Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/notable/notable <comment><USER2> There was an interesting point during Notable's development when the project went from an open source one to closed source [1]. While I get open source developers should be paid for the work, I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source

[1] [https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432](https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432)

<comment><USER3> All of this said, I've recently found Foam hard to beat. Awesome markdown "thought web" experience built right into VSCode. Refreshing approach after years of mediocre Electron apps

[https://github.com/foambubble/foam](https://github.com/foambubble/foam)

<comment><USER4> I use this too but have already extended it a lot. What I don't really understand is what the Foam extension itself does (I think nothing yet?!).

I'm not interested in publishing so I instead focused on adding extensions for things like tags (to get closer to the Zettelkasten principle) and more features like graphs (e.g. using mermaid). I would recommend installing 'Markdown Preview Enhanced' to really improve the experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Author here, it's nice to see Notable linked to on HN by somebody else! I was planning on posting about it myself after v1.9 gets released though, as pretty much everything changed since the last version available in that repo.

If you want to try a not-yet final version of v1.9 you can find it here: [https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases](https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases) It's quite stable at this point and I would trust it more with my data over v1.8, but I haven't written the new tutorial notes and built-in documentation for it yet, and I need to rewrite the search engine before releasing v1.9 final.

If you want to get a quick sneak peek about v1.9 I had recorded a video about it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ERHvuhFH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ERHvuhFH8) It's about 2 months old now, and it only goes over a bunch of new features I had implemented at that point in time.

We also have a chat by the way, if you'd like to keep track of the progress more closely: [https://chat.notable.app](https://chat.notable.app)

Hopefully I'll see you back soon once v1.9 gets released, that will be a lot more exiting than the current v1.8.4.

</comment><comment><USER6> My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list.

I could name everything as `001-scene1.md`, `002-scene2.md`. But if I want to change the order, it's an O(n) operation by hand, which is painful.

Another thing is that I really want a good pen support. Many notes I take are not texts.

The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person.

<comment><USER5> Notable's author here.

> My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to > have a manual order in the file list.

This has come up a few times, I don't have anything against it, I'm just not sure how it should work exactly. Like since the app supports sorting notes by a few dimensions (title, creation date, modification date), how would a manual sort order fit into this? Would that be a separate sorting dimension? Would that work alongside the built-in dimensions? How do you know if a note is being rendered at position X because a built-in rule or because you manually moved there? How should the user remove manually-set note orders?

If you have any suggestions I'm all hears, so far I haven't been able to think of a really good solution to this.

> The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that > everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement > differs from person to person.

I can't speak for all people who made note-taking apps but I would personally agree with this.

Slight rant: part of the problem IMHO is that people have hundreds of note- taking apps to choose from, some of which even completely free and open source, and they just don't want to pay for them, often not even technical users, and if a project is not financially sustainable _eventually_ it's going to die, or it will never get to implement the features needed by those other people that will eventually end up starting new note-taking apps, maybe that's a factor that contributed to the proliferation of all these apps too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally I have been a fan of Joplin [https://joplinapp.org](https://joplinapp.org) for note taking. It is also markdown-based with all kinds of features and is MIT licensed.

<comment><USER8> Joplin has a broken mobile interface on iOS. I had hopes, but they were dashed.

<comment><USER9> What's broken about it? Admittedly I haven't been using it for more than a month, but the interface seems to work just fine on my iPhone.

<comment><USER8> I remember trying some basic operations a few months ago and it was just not working properly at all. Like I couldn't scroll when the keyboard was up levels of borked.

<comment><USER10> The iOS-can't-scroll bug was killing me for about 5 months, they finally fixed recently. It's free software and all but...oof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yet another electron-based notetaking app.. There's already so many of those. And it's not even open source (anymore, since version 1.5.1). Why go to closed-source for something like this?

I really miss the old Tomboy. It was lightning fast and you could hotlink to another note just by typing its name. It had keyboard shortcuts for everything and searches were pretty much instant. But it's not maintained anymore, and the "NG" version lost the speediness of it (it was a complete rewrite)

The only thing I didn't like about it was that it was based on mono/.net and that it didn't have a CLI version. But despite using mono it was still really fast, it was just a bit of an installation hassle. I'd still use it today if it was still viable, but the lack of HiDPI support in particular makes it really difficult to use today.

One thing about Tomboy that I was a bit divided about was the lack of images. Today I use OneNote because it's basically the only thing my work supports. But I took much better notes with Tomboy as I always had to type content in my own words, whereas with OneNote I got lazy and just screenshot presentation sheets (which aren't searchable and make the database huge and slow).

<comment><USER12> For some historical perspective, consider this. When Tomboy was new, people complained about its 'bloat'. Why? Because it's 'unnecessarily' written in .NET, and Mono was a 'huge and bloated' dependency.

<comment><USER13> It was a little more than that. It was the only app on the live CD of several major distros that relied on Mono. That meant, back in the days of CD's that could hold 800 MB (?) you had to remove a whole lot of other stuff from the live CD, all for an app that most people didn't use. (As was pointed out at the time, what's the purpose of a notes app on a live CD, where you don't even have persistent storage?) It was widely perceived, correctly in my opinion, as a way to get Mono installed on everyone's machines. After the pushback Miguel de Icaza got pissed, trashed Linux every chance he had, and switched to Mac. I'm not going to relitigate all of _that_ , but it wasn't just that Mono was bloated.

* Here's just one link: [https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html](https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html)

"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spent three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered."

<comment><USER11> Haha that random speed degredation happened to me even in Windows. Turned out to be a bug in the T470 firmware that throttled the cores down to a couple of hundred Mhz when on battery. I could literally watch the windows being drawn. Not sure if this was what happened for him, probably not as he wrote that years before the T470 was released, but I'm just saying it's not necessarily Linux related.

But overall I've had no such issues with Linux during the last years. I use all 3 desktop platforms a lot, and my favourite was Mac, but due to Apple's constant "dumbing down" (both the OS and hardware) to appeal to the iPhone/iPad userbase it meets my needs as a power users less and less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Now that Notable is closed-source, it feels like a feature-incomplete version of Inkdrop: [https://www.inkdrop.app/](https://www.inkdrop.app/)

Also suspicious that Ink is the only markdown editor not listed in your comparisons, despite being the one most similar to your project

<comment><USER5> Author here, I can add Inkdrop to the comparison table.

There are hundreds of note-taking apps out there, believe it or not when I first made the comparison table I didn't know about Inkdrop, later on I learned about it of course, it should be added to the table. Adding a new app to the table isn't exactly a fun experience as you can imagine, I guess I prioritized more doing other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I spent a lot of time recently looking for a good note taking app. Notable (electron), QOwnNotes (Qt), and Joplin (electron) are very similar, with a markdown format with the ability to switch to the rendered view or have them split side-by-side. Joplin has an experimental combined rendered markdown editor view but it's still a bit rough around the edges.

Ultimately I settled on Zettlr. It can be used as a normal notebook, and most importantly it's killer feature to me is that it allows you to paste images from your clipboard into a note, and then view that image inline in the markdown editor instead of having to switch to the rendered view to see the image. All of the other applications show a markdown ![image-filename]() link inside the note editor, requiring you to switch to the rendered view to see the actual image. The only other applications I found which can do this are: Joplin with the experimental editor, OneNote (no linux support, proprietary format), Bear Note (Apple devices only), and a few desktop note taking applications with a non-markdown format and no mobile application. With any of the markdown ones you can sync to Syncthing, NextCloud, Dropbox, etc. and then access them on your phone with the Joplin mobile application. But Zettlr just feels better than Joplin on the desktop, has some nice themes, and the editor is more refined than Joplin's experimental one.

Given this, I don't really see any reason to use Notable over Joplin and Zettlr. QOwnNotes is also good if you really don't want electron and can live without inline images. I used all four of these for quite a while before forming this opinion.

<comment><USER5> Author here. One practical reason to switch to Notable from Joplin is that notes in Notable are just plain files on disk, and that's extremely powerful. In Joplin instead you can only open notes one by one in the default app, the difference is that Joplin essentially copies the note out of its database, opens that in the external editor, and then synchronizes its changes back with the database. In Notable the files on disk _are_ the database.

In practice this means that you should be getting better startup times with Joplin's approach, but anything that has to do with manipulating a lot of notes with an external tool is trivial in Notable, but you can't really do it with Joplin.

Plus each note in Notable contains its own metadata in the YAML frontmatter section of the note. Last time I checked Joplin just doesn't expose this at all.

I don't know enough about QOwnNotes to compare it in the same level of detail.

If you want to give Notable another spin you should probably try one of the alphas of v1.9: [https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases](https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases) the app changed quite significantly. For one now all shortcuts are customizable like they are in VSCode, and theming too is pretty much like in VSCode, in fact I ported all themes from VSCode to Notable, they are installable via the "Theme: Install..." command in the command palette.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really like the comparison chart. I wish every project had that. The first thing I think when I see a project like this and there are a ton of options is "why?". This helps with answering that.

I usually assume these projects exist because the creator looked for a solution to their problems but couldn't find one. So it's nice to have their research presented like this instead of having to try to figure it out myself.

<comment><USER5> Author here. I agree with your comment wholeheartedly.

The only issues with the comparison table are that it takes quite a bit of time to try all the features in all the apps, if you want to add a new row you are in for a wild ride downloading many note-taking apps, and the more apps you add the less the table becomes easy to read. And of course the reader may disagree with the content in the table, but it's impossible to make everybody happy about everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like a clone of Bear, which is an awesome mark-down based note app: [https://bear.app/](https://bear.app/)

Edit: This is nice, it's also out on linux and windows, unlike Bear which was one of the big negatives for me (day job is on Windows 10 where a note app like this is lacking). Def giving it a try.

<comment><USER17> It most likely isn't a clone. While Bear predates Notable, the timeline does not seem like Notable was a deliberate clone at all.

<comment><USER16> I don't mean to imply it was intentional but rather a good sign, Bear is awesome. Nice to have a similar app for other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently set up Syncthing on my laptops and my phone. I have always edited my notes in plain text in Vim and dumbly I would email these to myself (and reply to the email) on my phone so I could access my notes when afk. But now that I have Syncthing and Markor (a markdown/text editor) on my phone, I feel like I am in note-taking bliss.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe someone here is interested in Noteless, an open-source Android note- taking app which aims to be compatible with Notable. [https://github.com/redsolver/noteless](https://github.com/redsolver/noteless)

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been on Quiver for quite a few years now — [https://happenapps.com](https://happenapps.com) – and I am pretty satisfied. I can't say if it's been updated at all for most of that time. I just don't pay attention to it.

I'd probably switch if something great came along. I liked a lot of things about Bear but the pricing model drove me away.

I tried to just use iA Writer for plain markdown but the structure/search isn't usable.

A part of me just wants something simple as [http://notational.net/](http://notational.net/)

<comment><USER21> I used to be a huge fan of quiver, until one day I was writing a very useful piece of text, later, the day finished and I turned off my computer. When I turned it back on and opened Quiver, the note was gone. And it had 0 trace of it.

That time I understood that I undermined the importance of a simple note taking app. Which drives me away for the new electron based app of the month. Because they can just stop being maintained and my content is stuck there.

<comment><USER22> I was also a fan until I discovered that there is no search and replace feature.

The issue for it was opened in 2016 but the dev doesn't seem interested. Search and replace should be core functionality for any text or code based editor IMHO.

[https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/issues/417](https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/issues/417)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There seems to be a markdown note-taking app trend... I just want to throw out there that I have been using jupyter lab as a daily journaling markdown editor for nearly a year now and am very much happy with my setup.

</comment><comment><USER24> For me, ability to quickly expand/collapse headings/sub-headings is essential when I am working with markdown. After some effort got it working in Sublime Text.

Notable looks good, but not sure if it can be made to do this.

<comment><USER25> I struggle with this in sublime, I would love to hear how you figured it out.

<comment><USER24> I installed the SyntaxFold package and customized the key binding. There needs to be 2 empty lines between sub/headings for folding to work.

It's not the prefect solution but good enough.

<comment><USER25> This just made my day, thank you so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Been using it myself for a few years now. Mostly at work for code snippits, scripts, or commands as it has decent syntax highlighting. Synced to dropbox. Love its minimalist UI and feature set.

</comment><comment><USER27> Would love to simply see this as a website. Why doesn't chrome make it easier to create desktop apps with a web shell? 63MB download again :(. That's like 0.1% app, 99.9% chromium + nodejs. That's why I don't install the desktop slack app. It's not an efficient user of my computer's resources. VSCode is the only electron app I have.

Soz for the rant. Great app though. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been using notable for a few months now. Its really good for a basic note taking up but clearly theres a lot more in the pipeline that excites me :)

<comment><USER5> If you don't know about the alphas of v1.9 already you should probably give them a try: [https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases](https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases)

Many of the interesting features you might be referring to are available there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If curious see also

2018 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482)

<comment><USER5> @dang I'm Notable's author. I had planned to post on HN about the next update of the app in a few weeks, which I've been working on for about 6 months now, the current post has been made with a bit of an unfortunate timing by a user. Hopefully this will be to ok you and the other people moderating the site. The app changed quite significantly in almost all areas, it's essentially like another app that looks similar to the older one at this point, the post won't be "more of the same thing" if people will actually comment on the app, I'll try to push for a healthier discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's really striking that there are _so many_ markdown-based note-taking apps out there. It seems like there's a new one on show HN every week.

Anyone have any idea why this is? I assume the ones that show up here are mostly people scratching their own itch, but are note-taking needs all that diverse?

<comment><USER31> I find it striking as well! At least in this case:

> I couldn't find a note-taking app that ticked all the boxes I'm interested > in: notes are written and rendered in GitHub Flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, > no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes > support attachments, the app isn't bloated, the app has a pretty interface, > tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that's > what I was using before).

> So I built my own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I use simplenote but I still feel like the added features to this are enough to convince me to switch

<comment><USER5> You should give the last alpha of v1.9 a spin, it blows v1.8.4 out of the water in many ways: [https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases](https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I just tried Notable the other day, realized how slow and jittery the app and animations were and quickly moved on. I really wish electron would die already, it's ruining good apps imo.

<comment><USER5> Did you try v1.8.4 or one of the alphas of v1.9? ([https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases](https://github.com/notable/notable- experimental/releases))

In either case can you provide some steps that would help me reproduce the slowness you experienced?

And you should blame that entirely on me, Electron doesn't really have much to do with this.

<comment><USER33> It would've been v1.8.4.

Machine is 2020 MBP 13" i7 32gb. Drag the window and you'll see white flash on the background. This complaint is pedantic for sure, just as a note. I was having issues with dragging the separators before but these don't seem to be reproducible currently, so perhaps it was specific to my machine.

Another note is that typing in Notable pushes my CPU to about 10%+ usage. It doesn't do this with Notes. Also the smoothness of typing in native Notes vs this app is quite apparently, everything seems more fluid on the native app (it seems like Notable is, at times, struggling to keep up with rendering).

Again I'll note I'm very pedantic about the native feel of apps and I very much dislike electron / non-native type apps, so take my criticisms with appropriate amounts of salt. Nice job on the app!

<comment><USER5> > Drag the window and you'll see white flash on the background. This complaint > is pedantic for sure, just as a note. I was having issues with dragging the > separators before but these don't seem to be reproducible currently, so > perhaps it was specific to my machine.

I'm on a 2014 MBP and I can indeed reproduce this issue with the last version of the app, that indeed is one of the few things Electron makes harder on the developer to remove, but I think there might be ways to fix that, I'll look into it.

> Another note is that typing in Notable pushes my CPU to about 10%+ usage.

That might be harder to fix, although on my 6yo machine I can see similar numbers when writing inside Notes as well, maybe they fixed it in Catalina or Big Sur. I can't really see any difference in smoothness, are you using an external high refresh rate display perhaps?

> Again I'll note I'm very pedantic about the native feel of apps and I very > much dislike electron / non-native type apps, so take my criticisms with > appropriate amounts of salt. Nice job on the app!

I know how some people have almost an ideological stance on this, don't worry about it.

<comment><USER33> > That might be harder to fix, although on my 6yo machine I can see similar > numbers when writing inside Notes as well, maybe they fixed it in Catalina > or Big Sur. I can't really see any difference in smoothness, are you using > an external high refresh rate display perhaps?

Sorry for the delayed response, yes it is a 100hz external display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> QOwnNotes is the best thing to come along in this space in a long time, IMO.

[https://www.qownnotes.org/](https://www.qownnotes.org/)

</comment><comment><USER35> I tried using Notable for a while. I ended up sticking with Mark Text. I enjoy the more Bear-like WYSIWYG editor I can switch to for normal note taking.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Big fan of Notable, thought I'd share it!

</comment><comment><USER36> I use standard-notes for its focus on zero knowledge design and simple markdown plus potential economic viability.

<comment><USER37> I was wondering what's the difference between the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Zettlr, RemNote, Roam, Obsidian - these are some of the titles a modern note- taking app should be compared to.

</comment><comment><USER39> Except the import from evernote feature, other features are already supported by modern editor/IDE

<comment><USER5> Well, kind of. The TL;DR is that I don't think people using Notion would be very happy if they had to switch to a general-purpose text editor like vscode.

General-purpose text editors are not focused on note-taking, so while apps like vscode are powerful enough that you can kind of hack on top of it and build your own note-taking app on it, it just doesn't make a lot of sense for vscode itself to support printing notes, or hyperlinking between them, or adding a tagging system, or searching all notes containing a particular attachment etc.

And vscode has been developed for way longer than most of these new apps, eventually the set of features provided by these note-taking apps you would want to use that vscode just doesn't provide, either at all or in an integrated-enough way, should grow considerably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> No Android app?

<comment><USER19> I really like Notable, so I made an open-source Android app which is compatible with notes saved in Notable. [https://github.com/redsolver/noteless](https://github.com/redsolver/noteless)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The comparison matrix made me close the tab immediately.

<comment><USER5> What's the problem with it? It can be changed if you have any suggestions.</comment></comment>


2016 in Design - <AUTHOR> https://www.format.com/2016 <comment><USER2> The design of this website makes me kind of nauseous. It's very in-your-face, and the rotating pictures are motion-sickness inducing.</comment>


Do you want to build it with me? - <AUTHOR>

Hey folks,
I have been working on a consumer app that leverages our social graph. The idea has been validated by potential users, startup executives, and investments are beginning to happen in this space. So we can say that the need is real. Related startups in this space - BranchOut, Jibe, Identified.
Since I am non-technical (I carry business development and marketing skills), I took the help of hacker friends and built a working prototype. My friends cannot spend more time on the app - they have other commitments. So, here I am looking for 1-2 hackers to join me in building the app further, validating it with real users, and then applying to the next YC batch or seeking angel funding.
The problem we are trying to solve is complex and challenging, but there are ways to start small and make the system intelligent over a period of time - and that's the path we are taking for now. It requires expertise in graph theory, algorithms, and social network APIs. The current version of the app is built using CakePHP.
So far there wasn't any other competitor doing exactly what we're trying to do, but recently we learnt of another startup that has built a solution "just like ours" - they have a seasoned team, and just raised good amount of funding from VCs. That said, there's still a lot of scope for us to differentiate - this other company has gone in for an enterprise play, and there's good opportunity on the consumer side as well. Plus, differentiation can happen through user experience too - the other company hasn't done a great job on this, considering they have been there for a while.
The opportunity exists for a team that can execute! And there is room for more than one player in this market.
We have the startup incorporated in US, from funding and valuation perspective. I am currently based in silicon valley, US. Though I am moving to my home country (India) so that I can spend time on this startup - due to visa constraints I'm not able to do so while in US on my work visa (I tried part-time work options but that didn't work out). I can come back to US once we're able to raise funding (the startup will be able to sponsor my H1 visa then). The situation is not the most ideal one, we might be working remotely - which can be a bit of a challenge, but hey 37signals guys have demonstrated how remote teams can successfully execute.
If you are interested in the opportunity, drop me a mail at: lostincoding at gmail dot com . Do share a little bit about your background and why you are interested. And we can chat more then, and explore if there is a good fit.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> No upvote for posting anonymously and on top of that using the phrase 'The opportunity exists for a team that can execute!'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree that phrase sounds like cliched. My intent was to emphasize that despite there being seasoned well-funded startup doing something very similar, there is still an opportunity for inexperienced (haven't started any of their own venture yet), early stage team provided it can execute well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not post your startup? When you say "social graph," I'm intrigued.

<comment><AUTHOR> Related startups in this space - BranchOut, Jibe, Identified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey.. All the best for your startup !

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


Too Cool for Rules: Engineering Principles for Software Development Teams - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/noom-engineering/too-cool-for-rules-447e7111114e <comment><USER2> Owning problems rather than tasks is a great approach.

In teams with very little experience, talent, drive, or organisation it might be hard to implement.</comment>


Fewer Helmets, More Deaths - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/31/science/motorcycle-helmet-laws.html

<comment><USER2> Hmm, that's some pretty misleading presentation.

Basically all of the "rise" in deaths, which they are trying to pin on helmet law changes, is due to a large drop in car deaths, not actually anything to do with motorcycles or helmets (unless car drivers have suddenly started wearing helmets and that's what caused the reduction in deaths?).

They don't even show a graph for any/all states that retain the helmet laws, presumably because its mere presence would show up this piece as intentionally misleading.

They do show actual deaths for Florida (which, even as a percentage seem very high compared with other states) but since it jumps up and down by 100 deaths per year both before and after the law change, I'm not sure it means anything, particularly if the number of people on bikes rose and fell, or it was linked to peak tourist activity.

I can't think of any reason why someone would scheme to mislead in this matter, some shadowy cartel of helmet manufacturers maybe?, so I'm guessing they think they're doing the right thing by blatantly misrepresenting the stats.

<comment><USER3> "Basically all of the "rise" in deaths, which they are trying to pin on helmet law changes, is due to a large drop in car deaths, not actually anything to do with motorcycles or helmets..." This is simply not true. The last three graphs all show a large rise in absolute numbers of motorcycle fatalities, independent of any automobile numbers. I agree that the authors have a ways to go before they've proved causation, especially given a significant bump in helmeted motorcycle fatalities seen in the Florida data.

<comment><USER2> I admit I misread a couple of graphs. I was caught out by the fact that the graphs were overall so similar to relative ones that came before them and that they "melt" into each other as you scroll, even though they're showing different things. But they do show that in at least two states, the death toll rose notably in absolute terms, though in one in was rising steadily anyway before the change and in the other it goes up and down dramatically after.

I also note that they're actually selling their own argument short, since they've smoothed the points between years rather than showing them as a bar chart, it looks like the death toll started rising before the law change, but (I think) that's actually an artifact of the presentation, probably depends on when in the year the law change took effect.</comment></comment></comment>


"Make It Biblical" – How Vagrant Story Changed Video Game Localization - <AUTHOR> http://www.usgamer.net/articles/vagrant-story-localization <comment><USER2> I was waiting for the part about how this game "changed video game localization" but it was not there. Just a clickbait title.

Overall nice post, though. Translation is hard, and especially getting the feel of a particular place in time.

It was neat to see their examples of turning plain Japanese into a quasi- Elizabethan English in order to match the vaguely medieval setting of the game. That's something that's really hard to do (because it's more than translation, now you're reinterpreting the original text)...

<comment><USER3> I agree it fell short. I thought the party about using more imagery in English than Japanese was interesting. I didn't know that was uncommon in that language.

<comment><USER4> It seems like a wild exaggeration to me. Japanese definitely has it's share of imagery and wordplay. It's just that most video game scripts - especially from that era - tend to employ a language that is straightforward and functional at its best and uninspiring and dull at its worst.

Japanese does have many forms of imagery though. For a prime example of cheeky imagery in wordplay like the one in the sodliers' dialogue you can probably look no further than Rakugo - which employs wordplay so much that it's notoriously hard to translate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat article.

For people deeply interested in video game translation, particularly with some knowledge of Japanese, I highly recommend the "Legends of Localization" books, where the author goes into extreme details about how Zelda (first book) and Earthbound (second book) were translated. There's also a website with similar information (but not as deep) for a whole plethora of games, and a third book (for Super Mario Bros.) is in the works.

[http://legendsoflocalization.com](http://legendsoflocalization.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like Vagrant Story, and most of the games in its setting (Ivalice) are my favorite in the Final Fantasy series.

For a more emblematic example of the script quirks these games employ, The Final Fantasy Tactics remake (War of the Lions) goes much more Shakespearean, for good and ill (you lose some of the most classic lines in the original, like _Don 't blame us. Blame yourself or God._, but the entire thing is more cohesive and vivid)

Here's a good side-by-side: [https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html](https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if I'm alone on this. For their examples, I do prefer the literal translation, and I can't stand the "localized" one.

Why can't we have some respect for the original work?

This is a bad trend in game translations, and sadly does extend further than that. I do hope it comes to pass.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you're alone in disliking translation 'liberties' , but I don't think most people really like literal translation either.

A literal translation of many sentences from Japanese to English (and vice- versa) reorders words to the point of gibberish.

Almost every idiom is broken without reinterpretation -- well except for the really good crude ones.

<comment><USER9> I don't think anyone would argue for word-level translations without any grammar - that wouldn't even be possible, since there isn't a 1-1 mapping between words in different languages. But for a translation, I think most people want you to do the minimum possible to preserve the original meaning. So no switching "ramen" to "spaghetti" because you think people won't understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Loved that game. Dark souls is the spiritual successor to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not a fan of changing style.

People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they?

But at least they aimed for accuracy. Not too much American culture and memes. And actual respect for the product and creators! Unheard of in some contemporary videogame localization circles.

<comment><USER12> > People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they?

Alexander Smith was based in Japan and got Matsuno's blessing for the changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Initially I thought this was something to do with Hashicorp's Vagrant. It's really not.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story)</comment>


How Fast Are Vita Memory Cards? - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-how-fast-are-vita-memory-cards

<comment><USER3> Sony screws their customers yet again.

For the $60 they're asking for the 16GB Vita card, you can get pretty much the fastest memory card on the market: a UHS-1 SDHC card that blazes at 45MB/s read/write. That's nearly 8x faster than the Vita cards.

The arrogance of this company astounds me still. They continually go out of their way to give their customers a poorer customer experience for more cost, and yet they don't get why they're losing so badly on the market - they're shedding TV market share, console gaming market share, and they've long since lost mobile gaming market share.

</comment><comment><USER4> I undertand why people are upset that Sony charges more money for those cards than off-the-shelf SD cards, but there are few (arguably bad) reasons for that.

First of all, these are MUCH smaller than SD cards - microSD are better for comparisons (granted, those are much cheaper too) - but there are two reasons why those cards are priced like that.

Secondly - it's no mystery that console makers lose money on hardware they sell, and recoup part of the cost on accessories and licenses on games - <USER2> it's easier to upsell $30 4GB memory card, than charge $280 or $330 for portable console.

Thirdly - making them proprietary prevents you from putting those cards in any random microSD card reader and putting whatever you want on them - and Sony spokespersons publicly admitted that they are proprietary to make eventual piracy harder.

<comment><USER5> Your second (third?) point is moot, since Sony's own Content Manager Assistant[1] can copy anything from your Vita memory card onto a Mac or PC. The piracy chat from Sony's spokespersons is pure marketing dross.

As for their right to earn money, I don't think anyone is debating that - Digital Foundary's main criticism is the speed of the media, which is (through empirical testing of course) significantly worse than standard microSD cards that are much cheaper.

The best comparison though is to Nintendo's 3DS which comes bundled with a standard SD card, and it hasn't fallen to piracy yet.

[1] <http://cma.dl.playstation.net/cma/>

<comment><USER4> Ah, that's weird. I was under impression that CMA would allow you only to copy over specific data - akin to iTunes, but seems I was wrong. (Or was I? From the link:

      You can display lists of music, image, and video files stored on your computer and transfer the files to your PS Vita system.

That sounds like iTunes-esque thing - is anyone here in possession of Vita and could chime in about this?)

Nevertheless, thanks for that link.

<comment><USER5> It allows you to copy pretty much anything, including "Apps" of which Games are a subtype. PSP hacker websites like Wololo are already poring over encrypted .psvimg files.

I know this because I own one, and I ran out of space on my 4GB Vita memory card within a day just by downloading games from PSN. The CMA is a life saver because I can use my PC as backup storage, essentially, without being forced to buy a larger, more expensive, memory card.

Of course, this just leaves the matter of convenience, which is why the performance of the media is such an annoying factor.

As for the CMA itself, it simply acts as a daemon once it is set up - there's no GUI and all file transfers are handled on the Vita itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Charging extra for a mandatory peice is unacceptable to me. Buying the system, with a 32gb memory card and a AAA game is going over $400 american. For a handheld with a sub par browser that just doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER7> The fact hat you even mentioned the browser suggests that you may not be the target market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> security != piracy prevention...

It could mean a wide array of things ranging from integrity checks, write prevention, DRM, etc. This article (and these comments) only seemed to focus on the former.

</comment><comment><USER9> was this to avoid paying Microsoft for FAT?

<comment><USER10> Not sure why you got downvoted - I wonder if this is a patent license issue, if not FAT, then perhaps something else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> After having bought one of Spny's early digital cameras (circa 2000) and a voice recorder, both which used proprietary memory formats, I vowed never to buy another Sony product again (though I did get a replacement PS2). I've since gone back on my vow now that Sony is producing competitive cameras that use standard memory cards, but I'm glad I'm not a gamer anymore

</comment><comment><USER12> Sony does it again. Time and again this company keeps shooting itself in the foot, refusing to take notice.</comment>


The 'Samsung Was the Real Winner' Theory - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/31/the-samsung-was-the-real-winner-theory

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if his flippant and biased opinion was backed up with any sort of supporting evidence whatsoever.</comment>


TH++(C++ tensor library), FBLuaLib (Torch / Lua components) - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/posts/10152495827632200

<comment><USER2> I installed everything needed to test this in a terminal.com container, including Torch, iPython, luaJIT and the libs (of course). Check it out at: [https://terminal.com/tiny/3epyufPI5z](https://terminal.com/tiny/3epyufPI5z)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For now, this requires LuaJIT 2.0+, Linux x86_64.</comment>


Show HN: Qonversion.io The mobile subscription analytics every app maker wanted - <AUTHOR> https://www.qonversion.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I'm the co-founder of Qonversion.io.

The problem It's challenging to run marketing for a mobile app that offers a subscription.

Subscription related events like a conversion from trial to paid user, renewal, or cancellation are happening on Apple/Google side. You have to validate the receipt of a user with Apple/Google to get the data, and you need a complex backend for that. Once you get the data, it's hard to process it to get to users' LTV, CAC, and other crucial marketing parameters.

Our solution - Qonversion.io: \- gets the subscriptions' data from Apple/Google \- provides real-time dashboards to track subscription performance \- sends subscription data to advertising accounts and third-party analytics (Facebook Advertising, AppsFlyer, Amplitude, Mixpanel etc.) \- provides LTV and CAC analysis to drive your marketing (this feature is being tested with a limited number of users now).

Tracking and sending events to third party analytics is free up to $100k in monthly tracked revenue. Sign up in November to get free 6 months of LTV/CAC insights when it's rolled out of the beta. Any questions, please do comment!</comment>


Time Hacking - <AUTHOR> http://karan.github.io/time-management

<comment><USER2> When I started to read this I had no idea this was a college student! Fabulous article and quite inspiring. My only wish is that I had figured this out in college. I can't imagine where I would be now if I had.</comment>


Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/22/is-mips-dead-lawsuit-bankruptcy-maintainers-leaving-and-more/ <comment><USER3> MIPS dying is really the end of an era. I think it was the quintessential RISC processor of the early 90's. IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code.

I remember reading a PCWorld article comparing various processors. This was the time the Pentium came out. If my memory servers, the MIPS won the overall performance crown vs Pentium, PowerPC, and Alpha AXP.

<comment><USER4> > IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent > x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code.

Not MIPS. Windows NT was initially developed on a more obscure RISC architecture, Intel i860. It was later ported to MIPS though.

<comment><USER5> And ported to DEC Alpha too! It's one of my weirdly favorite ports of NT just because of how little use I believe it ever actually got.

<comment><USER6> I've seen live Alpha installations of windows NT driving RIPs at large format printing shops in the 90s. It was also not unheard of at VMS shops.

<comment><USER7> This reads like a Blade Runner quote.

<comment><USER8> Those C-beams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> May be its days are numbered, but MIPS still has significant presence in the low to medium end routers (Mediatek's MT72xx, Atheros AR7xxx so on).

<comment><USER10> MIPS still has a very large presence in the education sector as well - <USER2> asm is very easy to learn because of how consistent it's syntax is and the plethora of open source debuggers as well.

Learning MIPS was what originally got me interested in ASM programming since we had a class that was focused on MIPS code and another class that had us build a digital MIPS processor from scratch. The combination of these two classes really sold me on the magic of super low-level programming.

<comment><USER11> Yep, I also learned MIPS in my CS class. It's pretty nice to program in.

<comment><USER12> MIPS is typically seen in computer architecture class because it is simple and regular (at least the original version seen in class). However, for Assembly programming, MIPS, like (almost?) all RISC instructions sets, is tedious. Give me any CISC with a generous range of addressing modes, and I take any day over MIPS/RISC.

We can make a parallel between those low-level ISA and high-level languages: a language like Lisp is lean and simple so it is taught and presented as good design (and people who went through that education keep that in memory), but when it comes to produce real program almost everybody chooses a much less regular language, which is way more practical. (Same could be said for stack- based languages like Forth, which present an extremely simple model to apprehend, but that doesn't mean at all that it is simple to program in.)

Or postfix vs infix for mathematical expressions/calculations. Same principle: the one which is based on a very simple model is praised by aesthetes, but almost everybody prefers the other one, which is simpler to use because it is more natural, despite being based on a more complex model.

In fact, the simplicity of the model is not of much interest for the user, it just makes the life of the implementer easier. But for 1 implementer, there are thousands or millions of users, who want ease of use, not ease of implementation.

<comment><USER13> Traditional addressing modes have been largely abandoned because modern architectures are based on the load-store principle. Simplicity has little to do with it, and referring to that whole shift in design as "complex" vs. "simple" instruction sets is a bit of a misnomer. Besides, well-designed architectures are not exactly lacking in ease-of-use.

<comment><USER14> This is only "sort of" true.

First, mod-r/m addressing on x86 is fairly traditional and can often save considerable calculation over a "simpler" addressing mode (given the opportunities for add-and-scale operations).

Second, treating x86 machines as load/store architectures passes up the opportunity to achieve improved code density and increased execution bandwidth from "microfusion" \- this is when a operation (e.g. "add") is done with a memory operand. Microfusion, for those not familiar with it, allows two "micro-ops" (aka uops) that originate from the same instruction to be "fused" \- that is, issued and retired together (even though they are _executed_ separately).

This can occasionally - in code that has already been militantly tuned to an inch of its life - yield speedups, as Skylake and similar can only issue and retire 4 uops per cycle. However, there are 8 execution ports (of which only 4 do traditional 'computation'). Carefully designed code can take advantage of the fact that issue/retire are in the "fused domain" while execute is "unfused domain" \- so you can sometimes get 4 computations and 1 load per cycle even on a 4-issue machine.

I was trained on MIPS and Alpha, so of course old habits die hard, and it's always tempting to go old school and design everything to act as if the underlying machine is a load-store architecture. However, this (a) isn't necessary on x86 and (b) often won't be faster.

The other blow against load-store is that a modern o-o-o architecture can hoist the load and separate it from the use _anyway_ \- and it doesn't have to consume a named register to do it (it will use a physical register, of course, but x86 has way more physical registers than it has names for registers). This of course is a bigger deal for the rather impoverished register count of x86 so it is, in the words of a former Intel colleague on a different topic, a "cure for a self-inflicted injury".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> KOMDIV-64[1] is still using MIPS. It's improbable that one would encounter these chips outside of Russia weapons tech though.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOMDIV-64](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOMDIV-64)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson)

<comment><USER17> Relevantly, Richard Stallman used to use a Lemote YeeLoong (notebook with a Loongson MIPS CPU) before he switched to a librebooted ThinkPad T400.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> ARM and RISC-V have collectively removed any remaining niches (or future prospects) for MIPS.

<comment><USER19> Except that there aren't really any practical (affordable!) RISC-V based Linux boards/modules.

The Onion Omega2S is based on a MediaTek MT7688 (MIPS32LE) and since the demise of the CHIP-Pro, is really the only inexpensive surface mount Linux SoM left.

[https://onion.io/store/omega2s/](https://onion.io/store/omega2s/)

<comment><USER18> That's why I said also "future prospects". It's likely RISC-V will for the very least fill certain niches.

<comment><USER19> Right, I just hope they do it quickly! I'd love to see a low cost (e.g. RPi priced) RISC-V based SoM that runs Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> WAVE computing used to be working on CGRA [1] chip as deep learning accelerators. I got in touch with a few folks there. They apparently failed that endeavor and pivoted to MIPS.

[1] [https://wavecomp.ai/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/WP_CGRA.pdf](https://wavecomp.ai/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/WP_CGRA.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> It's already been bought+sold a few times.

      (Stanford)
      MIPS Computer Systems
      SGI
      Spun off, IPO
      Imagination
      Tailwood
      Wave

I might have missed one.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't think MIPS is going to completely disappear as long as Linux works on it. Someone somewhere in some country will keep making them as long as the licensing situation is more favorable for whatever use than ARM or x86. If the owning company is going bankrupt that means making MIPS CPUs will be cheaper than ARM or x86.

<comment><USER23> In China they have lots of new MIPS developments based on existing MIPS architecture.

The question it's not if someone will use some old MIPS ISA in a few years from now on, the question is if someone will improve the ISA from now on, in the same way x86 and ARM are consistently being improved.

Some companies are still fabbing old Z80 CPUs, but that's not to say Z80 has a bright future.

<comment><USER24> Ingenic an Loongson both have architecture licenses and so far have kept releasing new chips with their own cores on a regular basis, including (in Loongson's case) some interesting enhancements. Both are also members in the RISC-V foundation already though, so it seems likely they would in the long run pivot their instruction sets to that, like others have done before them: Andes, C-Sky, Cortus, Cobham-Gaisler, NVIDIA, and presumably many more all keep supporting old products based on their previous designs while doing new development on RISC-V.

CIP-United still promises to provide enhanced versions of the both the architecture and the MIPS Warrior cores for the Chinese market, regardless of what happens to MIPS Technologies. This may seem utterly futile now, but it is also the very thing that the US Committee on Foreign Investment was trying to prevent when it required MIPS to be spun out of Imagination Technologies when that got sold to Chinese investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The writing's been on the wall for MIPS for ages. AFAIK it's not better than ARM in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER26> The creator of ARM speaks well of RISC-V and considers ARM yesterday's old news and has moved on. Comparing MIPS to ARM in essentials of architecture is MIPS more beautiful? ARM I understand is a mess that has evolved for its niche.

<comment><USER24> I find the latest architecture versions are all remarkably similar as they have all adapted to the same environment:

The old 32-bit Arm (now called Aarch32) was quite different and only somewhat RISC-like. Arm's Aarch64 however is mostly derived from MIPS64 with a lot of modernization plus some parts (exception levels) from 32-bit Arm.

MIPSr6 was an attempt of modernizing MIPSr5 by removing all the ugly bits (delay slots!) but the incompatible instruction encoding prevented it from being widely adopted. You cannot buy a single MIPSr6 machine that a mainline Linux runs on.

RISC-V's design looked at all RISC architectures (Berkely RISC, MIPS, SPARC, Power, Arm, ...) for inspiration and took the best parts of each. Leaving out all the historic baggage means it's simpler (the manual is a fraction of the size), but most of the important decisions are the same as in MIPSr6 and Armv8/Aarch64.

One notable difference is the handling of compressed (16-bit) instructions: ARMv8/Aarch64 doesn't have them at all (like RISC-I/RISC-II, ARMv3 and MIPS-V), MIPSr6/microMIPS needs to switch between formats (like ARMv4T through ARMv6) and in RISC-V they are optional but can be freely mixed (somewhat like ARMv7 and nanoMIPS).

<comment><USER8> It's disappointing that RISC-V designers swallowed myths that resulted in unpleasant ISA details.

For example, the notion that condition codes interfere with OoO execution has been repudiated; Power and x86 both now rename condition registers. Lack of popcount and rotate in the base instruction set are glaring omissions. (That x86 got popcount late, and that the bitmanip extension will have them if it ever gets ratified, are no excuse.) It was silly to make the compare instruction generate a 1 instead of the overwhelmingly more useful ~0.

We only get a new ISA once in a generation. It is tragic when it is wrong.

It is possible, in principle, that popcount and rotate could be added to the base 16-bit instructions, but I'm not holding my breath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I remember listening to some guy from ImgTec brag about how MIPS is the 4th biggest instruction set in the world as if MIPS had like 20% market share rather 1% or whetever ridiculous market share ImgTec had bought their way into. That was literally at the peak when ImgTec were on top of the world, they'd just built a new campus and were spending like there was no tomorrow. Then Apple drank their milkshake, and they had to sell everything. Even then though, it was really bizarre that anyone was still trying to make MIPs a thing.

MIPS has been the walking dead for a couple of decades now. It's really time to let go. Especially since there are actually interesting things happening in the ISA space with RISC-V.

<comment><USER28> Pardon my ignorance, but... is RISC-V all that much more alive than MIPS? My impression is that MIPS has a past, RISC-V may have a future, but neither has much of a present.

<comment><USER5> For desktop or server class stuff, RISC-V is still shaking out but there are attempts to make it happen on-going right now. For everything else you've got companies like Western Digital that have committed to shipping a billion[2] RISC-V processors for their own devices, and many others. [1]

Just take a look at their membership page for people funding or helping develop the processors, [https://riscv.org/members-at-a- glance/](https://riscv.org/members-at-a-glance/)

[1] [https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v](https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v) [2] [https://www.extremetech.com/computing/281891-western- digital...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/281891-western-digital- announces-plans-for-its-own-risc-v-processor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Consolidation, together with buyouts and bankruptcy made a part of the computing world much more boring.

In the '90s and early 2000s there were lots of CPUs, computer systems, operating systems.

</comment><comment><USER29> Please help me remove some of my ignorance:

ARM = RISC?

Intel = CISC?

? = MIPS?

What else is out there in large amounts?

<comment><USER30> I assume that all modern CPUs are CISC-ish opcodes running in microcode on a RISC-ish core, and it's been a few decades since those were useful labels.

<comment><USER13> There's nothing much that's CISC-like about ARM, MIPS or RISC-V. Even many μC architectures are closer to "RISC" than "CISC", though there's at least some room for exceptions there.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > There's nothing much that's CISC-like about ARM,

I struggle to think that ARM can really be called reduced-instruction after neon or so.

<comment><USER14> RISC has never been about reduced _number_ of instructions, but their complexity. A SIMD extension built around load/store architecture is quite compatible with the principles of RISC, despite the fact that such an extension might have very numerous instructions.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Well, I learned something today:) I'd always assumed that RISC meant a reduced number of instructions, but that's clearly not the case. Wikipedia phrases it as,

> The term "reduced" in that phrase was intended to describe the fact that the > amount of work any single instruction accomplishes is reduced—at most a > single data memory cycle—compared to the "complex instructions" of CISC CPUs > that may require dozens of data memory cycles in order to execute a single > instruction.[23] In particular, RISC processors typically have separate > instructions for I/O and data processing.

So yeah, if SIMD instructions can execute in a single cycle (or maybe even a small number), then it still counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> All hail Rick Belluzzo.

</comment><comment><USER32> i learnt how cpu work on spim

<comment> iso-8859-1 nah, you only learnt how to use them ;)</comment></comment>


Luther's Theses and the Role of the Printing Press [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://www.newberry.org/95-theses-you-wont-believe-what-32-is <comment><USER2> Make sure to check out Dan Carlin's Prophets of Doom [http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore- history-48-prophet...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore- history-48-prophets-of-doom/) after you are done with this one.....

</comment><comment><USER3> This is from the Newberry Library, in Chicago, a premier private research library.

Show Notes

1:58 – Luther's original goals for the 95 Theses.

4:10 – Today, the 95 Theses look a lot like the sixteenth-century version of a listicle. Was this a common form for presenting theological arguments in those days?

7:07 – A reading of thesis #32.

9:16 – At what point did Luther realize just how revolutionary the 95 Theses were?

11:37 – Print spreads Luther's ideas much farther than he ever imagined possible.

13:38 – Rome's response to the 95 Theses.

15:37 – Luther harnesses the power of print to win public opinion and make theological debates accessible to a larger audience.

19:12 – The synergy between the medium (print) and the message (direct access to the Bible).

23:18 – Luther's regrets after empowering people to read the Bible and giving them a model for sharing their ideas with the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> I absolutely love Luther but today's evangelical church would mostly hate him.

My favorite thing was the book covers of his books and pamphlets. One had the Pope blowing a trumpet with his flatulence with his bare butt cheeks.

<comment><USER5> They'd hate him because of his eccentricities or because they've long since departed from sola scriptura?

<comment><USER6> > or because they've long since departed from sola scriptura?

Lutheranism isn't a sola scriptura faith. While Luther did often argue against Rome on biblical grounds, Lutheranism has always accepted a vague concept of "tradition" alongside Scripture just like Anglicanism or Orthodoxy.

<comment><USER5> I'm not deeply familiar with Lutheranism but this [1] seems to contradict what you're suggesting. Also, sola scriptura doesn't negate creeds & confessions, etc but rather affirms the supreme authority of scripture.

This is in contrast to Roman Catholicism which affirms tradition as of higher authority.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura#Characteristi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura#Characteristics_in_Lutheranism)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Great Cloudwall - <AUTHOR> https://codeberg.org/crimeflare/cloudflare-tor#the-great-cloudwall <comment><USER2> It seems to be part of the American ethos that we distrust when a company becomes _too_ successful or gains too large a share of a market. Is Cloudflare well positioned to be more evil than Facebook and Google combines? Maybe. Is it a service we keep using because it's a free/inexpensive way to insulate small but popular blogs and websites from shared hosting providers demanding we upgrade To VPS or leave because of the traffic we're getting? Absolutely! If we go into the agreement KNOWING we're enabling a MITM situation — because Cloudflare doesn't work otherwise — then we can make intelligent decisions about what content goes over that MITM and what our fallback plan would be if even Cloudflare tells us to go away.</comment>


Show HN: Football Prediction API - <AUTHOR> https://boggio-analytics.com/fp-api/ <comment><USER2> This seems too good to be true. If they could actually predict football results with better-than-random accuracy, then why wouldn't they just use this themselves to make loads of money on betting markets?

<comment><USER3> I don't think they're claiming their statistics-based predictions are necessarily more accurate than the bookmakers' odds

<comment><USER2> Good point, I suppose "69%" accuracy doesn't actually mean that much unless you consider the odds.

I'm pretty sure I could predict Real Madrid vs. my local home town team with better than 69% accuracy, but that doesn't mean much

<comment><AUTHOR> Well sure, but there are over 2200 games per month and less than 3-5% are the kind of games you are talking about. Super good team vs terrible team (assuming your local home town team is not Barcelona)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat! What is it's past performance / accuracy like?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an endpoint that measures accuracy.

Long-term accuracy is 69%.

<comment><USER5> Over what period and how far have you back-tested?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 year and a couple of months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No Champions league? or UEFA cup? Just local leagues?

<comment><AUTHOR> No.. maybe in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think you should call it "soccer" or at least "association football" in this context.

<comment><USER4> Why?

<comment><USER8> Because most native English speakers call it soccer.

<comment><USER9> Really? Everyone I know calls the sport football. The second F in FIFA is football.

I know Americans call it soccer, but that is I assume because of American football, a sport no other country seems to play, or care about.

<comment><USER10> [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/wh...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/why- we-call-soccer-soccer/372771/)

The name soccer came from Britain, not the US. It was used to differentiate Association Football (soccer) from Rugby Football (rugby). Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand all still call the sport soccer. Even in England, it continued to be a popular name for the sport until the 1950s.

<comment><USER11> Pretty mixed in Ireland to be honest, and we have our own sport Gaelic Football which gets confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting but football is such a terrible sport to predict statistically outside of a few teams (the outliers) in each league. Kind of hope there would me tools out there to mess with play patterns and tendencies more than the actual result, I think that it would be actually useful plus such a resource paired with a decent analyst would net a way better prediction rate. But betting.jpg

<comment><USER13> >mess with play patterns and tendencies

Maybe you should get involved with Data Science, this field is all about playing with patterns (and _hopefully_ finding a result), and even thinks like SVM's, random forests and genetic algorithms aren't really hard to grok and apply in that area.

There are some scientists involved with betting, but this field has really low profit margins IMHO. Personally, I view algorithmic trading as more interesting but YMMV.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup - Social gaming framework for Android, iPhone - <AUTHOR>

We are building a social gaming framework for smartphone developers (Android and iOS, but also Flash and more), which solves many common problems of developing multiplayer games: networking, matchmaking, user authentication and attribute storage, security and scalability. The social services include cross-platform friendships and feeds, presence status and invitations as well as support for external services such as Facebook (authentication and the Graph API), Twitter, etc.
The server infrastructure is hosted at Amazon EC2 which greatly simplifies the dynamic scaling of the network. Gameserver instances are created via a web-interface and provide detailled statistics about the games, the players and the connections (including a real-time display of active users). Our plan is to charge based on the used resources, trying to make a very good offer for indie devs in particular.
Recently we've started private beta phase with the Android implementation, and will soon support more platforms. The first developers have deployed games on the Android market using the framework; everything works great and we are as excited as the devs are! It feels like a great moment to tell the HN community about the project - and to ask for feedback in particular.
Thanks!
http://www.flockengine.com <comment><USER2> Interesting.

At one point, we were planning to open source our gaming framework and build business around server-side functionality. However, after various discussions, I finally abandoned that plan and we are focusing to use it internally.

First, in games particular, considerable amount of work is spent on the client side. Unless you are super-successful to encounter serious scalability issues, all the hard problems are on the client-side.

Although gaming companies do not currently have that much back-end guys, they still have quite capable coders in general, who can learn back-end stuff quite easily. Thus, you really need to provide significant value to them (us). Looking through your APIs, you currently have solved some basic authentication stuff. That's okay as a start but definitely not enough to attract skilled teams.

Second, game business is very hit-driven, thus you are likely to serve the less-profitable long tail developers. The best offering for them is not to provide server-side technology per se, but bring more buyers/players for their games. Thus, approach that e.g. OpenFeint has taken seem to serve those guys better, they basically are offering the stuff that you offer + the existing community.

But best luck! I suggest that you talk to experienced game studios. Find out what are the biggest pain points and try to provide solutions to those.

 _EDIT_ : Note, I didn't want to sound discouraging, although reading it now, it definitely came out like that. I think there's definitely opportunities in this space, I just wanted quickly to highlight some key issues. Note also that it will be a very competitive space, because successful mobile multiplayer game companies can also try to enter the space with their proven propriety solutions. That's part of our long term plan, i.e. we first try to create succesful mobile multiplayer games, and then consider platform-provider option again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! I agree that using such a framework internally and focusing on developing games is definitely an interesting option.

OpenFeint looks pretty similar but has a primary focus on highscore and leaderboards, which is a free feature of theirs. I couldn't find out how much they charge for their turn-based multiplayer feature though. We are trying to make a good offer for small developers; for the first developers it looks like < $10 per month with around 150,000 connections.

For Android there are also a couple of highscore/leaderboard services such as ScoreLoop and ScoreNinja. We plan to provide interfaces to both and more.

Apple's GameCenter (see WWDC Session 404) will be a big "competitor" on the iOS arena, but they probably won't expand to Android or other platforms. We are starting off on Android and see where it goes from here. Flash is an interesting option too.

 _> Looking through your APIs, you currently have solved some basic authentication stuff. That's okay as a start but definitely not enough to attract skilled teams._

Yeah, I agree. Right now we have a MVP, and many ideas.

 _> But best luck! I suggest that you talk to experienced game studios. Find out what are the biggest pain points and try to provide solutions to those._

Thanks, and I agree this is the best approach right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about the idea, but I can give you some feedback on the main page.

First, "Flock is an easy-to-use social gaming network for Android and Iphone". I have no idea what that means. Is it a tool I download to chat with my buddies in game on iPhone? Is it something that will help me as a developper to create and publish game? Is it a kind of steam for iPhone and android?

I think the main page as too much "features" and not enough of "wtf is flock?".

Like, "Integrated encryption with SSL/TLS and AES-256".. I really don't care about the encryption you use if I'm not to use your service because I don't know what it is.

If you absolutely want to tak about security, say it in a: Flock is a secure and reliable way to blah blah.

Keep it simple!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, highly appreciated! I've updated the main image hoping it better conveys what the framework is about.

Before: "Flock is an easy-to-use social gaming network for Android and iPhone"

Now: "Flock is the easiest way to connect users on Android and iPhone to multiplayer games."

That's really the core functionality right now. The social part is rather peripheral.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm an iOS developer who does a few games a year.

1) I'm betting on Apple's Game Center. It will be popular with developers. You need penetration--how will you compete with Apple on numbers?

2) The other reason I'm doing GC integration is that people who don't have my game can get invites from friends who do for multiplayer matches. This is huge for discoverability. You can't do that. Again, how are you going to compete?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's probably impossible to compete with Apple GC - essentially they are building the same thing for iOS. There are other options though. The client implementation is not that complicated and could be ported to various platforms: J2ME, Flash, HTML5, etc.

We think developers might appreciate a "GameCenter Light" which is easy to integrate, cheap and does does the basic things right.

Discoverability is another interesting topic, and of course GC will be huge for that. I think that again it would be possible to start a light version, which offers additional exposure for developers and their games. There are many ideas that could be implemented in that direction.

<comment><USER4> You're making the same mistake I made with my startup.

From my comment you know: 1) I'm on HN, so I'm automatically sympathetic 2) I'm smack dab in the middle of your target market

That should have caused you to swing into sales mode. You're telling me what "we think [hypothetical] developers might appreciate." Hypothetical developers will never pay you any money. I might, if you can convince me not to write the GC integration code next week (Not a joke, I am actually gearing up to test a new game with it this month).

What would I do with a GC lite? In my experience (and from talking to the apple engineers at wwdc), GC looks really easy to integrate. It's also free. If your play is to do less than GC, how will you compete with free?

There are some things that GC is doing wrong. Maybe you can improve on these. But you haven't touched on anything that specifically irks me about GC yet. So I have no reason to buy in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome, I have been working on something similar for a long time. I used to greet news of similar services with dread, but as HN has taught me, having competition is a good sign that you are thinking of something less than completely hairbrained.

I do have a different angle than Flock, and I am far down the path to launching. But, my daughter just arrived at 31 weeks and my time is now happily gone.

So, good luck to you (and to myself! Heh).

Edit: the teaser site is <http://PlayRelay.io>

</comment><comment><USER6> You're aware of the established social web browser named Flock, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. currently "Flock" is a working title; we looked for a name that developers can relate to while programming with the API (eg. to use "Flock.connect()"). Do you think that name would be too confusing for users because of the similarity?

we probably will change to a better name sometime soon. suggestions are appreciated :)

<comment><USER6> Well, it might be confusing, yes, but the Flock browser might not be happy about you using the name (especially considering the similarity between the browser and your project).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.flockengine.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, though I wonder if apple could potentially block something like this to favor their own platform like they do for analytics and the Appsfire fiasco

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point and one we are also thinking about.

I can't imagine a reason for Apple to reject such a framework, since it is really only basic socket connections with a bit of additional logic. They can't take sockets away from developers.

<comment><USER8> Sure they could--provided you aren't using them in a way they approve of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome idea! Wish you all the best.

</comment><comment><USER10> got a 404 when downloading flock-sdk-android.zip

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks -- one link to the sdk was broken which is fixed now!

We recently switched from PHP to web.py and this was hopefully the last orphaned link.</comment></comment>


Saudis Offered 'Protection' Against Terrorist Attacks At Sochi Olympics  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/saudis-russia-sochi-olympics-terrorism-syria-2013-8#ixzz2q3x4RJ2F

<comment><USER2> Story _is_ explosive, but is datelined 27 August 2013.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the timing of the terrorist attacks is eerie and the fact it's concentrated on Sochi before the Olympics start next month. Enough for US to issue travel warning.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Effective use of Twitter? - <AUTHOR>

I may be clinging too much to the past, but I have yet to find any particular interest in reading Twitter feeds, and have yet to think of a good way to use one myself.<p>Any folks here have examples, either your own or someone you know, of effective use of Twitter?...  Either for increasing sales/clients/business, or for literary purposes, or whatever? <comment><USER2> Check out Twitter API: Up and Running: <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596154622>

Chapter 1 has a great section called "Creative Uses of Twitter" (& a history of Twitter). Examples range from breaking news & games like Artwiculate to organizing protests & flash mobs. Also, Twitter is adding geotagging [[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/21/twitter- goog...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/21/twitter-google)], so you'll soon be able to get feeds for, say, restaurant deals in your area...

</comment><comment><USER3> My startup has used twitter really effectively the past few months to do a few things. 1) Drive traffic to our blog, 2) drive people with a need for our service, to our service

Of course, we're a b2b targeted at engineers / sales guys, so we have a strong early adopter / seeker basis for our guys. But yeah, we've driven a worthwhile number of users to our site through judicious (and not even obsessive!) use of twitter. Even had to write a twitter bookmarklet to manage how we broadcast everything.

</comment><comment><USER4> Effective use of twitter??? Keep it blocked. At the least when you're working on something.

</comment><comment><USER5> the best use of twitter I ever made was when i was listening to pandora and it stopped playing. I tried a few things, figured out it wasn't my network so i thought that maybe pandora was down. i went on twitter and searched #pandora... sure enough, 4 posts in the last few minutes that pandora was down. I added my tweet saying the same thing.

Later, my wife was stuck in a huge traffic jam, i went on twitter and searched for her location and the word 'accident' and sure enough, up came a link to a web page detailing why there was such congestion and how far it went.

twitter is good for finding out about something that is happening RIGHT now.

</comment><comment><USER6> effective use of twitter: <http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays>

edit: i'm serious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not quite my style of reading, but great concept! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> 8 great uses: [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9118441/8_ways_Twitte...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9118441/8_ways_Twitter_will_change_your_life?taxonomyId=11&pageNumber=2)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881307></comment>


ASK PG: Startup News Radio interview: How did you get users for Viaweb? - <AUTHOR> I just listed to the PG interview on Startup News Radio. Loved the story, but I really want to know how Viaweb got their first customers and how they scaled bringing on more customers. <comment><USER2> From [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

> _Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were > assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 > a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine > optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself > inserted directly into the stories._

Also [http://www.paulgraham.com/vw.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/vw.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What command line interface do you wish had a graphical user interface? - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=11705510 asks the reverse. <comment><USER2> Pipes. It may sound a little odd, but I wish I could automatically pass results from one GUI program to an unrelated one in that sort of hassle-free way.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly RISC OS had something like this, where graphical programs were composed by dragging and dropping icons representing a document. So for example, to save a file, you open the menu and see an icon representing that file. You then drag it into the file manager, a separate program, to tell it where the file will go.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28software%29#Pipeli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28software%29#Pipelines_in_GUIs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish PostgreSQL had better GUIs. There are quite a few of them, but none of them compare to Sequel Pro for MySQL. It's frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, I really wish my terminal/bash had mouse integration..

Every so often I'll be deeply embedded in a command, and want to go back and edit an earlier part of it. With KB shortcuts I can go to the beginning/end, or forward/back one 'word' at a time, but sometimes it'd be nice to just say 'put the cursor HERE.'

<comment><USER6> It would screw with "TUI" programs but I really wish consoles had split input and output panes, where the input pane is just a regular text box that supports standard editing shortcuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Git, without a question. There is the TortoiseGit on Windows which makes Git USABLE. On *nix there is nothing even remotely as good, unfortunately.

<comment><USER8> SmartGit. It's way, way, way better than Tortoise.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's one of the better ones. It's good enough to do stuff, but still leaves a feeling of being severely underfeatured wrt Tortoise.

Small things:

-File comparison tool is unusable - the relative floating sides make it impossible to see non-trivial changes.

-No graph view to see branch dependencies

-No exporting a commit from history into a zip file

-No changed line count for quick look at where the significant changes are

-Maybe more, don't remember the all of it

The total on the small things makes it a barely usable tool.

<comment><USER8> > File comparison tool is unusable - the relative floating sides make it > impossible to see non-trivial changes.

Up and down arrows. They will take you to the next change, regardless of how small. Start at the top and hit the down arrow until you've reviewed all the changes.

> No graph view to see branch dependencies

The log does the same thing, just in a different visual format.

> No exporting a commit from history into a zip file

If you mean as a patch, you can do that in the log. Right-click the commit and select "Format Patch".

If you mean the whole repo at the time of that commit, you just have to do it manually by switching to that commit and creating the archive yourself. If you host your code on GitLab, GitHub, or BitBucket, you can just do this through the GUI of the host. I'm sure there are CLI tools that automate the process as well.

> No changed line count for quick look at where the significant changes are

This is definitely missing from SmartGit. I review 100% of changes and force my team to commit as atomically as possible, so this wouldn't be helpful for me.

<comment><USER7> > Up and down arrows. They will take you to the next change, regardless of how > small.

I meant the whole idea of relatively floating comparison - you can't see the size of the change, just jump over it since the text on both sides is continuous. If the lines are added, then there should be a gap on the opposite size, with _fixed_ text-to-text relation.

That, or it's a peculiarity of my perception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ffmpeg

I want to be able to do some basic stuff quickly without having to search for what I need to copy and paste into the CLI or read a bunch of docs. The gui should make things like converting between formats, cropping, stitching, etc straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm toying with the idea of writing a GUI on top of my console-based mail- client. This would be interesting to experiment with, because I'd probably decouple the UI from the back-end, allowing others to experiment with unusual layouts and options.

The downside is that GUI stuff is hard to do right, and I'm not really sure I could force myself to complete the job. I just don't like any of the existing (linux) mail-clients.

</comment><comment><USER11> I run cPanel (Graphical User Interface Linux Server Administration) on my Virtual Private Server and just love it. It makes things so much easier. I can just focus on programming, and not system administration. So to answer your question: I wish every hosting option had something like cPanel!

</comment><comment><USER12> Amazon Echo</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know websites telling how to make use of old cell phone parts? - <AUTHOR>

I have some cellphones that I'm not using anymore. As they have cameras, readers, displays, etc, the first idea I had about was to disassemble them.
The problem is that I coudn't find a site with enough info on the subject. Do you know such a site? <comment><USER2> Can't help you with the disassembly question, but in terms of making use of the parts, some interesting projects show up on Hackaday (<http://hackaday.com/>). Click on the cellphone hacks category.</comment>


Friend Scan Me Alpha released - <AUTHOR> http://friendscan.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> Friend Scan Me is a new way to add friends on Facebook. Friend Scan Me simplifies your life by translating your user name into a QR code.</comment>


Parkingplace - <AUTHOR>

Anyone can help me please ? My project  is not visible on the site  and I no longer know what to do... www.indiegogo.com/project/preview/2bb72a6b <comment><USER2> The link works for me.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any healthcare software SMEs? - <AUTHOR> We want to leverage our platform within the healthcare space and need to understand the regulatory environment. Hoping to learn more about what we need to fix to be compliant.<p>Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Have you talked with any stake holders in a hospital? They each tend to have their own requirements for deployment. Most likely you will have to operate on premise.

Beyond HIPAA, if you intend to recommend treatment, you need FDA approval.

I'm currently working on the DevOps for a competitor of yours, ML models in the hospital, moving towards a marketplace and ecosystem. Fun stuff because in some hospitals, you can't even get remote access. Everything installs from a USB stick.

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny - looks like everyone is moving towards the same model (i.e. marketplace and ecosystem) which is a logical step! Wonder what would happen if there are too many marketplaces.

Effectively, I won't be recommending treatments but rather I'll be hosting ML models from other researchers that might - I wonder if I can write a legal clause that clears me from FDA approval.

It seems like IBM has a way of saying 'not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use': [http://www.merge.com/Solutions/Cardiology/Merge- Cardio.aspx](http://www.merge.com/Solutions/Cardiology/Merge-Cardio.aspx)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I am giving my first talk to 200 people at my job. Any tips? - <AUTHOR>

I wrote a framework that has gotten very popular at my company. I have only ever given a 15-20 min talk on it in the past to groups of 20, 30 people. My next talk has >170 online viewers registers and 150+ in person. Any tips / advice? <comment><USER2> Congratulations on the fact that your work is getting recognized, and good luck on the presentation!

You might find this helpful:

 _Public speaking for introverts_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198997)

Note patio11's advice in that discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am assuming that the intention of the talk is to convince others within the company to use this framework. So, in a sense, this is a sales pitch.

What I would suggest is to take some time and make a list of all the possible objections as to why anyone in the audience would not want to use your framework. Put yourself in their shoes. Try really hard to see from their point of view. Once you've done that, now go through each one and come up with real answers to each objection as to why they should use the framework.

For some of the reasons for not using the framework, you will not have a good answer (ie. its hard to argue too much with "we have million+ line of code and using your framework doesn't add any value") but for a lot of it, given some thought you should come up with a reasonable argument for your framework.

Once you've done this, you can now implicitly incorporate some of the answers to the objections in your presentation without explicitly mentioning the objection. You will also have given yourself a great chance at answering some good questions that will come up that will likely touch upon these areas.

</comment><comment><USER4> While these are some great tips, don't focus so much on the mechanics (timing, practice, speaking style, slides) that you fail to spend time on honing, improving and buffing up the actual content, or taking it in a new direction. A compelling and memorable demo or example of your framework in action-- perhaps using it some novel or humorous way no one expected, or connecting it to some bigger picture need that the community doesn't yet know that they have --is time well spent.

You want people coming away with bigger ideas and better understanding; that's what will persist long after they have forgotten whether you ran 3 minutes over or had too many "ums".

Don't neglect the mechanics though, but first things first: interesting and compelling content makes up for a lot.

</comment><comment><USER5> The advice given to radio DJ's might be helpful: you're not talking to 100,000 people. You're talking to one or two people. In this case they're all sitting in the same room, but you can still pick out one or two who appear to be listening closely.

If you have a set amount of time to fill, avoid any anxiety about that by preparing more than enough material, and knowing ahead of time what you'll be sacrificing.

Since you know your subject well, focus on communicating your enthusiasm about it. We've all sat through lectures by people who sound bored by what they've chosen to spend years at.

</comment><comment><USER6> Look people in the eye. Except, don't look them really in the eye because it'll make you nervous, just look right above their eyes at the hair. From a distance they won't notice.

Make yourself sympathetic (well, that's how I do it, not necessary your thing). After you told them who you are and what your function is, tell very quickly in 10 seconds what you like, some hobbies, where you live, show them a funny picture of your cat/dog.

I like to do things out of the ordinary, it catches their attention.

Engage your audience: Ask questions. DO a little quiz. Here's some examples of what I do in our standard presentation:

I have a slide of a biometric device the competition uses. Next I show different ways people use it, 3 photo's next to eachother, 1 right, 2 wrong. Then I ask the audience who thinks photo 1 is right, who thinks photo 2 is right,... There's always lots of confusion.

Next, I show the biometric device we use and ask them if they can think of a way not to use ours the right way. There isn't.

Another example: When I have told how what our operations does and give them some figures, I ask them 'who thinks we are more than 50 people, raise your hand please'... 'who thinks less than 50'... 'less than 20'.... etc. We're less than 10 and about 40% thinks we're more than 50 so that drops a little bomb.

</comment><comment><USER7> Engage the folks there in person - look them in the eye (as many different people as you can).

Try to generate some interaction - ask questions, preferably ones that can be answered with a show of hands.

Breathe.

Know your material, but don't try to memorize it. Work it like a TV sports anchor - know what's going on and the details and ad-lib the specifics.

Smile and seem/be genuinely happy to be sharing this information with your audience. Wanting to be there is obvious, and so is not wanting to be there.

</comment><comment><USER8> Also, handouts != slides. A good slideshow is sparse, so handouts from it won't have much data. Try to put enough in the slides to make them useful as handouts, and they'll be a mess as slides.

Steve Jobs' unveiling of the iPhone is on YouTube. Watch it! Learn from the master. And watch his slides, and imagine how awful they'd be as a handout, and enjoy how awesome they are as support for his verbal presentation.

<comment><USER9> I have to disagree on the Steve Jobs advice. People liked his presentations because they buy into the whole product image and they'd be on the edge of their seat to see what he was announcing.

If your audience actually wants get useful in-depth technical information (e.g., to evaluate an app development framework) or new skills, don't try to come off like Jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You're never perceived as being as nervous as you feel.

Pace yourself. Speak slowly and clearly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, right now I feel like im ok on nerves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Buy the book _Presentation Zen_ and read it. Build your slideshow based on advice in that book. Practice your talk, with a timer, both alone and with a friendly audience (my dogs will sometimes listen for upwards of five minutes if they think they'll get a treat).

</comment><comment><USER11> Practice a lot, as much as you and your friends can bear. Review the videos between practices.

</comment><comment><USER12> \- 30 slide maximum for 1 hour talk.

\- Speak slower.

\- Practice the entire presentation a few times at home.

\- Speak slower.

\- Answer questions DURING the talk.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER13> I say be sure to dry run your entire presentation and to time it. You will figure out any nuances and time issues with your presentation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Slight off topic but what do you call your framework, is it for the company only, and what language is this base in? Just wondering.

</comment><comment><USER15> Don't say "um" or "uh" etc, instead just pause, and speak more slowly than you think is reasonable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks everyone, some solid advice here

</comment><comment><USER16> Be your best self. Talk to people like you already know them (in a good way). The DJ advice mentioned here is great too. Talk with feeling. People want to hear your energy as much as your words. Talk in short sentences, they help line up the next sentence. Don't worry about memorizing your presentation line for line, but more about the major points you want to make, you can trust yourself to make those points in your good style already. If you feel like you stumble or whatever, don't worry about it, you can just pause and go into another sentence or topic.

</comment><comment><USER17> Practice</comment>


Work / life balance at Palantir - <AUTHOR> http://blog.miklosdanka.com/work-life-balance-intrinsic-and-extrinsic-motivation <comment><USER2> Palantir appears _nowhere_ on the page.

Even if the workplace he writes of _is_ Palantir, one should assume that his choice to not identify it should be respected.</comment>


VoicePHP from TringMe to create Voice Applications - <AUTHOR> http://socialapp.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/voice-applications/

<comment><USER2> How does this compare to twilio.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Never heard of twilio. I'll check it out and see.</comment></comment>