Finally, a Startup Visa That Works  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/finally-a-startup-visa-that-works/ <comment><USER3> I've been _soooo_ frustrated by this, running <http://www.hackersandfounders.com> . I can't tell you how many amazing entrepreneurs I've seen come into the area, and then have to leave because of visa issues. So, even though I'm way oversubscribed right, now, I'm burning a bit of bandwidth on the startup visa movement.

Votizen (I have no attachment other than knowing the founders) is coming up with a crazy cool platform to mobilize people about this issue.

Just text "startupvisa" to 894546. They've build a hella cool twilio app, that texts you back, verifies that you are a registered voter in the US. If you are, they_print_out_your_text_message and hand carry it to your senators and representative in congress.

It's friggin genius. Please, pass the word.

Hell. I'll start another thread specifically for this. If you are a voting US citizen: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324232>

If you are a foreign entrepreneur who wants to get a visa to the US, please help us promote this issue, so you can get a visa.

Craig Montuori set up a tumblr to tell stories of Entrepreneurs that haven't been able to start companies in the US because of visa issues. Contact him at <http://startupvisa.tumblr.com/>, or email@example.com .

<comment><USER4> How exactly does the message delivery work?

<comment><USER3> Back and forth between you and votizen, is text messages. They ask you for your name and zip code, and if you're a registered voter. They verify that with voter registraion databases.

Then, if you are a registered voter, they tell you who your representative and senators are, and then they hand carry a print out of your support to the physical offices of those senators and representatives.

The last mile of the message delivery is in meat space, foot work.

<comment><USER5> Having a brother who worked in constituent services: being lobbied is not a new experience for Congresscritters. If you really want to do something, send them an actual letter on paper. If you don't send a letter on paper, it is highly likely that your support will be discounted as someone who is weakly attached to the issue. This is because, if you don't care enough to send a letter on paper, you _are_ weakly attached to the issue.

The very mild inconvenience relative to, e.g., "RT for great justice!!1" is used as a bozo filter. Startups aimed at reducing barriers to entry in petitioning Congresscritters should consider carefully whether removing a functional bozo filter is desirable to a group whose opinion of their products is super-critical.

As an example of a previous technological innovation: a few groups discovered years ago that you can hook up a CGI script to a fax machine and then get anybody who submits a web form to fax a form letter about e.g. abortion to their representative. Congressional staff thought that was a very interesting development... for about ten minutes. After that, they were "measured by weight."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All I can say is I find category 2 -

 _Workers on an H-1B visa, or graduates from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or computer science—if they have an annual income of at least $30,000 or assets of at least $60,000 and have had a U.S. investor commit investment of at least $20,000 in their venture. Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue_

on a strictly personal basis, umm, droolworthy.

<comment><USER7> My question is why this visa limiting to STEM majors only? What about business and finance majors? Aren't business students likely to start a company too?

<comment><USER8> 2 reasons:

1) The goal of the bill is to hang on to entrepreneurs who will generate new value and create new jobs. To drive "real value" you have to improve business productivity, make information accessible that wasn't accessible before, automate things that were hard to automate previously, etc. These are almost always technical accomplishments first.

2) There is an oversupply of people on the business side and an undersupply of people on the engineering side. For the US to stay competitive it has to hang on to the technical talent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When asked six weeks ago whether the Yuri Milner / SV Angel offers would affect which startups YC accepts, pg said "No, of course not."

I would imagine that, if this legislation does pass, it might change his answer to that question, as all of a sudden that extra $150k becomes the difference between foreigners being able to get a Startup Visa to be accepted into YC or not.

If you read this Paul, care to share any updated thoughts on how this legislation and the $150k offer will/won't impact who you can accept to YC, and possibly who will apply to YC?

<comment><USER3> Or, if you have decent product, team, traction, pitch and social proof, you can apply to Angel List, and pick up the investment.

Come to the area on a tourist visa, hang out at local meetups like 106 miles or Hackers & Founders, and we'll try to get you guys plugged into the scene. Hopefully, you'll make enough connections that if and when you have to go back, you'll be able to have enough connections to raise an angel round, get a visa and move.

<comment><USER10> If only getting tourist visa was so easy for everyone =))

<comment><USER11> There's 36 countries on the Visa Waiver Program, see if you qualify:

[http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html#...](http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html#countries)

" _The Visa Waiver Program (VWP) enables nationals of 36 participating countries to travel to the United States for tourism or business (visitor [B] visa purposes only) for stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa. The program was established to eliminate unnecessary barriers to travel, stimulating the tourism industry, and permitting the Department of State to focus consular resources in other areas._ "

<comment><USER12> While nice, it is not without its caveats, if CBP officer does not like you, you are gone.

"Travelers should be aware that by requesting admission under the Visa Waiver Program, they are generally waiving their right to review or appeal a CBP officer's decision as to their application for admission at the port of entry. Likewise, if the traveler is later found to have violated the conditions of admission under the Visa Waiver Program, they do not have the right to contest a removal order (See the CBP website for additional details.) "

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Foreign entrepreneurs whose business has generated at least $100,000 in sales from the U.S._

Now that's more like it! If US consumers are sending lots of dollars out of the country, it makes sense to bring those entrepreneurs into the country and keep the dollars at home. Not all of us need funding so this proviso could help us out without having to go looking for arbitrary angel cash.

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't it makes sense to get those who sell outside the US even more? that could potentially get the trade deficient back to zero, which this measure won't.

<comment><USER15> Most of the monetary requirements are to stop scams - ie where millionaire's kid bills family company abroad for $100K and gets to stay in the US running his company. It's also the reason for requiring qualified investors - to stop this just being family money recycled.

Although it is a bit silly that if you invented say a malaria vaccine and had a $Bn in foreign sales you would be deported!

<comment><USER16> IMHO, it is in the best interest of the US to let rich people in. They have a big potential to invest or consume.

<comment><USER15> Depends on what you mean by 'rich' - $1M, $10M, $1Bn ?

There have been classes of investment visa for people bringing $1M into the country. But then people simply used it to buy a house = $1M in some areas. So then there were requirements that it had to be invested in a business, so people formed a company, bought a house and leased it to themselves.

So the politicians upped the $$ requirement, but that leads to different problems. People with $100M in cash are often not very nice citizens - do you want to give Col Qaddafi, Kim Jung whoever, etc a US visa if they bring $100M of their people's money with them? How many of their family/ friends/ associates also get a visa?

<comment><USER17> People with $100mm could buy their visa by making a unprofitable business and come in on the immigrant investor visa anyway. Or get a US friend to create a company where they have veto powers and come over on an L-1A and get their green card in 2-3 years due to no labor certification or waiting list. And their spouse can work also on a L-2 visa when they apply with him. Someone who has made a $100million could also get an O visa. Your a pretty remarkable person if you've made $100 million.

Also if you have $100 million and don't setup your income to be indirect through companies and such, the USA taxes all international income, even if you've never lived or set foot in the US for years, and has an expat tax if you give up your green card or citizenship explicitly made for rich people. The usa is the only country in the world to do this and makes it unattractive to actually get a citizenship from them if your wealthy. You can still do business and profit from the country quite well without being a citizen and at that level you could do business in the country part time coming in on B-2 visas. The consulate would have no problem giving you a 10 year multiple entry B-2 visa since you have a very very very low illegal immigration risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm an Indian entrepreneur, and much as I'd love to see #3 see the light of day, I have this sinking feeling it's just way too ripe for exploitation.

 _Foreign entrepreneurs whose business has generated at least $100,000 in sales from the U.S. Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue._

A ton of companies that aren't really startups could easily misuse this clause. And even if there's fine print to guard against the same, due diligence in each case will translate into a ton of paperwork and enormous bureaucratic delays, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid in the first place, right?

That said, no one hopes I'm wrong more than I do right now.

<comment><USER19> I agree that it sounds too easy. My startup easily has $100K in accumulated sales from the US, so I would all of a sudden qualify for a visa. That's perplexing if you know how much trouble they made me go through to attend a US university (and send me packing right afterwards).

Then again, even with some abuse of the rules I think this would probably be a good deal for the US economy. Anyone who is able to "fake" $100K in revenues is not likely to go through the trouble to "take away" any blue color job there. You would just get a well educated tax payer for free.

<comment><USER6> I'm going to guess that means $100k in annual sales. Its not entirely clear on that point, but the mention of the same number required annually after being approved seems to suggest that. Your use of the work "accumulated" suggests you're talking about a period > 1 year.

<comment><USER19> Actually, I think you are right that they probably mean $100K a year, although the article doesn't say that. (My startup does >$100K annually too now, but I guess that would limit the potential candidates quite a bit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just WISH we had such politicians in my country. It is just mind blowing to me that a politician actually took the time to read a TC article and modify a bill accordingly.

<comment><USER21> Hell, I'm American and its still mind-blowing to me that a politician actually took the time to read a TC article and modify a bill accordingly.

<comment><USER15> It's still mind-blowing to me that a politician could read!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow....there is a lot of hyperbole generated on Techcrunch but this post is spot-on.

If this bill had been passed while I was still in the US, it definitely would have convinced me to stay.

The truth is, that if it is passed, I just might be inclined to go back - under the third category.

We will see what materializes though.

This could be pretty interesting either way.

<comment><USER23> Agree! pretty interesting times are coming... I had to leave 7 months ago because I wanted to focus on my startup and I was not able to do it with my H1 job, the discussion ahead related to this topic is worth watching

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It makes way too much sense.

Somebody is going to have to ruin some part of it for it to pass.

Yes I'm cynical. I've lived here too long.

</comment><comment><USER25> I look forward to contributing to the American economy if this passes.

</comment><comment><USER26> If only other countries would follow suit. Afew years ago I had a great plan in place for an internet cafe (and more) planned for a great location in Grenada, and was basically told that I needed close to $300k in assets and/or financing in order to qualify for residency and make it happen. The entire project could have gotten off the ground for less than $200k (for which I had good faith agreements), and my plan involved hiring at least 3 locals to start with, so why did I need the other $100k?

"Just because..." was pretty much the only answer that the immigration officials could give me.

Oh well, it was a great 9 month vacation while it lasted...

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone know whether the Startup Visa will allow dual intent - i.e. if you pass the "remain in the country" criteria can you apply for a green card?

</comment><comment><USER28> Very exciting. However remember this is the an initial step in a long road of many steps -

See this info-graph for an articulation of the legislative steps needed to make law: [http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/05/howla...](http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/05/howlawsmadeWIRTH2.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER29> This is fantastic news. I'm here in San Francisco on a three year E-2 visa, and this should simplify things a ton when the time comes to renew it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't this give investors a rather disproportionate amount of negotiating power, particularly for the 2nd round?

"Agree to our terms ... or lose your visa!"

<comment><USER31> Not really. Except for the first category, it's 100K in financing. Not penny change, but not a big amount either. Of course, you can also generate 100K in revenue (two years is plenty enough time to get there) and then financing isn't a requirement.

<comment><USER30> 100K in financing that _must_ come from a US-based VC/angel, no friends-and- family fundraising or personal savings allowed.

That 100K is going to be rather more costly to acquire than you think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> On the hand one I love this. On the other hand, this means it's going to be harder for a startup scene to take off in any European city.

<comment><USER15> It's going to hit Vancouver - the place is currently full of startup people that couldn't get US visas

<comment><USER33> What notable startups have come out of this community in Vancouver?

<comment><USER15> What notable startups have come out of silicon valley in the last 10years? It's been a long time since HP, Apple, Sun appeared - a few people with a high traffic no income social web site doesn't make an industry however many $M/Bn it's notionally valued.

<comment><USER33> You made a claim that there were many startup people there, and I simply asked what notable startups have arised from that. It was a simple question, and the answer would have revealed concrete examples of which startups this country is missing out on because of a lack of a Startup Visa, and in this case, those would have been literally right across our borders! Your lack of examples would seem to indicate that the US wouldn't gain much from this purported community of startup types crossing the border.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If anyone needs advice on getting a long-term US visa without getting funding, feel free to email me (it's in my profile). It's currently an incredibly difficult process, but do-able.

</comment><comment><USER34> It seems somewhat strange if a degree is required for the startup visa - <USER2> that the case?

</comment><comment><USER35> The press release can be found here: [http://kerry.senate.gov/press/release/?id=4e6a51f6-fb2b-4212...](http://kerry.senate.gov/press/release/?id=4e6a51f6-fb2b-4212-b299-b0c46c7e6b58)

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know how long will it take to find out if the bill passes or not?

<comment><USER24>
        def pass_bill
          while bill_passed.eql?(false) && bill_dead.eql?(false)
            Get involved, drum up some buzz on its behalf
            Watch the news and immigration lawyer blogs
          end
        end

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Check out the Votizen page to send your support to Congress: <https://www.votizen.com/issues/startupvisa/>

</comment><comment><USER37> Help me understand this?

Is there a shortage of startups in the USA?

Can startups (that in reality have an online-only product) not occur outside the USA?

These are honest questions, I'm trying not to be biased, why come here?

<comment><USER38> I really fail to understand this line of thinking.

>Is there a shortage of startups in the USA?

What harm will an additional 1000 startups do, even if they fail? Fill the Whitepages and Yellowpages and make it heavy when you have to carry it inside your home? Look at the upside. Even a few successful ones(esp. big ones) can more than make up for the failures.

>Can startups (that in reality have an online-only product) not occur outside the USA?

Things are more conducive in the USA. So the same people may not be able to start and succeed elsewhere.

Online only etc. doesn't matter. There will be too many obstacles like tax laws, payment methods and what not.

<comment><USER37> To clarify, I am not anti-immigrant in the slightest. If anything I think we should give more people the chance for freedom here who are pursued politically in other countries. But I just cannot imagine anyone wanting to come to the USA if they can afford to be elsewhere.

For one example, you best not need medical care while you are here because you certainly will not be able to afford it and it will ruin your credit for life (one trip to the hospital with nothing actually done will cost several thousands of dollars). Secondly, if you wander outside of the more diverse college-towns and metro areas, it's rednecks everywhere (look up "redstate" on wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Governors_ma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Governors_map.svg) ).

My logic is if you are intelligent enough to start your own business that can take in money virtually, you are already way ahead of a vast majority of our own population and can have the best of both worlds - take our money and avoid our problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is really a good thing. Especially for Europeans like me who are seeking for Silicon Valley investment the limited H-1B visa and the high demands for initial funding have been kind of a barrier hardly to be overcome. The ranges now really encourage also foreign entrepreneurs to work on their ideas and that should add some value to both parties, the entrepreneur and the US.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the proposal is an interesting one. This really is one good step in cleaning up the issues with visas in this country. People that want to come here, start companies, and build the economy should be encouraged. Those that come for school, get an advanced degree and want to start something should be allowed to as well.

What isn't clear to me would be a scenario, say, where two foreign nationals want to work together to start something under this proposed program, would they need 2x the numbers? Also, "three new American jobs", are those visa eligible or not?

The second area I would like to see addressed is the whole of the H1-B process, specifically for "filling jobs where there is a shortage of talent". The economy is in the shitter and there are people qualified that are having a hard time finding things -- maybe due to age, location, or possibly needing to brush up on skill sets. I don't know what the right approach here is, but it really needs to be cleaned up to encourage training and hiring of those not needing a visa. I've worked with many of the job-shops (Wipro, GlobalLogic, etc) where the amount being paid for "talent" often was much higher than what hiring locally would cost with similar or worse quality.

Balance is needed. This proposal is a great start and maybe adopting something like the Canadian point system would be an interesting follow up for the non- entrepeneurial crowd.

</comment><comment><USER41> Did the bill pass already? The article is not clear atleast to me, since it mentions "draft of the bill".

<comment><USER35> No, the bill was introduced last year and failed to have any action taken on it. This is the reintroduction, basically the very first step of a many-step process to become law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What about J1 visa holders? A number of people come in to universities and national labs from abroad on these...It's already a great step--if J1 holders were added, it would be even better.

</comment><comment><USER43> A senator takes blogger's opinion into account and revises the legislation? That's how a democracy should work.

I'm really impressed (and the revised conditions seem very reasonable, too).

<comment><USER35> Bob Litan of Kauffman has been pushing hard for the changes, and Kauffman has the connections to affect the policy. I imagine that had a lot to do with it, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only problem with this is the requirement that it has to generate jobs - there are so many ways this can cause a small business to fail that are outside the control of those who are running it. That is in addition to all the ways a business can fail without employees.

All it really takes is that you overlook a little provision or somebody gets mad and sue because you didn't hire them and they turned out to be some minority that was protected. Even if you win the suit most likely your business is already done for and you lose everything.

The fact that legislation like this is cause for celebration is the measurement of how far the US has fallen.

<comment><USER35> It's an OR requirement within the bill. Jobs is one way to convert the visa into a green card within 2 years, but it's not the only way.

EDIT: Corin_ is right, and I was working off of the old bill, which had jobs as an OR. Interesting that this change was made, probably to sell it more effectively on the Hill.

<comment><USER9> Actually, according to TC's summary (I haven't read the exact proposal yet), the OR requirements are all regarding "raised new financing OR bringing in a certain amount of revenue". Creating jobs is an AND requirement in each of the three options.

Edit: Have now bothered to read the actual press release, TC's list of the three options was almost exactly copied word for word. So yeah, job creation within two years is a must, not an option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I assume the idea is to create American jobs. So, couldn't you just require the company to have so many US citizens on their payroll at a certain minimum salary.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is way too sensible to become true in the U.S. Next.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is so crucially important. Even for an avid follower of politics, it's astounding how something like this can get bogged down in partisan politics.

</comment><comment><USER47> If you have met the employment/revenue standards after 2 years, do you qualify for a startup visa renewal or a green card?

</comment><comment><USER48> I am rooting for this legislation to get approved. It would be a very big boost to many would-be entrepreneurs

</comment><comment><USER49> And just six days before YC S 2011 application deadline. Will probably encourage many people to apply.

</comment><comment><USER50> Finally ... hopefully it will work .. will certainly be a breather for many of us outside the US ....

</comment><comment><USER51> Definitely looking forward to this one too, for personal reasons. Especially the second category.

</comment><comment><USER52> Awesomesauce.... This makes it much more likely that I will take the plunge...

</comment><comment><USER53> I hope inviting immigrants/investors will neutralize outsourcing

</comment><comment><USER38> Well, there were naysayers saying Vivek was just saying this to keep himself in the news and what he writes is useless, he keeps repeating the same thing etc. etc. and got some nice upvoting on here too. Interesting what their take on this would be.

See these two threads.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294552>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294385></comment>


The Story of Mel - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

<comment><USER2> I re-read this story every year or so It's part of the culture of hackers/programmers, and one of the stories that everyone involved in programming should know.

It has, of course, been submitted here many times, and some of the comments should become part of the story. It's not enough to read and enjoy - we should also learn.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20story%20of%20mel&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20story%20of%20mel&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. Cheers for the link!</comment></comment>


Demo scene party next summer in Harvard, Massachusetts - <AUTHOR> http://atparty-demoscene.net/

<comment><USER2> Could the event and the venue be any more incompatible? I mean, what's next? lan party at Lockheed Martin, or a phreaker event jointly held by Oracle and Sloan Business, or Burning Man sponsored by department of health and human services?</comment>


A 'viral' new bird song in Canada is causing sparrows to change their tune - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/a-viral-new-bird-song-in-canada-is-causing-sparrows-t-1844245103 <comment><USER2> Original journal: [https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)...](https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(20\)30771-5)

Watch the video at the bottom. It says:

> A hypothesis suggests that, female birds may habituate to the common songs > over time, and that drives the male bird to adopt novel songs to maintain > female's interest.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a bird singing pirate of Caribbean tune

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpR8BeLR_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpR8BeLR_Q)

Another singing Adam's family reunion tune

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD_tPNYgy58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD_tPNYgy58)

And finally Star wars Darth Vader tune

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjoCi04Rxwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjoCi04Rxwg)

<comment><USER4> Note that these are all cockatiels, very intelligent parrots that will readily pick up and replay sounds they hear. This is quite distinct from sparrows and most songbirds, which only seem to pick up certain songs.

<comment><USER5> Even more fascinating, in my opinion, are Lyrebirds [0]. They have been observed the imitate artificial (human-made) sounds such as those of camera shutter, chainsaws [1], and construction work [2].

Not only do I find it impressive that they're capable of producing these kinds of sounds, but probably much more the necessary memory-recall for this. Birds have rather little brain-mass after all, so they must have some excellent way of 'sampling', distinguishing, and storing auditory stimuli.

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

[1] [https://youtu.be/VjE0Kdfos4Y?t=104](https://youtu.be/VjE0Kdfos4Y?t=104)

[2] [https://youtu.be/C0ZffIh0-NA](https://youtu.be/C0ZffIh0-NA)

<comment><USER6> I expect that, sometime before I die, there will be a clip of a lyrebird doing a David Attenborough narration of a clip of a lyrebird imitating David Attenborough marvelling at some sound that a lyrebird is making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_level_geolocator](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_level_geolocator) \-- How they get rough but scientifically useful tracking information from a device small enough to attach to a sparrow leg!

<comment><USER8> I love this technique! Using a light sensor to measure sunset/sunrise and then calculate the location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I spent two summers in an apartment in San Francisco that was near the nest of what I assume was a nightingale.

Every night around midnight it would start singing. It would loop through maybe 8 songs. Some of them sounded very much like the local environment. For example one song was pretty much identical to sirens that I would periodically hear.

It would last for an hour or two each night. I don't know where the bird went the rest of the year. That was almost ten years ago and I still miss falling asleep to that.

<comment><USER10> In San Jose we have birds that imitate car alarms. I don't like them at all.

<comment><USER11> The Lyrebird from Australia is probably the best at this. It can imitate just about anything - car alarms, other birdsongs, camera shutters, gunshots, etc. etc.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq- yQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrebird#Vocalizations_and_mim...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrebird#Vocalizations_and_mimicry)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Related: lyrebirds passing on flute tunes long after the guy who played them died.

[https://www.chonday.com/lynibird18/](https://www.chonday.com/lynibird18/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Back before the iPhone when Nokia was the defacto phone, there were news stories that birds had started to chime the Nokia ringtone or the Nokia sms chime.

Back then I totally believed it, but I've grown skeptic, but it looks like it is not completely outlandish.

<comment><USER14> I had an Alcatel One Touch Easy and One Touch Max. Both had high chirpy tones and powerful speakers.

My budgerigar have learnt that I always responded to SMS tone of the phones and started to mimic them when she wanted some time with me. She did them with pinpoint accuracy so, it was impossible to tell whether it was the phone or her.

She also chirped parts of the ringtones for fun. Also we had a tune between us. I'd whistle a specific tune and she'd respond back with the same tune (or vice versa). It was a kind of pinging each other.

<comment><USER15> That last bit is so cute :)

<comment><USER14> Thanks. She was very intelligent and very loving. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Next up: getting birds to sing your advertising jingles

<comment><USER17> ROTFL, enter nest seeking drone. A small, low powered device with solar panels gets auto-clamped a few feet from nest.

For the first few weeks of life, baby birds hear your tune, driving it deep into their very essence of self.

I am bird, ergo I sing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder, if I play this video during a walk in the nearby mountain in Japan, will the song be picked up by the local species? The scientists would have a new mystery on their hands lol!

<comment><USER19> > _if I play this video during a walk in the nearby mountain in Japan_

I know you're probably joking here, but since it's an important area of honest lack of knowledge I really want to point: please please don't ever do this everyone. Not just this video specifically but play any bird song at all outside. Many of the guide apps these days for example have collections of bird songs for each species as another aid in identification, and sometimes people play them to try to attract said birds to see them.

But this can genuinely screw things up for a few poor birds and be another pebble of human caused misery added onto species in trouble. Birds use song in part as a gauge for health and thus mating and territory. This is intuitive if you think about it: to produce more, better song requires a strong healthy respiratory system, syrinx and so on. But no bird can match the output of speakers, and recorded song samples are often chosen for being particularly clear and high quality. So if you play it, females may spend their time searching around for this incredible magnificent perfect specimen of birdliness who doesn't exist, and refuse to mate with other males. And other males themselves may just leave the territory.

If you've got a single well fit earphone or something of that order and play at low volume that can work, or else make recordings of the songs then replay them and try to identify them after getting back indoors. But all those songs are just for show and fun, they're an important part of bird life cycles, so please be careful to enjoy them without disrupting them.

<comment><USER20> This is similar to what happens with humans. Females will use an app to quickly scroll through a lot of men, but because they are presented with so many options they will gravitate only toward the top tier men. But the top tier men can only be with so many females, so the majority of females will not get the top tier. However, their standards will still be raised and they will not settle for someone lower. So females will continue searching for this perfect specimen of men and refuse to mate with other males. The other males end up leaving the app and revenue is lost.

<comment><USER21> In the real world people seem to still be reproducing and mating and marrying. So no, this story of women no longer pairing with men due to apps making them picker doesn't ring true.

<comment><USER22> Human reproduction is below maintenance in most first world countries

<comment><USER21> Which is presumably due to birth control and other unrelated factors. To back up the claim that women are no longer looking to pair with men due to apps you can't use reproduction statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can train starlings to speak. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhBaVInb3jI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhBaVInb3jI)

This is the medium of Brian D Collier's brilliant art project Teach the Starlings [http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/html/intro.htm](http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/html/intro.htm)

<comment><USER24> Wow, that was really impressive.

But your second link is broken. I think it should be:

[http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/introduction.html](http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/introduction.html)

This bit is hilarious:

> HOW TO TEACH STARLINGS THEIR NEW CALL

> The first and most simple strategy is to find a starling and shout > "Schieffelin" to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have no idea what's "doublet" or "triplet" about the two bird songs. If they just mean the number of notes, it almost seems like they got the labeling backwards.

<comment><USER26> It's the phrasing of the notes. The "triplet" ending song goes da, da, da da da, da da da. The "doublet" ending song goes da, da, da da, da da, da da.

Disclaimer: I am not a music theory wizard, but I do play drums.

<comment><USER25> Rhythm is not these birds strong point, but I can sort of make out a barely- articulated 3rd in not the first one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Never found a video of killdeer online that sounded anything like the killdeer at my home have sounded like the last 30 or so years.

<comment><USER28> Now's your chance to become an obscure YouTube birdsong maven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oh I've seen this movie before [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_\(film\))

<comment><USER30> OK so yours is a bit of a troll, and at some risk of feeding, I'll offer that _Pontypool_ is such a conceptually amazing film, exploring as it does the intersection of language, media, and mortality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> These two phrases... to me they seem like the new one "answers" to the old one.

Maybe it's something to do with it. They're happy they found a "continuation" to the previous phrase.

</comment><comment><USER32> By now, birds must have developed a low opinion of us hoomans and our "cold- calling" techniques!

We either post mating calls, the bird equivalent of "Singles in your area..." or post danger calls, the bird equivalent of trolling flamebait.

I bet there's a market opportunity for a HN for Birds!

</comment><comment><USER33> To keep up with the current times, wouldn't it be better to call it a "meme" song?

<comment><USER34> One does not simply chirp, chirp, chirp with the eagles

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Tweet memetic.

</comment><comment><USER36> So that's what you call a viral tweet.

<comment><USER37> I have never upvoted with such reluctance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Maybe this is common, but I just noticed it - I scrolled down a bit on the website, and suddenly it took 5 or 6 Back button clicks to come back here. Each mini-article loads a new URL.. Looks like you're on the same page but seems like you're not. There's something I really don't like about that! If you went right to the bottom, if there is one, it might take dozens of Back clicks to get off the page. Which effectively disables your back button.

I've seen bottomless pages on sites, but they don't usually load a bunch of URLs like that in your history, do they?

<comment><USER39> This is the history.pushState() API in action. I use it on [https://theannoyingsite.com](https://theannoyingsite.com) to fill the history with entries to effectively disable the back button.

Also, this one is a gem:

window.addEventListener('popstate', () => { window.history.forward() })

Source code here: [https://github.com/feross/TheAnnoyingSite.com/blob/master/st...](https://github.com/feross/TheAnnoyingSite.com/blob/master/static/index.js)

<comment><USER40> I don't know if I hate this or love it.

<comment><USER41> I loved it. I feel like I should get bonus points for killing the DVD bouncing cat by hitting the exit button as it moved around rather than just using Alt-F4...

<comment><USER40> I cheated for most of the things like that.

I have tiling turned on in my DE, I didn't even realize that things were supposed to be moving until I was almost done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> When I try to read the article on mobile, an unstoppable video fills up 1/3 of my screen. The video is unrelated to the article and has no obvious UX to stop or dismiss.

Gizmodo's website is fucking stupid. Who comes up with this shit?

<comment><USER43> The hedge fund placed exec who has been running Gizmodo into the ground for the last year. Part of a larger trend of user-hostile design changes that have caused quite a lot of controversy as they attempt to extract as much value in the short term as they can. Last time they implemented this exact change it only lasted a few days before the writers at most of the Gizmodo sites more or less openly revolted. It resulted in the shut down of the left leaning news site though. I'm wondering whether we'll see a repeat, or if they'll shrug and give up.

<comment><USER44> What kind of short term value does this kind of stuff extract? Does forcing visitors to watch a video bring ad revenue or something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Sparrows moved into the neighbourhood this year. We noticed their chirping is incredibly annoying. Turns out it's the two-chirp version.

For us this sound doesn't fade into the background because it sounds synthetic or man made. About as annoying as a back up beeper on a truck.</comment>


I scraped all of Fandango's movie listings - <AUTHOR> https://readypipe.com/blog/fandango-ticket-prices/ <comment><USER2> I can vouch for their blurb on CMX in Miami. Truly rapacious experience. $28 and the popcorn isn't free, and service was awful (food delivered in the last 15 minutes of a 2-hour movie after ordering before the movie started). /rant

<comment><USER3> how do they stay in business?

<comment><USER2> my theories are: no other super close theater (though one opened less than a mile from them at 60% of their price), or grandfathered in super cheap rent (they opened with the new building), or tourists don't know better, but never return.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really interesting, even as someone who is not from the US.

I find it astonishing that it's only 13 bucks for a movie ticket over there (around 11 euros). Here in Finland tickets can easily cost over 20e if you see a movie on the weekend.

<comment><USER5> How much do you pay for an oversized soda drink and a family-sized bag of popcorn for one? I believe the concession stand is a major source of revenue for theatres compared to the ticket price itself.

<comment><USER6> Yes. I read on here a while ago that theaters actually don't receive much revenue from movie tickets, due to the studio negotiating a 60% or so share of ticket sales. So most of the money has to come from expensive concessions.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, if that were true as it's said to be, you'd think all theater chains would offer cheap subscriptions, since getting people in seats is way more important than maximizing their revenue from ticket sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this the same technology that was used by Yipit to aggregate daily deals back in the Groupon/Living Social days? What languages do you support and how are you different from scrapinghub.com ?

<comment><USER9> Yes, we've been improving our scraping technology for the past 8 years as we've worked on YipitData (the #1 provider of web data to wall street).

Python is the only supported language right now. Scrapy is an awesome project, but we have a very different approach. We strive to be Flask instead of Django.

If you want to, you can use ReadyPipe entirely in the browser through jupyter notebooks instead of needing to setup a local environment. This is especially helpful with more complicated systems using Selenium and Puppeteer. We discuss a lot more of the features that differentiate us on our homepage: [https://readypipe.com/](https://readypipe.com/) and the docs [https://docs.readypipe.io/](https://docs.readypipe.io/)

Feel free to reach out (email in profile) with additional questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great piece of natural content marketing and demonstration of product. Keep it up.

<comment><USER11> Given the effort that's clearly gone into this article, it would seem appropriate to mention/link to the underlying product near the top of the article. Good job, marketing in a way that didn't annoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is the author aware that the prices depend on the day of the week? Competition in Utah has driven all the big theaters to charge only $5 for all movies every Tuesday, making the movies cheaper than even Wyoming. I'm curious to learn whether the same thing has happened elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! We scraped on both weekends and weekdays, and also limited our analysis to "Adult" tickets for "Standard" class. Typically the special Tuesday tickets (they are often on Tuesdays) will have a different designation.

Possible we didn't catch everything, but in aggregate it should be a reasonable estimation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> very cool! I always wanted to know these things more often

I've done the SF/NYC/Miami circuit, completely skipping the heartland like everyone else, and these ticket prices are baked into my budget.

Oh you want 3D/Special Sound System/random perk? Prepare for $22 and I'm okay with that

For the actual residents of these cities, there isn't often a place for you to watch something you chose to see in a loud usually spacious environment. These are still undervalued entertainment experiences, amongst the sea of entertainment choices, for actual city residents.

I wonder what the industry's own pricing models show

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this a violation of Fandango's TOS?

<comment><USER15> Most likely, although there isn't a practical issue unless they redistribute the raw data.

<comment><USER16> seems like they are advertising a scraping service -> "Want to get the data yourself?"

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that's a legal gray area. (also, from looking at the example code, it's unclear what the service is value-adding anyways; you still need to do most of the legwork by figuring out what/how to scrape).

<comment><USER17> It is not gray at all, it's a violation of their terms plain and simple. They only gray part is whether or not it's enough of a bother to Fandago to actually initiate legal action.

<comment><USER18> While it is a TOS violation is this data being scraped really hurting anything? I dont think so.

<comment><USER15> That's why I said in practice nothing would happen. However, if the data is used to build a competitor or it contains PII, it could be problematic.

<comment><USER19> Plus it consumes server resources and bandwidth.

And some scrape so aggressively that it's like being DDOS'd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tangent, but I wish someone would disrupt the movie ticket industry. Fandango's mobile app is one of the worst apps that I've ever seen: it's very unresponsive and full of advertisements, spams and interstitials I do not care about. And yet it's the only way to buy tickets in my area.

I mean I'm already using the app to spend money, why not offer me a good experience instead of bombarding me with crappy ads?

<comment><USER21> I assume it's because they want to avoid paying fees to Apple no?

<comment><USER10> I don't see how that transfers. Paying fees to Apple also might not apply with Fandango, as it delivers a service fulfilled physically and not digitally. I would suspect the ad bombing in the Fandango app is due to razor thin margins in the movie tickets purchasing business.

<comment><USER21> Hmm good point.

If one was to take on Fandango would you have to take over their contract with the movie theaters or could I be a competitor to Fandango?

<comment><USER10> They definitely have direct contracts that are not easily replicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You might want to clean up that messy prototype code. It's annoying to have to scroll horizontally and the nesting level is just insane.

</comment><comment><USER23> How did you verify that you got all the theaters?

Having looked at the code in regards to only using zip codes that end in 1 in order to eliminate overlapping neighborhoods, it seems like you missed some.

Why not grab all of them and clean the data? Maybe it is too intensive, but insisting you have "all of Fandango's movie listings" is actually false.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a really cool example of ReadyPipe - It's a great demo of scraping a site that's got some intent not to be scrapeable :D

On the other hand, your data just seems to follow [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/) \- What happens to the prices if you adjust for cost of living index? What about if you adjust just for population? It looks to me just like a Cost-of-Living heatmap.

</comment><comment><USER25> >> Only cities with 500,000 residents or more (per Wikipedia) were included in this analysis

So 35 cities? Interesting read none the less. Good to see independent theaters are still doing well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! Just those 35. Main reason being that it's actually a pretty manual effort to assign theaters to cities, because there could be a bunch of different "cities", as Fandango classifies them, that are all really the same city - like for Miami as an example, you can have Miami and Coral Gables and Miami Beach, which you'd really want to classify all as Miami.

Long story short, didn't want to go to that process for too many more cities haha.

<comment><USER26> Maybe theres a mapping somewhere, between List<Zipcode> <-> Metropolitan area.

<comment><USER27> I believe the US Census offers that [https://www.census.gov/geo/maps- data/data/ua_rel_download.ht...](https://www.census.gov/geo/maps- data/data/ua_rel_download.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why don't you summarise what you found in the title, and give me an indication of whether the I should read your article or not

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly planned to but was character-limited

<comment><USER15> The HN guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)) favors the article title w/o numbers, in this case "Insights From Analyzing Fandango Ticket Prices"

HN specifically discourages clickbaity titles. (in this case, your title "I scraped all of Fandango's movie listings, here's what I found" is also misleading; you didn't scrape all the listings)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, noted. Will keep that in mind in the future</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Grand unified theory of markets - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-22/a-grand-unified-theory-of-markets <comment><USER2> To my understanding the author doesn't present an 'grand unifying theory' but a narrative of one way money flows in markets with unclear assumptions. I find the headline promises far too much.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the author is sarcastic. He's pretty conical.</comment></comment>


Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-missiles-ai-insight/deep-in-the-pentagon-a-secret-ai-program-to-find-hidden-nuclear-missiles-idUSKCN1J114J <comment><USER2> > The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into > its war machine ...

Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it?

Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. But AI is much less strongly dependent on those things: You don't need lots of people; the robots and computers do much of the fighting. And wealth only helps so much: For AI, much of the war-fighting asset is software, which of course is free to produce after development, not expensive hardware. As we know well, spending more on software development doesn't always yield a better outcome. What's the benefit from spending $100 billion on development rather than $1 billion or even $10 million? For a lot of software, not much. (Hardware scale does help machine learning, but is there an upper limit or diminishing returns?)

Small countries might have an enormous opportunity. Could Singapore or Israel take the lead in AI and become major military powers? Could Saudi Arabia or Iran afford to develop AI as good as the U.S., China, or Russia? What about private companies or individuals? I suspect it depends not on quantity of developers, but on quantity of 10x developers and on who first discovers the superior technology and, more importantly, its application. Remember that in WWII, German tanks were inferior to many of their enemies, but the Germans figured out how to use tanks more effectively and seized an enormous advantage before their enemies could catch up.

EDIT: A couple clarifications and added the potential of private organizations

<comment><USER3> >> _Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population._

I thought that military power depended primarily on the quantity of population and _materiél_. The latter is driven primarily by wealth, but also relies on building, operating and maintaining a manufacturing and industrial base.

Smarter software will help equalize and hopefully reduce coordination costs (i.e. command hierarchy & effective intelligence) but doesn't really help with population nor materiél factors.

<comment><USER4> > but doesn't really help with population nor materiél.

To add, AI can help reduce staffing, failures, costs, etc. What it can't do is magically project force. This requires boots on the ground or a weapons system capable of reaching out and touching someone. This requires materiél, and for the initial build-up flesh-and-bone soldiers.

However, there is a possible exception in the form of cyber warfare. If AI can sufficiently disrupt digital infrastructure it could hypothetically bring another power to its knees. Still, if that power can bounce back from the initial setback that AI would again become a less direct asset.

<comment><USER5> Correct. And Cyber-based attacks are much less visible and easier to hide than overt attacks e.g. a cruise missile. But as things get more automated, the attack surface and concomitant damage will only increase.

This could have very real military effects. Suppose your supply lines/defense contractors are targeted by foreign digital attackers. Even if your Military itself uses secure communications and infrastructure, if their dependents are disrupted, it will directly impact their effectiveness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If the research is successful, such computer systems would be able to think > for themselves

At what point will journalists stop writing this. We may very well have general AI at some point in the future, but I really doubt it's going to be in our lifetimes.

<comment><USER7> It makes me bristle every time I read it. Advanced statistical computing != thinking! People love to conflate number crunching with intuition and all of the other things that are impossible for computers to do, so I expect it to continue.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't help that a lot of Tech companies actively promote that AI can deliver a lot more than it can (e.g. IBM, Tesla)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch

Replace "a missile launch" with "a peaceful protest" and the statement suddenly becomes dastardly.

The increasingly authoritarian Chinese government would absolutely adore a technology like that, I am sure of it.

<comment><USER9> > Government-sent postmen would be able to walk past every single door in the > country every morning and [deliver mail].

Replace "deliver mail" with "look through the windows and write down what they see" and the statement suddenly becomes dastardly.

See what I did there? I took an random situation and made it instantly negative and big-brotherish just by invoking an imaginary narrative.

Conspiracy theories just don't help advancing arguments.

<comment><USER10> I think you're being unfair.

You've conflating the much simpler task of changing the label with a much broader change (ie, throwing away the entire practice in favor of a completely different and more difficult one).

Which do you honestly thing is more realistic and more consistent with what we know of the history of the state?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure why this is news. I was interviewed for a position almost 10 years ago to develop software that categorized satellite imagery using heuristics, object detection, and classification. I assumed that similar projects had been going on for decades before.

Much of the 'AI' research has been directly (or indirectly) funded by DoD, 3-letter agencies, NATO, and many other countries since the field's infancy.

<comment><USER12> Propaganda to counteract the negative press about AI for defense/Project Maven, perhaps.

<comment><USER13> So propaganda to counter propaganda?

<comment><USER14> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I imagine reviewing positive training data for that model is terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can only say from experience in Pakistan but culture makes it difficult for other countries to succeed if they are turning away developers for ethnic, tribal or religious reasons or for being on the autism spectrum. Not to mention the culture of never questioning authority figures making proposing new ideas much more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER17> Detecting launch prep might be useful but it's ultimately just too easy to conceal a launch site to be the complete solution. It doesn't really help with a sneak attack from a major power and US missile defense isn't even good enough yet to reliably stop a NK attack.

What the world really needs is to ensure mutually assured destruction is remains in effect. The world cannot afford to let the Russian or Chinese dictators believe they can pull off a first strike and take over the world.

The problem right now is that the US is still trying to uphold MAD by itself and it's failing. The US nuclear triad is way out of date and potentially vulnerable to a first strike. We need to decentralize the system among other wealthy and trustworthy countries.

All countries in the G7 should have enough nuclear weapons pointed at Russia and China to ensure MAD. And they should develop these weapons independently of the US for increased reliability and redundancy.

<comment><USER18> Frankly, I think the country that one should be the most concerned about pulling off a first strike is the USA, not China or Russia...

<comment><USER19> Let me guess, because of Trump, right.

<comment><USER20> more like superfusing, missile defense systems, superior early warning radar...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> But what if the nuclear missile is being carried by a bipedal walking tank?

</comment><comment><USER22> Does the fact they are using a different approach (i.e. 'Deep Learning') to many of the same problems they've been trying to address for some time ... even really matter?

</comment><comment><USER22> 'War Games' -> WOPR [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsycWRQrc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsycWRQrc8)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm kind of sad that we have enough imagery of nuclear missiles being fired to train the model and verify it. :/

</comment><comment><USER14> This is the most propaganda headline I've ever read.

</comment><comment><USER24> Do you want Skynet? Because this is how you get Skynet.

</comment><comment><USER25> I misread this as "secret AI program to fire nuclear missiles" and was briefly terrified.

</comment><comment><USER26> I see Pentagon PR reached out to Reuters.

<comment><USER27> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.</comment></comment>


Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/science/earth-highest-temperature-record.html?_r=1 <comment><USER2> Canada is becoming more and more appealing to me in every way.</comment>


Tableau acquires ClearGraph, a data analysis startup using natural language - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/09/tableau-acquires-cleargraph-a-startup-that-lets-you-analyze-your-data-using-natural-language/ <comment><USER2> I've been working on a (soon to be) open source version of this, I didn't realize there was a real business version out there. So far it works great alongside Salesforce e.g. "Find me appointments in San Mateo today set by Jason Jones".

<comment><USER3> Nice, do you have any details already? Library / Language? Can't wait to see some actual efforts in open source in this space.

<comment><USER2> It's based on seq2seq translation models, where instead of translating from one human language to another, it translates a human language to a command language: "Find appointments in San Mateo" -> "find($type=appointments, $location=San Mateo)". The code that does that parsing (PyTorch based) is at [https://github.com/spro/RARNN](https://github.com/spro/RARNN)

The missing piece is generalizing the training process to fit other people's schemas; generating training data based on models, attributes, and relationships.

<comment><USER4> This is very interesting! How far does the 'missing generalization' impact go? I.e. your Nalgene grammar file (nice reference, didn't know about Nalgene) is used to generate both flat input strings and nested desired outputs, which you use to train your network on (if I understand correctly). This file seems to contain quite a lot of hand-written varieties like "please/plz/plox/...". After training the network, I assume it is capable to also handle inputs not seen in the training data? Like someone writing "please?!11"? If not, I don't really understand why'd you'd train a network in the first place: you have put in the effort to create a grammar, so might as well use that one to use the actual conversion to a tree, no?

Totally not trying to be negative here, just trying to understand your workflow a bit better.

<comment><USER2> The words are turned into GloVe word vectors on the input side, so it is able to handle a decent amount of variation in spelling and using synonyms. Having synonyms defined in the Nalgene file helps the network to accept vectors in a general region rather than an exact point in space. It also encourages the network to learn about the grammar of the input rather than use of specific words, so it can handle words that it hasn't seen before (good for names, places).

<comment><USER4> Gotcha! Thanks for the explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Saw a pretty sweet demo of Tableau's home-grown prototype at their annual conference last November. It was surprisingly useful to be able to just speak "show me all of the 3-bedroom homes in the downtown Seattle area less than $400,000".

It was slow, but effective. I kept feeling myself wanting to click around for the first few minutes but quickly realized I didn't need to.

I did have to speak in away that the NLP engine could understand (i.e. "four- hundred thousand dollars" instead of "four-hundred k") so it still feels like I'm building a SQL query with my voice instead of just speaking an idea and the software figures out what I mean (hard problem to solve, I know!)

<comment><USER6> Is there an open source NLP engine out there? I've been trying to learn this area and there are so many "pot holes" and wrong paths ... I've looked at OWL/Sparql, Graph DBs, logic programming, rule based systems. I feel like I'm dancing around the real topic and I don't know what "it" is :'(

<comment><USER7> .NET has some speech synthesis and listener libraries. They work pretty well; I built a modestly-functional chat bot once with them. Not sure about the overall .NET licensing arrangement, but I heard it was moving towards open source.

Though they feel abandoned, and there hasn't been much recent activity around them. Microsoft probably has all speech engineers working on Cortana instead. (Though I'd be surprised if she's not using .NET at some level.)

<comment><USER8> > Microsoft probably has all speech engineers working on Cortana instead

Microsoft cognitive services

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a lot of movement in this space at the moment. I'm aware of the following players:

\- Veezoo www.veezoo.com

\- Wizdee www.wizdee.com

\- Kueri www.kueri.me

<comment><USER10> Pokemon or Data company

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has been in production with Power BI + Cortana for about a year now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it any good?

<comment><USER11> Mostly agree with Baconner.

It does help with discovery if configured well. 'Configured well' is a fairly high cost, so only worthwhile for a fairly simple data model that will have a large number of consumers.

Typically, there's not much of a population of "people who are unfamiliar with the dataset, but need to ask questions of it".

<comment><USER12> I do agree. It can work and when you've put the time into designing it to work then it can feel fairly magical, but there's a point at which you feel like you're almost pre-creating all the queries for users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a great combination IMO. I spent some time researching various BI data analytics services and I was impressed with some of the newer ones like Tableau. This seems like essential tech for any medium-large company.

Dashboards and visualizations that can be easily composed with a natural language interface... it makes a lot of sense. Especially when combined with alerting services and/or chatbot-esque interfaces for automating workflows.

<comment><USER5> Hmm - I hadn't thought about the dashboard / data viz creation side of this. Not sure that I'd want to be sitting in my cube creating dashboards "out loud".

 _" Okay, let's bring in 'Sales' to the rows card._

 _" Nah, I don't like that. Move 'Sales' to the columns card._

 _" Hmm, that doesn't work either. Put 'Sales' back to the rows card but add 'Profitability Indicator" to the details section._

 _" Crap. Still not working. Let's start over."_

Imagine 10 analysts in a room all talking like this :)

<comment><USER14> Well, anything you can say you can also type out.

<comment><USER12> this here. I've spent the last couple of years working on a similar data discovery style product and after a lot of playing around with concepts I think semi-natural language descriptions typed and also generated based on your manual data selection can be really useful.

If I'm speaking i have to finish the whole thought and deal with excluding all my "uuhms" and half thoughts. If I'm typing i can intellisense prompt for relevant things. Correlate Sales with _[Discounts, ...]. I think terse natural langage descriptions of data views are really useful aside from voice.

Incidentally nothing like trying to play around with this stuff to make you super self conscious about uuh how you speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Curious to see how the industry will play out.

Seems like more analytics and BI companies will have to incorporate NLP if they want to compete.

Currently working on a similar project

\- www.askned.com

<comment><USER3> You mean another player like the company you are a VP of marketing?

<comment><USER15> Absolutely, It's a unique opportunity in the space, it feels like everyone is racing to market - next 6 months will be interesting to watch.

<comment><USER14> Nice edit to your comment.

Originally, claudfuen wrote something like:

"Wonder if we'll see more acquisitions this space, like askned.com."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Aren't We Talking About Burnout? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/2014/05/08/why-arent-we-talking-about-burnout/

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=burnout#!/story/forever/0/burnout](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=burnout#!/story/forever/0/burnout)

HN has a substantial amount of discussion !

(for those interested)</comment>


Zenbox Omniwrite: Powerful customer admin panel works with your existing SaaS - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zenboxapp.com/zenbox-omniwrite-a-supercharged-customer-admi

<comment><USER2> 360p video to demonstrate a product in this age?

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose we could up the quality, it was the default setting. What's recommended, 720p?

<comment><USER2> With 720p I can at least see text, and feel like watching over a colleagues monitor. Also, along promoting your product, it kind of hints toward attention to details.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated! It's in 720p now - thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Our customers have been asking for the ability to quickly edit their customer profiles for awhile now, so this is easily one of the most exciting features we're released so far.

Happy to answer any questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this looks awesome! Well done guys, this is a really powerful feature!</comment>


It's Time to Declare Juneteenth a Federal Holiday - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/06/14/no-more-excuses---its-time-to-declare-juneteenth-a-federal-holiday/#60146f4850d3 <comment><USER2> Or could we get rid of ALL federal holidays and put everyone back to work?

Everyone wants their pet project/idea/ideal/personal-fetish as a "federal holiday" which then all but forces States to also adopt them (or get into name-calling and finger-pointing).

How about we abolish ALL federal holidays and decide that our tax payer dollars don't give federal workers (white, grey, or blue collar) automatic paid days off, or bankers and others?

Then, everyone just gets five (or some magic number that makes fiscal sense) paid days off per year that they can use for whatever "interest" they have. If they want it for Christmas, or MLK, or President's Day, or "save the Great White Shark Day" or whatever, go and knock yourself out.

"Holidays" will still be on XML feeds and Hallmark calendars and can be celebrated by your family, clan, tribe, city, state, or what-have-you... but no one just auto-mandates that federal workers get them off (and paid for by taxpayers) automatically.

If you want to blow your allotment all at one time (and it's possible in your business to do so), go for it.

WF&A is what federal holidays really are.

How many federal workers take Memorial Day off to go weep over the tombs of veteran soldiers, or attend parades. Maybe 10%?

The rest just go party the night before or sleep all day or mow their lawn or Netflix binge. If you aren't willing to use an allotted day off on Memorial Day, then you probably don't really care about our Armed Forces or their sacrifices. That's fine - just don't use our taxpayers dollars to watch Netflix all day; go work that day instead and take one of your allotted days off for something that matters.

When is this socialism gonna end? And why is this even related to HN and being submitted here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Couple of points:

0\. You offer an interesting idea: providing days off that individuals can take off for whichever reason they want. Seems like a good policy. This could be implemented as a 'mandatory minimum number of days off for every full time worker'. It does not have to compete with national holidays.

1\. I think holidays serve a symbolic meaning too: indicating what we as a nation value, even if not every person in the nation does. It's like an agenda: we choose to remember certain individuals or ideas. Some like Columbus day, people are fighting and trying to remove.

2\. Holidays provide a day when "everyone" (obviously not everyone, but most people) are reliably free without work. This makes family gatherings easier (4th of July). I think it's a tragedy that election day is not a national holiday.</comment></comment>


VoIM interop startup: lets you make free calls between Yahoo, MSN, GTalk and SIP - <AUTHOR> http://www.gtalk2voip.com/ <comment><USER2> I've tried this service on my Nokia and it's impressive!</comment>


YouTube should give users a way of knowing if a video has been altered - <AUTHOR> https://spencerdailey.com/2019/06/24/youtube-should-give-users-a-way-of-knowing-if-a-video-has-been-altered-after-its-been-posted-a-no-brainer-consideration-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> I tend to disagree because it can be used to remove information not to add it. As OP said, the info about the number of "folds" was inaccurate so the content was removed from the video. The tool is also used to remove person information accidentally included from a video and is also used to remove baked in ad segments after the ad has ran its course (useful for content that the info contained rarely changes. I know one electronics YouTuber who had been pushing for this feature for a while, though not actually seen them use it).

We know YouTube has the ability to edit video, heck they have done it to their own promotional videos. But here is the thing imo. When a video is edited "in bad faith" we hear about it pretty quickly, when a video is edited in good faith (removing inaccurate information, ads, personal information) do we really care?

Not everything said online needs to be set in stone. That's just my own opinion on the matter.

Also the dot marker on reddit only shows if it's been edited after 3 mins. In a heated debate that's penlty of time to alter "what you have said". And atleast one of the high ups have been found to edit people's posts directly in the database avoiding the "edit marker" to change the tone of their posts. The edit marker did nothing to prevent this. People speaking up brought it to everyone's attention [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_by_editing_some_comments_and_creating_an/)

<comment><USER3> Videos until now were thought to be immutable. If someone removes a point of controversy from a video, a person linking to it as proof of that controversy suddenly looks like a liar.

<comment><USER2> Video has never been immutable. Video has been able to be edited long before YouTube. Same happened in traditional media where an inaccurate slide shown on lunchtime news would be corrected on the evening news.

You want a more immutable source, archive the video and link to that. Same reason people archive other websites when wanting to link to something as "proof". Because we know that the web server is not write once.

<comment><USER4> > _Video has never been immutable. Video has been able to be edited long > before YouTube._

I think they're talking about the actual content hosted at a specific url, not just video editing in general.

<comment><USER5> Even that isn't immutable. e.g. the video of the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch was modified after the livestream while still claiming that it was a livestream from the original date

<comment><USER6> The /expectation/ of viewers and sharers of the content is that it is immutable. I think the argument is that the /expectation/ will need to shift unless proactive steps are taken to make certain guarantees about the nature of shared content. One compromise, for example, would be to force edited videos to be a new resource, instead of replacing the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are at least four separate questions to address here.

One, if videos should be editable. Two, if edited videos should be allowed to re-use the old URL. Three, if users should be able to tell an edit has been made. Four, what level of granular detail YouTube should provide about the editing process, up to and including if the previous version(s) of the video should be made available by YouTube.

Many comments here arguing for point 1, when TFA is not objecting to point 1. Obviously YouTube should allow editing videos.

I think point 2 is also a crucial feature, because of the widespread sharing of video links, the penalty for editing would be too high if it was equivalent to posting anew. I would hesitate to call it "editing" even, if the URL changed.

I think that point 3–at the least indicating a last modified date—would be uncontroversial.

I think hosting the previous versions contravenes the intent of the publisher and is not the right choice, bad or wrong information need not be hosted by the platform indefinitely. That's not to say someone somewhere might not archive it, but that doesn't mean YouTube should.

<comment><USER8> What about comments? Say you comment on a video and now the edit changes a part you commented on. Should comments before an edit show something like these comments were made before the edit on X date?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who records programming screencasts, this is a great feature.

So many high-traffic videos on YouTube are tutorials that no longer work due language and framework changes! At least in my corner of the web, a simple "last updated on <date>" would be sufficient for me as a viewer.

<comment><USER10> Right, or you do a live / unscripted video and you forget one important thing or say something but don't elaborate enough in the moment.

Happens pretty often in off the cuff programming screencasts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A cheap answer would be for Youtube to present a last edited date for any video in an easy to check place.

Since current copyright makes it difficult to make a copy of the video and link to the copy, we've fallen into the bad habit of linking to things and hoping they don't change. Copyright interpretation isn't going to change anytime soon, and keeping immutable copies on Youtube might be too expensive. I say might, because, in the grand scheme of things, edited videos might be few.

A last changed date would be enough for most purposes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is this so controversial? It's common among other technology to show when something was edited. It's very common for textual based social networks to do so.

It'd be a cool feature.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this breaks YouTube's timestamped ("share at") links. So, if a user shares a timestamp link (?t=55), and then the creator cuts X seconds from the beginning of the video, the timestamp link will start X seconds after the user intended it to.

A product change that's this ill-considered, half-baked, consequential, and poorly communicated makes me wonder what the UX design process looks like at YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER13> As others already commented a lot of content creators are getting copyright claims for just 5 seconds humming of a song and this allows them to edit that part and change it. It's funny how people want to edit their tweets when they misstype something but don't want others to do so. In a video of 10min there are a lot of mistakes to be made and things that can be changed.

<comment><USER14> > people want to edit their tweets when they misstype something but don't want > others to do so

Those are actually two different (though somewhat overlapping) kinds of edits. People want "I wrote tyop instead of typo and that makes me sound like a idiot, so imma fix that". They don't want "@jswift1729 tweeted that we should kill children for food, but then edited it so everyone compaining about it sounds delusional".

This problem could be (mostly) solved easily by showing the most-revised version by default, but including a text to the effect of "edited 5 times ; last edited 1970-01-02 04:30:21" linking to a list of all revisions.

<comment><USER15> Basically implement wikipedia's history system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> spencerdailey.com lets authors alter posted articles; readers should have a way to tell.

The Internet is highly mutable. If you want a snapshot of something, take a snapshot.

<comment><USER17> I think there's a pretty big difference between a static page, which can be easily and cheaply cached, and a video streaming service, which very much cannot be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think YouTube should also allow viewers to see what was removed unless there was a very good reason for it.

This should be true for video titles and descriptions too. YouTube is very opaque about this right now. Did you know a video can have a different title depending on your language setting? I'm not sure if that's optional automated Google Translate or written by the uploader.

<comment><USER18> Who determines what constitutes a "very good reason"?

<comment><USER3> Possibly YouTube's report system would work actually. It's only in rare cases like personal information breach or something that it should be used.

<comment><USER19> > It's only in rare cases like personal information breach or something that > it should be used.

In Germany we have something called "Recht am eigenen Bild" (right to your own picture). I film political demonstrations but until now I've been hesitating with uploading them as a successful "strike" with no editing option would endanger the video itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think youtube should keep copies of the un-edited video for users to view. Quite obviously there was a reason for the uploader to remove that section of video.

The chaotic side of me says youtube should do this, as it's another reason for alternate platforms to crop up. youtube needs to lose it's market share.

<comment><USER21> Even if they don't keep the un-edited copy around, there should at least be some visible indication that the video was edited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel like we're starting to see the limits of single platforms. Once upon a time, the technology YouTube built was sufficiently core to their business that no one else could compete without also building their own video pipeline for UGC. Today, that's commodity, and we're also learning there isn't a one- size-fits-all approach to community. The problem described here is a benefit for someone in their situation. It isn't always helpful in every context.

It makes me wonder if the next evolution of products are around focused communities instead of monolithic platforms.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very expensive but YouTube could have immutable revisions. So you can still watch old content even after the creator has modified it. Something like youtube.com/watch?id=123&revision=0

<comment><USER24> there are times youtube (or the uploader) wouldn't want old versions available. Copyright/privacy violations, ToS violations, or even just unintentional misinformation can be edited out, but leaving the old version accessible could be a liability issue for youtube

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wanted to make a site/personal list of "approved" videos (for kids for example) and the expectation would be a way to detect if the video has been altered since it was "approved" - like mark a dirty bit until it can be reviewed again.

I haven't actually gone deep enough in metadata or API or anything to see if that data is available (last modified or a hash of some sort)

But the fact it doesn't show this on the frontend makes me wonder if that's even a detail I could get.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also, news sites should let the readers know if an article has been altered since it's published. Time and time again, I've seen some news sites (some of them are even reputable ones) silently modified an article without changing the published date, or not showing the date because of this very reason. I don't know how we can stop the practice, but at least we should be aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wasn't aware they allowed this. It's a horrible idea, but it leads further towards Google's dream of an fully and instantly mutable, impossible to reference, fully personalised internet where no one and everyone could be accountable for the fact that you shared a video with your coworker and he saw a completely different version of it while neither of you is aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Altering videos feels very much like a key component of a site like YouTube, but also one that could easily be used to manipulate viewership.

I feel like the only way to do it is to use a human moderated whitelist of top producers, _and_ clearly mark them as edited.

</comment><comment><USER29> i wonder, though, if our feedback matters for a service such as youtube. i don't know how many times i have sent a feedback on having the most basic sorting order for the watch later playlist, which is simply by length. sometimes we just have time to spare for short 5mins or less videos. and yet over the years i have seen layout change, not very useful drag sort, mini player, etc., being added.

but editing your watch later playlist takes you to a 2010 webpage with very limited functionality...

(my own personal hack is to go through the list and "move to top" short videos... it's worse on mobile because you have to drag and sometimes you lose the drag...)

</comment><comment><USER30> Headline says "now" but this isn't a new feature. Article is just a huge rant in blog form.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair, my reasoning for saying "now": the ability to alter videos is a relatively new feature (last few months) that YouTube did not make a clear announcement about on launch day.

It is a major departure from immutable videos, and deserved more of a company PR effort to inform users of the change.</comment></comment>


What the HBOS fraud tells us about the state of British banking - <AUTHOR> http://www.ianfraser.org/mobile1/hbos-fraud-british-banking/ <comment><USER2> Andy Hornby [1] shouldn't be allowed to run a corner shop, let alone a bookies. Under his rule HBOS ran an unhedged mortgage book.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hornby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hornby)</comment>


The Countries That Trust Their Government Most and Least - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/01/22/the-countries-that-trust-their-government-most-and-least-infographic <comment><AUTHOR> just for some comparison, here are some data for the US between 1958 and 2015,

[http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/1-trust-in- government...](http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/1-trust-in- government-1958-2015/)</comment>


One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864.pdfhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.08864 <comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15577885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15577885)

Also:

        Paper identifier
        '1710.08864.pdfhttps:/arxiv.org'
        not recognized

        There appears to be a valid arXiv paper identifier
        within '1710.08864.pdfhttps:/arxiv.org'.  Perhaps
        the link you followed was intended as a link to
        arXiv:1710.08864.

Links:

* [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864)

* [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864.pdf](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864.pdf)</comment>


LulzSec Leaks 62,000 Email/Passwords of writerspace.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/06/lulzsec-leaks-62000-emailpasswords-of.html

<comment><USER2> These kids seriously need to be punched in the face. "For the lulz," as it were. Or perhaps "for great justice" would be more fitting.

Is there any way we can help these 62,000 people? I'm reading through the password list now, and many of these passwords are to people's gmail accounts. I see a comcast account too ... you could probably access billing info just with that password alone.

It feels like our duty, somehow, as good internet citizens, to help these people out. Many of them are probably mom'n'dad-types ... they have no idea what a "Database" is, let alone what it means for one to be leaked.

But we can't just go and change their passwords, even if it's for their protection, since it's the password to their email account and we have no way of notifying them.

<comment><USER3> Parse & collect email accounts, send emails (in serial) and weep as it gets gobbled up by gmail's spam detection.

A more realistic alternative might be to notify Google with a machine-readable list of email addresses the passwords for which have been compromised so they can do a system notification of these users without fear of getting eaten by spam filter.

<comment><USER4> It's done. Redditters took care of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Prolific & brazen criminals = enormous egos. They won't stop until they are stopped.

edit: My PR senses started tingling on further reflection.

The best way for LulzSec to be countered is in the PR arena. Since they're already bad guys, and since they've already worn out their folk hero sheen, it does no good to villify them.

The best way is to steal their thunder. An organization of people who make a concerted, __publicized __effort to mitigate damage to the random victims caught in LulzSec's blast radius would definitely steal the limelight.

It's similar to responding to a forum troll by making fun of them. Take away their momentum and make them a pawn in your press releases.

<comment><USER5> Sadly, I doubt they can be stopped.

<comment><USER6> No one is infallible, it's only a matter of time until they slip up. They're making a rather large footprint

<comment><USER7> I think calling it a "large" footprint is an understatement. My conspiracy buddies are going nuts with the idea that its the government trying to convince us to hand over our internet freedom to them. I wish i could laugh at them with confidence

<comment><USER3> Well said. I'm not completely convinced this isn't the government, and I'm definitely not normally a tinfoil-hatter. I think the most likely scenario is that, like the ATF's blind eye toward gun-runners on the Mexico border, an agency or agencies have been ordered to turn a blind eye for now.

The chickens are coming home to roost on the ATF thing and I sincerely hope that, if my suspicions are true, they do the same on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please stop upvoting this blogspam posted constantly by unixroot. He's clearly doing this to promote his site, thehackernews.com

I imagine he's made a killing lately with all the Lulzsec drama that gets reflex upvoted. Just more noise and blogspam. He submits several stories a day exclusively from that domain, thehackernews.com

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a great time to be a security specialist. People who know their shit can probably make an absolute killing right now consulting for companies.

And all companies should be on red alert, because if nothing else, this is an amazing wake-up call about security.

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/i16hm/lulzsec_j...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/i16hm/lulzsec_just_publicly_gave_away_62k_emails_and/c2019le)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not convinced these are real. A lot of the passwords are surprisingly cryptic - not the usual collection of bananas and children's names you might expect.

Assuming that most people use the same username and password for most things, and that AOL users will be the least sophisticated I thought it would be interesting to verify 10 of the combinations which had an AOL address against AOL. Not a single one of them actually worked and I'm inclined to wonder whether (happily) this isn't just a hoax.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've got to admit to finding a few of the things they do a little amusing in a somewhat childish manner, but this sort of thing ruins what little (debatable) good comes from their politics.

If they are going to keep on hitting targets like this just because they can then, they could at least release only the email addresses and not the passwords, which will illustrate the point and allow affected users a chance to know they are at risk from the sites policies whilst reducing the immediate risk to their data.

Obviously what the could actually do is just release nothing and work with administrators to correct the errors, but then they wouldn't be garnering the publicity they so obviously crave.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's just no class (as if there could be any in hacking) with LulzSec. I could be on the side of a hacker with cases like Kevin Mitnick. These guys are just dicks.

</comment><comment><USER14> I tried about a 100 password/login pairs and none worked. Perhaps they've all been changed, or maybe this list is fake.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why o why do developers keep storing plain passwords in databases. They should store hashes instead.

<comment><USER16> That's not good enough. Scrolling through the list, I haven't seen any password that I can say with certainty couldn't be either brute forced, dictionary attacked, or found in a rainbow table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You're just encouraging them.

</comment><comment><USER18> Would it be acceptable for someone to post a list of just the passwords? I would love to add them to my collection of passwords that are not allowed.

</comment><comment><USER19> So why isn't anyone upset that writerspace.com is storing passwords in plaintext?

</comment><comment><USER19> Honestly, the more you rage about this in comments here, the more they love it. Stop caring, it's the only thing you can individually do to reduce their power. Unless you're working for the cyber police.

</comment><comment><USER20> Lets see LulzSec and Anonymous trying to out do one another.. and mixed in the possibility that both are being played by government agents to get info on wikileaks..

Nothing good will come of this..</comment>


Apple's Business Beyond the iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-30/apple-shares-rally-as-company-outlines-life-beyond-the-iphone <comment><USER2> Wow, Apple's services business (consumer focused) is $10 billion a quarter now.

To put that in perspective, Amazon's entire AWS cloud business, which is enterprise focused, is at around $7 billion a quarter.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention Apple has a much higher Operating Margin than AWS. And yet people are still not happy with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have bought myself and many in my family Apple Watches - a fantastic product IMO.

As voice dictation gets better, answering email and messages on the watch lets me often just leave my phone at home.

I can imagine a future when many people only have a watch as their personal device but use other larger devices that are shared, instantly personalized by a watch.

<comment><USER5> In the Apple world, everyone owns their own devices. No sharing.

<comment><USER6> But if everything is powered by your watch, then all the external "devices" become essentially dumb monitors. If you could walk up to a monitor and your watch automatically paired with it through Bluetooth and all your stuff popped up ready to be browsed in full HD, desktop sized, wouldn't that be awesome? Of course the watch internals need to be capable of driving full-screen HD, but we're not too far from that.

<comment><USER5> My watch is more powerful than my smartphone was a few years ago. _But_ my phone is also now more powerful than my desktop was just a few years ago. And my current desktop is just ridiculous.

Of course, my watch is good for mostly telling the time. My phone is good for browsing the web and playing games. And my desktop is good for software development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i don't think there's much mystery here. apple's strategy has been pretty consistent with their apparent mission--ubiquitous computing for regular (but not poor) folks--for years now, since the success of ipod revealed itself as a foothold for apple to launch the iphone and set it on this path.

the iphone is a huge stepping stone to that future, and it will still be relevant for a while (if no longer novel and sexy). carplay, home, airpods, watch, even icloud--all that stuff now wraps around the iphone to create pieces of a future personal computing cocoon. over time, the integrations between them will be more and more seamless until the iphone disappears, absorbed into those other devices.

apple's current services growth is part of this strategy, not the strategy itself. it has to build out that part of the business (particularly video content/entertainment) to set itself up to be competitive in that future market that the other faang companies are also vying for.

(as an aside, the movie _her_ seems to be a neat extrapolation of apple into the future, minus the clunky ending)

</comment><comment><USER8> They desperately need to port messages/facetime to windows and android. They could very easily charge a flat yearly fee with the promise of secure messaging. They're going to miss the boat just like blackberry before them if they don't move sooner rather than later.

EVENTUALLY Google will stop dropping the ball, and then it will be too late.

<comment><USER9> What makes you think that Google is the big competitor to Messages in the US, rather than FB Messenger? I know more (non-tech audience) people who use FB Messenger than any of the google products. Does Google default to Hangouts messages when using an android phone, if the recipient also has an Android (vs. straight MMS)?

Personally, I use Apple's Messages, but that's because it's installed by default and integrated with SMS. It's basically just enhanced MMS, so a really really easy transition.

<comment><USER5> > Does Google default to Hangouts messages when using an android phone, if the > recipient also has an Android (vs. straight MMS)?

No. Google does not integrate their messaging solution with SMS. The real reason behind that is that Google doesn't want to piss off the carriers who still see messaging (iMessage excluded) as a source of revenue.

<comment><USER8> You realize hangouts supported SMS previously and they removed the functionality to try to get people to use Allo, right?

<comment><USER5> ...and Allo is gone to make room for the carrier implemented RCS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I want my Mac's Time Machine to use my iCloud storage. Then I'll be fully migrated to the Apple ecosystem. What Scott Galloway calls a "monogamist relationship".

I also want to send iCal invites via Message.

PS- Oops. I forgot about my personal email. I'm still using gmail for my throwaway and official email addresses (eg firstname.lastname@example.com). Ya, I'll want to migrate that to Apple too, some day.

</comment><comment><USER11> iGlass.

</comment><comment><USER12> It would be _really nice_ if Apple went back to their roots and built INSANELY AWESOME computers. With FULL keyboards instead of gimmicky touch-bar thingies.

<comment><USER6> I think my MBP is pretty awesome and I love the Touch Bar.

<comment><USER13> I've heard people saying that they hate it, that they don't mind, or that the find it somewhat interesting. Never heard anyone say that love it. Can you give more details?

<comment><USER14> I love the touchbar as well, because it allows me to easily change volume (swiping a bar rather than tapping the same button) etc.

However, the ESC key is also on the touchbar, which makes using vim pretty annoying.</comment></comment></comment></comment>