't mean its not news. I know that wild fires will inevitably happen, but I'm happy that they are reported on the news.

> So how is it that there are still people who apparently care that this > happens?

So how is it that there are still people who apparently don't realize that the 2B+ users of facebook don't know everything they know.</comment></comment>


BOSS – The Next Step in our Open Search Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/07/boss_the_next_s.html

<comment><USER2> Hi, my name is Micah Alpern and I work with the Yahoo! BOSS team. If you have any questions about BOSS or ideas for how we can make it even better please feel free drop in on the BOSS Yahoo! group: <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ysearchboss/>

There are a number of BOSS team members there who can answer you questions. You should also check out our Python based mash-up framework that makes it easy to blend search results from multiple sources. <http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/mashup.html>

Also check out this personal blog post by Vik Sing, the BOSS architect: [http://zooie.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/yahoo-boss-an- insider-...](http://zooie.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/yahoo-boss-an-insider- view/)

<comment><USER3> Micah, thanks for checking in. BOSS is going to solve a problem I've had, and I'm sure it's going to be a boon for a lot of others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remarkable in the sense that BOSS is a search service that will have 'No Restrictions on Presentation' and 'Blending of Proprietary and Yahoo! Search Content Allowed'.

But AMAZING it will have monetization, even though right now its says 'Coming Soon', wouldn't be strange if they took a while on this.

Its their kind of resources and scaling capabilities that allow 'THEM' to monetize search the way the do, now they will give everyone the same crack at using their same power and on top monetize it..wow..sounds like this will shake things up a bit in search, if BOSS delivers on what it says it will.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do they really mean unlimited queries? I think they need to do or say more to assure the developers they really meant unlimited.

The API can be found at <http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_guide/index.html> and it seems very simple:

       http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/{vertical}/v1/{query}?appid=xyz[&param1=val1&param2=val2&etc]
       vertical  - web , image , news...
       query     - text query
       appid     - your Yahoo application id
       parm1,2,3 - filter, type...
       filter    -  -hate , -porn...
       type      -  pdf , html , nonhtml , ppt ...

<comment><USER6> You might find this helpful (#2, #15): <http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_guide/faq.html>

<comment><USER7> also, "There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day" from [http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/07/boss_the_ne...](http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/07/boss_the_next_s.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yahoo is bang on with this one.

BOSS + Amazon Cloud counters the huge infrastructure edge that Google services enjoyed till now.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think acceptable BOSS usage can best be described as "anything that doesn't piss Y! off". Now, this may be a compromise between their lawyers and the host of innovative search offerings they can't put in a legal box at the moment, but I'm still hesitant to think this is all great.

Looking through the TOS I also found this beauty (good luck writing a blog post announcing that you are now integrating BOSS search results):

(a) You shall not refer to the Services, or use or display any Yahoo! trademarks, service marks, logos or other Yahoo!-related branding in connection with any Links or Web Search Results or in any other manner, except where expressly and specifically authorized by Yahoo! in writing.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but that's the kind of "just in case" language that's rarely actually used if you're not being a jerk. There's a limit to what's actually enforceable.

If you wrote a blog post stating that you're using Yahoo's new BOSS service in your app, and showed the Yahoo logo there, and talked about how great it is, I sincerely doubt anyone at Yahoo would have a problem with that.

However, if you had an app that was specifically designed to phish passwords, and you put the Yahoo logo on it, and Yahoo sued you for inappropriate use of their IP, you couldn't even begin to claim that they gave you permission. This kind of legal language precludes them from appearing to even accidentally permit that kind of thing. It's just erring on the side of being cautious, which is expected, common, and responsible.

<comment><USER9> I agree with your interpretation (if you write positive stuff I don't think they'll complain), and I think they do have the right to just arbitrarily decide that someone is doing something bad and cut them off.

I don't like that they are saying that this is an open system, then laying down a legal trap where "everyone" who writes anything about the service would be in violation of their TOS. You can't have it both ways.

<comment><USER10> They're not trying to have it both ways.

They're saying, "Unless we have given you permission to use our IP, you don't have it."

It's not like Yahoo is claiming that BOSS is GPL'ed or anything. And even if it was FOSS, PHP has similar language in its license--you can't use the phrase "PHP" or the logo to endorse or promote any product without written permission.

Language like this in a license never trumps fair use anyhow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope they give me movie data! I want movie info.

<comment><USER12> i'm working on movie search as a side project and have been doing it via scraping

<comment><USER13> Are you guys avoiding using IMDb's data since it can't be used commercially?

<http://www.imdb.com/interfaces>

<comment><USER12> yeah, too bad we need a written consent, i'm just scraping theater showtimes and will have to include links to imdb for more info, thankfully they let me do this "You are granted a limited, revocable, and nonexclusive right to create a hyperlink to IMDb.com" they are so generous for letting me link to them</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We built it for hackers, need feedback, thanks! - <AUTHOR> http://devdraft.com?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=needfeedbackthanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you guys for the feedback! Also, feel free to help us figure out the tagline: devdraft.com/redirect/tagline. Just takes a minute.

</comment><comment><USER2> I guess you need a "connect with github" button if you're building this website for hackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thank you for this feedback. Connection with github is in our sprint.</comment></comment>


How I made an easy $4,300 on the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://joeallenpro.com/how-i-made-an-easy-4300-on-the-app-store/

<comment><USER2> tl;dr, card trick app earned an average of $180/month over the course of two years.</comment>


What Is Functional Programming? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/what-is-functional-programming.html <comment><USER2> The opening, about hidden inputs and hidden outputs, was wonderfully done. It made Haskell's insistence on purity make much more sense.</comment>


Contextual User Interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://chrismahon.com/blog/2009/03/contextual-user-interfaces/

<comment><USER2> Good points, but not so many of them. After having first well designed site I really could use feedback: What if the UI was semi-automatically giving feedback? Like each link could have two variations: normal: _change time zone_ and with feedback: _change zone but why this was buried here_ Now as a webmaster I could follow up if people started to "complain" on something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Emailing the password? Ha.

<comment><USER4> Why is this a ha? I'm confused.

<comment><USER5> There's a few reasons this is undesirable. The reason that leaps to the fore is that this means the password itself--not a hash of it--is stored in the application. Since people re-use passwords and usernames, that means a breach of security in one website could lose a large swath of many users' online identities. These days, most low-security websites randomly reset your password and email the new one. For financial or other higher security websites, two-factor authentication is normal.

<comment><USER4> That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!

Even so, I like the idea of click-to-send email directly after log in. In some ways that's better than the model that my site uses right now. It makes sense to make it two-step instead of one-step, but it's a good integration of the Forgot Password process.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twilio Phone Call Automation - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.coachup.com/47/

<comment><USER5> The Twilio Erlang library has a built in Extended TWIML library that is compiles to a human readable statement of the state machine and the state machine that implements it. It also guarantees that the state machine doesn't hang for the user.

So for example you write:

         SAY1 = #say{text = "My you are looking swish"},
         RESPONSE1 = #response_EXT{title = "Praise", response = "1", body = [SAY1]},

         SAY2 = #say{text = "What you looking at, fannybaws?", language = "en-gb"},
         RESPONSE2 = #response_EXT{title = "Abuse", response = "2", body = [SAY2]},

        SAYD = #say{text = "can you no use a phone, bawbag?", language = "de"},
        DEFAULT = #default_EXT{title = "a slagging", body = [SAYD]},

        % now put them all together
        [#gather{numDigits = 1, autoMenu_EXT = true, after_EXT = [RESPONSE1,
                                                                  RESPONSE2,
                                                                  DEFAULT]}];

and it compiles to:

        1 - GATHER (request Keypad Input)
            1.1 - SAY "Press 1 for PRAISE. Press 2 for ABUSE. Do nothing for A SLAGGING"
            1.2 - end of Gather (wait for response)
            1.3 - Response 1 : PRAISE
                1.3.1 - SAY "My you are looking swish"
                1.3.2 - <USER4>
            1.4 - Response 2 : ABUSE
                1.4.1 - SAY "What you looking at, fannybaws?"  en-gb
                1.4.2 - <USER4>
            1.5 - Default : A SLAGGING
                1.5.1 - SAY "can you no use a phone, bawbag?"  de
                1.5.2 - <USER4>

Disclaimer: I wrote it...

</comment><comment><USER6> This article is fantastic and describes the Canonical Right Way to model Twilio call flows which every serious user of Twilio seems to independently rediscover but which no one has covered at this length in a public post before. I strongly, strongly suggest you read it.

<comment><USER7> I worked at a business services group that implemented IVR applications for years, using vxml, and this pretty much describes exactly how that company built their products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another coachup dev here: how have others' experiences with Twilio been?

We actually moved off Tropo because Twilio seemed to be better documented and we were having SMS deliverability issues with Tropo.

Anyone used Twilio for SMS? That's next up on our Twilio integration.

<comment><USER6> Yep, we're (heavy) users of Twilio SMS. Aside from maybe two incidents that I can think of in the last 3 years, they've been rock solid for us. I am struggling to remember any customer complaints from SMSes not being delivered -- while I think our scale guarantees that this has probably happened (yay telephony), it doesn't happen often enough for it to impact customer results for us. (The typical customer will be sending dozens to hundreds of them a week, so one or two going undeliverable do to carrier issues/user error/etc is not the worst thing in the world for us.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What IS a state machine?

<comment><USER10> "A finite-state machine (FSM) or finite-state automaton (plural: automata), or simply a state machine, is a mathematical model of computation used to design both computer programs and sequential logic circuits. It is conceived as an abstract machine that can be in one of a finite number of states. The machine is in only on one state at a time; the state it is in at any given time is called the current state. It can change from one state to another when initiated by a triggering event or condition; this is called a transition. A particular FSM is defined by a list of its states, and the triggering condition for each transition." Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite- state_machine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine)

Basically, it's a way to track known "state" of a system and know valid and invalid (or prohibited) operations that can be performed and what "next" state these operations move the system to.

For example, in a phone call, if the state is "ringing", your next options can be "answered", "no answer", "busy", or "failed" (including refusal to route, not in-service numbers, etc.). If you try to move the call into some other state, for example, "queued", a state machine should refuse to do so and respond with an error.

A more complex example could be in managing conference rooms or call transfers.</comment></comment>


Fast and maintainable patterns for fetching from a database - <AUTHOR> https://sophiebits.com/2020/01/01/fast-maintainable-db-patterns.html <comment><USER2> Am I missing something or wouldn't this be much (much) more efficient to do in SQL with a single parameterized query?

<comment><USER3> If you are, so am I.

From the description "like to render a summary of published posts, with the post title, author, number of times it's been viewed, and a fun fact about that view count number" I don't even see why you'd need a parameter.

<comment><USER4> Just gotta rethink the architecture so that it scales: this sounds like at least 3 separate APIs w/ at least 3 separate DBs should be stood up. This is of course because if the post-title service goes down then the customers can still access post-authors and post-data from their respective services.

/sarcasm</comment></comment></comment>