Ask HN: I am shutting down. And starting up, again? What do you think? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I've been around enough for quite some time to see people excited about building new things and then some shutting the very same business down a year or two later. It's just a thing that happens and is most likely a smart call to make in most of these cases.
Today, I made the decision to shut down my business. Something I've worked on for over 2 years right after quitting an insanely well paid job at Microsoft. I am running my bank accounts dry (there's something left, no worries) and did not succeed in pushing my revolution enough.
I am starting a new project called urbanvisitor.com and I wanted to see what you guys think beforehand. Opinions are always to be treated with caution, but the last time, I was the only one who was 100% sure I'll succeed, so that didn't work out well.
So quickly: I want to build a real-time scheduling/meeting slots application centered around the idea of meeting new contacts (professionally, friendly) anywhere you go. I travel a LOT and always try hard to meet locals. Anyone I met turned out to be the absolute best experience I could have had in a particular city (I've always kept it professional, so that helps).
I want to have an ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES section for every large city in the world. As a local, you can scan the list and suggest for anyone on it to meet you. As a traveler, you can allot a number of slots (say 5 slots each 1 hour on Tuesday) available, receive meeting inquiries and can accept whoever you want and deny (in a friendly way) those you are not interested in meeting.
What do you think? Help me out guys, I value this community so much and would really benefit from any thought you might have on this. I have the man/technical-power and business experience to execute on it, it's really just a question of whether people need this enough.
Thanks again.
edit: just adding this real quick, the comments below is exactly what i value in hacker news. thanks so much. i hope this place stays like it is now for a long time to come. <comment><USER2> This is a very hard kind of service to bootstrap - I'm certain it's been tried before. That's not to say that you can't do it, but it's a high-risk project.

I'd suggest trying to prove the concept without developing any actual technology - something as simple as a shared Google Docs spreadsheet might be enough. That way you reduce the risk of wasting months working on the wrong technology, but you can still get a good idea for if the concept has legs.

<comment><AUTHOR> well risk is just a matter of money/time invested on this one. I still have a bit left to get this off the ground and i love making working prototypes (12-year long developer) despite my business background. so that should be the easy part and risk-wise, i've had great success with weekend projects in the past - so i am planning to invest a couple of weekends to get the prototype up and then go from there. i have a good network globally, so i am hoping for referrals on that part to get people excited. it's obviously more about the hosts first than the guests, i'd assume.

<comment><USER3> You didn't listen to what he said...

He said that you should test it while dedicating minimal resources. In this case, a Google Doc spreadsheet could do the trick. It's a great piece of advice.

Why spend multiple weekends working on building a prototype when you could start testing the idea's viability (virtually) straight away?

<comment><AUTHOR> well, i like the simplicity of a very minimalistic approach. at the same time, i feel it will require a certain presentation to get enough people to sign up. not breaking a sweat with the developing here, this one is more about bringing on the right people. so i'll be investing more time on refining the message and pushing it out than developing the site. but i guess a google docs is just too much of a gamble to risk my first set of contacts to the feedback of 'google docs? seriously?' -- of course it's the easiest way to test the idea. i'm not talking pay a developer two grand to build this and we'll take a look afterwards. i'm taking very simple (hopefully not another bootstrap, but maybe) implementation with a database hookup and basic design. i was thinking a facebook page could help as well to test the idea, but again, too risky to burn contacts. no? curious to hear a counter statement here... thanks!

<comment><USER4> Ugh. I am getting some serious "when I ask for advice I mean tell me how great this will be" vibes from this thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> i find it easier to challenge those with negative opinions and prefer when they take time to follow up. this is by far the most helpful stuff here. i take it from your comment history you're a critical person, which i'd definitely value if you added a tiny bit of what you actually thought about the idea. still curious.

<comment><USER5> Respectfully, I think this is a good example of why some of the best people on HN are getting more reluctant to participate in Ask threads.

Don't do this: Ask -> "Challenge those with negative opinions"

Do this: Ask -> Consider opinions -> ask more smart questions.

simonw and yoseph are exactly right. They are asking you, " _How do you know that this is something people want?_ " Just because it would be valuable to _you_ doesn't mean it's going to be valuable to enough other people to make enough money for you to live on.

You could find out if you have a market or not by throwing together something really small and simple and using that for a while, or you can find out by building a fancy website and doing everything else you're talking about to make your first presentation pretty, and then a year from now find yourself in the same position you're in now except with less money.

How many people need this?

How much are they willing to pay?

How are you going to make money?

How are you going to reach your market? (Can you partner up somehow with AirBnB or other popular travelers' sites?)

<comment><AUTHOR> just one point: was never planning to build a 'fancy' website first. i just wanted something a bit more polished than a google docs.

everything else, yeah, i see your point and sort of feel bad. i get what you're saying and it makes sense. i do have an attitude that was trained to challenge negative statements because there's just so much 'this sucks!' on the internet and i always want to understand the motivation behind it.

on the statement of testing viability, 100% agree. asking around here whether you guys know if this will succeed or not is the wrong approach. i should have showed up with the google docs here and asked people to use it please and tell me what i missed. agree.

<comment><USER5> I get why you're reluctant to start with Google Docs. I would be too. Can I propose an in-between solution?

How about a really simple form that just adds people to a mailing list? "I am in [town]. I would like to receive an email when a visitor is in my area. [subscribe]" ... coupled with, "I am visiting [town]. I'd like to meet people. [send]"

If it stays small, you can manage this manually with little effort, and you'll know that it's probably not a service that lots of people are looking for. If it gets big, you won't be able to manage it manually anymore, but now you'll know whether or not people are interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> that!!! i've seen this before a couple of times on HN and i always signed up. damn. why didn't i think of this right away. f* launchrock :) this is it. i'm serious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I meant to write a response earlier but I just left the window open. Hopefully you'll still read my personal opinion about your venture and it helps.

I too have the problem you are talking about. I'm very interested in the people in places I visit and taking part is "local activities". I've used resources such as local mailing lists. reddit etc. to find interesting people and places to go to at my travels. I've had major success with that, for example I had the pleasure of going on a huge bike ride with someone from the NYC Reddit mailing list from Central Park to Kony island. I had a 12 hour connection and I don't think I could have spent those 12 hours better (I also visited relatives, so my schedule was super tight). This is still one of my best travel experiences.

I hope by now I've established I'm a perfect audience for your startup. I would love to have a few meetings with local startup people at places like Berlin for example. But I would feel VERY bad about the experience if I needed to pay money for it. I would love to reciprocate by giving someone a place to stay in Israel, paying for a drink or lunch (or both) or tweeting something good as long as I actually enjoyed it. But paying for it with cash upfront would make me feel like this isn't a genuine human experience and interaction, but more like bought time.

I'm not saying that is something everyone feels, it might just be me, but all I can offer you is my personal opinions and experiences.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks so much. i am still glued to this thread, i soak all the comments in and it greatly helps shape the idea. i am working on it right now and hopefully can launch something soon. of course, i will make sure it's a free experience for anyone who is not using it professionally

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do like the idea. I travelled a lot in the past but never made an effort to reach out to interesting people, so when planning future trips, I'm gonna make an effort to connect with local startup scenes.

I think for this to work you have to really define your community. Exclusivity will help, something like asmallworld.com (an invite-only social network).

Off the top of my head, I can think of two groups who'd use something like this:

1) people like us, ie entrepreneurs, and others in the startup world (investors and so on).

2) partyers, who want to find the cool places that aren't yet in the tourist guidebooks.

I think both groups would like some exclusivity. I mean, in any local startup scene, the most interesting people are oversubscribed - all the founders of no-traction startups want to grab coffee with the guy who just raised a $10 mil Series B.

When the $10 mil CEO travels to a new place, he'd probably like to grab coffee with founders at a similar level to talk shop. But those guys don't necessarily know who he is or why he's worth talking to.

If you can get people to say "hey, this person messaged me on urbanvisitor.com, he must be worth meeting" - then you'd have a decent business.

<comment><AUTHOR> i really, really like your comment. it reflects exactly what i was hoping for someone else to bring up. i agree on the two groups and i agree on the 'oversubscribed people' issue. i actually love the term. i truly believe that most services fail to deliver on this and end up having lots of hookers use it with fake profiles, or joe the weird power networking guy who sells nothing but his life consultancy work to you and keeps requesting meetings... so fully agree. that's crucial to nail. thanks isaac.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it seems a lot of social sites don't grasp some of the underlying dynamics of how social networks actually work in the real world. If you can work out those dynamics, you'll have a hit.

Despite people thinking he's an awkward nerd who got lucky, Mark Zuckerberg is actually very good at this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be critical to ensure that people meeting share the same goal in the encounter. The goal of the meeting should be explicit. One way to do that would be to target a very specific demographic which might be likely to use such a service in a gratifying manner. This would have the benefit of helping you market to your target audience, if you can make the case that it solves their specific problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the comment. So far, I know for a fact that entrepreneurs love traveling and meeting people, so that definitely is a group I am going to cater to. Additionally, there's a layer of folks who just want to get showed around town by a local, possibly even paying that person dinner or whatever - which is a bit of a different scenario. So I am still trying to figure out which one I should be focusing on first. The "same goal" topic is crucial, I am currently wrapping my head around a solid haves/wants type of profile that is as little typing as possible and a lot of pulling data from other networks so that you'll immediately get an idea of the other person's social profile. Plus, your one-line meeting reason.

So, yeah, thanks. I really appreciate help at this point. Solid advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You need to verify that you're solving a need that people have, and would pay to solve. Not sure that you've done that here.

Highly recommended:

<http://theleanstartup.com>

<http://www.runningleanhq.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the advice. i know the lean movement very well and I am not a very religious person per se. but i do value your thought on whether that's something people need. this is what I am starting right now, i am sourcing any feedback i can get (and not only here). there's always people who would not use such a service for sure - but I want to know why, and for those who want something like that, i'd be really curious to hear what they imagine it like.

i'm a massive fan of iteration, so that's the easy part, just want to make sure i'll scout the field for qualitative input a bit right now. i value your guys' opinion a lot, so this is why i am starting out here. thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a counterpoint to some of the views already expressed, I would happily pay for this. I'm planning to take my freelance/consulting business full time starting January, and have become hyper-aware of the importance of my personal network and meeting new people (not even for business opportunities, just to understand a wider cross-section of people in general). I'm also planning to travel a lot and work remotely--in other words, what you are proposing sounds ideally suited to me.

I already signed up for your list, feel free to shoot me an email if you want to know more (its in my profile).

<comment><AUTHOR> as soon as we have pro accounts, you'll be getting one for free. thanks again, i really appreciate early help and always try hard to return the favor.

thanks dave, is <http://blackchair.net> what you're taking full-time?

<comment><USER10> That's awesome Roman (it's Roman, right?), I'm looking forward to it! And yes, Black Chair is going to be my full-time gig, although the website is a major work in progress right now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A speaker at a Founders Institute event, his name escapes me, spoke about his experience starting this very business. The problem he encountered was that at events, or any social gathering, there was typically a small percentage of people in attendance, call them the stars, that everyone else wanted to meet. But the stars only wanted to meet other stars, meaning the demand is not evenly distributed across would-be users. So, if you are to go ahead with it, I suggest you consider how to overcome this issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> that is part of the core problems i wrote down. imagine paul graham is in new york for a day and decides to meet some people in 30 min slots on a thursday afternoon. everyone's gonna request a meeting. but it's his call to move requests into the actual booked slots. the person arriving in a city is the one who accepts the meeting based on the incoming requests (filterable by haves/wants). does that make sense? would it be smarter to have locals accept/deny?

<comment><USER12> This is the thing though, do you really think someone like pg would have difficulty finding A-level people to meet when he travels? The thing about A-level people is they already know other A-level people who can make an intro in that city. And actually now they'd probably just have their assistant do all the work and have a scheduled lined up for when they get there. So your service is going to be for < A-listers, which nobody cares that much to meet.

Looking at the travel market more broadly you have people who travel extensively do it for either business or pleasure, but mostly business. The kind of person that travels for business a lot usually has a packed schedule without much free time. Any free time on their trip that they do have they're probably going to use to take it easy. However "taking it easy" on a business trip is pretty crummy since you often don't know anybody.

Here's an idea - a service that is focused on frequent business travelers. Not the A-listers, but regular professionals that just travel a lot and would probably get along really well with other business professionals that travel a lot.

You can integrate with TripIt as a way to have exclusivity (must go on > threshold trips/miles in timespan) you also then have TripIt information to know where people are going. Automatically the service can see which Trippers are going to be in the same location on the same night (on a trip) and automatically say "Hey, there's 10 trippers in Manhattan on Thursday night, are you interested in an event?" Reply Yes and the service creates the event that people just have to show up to. You as the service will make the reservation, and handle all the logistics of notifying people. People just have to say "yes I'm interested".

<comment><AUTHOR> just first off, fucking love streak. now my response:

everything you say is true. a-listers won't have problems meeting other a-listers. but that's not what i'm trying to achieve. i do know though that sometimes, a-listers might be curious/open to meet others as well. couple of examples:

lars hinrichs is running hackfwd, germany incubator, definitely a-lister. he's a cool guy who regularly tunes in to random startups/founders and wants to hear what they're working on. two 30 minute slots during a business trip where he can select from 'meeting requests' would probably be interesting to him. that's startup world though.

say you're jimmy fallon. crazy popular. he flies to london and says he wants to meet 3 random writers who can request a meeting with him. promotional opportunity.

or, you, the guy from streak, goes to paris, does not want to be bothered by random 1-person startup folks but rather meet someone who might be a tech guy, but his dad owns a french bakery and invites you to take your girlfriend there and see what they do. probably worth that hour?

just a couple of thoughts on that.

then, for professional travelers, i used to fly a lot for microsoft and i always had time. evenings, or sometimes late afternoons. i knew people in cities i traveled to, but sometimes you're back in chicago for the fourth time and feel like meeting someone you don't know yet but who shares your interest or works in a similar sector, etc.

the frequent flyer thought is very interesting. as long as i get to keep out the networking crazies, that'd be a perfect monetization aspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. I don't think people will pay for that 2\. I don't think there will be enough users to decide how to monetize later.

I can speak from my voice only and I won't use such service.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! well, one thing i've learned for sure was that there will be paid accounts right away. one person per city or one meeting per week or something, above it'll be paid, depending on the dynamics of the offers market.

i never thought people would pay for a simple twitter analytics service (i felt it would be the big guys at most), but with fruji.com (side project that made me good money, and keeps going) it's 90% regular people, 10% business paying for these accounts.

what i'd be curious about is, if you're traveling much? say, you go to new york and there's a guy from general assembly willing to show you around the local startups they host? yes/no? i'm really curious!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So this is like serendipitous-travel-networking.

This seems like a small market to me. Even if you got it off the ground it would be difficult to charge for it.

How about removing the travel aspect, and just start a serendipitous- networking service? People sign up with their LinkedIn's and/or Facebooks, and you connect people who would benefit from knowing each other.

This seems like a better idea, but still not a great one. Monetization will likely be difficult.

<comment><AUTHOR> i wanted to do that first, for conferences. but there were some really good providers out there doing this and i wanted to see if they can get it off the ground for conferences... so i looked into the travel-associated aspect ... but it's really just another tie into your life. meeting is the core transaction, whether you do it at a conference, lunch or in a new city you're traveling to, i feel.

and yes, agree. market is small. very small compared to building another service on top of twitter's api ... people just flock to this stuff... so yeah, true that. 100 million dollar business? not sure ... i just really want this to work for me, for now. i'd use this everytime i go somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I definitely echo the thoughts in the other comments: is this solving a real problem? I can imagine a traveler wanting this, but the locals? Maybe tour guides could get into this, but the traveler + tour guide combo seems like something you aren't going after.

There is _a lot_ if money in tourism, but I am not sure this is an especially fruitful angle to get at it. It could be a starting point though.

Goal #1: get someone to pay for it!

<comment><AUTHOR> i agree. with my other projects, i tried the free and the pay from day 1 models and the paid models performed much much better. it's just another more direct form of validation. and those paying will definitely help shape the service.

and the locals will definitely be the harder group to build up. i have a favorite restaurant here in vienna and i love going there as much as i can. i'd be open to take someone flying in there once a week and hear about their life and plans.

it's really a matter of communicating the 'why' for locals. i don't want anyone to make money off meeting people, that's the wrong direction. i'd rather charge for other things (pro members can do more, ask for meetings in certain premium lists or whatever)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh, and quick follow up: I am trying to make sure that marketers (and hardcore networkers) are identified as such and that say, a certain Mr. Graham could travel without being attacked by 500 crazies (like us) randomly. He gets to pick who to meet based on certain criteria. Vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER16> Your ideas have some similarities with a site that was recently pitched on UK's Dragon's Den <http://www.eatwithalocal.socialgo.com/> might be some inspiration there

<comment><AUTHOR> yes yes yes, that! not necessarily focused on food as main scenario, but message-wise, that's the idea.

what was the feedback like, remember?

<comment><USER16> The pitch wasn't great as the 'dragons' had trouble seeing enough scale to warrant investment. They liked the idea - and their site does have quite a few members when you consider the people running it aren't business or tech savvy. I think it's a good indicator that their is a sizable market out there for this kind of thing.

Deborah Meaden was probably the most qualified investor there for this idea and she anticipated it would be hard to monetize and the budget required to obtain traffic would be substantial based on her experiences with another online membership type business.

To be honest I think they have a decent life style business potential there, they just need more business savvy and tech savvy on their side. If you have a subscription model you know what kind of targets you need to make the business viable, it's just a matter of doing the calculations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> just adding a little comment myself here: the only thing that worries me a bit is the lack of major services offering this already, there probably is a reason... so far, people suggested:

[mingle: close, but not tied to a certain timing/travel aspect]

[vayable: focused on activities, like gidsy]

[gidsy: focused on activities, like vayable]

[letslunch: very close, focused on lunch]

[eatwithalocal.socialgo.com: close, but focused on lunch]

</comment><comment><USER17> I live in paris.. why on earth would I want to take time out of my day, to go meet some random tourist out of the MILLIONS who come every year?

<comment><AUTHOR> can i ask what you do for a living? i'm really curious, i assume tech-focused, student or full-time working? would there be any type of person on earth (probably from the tech community) you'd be happy to meet for an hour (and probably pay you lunch) or so when they come to paris for few days? what type of person would that be? totally understand if you are not interested in meeting strange foreigners, you're french after all ... HA :) no please, i'm from austria, i wish I could live in paris and speak french, i'm not kidding. i envy you and everyone else in that city everytime i visit.

<comment><USER17> Sure, I was a student.. . now i'm a tech-focused entrepreneur. I work on a flexible schedule, usually at nights. Enjoy the day exercising, being with my gf. I can't think of any one in particular i'd like to just meet offhand, but usually when I do have free time to go out, I'd prefer to spend it with friends I know. I'm pretty sure most people here would feel the same..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are you familiar with Let's Lunch? They do something similar.

<http://letslunch.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> oh cool, i like that! i was trying to locate something similar but had a hard time producing results through google. that's very helpful thank you!

<comment><USER19> There is also <http://www.joinmingle.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> oh i remember mingle i think... always felt it's like a dating/hookups platform.

basically the professional component of what i want to build, at least from what I can tell by their website. going to try this right away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea. I imagine it may have some similarities with "vayable/gidsy" those kind of local-travel experiences startups?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, i was always very curious on the local activity type of businesses, but while i wished more individuals would start offering activities, i guess nobody really felt they were up par with what was expected from someone offering local experiences professionally... so it stuck with professional tour guides and such mostly, i'd assume?

but i believe that these local cooking classes in barcelona and such things are going to take over more and more of vacation planning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For what it's worth, I would pay to use a service like this. Obviously the chicken and egg problem is the tough part here.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! yes, definitely. although i think it'll be a bit harder to get the hosts excited to meet incoming folks. i'll probably start with the entrepreneurial community, they're used to meeting people a lot, as well as couchsurfers.

my main goal is to bring this service to a level where i can use it myself. just chatted with a couple of friends and they said the same thing, make it so that we can use on upcoming trips asap that and anything else is secondary :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What are you shutting down? Twentypeople.com

<comment><AUTHOR> wow, thanks for looking it up. so, in a nutshell: i hate how recruiters make 5 grand a hire and employers constantly struggle to find talent. so i built a site that focused on being hired/hire through your skill graph. i hate job boards, i hate monster, i hate recruiter fees - guess what, after a while, i had to add a job board, and i offered recruiting services and i made 5k a pop. the site itself produced over 2k active users, but that was it. companies asked me to charge for job board listings, not for my self-recruiting credits.

i just couldn't disrupt an industry that keeps using advertising little entries in long lists and making lots of cash with it. as well as recruiters, like real estate agents, another industry that needs to be redone on the social web better.

i started fruij.com as a side/weekend project and people came in from everywhere, i had no plan, no direction, no marketing, but it kept making me money. people just bought pro accounts without me telling them why it's important to have one. they just flocked to it. so that was a bit of an eye opener.

<comment><USER23> Why not build on fruji vs starting anew? How long ago did you launch it? What kind of growth could you see if you focused on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> so fruji is interesting. everytime i shut it down (database issues, twitter api changes, etc.) and turn it back on, people start flocking to it immediately after, and it grows from 10 signups a day to 150 a day quickly. that's awesome. payments are coming in as well, drafting new (more expensive) account types for corporate users looking good and so forth.

but i've had a couple of really popular a-listers sign up, won't name them here, but you all know them. and after i had to tell the 5th over 1M+ follower person that it'll take more than a few days to scan their account (run analysis) based on twitter's api rate limits, it just feels terrible.

i thought i'd just lock out people with accounts over 500k (can you imagine?!), it'd make a lot of things easier.

twitter has been very responsive and i've been able to submit a couple of bugs with them successfully. but i'm really worried this one gets shut down and i do not even have the tiniest chance of doing anything about it.

i'll keep going with it. but it just runs all by itself now. a very smart, distributed system, i just receive payment notifications.

edit: one thing about twitter: i can not spend any of the payments i receive. if twitter shuts me down tomorrow (they likely won't), i have a lot of people who paid me for a yearly account and it's money i need to refund. so that's locked up credit at this point until the year expires.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DimDim web conferencing acquired by Salesforce for $31 million in cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.dimdim.com/# http://m.prnewswire.com/news-releases/salesforcecom-acquires-dimdim-113029849.html<p>Better link, this submitted from my Droid. Acquisition for $31 million in cash. <comment><USER2> Maybe there should be an YC RFS for stuff Salesforce might buy :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow salesforce is really on an acquiring spree right now.

</comment><comment><USER4> Out of the blue. I used to check out DimDim UI a year go to see how far they can use GWT. Never thought the next news coming out from them is this one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Their email to customers and FAQ is atrocious. Good example of how to suck at communication.

<http://www.dimdim.com/faq.html>

<comment><USER6> Looks fine to me. What did you dislike about ti?

<comment><USER5> Seriously? Did you get the email? It basically said "we're closing in 2 months. All you data will be delete."

Nothing about thanks for being a customer. Nothing about what the future holds. Nothing about appreciating our trying of their product instead of WebEx and helping them build value or providing feedback. It was embarrassing.

No clue why I'm being downvoted. It was written by someone who clearly doesn't give a shit about their customers anymore.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I didn't get the email, just read the FAQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And they close new signups rightaway. Can Salesforce not handle a few thousand new customers? Whats the logic behind these decisions?

<comment><USER8> Why should they accept new signups for a service that they plan to close, in the coming months? Its a pretty straightforward logic to me.

<comment><USER7> My bad. I did not catch that earlier. Makes sense

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the WSJ article:

"We bought it for a relatively low cost," Benioff said in the interview. "We're buying it primarily for the technology."

I would love to know how successful DimDim was at aquiring customers for their service, $31m for webinar technology and and engineering staff seems high?

<http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110106-714513.html></comment>


Why it's hard to make machines think original thoughts - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkartificial.org/artificialcreativity/original-thoughts-intro/

<comment><USER2> Yet a predictable system doesn't always lead to expected output.

I once heard a story about a student, probably graduate, who wrote a very complex genetic algorithm, complete with a physics engine, to build (out of blocks representing legs, arms, etc) a creature that could best walk to a finish line.

But what it actually did, after months of work and weeks of running, is stack all the blocks on top of each other and have the creature fall over the finish line, because it only measured how fast the creature reached the finish line, not whether the entire creature crossed it.

And don't tell me that isn't a creative (albeit rules-lawyering) solution to the problem.

<comment><USER3> There was another genetic solution to the problem. They put energy using dampers on all the joints of a walking figure, except one, the neck. After running the simulation, they found the figure, diving head first into the ground, balancing on it's head, tipping, and then repeating, in this bizarre sort of half cartwheel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And yet there are at least "15 instances where genetic programming has created an entity that either infringes or duplicates the functionality of a previously patented 20th-century invention, 6 instances where genetic programming has done the same with respect to a 21st-centry invention, and 2 instances where genetic programming has created a patentable new invention."

See <http://www.genetic-programming.org/>

<comment><USER5> There are also neural networks that have created patentable inventions. One of them is mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> creativity seems to be a word with no referent. what we really seem to mean by creativity is non-obvious solutions to complex problems arrived at by unknown means.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article tends to define creativity as 'something that entertains humans' which is in my view a seriously flawed perspective.

A bird call would entertain another bird more than the greatest music ever written. Human attempts at imitating the bird call are probably at best derivative and usually nonsensical. So from a bird's perspective, humans could be regarded as less creative than birds. Similarly, judging an AI system's creativity by something inherently human as art or literature is to use an unfair measuring stick.

P.S. Actually I don't really know what the state of the art is in bird call simulation is but you get the point right.

<comment><USER5> You are wrong about the article. It explicitly mentions that human activities are "nowhere near the whole story" and that even primitive organisms can be considered creative. The statement "creating something new or being original is an essential part of creativity" is the only one used to explain what creativity is, and to explain this particular problem.

The problem in question affects all systems, whether they are human-like or not.

<comment><USER7> > It explicitly mentions that human activities are "nowhere near the whole > story"

I read this as being relating to artists (specifically graphical) rather than the entire class of human activities.

> even primitive organisms can be considered creative

Must admit I missed this as the sentence was in what I thought was a plug for a book.

> "creating something new or being original is an essential part of > creativity"

This didn't really mean anything to me.

Most the article was explained using specific examples which were human specific activities and for me that was the main thrust. Perhaps it wasn't the authors intention but that is the impression it left on me even re-reading it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do you think that at least some part of the problem is the difficulty involved in getting people to think original thoughts?

<comment><USER9> I thought of this too. I suspect that this question is somehow "obvious."</comment></comment>


Martin Shkreli is the symptom, not the problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/12/17/10447984/martin-shkreli-arrest <comment><USER2> Just because he's a symptom of something, doesn't mean he's not also the problem. The fact that there are many other people like him doesn't mean that each one of those people isn't a problem too.

The "Why people think he's an ass" section of the diagram keeps on expanding to encompass more and more things about him as they are revealed over time.</comment>


Rolls-Royce's single-crystal turbine blade casting foundry - <AUTHOR> https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/june-2015-online/jewel-in-the-crown-rolls-royces-single-crystal-turbine-blade-casting-foundry/ <comment><USER2> Fantastic read! Now why can't all technical and scientific journalism hold itself to this standard? Instead of making the prevailing assumption that your average reader has the I.Q. of a parsnip and the scientific literacy of a kindergartener ;)

Have always felt single-crystal foundaries could be a great driver for building low Earth orbit microgravity factories. There has been extensive research in the labs on ISS dedicated to making highly spherical ball bearings, long macromolecular protein crystals and extreme density refractory metal composites. But is anyone contemplating large scale commercial production? With the cost of delivery dropping, it seems like it might be a idea worth re-considering!

<comment><USER3> "The Engineer" is a trade publication, so its writers have a very different target to hit than, say, those of a daily paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the best documentary on how RR makes the jet engine and the blades. 1 hour long but once you click it, it would be hard to stop!

[https://youtu.be/VfomloUg2Gw](https://youtu.be/VfomloUg2Gw)

<comment><USER5> If you liked that documentary, you might love this older one, which features Stanley Hooker. It's amazing to get the perspective of the legendary engineer himself, and it goes much more in depth into the technical problems and business challenges.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4lH2whhjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4lH2whhjk)

<comment><USER6> Haven't seen that before, hugely enjoyable and entertaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For context: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Tu...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Turbofan_operation.svg/2000px- Turbofan_operation.svg.png).

The blade in the first picture would sit in the high-pressure turbine, just behind the combustion chamber. Note that the flow path of a jet engine corresponds directly to the pressure-temperature transitions of the Brayton cycle, which governs the operation of gas turbines: [https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/Images/braytonts....](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/Images/braytonts.gif).

If you're wondering _why_ Rolls Royce goes to so much trouble to build turbine blades that can handle high temperatures, see: [http://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/SPRING/propulsion/notes/no...](http://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/SPRING/propulsion/notes/node27.html).

Also note that difference in size between the XWB's fan in the second picture (of the article) and the turbine blade in the first picture. The XWB is a high-bypass-ratio turbofan, which means almost all the air taken in by the 3-meter-diameter fan bypasses the core of the engine, generating thrust at low exit velocity. Only about 1/10th the air goes through the core of the engine. There, it is compressed, so by the time you get to the HPT, the flow path is quite narrow. As the turbine section removes energy from the hot air, it cools and expands, and the flow path gets wider.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to note few things: single crystal is the best way to fight creep, but that's it. This is very specific problem with very specific solution. For most engineering problems you would prefer high fatigue strength or high ductility. Single crystal is poor for both.

Another thing is that single crystal metal is very distinct from amorphous metal. Neither has grain boundaries, but single crystal is very strictly ordered structure while amorphic is completely disorganized. As a result, single crystal tolerates high temperatures extremely well, while amorphic is worse than regular metals.

Both are distinct from powder metallurgy. Which in turn has very high amount of grain boundaries.

Interesting thing here is that in regular steel, the grains are single crystals while the boundaries are often amorphic. So in a way you have "composite" material. (It's not technically composite, because both substances have same elements in same proportions.)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for this. I'd think a metal would fracture very easily if there existed a well defined boundary inside, which is what a crystal is. Seems like a property you wouldn't want inside of a jet engine, but what do I know.

<comment><USER8> When we talk crystals in material science it just means that the atoms are organized. There are relatively few common structures.

[https://media1.britannica.com/eb- media/37/1537-004-7657F6AC....](https://media1.britannica.com/eb- media/37/1537-004-7657F6AC.jpg)

"Grain" refers to crystal that internally has that crystal structure, but externally has whatever shape it just happens to have. Grain and crystal are almost synonyms. Regular steel has grains inside, which then have atoms inside organized in crystalline way. In between the grains are "grain boundaries" which are not organized in any way. Different grains have different directions.

If a crack starts to grow through steel, it first needs to penetrate a crystal. It can go "easy" by following some plane that doesn't have any atoms laying on it. Then it needs to go through amorphic (=disordered) boundary region, but now the crack can't go easy. The next grain extremely is unlikely to have nice plane continuing right after the first one. In practice the crack will have to follow winding path and this long path will consume more energy than short one.

Here is image of steel grain structure. The white are grains, the black are amorphic boundary regions.

[http://www.scielo.br/img/revistas/jbsmse/v33n2/a13fig01.jpg](http://www.scielo.br/img/revistas/jbsmse/v33n2/a13fig01.jpg)

Practically making grain size smaller is one of the best ways to resist crack growth (=fatigue strength). Other possibilities is to have different sized atoms in the crystals, so there are no perfectly straight planes for the crack to grow. And it's also possible to several different crystal structures in different crystals. But also different structures inside single crystal.

Here is "pearlite" microscopic image. The black stripes are one crystalline structure and the white ones are another. But they are well aligned and therefore don't require any disorganized boundary when they are side by side.

[http://www.eng.utah.edu/~lzang/images/pearlite.jpg](http://www.eng.utah.edu/~lzang/images/pearlite.jpg)

Sometimes you get bullshit like excessive boundary precipitation. Like in some stainless steels in certain heat treatments, the chromium relocates to the grain boundaries. This leaves the base metal chromium free and makes it soft. And also the grain boundary becomes lot more distinct entity. Now the crack can easily travel along the boundary layer, as the pure chromium boundary is not that well attached to the steel grains.

Also normal cast iron suffers from carbon flakes that are easy crack propagating mediums. Metals attach to metals nicely, but carbon is not metallic, so it's automatic weak spot. Broken cast iron can have almost black cracking surfaces. For this reason guys invented "nodular cast iron". The carbon makes little balls inside the iron, so it offers very little ways for cracks. It has almost as good mechanical properties as steel, but is lot easier to cast.

TL;DR Grain boundary is usually not distinct surface inside the material. It's just where one way to organize atoms shifts into another way to organize atoms. But it's still continuous solid.

<comment><USER9> Okay, it's all coming back to me now. I remember in one physics class we talked about magnetic grains. So this is the same thing.

When someone says "single-crystal", I think of a structure with zero boundary regions, a structure made up of one big grain. This is what was in the title of the article. Does that describe this turbine blade?

<comment><USER8> Yes. Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had the chance recently to see the Mayor of the City of London's (the strange city-within-a-city bit of London) two Rolls Royce's they keep for formal occasions up close. They are super rare (only ~400 ever made), worth a whole lot of money and looked _amazing_.

I'm not a car person but you can't help but feel a shiver when you see a car like that. The engines where the same as the ones they used in the Spitfire fighter planes during WW2 (6.5 liter v8!), full white leather interior, a retractable partition between the passengers and the chauffeur.

I know this isn't strictly about the article but I thought I would share anyway. Rolls is one of the things that makes me proud to be British.

Here's a picture: [http://c8.alamy.com/comp/C1ETKT/city-of-london-lord- mayors-o...](http://c8.alamy.com/comp/C1ETKT/city-of-london-lord-mayors- official-car-1984-6750-cc-rolls-royce-by-C1ETKT.jpg)

Edit: It's a Phantom VI - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls- Royce_Phantom_VI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Phantom_VI), and the first article on Google is unfortunately this: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1165522/Lord- Mayor-L...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1165522/Lord-Mayor- London-8217-s-chauffeur-accused-drink-driving---boss-8217-s-200-000-Rolls- Royce.html)

<comment><USER11> Spitfires used v12's, not V8's.

<comment><USER10> Ahh, shame, you're right. They where 27 litre as well! That would be a bit extreme. Seems someone was silly enough to put it in a car though: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u43pWEwI6xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u43pWEwI6xY)

<comment><USER12> There are more of these projects than you might think. Final Objective (a 55 Chev) is the best, IMO: [http://www.australiastoughestcars.com.au/news/video- merlin-v...](http://www.australiastoughestcars.com.au/news/video- merlin-v12-powered-55-chevy/)

<comment><USER13> This guy "Lucky Keizer" made a 5l v-twin motorbike from a Merlin engine.

[http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/08/19/4296075.htm](http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/08/19/4296075.htm)

I saw it live once, unfortunately he couldn't start it. I suspect it's a frequent problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a recommendation if you are interested in understanding the basics of turbine engines:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/AgentJayZ](https://www.youtube.com/user/AgentJayZ)

This guy, calling himself AgentJayZ, is a technician (not a designer) working on mostly older industrial and military jet engines, and he's showing a lot of the innards, and explaining a lot of the basics of operation of turbine engines. Also: Loads, and loads of footage of running engines in test-stands, which of course gets boring over time...

</comment><comment><USER15> This was a super fun read, and it felt nice to take the time to carefully read it to understand the very complex processes it was describing.

That said, can someone explain how the pigtail accomplishes the following?:

> "The crystals grow in a straight line in the direction that the mould is > being withdrawn, but because of the pigtail's twisted shape, all but the > fastest-growing crystals are eliminated."

<comment><USER16> By the principle of elimination by bottleneck. As the crystals grow into the pigtail, the lagging crystals hit the already-formed leading ones or the mold surface, leaving a primary, single crystal grain to exit the pigtail and grow across the blade proper. This would be almost impossible to happen without the pigtail because multiple crystal grains would grow in parallel across the blade.

<comment><USER17> Here's a technical explanation.[1] But here's an example of triggering crystal formation in a supersaturated solution.[2] Classic high school chemistry experiment. Dropping a solid crystal into the supersaturated solution causes the whole liquid to turn into a solid in seconds.

That's the basis of single-crystal casting. The solidification process relies on operating very close to the melting point of the material. The idea is to create an alloy mixture that's ready to crystallize, then starting the process by dropping in a crystal and letting the liquid crystallize in a very controlled way. The heated zone is moved through the liquid, as in zone refining (or the solid is pulled from the heated zone, or gas cooling is used) so that the crystal growth takes place in only a narrow layer.

This is decades old, and one of the reasons jet engines last a long time now.

[1] [http://www.asminternational.org/documents/10192/6019788/amp1...](http://www.asminternational.org/documents/10192/6019788/amp17109p26.pdf/3def4e97-ace9-47e4-8661-2d7bc8f71f84) [2]

<comment><USER18> Where's [2]? Thanks!

<comment><USER17> Oops!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kud9eVbmRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kud9eVbmRY)

<comment><USER18> Merci!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One other surprising thing about turbofans is that the majority of their thrust is produced by the huge main fans (the blades which are visible as you stand and look at the front of the engine) simply dragging the aircraft through the air as with a turbo-prop (or boat prop). The ultra-high pressure compression and burning stage (being discussed here) produces only 30-45% of direct thrust but clearly powers the spinning of the large components.

My father-in-law started at RR as a graduate trainee and left 40+ years later as its' longest serving member of staff, CEO and Chairman. he took me on tours of these plants when I first met my wife which was an unbelievable treat.

</comment><comment><USER20> Animagraffs has a very good set of animated cutaways explaining how turbofan and turbojet engines work:

[http://animagraffs.com/inside-a-jet-engine/](http://animagraffs.com/inside-a- jet-engine/)

</comment><comment><USER21> There is a cool How It's Made on these parts. Not sure if it's RR, but it shows the complexity: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9nvoRicKc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9nvoRicKc)

<comment><USER22> It shows a box at the end with the GE logo. Crazy how precise the manufacturing is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> On this topic, I'd like to ask how 3D printed parts fair in the new engines being built. [1]

I'd love to hear about this from a Metallurgical Engineer or a Material Science Expert.

[1] [http://qz.com/667477/ge-fires-up-worlds-largest- commercial-j...](http://qz.com/667477/ge-fires-up-worlds-largest-commercial- jet-engine-using-3d-printed-metal-parts/)

<comment><USER24> My graduate research was on a corner of the class of ceramic materials that are used as coatings on top of this type of turbine blades. Anything specifically you would like to know?

Generally, single crystal blades are designed for their resistance to creep at high temperatures. If your predominate creep mechanism is sliding at grain boundaries in a polycrystalline material, you can impart creep resistance by removing the grain boundaries. A single crystal is the limiting case of this process.

3D printed parts, so far, are polycrystalline, and would be used in other places in an engine's hot stage.

Happy to address specifics.

<comment><AUTHOR> What sorts of considerations are important for the ceramic coating? I'd assume that the coating is not under the same types of stress as the alloy core, and so thermal properties would be more important. Is that true, or is load as much of a factor there too?

<comment><USER24> I'm not deeply aware of the specifics of the mechanical loads near the surface due to rotation. Generally the mandates are to match CTE between the substrate and surface as much as feasible, and to insert a "bond" layer to help that match.

The dominant concerns I am aware of are low thermal conductivity, thermal stability, and lack of chemical attack in the environments in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not to take away from the engineering marvel that these parts and process represent, but the timing of this article is interesting - seems PR related. I recently read about problems ANA faced with Rolls Royce engines, specifically the turbine blades failing. There have been at least 3 incidents of engine failure, flights have been cancelled an all 787 engines have to be retrofitted with new blades.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ana-rolls-royce-hldg- boein...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ana-rolls-royce-hldg-boeing- idUSKCN1100X3?il=0)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-05/ana- said-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-05/ana-said-to-plan- to-ask-rolls-royce-for-787-engine-compensation)

<comment><USER26> Also don't forget the A380 RR disaster-that-was-prevented-by-sheer-luck.

<comment><USER27> ???

<comment><USER28> Guessing he's referring to this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32)

<comment><USER27> That would fit, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The high-pressure turbine is, in more ways than one, one of the the highly optimised inner-loops of the modern world.

<comment><USER27> Care to expand on that analogy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This technical paper has many pictures of the wax moulds and more details of how the process works: [http://www.journalamme.org/papers_vol32_1/32110.pdf](http://www.journalamme.org/papers_vol32_1/32110.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER30> For the curious, it's completely possible to buy used Rolls Royce turbine blades on eBay. eg:

• [http://www.ebay.com/itm/331908581051](http://www.ebay.com/itm/331908581051)

Off topic side note - seems like someone's buying them, mounting them + spray painting them at large markup:

• [http://www.ebay.com/itm/122000006766](http://www.ebay.com/itm/122000006766)

;)

</comment><comment><USER31> Always clearly remember when I was studying for my commercial pilot licence many years ago. In one class, an engineer took us for a tour of an airline hangar. He stopped in front of an engine on a rig and explained that EACH blade on the intake fan stage cost something like $40,000. That was about 4 times the price of the car I drove to that class!

<comment><USER32> In aviation, everything is _extremely_ expensive due to the quality level required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's really incredible to imagine blazing hot combustion products, and these blades surviving in that environment for any length of time. Now I feel as though I have a bit of a better understanding of how that comes to pass.

</comment><comment><USER34> Let me nitpick just a bit:

> the Riace Bronzes of Greek warriors found in the sea off Sicily

Well, Riace is in Calabria, not in Sicily. If you want to insert a nice quote in your article, how difficult and time consuming can be to check on the internet it in 2016?

<comment><USER35> Unnecessary nitpick. The sea is between Calabria and Sicily.

<comment><USER34> Ehm, no, not really!

[https://email@example.com...](https://email@example.com,18.1975818,8z)

Same question for you as for the author: how long would have it taken to check?

<comment><USER35> Your argument re: Off Calabria vs Sicily left an ambiguous zone. Showing Riace Marina is much more convincing - I now agree :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Look, I don't know what they are doing in UK facilkity's but I say leave those kittens alone!

From the article: "Steve Pykett, Manufacuring manager, Rolls-Royce Advanced Blade Casting Facilkity"

</comment><comment><USER37> And to think all this technology is used mostly for cheap holiday flights.

<comment><USER38> And power multiple countries military aircraft fleets, as well a fair few commercial and military vessels.</comment></comment>


Student Hackathon Aims to Break World Record This Weekend - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/09/17/world-record-student-hackathon/

<comment><USER2> As one of the original directors of MHacks, I can't wait to see what they pull off this time. Really looks like they are going big this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I know, it's being hosted in the Big House box seats - which will be absolutely fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER4> Any cool hack ideas to work on this weekend?</comment>


Why not use www - <AUTHOR> http://no-www.org

<comment><USER2> Yeah yeah, best practices, I know, but if twitter can make it work naked, that suggests to me naked domains are doable. The www. is too damn long! [1]

[1] [http://goo.gl/sGZnT6](http://goo.gl/sGZnT6)

</comment><comment><USER3> www? Ain't nobody got time fo dat!</comment>


Google confirms some of its own services blocked in Russia over the Telegram ban - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/22/google-confirms-some-of-its-own-services-are-now-getting-blocked-in-russia-over-the-telegram-ban/ <comment><USER2> I'm in Russia now. This morning I got the message on Telegram to throw a paper plane out my window tonight at exactly 7:00 p.m.

Telegram has been working fine here except for a short period right when the block started.

I haven't personally experienced any problems with the internet, but yesterday one of my Russian friends commented that she couldn't log into her _Russian_ bank account because of the banned ip addresses.

<comment><USER3> Google.com and gmail.com are not working on my side. Even worse, HN search is not working as well! Also on Sat MSDN loaded very slowly. Yesterday it became much better.

<comment><USER2> Odd, all of those are working fine for me. I went to MSDN just now and it seemed to load slow, but I don't regularly use it so I don't know if anything changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like Telegram may be Domain Fronting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting)

</comment><comment><USER5> A previous submission, when the Telegram related IP ban started.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16856509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16856509)

</comment><comment><USER6> The Russian federal government has ordered null routes of many chunks of ipv4 space as large as /12, of course this will break a great many non telegram related services.

</comment><comment><USER7> There goes the whole "too big to block" BS...

Although Durov and Telegram do have rather dubious reputation.</comment>


Waldseemüller map - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldseem%C3%BCller_map

<comment><USER2> If you like maps like this, you will also like the globe produced by Martin Behaim in 1491, which (obviously) doesn't show the americas: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel)

<comment><USER3> Why obviously? How was America missed in earlier maps?

<comment><USER4> Because Europe didn't know about America until 1492.

<comment><USER5> Or more accurately, as that wikipedia page mentions, March 1493- when Columbus got back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to see this map projected onto a current map (or even satellite imagery) to see what sort of accuracy they were able to achieve back then. It is quite a feat to gather all that information and compile it into a single (large) image!

<comment><USER7> There are a couple of projects which try to make that really easy by allowing you to georeference a map by matching some common places:

[http://www.oldmapsonline.org/](http://www.oldmapsonline.org/) [http://www.georeferencer.org/](http://www.georeferencer.org/) [http://maps.nypl.org/warper/](http://maps.nypl.org/warper/)

If you want a desktop app (handy with e.g. massive high-res scans) there's a fairly polished QGIS plugin: [https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_geo...](https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_georeferencer.html)

Once you've georeferenced something it's a fairly straight-forward process to either export as KMZ for Google Earth, etc. or export tiles which can be used with something like LeafletJS. I've used a master -> QGIS -> GeoTIFF -> gdal2tiles -> mbutil path with fairly low hassle.

I used this awhile back on [http://www.wdl.org/en/item/2589/](http://www.wdl.org/en/item/2589/) and it was pretty interesting to see how the 1827 map was fairly accurate for the western part of the Russian empire but got significantly inaccurate as you headed to the northern or eastern frontiers.

<comment><AUTHOR> very interesting. I've been meaning to do a study where I track maps over time to get a visual picture of how the world was "discovered". Have you seen anyone else that has done something similar or any references?

<comment><USER7> I've certainly heard interest in that sort of thing but I don't follow it closely. It'd be a great project, particularly if it involved something like georeferencing TIFFs on the Wikimedia Commons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one of _many_ interesting things hiding in the stacks of the maps division of the LOC, if you ever get an opportunity for a private tour - though I'm not sure if every one of those dips into the vault.

My strongest memory is of the WW2 Normandy beaches invasion map, done as an architectural model. Also, in the reading room, they keep a personal presidential globe - [http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/_html/wc00...](http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/_html/wc0001_3.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> It amazes me how maps like this were made... I presume it was using navigation tools to determine the place on the globe? I just can't imagine how to draw a map when having nothing but navigation tools.

<comment><USER10> You could do a pretty good job with latitude, between noon observations of the sun and Polaris at night. But it was the 1700s before anybody could work out accurate longitudes. So I suppose you worked with latitudes and compass routes when you mapped a coast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Original Size image is crashing my Chrome: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Waldseemu...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Waldseemuller_map_2.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know a good source for getting a high quality print of this image? Saw a few sources googling but not sure if I should trust them for print resolution/quality.

</comment><comment><USER13> another installment of slightlyinterestingwikipediaarticles.ycombinator.com

</comment><comment><USER6> TIL America used to be tiny!

<comment><USER2> What with california being an island off its west coast: [http://www.businessinsider.com/people-used-to-think- californ...](http://www.businessinsider.com/people-used-to-think-california- was-an-island-2012-8?op=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Loooove these old maps.</comment>


LegoBlocks – A block based Rich Text editor made using React - <AUTHOR> http://bitwiser.in/legoblocks/

<comment><USER2> Suggest you change your name _before_ you gain traction and get sued.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can that really happen?

<comment><USER2> It _will_ happen.</comment></comment></comment>


Basilisk II: An Open-Source 68k Macintosh Emulator - <AUTHOR> http://basilisk.cebix.net/ <comment><USER2> Thought I'd mention this: BasiliskII (OS 6 - OS 8.5) and SheepShaver (OS 9) are both open source, need a UI redesign rather badly, are nontrivial to compile on FreeBSD, and could do with quite a bit of cleanup.

I've been meaning to look at it myself for quite a while, but it's at the bottom of a very long list. (Incidentally, if anyone's interested in poking it as a team project sometime, my email's in my profile.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I never realised Basilisk is open source. Anyway it's a great emulator, and the Mac 68k has the best version of Prince Of Persia. :)

<comment><USER2> There's also SheepShaver, for OS 9. Similarly open source, looks pretty much identical actually.</comment></comment>


IBM takes on Google and Microsoft with a cloud based service called IBM Docs   - <AUTHOR> https://greenhouse.lotus.com/wpsgh/wcm/connect/lotus+greenhouse/lotus+greenhouse+next+site/home/labs/ibm+docs

<comment><USER2> I think the word "Lotus" on this is going to kill it dead before it even gets of the ground. There is almost universal hatred for that brand (other than from a few people who paid for it and don't have to use products from that division of IBM).

It's literally like branding your new product with swastikas.

<comment><USER3> IBM is in the process of removing the Lotus brand from everything. This 'Greenhouse' is a test bed for the "Lotus" community and hasn't gone through the rebranding yet.

I'm sure that when they release this properly it won't have the dreaded L-word anywhere near it.

This has been a long-running saga within the IBM/Lotus community for years now. It's obviously a toxic brand, but it's taken them a while to start clearing it out. I think they're still working out how to brand the next version of Lotus Notes.

(Yes, Lotus Notes is still widely used. Reluctant Notes/Domino admin here).

<comment><USER2> That's only because people are widely "stuck with it". I've not seen a single organisation in the last 10 years that has done a new deployment. It's always been hanging on by a thread, usually along with some Netware and occasionally DEC estate and some serious 10base2 mileage. "We'll fix it one day" etc.

<comment><USER3> I looked at migrating when we did our last e-mail server upgrade, but the cost of moving to Exchange vs upgrading Notes just wasn't worth it. The latest version isn't so bad for general groupware type stuff.

For a new deployment I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole though.

<comment><USER4> This is what I heard as well from consultants: moving from Notes to Exchange don't yield more benefit or safe money.

<comment><USER2> I bet that was heard from Notes consultants...

<comment><USER4> He does both Notes and Exchange including migrations to or from and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to the cloud. Where you still have to manually save your documents by clicking on a floppy disk icon.

Somehow I don't think Google need to worry.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love how all IBM software looks like a 2001 university project hacked together the night before a deadline in Java.

<comment><USER7> Looking at the screen shot it looks a lot like EverNote. I think the screen is designed to be clean,if not a tad boring. But there is nothing wrong with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <https://greenhouse.lotus.com/ghouse.nav/header.js>

Their javascript writes javascript which writes HTML/XML? For their sanity, I hope that's generated somehow.

</comment><comment><USER9> IBM is in no position to compete with Google or even Microsoft on this marker, it targets the slow and big companies that want "their own facebook" or their own "google docs" on their intranet, so don't expect this to be a consumer level offering even if it is on the "cloud".

<comment><USER10> I completely disagree about competing with Google and Microsoft.

Google's weakness in the enterprise productivity software market segment is that they have no track record of providing stability via long term backward compatibility and support for obsolescent software - e.g. the Chrome Browser. Furthermore, the enterprise market is not a significant piece of the core strategy - it just doesn't grow fast enough and it requires the dedication of a highly trained salesforce and a commitment to long term support of each software release.

IBM can compete with Microsoft on the same basis as they have for the past twenty years - as an ecosystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is IBM really serious about the office productivity space? There doesn't seem to be any buzz around their desktop offering, Lotus Symphony. [1]

When I last tried it, Symphony was slow and clunky to use, and miles behind LibreOffice (!) in usability.

Or is there some uber-visionary long-term play going on here? I certainly don't see it.

[1] <http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home>

<comment><USER3> This is part of a wider collaboration strategy from IBM.

As well as Notes, they have a "Connections" platform which is a combination of document sharing, facebook-style profiles and a few other things for internal corporate intranets. From the demos I've seen it's relatively nice, as enterprise software goes. From last month's "Lotusphere" conference it sounds like they're adding document editing to this, and aiming to move everything (including email) to an integrate web-based system. I think they're selling it as either onsite or hosted.

Edit: Sorry for how corporate that sounds. I guess that's just how my mind goes when I start thinking about IBM software!

<comment><USER12> The same thing happened to me last month. I was writing up something right after reading a few IBM Tivoli and Websphere white papers and suddenly noticed I was talking corpspeak without even realizing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I clicked around and got to a sign in page called "Welcome to IBM Connections". Couldn't find where to sign up or even if I can. Closed.

<comment><USER14> I found a page where I could create an account but that account does not work on the login for the docs-page.

If they can't even do a user friendly login, how can they make a good document editor?

<comment><USER13> They can sell anything, even stuff that is not friendly nor good. See the hatred for Lotus Notes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see "Duplicate headers received from server", When I click on icon. only on chrome... Please fix it or put "alpha release "on top....

</comment><comment><USER16> Although there is a picture of someone editing a file the functionality seems to be missing from the site and its not shown off in their demo video.

[http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/de...](http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/files/files_demo.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Based on the screenshots, it looks like it's flash/flex based. I can't actually get it to works so I can't verify that. Are they serious? I guess they don't plan on having any good mobile support.

</comment><comment><USER18> Won't accept gmail and yahoo emails and has a mandatory company name field. It not just 'not targeted towards consumer market', its a 'we don't want the consumer market'.

</comment><comment><USER19> Whenever I try and view a document in Chrome (OSX) I get a net::ERR_RESPONSE_HEADERS_MULTIPLE_CONTENT_DISPOSITION :(

</comment><comment><USER15> Sell this to enterprises who love your sloppy stuff like WAS..

</comment><comment><USER20> How did people collaborate on documents before google docs?

<comment><USER21> By sending Word/Excel/etc documents around in email, turning on revisions, and having endless discussions on which version is current.

We still do that now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Did anybody try it already?</comment>


Intent to Implement: Display Locking - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mSQhTtaYFNy0qv5KifopEYm-ZKAZULnHyNcmKL8J4e0/mobilebasic <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the time many years ago when we worked on a VB app that had to resort to the sledgehammer of Win32's LockWindowUpdate API call to do some hefty calculations and not "freeze" the UI even though we were, in fact, freezing the UI.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/api/winuser...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/api/winuser/nf-winuser-lockwindowupdate)

</comment><comment><USER3> Better link: [https://github.com/chrishtr/display- locking/blob/master/expl...](https://github.com/chrishtr/display- locking/blob/master/explainer.md)

TD;DR: [https://github.com/chrishtr/display- locking/blob/master/READ...](https://github.com/chrishtr/display- locking/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER4> Interesting. My, perhaps wrong, visualization of the janking effect, without the display update, concerns resizing, or showing, a column or pane in a web app. During the resize, the content in both frames are not updated until the resize is complete under certain (most?) conditions.

"If an undue delay is likely to be caused, the work already completed is processed and the update phase yields to other update phases for unlocked content."

My interpretation for a pane/column resize or hidden to visible operation: display-locking reduces jank if I could operate on these elements with the display lock tools. This jank reduction produces more fluid updates in elements not affected by the lock.

Question: If sub elements have complicated draw/render cycles, how will the interplay of locks at different layers affect the result? Composing objects with libraries that use these locks makes me wonder about this issue (or if I make sub-components myself).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow! When I first learned web development way back when, I was surprised that something like HyperCard's _lock screen_ didn't exist/wasn't possible. Being able to do this on an element level is a huge improvement over that. This is great.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has there been substantial discussion about this feature? Neither of the two links provided lead to deep discussions about this. It doesn't seem like this is related to any agreed upon standards process.

As far as I can tell, this is being presented as a change to the programming model which will be undertaken unilaterally. Are we back to the days where one browser gets to decide how the web works, and everyone else can catch up if they like?

<comment><USER7> This is just about implementation, not shipping. It's still extremely early in the process. See:

[https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching- features](https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the point of this just to reduce visible jank, or to obsolete shadow-dom implementations by replacing them with lock->modify->unlock?

</comment><comment><USER9> There's a more detailed explanation of the proposed API at:

[https://github.com/chrishtr/display- locking/blob/master/expl...](https://github.com/chrishtr/display- locking/blob/master/explainer.md)

</comment><comment><USER10> TIL _jank_ is an actual term people use in formal documents.

<comment><USER11> Jank is an actual term, it's the time-derivative of acceleration. Page jank looks how motion jank feels; unexpected and uncomfortable.

<comment><USER12> Jerk is the derivative of acceleration. I haven't heard jank used in that context.

<comment><USER11> Brainfart, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Will this allow content providers to lock content so that ad blockers can't change the content ?

<comment><USER14> No, this is about increasing performance by taking elements out of the slow DOM update cycle

<comment><USER15> >> No, this is about increasing performance by taking elements out of the slow DOM update cycle

The question was not about the intent of the feature, but a possible use case that may not have been intended. A more specific reason for the "No" could be more informative.

<comment><USER16> Interesting idea - though I think any kind of script API can be circumvented by ad blockers pretty easily: They can always inject their own script before anything from the page is executed and manipulate the API functions or replace them with "do nothing" implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is one of multiple proposals to make DOM read/writes more performant. More are listed here: [https://github.com/chrishtr/async- dom](https://github.com/chrishtr/async-dom)

</comment><comment><USER18> For someone who doesn't follow lower level browser dev that closely, this seems like an optimization pretty specifically for a react style 'nested redraws' use case. Is this at all correct?

<comment><USER19> Basically "

...

" && #foo.append( ...li... ) may cause a redraw, recalc, reflow, of layout + styles for each LI you add to the UL, as well as the rest of the dom containing the UL.

However if you can do: "BEGIN TRANSACTION; ...#foo.append(...)...; END TRANSACTION;" it gives you a mechanism to "freeze" all or some of the display (think of it as a subset double-buffer), and "blit" the changed dom to the UI when you're done (with the possibility of: " && CONTINUE TRANSACTION".

Imagine a simple list of search results with alternating row colors (white / grey backgrounds) specified by css (nth-child %2 == 0).

If you prepend elements, instead of appending elements it might cause all elements to change color and re-render, on each insertion.

If you append elements instead then it's likely a more efficient on an individual element basis than prepending, but if you had the ability to "lock" the affected display area until you're done with your for-loop, then the browser can avoid updating the area at all until the "COMMIT" call (multiple actions, with a single commit resolution at the end).

Think of it as "batch these dom updates..." Git/SVN multi-file commits vs CVS commits (single-file).

<comment><USER20> For many such cases, i.e. layout changes triggering the recalculation of siblings or ancestors, contain[0] might be a more lightweight alternative.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "...without jank."

Is this a technical term?

<comment><USER22> I think it's a reasonably common technical term in Android circles (possibly elsewhere) that means "non-smooth animations" or "skipped frames".

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jank](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jank)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why not just double-buffering the DOM? That'd be much simpler. Mutate your DOM all you want, then swap it in when it's ready.

<comment><USER24> This allows the browser to delay all style, layout, and paint work on attached DOM, and then also spread that work across multiple frames during a commit, reducing jank for the unlocked portions of the page.

If you synchronously swap a large portion of DOM, style, layout, and paint will likely blow your frame budget.

<comment><USER25> Either I don't understand double buffering very well (not unlikely) or I don't know what you mean by "frame budget". Wouldn't swapping one buffer for the other be faster than most or all of the computations going into calculating that background buffer and easily doable in a single frame?

What am I missing?

<comment><USER26> Normal double-buffering involves doing something trivial at the moment of buffer-swap, like changing pointer or at most doing large-ish memory copy. Double buffering DOM would either not solve the problem (in the case of doing the layout computations in background and then swapping already layed out DOM) or would involve doing all the layout computations at once when the swap happens (with the implication of this being mostly equivalent to loading new page and thus slow and in many cases too slow to happen at 30, 60 or whatever Hz)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SpotifyTube: Convert Spotify track to mp3 - <AUTHOR> http://spotifytube.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> As we say on the site, here is a explanation why we build this service:

The primary motivation behind Spotifytube was my friend that was trying to make an audio CD to play music in his car. He asked me for help because he has a Spotify premium account and can download all his tracks for offline use. We figured files are located on his hard-drive, but we couldn't find a way to access the encoded files containing the audio files.

We've been reading about how Spotify protects and encodes their music preventing users from downloading the audio files. We looked for a solution online, but it seemed there isn't any Spotify downloader available online. We figured we can find Spotify tracks on Youtube and convert Youtube videos to the mp3's without doing any harm to Spotify.

To our surprise, it worked so well that we wanted to give other people way to convert their Spotify tracks and make audio CDs to listen in their cars.</comment>


Xkcd: Mythbusters and Zombie Feynman - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/397/

<comment><USER2> I think experimentation is hard-wired into the brain (its partly how we're able to learn so much so quickly as children), but rigor isn't. So is Mythbusters' approach to experimentation without rigor a net win? I spend probably a third of each episode wondering about that. Its very frustrating, but then something blows up, so generally it works out ok.

<comment><USER3> Mythbusters is close to correct, which is good enough.

They actively involve their community, which goes the rest of the way. If there is a serious lack of rigor, their audience will point it out, and an experiment will be rerun.

<comment><USER2> I sometimes think the lack of rigor is serious: most Mythbusters' viewers could probably create similarly rigorous experiments if they had the inclination, what is lacking isn't so much holding beliefs to experiment, but interpreting the validity and applicability of experiments.

Some of Mythbusters' experiments are reasonable enough, but a lot of others are a little too sloppy for my taste, teaching a lazy habit of confirming beliefs by constructing plausible narratives.

<comment><USER4> Key words "if they had the inclination." Imprinting minds with the idea that ideas should be tested by experiment is of tremendous value. Rigor can follow once the inclination is there.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, absolutely. You have to _motivate_ rigor. I actually think the show does a fine job of that.

Sometimes they'll do a half-assed experiment, bust some myth, and then get viewer mail criticizing their technique. Then they'll _revisit_ the myth, with better controls! This is pretty much exactly how real science works. Nobody does rigorous science because they _want_ to spend enormous amounts of time and money doing the same boring experiment over and over, gradually imposing tighter and tighter controls on everything. They do it because otherwise their half-assed papers will get rejected by their extremely critical peers.

<comment><USER6> For good science to happen, you should convince yourself about the validity of your theory / experiment as well. You are your own critic.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but convincing yourself of the validity of your own theories is always easier than it should be. That's human nature.

Among other things, rigor costs money and time. People's self-criticism tends to taper off as the deadline looms. This is a particularly important factor in _Mythbusters_ \-- my impression is that the Mythbusters folks are exactly as self-critical as their budget allows them to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1) Write a script to automatically submit every XKCD and TechCrunch post on News.YC.

2) ???

3) Karma profit!

<comment><USER3> xkcd can actually be quite good. Most of his comics don't reach the top.

Today's comic is actually similar to recent posts on being creative and another Feynman quote on good problems. I wouldn't be surprised if the latter inspired today's comic. This means xkcd is part of the serious hacker conversation on the internet.

xkcd != LOLcats

<comment><USER8> Um, was that a real Feynman quote? I highly doubt it, there was no Mythbusters during his lifetime, or was there?

I hate people who think it is OK to put their own stupid quotes into the mouths of famous people to give them more leverage...

<comment><USER9> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> +1 for bashing string theory in the last frame of the strip! Haha!

</comment><comment><USER11> From <http://xkcd.com/about/>

How do I write "xkcd"? There's nothing in Strunk and White about this.

For those of us pedantic enough to want a rule, here it is: The preferred form is "xkcd", all lower-case. In formal contexts where a lowercase word shouldn't start a sentence, "XKCD" is an okay alternative. "Xkcd" is frowned upon.

</comment><comment><USER12> C'mon guys, I complained about the xkcd "manual RSS feed" we have here, but this one was good and relevant. Let the pain and backlash die down, then let's submit the appropriate ones. Lots of them get 2-3 upvotes, this one got 24. The system IS working.

</comment><comment><USER13> What, no bongos?

<comment><AUTHOR> The bongos were only a small part of what made him Feynman.

When _The Feynman Lectures_ were published, a picture of him playing the bongos appeared in the preface. Feynman was a bit mystified as to why they used that picture, but he let it slide.

A few years later, a Swedish publisher wanted to use the bongo photo in an encyclopedia article about him. Feynman was pretty upset by this, saying:

"The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings - and this perpetual desire to prove that people are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me.

I am human enough to tell you to go to hell." (letter to Tord Pramberg, 4 January 1967)

<comment><USER13> OK,but one of his books, perhaps Surely You're Joking, had an offer to buy a cassette that had a mix of him telling his stories, and him playing bongos.

Both pretty cool.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you distracted by any motion on the screen that you did not effect? - <AUTHOR>

in the new redesign of google news i find it distracting that things continuously rearrange themselves - do you think this is a good user experience <comment><USER2> Yeah I find this kind of hard to use as well. I initially thought it was some kind of live feed, but it seems it's just based on mouse movement, not news updates, so it's confusing why things are rearranging themselves and why. It probably doesn't help that I have a somewhat bad home internet connection, so sometimes stuff will expand a second or two _after_ my mouse has already moved on somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bad bad bad for me.

But I notice _anything_ in my environment that changes.

Hmmm ... will users feel like they are in less control of it? That would be generally bad, I would think. Then again, Google is big on empirical testing so maybe most people like this or accept it or whatever.

<comment><USER4> Do you know if they lab test pre-release?

With the amount of traffic their apps receive it would be quick and easy to achieve statistically meaningful data with a simple A/B test on a release.

I personally hate any animation in a UI unless it appears as a direct consequence of my actions.

<comment><USER3> Given how notorious they are for not wanting to deal with people directly I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't....</comment></comment></comment>


EcmaScript 9 - <AUTHOR> http://clubajax.org/es-9-sneak-preview/

<comment><USER2> It's a bummer that division is not going to be supported in ES9, but boson() seems really useful ;)</comment>


Hunting down my son's killer (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/ <comment><AUTHOR> Matt Might is now leading a medicinal institute at the University of Alabama. That's an impressing cross-transfer from computer science.

This text is one of the texts I have read most in my life. Not only is it emotionally powerful, but I have spent weeks translating it into German.

At one time, Matt asked on Twitter if there was a German willing to translate, there was a deadline and it was important (for reasons he explained later in personal mail).

I offered my help, with the caveat that I'm neither a professional translator, nor with any medical background. I wasn't totally inexperienced, I had translated a few things here and there, like Mark Nottingham's Caching FAQ.

But boy, was that text a challenge! I always wanted to write that up, but by now my memory has faded a bit.

Quite stressful, but it felt more meaningful than translating a technical text.

And I learned a few things along the way. And I found several errors in the original. I had read the text many times before, but only when translating, you're really struggling with the text on a fine-granular enough level to actually notice things. Like when you look up the list of ultra-rare genetic conditions in some medical research database I've never heard of before — because (a) Wikipedia doesn't have an article for all of them, (b) if so, the German-language Wikipedia doesn't, and (c) some of those have names in German that are not straight translations of the English name — you may notice that Matt listed one or two diseases twice, where the disease has two common names or aliases.

In the end I wonder if anyone really cared about the translation, because the original reason for wanting a German translation kind of fizzled out, in my perception.

Still, it was a cool time.

</comment><comment><USER2> I enjoyed the read, here is a follow-up article - [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/one-of-a- kind-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/one-of-a-kind-2)

</comment><comment><USER3> My girlfriend's lab at the University of Utah just published a paper on this disease a few weeks ago:

[https://academic.oup.com/hmg/article- abstract/27/6/1055/4810...](https://academic.oup.com/hmg/article- abstract/27/6/1055/4810719?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

Biological pathways are insane... I'm really impressed with what's being uncovered in this field of research.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article has a misleading, sensationalist title. In fact there is no murderer and there was no violence.

The article is about the author's journey of diagnosing a genetic disease in his son.

<comment><USER5> "Killer" does not necessarily denote murder nor violence.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, ``killer'' has the other (nonviolent) meaning: cause of death, fatal/deadly illness, destroyer, threat to life, menace, plague, scourge, peril.

The author of the article could have easily used any of the above less ambiguous words in the title, but he didn't. Hence I formed the opinion that the title is sensationalist.

<comment><USER5> Not everyone agrees that "destroyer" and "scourge", etc, are any less emotive of words. In fact, they end up being suggestive in unnecessary ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/12315/deficiency-...](https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/12315/deficiency- of-n-glycanase-1)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also interesting: [http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/](http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/)

(That's a repost, because the Quora question has been deleted)

</comment><comment><USER7> I had the opportunity to interact with Prof. Might when I was in grad school; hearing about his son and the struggles has been heart wrenching at times, more so after hearing him speak about it in person.</comment>


Colorful Bodies of Water in Digital Artwork - <AUTHOR> http://www.designtickle.com/2012/03/colorful-bodies-of-water-in-digital-artwork/

<comment> T-zex

      "Our planet is made up of well over 50% water."

Nope. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Composition_and_structure></comment>


The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World's Most Secretive Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/ <comment><USER2> Looks awesome, but the guy said the magic sentence for failure.

"I will wait until it's perfect!"

Sorry buddy, but it never will be perfect.

By the time it comes out all the other competitors already dominated the market. So to get some ground in there you have to add some extra features, which will delay the project. Then the competition comes out with the same feature sooner, because they already cashed in the rewards for not waiting and have the funds to push forward and already have a working base system. And you will end up in a vicious cycle until your funds dry up and you will be left there with an unfinished product, which was actually in a finished state.

Or to save something, you will sell out to one of your competitors to get some satisfaction and to see 10% of your dreams integrated into someones else's.

I know, I know, it was a bit harsh, but how many time did this happen?</comment>


RESTful APIs R.I.P. - <AUTHOR> http://mmikowski.github.io/the_lie/

<comment><USER2> So the author proposes to replace REST with "JSON-pure APIs": Just stuff all of your data (errors, warnings, data, domain-specific stuff; he really does not propose any structure) into JSON, and then send and receive that via anything.

With this, we would lose the discoverability of a good REST API (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS) ), which would be a huge price to pay.

Other than that, this reminds me a bit of:

"Hey man, this relational stuff is really hard! There must be a better way..."

"I know a better way! Let's rather just stick all of our data into these JSON objects..."

<comment><USER3> I agree with the author. I came to the same conclusion way back. Shoehorning commands and errors onto HTTP request methods and response codes was frustrating. As the author wrote, they're not rich enough to map on to. For example, if an error occurs what do I return? 400 Bad Request? What does that mean to the client who needs to show something to the user? Have to stick some details in the JSON response like an error field with the detailed message. So why not just check if there is an error field in the JSON response and make 200 OK mean that the HTTP request made it to the server. Now the client is simpler as the error callback is just for HTTP transmission errors (host not found, transmission errors, etc) and the success callback is just for communication with my back end code.

The HATEOAS just combines the documentation with the protocol. No thank you. I'd rather have a good API document to work from and a fixed API rather than trying to dynamically figure out what's going on. Seems HATEOAS is more suited for interaction with a human rather than a machine to machine protocol.

It's ironic that you used the NOSQL vs RDBMS debate as an example to prove your point. HTTP is a transport protocol. While it has some support for being an API layer it is way inadequate for that purpose. Expanding it is just not feasible as most servers and clients don't even support all of the existing options.

So just use what's best designed for the task. HTTP for transport and JSON for data. Makes things a lot simpler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When it comes to APIs, every now and then someone say "X is dead, Y is the future".

APIs are not a one-size-fits-all problem, and while general trends and paradigms are a nice thing to have, developers should not be restricted by whatever is the hottest buzzword today.

A nice and clean API will always be pleasant to use, and this has nothing to do with RESTful awesomeness or SOAP verbosity.

</comment><comment><USER5> "...it has served us well for two decades. [...] is probably one of the worst ideas ever widely adopted in web software"</comment>


Hemingway Interview: The Art of Fiction - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway

<comment><AUTHOR> This is long.

This interview is about writing prose, but it really spoke to me about the creative process and I read it from the perspective of a startup founder.

It's great how sometimes he gets snippy at silly questions and I love how he describes the separate pleasures of creating and consuming (writing and reading) and how they each have their own merits, and that they're not necessarily meant to be shared.</comment>


Cultures of Code [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/2014129911110802-2015-01Hayes.pdf

<comment><USER2> This is the kind of deskilling many philosophers in the strand of technological critique (Heidegger, Ellul, Marcuse, to name a few) have discussed. It's strikes me as a byproduct of the intellectual division of labor - as practices mature their component parts get separated. Many crafts have suffered the same fate and that fate has been equally lamented.

</comment><comment><USER3> srsly, noone ?</comment>