Show HN: I've made a tool to generate beautiful gradient background images - <AUTHOR> http://gradient.quasi.ink <comment><USER2> Not completely on-topic, but I wish more designers would consider using some kind of gradient or custom vector graphics for their landing page designs instead of defaulting to multi-megabyte stock images that, for the most part, don't even add anything of value to what they're trying to convey.

<comment><USER3> They do convey something very important: credibility.

Or, at least, they coerce the fast pace internet viewer into having that first impression. I know its silly, but the average viewers mind will subconsciously attribute more effort and quality - thus, credibility - to a polished photo than to any gradient.

It sadly does not make a difference if its merely a stock photo bought for a few bucks. It still works.

Also, a photo gives a more "real", less abstract impression, so the target customer can relate. You can't relate to a gradient. So the photo should be chosen according to the target customer.

I agree though that some effort should also be put into technical aspects, e.g. making the photo file size as small as possible.

<comment><USER2> I personally believe credibility at first impression has more to do with the overall polish and quality of your design than the existence of a photo.

Sure, adding a photo might be an easy shortcut to fabricate the illusion of quality, but it's a shortcut that also has severe adverse effects on UX in bandwidth constrained environments, which actually has the opposite effect on perceived quality, and thus credibility, than the designer intended. This is why I believe it's worthwhile to explore alternative designs that don't rely on photos, at least once you're past that MVP phase where you just want to put something together as quickly and easily as possible.

RE: You can't relate to a gradient. This is true enough, but there's no reason why you need to make users relate to a background image, when you can have them relate to something in the foreground like some kind of feature showcase of your app/service (with screenshots and such). A busy stock photo in the background is actually detrimental to this kind of design compared to something simple like a gradient. And in my opinion, this kind of design is much more directly relatable for users because you're presenting your value proposition to users explicitly rather than relying on your users being naive enough to fall for some subliminal mind trick.

Stripe's landing page is one good example I can recall of such an approach: [https://stripe.com](https://stripe.com)

<comment><USER4> 37 Signals split-tested various home page designs a while back and from memory it was the one with the large smiling face that was most successful.

<comment><USER5> Here it is:

[https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab- tes...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing- part-3-final)

"Big photos of smiling customers work"

<comment><USER6> Sure, but now look at Highrise's visual approach. We know that they have A/B tested in the past, so I am going out on a limb to say that they continue to do so. They have a human element in their hero image on their homepage, and they include an image of a smiling influencer near the top. I'd reaffirm what others have said and test for your audience! I am not affiliated with business of the case study in the link you posted. [https://highrisehq.com/](https://highrisehq.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's also the CSS property `filter: blur(<length>)` which basically has the same effect with a high enough length value. Not every browser supports it yet, of course (i.e., IE). Still, kudos to the author for the clever idea.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/filter](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/filter)

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-filters](http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-filters)

<comment><USER8> I would suggest using this in _conjunction_ with the scaled-up image technique in order to get the same blur effect cross-browser (see the posts elsewhere in the comments about bilinear vs. bicubic scaling)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Firefox the gradient is not as smooth as in Chrome, looks like they are using different scaling algorithms. It's more noticeable with higher sample area settings:

[http://i.imgur.com/notR7Jc.png](http://i.imgur.com/notR7Jc.png)

<comment><USER7> In my Firefox (v43, El Capitan, Retina screen, Electrolysis-enabled), it looks completely pixelated:

[http://i.imgur.com/1yMk1e5.png](http://i.imgur.com/1yMk1e5.png)

<comment><USER10> It looks this way on Chrome for Android as well. I thought this was the intended effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Clever idea to use a dramatically zoomed image to allow for a variety of "stops" in the gradient!

I've used random CSS gradient backgrounds on my personal blog for some time [1]. The "background options" at the left includes a couple grays and a random colors option. The randomness is recomputed each time you click on one of the options.

In IE 10 and 11, the only browsers that I am aware of that do gradient transitions, they slowly animate.

[1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is not beautiful. It's ugly. The lines are very harsh. No artist would make something that looks like this.

Props for the effort. It was clever idea. But it didn't work. I'm sorry.

The word beautiful is wildly, wildly overused. Everyone claims everything is beautiful these days. But that is not the case.

<comment><USER13> What lines? I don't think you are seeing what the rest of us are - can you share a screenshot?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This may be counter to your original design intent, but I know people who would like to put these gradients into powerpoint.

Would you be able to generate an arbitrarily sized PNG or JPEG download from them?

<comment><USER15> In the meantime, you can always just load the html and delete the div elements for text and controls (to take a screenshot). Obviously this makes the "arbitrarily sized" part harder but now I have a nice wallpaper for my phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you press escape you can hide all the UI, I added this feature for screenshots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This used to be a well known technique by windows users to save memory and resources, back in the day when the desktop background could have an impact on system performance. The trick was to have a background of an image of a few pixels square and use the "Stretch to fit" option, which created beautiful soothing backgrounds, but only take a few bytes of memory.

<comment><USER17> Did that actually have an effect, since the full-size interpolated version had to be in memory anyways?

<comment><USER18> It might have only had to have been in video memory. Depends on exactly what kinds of blitting operation were available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I made similar thing few years ago, but with more effects (click to randomize gradient effect) [http://lib.ivank.net/demos/plasma.html](http://lib.ivank.net/demos/plasma.html)

59 lines of code

</comment><comment><USER20> This doesn't seem to work for Firefox on Android. Instead, I see three giant pixels, with a discrete border between them.

<comment><USER21> Hacker news comments section doesn't work on Firefox on Android either.

<comment><USER10> They don't work on desktop Firefox either, if you make the window small enough.

I always thought the staff had, for some reason, decided that mobile users didn't need to know which comment was part of which thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The gradients look nice, but a nitpick about the site: Alt+LeftArrow and Alt+RightArrow are hijacked by the site to scroll! This is a shortcut for back/forward in browser history, and apparently I use it without thinking, because I just had a rather jarring experience trying to get back to the HN comments page.

</comment><comment><USER23> Good job on this- very cool. I think it'd be a nice addition to have a "randomize settings" button, or perhaps allow a "travel" mode where the x/y positions change in smaller increments (so the background changes a bit slower).

I'd like to add something like this to: [http://projects.skratchdot.com/infinite- gradients](http://projects.skratchdot.com/infinite-gradients)

I'll at least add a link to [https://github.com/tiborsaas/unique-gradient- generator](https://github.com/tiborsaas/unique-gradient-generator) in the README...

<comment><USER24> The x/y increment resolution is a limit of the technique used. It uses overzoomed images, you scroll one source pixel at a time. Since it uses `background-size: cover;` for rendering, you cant scroll by fractions of pixels.

<comment><USER23> Ah, that makes sense. I thought it was just that the dat.gui step was set to '1' not '0.01'. Didn't realize the step was set that way puposely due to a limitation of the technique being used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Were you by any chance inspired by Medium's approach to pre-loaded thumbnails?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read about that before, so there's a chance it planted a seed in my brain, but the idea for the tool came from a codepen experiment I did a few months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love this -- Nicely done!

Does anyone know; is the smoothing guaranteed to be consistent across multiple browsers (I'm guessing it's done on GPU when possible with a software fallback and is probably just a bilinear filter)?

</comment><comment><USER27> awesome.

i often shoot pictures of the sky, a forest canopy, or other natural phenomenon, to get this kind of gradient. but this is even better, in many ways.

one suggestion is to feather the edges into each other, a la the "seamless" background patterns of yesteryear, to soften them if/when the background repeats, because background-size:cover doesn't handle very long elements, like "body", without having the background-image repeat.

good work.

-bowerbird

</comment><comment><USER28> I just tried this adding it to a page. When I drag the window so the width is not very large compared to the height the image clips/repeats. Is that the intended behavior (Chrome)? Added the CSS directly to the body of the page. Example here: [https://jsfiddle.net/r1ueprrz/](https://jsfiddle.net/r1ueprrz/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really, that's not how it's supposed to work, seems like a bug, but a 'min-height: 100%' solves the problem.

<comment><USER28> Tried that in the fiddle but didn't make a difference?

<comment><USER28> Put it on html and body and now it works. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In this context "designers" are more accurately labelled as "graphic designers." Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER30> Bilinear filtering doesn't look that great to me, is there a way to get bicubic interpolation or similar?

</comment><comment><USER31> If you love gradients and randomness: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random- gradient/ga...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random- gradient/gaklopmcfgbcdnehdleeocjfhaipajgf?hl=en-US)

<comment><USER32> If you love horrible banding effects...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is wonderful. I hope gradients become more regular in web design. I wrote an image -> css gradient converter last year [https://github.com/fraser- hemp/gradify](https://github.com/fraser-hemp/gradify)

</comment><comment><USER34> This is awesome.

If you need cross browser solution and if you don't mind using JS, then you can use canvas to blur images. Its not good as this.

Demo: [http://premii.com/](http://premii.com/) (Refresh the page to see a different background).

<comment><USER35> Ooh, is that your site? That's sharp as hell, very nicely designed. I'm going to take a screenshot and add it to my inspiration folder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> When I did a stylesheet something BeeLine-esque for Calibre, I did something similar for the text fill gradient ([https://gist.github.com/osuushi/6461324](https://gist.github.com/osuushi/6461324))

</comment><comment><USER37> This is really nice. It could be interesting to also add a thumbnail of the chosen image on the page. That would instantly give the effect that the background color/gradient had been chosen to match the image (which of course it had :) ).

<comment><USER38> I second this idea! Maybe a photoshop "navigator" panel [1] would be kinda cool.

[1] [https://www.agitraining.com/sites/default/files/PSE3793.png](https://www.agitraining.com/sites/default/files/PSE3793.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Lovely app, I like this type of gradient backgrounds.

Came to my mind the decision you made to not be able to generate a custom link for uploaded images, and I wonder, is there a way to achieve this? Considering that the base64 length hits the URL size limit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) It can be done, but the because of URL limits, the image should be saved. I plan to allow full scale downloads and I might just store custom uploads too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Can the sample size be done in percentage points (of the source image)? I think some of your example images are higher resolution than others so it takes a lot of fiddling to find similar results.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea, I'll add it soon. Yes, example images vary in resolution, I scaled them to have a dense visual complexity. The idea is a bit revolving around chaos, you never know what you discover :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is this guaranteed (by web standards) to show correctly on all browsers?

</comment><comment><USER42> Neat tool, I'll probably use it on my next website. I like the keyboard controls to move the image, but I also found myself intuitively trying to drag the image around with my mouse.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is a really great idea. In addition to using existing images, would it be possible to create interesting patterns and textures procedurally using canvas.toDataURL()?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, yesterday I just had an idea to enable WebGL shaders as an input, but I have to research the idea a bit further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> That's awesome - nice work, and thanks for sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Nice technique in terms of now having too much noise. Could be great to limit brightness (or darkness) for better contrast with text.

</comment><comment><USER46> Pretty sure people used the same idea in Windows 95 with active desktop to make a gradienty background.

</comment><comment><USER47> It is a bit slow: when I load page the background appears black and then becomes gradient.

<comment><USER24> It's a demo/app to generate backgrounds. It produces CSS with a `background- image: url(data:tiny-image-here)` that should load instantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The image is a derivative work; it's derived from the original stock image.

If the stock image is protected by copyright, and you don't have a license to use it (for anything), is it copyright infringement to use it like this on your website?

Or is it fair use?

<comment><USER49> According to the page: "The images used in the project are all public domain stock images."

<comment><USER24> Indeed, but it is derivative, not fair use. If the source can be used and modified freely (public domain, appropriate Creative Commons subtype), then it is also the case for the gradient.

If the source image is copyrighted, then the gradient can't be used without a license from the original owner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Any examples of pages where such an effect is used in practice?

<comment><USER51> Here: [http://www.riaxe.com/marketplace/thin- admin/index.html](http://www.riaxe.com/marketplace/thin-admin/index.html)

(It's a ThemeForest template.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Love it. I'll definitely use it. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER53> Not very beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER54> >> The browser's image smoothing algorithm takes care of the rest.

So it doesn't survive noscript? Without scripts the OP is just a black background. Call me old, but I'd rather be sent the png.

<comment><USER55> The tool requires javascript, the final result does not.

<comment><USER54> Ah, that makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I find this to be a good source of gradients/colors, but it's just images (no CSS generation): [http://colorfulgradients.tumblr.com](http://colorfulgradients.tumblr.com)</comment>


16 Inch MacBook Pro and Other Apple Products predicted coming in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/02/17/apple-16-inch-macbook-pro-display-more/ <comment><USER2> Apple would need to give up the butterfly keyboard, the touchbar should be separated from function keys, and give me a dedicated USB-old and HDMI port for me to get legitimately excited.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am so sad that the SE line seems dead. Truly wonderful to be able to hand everything on the phone with one hand and also be able to keep it in a normalsized pocket without much fuss. :-(

<comment><USER4> current SE user here. I cannot agree more.

It's kind off topic, but what's make me more sad is since iOS12 update, my battery die so fast!! The update rendered my phone almost unusable!

Is it just me? Or is this Apple's strategy to drive people to buy shiny-new iPhone?

<comment><USER5> another SE here. battery is fine with iOS 12. sounds like battery isn't at her peak. my wife just replaced her phones battery (2+ yo iPhone 7 and it suddenly keeps almost a day of intense usage from constant use of charger)

SE is one of the last modern phone < avg. hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My 10 year old MBP17 still works, but it's good that finally there will be a replacement option available. Hopefully it will have upgradeable parts again (at least RAM and disk).

So please start making bigger MBPs and smaller iPhones!

<comment><USER7> > Hopefully it will have upgradeable parts again (at least RAM and disk).

Pretty sure that won't happen. Don't know why, but somebody in control thinks that professional users prefer the slimmest available device over being able to put in a bigger SSD or more RAM when they need to. Better start looking for something else, because the new MBPs are no "replacements" to the one you have.

<comment><USER8> Just max it out, and it'll last at 5-10 years

<comment><USER9> "Just maxing it out" would work if Apple didn't charge outrageous prices for memory/storage upgrades. I would be quite willing to order any device in the maximum needed configuration for its life time and even pay a modest premium for that, but the prices Apple asks for upgrades are a multiple of market prices.

<comment><USER10> Pretty much all the LogicBoard Chips soldering are done though machines, I just don't understand why Apple had to charge the insane amount of money for those parts other than "Because They Can". I could understand they want to maintain margins etc, but it was so much higher than their usual margin it is as if they don't want you to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No more butterfly keyboards please

<comment><USER12> Starting with the 2018 models they added a membrane around all the keys that 1) significantly reduces ingress of random crap 2) makes the keyboard quieter.

Before I got my 2018 I had a 2015 MacBook Pro and don't find the keyboard to be inferior or superior to the old gen.

<comment><USER13> I just finished 3 days of meetings with peers and the note taker was on a brand new MBP. The noise from her keyboard was extremely distracting. I couldn't believe how loud it was. We switched her to a 2015 so we could think as we were discussing things.

<comment><USER14> I was in a Starbucks 3 seats away from someone on a 2016-2018 MBP last week. I hope it was one of the 2016/2017 non-membrane models, because it really was ridiculously loud and echoing through the store. I thought the complaints about noise from those keyboards was exaggerated until I had that experience.

<comment><USER15> Have you ever tried sitting in an office full of keyboard snobs?

<comment><USER14> Thankfully I don't have to, since I'm usually working from my home office or a favorite cafe. I do have a Model M keyboard here that I use sometimes, but not very often.

(However, I do sometimes work on flights after they've dimmed the cabin lights, and a laptop keyboard as loud as the MBP I heard in that Starbucks is a dealbreaker for that use case.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If the 16" MBP has a new keyboard more similar to the pre-butterfly one, they're going to sell a bunch of laptops.

<comment><USER17> Introducing _Classic Pepsi_!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While Apple "may" add more memory to their MBP specs, I can only wish they could add more USB-C ports AND spacing USB-C ports to farther away each other.

<comment><USER19> Having two on each side (plus optional USB hubs) seems to be plenty. USB-C isn't perfect, but being able to charge from either side is a quality of life improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I sure hope they are wrong about the lightning port living another year

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm excited to hear about Apple doing _something_ at least approaching innovative, though I'm pretty sure that adding another size to the MBP lineup will just muddy the waters further. Then again, if they replace the Intel platform with ARM in the 16" MBP that would be outstanding and would really shake things up.

Either way, I expect the pricing to be astronomical; $8,999 for a 16" MBP wouldn't surprise me much.

</comment><comment><USER22> No mention of what I'm holding out for - a Macbook with specs as good as some of the competitors in that space. Give me one with a 4 core whiskey-lake chip, and at least one thunderbolt port, and I'm in... otherwise it's looking increasingly like the successor to my late-2013 pro is going to be an ASUS.

</comment><comment><USER23> Introducing a new size seems like a good strategy. It will trigger some upgrades and more sales.

I hope they do something with butterfly keyboard, Otherwise, stop call it PRO.

</comment><comment><USER24> The big news is the 32gb RAM in the 13" mbp. Amazing that a small form factor is starting to be treated like a real computing device by Apple.

</comment><comment><USER25> I will only buy a new Macbook, once the SSD is replaceable. It is insane to waste 500-6000 USD just because something stupid on the mainboard breaks.

</comment><comment><USER26> Time to save up for a new MBP, my 2012 model is still working fine but I'm guessing Apple will end its support by 2020.

<comment><USER27> I'm in this position too. Mine (early 2013) is still working perfectly and does everything I need for both work and, albeit a bit slowly at times, editing photos.

I'd have bought a Windows machine for the latter requirement but they no longer appear to sell a _Professional_ OS for non-enterprise customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I want my Touch ID/Home button back.

EDIT: Downvotes? Really?

<comment><USER29> I wanted that ghastly physical vestige gone from the very first day I set sight upon it (when I acquired my first iPhone2G in late 2007). There's no excuse for wasting real estate on an actual physical switch.

As for TouchID I do miss it, but I'm hoping they'll eventually get their under-screen sci-fi tech working.

<comment><USER28> My excuse is that it feels nice to press. Simple as that.

I miss tactile keyboards and button on smart devices in general. I enjoyed using them a lot more back in the dumbphone days. Even one of my synths (Yamaha Reface DX) has a uselessly touch-based workflow that steers people away from it, even though it's an amazing synthesizer.

I understand why we made the leap to lose physical keyboards though, don't get me wrong.

As for your Touch ID point - yep, same!

<comment><USER29> Don't get me wrong you don't "need an excuse" to prefer one thing over another, just as I don't need to apologise for not liking it you don't need to apologise for liking it. Indeed, at least until very recently, I think you'd be considered in the main. Personally I grew up in awe of entirely software- defined interfaces (mainly due to the Star Trek LCARS touch-interface specifically designed to look as if it were a very simple manner of controlling very complex processes) and that will probably stick with me my whole life. Keys and buttons are just cool to me in a retrofuturistic/Blade Runner kind of way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe they will be "brave" enough to put a mechanical keyboard in a notebook?

One could dream...

<comment><USER31> What laptop comes with a mechanical keyboard?!

<comment><USER32> This one: [https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7495073/msi-mechanical- key...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7495073/msi-mechanical-keyboard- gt80-titan-laptop-ces)

<comment><USER31> That's a portable desktop computer, lol. Can you imagine Apple increasing the thickness of their laptops by an order of magnitude to do this?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Script for hosting a secure and scalable website on AWS S3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/acmeyer/s3-static-site-generator <comment><USER2> I don't think you should invest your time in this.

Deploying to S3 is controversial, involves personal preferences, there are already many tools[1] that say they do the same job as yours, each one is slightly different than the others.

There are also so many quirks difficult to solve from a script or command line tool, and at the same time so easy to solve using human inteligence at the time they happen.

[1]: Example: [https://stout.is/](https://stout.is/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link, didn't know there were that many options outside of AWS's own tool, guess not great marketing...This is less of a time commitment and more of a scratching my own itch thing. I was finding myself doing the same thing over and over so I wrote the script for myself and thought maybe others would find it interesting. If not, no biggie.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A new take on academic search - <AUTHOR> http://scholr.ly/

<comment><USER3> I seem to recall when Google Scholar came out that they had a set of example queries. Maybe this was another search engine that did this. Anyway, a set of sample queries with results that you're proud of would be nice to see on scholr.ly, because apparently I can't figure out how to use it.

I tried some queries and the results were awful.

query: author:"george church" ... I see only one publication, titled "registered trademark of AAAS. Synthetic Gene Networks That Count" which must be wrong.

query: author:"george whitesides" ... again only one publication ("New Editorial Board Chair"), and a coauthor named "Dropspots Microdevice" <http://scholr.ly/person/6263228/dropspots-microdevice>

Naturally, his affiliation is listed as "for Lab on a Chip".

query: "Rapid casting of patterned vascular networks for perfusable engineered three-dimensional tissues" (the title of a recent paper) returned a few publication results, none of which were the publication in question. It was in Nature Materials, so it's not exactly obscure.

query: doi:10.1038/nmat3357 ... no results found. Hmm.

Well, I don't know how to use this site. Here's what I really want:

* I want a public domain, reusable index of all papers everywhere. I want bibtex, xml, json, and all the other terrible formats for keeping track of those papers.

* I want working Zotero translators that can properly extract metadata from all science publishing sites. And I just want this data instead of having to fish it out of a search engine.

* I want to be told where I can find pdf files hosted on sites, so that I don't have to send emails begging for copies. Google Scholar does this pretty well.

* Actual data about which papers cite what, instead of trusting the "cited by" links/results in Google Scholar. Also, a "this paper cites..." feature so that I don't have to bother digging out the doi numbers from the bibliography myself.

* Supplementary documents are evil, but they exist and they should be immediately available next to or with any paper.

Edit:

* An index of which libraries at which universities are subscribed to which publishers. If anyone wants to contribute to this information, please go to your library's ezproxy service (ezproxy.lib.whoever.edu:2048/menu or sometimes on a different subdomain) and copy/paste to email@example.com for aggregation. This is useful for understanding which universities are likely to have access to which papers. Each service listed also has either partial/incomplete subscription and very rarely full subscription, but getting a list of the exact access rights is even harder to squirrel out. Tracking down access to papers is a pain in the butt. ILL is silly and costs way too much ($0.30/query say whaaat).

* I also want an academic aggregator that has the balls to go after OCLC, WorldCat, etc. I wish Bill Gates would just buy the entire scientific publishing industry, but alas! I should emphasize this OCLC alternative would be open-access. Mendeley doesn't count, I can't even get their data out.

I'm definitely neglecting some other major issues..

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually- we address some of that! So we don't quite provide a Zotero data utopia (yet...), but

* each paper page has PDF links and BibTeX

* we extract citation data from PDFs so you can browse the citation graph immediately. We're working on stats right now, but everything we extract is publicly inspectable.

* we're all about open access- in fact, we are _only_ open access, and will do our best to contribute back to bettering academic communication.

* trust me, we have the balls. Still working on the rest.

<comment><USER4> Yeah? Is there a freely available api for your service, which exposes PDF links among other things? If so, I and many other university library developers would be VERY interested in your service. If you'd like to get university library software engineer attention on your service (and especially if you have a freely avail API, please let us know), I'd suggest you email some info to the code4lib listserv: [http://www.lsoft.com/scripts/wl.exe?SL1=CODE4LIB&H=LISTS...](http://www.lsoft.com/scripts/wl.exe?SL1=CODE4LIB&H=LISTSERV.ND.EDU)

<comment><USER3>
        > freely available api for your service, which exposes PDF links

I configured an API like this just the other day (zotero's translation- server). I wanted an IRC bot to fetch pdfs. I call him paperbot. The big problem was figuring out how to extract the right links and metadata from each publisher. But the server seems to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very fast and unfiltered initial reaction:

This site is very heavy. Literature reviews are a process of finding the tens of papers you need out of thousands of candidates, and this site gives ten results per slow-loading page. The results take up a lot of screen real estate, and are not optimized for scanning. Whitespace usage seems to be intended as something to make the site look pretty and modern without any particular functional value.

The right column is annoying. The "Authors" heading is way to the right, making it hard to figure out what it's supposed to be. And all enties in the search I did seemed to be labelled "related publications", so it's not immediately clear why it would be headed "Authors". The author pages are pretty slight when you get to them and, again, are not well-optimized for quick visual extraction of information.

The paper page is terrible. Even on my 1920x1200 screen, a long paper name takes up over half the page height. Useful targets (like obtaining PDFs and bib info) are small and hard to find relative to the giant, useless title. And why on earth would one need to click on a "see more" in order to see the full list of citations? When you do click through, the sliding transition holds no value and the list is filled with duplicates (e.g., [http://scholr.ly/paper/2887595/enhancing-search- performance-...](http://scholr.ly/paper/2887595/enhancing-search-performance- on-gnutella-like-p2p-systems-ieee-transactions-on-parallel-and-distributed- systems-tpds-2006-yingwu-zhu-received-the-phd-degree-in-computer-science- engineering-from-university-of-cincinnati-in-2005-he-received-the- bs-a/citations)).

Google Scholar, despite the fact the you can't easily surf citations in both directions, is very useful for hoovering up a large number of papers so their relevance can be assessed. This site is not, and doesn't seem to provide any particular new value in paper discovery. If there's something else going on here, it isn't immediately obvious.

The academic search space has a lot of opportunity for improvement, but for me the interface of this site just adds friction to an already painful process.

<comment><AUTHOR> First, thanks for the honesty. We're far from where we want to be and I appreciate the criticism. I'll address your criticisms in another comment, but first I'd like to ask- what could we do to improve your academic search? Where are you coming from, and what do you need fixed?

<comment><USER5> I'm a CS grad student, by the way.

Looking for relevant papers involves sifting through a LOT of chaff. For search results, I tend to want focused density in my results, and I want to do as little work as possible to get it.

      * Scannable

      * Enough context to establish possible relevance

      * An easy way to obtain the fulltext of the paper and a .bib entry

As far as scannability...

      * I'd rather scroll than click.

      * I'd rather not scroll than scroll.

The more info I can easily read on each screen, the better, and I want action links with the search result itself. Clicks that go to other pages or sites require leaving a trail of tabs open in the browser to avoid losing the search context. So don't assume that if someone clicks on a link that they want it to open in the same window. I want to whip through all the garbage as fast as possible, and every click and animated expanding box makes that harder.

Part of the issue is that search results are only a small part of the paper- finding process, and the poor quality of most results (as well as text buried in PDFs) means that a lot of additional steps are required to assess relevance. I've tried Zotero but don't like being trapped inside it, so have developed my own workflow for capturing and assessing papers:

First, every paper I download gets a unique identifier that is easy to recreate from the paper's metadata, so I can figure out what it is just from a printed hardcopy. The code is similar to the one that Google Scholar used to generate, slightly extended to improve uniqueness. It's not perfect, but I think I've had only three collisions during the time I've been using it.

Second, the paper is saved as CODENAME.pdf in a papers directory, and possibly symlinked to a project directory. I've got a greasemonkey script to automatically route appropriate sites through my university's ezproxy, but the slight differences between IEEE, ACM, and Springer are constantly annoying.

Third, a BiBTeX entry (with the code as the identifier) is appended to a master .bib file. Google Scholar's BibTeX entries are often incomplete, so getting them from the publisher's site is much preferable. Bad entries still creep in, and have to be cleaned up later if it ends up being used as a reference.

Fourth, an entry for the paper is created in an appropriate .org file, keyed with the code. Notes will later be transcribed, and keywords appended.

That's the trawling process. Later, I'll go back and actually sort through all the papers pulled in, to determine whether or not they're really relevant, or might be relevant to another project. This process can either be using a PDF reader (which is painful) or using a large pile of actual hardcopy printouts (which is painful). On Linux, I've yet to find a good way to annotate PDFs, so hardcopy is actually the most useful. As each paper is assessed, I use different colored highlighters to mark the most relevant bits, particularly references that I want to chase (which, for example, get marked with red highlighter). A quick assessment of the value of the paper is scrawled across the front page, along with its code. If it's determined to be irrelevant, a paper can be discarded at any point in the process.

Highlighted references are chased during another trawl. Each reference has to be entered by hand into Google Scholar, since it doesn't let you surf the reference chain directly. (MSR's fancy bits are Silverlight-based, so I've never used it much.) At this point, I'll have the knowledge to guess whether other works by the same author might be relevant, and at this point I'll do author-specific searches, or search for later papers by other authors that cite an interesting one.

Good surveys are of particular interest, if they can be found, as they're likely to have a high density of good references as well as to be cited by other researchers working in the same area. Often, I'll want to chase down a large proportion of the cited papers in a good survey. If particular conferences or journals are found that are highly relevant, slogging through the ToCs on the publisher's website is often another way to find useful connections.

I prefer an assembly-line approach: I don't want to actually read papers while trawling; I don't want to chase references while reading.

If I click on a paper title in the search results, the most important thing I want to see on the next screen is not the paper title; it's everything else about the paper that will let me figure out how much additional attention it's worth to me. If I've deliberately looked up the paper, that's when I want to surf a citation graph, or explore other works by the same author.

The process is very messy and only partially automatable. But, any new search site would have to provide a lot of value relative to Google Scholar in order to result in a real improvement to the overall workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised nobody mentioned MSR academic search in the comments yet. It is light-years better than Google Scholar.

<http://academic.research.microsoft.com/>

Example author page:

[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1180211/hari-b...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1180211/hari- balakrishnan)

Example citation graph:

[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211&citation)

Coauthor graph:

[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211)

And finally, the most addictive feature, coauthor path:

[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211&1112639)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not as surprised. I'm not certain MSR markets the project at all, for all the promise it has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big challenge with 'scholarly search' is that what users want is to get to fulltext, but most scholarly fulltext is behind paywalls.

Google Scholar and MSN Academic both have ways of trying to deal with this. Interestingly, both often get you to a copy from the extensive number of "a professor illegally posted a PDF on the public web even though the publisher holds copyright and wouldn't allow that" copies. Google Scholar also will try to let you register your academic affiliation as a 'preference' and use the academic institution's infrastructure to get you to a post-authenticated licensed copy.

scholar.ly... doesn't seem to do this all that well.

I'm surprised that dude_abides thinks MSN Academic is 'light years better than Google Scholar', hasn't been my experience.

(I happen to work in the field we're talking about, being a software developer for a university library)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're only open-access right now, so there's no need to supply university credentials. Just click on a result to expand it and get the full-text, or go to the paper result page and click "full-text".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, not trying to be a dick, but what does it do? Is it supposed to be a better Google Scholar? The "about" page is pretty terse and all it tells me is that your site is "lovingly crafted" which I'm sure is very wonderful, but uninformative.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not "dick" at all- we need better messaging. We're a people-focused academic search engine, currently for computer science. Instead of just returning papers, we also deliver authors relevant to those papers. The idea is that there's a bunch of value in the citation and co-authorship networks that aren't exposed when results are simply flat PDFs.

<comment><USER7> Who is this aimed for? PhD students? Faculty? Businesses looking for consultants? I'm not that far along in my career (assistant prof in econ) but I know many of the people working in my area personally, so it's not clear how much value I'd get out of a search engine like yours -- not that the information isn't useful, but people working in the area have already internalized a lot of it. For prospective grad students or other people outside the field, that obviously wouldn't apply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, I think we'll be most useful to grad students. I think we'll also be a good tool for lit review, less cohesive fields, or interdisciplinary work. We've found your anecdote to be true time and again, though the effect varies by field.

I spoke to two CS professors who had interesting views. The first told me he "knew everyone", and that the tool wasn't worth his time- the second said that he "thought he knew everyone", but had a great use regardless. He wanted his students and peers to try it so that they could learn the movers in his part of computer science, and take over the conference he'd been organizing.

<comment><USER7> You may want to check out the RePEc sites for ideas, they're for econ, so you may not have come across them. One main page is: <http://ideas.repec.org> author listings are: <http://ideas.repec.org/i/eall.html>

Just another possible source of ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So far in my using it, it appears to offer the same features as Google Scholar, and I can't find much on the about page. How would you describe your new take?

Also I would recommend adding a meta image of your icon on at least the index page, because the only images available for preview when sharing on Facebook are pictures of the developers.[1]

[1]<http://i.imgur.com/NljWy.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I answered this question on the other comment, but more concretely you can

* browse the citation and co-authorship graphs without jumping between PDFs.

* find authors relevant to your searches- when we do our job right, serendipitously.

I think many of our future features are going to hew closely to "there's power in people".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's some feedback from 5 mins of use. (My field is philosophy)

Searching for paper title 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' doesn't return the paper or author.

Searching for keywords 'Democratic Authority' returns unrelated CS, engineering, and risk management results but no philosophy or political science results.

Searching for author wasn't effective - top hit for 'AJ Simmons' was 'Jennifer Pealer M. A'

Lots of gobbledigook in the results > ⌊aj⌋xj + fj≤f0 > expand > > 2007 > > n� j=1 ajxj + Substitute aj = ⌊aj ⌋ + fj, b = ⌊b ⌋ + f0. Then,

So all up, not very promising from my initial perspective and as a user, I see no clear advantage over GS.

The think that academic search seems to lack right now is the ability to follow citations easily. In early stage research, I would love to be able enter a keyword eg 'Philosophical anarchism' and follow the citation trail but limited to that keyword eg show citing papers based on their impact AND keyword match.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're only indexing computer and information science related articles right now. One of the interface's most obvious failures is communicating that- we'll try to improve the messaging and make that more clear. Coverage of material in philosophy is down the road.

What about following keywords in Scholrly doesn't satisfy what you need?

<comment><USER9> Compare these two searches from a mathematics & CS related area of philosophy:

[http://scholr.ly/results/?q=bayesian+epistemology&x=0...](http://scholr.ly/results/?q=bayesian+epistemology&x=0&y=0&page=0) [http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=bayesian+epistemology...](http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=bayesian+epistemology&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=1%2C5)

Scholrly omits big names like Hartmann and Talbott. Most of the author section is actually filled with non-people.

The publications section doesn't show me citation count or any reason why it might be relevant such as keyword highlights or score. I'd have a very hard time trusting these results that have such clear omissions.

'Causal Inference' at least includes Judea Pearl as a top hit but clicking the link [http://scholr.ly/paper/1147771/the-mathematics-of-causal- inf...](http://scholr.ly/paper/1147771/the-mathematics-of-causal-inference-in- statistics) sends me to a page that is 80% white space and not very informative.

Then compare [http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bAipNH8AAAAJ&...](http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bAipNH8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra) with <http://scholr.ly/person/5080037/judea-pearl>

Why do I want to look at an empty page with a picture of an owl? (Pearl by the way is a rockstar CS professor with 400+ papers and nearly 50k citations - <USER2> list a single paper of his)

My biggest pain point of academic search is knowing where I should spend my limited time researching. GS does an OK job of pointing me in the right direction but scholrly wastes my time with numerous dead ends.

<comment><AUTHOR> On search context- very good point. We're putting together a couple graphical summaries to try for profiles, as well as exposing keywords on search results soon. I think you're absolutely right about result trustworthiness and backing up why something is relevant in a meaningful way.

I'd love to include results from philosophy and related fields, but we just don't have data sources for them yet. Right now, I think we need to do a better job hammering in that the data we've indexed is in the computer and information science arena. We don't have the resources of all the other players in the field, so I think a niche strategy is important. Are there any particularly great repositories for bibliographic or full-text data in philosophy?

On Judea Pearl- you're right, we messed up! Do consider, though, that he's claimed his Google Scholar Citations profile. We've done all of our profile inference automatically. Sometimes that leads to a bunch of author pages that need to be merged, like in Pearl's case- we have all his papers, but didn't know they were written by the same real-world person, so they're fragmented ([http://scholr.ly/results/?q=judea+pearl&x=0&y=0&...](http://scholr.ly/results/?q=judea+pearl&x=0&y=0&page=0)). Other times, we have more complete profiles than Google, because many academics don't claim their Google Scholar Citations profiles.

It's an ongoing concern, so we'll be spending a bunch of time on this problem (called entity disambiguation in the lit) as well as upgrading venues, publishers, etc to clickable first-class citizens before our next major release.

Thanks so much for your feedback- hopefully I'll be able to post again soon with improvements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I went and did a couple searches and the publications search always cut out after the first page. The list of authors would continue for multiple pages though. Not sure if this is a bug or if I'm doing something wrong, but I thought I'd point it out. FYI, my searches were just test searches to see how much depth you had in my field, like "bootstrapping," "pattern recognition," and "classifier fusion."

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry! That's a regression, we'll take care of it- thank you!</comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Following In Steve Jobs' Footstep By Ignoring IPO Flop - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/05/25/mark-zuckerberg-following-in-steve-jobs-footsteps-by-ignoring-the-facebook-ipo-flop/

<comment><USER2> Well done Forbes! No original content, but high clickbait value!</comment>


Ask HN: Given ChromeCast, how can we now kill hollywood? - <AUTHOR>

For those of you unaware, chromecast (http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast/) is a 35 attachment to your TV that lets your basically puts whats on your laptop on your big screen.<p>Given that, HN, how can we now kill hollywood/use live video in a new way/make journalism new again? <comment><USER2> > Given that, HN, how can we now kill hollywood/use live video in a new > way/make journalism new again?

Is Chromecast even relevant to all of those?

1\. Hollywood: Chromecast doesn't change the production costs of high-end movies, so doesn't seem relevant to the main function of Hollywood. There's already vast hordes of lower-end video content produced outside the Hollywood studio system and its foreign equivalents. 2\. Use live video in a new way: Chromecast might be relevant here, in that it might extend the potential reach of internet-based video apps into the living room. So I see some potential there. 3\. Make journalism new again: video is demonstrated to be a less effective medium (and, in many studies I've seen, a medium of _negative_ impact) for actually informing and conveying understanding of journalistic content -- and Chromecast doesn't really do much to increase the reach of textual content, which is the more effective medium.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first thought would be to A) aggregate and priorities content that is online. Dare I saw a digg/reddit version of videos (youtube,vimeo,etc.) that would allow you to get the content and push it to your chromecast. This would work on video that is online, but this device doesn't address live sports/news events that are being broadcast to cable box and/or via antenna.

B) Sharing is care - another thought I had was more of integrating a raspberry pi or device to hook into your NAS or external hard drives that have videos/content from DVDs/Music/whatever - which you would want to stream. So maybe a raspberry pi to hard drives (usb) device that allows you to have all your content in 1 location but leverage some p2p secure protocol to allow for others to stream/request the content to their box before pushing to the chrome cast

Just some thoughts!

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't Chromecast accomplishing similar functions as Apple TV?

I don't think this is revolutionary.

<comment><USER5> It's subtle. I think it's a revolutionary UX. Think of how you watch your big screen. You either channel surf or fumble through a crappy Netflix UI. Opening up your method of discovery is a big deal. Being able to push to a bigger screen using established habits (that smartphone attached to your hand) will make standard TV seem quaint.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SoVersus – Map of Stack Overflow programming language popularity - <AUTHOR> http://soversus.com/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. It'd be really nice if you could see a ranking by state somehow (e.g. it's no surprise that C# is most popular in Washington, but it'd be cool to see what numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 are short of manually de-selecting them in the dropdown menu).

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice, except StackOverflow as community is biased towards .net and c#.

Same map with github data would show very different results.

<comment><USER4> Why is it biased towards .NET and C#?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> New Mexico is an interesting one. Any ideas why it should be the only C++ one?

<comment><USER6> Area 51. C++ was give to us by aliens.</comment></comment>


A Closer Look at the Java 2.2250738585072012e-308 Bug - <AUTHOR> http://www.exploringbinary.com/a-closer-look-at-the-java-2-2250738585072012e-308-bug/

<comment><USER2> What I think is amazing is the fact that there's a bug from November of 2009 (<http://bugs.openjdk.java.net/show_bug.cgi?id=100119>) that's first reporting the issue.

So there was a known denial of service vulnerability in Java for more than a year before people recognized it as that and actually started bothering to fix it.

<comment><USER3> Problems with it date back to 2001, actually:

<http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4421494>

(Ergh, except fucking Oracle broke that. But <http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4396272> also shows the boundary case not quite doing the right thing.)

<comment><USER4> Your second link is dead now, too.

EDIT: Now it's come up, upon retrying after some minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fix is available. See: [http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2011/02/security_alert_for_...](http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2011/02/security_alert_for_cve-2010-44.html) and [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/inde...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html#fpupdater)

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought this was a side effect from a GCC bug when it affected PHP. So does Java use the same algorithm for generating machine code at it's lowest level?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, It's a different problem, as stated in the article:

"Java's decimal to floating-point conversion routine is java code, although obviously modeled on David Gay's C code. Apparently, it was changed just enough to avoid the x87 error — but it introduced a new error."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good analysis. I sure hope a unit test will be added to the Java code base to cover this boundary case.

</comment><comment><USER8> so when/how would the fix get into some java update?</comment>


What I learned from the $2,000 elusive design book "Designing Programmes" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/svilenk/what-i-learned-from-the-2-000-elusive-design-book-designing-programmes-f518faefcf4b <comment> yoz-y So... what did the author learn from the book? To me this seems like a collection of examples of programatically (or not) generated stuff.

As a curiosity this is fine but I was hoping for more depth.</comment>


The Department Of Homeland Security Is Now Bitching At Me On My Blog - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2013/02/23/the-department-of-homeland-security-is-now-bitching-at-me-on-my-blog/

<comment><USER2> I love it when government representatives, who in principle have the right to shoot you on the spot if you break their rules, pose as innocent victims of ordinary citizens who never volunteered to go through their bureaucratic procedures.

I suspect the DHS person who posted hisreply to Arrington's original post will receive at minimum a dressing-down once the managerial class realize what he's done. It's considered very bad form to argue with mere civilians -- it sends a signal of weakness.

<comment><USER3> > It's considered very bad form to argue with mere civilians -- it sends a > signal of weakness.

Apart from the fact that the opposite of government worker is not "civilian", you could probably think of the more obvious reason (the same reason that employees are usually berated for talking about ongoing situation): random gov't employees are not supposed to play spokespeople.

<comment><USER2> > Apart from the fact that the opposite of government worker is not "civilian"

I could have said "citizen" but that coinage sounded a bit too Orwellian.

> random gov't employees are not supposed to play spokespeople.

Yes, true, and in some places like the military, this is very clearly spelled out by ordinance -- military personnel must avoid engaging in political advocacy while in uniform.

<comment><USER4> _I could have said "citizen" but that coinage sounded a bit too Orwellian._

Hey, if the cap fits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The DHS agent should be thanking Mr Rich Guy. You pay his salary with your taxes after all

</comment><comment><USER6> I dislike TSA as much as the next casual traveller, but why are they such a bugbear for HN?

<comment><USER7> <http://paulgraham.com/gba.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You've got your boat back, now sue them for defamation or something.

</comment><comment><USER9> "And third, for fuck's sake, you are the Department of Homeland Security. What happens to me the next time I got through TSA at the airport, or try to cross the border into Canada? Do you think I may perhaps be on a "list" and have some difficulties?"

Nice FUD, bro. With what DHS has to do on a day to day basis, your fucking boat isn't making any impressions outside of one office's circle of employees.

If that office failed to serve for whatever reason, and you called them out then congrats on being a good citizen. But suggesting something as big as what you just did is more than a little fear mongering.

But yeah, sorry to hear about your bad day.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, think of all those blogs they have to comment on. There's a _lot_ of blogs out there.</comment></comment>


The Geek-Kings of Smut - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/news/features/70985/ <comment><USER2> Lessons for people not in the porn industry:

1\. See what is new and working in other industries. And replicate them for your industry. Youtube's success gave rise to all the xtubes. The first few people to ride that bandwagon made it big.

2\. Select a niche and focus on it. Dominate it. Then use the cash flow from one niche to venture into other niches. Then earn even more cashflow and start buying people out. This picture is an awesome example of parlaying to domination: [http://images.nymag.com/news/features/sextube110207_2_560.jp...](http://images.nymag.com/news/features/sextube110207_2_560.jpg)

3\. When faced with a threat - brainstorm on what dilutes that threat value. "Unlike recorded porn, live cams are immune to piracy..." (But live cams can't be scaled up either. You can only have so many people watching you live.)

4\. Being a platform is always better than being a player. People doing live cam shows earn $1200 or so a month. The website where these live cam shows are streamed earn that much too - per person. But they have thousands of such people participating... so $1200*thousands. (Apple will always make more money than a single developer. Facebook will make more money than Zynga.)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Fans don't understand that if they don't pay for porn, we can't make a > living. They'll have to watch crazy European porn.

I am speechless. Maybe they could ask for government subsidies like the agriculture business does? :-D

<comment><USER4> Govt porn subsidies seems like a nice background detail for a dystopian scifi book.

<comment><USER5> It could make sense in a Brave New World scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like many, I'm puzzled why one would pay for porn on the internet when so much is given away for free. I don't just mean the amateur stuff--the pay sites give away a ton of their stuff as samples.

I did an experiment once. I picked a particular model, and would follow links to that model whenever they showed up thumb nail sites, trying to get to the sample photo sets for that model--the ones that give you a dozen good photos and then say the full set is available at some particular paid site.

After my collection for that particular model had stopped growing, so I figured I had most or all of the free stuff, I bought a one month membership at the pay site, and grabbed all of that model's material and compared.

There was nothing there I had not acquired already from the sample sets via the thumb nail sites.

It seems to me one should be able to automate this. That is, make an application that you seed with a list of a several free porn sites, such as thumb nail sites. The application would crawl those sites, and follow the links to other such sites, looking for sample photo sets. It would use face recognition to build up sets of photos classified by model. You could pick specific targets from those sets, or point it at targets you identify in your own browsing, and it would seek to find as much free material involving those targets as it can.

<comment><USER7> > Like many, I'm puzzled why one would pay for porn on the internet when so > much is given away for free. I don't just mean the amateur stuff--the pay > sites give away a ton of their stuff as samples.

This didn't make any sense until I got to this

> looking for sample photo sets.

People don't pay for pictures. They pay for 2000+ HD quality videos, carefully and accurately categorised by various topic, by scene. They pay for getting exactly what they want now. They pay to stream in HD, and download HD quality video. They pay for updates. The pay for the exact niche they want.

I work in the industry. Piracy does hurt. We are looking to fight this through quality. Simply put, you can't get the same level of quality from us that you can from free sites. For some people, this doesn't matter. For some, it's the difference between VHS and BluRay.

Our focus is about quality. Quality in the content. Quality in the customer support we offer _. Quality in the offers we provide. It's a business, and those that are successful treat it like such. It's actually sad that their is a negative perception around the business. Granted, I just assume that anyone with a negative outlook on the industry is ignorant. Anyone that lets that ignorance affect their judgement is a fool, and is fairly worthless.

_ Yes, quality customer service. Obviously being in a high risk industry means we have to jump through hoops to keep customers happy, especially when people make the assumption that porn sites are run by crooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am a little surprised, but so glad that someone posted this article. As a matter of fact, the prime reason I joined Y-Combinator and Hacker News is because the business I am developing is a solution to this very problem that the adult industry's experiencing. As I write this I am busy with my application for the Summer funding round.

The article is really thorough and provides a great summary of the overall state of the industry. The most important point raised is that while the traditional avenues of generating revenue from porn are dwindling rapidly, there are still many new (and also undiscovered) methods of generating revenue, and lots of it.

In my opinion, the only way to go about this, is to work with the content producers, not against them. Tube sites all work against the industry, but surfers go there because they have what they want. Isn't it obvious that if there was a solution that worked WITH the industry that the benefits would be much greater for both the producers and surfers?

Apple charges peanuts for a track in their iTunes store, but they generate massive revenue because of the sheer volume of content sold. And it's not just because their content is cheap, but because its convenient and easy for the users, so people keep going back and back again. If you had a solution delivering porn on similar principles, you would be generating revenue and supporting the industry. Just like with music, you will always get those that download illegally and those that pay. Same principle for porn. Just make sure its on terms the user is happy with and you may even convert non-payers into payers when they realize how much more convenient the new service is that trawling through the net searching for their stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> > "Fans don't understand that if they don't pay for porn, we can't make a > living. They'll have to watch crazy European porn."

I'll just leave this here: <http://www.reddit.com/r/gonewild> (If you don't notice that this link is NSFW... then you didn't read it.)

(To spell it out a bit more explicitly: there will always be amateur porn. People claim to like it more in the same way that they claim to like unsigned bands. The industry faces more threats than just piracy...)

<comment><USER10> I think the "reddit gone wild" site is a clear example of what's a much bigger threat to commercial porn than piracy. Why would anyone pay for porn with bored looking actors/actresses, fake boobs, etc. when there is tons of high quality free naked real people on sites like gonewild? I assume that the only reason commercial porn sites still exist is because most people suck at searching on the internet and porn companies are so good at stuffing the search engine results?

<comment><USER9> Consider this: pornography can be an escape into fantasy land. Some many not want 'real girls,' specifically because they're fantasizing about some sort of ideal. Which may be different than your ideal.

Also, porn can still make money from the long tail. Yes, if you're into blue eyed, blonde haired girls, you may have it easy, but what if your tastes are more specific?

If there's anything I've learned from /b/, it's that human sexuality is incredibly varied and complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To take the topic a bit more seriously, it seems to me that having to watch crazy European porn is, perhaps, not such a big deal. The music industry often likes to say that without big money coming in, no one will make music. I don't think that's true, but I especially don't think it's true when it comes to porn. Somehow, I have a feeling porn will survive even the coming of the internet...

</comment><comment><USER12> Information wants to be free! So does porn, it seems.

The fact remains, they'll find a new way to monetize or the industry will die. And we all know, porn is here to stay.

Edit: I particularly like the line, "Unlike recorded porn, live cams are immune to piracy...". That seems mildly delusional. I'm no expert, but I'm certain that a few minutes of searching would uncover numerous guides on how to circumvent any number of 'cam' sites.

<comment><USER13> I never did understand why anyone paid for internet porn in the last 15 years, given there was such a _fecund_ variety of the free stuff floating around.

Then there was that thing which was prevalent 5-10 years ago where sites would pretend to be legit, but then trick you into clicking a link that would take you to a free porn site. How pointless is that?

The funniest thing though, is when the pron people get preachy about how piracy is bad. Yeah, about that 'moral high ground'? Sorry guys, you kind of conceded that a _long_ time ago.

<comment><USER14> > 'moral high ground' [..] you kind of conceded that a long time ago

I hope you realise that that is simply your opinion you're stating as fact. Many people, including myself, have no moral problem whatsoever with porn, and would consider their piracy concerns as legitimate as anyone else's.

<comment><USER15> There's no question that smut peddlers basically slimed their way around local obsenity laws throughout their industry's history. _It's your opinion_ whether this is good or not, but the fact is that those laws were, and are, perpetually being violated, just as copyright laws are.

<comment><USER16> Whether or not that is true, it's entirely irrelevant because it has nothing to do with morals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Suppose that the porn industry somehow manages to curb piracy, then they still have a problem: there is 50 years of porn out there that the internet can unlock at a cost that is surely much less than creating "fresh" porn. (I'm not a connoisseur but I assume porn from 2011 looks pretty much the same as porn from 1990)

<comment><USER7> Porn from 1990 doesn't look as good as porn from 2011. Not only does fashion and look change, but so does the quality of the video.

Try taking a 90's porn flick and turning it into a 1080p HD quality video. It won't be pretty.</comment></comment>


The software engineer's guide to asserting dominance in the workplace - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-software-engineer-s-guide-to-asserting-office-dominance-ddea7b598df7 <comment><USER2> Holy shit. This is diabolical. And brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is quite authentic. Great post.</comment>


Contributing os.scandir() to Python - <AUTHOR> http://benhoyt.com/writings/scandir/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the write-up. It does a good job of communicating:

* the joys of contributing to Python

* how time and labor intensive the process can be

* the complexities of dealing with multiple operating systems

* what it is like to be alternately helped or hindered by other developers

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that sort of thing is an often-underappreciated benefit of Python as an ecosystem - it has a well-defined procedure for adding and changing things to core language and library, that strikes a pretty good balance between agility and prudence, and generally yields great results.

</comment><comment><USER4> That was a great write-up. I liked how you not only covered the technical details, but the human details, too -- how to get your idea noticed by python- dev, how to gain early adoption.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the additional windows attributes initiated here:

[https://github.com/benhoyt/scandir/issues/22](https://github.com/benhoyt/scandir/issues/22)

(Source: It was my issue :) )

I was long using the project since it was named betterwalk and was very glad to see PEP 471 approved. Great work Ben.

(Now I just need to upgrade the project I use it in to 3.5)

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha, I'd completely forgotten that had come via a scandir issue, sorry! Fixed here: [https://github.com/benhoyt/benhoyt.github.com/commit/0c156b9...](https://github.com/benhoyt/benhoyt.github.com/commit/0c156b9b16d918eca09e3eb6e38e78ead992a2fc) (let me know your name if you want to be called out by name).

<comment><USER5> Ha, nah... that wasn't the idea of mentioning it. Probably shouldn't have...

Thanks again for all your efforts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great work! To contribute to Python, would you say it's necessary to be comfortable with writing C code?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, not necessarily at all -- there's a ton of pure Python code in the standard library, so if you're adding to or making improvements there, no need to know C. And then there's documentation and other non-code issues too.

<comment><USER6> Perfect, thanks. Been wanting to contribute to Python upstream for a while now, but it's overwhelming every time I take a look. :)

<comment><USER7> Remember that status quo is the sane default. Much more important to fix bugs and add docs than to add features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting. I just benchmarked this (the python2.7 module _only_ ) with an internal application that walks over filesystems and found scandir.walk() to, inexplicably, be slightly slower than the os.walk().

I think part of the issue (though I've not tested this yet) is that we're stat()-ing every single file _anyway_ so with os cache considered, it really ends up not mattering anyway.

I thought the additional cost of the extra system calls (even if they were entirely cached in memory) would add up, but, it seems like _something_ the scandir module is doing is just less efficient in general.

Devising some much simpler and more controllable tests (but still with our exact workload) and testing more though.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very intriguing to me -- I've rarely/never seen it be _slower_ , and usually at least several times faster. Are you using benchmark.py? If so, can you send a link to a Gist with the output? It may be that the C module is not compiling, and it's falling back to the much slower pure Python module.

<comment><USER8> I wasn't running your specific benchmark test. I've been running some more controlled tests now that show it basically being on-par with listdir() which I still consider completely oddball.

Also, not remotely hating on what you did here. I actually wrote/tested a very similar concept in python several years ago for the exact same reason. My C-skills (and mostly time resources) weren't really up to par to try to get it included in core. I mostly _really_ want this to work as well as I think it should :)

I'll run some tests with your benchmark.py (and compare that to my benchmark script) and post some results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This issue has been looked into decades ago.

NFSv3 introduced READDIRPLUS in 1995: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1813#section-3.3.17](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1813#section-3.3.17)

FUSEv3 (the library) will have support for such a call. It is already in the git repository ( [https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/blob/master/include/fuse_...](https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/blob/master/include/fuse_lowlevel.h#L1030) ) .

Sadly, there is still no syscall on linux to do a "readdirplus" (usually called xgetdents()).

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice to read this man thanks! Interesting to see your experience in this process and what it's like to contribute to such a project. I've stopped writing alot of python code admitedly because i prefer to torture myself with unnecesarily tedious things... but i like how python evolves, and this kind of contributions are really important and what makes me feel python is one of the more powerfull scripting / programming tools if you're not writing in machine native codes. thanks for the writeup, and ofcourse your contribution to improving all of our codez =]

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice work, I'll keep it in mind next time.</comment>


Challenges of Deployment to ECS - <AUTHOR> https://convox.com/blog/ecs-challenges/ <comment><USER2> _" Say we want to deploy a web service as four containers running off the "httpd" image....This is simple to ask for but deceptively hard to actually make happen."_

...and yet, would take almost no work to set up using a non-dockerized workflow. I don't understand why so many people are putting themselves through this. It's becoming common to hear people from dinky little startups going down dark rabbit holes trying to build their infrastructure like Google -- but it's a total distraction!

If you're running a service with a small number of machines, don't do any of this. Architect a sensible multi-AZ deployment (i.e. a cluster of 2-3 machines, an ELB, a VPN, and a firewall/bastion server), spin up instances by hand, and upgrade things as needed. Create AMIs for your machine classes, and get yourself used to working with a sensible upgrade schedule. Doing this for a small number of machines (e.g. N <= 25) won't take an appreciable amount of your time.

Once you start to have more machines than that, you'll probably also have the resources to get someone who knows what they're doing to set up more "magical" automated management schemes. Don't bury yourself in unnecessary complexity just because it's the hot new tech of the moment.

<comment><USER3> I mostly agree with your basic point, but I disagree that AWS is a necessary part of the situation. If you aren't dynamically spinning VM's up/down depending on usage - that is, if your EC2 instances are a pretty fixed list of always-on machines - you're throwing money away, _and_ you're spending more time and effort to make use of proprietary infrastructure you _aren 't_ using as intended.

If you have a 'static' number of servers for your app - just rend a bunch of VPS. Use whatever automated setup tool works for you. I'm a _big_ fan of Debian config & meta packages, but ansible, chef, hell even fucking shell scripts will work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our own experience with ECS has been similarly negative. While this was 6 months ago, I am not aware of significant improvement.

In general, the whole thing feels rushed and duct taped together. Networking model (inherited from Docker) doesn't play nice with ELB.

\- The built-in AWS tools for monitoring are not container aware.

\- We've had multiple occurrences of the ECS daemon dying.

\- Very little visibility into the progress of deploys. The API/console will report something as "running", when it in fact was still loading up.

If you watch their videos, they promise integration with Marathon, but if you look at the code, it's in "proof of concept" stage.

At this stage, GCE is significantly ahead of AWS. Out of the box, you get a top notch container story, logging and monitoring.

<comment><USER5> You also get a private registry. And all the complexities of authentication are wrapped up in a nice package.

And upgrading your cluster is easy too. Just one command and it rolls it out server-by-server, doing a full health check afterwards.

k8s (not specific to GCE) also integrates with network drives, so attaching and maintain persistent storage is really easy.

I've used ECS and it feels just so vanilla by comparison. AWS should have just built a hosted cluster system, rather than one from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> All of this works without requiring that we install or operate our own container scheduler system like Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Core OS Fleet.

You can use kubernetes without installing and operating it yourself on Google Cloud PLatform too, it's called Google Container Engine but it's k8s under the hood.

My experience with ECS is very brief, as contrasted with several months working daily with k8s. My first impressions of ECS was that it is cobbled together from a bunch of existing AWS services, and as such it requires you to get far more involved in the various APIs than kubernetes on GCP does.

Overall kubernetes feels more like a cohesive abstraction because that's what it is. ECS by comparison feels like a solution pieced together out of Amazon's existing proprietary parts because that's what it is. I'm sure they will be improving this.

<comment><USER7> It would be amazing if Amazon just used kubernetes in the background like Google compute uses it for their container engine. It seems like everyone knows kubernetes did the best job at container orchestration, but everyone wants to keep their own tools (docker, aws, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest missed opportunity of ECS that AWS missed was completely hiding the complexity and concerns of managing EC2 instances. If you use ECS you have to deal with the complexity of both and manage those resources. The dream being sold by the container industry is that you don't really care about the machines you're containers are running on. ElasticBeanstalk gets this right because they hide that concern.

ECS is akin to selling git on top of SVN. It doesn't really make sense.

Bryan Cantrill gave a talk about the craziness of running containers on VMs at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFIEH3vXPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFIEH3vXPw).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that starts taking you down the path to "serverless" \- eg. AWS Lambda. I think iron.io has a fully container-based approach here (I've only used their pre-baked containers though).

<comment><USER3> An application written purely in client-side code, but that still requires a server-side component is not "server-less".

A "server-less" app is one that literally has no need for it. Just because you aren't in control of the server-provided resources the app _depends_ on, doesn't make it "server-less".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Author here.

I'd love to compare more notes with everyone about deploying to ECS.

If you want to play with an ECS cluster, `convox install` is a free and open source tool that sets everything up in minutes. Little to no AWS knowledge required. [https://convox.com/docs/overview/](https://convox.com/docs/overview/)

<comment><USER10> I would love to hear what advantages ECS has over Kubernetes. I've found that Kubernetes solves all seven of those challenges (and more – service discovery is a challenge, too!) pretty handily, and is cloud provider independent on top of that (but can have provider-dependent tie-ins where desired).

1\. Cluster set up on AWS/GCP is fairly automatic. On vanilla machines it's straightforward, but involved, to install.

2\. Kubernetes relies on etcd, which uses Raft, to run. It does depend on one master node to provide an API server to control the instances, though.

3\. Pods have health checks, and deployments will halt if new instances fail their health checks.

4\. Deployments handle rolling updates within the cluster

5\. The scheduler can cordon off or drain nodes before destroying them, and new nodes can easily be added to the cluster

6\. fluentd is often run in a DaemonSet for this purpose

7\. kubectl makes deployment feel like playing with legos – interacting with a bunch of objects in a predictable and documented manner. In the case you laid out, for example, many rapid deployment version changes are handled gracefully by the deployment object, scaling down the old two versions and scaling up the new version.

<comment><USER9> The big advantages I see:

AWS ecosystem. Everyone is already running stuff here, or wants to.

Particularly data. If I have important stuff in RDS or Redshift I want to run my apps in a VPC next to that.

Managed service. I don't want to be responsible for etcd. I manage 150 clusters and counting. I couldn't do this without ECS and DynamoDB and their excellent SLAs.

I am aware GKE does this. When I use Kubernetes that's what I'll use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ECS is order of magnitude more complex than almost anything I had experienced with (taking out Marathon).

I found ElasticBeanstalk to me MUCH simpler for Docker based deployments. It's using ECS behind the scenes for multi-container instance.

You essentially deploy a zip with with a Dockerrun.json metadata file and it handles everything for you, including rolling deploys based on your auto scaling groups.

I never found the ECS definitions of Task and the rest really intuitive to work with.

<comment><USER9> I didn't realize ElasticBeanstalk delegated to ECS. Thanks for sharing.

ElasticBeanstalk does have some serious simplicity advantages for the type of apps it was designed for.

I'll definitely second your opinion that raw ECS can be very challenging. It's begging for some good tools to help you manage it.

<comment><USER12> I believe ElasticBeanstalk only uses ECS if you're doing multi container. If you're just deploying a single Docker image, I believe it's still using the Docker AMI on an EC2 instance.

<comment><USER11> I mentioned that in my original comment. Yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've generally enjoyed my time with ECS and I think it's pretty likely it will be a strong-contender/the-winner of the docker wars, because net-net if you're starting from scratch without experience and a skilled ops team it's the easiest to Standup.

But I definitely agree that at this stage there's some oddly rough edges. I'm glad to hear logging is a bit better. But I would love if that were just solved by default. Similarly build/deploy. I think a teeny bit more standardization and UI would make that a ton easier.

Overall though I'm still bullish. I put together a sample terraform config that is the skeleton for a basic rails app in ECS [https://github.com/jdwyah/rails-docker-ecs-datadog- traceview...](https://github.com/jdwyah/rails-docker-ecs-datadog-traceview- terraform)

</comment><comment><USER14> I found ECS to be quite good honestly (recent experience).

I have some multi-server deploys running with load balancers, rolling restarts, SSL, private registries and more.

In fact, I like it so much that I created an end to end course that teaches you all about using roughly half a dozen AWS resources to deploy and scale a web application with ECS.

Details can be found here (it's an online course taken at your own pace and costs $20):

[https://www.udemy.com/scaling-docker-on- aws/?couponCode=HN_2...](https://www.udemy.com/scaling-docker-on- aws/?couponCode=HN_20)

The example application is a multi-service rails app that uses postgres, redis and sidekiq but you can follow along without needing any rails experience.

<comment><USER15> Good course, I'm about half way through, though from the comments in this thread I'm wondering if I should just give GKE a try.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, I'm glad you like it so far. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with trying new things if you want to experiment with Google's platform.

<comment><USER15> Just in case that came across wrong, I wasn't taking a dig at you. I'm enjoying and will use the knowledge from your course even if we opt to go with GKE. I started with ECS just because I have a lot more AWS experience.

<comment><USER14> It's ok, I knew your intentions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >All of this works without requiring that we install or operate our own container scheduler system like Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Core OS Fleet.

vs

>We need to bring and configure our own instances, load balancers, logging, monitoring and Docker registry. We probably also want some tools to build Docker images, create Task Definitions, and to create and update Tasks Services.

Doesn't sound like much of a win then. That sounds annoying. I just set up mesos/dcos on AWS, and it sounds like the same amount of effort, only now I've got a platform-independent solution with great UI and cli, along with load balancers and routing. Is ECS worth the effort?

</comment><comment><USER11> The first time I heard/read about ECS, I thought it's going to be like Lambda for containers.

Amazon took the managing instances, managing containers, selected the hardest to comprehend parts and wrapped with with a cumbersome JSON definition.

Marathon takes a much simpler approach, but it lacks the control over the underlying cluster.

ECS should be a combination of the marathon with control over the underlying cluster. I deploy a container and I don't want to worry about anything else after that.

For now, I'd seriously focus on HTTP facing services. With simple health checks rules for scaling.

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't rule out the Azure Container Service, which is based on the open source DC/OS[1] and is, arguably, the most robust and proven container system.

[1] [http://dcos.io](http://dcos.io)

<comment><USER18> Can you say more? Many, many businesses bet their workloads on Google Container Engine and has been GA for nearly a year with a 99.95% SLA, was there something about it that we could do to demonstrate that it's robust or proven better?

Disclosure: I work at Google on Google Container Engine

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py any tutum users available to weigh in?</comment>


Pinboard is 4 years old - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/07/pinboard_is_four_years_old/

<comment><USER2> I recently spent some time thinking of the apps that most inspire me as a solo entrepreneur. Pinboard is one of them:

* it scratches the developer's own itch

* it's basically a one-person operation

* it wasn't the first tool of its kind, it's the superior tool

* it charged customers from the word go, and if it didn't work the developer would be doing other interesting things instead

</comment><comment><USER3> User base seems to be capping off (23K active in 2012 -> 23K active in 2013). What's the reason behind this?</comment>


The Awesome Foundation: $1K grants every month in the name of awesomeness - <AUTHOR> http://awesomefoundation.org/

<comment><USER2> Someone from boston should submit a proposal to manually curate the MBTA's scheduling information and produce a version in Google Transit Feed Spec: [http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specificati...](http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html)

<comment><USER3> someone from boston should also make a microsite, is_it_raining_in_boston.com

      def index( request ):
        return HttpResponse('yes, damn it')

<comment><USER4> in Arc

(dfn indx (rqst) (rspns t))

<comment><USER5> t = 'yes, damn it' in Arc?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I would use $1000 to purchase lab reagents and host a class teaching participants how to sequence a short segment of their choice from their own genome - for free!

<comment><USER6> They are pooling their money together to entice smart, creative individuals of their choice to spend one month each at their coworking office by giving them recognition and paying them $1,000 to be there. This will be a great way to meet and learn from such people who they might not ever hear about or meet otherwise, never-mind work alongside for a month. It also gives the house some publicity as well as a list of cool people who were "guests".

<comment><USER7> How is it not helpful or useful??

<comment><USER6> It was his first (or second) post on News.YC, and it seemed sarcastic. (I've removed the first sentence of my paragraph.)

<comment><USER8> The kicker here is that OP of this thread appears to be Mac Cowell, one of the Awesome Foundation members. <http://awesomefoundation.org/controls/whois>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like a great way to get people to give you tons of ideas on what to do yourself ;)

I'm not saying this is what's happening here of course...

<comment><USER10> believe me, we don't want ownership over any of the ideas. we're also aware that "no-strings-attached" often is not, so I'll grant you that this may all seem rather suspicious. Honestly, I hope people get fabulously happy and can quit the day job off of the $1000 we're handing over. Doing that for somebody is my ROI. But even if all it does is lower the activation energy required for somebody to get off his/her ass and do something awesome or encourage already awesome people to keep going, I think we all win. We could use a little more unfettered joy around us, don't you think?

<comment><USER11> I think this is a great idea, and if I could I'd support a 5K and 10K grant for more complex projects.

Something I have noticed: people tend to do better under a little pressure.

So if you could have some kind of requirements, like regular emails, submitting a video of your work, or an online interview at the end, you might get better results.

Just a thought. Good luck with this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this parenthetical is a typo:

      (> ~500 words for you precisionists)

<comment><USER13> Good call, I'll fix it.

Also just a warning the site seems to be under a bunch of load right now :-( We'll be keeping an eye on it, but sorry in advance if you can't get through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The source code for that page is most definitely not awesome. :(

<comment><USER15> pagehtml.replace(RegExp(/\<p\>/,g), 'bigfatmonkeydick');

Huh?

<comment><USER13> gotta love easter eggs right? to be fair that function isn't called.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could this be a way of taking ideas? Sounds a bit sketchy to me... specially since the domain is registered to an individual, and not a group/foundation...

<comment><USER17> The Board of Trustees has a few people who are affiliated with reputable organizations (BetaHouse, Microsoft, etc). Seems legitimate to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's not clear to me is if the $1000 is actually supposed to help fund the Awesomeness, or if it's basically just intended as a reward for doing something Awesome. For instance, should submitted ideas be confined to something achievable within that budget? I assume not, but the whole thing could use a bit more clarity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Either. We're keeping the whole thing rather open ended, at least to start. That said, we're happy to answer any questions and we'll add a FAQ to the site sometime soon. Also, for those in the Boston area, we'll host an information session at BetaHouse in a couple weeks.

<comment><USER18> I can say that if this had the double-intention of functioning as marketing for Betahouse, it definitely worked on me. I have every intention of keeping track of your events, etc, from here on out.

<comment><USER19> Oh god! We're being watched now :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How are they funding this? Is everybody just chipping in $100 a month?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. Individual contributions of $100 a month pooled together.

<comment><USER21> How do I get in on the contributing group? [email@example.com]

<comment><USER19> We're (currently) at a fixed number, BUT we are hoping that other people soon spin off their own Awesome Foundations (in a barcamp like manner). We'll be in touch though soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like the idea a lot. The font however, hurts my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone using the form should be ineligible. Modesty is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems like an interesting way to create a sort of "rolling YCombinator" if there was a little bit more money being tossed around. Say maybe giving out $3-5000 each month, creating 12 new business opportunities a year, each one launching in a somewhat timed fashion in sync with the others from other months.

</comment><comment><USER25> What the hell?

[http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2422/3682531265_1ea4ddaa78_o....](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2422/3682531265_1ea4ddaa78_o.png)

<comment><USER25> Ok not sure why I am getting downmodded. But this warning actually pops up with AVG on betahouse.org everytime same with chrome. Anybody from betahouse bothered to check if AVG incorrectly blocking their website and issuing warning?</comment></comment>


Kubo: Kubernetes on Cloud Foundry Powered by BOSH - <AUTHOR> http://pivotal.io/kubo <comment><USER2> I think a better link for the general HN crowd would be the deployment repo: [https://github.com/pivotal-cf-experimental/kubo- deployment](https://github.com/pivotal-cf-experimental/kubo-deployment)</comment>


A sobering Internet metric regarding Haiti - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2010/01/14/internet-usage-in-haiti/

<comment><USER2> What is more sobering is that, even before the quake, it appears that there were fewer than 10K Firefox users in a country of 9M people! It's not a surprise to me at all that the country's communications infrastructure was damaged.

<comment><USER3> Um... _More_ sobering? I have to disagree.

<comment><USER2> The country's previous lack of eletronic knowledge sharing is certainly more sobering than the lack of Firefox pings. That a 3rd World country's communications infrastructure could be damaged by an earthquake is hardly surprising. That 2%+ of any country's population could die in a single natural disaster.....nevermind the ping rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OT: Does anyone know how I can disable firefox's daily ping to mozilla?

Checking about:config, I see browser.send_pings, however, that controls <a ping>.

<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.send_pings>

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few automatic connections made to Mozilla servers by products distributed by Mozilla. The are mentioned in the privacy policy: <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/privacy/firefox-en.html>

And there is a support article with instructions on disabling them: [http://support.mozilla.com/en- US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequeste...](http://support.mozilla.com/en- US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequested+connections#Auto_update_checking)

Note that these "pings" aren't implemented as "phone home" type tracking. Rather, they are necessary parts of useful features such as automatic update tracking and extension blocklisting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So... People do not log on to the internet after an earthquake? Is there something surprising about this?

<comment><USER6> The Internet could be very useful as a way to connect and find relatives and nearby aid, as well as information in general. If there was a major earthquake where I live and I still could get online, you could bet that I'd use this to find out as much as possible about the situation.

The graph is evidence of the complete breakdown of infrastructure in Haiti.

<comment><USER7> Their probably was a very basic internet infrastructure to begin with, based on the graph you can pretty much conclude that internet pretty much doesn't exist there right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _it's based on a once daily "ping" that we see from active users_

Slightly off topic but are they referring to the opt-in "provide anonymous" usability statistics or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> See my above comment regarding where the statistic came from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apparently, no-one in Haiti stays up past 10pm.

<comment><USER10> Or the only installations of Firefox are at PC cafes, places likely to be closed at night.</comment></comment>