Real-Time Adaptive Image Compression - <AUTHOR> http://www.wave.one/icml2017 <comment><USER2> Nice work, but disingenuous to not include a BPG (HEVC) image for comparison -- BPG is close to state-of-the-art, not WebP -- even their own SSIM charts show this.

Interesting that decoding is slower than encoding. Also curious about performance on CPU.

This approach may also be susceptible to "hallucinating" inaccurate detail; you can see a little bit of this on the upper-right of the girl's circled eyelid compared to the original Kodak image. See also: [http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox- workcentres_...](http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox- workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning)

<comment><USER3> > This approach may also be susceptible to "hallucinating" inaccurate detail

Yes! This. I can see us givng up decisions to 'AI' without realizing that it's just a loose association machine. Would I want to have my mortgage rate adjusted by a 'loose association'?

[https://twitter.com/keff85/status/862690920805916672](https://twitter.com/keff85/status/862690920805916672)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone interested in the field, this does not look much different from state-of-the-art video codecs, e.g. variable-size blocks, wavelet, predicator, arithmetic coding. Only that the predicator is trained on real data. But symbol dictionaries are already used in modern compressors like brotli and zstd.

Most codecs have been tuned for a mean subjective score (MOS). MS-SSIM is not particularly good to fully rely on [1] [2]. In my experiments it performed poorly.

I think Google team effort will have a much bigger impact [3] just by combining all recent practical improvements in the image compression.

Meanwhile, they could have optimized images on the website a little better. Saved ~15% with my soon-to-be-obsolete tool [4].

[1] [https://encode.ru/threads/2738-jpegraw?p=52583&viewfull=1#po...](https://encode.ru/threads/2738-jpegraw?p=52583&viewfull=1#post52583)

[2] [https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/toward-a-practical- perce...](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/toward-a-practical-perceptual- video-quality-metric-653f208b9652)

[3] [https://encode.ru/threads/2628-Guetzli-a-new-more- psychovisu...](https://encode.ru/threads/2628-Guetzli-a-new-more-psychovisual- JPEG-encoder?p=52198&viewfull=1#post52198)

[4] [http://getoptimage.com](http://getoptimage.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> From their website:

> Lubomir holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, 20 years of professional experience, > 50+ issued patents and 5000+ citations.

I just hope this type of research isn't going to end in a patent encumbrance, like it did with JPEG and MPEG.

These techniques are right around the corner, no matter who invents the file formats.

So if their idea is to lock these general ideas down with more patents, I'd want them to stop their research and let people with more open intentions research this further.

<comment><USER6> This also looks like a meta-algorithm, an algorithmic way to generate domain specific compressors, potentially anything this thing creates would also be covered by patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A rarely discussed danger of all machine learning models: If they don't know the answer, they'll rather make something up.

Here's a Google Translate example: [https://twitter.com/keff85/status/862690920805916672](https://twitter.com/keff85/status/862690920805916672)

I wouldn't like to lose a part of parcel in a lawsuit because an adaptive algorithm made up some details in aerial photograph so that it compresses better ...

</comment><comment><USER7> So is this only good for ridiculously low target filesizes? Noone in their right mind is going to compress a "480x480 image to a file size of 2.3kB"

What I want to see is an acceptable looking JPG next to a WaveOne image of the same size. Or an acceptable looking WaveOne next to a JPG of the same size.

How small is good enough? How good is small enough?

<comment><USER8> The use of a small image is for illustrative purposes. Saying "this image is less bytes than that one" is less striking than "look at those two images: they have the same size, but one is ugly".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how this compares to FLIF. I also tried to compress images based on shape and structure but by approximating these using skeletons.

I'm just a bit struggling with their performance comparison. The graphs they present are very pretty and promising but for the presented images we're quite left in the dark. They dump some images and theirs looks prettier and the authors give us _some_ indication of quality but it's not conclusive evidence that their method produces better images. Typically when different compressed images are presented two things can vary: quality and file-size. In the presented images both seem to varying without telling us which is which. Also, there is no baseline to compare against, either in terms of filesize or what the should look like. Sure, we humans can make a very educated guess but it is just sloppy to not include the uncompressed original image.

I will be fully convinced when I can try it for myself on my own image set.

<comment><USER10> FLIF is lossless. So very very different.

<comment><USER11> Err... FLIF is intended for lossless compression, but _can_ be lossy (it doesn't perform as well as intentionally lossy codecs, although that might also be a matter of optimising for it).

However, it also has a kind of adaptive ML-ish approach so it might be technically similar.

> _FLIF is based on MANIAC compression. MANIAC (Meta-Adaptive Near-zero > Integer Arithmetic Coding) is an algorithm for entropy coding developed by > Jon Sneyers and Pieter Wuille. It is a variant of CABAC (context-adaptive > binary arithmetic coding), where instead of using a multi-dimensional array > of quantized local image information, the contexts are nodes of decision > trees which are dynamically learned at encode time. This means a much more > image-specific context model can be used, resulting in better compression._

[http://flif.info/](http://flif.info/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very impressive work, though it seems like a mistake to focus on compression, which gets less valuable as storage and bandwidth gets cheaper. You need only look to the staying power of jpeg, which is so far from the state of the art, yet it's not going anywhere. Why? The demand for replacing it is not strong enough.

They obviously have some good image priors here, if I were them I would consider applying this tech to other image-related things, like image manipulation, or image search. Although competition is heating up quickly in these fields...

<comment><USER13> It isn't 'very impressive work', it is marketing for Silicon Valley (impressive marketing though).

Literally the first sentence of the linked page:

"Even though over 70% of internet traffic today is digital media, the way images and video are represented and transmitted has not evolved much in the past 20 years (apart from Pied Piper's Middle-Out algorithm)."

EDIT: This is embarrassing that not one person in this thread seems to have actually read any of the paper. Now with obvious evidence that this is fiction, people still don't want to believe it.

<comment><USER10> There are real people behind it:

[https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=reEAEWsAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=reEAEWsAAAAJ&hl=en)

[https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=OXFjRnEAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=OXFjRnEAAAAJ&hl=en)

Company entry on Linkedin: [https://www.linkedin.com/company- beta/12953035/](https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/12953035/)

<comment><USER13> It literally quotes a fictional TV show in the synopsis and directly in the paper. Are you seriously not getting that is is fiction?

Why would they have this in the actual PDF?

"Finally, Pied Piper has recently claimed to employ ML techniques in its Middle-Out algorithm (Judge et al., 2016), although their nature is shrouded in mystery"

This is promotion, they are getting a fake paper to permeate throughout the internet. If I had to guess, I would say they are making a statement about reproducing results in academia and not taking a single paper as gospel. If so, I think they are making their point pretty well.

<comment><USER10> Okay, it may be. It is something that can be done from a technical level for sure, given enough training data and enough data on the client side to do reconstructions.

I guess once you get popular enough you can get TV consultants who can propose real solutions as TV props. Heh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Deep learning will be a great way to do compression for sure, both for audio, video and images. I could see that one could download "knowledge sets" for these decompressors. Looking at Google Earth, download the supplemental "knowledge set" for overhead shots of cities and country side. Looking at people, download the supplemental "knowledge set" for faces and clothing, etc.

Basically each domain you want to do well in you need a knowledge set that is trained on that data. Then you need a discriminator on the compression side to classify an image or subregions of an image into those categories.

If you can make the knowledge sets downloadable on demand and then cached you can be incredibly efficient over the long term, while maintaining very small initial download sets. I think evolveable knowledge sets over time also ensure that the codex is flexible to handle currently not foreseen situations. Nobody wants a future where are DL-based image/video compression tool only knows a few pre-determined sets and is mediocre on everything else.

<comment><USER14> The "knowledge set" would be a small matrix - the one that allows to decode whatever encoder has put into compressed data. I guess it will be in volume range of 8x8 16-bit floats or so. Maybe three to six such matrices per channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This encoder seems to have some weird distortions that are most visible in the aerial shots. Compare [1] and [2]. The lines on the basketball court are distorted and curved. If you look closely, there is also curvature added to the sidewalks where there isn't any. In case those links break, I'm referring to the top row of aerial images.

[1] [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57c8be4459cc68c3e3d7b...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57c8be4459cc68c3e3d7b040/590bade05016e1ca29d9d74f/5910f88203596eba4ac0e444/1494284425679/bloomington28_3_crop_aerial_bpp0.1_disc_reconst_WO.png)

[2] [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57c8be4459cc68c3e3d7b...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57c8be4459cc68c3e3d7b040/590bade05016e1ca29d9d74f/5910f88086e6c0368e048208/1494284423491/bloomington28_3_crop_aerial_bpp0.1_disc_reconst_JP2.png)

<comment><USER3> Yep - and see how it almost disappeared the white car in the shadow in the left middle part. "We've deleted your only alibi so that our data would compress better ..."

<comment><USER16> Lossy codec being lossy is a feature, not a drawback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _While we are slightly faster than JPEG (libjpeg) and significantly faster > than JPEG 2000, WebP and BPG, our codec runs on a GPU and traditional codecs > do not — so we do not show this comparison._

This is great news!

I'd actually like to see the plot, though. (Both for encoding and decoding.) It stands to reason that a neural network can optimize image compression, as it can encode high-level information like "this is a face". But encoding / decoding speed is the sticking point, so I feel successes there should be emphasized.

The necessity of having a GPU doesn't seem problematic nowadays; everything has one. Testing it with a mobile-grade GPU would be interesting.

<comment><USER9> Thing is, "running on GPU" might mean "uses CUDA" which would make it more problematic

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm going to need to see this code in practise to believe it.

<comment><USER18> I didn't find the code. Did you have more luck?

<comment><USER13> It is a joke paper as a marketing stunt for Silicon Valley. I would bet they could get it accepted to some journals / conferences too since it looks extremely convincing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems like a slightly unfair comparison. Training the compressor moves data from the images into the compressor, making the bit per pixel evaluation slightly more iffy.

<comment><USER20> Not really.

As long as the decompressor needs just an image file and no other data, it's a fair game.

<comment><USER10> How large is the decompressor to download?

Is this image compression tool good at images it was not trained on?

How bad does it get in those situations?

Is this training data fixed into the codex forever? Will there be slightly different image codexs that have different training data? That would be sort of hellish.

<comment><USER19> You'd need some bits in the file telling you which trained decoder you need to get the proper image out.

What would the image of that girl look like if they used WaveOne Aerial?

How is this not cheating if the example image they used to compare algorithms is in the training data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One big reason for "hardcoded" encoders and decoders is that they much easier to implement in hardware.

One can improve e.g. H.265 somewhat easily, if software only solution is an option. But if you need cheap hardware only solution then ML-required-way seems a bit too expensive.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does no one realize this is a joke / marketing?

Directly from the paper's PDF:

"Finally, Pied Piper has recently claimed to employ ML techniques in its Middle-Out algorithm (Judge et al., 2016), although their nature is shrouded in mystery."

<comment><USER22> Or, you know, that could just be a humorous reference to the TV series, while this is a real implementation.

<comment><USER23> This is my read too, since they're citing Judge et al versus the characters or the characters' papers. Its the same vein as when Dropbox's Lepton article cited middle-out as a humorous attempt at self-promotion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this open source or something that you are aiming to license?

</comment><comment><USER24> Where is PNG?

<comment><USER25> I think this is lossy compression, so it doesnt really overlap w/PNG in terms of performance/file size goals.

<comment><USER24> Oh, right. I didn't consider that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> for some reaso they do not show the uncompressed image for comparison

<comment><USER27> They mentioned the Kodak dataset[1] in the second paragraph. It seems to be Kodak Image 15[2]

edit: as for the other images: it would be indeed nice to see those.

[1] [http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/](http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/) [2] [http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/kodim15.html](http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/kodim15.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Click anywhere to type like OneNote - <AUTHOR>

Are there any plain text editors that support the concept of click anywhere to type (i.e., the user need not space/tab/return to a point on the page/scree, but can just click to insert text where the user wants)? OneNote has this functionality, as does the forgotten OpenDoc word processor WAV, which was a great word processor. <comment><USER2> It would not quite be plain text, would it? I use Basket, which supports this feature, but I tend to prefer the single-column format.</comment>


Ask HN: How to make a profitable business from a newsletter app? - <AUTHOR> Hi, My name is Bryan and Happy Holiday to all hacker news readers.
situation: I created a project that helps instagram users to rediscover their old photos buried down deep in their timeline. It's a service that randomly draws a photo that the user taken 6 months on instagram and sends it to them via email on a weekly basis. (like the flashback feature, that everpix just to have)
questions: 1. what is a likely business model you would use in a pdt like this that only engage with the users once a week via email.
Initially, I was thinking of adding ads into the email that I sent. However, I later realised that it is not possible todo that. adsense programme does not permit adsense ad code to be placed in email messages
some plans in mind:
- Advertiser-Supported Email Newsletter - still go for ads, but I would go and find sponsors. Like the sponsored post on iosWeekly or JavaWeekly
- Or I try to add features to the emailer. For example. I will add flickr integration and this is a paid service. (but I also understand from many HN reading, that to be a paid service I must really be solving a pain point. (which I think I am, but I'm not sure thou)
- Or I would go for open source. Maybe be using gittip service. If there is donation, great. Otherwise I would just let it run, since I using the service myself.
What do you think? How would you create a business model around such a product. Love to hear your feedbacks.
p/s this is actually my first post on HN and to avoid fellow readers to think that I'm creating an Ask HN question to spam my project url. I did not put project link in the question itself. But if you any of you are interested to find out more so that you can help advise me. The service is here (http://bit.ly/marcusapp) <comment><USER2> 1)set up an affiliate deal with a service that turns the photos into real products and integrate with their API.

Send them the photo, and then give them the option to buy a print / hat / sticker / skin / etc.

2) you can use display ads from other networks in your email news letter if you want to try that, but it's a pretty abstracted revenue stream

3) sponsorships are much better than ads on low traffic properties.. I have luck selling ads at close to $1k / cpm equivalent for a blog I ran.

4) joint ventures -- run the app for free and then once a week / month / whenever promote a specific offer to your list.

5) I'd be focused on getting users first and probably the only action I'd want them to take is to recommend the service to friends.. Otherwise, you are trying to reinvest ad revenue from users to recruit more users - it seems that focusing on getting your viral coefficient above 1.0 would be a better use of focusing the actions of your users since the users are the best evangelists... Maybe even just having a feature for them to share the photo on Facebook, etc and include a link back.. Better yet, have an automatic option to autopost the throw back photo to their time time.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the reply and suggestions. I agreed and feels that sponsorships (in this case) might work better for me. JV is definitely something interesting for me to try out too.

I realised that dkokelley and you shared a common advice for me and that is to grow the users first. I totally agreed with that.

This is my first web app too. So I also I like to ask in your opinion and dkokelley how long would you give your pdt/service a chance to reach product market fit? Currently I have on 30 signups. What if after 3 months it stands at 300 users? Do you use number of users as a metric?

Thank you :D

<comment><USER2> Sign ups will help you determine your cost to acquire a customer and how predictable that can be.. I'd look at that more than raw sign up numbers.. Also, how many people do you need to make money?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would frame this slightly differently: "How can I make these emails absolutely delightful to users?" Once you nail this you should make it dead simple for happy users to recommend the service to their friends.

As for monetizing the happy and (hopefully) growing base... It won't be easy but I would focus on your main strength: unlike most advertisement inventory you have people's email addresses, which could give you a good head start on the "who" question. Maybe you could even ask an optional question or two as part of your sign up process to give you more data on your users, and based on the combined info you get you could write simple scripts to try and extract the most out of each one.

For instance: if the user is in a country served by Amazon, suggest a different product you actually really like on each email you send out (shouldn't be that much work to curate a basic list of things that caught your fancy). Personally I would make it very explicit that you're:

\- adding an affiliate link to the product, which helps pay for the service in question

\- you actually do use and like the product (for reasons x, y or z)

I would also make it incredibly simple for users to put money in your hat if they choose to. Paypal recurring payments could be an option here - [https://www.paypal.com/pdn-recurring](https://www.paypal.com/pdn-recurring).

<comment><AUTHOR> hey :D amazon affiliate link is a great idea too, and you are right that I would need to make it transparent for the users. Maybe I could also test on the following hypothesis that "people who loves using-smart phone for photos, might be interested in camera pdts as well" \- I could be sharing some of the camera items I brought off amazon.

And I really like the way you rephase my question."How can I make these emails absolutely delightful to users?"

Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you are getting way ahead of yourself in some aspects, as of yet you have not done anything to make your service 'sticky or viral'.

How about this:

Create a website called "Life goes on..." (or something like that, 'It wasn't that bad really' also conveys the sentiment).

In your newsletter send a few news headlines for the day that the regurgitated instagram picture was taken.

Invite your subscribers to post the picture to the "Life goes on..." site, with a few words regarding what they were doing.

On the "Life goes on..." site juxtapose the big picture media headlines for the day (which are inevitably bad things) along side people's happy stories. Allow some simple tagging system for submissions to facilitate this. For instance, recently the entire world was in mourning because Africa's greatest ever Freedom Fighter passed away. However, whilst that was going on plenty of other people were celebrating christenings, new births and that sort of thing.

Allow people to upvote, add comments, share and so on. Make it searchable/sortable by tags.

Also consider music, people like to have a soundtrack to their lives. Do something with that.

You will be able to create a site useful to social historians and give people a means to participate in the project in a fun way using your original idea.

Most importantly to you, there will be something to monetize using the standard advertising model we all know.

<comment><USER5> Wow, that's possibly the most hilariously offensive idea I've heard of in some time. Given your lionization of the man, you clearly care about Mandela, so imagine the product you're suggesting: a big picture of Mandela with some sort of respectful, eulogizing headline, next to which is a picture of a lolcat with some glib pun, and the -- almost sarcastic -- title 'Life goes on' above both.

The mental picture alone is amusingly objectionable.

<comment><USER4> Actually we have that already in newspapers.

Do you want me to dig out the Daily Mail front page with the President doing a selfie, Miley Cyrus twerking and an X factor winner doing something pointless?

I am proposing something far less objectionable to that which passes as 'normal' for the media.

<comment><USER5> There's a reason that the Daily Mail is held up as a figure of ridicule.

EDIT: While amusing, my glib original answer ignores one important point: the Daily Mail sells, and it sells extremely well (it's the most circulated UK newspaper). However, while it's true that the Daily Mail does precisely what the parent poster is proposing, I'd argue that the internet demographic (especially the photo-sharing/social media market) tends to swing younger than the Daily Mail's audience. This _will_ result in young people either:

A) deliberately gaming the site to show offensively contradictory images alongside each other (e.g. something racist next to Mandela) or B) complaining about situations like A

While the Daily Mail does peddle in hypocrisy and bile, it peddles in carefully curated hypocrisy and bile. It knows its market well, and it knows what it can juxtapose. It knows it can rant about paedophilia on one page and then write saucy articles about teenaged royals on the next page, because it knows what its market will tolerate. Allowing a crowdsourced attempt at the same will result in mayhem that targets nobody and offends a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would start by just offering the service and gaining traction. I think trading the service offering for occasional or integrated marketing emails is acceptable for most users.

Over time, you will build your user base/email list. You may be able to identify certain segments within that list that share a particular interest. Now you know what these users like, and have explicit permission to market to them. Use this service as a platform to engage your users and discover other ways that you can add value to their lives in such a way that they are happy to pay for it.

In summary:

1: Build the service, get users

2: Where possible, segment those users by interest

3: Based on the major interests, build and/or sell other products that your users will pay for

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out Dan Lewis's great newsletter "Now I Know," for ideas on content, advertising, and list-growing. Dan is here in HN as @DanLivesHere. He probably has ~100k subscribers now, and monetizes with ads and Amazon affiliate links.

Here is the newsletter: [http://nowiknow.com/](http://nowiknow.com/)

Here is a good interview with him: [http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/now- i-know-real-person...](http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/now-i-know-real- person-e-newsletter-success_b15248)

</comment><comment><USER8> Give your users a link where they can print out their Instagram photo and partner up with Instacanvas. That's what I advise everybody having a business based on Instagram. Making money online with Instagram is just not worth, however, going for physical products is.

They make millions of $$ with it and it's such an easy business.

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/instacanvas-launches- global...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/instacanvas-launches-global- marketplace-for-instagram-prints/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Are you familiar with Timehop? Your concept sounds similar, though I don't use the app and may be wrong. In any case, it might help to look into how they monetize.

<comment><USER10> Yep, very similar - in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Timehop added this as one of there options as they already do twitter and facebook.

I use Timehop but not sure about any user facing revenue model. They do however have the last 5 years of facebook and twitter data about me so I'm sure they're making some money from that.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep. just check them out. there is no business model for the users. How do you find the service Ben? I read a post that they used to send daily emails. Do they still do that?

<comment><USER10> I get daily iOS notifications. I have a feeling if I didn't open the application then I would get an email which is a really nice way of handling notifications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sponsored Pics.

One email per week sent is an ad (on a random day). Build up as much data about each user as you can which you can then offer up to advertisers. E.g. Email all women who like jeans with a sponsored pic.

$lowXX to remove ads.

Also offer backup service for small additional fee.

Partner with a service like blurb to send Instagram photo books to users of their old pics. Perhaps suggest the images that should be used in a book?

Back to beer.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you want to spike traffic, you can always follow the good example of Ron Paul & Associates, and start peppering your articles with random racial, homophobic and other gratuitous provocations. Don't overthink it, and don't make it _too_ obvious; instead aim for approaches more oblique and back- handed, in the spirt of, e.g.:

 _"If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."_

You can also try opening with catchy titles like "The Disappearing White Majority." The idea is that, sure, such tactics will probably offend some people, but they will also generate _controversy_ and get you talked about. And if you get flack from anyone over it, you can always claim it was the work of junior staffers, and that you had "honestly do not know" who might have said those things.

<comment><USER13> Wow, this is the most unnecessary and untimely comment I've ever seen. This has absolutely no relevance. This does not even address the question being posed and goes off on a wild tangent that can only be meant to incite others and detract from the conversation at hand. This doesn't belong here, and I'm questioning whether the kind of person who would post such a thing does either.

<comment><USER12> Apologies to anyone who felt distracted or incited. I assure you that wasn't my intention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So your business is to ask people for their Instagram/Facebook credentials, then send them their old pictures wrapped in ads? Everpix already tried doing something much better than this, and crashed and burned.</comment>


Website Style Guide Resources - <AUTHOR> http://styleguides.io/ <comment><USER2> Another really good similar resource is [https://storybook.js.org/examples/](https://storybook.js.org/examples/)</comment>


Functional Fixedness - The Candle Problem - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness#Candle_Box

<comment><USER2> The horrendously misleading part of this is that the experiment says to attach the _candle_ to the wall. The lexical semantics of "attach" do not permit that you "attach the candle to the wall" by tacking a box to the wall and placing the candle in it. The verb attach simply doesn't mean that -- this demonstrates nothing.

Further, numerous studies have been done regarding lexical and conceptual semantics and the role of direct objects in semantic interpretation, and they demonstrate quite simply that whatever the direct object is of a sentence, this tends to be an affected item. Supporting a candle with a box is not affecting the candle in the ways relevant to human cognition, while tacking it to the wall, or melting it, _is_. So the phrasing again was misleading.

While I'm sure functional fixedness is a real phenomena, I would bet that it isn't even remotely as simple as this particular experiment suggested, and that a wide variety of linguistic techniques can affect how well people are at this. In fact, on the main page for the Candle Problem it's point out that a) using "box _and_ tacks" instead of "box _of_ tacks" in the instructions improves performance, while b) offering a monetary incentive _decreases_ performance. So before you get all hyped up about how you want to think outside the box because my gosh imagine what awesomeness functional fixedness is preventing you from seeing, stop to consider that noone's got any clue what's really going on inside the mind, and you're probably just as likely to screw yourself by trying to manipulate yourself this way as you are to benefit yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I not sure your argument about semantics applies. First of all, we do not know if the word "attach" was used in the original experiment. In fact, the main candle problem page says this:

 _The test presents the participant with the following task: how to fix a lighted candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won't drip onto the table below._

The semantics in that phrasing of the problem seem alright.

Now, consider the experiment by Adamson. In that case, presenting the materials in a certain manner changed how they were made use of. This is clearly independant of any semantics. You may want to watch the video nreece linked to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Candle Problem was used as an insightful example by Daniel Pink in his TED talk on the surprising science of motivation - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's how I originally found out about it, and would have linked to that talk. Except, TED talks often don't seem to get many points here, which seems strange to me given the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tacking a box onto a wall is a horrible solution. You'd need two or three long tacks, a light candle, and I'd probably put the tacks in at an angle, too. And then you'd need to solve the problem of the falling candle.

I'm not sure what _would_ be a good solution, since the candle would need to be placed at least 5cm away from the wall, and there just aren't materials for that.</comment>


Apologies from New Relic – Email Mistake – Mailpin - <AUTHOR> http://mailp.in/j2hnoS81/ <comment><USER2> I feel this is a marketing gimmick and New Relic is hoping to get people to revisit the site and check the features.</comment>


Hacker Breaks Through Encryption Shield Before Uploading Nano-Virus - <AUTHOR> http://www.theonion.com/articles/fasttalking-computer-hacker-just-has-to-break-thro,32000/?ref=auto

<comment><USER2> _"At press time, sources confirmed this is why Cipher is the best in the business."_</comment>


Ask HN: Importing email from Gmail to Fastmail - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I'm currently migrating my email account to Fastmail from Gmail and I hit an interesting problem. Fastmail seems to have a great import tool to migrate your emails but being a privacy-conscious person I started to wonder if it was possible for an app-password from Gmail (I have two-step verification enabled) to limit its access to IMAP. I don't currently distrust Fastmail but I would be feeling better if I knew they couldn't mess with my Account Settings on Google (or gather my data from other services). From what I could gather online there aren't granular permissions nor official information pointing to any IMAP-only app-password.
Given the stated problem I started to look for other solutions like imapsync but I currently have around 15GB of emails and it seems Google throttles downloads and uploads so it would take around 7 days, at least, to import all my email to Fastmail (and having to download them to a machine which would then upload to their servers).
Anyone here had a similar problem? How did you approach it? <comment><USER2> Personally I wouldn't entrust my emails to a provider that I trust so little as to not abuse the trust of its users with their "Email import tool". That is, if you even suspect that their "Email import tool" does shady things, I don't see how you can be comfortable with hosting your mail with them.

That said, you could use the google takeout function [0] to download your mail, and then upload via offlineimap of another similar tool. (I believe google takeout produces a .mbox).

Finally, I also host with fastmail, a great choice so far :)

0: [https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is not so much about me trusting the company but being sure nothing can be done outside the scope I trust it, even if by mistake. It is also, from my point a view, a failure from Google to provide a more granular access to its services.

Did you personally use the import tool (assuming you previously used Gmail)? I assume everything worked smoothly?

<comment><USER2> Completely agree on the granular access issue, companies with much smaller engineering teams manage to do it!

I did use the import tool with no trouble but it was about 10x less data than what you have. Given the 2.5GB/day bandwith cap of the gmail API/IMAP you might really be better of with the takeout option though, doing the whole operation from a machine possibly in a datacenter with a good uplink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The App Password you created for FastMail to access your Gmail account over IMAP cannot be used for anything other than mail/chat/calendar. Additionally, you have 2-step auth enabled so any access to change your account settings would require that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is the need for 2-step auth for account changes a documented feature? I'm asking because I couldn't find anything pointing to that and, if so, it could solve my initial problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, a couple points:

1\. It depends if you don't trust them in the long term or the short term. In the long-term, after you finish the migration, there's no need for Fastmail to still have access to your account, and Google does let you revoke/cycle app passwords, so I would just do that and that would cut off Fastmail's access, even if they did retain your password (which, based on what I know about them, I doubt they'd do, but I don't know them personally).

2\. For the actual transferring, if you don't want to use Fastmail's tool, I'm a big fan of imapsync, and my second best choice would be offlineimap. I like the former for my needs, where I do a lot of one-shot migrations/backups/restores, but the latter does have the benefit in your case that it can be run as a daemon, and then it'll slowly steadily upload your mail in the background over the course of however many days it'll take.

3\. It should not take 7 days to move 15GB. I've done it in under 48 hours. Part of the bottleneck might be that your local machine/network/etc. I would try to fire up a VM with a cloud provider, preferably one of the fast-network variants, and run imapsync from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can use a 3rd party service called MigrationWiz.com, it's used by F100s to migrate their corporate email, but also works for consumer migrations.

I believe at one point it was done via IMAP, but Google changed their APIs and you may have to grant greater access. I could be wrong here, it's been a few years since I last worked there.

Hope this is helpful.

</comment><comment><USER6> there is no other good solution. start now by renting a server and it will be done in 7 days.</comment>


Physicists Lay Out Plans for a New Supercollider - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-lay-out-plans-for-a-new-supercollider/ <comment><USER2> As the Higgs fills in the last missing particle for the Standard Model, creating such a new accelerator seems very speculative. Maybe there is nothing else to find at higher energies, there is no hint of them at the LHC and the Standard model does not predict anything. I understand professionals always want more experimental power, but given the $10billion+ cost, it seems hard to justify.</comment>


Secret Government Report: Chelsea Manning Leaks Caused No Real Harm - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/secret-government-report-chelsea-manning-leaks-caused-no <comment><USER2> Sloppy reporting. BuzzFeed's conclusion is drawn from the 50% of the document that's un-redacted. The other half may or may not paint a different picture.

<comment><USER3> You firmly can say sloppy reporting, THEN say "may or may not be an issue". How can you be so sure and so unsure?

<comment><USER4> You're absolutely right to note the internal contradictions of parent's comment. They're both very certain and very uncertain at the same time.

However, is it not possible to observe that a clearly poor methodology can produce unreliable results in any field? And is it not possible that this may be such an instance?

<comment><USER3> Of course, I can agree that.

Can you agree however, that you can say "a clearly poor methodology" without ever showing whats "clearly poor" about a methodology in any field? Is it possible that this might be such an instance?

<comment><USER4> You're absolutely right! It's possible that a methodology can be described as poor without every showing what poor is in context.

It's possible that some might regard this as such a context, but I happen to be of the opinion that the original comment both noted a poor methodology _and_ clearly showed what about it was poor.

<comment><USER3> > _" but I happen to be of the opinion that the original comment both noted a > poor methodology _and* clearly showed what about it was poor"*

You can happen to be of opinion about many things. But it didn't clearly note, or clearly show anything, as you have stated in your last comment. Its your opinion. And Its great that this is _your_ opinion of course, but its not my opinion. That's why I commented.

Facts are not my opinion either. They are fact. Period. Facts usually get put in reports like this, not our opinion.

Not sure why you are wanting to flog a dead Horse on this mate, but flog away!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unless you were one of the human sources named, abandoned to the tender mercies of the Taliban. The report says no harm to senior decision makers, not to others.

<comment><USER3> Is it not kind of a bit much to swallow you saying this??, knowing that, due to her leaks, for better or worse, we know that innocent civilians got butchered.

I mean, if that didn't happen, I would whole heartedly agree with your point. But thats not the reality. What reality are you in buddy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting read, but headline seems slightly misleading, given this bit:

> The most significant impact of the leaks, the report concluded, would likely > be on the lives of "cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign > interlocutors."</comment>


3 Steps to a Great LinkedIn Invitation - <AUTHOR> http://facethebuzz.com/2011/06/07/great-linkedin-invitations/ <comment><USER2> Here's one step that encompasses them all and should be in your wallet at all times: be authentic.

Point, set.</comment>


Business Guy: Why Engineers Don't Like MBAs Looking For Tech Cofounders - <AUTHOR> http://www.marshallyang.com/post/70292980706/let-a-business-guy-tell-you-why-engineers-dont-like <comment><USER2> The problem is most business guys aren't business guys. By splitting the world into "technical" and "non-technical", the title "business guy" just means "a guy who can't code but wants to do a startup". Most self proclaimed "business guys" aren't business guys, they're nothing guys.

I contend that it's easier than ever for true business guys to find a technical co-founder. But for that to happen, they actually have to do their job, which is to drum up business.

Here's what non-technical people should be doing BEFORE they even start hunting for technical co-founders if they want to be introduced to a tech co- founder actually worth having:

* Conduct 100 customer interviews within the target demographic, record them on video and edit it down to a 2 - 5 minute reel that provides some unique insight or perspective on the market that others have not realized. Ask for a verbal intent to buy at the end of the interview and achieve at least a 10% success rate. Prove that your idea is within striking distance of product/market fit.

* Start a blog within the target demographic, achieve a steady readership of at least 100 pageviews/day within the target demo and build up a mailing list to at least 1000 qualified subscribers. Prove that you can own an effective marketing channel that is unavailable to competitors.

* Build out whatever parts of the business are possible using human labor in replacement for code and demonstrate actual customer demand, validated by at least $100/month of revenue. Use spreadsheets in place of a database, text messages from your phone in place of notifications etc. and demonstrate where automation can lead to easy efficiency gains. Prove that there even is room for technology as a core competency of this startup.

* List out at least 3 major learnings, lay out what your original assumption was, what data prompted you to change your mind and what implications this learning has on all aspects of the business. Prove that you can remain open minded and pivot the startup as appropriate.

Achieve at least 3 of these 4 things and engineers will actually be interested in talking to you.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's worth noting that this problem can be flipped the other way around: you get to hear a lot of tech guys trying to "disrupt" industries they know nothing about. The only reason why they don't sound like total jerks is because now coding is cool, when coding won't be cool anymore they will be considered jerks too.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think someone else said it here already, but this is an extremely gross oversimplification of the issue.

My mantra is that a good startup requires two core skills: building a good product and getting customers to buy your product. The worse you (or your team) are at one, the better you should be in the other. Both take time and energy to learn and do well, and we shouldn't trivialize the effort and skill it takes for either side to do their jobs well.

A business guy reading up on code and putting up a site should be encouraged, but if his talents are best spent in front of a customer and closing sales, that's where the bulk of his time should be spent. An great engineer who can put together a decent pitch and has learned how to do Adwords / e-mail campaigns should also be encouraged to learn more, but again how much focus and leverage is it taking away from building the best damn product possible?

Let's learn to have a healthy respect for both aspects of the business. If you can do both really well, you are awesome -- most people cannot. Don't be a douche, know that everyone you meet is better than you at something, and have a healthy respect for "the other side".

Final note: Not at all defending 'value' of making spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, and schmoozing, but understand that _sometimes_ enterprise level sales are closed by good powerpoint presentations. _Sometimes_ , new relationships with governments, investors, and customers are built over open bars and playing golf. And _sometimes_ , that excel spreadsheet can be your first MVP to validate a new product (I personally know of a now-successful startup that used an excel file as the first version of their product).

</comment><comment><USER5> Most MBA grads are insanely arrogant and completely technically illiterate.

A Wharton MBA is just partying and networking with other arrogant ibankers and consultants. They think having some idea is brilliance and they just need a monkey to code it up for them.

Their version of "hard work" is insane hours spent making spreadsheets and powerpoint presentation instead of building things and learning real discrete skills. Mixed in with more schmoozing and work dinners/open bars.

I have seen this firsthand (gf is a Wharton MBA grad)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to see MBA programs require a class called something along the lines of "Minimum Viable Business Guy". Coming out of that, an MBA grad would be able to pass the following standard "MVB" test from any potential partner:

      1) Open up Github for Mac </question>
      2) What does MVC stand for, and why will you never touch
      M or C until you can demonstrate you won't f*ck up V

</test>

</comment><comment><USER7> My personal gripe has less to do with the non-technical or business cofounder not knowing how to code but rather they know nothing about any other skill set, including the business side, yet often times think they do. This, in my opinion, is a bigger problem than whether or not they understand code.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looking at things as "business" and "technical" is part of the problem. There are "products/services" and "customers". A group of people wanting to serve a market must be able to contribute to these two things - via programming, selling, insight, connections or whatever. This is important. It doesnt matter how one does it, but contributions ought to be meaningful. These labels (business, guy or technical guy) may prevent a good open discussion and box people, sometimes too early and sometimes needlessly.

</comment><comment><USER9> Totally fair point--I'm looking into Python for similar reasons...what would a business guy know about Java syntax anyway? ;-)

<comment><USER10> new WhatDidYouSay.CoreBusinessLogic.PickALanguage.AnyLanguage()

<comment><USER11> Classic Java. Laugh out loud!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i think its a bit of a gross over-simplification that this is why... but its a good observation.

two classic engineer arguments i've heard over and over in many contexts:

* academia is not grounded in reality therefore academics are not worth much - solving theoretical problems is not as hard as solving real problems and the tools and skills required are radically different. (or 'your MBA is worthless')

* engineers make products, you need a product to sell products, sales are necessary, but the rest is fairly optional and can be outsourced. sales depend on products not the other way around therefore engineers add more value than anyone else can. (or, i don't need you to the same level that you need me)

both arguments are flawed, but extremely common and have some truth to them. (you can flip them on their head too which is interesting...)

</comment><comment><USER13> The article is a rather short piece and doesn't seem to have much in the way of new contributions.

I think it might be more fair to generalize the phenomenon that Engineers generally dislike MBAs in a multitude of situations.

</comment><comment><USER14> unless your following lean startup the business guy has an idea expects the "computer" guy to put in tons of hours upfront why he adds little to the equation.</comment>