Who will protect Dante's copyright? - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5445824/dantes-inferno-the-official-novelization-of-the-book <comment><AUTHOR> Public domain, yes, I know.

But one of the collaborators in this stunt are Random House - known for over- reaching (imho) in their crusade against copyright infringement. [1] [2]

[1] [http://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/05/13/kindle-2-vs- readin...](http://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/05/13/kindle-2-vs-reading- disabled-students)

[2] [http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/business/0,39044229,10035062,0...](http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/business/0,39044229,10035062,00.htm)</comment>


Shell invests in Nashville solar firm, but it's no less an oil company - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/shell-invests-in-nashville-solar-firm-but-its-no-less-an-oil-company/ <comment><USER2> I could be wrong but I don't think shell has billed itself exclusively as an oil company since the 90s</comment>


Stay Focused on a Project by Working with a Virtual Coworker - <AUTHOR> https://lifehacker.com/stay-focused-on-a-project-by-working-with-a-virtual-cow-1826182870 <comment><AUTHOR> Thought the folks here would benefit from the tool discussed in the article (www.focusmate.com).

You can either optimize your output through the behavioral psych principles it hinges on or you can force yourself to show up for something you have been avoiding via personal accountability.

I tried it and it works well when your partner shows up, but I still find it is difficult to want to pre-plan unavoidable work time on it.

I would be curious to know about the experience others have had.

</comment><comment><USER2> This service is the best service since sliced bread! I've been an entrepreneur most of my adult life, and often felt very isolated. Thanks to Taylor, I now have over 1000 "friends", except these aren't fake Facebook Friends, but true innovators, entrepreneurs, disruptors, researchers, scientists, technical geniuses, etc. Hats off to Taylor who has gone way above and beyond the call of duty to create such an amazing service. I'm definitely going to invest in his company, as it's going to be very very very successful!

Jeanine Buckley

<comment><USER3> How _convenient_ that you just happened to come along and build an account _right after_ this submission... by another brand-new account.</comment></comment>


Atomontage: voxel 3D simulation technology for games - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/05/atomontage-reveals-voxel-3d-simulation-technology-for-games/ <comment><USER2> I have known two of the guys involved for a while now (Dan and Bran). Both of them strike me as honest people who are legitimately passionate about graphics tech, so I don't think they are running a scam (only mentioning this because of other comments). I myself, having delved into the voxel world, have my own doubts about voxels in general, as a silver bullet for everything, but there are many areas worth pursuing (particularly within medical, which they are). From an aesthetics standpoint alone voxels are great for games (voxel art now has a serious following on Twitter). Anyhow, I've been amazed with Siles' work over the years. I am curious to see what they cook up. :)

<comment><USER3> Volume amd voxel rendering are essential for medical visualizations. But there should already be a lot of competition in that area.

Voxel graphics for games is mostly restricted to non-deforming bodies. Games like Comanche and Outcast made use of an optimized variant of voxel rendering for their terrains with great results in the 90s. But I have yet to see an animated face in realtime rendered using voxels or points. I would love to see that done, but this is a hard problem.

<comment><USER4> Wow. It's been quite some time since I last thought about Comanche. Thank's for the throwback.

<comment> aaron-lebo You may find this interesting:

[https://comanche3d.com/](https://comanche3d.com/)

<comment><USER3> Nice, but this implementation should extend the voxels down to the lowest neighbor. This would close the gaps in the steep hillsides.

If you're doing it in a pure software implementation and with no tilted camera, you could optimize this heavily. You start at the bottom of the screen and for each vertical row of pixels you march along the heightmap in 2D and project the texels to the screen. You also remember the current hightest Y coordinate that you've drawn. If the new texel is projected higher than that, you draw another vertical line to that position with the texel color and remember that position. So you're filling up your screen from bottom to top in an extremely efficient way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Atomontage has been around for many years now without any release. The two Achilles heels of finely detailed voxel engines have historically been animation and lighting. Based on the video, it looks like they have animation now but the lighting doesn't seem to be any better.

All of the shading that I've seen in past Atomontage videos has been screen space ambient occlusion, which is a great effect but is no substitute for real lighting with dynamic shadows. I've also seen them use AO baked directly into the voxel models.

I just wish that they would actually release something instead of posting countless tech demo videos. If the technology is so great, why aren't they trying to put it in the hands of real game developers right now? The whole thing smells of vaporware...

<comment><USER6> I see specular reflections in here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE3bjUrhXWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE3bjUrhXWk)

<comment><USER5> There are now algorithms for screen space reflections and screen space shadows, so perhaps that is what they are using.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone else getting flashbacks to that "Infinite Detail" Vaporware/Propagandaware with this? "Exciting New Graphics Technology!", light on technical details and heavy on marketing speak.

<comment><USER7> We need a nice succinct term for projects that are purely marketing and exist only to scam money out of venture capitalists.

<comment><USER8> I think vaporware does the job.

<comment><USER9> But this is specifically shined up for VCs - _ventureware_!

<comment><USER10> Ooh I love this and will start using it immediately

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I totally get that this isn't going to quite "change everything" what really stuck out to me is their use of geometry shaders to do the animations with voxels. Very interesting. I have a fork of google draco where I've been working on getting animated point clouds into unity compressed then adding geometry shaders to them. I think there are very unique experiences coming for us with point cloud tech and voxel tech, but they probably wont replace our polys any time soon for gaming or anything.

[https://github.com/millerhooks/draco/tree/unity_point_cloud_...](https://github.com/millerhooks/draco/tree/unity_point_cloud_plugin)

[https://github.com/millerhooks/DracoAnimatedPointClouds](https://github.com/millerhooks/DracoAnimatedPointClouds)

[https://github.com/keijiro/Pcx](https://github.com/keijiro/Pcx)

</comment><comment><USER12> Attn. vaporware naysayers: Some smart people think this is worth pursuing. Miguel Cepero has been doing this forever with Voxel Farm. Sony almost made an Everquest with it. John Carmack once believed a future id engine would be voxel-based. It hasn't been proven yet with a big hit, but there is probably something here worth noting.

<comment><USER13> So Sparse Voxel Oct-trees (SVOs) have been around for a while now. NVIDIA heavily invested in researchers for this. However, the existing workflow for game / movie assets is polygonal in nature, making this a really niche technology. They've instead focused on Bounding Volume Hierarchies (bVOs) which allow for fast ray tracing into traditional models / with normal materials.

<comment><USER14> I don't think voxel engines need to work with only voxels. The environment could be, but animated models should probably still be polygons.

So the challenge is you don't just need fast voxel rendering, you need fast 3D rasterization into an optimized data structure (like sparse voxel octrees).

I don't think this will pay off until game engines do absolutely massive amounts of physics and lighting simulation. But I think it's inevitable. You're already seeing indirect lighting engines using low resolution sparse voxel representations of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The volumetric video rendering they showed seems particularly compelling for me, having played a bit more with VR recently.

What're the current methods for doing reasonable volumetric video capture? I had a set up of kinects a few years ago, but it was quite tedious to programmatically interact with in real-time.

<comment><USER16> Generally structured light (ie. Kinect or laser scanner) is still gonna be your only option, I think. Stereo 3D reconstruction is getting quite good and might be usable though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The demos look nice. Is there any information about how their technology is different to voxels that have been around forever?

</comment><comment><USER18> This again? Remember the Euclideon engine? The main problem is that you can't animate models composed of voxels. Every one of these "atom-based engine" projects runs into that wall and rides the funding until the hype runs out. Bummer.

<comment><USER19> Of course you can animate voxel models - there are game engines that do it now - the trouble has been doing it on a _large number_ of voxels in real time.

This is why existing voxel games tend to look super blocky and pixelated.

That said - they seem to have solved that for non-organic forms at least (their video forms are very cool, but are basically frame by frame volumetic animation - a little different).

Lighting will be the big issue, though not always a problem in all games.

<comment><USER20> > but are basically frame by frame volumetic animation

I'm assuming by this you mean each frame using a distinct voxel model.

I may be wrong, but I think what's being demoed at 0:47 in the video is animation by deformation of a static model. If true, this is something I've not seen in voxel graphics before.

Unfortunately, the article is very light on the details about what is technologically novel about what Atomontage is doing, versus previous endeavours.

<comment><USER19> That's certainly what they're doing with the buildings. The dancing man and face animations look like frame-by-frame tho (which is why they are likely video I would imagine)

 _That said_ if they can do just non-organic forms well and leave organics to polygons - that would be pretty incredible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems neat but not scalable. I would like to be proven wrong though. These description was pretty generic so it is hard to see what is unique.</comment>


Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018? - <AUTHOR> What business would you start in 2018? <comment><USER2> In the US, I will start a company that would partner with Doctors/Clinics/Hospitals where they would agree to transparent pricing for simple and routine services (like wellness checkup, simple procedure etc.). In return, the consumers will purchase a service from us (sort of insurance but I hate that word) for a much lower premium/fee per year (say something like 500 a year) where they pay the routine services out of pocket but we cover them for major procedures or catastrophic stuff (like cancer treatment). Each Participating doctor/clinic/hospital gets a cut of the premium that the consumer pays us.

This creates a win-win for all 3 parties. Consumers don't have to pay crazy health insurance premiums (which can be 15K easily for a family of 4 per year), pricing is transparent and even though they pay out of pocket for general services, the total they will spend per year will be MUCH less than average insurance premiums we pay today in the United States. Not to mention that insurance companies don't get to butt in every decision about which service should have been covered and which one not. Doctor gives a bill, patient pays it and all done. Probably will put some medical billing companies out of business too ? Doctors/clinics/hospitals get a cut of the premium from every consumer who participates effectively creating a huge pool/network.

Bonus feature: Our company will create a centralized platform where consumers can login and see their doctor visits and billing all in one place. No more individual health insurance websites or doctor billing websites. I can get a simple statement at the end of the year even if I visited 20 different doctors.

How we make money though with those lower yearly premiums will be a challenge. Btw, this was just a joke and a wishlist. I wish someone would do this.

<comment><USER3> That's what "insurance" actually is— protection against unforeseen financial loses. The current idea of "insurance" is more of a health plan than a financial protection scheme.

Car insurance doesn't pay oil changes because that's a normal part of owning a car and thus should be budgeted for, but a crash isn't — this insurance exists to make someone whole after a covered loss.

<comment><USER4> There's a really great writeup on this in "catastrophic care", a book I'd recommend on this topic.

Rather than "insurance", a better model is that "you'll need to spend a lot with p approaching 1, for some years of your life". So allocating each person a lifetime fixed pool of money (through the tax system) might be a good way to force some cost discipline onto the system, while still ensuring coverage and access are widespread.

What I like about this is that it makes explicit, society's commitment to sharing some of the burden of care. I have a close friend whose wife has Crohn's. It's a real bitch of a disease, essentially no known cure, chronic, you just try to get it "managed" as well as possible. We could probably spend an infinite amount of money trying to improve her quality of life, but that's not fair to society at large. So if we said, here, you get $x, that would encourage the medical system to provide cost-effective management options that would be within some bounded price range everyone agrees would be reasonable.

I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's precisely the conversation we need to be having.

<comment><USER5> 'I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's precisely the conversation we need to be having.'

This is only a thing in the US.

In the countries with sane public health systems, they have zero problem saying "Look, we've got this much money to spend, we think this way of spending it gets the most bang (roughly speaking, QALY's) for buck, so if you want more coverage hit up the private insurance market" [1].

And you know what, those private insurance markets _work great_ because they actually have to provide meaningful value beyond the public system in order for consumers to bother using them.

As a vaguely relevant side note: Goddam it's difficult for me not to get angry about the diabolical state of the health system in the US and _I don 't even live there_. There should be marches on the streets about this. You could radically improve the lives of the vast majority of 300 million people without spending an extra cent of government money on health if you just stopped being so goddam dumb about it [2].

[1] For instance, here is the website of the public pharmaceutical supplier in my country-- NZ-- who've hired lots of phys and maths grads I know: [https://www.pharmac.govt.nz/about/your-guide-to- pharmac/fact...](https://www.pharmac.govt.nz/about/your-guide-to- pharmac/factsheet-01-introduction-to-pharmac/).

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita#/media/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg)

<comment><USER6> When Obamacare was being debated, the UK was accused of having "death panels", which were basically this: deciding that it was uneconomical to provide certain types of care to certain types of patients where the QALYs achieved would be minimal and excessively expensive.

But that is "communist" and so Americans as a whole could never agree to it. They'd rather squeeze every last day out of someone rich, even with a low or negative quality of life impact, and let the poor die early.

I don't live there and it makes me mad too. It fails the Rawlsian test of ethics (veil of ignorance), which I think is a good way to decide on political issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bitcoin VR vegan gluten free crossfit app

<comment><USER8> Native or PWA?

<comment><USER9> Vue or React?

<comment><USER10> So 2017. ReasonML and Serverless

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Something around video verification.

Convincing fake video and audio is coming soon - it isn't a major problem yet, but it will be more challenging to determine if recorded evidence can actually be relied on.

Some sort of service that signs and proves the authenticity of videos I think is a an idea that was until recently probably bad, but has now became good.

It'd be similar to what digicert does for websites. You could then work with browsers to show verification for trusted videos.

<comment><USER12> > Some sort of service that signs and proves the authenticity of videos.

I don't think that is even possible.

You might want to succeed with amateur efforts, but I would guess there will be a point where it is impossible to tell if a video is fake or not.

<comment><USER11> Just sign it after you verify the original person's identity so you know if it's been tampered with.

Company would be responsible for effectively verifying identity - similar to how this is done for websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Teacher collaboration tool to open source lesson plans.

Create a platform like facebook or github for teachers to collaborate on planning an entire unit. At the moment each teacher does it alone or maybe a department may get together and create some content.

But there are thousands of schools tens of thousands of teachers, all of them building lessons and delivering them.

Build in testing. assignments. progress. etc.

<comment><USER14> I've actually thought that something like this could be a fairly useful product. May I ask what your inspiration for such an idea was? Perhaps personal or anecdotal experience? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER13> I am a cover teacher, I travel to schools when teachers are sick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I intend to retire from my current successful company (founded in 2011) and design a range of personal health & wellbeing items for people on the Autism spectrum (more for people with mild-to-moderate ASD, Aspergers, or other similar disability, as opposed to for severe cases - i.e. this isn't a medtech company but a health and wellbeing product line). I stumbled on this by creating a few prototypes at home for my personal use that really contribute to my quality of life as someone with mild ASD traits.

Also, a social enterprise-based reforestation project – I'll be using same savings to buy a piece of deforested ex-farmland (one in particular) and working with friends and local community to return it to its former forested glory. The goal is really to give back but also to learn a heap about land management and permaculture.

For-profit and non-profit, respectively.

So it's really businesses that scratch my own itch.

</comment><comment><USER16> A not for profit ride sharing platform, in the spirit of ghost.org .

Self driving cars are still years ahead, besides that, humans will still be needed for other kinds of gigs for some time.

<comment><USER17> See Waze Carpool. AFAIK not (as much) for profit.

[https://www.waze.com/carpool](https://www.waze.com/carpool)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A staircase bot to carry heavy objects. With an increasingly aging population, it is a literal pain to be lugging objects - especially heavy ones - up/down stairways.

<comment><USER19> I believe those are called elevators

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A personalized learning program.

I really think education is a very inefficient process currently. Not that it doesn't allow growth of other traits which it doesn't value but also the virtues which it does see fit remain undeveloped.

For starters, I will begin with a program like 'Computer science/ concepts for developers' which will go far further than Networking, OS, DB...

The most important part of it would be that it will specifically crafted for the individual- it will start with the level of expertise the learner is at and incrementally go up.

Secondly, it will be focusing on virtues which imo makes learning efficient and enjoyable- like pressure free learning but getting sense of accomplishment by doing stuff. The best reason one would be learning for would be for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know but I'd support companies working to improve privacy. It's a hard thing to monetize but there's a need and a market.

</comment><comment><USER22> A not-for-profit company that builds an AI based identification and reputation (drivers license meets credit score meets ebay ratings) system on the block chain (perhaps using voice + location + image to imprint a person as being who they say they are.

Then use this identification system to create a crypto-currency that has guaranteed basic income built in, and the person would need to re-verify every 6 months to keep their account.

The not-for-profit company would also start it's own businesses that provide products/services to consumers and use only local fiat + the ubi-coin for payment with maybe benefits for using crypto over fiat (to increase adoption).

Execs for all businesses would be capped at 125x average worker salary. All left over money at end of fiscal year would be divided up evenly and 30% would go to workers as a bonus, 70% would be dispersed to ubi coin holders evenly. Businesses the co-op could start could be grocers, mail-order pharmacy, insurance companies, cell phone providers, the goal being --be self-sufficient but not make a profit except enough to pay all workers, and reward the community as a whole and also make services people use everyday cheaper and more affordable.

</comment><comment><USER23> Collaboration/Project software designed with distributed teams in mind first.

<comment><USER24> I'm actually exploring this idea right now. It's been an issue I've been facing in my day job and think it is only going to become more pervasive as more teams start to work remotely.

If anyone is currently experiencing this issue, I would absolutely love to talk to you! I only have a really rudimentary site up right now at [http://hallwayapp.com](http://hallwayapp.com) if anyone is even remotely curious (no pun intended).

<comment><USER23> I've been working remote for 2 years now, and your articles and experiences are definitely accurate. Subscribed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Something to do with transportation and logistics really. Free trade is just not going away despite populists doing their dardnest to make it more difficult and free trade runs on transporting stuff from A to B easily.

If you could innovate something minor in that field, I'm talking something that impacts maybe 5% of the shipping process, that's an absurdly big market.

However, don't do like the airlines and build your business plan on having exclusive agreements with nice and naive governments. Once that special treatment stops and they let smaller players in party's over.

</comment><comment><USER26> Real time interactive NBA betting app. Try to get John Stewart to host. Squeeze HQ app out of business

</comment><comment><USER27> I actually don't think I'd start this one personally, but given the recent supreme court ruling, I would expect that a sports betting site/app would likely get traction pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER28> A relational/lang mixed access/excel platform.

Looking for enough funding to work on this (just to cover life expenses US1000/month)

<comment><USER6> Check out airtable.io; they are the closest I've seen to achieving this and I've been watching this space for a decade.

(It's my dream to build something here too.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Website to collectively buy satellite pictures

<comment><USER30> What's wrong with the USGS or Landsat data portals?

<comment><USER31> Resolution is the main factor. Landsat is ~15m, DigitalGlobe is ~0.5m

<comment><USER32> Landsat is 30m.

There is also Sentinel2 (which is 10m) that can be used commercially.

Obviously DigitalGlobe (and recently Planet) do better with <1m resolution but it seems to be more expensive and (sub)licensing might be non-trivial (at least they are vague in pricing details).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Apocryphal News Site - "News, just the way you want it."

<comment><USER31> Be careful not to fall into an echo chamber

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A data firm within the US. (which is what i'm doing)

<comment><USER35> pretty vague there -- what do you mean data firm?...like a consultancy? I mean, OP didn't specify what type of business to start, but in some sense pretty much all tech start-ups are data firms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Prediction market + cryptocurrency ICO. How can I lose?

</comment><comment><USER37> GDPR consultancy

<comment><USER38> should have started that 2 years ago

<comment><USER39> True, but the number of executives and managers that are just starting to ask "what's this GDPR thing I keep hearing about?" tells me that it's about to be a growth industry.

IME, there's also a significant overlap between the execs that insist "2 years isn't enough time to get compliant" and execs that ignored it for the last 2 years. Not sure what that means, but it's at the point where I write off timeline complaints as whining and lack of forethought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A good, simple and anonymous chat app.

<comment><USER41> He said _business_ \- you can't make much money off of simple and anonymous.

<comment><USER40> Some do and create value can be enough for a startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Social apps. Neglected. Especially voice + social.

</comment><comment><USER43> A betting site offering over/under wagers on the number of people from the Trump administration who are indicted in the coming years.

<comment><USER35> Would this be covered under the new sports betting legalization?

<comment><USER43> yes. It'll be like hsx.com, but for felons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> #1

Imagine you have a fleet of vehicles and one of your drivers just had a fender-bender or seen one occur. One or both of the involved parties will call the police and notify insurance agencies. Sometimes the evidence, as deemed by you to favor your situation can get moved around or shuffled by local authorities. With my service, you'll be able to post as many pictures or videos as you like of the actual event. Our in-vehicle dash-cams will also collaborate the information you're uploading. The complete offering and system helps you secure a better insurance rate saving you millions. I just need $4.5MM to get started.

#2

This one has an even greater return. Imagine REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. It will do really well!</comment>


Google search parameters in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.rankpanel.com/blog/google-search-parameters/

<comment><USER2> Always a good idea to truncate one's search queries when sharing with others down to a simple "/search?q="

Example: <https://google.com/search?q=google>

</comment><comment><USER3> The most important parameter of all is missing i.e. ncr (no country redirect), which, ironically stopped working for me in the last few days.

Can someone confirm that the following query gives non personlized search results?: [http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu&ncr=1&pws=0](http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu&ncr=1&pws=0)

btw, this thing has been my #1 complaint with google for years. How hard is to make a completly 'neutral' non personalized version of Google available at a specific adress or with a checkbox in your google account.

<comment><USER4> _> How hard is to make […]_

Since you are on HN, I assume you either are an engineer of some sort or something close to that and you are working on some product, so I expect you to know that the answer to questions that begin like that is very, very often "more than you expected".

(I would like _the option_ of a "neutral" Google Search too)

<comment><USER3> I guess any change to something so big as google search is not simple per se. But my problem is that I think this is their business decision and not a technical problem that needs to be solved as I remember a thread here mentioning that even engineers at Google have a problem with this (that is, personalized seach results)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't read the content on my small Android screen, zooming in hides the blog content.

<comment><USER6> <http://www.imgur.com/tnlK0.jpg>

Enterprise Quality responsive web design

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for this :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are there any add-ons out there which allow you to remove specific parameters from the URL before requesting it? This would be very useful for me, as I have a slight (probably OCD-related) problem with the parameters added while browsing YouTube. Before I start viewing a video, I always remove "&feature=related" and similar ones appearing, causing a reload. I would prefer not requesting with those parameters in the first place.

<comment><USER8> You can also make a custom setting in Chrome to send only the parameters to Google that you want. In the Settings panel, click on Manage Search Engines. Make a "new" search engine but make the query go to Google (or YouTube, or whatever) with only the parameters you want. You can start with the url for Google and prune down the input encoding or the sourceid or whatever you want, or just make the path be "/search?q=%s" if you want to go really minimal.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a great solution. it would be also quite great if you would tell us what these (to us) unknown parameters mean :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It irritates me that all this stuff is sent in the URL. Personally, I would put the query (and query-related) things in the URL, then use POST parameters for the stuff that the user needn't see.

<comment><USER10> Well that would break back and forward history navigation as browsers require you te explicitly resend POST parameters.

<comment><USER11> Also the possibility to bookmark and to send a link to somebody else.

Also after all, you want to GET the search result, not POST anything.</comment></comment></comment>


The Internet Archive truck has been stolen - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/722094405931397121 <comment><USER2> Are you telling me there's a ~station wagon~ delivery van full of tapes hurtling down the highway right now?

<comment><USER3> I figure that's only, like, a gigabit per second or so, right?

(Awful latency tho...)

<comment><USER2> And the retransmission delays...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't tell if joking or serious: [https://twitter.com/Foone/status/722096054968057856](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/722096054968057856)

"@textfiles @internetarchive I just had to move a bunch of floppy disks, I'll have it back by lunch"

<comment><USER5> That was a joke. Sorry, more than one person thought it was serious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hello everyone! Jason Scott at the Internet Archive. Today, the truck was found abandoned by the San Francisco Police Department, having driven at least once over the Golden Gate bridge during its time away, and is being returned to the Archive tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for getting the word out - it meant a lot. Hopefully the truck didn't suffer too much for its time away and can be back to transporting data and hardware for the archive shortly.

</comment><comment><USER7> is The Internet Archive cursed? Didn't they have a massive fire not that long ago?

<comment><AUTHOR> A scanning center attached to the main building and known as the reading room caught fire in November 2013.

[https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire- ple...](https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire-please-help- rebuild/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We can real time track the location of every phone in every pocket but tracking a vehicle is still a rare luxery.

Why has no startup tackled this?

<comment><USER9> [http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich- world-s...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-seeing- less-and-less-crime-even-face-high-unemployment-and-economic)

"But thanks to central locking, alarms and circuitry immune to hot-wiring, stealing a car is far harder than it was. In New York City the annual number of car thefts has fallen by 93% over the past 20 years. According to Graham Farrell, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, reducing car theft may have had broader knock-on effects than just restricting getaway options. Stealing a car for a joyride used to be a "gateway crime", which would lead teenagers on to other crimes; now such escalation is restricted to Grand Theft Auto games (which, at least one study suggests, may themselves be reducing crime by keeping feisty young men occupied)"

So, video games have made criminals into lazy slobs. I don't buy the car alarm thing - in the 20 years that they've been common, I don't believe anyone has ever called the police when they heard one go off. I'm willing to bet that car thieves are able to disable car alarms faster than the car owner, that can't figure out what button to press on the fob.

<comment><USER10> I think you may be underestimating how easy some old cars were to steal. Alarms aren't perfect, but they're noisy and paranoia inducing. In some cases starting an old car could have been a matter of opening the door with a clothes hanger (these things weren't sealed too tight), pulling out the key thing, moving it aside and using a coin or something to turn the ignition.

They were also worth something. It just isn't as easy in most places to flog a stolen car. At least not factoring for inflation or something, I guess. The economics of crime shift just like everything else.

Sometimes stuff police or politicians or somesuch do helps too. Anything is possible.

<comment><USER11> And turning the alarm off typically comprised popping the bonnet once in and just yanking the cables out of the aftermarket crap.

I went through a phase of buying 80's cars, and had to disable more than a few weirdly installed aftermarket alarms the violent way - even did so once in a sainsburys car park, and managed to break the window as I slammed the door in rage at the fucking thing - and nobody batted an eyelid. Could've been stealing it, no problem. Or maybe it was the suit. Nobody suspects the guy in the suit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's OK. I made a backup. Just need to find the right archive tape...

</comment><comment><USER13> That's unfortunate. If it truly has been stolen it's probably being crushed as I type this (too recognizable to not get rid of immediately).

<comment><USER14> They could just paint over it.

<comment><USER13> Even if it didn't have the "cops look at me!" paintjob, no offense to the Internet Archive people but it doesn't really look like a nice enough truck to even be worth the effort of dismantling for parts (as opposed to just scrapping it), much less repainting it and keeping it around.

<comment><USER15> Commonplace vehicles with highly interchangeable parts apparently have large value on chop-shop markets. They're liquid.

Discussion of this and related concepts on the recent HN discussion of why soap is so frequently stolen from urban markets.

<comment><USER16> Just liquid soap, or bars too?

<comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500471)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11501491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11501491)

<comment><USER16> I was making a pun, but thanks, those were interesting reads.

<comment><USER15> What is this "pun" of which you speak?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sneakernet thief!

</comment><comment><USER18> License number and VIN?

</comment><comment><USER19> Why?

<comment><USER20> Why do people steal things?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hate to be _that guy_ but why is a stolen truck relevant to Hacker News? Only because it's the "Internet Archive" truck? Half a million vehicles get stolen in the US every year.

There's nothing of intellectual interest here, no new phenomenon to comment on, nothing but the tech version of celebrity gossip.

<comment><USER22> And I'm going to be _that that_ guy and say you didn't have to look at this story, let alone leave a comment. Like I didn't have to read your comment and leave a comment, but I did nonetheless. Are you and I really so different?

<comment><USER23> I remember there was some text on the goatse.cx website that used to read "if the image above offends you, simply don't look at it." Below the... shock image. Yeah.</comment></comment></comment>


Why to Move to a New Place: It Slows Down Time - <AUTHOR> http://ben.casnocha.com/2011/05/why-to-move-to-a-new-place-it-slows-down-time.html

<comment><USER2> Works for a short while I guess, but for some people moving becomes a routine too at some point.

I think the essence here is that generally speaking we can slow time down by constantly doing new things. But I still wouldn't be 100% sure it has that effect on me.

It is true for me that completely routine tasks tend to make time go the fastest, but as to what makes it stall the most I'm not sure. When I'm completely entertained by something it seems to go fast too. Complete boredom makes it slow down, but boredom is not too desirable either. Something that requires effort but is entertaining at the same time would seem slower than complete entertaiment but faster than total boredom.

So in the end I think there is no hack, no magical way of increasing the utility/"speed of time" rate.</comment>


LattePanda Alpha - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/139108638/lattepanda-alpha-soul-of-a-macbook-in-a-pocket-siz/description <comment><USER2> Is there anything actually "hackable" about this thing? Everything seems hardcoded; it just has ports</comment>


Two English authors 'engineered start of Spanish civil war', claims new book - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/27/two-english-authors-engineered-start-of-spanish-civil-war-claims-new-book <comment><USER3> This is extremely inaccurate and misleading.

First there was lots of international actors in the Spanish civil war and England was probably the least important of all those.

Of course UK media like the guardian will grossly exaggerate the England importance over it.

Countries like the Soviet Union had much more importance as they were the main supporters of 1934 "Asturias' revolution" that tried to make Spain a proletarian dictatorship and URSS satellite. Stalin will influence the war removing Largo Caballero and putting his lackey Negrin as leader of the republicans.

Germany also had great influence as they considered essential not letting his enemy URSS get more power in Spain.

England and France mainly remained neutral. There were socialist, anarchist and Communist on those countries that supported republicans as well as entities that supported Nationalists.

This article try to mislead people talking about Franco as he was the leader of the revolt in Spain, but he was not. He was a very good general but totally lacking charisma over the masses and there were several people over him at the start of the revolt.

Most of those people died over the war or just were too old to leader and Franco was elected as leader four months after starting the war.

<comment><USER4>
      Countries like the Soviet Union had much more importance
      as they were the main supporters of 1934 "Asturias'
      revolution" that tried to make Spain a proletarian
      dictatorship and URSS satellite. Stalin will influence the
      war removing Largo Caballero and putting his lackey Negrin
      as leader of the republicans.

      Germany also had great influence as they considered
      essential not letting his enemy URSS get more power in
      Spain.

This is so not true.

In fact, the "Asturias Revolution" of 1934 was organized by anarquists (CNT) and social democrats (UGT) and anti-stalinist communist groups like the (BOC).

The pro-russian Communist Party in Spain had little support among Spanish workers, and it only gained power after the country was long into war and the URSS became the only international supporter of the Spanish goverment.

Germany supported the rebellion since early on because of their affiliation with the fascists ideas of the uprising in the 1936 coup-de-etat.

Your views reflect the historical revisionism of the Spanish right wing to paint Franco as someone that saved Spain from the soviets. However, the uprising was motivated by the loss of power from the Church, big land-owners and capitalists during the republic.

<comment><USER5> So you agree that Germany (and the URSS, only later) had much more influence than UK in the war, which is clearly the point of the comment you're answering to.

About revisionism... there was blood in both sides' hands. To mention just the most obvious fact: the spark that ignited the war was the assasination of the opposition's leader. That happened in downtown Madrid with total impunity. Do you really believe that can happen in a normal situation? That's terribly one- sided.

<comment><USER4> > So you agree that Germany (and the URSS, only later) had much more influence > than UK in the war, which is clearly the point of the comment you're > answering to.

I agree. The UK still had significant indirect influence in that Churchill convinced France an other European powers to not support the Republic. That support might have diminished the URSS influence, or maybe just started WWII earlier, or prevented it... all that is political fiction of course, the truth is that Germany and (later) the URSS were the only significant international powers _in action_.

> About revisionism... there was blood in both sides' hands. To mention just > the most obvious fact: the spark that ignited the war was the assasination > of the opposition's leader. That happened in downtown Madrid with total > impunity. Do you really believe that can happen in a normal situation? > That's terribly one-sided.

I agree that the situation was not specially peaceful before the war (I did not imply that in my parent comment). Still, documentation says that the coup was planned _before_ the leader of the opposition was killed. But as another comment says, there are many forces into play and it is hard to quantify the impact of particular events... It is also hard to discuss the war without entering into moral positions (i.e. what justifies what.).

I don't need to go further into analyzing this... I am happy that we agreed on the influence of Germany and URSS.

Btw, last year I read "Homage to Catalonia" by Orwell, in which he talks about his experience during the war. Of course it is a very one-sided account (he fought for the republic) but nontheless interesting from a literary and anecdotal point of view, and it might appeal the english-speaking crowd here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Beware that the title is highly misleading. They apparently helped to arrange the flight of Franco from Las Palmas to Morocco to start the war, but this step was just the culmination of a long conspiracy to overthrow the Republican government, which Franco himself only joined towards the end, when the coup was certain.

It would have happened anyway, these guys just helped providing that particular flight. If not for them, the conspirators would had chartered someone else's plane or boat.

<comment><USER7> Like many major events in history (including most wars and revolutions), it's probably best interpreted as the product of both large-scale and systematic factors _as well as_ happenstance and small-scale interventions -- like the timing (and relative speediness, compared to a boat) of this particular chartered flight.

To refer to an even larger-scale example: clearly the Russian Empire was in the throes of an extended period of turmoil and conflict in the last years of the House of Romanov, which by that point was unlikely to stay in power for very long in any case... but at the same time things might very well not have turned out _quite_ the way they did had not the German government approved that famous train ride from Zürich to Petrograd for Lenin and his entourage in February of 1917 (as nifty way, so they thought, of seeding just the right amount of chaos to induce in the Empire to soften its resolve to continue the fight against the Central Powers).

<comment><USER6> I agree, it is reductionist to claim that WWI happened just because Gavrilo Princip, or that the Kaiser "engineered" the birth of the Soviet Union with the sealed train. In this case the coup was too advanced to be aborted (top generals were already too implicated) so it would have happened one way or another. That the war itself and the dictatorship afterwards could have changed if Franco had to resort to other transport is indeed quite possible, but we will never know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not only misleading but rather inaccurate, as Franco wasn't even likely to succeed Sanjurjo [1], the lead in the conspirancy.

Classical narcissistic delusion, more proper of the daily mail than the guardian. Brits are traditionally prone to it, poor souls.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Sanjurjo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Sanjurjo)

<comment><USER9> In all fairness, all press geared towards internal consumption does that - <USER2> least in every western country I've lived in.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely, that's why I quantified it as 'prone'. Paraphrasing an all time favorite Briton of mine, we might be all equal, it's just that some of us are more equal than others.</comment></comment></comment>


Analyse Asia 56: SMART Nation and Singapore Start-Up Ecosystem with Steve Leonard - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2015/08/30/episode-56-smart-nation-and-singapore-start-up-ecosystem-with-steve-leonard/ <comment><AUTHOR> Episode Synopsis: Steve Leonard, deputy executive chairman of IDA Singapore joined us in an interesting conversation on the SMART Nation initiative in Singapore & his thoughts on the startup ecosystem. Our discussion began with his reflections from an illustrious career in enterprise technology to a government role, and subsequently, we discuss why the Singapore government has embarked on the SMART Nation initiative to collaborate with the various stakeholders from public to private corporations, start-ups and also citizens. Steve also shared his thoughts on how far the startup ecosystem has evolved.</comment>


Sam Klemke: The original selfie guy, a life catalogued in 35 years of filming - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-26/sam-klemke-original-selfie-guy-makes-big-screen-debut/6884752 <comment> vezzy-fnord Similar undertakings were Jonathan Caouette's "Tarnation" [1] and an honorable mention to "David Holzman's Diary" [2], likely one of the earliest attempts at lampooning the _cinema verite_ genre and precursor to modern day "found footage" films.

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390538/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390538/)

[2] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062864/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062864/)

</comment><comment><USER2> The other day I posted to a HN piece about someone who worked for a 1990s ISP that used dialup. That was interesting and triggered a LOT of memories from that time.

I'm actually rather glad I _didn 't_ document myself at this time. It would have been far too sad: my current group of friends is almost completely different to my group of friends from that time. It's sort of like I'm living a parallel existence, only I'm still involved with tech stuff.</comment>


Ask HN: How common are one-way attorney fees in a non-compete? - <AUTHOR> The title says it all, I am wondering how common it is to have one-way attorney fees (where the employee is on the hook for legal costs, but the employer is not)? This seems unfair to me. Would you sign a non-compete that had one-way attorney fees? <comment><USER2> All attorneys fees clauses in California are two-way, even if they are written as one-way. A lot of employers don't know this and it actually favors the employee, so I'd not mention it.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a consultant, I see this all the time. As an employee I only experienced this one time and requested an addendum to the NDA/Non-compete contract.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. Did the company amend the contract as you requested?

<comment><USER3> Yes. When requesting any change to a standard contract, be respectful and give clear and reasonable justification for the request. Also, it helps if you have legal advice prior. These days, I generally run all my contracts through my lawyer and respond with any questions or changes with a "my attorney recommends..."</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Acquires Photo Startup Cooliris - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/21/yahoo-acquires-cooliris/ <comment><USER2> Is an eight-year-old company still a startup? I vaguely recall CoolIris having a plugin for the old Mozilla suite.

<comment><USER3> Similarly, is a company without any growth still a startup?

(ref: [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can Yahoo and Google please stop shutting down services of start-ups they acquire?

</comment><comment><USER5> Coolpreviews is one of my most indespensable browsing extensions and a major reason why I prefer Firefox to the alternatives. I hope they continue the project and/or alternatives appear

[http://www.coolpreviews.com/](http://www.coolpreviews.com/)

<comment><USER6> Mozilla just formed a partnership with Yahoo, but I don't know if that says anything about the life of Coolpreviews

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice- an...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-and- innovation-on-the-web/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> any yahoo insider wants to share with us how all these acquihires are working out?

</comment><comment><USER8> > More recently, the company focus shifted to a mobile app...that allowed > users to browse photos from across services like Facebook, Flickr, and > Dropbox.

Does anyone know whether this is a violation of those services' TOSes, and if so, how they got around it?

<comment><USER9> these services all provide APIs for viewing their data.

as long as they are within those terms i don't see what's wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is Yahoo doing anything own, other than acquiring companies?

<comment><USER11> someone in the recent mozilla-will-use-yahoo-search thread mentioned that they are going to release a significant upgrade to their search tech. Also, Yahoo! Mail is not the one you might remember form a decade ago, it's rather nice.</comment></comment>


SV2A level reduced in schizophrenia patients/unchanged by antipsychotics in rats - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14122-0 <comment><AUTHOR> >In conclusion, SV2A levels are significantly lower in the FC and ACC in schizophrenia, and antipsychotic drug exposure at clinically relevant doses does not significantly alter SV2A levels or [3H]UCB-J-specific binding in the prefrontal and cingulate cortices of naïve rats. These findings indicate that synaptic alterations occurs in vivo in schizophrenia, and lower SV2A levels are unlikely to be directly accounted for by antipsychotic drug treatment.</comment>


WipeModules: A new CLI tool to free up space by wiping old node_modules folders - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bntzio/wipe-modules <comment><USER2> Very nice. I like that there is an option to set the inactivity threshold.

My method is considerably more primitive but works well enough. It's disturbing how long this process can take after a few npm installs.

      function nmpurge --description 'Recursively delete all node_modules folders' --argument target
          if test -z "$target"
              echo "Specify a directory to clean"
              return 1
          end

          find "$target" -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +
      end

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, that works too.

I wrote wipe-modules to be more precise at the moment of wiping out node_modules, I will add more features soon! :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: There is any alternatives to cobian backup for windows xp/7/8? - <AUTHOR>

Cobian backup is the best donationware backup software  (even compared to many commercial software).
Now his creator, Luis Cobian decided to sell the complete source code (after many year of awesome coding for free!! so is a perfectly understandable choice) so we can't expect more update or free version.
Now I'm searching for a valid alternative to cobian. What i need:
- Open files backup (Volume Snapshot Service (VSS))
- Email alert in case of failure/backup problem
- freeware even for commercial use (better if opensource)
- well maintained with a good forum
- a good integrated scheduler that support good backup
scheme (daily incremental -> weekly full -> last n months  ) deleting the old backup automatically
any idea? the only good candidate is "duplicati" but at the moment don't support email allert (only in a 2.0 cli version for testing purpose)
P.s. sorry for my english, is not my native language <comment><USER2> I was a Cobian user but ended up switching to Crashplan for my Linux machines. Crashplan looks similar to duplicati so check that out. It does email alerts too.</comment>


Ask HN: Are people manually doing this? - <AUTHOR> Prefixing the title with Ask HN and Show HN? Is that a convention here?
I also notice some posts, end up on Ask/Show...so is there an algorithm behind that?
Ps: just a noob asking... <comment><USER2> That's the naming convention used to categorize the Show and Ask section. You simple prefix the title of the post with either 'Ask HN:' or 'Show HN:' and leave the URL field empty, if you want to create such a thread.</comment>


Keypress: A Javascript library for capturing input - <AUTHOR> http://dmauro.github.io/Keypress/ <comment><USER2> Note that you should avoid using this (or anything else with JS) to emulate shortcuts.

The reason is because what this usually looks like "oh nice I can define shortcuts people can press". What it actually means is: "Ohcrap, that shortcut only works for US-US 104 keyboard layouts, and about 80% of people can't press that shortcut".

For example: suppose you want a shortcut for shift+/, which is for the US keyboard under the small right finger. But that shortcut can't be defined for SG (swiss-german) because there the / is on the numeric bar where 7 is. So if you assume (for whatever reason) that left+right small finger is a convenient shortcut, and left small finger + right index finger top isn't, then you're totally screwed. Instead, to reach the right small finger low on swiss german, you'd have to define shift + "-". Except that if you define that, it'll be one of the most uncomfortable keyboard shortcuts imaginable for US users, which find - on the numeric row top --> bottom left small finger + top right small finger = ugh.

The truth is that you cannot do reasonable shortcut definition the way that everybody would like to with JS... yet.

But wait, can't you like, define some reasonable presets and let people choose their own? The answer is no, because you don't have a reliable way to translate a keydown/keyup to a unicode char, and the unicode char is related to the modifier keys, not the key cap, so though you can do that shortcut definition, you can't show to the user what that shortcut definition actually is, because it'd be either undefined or completely wrong.

I've written at length about this here: [http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/jan/30/keyboard-events- in-j...](http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/jan/30/keyboard-events-in- javascript-are-broken/)

<comment><USER3> > But wait, can't you like, define some reasonable presets and let people > > choose their own? The answer is no, because you don't have a reliable way to > > translate a keydown/keyup to a unicode char, and the unicode char is > related > to the modifier keys, not the key cap, so though you can do that > shortcut > definition, you can't show to the user what that shortcut > definition actually > is, because it'd be either undefined or completely > wrong.

But couldn't you let the user write the shortcut in a text field, capture the keycodes from the keydown/keyup events and the char from the text field?

Edit: This obviously doesn't work for shortcuts that do not produce any text, such as F-keys. But couldn't you at least get normal keys right most of the time?

<comment><USER4> That's kind of what I was thinking. Add to that a 20-questions thing to check which keyboard layout they're using, and you can probably uniquely detect almost every keyboard layout (minus custom, of course) in a couple keypresses.

But if you're going this far, you're probably significantly better off just letting people remap their shortcuts if it doesn't match what 95% of your users are using. The ones that care will love you for it, the ones that don't probably wouldn't have used it or been interested in 20-questions anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is such nice work that I hesitate to bring up a minor point of coding style... But the use of names_with_underscores looks out of place in JavaScript.

JavaScript code traditionally uses PascalCaseNames for constructors and camelCaseNames for variables, properties, and methods. You do see UPPERCASE_NAMES_WITH_UNDERSCORES used sometimes for "constants", but that's about it.

Of course, names_with_underscores work just as well as any other names, and some people use them in their own JavaScript code, but I think libraries should follow the traditional native conventions of their language.

It would be like releasing a Ruby library that used camelCaseNames for its method names. It would work, but many Ruby developers would feel that those names were a bit out of place in a language where method names customarily use underscores.

Mentioning it here basically just as a reminder for other library developers: "When in Rome..."

<comment><USER6> I don't think the language gets to decide the coding style. Only the programmer gets to do that.

Especially if you program in multiple language it can be jarring to switch styles for each language.

<comment><USER7> I change keyboard layouts depending on (natural) language, though that's just personal preference.

I think that flexibility of style has been getting less and less favor recently : a lot of languages are starting to "force" some elements (such as indentation) , and go has done the most intelligent thing ever and ships with a formatter so that there's only 1 "right" way to write things.

Formatting issues is the source of so much bike-shedding, despite that it really shouldn't be much of a productivity sink in 99.9% of situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tangentially, can someone on the W3C please fix the sorry state of key bindings across UAs?

Cross-browser idiosyncrasies are finally improving...except for webapp key bindings. Alt-F is taken in IE, Ctrl-whatever is taken in other UAs. Or an extension like (the awesome) vimium conflicts with some key bindings, so you have to disable it all together.

To the point where Asana uses _tab_ as their short cut key. Tab! Wtf! "tab-p" for project. Bizarre!

But I guess I can't blame them, as I wouldn't be surprised if it's the only shortcut modifier that wasn't taken yet across all UAs.

I admittedly have no solutions to propose, so am just ranting about an understandably hard problem...but it would be nice if someone came along and fixed this. Please. :-)

<comment><USER4> I think that Asana's aren't actually tab _and_ p, they're tab _then_ p. Or at least that's true for all the ones I use. Given that, tab just takes focus out of whatever default / current text field the cursor is in, so 'p' is unambiguously a command and not a letter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks like [https://github.com/ccampbell/mousetrap](https://github.com/ccampbell/mousetrap) I'm much more fond of the implicit syntax of mousetrap though.

<comment><USER10> I have referred people to Mousetrap in the past that don't have need of some of the more advanced features that Keypress offers. I wrote Keypress because there was nothing to support some of the more complex, game-specific things I wanted to do with keyboard combos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Obligatory link to the fantastic [http://unixpapa.com/js/key.html](http://unixpapa.com/js/key.html)

<comment><USER12> Also this: [http://craig.is/killing/mice](http://craig.is/killing/mice)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks great. I was impressed that the keyboard visualization handled up to 7 simultaneous button pressed on my physical keyboard. Honestly, I wasn't aware my keyboard's wiring (MacBook Air) was capable of handling that.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't have to do with hardware, it's just client-side implementation. I had to write code for multiple key presses before. The browser will normally trigger a keydown and keyup event whenever something is pressed and released. The trick is to keep an array of keyCodes representing current keydowns; during keydowns add to array and during keyups, remove from array.

<comment><USER14> It is hardware related. USB has a maximum rollover limitation of 6 keys + 4 modifiers. Though keyboards can have n-key rollovers (i.e., greater than 10 keys simultaneously), you have to use PS/2.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_\(key\))

<comment><USER15> I don't know the details, but it is possible for a USB keyboard to support N-key rollovers. As an example: [http://www.corsair.com/en/support/faq/vengeance- gaming/](http://www.corsair.com/en/support/faq/vengeance-gaming/)

<comment><USER4> Do they require custom drivers? I see no reason you can't have all-key rollover with that, unless the OS refuses to do so.

Not that I'm saying you're _wrong_ , I really don't know if normal driverless keyboard input is capable of this. I certainly hope so. I just see essentially all 10-key rollover (or more) keyboards using PS/2 and citing that it doesn't work through USB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks neat, but how do you write a keyboard input library with sequence combos and then _not_ have the Konami code as a secret demo?

<comment><USER10> Ha, fair point. I should get on that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice. This seems to solve a common problem for developers building rich UIs.

On a similar topic, does anybody have any pointers for implementing keystroke- by-keystroke character replacement in an INPUT box that doesn't suck? I'd like users to be able to enter "townhall" but have the input value be "TOWNHALL" and there doesn't seem to be a simple way to do this that doesn't fail when the user uses the arrow key or wants to insert more than one character in the middle of an input box.

<comment><USER18> It's a bit of a workaround, but one approach is to split the problem into two pieces: display and transmission. For display, you can avoid the cursor problems by using:

      text-transform: uppercase;

It's simple, the user experience remains natural, and there are no JavaScript dependencies. For the transmission phase, simply munge the actual entered content (which will not be all uppercase unless the user enters it as such) during the submit event. Of course you'll want to validate input on the server side as well.

Edit: clarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you use this for hotkeys in your application make sure to return false or set e.handled to true or something like that. I don't remember the exact details right now.

Otherwise features from the browser like "incremental search" in firefox will get priority over the key captures in your app. In fact _both_ your key capture and the incremental search will trigger which is very frustrating as the page starts scrolling to the first match of the letter you just typed.

But be very careful while doing this. Only do it for for your own hotkeys and make sure they are not used for other hotkeys in most common browsers! If you always swallow the keypress, normal hotkeys like ctrl+t for new tab will stop working for the user also.

</comment><comment><USER20> I built a demo with some similarities 7 month ago ( _EDIT_ \- that's not a plagiarism charge, the OPs submission predates mine and was created a year ago). [https://gist.github.com/arnehormann/4163916](https://gist.github.com/arnehormann/4163916) for the source and [http://bl.ocks.org/arnehormann/raw/4163916/keycodes.html](http://bl.ocks.org/arnehormann/raw/4163916/keycodes.html) for the demo. The code is documented and includes a konami code and a mode switching example. It's set to a German Windows keyboard layout, but the code includes comments on how to change that.

</comment><comment><USER21> I know the mess is in the OS-side but is there any chance we will have some day a DOM API independent of the keyboard layout?

For instance you want to make a game using WSAD keys, well in a french keyboard it's ZSQD... Also in a French keyboard, there some keys which trigger the same keycode so you cannot differenciate them! (I think it was the comma with something else)

If you want to make a software like Blender on the web which have a lot of key shortcuts you are a bit screwed!

</comment><comment><USER22> My biggest issue is wanting to bind ctrl/meta-x/c/v to do what you think they would do in my UI (a graph editor), but not do anything in input fields. I can stopPropagation, but it is a pain to keep track of.

<comment><USER23> You can attach an event to the window or some other higher-level element and check if event.target is an input field... something along the lines of:

        document.body.addEventListener('keydown', function(e) {
          if (e.target.tagName !== 'INPUT') doKeyBindings();
        }, false);

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This just looks like a development implementation of [http://keycodes.atjayjo.com/](http://keycodes.atjayjo.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I see the potential for reading key presses when people are entering data into a form. I look forwarding to investigating this. Thank you!

<comment><USER26> iPad keyboard data entry firm that farms keypresses via HTTP to solve newly discovered cancer systems or other genetic puzzles.

At least give data enterers feedback, WPM, errors. Elderly can do data entry while on a walk to the park, and afford their peppermints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is it meant to work with all the keys? Chrome 29:

> Open page

> Don't touch anything

> Type

        this is a test

> Now you've moved down three times.

<comment><USER28> the spacebar makes the page scroll down

<comment><USER27> Yes, I have used a web browser before today.

It doesn't work unless you interact with elements on the page first, in which case the library catches space.

Hence my instruction not to touch anything on the page.

<comment><USER10> That doesn't seem to be the case for me. OS 10.8/Chrome 29.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> pressing as many keys as possible makes me wonder how is wired my keyboard, I can get all 8 'asdf' and 'uiop' in down state, but not 'asdf' 'hjkl' nor 'qwer' 'hjkl' .. funny

<comment><USER30> That's keyboard ghosting.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_%28key%29#Key_jamming_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_%28key%29#Key_jamming_and_ghosting)

[http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/antighostingexplain...](http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/antighostingexplained.mspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ooh, I could use this in a project I'm working on. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER32> Pause/break not working in Firefox 24.0 on Windows x64 8.

</comment><comment><USER33> suggestion: add to console echo when pressed something in your demo

</comment><comment><USER34> Looks great.

</comment><comment><USER26> This will do to onscreen keyboards what Wordpress did to onscreen journals.</comment>