On Technical Writing - <AUTHOR> https://arturdryomov.dev/posts/on-technical-writing/ <comment><USER2> This article, like many on "technical writing" conflates techincal writing and _writing about technology_. In my estimation, they're two different things.

Technical Writing is a profession with a massive set of practices, relatively well-prescribed goals, and a long history. It's a discipline that has almost nothing to do with Stephen King and Strunk and White—though of course these sources might be applied. Chances are, if you were to ask an professional technical writer about resources for technical writing, they'd point you to a few text books on technical communication or papers or blog posts from people in the industry. Technical writing also has serious consequences. If a manual for a missile has mistakes, it could cost thousands of dollars or thousands of lives. Stephen King's advice isn't quite as helpful in such perilous situations.

 _Writing about technology_ , I think, is closer to what the author is actually pursuing here—and most tech blogs better fit this classification than technical writing. Writing about technology is more free form, more whimsical, full of opinion, intimations of possible approaches or solutions but not hardened proceedural documentation.

It might seem a bit pedantic to make such a distinction, but I would really love it if more people honored it. For instance, this article was a bit of false advertising, since I thought it'd be about technical writing in the professional sense (i.e. writing documentation) and not about writing about technology in a more casual, opinionated way. It's similar to the distinction between programming and software engineering—they're quite distinct pusuits, even though the tools and techniques considered overlap.

<comment><USER3> My guiding goal as a practicing technical writer is _how do I transfer knowledge as efficiently as possible?_ For that reason I think it's a skill that is applicable to anyone whose job depends upon a lot of collaboration, which is why I think we see the topic come up somewhat frequently here on HN.

I 100% agree that _technical writing_ is a discipline with a specific meaning and is not the same thing as _writing about technology_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is actually quite empty, it starts like it is going to be about how to write good technical content, then becomes an auto-biography, then becomes an article on how one can get started blogging, then just end abruptly with some statistics that probably nobody cares.

So if you came here to know how to write, Stephen King wrote a book "On Writing" that is quite interesting and mostly reads like a novel. See it as a "I'll read this and I'll get motivated to write".

If you came here to understand how to get into blogging: just start. Create a wordpress, and just start writing. Focus on content, not on form. After a while, you can think about a domain name, about a custom theme, or about hosting this yourself on github with hugo. But don't start with the technical parts of managing a blog, just write.

If you came here to understand how you can become a good technical writer: keep writing. Consistence over years of writing is what makes you a good writer. The ultimate technique for me is to give an interactive talk to people about your ideas, and see where your audience get stuck, where they ask questions, how different ways of explaining something get the point across.

Malcolm Gladwell does more than this: he explains an idea multiple times in different ways. If you have the page count to do this, do it. Different people need different ways of explaining.

(shameless plug: I'm writing a book on crypto [https://www.manning.com/books/real-world- cryptography?a_aid=...](https://www.manning.com/books/real-world- cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto&a_bid=ad500e09))

<comment><USER5> William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" is also quite illuminating in regards to writing non-fiction.

[https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060891541/on-writing- well/](https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060891541/on-writing-well/)

<comment><USER6> Have you read Steven Pinker's _Sense of Style_?

[https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style- thinking-p...](https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking- persons-guide-writing-21st-century)

I was thinking about reading it but it's hard to find reviews of the book that don't include praise or criticism of Pinker's other work or the author himself.

<comment><USER7> I've read it and I found it to be the most useful book on writing I've read so far, because he grounds his advice in clear linguistic principles and he is mostly not prescriptivist in his advice.

His advice about keeping an easy-to-understand sentence tree alone is worth the price of admission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am surprised that someone who claims to have been an avid reader writes so poorly. Consider, for example,

"Fast-forward to the last year of school. I've started writing. It was nothing special really, short fictional stories there and there."

The author's tense is muddled, and I have no idea what "there and there" means. Better would be

"Fast-forward to my last year of school. I started writing. It was nothing special really, just some short stories."

There were a few instances where the author should have used "I" rather than "I've". In fact, I would encourage this author to avoid such contractions altogether.

The goal of writing at least one article a month is laudable, but this author should work on writing craft fundamentals. Perhaps a book like The Elements of Style would help. Even better would be a tutor or coach.

</comment><comment><USER9> > There were no recommendation engines of course so I went through everything, > itching to consume experiences left behind by humanity. Sounds like an > addiction, right? Well, it kinda was.

Well, there kind of were. I doubt you would end up reading The Hobbit, The Three Musketeers and Sherlock Holmes purely by accident. The idea that the best content bubbling to the top of the popular consciousness is merely a product of modern ML recommendation engines is for the birds.

<comment><USER10> Of course there were recommendation engines - they were called librarians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> « Kids certainly don't give a damn about them either. »

Well I guess it depends on how you educate them.

While I'm here eating my (late) breakfast, both are in their room reading.

They are 9yo (10 next spring). My son is finishing season 2 of Erin Hunter's warriors (he loves cat) and my daughter finally catch up on Harry Potter and is reading no2 (they are not allowed to see the movies until they read the book)

<comment><USER12> "Kids these days" never really goes away huh? Funny how smart phones and social media will be our version of that.

<comment><USER13> > _" Kids these days" never really goes away huh?_

And it's seldom wrong either.

Kids do have different behavior in different ages. Whether that's good or bad is another thing (in some things it's bad, in others are good). But culture, habits, etc, are not the same blob of sameness for centuries. Kids in 1950 are different than kids in 2020 or kids in 1900.

In this particular case, indeed, kids these days seldom read books, whether in print or eBook form.

Whether they still read social media pages, and online news, is beside the point when it comes to reading books.

<comment><USER12> It's frustrating because it's based on anecdotal evidence and preconceptions. It also defaults to the assumption that all change is bad.

I know plenty of kids these days who read books, lots of them in fact. Often reading fiction and literature especially.

<comment><USER13> > _I know plenty of kids these days who read books, lots of them in fact. > Often reading fiction and literature especially._

Well, since you've mentioned anecdotal evidence, all the statistics say kids read less than ever. Down to 1/4 or so of what kids in the 70s read (including eBooks).

[https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.as...](https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=11098)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Btw, conferences and events are dead.

The author lost me right there.</comment>


Minigo: An open-source implementation of the AlphaGo Zero algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tensorflow/minigo <comment><USER2> To help put it all together, there is currently a book being written about Deep Learning and the game of Go. It is currently in MEAP at Manning [[https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-and-the-game- of-...](https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-and-the-game-of-go)]

I am finding it quite useful. (I'm not the author, just a happy reader! :-))

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat! I was hoping to see an idea of what strength the self-taught Minigo can play at, e.g. on KGS.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've put it on KGS as "somebot", and it can play at somewhere from 3-5d level, although amusingly it still can't do ladders, and almost always plays 3-3. Our strength seems to have plateaued recently, and we suspect it's because of value net overfitting issues.

<comment><USER4> So, um, what would you have to do to it to make it play at about 25 kyu? (I'm, um, asking for a friend...)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on making all the data (models, selfplay SGFs) available to download - you could download an older generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been super out of touch with playing Go for the past couple years. I would love to get back into it with all these new development! Does anyone know if I can play against AlphaGo or derivative (such as MiniGo) online?

<comment><USER6> Various people have tried to incorporate AG-like techniques into their Go programs. One you might wish to play with is Leela Zero, which is low to mid dan (amateur) now.

To get this working:

* Acquire a GTP-capable GUI, such as Sabaki

* Acquire the latest Leela Zero release

* Acquire a recent Leela Zero neural net

* Set up Sabaki to use LZ with the net passed as an argument, e.g. "-t 1 -p 1600 --noponder --gtp -w d16fa4c3801e55ec21e0df7ead67980fe8d4ee49188a3516818207ad28b017a6"

It's a bit of work but nothing too hard. I should mention that this may require a semi-decent GPU (my old GTX 750 works fine).

<comment><USER5> Interesting, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool! How much work would it be to get this to work for chess?

<comment><USER8> Check out [https://github.com/glinscott/leela- chess](https://github.com/glinscott/leela-chess). We are getting close to kicking off the distributed version now that we have validated it's possible to get a strong network through supervised training.

A nice win against Gnuchess (a very weak opponent, but nonetheless :) - [https://github.com/glinscott/leela- chess/issues/47#issuecomm...](https://github.com/glinscott/leela- chess/issues/47#issuecomment-361174111)

<comment><USER9> > A nice win against Gnuchess

Not sure why you guys don't show the PGN, but here you are:

1\. e4 Nc6 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nc3 d5 4. exd5 Nxd5 5\. Bb5 Nf4 6. O-O Bf5 7. d4 Nd5 8. Ne5 Qd6 9\. Nxd5 Qxd5 10. Bxc6+ bxc6 11. c4 Qd6 12. Qf3 g6 13\. Nxc6 Bg7 14. Bf4 Qe6 15. Rfe1 Qxc4 16. Rxe7+ Kf8 17\. Rae1 Kg8 18. b3 Qc2 19. Qd5 Be6 20. R7xe6 fxe6 21\. Qxe6+ Kf8 22. Bh6 Bxh6 23. Qf6+ Kg8 24. Ne7#

Question : when you switch to self-play reinforcement learning, do you plan on starting from the networked obtained in supervised learning or tabula rasa? I understand starting from tabula rasa will require more comptuting power/time, but if you start from the supervised learning network, isn't there a risk you inherit human biases in the game style? It would also defeat the purpose of having the system discover existing chess theory and possibly new one.

<comment><USER8> We are going to start tabula rasa. The supervised learning is meant to prove that there are no major bugs in the framework/learning process.

Should be fun to watch it learn chess theory :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone tried using Minigo with KSP (Kerbal Space Program)?

</comment><comment><USER11> Can you run it with the LeelaZero weights?

<comment><AUTHOR> With a lot of elbow grease, mayyyyybe. We're currently using 128 filters, 20 residual layers, whereas LZ is using a smaller network size. Our networks would have had to define their batchnorm layers exactly the same way for the model files to be compatible, and it would also require a lot of op renaming for the model load operation to work correctly.

<comment><USER11> A lot of computation has already gone into training LeelaZero, so it might make a good baseline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> does it come with a pre trained model/s?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's one of the stronger models we've gone through.

[https://github.com/tensorflow/minigo/releases/tag/v199](https://github.com/tensorflow/minigo/releases/tag/v199)</comment></comment>


A unit testing framework for Sinclair ZX Spectrum assembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rhargreaves/zx-spec <comment><USER2> Oh wow! My first code I ever wrote was on ZX Spectrum computer. What a jog down the memory lane to those good ol' days. Peek Poke GoTo GoSub Return. Took a stab at Z80 Assembly at that time but ended up playing Saboteur video game on ZX Spectrum+

My friend and I used to "transfer" video games across the city between our Sinclair Spectrums by plugging cassette players to the analog phone lines and then feeding the output directly to the computer data input/output jacks on the other end. We did the same with the programs and data we wrote to solve math problems. And this was in the early/mid 80's where we "invented" our own Internet/BBS system as a necessity.

Ok, just random thoughts. Maybe irrelevant to the post but just felt compelled to share.

<comment><USER3> Mine too. Our family moved house and that year we all shared a single present which was a 48k Spectrum, with a bundle of ten games. The tape-player didn't work, so my sisters lost interest - I read the (orange) manual from cover to cover instead.

I suspect I'd have gotten interested in coding eventually regardless, as most of my efforts were hacking games for infinite lives, but it was definitely my defining moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have always wanted to get into assembly programming ever since I was a kid, growing up on those magazines with "listings" that you could type in to play games (something that I hope gets rekindled in the current era, on devices like the iPad with Swift Playgrounds; kids getting simple new games by literally typing in their source code.)

Then the Commodore 64 came along with its more complex features, and it got more intimidating. Decades later, I dabbled in GameBoy Advance homebrew for a very short while, but my life still feels incomplete without having made a ZX Spectrum game in assembly. I hope to get around to it one of these days.

<comment><USER2> I know what you mean. Ping me when you embark on that journey!

<comment><USER4> I've been meaning to dig up those old books and magazines, and try to only use the resources that were available back then, and try them out on an accurate emulator.

Effectively going back in time seems to be the best way to correct that wrong and fill the hole of an unfulfilled ambition. :)

<comment><USER2> Preach! I am actually looking for one on eBay as we speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My first computer experience was with its under-powered sibling, the ZX81 [1]. Typing in and running silly little BASIC programs was the most exciting thing in those days.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81)

</comment><comment><USER6> Could have done with this in 1986! :-)</comment>


A simple epub reader written with pygtk and pywebkit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sakisds/pPub

<comment><USER2> Seems to use old PyGtk instead of the newer GObject Introspection way:

[http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel-demos/3.2/image- viewe...](http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel-demos/3.2/image- viewer.py.html.en#first)

From PyGtk website:

 _New users wishing to develop Python applications using GTK+ are recommended to use the GObject-Introspection features available in PyGObject._

 _Existing authors of PyGTK applications are also recommended to port their applications to PyGObject to take advantage of new features appearing in GTK-3 and beyond. More information on PyGObject and GObject-Introspection can be found at<http://live.gnome.org/PyGObject> ._

 _PyGTK-2.24 will be the final major release of PyGTK. Additional bug-fix releases may appear when necessary to maintain compatibility and stability with the GTK-2.24 series._

<comment><USER3> PyGTK will be maintained for a long time, and right now PyGObject it's not well supported in all distributions (and chances are that only the newest releases have a working version of PyGObject because it's been in heavy development for a long time).

It sounds to me like saying... oh, he's using Python 2.7.1 instead of Python 3.2.2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the trick about identifying books (for bookmarks) via MD5 hashes, so that the name and path are immaterial. It's simple and obvious... once someone has already thought of it.

That also enables a very simple bookmark sharing system: store the hash, date of last access and bookmark points into any online system. Garbage collect with date expiration.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want to earn fame you could write a nice GUI to wrap around the command line tool (ebook-convert) from Calibre to allow people to do batch conversion of ebooks from one format to another.

Many people dislike the Calibre look and feel, and some of those people aren't sure about simple bash scripting.

</comment><comment><USER6> If this could also do pdf and/or mobi, I'd be sold. Nevertheless, I think this just might replace Lucidor for me as my default epub reader.

Add in the ebook-convert feature from Calibre and you will win great fame and glory.</comment>


Spolsky on WebPutty - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/spolsky/status/93751313896177664 <comment><USER2> Someone should have told Spolsky about CSSEdit - <http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/> \- its offered that style of CSS editing for a number of years now...</comment>


The Tungsten Renderer - <AUTHOR> http://noobody.org/tungsten.html <comment><USER2> This is very impressive! The project doc was a great read and, while beyond my level, I appreciated the author's ability to distill the academic papers into something workable and discuss the snags encountered when trying to approximate the solutions.

For the author, if they're able to take any questions, I would like to know how much time was spent rendering that final scene (the 3840x2160 or so resolution one), and how much you were able to cut that rendering time while prototyping it with your low resolution or low sample approximations of the scene?

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

The final render took about 30 hours at >5k samples per pixel. While prototyping I typically used a resolution of 1000x563 (low-res 16:9) and used the incremental renderer in the editor, meaning that the first images would come back after a few seconds. This was usually enough to figure out whether a composition would work or not.

To setup and tweak the lighting, I needed more converged renders, and that could take anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours. Most of the museum converged pretty quickly, making it easier to set up the sun and these sorts of things, but the planet would stay noisy for a very long time. Multiple scattering in the atmosphere has enormous variance and tends to just spray bright blue dots throughout the scene. Any change to the parameters of the planet, atmosphere or clouds would require a few hours of rendering before I was able to check whether the change was for the better or worse.

Not the most efficient feedback loop, but I had other final projects to work on while renders were running, so it wasn't too bad.

<comment><USER4> Great work! The image quality is astounding, really.

So, I just tested your renderer with the material test scene, and while it ran pretty fast, it seems it only used 3 cores out of 4 on my system. Is there a way to configure/force the renderer to run a number of threads?

<comment><USER3> By default it will use one thread less than the amount of cores available, so that the rest of the system is still usable while a render is running.

It's not currently user configurable, but I'll add it to the Todo list. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> It makes sense, thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While all of the images are impressive, I found the hair rendering to be the most interesting. It's very tough to get it right, that is, realistic- appearing. As presented it's very close to that ideal.

An attribute of hair that makes it hard to render is color. At least on my monitor the "blonde" sample seems a bit too reddish. (Blonde is really sort of a dull green.) Another factor is color variation, not only the result of lighting, but also intrinsic to hair growth. (Commonly hair at its "roots" is slightly darker/lighter, and there's natural randomness among individual hairs.)

I hope that doesn't sound like picky criticism, it really does look very promising. Portrait artists I know would empathize with the challenge of convincingly depicting the hair of human heads.

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. Getting the hair data right (groom, strand color, little fiber variations) is just as difficult as implementing the right shading model.

My renders are currently a bit lacking in that regard - I'm not an artist, but I'll try to look out for that in the future. Adding some subtle random variation between fibers is definitely doable.

As far as the hair color goes, I was following measured absorption coefficients of real human hair. Eugene d'Eon's paper "An Energy-Conserving Hair Reflectance Model" contains measured absorption coefficients for the pigments Eumelanin and Pheomelanin, which are responsible for human hair color. By mixing their concentrations, you can reproduce any hair color found in real life. It's difficult to find the mixtures that are just right though, and it's likely that I was a bit off for the blonde hair render :) I'll tweak it some more in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely stunning! I've been glued to the idea of real-time path tracing for a while and I'm wondering how feasible you think it would be to implement a real-time version of this at a much lower quality? What would you change if you were to do this for a real-time implementation?

<comment><USER3> I think that an implementation targeting real-time would need an entirely different design than an offline implementation, especially if it had to run on the GPU.

The main challenge is probably achieving full utilization of SIMD units (CPU) or streaming multiprocessors (GPU), which would require tracing and shading multiple rays within one unit. There's lots of papers on how to do this for geometry intersection (i.e. packet tracing), and I think there's a few slides from nvidia that give hints on how to do it for shading (avoid megakernels, sort all shading points by material id).

Brigade is a path tracer that is close to the real-time ideal (for outdoor scenes and using high-end GPUs), so looking into their code would certainly be interesting.

<comment><USER6> As far as I know, Brigade isn't open source though. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really want graphics hardware that does path tracing. Like if I could feed that material test json into some graphics card or something and get realtime results. That would be bad ass.

The reason I know something like this is doable with enough engineering is the Brigade Engine demos.

<comment><USER8> It looks like voxel cone tracing is becoming popular at the moment. Both approaches have the disadvantage that you need to keep the entire scene in video memory, however with VCT that memory usage is bounded by the voxel resolution and integration over large solid angles is very cheap and has no aliasing. It's probably also a disadvantage of GPU path tracing that it makes little use of the features that graphics cards provide.

<comment><USER9> Here's an article on a voxel raytracer focused on realtime operation: [https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/real-time- ray...](https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/real-time-ray-tracing- part-2/)

And here's a video of the raytracer discussed in the above link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8hSZGTXTx8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8hSZGTXTx8)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure how well this renderer handles arbitrary scenes through. Pieces of broken glass are very suitable for GPU raytracing, because rendering them is not a "branchy" task since there is no scattering, only definite reflection/refraction. The reflections also make it look like there were a lot more triangles. With Monte Carlo sampling you need 4x samples for .5x error, which means that a lot of samples are needed for scattered indirect illumination in a typical scene (I think in the order of 100 to 1000). In VCT you only need 7-13 samples but a lot of preprocessing.

<comment><USER9> The author mentions that he chose reflective materials for exactly that reason.

Realtime renderers still struggle with things like Monte Carlo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this really forward path tracing as in "follow the photons from a light source"?

I'm very interested in forward rendering but it has always been slow as hell because it's very hard to predict which ray of light will end up in the camera.

But this is looking very good. Nice work!

<comment><USER11> It depends on the context: for path-tracing (uni-directional / bi-directional without photon mapping / VCM), "forward" generally means starting at the camera (eye) and bouncing around the scene.

"backward" generally means starting at the lights in this context (for bi- directional).

Forward in the photon context generally comes from the fact that multiple bounces didn't used to be done, you generally sent out photons from the lights, they were stored, and then a final gather was done to create the image.

</comment></comment><comment> Ono-Sendai As someone who enjoys making atmospheric simulation renderings ([http://www.indigorenderer.com/images/clouds-0](http://www.indigorenderer.com/images/clouds-0)), this is nice work!

<comment><USER12> How're you rendering the clouds? A friend of mine did a thesis a few years ago on real-time cloud rendering [1]. It was very interesting learning about cloud transference functions (and what a Glory is!) and how they found a way to optimize that into a manageable database (IIRC) usable for real-time and realistic rendering.

[1] [http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2008/BN08a/](http://www- evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2008/BN08a/)

<comment> Ono-Sendai The clouds are done with multiple-scattering path-tracing with participating media. Basically the ray bounces around inside the cloud until it exits :)

The cloud density is defined by a shader, which basically takes the form of a function from position to density (scattering coefficient).

<comment><USER12> Sounds like you're taking the brute-force approach, and the aforementioned thesis could show how to improve that. The powerpoint is surprisingly clear, IMHO.

From the paper's conclusion: "We propose a new approach to find significant light paths in clouds via searching for their collector area which comprises their entry point on the lit surface of the cloud. In addition to this new formulation we have proposed a new, GPU-based algorithm to find these collectors and compute their contributions in interactive time. Similarly to our previous model, we account for the varying anisotropy of light transport by treating separately light paths of different orders."

Of course, that's avoiding assumptions about how easy it is to integrate in your rendering... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool looking project. I get a bit of a Mitsuba [1] vibe from the renderer, at first glance -- I'm curious how the two stack up.

[1] [http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org](http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org)

<comment><USER14> Considering that the author and Mitsuba's author, Wenzel Jakob, are both at ETH Zurich, I wouldn't be surprised if they knew each other. ;)

Additionally, the author has a report page [1] with side-by-side comparisons of material renders with Mitsuba.

[1][http://noobody.org/is-report/medium.html](http://noobody.org/is- report/medium.html)

<comment><USER3> Yep! Wenzel was even one of the judges at the rendering competition.

Mitsuba was and continues to be an important inspiration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was looking forward to an article about a 3-D printer that created objects out of tungsten.</comment>


Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control and automate tasks - <AUTHOR> https://slapbot.github.io/ <comment><USER2> For anyone else on Linux that gets the error:

Default Audio Player for mp3 files is not set up, like vlc or something.

when you try to run it, note that Stephanie depends on the python module os.startfile[0] which apparently is a Windows only thing that works like xdg- open. I'm not a python expert but here's what I did: the offending file is stephanie-va-master/Stephanie/TextManager/speaker.py. If you edit line 15 which is:

os.startfile(self.speak_result)

and change it to:

os.system("xdg-open " \+ self.speak_result)

everything works. Somebody else more knowledgeable can probably suggest something better.

[0][https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.startfile](https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.startfile)

Edit: Fixed! They fixed it by wrapping that line in an if statement checking the output of sys.platform. Very responsive dev.

</comment><comment><USER3> The website is a way better source than the Github repo: [https://slapbot.github.io/](https://slapbot.github.io/)

<comment><USER4> It looks great. Started watching the pitch video...somebody get that guy a decent microphone!!

<comment><USER5> I came here to 2nd this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are lots of projects like this today; but I think the most important and useful thing (profoundly missing) is an open source state-of-art offline (or maybe hybrid) speech recognition package. Until that happens, almost nothing has changed.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is exactly the kind of IoT I was hoping for. Not the bastardized corporate data-mining kind.

Hope this project keeps growing!

<comment><USER8> It uses speech to text from Google/MS/Facebook/IBM/SoundCloud with your API key

[https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/](https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/)

<comment><USER9> I wonder how easy it'd be to add support for Sphinx via Python's SpeechRecognition package...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > or just write your own modules to extend the functionality of the > application using simple as f __* guide.

I'm not one to be a prude... but, is this really necessary?

</comment><comment><USER11> I would recommend re-recording the video with a better audio setup, including a good mic or try to process the audio somehow. It's a bit difficult to hear.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool! Any video demo or anything of this anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> This may be helpful to you : [https://youtu.be/Pp5dXbWZsrU?t=1m40s](https://youtu.be/Pp5dXbWZsrU?t=1m40s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm sure this is a great project, but for once, it would be wonderful if Virtual Assistants weren't named after women.

<comment><USER2> We've already hashed this out in these very comments. If you'd read before posting, you'd see the premise was investigated by looking at the current crop of virtual assistants on the play store and found to be false.

<comment><USER14> Firstly, there's no requirement to read other unrelated threads before commenting in this thread.

Secondly, what's more relevant: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or random assistants on the Play store? (I'm ignoring Google Assistant, as that's named after a company, not a male or female).

To be clear, I don't think it matters whether assistants are named after males or females, I just thought your comment was needlessly dismissive. Had you provided a link to the other hacker news thread[s] and not been as aggressive, your comment would have had much more value.

<comment><USER2> >Firstly, there's no requirement to read other unrelated threads before commenting in this thread.

The guy started a new thread on the exact same issue that had already been discussed completely with insightful posts on both sides in another thread containing exactly 32 comments which was more than half the total comments on the article at the time he posted. Starting a new thread when over 50 percent of the comments were on this exact subject was absolutely unnecessary and frankly tiresome. And you claim that is "unrelated". How exactly do you get that?

>Secondly, what's more relevant: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or random assistants on the Play store?

The latter are more relevant as this is an assistant written by some guy by himself in Python. Furthermore, in the settings for this one, you can name it whatever you want. Additionally, note how Siri defaults to male or female depending on the market. Specifically, in the UK, it is male out of the box.

>I'm ignoring Google Assistant

Hmm..

>I just thought your comment was needlessly dismissive. Had you provided a link to the other hacker news thread[s] and not been as aggressive, your comment would have had much more value.

Provide a link? Use your eyes. The comments are inches away on this exact page.

The bottom line is, this issue was talked about thoroughly, yet it keeps being brought up, derailing the comments, instead of actually discussing the topic at hand which is the app the guy wrote. This kind of thing makes Hacker News less useful and that is a worse problem than my purported "dismissiveness" over something that shouldn't exist in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice. Anyone interested in porting this to Android to replace Google voice- driven services? F-Droid needs this.

<comment><USER8> [https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/](https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/)

Sadly not possible with fdroid if it has api keys from proprietary services.

<comment><USER15> Oh, I though it did speech to text itself. It just calls one of several commercial speech to text engines run by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

Could CMUSphinx be used? That's open source speech recognition that can fit in a phone if you keep the vocabulary size down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Someday, someone will buck the trend of naming their voice assistant with a woman's name. Sadly, today is not that day.

<comment><USER17> To be fair, Siri is androgynous enough and could be given a man's voice by default.

<comment><USER18> I gave Siri a male voice right out of the bag, and keep forgetting other people have female Siris. Having Butler Siri feels classy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Slapbot?

</comment><comment><USER20> How many times have you complained about 99% of soldiers being male? Let me guess, none. Or 75% of suicides being males? Let me guess, none too. Now, how many times you have complained about the gender of artificial computer voices like you just did? many times right? Not only you give this kind of inane issues any relevance whatsoever, you give none to any actual form of equality and pretend us to take it seriously.

<comment><USER21> Please don't take HN threads on this sort of ideological tangent. The original point was at least partly on topic; this is way off in the flames.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530866) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER22> I don't approve of this decision. If discussion about how AI assistants have female names are on-topic, then so is the rebuttal that "AI assistants having female names is a non-issue". I like you, dang, but I think you added your own ideological bias in making this decision.

<comment><USER21> I know you guys often see ideological bias in these things, but there's a strong if not irresistible tendency to see that whether it's happening or not [1,2], and people of opposite ideological persuasions accuse us of the same thing. So I dunno. I can't judge my own bias, obviously. What I can tell you is that after dealing with thousands of these, the only thing I consciously care about is what makes the threads tedious and predictable vs. not. That's pretty much the only thing that HN is ultimately about, and I probably have a more fine-tuned sense of it (i.e. of what's predictable) than most people do, just because of the effects of brute quantity on the brain.

1\. [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20cognitive%20bias&sor...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20cognitive%20bias&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

2\. [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20beholder&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20beholder&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

<comment><USER22> You know best, of course. Note that I'm not claiming that HN is too left-/right-wing for me. I think HN is pretty well balanced and centrist. What I'm saying is you might have erred on the side of avoiding controversy. HN could use _more_ controversial comments, whether it comes from the left or the right, especially when the comment is not trolling and is informative.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Real Time Visitor Stats for All Your Websites in One Screen - <AUTHOR> http://livestats.io <comment><USER2> +1</comment>


Reddit hiding r/the_donald in web and mobile search results - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/search <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing with this link. Are you intending that I search for the subreddit?

AFAICT, it still shows up in the subreddit search[1]. I searched for a post at the top of the subreddit via the post search[2] and still found it. These are true regardless of if I am logged in or not and regardless of if I am using new reddit or old reddit.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/search/](https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/search/) [2]: [https://www.reddit.com/search](https://www.reddit.com/search)

</comment><comment><USER3> So is Google. "reddit the donald"

</comment><comment><USER4> Works for me.

<comment><USER5> me too</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what PaaS add-on galeries are out there? - <AUTHOR>

I only know following:
1. Heroku Add-ons:
https://addons.heroku.com/
2. EngineYard Cloud Products Add-ons:
http://www.engineyard.com/partners/platform-services
3. MS Azure Store:
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/store/overview/
4. Amazon AWS Marketplace (not really PaaS, but close):
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace
Any others? <comment><USER2> <http://www.force.com/> \- force.com, Salesforce's</comment>


Show HN: CloudFIRE – Open-Source Replacement for Cloudflare + Pubnub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/coinkite/CloudFIRE

<comment><USER2> Very interesting project. But it was far too much of a delay when I visited your site: [https://coinkite.com/](https://coinkite.com/) much more than CloudFlare ever causes, I believe.

Ultimately this isn't a replacement for CloudFlare at all though. Their primary service is only possible by having more servers and more bandwidth than the bad guys can muster for DDoS attacks.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very cool. Doesn't quite provide the hundreds of gigabits/second of capacity that cloudflare does.

I also wouldn't undervalue the global reputation data they have from servicing so many websites.

But still, this is cool :).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just FYI, all the hackers out there: not yet in production!

</comment><comment><USER4> Considering all serious attackers already bypass the CF browser check, what's the point?</comment>


Hello Bar - <AUTHOR> http://www.hellobar.com

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen this before, and didn't sign-up because I have no idea what I'm actually signing up for.

"right message at the right time to your website visitors."

Then why haven't you shown us this on the hellobar website? What does it look like on a site. How does it work?</comment>


User-generated science: Web tools are beginning to change the shape of scientific debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12253189 <comment><USER2> Awesome. I'd love to see one of these guys pull through. I'm in one of my heavy research phases right now and there's always this cat-and-mouse information tracking problem of trying to trace an idea back to its source and track its derivations through the clunky interfaces that online journals use now. (Especially, say, if you're not members of all or any of them.)

Similarly, I asked exactly the question The Economist nails of a friend of mine in academia last week (who does a lot of peer review) -- how do ideas spread at a reasonable pace through academic circles given that it often takes a year or more for a paper to be published? The answer was, "Everybody knows everybody. They talk." Which naturally is frustrating looking from the outside in and working on theoretically intensive problems from a non-academic setting.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's entirely true. People might talk (brag?) about their latest results but if you want to compare notes on methods it can get extremely frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, especially if access to the blogs remains open to anyone.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you favorite things that your teacher(s) did? - <AUTHOR>

I'm knee deep designing an 8-week curriculum for devbootcamp.com and I want it to be amazing.
I keep thinking back to my favorite teachers, how they used humor, expected the best of me...etc.
What are some of your fondest memories of your teachers? What techniques/attitudes/strategies did  they use that really worked for you, and helped you learn? <comment><USER2> I had two teachers in high school - a math and a Latin teacher - who started every class with short warmup exercises. They weren't graded, but covered material from the previous couple of days. The exercises would take roughly 5 minutes, and then we'd spend 5 more minutes "grading" them and handling short ?'s before segueing into that day's lesson.

I think it was one of the best teaching techniques I ever saw, and if I ever go back to my old dream of teaching I intend to use it. It kept everybody on a short feedback loop. This ensured that students knew whether they really "got" a subject and that the teachers knew where they needed to spend more time.</comment>


Ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-06-07/real-teenagers-silicon-valley <comment><USER2> Any small town HN readers like me see articles like this and can't relate at all? I used to be envious and longed to be part of this type of community, but now I just feel indifferent to it. It's a very strange world you Silly Valley kids live in.

<comment><USER3> > Silly Valley

That's not a thing. Don't believe everything that random comedians make up.

<comment><USER4> > That's not a thing.

Sure is! Lived there for a year and a half. First saw Rachel (of rachelbythebay.com) use it and was like "holy crap, that's a perfect description!"

<comment><USER3> I've lived here for 3 decades. No one here calls it that, and the google hits are (1) fairly few and (2) mostly google treating it as a synonym for "silicon valley" and (3) actual hits are for a not-well-known recent comedy news show.

I certainly did not deserve downvotes for speaking the truth. It's not a thing, it's not widely used, it's a recent one-off joke -- and if you want to make fun of silicon valley (which of course has many faults), "silly" is simply not what this place is like.

<comment><USER5> > It's not a thing

The fact you've become so offended at an online message board comment word joke supports the entire point of your environment being ridiculous, out of touch, and, dare we say, silly.

> "silly" is simply not what this place is like.

what.

<comment><USER3> A factual correction is not being offended. But now I'm offended that you are calling me offended because it's offensive to read fault into factual statements; is that offensive to you?

> supports the entire point of your environment being ridiculous,

"Ridiculous" is in fact a much better word for it.

> > "silly" is simply not what this place is like.

> what.

Silly implies things like light-heartedness. Silicon Valley's faults are not light-hearted. At its worst it can feel like a dungeon, not something amusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems these kids are going into sedentary lifestyle pretty soon and taking on stress early on in their lives. I would imagine that there would be some negative effects due to that. But some kids might be just right for it.

<comment><USER7> Lots of teenagers are under stress in high school to get into the "right" college. Knowing of paths to interesting and well-paying jobs that don't require college, much less an Ivy League college, should reduce stress.

That said, I do wonder what the success rate of the youngster is. Would I let my son go to a hacker house (or whatever you want to call it) instead of college?

<comment><USER8> Honestly, what would really reduce stress is being told "a state school is fine too". Encouraging kids to grow up early and jump right into careers and leadership positions just sounds like a recipe for burnout. Some people can thrive in that kind of lifestyle, but others will just crack after a few years.

I wonder how many of them will still be working in tech at 35.

(My uncle was kinda like that... got into the industry at an early age, was a big name on the Internet in the early 90s -- he was even listed in some of those old "Internet directories" and owned [our last name].com for the rest of his life -- and then he burned out, quit the tech industry, and became a cab driver... he ultimately became an alcoholic and died in his fifties)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is a very curious way to go about things. Some of these kids are undoubtedly successful early on, but dropping out at high-school is something that seems a bit weird to me--and I say this as someone who was consistently bored in highschool, nevermind college. I think I'm a fundamentally different person thanks to my college education, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

Some people have gotten incredibly wealthy following dropping out (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Page [Phd dropout], Steve Jobs)--and I think there may some sort of category mistake in equating that smart + dropout = success. That said, each of these people were well educated to begin with. There is likely a fair bit of truth in that the education experience isn't for everyone, and I would support those individuals in doing their own things-- though I would caution against short-circuiting a growth process.

I'm still a student finishing my B.Sc., so I'm not free of bias. It appears as though these guys are doing something right given their successes so far. I'd be curious to sit down and share a beer with a few of them to better understand what makes it all tick.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a scale on the corner of Latta's desk. What's that for? [0]

[0] [https://stories.californiasunday.com/data/files/organization...](https://stories.californiasunday.com/data/files/organization/2343/image/derivative/scale~1300x5000~0607ffteen-1431555236-0.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Believe it or not, coffee! You can't see it in the picture, but I keep my aeropress and grinder in my room as well.

<comment><USER12> Fantastic catch. Sure it is, Zach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know a few of the people here. Before going to college I was definitely tempted to work at a startup and not to go to college. The tech industry in SF is overflowing with money, so I'm not surprised these people are making this choice (unexpectedly, it's often the small-but-VC-funded startup desperate for talent that pays more $$$ the bigcorps, often run by founders unable to qualify the talent). Also, in my experience studying CS (at least at Berkeley) is definitely harder than working in tech (compare doing psets and pulling all-nighters to doing working on things you're pretty good at, surrounded by every perk imaginable).

I did end up making the judgment that deeply studying CS in my 4 years at Berkeley would help me in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER14> As far as I can tell this whole article is about San Francisco not Silicon Valley. Granted, the startup scene has migrated north over time but that doesn't make it Silicon Valley even if that's where the VC funds are coming from.

<comment><USER15> Some of the same crowd is at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. It's not all teens there, but there's some of the same mentality.

Only at a few points in history are there opportunities like this. Do it while you can. It may not come around again in a lifetime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "Teens have a greater risk tolerance. They can live in conditions we would > find inhospitable. They have a fresh mind; they have so much optionality, > youth, and stamina."

Sounds like the same reasons we send young people to fight in wars. No spouse or kids to care for, easy to get excited about "the adventure," and, as a result, easy to exploit.

<\cynic-hat>

<comment><USER17> People fighting in wars get killed. People doing this at worst come away feeling like they've wasted/lost a few years of their life - life goes on - and at best come away feeling fulfilled and/or wealthier (what more can you ask for?).

<comment><USER16> I totally agree. It is an imperfect comparison, and by no means did I intend to directly compare the horrors of war with a few years spent in a hacker house. But it is interesting that the reasons quoted above can be used to justify so many levels of exploitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _"Hackathons are technological Woodstock,"_

It certainly reads that way, though the bands that played at Woodstock were already successful. The way I see it: more like youngsters rushing to Hollywood to get into films except this time with a bit of luck, talent and product have a better chance at _making_ to the top.

A positive article.

Deepak Jeevan Kumar: _" a principal at General Catalyst Partners, led sessions at Interact, encouraging attendees to work in unsexy enterprise industries like cloud computing, which he thinks need new ideas. "The way that I would sum it up is that the intellectual curiosity of humans goes down as we start aging," he told me. "Intellectual curiosity is correlated with imagination and ability to take risk. So that, combined with the fact that experience is mattering less and less to be an entrepreneur""_

Shite VC's say.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think this is amazing. Having a third choice beyond "go to college" or "go to work" has been sorely needed for many people. When I was a teenager (late 1990s) I wasn't able to go to college (had no family support, did a trade school for 1 1/2 years, ended in several types of disaster), so I went straight to work. If I had something like this as an option, I probably would have jumped on it.

A big plus is that even if they fail, many still have family support so they can just go back home and go to school a little later. Even if this is just another gold rush, this is a great opportunity for them with little to no downside risk.

Edit: about the Thiel money: it'd be nice to see a lot more people with the means doing this. 20 people isn't exactly scaling.

</comment><comment><USER4> At least some of these folks seem pretty self-aware.

> "One thing I'm really bothered by is the insularity of tech — it's > narrowing," he said. "It's pretty much all white dudes. It's a fake bubble > with a bunch of money, and we just go with it."

</comment><comment><USER20> I do have to say it's really weird to read an article where I know most of the people in it. Does this become more common as you get older in the tech community? This is the second time this year I've experienced this.

<comment><USER21> It happens more the tighter you move into the echo chamber of startupland

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's nice to see an article for a change about young people in tech that's not about how entitled/nerdy/unfuckable they are.

<comment><USER12> Entitled and nerdy, sure.

<comment><USER23> If you are going to program I would make sure I understood negation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Its always interesting to read about people like this - what led these people to have this sort of skill level and confidence?

<comment><USER12> I think the reason we're here is simply because we've never known any alternative. It's been in my blood for longer than I can remember.

This just feels right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> god, I'm old.

<comment><USER5> Lots of people were doing these same things ("I don't need school—I know HTML!") in 2000/2001\. Then all the funding dried up over night and all the acquiring companies went away. Then the people who decided to go to school and learn fundamentals and grow themselves over time instead of turing startup tricks ended up winning.

Never forget: $5.7 _billion_ dollars just burnt for fun. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com)

<comment><USER21> That 5.7Billion dollars got many people set for life, inculding HN hero Mark Cuban. It's not an argument against diving into the frat for a piece of the pie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "...he rebuilt Yo's backend. He's baller."

That might be the most cringey opening quote I've ever read for an article. Straight out of Silicon Valley (the show). The only explanation I can come up with is that the reporter knows nothing about tech and the kid was trolling her.

<comment><USER27> "...he rebuilt Yo's backend. He's baller."

I wonder what he did with the other 23.5 hours that day...

<comment><USER12> #SHOTSFIRED

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder what that digital scale on the kid's desk is used for, hmmmm....

<comment><USER29> It's actually the web scale that you get for using mongoDB.

<comment><USER30> LOL wow. I needed this laugh. I genuinely teared up a bit.

Thank you so much.</comment></comment></comment>


Why it's so hard to fix banking: An interview with Simple's exiting CEO - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2018/05/why-its-so-hard-to-fix-banking-an-interview-with-simples-exiting-ceo.html <comment><USER3> I've been using Simple for close to 5 years now and have been incredibly happy with my experience. The customer service is hands down the best I've ever come across and all updates to the app made the experience much better. Simple being a partner bank instead of a stand-alone bank has definitely held them back. I'd wager they lost quite a few customers when switching from Bancorp to BBVA. Even I considered leaving due to lengthy switch process and generally thinking that such a hard change is not acceptable, but I stuck around and the entire process was exceptionally smooth. I'm still somewhat surprised they haven't made strides to become an actual bank entity, but having experienced regulations working at a banking SAAS company myself I can imagine the monstrous effort required here. Either way, it's sad to see the original founders leave. I really hope this doesn't change the vision and direction.

<comment><USER4> Huh. I had exactly the opposite experience, simple was mostly fine when I used it but the web experience of chase these days is also fine. A clear, simple UI for seeing statements and setting up credit card auto-pay, deposit checks in the app. Plus, having branches if you absolutely need to use them is nice, and finding atms in most us cities for a big bank is much more straightforward than finding the partner atm brands that work with simple, or whatever you have to do there.

When simple goes wrong though, the leaky abstraction of being a thin wrapper around another bank makes it much more painful. I forget the details now, but some fairly straightforward things broke for me a couple of times. And as friendly as their support might be, they were completely useless for fixing the problem because it was due to the underlying bank they built on top of. Canceling my account was also somewhat opaque.

So I can't really relate to this article or most of these comments at all.

The underlying money transfer infrastructure in the US (between banks and merchants or banks and other banks) on the other hand really needs an upgrade from the arcane ACH system, that's the last thing that sucks about consumer banking as far as I can see.

<comment><USER5> I agree Chase's web UI is solid now. Except for the part where I have to spoof the user agent on Chromium (Linux) otherwise I'm stuck with the abysmal mobile UI...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If someone wants to fix banking they should figure out how to do it in Japan. For all of the supposed idea that Japan embraces the future Japan's banking system must be among the worst in the 1st world.

A couple of examples

No interest: A typical interest rate is 0.015%. No that is not a misprint. It's X * 0.00015 annual interest rate ([https://www.boj.or.jp/en/statistics/dl/depo/tento/te180516.p...](https://www.boj.or.jp/en/statistics/dl/depo/tento/te180516.pdf))

No checks: Not sure about other countries but in the USA sending a check to someone usually costs nothing. In Japan checks really don't exist. Instead to send money you do a bank transfer which costs anywhere from $3 to $8 per transaction. For a regular person they might only have 1 payment like that (rent). But for a company that adds up quick. Electronic payment (sign in to your bank, send payment) uses the same $3 to $8 per transaction system.

Byzantine hours: I recently got a business bank account and signed up for the online banking (costs extra). I'm only allowed to send payments from 8am to 3:30pm.

ATMs are still not 24hrs. 7/11 (Shinsei Bank?) and a few others open 24hrs. Most ATMs still close at some point ever day. MUFG ATMs are currently 7am to midnight.

Japan is still a very cash oriented society. They do have things like Felica (digital cash) but getting around with paper cash is not easy. Note, I don't mind the cash thing since cash = anonymous but I know lots of foreigners east and west that are surprised as they can generally get by cashless in their own countries but not here.

I'm not even scratching the surface. I'm sure the people in power and regulations in place make it nearly impossible to fix the system but someone one out there must have a way.

<comment><USER7> Interest rates are basically zero all over the world. Its not a banking issue thats an economic issue.

As others point out, checks don't really exist outside the US, but electronic money transfers are usually mandated to be free. Most countries are starting to have some sort of mandated "basic banking" to allow anyone to have and use a bank account as a replacement for cash.

<comment><USER8> > Interest rates are basically zero all over the world

Interest rates for savings account in India is usually 4% p.a. It's higher for term deposits.

<comment><USER9> Is that real (adjusted for inflation rate) or nominal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's already a solution for what is wrong with banks: credit unions. They just don't waste money on advertising so they get less visibility than they should.

<comment><USER11> I'll second this. I used to do a good bit of work for credit unions. Every one of our clients were great folks who genuinely were trying to do the best thing for their customers. I'm a happy customer of USAA and Simple. If they didn't exist, I'd use a credit union. Without question.

<comment><USER12> Usaa is the single best "bank" in the USA. Unfortunately their charter prevents lots of places from using them.

I'll note they are much different than a "small" credit union in terms of reach & technology.

<comment><USER13> i have a zero fee, zero minimum account with schwab that also gives me access to their ETFs with no trade commissions or monthly limits, and the ETFs themselves have extremely low expense ratios. also they reimburse any ATM fees in full every month. what advantages does Usaa have over this setup?

<comment><USER10> Among others, USAA doesn't require a brokerage account to bank with them. I don't think it's really a comparable situation.

In their competitor comparison[1], you'll note they don't list USAA or any credit unions, because it would look basically the same as the Schwab account. Low or no fees, low or no minimum balance, decent interest rates, etc.

There's no reason for you to switch, either, but not everyone needs or wants a Schwab brokerage account too.

[1]: [https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/banking_lending/checkin...](https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/banking_lending/checking_account#account- basics)

<comment><USER14> Schwab refunds unlimited ATM fee, whereas USAA refunds up to $15. Schwab also has worldwide no foreign transaction fee, something that USAA doesn't have.

IMO Schwab is still the best because I travel a lot. There's no downside to keeping an empty brokerage account

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Why it's so hard to fix <X>?"

Very easy question. There are people who profit from how <X> fails. The reason it bothers you is because you are not one of the people who are profiting. You might not be profiting from <X> but you are likely profiting from some <Y>. And when it comes to <Y> you are probably not recognizing how it fails on the cost of others and are not really bothered by it. So good luck convincing the people who profit from <X> to change it.

<comment><USER16> I read somewhere, probably Nietzche, the following statement (paraphrasing):

 _There are only 3 types of people: the poor that wants to be rich, the rich that wants to continue to be rich and the idealist, that using his ideals, wants to be rich._

edit: I always read it figuratively. Getting rich meaning to improve position in whatever hierarchy the person cares about.

<comment><USER17> And do you think that's true? Why category do you think - say- Tim Berners-Lee falls into?

<comment><USER18> He's worth tens of millions. Is it really hard to understand?

<comment><USER17> I chose a poor example. Do you really believe there's no such thing as altruism?

<comment><USER19> Altruism exists, but it very rarely makes you money. And that's really only ok if you already have a good amount of money and can afford to give some away, or work for nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm going to write a few words I always do this in the bank topics. In Poland (post-soviet EU member, 36M people) we have many banks. Inter-bank transfers are free for personal accounts. $0.50 for businesses in my case. We have free transfer for phone number of up to $1000. Instant. We use mostly debit cards tied to accounts without any fee with wireless payments. Our goverment reduced transaction fees so you can pay as low as $.10 bill without complain. Of course this moves us closer to cash-less full-control mode but who cares ;)

<comment><USER21> "post-soviet EU member"

Poland was never part of the Soviet Union.

<comment><USER22> Poland was a Soviet satellite state, so I'm guessing "post-Soviet" here means "post-Soviet controlled" vs. being an official member of the Soviet Union.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We came to many of the same conclusions.

This is why my co-founder and I decided to relocate to the UK in order to set up our bank. The friendlier regulatory ecosystem here is just a huge advantage compared to the US.

Plus, there's still a pretty clear path to getting a national US banking license - it just requires you to expand in from abroad, rather than trying to build it within the US.

</comment><comment><USER24> > but the reality is that most millennials, like most Americans, bank at the > top four banks.

I suppose I'm willing to believe this claim, but I find it pretty surprising. In my social group, the commercial banks are viewed negatively almost to the point of stigma against using them. Everyone uses credit unions for their checking, and several credit unions in this area (Nusenda, Rio Grande, USEagle) are at least as convenient as the major national banks.

I think a large part of the perception of convenience comes down to the Credit Union strategy of federating services. An ATM network jointly operated by many of the credit unions in the region (CU Anytime) has a large fleet and has focused on placing ATMs in high-convenience locations like offices of major employers and college campuses. Co-Op Shared Branching means that you can walk into a branch of almost any credit union and they can access your accounts at your own credit union. And as for avoiding ATMs and branches at all - <USER2> online and mobile services offered by most credit unions are perhaps a bit behind aesthetically, but they work just fine, and the credit unions seem to have been offering free and easy person-to-person transfers for longer than the commercial banks have.

So what's limiting adoption of credit unions? I'm skeptical that it's awareness because the branches are everywhere and some of the larger ones around here purchase billboards and TV advertising regularly. Is there a feeling that they're more limited in their service offerings?

<comment><USER25> As a card-carrying millennial, I've found my friends to be woefully ignorant of how to bank, despite (or because of?) their often well-off upbringings. People often tend to follow the lead of their parents when it comes to banking decisions. They don't really explore the market for themselves or have strong opinions on what's efficient or ethical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wanted to like Simple. But the budgeting and money tracking features were never really that useful, I needed checks, and my card number was stolen and used to purchase groceries in another state even though I had only used it for a couple of transactions. Their customer service handled the transaction but it really seemed like the card leak was probably on their end. I pulled my money out then.

</comment><comment><USER27> They picked the worst possible time in 80 years to start a new bank. It meant they couldn't actually get a banking certificate. This constrained every technical choice & feature they wanted to offer.

I mean....I'm not sure there's a lot to learn from the Simple story beyond that.

<comment><USER28> Why do you say it's the worst possible time in 80 years to start a bank?

<comment><USER23> He's referring to the time Simple started - in 2009, in the peak of the financial crisis and right after the Office of the Controller of the Currency initiated what is now nearly a 10-year moratorium on the granting of new national bank charters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been using Simple for around 4 years now, and one thing I really hoped to have was a very good system for tracking and managing my money. They had a good start 4 years ago with their "envelope savings system" and goals and their web interface. It had a few warts, and was only ok, and really didn't do a very good job of categorizing the transactions. But, they were new and surely it would improve, right?

4 years later I can say it is basically unchanged. It really isn't very usable. I do still like how it implements the envelope savings towards your goals, but for managing and tracking money it really isn't useful. Mint is better for tracking.

I like Simple, but I wouldn't say I love Simple.

<comment><USER30> Agreed, I tried them for a while but now I've switched to Capital One 360. Excellent app and web, savings account with 1.6% interest, free ATM worldwide, no foreign transaction fees, etc. I tried Schwab as well but IMHO Capital One is above and beyond the others when you look at everything offered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's the future of simple, though? With all the founders leaving, does it have a future?

<comment><USER32> Surely, a company that requires the presence of its founders to function has way less of a future than a company that doesn't? A great company should not be dependent on any one person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ugh. Looking at their info:

\- I can get same deals from Ally bank. No fees.

\- Ally bank reimburses 100% of all ATM fees I pay.

\- Ally bank savings account is 1.60% at the moment. It is no investment account but better than any other bank period.

\- Ally's customer support is pretty darn good

I don't see ally going crying around about how hard banking is.

Simple was just sub-par.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was with Simple from the start and generally liked the app and the customer support (based in Portland IIRC) was very helpful and friendly.

My problem was that I had a large check to deposit and before they cleared it they insist I not only specify the source of the funds but also what I was going to use the monies for! I understand they need to ask the former (per IRS regulations and "Suspicious Activity Reporting") but the latter is frankly NOTFB and no other bank has asked me that question. I told them as such and closed the account.

<comment><USER35> They're supposed to ask both actually per AML laws. Which may be completely overbearing but are not within their control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Eh. This is not a mystery. Banks have tremendous lock-in and inertia working for them. The only way to fix the industry is complete account portability. Anybody should be able to wander into any competitor to their existing bank and initiate a transfer of their account to that competitor. The transfer should freeze the account and take no more than 48 hours. Do this and let the free market work its magic. Just like American celluar providers used to suck until number portability kicked in, American bank providers will suck until account portability is a thing.

P.S. Banks should also be required by law to provide minimal services to every American citizen. It is absolutely beyond stupid that there are 10 million American households that don't have access to a bank account [1]. These households are then forced into dealing with the Check Cashing/Payday Loan businesses who are pure, unmitigated fucking evil. These firms charge outrageous fees that trap many people in poverty.

[1] [https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/](https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/)

<comment><USER37> What exactly prevents people from cashing checks at the issuing bank, or walking into a bank or credit union with their paycheck and opening an account? Or cashing it at a Wal-mart or a 7-11, which have low fees? These people may trapped in poverty, but ultimately not by the check cashing/payday loan business.

<comment><USER38> Many banks have a tiny number of branches so good luck finding one to cash a check. Low fees are rarely low when you're talking a minimum wage income. Walmart's 3$ fee for anything under 1000$ works out to 1/2 an hour of work. Picture spending 1/2 an hour of your salary every 2 weeks simply to get paid. Now make that worse by having 3 jobs...

<comment><USER39> I had no idea this was the case. That's shocking.

If I need cash, I walk into a Chase branch [Not my bank, but conveniently near a Thai Restaurant I like to visit] and just ask for cash advance against my VISA card. Done by a teller, there's no ATM fees.

<comment><USER40> Which cc does not charge interest before the thirty day grace period with cash advance?

<comment><USER41> Use a debit card which has no fees or do us banks not offer those

<comment><USER42> Is it a cash advance if you're using a debit card? Isn't that just a withdrawal.

<comment><USER40> The op terminology must have been off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> An alternative to to Simple is VaroMoney. Unlike Simple, they are trying to get a bank charter which should give them more control over the bank experience.

</comment><comment><USER44> In the interview, he talks a lot about the difficulty of navigating the regulations.

Perhaps his criticisms of those regulations are valid — but those regulations exist because of previous problems.

In many cases, the same people who scream, "banking sucks" would also scream if their bank failed due to a reason that some existing regulation would have prevented.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hey, so you are using all these expensive AND inadequate techs, could we at least use something sane for this non critical stuff? I mean you don't have to worry about this thing and you save a lot and you are using a much better stack overall. What say you?

No.

</comment><comment> purple-again The number of FDIC banks in the United States. Anyone working near this space can attest to the flurry of mergers and acquisitions.

2002 7,870

2003 7,750

2004 7,612

2005 7,507

2006 7,380

2007 7,262

2008 7,061

2009 6,813

2010 6,506

2011 6,263

2012 6,061

2013 5,836

2014 5,596

2015 5,330

2016 5,102

<comment><USER46> > 2016 5,102

In my country (Brazil), the bank identifier used by several banking protocols is three digits. It's hard to imagine over a thousand separate banks in a single country.

(For the curious, the full list of identifiers: [http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/compe/dwn/IFPCNC.pdf](http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/compe/dwn/IFPCNC.pdf) and [http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/compe/dwn/IFPECNC.pdf](http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/compe/dwn/IFPECNC.pdf))

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> So how hard is it now to open a bank with $20 million?

</comment><comment><USER48> I am glad they came along when they did. Works great for me.</comment>


Realtime pixel tracking with nginx, syslog-ng, and Redis - <AUTHOR> http://benwilber.net/realtime-pixel-tracking-nginx-syslog-ng-redis <comment><USER2> Sir, I can't tell if you're brilliant or insane.

For those who didn't read the post: he's formatting syslog messages as redis wire commands, telling syslog to forward those messages to redis over the network (normally you're forwarding to another syslog client, but because of the custom message format here, it acts against a redis server), so syslog ends up as a write-only redis client.

Insane. and brilliant.

<comment><USER3> He's already patching nginx to support logging via syslog, so why didn't he just patch nginx to log directly to redis? One less place for things to go wrong.

<comment><USER2> Some ad contracts require you keep server logs of hits and not post-processed versions in your DB (in case any discrepancies come up). Running through syslog allows you to centralize where your logs are being processed/sent since each log hit can branch out to multiple endpoints.

<comment><USER3> Okay, that I can buy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. A similar (in spirit) hack I've used is to host the pixel on a CDN (like Akamai or Cloudfront) and run map reduce over the logs there. You don't get real-time, like this, but look ma, no server! CloudFront is especially useful since it can log directly to S3 and you can run elastic map reduce directly on those files.

<comment><USER5> I've started doing this as well, and it works well. Cloudfront lists their log delivery as "best effort" which gave me pause me at first. However, after a month of testing, I've seen the stats to be on part with Google Analytics.

I'd love to see an open source package emerge to implement the collection and the data processing. Cloudfront + Redshift would rock.

<comment><USER6> It exists :-) Check out [https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow)

<comment><USER5> Awesome! Thanks for the link

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As others have mentioned, nginx + one of the redis (or lua-redis) modules does this very well without the complexity of syslog in the middle. We load many millions of values a day via httpredis2. It's been rock solid.

[http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpRedis2Module](http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpRedis2Module)

We log the same requests to a file in a custom log format that gets batched to s3 and then Cassandra and EMR/Hive. Makes a great platform for realtime + historical analytics.

<comment><USER8> Seconding this. I've been doing something similar using OpenResty[0] and Redis. Handles millions of page views a day on a pretty low end server without breaking a sweat. Documentation on OpenResty is kinda tricky to wade through, but man is it lightweight and fast.

[http://openresty.org/](http://openresty.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A more sane approach would be to script nginx using lua and lua-resty-redis.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been playing around with Docker and containers a little recently and I decided to test my skills in creating a container, installing software, and packaging it up for re-use and possibly even try to do it all in a Dockerfile after I do it through just "docker run -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash/".

I followed your guide but I am not able to see the Redis records. I was able to find pixel.log in /var/log/nginx and inside was what I would expect to see in Redis:

        1379192937.393,test=2
        1379193104.365,test=5
        1379193105.308,test=7
        1379193106.311,test=28

.....

At this point I went to check the syslog-ng program as I realized I never verified it was running/working. I am getting a "Error parsing source, source plugin system not found in /usr/local/etc/syslog-ng.conf at line 2, column 3:" error and after some googling I found some people suggesting[0] adding '@include "scl.conf"' to the syslog-ng config file. I tried added this and it caused another syntax error. I googled for a while longer to no avail.

I know HN isn't really the forum for tech support but I couldn't find a better place to post it other than over email (My email is in my profile if you prefer that). If you have any pointers please let me know. Thank you for any help you may be able to provide.

[0] [http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.syslog- ng/15325](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.syslog-ng/15325)

<comment><USER3> Did you patch syslog-ng? ([https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch](https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch))

<comment><USER10> Yes, I patched it. I think the issue is with syslog-ng as it is complaining about the configuration file. Nginx is working fine (and patched).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you are like me thinking why on earth would you do this instead of using Google Analytics there are 2 reasons:

1\. Javascript disabled

2\. Tracking emails opened

[http://skillcrush.com/2012/07/19/tracking- pixel/](http://skillcrush.com/2012/07/19/tracking-pixel/)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're just popping off a queue, using something like POSIX Message Queues of SysV IPC might be nice to avoid depending on Redis on every single app server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Increases the complexity immensely. Anyone can do this. Not everyone can use POSIX msg queues or IPC effectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now, can syslog-ng be made to wrap each flush in a Redis pipeline?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is ideal :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good hack.

</comment><comment><USER15> this is GREAT!</comment>


Gild: A giant database of developer info, ranked by skill and coding ability - <AUTHOR> http://www.gild.com I've been wondering how the many recruiters have suddenly been getting my phone number. If you are a developer they blacklist your e-mail from creating an account to view the info they have on you. <comment><USER2> If,

\- My NDA protected work can not be added to the metrics \- I can not view my profile \- Opt out

Then I believe this is a terrible product.</comment>


Snap to Release New Spectacles - <AUTHOR> https://cheddar.com/videos/exclusive-snap-to-release-new-spectacles-this-year <comment><USER2> Mentioning "on Cheddar" in the title seems very much promotional. Could we get a title change on this post?

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, didn't catch it at submission time.

<comment><USER2> Thank you :)</comment></comment></comment>


Developer with recommendation engine experience for startup - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I am a co-founder for a startup in Amsterdam called http://Favour.it and we need to find a co-founder with experience in creating even simple recommendation systems to build on top of what we are doing. Would anyone have any ideas? Help is really appreciated. My twitter is paulmoconnell btw <comment><USER2> How about tapping into the local universities around you ? Plenty of universities nowadays teach intro-level courses in machine learning. Someone who has gone through such courses would know more than enough to satisfy your needs. I'd love to help, but I'm not based in Amsterdam :)

Failing that, there're always online resources to turn into. I highly recommend this <https://class.coursera.org/ml/lecture/preview>. This is how I got started with machine learning too. It's not hard to hack together a basic recommendation system quickly ... although for the long term, you might need a dedicated person to work on it since providing good recommendations on favourites seems to be your core value proposition.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could relify.com help you?</comment>