The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/04/maori-river-in-new-zealand-is-a-legal-person/ <comment><USER3> I spend a LOT of time on the Whanganui River.

What a great article, thanks for sharing!

If it is a legal person then I know quite a few people who would like the Whanganui River to be held accountable for its actions in the destruction of personal property. Haha.

About 20km up the River is a wool shed I've been visiting since 2011.

On it is a marker of the highest known modern flooding level.

It was shockingly high.

Since that time there has been 2 major bouts of river flooding.

The most recent was metres above the last record high(above wool shed roofline).

That river is bipolar.

Absolutely beautiful and deceptively dangerous.

The Whanganui River is like an old girlfriend who will always have my heart, but it's best we spent most of our time apart.

It changes literally right before your eyes.

Riverside erosion in real time, and rain upriver can raise the river height and speed faster than any other river I have spent time on.

It's like nature on time lapse.

A good friend and mentor is on the local Iwi(Maori Tribe) governance board.

The best part is there is no mobile phone connectivity up the river.

Only hardline or satphone.

<comment><USER4> Good to see another kiwi on here.

I grew up in Whanganui.

You must be pretty far up to run out of cell service. I had service all the way up to the bridge to no where last time I was up that way.

It is weird to see the river or as my dad would say awa in hacker news.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely!

I'm South Island based, but up there twice a year for the last 8 years.

We lose mobile coverage once we are descending on the north side of the hill heading up the river from town.

We stay at a farm and Marae owned by the local river people iwi.

We hang out between there and Jeresulem further north.

Hope your family and friends did ok in the floods.

Pretty crazy seeing it here, already shared it and the river folks I've been able to reach are really chuffed with the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I canoed down the Whanganui over Christmas a couple of years ago. It's one of New Zealand's 'Great Walks' with huts to stay in along the way.

We were told that the Māori considered the river to be a person and as a sign of respect we should not wash ourselves in it. Aside from that, it did not effect our trip.

If anyone is interested, there's more information here - [https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to- go/ma...](https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/manawatu- whanganui/places/whanganui-national-park/things-to-do/tracks/whanganui- journey/#page-id-7061)

<comment><USER3> I hope you enjoyed it!

It is a different world once you go over the Whanganui River Road hill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Legal personhood is much misunderstood. There is no grand set of rights attached to all persons. There are an infinite different types of persons, entities to which some rights are attached but never all. We in the west normally understand "persons" as in flesh-and-blood physical people but even then what rights a person has depends on all sorts of things, from the location of their birth, to their age, sex, mental capacity, education or wealth. And yes, race can still alter a person's rights under the law. What matters is not the "person" label but what rights this court is willing to recognize at attach to this new type of person.

<comment><USER7> Why call them persons then, when they clearly aren't, and their rights are so different that same right can be fundamental for one type or entity but completely irrelevant to another (e.g. right to life, in the context of legal entities). Basically, what's the benefit of having this single category where everything gets lumped?

<comment><USER8> I forgot where I learned this, but I remember someone saying that in law there are really just two entities - person and property. A person is any entity that has rights. Only "persons" can have rights in law. A property is anything that can be owned. And all law is revolved around person and property.

The rights between a human, a corporation and a river might be different, but the fact that they all have rights is what unites them and why they are "persons". I believe it is a legacy when only human beings had rights. But the legal system got abstracted and we wanted to give rights to non-human entities.

Also, keep in mind that human beings had different rights as well. Some humans didn't even have rights and were not considered legal persons.

Colloquially, we use person as a synonym for human, but in law, person is anything with rights.

<comment><USER9> I've always found "US govt VS $200" type court cases to be ridiculous.

Person vs Property.

<comment><USER10> Are they actually titled that way? That's hilarious.

<comment><USER7> Yep, that's exactly how civil forfeiture works.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Civil_forfeiture_case_US_District_Court_Nebraska_2.png)

<comment><USER10> Wow. I knew civil forfeiture was a claim brought against a property but I didn't realize that's literally what they would write as the defendant. I can't believe judges take this seriously...

<comment><USER11> There's a long tradition of actions _in rem_ (against 'the thing') in law, especially in admiralty actions. If you're, say, the Port Authority for a harbour, and a foreign ship fails to pay its harbour dues, what do you do? The owner is an ocean away (and difficult to enforce jurisdiction over) but the ship is sitting right there and can (if necessary) be seized and sold. Looking at it that way it makes a lot more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a link to the paper mentioned at the end of the article; "Should Trees Have Standing?" by Christopher Stone - [https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone- christop...](https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christopher- d-should-trees-have-standing.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> I find this philosophical debate very fascinating. What actually is a person? e.g. one definition claims

PERSON = "any entity that has the moral right of self-determination."

[http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_i...](http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_is_a_person.php)

so can a confinable area of nature like a river, a mountain, a planet etc. be such an entity with those rights? Who grants those rights? How is self- determination recognized?

For humans the latter is leading to the free will debate, see e.g. here for a start [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/Wha...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/What_is_a_Person)

so in essence, if a significant amount of humans agree, that the criteria for self-determination are not only the strict ones expressed by humans, why should a natural entity not be treated like a person?

edit: the initial reaction so far has been: it can not stand up in court so it cannot be a LEGAL person. So one could challenge: a company can as well not speak in court. The only ones speaking in court are representatives that got somehow chosen. Why could the same not be applied to the person in discussion here?

<comment><USER14> _why should a natural entity not be treated like a person?_

The obvious answer here is "ok, they're all persons, and as soon as they can stand up in court and tell us what they want, we'll listen to them".

<comment><USER15> To which the obvious counterpoint is "ok, so mentally incapacitated people shouldn't have rights because they can't articulate them?"

<comment><USER16> To which I would reply "Disabled people are humans, so there are non-disabled humans who have articulated universal rights."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the second place in Aotearoa New Zealand to be given this status, the first being Te Urewera. The NZ government grants these rights due to their Tapu for the Maori people.

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

</comment><comment><USER18> It seems to be having a positive impact on pollution, I wonder if similar could be done for other rivers. For those who don't know many New Zealand rivers are toxic cesspits thanks to years of intensive dairy farming. It's something that successive governments seem unwilling to act on thanks to lobbying from the dairy industry.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wasn't there a river in the US who was going to get this too?

[https://satwcomic.com/a-whole-new-world](https://satwcomic.com/a-whole-new- world)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is beyond stupid. A lot of practical questions were not answered in the article…

\- What is the date of birth and gender of this "legal person"?

\- Is it a New Zealand citizen?

\- How will the river enroll to vote? How will the river pay it's fines when it fails to vote?

\- What will happen when the river breaks its banks and destroys property, and someone sues it for damages? Will it be in contempt of court for not showing up to appearances?

\- If New Zealand enters a major war, can the river be drafted for military service? How do you fine or imprison a river for draft dodging?

\- Where the river releases it's fluids at the beach, is it engaging in public urination?

\- If a policeman issues it with a lawful order, and it fails to comply, can it be arrested?

</comment><comment><USER21> Better them than corporations.

<comment><USER22> This is a misunderstanding of what "person" means in law. It is not synonymous with "human being". It means a legal entity that can own things and have responsibilities. If corporations are not persons, then they cannot own property, they cannot sue, they cannot be sued, they cannot enter contracts, etc etc etc.

The reason corporations are called "corporations" is that they are "incorporated" which is a legal term meaning the creation of a legal person.

<comment><USER23> Now that would be an interesting system, if corporations were deprived of the benefits of legal personhood.

<comment><USER24> It would be interesting for sure.

If corporations cannot get those benefits, how will we as a society get any benefit from people working together for something complex? You cannot make a workable spaceship, car engine (a car might be possible once you have an engine that meets emissions, and several other complex parts). Our modern world is mostly designed around retirement plans owning corporations - <USER2> some legal shield 3/4ths of the US should go to prison for Enron

Will it be a few rich people who enter into all those contracts and pay their people? At what point do the rich refuse because they have too many people signing contracts on their behalf that they dare not take the risk?

There could well be other solutions to the problem. It could be that some alternative is a "better" compromise. However it is not easy to come up with something that doesn't have flaws that are worse than what we have.

<comment><USER7> How about, you still protect the rights of people that make the corporation - as individuals. In other words, if the corporation can name a specific individual whose rights are being infringed, then they have a case. But the corporation by itself can't claim infringement of its rights.

So for example, with Citizens United, there's no restriction on individuals that make up the company from making political donations from their own personal funds - including those that they earn as owners or employees of said company. But the company cannot use the funds that it owns as an entity in its own right for the same purpose. If its owners want to use those funds for that purpose, they can have the company pay it to them as dividends (taxed accordingly), and then spend them as they see fit - with their own name attached to any such use.

Note that this effectively protects free speech qua speech even for corporations, because there's ultimately always a person speaking.

<comment><USER25> Seeing as one individual person can own a corporation and thus have unquestioned control over how the Corp spends its money, then yes one person's individual rights are being infringed upon -- namely the right to use ones material resources to further political interests. In the case of one or a few owners, the owners could alternatively authorize a share buyback to simply transfer money between then and the firm

<comment><USER7> They're welcome to do it in that manner - and the very fact that they can shows that it's not really an infringement on their right. The point is that it's still freedom of John Doe to speak, not freedom of John Doe LLC to speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is philosophical drivel that has only the effect of making politicians seem like they care about the environment. The notions of harm or injustice with respect to the environment are all socially constructed human values we imbue them with.

If I dump waste in the river, the river or its creatures aren't going to march into court and demand justice, people will. They will say they are acting on behalf of the interests of the river, its ecosystem, or its living things, but rivers are unthinking geographical features and the animals aren't choosing these advocates.

You don't need to engage in such theatrics to protect the environment.

<comment><USER27> On the other hand, is it any different than the legal fiction in the US that says that Google and Microsoft are "people" themselves rather than businesses that employ people?

<comment><USER28> Probably not, but I think a pretty vast number of people would agree that these sorts of corporate legal fictions should also not exist.

Giving a corporation personhood does not give the corporation rights as much as does take away rights from those who interact with that corporation.

<comment><USER29> Arguably, you can't destroy corporate personhood without doing a lot of damage to capitalism itself.

One problem that corporate personhood was meant to solve was that owning part of a business becomes a legally risky thing when the business isn't a separate person from its owners. Incorporation creates a legal firewall that, for example, allows me to own stock in Apple without having to fear that I will get personally sued if they do something wrong, or that someone will be able to go after my personal assets if they go bankrupt.

It also makes it easier for me to interact with the corporation in certain ways - for example, if I have a grievance against something Apple did, I can name a single, easy to identify entity in my lawsuit, rather than having to pursue a case against a whole slew of individuals. The latter would be a prohibitively difficult effort, since you'd have to figure out exactly which individual are responsible in order to name them in the lawsuit, and then deal with a whole bunch of additional litigation in order to allocate liability among all the people involved in whatever thing it is you're suing them about.

There is still a question of exactly what rights and responsibilities a corporate person should get. Many legal jurisdictions, including the United States, have historically been _very_ liberal in granting natural rights to corporations, and there's plenty of room to argue that they've gone too far. But I don't think there's much room for arguing against the idea that at least some aspects of corporate personhood actually work out to the benefit of people who interact with corporations.

<comment><USER28> > allows me to own stock in Apple without having to fear that I will get > personally sued if they do something wrong

This is part of what I mean when I say that corporate personhood takes away rights from those who interact with corporations. A corporation can feel financial pain, but it cannot experience the emotional pain of loss, the fear of which being a deterrent against tortious (or criminal) behavior.

I realize, the notion of personally punishing e.g., XYZ Phone Co shareholders, because one their phone's battery bursts into flames and kills a child, sounds a little weird. Should the mother of this child simply accept cash for her son's life and be happy with it? If that's not fair, who should personally pay, the CEO? He's just an employee of the corporation, who is beholden to the shareholders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Title is incorrect. It is _a_ Maori River, not _The_ Maori River being talked about here. It is _The_ Whanganui River. National Geographic's title is also confusing, but not outright incorrect as posted here.

<comment><USER30> It makes one wonder why people feel the need to editorialise titles at all. In plenty of subreddits, for instance, the practice is banned.

<comment><USER31> It's banned here too, but banning a thing doesn't eliminate it. (If only it were that easy.)

" _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._" [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment>


The Case Against Google (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Left unsaid was that Google itself generates millions of new subpages without inbound links each day, a fresh page each time someone performs a search. And each of those subpages is filled with text copied from other sites"

Absurd. The article is complaining that Google SERP doesn't penalize Google SERP results. Google doesn't index its own search result pages.

<comment><USER4> I think your comment should have a disclaimer that you work for Google. But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This seems inherently anti-competitive, no? Consumers would be overjoyed to find that a new website existed out there that gave better results than Google for anything they might be looking for, yet they would never find out about the existence of such a website, as Google would suppress it in its results. This may be purely innocent intention—based in an understanding that users want results immediately instead of entering another engine or aggregator, but it's not completely apparent that is indeed the case.

I was completely neutral (or as neutral as one can be, foremost concerned with ascertaining truth) at the end of the last sentence, so I decided to investigate a little myself. The results seem to me like Google isn't doing anything obviously of egregiously wrong from a first pass, though obviously I don't have the benefit of the 1.7b queries the EU had in their investigation.

I searched, "price comparison website" and was presented first with this link: [https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison- shop...](https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shopping- engines-to-increase-ecommerce-sales)

I then searched for the name of each of the companies I didn't recognize. As I actually searched for Pronto first, I thought this verified Foundem's claims, but I think that Pronto didn't come up as it's a Brazilian site, as then when I searched for all the other sites they came up as the first result, except Become, which was on the first page but further down (presumably because it's such a common word).

Nextag (dead) [1]

PriceGrabber (first link on SERP)

Shopzilla (first link on SERP)

Become (bottom of first page)

Pronto (not on the first ten pages)

Bizrate (first result on SERP)

So, you can clearly find these websites if you're looking for them. For Google to not directly link aggregate pages instead of direct results could very well be in the best interest of users... but the point at the end of the article stands that the sterility created in the overall tech ecosystem by such dominance may be harming consumers overall in the long term. It's unclear to what degree that's the case, though, if it is ultimately true.

[1] WSJ piece from Nextag CEO 2012 [https://outline.com/n8rW7a](https://outline.com/n8rW7a) They shutdown last year.

<comment><USER3> Even if the issue were valid, the analogy itself is absurd. He could have said that Google Search surfaces links from Maps, YouTube, Groups, etc and doesn't penalize them using identical criteria (I don't know if it does or not). But saying Search doesn't penalize Google Search leads to infinite regress, or contradiction: If SERP generates a Link to a Next 10 results page, it must then derank the next page and filter it, but then since it wouldn't generate an internal link, it should rank in the results and be granted pagination. It's like Godelian Incompleteness Statement for Search.

More then that, the entire argument relies on a technicality: Links as UI buttons. Pagination uses links for UI interaction, but after Web 2.0 arrived, it doesn't have to. Infinite scrollers, pure JS pagination + XHR that doesn't generate links could be used.

(yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it, but if you search back far enough before 2010 when I joined, you'll find my opinion on these matters has not changed. I'm a copyright minimalist, I favor decentralized, mostly unregulated web, where everyone can scrape everything, remix, reuse, and repurpose data for permissionless innovation, and I do not favor the government getting involved so it can artificially create categories like 'vertical search' or decide what search algorithms should do)

<comment><USER5> > yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my > HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it

While I don't personally care too much, I suppose it could be problematic if you remove this information from your profile at a later date, and from that point on people reading your comments wouldn't (easily) be able to know that you work at Google.

<comment><USER6> Google is a big company, and most of us working for them are mainly in it for the paycheck.

Knowing that I work for Google doesn't, by itself, tell you very much about my opinions. It indicates I'm not strongly anti-Google, I guess.

<comment><USER7> > It indicates I'm not strongly anti-Google, I guess.

Or maybe you're so strongly anti-Google that you realize the only way to take them down is from the inside.

<comment><USER6> And now you know too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow!

This is a long article but I believe it is worth a read to the end: in short, don't dismiss this as yet another "top N evil things that Google has done" article. It is a narrative about anti-trust regulation that happens to pick on Google. In fact, given the paragraphs at the end, I wouldn't even classify this as anti-Google.

The paragraphs detailing the fears of Microsoft in 2000 when they were under public scrutiny were especially insightful - they touch upon aspects that the Wikipedia summary of the Microsoft anti-trust cases [1] do not really highlight.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp).

</comment><comment><USER9> What is it with all this tech bashing lately? Certainly they aren't perfect, but silicon valley is far down on my list on things we need to fix. What about ISP monopolies that have required massive amounts of regulation just to let small ISPs ask for a bit of dark fiber? What about the gambling house that is wall street? Or our crumbling rail infrastructure? What about our exceedingly ineffective health care system full of insurance middle men and price gouging?

The difference between Google and those other issues, is that Google actually has a mission, and they use their money to generally do good things. In fact, I'd say it's a small miracle that Google isn't 10x evil. If Google was as evil as the big TelCos or some of the other scummy businesses out there, we would absolutely be having a bad day.

Part of that is google's culture. Not every company can afford to hire the best, and put them in an environment where work is fun and people feel compelled to do good. Break up Google and you get 1000x more companies all gathering the same data, except each one of them is staffed by idiots that leak data every day. Google is working as hard as possible and it's still a challenge to keep nation state attackers at bay with unlimited sums of money.

Let's get real here. The journalists are mad because they work for tech illiterate companies who gave in to shilling fear stories in the 90s. Now they have the jester-as-king calling them out as fake news, and the irony is that it's true. Maybe 5-10% of each story as some nugget of truth to it. The politicians of course have to lap those stories up so they can virtue signal to their ignorant constituents who barely understand tech any better than the politicians too.

<comment><USER10> If you use basic encryption your ISP can't know much about you. But you can't lie to Google. Search "red spot in my groin" \+ tracking on Android/Maps -> Google knows you have a venereal disease and likely from who.

Not even Facebook knows you this well. On social media you present a highlight reel and hide your ugly side.

You can't lie to your search engine and Google tracks you even when you don't think it's doing so. Google gives hundreds of variables about a user on real- time bidding. That's you.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely false. DNS is still a huge leak of privacy, and it's trivially easy for an ISP to rate limit traffic going to major content providers they directly peer with, which is most of their traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The downside of "Google" becoming synonymous with "Internet search" is that normal people don't understand that Google is a search engine and that it's possible to use the Internet without Google. You don't need Google to search the web or visit websites, Google is optional. Alternative search engines are garbage, but it was like that back before Google.

<comment><USER12> > _" Alternative search engines are garbage,"_

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like that gap has been narrowing rapidly. Partially because other search engines are getting better, but also because google has been getting worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" If you're old enough to remember the internet before 1998, when Google was founded, you'll recall what it was like when searching online involved AltaVista or Lycos and consistently delivered a healthy dose of spam or porn."_

The main things I remember were that AltaVista showed ads along with its results, while Google was, ironically, ad-free. And Google was also much, much faster.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Each time someone used Foundem to buy something, the Raffs would receive a small payment from the website making the sale.."

Maybe people actually prefer Google because for a lot of the results you get, nobody is paying?

</comment><comment><USER15> The scrutiny of Google is warranted, but misdirected. Remember that advertisers are are Google's customers, not individual search users. If drawing an analogy between Standard Oil and Google, the question to answer is: are advertisers being harmed as a result of a Google-Facebook duopoly? I don't have the expertise to investigate this question, but I'd love to hear from someone who does.

(disclaimer: ex-googler)

<comment><USER16> If we shouldn't get consideration in antitrust discussions because we're the not the customer, we're the product being sold, perhaps adtech needs regulations akin to animal cruelty laws. It's okay to slaughter us, you just can't be unnecessarily cruel while doing so...

<comment><USER17> Not a great analogy -- animal cruelty laws are far too lenient. For example, they exempt farm animals. In fact, there are laws against things that would reveal abuse of such animals - [https://www.aspca.org/animal- protection/public-policy/what-a...](https://www.aspca.org/animal- protection/public-policy/what-ag-gag-legislation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux The case against Google is surely that it tracks and records online behaviour on an industrial scale that has no equal among technology companies. Yet, of all the many large technology companies, it mostly escapes scrutiny. Thousands of people in the tech field happily rush to it's defence. Does a giant multi- billion company with an army of lawyers need your defence? Google probably knows more about you that you know about yourself.

The tracking begins at a young age - with kids who uses ChromeOS in school (pity the poor kids who don't even get the choice of whether they get tracked, the adults decide for them). Google doesn't build marketing profiles of students, but they are still recording the online behaviour of students. Even if that data is detached from individual accounts and then aggregated it still amounts to data from millions of students. Horrible.

So normalised has online tracking become, no-one even bothers to ask why we should be tracked to this degree in the first place. Generic catch-all phrases like "to improve our services" are meaningless without specifics.

The case against Google is arguably also a case against the tech field that seems complicit in supporting such unprecedented online tracking. When it comes to privacy and online tracking, this industry is rife with hypocrisy.

<comment><USER18> Facebook is surely at least an equal to Google in the tracking department, no?

Google is also part of the student privacy pledge: [https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy- pledge/](https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy-pledge/), which seems like a reasonable document.

Edit: should have said earlier, I worked at Google many years ago.

<comment><USER19> > _Facebook is surely at least an equal to Google in the tracking department, > no?_

Not even close, maybe 50% of the capability. Why? Because no one in my family has Facebook, but everyone has/uses Google either our phones, or Chromebooks (from school for our kids) all the google accounts that are _required_ to hand in homework.

Facebook isn't even a blip on the radar by comparison.

<comment><USER12> Not having a Facebook account doesn't put you totally outside of Facebook's sphere of knowledge. If any of your friends has allowed Facebook to vacuum up their contacts list, Facebook knows you exist and have a shadow profile for you. Piece by piece, they can compile a substantial amount of information about you even though you've never signed up.

However I agree with your basic premise, that Google is an even worse threat. From using uMatrix and paying attention to what 3rd party shit websites pull in, it seems like Google's surveillance net is _far_ wider than Facebook's. If you consider the possibility of AWS being used by Amazon for surveillance, then Amazon seems to have more reach than Facebook too. But all of them plainly have more reach than anybody should be comfortable with.

<comment><USER19> I use a standard set of privacy tools, so Facebook is almost universally blocked from my life. Their shadow profile is probably pretty thin, but I agree they are still a threat. But no-where near as bad as Google.

I hadn't considered Amazon. Maybe we should add Cloudflare to the mix now as well? (in the same vein of thought)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Oral History of the Poop Emoji - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3037803/the-oral-history-of-the-poop-emoji-or-how-google-brought-poop-to-america?fullsite

<comment><USER2> Great little article. One nit though:

> A tree looks like a tree in Chinese (樹), and a forest is multiple trees (森林)

I'm pretty sure they meant 木 there. (Although 樹 is also a perfectly valid character for 'tree'.)</comment>


Hellish Venus Might Have Been Habitable for Billions of Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hellish-venus-might-have-been-habitable-for-billions-of-years/ <comment><USER2> So life could have formed on venus and then transfered to earth?</comment>


Solving All the Wrong Problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/solving-all-the-wrong-problems.html <comment><USER2> So many submissions, so little discussion, and yet with so many submissions, clearly lots of people think it's interesting and relevant. Will this be the first submission that gets a substantial discussion?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127803) (5 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064083) (4 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12150661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12150661)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12110238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12110238)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100267)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12072310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12072310)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12066079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12066079)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065530)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064984)</comment>


Woz on artificial intelligence: 'The future is scary and very bad for people' - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/03/24/apple-co-founder-on-artificial-intelligence-the-future-is-scary-and-very-bad-for-people/ <comment><USER3> this article is a prime example why i don't give mainstream "journalism" a dime of a chance. the author clearly lacks a big chunk of intellect or whatever to properly deal with the subject. as soon as things get controversial, editorial-staff-sponsored cognitive dissonance kicks in to calm the flock. i'm so sick of the bunch that wapo and co are.

</comment><comment><USER4> "The Super Rich Technologists Making Dire Predictions About Artificial Intelligence club gained another fear-mongering member this week: Apple co- founder Steve Wozniak."

This article is immediately nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER5> So everyone without an AI background but with high net worth has a go - <USER2> this how it works? Like the Ice Bucket challenge but about AI scaremongering.

In the grand scheme of things, the important bit is for some intelligence on Earth to survive. Maybe a non-Facebook+CandyCrush-loving kind of intelligence would be a better option.

<comment><USER6> I agree with the sentiment in your first sentence, but really, loving Facebook and CandyCrush is the first trait you think of to eliminate? If only that were the worst thing about us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could these predictions be more telling? _Computers will make you irrelevant. They 'll make you useless to society. You won't be important anymore_.

These predictions are the very definition of FUD.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh no if robots get into power maybe they'll institute mass surveillance and start taking our rights away!

Oh wait...</comment>


Ask HN: How do you name your files? - <AUTHOR> What scheme do you to name your files? Any syntax you prefer? <comment><USER2> I prefix every file/directory in a workspace with a different letter, if possible, because this makes autocomplete as fast as possible (i.e. usually produces exactly what I want).

I try to make every temporary file start with "tmp-" so I can quickly do things like "rm tmp-*" instead of staring at a directory full of files figuring out what I can clean up.

If I include a date stamp, I use the standard YYYY-MM-DD form because this sorts perfectly by default. I don't really understand people using things like "Mon-Apr5-..." because for me that makes it really hard to find files at a glance.

It helps to observe how sorting is done in commands like "ls" because sometimes filenames can create other natural groupings. For example, I like to prefix all my documentation files with "_" so they show up together at the top.

</comment><comment><USER3> I try to use names that I think that I will remember. For files that I generate more than once, test data runs for instance, I use a date string that I have aliased in my shell like this:

        alias otag='date +-%Y-%m%d-%H%Mh%S'

which yields:

        -2017-0521-1430h14

</comment><comment><USER4> This is such a wide open question, very hard to answer. Can you be more specific?

<comment><AUTHOR> WHat is first, to last. The date format. Separators? What info do you includ? How do you separate words? Dashes? Spaces? Und score? No spaces and capitalized words? Other tips and tricks?

<comment><USER4> I don't have a super strict standard, but there are a couple of conventions I follow.

ISO date format - 2017-05-23. Yyyymmdd is the only numerically sortable date format, whatever dividers you use

I use spaces, not underscores

I keep everything lowercase

I split projects by folders, and have a number of sub folders inside with various standards names - docs, resources, src, art, and usually a root level file called wot.txt which explains what the project is. Sort of like a github readme.md file.

I break my own rules all the time though. And my rules are more habit than anything. Following someone else's exact folder structure is more likely to cause you grief than help you be organised. Everyone is different</comment></comment></comment>


Stupeflix To Help Create The Next Instragram, Vine - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/09/11/live-at-techcrunch-disrupt-stupeflix-to-help-create-the-next-instragram-vine/

<comment><USER2> Non sequitur to follow.

There is a French band called Stupeflip. Briefly, I believed this was going to be about them: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdaAHMztNVE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdaAHMztNVE)

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats on the launch.

I'm the founder of a photo/video service and aside from some initial up front investment in processing of photos (done entirely by us) and videos (mostly done by AWS) the vast majority of time is building the features around the already processed media.

I think this could be useful for a service which isn't _that_ interested in the media itself but wants to put together something pretty quickly. But if the media is your livelihood I don't see it as such a fit.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought based on the video that I would have been a target customer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jmathai,

[I'm the OP & guy in the video]

The 15 new APIs are a suite of specific services to quickly transcode, resize, slice & dice all kinds of media assets. They're meant to quickly build UI features around UGC media for web & mobile apps. Yes: if media asset management is the core value proposition, these services may be used to rapidly prototype and test new features, rather than build the core product. We do however have customers in the photo sharing space. The majority of them are either starting apps, or building UX quickly - for instance we've powered promotional experiences for all kinds of large brands (Coke, Visa, Samsung, Nike) e.g. jordan.com/liftoff

Our core product is the video creation API: send a XML description of the composition of a video, it renders a video file.

The video messaging was more mass media than HN.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the response. I'll have a deeper look at the APIs. There might be something in there that's useful to us.

I think the promotional/brand/agency experiences is a really big market in need of ways to quickly build and deploy apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used Stupeflix for a project (needed the generate videos from set of pictures) and their API works really well. Simple, does the job, developer- friendly.

</comment><comment><USER5> How is this different to [http://animoto.com/](http://animoto.com/) other than adding somewhat more refined controls?

<comment><AUTHOR> Only comparing the developer offering here.

Our main product, the video creation API, differs from Animoto API in a zillion ways that can be summed up by flexibility. Also, access is $30/mo, instead of I believe $30k upfront - OH, not public.

Then the 15 new APIs covered in the Forbes article are completely new and do not exist at Animoto or anywhere else as an ensemble of web services. Things like extrating a frame from video, detecting faces in photos, stabilizing videos, detecting beat in music. Our goal is to address the broader spectrum of developers and offer a complete toolkit of services to quickly build apps that process UGC.

Some of the new services exist as standalone APIs from some great folks like encoding.com zencoder.com (transcode), cloudinary imgix (photo serving), lambda labs (face detection), neospeech (TTS).</comment></comment>


HN Meetup Boulder? - <AUTHOR>

Are there enough folks from HN in the Boulder/Denver area to try a HN meetup?  Let me know in the comments if you would be interested and I can try and put something together. <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about all the duplicated replies about the meetup this week. For some reason the announcement of the actual meetup never got up-voted and not very many people saw it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OK, meetup this Wednesday. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965> for details and rsvp.

</comment><comment><USER2> Techstars is doing something similar in February:

<http://tsbfounderdating.eventbrite.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Techstars is a really cool program, and the founder dating thing looks like a good place to find other people to start businesses with, but I think it would be nice to just have an in person way to meet some of the folks who share a common interest in the community around Hacker News. I think a no pressure sort of event where the goal is to have a beer and meet other nerds in the Boulder area is what I am looking to put together. If people find other people to start businesses with, then that is great, but if they just have a beer and meet someone interesting, that is great too.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It looks like we certainly have enough people to get a meetup put together. I will put together an invite for sometime in early February.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use this comment as a counter if you are planning to come by. Thanks in advance for the free karma!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm up for a Boulder meetup this week. Any day but Friday is best for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would love to join. Either Boulder or Denver downtown would work fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes please. Depending on how many people, mountain sun or southern sun?

<comment><USER6> Southern Sun is quieter because of its size. Its hard to hear people sitting across from you at the mountain sun.

<comment><USER7> Hey, I wanted to meet up with you in Boulder (Qualcomm interview guy). I couldn't find your email, so I'm spamming all your comments, which is probably against the law. Please email me at email@example.com, or read my longer comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078343>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it's in June or later, I'm in! I'm moving there then.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't attend this week, but I'd be up for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can drive in to Boulder or Denver

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am in for meeting up in Boulder.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm there, schedule permitting...

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> sounds like a meetup I can get behind, when where?

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm definitely in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm in!

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup this week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm going to Boulder this weekend for an interview with Qualcomm. But I doubt this helps.

<comment><USER6> What sort of position are you applying for at Qualcomm and more importantly what sort of job are you interested in? Curious because most of Qualcomm's work is way below the abstraction level of the "average" HN audience (I work there)

Boulder, is a fun place to ski/hike with plenty of young interesting folks. Tons of startup folks: <http://www.centernetworks.com/why-i-love-boulder>

I am usually at the Laughing Goat in the afternoons on the weekend, if you want to meetup.

<comment><USER16> There are people here with all sorts of backgrounds - I'm pretty sure there are some folks from Intel who read HN, as well as some I know from Nokia.

I did some low level work (and most of my degree was EE), and to be honest I don't think moving up and down the stack is that insurmountable provided you are willing to spend the time (re)learning a chunk of stuff each time.

<comment><USER6> My undergrad background is in EE and good amount of research work with compilers in grad school. I am apprehensive about working on low-level software because the state-of-art in commercial OS development in smart-phones always lags a few years behind desktop or high-end systems. The software problems have already been solved by other folks.

Example, Low-level software is poorly designed from a software engineering point of view and its problems plainly evident over multiple hardware product cycles.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bottles used to light poor communities - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14967535

<comment><USER2> If you find this interesting, you may be interested in previous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2842632> : 46 days ago, 10 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3009276> : yesterday, 4 comments

It has been submitted many more times, mostly with no significant discussion, from many different sources:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2307972> : 193 days ago,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2757047> : 68 days ago,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816556> : 53 days ago,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2994086> : 5 days ago,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004324> : 3 days ago.

Clearly a story that hackers gravitate towards, although it's interesting how little discussion it engenders.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is an interesting concept, however perhaps it is so lo-tech that it needs no discussion.</comment></comment>


TimesPeople, the New York Times' social network, launching tonight - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/timespeople-the-new-york-times-social-network-launching-tonight

<comment><USER2> I am the only one here who already has trouble keeping up with my barebones twitter account, facebook and email (WSJ social network is tempting)?

How about a site that let's you put up a "Gone Fishing" message on every single one of your social networking sites in one click?</comment>


Have we simply replaced tables with div's? - <AUTHOR>

CSS has helped make content more semantic to made using tables redundant. However the way most sites are being developed using CSS frameworks and their classes, it feels we have simply replace tables with div's.<p>What do you think? <comment><USER2> You can write fortran in any language.

All CSS gives us is an option to not suck. It doesn't force us to not suck — we can still write poor CSS. Given the number of PHP programmers I'm not surprised that poor CSS is common.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use Definition Lists !

Use Lists!

Legends, labels, spans! Smalls, italics, bold!</comment>


Y-Cloninator: GitHub Projects Trending on HN Without Distractions - <AUTHOR> http://ycloninator.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> Nice project, I'd love to be able to sort these based on things like:

      * date first mentioned on HN
      * date last mentioned on HN
      * number of links pointing to
      * number of stars on github
      * language

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! These are all definitely possible. We'll look into implementing these, but we're both students who are pretty busy with school and interviews for jobs after we graduate soon.

<comment><USER3> So open source it so others can contribute

<comment><USER4> If you click the Fork Me button in the top right you can contribute right now :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great!

One quick feedback, you should probably normalize the case in searches. I searched for "python" and got nothing. I had to change it to " _P_ ython" to get it to work.

<comment><USER6> I noticed this immediately too. But since there are a fixed set of possible languages, seems like a dropdown box and/or multi-select would do the trick and remove the possibility of user error.

<comment><AUTHOR> We use the language reported by the GitHub api, so the list of languages may change without notice. We should definitely normalize capitalization and I think there are node libraries edit distance we could leverage too. Thanks for the advice!

<comment><USER7> I'd like to be able to search "lisp" and get both Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp. I tried that and was surprised when nothing showed up.

<comment><USER8> I think that would be best handled by manually coding a set of language synonyms, rather than substring searches. Shorter language names could cause problems in the latter, such as C and Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The newest link is this ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818244)), which is 386 days old. Looks like the author hasn't been updating it for more than a year.

<comment><USER2> [https://github.com/iankronquist/y-cloninator/commits/master](https://github.com/iankronquist/y-cloninator/commits/master) \- Yep.

Tried to call refresh_content but sadly it didn't seem to work: [https://github.com/iankronquist/y-cloninator/blob/master/rou...](https://github.com/iankronquist/y-cloninator/blob/master/routes.js#L21)

<comment><USER4> Hey, I'm actually the one who has the Heroku instance this is on. I'll go ahead and update it, I think the database ran out of space...

EDIT: it's all nicely updated. It should pull in links for a good long while now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks cool! I just noticed the search is case sensitive - "php" returns no results while PHP returns quite a few. Same with c#/C#.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice! Nitpick: it would be cool to be able to click on a language to automatically search for it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The links to HN suggest that the data set is about a year old.

</comment><comment> chao- Already used this to find some fun tools, one of which I'll start using later today. Thanks!

As others have said, it would be useful to have some "max age" requirement.

</comment><comment><USER13> Feed, please? Would love to get this on my daily reader.

<comment><USER4> Certainly! I'm currently working on the case sensitive search issue, but afterward I'll try to see what it'll take to make a feed.

Can you create an issue? [https://github.com/iankronquist/y-cloninator/issues](https://github.com/iankronquist/y-cloninator/issues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks good!

I'd like to be able to click on a language in the language column, rather than having to ring it in in the search box.

Also, it would be nice if the "Read on HN" link had the posting date — preferrably in ISO 8601 notation — as tooltip.

</comment><comment><USER15> What does "trending" mean, in this context?

The top item I see (node.php) has 7 points, no comments, and was posted 386 days ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I recall, if a link to GitHub hits the front page then we pick it up. The code to clean up old entries in the database is slightly broken (oops! :), Tschuy is fixing that up right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmm this is pretty cool but I'm a little sad my project, msngr.js, isn't listed (it was on HN 344 days ago and hit the front page briefly). Would love to see it stated what criteria(s) are used in determining the projects without me going through the source.

<comment><AUTHOR> If a GitHub link makes it to the top 100 posts to hacker news we grab it. A while ago the PostGres DB on Heroku filled up, and we stopped pulling in new links, but we've fixed that now. Sorry your project isn't listed! If it makes it to the front page again, maybe on the next release, we'll automatically feature it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this manually curated? (the titles seem to be different than the original HN titles)

<comment><USER4> The titles are from the Github projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is pretty neat and useful. A bit disappointed though that I didn't see my GitHub project listed. I would think you could build this list with a simple Google query "site:news.ycombinator.com link:github.com"

</comment><comment><USER19> Another suggestion: In addition to normalization that others have mentioned, support for searching on the most common synonyms and abbreviations would be great. E.g. "js" for "Javascript", etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a pretty handy idea, especially for the "X version 1.0.0 released!" with absolutely no description about what X is. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem up to date / accurate.

</comment><comment><USER9> An Atom feed, so I can plug this into my reader, would also be great.

</comment><comment><USER21> Love the idea! Alas it appears that there have been no go, elixir or "golang" projects posted, or in your index. (or maybe search isn't working.)

<comment><USER4> Search has been updated! Go projects are under "Go", and there's on elixir project on there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting idea! Would you consider extending this to cover projects _not_ hosted on GitHub, including gitlab, bitbucket, and similar?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea! We'd have to look at those sites individual APIs. PRs welcome of course!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really interesting, thank you for sharing. Discovered resdet which is something I've been searching for a long time!

</comment><comment><USER24> This is awesome! It would also be really useful to have column indicating which open source license the project uses.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting.

I would like the [Search] form to be implemented using GET. so that I send links with search results.

</comment><comment><USER26> Can't hit the back button to go back to the project list. Makes for bad UX.

Cool concept.

</comment><comment> mickael-kerjean Amazing thank you!</comment>


The Scrollympics - <AUTHOR> http://the100meterscroll.com/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool idea, but the scrolling is too slow. I only managed to reach 0.3m/s so couldn't be bothered finishing.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to minify the code so it's harder to cheat (:

</comment><comment><USER4> 37:56</comment>


Face masks 'significantly reduce' spread of Covid-19, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.routefifty.com/health-human-services/2020/06/coronavirus-facemasks-study-effectiveness/166134/ <comment><USER2> While I could believe it, this study was essentially: 1) make assumptions about mask effectiveness 2) run a simulation model with a range of parameters of that effectiveness 3) conclude that masks significantly reduce spread

I'm not saying it's not worth doing, but it's substantially different than what the headline says. "Theoretically, masks should work to significantly reduce spread of Covid-19" would be more accurate.</comment>


What to do if we find extraterrestrial life - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39675346/ns/technology_and_science/

<comment><USER2> What do we do? Probably very little. What would they do to us? Hopefully, very little.</comment>


The Game of Life – Emergence in Generative Art - <AUTHOR> https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/7/12/the-game-of-life-emergence-in-generative-art <comment><USER2> I think showing the (very small) source code as they have with the first example is key to allowing new people to appreciate these. Because we are exposed to so many amazing computer graphics art these days, but most of those take many man hours and are assembled with massive amounts of complexity and computation driving them. Essentially they are brute force art, people imposing their will on the visual output.

What's impressive with generative art like this is how minimal, effortless and elegant the process that created it is. And what i find interesting about it's natural origins is how the process of creating it is far more biased to exploration than forcing output from your own mind.

Shameless plug... although CA are one of my favorite things, I find attractors better for generative art, you get a lot for very little code (although I understand them far less than CA):

      Abstract:
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/15329
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/15367
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/17223
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/17272

      Planet by mapping the same technique:
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/17271

These are all < 194 chars. To see the code for the "eval(escape(unescape..." ones just replace eval with throw.

If I was to ever print something like this I would put the source code directly in the picture itself, seeing that is part of the art for me.

<comment><USER3> Great advice on sharing the code to help see how much complexity can come from very little code. Most of these artists open source their code. I will try to add in links to the code - great idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm working on some game of life stuff, too! May interest some of you: [https://lockwood.dev/automata/2020/03/28/bruteforcing- beauti...](https://lockwood.dev/automata/2020/03/28/bruteforcing-beautiful- cellular-automata-rulesets-with-golang.html)

<comment><USER3> Very cool! Love the introduction of random rulesets!

<comment><USER4> If you want to collaborate on anything, I'd love to!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ive tried doing a 3D Game of life a week ago in Blender [https://youtu.be/xEu- YKq91-A](https://youtu.be/xEu-YKq91-A)

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty bizarre! Just a few hours before this article got posted I was brushing up my compute shader skills and the first thing I wrote was Conway's Game of Life on a 4096x4096 texture.

baader-meinhof is in effect.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've made a, bit nausea inducing, maze cellular automata implementation that maps as a texture onto a rotating cube a couple weeks ago. Planning to add colors and different polygons later.

Maybe making it so it restarts the growth phase when the polygon is almost filled because the slow growing seems most interesting to me: [https://gen.har.ink](https://gen.har.ink)

<comment><USER8> Wow, that creates all sorts of optical illusions for me. After the cube faces are filled I see massive waves sweeping across the faces and sometimes the cube vertices seem to expand and contract distorting the cube and turning it inside out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I also do generative art, although mine is not based on the game of life and incorporates some non generative elements. In fact I spend too much time making art and not enough completing the website to showcase it. Digital allows for a wider spectrum of art than can be achieved by brush and canvas alone, although admittedly you can create things no one likes either with great ease.</comment>


Rampaging British Granny Plays GTA V  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXpN8hOWRNc Reaction to UK energy price increases <comment><AUTHOR> Is this real?</comment>


Goldman Sachs now a conduit for blockchain education - <AUTHOR> http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/blockchain/index.html <comment><USER2> THE 4 STEPS TO GET THE MOST OUT OF THIS ARTICLE

1) Set website to auto scroll at your preferred reading speed.

2) Begin to feel dizzy.

3) Throw up on your shoes.

4) Curl up in a ball in the corner, and wait for the horrible ride to be over.</comment>


Little Printer prints you a beautiful mini-newspaper. - <AUTHOR> http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/

<comment><USER2> It's a receipt printer in a box. Receipts (the thermal kind this uses) can't be written on with a normal pen without it getting all gunked up, so the 'puzzle' idea is more or less not going to work.

The quality of the printing will be receipt quality, and will degrade and become completely unreadable over time.

We went through this entire 'push media' bullshit in 1999, but I guess knowing that makes me an old timer these days. The punchline is, people will not want this.

Edit: Now, take away all the cloud magic and foursquare bullcrap, and I would actually like to have this just as a little printer. I'm often trying to print lists and so on, because I hate unlocking my phone over and over to check a shopping list at the store. So I would buy this if it were possible to print out lists of things, driving directions, and that sort of thing.

<comment><USER3> Some kinds of thermal paper don't work with pens, some do (e.g. the kind used by credit card terminals, or fax machines). What made you think that they use the first kind of paper?

<comment><USER2> They all clog pens. It just takes a few uses. Anyone who has ever worked a cash register can tell you that between customers you often have to scribble on some regular paper to unclog the pen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm having an extremely hard time wrapping my head around the usefulness of this product. The Little Printer is generating hardcopy of snippets of temporal events. These snippets are reduced to headlines without content to put them into context. It is using thermal paper, which HN has identified does not have longevity for scrapbooks or archival purposes. I can't find the value of this. Why consume resources when my phone can provide me all this? I was very surprised to see it as a trending topic on Twitter. Why does everyone want one so terribly so?

<comment><USER5> It's like having an infinite supply of smartphone displays that are set up to show one thing at a time. Limited use, and temporal, but far more long-lasting than the notifications you get that disappear a second later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cute, and nice music choice. But wasteful, and most of the things they print out on the video left me thinking "wait, why would I print that? I can read that off my smartphone in 2 seconds!" It would take longer to print than just read. The Sudoku puzzle makes more sense, and a todo list might, but still...

<comment><USER7> Depending on the content, I think a scrapbook of daily updates would be a fascinating collection for my kids to one day look through. Making interesting collections of news would outweigh the wastefulness of the experience (it's far more conservative than a daily paper).

<comment><USER8> It's thermal paper, which tends not to last very well. This is especially a problem for medical information. (<http://www.mdsr.ecri.org/summary/detail.aspx?doc_id=8155>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have absolutely no need for this and yet I want it anyhow. It's nice because it makes something ordinary precious through anachronism and size. If it had an API I could see using this as a fun tool for people visiting an office. Another note: I love thermal paper.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cute, but all in all it's a machine that generates trash.

<comment><USER11> At least its not A4 sized trash!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We can talk about that how wastefull or how anachronistic it is. I totally agree, but what I find more interesting is, why so many people (including me) like this useless thing? Did we somehow, reached a point where we get too much of our experiences through a computer or a mobile display? More and more information through a narrowing medium. Or just because to have more kind of medias? Does somebody have a better hipotesis?

<comment><USER13> Yeah. My first thought was exactly the same. Why do I find this interesting (I always have my phone with me)? My hypothesis is that with everything getting displayed through LCD screens these days, after a while people will crave for the old sensory experience - working with physical paper.

Not sure about the current generation which is growing up with iPads and may have never used a physical newspaper. I will be curious to see their reaction.

<comment><USER11> Funny how you writing "physical paper" proves your own point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Minimal and fantastic.

I could absolutely imagine getting one of these for my grandparents, for example.

Or a parent with young children.

Or a local shop owner that doesn't use a smartphone.

<comment><USER15> But you set it up with your smartphone. Will you be the one with the smartphone that sets up each of those people's printer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A Google Calendar/Tasks-polling, Arduino-driven thermal printer with one press printouts has been somewhere on my "eventual weekend projects" list for a while.

I really like this idea. I think the services it supports will make or break it.

As someone who has a smartphone permanently embedded in his pocket, an iPad never more than an arm's length away, and is strongly considering buying a second tablet, I definitely still see a great deal of utility in small, printed infoclusters.

(And for everyone saying "this just generates trash," every moment you've ever spent reading vapid nonsense on backlit screens has been a utter waste of precious energy. What's your point?)

<comment><USER17> The point is that it takes a hell of a lot less energy to display something on a screen for a couple of minutes versus printing it out; and it leaves a lot less paper trash lying around, specifically none.

You don't have to agree, but it's obviously something to consider. I still get a daily newspaper, and I'm always on the verge of cancelling it both because it's such a waste of resources and it's a chore to have to throw out a pile of paper every few weeks.

<comment><USER16> I suspect you're right that the amount of energy used to download the information and run the mechanism to print it is greater than the energy required to download and display it temporarily. Also, thermal paper is apparently non-recyclable, so that sucks.

I suppose what I was getting at is that we're all great wasters of energy and resources, and a product like this represents a fraction of a drop in the bucket, so all the commentary on how wasteful it is may miss the forest for the trees.

The primary reason I like the idea is that I waste less psychic energy with a piece of paper sitting on my desk which I glance at occasionally, versus my iPad or Android phone sitting in the same spot, capable of displaying the same information plus an entire universe of distraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> CUTE. But man, this feels like a product that would've made more sense a decade ago.

<comment><USER19> Yeah; next we'll see it print Opera tickets and phone books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The concept and implementation is nice. But for the sake of the planet I would not get one, nor would I recommend it either.

<comment><USER21> Or potentially for the sake of your health, especially if you spend half an hour on the train every morning handling the printouts:

\- [http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-bpa-thermal-paper- receip...](http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-bpa-thermal-paper-receipts- skin.html)

\- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_paper#Health_and_enviro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_paper#Health_and_environmental_concerns)

<comment><USER22> the Wikipedia link you gave says: _exposure of a person repeatedly touching thermal printer paper for 10 h/day, such as at a cash register, could reach 71 microg/day, which is 42 times less than the present tolerable daily intake (TDI)._

<comment><USER21> Present being the operative word. Plus cashiers don't rub the receipts against their hand for long periods of time building up sweat, as you might if you were filling out a puzzle.

Anyway I did say potential, but as the researcher suggests _pregnant women working as cashiers should be careful and err on the side of caution._

<comment><USER23> Cashiers have to deal with thermal printer paper that is being printed all the time. You will be dealing with just one or two printouts per day.

You are being overly dramatic.

<comment><USER24> Hopefully they use a standard size of paper so you can just buy BPA-free paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My wife is a die-hard paper/pen person. I could see printing stuff out for her, articles, grocery lists, funny quotes, etc, and putting it in her lunch for the day. It'd be a nice little pick-me-up.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can imagine the picture with the boy face getting old very fast if it's printed on each and every note.

</comment><comment><USER26> Make it hackable and it'll have longer legs.

A daily to-do or grocery list is a good use-case, but for social updates it's quite wasteful.

<comment><USER27> Oh come on!

You could make it print out @replies on twitter or something. How freaking cool would that be?

<comment><USER28> you mean like this? [http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/06/22/prototype- thermal-...](http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/06/22/prototype-thermal- tweeter-networked-twitter-printer-dangerousproto/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Anyone notice this bit?: "In your front room, Little Printer wirelessly connects (with no configuration) to a small box that plugs into your broadband router."

So it's not actually using your wifi setup, but some other parallel network. Seems like an odd choice... yes initial configuration would be hard with a box with no inputs, but since it seems to require an iPhone anyways, you could do it through Bluetooth.

<comment><USER30> Nope. That quote's not on the page that I received (updated content? A/B testing? geographical segmentation? who knows)

I did notice this bit, though:

"Little Printer sits in your home, but it's BERG Cloud that does the heavy lifting. Because publications are created in our cloud on the Web, not in your front room, we can offer more services for your Little Printer without the need for updates or a replacement product.

"BERG Cloud Bridge sits by your broadband router and wirelessly connects Little Printer to the Internet, which makes it easy for you to place Little Printer where you can see it."

And then I noticed the domain that this page is hosted at; the people who built the little bridge box are the same people who make the printer. So, it makes perfect sense to me that they would build devices that work together, on their own little network, if each promotes sales of the other. Not an odd choice at all.

<comment><USER29> Ah yes, it's on the blog post: <http://bergcloud.com/blog/>

I still think it's odd to use your own wifi protocol just to support future products.

<comment><USER31> Seems like the modularity would help on the marketing side: people will be much more receptive to BERG Cloud product #2 if it connects to a device already in their living room. I think this is probably true whether or not there's a technological reason why it needs to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow. These guys wasted a crapload of time on this.

Why would I want to print ANY of the things they've shown, when I could just open the app on my phone instead -- at least that way I can actually interact with the data?

Why are you killing trees for no reason?

</comment><comment><USER33> Neat. This design team has been thinking about this for five years.[1]

Personally, I think if the printing doesn't smudge, prints at the speed it shows in the video and isn't cancerous[2] I'd love to have one.

Aside from functional difference and advantages, physical things still hold a special power in the world, at least to me.

[1] [http://berglondon.com/blog/2006/10/06/my-printer-my- social-l...](http://berglondon.com/blog/2006/10/06/my-printer-my-social- letterbox/) [2] [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20011903-10391704.htm...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20011903-10391704.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> What's the pricing going to be for this? At $30 it's a slam dunk, at $50 I would consider it. Anything more and it's a non-starter. They could try to increase profit on the razor blade model, selling ink and service upgrades.

<comment><USER35> They could likely make decent additional revenue through paid placement for front-page subscriptions via their app which is then monetized by advertiser via micro ads ("Today's crossword courtesy of Toyota"). However, as the printer is thermal they can't sell ink but it does have one significant consumable: the paper. If the paper is a custom size or with an incompatible spool mount they'll hopefully get some refills before the novelty wears off and/or it breaks down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Thank you for not calling it "Printr"

</comment><comment><USER37> Dupe. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290017>

Posted an hour earlier than this one.

</comment><comment><USER38> It reminds me of the Tandy TP-10 thermal printer I had in the early eighties for my CoCo I.

<http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/360/mc10tp10wz7.jpg/>

I honestly wouldn't mind a little wireless printer that I could dump lists to these days. Bonus if it printed on Post It Notes.

<comment><USER39> 3M has printable post-its, but they are frightfully expensive and a bit clunky. <http://goo.gl/yVlB0> At least one industrial designer has taken on the challenge of a printer for normal post-its. <http://goo.gl/Hicpr>

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looks like a nice device if it has some kind of API. However I'm wondering if they can make this at any decent cost.

The cheapest thermal printers, even off eBay cost around $65. Most thermal printers start at $150 and go to around $300.

At ~$50-60 with an API, this would be an instant buy for me. However, I doubt they can hit that price point.

</comment><comment><USER41> Oh god! It's a stock ticker machine for the modern age!

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. :/

</comment><comment><USER42> Although new mobile commerce solutions avoid paper receipts for emailed digital statements, I oould see this being used by many vendors in combination with payment technologies like Square to provide clients with paper statements.

</comment><comment><USER43> shouldn't it print out the top? i read from the top down, anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't remember where I read it, but successful web properties often share the same theme of bringing the offline world online, or vice versa. This seems to do that quite nicely :)

</comment><comment><USER45> i like the machine. have you thought about pitching it to businesses for receipts, movie stubs, raffles, parking tickets, checks, contact info...etc

</comment><comment><USER46> Dupe. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Printer>

</comment><comment><USER47> Reinventing the fax machine in 2011?

</comment><comment><USER48> Perhaps this is too obvious, but this would be killer if it could get integration with Square.

</comment><comment><USER11> My father would finally read his email if it just came out of this magically.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is the closest thing to a fax machine made by Steve Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER50> I hope it will be able to print flipbooks from Youtube/Vimeo!

</comment><comment><USER25> TIL the english call their living rooms "front rooms".

<comment><USER51> I never thought about it before, but I grew up in Missouri and we all called it the "front room", too. I still do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> If you actually wanted this, you could just spend five dollars on a gameboy printer off ebay and make the exact same printouts.

</comment><comment><USER53> Seems more like a novelty item.</comment>


Startups, Don't Starve - <AUTHOR> http://ariannasimpson.com/post/29580051074/startups-dont-starve

<comment><USER2> Awesome advice for any cash strapped startup - let's not just give out business and coding advice, startups have problems that go way beyond that (like survival!)</comment>


In South Korea, All of Life Is Mobile  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/25iht-mobile.html?em=&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Many things in South Korea aren't available to foreigners. If you're a foreigner, you're limited to the kinds of phone you can buy and can't even use wifi at Starbucks because it's only for Koreans.

<comment><USER3> What is it with Korea and Japan and this exclusionary attitude? You can't even use _wifi_ based on nationality, no matter how many lattes purchased?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> And internet speed isn't faster than in the US, they talk about 100mbs speed but that's just the speed of connecting to the network; internet speed is 10mbs max.</comment>


Show HN: Publish Your Flutter App on MacOS - <AUTHOR> https://feather-apps.com/mac.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is a new release of a project we've been working on for a few months. The idea is to allow developers to write a cross-platform app which runs on all major operating systems. Google's Flutter project does this for Android and iOS - we aim to extend this to Windows and macOS.

Happy to answer any questions...</comment>


Improving the Command-Line Postgres Experience - <AUTHOR> http://robots.thoughtbot.com/improving-the-command-line-postgres-experience/

<comment><USER2> Slightly irrelevant but I have always had terrible experiences with PostgreSQL on the CLI. To start off, it has extremely generic names for its binaries that are installed on Linux -- `createuser` for example gives no indication that it handles user creation for PostgreSQL. This also means that I cannot do something like `pg-TAB-TAB` to find out all PostgreSQL relevant binaries that I can then invoke. Apart form this, the OS X PostgreSQL installer I noticed had changed the ownership of the `/usr/local/bin` _directory_ to itself, which was plain rude.

I'm largely new to PostgreSQL and it is quite possible that I'm using it all wrong, sorry for ranting.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I also have a problem with createuser vs adduser vs useradd.

Also, dropdb, createdb, postgres, pg_ctl, initdb, pg_basebackup. No consistency.

<comment><USER4> I think it is a legacy issue. All the new executables are named with a pg_ prefix. Maybe someone should suggest a patch which renames the executables and adds symlinks from the old names.

EDIT: There was a discussion and a patch 5 years ago, but I am not sure what was the final result other than that it was obviously not changed.

[http://www.postgresql.org/message- email@example.com...](http://www.postgresql.org/message- email@example.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is my ~/.psqlrc:

        \pset pager
        \pset null 'NULL'
        \timing
        \encoding unicode
        SET search_path=public,postgis

The first line turns off paging, since I dislike how paging causes previous queries/results to disappear after I press q.

The second line is like the article's.

`\timing` shows how long each query took to run.

I honestly don't remember why/if `\encoding unicode` was necessary. Playing nice with my terminal? Writing to a file with `\o`?

The `search_path` line is because I often install PostGIS objects in a `postgis` schema, and this lets me reference them without a prefix. If there is no `postgis` schema I get a warning when I start psql, but that's no bother to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you haven't yet; set the following environment variables in your shell:

        export PAGER='less -S'
        export EDITOR='emacs -nw' #or a lesser editor if you prefer

That way you'll get result sets without linewraps and your queries will be edited in the non-default editor, which is `vi` in most distributions.

<comment><USER7> Might as well go whole hog with Emacs' SQL-mode and/or pg.el

<comment><USER6> I like sql-mode but I also like doing things in the terminal. Using sql-mode in emacs is for developing queries, but psql is what I use to talk to a database of any consequence. A large part of that is so that I know what context I'm in. Slightly more cautious and consequence oriented when it's the production database with ten million rows of PII and less so when I'm programming.

<comment><USER7> SQL-mode is a wrapper around psql that makes the psql tool a bit more human friendly. You can always add a buffer name / theme for production to avoid confusion. General rule of thumb: caution for production should take the form of a more careful code release process (i.e., you release scripts that talk to the database, not use psql directly). Executing interactive queries isn't for prod.

<comment><USER6> Oh dear; I fear you have gotten the wrong idea.

I spend most of my time in emacs doing things in python, sql or what have you. Usually the only time I talk to a production database directly is when it's already in trouble.

And yes; one's migrations and DDL etc. should all be tested before being rolled out to production; apparently that is not an assumption people make around here.

<comment><USER7> Apologies. I definitely got the wrong idea. Generally no one does ad hoc queries to prod, even when in trouble. It's all, "sync to offline DB, check it out there".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made something like this for MongoDB and even improved the api a bit.

[https://github.com/TylerBrock/mongo- hacker](https://github.com/TylerBrock/mongo-hacker)

I found that adding color to the JSON output helped newcomers differentiate the data types and understand the structure of the data models more easily.</comment>


Just introduced paid plans in my SaaS and got the first paying customer - <AUTHOR> As per the title, Today I just introduced a couple of paid options for my Saas and I just recorded the first payment, for a yearly Pro plan ($150).
The tool is in the niche of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and allows users to calculate their returns when investing in Uniswap, a (super-interesting) protocol which is getting pretty popular within the Ethereum community. I launched it as a totally free product in June, got some initial traction, and now trying to find a model to make it sustainable and develop it further. DeFi is still very small, but with high growth potential I believe.
I've created so far 3 plans: Basic (free),  Pro (1 ETH/year, about $150) and Large Investors (5ETH/year, about $750). They differ in terms of features as well as for the number of analysis allowed.
Wanted to share this with you. Any consideration/ pitfall to avoid when moving from free to paid?
https://www.uniswaproi.com/ <comment><USER2> Congratulations ! You've hit the market validation milestone. That's not easy.

I believe your project success is tighly coupled to DeFi success (as a platform).

In order to succeed you should help spread DeFi - make yourself and your product an authority on the subject - and prepare material _easy to digest_ and understand.

First of all, you should know your customer. Why paid, what benefit/outcome gets from your service.

With this information, you should be able 'lower the barrier of entry' for other users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree, thanks for your insights!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations, would you mind sharing how many free users you had before you decided to make this transition?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to say since the tool was not only free, but didn't even require signing up (see for example comproi.com, its sister-site which is still free and no-sign-up). My estimate is about 200 free users, but could be off. We'll see how many they actually sign up now (so far about 50)

<comment><USER4> Wow! In 1 day you converted about $7500/year of customers. That's impressive. This implies you're already at MVP!

How long did it take you get those ~200 free plan users?

If you can repeat that every month, you're already in "real, viable company/job" land. Perhaps you should consider spending at least a portion of your time on market rather than tech dev now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on your fist paying customer! Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!!</comment></comment>


Stallman insists he's still Chief GNUisance while 18 maintainers want him out - <AUTHOR> https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2019/10/07/gnu_stallman_protest/ <comment><USER2> 18 out of 300 to 400

</comment><comment><USER3> They can leave the GNU Project very easily. The project will still be owned by GNU, but GNU will have to find new maintainers. There's a lot of precedence with this.</comment>


Hugo 0.20 Released: Custom Output Formats - <AUTHOR> http://bepsays.com/en/2017/04/10/hugo-20/ <comment><USER2> If someone is interested to checkout Hugo, I have written up a my personal cheat sheet to setup everything with Digital Ocean. [0]

\- [0] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five- days/](https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/)</comment>


A new Ruby Rack Push, simple and fast - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ohler55/agoo/blob/develop/misc/push.md <comment><AUTHOR> Also along with the simply push API, the Aggo server serves static assets 2000 times faster with sub millisecond latency.</comment>